Holiday

Taking a few days off for the holidays...

Very merry, very happy.

Cheers!

Mojito Weekend

Happy Holidays!

Track(s) of the Week: From the Top Ten

Five Track from my Top Ten:

High Places - From Stardust to Sentience: Dreamy and ethereal. This track is a perfect depiction of the entire album.

Man Man - Mister Jung Stuffed: From the first "Been locked down way too long" of this opening track through the final "Who are we to love at all" of the album's closing tune ("Whalebones"), Rabbit Habits is the funnest circus-ride of an album that I know.

The Dodos - Red and Purple: I'm amazed when two-man bands are able to produce a sound this full. I know, recording studio hocus pocus and all that... but, still, there's a richness to The Dodos that's unexplained by the effects of layering tracks.

Sleepingdog - The Sun Sinks in the Sea: Hypnotic. Mesmerizing. Polar Life is like forced meditation. The entire album manages to stay consistently entrancing without sounding repetitive.

Gang Gang Dance - First Communion: Saint Dympha made the top ten largely because it's been the backdrop for my writing for several weeks. It's a good album, but it's particularly good for passing the time spent in the excruciating work of wordsmithing.

Enjoy! If you like it, buy it (if possible, buy as directly from the artist as you can - by picking up something at a show, purchasing through their websites, or going through their record labels).

Track(s) of the Week: Honorable Mentions

Five tracks from my Best of '08 Honorable Mentions:

Cat Power - Song to Bobby: The one original tune (not counting Chan's cover of her own song) on Jukebox. Also, an unapologetic love letter to Bob Dylan.

Ratatat - Mi Viejo: These boys have some great remixes out there.

Juana Molina - Dar (Qué Dificil): Juana Molina is incapable of making songs that aren't completely infectious. Listen to this and don't like it. I dare you to even try.

Tobacco - Hairy Candy: All analog. From a limited vinyl release. And (perhaps too surprisingly) a Pittsburgh native.

Department of Eagles - Around the Bay: A solid tune from a solid album. If I'd had more time to spend with In Ear Park, it may very well have ranked higher.

What to get me for Christmas:

Palo Santo Marron:

An unfiltered, unfettered, unprecedented brown ale aged in handmade wooden brewing vessels. The caramel and vanilla complexity unique to this beer comes from the exotic Paraguayan Palo Santo wood from which these tanks were crafted. Palo Santo means "holy tree" and it's wood has been used in South American wine-making communities.

Also, if you haven't read Burkhard Bilger's New Yorker article on extreme beer, you should check it out. Bilger situates the history of Dogfish Head brewery and its founder and Brewmeister Extraordinaire Sam Calagione within the larger context of the fascinating history of American beer, pointing out that the post-Prohibition development of mild, light domestic beers is directly linked to the sweet tooth America developed during Prohibition by getting addicted to Coca-Cola.

Best of '08

Earlier this week, Pitchfork published the results of the aforementioned readers' poll, and although my original picks for best albums of the year didn't fare as well as I would have hoped, it's a good list.

They're going to begin announcing their official Best of '08 lists tomorrow, beginning with honorable mentions, and so I thought I should throw mine out there - less in hope that it will predict their picks (it won't) and more to validate my choices as unintentionally non-hipster (as opposed to decidedly counter-cool).

The problem with lists: In any top five list, the first four are solid and the fifth is a nearly impossible and perpetually shifting position. In top 10 lists, you get a solid four, followed by three or four that could have been number five, and a few more solid choices to round things out.

I'll admit that my picks have changed since I last posted them. But, so what? I can change my mind, can't I?

That said: My 10 Favorite Albums of 2008

1. High Places - S/T
2. Man Man - Rabbit Habits
3. Jay Reatard - Singles '08
4. The Dodos - Visiter
5. The Black Keys - Attack and Release
6. Born Ruffians - Red, Yellow, and Blue
7. Sleepingdog - Polar Life
8. The Raconteurs - Consolers of the Lonely
9. Death Cab for Cutie - Narrow Stairs
10. Gang Gang Dance - Saint Dympha

My Top 10 Honorable Mentions (coincidentally, the list that will more likely resemble Pitchfork's top 10)

1. TV on the Radio - Dear Science
2. Cat Power - Jukebox
3. Fleet Foxes - S/T
4. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
5. Ratatat - LP3
6. Juana Molina - Un Dia
7. Deerhunter - Microcastle / Weird Era Cont.
8. Tobacco - Fucked Up Friends
9. Abe Vigoda - Skeleton
10. Department of Eagles - In Ear Park

I'll save further commentary for later this week, but for now, feel free to post your lists here. And keep an eye out for tracks from some of these bands in this Friday's "Track of the Week" post.

