Moved the portfolio section to its own site: mrfarthing.com (also codyfarthing.com). Eventually this site will probably be decommisioned or archived, but until then I'll continue using it for expanded information about portfolio items.
After reading a biography of Nikola Tesla I've been mildly obsessed with that turn of the century post-Victorian aesthetic, that brief period before the physical sciences were usurped by the quantum and the brutal realism of war took the place of unbridled technological enthusiasm. Design had only recently entered the realm of populism, as small run printing and advertising became more ubiquitous, and the lines between art and design were starting to blur. I tried to capture that sort of breathless enthusiasm (and low price!) you see on designs of the era. This compilation might be a little more challenging than the last, as it's heavy on instrumental and strange orchestration. I tried to find songs that somehow evoked that period (loosely defined as it is). The Mirah track is a particular triumph, as it is a song composed by Stephen Foster in 1855.
This also marks the first disc I printed entirely at home, which means a few things. The cover is a thicker, richer stock, which should protect the discs better in transit. The colors are more accurate, as I could adjust them by trial and error. The dpi has dropped a bit since my printer is quite a bit cheaper than the one at the print shop, so text in particular is a bit fuzzier, but still seemed pretty crisp and readable to me. I also reinforced the shipping envelopes with the excess cardstock trimmed from the covers themselves, since there have been so many broken cds lately. Hopefully that problem will diminish, at least.
After an arduous battle with the printers, which I didn't really win so much as give up on, the winter concoction is out. The printed covers are a little more contrast-heavy and lose some detail, but there's only so much I can take. The concept was to collect a bunch of songs that felt warm to me, in some fashion or another, and hopefully communicate that. It's very very cold here; we've seen temperatures somewhere down below zero, the kind that freeze your eyes into popsicles, so a little bit of thermal assistance seemed in order.
This month's collection is primarily composed of delightfully sputtering electropop. If I could just send you a link to the Cassettes Won't Listen album, I would, but such a thing exists only in my sweetest dreams. So I won't. Instead, you get a bunch of his bloopy remixes bookended by other stuff. This is pop so catchy I've taken to calling it weaponized. Get it now before homeland security shuts us down.
After a brief respite to work on a couple of other, non-distribution album covers - maybe I'll update my portfolio soon and get this kind of thing out in the (more) public eye - we're back in effect.
I began composing these compilation discs for myself in January of 2004, after discovering the treasure trove of music lurking on mp3 blogs across the web. They were originally to break the monotony of the Seattle-to-Redmond commute across the nightmarish 520 bridge, and it just happened that I was getting about sixteen to twenty songs a month that I really liked, so it sort of by default became a monthly endeavour. When I moved to California my commute shortened rather dramatically - from 90 minutes to about five, but I enjoyed the process of creating mixes (in the loosest sense). I decided to use them as an opportunity to engage in a monthly design project to explore whatever style I chose at the time, free of the constraints of work.
This disc is a collection of songs that were included on the compilation cds that I didn't send out to friends - specifically from the cds before August 2004. Not all of these tracks were released in 2004, but that's when I first heard them, and this is what I was listening to back then. So it's a little bit of time travel, at least from a very Codycentric perspective, but maybe for others as well. The cover is also an attempt to capture the time that has passed, recombining elements from the earliest and latest efforts.
Coming as it is, hot on the heels of the last collection, we have here a distinct change in tone and timbre. Technically the two year anniversary of these cds, but seeing as I've missed far more months than I've delivered, we'll just wait a bit for that particular celebration. It wouldn't do to have it on time anyway. Maybe next year. There's some j-pop in the middle of this one; you know you love it.
I recently designed and built a portfolio website for New York painter Rachel Schmidhofer, in exchange for an original work. Good deal all around. I started with an open-source slideshow component from squidfingers.com as the basis for the gallery section. I also did logo and identity design, but really need to find a good printer in the NYC area. I'm pretty proud of how the site turned out.
I can't believe I ever complained about the California summer. New York is actually a rainforest, but no one told you, with temperatures closing on 100 this week and a heat index of around 110. Three digits is too many, my friends. I thought I understood oppressive heat before, and I even thought I knew what east coast summers were like, from Philly, but this is really an educational experience.
