Genealogy of music (and the Skeksis departed)
Monday, August 13, 2007
I really enjoy seeing artists’ renditions of the genealogies (or family trees) of music, specifically rock music. Last year I bought a vintage t-shirt on eBay that shows a rock & roll family tree, starting with Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, and Louis Armstrong and progressing up the trunk to the outer branches of popular late 1980s artists like M.C. Hammer, Skid Row, and Sinéad O’Connor. 
The shirt design is copyright 1990 Rock Histrees, Ltd., Northridge, CA.
Along those same lines, HistoryShots has some really cool poster prints, including The Genealogy of Pop/Rock Music and various political, military, and sports histories.
And there are always Pete Frame‘s famous The Complete Rock Family Trees books. Some of the diagrams look a lot like music history mind maps.
Also related to music is The Interactive Road, a research agenda being pursued by the Mobility studio at the Interactive Institute in Stockholm since 2001. “It explores the benefits of increased interaction between individual drivers, and road users in general, to create innovative services and corresponding technology.” One of the projects is called Sound Pryer, which aims to enable joint music listening on the highway and file sharing in traffic. Very interesting stuff that I found accidentally last week.
David Firth posted a new Flash cartoon called “Health Reminder” last Thursday.
A Russian woman who has given 130 street cats a home finds that mealtime can spark a feeding frenzy. Wow. Watch the CNN video. Our apartment complex is going to end up like that room if we don’t get some help with the feral cat population underneath our building.
My mom told me that her elderly brindle Afghan hound, Baby (AKA “the Skeksis” between my brother and I), passed away yesterday from congestive heart failure. From what they can figure, Baby had a heart attack while fighting the only other male dog in their house, a young golden retriever, over breeding rights to the resident female English golden retriever who had just gone into heat for the first time. The stress of the fight was just too much for the equivalent of a 95-year-old man with a bad heart. Perhaps it was a noble death; Baby went out trying to get laid.
(Skeksis, by the way, are the corrupt rulers of the planet Thra in the 1982 Jim Henson film The Dark Crystal, a childhood favorite of mine.)