A shoe at your head is worth two at the Bush?

Okay. Corny title. But this has been cracking me up all day: Yesterday, an Iraqi journalist threw both of his shoes at lame-duck Bush's head during his final presidential visit.

From The New York Times:

President Bush made a valedictory visit on Sunday to Iraq, the country that will largely define his legacy, but the trip will more likely be remembered for the unscripted moment when an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at Mr. Bush’s head and denounced him on live television as a “dog” who had delivered death and sorrow here from nearly six years of war.

Read the full story here.

Or check it out below. Who knew Dubya had such quick reflexes?



So, how long before tossing a shoe at Bush's head turns into a banner advertisement for insurance quotes or debt consolidation?

Mojito Weekend

Mojimail.



















Happy Weekend!

Track of the Week: "Old Panda Days" by Casiotone for the Painfully Alone

To continue the series of tracks from bands I've recently seen live and who, after the show, slept on my couch,* this week's track comes from Casiotone for the Painfully Alone (cftpa).

After seeing cftpa in a small, artsy venue in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago, I invited Owen Ashworth - cftpa's creator and sole member - and his brother Gordon (who's band Concern also played) to crash on my couch, and, to my surprise and overly-enthusiastic delight, they took me up on it.

I first heard cftpa on the first installment of the limited David Horvitz Picture Disc Series from Aagoo Records, and I immediately fell in love.

"Old Panda Days" is the track from the picture disc series that sealed the deal on my gushing fandom. Enjoy!

Buy cftpa's recent full length Etiquette here or digitally through iTunes. Also, see the band's MySpace page for some extraordinarily awesome and rare wax, including the highly recommended Ashworth brothers' collaboration on a couple Springsteen covers printed on a square slab o' vinyl.

* Note: unless in the extremely unlikely event that another band happens to sleep on my couch between now and next Friday, this will be the last track in the "bands who've slept on my couch" series. I don't go givin' that couch out to just anyone, you know.

Thirteen Theses for the Writer

Today I set aside the aforementioned MLA paper to start revising the second chapter of my doctoral dissertation. When I read through the chapter, I revisited the struggle of writing it in the first place, and so I started thinking about ways I'd like to approach writing.

This is, in part, a response to Walter Benjamin's "The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses," which I will post here sooner or later. But it's also just my thoughts on the practice of writing, conveniently packaged in 13 segments.

1) Advanced thought in accessible prose.

2) Always write as if a larger audience - one that consists of intelligent non-specialists, especially a group of smart people you know - will read what you've written.

3) Write about subjects that interest you. Truly.

4) How you feel about the writing, the subject, the audience, etc. will get embedded in your prose. So will how you feel when writing.

5) In three versions:
5.1) Be who you want to articulate. Then, write.
5.2) Ontology first. Composition second.
5.3) Compose your self first.

6) A writer's mantra:
Write.
Every day.
No matter what.
[Note: you can define "every day" how you like. For me, it mean 5 or 6 days a week]

7) If possible: Write First.
[This does not contradict number 5]

8) "Nulla dies sine linea" - Plinius

9) "Nulla dies sine linea - but there may well be weeks" - Benjamin
But if you find yourself having gone weeks without writing, start writing.

10) Embrace a healthy obsession with both your subject material and writing about it.

11) Revision is generative. Even destruction, as Marx tells us, is a creative process.

12) No single approach to writing is 100% effective 100% of the time. Switch it up as often as necessary.

13) Rest and relaxation can be as useful for your work as work itself. Moreover, taking a long enough break from work will enable you to return to it as both a reader and a composer.
[Note: But if you take too much time off, see number 9]

"The New Examined Life"? Or Dataveillance?

Thanks to Swade for this article from the Wall Street Journal:

The New Examined Life
Why more people are spilling the statistics of their lives on the Web

By JAMIN BROPHY-WARREN

In the first week of January, New York graphic designer Nicholas Felton will boil down everything he did in 2008 into charts, graphs, maps and lists.

