Saved a quick blog post draft about the The Johnny Cash Project back in April of last year when I first learned of it. The collaborative project site describes it:

Working with a single image as a template, and using a custom drawing tool, you’ll create a unique and personal portrait of Johnny. Your work will then be combined with art from participants around the world, and integrated into a collective whole: a music video for “Ain’t No Grave”, rising from a sea of one-of-a-kind portraits.

Strictly Global just aired he the ever evolving video of “Ain’t No Grave” on regular old TV and it is high past time to blog it.

The video itself as of 9/30/10 starts around the 2:45 mark.

Toxoplasmosis at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 12/28/10 by divvied

Put my iPhone on the table at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, fired up the SoundCloud app and recorded this Toxoplasmosis performance.

To describe the duo badly: experimental noise.

Doc Pop wears many digital hats: iPad musician,  visual experimenter of mobile apps, blogger, yo-yo madman, game developer/designer, painter, illustrator, etc. etc.

He’s was also my first follower on the (primarily) iPhone (only) social photo app http://instagr.am.

The good doctor does a Daily App Experiment where he takes an images and applies manipulations using different iPhone apps.  He used a photo I shot and posted to Instagr.am yesterday to make #48 in the series.

Daily App Experiment #48: “Nettled Birds” – Saw this pic in @dippold’s instagram and asked if I could play with it. Using TypeDrawing, I added one trillion birds to his original image. I’m really happy folks are willing to let me alter their images. (Taken with Instagram at Daily App Experiment) ~Doc Pop

Make the jump to see my original image and read more about Doc Pop and Instagr.am

My original Instagr.am image, the starting point in his Daily App Experiment #48.

If you don’t have an iPhone, or aren’t ready to download the free app yet, Doc Pop feeds his Instagr.am photos and images into a Tumblr for general viewing.

Another noteworthy and recent project of his is the electronic-pop-ish record “Beats and Smudges,” recorded exclusively with mobile applications.

Sort of duplicating, or triplicating, content here, but the text of an old blog post “IM babble: Lash La Rue, Twitter, Randy Travis and Tramp Stamps“ found its way to becoming an animated video via Xtranormal.

Something a bit different for Veteran’s Day.  Something that cuts directly to the soul of what this day means.  No flag waving.  Just the raw humanity of it.

(Advise against watching the imagery is this “video” and let your mind do the work. Then get a decent quality copy of the song and quit paying attention to snobs like me.)

Lyrics:

Well I used to hang out down at the VFW hall
And stare at the photographs up on the wall
Of the neighborhood boys that died
in the wars we’ve been through
And the hand lettered sign that said
remember Jimmy McGrew

Well Jimmy went to Nam back in 1965
But there’s a lot of men here that think
Jimmy McGrew’s still alive
Though they carved his name
on a stone in Washington DC
His brother said that stone
don’t prove a thing to me

It’s veteran’s day and the skies are gray
Leave the uniforms home cause
there ain’t gonna be a parade
But we’ll fill up a glass for the ones
that didn’t make it through
And leave a light in the window tonight
for Jimmy McGrew

[ guitar ]

There’s a hot rain fallin’
on the back streets of Saigon
There’s an old soldier stumblin’ down the alley
with his mama-san
Lord his eyes are cloudy
and his arms are black and blue
He’s just hangin’ by a thread
and he looks like Jimmy McGrew

It’s veteran’s day and the skies are gray
Leave the uniforms home cause
there ain’t gonna be a parade
But we’ll fill up a glass for the ones
that didn’t make it through
And leave a light in the window tonight
for Jimmy McGrew
And keep it burnin’ bright
there may still be a lot of Jimmy McGrews over there
But we’ll fill up a glass for the ones
that didn’t make it through
And leave a light in the window tonight
for Jimmy McGrew

Preview and buy Tom Russell‘s “Veteran’s Day” at http://www.amazon.com/Veterans-Day/dp/B0010SE8IQ or wherever.

Or if you prefer Johnny Cash belting it out: http://www.amazon.com/Veterans-Day-feat-Johnny-Cash/dp/B00265WH4E

While already ancient in Internet years, these three stood out after a recent video viewing catchup binge:

Sport:

If this hasn’t been on repeat on ESPN can anyone really even utter the word “sport” anymore?

Meatspace:

The 600 Years from the macula on Vimeo.

Video Projection Mapping for the 600th anniversary of the Astronomical Clock in Prague — it’s a video of video projected on the clock itself.

Art/Architecture/3-D computer modeling/Music Video/Or something like this:

(via BoingBoing)

The Multi-part postings “The dreaded ‘Idea’” addresses minor world needs that I’d like to see happen but don’t believe any single one is important enough (for me) to go to anybody with.

Part 1 spouts freely about Twitter and iPhone/iPod Apps & iOS along with a short treatise-like rant on ideas.

Part 2 explores needs in the web media landscape.

Reading

• Service to access all your ebooks anywhere. Any platform on any device.

