[Oooof. That’s pretty damned ugly. -egg]
 – –
Economic recovery in the US actually made 99% of Americans poorer, top 1% captured 121% of gains:
“Striking it Richer,” a paper by Emmanuel Saez (an economist at UC Berkeley) looks at the way that the dividends of the slow US “economic recovery” have been distributed. Saez finds that 121% of the economic gains since 2009 have been captured by the richest 1% of Americans — in other words, despite economic growth, the poorest 99% of Americans actually got poorer through the “recovery.”

This confirms a pattern that Matt Stoller highlighted: that income inequality increased more under Obama than under Bush. And the new Saez paper also describes how it came about. In short form, income to the top 1% is significantly influenced by capital gains. Remember, the tax reporting is not clean here: rising equity and bond markets help all those private equity and hedge fund professionals, who are able to get capital gains treatment for what ought to be labor income. But the paper also stresses that the lower orders were hit hard in the aftermath of the global financial crisis than in the dot-bomb era, which also saw a big drop in capital gains. That isn’t as hard to understand. The collapse of the dot-com mania didn’t impair the real economy overmuch because it was not fueled in a meaningful way by borrowings. By contrast, the housing bubble, and more important (in terms of damage to the financial system) the much housing exposure created synthetically by CDOs that consisted entirely or mainly of credit default swaps was highly geared, hence when it collapsed, it took credit providers down with it.

Yes, Virginia, the Rich Continue to Get Richer: the Top 1% Got 121% of Income Gains Since 2009 [Yves Smith/Naked Capitalism]

Steroids:

[This looks pretty amazing. -egg]
 – –
Gestrument, Shaping Music with Kinect, Touch, and Acoustic Ensembles [Videos]:

Swiping through clouds of timbre and melody, using Gestrument is an experience of a different musical animal. Jesper Nordin and Kymatica / Jonatan Liljedahl created the iPad version, available now for ten bucks. But it’s worth looking at that side by side with Gestrument for Kinect, as the same metaphors can translate across input methods. Both employ a kind of meta-composition – instrument as conductor of musical structures, more than an object for exclusively solo expression.
What’s especially nice is hearing these digital, synthesized environments meld with acoustic instruments. The solution may not convince everyone yet, but there’s clearly potential for these digital instruments to join up with conventional chamber ensembles and acoustic instruments. (See the video below, a live concert with Trio Trespassing. Christophe Lebreton from GRAME in Lyon, France contributed to the development.)
And at the very least, Jesper Nordin’s development work and compositional experiments have earned him attention; the City of Stockholm has even recognized the app.
First, the iOS app:

And here’s a performance of the Kinect version, combined with an ensemble. (I’m curious, readers: sold one one more than the other? Neither?)

All reviews can be read on our Facebook page –

www.facebook.com/gestrument
Feature set of the iOS app include various options for control, sharing and collaboration, and support for file import/export, AudioCopy, MIDI, and now AudioBus:

• Play and compose music with the swipe of your finger

• Generate music within defined scales and rhythms

• Improvise freely within a fully controlled musical framework

• Use the internal GM sound bank or your favorite MIDI synthesizer, or load your own sf2 soundfonts.

• Use Gestrument to control other iOS apps or external MIDI programs through a MIDI interface ([Apple] Core MIDI enabled) or Network MIDI

• Virtual MIDI with MIDI clock in and out lets you sync with sequencers and DAWs

• Create and save your own presets and share with your friends or download new presets from www.gestrument.com

• Record what you play to audio and MIDI file

• Export recordings to AudioShare – audio document manager

• Copy recordings with AudioCopy

• Play back previous recordings, optionally looping

• Use Gestrument as a source synth in Audiobus

• Allow mixing with other apps, for example play a track in the

Music app and play along with it in Gestrument.

The idea is, you surf around scales and rhythms that are pre-mapped to the layout. Korg’s Kaossilator popularized some of these sorts of ideas in hardware; here, you have various other ways of setting up those kinds of layouts. The idea isn’t new: the traditional Autoharp has long allowed folk musicians easy access to harmonies simply by strumming. (Frets are a more complex solution to the same idea.)
You are a bit restricted in sound set, but with MIDI out, there’s room for growth.
More on the app:

http://www.gestrument.com/

okcebooks – “In which a bunch of earnest dudes try to chat…:

okcebooks – “In which a bunch of earnest dudes try to chat up notorious twitter robot “Horse_ebooks”, via Dan W.

[Hot damn. -egg]
 – –
Projecting the Lorax on a blizzard:

As readers of Pirate Cinema will know, I love pointing powerful projectors at distant, public objects, because there’s something awesome about watching YouTube videos against the side of an office-building opposite one’s 15th-storey hotel room. But I never suspected how wondrous the results would be if I shone the movie-light into a blizzard, as Redditor bmaffitt did three days ago.