The 2007 edition of his yearly retrospective notes that he received 13 postcards, lost six games of pool and read 4,736 book pages. He tracked every New York street he walked and sorted the 632 beers he consumed by country of origin.

Part experimentation, part self-help, such "personal informatics" projects, as they are known, are gathering steam thanks to people like Mr. Felton who find meaning in the mundane. At their disposal are a host of virtual tools to help them become their own forensic accountants, including Web sites such as Dopplr, which allows people to manage and share travel itineraries, and Mon.thly.Info, for tracking menstrual cycles. Parents can document infant feeding schedules with Trixie Tracker. And couples can go from between the sheets to spreadsheets with Bedpost, which helps users keep track of their amorous activities.

The objective for Mr. Felton and others is to seize data back from the statisticians and the scientists and incorporate it into our daily lives. Everyone creates data -- every smile, conversation and car ride is a potential datapoint. These quotidan aggregators believe that the compilation of our daily activities can reveal the secret patterns that govern the way we live. For students of personal informatics, the practice is liberating because it shows that our lives aren't random, and are more orderly than some might expect.

Mr. Felton calls his compilation the Feltron Annual Report; the slight alteration of his name connotes the mechanical nature of his autobiographical cataloging effort, now entering its fourth year. He plans to continue his project over the next decade in what he hopes will result in a modern-day spin on James Boswell's famously detailed biography of Samuel Johnson. "I want to create connections where I didn't know that they existed," Mr. Felton says. "I'm a natural annotator."

The elegantly graphical reports, as much design projects as they are data compilations, are posted online by Mr. Felton. He also creates hard-copy limited editions, available free of charge. They have become so popular that he recently launched a Web site with his friend Ryan Case called Daytum, which helps fellow chroniclers track the details of their own experiences.

The culture of sharing information online has shifted in recent years, from a focus on blog ramblings to the ubiquitous micro-movements of posters' daily lives. Microblogging sites like Twitter have become commonplace. President-elect Barack Obama, for example, had his own Twitter account and used it to keep his supporters up to date on his campaign's daily comings and goings. (It's been silent since the election.) Facebook's News Feed feature initially drew criticism from members because it offered a running log of users' minute postings and updates, but has since became a core part of the Web site's community. Some sites collect data automatically for their users. Last.fm keeps a record of all of the songs users have listened to, and Netflix keeps track of members' movie-watching habits.

"It's a natural progression from people sharing things like movies, photos and videos," says Dennis Crowley, founder of Dodgeball, an early social-networking service for mobile phones which was sold to Google in 2005. "What's left to share? Basic data."

Yannick Assogba, a graduate student at MIT's Media Lab, created a site called Mycrocosm to help users compile and share the "minutiae of daily life" in the form of multicolored bar charts and pie charts. Mr. Assogba, for example, tracks his ping-pong winning streaks and what days he spends the most money. Created in August, Mycrocosm now has 1,300 registered users. "We're living in an era of data," Mr. Assogba says.

Today's info-chroniclers are just the latest in a long history of diarists and scientists who kept notes by hand. Nineteenth-century English inventor and statistician Francis Galton, who introduced statistical concepts such as regression to the mean, was an obsessive counter who created the first weather map and carried a homemade object called a "registrator" to, among other things, measure people's yawns and fidgets during his talks. (Mr. Galton's preoccupation with data, specifically with human hereditary traits, also yielded an unsavory by-product -- eugenics.)

In 1937, a social research organization called Mass Observation in London used about 2,000 volunteers to develop an "anthropology of ourselves." For more than a decade, participants recorded such things as their neighbor's bathroom habits and what end of their cigarettes they tapped before lighting up. Personal tracking also showed up in "Cheaper by the Dozen," a 1948 book about efficiency experts Frank Bunker Gilbreth and Lillian Moller Gilbreth and their attempts to track and optimize the daily routines of their 12 children (including when they brushed their teeth and made their beds).

Several technological shifts in the last decade have helped turn personal informatics into a mainstream pursuit. The iPhone, for example, has several applications such as Loopt that use the product's internal global positioning system to record a user's location and then share it with others. Low-cost products such as Wattson, an energy monitor that tracks real-time power consumption, make it easy to record otherwise nebulous data.

