Hi Summer. Bye Summer.

by Jonathan on August 26th, 2008

It feels like summer is finally ending. The heat in NYC has eased a bit in the last week or so; sure, we’re still in the 80′s, but the low 80′s most days, and the humidity is just about manageable. This week, I caught a fantastic event at Damrosch Park: the Éthiopiques concert featuring Mahmoud Ahmed, Getatchew Merkurya and Alemayehu Eshete, playing with the Either/Orchestra and the Ex.

It really was a perfect evening. I avoided the hassle of crossing Manhattan during rush hour by taking the number 6 to 59th Street and then walking across the park: dusk is my favourite time of day in Central Park.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had a solo picnic dinner by the pond on the south end. It’s quiet and shady there, although the breeze wafting down from Central Park South tends to carry faint, distracting notes of horse manure. I watched  a couple of guys fishing for bass in the pond, which to me seems a lose/lose prospect – Central Park bass sounds even less tasty than East River whitefish (NYC insider joke alert!). I had grilled chicken and flabread, pomegranate juice and pistachio Turkish delight for dessert – hardly wot and injera, but a vague attempt to be less-Eurocentric.

Then over to Damrosch for the concert. It was an unrestrainedly beautiful evening, a fistful of great musicians and several thousand New Yorkers of all stripes – hipsters, young families, rastas, Lincoln Center types, jazz hounds and Ethiopians galore. The sax player Getatchew Merkurya really stood out for me, although much of the crowd love went to vocalist Mahmoud Ahmed (who admittedly rocked it very hard indeed, putting the lie to the idea that you should slow down after you hit 65).  Just a great, great night, and probably my last outdoor concert this year. Bah!

Here’s Ahmed onstage – the tiny figure in white, under the violet, violet sky.

By the way, I can’t recommend checking out the Éthiopiques records highly enough; it’s a series of French reissues of jazzy Ethiopian pop from the 60′s and 70′s. My personal favourites are both instrumental sets: Éthiopiques Vol. 4: Ethio Jazz et Musique Instrumentale, 1969 – 1974 and Éthiopiques Vol. 14: Negus of Ethiopian Sax, which is a collection of cuts by Getatchew Merkurya. I do realize that these sound hopelessly obscure – and that certainly accounts for their appeal in some hipster circles – but this is wonderfully vital music, at once exotic and familiar, and definitely worth checking out. These records are like the soundtrack to some psychedelic secret agent movie set in the Middle East in 1971. Which is, in the words of my former employer, a good thing…

Start waving goodbye to Uncanny Valley

by Jonathan on August 21st, 2008

Have a look at this video:

No, seriously, I mean it. Watch this video before going on.

I came across it on Gizmodo , the tech/gadget-obsessed website. The woman talking in the interview is acting for the camera. Or, rather, some of her is: you’re hearing her voice, and you’re seeing her body and her hair, but her face is computer-generated. The video was rendered using special software; she posed for 35 facial shots before a pair of digital cameras, and then her expressions for the entire interview were rendered by a computer.

Of course, on Gizmodo, all of the readers insisted that they could tell that her face was synthetic, but that’s largely because the title for the item was something like “Emily Is Computer-generated – Can You Tell?” The fact is, it’s a pretty astonishing likeness. The animation is smooth, the features moving in a coordinated, natural way, the facial expressions elegant and real.

In computer graphics, there’s a notion referred to as the “Uncanny Valley”. You can play a video game with hokey 8-bit graphics, a Super Mario Brothers game, for example. The characters are pixelated little creatures, but even so, you can relate to them as human.

However, as the graphics improve, and as characters look more and more human, something strange happens. When we see a computer graphic image of a person that is very realistic, but not quite accurate, it has a slightly eerie effect, as alienating as a life-like waxwork. We resist the emotional connection, and feel slightly disturbed. The “Uncanny Valley” is that vaguely upsetting distance between something real and its very realistic copy.

The video was made by a company that specializes in generating life-like faces for computer graphic characters in movies and videogames, but the technology is very impressive, and will only get better. We’ve all seen video clips or TV commercials in which dead actors or musicians are composited into present day situations, but one has to wonder what the implications of this new  software are. It would obviously be easy to turn a video of a man’s retirement speech into a confession of murder. It’s only a question of time before faked videos will show up – you’ve probably seen doctored pornographic images of celebrities having sex, some of which look impressively real. It’ll be interesting to see what happens as these videos begin to proliferate.

In forensics, the switch over to digital photography has been a challenge because of the liability of digital files to tampering. For example, when a dead person is found with severe facial injuries, a medical examiner friend uses Photoshop to conceal the wounds to produce a “cleaned-up” photograph of the victim to show the family for identification. Obviously, viewing images of a severely injured son or husband is devastating, and what my friend does is genuinely kind to the family.

