Friday, December 30, 2005
Thursday, December 29, 2005
Friday, December 23, 2005
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Due to Unforeseen Circumstances that Make all Rationalization Bullshit,
I'm posting an essay I wrote that doesn't take into consideration a second level of real suffering brought on by first-level societal moral panic. That is, what sort of discussion do we need to have when the panic of one group puts another in a real tight spot for an indefinite amount of time? It's an incoherent romp through that first level of all o'it, tho. This content will be removed from the web when the extenuating circumstances that prevented, thus far, the intended publication from coming out with its most recent addition are demoted in their bedlamist priority, and all important parties are embraced again by the arms reason and of moral panic's resolution.
Pop Life and the Ergonomics of Dread
Pop Life and the Ergonomics of Dread
Monday, December 19, 2005
Is the Heart the Only Dynamo?
"Sometimes things don't work out. Sometimes all the conditions are right, but no catalyst steps in to perfect the potentialities. Sometimes the most important variable/vector that people leave out of their master plans is time, circumstance in sequence..."
Murakami sat down with two sweating dai-bins of Kirin 一番 (Ichi-ban) in a sack and three small glasses (juice glasses?) his jeans were new, and he was wearing a warm-looking cardigan sweater. He pulled one of the bottles out of the perfectly ordinary brown paper sack, popped the top off with a church key he had secreted in his front jeans pocket. He had been listening to me spout advice from the kitchen where he had been making and consuming ham sandwiches for one hundred forty-three millenia, sandwiches with individually-wrapped pieces of cheese and white bread gravid with mayonnaise. Sometimes they were egg salad sandwiches, but the activity and the devourer remained constant. Tanizaki was just outside the room on the balcony, sitting by a low table in his 甚平, (Jinbei), looking out over Manhattan. I couldn't tell if he was listening.
"I'm just trying to wean us off of our old relationship. I know it will take some time, if it works, but the key is to seep into her slowly... normally..."
His strategy.
"Like water into rock- reminds me of something a poet once wrote," I began, taking another opportunity to be verbose, "We are the ghosts of water, hiding in rock... something about geodes and the works of man on man. There was a nice metaphor comparing having teeth in one's head to being in possession of a rock full of knives."
My friend was becoming impatient with my need to get off topic, and Murakami sipped his beer resignedly.
"We know you're talking about yourself," he chastened.
He was right. If Murakami only taught me one thing, it was to just write it all down. All of it. No one wants to be tortured mid-pow-wow with the wishful remembrances of half-poems you only thought about writing. But give anyone all of anything that occurs to you anytime and you have a career.
I've failed as a writer.
My friend:
"You see what I'm saying, though? You know I'm not necessarily talking to hear advice?"
One version of poetry holds that the simple observation of completeness is itself a work of art. Beheld with those eyes, all is complete in an instant, and all judgment is exchanged for forgiveness. God, to see with the mercy of the sculptor's eyes, he who sees the embryo of genius already embedded in simpleton stone.
"I know. Go on."
But it was Murakami who picked up the thread of conversation, refilling our glasses in the golden light of the afternoon, hypnotizing with that light made more golden as it passed through the beer he had raised to his lips, light pressed also through the slow fluid silicate vessels we saw as solid, yet invisible, objects.
"It's true, what I think he's getting at, though. Whether or not it works, in the end, well..."
He paused to enjoy the cold beer in his mouth immensely. The "he", of course, was referring to me.
"In the end, I suppose there's not always anything you can do about it either way. Do you really want to be invested in something like that?"
He directed the question to my friend.
I knew Murakami would show his colors eventually, finally betraying his serenity for a willful and trite nihilism, but I didn't relish being lumped in with him like that, having him use me to justify him.
But the respect I felt for him, I had to make some final show of deference before giving up on him entirely.
"Is that really your lesson, Haruki, if I may call you that?"
He winked.
"...Or are is your serenity an act of didactic wrongdoing? Is your quietude and your opposition to response, surprise, all of it, supposed to feel wrong? You sit there eating sandwiches and drinking beers, so many hundreds of them since I've known you, and you can tell me what each of them was made of, how fat the dew collected on the outside of the glasses. Goat-men, dreams, fealty to loss, fealty to victimhood- you die in such extravagant wonderlands. Methinks you don't protest too much"
Murakami put his glass down on the table, only partially to the left of a ring of condensation already evaporating and losing its definition. He smiled and opened the other bottle, poured again. There was no man here, here instead was a method writ large, a temple of impossible alien machination on a dimly-lit planet. Were these things (the bend of the elbow, the massive, that is heavy, grin, the precision) intelligence or its ancestors? Human kin or monument?
He said nothing.
Tanizaki, without turning, put down the glass of sake he was sipping and began a discourse on the value of- the PRESENTATION of- the unseen.
"Junichiro, we've read your "In Praise of Shadows." We are trying to uncover things here as they are, not as we imagine them to be."
My friend was smoking now, pausing after the smoke had filtered into his lungs, and exhaling. "I don't know. I don't want to make a big deal of this, I just want it to go right. There's no reason to get hopes up when what I want might not even be the best thing. I'm not looking for advice."
"She is uncommonly beautiful, though, is she not?"
I had built up a fantasy of the girl in my mind, and she was tits and ass, she was cleavage and the power invested in that space, she was the bounty of youth and adventurous mercy between refractory periods. That is to say, I didn't know this girl.
"Don't go the way Murakami might be telling you to be ok with going, whether or not he'll tell us if he's for or against us. The industry of the will, uh, that is, desire becomes the driving, justifying force in all human relations only willingly."
Tanizaki: "You love to hate yourself. Finish a poem for once, or admit that, for you, divorce from achievement is itself achievement and that it leaves you sated. The things you say make no sense, otherwise."
My friend had begun to read. The last afternoon sun had slid a ransom note beneath the door. Tanizaki may have fallen asleep immediately following his outburst.
Fearing the worst, fearing Murakami might go back into the eternal kitchen and stand by the sink eating sandwiches, fearing my friend might leave to brood elsewhere without resolution, I recited loudly:
I need you,
but impassively.
I have made the decision
to need the regard
of your softened aspect.
Desire is the single motive force
but willingly.
"That is, it is only agency and ownership of events, right or wrong, that let anything really happen as opposed to simple occurrence."
Murakami:
"But, you were saying, Time is the most important unacknowledged medium for love?"
"I'm saying that you have to take up agency, and that a part of that is acknowledging the possibility of loss, but not resignation to it."
"But what was the metaphor you used earlier? 'Getting the message of love from one heart to another is like making a cross-country telephone call- something with enough juice has to push that lightning across the miles of wires, the miles and yards of days/weeks/years before it arrives... Is the heart the only dynamo that can power the message across so many invisible miles of years strung out above our heads? Do you expect a guided stroke of lightning to the center of some distant vision's chest?' The way you talk, it sounds like all is lost before it's begun."
"Murakami is dishonest." Thoughts of "shit, he's used me again" began to convince me I, too, was a passive nihilist, but I pressed on.
"I would like to quote Mayakovsky, though he destroyed himself- another act of didactic wrongdoing, but forgive him for being in some fashion right in this instant-
The bull of the days is skewbald, the cart of years is slow. Our god is speed. The heart is our drum.
"I'd say history is full of the sentiment that the heart is dynamo enough."
More beer all around, we stand and shout BONZAI!, Clapping after, and the evening begins.
"And some prefer nettles." muttered a sleeping Tanizaki, who would wake up the next day to divorce his wives and build his houses into literary perpetuity.
Murakami sat down with two sweating dai-bins of Kirin 一番 (Ichi-ban) in a sack and three small glasses (juice glasses?) his jeans were new, and he was wearing a warm-looking cardigan sweater. He pulled one of the bottles out of the perfectly ordinary brown paper sack, popped the top off with a church key he had secreted in his front jeans pocket. He had been listening to me spout advice from the kitchen where he had been making and consuming ham sandwiches for one hundred forty-three millenia, sandwiches with individually-wrapped pieces of cheese and white bread gravid with mayonnaise. Sometimes they were egg salad sandwiches, but the activity and the devourer remained constant. Tanizaki was just outside the room on the balcony, sitting by a low table in his 甚平, (Jinbei), looking out over Manhattan. I couldn't tell if he was listening.
"I'm just trying to wean us off of our old relationship. I know it will take some time, if it works, but the key is to seep into her slowly... normally..."
His strategy.
"Like water into rock- reminds me of something a poet once wrote," I began, taking another opportunity to be verbose, "We are the ghosts of water, hiding in rock... something about geodes and the works of man on man. There was a nice metaphor comparing having teeth in one's head to being in possession of a rock full of knives."
My friend was becoming impatient with my need to get off topic, and Murakami sipped his beer resignedly.
