Thru You: The YouTube Mash-Up, ReMix, Megajam

Do yourself a favor while you're slacking off at work or procrastinating on that essay, book, project, Spring cleaning, yoga practice, feeding the kids, etc., and check this out.

Titled Thru You: Kutiman mixes YouTube this fascinating project seamlessly mixes together strange little, digital odds and ends into some decent music. Even more, it highlights what's best about collaborative digital environments: together, we can make some cool shit.

As explained by the man himself:

Together for Life

From Pitchfork:

If I were Bob Dylan, I would spend my days in sweatpants watching "The Price Is Right", eating fresh strawberries and cream, and maybe getting up to sign off on a few official bootlegs every few months.

It's a good thing I'm not Bob Dylan. After revising what it means to be a rock star, bringing the idea of rock'n'roll to something close to high art, and becoming the legend among legends, Dylan is still going at age 67. As previously reported, he's coming out with a new studio album-- his 46th-- called Together Through Life. The LP comes out April 28 via Columbia. That picture of an old-school couple making out in the backseat of a giant car is the sure-to-be-scrutinized cover.

The self-produced affair (under Dylan's Jack Frost alias) follows 2006's Modern Times and was inspired in part by French director Olivier Dahan's upcoming film My Own Love Song with Renée Zellweger, Forest Whitaker, and Nick Nolte. Dylan wrote the new song "Life Is Hard" for the road trip flick and then Together Through Life "sort of took its own direction," according to an interview with the songwriter now up on his site.

In the chat with longtime rock journo Bill Flanagan, Dylan talks about the heavy influence of Chess Records on the new album and how his recent artistic resurgence has changed his creative viewpoint: "If there's an astrologer with a criminal record in one of my songs it's not going to make anybody wonder if the human race is doomed. Images are taken at face value and it kind of freed me up."

Dylan invented and then figured out how to break almost every rock stereotype there is, so it's only right that he continues to age with striking grace.

Dylan's never-ending tour continues this spring with a six week trek through Europe.

I'm giddy.

Mojito Weekend

Happy Weekend!

Track of the Week: "Trouble Weighs a Ton" by Dan Auerbach

The first track from the Black Keys's frontman Dan Auerbach. This guy can do no wrong, in my opinion.

"Trouble Weighs a Ton"

Enjoy!

The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses

In December, I posted my "Thirteen Theses for the Writer," which were, in part, a response to Walter Benjamin's "Post No Bills" (Selected Writings, Volume I). In "Post No Bills," Benjamin includes "The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses" along with "The Critic's Technique in Thirteen Theses." Consider this Part One:

The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses:

I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.

II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

III. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude of a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

IX. Nulla dies sine linea – but there may well be weeks.

X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

XII. Stages of composition: idea – style – writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea writing pays off style.

XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.

I often get stuck at number 1. Good thing this isn't a 12-step program.

Chiming in on Best Actor. Also, Aging.

First, my apologies for the hiatus. Between the last post and this one, I've scrambled to put together a paper for presentation at The Louisville Conference [truncated version of the cumbersomely long conference title], and I've had little time and energy left over for the blog. The paper - "Autopoietic Meta-Et-Cetera" or "Too Much Information is Never Enough: How to Create and Erase Yourself Using Common Household Tools" - went over very well, thank you.

Second, I wasn't going to throw in my two cents on the Mickey Rourke debate, but I've been thinking about using the film as the focus of a future conference presentation, and so I thought I'd throw this out there and see what comes back.

What I found interesting was that the Best Actor category also pitted against each other two films that portrayed anxieties regarding aging: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Wrestler. Where the former, a film based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, presented a hopeful protagonist aging in reverse; the latter, written by The Onion's Robert D. Siegel, gave us a pathetic protagonist facing age, death, nostalgia, and loss. And where Benjamin Button offered a fantastical portrayal whose cinematic effects were matched in superficial beauty only by the good looks of lead man Brad Pitt, The Wrestler offered the stark realism of a washed-up wrestler whose life dovetails both wonderfully and tragically with lead actor Mickey Rourke’s. Ask a movie buff who should have won lead actor, and chances are they will concede that Sean Penn was very good in Milk and that the film deserves all the attention it can get for its sympathetic portrayal of the film's namesake, Harvey Milk; but between Pitt (who, in my opinion, is really a superb supporting actor trapped in a lead actor’s body) and Rourke, I think most of us will agree that Rourke’s “comeback” deserved the Oscar.

Rourke’s acting was certainly deserving of the award, and I think there are many who suspect that he deserves it as much for the way he allegorically acts out the narrative arc of his life prior to The Wrestler as he does for his acting; but I think this reaction also speaks to the poignancy of the film/Rourke’s life as a cautionary tale. In short, the moral of both: Don’t fuck up, and if you start fucking up, stop. We find Randy "The Ram" Robinson and Rourke both looking back over a life of fucking up and the ensuing loss that goes along with it. Robinson’s rampant path of self-destruction takes only the briefest pause in the face of a life-threatening heart attack, shortly after which, having failed to patch things up with his daughter (wonderfully played by Evan Rachel Wood), he recklessly abandons himself to complete self-annihilation.

So what is it about his recklessness and self-destruction that resonates so well with aging and failure (not that aging and failure are intrinsically linked)? Is the real moral of the film that, if you're a man, and you're alone (i.e. sans family), you're pretty much screwed? I'd like to think director Aronofsky is a little deeper than that. And I think he's deeper than to just be overtly setting Robinson up as the "sacrificial ram" and making our protagonist into someone who suffers so we don't have to. But, still, what IS going on here?

Track of the Week: "Legal Tender" by Handsome Furs

This one comes from the duo comprised of Wolf Parade's Dan Boeckner and his wife Alexei Perry: Handsome Furs.

The other bands involved in the collective that gives us Wolf Parade and Handsome Furs - Frog Eyes, Sunset Rubdown, Swan Lake, et. al. - seem to get more attention than the Handsome Furs, but, in my opinion, the Furs are the best of the bunch.

Here's a new one from their forthcoming album Face Control.

Legal Tender.

Enjoy!