Drone: Three Hearts

Anyone who's talked to me about music lately knows that I've been listening to tons of Animal Collective and field recordings (like Geir Jennsen's field recordings from Tibet). I listen to lots of music (can I call field recordings music?) in general, but just as AC and field recordings might seem strange to most people, after listening long enough, most of what "most people" listen to sounds strange to me.

Today, I discovered that WFMU publishes a podcast called "Airborne Event Dronecast with Dan Bodah," which they describe as "Your weekly ticket to droneland. Field recordings of waters, machines, subways, drums, frogs, ice, etc, and then those same recordings spindled, folded, or mutilated. Don't worry, that ticket will still get you through the phantom tollbooth."

Oh. My. Goodness.

I've had a few friends recommend checking out WFMU before, and like most occasions when friends make recommendations, I haven't followed through (even though they're usually right about my tastes, I insist on being a precious snowflake). And like most good things, WFMU is best discovered on one's own. But, man, it's good.

I'll admit it: Listening to 25 minutes of beating hearts might seem like a little much. And I understand that there are those who would question the necessity of this type of (re)mediation. In other words, why do I need a radio station podcast to give me the opportunity to just listen? Why don't I just put my ear on D.'s or Mojito's chest and enjoy? Or get a stethoscope, even?

Maybe, like my friend and fellow blogger David at ad vertiginem has recently suggested, this is further evidence of the "zombification" of the common "diePodder." In other words, maybe it's another example of the ways technology has further distanced us from each other and from the real world.

But I don't think so. I'm sure in Alexander Graham Bell's day, people were making similar arguments about the telephone: As in, "no one ever just sits down together for a good chat anymore." And, really, such sentiments are good at the level of intention, but at the level of practice, they just look like neo-Luddism to me.

But enough of that. Why not give a listen to those beating hearts yourself and see what you think? I'm not recommending it. I'm giving you the opportunity to discover it for yourself.

Dismembered

What do you get when Moby (yes, Moby) meets David Lynch?

"Shot in the back of the head."

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:

GeekDad, the SuperBowl, and the new Dylan?

Even just thinking about Wired's blogging collective of sci-fi loving, mustachioed, game-playing, tech-freaky fathers puts a smile on my face. I love those guys at GeekDad so much. From reviewing Star Wars themed lego creations to raving about the "10 Science Fiction TV Series [They] Can't Wait to Watch with Their Kids," these guys make it clear that they unapologetically love being good fathers while completely embracing their geekdom.

God Bless 'Em.

Most recently, one of them - Ken Denmead - commented on his picks for the worst Super Bowl ads. Unsurprisingly, the GoDaddy.com ads were blasted. I'm not a parent (I'm certainly a geek), but even I was a bit put off by the excessive and entirely unnecessary sex appeal of the ads. Moreover, my intelligence was a bit insulted: rather than tell anything about the GoDaddy service, the ads just flashed some flesh under the assumption that sex sells, even when the product may have been a bit ambigiously pitched.

Don't get me wrong: I don't need my ads to be blatent endorsements of their represented goods and services. Often, the crew working on an advertisement consists of talented filmmakers, writers, directors, etc. who are trying to break into the film industry, and so they build a resume and forge an artistic identity through branding themselves while helping to endorse brands.

Such must be the case for the Dylan/Will.I.Am Pepsi ad (embedded below).

I don't typically comment on Dylan's endorsements. They haven't bothered me much, and my sense is that it's far easier to criticize (and to make the obligatory, sarcastic "I guess the times are a-changin'" comment) than to understand or accept. In the 60s, Dylan reportedly said that he'd let his music be used for the endorsement of ladies underwear: at the time, it was almost preposterous to imagine an underwear ad. But, sure enough, in the early aughts, there was Dylan, strumming and singing in a Victoria's Secret ad. Didn't bother me. With the release of his most recent album (Modern Times), Dylan did an iTunes promo in which he sang one of my favorite tracks from the album ("Someday Baby"). I like the song, the commercial is well done, I dig Apple, I have an iPod...so...whatever.

But one thing bothers me about the SuperBowl ad. Wait for it. Let me describe.

The commercial - visually beautiful, artfully done, thematically significant - essentially compares popular cultures of previous generations with the pop culture of today's youth, reminding us that "every generation refreshes the world." Overtly, it suggests that Shrek is the new Gumby, that Jack Black is the new John Belushi, that the cell phone slowjam tribute is the new Bic lighter...And that Will.I.Am...I say again, Will . I . Am ... is the new Dylan. Look, I even like the mash-up. It's a decent mix, and Dylan notoriously approves of interpretations of his songs (see the Dylan-approved soundtracks for Masked and Anonymous as well as I'm Not There).

But, really? The new Dylan?