A year later, nothing in the interim, and now this. But look how it matches - that kind of synchronicity is worth the wait. Maybe I'll make that my new logo. Sort of a subverted Texaco-slash-People's Republic thing. Looks like I should brand it onto the shaggy haunches of my cattle, lest they be rustled in the night by unsavory types. It's a problem around here. Remixes, mostly, except for an intro and a nugget in the middle, but then I never did like rules. Limited edition on account of the labor involved, but I'll consider thoughtfully worded requests.
Anyone else use last.fm? I just started. I have no friends. I do have a poor quality profile picture. More stuff coming soonish.
Yes, this post was written over a year ago and never made it online. That's what happens when you forget about a website for so long. Little bastard children posts like this get left on the hard drive until they die, alone.
Miramax finally got off their immense corporate ass (collective ass; singular) and released the brilliant French documentary Microcosmos (Le peuple de l'herbe) on dvd. They chose to market it to kids, which seems a somewhat dubious tactic given that it is composed of eighty dialog-free minutes of ultra-closeup footage of insects doing insecty things, which is fascinating and gorgeous but slower-paced than most kids fare. I don't know what the alternative is. Tap into the massive latent entomologist market? Regardless, it is excellent that this film is finally getting an updated release, as vhs copies of it were somewhat rare and it really deserves to be experienced by more people. If you haven't seen it I recommend it; most decent video stores have recently strocked copies.
The cover they chose, however, is just bad. It reveals the downside of the decision to market to children. A travesty really, given that the French release has fairly nice cover art. It really needed to go. Luckily the covers of most dvds are simply sleeved into the plastic of the case and are easily stripped. I couldn't find a print-quality copy of the European cover online, and the dimensions are wrong anyway, so I decided to roll my own. Below, in order, see the French cover, domestic cover, and the CEcom version (click to enlarge). The full printed cover includes the spine and back, but they are comparatively uninteresting so I left them off here. I got the picture of ox-eye daisies from the University of Wisconson Urban Horticulture site, and I used a chunk of a public domain Ernst Haeckel print on the back cover. So I've gone the opposite extreme, from cartoony to subjectless pretension. But it looks very pretty on the shelf.
The Northern California spring seems to be more or less equivalent to the Seattle winter: a relentless morbid gray punctuated with staccato bursts of rain. The sun periodically stages a commando raid and the panicked clouds speed East for the safety of the hills only to disappear in the desert, and the remaining crisp blue seems alien and alluring. The four-story atrium that stands in for a ventilation system in my apartment constantly smells of the sea, which is odd since the bay is three miles away and the true ocean another ten.
So I end the unannounced compilation hiatus with a disc filled with murder. It doesn't mean anything. I'm much more satisfied with the cover this month, the starkness a refreshing change after the messy clump of February. Bonus edition includes: mp3 data track for convenient piracy iPodding, suspicious blood-spattered sleeve, and a careful measure of awkward love. It's probably time for a general redesign around here; this snarky red is getting stale and brittle with age. I really need to figure out some sort of archiving system, since this page is reaching an absurd bloated size, gorged as it is on high-fat images. Here are some more.
I forgot. February is too short anyway. I will invent my own dates.
Test: someone offers you a breathy, glitch-laden electropop cover of Tears for Fears' seminal 80s classic Shout. Do your eyes light up with delight and you begin to softly vibrate in anticipation? Or do you shudder and consider inciting some violence on the offerer? If you are the second kind of person you may want to skip this month's collection because it will probably make you want to chew your own ears off.
The more astute will recognize that only about ten percent of the disc is actually about robots, but that's why I make the mixes and not you. Includes data track of mp3s. This is the first time a mix hasn't had thirteen tracks. Worse than my subconscious obsession with thirteen was that the December cd, once you packed in the mp3s, totaled out at six hundred sixty-six megabytes. I do not deliberately deliver the devil to your home.
Does anyone have advice about blog content management systems? Needs to be free, needs to run on a Windows 2003 IIS server. Tell me what you know.
The alternate title was: The Sad Bastard Mix. Just in time for the frigid winter.
This disc also has a data track consisting of the songs in mp3 format. Get them while they are (figuratively) hot.
We are under siege. It began innocuously enough, a few scattered outriders scouting the area. We would see one or two a day clambering awkwardly over the debris on the coffee table, or sidling up the trim on the doors, trying vainly to blend their black bodies into the stark white paint. Mostly they stayed out of sight. And watched. Always watched. Silently they sniffed the air with their delicate antennae, mapping the paths, preparing the way.
