who is teh most geniusy macarthur genius winner 2013

http://www.macfound.org/fellows/class/2013/

behavioral economists are a thing!

swamplandia!

i wanna read her stuff. people really like her.

http://www.macfound.org/media/photos/russell_2013_hi-res-download3_1.jpg

Using insights from his work on imaging subatomic particle tracks in high-energy physics experiments, Haber and colleagues developed IRENE (Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc.), a non-contact method for extracting high-quality sound from degrading or even broken analog recordings on two- or three-dimensional media. A disc or cylinder is placed in a precision optical metrology system, where a camera following the path of the grooves on the object takes thousands of images that are then cleaned to compensate for physical damage; the resulting data are mathematically interpolated to determine how a stylus would course through the undulations, and the stylus motion is converted into a standard digital sound file. - See more at: http://www.macfound.org/fellows/892/#sthash.Y81aACSy.dpuf

my vote is for that guy.

http://www.macfound.org/media/photos/haber_2013_hi-res-download3_1.jpg

Next up: Who is the hottest MacArthur genius winner?

Didn't really like Swamplandia, but curious about Russell's short stories nevertheless, since I liked parts of the novel, and some of the stories sound pretty fun.
I dug the first Antrim novel. Picked up the second just last week, cuz I'm totally ahead of the curve yo.
Jeremy Denk's a really good writer, but I'm pretty sure I've never heard him play.
This made me check out Vijay Iyer and he seems pretty badass.

That record scanning thing is great; I used to sorta wonder if it'd be practical to digitize LPs by taking pictures of them (I did not think so far as compensating for damage, though! But then I'm a dummy, not a physicist)

my vote is for that guy.

― scott seward, Saturday, September 28, 2013 5:01 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Wow, mine too.

There's some discussion on fb, partially initiated by Matthew Shipp, about Vijay Iyer's grant. He's a fine pianist. But ffs, he's not exactly on the level of Cecil Taylor or Anthony Braxton or Max Roach (to name three previous MacArthur grant recipients).

Supposedly, this music is an area in which the MacArthur panel is somewhat clueless (hence the awards to Ken Vandermark and John Zorn), so I guess it's not a huge surprise. But ffs, what does William Parker or Milford Graves or Arthur Doyle or Charles Gayle or Andrew Cyrille or Henry Grimes or Marshall Allen etc. etc. ad infinitum have to do to get these peoples' attention?

allen lowe was talking about it on my facebook. he had a lot to say. i guess jazz guys have a lot to say about it. i never would have known about the geniuses otherwise.

Ha, yeah, I saw his contributions to the discussion.

I can definitely see why musicians in this music are pretty talkative/opinionated about McA grant recipients: everyone's just scraping by, and could use a cash infusion.

The thing is, there are some musicians who would have used said infusion for more community-based purposes (Bill Dixon had been saying for decades that his dream was to establish a space for scuffling musicians where they could focus on their work and not worry about money) and some who would only use the money to do a tour or, I'm not making this up, buy a car.

john zorn is imho a genius

russell's short stories are good! nice slipstream stuff. her contribution to this was the best written, on a sentence level, imho

http://www.amazon.com/20-Under-40-Stories-Yorker/dp/0374532877

I personally love Vijay Iyer, so I'm fine with it on aesthetic grounds. But I can imagine disgruntlement in the ranks, suspicions of multi-culti favoritism. Probably fair suspicions, too -- he checks a couple of boxes for the Macarthurites (Macarthurians?). On the other hand, I can't imagine all the tension every year, trying to come up with a list that seems at least reasonably balanced between disciplines, gender, race, ethnicity etc. Anyway, good for him.

artists buying cars is nothing to feel disparaged about; art isn't just paint supplies; giving people money to just operate with fewer impediments is important

maybe they dug iyer's academic work

Kyle Abraham because he's a dancer and choreographer which is surely the best thing to be in life.

To my mind, Iyer's win can be chalked up at least in part to his having a really good, and really relentless, publicist (who's a friend of mine—as is Iyer). He's been on pretty much every jazz magazine cover, when websites that don't know jack shit about jazz (Pitchfork) decide to dip a toe in, he's the guy they cover, he's been basically adopted by NPR, etc., etc. I like a lot of Iyer's music (not all of it), but if I was a voter I would not have voted for him. And while he's expressed humility and a desire to use it wisely in accepting the money, I don't think he's likely to do as much with it as Vandermark (who spent the majority of it putting himself and other musicians on the road, and making records, and doing other stuff to increase the amount of interesting music in the world) or Zorn (who I think probably did this to an even more extreme degree, pumping the cash straight into Tzadik and The Stone). On the other hand, there's long been a rumor that a lot of Cecil Taylor's MacArthur money went up his nose. So whatever.

years ago i hung out with someone who won a macarthur genius grant. i think i was too shy to say much, though :S

Anyone who meh'd Iyer when I played him in plug has been PROVEN BY SCIENCE TO NOT APPRECIATE GENIUS.

i think it was actually proven by a committee, which--

lol I am a jazz dilettante and vijay iyer is totally my "I'm into contemporary jazz" guy.

But I mean this is total Macarthur bait: http://www.iop.org/careers/workinglife/profiles/page_37724.html

Colin Camerer, the behavioral economist, is a smart and upstanding dude. It’s well deserved.

But, most importantly, he was the founder of Chicago’s Fever Records that released The Dead Milkmen’s “Punk Rock Girl,” Big Black’s “Bulldozer,” and a few other semi-notable releases:

http://www.discogs.com/label/Fever+Records+%283%29

Dina Katabi also rules. The lab she runs is super influential in the systems and networking communities.