Mash-Up!

Tonight, I was going to continue something I started earlier today in debate with a close friend: a rant I started regarding the "institutionalization" of the arts through the creation of a Secretary of the Arts (or Culture Czar) position in Washington. For those who don't know, Quincy Jones has suggested he'll ask ("beg" even) for a Secretary of the Arts position during his next talk with Obama. In support of Jones, Jaime Austria, a bass player with the New York City Opera, started an online petition (which, at the time of this post, has received well over 207,000 signatures).

Rather than rant, I'll just ask this question:

If the U.S. government appointed a Secretary of the Arts (and let's hope Obama would be as wise in making this appointment as he was in the appointment of, for example, a Nobel Physicist as Energy Secretary), would, at the end of Obama's presidency, the "mash-up" still be the most popular go-to form for artistic expression?

Spoiler Culture

I'll admit it: I'm a Lost addict. I'll not try to justify, qualify, or explain my raging fandom. It just is.

As it has for other television series with cult followings (ranging from Battlestar Galactica to Survivor), the surrounding spoiler culture is thriving as a new season begins. As Wired's Hugh Hart puts it: "To the true believer, spoilers are the sincerest form of flattery."

Books, blogs, websites, and even a Lostpedia provide venue for believers to obsess and flatter. I'll not take a stab at spoiling anything here (I struggle with both the obsessive urge to know and a romanticized sentiment for enjoying the surprise), other than to say this:

I may be taking Wednesdays off for a while...

oooh...commercial's over!

Unwavering bands of light: What's post- the post?

I'm fond of talking, theorizing, about what comes after Postmodernism. Some see the whole PoMo thing as a paradigmatic example of exaggerated, pretentious intellectualism. I don't.

As a literary and cultural movement, it has given us useful language and a situational discourse to understand the underpinnings - the psyche - of our contemporary culture. More importantly, it's given voice to a multiplicity of perspectives that have traditionally fallen outside of academic discourse. It has sought to liberate marginalized groups by not only giving them a voice, but also by seeking to understand what it means to "be" ~someone~.

It essentially asks my favorite question: Why are you you? Its responses to this question have been various, and they typically suggest that the Postmodern identity is ideologically interpellated, socially constructed, subject to contextualized performative imperatives, unstable, under continual construction, without a core essence, open to continual possibility, and so on. I don't find this scary, or even existentially overwhelming, as some do. I actually find it hopeful. And important.

But what comes next? Historically, at least in America, cultural shifts - in literature, art, film, etc. - have coincided with wars. As many theorists have observed, cultural production is intrinsically linked to both economics and the widespread concerns of the masses. These things show up in the art. During periods of war, economics are affected as are our cultural concerns. The time is beyond ripe.

Appropriately the tone and focus of various academic discourses has been shifting: I've noticed a greater attention being paid to aesthetics. Postmodernism essentially did away with aesthetic concerns, noting that aesthetic taste is, on one hand, subjective (and thus socially constructed) and, on the other, without essence (like the PoMo subject). If anything, PoMo gave us the aesthetic of the abject: piss, shit, blood, vomit, that which is within me and I violently expel (read Kristeva, if you dare). I think we've gotten what we need from the abject and are ready for a new sense of aesthetics.

I think this also points towards the development of a new understanding of ontology, of being. I think that we'll see something that seems like a return to considerations of essentialized identity, but I think these considerations will be unfettered from religious associations, and, by and large, will be free from considerations of the permanence or infinite status of the soul. Rather, I think these considerations will, in some ways be extensions of pre-existing understandings of subjectivity - and will thus have an existential component. In other words, I think we may see considerations of the subject reconsider the possibility of a vestige of selfhood that isn't explained by the complex interrelationships of genetic preconditions, environmental factors, social constructions, and so on. I think we'll see a Post-Postmodern formation of subjectivity that considers both the complex interaction, and the process of putting together fragments of selfhood, as resulting in a ~something else~ that isn't necessarily reducible to the focus of previous considerations of subjectivity.

I'm seeing evidence of this shift a lot these days (but perhaps it is only the reflection of my own perspective). Consider the lyrics from the new Animal Collective album I recently mentioned:

Am I really all the things that are outside of me?

Would I complete myself without the things I like around?

Does the music that I make play on my awkward face?

Do you appreciate the subtleties of taste buds?

Or maybe Vonnegut - being, as always, ahead of his time - wrote it best when, after writing himself into Breakfast of Champions as both author and character, changed his perspective from this:

I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide.

to this (in the voice of the book's artist Rabo Karabekian):

"I now give you my word of honor," he went on, "that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal - the 'I am' to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us - in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery."

I'm still working this out, but I'm curious: What do you think, you unwavering band of light, you.

