The librarian for the Other Minds RadiOM collection has an interesting blog entry over at the Internet Archive. Stephen Upjohn tells of the joys of listening to archive tapes all day and all the interesting things he's come across that are now available on the RadiOM.org site.

Here's a quote:

The Other Minds Archive*, which is hosted by the Internet Archive, represents the organization’s efforts to digitally preserve and make freely available, hundreds of hours of interviews, lectures, poetry readings, and musical performances featuring avant-garde composers, musicians, artists, and authors. Many of these programs were originally broadcast on Berkeley California’s KPFA-FM during the later half of the 20^th century, while others are taken from the Other Minds Festivals and various private collections. The Other Minds Archive is a veritable treasure trove, with something for everyone’s tastes, be it jazz, classical, rock, poetry, radio dramas, soundscapes, text-sound compositions, or just downright bizarre, unclassifiable auditory content. 

>>Read the whole entry 

Chronicle Books now has the perfect coffee table book for the computer geek nostalgic for the good ol' days when computers were computers and programmers ruled the world.

Core Memory
A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers • Featuring Machines from the Computer History Museum

Photographs by Mark Richards Text by John Alderman Foreword by Dag Spicer 11 x 9 in; 160 pp ; 150 full-color photographs Hardcover Published in April, 2007 ISBN 0811854426

Sample images here.

Beautiful images. 

A few weeks ago, while playing with my new digital Nikon D80, I started to feel nostalgic for my old, hefty, Nikon F2 ... the camera I shot most of my 8000 or so slides with for some 20+ years. I was wondering if the thing still worked. And, for my favorite lens, the Nikkor 85mm 1.8, which won't work with the newer N80 film and D80 digital cameras.

So I brushed it off, loaded up the F2 with some Tri-X 400 film, and took a hike thru our local cemetery, Oakland's fine Mountainview Cemetery, where all the Robber Barons are buried ... people whose last names we remember because streets and towns are named after them.

Black and white film seems to fit well against the granite stone of the cemetery. Static images, lots of symmetry, strong verticals and horizontals, strong shadows. Things I like.

I had no idea how these pictures would come out. Sending them out to a lab and waiting a week or so for the contacts and negative strips was nostalgic. Already I had fallen prey to the instant gratification of digital. But the wait for results is good because by the time you do get the contacts, your visual memory of taking those pictures has faded and you're able to look at them somewhat objectively, as if they were taken by someone else.

What concerned me most was whether or not the shutter screen was working properly. I've had the camera for about 30 years now, and somewhere in the middle of that lifetime it started to expose images unevenly. The camera slightly overexposed the leftmost eighth of the image. I had Nikon fix it (which left me without a camera for months, and set me back a pile of cash, as I recall.) 

So I took some blank wall shots this time, just to see how the exposure was doing. And as you can tell, the camera is doing really well, considering it probably hasn't been used in over 10 years.

Out of the 36 exposures, about eight are worth sharing. I was mostly testing the camera, taking a variety of shots to see if it worked. I also remembered t reason why I moved on from the F2 to the N80 some 8 or so years ago:  the Photomic thru-the-lens meter system had gone wonky and was not reliable. There was a bad connection in the linkage between the lens and the F-stop ring. So you would have to rely on a hand-held light meter most of the time. And, as expected, some of the shots on the roll were over and under exposed.

Another reason for finally abandoning my friend was the sheer weight of the thing. I still can't imagine that I carried this camera and lens around my neck and on my arm thru hikes in the Alps, protest marches in the streets, and knocking around with small children.

Still, it's good to stay in touch with the old technology. My digital Nikon D80 is an extremely fine camera, and I'm really enjoying using it. But it's with the mostly manual cameras like the F2 that you really learn about photography.

It's a keeper.

Some images from my cemetery walk are showing up on my photo blog All I've Seen http://rchrd.com/photo. You'll recognize the recent F2 images. They're the ones in striking black and white. And if you keep looking thru the images, eventually you'll get to the bulk of the F2 images taken between 1977 and 1999 or so. Let me know what you think of them.

How many of us in my generation, growing up in the 1950's, got interested in science because of Mr Wizard?

Well, Don Herbert, Mr Wizard on NBC, died today. He was 89.

In its time, Mr Wizard was one of the best things on TV, as far as I was concerned.

Another were Dr Harvey White's  "Continental Classroom" early morning Physics lectures.

Do kids have anything like it today? I haven't noticed.

Here's the obit in the LA Times.

RIP Mr Wizard. Thanks for the inspiration. We'll be thinking of you.

Here's a silly appearance that Don Herbert did on Dave Letterman's show in 1982: http://youtube.com/watch?v=TLRxVwRClRg 

Here is a book people have been waiting for.

Carolyn Brown, one of the founding members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, has published a memoir of her twenty years with the company, 1952-72.

Finally, that is. Apparently it took some 30 years to write it.

And it is a fascinating look into the early years of the avant garde in NY in the 50's and 60's -- the world around John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Earle Brown (Ms Brown's husband during this period), Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and the list goes on.

What makes the book most interesting is that it is a critical as well as adoring account of these people. You read about their good and bad points, and wonder about how much physical as well as psychological abuse dancers must suffer through. And all for art.

It's an excellent book, and a good example of why it's so important to keep good journals. 

Here's what's coming up from Other Minds:

Dennis Russell Davies & Maki Namekawa, Two Pianos:
October 11, 2007, Thursday, 8:00pm.
Music of Philip Glass, György Kurtag, Adam Fong, and American premieres by Chen Yi and Balduin Sulzer. Herbst Theatre, San Francisco. Tickets TBA.