Bodyw0rks

Progress on further birdw0rking. Coupla tracks pretty much completed, if not yet mastered: The Midnight Stint and Front. Not sure the rhythm sections work, but am liking the larger sound and things’re getting tighter. Fishing around on Soundclick has unearthed some decent work by other online musos – there’s a lot of dross out there, but it’s worth digging. Users can shove fave tracks in personalised “radio stations” – am slowly adding to the birdw0rks station on each visit.

Intriguing exhibit just opened at the MOMA: design & safety (visited during mad Friday night freebie crush). A real mixed bag of the amazing, the innovative, the pleasingly artisitic, the banal, the pointless, and the twee. Loved the ‘ParaSite’ – a temporary homeless shelter that hooks up to the output of a building’s heating/air conditioning system to inflate and heat.

Recommended read: Stiff by Mary Roach. Details everything that may happen to your cadaver once you’ve donated yourself to science. Good mix of macabre facts & historical background. The attempted wit doesn’t really come off that well, but it’s a well constructed & an (en)grossing read. Includes a description of a visit to the infamous ‘body farm’ down in Tennessee that investigates decay processes in corpses littered around the countryside (by coincidence, Dr. Driv, colour chemist and textiles prof., was just the week before describing forensics studies down in a similar site in NC). Interesting chapter on heart transplants, organ ‘harvesting’ and debate over where the soul resides that I've just read 'ere.