Then, they were everywhere. The balance of power in the apartment shifted overnight to their hands. Or feet. Foots. Whatever. They were on everything, inside everything. Throngs of them teemed from the walls which contain their secret fortresses, every crack, gap, and opening emitting a stream of tiny soldiers intent on claiming our home as their own. We cowered, their numbers and strength overwhelming. It seemed easy enough to just accept them and get on with our lives. We didn't need to control the place, we could accept enemy occupation. Life goes on.
They soon became bold, haughty. Contemptuous. Sometimes one or two, drunk with power, would crawl up our legs or amble across the counter where we were attempting to prepare food. They would corner us against a door and taunt us, showing off their superior number of extremities and relative strength. They would mock all of our self-aware neuroses while gloating about the grandeur of the hive mind.
Then they discovered my powerful insect phobia. They began tormenting me for fun, taking every opportunity to tickle me with their horrible little legs, or to hide inside some item or article of clothing only to strut out onto my hand when I picked it up. It became common to see me jumping in erratic circles around the apartment gibbering senselessly while brushing frantically at my entire body, convinced they were staging a full-out attack on me and my delicate orifices.
It became an unrelenting psychological holocaust; my every moment spent in a state of painfully-heightened awareness. My eyes darted uncontrollably about the room. I developed a twitch. Every itch was grounds for unbounded panic. And the itches never stopped. Even at work, free from the scourge, I felt them. Crawling, always crawling, awful, unstoppable. I could immerse myself in water and ants equipped with indescribably cute tiny diving gear would descend and traverse the reefs of my feet.
When I woke up with one of them crawling blithely across my face it was time for war. No more will we stand for this oppression. We shall rise up against our insectoid masters and show them the fury of really scared people.
We sealed the gaps in the trim with spackle, taped up all the outlets and heaters save one, and set elaborate traps. The final unsealed electrical outlet, now their only ingress to the apartment, rapidly evolved into a distillation of all the world's horror. Cyborg electrical ants swarmed out of the sockets to form a writhing black mass of pure, unadulterated revulsion. They streamed into the traps, dutifully picking up the poison and taking it back into the wall, where it would be fed to the young, condemning them to a painful spasming death. As it took effect some of them began to stagger around and fall off the wall. It was sadistically satisfying to watch them die. A very few appeared to gain awareness of their impending doom and began skidding frantically around the group, waving their antennae with all desperation, but they were foolishly branded as lunatics and ignored. These cursed insect Cassandras soon joined their brothers in hell.
The traps became clogged with corpses. Within a day the flow had nearly dried up. Only the unusually hardy , ascetic, or anorexic ants remained, left with the lonely task of carrying home the dead. We assumed the colony, hidden in the depths of the walls, was in a similar state. The abomination that formerly squirmed across the face of the outlet was gone. All seemed quiet on the front.
Reinforcements arrived yesterday, probably freshly hatched and transferred in on a starvation march. New paths were forged into the house - they discovered weak points in the countertops, in light sockets. Runners once more advance across the remote reaches of the apartment. They are preparing for something. The electrical outlet where so many atrocities and acts of heroism had taken place again pulsed to life with a mass of bugs.
And these bugs are different. These are the ants that survived the genocide that took effect when the poison infiltrated the nest. They are strong, and fueled by righteous anger. These are ants with fire in their exoskeletons. They feed on the poison with delight, dancing gleefully across its toxic surface, bathing in the chemical fumes until their carapaces shine in the dull light. With each bite of ant killer they grow bigger, more powerful. They will not be defeated so easily.
The compilation disc for September is: The Sing-A-Long Album. Composed entirely of songs that invariably trigger the fatally embarrassing karaoke urge, at least in me. If you don't experience a similar effect you're probably dead inside, living out your joyless days as a heartless automaton bent on the ultimate destruction of love itself. I sing exclusively in my car, and only when alone, where my complete lack of tonal understanding is no obstacle to belting out these songs at a throat-rending volume. This is no doubt to the delight of passing drivers who get to witness my facial contortions and jittery, restrained, yet remarkably sexy seated dancing. I am desperate to believe that the soundproofing on my car is enough to keep my voice safely inside. I fully expect you to engage in the same sort of neurosis-overcoming dropping of the guard and sing your little heart out. A definite upside to vehicular performance is that you can usually turn the volume up loud enough to drown yourself out, creating the beautiful illusion that you are on key, singing perfectly along with every song. And I live on illusion.