However, in demonstrating how easy it is to add and to subtract wounds, she’s risking compromising the integrity of her evidence (and an identification is indeed part of the evidence on the case). How do we know, the defense attorney will say, that she didn’t Photoshop in this gunshot wound of the chest here?

Sure, that’s pretty over the top, and she can forestall that by keeping the original and by making it clear in the record that she has retouched the photo for identification purposes, but I suspect it’s only a question of time before we see that sort of defense argument. In NYC, where we have only this year moved up to digital, we have a digital watermarking system that will flag any photograph where the image has been altered, even if it’s something so trivial as rotating the image from the horizontal to the vertical. In truth, it’s a bit of a pain in the ass, but if it helps us to defend the integrity of our work, I’m all for it.

One of the things I like about forensic work is its realness. I examine the victim, I document the injuries, I open the body and explore the wound pathways – the definition of “autopsy” is “seeing with one’s own eyes”. If I look at a body before me, I can be confident in my analysis and conclusions – there’s no Uncanny Valley in Forensic Pathology.

At least not yet: there is a growing fascination with the “Virtual Autopsy” – an examination done exclusively through imaging technology like MRI’s. I’ve seen enough errors made in diagnoses from CT and MRI scans that I’m very wary of that technology – call me old-fashioned, but I’ve got every intention of remaining autoptic…

Worst. Blogger. Ever.

by Jonathan on August 19th, 2008

I see, with mingled pride and awe, that I’ve not posted anything to my blog since April 1. PSYCH!!!

I’d like to say that this is because I’ve been busy – writing, working, traveling – but mostly it’s because I have the attention span of a jackdaw. Writing these three lines alone, I’ve already taken breaks to look at Alafair Burke‘s and Jason Pinter‘s blogs, as well as to browse the new Crate and Barrel 2 catalog, and to listen to Carcass’s 1991 death metal classic Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious. I blame the internet! There are too many flashing lights and loud noises to allow easy concentration.

Jason and Alafair put me to shame. While I maintain a sleek average posting rate of once every 4 1/2 months, they are daily bloggers, their posts well-constructed and glimmering with photos and useful links. I vow that I shall be more like them!    Both have new books out, and both recently gave excellent readings to packed houses in NYC. And because I’m now a serious blogger, fully intent on festooning my posts with pictures and links, here are their covers:

 

Of course, life in NYC is more than just attending friends’ readings and going out for drinks afterwards! There’s also going to concerts and going out for drinks afterwards. On Friday evening, I went to an outdoor event at Lincoln Center: Ronen Givony of Wordless Music, with Lincoln Center’s Bill Bragin, had put together an ambitious program called 800 Years of Minimalism. The show started with 13th century vocal music from Perotin, then Manuel Gottsching, one of the early pioneers of krautrock, performed a 70 minute version of his 1984 classic E2-E4, improvising on keyboard and guitar over a rich bed of electronic polyrhythms (E2 – E4 is essentially Ravel’s Bolero for the Ecstasy generation).

It was a beautiful evening; the rain eased for Gottsching’s performance, and a couple thousand of us sat in the dark blue dusk, blissing out to the music and the psychedelic light show like so many filthy hippies. It was a wonderful NYC experience, but it did have its sad side: the rain forced cancellation of the US live debut of Rhys Chatham’s A Crimson Grail, for which 200 electric guitarists had gathered from across the country to perform. It was a sensible move, seeing as how 200 electric amplifiers in several inches of water is a recipe for electrocution. Both Bragin and Chatham vowed that the show will eventually take place; since I’d been looking forward to the show for months, I guess I can wait a little longer.

Anyway! I bumped into some old friends there, including Adam Shore of Vice Records, who I knew from my raving days. I remember him most fondly at some rave on a ski slope in Western Massachusetts in the mid-90′s, lying blissed out under the bass bins during Carl Craig’s set like a filthy hippie.Since it was about 10PM, dinner was on the agenda, and Adam, his  cool friend Vanessa and I went to Gotham, where right now I think the duck is about the best thing in the world.

The conversation somehow turned to heavy metal and black metal and death metal, which was when Adam recommended the Carcass album, particularly for the lyrics. Which are, in fact, hilarious, a barely comprehensible salad of words clipped out of a Lovecraft novel. Take, for example, the opening lyrics to “Forensic Clinicism/The Sanguine Article”:

Insipid fumes bellow from the atrabilious chimney
Whilst in the sanctified crevet I calmly pillage and rake
For hot dry powdered human slag
Still steaming in the crematorium’s grate

Quick, someone get that lyricist a mug of warm Ovaltine! Find him a koala to cuddle! And a DVD about penguins!

And the Magic 8-ball says, “Signs point to atrabiliousness“…