I pointed a video projector into the blizzard tonight, and took pictures. The results were… unexpected. (imgur.com) [Reddit]

Projector Snow [Flickr]

(via Hacker News)

Couple engrossed in their wireless devices ignore each other (1906):

From A Century of PUNCH Cartoons. (Via Kip W)

Little girl hears Bad Brains for the first time:

How did she know how to slamdance like that, you may ask? Some things are not taught. You just know.
I first heard the Bad Brains when I was 12, after their eponymous cassette came out on ROIR Records. And you know what, I did the exact same thing this little kid is doing in the video.
Link: “Adeline hears Bad Brains for the first time.”
(thanks, Sean Bonner, via Vice)

[Great essay. -egg]
 – –
Indie rock, class, race, and culture in America:

Martin Douglas’s “The Only Black Guy at the Indie Rock Show” is a fascinating longread about race, culture and class, partly a memoir of Douglas’s life as a young black kid in a North Carolina housing project who loved indie rock; partly a critique of the way we think about what blackness, whiteness and culture are.

The black kids of my generation and the ones before it were raised with the notion that it’s essential to hold onto one’s “blackness,” and that venturing outside of those boundaries meant you were trying to assimilate to white society, to “be more like one of them.” But essentially every African-American child growing up has an intimate knowledge of some version of the black experience, and the way we dress or the music we listen to still won’t hide the color of our skin. I never saw my interest in alternative culture as a way to obfuscate my racial identity. Aside from the annoyance of being typecast as a fan of a band purely based on superficial concerns, that conversation overlooked the one substantial reason why there are a lot of black people who relate to TV on the Radio’s music: They are a band primarily consisting of African-American men who often explore what it means to be African-American. For a generation of alternative music fans made to believe we were betraying “what it means” to be black, a band had finally come along that made that very idea a theme in its music.

But as TV on the Radio started to grow in notoriety, it still created a schism in my initial attraction to rock music; here was a band that was, for all intents and purposes, “socially acceptable” for black people to like. This falls into my earlier point about young children emulating people who look like them. I imagine if the band were around when I was younger — with their overtures to shoegaze, incisive and smart lyrics, steadfast commitment to experimentalism, and Kyp Malone’s beard — they probably would have been my favorite band throughout my entire childhood. At the very least, I wouldn’t have felt like such an outsider for loving alternative music.

The Only Black Guy at the Indie Rock Show

(via Andre’s Notes)

Strange, scammy director made the same movie over and over for 40 years:

A filmmaker named Melton Barker travelled America from the 1930s to the 1970s, making and remaking a short movie called “The Kidnapper’s Foil,” which featured a large cast of kids. He’d roll into small towns, announce that he was going into production, and advertise for proud parents who wanted their kids to break into the movies. He’d raise local money to (re)make the film with an all townie cast, have it produced, and leave it behind. There are lots of versions still extant, but there are probably hundreds more that may never be recovered. They’re a fascinating insight into the lives of Americans across the country and the years.

She estimates that Barker made hundreds of versions of “The Kidnappers Foil,” but fewer than 20 have been unearthed and digitized. In advance of his arrival to a new town — like Reidsville, N.C., or Allentown, Pa. — Barker, who Ms. Frick said probably died on the road in 1977, would broker a deal with a local theater to screen the film upon completion, handing over the reels once they’d been developed, either by himself (working in his hotel room) or by a lab in Dallas. (During part of his career Barker, like the filmmakers of his era, was working with cellulose nitrate, a wildly flammable film stock that is difficult and dangerous to store.) All the currently accessible prints are available to view on meltonbarker.org, a Web site Ms. Frick and her colleagues built to raise more interest in Barker’s work. That collection, Ms. Frick reasoned, might lead to the recovery of more prints.

Dan Streible, a film historian and an associate professor of cinema studies at New York University, is the director of a recurring symposium for so-called “orphan films” like “The Kidnappers Foil.” Mr. Streible said such films, which he defines loosely as “amateur films and home movies, medical films, outtakes, uncompleted films, fragments — things which were not commercial features,” are also “the ones that need the most preservation and advocacy.” He added, “There wasn’t an obvious commercial value to them, and there isn’t always an obvious owner in the legal sense, and they’re films that are left behind in archives for any number of haphazard reasons.”

These lost artifacts can become essential cultural documents, and what they occasionally lack in narrative coherence or flash they make up for in historical worth. Unlike Hollywood films set in fake small towns and populated by professional actors, “The Kidnappers Foil” captures, however incidentally, an authentic American culture and locale. “By going to all those small towns, throughout the South and all over, Barker was preserving regional dialects that cannot be heard in a single Hollywood film,” Mr. Streible said. “No one else was recording people in Childress, Tex., in 1936, and here they are, a large group of them all talking in their natural voices.”

The Legacy of a Camera-Toting Huckster [NYT/Amanda Petrusich]

(via Making Light)

(Image: Texas Archive of the Moving Image)