"We know you're talking about yourself," he chastened.
He was right. If Murakami only taught me one thing, it was to just write it all down. All of it. No one wants to be tortured mid-pow-wow with the wishful remembrances of half-poems you only thought about writing. But give anyone all of anything that occurs to you anytime and you have a career.
I've failed as a writer.
My friend:
"You see what I'm saying, though? You know I'm not necessarily talking to hear advice?"
One version of poetry holds that the simple observation of completeness is itself a work of art. Beheld with those eyes, all is complete in an instant, and all judgment is exchanged for forgiveness. God, to see with the mercy of the sculptor's eyes, he who sees the embryo of genius already embedded in simpleton stone.
"I know. Go on."
But it was Murakami who picked up the thread of conversation, refilling our glasses in the golden light of the afternoon, hypnotizing with that light made more golden as it passed through the beer he had raised to his lips, light pressed also through the slow fluid silicate vessels we saw as solid, yet invisible, objects.
"It's true, what I think he's getting at, though. Whether or not it works, in the end, well..."
He paused to enjoy the cold beer in his mouth immensely. The "he", of course, was referring to me.
"In the end, I suppose there's not always anything you can do about it either way. Do you really want to be invested in something like that?"
He directed the question to my friend.
I knew Murakami would show his colors eventually, finally betraying his serenity for a willful and trite nihilism, but I didn't relish being lumped in with him like that, having him use me to justify him.
But the respect I felt for him, I had to make some final show of deference before giving up on him entirely.
"Is that really your lesson, Haruki, if I may call you that?"
He winked.
"...Or are is your serenity an act of didactic wrongdoing? Is your quietude and your opposition to response, surprise, all of it, supposed to feel wrong? You sit there eating sandwiches and drinking beers, so many hundreds of them since I've known you, and you can tell me what each of them was made of, how fat the dew collected on the outside of the glasses. Goat-men, dreams, fealty to loss, fealty to victimhood- you die in such extravagant wonderlands. Methinks you don't protest too much"
Murakami put his glass down on the table, only partially to the left of a ring of condensation already evaporating and losing its definition. He smiled and opened the other bottle, poured again. There was no man here, here instead was a method writ large, a temple of impossible alien machination on a dimly-lit planet. Were these things (the bend of the elbow, the massive, that is heavy, grin, the precision) intelligence or its ancestors? Human kin or monument?
He said nothing.
Tanizaki, without turning, put down the glass of sake he was sipping and began a discourse on the value of- the PRESENTATION of- the unseen.
"Junichiro, we've read your "In Praise of Shadows." We are trying to uncover things here as they are, not as we imagine them to be."
My friend was smoking now, pausing after the smoke had filtered into his lungs, and exhaling. "I don't know. I don't want to make a big deal of this, I just want it to go right. There's no reason to get hopes up when what I want might not even be the best thing. I'm not looking for advice."
"She is uncommonly beautiful, though, is she not?"
I had built up a fantasy of the girl in my mind, and she was tits and ass, she was cleavage and the power invested in that space, she was the bounty of youth and adventurous mercy between refractory periods. That is to say, I didn't know this girl.
"Don't go the way Murakami might be telling you to be ok with going, whether or not he'll tell us if he's for or against us. The industry of the will, uh, that is, desire becomes the driving, justifying force in all human relations only willingly."
Tanizaki: "You love to hate yourself. Finish a poem for once, or admit that, for you, divorce from achievement is itself achievement and that it leaves you sated. The things you say make no sense, otherwise."
My friend had begun to read. The last afternoon sun had slid a ransom note beneath the door. Tanizaki may have fallen asleep immediately following his outburst.
Fearing the worst, fearing Murakami might go back into the eternal kitchen and stand by the sink eating sandwiches, fearing my friend might leave to brood elsewhere without resolution, I recited loudly:
I need you,
but impassively.
I have made the decision
to need the regard
of your softened aspect.
Desire is the single motive force
but willingly.
"That is, it is only agency and ownership of events, right or wrong, that let anything really happen as opposed to simple occurrence."
Murakami:
"But, you were saying, Time is the most important unacknowledged medium for love?"
"I'm saying that you have to take up agency, and that a part of that is acknowledging the possibility of loss, but not resignation to it."
"But what was the metaphor you used earlier? 'Getting the message of love from one heart to another is like making a cross-country telephone call- something with enough juice has to push that lightning across the miles of wires, the miles and yards of days/weeks/years before it arrives... Is the heart the only dynamo that can power the message across so many invisible miles of years strung out above our heads? Do you expect a guided stroke of lightning to the center of some distant vision's chest?' The way you talk, it sounds like all is lost before it's begun."
"Murakami is dishonest." Thoughts of "shit, he's used me again" began to convince me I, too, was a passive nihilist, but I pressed on.
"I would like to quote Mayakovsky, though he destroyed himself- another act of didactic wrongdoing, but forgive him for being in some fashion right in this instant-
The bull of the days is skewbald, the cart of years is slow. Our god is speed. The heart is our drum.
"I'd say history is full of the sentiment that the heart is dynamo enough."
More beer all around, we stand and shout BONZAI!, Clapping after, and the evening begins.
"And some prefer nettles." muttered a sleeping Tanizaki, who would wake up the next day to divorce his wives and build his houses into literary perpetuity.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Monday, December 12, 2005
The Actor Lead Crystal
The actor Lead Crystal stopped me in the doorway to my apartment. He was desperate, he was broke, he was down to his last, he told me, couldn't I, with my wristwatch and my easy smile, couldn't I spare a dime for a laborer in the ur-culture industry. I paid him no mind, slipping past him into my building. I could already hear him, in his good announcer's voice, accosting the next joker on his way home.
It's true that I remember him. I was 10 when I first saw "What the Blazes is Glory?" , and I was hooked. I saw all of his films, as a matter of fact, even "Didn't Know I was Dropping In," the flop that rested atop his career like the cast iron lid of a cistern. Those were different times, different days, right before Social Software and then the personal feeds. In those days Lead Crystal would never have been asking for change. I- hundreds like me, even- would be begging him for his autograph, some artifact to somehow connect his lifestyle and panache to the average Joe Gonowhere.
You have to laugh to yourself when you look back at how things were always more innocent then, before, back when. It's hard not to believe in progress when there is always the notion that, somehow, with all the changes that come around, everyone, from your grandparents to you, looks back with the same forgiving and nostalgic eyes. Remember movie stars? Remember going somewhere, to someone else, for a taste of the good life?
Once inside my apartment, I sat down at my dressing table and put on my stage makeup, made a few adjustments to my hair, tinted my irises for best capture on fiber optic, took a deep breath, tried to imagine me coming home from work, and set the webcams rolling. There I was, coming out of the TV, the soundtrack to my evening routine a new one that had just arrived that morning. I ate some food, made some witty and embittered comments while reading the news, put the dishes away. Leila came over around 8:45, we patched her feed into mine, and we did our best us, careful of the contractual agreements regarding time at center stage, number of lines granted to each of us, made sure we mentioned our sponsors, etc.
I put it to her pretty naturally, I'd say. One of my best performances. Had to remember to put it at the top of my profile feed in the morning when I headed off to the cinema for work. For flair, at the very end, I thought it would be interesting to portray what Lead Crystal might do in this situation. I adjusted my smirk, the contemptuous offhandedness with which I handled Leila, to how he would do it, wondering how the numbers would come back or if the machines or anyone else would notice the change, stop buying my sheets or my condoms, whatever.
"Baby, you mean so much to me. Look at me, baby." I told her as we were falling asleep.
"Look at me, sweetie." She murmured, snoring.
Lead Crystal was asleep in my doorway in the morning as I straightened my tie and headed to the theater. Some people just can't keep up, the poor bastard, can't just see that the world that gave them their heyday is over. I gave him a stern look of pity, pausing a minute as though I was thinking something. As I turned to go, he opened his eyes.
"I made you people, you know."
When I got to the theater the first thing I did was check to see if my ratings had flickered along with the shift in my performance last night, but there was nothing. No sign I had done anything different.
Huh. To all appearances I was performing as my best "me" the entire time.
My phone rang. I answered it. "Oh, Leila!"
That was when I was really starting to fall for her, couldn't stop with the affectionate talk.
"Look at me, baby!"
It's true that I remember him. I was 10 when I first saw "What the Blazes is Glory?" , and I was hooked. I saw all of his films, as a matter of fact, even "Didn't Know I was Dropping In," the flop that rested atop his career like the cast iron lid of a cistern. Those were different times, different days, right before Social Software and then the personal feeds. In those days Lead Crystal would never have been asking for change. I- hundreds like me, even- would be begging him for his autograph, some artifact to somehow connect his lifestyle and panache to the average Joe Gonowhere.