The cover is a faithful replication of the sort of cheap block-toned, typography-heavy and decoration-light record sleeves everyone was pumping out around the 50s. Or so the web tells me. Isn't the logo so cute. The important and/ or memorable lyrics are printed, rather redundantly, on the back.
Send in your requests. And your addresses.
As I locked the apartment door on my way out, like a good little boy, I realized how often the prudent action goes unnoticed. Doing the right thing rarely garners you any accolades or attention. Most of the time it is simply ignored because it doesn't necessarily have an effect at all. Rather, it usually prevents an outcome. Locking the door helps keep my possessions in place, or discourages the intruders who may choose to rape, murder and/ or pillage. Paying your taxes prevents the government from coming in the night and stealing your children. Refraining from blurting out offensive insults and arbitrary nonsense words in the midst of conversation helps maintain the critical illusion that you are sane and functional. Sacrificing virgins in a timely manner wards away the demons for one more year. Returning library books when they are due helps you avoid the vengeful wrath of the librarian and her merciless titanium cyborg claws. The list goes on. All maintenance, all preventative, all basically ignored and undetected.
On the other hand, doing the wrong thing results in an effect, baby. Flames, floods, gunfire, blood, screaming, sobbing. Something you can see and touch. You get an immediate and visceral response. Gratification right away. If you are fixated on proving your own existence, doing the wrong thing is a effective way to accomplish it. What quicker way to get somebody's attention to validate your presence than to insult their parentage or run them down in your car?
For those of us in the MTV generation (or the www.generation?) this kind of instant result is quite a bit more appealing. The Doctrine of Nintendo has taught me the linear thinking that says when you do action A, you get effect B, and ramifications beyond that moment in time are mostly conceptual and as such not really worth paying attention to. There is always another box to break, another turtle to divest of its shell. Keep moving, because once you are past any point on the continuum, you never have to deal with the objects or events it contains. Unless you die, in which case you have to start over. Luckily most of us have realized that the punishment for losing a life in a foolish maneuver is pretty harsh, so we're careful enough to dodge the spikes and lava, and the past stays comfortably in the past.
If, on the other hand, you are more of the Kierkegaardian mind of obscuring your existence as much as possible without engaging in outright hermitage, quietly doing the prudent thing at all times might be a good method. The risk is that someone might up and recognize your good works, ruining the whole plan. It's probably safe to say that this is a very slim chance, given the overarching selfish nature of the world, but it is worth mentioning. You could be unlucky enough to trigger the latent benevolent urge in somebody with the power to reward you with fame and fortune. You just can't trust people.
I tend to rinse with Listerine much longer than is strictly necessary, grimacing through the burning of delicate tissue, a wild look of determination established firmly in my eyes. I slosh that antiseptic concoction around until it feels good, and at the precise moment pain becomes pleasure I spit it out, victorious once again over the forces of mouthwash. That's right, slink away down that drain, and don't come around here any more. It's like some twisted display of machismo that no one is privy to.
What horrifying psychological deficit is this a symptom of? Or if it is just machismo, and that urge itself is rooted firmly in the evolutionary directive of impressing your mate, why do I find myself contorting my face into the mirror every morning, a narcissistic audience of one? What damaged impulse compels me to engage in a battle of wills with an inanimate object? Isn't that a conflict you're guaranteed to lose? Not if you choose wisely. There are secret guidelines. With care, you too can overcome the nefarious hordes of everyday things that quietly threaten your dominance. It's simply a matter of selecting which materials you can overpower, preferably at a subconscious level so you aren't aware of the compromise.
This might seem like a harmless quirk until you see me driving relentlessly towards that red light, trusting blindly in my superior will to make the colors switch before I plow through the stream of opposing vehicles. What have you got, traffic signal? Bring it on.