Some of the new data collectors hope to make better decisions about their activities and improve their quality of life. For the last four months, Alexandra Carmichael, the founder of a health research Web site called CureTogether in San Francisco, has been tracking more than 40 different categories of information about her health and personal habits. In addition to her daily caloric intake, her morning weight and the type and duration of exercise she performs, she also tracks her daily mood, noting descriptions such as "happiness" and "feeling fat."

From her initial readings, she concluded that her mood went up when she exercised and went down when she ate too much. "I realized my relationship with food is a distorted, unhealthy one," Ms Carmichael says. She has concluded that she may have an eating disorder and has decided to seek counseling.

Andy Stanford-Clark, an inventor for IBM, began tracking the power usage of his 16th-century thatched cottage on the Isle of Wight in an unusual way. Everything in his house, from his phone to his doorbell, is hooked up to automated sensors. Each time water is used, or a light goes on or off, it's catalogued publicly on Twitter for all to see, along with the total household water and electricity consumption. Mr. Stanford-Clark says he now tries harder to conserve power. "I just couldn't believe how much money that was wasting," he says.

Keeping track of personal data online can yield unexpected consequences. "Initially, it sounds like a great idea, such as the social aspects," says Christopher Soghoian, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. But "for most users, the costs outweigh the benefits," he says. Specifically, Mr. Soghoian points to the legal concept called the "third-party doctrine" which eliminates the right to privacy for users who voluntarily place their information on Web sites. "If you're cataloging every movement, that might come up if you get divorced," he say.

Private investigators and the federal government could also use such information in some circumstances. In the application for jobs with Mr. Obama's administration, applicants are asked to list all of the social networks that they are involved in and to supply any potentially problematic blog posts from their online past. "All this stuff is creating a huge digital paper trail that could come back and haunt you," says Mr. Soghoian.

Personal data collection can get in the way of living, some people admit. "It becomes an obsession," says Toli Galanis, an aspiring filmmaker in New York who tracks everything from his mercury levels to his vitamin D consumption. He says that he's had to forgo outings with friends when he's trying a new diet that requires scheduled mealtimes, and elicits strange looks from his parents when he measures his dinner food to the ounce.

Still, he adds, "Life and its goals are like a lab. Why not use it like a scientist? Then you'll really know what you want to. There's so much info that it'd be a shame not to track it."

I find this fascinating.

Felton's annual report reminds me of Hassan Elahi's ongoing Tracking Transience project. It's awesome. Elahi continually broadcasts his current location and regularly posts pics of his meals and mechanisms of travel. What, at first, looks like full disclosure turns out to be something much more subversive.

So, to get uber-theoretical: Does "data-blogging" represent a Foucauldian internalization of the ideology of surveillance? Does it subvert the Foucauldian model by introducing the idea of flooding the panoptic eye with an excess self-circulated information? Neither? Both?

And, as Swade asked, is data-blogging a technologically-assisted practice in mindfulness? Or narcissism?

Neologisms

Jefferey Euginedes, a writer who's probably better known for The Virgin Suicides - a book made famous by Sofia Coppola's filmic interpretation (accompanied by a fine soundtrack composed and produced by Air) - than for his Pulitzer-winning masterpiece Middlesex, writes, in the voice of Middlesex's protagonist and narrator Calliope:

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.”

And so I propose that we should come up with better words for expressing more complex emotions. They don't even have to be "Germanic train-car constructions" like Schadenfreude.

Like, for example, "the irresistible urge to 'zerbert' a baby's belly." How's about "Zerbunger"?

And, really, what's the word for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar"? I'd really like to know. I'd use this word.

And how's about a word to describe "the agony of entertaining unappreciative house-guests," or "the joy of discovering someone has done a household chore you were putting off"?

How's about some help here? I'm suffering from deneologificiency.

Typing Without a Clue

I just read this excellent New York Times article by guest columnist Timothy Egan. Here it is in full:

Typing Without a Clue
By TIMOTHY EGAN
Published: December 6, 2008

The unlicensed pipe fitter known as Joe the Plumber is out with a book this month, just as the last seconds on his 15 minutes are slipping away. I have a question for Joe: Do you want me to fix your leaky toilet?