You have to laugh to yourself when you look back at how things were always more innocent then, before, back when. It's hard not to believe in progress when there is always the notion that, somehow, with all the changes that come around, everyone, from your grandparents to you, looks back with the same forgiving and nostalgic eyes. Remember movie stars? Remember going somewhere, to someone else, for a taste of the good life?
Once inside my apartment, I sat down at my dressing table and put on my stage makeup, made a few adjustments to my hair, tinted my irises for best capture on fiber optic, took a deep breath, tried to imagine me coming home from work, and set the webcams rolling. There I was, coming out of the TV, the soundtrack to my evening routine a new one that had just arrived that morning. I ate some food, made some witty and embittered comments while reading the news, put the dishes away. Leila came over around 8:45, we patched her feed into mine, and we did our best us, careful of the contractual agreements regarding time at center stage, number of lines granted to each of us, made sure we mentioned our sponsors, etc.
I put it to her pretty naturally, I'd say. One of my best performances. Had to remember to put it at the top of my profile feed in the morning when I headed off to the cinema for work. For flair, at the very end, I thought it would be interesting to portray what Lead Crystal might do in this situation. I adjusted my smirk, the contemptuous offhandedness with which I handled Leila, to how he would do it, wondering how the numbers would come back or if the machines or anyone else would notice the change, stop buying my sheets or my condoms, whatever.
"Baby, you mean so much to me. Look at me, baby." I told her as we were falling asleep.
"Look at me, sweetie." She murmured, snoring.
Lead Crystal was asleep in my doorway in the morning as I straightened my tie and headed to the theater. Some people just can't keep up, the poor bastard, can't just see that the world that gave them their heyday is over. I gave him a stern look of pity, pausing a minute as though I was thinking something. As I turned to go, he opened his eyes.
"I made you people, you know."
When I got to the theater the first thing I did was check to see if my ratings had flickered along with the shift in my performance last night, but there was nothing. No sign I had done anything different.
Huh. To all appearances I was performing as my best "me" the entire time.
My phone rang. I answered it. "Oh, Leila!"
That was when I was really starting to fall for her, couldn't stop with the affectionate talk.
"Look at me, baby!"
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Baby in the needle field
Here's a story told through google images about a baby unleashed, unswaddled!
Neat Link Via Create Digital Music: Turn Your iTunes Library into a Sonic Signature
Via Create Digital Music:
I ran across this today and immediately had to try it myself. I'll be posting a link to my own digital signature shortly. Suffice it to say, it reveals things about you that you might not have known- like what you were listening to a whole lot before you started listening to most of your music on your ipod.
Enjoy.
Turn Your iTunes Library into a Sonic Signature:
Jason Freeman, a professor and musician from Georgia Tech, wrote a Java application which scans your iTunes library and creates your own "signature" out of small audio samples from your songs. From reading his technical docs, it's more sophisticated than you'd think -- the program finds your most played songs and then uses an FFT to merge spectrally similar audio, mixing down your audio smoother than a baby's bottom.
It takes a little while to render and you have to sign a Java security license, but the results are brilliant! Our music collections can pretty accurately describe who we are and the ITSM does an amazing job at boiling me down to 47 seconds of glory. Something tells me that posting your own audio signature is the next big thing to hit
MySpace...
iTunes Signature Maker
Press Release
Ed: I know Jason from a while back, and this sounds like just the wacky development I'd expect from his past efforts -- cool, Jas-- er, Dr. Freeman!
See also Jason's auralization of Gnutella searches, which creates total sonic chaos out of peer-to-peer files, algorithmic audio mixing, and even an interactive Net instrument you can play in your browser. (The others can be downloaded.) Thanks for the heads-up, Jordan! -PK
.
I ran across this today and immediately had to try it myself. I'll be posting a link to my own digital signature shortly. Suffice it to say, it reveals things about you that you might not have known- like what you were listening to a whole lot before you started listening to most of your music on your ipod.
Enjoy.
Turn Your iTunes Library into a Sonic Signature:
Jason Freeman, a professor and musician from Georgia Tech, wrote a Java application which scans your iTunes library and creates your own "signature" out of small audio samples from your songs. From reading his technical docs, it's more sophisticated than you'd think -- the program finds your most played songs and then uses an FFT to merge spectrally similar audio, mixing down your audio smoother than a baby's bottom.
It takes a little while to render and you have to sign a Java security license, but the results are brilliant! Our music collections can pretty accurately describe who we are and the ITSM does an amazing job at boiling me down to 47 seconds of glory. Something tells me that posting your own audio signature is the next big thing to hit
MySpace...
iTunes Signature Maker
Press Release
Ed: I know Jason from a while back, and this sounds like just the wacky development I'd expect from his past efforts -- cool, Jas-- er, Dr. Freeman!
See also Jason's auralization of Gnutella searches, which creates total sonic chaos out of peer-to-peer files, algorithmic audio mixing, and even an interactive Net instrument you can play in your browser. (The others can be downloaded.) Thanks for the heads-up, Jordan! -PK
.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Stuff that is hardcore and essential
I just updated my spanking new Firefox 1.5 browser with some excellent extensions.
First, I installed the Sage, basically eliminating my need to use a second newsreader (I've been using the excellent netnewswire lite) to keep up on all the music/culture blogs I would never remember to hit if I didn't have it etched in silicon somewhere. It updates all the entries and shows them to you in your browser window. The Downloadthemall extension is invaluable, after browsing to your favorite new music blogs, for sucking everything down at once and listening at leisure.
First, I installed the Sage, basically eliminating my need to use a second newsreader (I've been using the excellent netnewswire lite) to keep up on all the music/culture blogs I would never remember to hit if I didn't have it etched in silicon somewhere. It updates all the entries and shows them to you in your browser window. The Downloadthemall extension is invaluable, after browsing to your favorite new music blogs, for sucking everything down at once and listening at leisure.
Monday, November 28, 2005
I Liked You Better
I saw Trainspotting for the first time yesterday, right after Fellini's Amarcord. The response people have always given me when I would say that I hadn't seen the film adaptation of the Irvine Welsh novel is incredulity- how could I not have seen it?
I just hadn't. And it's a good thing. When it came out I probably wouldn't have been able to get past the obfuscating themes of the film- heroin, general tomfoolery- to see to the meaningful themes- leaving people behind, standing on your own.
But, really, I would have liked Renton a whole lot better if he had left off that "I choose life" platitude at the end of the film. Yer gonna end it that way, stay a junkie, mate.
I just hadn't. And it's a good thing. When it came out I probably wouldn't have been able to get past the obfuscating themes of the film- heroin, general tomfoolery- to see to the meaningful themes- leaving people behind, standing on your own.
But, really, I would have liked Renton a whole lot better if he had left off that "I choose life" platitude at the end of the film. Yer gonna end it that way, stay a junkie, mate.
Saturday, November 26, 2005
Вперёд в Сиски! -- I Loves Me Some Titties Redux
Via Audiomastermind:
Free vst : Extreme effects for extreme musicians:
Perky ! : "Make your drums percolate…"
Free vst : Extreme effects for extreme musicians:
Perky ! : "Make your drums percolate…"
Friday, November 25, 2005
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Business as usual.
When the mouse is away, the cat will obsess on the mouse's absence until it returns. The cat will be BUSINESS AS USUAL.
When the cat is away, the mouse will recreate the terror and authority it lived with when the cat was lurking just outside.
When the cat is away, the mouse will recreate the terror and authority it lived with when the cat was lurking just outside.
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
What Have I Been Thinking?
I will leave it to intrepid souls to interpret and execute the amazing baked cheese dip described in the previous entry with so very few meaningful pointers. Suffice to say that this shit is good when baked within a bowl hollowed from a loaf of Hawaiian bread.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and I need to think thankfully.
Thanks: this year is almost over. There are a JET AA Bonenkai and Shinenkai on the schedule in the near future- will be attending those.
Thanks: Man, what a year!
Still, as Jeff Tweedy would say, "short on long-term plans", but making some kind of progress. Nearing 30. Very strange, but that is not to be mistaken for unique. Must remember that.
Been listening to the new Wilco live album:
I am short on words, but this will be described in detail.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and I need to think thankfully.
Thanks: this year is almost over. There are a JET AA Bonenkai and Shinenkai on the schedule in the near future- will be attending those.
Thanks: Man, what a year!
Still, as Jeff Tweedy would say, "short on long-term plans", but making some kind of progress. Nearing 30. Very strange, but that is not to be mistaken for unique. Must remember that.
