I wrote the cover story for the Spring 2010 issue of Columbia College’s DEMO Magazine. The feature documents two Columbia professors who are using video games to approach social issues, in very different ways. Professor David Gerden’s CONSTRUCT project attempts to bridge bleeding-edge video game research and behavioral science, while Mindy Faber’s Open Youth Projects utilizes gaming as a tool for community outreach:

“This is like the quarter-million-dollar table,” says Columbia professor David Gerding, sitting in front of a modest conference table outfitted with six laptops that are connected to optical sensors. As Gerding speaks, an avatar of his face appears on the laptop screen before him. A click of a button, and beams of light appear to radiate from the eyes of his digital self. “It’s detecting the iris. Can you see the laser beams coming out of my eyes? It’s like Blade Runner!”

In a modest conference room in Columbia College’s Department of Interactive Arts and Media (IAM), we’ve stepped into what could pass as a set from the ’80s sci-fi classic. It’s a futuristic space where individuals interact on screen as small sensors track their eye movements, pupil dilation, and even facial expressions, all in the service of teaching machines to understand how people communicate and collaborate with one another.

Read the entire article at the DEMO site.

Photo by Drew Reynolds

An interview with Balkan-fusion septet Beyond the Pale for the Santa Cruz Weekly:

Eric Stein, bandleader and mandolin player for Toronto Balkan-fusion band Beyond the Pale, didn’t grow up on the music of his Eastern European ancestors. He was weaned on rock & roll and folk. As his tastes matured, he developed into a bluegrass aficionado. But after a couple of years performing in the bluegrass style, Stein started feeling conflicted.

"I found with bluegrass there was something about it that didn’t feel quite honest playing it," Stein says. "I could do tons of practicing, I could get the technique required to play that music, but being a Jewish kid from Toronto, bluegrass wasn’t within my realm of experience or my own historical and cultural context to work within."

Read the full article at santacruz.com

From ‘99-’06, I was an active participant in my hometown of Santa Cruz’s music scene, and I have a ton of affection for it. In this retrospective for the Santa Cruz Weekly, I took a crack at documenting it. If you’d like to hear some of the music of Santa Cruz in the ’00s, you can download the compilations that I released while living there–Tastes Like Burning, Someday Coming Down, and Someday Coming Round. Otherwise, this should serve as a decent introduction.

PUTTING a retrospective of the Santa Cruz music scene into print is probably asking for trouble. After accepting this assignment, I posted a one-line status update to Facebook: “writing a roundup of Santa Cruz’s most significant bands of the decade. Suggestions?” It didn’t take long for the responses to start coming in. “There have been significant Santa Cruz bands since Camper Van Beethoven?” wrote one local, illustrating the foolhardiness of trying to present a single overview of a decade of Santa Cruz music. For every resident who thinks the local music scene ended in the early ’80s when CVB signed to a major and left town, there’s a grubby teenager in a Soquel garage blasting through two-minute punk songs who has never heard of David Lowery. (more…)

From the Santa Cruz Weekly

Call it the curse of consistency: any band can take a long hiatus before being welcomed back with open arms upon the release of a so-called “comeback” record. On the other hand, you have the unassuming bands that create strong work, album after album. Bands like Yo La Tengo who never get their comeback record because they’ve never gone away. Some start taking these artists for granted. But as Yo La Tengo demonstrates on Popular Songs, that would be a mistake.

Read the article

From Vagabondish

Last year, I accomplished something unlikely, if not quite impossible: during a six-month road trip around the entire United States, I continued to work my full-time publicity job, and did steady freelancing work on the side. It wasn’t easy, and I can’t say that I accomplished every task to the best of my abilities, but I learned a ton (the hard way) on how to work while taking an extended trip.

Read it here

Appeared in the Santa Cruz Weekly and the North Bay Bohemian.

Illustration by Mott Jordan

To paraphrase Dave Chappelle-as-Rick James, “Internet’s a hell of a drug.” Like James’ drug of choice, the web is addictive and alluring, its benefits debatable.

I speak as someone intimately familiar with an addictive drug: two years ago, I quit smoking. To this day, I find myself smoking in dreams, and occasionally sneak them from friends at the bar. The rest of the time, the Internet serves as a proxy.

Addictive personalities often replace one addiction with another. My new worst friend is the social web, the endless stream of information constantly streaming down Senator Ted Stevens’ infamous “series of tubes.” Here’s a short list of Internet services that I use and check on a daily basis: email, Facebook, Tumblr, Delicious, Evernote, Twitter, Remember the Milk, Google Reader (tracking some 180 RSS feeds), and Yahoo News. I back up longer articles using Instapaper to read on the bus; at the home office, I work with two web browsers open at all times, 10 individual tabs loaded in each, spread over two monitors. While commuting on the train, I’m checking text messages via my Internet-enabled phone and reading archived blog posts on my iPod. At times, it seems like a type of digital schizophrenia, or if nothing else, a hell of a drug. (more…)

From the AV Club Chicago

At turns lyrical and fierce, the work of hip-hop poet Kevin Coval is intrinsically a product of Chicago. Coval’s latest collection of poetry, Everyday People, is a paean to the city where he earned his chops, attending basement hip-hop shows as a teen and honing his skills under the tutelage of hometown heavyweights like Reggie Gibson and Dan Ferry. (more…)

New feature for the Santa Cruz Weekly on the Handsome Family:

MANY ARTISTS have explored the dark recesses of the American id, but few have wrung such effortless beauty from it as the Handsome Family. Since 1995, the married duo of Brett and Rennie Sparks has found gold in the strange, the mundane and the macabre. Specializing in folk, bluegrass and country delivered at a stately pace, the band has become known for songs examining the existential cruelty of the natural world and the sorrows of an ill-spent life, and bone-chilling murder ballads. But on the occasion of their 20th wedding anniversary, the two have turned toward territory they’ve rarely explored: the redemptive power of love.

Read it here

From Punk Planet #80

Late in December 2006, while most offices were closed for the holidays, the Independent Press Association (IPA) quietly sent an e-mail to its member publications announcing that the organization was closing its doors. Despite previous optimism expressed by the IPA’s board of directors, for many of the publishers whose titles the organization distributed, it came as little surprise. For them, the IPA’s sudden announcement was endemic to a total communications breakdown between the organization and its client publications that began in early 2005. Publications represented by the IPA continue to contend with the likelihood that thousands of dollars they are owed will never be seen. For some, such as Kitchen Sink (and Punk Planet itself), this comes as the IPA’s final, and fatal, blow. The fallout has been profound-the independent publishing community has experienced an unprecedented bloodletting in recent months, as magazines run on a shoestring have been unable to overcome huge losses in operating income. (more…)