I didn’t think so. And I don’t want you writing books. Not when too many good novelists remain unpublished. Not when too many extraordinary histories remain unread. Not when too many riveting memoirs are kicked back at authors after 10 years of toil. Not when voices in Iran, North Korea or China struggle to get past a censor’s gate.

Joe, a k a Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, was no good as a citizen, having failed to pay his full share of taxes, no good as a plumber, not being fully credentialed, and not even any good as a faux American icon. Who could forget poor John McCain at his most befuddled, calling out for his working-class surrogate on a day when Joe stiffed him.

With a résumé full of failure, he now thinks he can join the profession of Mark Twain, George Orwell and Joan Didion.

Next up may be Sarah Palin, who is said to be worth nearly $7 million if she can place her thoughts between covers. Publishers: with all the grim news of layoffs and staff cuts at the venerable houses of American letters, can we set some ground rules for these hard times? Anyone who abuses the English language on such a regular basis should not be paid to put words in print.

Here’s Palin’s response, after Matt Lauer asked her when she knew the election was lost:

“I had great faith that, you know, perhaps when that voter entered that voting booth and closed that curtain that what would kick in for them was, perhaps, a bold step that would have to be taken in casting a vote for us, but having to put a lot of faith in that commitment we tried to articulate that we were the true change agent that would progress this nation.”

I have no idea what she said in that thicket of words.

Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they labor to find their voice, to learn their trade, to understand nuance and pace. And then, facing a sea of rejections, they hear about something like Barbara Bush’s dog getting a book deal.

Writing is hard, even for the best wordsmiths. Ernest Hemingway said the most frightening thing he ever encountered was “a blank sheet of paper.” And Winston Churchill called the act of writing a book “a horrible, exhaustive struggle, like a long bout of painful illness.”

When I heard J.T.P. had a book, I thought of that Chris Farley skit from “Saturday Night Live.” He’s a motivational counselor, trying to keep some slacker youths from living in a van down by the river, just like him. One kid tells him he wants to write.

“La-di-frickin’-da!” Farley says. “We got ourselves a writer here!”

If Joe really wants to write, he should keep his day job and spend his evenings reading Rick Reilly’s sports columns, Peggy Noonan’s speeches, or Jess Walter’s fiction. He should open Dostoevsky or Norman Maclean — for osmosis, if nothing else. He should study Frank McCourt on teaching or Annie Dillard on writing.

The idea that someone who stumbled into a sound bite can be published, and charge $24.95 for said words, makes so many real writers think the world is unfair.

Our next president is a writer, which may do something to elevate standards in the book industry. The last time a true writer occupied the White House was a hundred years ago, with Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote 13 books before his 40th birthday.

Barack Obama’s first book, the memoir of a mixed-race man, is terrific. Outside of a few speeches, he will probably not write anything memorable until he’s out office, but I look forward to that presidential memoir.

For the others — you friends of celebrities penning cookbooks, you train wrecks just out of rehab, you politicians with an agent but no talent — stop soaking up precious advance money.

I know: publishers say they print garbage so that real literature, which seldom makes any money, can find its way into print. True, to a point. But some of them print garbage so they can buy more garbage.

There was a time when I wanted to be like Sting, the singer, belting out, “Roxanne ...” I guess that’s why we have karaoke, for fantasy night. If only there was such a thing for failed plumbers, politicians or celebrities who think they can write.

Amen, brother.

Mojito Weekend

Hairy Pupper



Happy Weekend!

Track of the Week: "Hazmat" by Via Audio

I recently saw the Brooklyn born and Berklee educated band Via Audio perform in Pittsburgh, and, as it was my fourth or fifth time seeing these guys, I was stunned by how consistently awesome they are.

This week's track - "Hazmat" - comes from their first full-length, Say Something. To quote the Pitchfork review:

Finally, a catchy pop record that's serious: not gloomy, not mournful, and not pretentious. It's serious and earnest, it's occasionally sad, but there is such a beautiful gloss over everything that it sticks, hurts, and feels delicious. Not surprisingly, the album was produced by Spoon's drummer, Jim Eno, who I don't believe puts a stamp on anything; he just added some sort of sealant that keeps the sultry goo of "Numb" and sexy-sad lollipops like "We Can Be Good" and "Harder on Me" in our heads for weeks.