Been listening to the new Wilco live album:
I am short on words, but this will be described in detail.
cheese dip
16 oz container sour cream - 2 cups
1 whole bar of cream cheese- (2? you must judge the thickness)
1/2 cup salsa (use more)
mix all together, add in 2-3 cups shredded cheese (more is good)
bake 375 for 90 min
if in casserole, only 30 min
1 whole bar of cream cheese- (2? you must judge the thickness)
1/2 cup salsa (use more)
mix all together, add in 2-3 cups shredded cheese (more is good)
bake 375 for 90 min
if in casserole, only 30 min
Monday, November 21, 2005
Thursday, November 17, 2005
Lethe Water
I've been very slowly progressing through Pynchon's Mason & Dixon since early summer. It's really the same way I got through Gravity's Rainbow- though I have not yet given up and started over from the beginning.
There is one passage that finds the two surveyors outside of Philadelphia at the site of an indian massacre where certain of the townsfolk slew a defenseless group of natives, the reason being, or given, that some of their relatives killed relatives of marauders. Mason is trying to fathom this hallucinated, cruel offshoot of England, an apparent den of all the darkest and most unreal impulses, and he comes up with this passage:
Acts have consequences, Dixon, they must. These Louts believe all's right now,- that they are all free to get on with Lives that to them are no doubt important,- with no Glimmer at all of the Debt they have taken on. That is what I smell'd,- Lethe-Water. One of the things the newly-born forget, is how terrible its Taste, and Smell. In Time, these People are able to forget ev'rything. Be willing but to wait a little, and ye may gull them again and again, however ye wish,- even unto their own dissolution. In America, as I apprehend, Time is the true River that runs 'round Hell.
There is one passage that finds the two surveyors outside of Philadelphia at the site of an indian massacre where certain of the townsfolk slew a defenseless group of natives, the reason being, or given, that some of their relatives killed relatives of marauders. Mason is trying to fathom this hallucinated, cruel offshoot of England, an apparent den of all the darkest and most unreal impulses, and he comes up with this passage:
Acts have consequences, Dixon, they must. These Louts believe all's right now,- that they are all free to get on with Lives that to them are no doubt important,- with no Glimmer at all of the Debt they have taken on. That is what I smell'd,- Lethe-Water. One of the things the newly-born forget, is how terrible its Taste, and Smell. In Time, these People are able to forget ev'rything. Be willing but to wait a little, and ye may gull them again and again, however ye wish,- even unto their own dissolution. In America, as I apprehend, Time is the true River that runs 'round Hell.
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Annie to Play with TSM, TV on the Radio
December 1 at Webster Hall the TSM show with TV on the Radio will also feature Norway's Annie. The following day she plays the BLISS party in DC. Politely alluring, this elfin nymphet from the land of long rays is suddenly 1 degree of social separation- or is it 2 if she knows someone you know?
Weird.
Radiohead concert on TV last night got the whole apartment into a mood, found me jamming until as late as my hangover husked brain would stay awake, people who came in the door began singing, the TV was on but the sound stayed on mute as everyone waited to see who was going to make the next great noise.
Weird.
Radiohead concert on TV last night got the whole apartment into a mood, found me jamming until as late as my hangover husked brain would stay awake, people who came in the door began singing, the TV was on but the sound stayed on mute as everyone waited to see who was going to make the next great noise.
Monday, November 14, 2005
Tune my fork
There's a channel piped into my face as part of the digital cable package we share here at my place that appears to be only concerts. Showtime C. I've been watching an '03 concert of Radiohead's for the past hour or so, and old seizure-eyes has been crooning back into my lizard brain with his icky toilet water love velvet slither voice. The colors are very saturated, they must have been using film. Thank you, right now, Thom Yorke for reminding us we are afraid of television and the awful pictures of ourselves we hit each other with over it.
Speaking of Radiohead, the band's American counterpart, WILCO, has a live album reviewed on Pitchfork today. WILCO: Kicking Television. I must get it.
Speaking of Radiohead, the band's American counterpart, WILCO, has a live album reviewed on Pitchfork today. WILCO: Kicking Television. I must get it.
Saturday, November 12, 2005
What is the state and role of politics when so many relations are no longer connected to the business of the polis, per se? When memes, direct transmission and submission to information, and clearly stratified virtual groups based around specialized interests dictate our physical gathering places, fashion, and our actions in the physical world, is politics then a euphemism for the balance and hierarchy established by our virtual selves acted out with the pomp of fabric and insignia in meatspace, or is it completely disengenuous, containing not even metaphorical value? Constantly in touch, never falling away, never moving on, our smaller cells of association stand the test of time and do more to dictate our actions than adherence to the general project of city planning and civility have done. Have we moved on to a guerilla cellular form of politics? Cellitics?
Now Playing Trigger Hippie from the album "Who Can You Trust?" by Morcheeba
Now Playing Trigger Hippie from the album "Who Can You Trust?" by Morcheeba
Friday, November 11, 2005
OBLOQUY!
1. a. Verbal abuse directed against a person or thing; detraction, calumny, slander. Formerly (also): {dag}an abusive or calumnious speech or utterance (obs.).
b. Abuse or detraction as it affects the person spoken against; the condition of being spoken against; ill repute; reproach, disgrace, notoriety.
2. A cause, occasion, or object of detraction or reproach; a reproach, a disgrace. Obs.
From our good friends at the OED.
Also, this is a good book about the OED:
b. Abuse or detraction as it affects the person spoken against; the condition of being spoken against; ill repute; reproach, disgrace, notoriety.
2. A cause, occasion, or object of detraction or reproach; a reproach, a disgrace. Obs.
From our good friends at the OED.
Also, this is a good book about the OED:
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Brian Eno is selling lots of gear!
Via Musicthing:
Brian Eno is selling lots of gear!:
Brian Eno is selling lots of gear!:
It's Vemia auction time again. It's a kind of cool private eBay for music geeks. Brian Eno is selling off his beloved (and battered) DX-7, which was presumably used to compose the Microsoft Sound, among one or two other pieces of music. He's also selling a Prophet VS, Jellinghaus DX-7 Programmer and a couple of Mackie Mixers. The DX7 is already at almost £2,000. Other delights include Tim Simenon (Bomb The Bass) selling his 303 and a load of other gear. The auction ends on the 12th November. The Vemia Website is still an absolute nightmare to use and navigate (try to ignore the javascript faults and popups), but it's well worth the effort. There was even a EMS Synthi with a starting bid of £20, but it's already up to £1660...
Monday, November 07, 2005
Abe Lincoln
Friday I picked up Steve Almond's latest short story collection, entitled The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories, and burned through it over the weekend. In the main, I would say it is at least as compelling as his first collection, My Life in Heavy Metal, with the same balance of really powerful stories and those that you end up feeling are sort of filler. This is simply the peril of working as an author who walks a very thin line between pure prosaic retelling of easily relatable goings-on and the perfectly-timed emotional switch that provides the strange and surprising, breathtaking insight that pulls the whole experience of reading his stories together. Each episode from the lives related (usually centered around relationships, loss, or love and the coming-to-grips associated with each) is made unique, always reiterating the message that, though, yes, we can all recognize love, heartbreak, loneliness, camaraderie, nostalgia, these states only come to be themselves through very personal and unrepeatable circumstances. Just as musicians are only musicians as a group by accident, huddled together by the independent hands of critics and not by the players themselves, who each have their own personal way of visualizing their music, using their emotions, their own personal goals to arrive at through their art, so lovers and friends are, ultimately, each unique in how they arrive at that definition. In one particular story, Lincoln, Arisen, we see Abraham Lincoln as a montage of his life and the world of his dreams through conversations between he and Frederick Douglass the abolitionist that may or may not be happening.
"There once was a man who found no happiness in his life. He was sad every moment of the day. His duties were many and without mercy. Senators ran to him in anger. Common men blackened their hearts on his behalf. A nation of mothers cursed his name. he hoped to make himself content through an adherence to God's will, but when he examined his beliefs found he held none. His wife went insane, Douglass. His children died like flies. his one love perished." Lincoln's voice deepens and curls, assumes the timbre of a dream. "He behaved nobly, but for reasons he could not fathom. His faults were but the shadows his virtues cast. He saw himself grimly advancing on history, but came to understand it was the other way around. He grew bored of his own stories and savored none of his achievements. His single respite was sleep. And then that left him too. Hold me, Douglass. All the strange checkered past seems to crowd now upon my mind."
I suppose I don't have anything to say about this passage, save that I was moved brutally by the idea that he behaved nobly, but for reasons he could not fathom. In reality, as is recognized by the author in his acknowledgments, the character of Lincoln only feels this way because he feels unrewarded by his path and disappointed. He is not ignorant of his motives. Almond writes in his acknowledgements of Lincoln:
"Let us, in this age of unremitting grievance, choose as he did: to love, to sacrifice, to forgive."
Good God, the responsibility lies with each of us.