Conversation - talking at all really - has become alien to me. The delicate interweaving of words and sentences seems incomprehensible, an act beyond my powers to even conceptually understand, let alone take an active part in. Attempts to engage me in dialogue end in brutal and humiliating failure for both parties. It is as if someone has just asked me to perform spur-of-the-moment feats of gymnastics or rattle off brilliant proofs about theoretical physics. These are things I know of, in a vague sense, but am not likely to pull off without at least a few years of preparation.
People approach me in the street or at the mailboxes in the lobby downstairs, speaking their strange language, gazing expectantly for a response, and the best I can manage is to stare, eyes wide, like a frightened puppy until they finally leave. Their disappointment and exasperation lingers as the only successful communication. The more tenacious ones, those unable to accept their inevitable defeat, continue to badger me for some sort of feedback, forcing me to curl into a fetal ball and whimper softly; a powerful defense mechanism that rarely fails me. Activating the disgust of others is a good way to drive them off.
This condition is most awkward among friends and family, those who are accustomed to at the very least a hollow semblance of verbal interplay. I've always been able to fake it enough to pass your day-to-day social examinations. Now I am a source of shame, to be avoided at all costs, even if that means diving recklessly through traffic or unceremoniously tossing mobile phones into the most convenient source of water.
This discussive paralysis is rooted in a greater disruption: I am losing the ability to see things as a unified whole. Objects, situations, concepts, pretty much most nouns, all appear now as a patchwork non-sum of their component parts. I see the ingredients instead of the complete item. This causes me to engage each piece separately instead of responding to the finished work. A monologue becomes a disconnected collection of sentences, which themselves break down into rhythmic sequences of words, that disintegrate into letters, which appear to be carefully arranged shapes. Ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
My hope right now is that this regression will continue past physical or mental objects to the point of intention itself, thus allowing me to circumvent the process of construction and comprehension, giving me instead an unfettered view at the roots, the seed. It could be argued that I will be missing out on entire rich levels of interpretation, but I am willing to accept that if it means that people will no longer sound like the clamoring "yup yup yup yup" aliens from Sesame Street.
I'm walking through MLK Jr. Memorial Park on the way to the post office to trip off the August CD, when a gentleman nearby ceases screaming to himself and falls into step with me. The following banal conversation takes place.
"How are you doing today, sir?" he queries with a calmness that startles me given his previous gibbering.
"Pretty good, how about you?"
"I like them glasses you're wearing." Wink.
"I, uh," casting around for a similar compliment, considering the odd-smelling skin-tight leather, single enormous golden earring in the shape of (i think) a seahorse, shaved head with only a ponytail remaining above his left ear. "Thanks," I manage.
He gives me a quick nod, stops dead in his tracks, and begins to - quite convincingly - howl like a wolf. Repeatedly. Until I am out of earshot. Was it meant for me? Is there some secret language I am not privy to? Sometimes I feel like there are entire levels of communication that everyone else engages in, but I simply don't notice or understand. Maybe everyone speaks Wolf, and my ignorance leaves me flailing about in this single language world.
As noted, the comp for August is gone. The whole printing/mailing production process cost a bit more than I expected, I need to figure out a way to cut corners. I am thinking: outsource to an offshore sweatshop. A CD for September is in the works; more information soon.
I need a memory upgrade. I had half a dozen items to elucidate and I can only remember those two. My absentmindedness is on the rise; if my mind decays this early, I'll be a vegetable by thirty. I'm amnemonic to the point that I'll put the kettle on for tea and then leave the apartment for work. After the kettle I was reduced to using pots to boil water. I've burned through the bottom of two (2) soup pots because I begin to cook and then get distracted by something else, recalling my original task only when the sweet odor of roasting Teflon wafts over to me. That leads to a bad spiral: overheated Teflon gives you polymer fume fever, which affects your cardiovascular system, which at some point probably affects your memory. No blood no remember. The vaunted seven chunks of memory seems to be an overestimation when it comes to my particular cerebrum.
It seems to be an environmental habit here. It usually happens in the late afternoon, after the sun has stopped hemorrhaging so much light onto all the stucco and palm trees. The bank of fog that spent the day crouching feral out over the ocean begins to crawl inland. I am led to believe that when it swallows San Francisco it is pristine white and gorgeous to behold. Not over here. My guess is that as it passes over the bay that fetid water vomits up its own contribution: some filth that stains the virginal clouds a sickly, slimy yellow-gray.
The Death Fog.