On a personal note, these guys - Jess, David, Tom, and Adam - also happen to be amongst my most favorite people in the world. It's such a lovely coincidence that they're also brilliant musicians.

Buy Say Something here or on iTunes.

"Hazmat".

The Singularity

Last night, with a few good friends, I got sucked into the old "life, the universe, and everything" conversation (and not the one where you gush about how much you love Douglas Adams). Maybe it was the beer talking, but I'd just read an excellent article in Wired on Ray Kurzweil, so I ranted about "The Singularity" for a little while, and I've been thinking about it ever since.

If you know Moore's Law, then you know it refers to the exponential increase of the number of transistors that can be reasonably (in terms of cost and physical space) placed on an integrated circuit. Moore observed that the number doubled roughly every two years.

Take Moore's law, apply it more broadly to evolutionary technological advances, and you get Raymond Kurzweil's brand of futurism that essentially says this: Technology is evolving exponentially faster and faster. First, it will reach a point wherein technology can replace the body (or at least many bodily functions - Kurzweil asserts that nanotechnology will be able to replicate and replace the function of, for example, the human liver). Second, it will replicate consciousness, effectively pass the Turing Test, and give us true Artificial Intelligence. Third, humans, having at this point augmented their bodies and extended their lifespans through nanotechnology, and machines, having "waken up," will merge into a new species. Finally, the entire planet and ultimately the entire universe, will become one, huge supercomputer full of disembodied and eternal consciousnesses.

"The Singularity" happens when artificial intelligence and technological advances render humans obsolete. The posthuman - or, in Kurzweil's phrase "Human 3.0" - will essentially be immortal, but will not have an embodied life as we know it.

And all of this, according to Kurzweil, may very well happen in your lifetime. 2045.

Sound crazy? It might be, but then Kurzweil is inarguably one of the brightest minds alive today. If you're old enough to remember when, in the early 80s, some scientist dude built a revolutionary reading machine for Stevie Wonder, then you remember Kurzweil. That was just one of many inventions. Morever, he's awarded about one honorary PhD per year (wait...shouldn't that also exponentially increase?).

If he's right, you better get off your ass, dust off those joggin' shoes, and get yourself into shape. It'd be a real kick in the pants to die of poor health shortly before the first bridge to immortality is built. But, then again, there probably won't be hot wings and PBR around when you're broken into a million digital bits of info. floating in the ether.

I wonder if they'll have good music all up in that b.

The YouTube Screening Room

I've been working on a paper entitled "Web 2.0 and the Expansion of the Filmic Event" for presentation at the MLA Conference in San Francisco later this month, and my "research" has involved watching short, independent films in the recently created YouTube Screening Room. I'm falling in love with this venue, which makes it hard to maintain enough cynical distance to write critically about it.

The YouTube folks describe the Screening Room as "a platform for top films from around the world to find the audiences they deserve." To quote the description in full:

Every other Friday, you’ll find four new films featured in the YouTube Screening Room.

These films always appear with the permission and involvement of the filmmakers, so be sure to rate, share and leave comments. This is your chance to not only watch great films from all corners of the globe, but also to converse with the filmmakers behind them.

While the majority of these films have played at international film festivals, occasionally you’ll find films that have never before screened for wide audiences.

All films playing in the YouTube Screening Room are displayed within our High Quality player to give you the best viewing experience possible.

Be a part of a new generation of filmmaking and distribution and help us connect films and audiences in the world’s largest theater!

The Screening Room arguably pushes the world of entertainment even closer to the inevitable: A multi-world, hybrid media that will allow us to chose what we want to watch and when we want to watch it. YouTube has recently signed deals with Lionsgate, Showtime, and CBS (yes, you can watch vintage episodes of Beverly Hills 90210 in full, any time you want), and its largest competitor, Hulu, currently partners with even more traditional television networks and film companies. YouTube and Hulu aside, you can use the old idiot box to get shows "on Demand," you can download your favs on iTunes (and other digital venues), you can record programs if you have cable connectivity and the right software, and, of course, there's the modern version of the VCR - the DVR. The point is that technological advances are pushing traditional venues of entertainment toward greater integration and increased availability for the viewer.

Enough gushing. Below, check out The Danish Poet - one of the first films to air at The Screening Room. Reminiscent of the reconstruction of the protagonist's random and chaotic genetic history in Jeffrey Eugenides's MiddleSex, The Danish Poet offers a lovely, animated take on the seemingly chaotic paths that lead to people to love.