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Tenderness, you find me with knives in the front and the back
Patience, you steer through the gauntlet of the steady and vengeful third hand
who is not the cheek unturned
and is not the cheek turned.
When you have found his blades' secret points
You answer,
"I am without response in kind."
Patience, your love has no enemies.
Patience, you steer through the gauntlet of the steady and vengeful third hand
who is not the cheek unturned
and is not the cheek turned.
When you have found his blades' secret points
You answer,
"I am without response in kind."
Patience, your love has no enemies.
Friday, November 04, 2005
Big Fuzz, All Action, No Motion
A quick trip to Illinois this past weekend put me in the mood to listen to Hum this week. The psychedelic static space rock has been crunching in my headphones, me doing dumb things like going to work and wondering why I'm doing dumb things.
Downward is Heavenward puts me in a still place in pulsing chaos these many years on.
"Downward Is Heavenward" (HUM)
Downward is Heavenward puts me in a still place in pulsing chaos these many years on.
"Downward Is Heavenward" (HUM)
Go to him
There was a voice that called, but you could not hear it, for there was only a single set of footprints and who got sand on the sheets? It sounded like "I'm sorry" or maybe "I'll be god-damned if I'm going to pay the bill in full before I die."
Herm is at it again.
Herm is at it again.
Technorati Tags: Hearts on sleeves, words, holy animal reliquary
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Monday, October 24, 2005
Some Thoughts on iTunes and the Music Industry
I was talking to a friend last week about a new feature in the new iPod that is being more or less kept secret out in the open, a feature overshadowed by its new gadget-porn video capabilities. While everyone is going gaga for the fact that music videos, porn, and television shows are available watch on the tiny, high-def screens of the new iPods (why anyone needs to watch things this much is beyond me- attention is labor, and you're signing yourself up for lots less downtime with video on your person), another feature was added that few are talking about- the new iPods can record in full stereo.
Time to throw away those portable DAT recorders, everyone. Podcasting is the new bootlegging.
With iTunes set up to suck podcasts down from the web now, with the very popular iPod highly and firmly installed in an eager consumer base, and with the digital method of music delivery taking more and more power away from the giant, vampiric middle men that are the music industry (an industry that doesn't produce music so much as it does a paid bureaucracy that, in the end, really isn't that into music) and giving it to the artists to produce, niche market, and publicize themselves, Apple may very well have set itself in the position as one of the sole entities existent in the music industry once all the majors collapse. As people and artists become more tech-savvy and realize they don't need the labels, iTunes will be there, still, with its handy podcasting capabilities and the viral nature of bootlegs spreading out across the web building artists' popularity. Not a label, but profiting as a distribution point. There won't be an absolute need to use iTunes, but the iPod will be indispensable. In one version of the future, Apple could be all that is left of the music industry.
Now: Playing
Not About Love
from the album "Extraordinary Machine" by
Fiona Apple
Time to throw away those portable DAT recorders, everyone. Podcasting is the new bootlegging.
With iTunes set up to suck podcasts down from the web now, with the very popular iPod highly and firmly installed in an eager consumer base, and with the digital method of music delivery taking more and more power away from the giant, vampiric middle men that are the music industry (an industry that doesn't produce music so much as it does a paid bureaucracy that, in the end, really isn't that into music) and giving it to the artists to produce, niche market, and publicize themselves, Apple may very well have set itself in the position as one of the sole entities existent in the music industry once all the majors collapse. As people and artists become more tech-savvy and realize they don't need the labels, iTunes will be there, still, with its handy podcasting capabilities and the viral nature of bootlegs spreading out across the web building artists' popularity. Not a label, but profiting as a distribution point. There won't be an absolute need to use iTunes, but the iPod will be indispensable. In one version of the future, Apple could be all that is left of the music industry.
Now: Playing
Not About Love
from the album "Extraordinary Machine" by
Fiona Apple
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Self-Employment of the Mind
The days pass lazy like an eye, and it is always easy to find tasks to fill them that do not require you to remember them.
It's commonly held that there is no long-term reward in working for others- the real fulfillment is only cultivated through self-employment, self-reliance, the confident highs extracted from the knowledge of one's own independence.
Of course, self-employment of the conventional variety suffers from the same deficiencies of wage slavery in that it is still a clever passing of time from cradle to grave, delivering a healthy dearth of reasons for carrying on in a culture that still, at least loosely, is based on the myth of progress. Forward motion without goals, without a proper ideology, presents dilemmas to the mind unburdened by sufficient distraction. One successful method for dealing with the outside world of varied ultimate disappointments is to become a hermetic man. Find self-employment in the mind, become a curator of your own private museum of a constant horror.
This method is not uncommon- it is the basis of delusions great and small. When the boundaries perceived do not budge, ignore the fact that you ever perceived anything beyond those frontiers and suppress the moment that you did so. The moment of perfect horror, the moment when you failed to achieve the escape velocity required to lift you from the morass of your life (perceived within the shared and first delusion, progress), that is the moment that will define the curio existence of the hermetic man, that will be the theme of the plan defining the cyclical boundary of the track his life is running on.
The gift of purpose! Even if delusion, what satisfaction one can bring to oneself closing doors and operating on an abbreviated operating system. Authority (the suppression of the knowledge of the lack of omniscience, the invitation to others to populate and cohabitate within the lonely mind), Righteousness (The security guard of the mental Mütter Museum), Ambition (the gift of the whole endeavor and the force assuring the museum stays in operation)- just some of the derivatives of this cottage curio industry's artifice.
On these small stages within these sealed humans all great social action takes place, producing a rich vein of ore for some alien observer to comment on and categorize.
I, for one, fucking love a good cup of coffee in the morning.
It's commonly held that there is no long-term reward in working for others- the real fulfillment is only cultivated through self-employment, self-reliance, the confident highs extracted from the knowledge of one's own independence.
Of course, self-employment of the conventional variety suffers from the same deficiencies of wage slavery in that it is still a clever passing of time from cradle to grave, delivering a healthy dearth of reasons for carrying on in a culture that still, at least loosely, is based on the myth of progress. Forward motion without goals, without a proper ideology, presents dilemmas to the mind unburdened by sufficient distraction. One successful method for dealing with the outside world of varied ultimate disappointments is to become a hermetic man. Find self-employment in the mind, become a curator of your own private museum of a constant horror.
This method is not uncommon- it is the basis of delusions great and small. When the boundaries perceived do not budge, ignore the fact that you ever perceived anything beyond those frontiers and suppress the moment that you did so. The moment of perfect horror, the moment when you failed to achieve the escape velocity required to lift you from the morass of your life (perceived within the shared and first delusion, progress), that is the moment that will define the curio existence of the hermetic man, that will be the theme of the plan defining the cyclical boundary of the track his life is running on.
The gift of purpose! Even if delusion, what satisfaction one can bring to oneself closing doors and operating on an abbreviated operating system. Authority (the suppression of the knowledge of the lack of omniscience, the invitation to others to populate and cohabitate within the lonely mind), Righteousness (The security guard of the mental Mütter Museum), Ambition (the gift of the whole endeavor and the force assuring the museum stays in operation)- just some of the derivatives of this cottage curio industry's artifice.
On these small stages within these sealed humans all great social action takes place, producing a rich vein of ore for some alien observer to comment on and categorize.
I, for one, fucking love a good cup of coffee in the morning.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
Friday, October 14, 2005
Homelessness
Further reading today, the essay Shelter for the Homeless by Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) ur-visual culture critic and mass culture critic of Weimar Germany.
The shelter he writes of is that provided to those spiritually homeless denizens of the middle class, those living the lifestyle of the salaried employee. He writes they "are living at present without a doctrine to look up at or a goal to ascertain. (88)" The closest thing they can associate with something "higher" is instead glamour. This shallow version of what there is to attain in life is attained "not through concentration, but in distraction."
The lower middle class escape from their workaday lives, from their horrid existences into the "homeless shelters" of taverns, clubs, department stores, and other houses of social intoxication. They cannot bear their own lives, and so prefer endless distractions, expensive hobbies and entertainment that lets them rub elbows with their image of the lives of leisure of the leisure classes while remaining more or less content enough with their lot to not attempt to actually achieve or usurp the leisure class from its denizens. Kracauer describes this flight into leisure and images of the Weimar middle class as depoliticizing. "The flight into images is a flight from revolution and from death."
The shelter he writes of is that provided to those spiritually homeless denizens of the middle class, those living the lifestyle of the salaried employee. He writes they "are living at present without a doctrine to look up at or a goal to ascertain. (88)" The closest thing they can associate with something "higher" is instead glamour. This shallow version of what there is to attain in life is attained "not through concentration, but in distraction."
