Early Music for Machines

American composer Conlon Nancarrow, who had fought on the "wrong side" of the Spanish Civil War, whiled away his years in exile in Mexico City in the mid-20th century meticulously punching holes in scrolls made for player pianos. The resulting sounds are truly something to behold. (Several other early "machine music" artists worth listening to also appear on this page.)

"Reality" Remade

The implications of this clip are mind-boggling. It's a painstakingly detailed re-enactment of a scene from a reality show (The Hills), and a startling dystopian vision of a permanently writerless Hollywood. It's also subtly brilliant satire starring bona fide actors James Franco and Mila Kunis.



Come back, writers! We at least need our news out here!
Courtesy of defamer.com

A Thousand Words?

The phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words" has been said in various ways throughout history. It may have originated as a Chinese saying, or with Napoleon, or the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, or a 1920's trade journal writer called Fred Barnard; since we don't know its origins anymore, it's called a proverb.

Ironic, perhaps, that today we can hardly trust the origins or veracity of the many pictures we see. Manipulation is a more common practice than many realize, and it's getting harder and harder to spot. Below are links to notable altered photos past and present.

Some examples here

A more thorough investigation by Dartmouth here

(P.S. Is that Trotsky's ghost behind Katie Couric?)

Britain's "Crazy Rulers" Documentary

Though we at the Bay Press seek to avoid duplication of content currently circulating in other major media, some stories merit amplification. One example is the excruciatingly strange documentary Crazy Rulers of the World (part one), which recently aired on the UK's Channel 4.

However many grains of salt you take it with, this piece will entertain and possibly frighten. It is at least a fascinating insight into the types of characters a bloated military bureaucracy creates. Prepare to learn about a spoon-bending U.S. general, the "Earth First Batallion", and the army's apparently ongoing forays into new age mysticism and paranormal research. Inspired by the 2004 book The Men Who Stare at Goats. The veracity of the claims aside, spellbinding stuff.

Credits: www.boingboing.net, www.deadrobot.com

Orson Welles, Terror Clairvoyant

Twenty years before 9/11, in a sensational documentary called The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, Orson Welles interpreted a Nostradamus quatrain to mean that a Middle Eastern "King of Terror" would attack New York in 1999. The incredibly hokey, but still spooky enactment shows, among other things, a model of the World Trade Center falling as a turbaned warlord watches from his bunker. Welles' near-planetary girth at the time is nearly as scary as the apocalyptic destruction in this clip (via YouTube).

Stay What?

An ad for the Hilton Garden Inn, appearing today on msn.com, almost seems to suggest something other than a hotel stay. Considering the ad was seen around 3am Pacific, they may be "hitting" a certain target market.

Of Rumblings, Terrestrial and Otherwise

The Bay Area just felt a significant earthquake, a 5.6 centered just north of San Jose. Communications are still spotty a half hour later, but thankfully, it seems so far that any damage was minor.

Just before the earthquake, Dennis Kucinich admitted during the democratic debate on MSNBC that he had indeed seen a UFO, as was recently reported, while visiting Shirley MacLaine, his children's godmother. Theory: the aliens were angered by this disclosure and chose to send a message to Shirley MacLaine, but missed by a few hundred miles.

Jason and the Afterthoughts

In 1978, Sean S. Cunningham set out to make a "real scary movie" called Long Night at Camp Blood. Then it hit him: the film should instead be called Friday the 13th. Like any good director, he promptly hired a New York ad agency to develop a logo for the unmade film and bought a full-page ad in Variety.

While scouting locations, Cunningham stumbled across a boy scout camp in northern New Jersey called No-Be-Bo-Sco. He rented the camp and proceeded to make his film. Buried in this real-life Camp Crystal Lake's site is one small reference to this fact. The boy scouts and Cunningham had rung the death knell of casual sex among promiscuous 70s youths, at least in any outdoor setting.

The Architectural Style They Named the Band After

Bauhaus, the architecture movement, celebrates its 75th anniversary sometime around now. A quarter century ago, Tom Wolfe, the perenially white-suited author of The Electic Kool-aid Acid Test penned From Bauhaus to Our House, a scathing indictment of the unadorned façades that characterize the Bauhaus style. This man hates glass office towers like Marx hated income disparity. Now that beach reading is finally over, there's no sense in not reading this 125-page epic. He may not be Rem Koolhaas, but hey, who would want him to be?

Baby Doc, where art thou?

Haiti's former dictator, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, once a multi-millionaire thanks to his adept kleptocracy, now lives in a run-down one-bedroom apartment in Paris with his girlfriend, Veronique Roy.

This is the fist in our "snapshot of a dictator" series which aims to answer the by-the-millisecond approach to coverage of less important historical figures.

Link an in-depth WSJ piece from 2003.

The Pervasive Music of Modern Life

In an episode on mapping, This American Life, among other things, analyzed the "music" produced by a typical office. The fan whirrs in F#, the computer hums in G, and the copier strikes an Augmented D third.

The root notes of these sounds were then played together on a keyboard. At times the result was beyond dischordant, horrible. How does this affect the worker's psyche? An interesting phenom. The Bay Press therefore pledges to one day feature not only excellent feng shui, but harmonic tuning of all its office machines, in its planned 176-story tower.

Link to episode 110 of This American Life. Available for free on iTunes podcasts.

"We may our ends by our beginnings know"

--John Denham

Welcome to the Bay Press, an entirely arbitrary agglomeration of media and ideas. Mostly we will seek to avoid covering anything already featured in mass market media, though we may bend the rules if we see fit here. And we will use the "royal we" at will, even when only one person is posting.

RDC