Digital meets Analog meets Radiohead

A friend of mine recently shared this incredible video (embedded below) by James Houston.

In Houston's words:

I've just graduated from the Glasgow School of Art's graphic design course. This was my final project.

Radiohead held an online contest to remix "Nude" from their album - "In Rainbows" This was quite a difficult task for everybody that entered, as Nude is in 6/8 timing, and 63bpm. Most music that's played in clubs is around 120bpm and usually 4/4 timing. It's pretty difficult to seamlessly mix a waltz beat into a DJ set.

This resulted in lots of generic entries consisting of a typical 4/4 beat, but with arbitrary clips from "Nude" thrown in so that they qualified for the contest.

Thom Yorke joked at the ridiculousness of it in an interview for NPR radio, hinting that they set the competition to find out how people would approach such a challenging task.

I decided to take the piss a bit, as the contest seemed to be in that spirit.

Based on the lyric (and alternate title) "Big Ideas: Don't get any" I grouped together a collection of old redundant hardware, and placed them in a situation where they're trying their best to do something that they're not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there.

It doesn't sound great, as it's not supposed to.

I missed the contest deadline, so I'm offering it here for you to enjoy.

Sinclair ZX Spectrum - Guitars (rhythm & lead)
Epson LX-81 Dot Matrix Printer - Drums
HP Scanjet 3c - Bass Guitar
Hard Drive array - Act as a collection of bad speakers - Vocals & FX

Houston does much more than just "take the piss a bit" here. He aesthetically expresses one of the contemporary intersections of the digital and the analog. And, while the topic has already been extensively covered, it's worth mentioning that, for example, the resurgence of the popularity of vinyl - analog media - in an age where most music is purchased or otherwise acquired digitally suggests that the line separating the digital and the analog is easily traversed if not increasingly blurred (there's a reason most LPs come with a digital download of the album, and I don't think that it's just to compensate for the difficulty in ripping vinyl into iTunes).

If art expresses the cultural undercurrents of an age, then Houston is clearly onto something...

See for yourself:


Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

The 2008 Pitchfork Readers Poll

Today marks the opening of "The 2008 Pitchfork Readers Poll," which runs until this Sunday, December 7.

The Pitchfork folks make it easy: Most of the better albums of the year are listed, saving you the time and effort it'd take to, for example, Google Cat Power's Jukebox to see if it was released in 2008. Just so you know, it was.

Perhaps to get indie-fan favorites Animal Collective on the list, or because a compilation of songs recorded in a given year with the subsequent compilation in mind probably should qualify, "albums" like Animal Collective's Water Curses EP and Jay Reatard's Singles '08 are included in the list. If my memory serves me correctly, though, the latest installment of Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series - Tell Tale Signs - was overlooked. Since there's a space for the voter to write in an "other" album, one could (read: I wish I would have) write it in.

My list:

1. High Places - S/T
2. Animal Collective - Water Curses EP
3. Jay Reatard - Singles '08
4. The Black Keys - Attack and Release
5. Cat Power - Jukebox

If I had a do-over, I'd bump the EP off the list (really, it's good, but it's not a complete album, is it?), and put Tell Tale Signs in its place (I know, it's also not an album proper, but it boasts a 27-song tracklist as opposed to AC's four).

Honorable mention:
TV on the Radio - Dear Science
Ratatat - LP3
Man Man - Rabbit Habbits (actually, I can't believe this one didn't make my list. Hey Pitchfork! Can I haz a do-over?)
Juana Molina - Un Dia
Death Cab for Cutie - Narrow Stairs
Abe Vigoda - Skeleton

Now, go vote! And post your list here!

The first post of the new blog

I've been thinking about starting a blog for years, and now that nearly everyone has one, it's time.

My aim is both ambitious and unfocused, but since I'm approaching blogging as method of self-expression, self-creation, and participation in the ever-expanding, "Web 2.0" community, ambitious and unfocused are appropriate descriptors. I'm often ambitious and unfocused.

I'll occasionally link to news that I find interesting or compelling, albums I'm getting into lately, or pop culture *stuff* that catches my eye. Beyond that, readers should expect heavy doses of nostalgia, sentimentalism, and over-intellectualized musing.