The lower middle class escape from their workaday lives, from their horrid existences into the "homeless shelters" of taverns, clubs, department stores, and other houses of social intoxication. They cannot bear their own lives, and so prefer endless distractions, expensive hobbies and entertainment that lets them rub elbows with their image of the lives of leisure of the leisure classes while remaining more or less content enough with their lot to not attempt to actually achieve or usurp the leisure class from its denizens. Kracauer describes this flight into leisure and images of the Weimar middle class as depoliticizing. "The flight into images is a flight from revolution and from death."
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Travels in hyper reality
Doing some research for Manny's monster due in the next couple of weeks on the end of the world, I just finished reading Eco's essay "Travels in Hyper Reality."
He brings up the philosophy of the Last Beach. Some quotes:
On the compulsive hodge-podge collection habits of those with archival or museum-curator leanings, the constant miscegenation of historical reproductions of art forms alongside other forms not of the same era in a desperate urge to create a fetishized and somehow more-real-than-the-original conception of the past:
"The condition for the amalgamation of the fake and authentic is that there must have been a historic catastrophe, of the sort that has made the divine Acropolis of Athens as venerable as Pompeii, city of brothels and bakeries. And this brings us to the theme of the Last Beach, the apocalyptic philosophy that more or less explicitly rules these reconstructions: Europe is declining into barbarism and something has to be saved."
p. 36
"It is the ideology of preservation, in the New World, of the treasures that the folly and negligence of hte Old World are causing to disappear into the void. Naturally this ideology conceals something- the desire for profit, in the case of the cemetery; and in the case of the Getty, the fact that it is the entrepreneurial colonization by the New World... that makes the Old World's condition critical. Just like the crocodile tears of the Roman patrician who reproduced the grandeurs of the very Greece that his country had humiliated and reduced to a colony. And so the Last Beach ideology develops its thirst for preservation of art from an imperialistic efficiency, but at the same time it is the bad conscience of this imperialistic efficiency..."
p. 39
He brings up the philosophy of the Last Beach. Some quotes:
On the compulsive hodge-podge collection habits of those with archival or museum-curator leanings, the constant miscegenation of historical reproductions of art forms alongside other forms not of the same era in a desperate urge to create a fetishized and somehow more-real-than-the-original conception of the past:
"The condition for the amalgamation of the fake and authentic is that there must have been a historic catastrophe, of the sort that has made the divine Acropolis of Athens as venerable as Pompeii, city of brothels and bakeries. And this brings us to the theme of the Last Beach, the apocalyptic philosophy that more or less explicitly rules these reconstructions: Europe is declining into barbarism and something has to be saved."
p. 36
"It is the ideology of preservation, in the New World, of the treasures that the folly and negligence of hte Old World are causing to disappear into the void. Naturally this ideology conceals something- the desire for profit, in the case of the cemetery; and in the case of the Getty, the fact that it is the entrepreneurial colonization by the New World... that makes the Old World's condition critical. Just like the crocodile tears of the Roman patrician who reproduced the grandeurs of the very Greece that his country had humiliated and reduced to a colony. And so the Last Beach ideology develops its thirst for preservation of art from an imperialistic efficiency, but at the same time it is the bad conscience of this imperialistic efficiency..."
p. 39
Technorati Tags: apocalypse, Eco
Sunday, October 09, 2005
Now tangled in you
Friday, October 07, 2005
The Most Accidental of Tremendous Boobies
I so enjoy this city and the uncounted opportunities it gives for, among so many other desirable things, turning your head innocently at any moment, caught in a world of one's own, on one's way to work, to suddenly plunge the richness of your whole vision into some ample and perfect bosom. Areolas and hosanas, brethren, to the innocent bystander.
Friday, September 30, 2005
This Friday, I wear a new hat?
My experience in the working world thus far, post-grad school, has been a lot like I feared it would be and a lot like it was before. I've been sitting without much of anything to do in any kind of sequence. I've been left to my own devices but regarded questioningly, as those powers who are wonder if they needed to hire me. Today I move to the other side of the office to do some other task I may or may not be required to produce proof of labor on. Money trickles in, money trickles out. It's getting cooler. My joints ache, especially on my typing hands, and I feel the grasshopper of the mind has foolishly used up all his serotonin during endlessly sunny summer days in the voluptuary. A love of sorts perches near my window and watches me lose my taste for excess. The seasons are changing within and without me, and I wonder if I'll ever get to Europe. The days are deceptively endless, and the retarder is heavy with an antenna finger in my third eye. These are the things that humans do, but I have so many questions.
Two Sentence Record Reviews:
Goldfrapp: Supernature.
T. Rex meets Olivia Newton John and Prince (and Eartha Kitt?). Good.
Boards of Canada: The Campfire Headphase
Bibio and Matmos meet BoC. It is clearly wonderful that Varispeed and delay squirts warble their way into this fuzz-trip, deceptively simple sound.
Ladytron: The Witching Hour
My Bloody Valentine and Roxy Music team up with the "If you're 21, you're no fun" krew. Pop a boner in the echoing vocals and pump away with the addition of the rock chug.
Technorati Tags: electronica, record reviews
Thursday, September 29, 2005
I want to read this book.
Deciphering a brave new world:
Legendary inventor Ray Kurzweil considers how artificial intelligence might reshape society.
Legendary inventor Ray Kurzweil considers how artificial intelligence might reshape society.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Blackalicious: The Craft- I Have Ten Minutes
Blackalicious' new project, The Craft, has dropped.
I first heard the Gift of Gab and Chief Xcel on their 2002 outing, Blazing Arrow, and ultra-dense masterwork of collaboration technical layering of tracks, and mixing of soul sensibilities with J5/funk-driven non-syncopated hip-hop. My mind was blown. It was one of the best albums to come out of a summer that gave us Schneider TM's "Zoomer" and Interpol's "Turn On the Bright Lights." The ensuing years haven't, unfortunately, shown us such a glut of quality, powerfully new sounds (I maintain that The National's Alligator remains one of the only albums of the past two years).
This is an album that two prolific and talented genii doted on. It's obvious. Think Funk + Soul + Hip Hop meets 5th dimension and Star Trek. This is an album that will not turn you off, but it is an album that on this second listen, has to be committed to. Xcel's production is tweaked, to say the least- each moment of music contains so much microinformation packed into a reassuring and familiar hip-hop beat that the ear is tempted to pass through the mass of it as the eye over atoms. The album does not appear to have another "First in Flight," a song that immediately and uncompromisingly lifted my attention at a five finger discount on their last album. The Gift of Gab's trademark rhythmic locquaciousness seems to fade into a drone- the spaces where the music's hooks were allowed to take over on the last release don't seem to be rearing their heads on this latest droplet of acrylic.
Keep in mind I am reviewing this record in comparison to my experience of my discovery of this duo- by no means is this album going to be a turn-off in the quality department. It simply doesn't seem to surmount the challenge erected by their last, amazing record, moving musically in nanometers in comparison- lacking the amazing changes and hooks.
Of course, I say this now.
My time is up.
Update:
After another couple of listens, I do have to say that this album is definitely a disappointment in comparison to Blazing Arrow, this record just isn't up to snuff. The trippy 5th Dimension meets Star Trek thing they have going on is cool, and it stands out particularly on the opener World of Vibrations and on The Fall and Rise of Elliot Brown, but most of the record gets lost in conventional beats and a morass of continuously invariably quickened vocals from the Gift of Gab.
[composed and posted with ecto]
Technorati Tags: Hip Hop
Monday, September 26, 2005
Saturday, September 24, 2005
Trying Something New
Just got Ecto to try to beef up my blogging. We'll see how this works out.
Soul Power from the album "Electric Circus" by Common
Soul Power from the album "Electric Circus" by Common
Friday, September 23, 2005
Earthlings colonize the universe with sexual desire:
The Aliens had no idea they wanted it doggy style.
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Nerf Balloon Man Treats His Ladies Indifferently
She makes to leave with cold eyelashes, doing not comely. For fair, it is she who may take her leave at her convenience. It computes.
How many steps along in the process further than she does the nerf balloon man behold?
One sees the distance, but one knows one's peg is still planted in the motionless now. He says "the dew on your mascara has gotten fat and tepid, and I feel the gravity of your eyes on me..."
Nerf balloon man spanks her for response, which returns moist and repetitively as it always has. He is behind her again, after all.
"My butterfly, I've fixed you here." Is how he finishes. She, for fair, will be here for years to come.
"You are free, making long at the door, but the danger of bringing your eyes once so close to mine..."
A mouth open is always now, be the eyes however far gone- hers, lovely, not the containment but the expression in wet skin of abundance.
"...I will always come faster than you can go."
How many steps along in the process further than she does the nerf balloon man behold?
