Author: Chris Barrus

The Odyssey Seekers: America’s Great Travelers

Odyssey seekersMy sister’s new book, The Odyssey Seekers: America’s Great Travelers is now available as a Kindle edition on the Amazon store.

Copy/pasting from the description:

In the first half of the 20th century, America could boast of a number of outstanding travel adventurers and writers. Superstars of their time, these men brought the earth’s most exotic countries to an enthusiastic public that demanded information and pictures about the world. They inspired an entire generation to travel in search of their own romance and adventure.

The Odyssey Seekers: America’s Great Travelers relates the stories of four of these men:

Harry Franck extolled the virtue of penniless travel by tramping around the world in 1904. He stowed away on ships and trains, and found odd jobs as a human nutcracker in Egypt, a clown in Ceylon, and a tennis ball chaser in British India to help pay the way. He walked through the jungles of Burma to Thailand—an unheard-of feat for the time. He continued with a four-year trip walking from Mexico, through Central America, and down the Andes to Argentina. In the 1920s, he walked through every province of China. In his more than twenty books, Franck’s vivid descriptions—underscored by a Yankee sense of humor and acute observations of everyday life of the common man—are often quoted by today’s researchers.

E. Alexander Powell introduced his readers of his thirty-one travel books to kings, sultans, and empresses. In the 1920s, he collaborated with movie producer Samuel Goldwyn on one of the first Hollywood “adventure” films in Southeast Asia. He wowed his audiences back home with stories of his narrow escape from death by a Dyak-poisoned dart in Borneo and his capture by Bedouins while crossing the Arabian Desert. Fulfilling one of many childhood dreams, Powell retraced the steps of famed explorer Henry Stanley across Africa.

Richard Halliburton influenced a generation of Americans to take off and explore the world. Each of his seven books became synonymous with youth, travel, and romance, and his lectures attracted men and women by the thousands who waited in long lines for hours to hear him speak. Halliburton was famous for such exploits as swimming the Panama Canal, sleeping on top of the Great Pyramid at Giza, diving into the sacred Mayan well at Chichen Itzá, and riding an elephant across the Alps in the manner of the Carthaginian general Hannibal.

Lowell Thomas introduced the story of “Lawrence of Arabia” to the world and became one of America’s most distinguished broadcast journalists. His listeners and readers of his more than fifty books traveled vicariously through him as he became one of the first Americans to visit some of the world’s most forbidden countries: Arabia, Afghanistan, and Tibet.

Fans of eccentrics and travel writing (especially the intersection of the two) should check it out!

Where I’m at these days

Just noticed an uptick in the RSS feed subscribers so “hello” wherever and whoever you are. It’s probably time to post an update to the “where you can find me” list.

  • Shoot low, they might be crawling: A Tumblr blog of assorted things I ran across that held my attention for more than a moment.
  • Flickr: Hip-hip-hip-hipstamatic!
  • Google+: Setting aside the relative worth of social networking in general, I’m kinda liking the way Google has this set up.
  • Last.FM: It’s rare that I’m not scrobbling anything
  • Twitter: Graffitti and other assorted asynchronous chatting.

Mars Science Lab has a posse

Whoever is doing the JPL mission films seems to have studied some Pixar films as despite having no music or narration, I was utterly absorbed by this mission overview.

I also like how the rover seems somewhat tentative after it’s rickety-looking landing – until the laser fires out of it’s helpful-looking head and you figure out that this guy can probably hold it’s own.

Arizona

We went out to southern Arizona for a short July 4th vacation road trip. Things we saw…

Tucson Clouds

The Man In The Moon

On Camera

Águila Negro

The Loft

Tucson Fireworks

On the way out Wednesday night/Thursday morning, some 50 miles or so west of Phoenix, two separate fatal accidents shutdown the eastbound lanes of I-10 for ten hours, creating a 20+ mile line of cars and trucks (we were a couple hundred yards from the front). In all, we were stuck for four and a half hours, but the bigger trucks had to wait.

Spooky scene with hundreds of cars and trucks just parked out in the desert. Felt like every post-apocalyptic story I’ve seen or read. Around the three hour mark you couldn’t help but note which trucks were carrying food and which cars had the weirdest drivers.

Waiting out the accident cleanup

McDonnell Douglas Product Registration Form

(Origin unknown. Emailed to me in 1994. All mistakes, inconsistencies, etc. come from the original document)

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Neighborhood Public Radio’s “In The Air” event at MOCA

Local art collective Neighborhood Public Radio has been hosting a series of “Engagement Parties” at the Museum Of Contemporary Art in downtown LA. Last Thursday the final event, titled “In The Air,” aimed to “[bring] together local noise musicians and sound and performance artists to facilitate a live performance gesture exploring the ways in which we sonically experience indoor and outdoor spaces, and how sound informs our perceptions of our surroundings.”

Operationally, this meant filling up the inside and outside of MOCA with 100 guitarists (a la Glen Branca) and, well, cutting loose with as much drone as you can. No way I wasn’t going to miss this.

IN THE AIR from NPR | Engagement Party at MOCA

(Yours truly rocking the ambience on the right. Azalia Snail on the left – check out her music when you get a chance)

There were some guidelines. Each player was given a small FM receiver, earphones, and a region of the museum to set up in. Regions were then “conducted” via radio but only in the loosest sense: “Region 5, play a low note.” “Region 1 play something rhythmic.” and so on. By 9pm or so, most of the players had moved up to the outside plaza under Nancy Rubins’ wrecked airplane sculpture.

(obliged to mention that I’m in the clip at the 1:01 mark – choose your own description for sound)

The YouTube video gives you a vague idea of what it sounded like, but is missing much of the subtleties… sound waves bouncing off the buildings, puzzled looks from the patrons, trying to fit your sound in between your neighbor’s. Very exhilarating (and honestly transcendent) couple of hours.

MOCA’s Flickr set of the event.

“Medium != Message…”

Truthbomb via Analog Industries

One thing I’ve often said, when confronted with the type of person that gets in to the minutia of the recording process, perhaps at the expense of the big picture, is that a good song will survive any production process, while a bad song can’t be saved by the most sophisticated gear and recording techniques available.

This sort of idea is anathema to the Gear Queer, who is always certain that there is that one more piece of kit sitting out there, just beyond grasp, that will push things over the edge and make all the difference. We’re each of us guilty of this behavior, of course. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, etc. But the simple fact of the matter is that the work of art exists already, as a wave function, and whatever you need to collapse that bitch and bring shit out in to the cold light of day is what you need. There are records that wouldn’t exist without a massive, and relatively expensive, modular synth and a fairly detail-oriented production approach (see: A Funneled Stone), and others that would sound fucking retarded if they were anything but a guitar and a vocal. (See: Robert Johnson’s entire ouvre. Happy 100th b’day to Mr. Johnson, btw.)

Now, this entire approach could be perceived as my own way of justifying my several rather ridiculous recording habits, the which you’re all perfectly aware of. I approach photography and music-making in the same way, trying to squeeze something interesting out of a device not really meant to do what I’m asking of it, largely via a trial-and-error approach rather than any cohesive planning on my part. My general philosophy with respect to photography is the Shakespeare/Monkey method: if you take enough pictures, some of them are bound to be interesting, and quantity has a quality all its own. No particular reason this can’t be applied to music. (See: Wesley Willis.)

I guess what I’m trying to say, when it comes down to it, is this: I am of the firm opinion that there is interesting shit hiding in my brain. All I have to do is figure out how to get it out. While a new piece of The Shiny might make certain aspects of that chore easier, at the end of the day, the song lives in my brain, not in the gear. The medium is the messenger, not the message itself.