I don’t know what to think of Ratatat. On the one hand, great band name, and great use of 2-person instrumentation limitations, like The Kills, Morphine or The White Stripes. On the other hand, I don’t ever listen to their stuff more than once. For that one time, I kind of like it, but I don’t need it again.
This video, though, for "Shempi", is both strangely weird and weirdly strange. A sort of simple technique that is very effective in making things seem dreamlike and odd.
As far modern rock-ish psychedelia, I much prefer this video from Marnie Stern, "Transformer". Not only is she a knockout guitar player, but the video is sharp too. Culled from Fluxtumblr, who posts a million videos that don’t do anything for me, and every now and then posts one that knocks my socks off.
I don’t know what NHTVSN stands for (anyone?) but it’s a pretty great hip-hop online magazine/blog. The most recent post features a video of DJ Clark Kent — who I had never heard of — the guy who discovered Jay Z and is apparently responsible for a bunch of classic tracks. The video is really entertaining and it’s only part one, so check it out at your leisure. I cut it down to what I think is the best bit, about Jay Z. Check it out…
So NYT has this music blog where people like Andrew Bird and Peter Holsapple write about songwriting and being a musician. Pretty neat. I got there from waxy, who links to a fun and well-written entry by Suzanne Vega about writing "Tom’s Diner", being remixed, and having her voice be the test audio for the invention of the mp3(!). Cool stuff. My favorite bit is where she writes about all the remixes of Tom’s Diner she’s received over the years, and when she put out a compilation of some of her favorites:
"However, it was a logistical nightmare to administrate. I had to go back to all the people who had taken the song without permission, and ask their permission . . . to use their version of my song! This is the main reason we have not put out “Tom’s Albums” 2 and 3, which we certainly could, as now we are up to almost 30 remixes including (really good) ones from Danger Mouse and Tupac."
Tupac?!
That’s got Billboard #1 written all over it.
UPDATE
Hmmm, well the track was apparently released last year — youtube embed below — and I need to revise my predictions of #1 greatness. Vega is a little off when she calls it a remix — it’s more like a re-interpretation. The youtube comments on the various postings of this track are all over the map, with some fans saying it’s the "best soft pac ever" and others doubting it’s even him. It’s apparently a new(ish) track that showed up on The Best Of 2Pac Part 2: Life, a double CD set retrospective that came out last December (that allmusic calls "of poor quality", "hastily or indifferently assembled" and "another in a long line of posthumous cash-ins apparently overseen by 2Pac’s mother"). Sounds kind of weak to me.
"In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.
They have warned that this is likely to be linked with the rapid warming that the region has experienced in recent years.
Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane."
As always though, Ellis puts it more succinctly:
"Should all concerns be confirmed, it appears that we’re all going to die from the escape of monstrous planetary farts from beyond history."
I wasn’t sure whether to post this or not but people told me they wanted to see it, so here it is. When we went out to OR last July, I was the best man at Roscoe’s wedding. This is my speech.
In the absence of faith, what stands behind a currency based on faith?
Interesting Op-Ed from the NYT about the financial implications of the fact that the dollar moved off the gold standard ages ago and has never looked back. MattD and I were talking about this just last night (over Frito pie) and using the rhetoric of barstool philosophers to maintain that, as Speed Levitch has said, "this is outrageousness and it cannot last."
First, MDvto sent me this great Quincy theme tune…
Then, while hunting for that basketball vid from below, I checked the history of this browser and searched keyword "youtube." There were a bunch of interesting vids that never made it to the blog…here they are, random and youtubey. Individually they didn’t seem to warrant a post, but collectively, it’s some pretty good stuff…
Tearing down the handball courts on our block. damn.
UPDATE – according to brooklyn blog OTBKB, they’re going to replace the whole area with a brand new basketball court, new handball court (nice) and a skate park(!). Should be interesting…
So LeBron James challenges this trick shot maestro to a game of horse. This is actually a bad move on James’s part, I mean, horse uses a totally different set of skills than regular basketball, right? In fact, one could even argue that a pro player is *more* ill-equipped to play horse because he has spent so much time training his muscle memory to perform certain exact shots from exact positions. To try and make them perform more random ones? Tough stuff.
This brings up the whole phenomenon of trick shot youtube videos. have you seen these? Some guys are doing some amazing things. Things that they must have spent a bit of time practicing. And before youtube there wasn’t as much of an incentive, right? Like parkour or that 17 year time-lapse thing that’s going round the internets…as always, the biggest resource is time.
I went to this promo conference thing back in 2002 and went to a seminar on the power of the internet. At this time we were still delivering approval tapes on VHS (wha?), no one posted anything for review online, we still got physical DAT’s from sound studios (instead of posting aiff’s) — it was the dark ages. Anyway, in this seminar, there were 3 guys speaking, and the first two were so boring, going on and on about how our jobs in TV were going to be transformed, and we better be worried and stay on top of technology and so on (true, but boring). Snooze-fest.
The third guy spent his time just telling us what websites he thought were cool. This was kind of revelatory for me. It was so interesting to see what weird stuff was out there, and to have this attitude of surfing the net’s hidden corners, looking for the stuff that keeps the world weird. I don’t remember all the things he showed, but I remember this one that was so dark, odd and good, full of small animations that seemed like they were out of a dream.
Six years later, and they show up on metafilter. Sweet. Dutch cartoonist/animator Hans Hoogerbrugge. Really, you’ve got to click here and go to the website to get the full experience, ‘cuz the clicking and discovering is half the fun, but here’s a small mov of me clicking around on it just to give you an idea of what it is. The sounds, the visuals, the feeling of the thing — so dream-like.
His main website is pretty cool too, full of weird artworks and this great museum installation that animates the outside of a museum wall and has the character say whatever people text to it. Pretty great.