One sees the distance, but one knows one's peg is still planted in the motionless now. He says "the dew on your mascara has gotten fat and tepid, and I feel the gravity of your eyes on me..."
Nerf balloon man spanks her for response, which returns moist and repetitively as it always has. He is behind her again, after all.
"My butterfly, I've fixed you here." Is how he finishes. She, for fair, will be here for years to come.
"You are free, making long at the door, but the danger of bringing your eyes once so close to mine..."
A mouth open is always now, be the eyes however far gone- hers, lovely, not the containment but the expression in wet skin of abundance.
"...I will always come faster than you can go."
Monday, September 19, 2005
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Sunday Morning Catches Me Up: Dig Desolation Jones
Listening to a little NPR "On the Media" via podcast.
As for new comics:
Got hold of the first issue of Desolation Jones this week, along with the most recent one, issue #3. Ellis's own commentary on issue #1 can be found here. This is easily one of the most visually captivating tracks on which I've ever set the eye-train running, which it does at bullet speeds. Ish one really put the whole story in place, correcting me on a few misconceptions regarding the plot. Set in some version of the present, not the near future as I had originally thought, L.A. is a sort of open prison for disbarred and out-of-favor members of the world's intelligence community. Jones is former M16, victim and sole survivor of an experiment the depths of the horrors of which have only been partially insinuated called the desolation test. In L.A. he works as a private investigator for this stray dog intelligence community. His existence is hallucinogenic, he is beset by visions and distortions of reality he can't keep at bay- he is the perfect hard-boiled supermodern private dick, a translation of noir into transient modernity. He lives in a world not unlike that encountered in the pages of Algren's New Orleans in A Walk on the Wild Side, a world peopled by the shells of the shells of people, the remainders of those mechanisms that once fulfilled a professional obsession or obligation with all traces of the social dug out of them; these are people who have become forks and who've had a few tines broken off who are then forced to fly back to the world of hugs and brunch. Ellis's theme of hyper-mediation is thoughtfully entertained and expanded in this book. Transmetropolitan explored, in the few compilations I had the good fortune to stumble across a few years ago, what I do not mean to seem derogatory in characterizing as a more superficial exploration of the effects of media on people. In that series, we see the hero, Spider Jerusalem, throwing his hands up in the air as he uses the press to try to get people in the hyper-mediated future to police their humanity and its loss. This book, in the first three issues, seems to be leading us to focus not on identifying with a voice of reason pointing out the decay of people victimised by their own eagerness to be mediated as in Transmetropolitan, but instead on a world without that antebellum voice of reason. This is a world of people ruined by their specializations, people who have tuned in to the million gallons of thought pouring down from the wire and lost vast tracts of themselves because they don't have enough channels in their perception to do something with all information at once. There are no other characters of any other stripe in this book. Though Spider Jerusalem's jaunts were set in the future, the present-day world Michael Jones inhabits is the bleaker, more far-flung.
Pay particular attention to Jones' musing on supermodernism, the mediation of space as a message: You are just passing through, you don't belong here. The characters in this book are a testament to the arrival of our plight in our mediated present- YOU don't belong here. YOU don't belong anywhere. If any part of YOU wants to get through to tomorrow, YOU had best make friends with a profession. And all professions simply use their human mediums to transfer information from one place to another.
Saturday, September 17, 2005
Too much good stuff
DMX Krew just released a new cd on Rephlex with very little press. 2xCD entitled "Wave:CD".
Friday, September 16, 2005
Some sounds and interesting stuff (New Boards of Canada...)
New Boards of Canada Track, via Scissorkick.
If you haven't already, you should get hold of the BOC remix of Broken Drum on the latest Beck cd.
Sound wonderfulness from a device called THE INSANIUM.
Spectrasonic releases drum loop collection to benefit victims of Katrina. Page seems to be down, though- maybe bandwidth problems? Here's a story linking to it.
Via Getlofi:
Sounds from hacked Yamaha FM chips here.
If you haven't already, you should get hold of the BOC remix of Broken Drum on the latest Beck cd.
Sound wonderfulness from a device called THE INSANIUM.
Spectrasonic releases drum loop collection to benefit victims of Katrina. Page seems to be down, though- maybe bandwidth problems? Here's a story linking to it.
Via Getlofi:
Sounds from hacked Yamaha FM chips here.
Feeling Shit Getting Multiple with MOOG
Yesterday I Watched MOOG, a recent documentary focusing on the spiritual side of Robert Moog, the man the movie would have you believe invented the whole world's ability to digest the idea of a synthesizer. That would be beautiful if it were true. I wonder if it is. The good people at the Keio Organ Company, also known as KORG, might have something to say about that. At least it never comes out and asserts that he actually invented the synthesizer, an insane proposition that almost everyone is fond of getting behind. Some early synthesizers were actually developed in conjunction with the technology for reproducing the human voice over telephone wires. You think that stuff just happens? That is synthesis, pink one. That's like a vocoder whose distortion we have been taught is simply a signifier of the real, technical anamnesis of the authentic human voice. It's synthesis we've been taught to ignore.
In any event, the movie was good. It focuses on Moog's thoughts on energy and the interconnectedness of all things. He describes his work with the design of synthesizers as a communion between a timeless realm of pure energy and human memory. It is his ingenuity and patience that puts MOOG-branded, oscillator-equipped hash marks on reality, inserts him into the flow of history, into everyone else's history. In naming these machines, as he puts it, it was not his wish to insinuate that the music they made was "synthetic," but that the music was real, that it exists, that it is whole and continuous- every bit as much as the music from conventional instruments. The music was not synthetic, but synthesized- made, irrefutable.
A short conversation excerpted in the movie between Bob Moog and European University professor DJ Spooky explores this same theme of the humanity of synthesized music, the compassion and emotion and the natural flavor it embodies. The Subliminal Kid spoke about his notions on sampling, on the idea that you can take sounds that exists in your memory and as a physical artifact recorded or encoded in something, a sound that remains forever in the time it was recorded (1922, 1950, 2003) and splice all these parts together into a new composition. Memory loses its time-locked sequence, its imprisonment in the past and in its context, its servitude to the limited multi-tasking opportunities provided by THE MOMENT. Notions and concepts remain whole but excerpted, recombined, real and whole and new in a whole new context. Bob saw his own act of bearing witness to the link between concept, URGE, and creation, a process that produced the synthesizers he built and thus enabled musicians to expand their performative capabilities, as a sign of the continuousness of the mental, conceptual realm and the world of the works of hands and days. DJ Spooky saw this same continousness played out in a perceptually adjusted vector, not in the audible expression of the simplest waveforms, but in the recombination through sampling of concepts and energy across time, across format, across the borders between life and death.
In any event, the movie was good. It focuses on Moog's thoughts on energy and the interconnectedness of all things. He describes his work with the design of synthesizers as a communion between a timeless realm of pure energy and human memory. It is his ingenuity and patience that puts MOOG-branded, oscillator-equipped hash marks on reality, inserts him into the flow of history, into everyone else's history. In naming these machines, as he puts it, it was not his wish to insinuate that the music they made was "synthetic," but that the music was real, that it exists, that it is whole and continuous- every bit as much as the music from conventional instruments. The music was not synthetic, but synthesized- made, irrefutable.
A short conversation excerpted in the movie between Bob Moog and European University professor DJ Spooky explores this same theme of the humanity of synthesized music, the compassion and emotion and the natural flavor it embodies. The Subliminal Kid spoke about his notions on sampling, on the idea that you can take sounds that exists in your memory and as a physical artifact recorded or encoded in something, a sound that remains forever in the time it was recorded (1922, 1950, 2003) and splice all these parts together into a new composition. Memory loses its time-locked sequence, its imprisonment in the past and in its context, its servitude to the limited multi-tasking opportunities provided by THE MOMENT. Notions and concepts remain whole but excerpted, recombined, real and whole and new in a whole new context. Bob saw his own act of bearing witness to the link between concept, URGE, and creation, a process that produced the synthesizers he built and thus enabled musicians to expand their performative capabilities, as a sign of the continuousness of the mental, conceptual realm and the world of the works of hands and days. DJ Spooky saw this same continousness played out in a perceptually adjusted vector, not in the audible expression of the simplest waveforms, but in the recombination through sampling of concepts and energy across time, across format, across the borders between life and death.
ADHD
A rundown of a million unrelated things:
Linux for the ipod.
I saw Scarlet Johannsen at Croxley eating 10 cent wings.
Yesterday I got Safety Scissors' Tainted Lunch.
Brian Eno and Cluster's 1977 collaboration, Cluster and Eno has been re-released, so two years after I start looking for it (three?) it is suddenly available to everyone. Hooray.
I am in possession of issue no. 2 of The Winter Men (Зимние Мужчины) and issue no. 3 of Desolation Jones. I read them last night.