It brings an early twilight, slowly blotting out the sun with sooty tendrils that make it look as if the entire city has caught fire. Which is resplendent in a post-apocalyptic way, but the deadly pollution component stifles the aesthetic appeal somewhat. It looks most like a dirty, dirty version of the Nothing from The NeverEnding Story. It smells like mortality.
It strips the paint from cars and burns the more combustible materials right off the buildings. The church across the street has become little more than a pair of tortured black steeples, growing thinner with each day's assault. In the mornings the sky seems so calm, inviting you to venture forth and experience the bright warmth of day. It's a trap. Every afternoon, like clockwork, the relentless clouds lurch in from the west to extract their ecological revenge.
A palpable shudder skims up streets as it oozes into view, and everyone runs screaming for the nearest cover. Those unlucky enough to be caught outside and forced to breathe it in find their day pretty much ruined. They fall, writhe about on the dank concrete, and seem to meet an untimely end, only to rise up stiff-limbed to wander the town in a godless eternal half-life. They cry the tears of the damned and sate their hideous hunger on family pets, the suit-wearing homeless, and unfortunate university students caught outside too late.
This may be the last you hear from me. The fog is searing its bitter way through the thick steel shutters on our windows and will soon be inside.
An unusual number of the homeless people in Berkeley seem to wear suits. And those who do wear suits seem to be among the most unbalanced; their muttering reaches a higher volume and their gesticulations are amped up to modern-dance-levels. They also seem to be critically lacking shoes. Maybe there was some tragic incident in the past where a big group of vagrants jumped an outing of salarymen and cannibalized their clothes but left their shoes out of accordance with some obscure hobo code regarding feet.
More likely, it seems to me, is the scenario I imagine in my quieter moments. I see the onset of sudden enlightenment at an extra-office business lunch. In the midst of their soul-crushing machinations some slip of the universal gears peels back the veil of existence and all the corporate cogs abruptly reach parinirvana. All these so-recently-oppressed middle managers jump up, ecstatic at their visions, and run out through the streets, stripping off their clothes and singing with unbridled joy at the vast miracle of life. But they keep their shoes, because even buddhas need protection from the searing asphalt.
Bums instantly emerge from the bushes and snatch up the discarded suits, glancing wildly about, then disappear once again into the unchecked wilds of the street median. Some kind of karmic residue, a spiritual ejaculation as it were, remains on the garments of the awakened ones and seeps into the (perhaps already troubled) minds of the newly-clad homeless, tantalizing them with a glimpse of Truth but really only offering them Warmth and some modicum of Nattiness. The delicious peek of awareness either leads them to a path of righteousness, in which case they spend their meditation-filled hours somewhere that is not the streets of Berkeley, or it drives them batshit insane and they spend their time jumping around the benches at the BART station and generally giving me the creeps.
Our apartment overlooks the workshop of Ifshin Violins. They construct and repair a variety of stringed instruments, and are apparently fairly renowned. The windows across from ours are littered with the shells of violins in various stages of completion. Naked white wooden bodies and gleaming polished works of art.
The best part, however, is that throughout the day the sounds of tuning, testing, or demonstrations will filter in through the balcony door, dusting the apartment with half-heard snippets of plaintive music. It is lovely. Prokofiev's Romeo & Juliet, phrases from Mozart, and children's nursery rhymes seem to be favorites. Or at least those are the melodies we can identify, mostly uneducated in classical music as we are. Even the discordant noise of strings being tuned into position sounds haunting after travelling between the buildings.
The most mundane events seem to take on strange weight and significance when backed by violins (a fact Hollywood has known for a century). It is as if we live with our own sparse, sometimes dissonant, yet ultimately beautiful Philip Glass soundtrack.
The compilation cd. Unlike the last one of these that I promised, I've decided on the tracklist beforehand so I won't spend the next two months in agonizing deliberations about which Hermann and Kleine song to include. The theme is loosely Futurism. 55m 11s of chirpy, throbby, futurepop goodness. Ok, yes, there is Kylie Minogue, but it is not what you think. It is the spastic robot sex version and you will enjoy it with a big helping of guilt.
Request your copy today, and be sure to include your most recent physical address.
To bring to light after a period of obscurity. Quietly back in effect. The synopsized list of recent happenings, because I'm lazy and bullet points are so hip.
Stay tuned.