UPDATE: Enter Google ebooks

Accomplished with web service using the following steps in the user process:

Step 1: Provide login info for all your eBook accounts and/or upload existing eBooks.

Step 2: Choose where and how you want to read your eBooks.

Step 3: Read

• Directly adding email newsletters/lists to ReadItLater

UPDATE:  Official and user created Read It Later apps for this.

ReaditLater lets you queue up words from the Internet to read later.  When you find something you don’t have time to read now just click a bookmarklet button in your browser’s bookmark bar.  Later, when you find time to read, you can tear through all your reading material at ReaditLaterList.com or from their app on your phone.  And you do so with any ads stripped away and the text formatted for quick reading.

ReaditLater’s only qualm is its individual nature.  Material must be added from a single web page.  It needs an option to add RSS feeds or subscribe to everything on a site via Feedburner.  The basic notion here is to enhance ReaditLater by also making it a bullshit-free RSS reader.

One way to accomplish this would be for ReaditLater to give its users their own unique ReaditLater email addresses to use when subscribing to mailing lists.  For example, Twitpic.com gives its users an email — like  username.3749@twitpic.com – to tweet photos via email.

No clue on how they’d do RSS.  Perhaps a custom field on ReaditLaterList.com to paste in a site’s RSS feed?

Music

• Lossless Audio upgrade subscription service

Since storage for music is hardly still an issue, why doesn’t iTunes offer upgrading your music collection to true, lossless, CD quality tunes?  Seems like many can’t tell the difference between a CD and an MP3, but some can and want better sounding stuff.

Or if Apple won’t do this, a web service could offer to scan your music library and upgrade your tunes with better sounding lossless versions like FLAC, Windows Media Lossless and Apple Lossless.

• iTunes local

Any older folk remember the record store where you’d actually walk inside this place and buy music sans computer?  When done proper, record stores still turn you on to great tunes and usually with plenty of patrons ready to engage in back-and-forth band banter.

Why can’t the local record store be revived and be revived with the help of the music behemoth that is Apple’s iTunes?

How? One big way would be for iTunes and music labels to offer exclusives and early releases available — for a set time – only at local record stores that partner with iTunes. Bring in your iPod/iPhone to load it up with this music.

And perhaps provide incentives to pack bodies in the music shops.  One possibility would be offering credits to play 30 sec preview clips or full songs for everyone in the store to hear. Get more of these jukebox credits when you buy something from the stores.

Subsequent installments of “The Dreaded ‘Idea’” will address Computing/Internet/Telephony and various miscellany that eschews its own category.

NINJA TUNE XX Video Mix by MOX

The most decent Ninja Tune record label is celebrating its 20 years anniversary with a box set.  It includes six CDs, six 7-inches, two posters, and a hardcover edition of the retrospective book Ninja Tune: 20 Years Of Beats & Pieces.

Stream its music free. And buy it. It is now sold out, but “A limited number have been held back to go on sale on when we launch the new NINJATUNE.NET.”

Related articles

• Ninja Tune Xx London Party (kspace.tv)
• Ninja Tune: XX, CD review (telegraph.co.uk)
• Various Artists: Ninja Tune XX | CD review (guardian.co.uk)
• Ninja Tune Blows Out Birthday With Box, Book (wired.com)

The record store — you know, those non-iTunes meatspaces where you can kind of touch and hold music — is rare and dying.  Except for Independent record shops.  These shops sell physical music formats to people other than top 40 lovers who have no computer.  In other words, they sell to music lovers.

Flavorwire did up “America’s 10 greatest Indie Record Stores.”  With links to their respected web presence, they are:

1. Other Music – New York, NY
2. Amoeba Records – Hollywood, San Francisco, and Berkeley, CA
3. Electric Fetus – Minneapolis, MN
4. Waterloo Records – Austin, TX
5. Criminal Records – Atlanta, GA
6. Princeton Record Exchange – Princeton, NJ
7. True Vine – Baltimore, MD
8. Reckless Records – Chicago, IL
9. Academy Records Annex – Brooklyn, NY
10. Shangri-La Records – Memphis, TN

Panoramic of the Jay Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park, Chicago,IL.

The Sonar Festival‘s first year in Chicago ran from September 9-11, 2010.  I took off from St Louis Thursday, September 9th, via Amtrak, in hopes to catch a few acts that evening and head back early the next morning.  But the Amtrak broke down for over three hours in Shipman, IL.

All was not lost.  Saw a few acts, including The Slew with Kid Koala at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, danced (actually my dancing is just me unstiffening a tad) and yukked with a couple friends, took pictures, etc, etc.

More bore time after the jump with “vacation” pics and videos of Millennium Park, Amtrak views of IL, Chicago, Sonar Fest. Stuff of that sort.

Inside the Cloud Gate or “The Bean” at Chicago’s Millennium Park

Panhandler on the Chicago L-Train

Graffiti outside the Amtrak close to Chicago

Crossing into St Louis, MO, from East St Louis, IL via Amtrak