There will certainly be more said regarding these.
Can someone please tell me how I can get hold of a copy of Good Sound by Mr. Schmuck's Farm (AKA Schneider TM and a collaborator)? This shit is hard to get hold of if you are me and do not want to order from abroad.
For the time being, that will be all.
Linux for the ipod.
I saw Scarlet Johannsen at Croxley eating 10 cent wings.
Yesterday I got Safety Scissors' Tainted Lunch.
Brian Eno and Cluster's 1977 collaboration, Cluster and Eno has been re-released, so two years after I start looking for it (three?) it is suddenly available to everyone. Hooray.
I am in possession of issue no. 2 of The Winter Men (Зимние Мужчины) and issue no. 3 of Desolation Jones. I read them last night.
There will certainly be more said regarding these.
Can someone please tell me how I can get hold of a copy of Good Sound by Mr. Schmuck's Farm (AKA Schneider TM and a collaborator)? This shit is hard to get hold of if you are me and do not want to order from abroad.
For the time being, that will be all.
Monday, September 12, 2005
Water and Cheese
A quiet evening in a living room, in the apartment where I now reside. Won't find me painting more tonight, I'll let the latex dry another day before I affix the masking tape to the beautful orange walls.
A Tinier World
Blink, Blink:
Your eyes drop twice like ice cubes
and we drop into a tinier world
And you and I and the others simplify
and I'm a martini and you're a gin and tonic and we're all just drinking each from the other
with the customary greeting:
Drink from me, I runneth over.
Your eyes drop twice like ice cubes
and we drop into a tinier world
And you and I and the others simplify
and I'm a martini and you're a gin and tonic and we're all just drinking each from the other
with the customary greeting:
Drink from me, I runneth over.
Sunday, September 11, 2005
a quick list of appropriate protest music
I've been meaning to write this post for about a week, but the new job, the moving, the painting, have all been getting in the way. I am suffering withdrawal from alcohol as I type this, but I am here eating and taking a break from painting for the moment, giving me the opportunity to post. Albums appropriate to the current state of government:
Trans Am: Liberation
Skinny Puppy's single "Tin Omen," done with the help of Alain Jourgenson, auteur of-
Ministry: Twitch, The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste (and all the other ones pre-filthpig, too, I guess)
Megadebt: Misadventures in Global Desecration
Food For Animals: Scavengers
Ted Leo "The High Party," "Ballad of the Sin-eater"
Free new protest track by TV on the Radio available here.
Short list, but, you know, these things are amendable.
Trans Am: Liberation
Skinny Puppy's single "Tin Omen," done with the help of Alain Jourgenson, auteur of-
Ministry: Twitch, The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste (and all the other ones pre-filthpig, too, I guess)
Megadebt: Misadventures in Global Desecration
Food For Animals: Scavengers
Ted Leo "The High Party," "Ballad of the Sin-eater"
Free new protest track by TV on the Radio available here.
Short list, but, you know, these things are amendable.
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Alarmism
With the deluge come so many new ways for the world to end. Take heart in a new possibility to be right, finally, sexily, with no threat of revisionists hijacking your last words.
Friday, September 02, 2005
Tiny visions of summer
Summer is pulling shut, we've sent the love home and the chlorophyll is seeping away from the surface of things, peeling away as a veneer from the murder beneath. In the soggy south the poor are at each other's throats.
I go to the bar, but I'm tired I will drink water and coke. this weekend I will not drink at all.nor will I smoke.
The Big Easy is underwater. New Orleans has sunk.
Current TV blog coverage here.
Watch your donations, article here.
Excellent interview with Matt Taibbi, formerly of the eXile and, more recently, the New York Press here. Elucidation on the swing right of that free weekly and the disgusting plight of reason under the merciless wheels of ideologically violent christian culture cultists.
I watch the degraded plight of the poor left behind in New Orleans, and a line from the National's "City Middle" keeps running through my head.
"Take me to the nearest major city middle where they hang the lights/where it's random and it's common versus common..."
It is clear and cool in New York City. I am tired and uneasy. Chaos right here in the States is peeling the paint off the illusion of safety, and the poor are left to float downstream.
I go to the bar, but I'm tired I will drink water and coke. this weekend I will not drink at all.nor will I smoke.
The Big Easy is underwater. New Orleans has sunk.
Current TV blog coverage here.
Watch your donations, article here.
Excellent interview with Matt Taibbi, formerly of the eXile and, more recently, the New York Press here. Elucidation on the swing right of that free weekly and the disgusting plight of reason under the merciless wheels of ideologically violent christian culture cultists.
I watch the degraded plight of the poor left behind in New Orleans, and a line from the National's "City Middle" keeps running through my head.
"Take me to the nearest major city middle where they hang the lights/where it's random and it's common versus common..."
It is clear and cool in New York City. I am tired and uneasy. Chaos right here in the States is peeling the paint off the illusion of safety, and the poor are left to float downstream.
Saturday, August 27, 2005
Friday, August 26, 2005
Some things I've been thinking myself
The Burning Man festival has always seemed to me to be the ultimate celebration of self-centered behavior, chock full of personal revelations that don't lead to anything. Feelings of being closer to god leading to... nothing! No change, just a return to the grind. God no longer omnipotent but, instead, omnimpotent. I don't get this faux hippie bullshit, revelations not leading you to new heights of understanding of the interconnectivity of all things, just a really far-out way to be into yourself and whatever dramatic, amazing thing you're experiencing... for yourself.(photo found via Warren Ellis' blog)
Mr. Brian Jonestown
Last night on my way to a 2-4-1 happy hour at 151 Rivington we walked past Iggy's, and who should be standing outside broodingly smoking a cigarette in a peasant shirt but the guy from Brian Jonestown Massacre. I proceeded from there to see an entirely shitty apartment in Williamsburg.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Fotki
Son Volt at the South Street Seaport. Hope to have some Ted Leo pics for the free show there this Friday.
Sunday, August 21, 2005
I'm reading The Winter Men
I wandered into Forbidden Planet yesterday to see if the riot of color, fetishized representations of sexy authority and authority confused with sex, and retarded people buying Green Lantern T-Shirts (and not even the old-school, Golden age Green Lantern in a yellow circle on a red background, insignia, either) would overstimulate me into a coma like it's done for the past year or so. It didn't! I ended up picking up two books that jumped out at me, both on Wildstorm. One was Desolation Jones #2, the new series from writer Warren Ellis, and the other a book about the whereabouts of secret Soviet supermen in the present day- The Winter Men. Highly enjoyable, extremely dense. Looking forward to collecting this one.
Friday, August 19, 2005
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Sunday, August 14, 2005
Podkasting ist rad
For kicks, check out the podcast at Splendid . Also, all entries from 8/12 till this one should be read from bottom to top.
Friday, August 12, 2005
At breakfast we chastise the valkyrie
Having someone else's dreams
drinking someone else's drinks
stuck with your own laundry.
Portishead was rumored to be back in the studio, making dark and fuzzy. Everything in our past is reapproaching; once announced, permanent.
Where is my swiss miss pouring me rivers of warm, fragrant, deep brown coffee from her gravid, gibbous, hell-white cleaves? My parchment-white, hundred-weight serving titaness who shines the light of the world when she turns and bends to pick up my fork.
The breakfast ritual ends in Valhalla with the tipping of maidens and history lessons, shouts of
"Present your singularity!" We begin burned by coffee and we end with our end in the beginning of all things.
drinking someone else's drinks
stuck with your own laundry.
Portishead was rumored to be back in the studio, making dark and fuzzy. Everything in our past is reapproaching; once announced, permanent.
Where is my swiss miss pouring me rivers of warm, fragrant, deep brown coffee from her gravid, gibbous, hell-white cleaves? My parchment-white, hundred-weight serving titaness who shines the light of the world when she turns and bends to pick up my fork.
The breakfast ritual ends in Valhalla with the tipping of maidens and history lessons, shouts of
"Present your singularity!" We begin burned by coffee and we end with our end in the beginning of all things.
Recent Music
Röyksopp: The Understanding
Daddy like. Big, atmospheric sound you can get inside, deep bass, pretty electronics with full, round tones, nice filter sweeps from bwoom to bwaaaaw. Disco exuberance.
Easy Star All-Stars: Dub Side of the Moon
I know this is old. I just heard it a few months ago for the first time, and I really needed to hear it again this week. Hot shit. It is exactly what it sounds like it would be.
La Dusseldorf: La Dusseldorf
I haven't listened to this all the way through yet, but, you know, krauty mechanical sounding stuff from the seventies. "Silver Cloud" tweets happy. "Time" goes on for as long as that expanse goes on, or seems to, burying you in afternoon light. Hooray.
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