Stanley Fish's 10 Best American Movies

Stanley Fish - most famous in my world for the concept of "interpretive communities," or the idea that readers interpret a text subjectively but in the context of the specific linguistic system to which readers belong - recently posted his list for "The 10 Best American Movies" on his New York Times blog.

His introduction and rationale:

It’s Top Ten time again, and like everyone else I have a list, in my case a list of the 10 best American movies ever. Here it is, with brief descriptions and no justifications. Only the first two films are in order. The others are all tied for third.

His List:

1. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
2. Sunset Blvd. (1950)
3. Double Indemnity (1944)
4. Shane (1953)
5. Red River (1948)
6. Raging Bull (1980)
7. Vertigo (1958)
8. Groundhog Day (1993)
9. Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
10. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945)

Has Fish only seen two films since 1953? And did he decide he should put them on the list for good measure?

Now I know that, while Fish's list is largely subjective, most film critics would probably agree that most of these are important, if not good, films. Moreover, I can accept that Fish himself is part of an interpretive community that brings a socially constructed value system to his "readings" of these films.

But, seriously...two Westerns? Not a single film from the last 18 years? And Groundhog Day? Really?

Don't get me wrong: I loves me some Shane. And Red River is a classy-classic John Wayne Western - if I'm channel surfing and hit this one on AMC, chances are I'll watch it (and for the upteenth time). The Best Years of Our Life - a bit depressing, but a good melodrama (and I can understand that, for a film made in 1946, it pushed the envelope on things like war, love, and...dismemberment). Scorsese, Hitchcock, and...okay...even Wilder deserve spots on a "10 Greatest Filmmakers of All Time" list. Sure...

And I totally dig Fish. I find his take on socially constructed interpretation compelling. He's a good writer - his blurbs about each film are great. I've even seen him talk and enjoyed it. But that's all beside the point. The point is:

Groundhog Day? One of the Best American Movies ever? Really?

Web 2.0 and the Expansion of the Filmic Event

In my talk at the recent MLA conference, I made the following case:

I believe that both the virtual community’s relationship to film and the advancing development of entertainment technology, in and out of the virtual world, suggest that the filmic experience is telescopically, if not exponentially, expanding to an inevitable point: an organic and integrated experience that straddles and blurs the boundaries between the real world and the virtual, between forms and genres of visual entertainment, and between the spatio-temporally isolated experience of the cinema and television and the ongoing experience of everyday life.

and that this "inevitable point" means that:

From here on out, and for those who have the technology and access, the filmic experience will become something less identifiable as traditional film and more recognizable as a hybrid between traditional film and something like a television show (if, in no other way, only by virtue of length and accompanied advertisements). The viewer will be able to choose what she wants to watch and when and where she wants to watch it. Moreover, the experience itself may well be accompanied by a social, “Web 2.0” component wherein the viewer may evaluate a film, asynchronously communicate with the filmmaker, synchronously interact with a virtual community of fellow viewers, or take part in an ARG or fantasy community collaboratively constructed around a particular film or around a series of films.

I used The YouTube Screening Room - a venue gushed about in December - as my paradigmatic example of this - but there are so many more examples of both digital venues and real-world technologies (like AppleTV and the TiVo).

What surprised me so much in the audience's reaction was the vast difference between those who felt like I was pointing out the obvious and those who couldn't accept that the cinematic experience can really happen to someone watching it on a computer screen (or iPhone or other such device) as opposed to the old movie house, big screen.

It seems to me that "Web 2.0" - particularly Web 2.0 as social space - has become a dividing line between those who can accept that social activity can happen without a physical bodily referent (these are the folks who have no problem with considering their facebook friends to be closer than their classmates, co-workers, etc.) and those who can't. Unfortunately, this line too easily looks like one determined by age - typically, the folks who haven't grown up with with the internet fall on one side; and those in the "Wired Generation" fall on the other.

Age aside, perhaps the key to my perspective - one that I'm still figuring out - is that I suggest that the cinematic experience will become (or already is) a hybrid one (and hybrid in a unique way for each individual): consider alternate reality games (ARG) that have surrounded films and television (from the marketing campaign called "The Beast" for the Kubrick cum Spielberg film A.I. to the more recent "Lost Experience"), the popularity of video games based on films (like ones that let you explore the Star Wars galaxy or roam Tolkein's MiddleEarth), or even just the popularity of rating film clips on YouTube... For those of us who want the filmic experience to go beyond the cinema screen, there is ample opportunity.

On the other side of this coin, so to speak, we might expect a cultural reaction comparable to the one regarding the digital distribution of music. Vinyl sales have been skyrocketing in the last few years, suggesting that the digitization of music has left us hungering for a physical artifact. What, then, might a similar reaction to digital film distribution be?

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?

"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?

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!