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September 29, 2003
Man and cat reunited after 10 years (September 26, 2003)
September 28, 2003
Oh no! Not democracy!
Whatever is the U.S. to do if the Iraqi council starts (gasp) making decisions that benefit their own country? They may have to bring back Saddam from his hidey-hole.
US sees challenge from Iraq councilMore actions like these would really put the BushJunta in a quandary. Iraq was supposed to be a subservient little imperial outpost, not anything like a democracy. And seeings anybody who appears to favor the U.S. leaders stands a chance of being assassinated, the council may continue to craft policy that acts against the U.S.'s self-interest. The Iraq situation has been a bloody mess. Now it's getting interesting as well.
Interim government pushes toward self-rule
By Stephen J. Glain and Robert Schlesinger, Globe Staff, 9/27/2003WASHINGTON -- The interim Iraqi government, set up by the United States to advise its senior administrator in Baghdad, has surprised Washington recently with a series of increasingly contentious positions as it presses for self-rule, from a push for sweeping economic changes to a move toward normalizing trade relations with Syria and Iran, countries branded by US officials as exporters of terrorism.
For the Bush administration, which is already fending off demands from allies for a swift return to Iraqi self-rule, such assertiveness by the Governing Council is a mixed blessing, analysts and diplomats say: It means democracy is evolving in Iraq, but at a pace difficult for Washington to control and not necessarily compatible with its interests."
September 21, 2003
Thom Yorke vs. Fifth Grade Art Class
What happens when you subject a fifth grade class to selections from Radiohead and then get them to draw their impressions? You get samples of artwork for their new album.
A funny post from the East Bay Express.
By way of Metafilter
September 20, 2003
Famous Breaks
I have a love of digging up the original sources from which hip-hop and now all modern music samples from. This has especially been true since I got into Pizzicato Five, as they cut and paste everything. But let's go back to the classics, first.
I've always wondered where that breakbeat comes from that has been used on everything from Erik B and Rakim's "Paid in Full" to Milli Vanilli's "Girl You Know It's True"--my favorite, however, is its use in Brian Eno's "Ali Click." Well, with a little searching, I found out. It's a record by the Soul Searchers from 1974 called "Ashley's Roachclip." The famous two seconds come in about 3.5 mins into the song. You can hear a low-quality RealAudio sample over at this one person's Milli Vanilli site. But for the muthaload, check out These Are the Breaks, a list of ten of the most recognizable samples in hip-hop, including my all-time favorite, the Apache break. Mmm, bongo goodness!
September 15, 2003
Cranks or Prophets or both?
There's a whole slew of info here, grim, grim forecasts of the American economy here at this article at 321Gold.
A Week with Richebächer in CannesMake of this what you will.
KR: "The idea of an economic recovery with such a huge trade imbalance is utterly ridiculous"
This refrain was heard at least a dozen times, sometimes out of left field, from Kurt's lips, spoken with dismay, even disgust. By the third day, the quote evoked my laughter, from mere repetition. By the fifth day, I reminded him that it had been over 24 hours since he last uttered the line, which evoked his laughter. How on earth can a nation expect or realize an economic recovery when $500 billion is sent abroad to pay its trade bills? The cost can support millions of jobs. Since the jobs are not returning to our shores, how can the economy recover? It cannot, yet Americans buy into the nonsensical notion of a "jobless recovery." He sees debt rising, consumption continuing, and jobs that are generated going to Asia. I called it a hemorrhage of capital, with jobs following the capital flow. He agreed. We talked about how Americans have been conditioned to regard trade gaps as normal, big federal deficits as normal, large debt levels as normal. I made an analogy regarding debt, whereby American households sit on living room couches, with the water level rising to within one foot of the ceiling. The couch floats up, but the breathing room is severely restricted. He nodded. I told of stories in the mid-1970's when the first $100 billion trade deficit was registered. Back then, economists warned that the capital loss was dangerous, while foreign dependence possibly could lead to instability. Such concerns are not now evident.
September 12, 2003
PCs Get Extreme Makeovers
For those with a lot of time on their hands, consider giving your bland PC box a beautiful Extreme Makeover. I particularly like the dual use coffee machine/PC.
By way of Boing Boing
Cornelius - PM
Polystar PSCR6118
2003.07.23
PM is the companion remix album to Cornelius' "Point" and by far the worst of all his remix albums. Having opened up the remixing challenge to any and all who came to his web site in 2002, Cornelius then collected the best of the lot and put them out here. He has said of his delight in receiving completely crazy remixes from people worldwide, none of whom have record contracts. He doesn't mention that none of them are any good.
Maybe some of it rests in the samples he posted. Instead of full vocal lines or some serious loops, there were nothing but a few solitary drum samples, a bass note, or a single word. What could be made of it? Anything, really, but nothing that remotely resembles the album it comes from.
Worst of the remixes is "MC Cat Genius' BomBassTic Re-bomb" by Animal Family featuring MC Cat Genius, the sort of tedious self-reflexive, self-defeating undergrad stuff that dares you to like it. No, we don't need three minutes of you telling us how hard it is to finish your remix. Stop moaning.
The rest is chop-up ProTools-y stuff, with very little groove, just a lot of stop-start business.
Accompanying this, I also listened to some of the hard-to-find Nova Musicha e.p.s that Cornelius put out at HMVs and Tower Records in Tokyo (collect all 8, suckers). There's a few pleasant tracks: The very brief "Star-Spangled Gayo" which reconfigures the national anthem and reveals its musical roots (very baroque), and "Search," which is not by Cornelius I just found out but Takashi Tsuzuki, of whom I know nothing. "Search" is a collection of hiccups, bubbles, and sound bites that exists and goes away, but just by doing so has more going on than the entirety of PM.
World Standard - Le Train Musical
Polystar PSCR 5916/7
1985 (rereleased 2000)
Wow, I never expected this, it's like Penguin Cafe Orchestra or some other more acoustic Editions EG record from the early '80s. I thought, being on the Non-Standard label, the music would some burpy electronica. No, this is happy little miniatures of acoustic guitar, punchy barrelhouse piano, a few minimal effects, a gong or two, and Meredith Monk-like vocals. Completely charming, working out a few simple chord progressions. Adding to the effect is the low-fi, recorded at home feel. "Music Train" is a a cheerful number with "la laaa la" vocals and a drum that reminds me of the There's bits of Harold Budd and Saboten in here too.
Very few things date this: there's a bell sound that comes straight out of a Yamaha, but for the most part this could have been recorded anytime. There's nothing very "Japanese" about the group either.
I'm listening to this as I read a very long unpublished Lester Bangs interview with Brian Eno just posted on Perfect Sound Forever. And the Eno theories are coloring my experience of listening to it (of course, it helps that they are coming from some similar places). The minimalism of World Standard reminds me of some of Eno's Music for Films pieces.
And then there's the live track, tucked away at the end as "Ishi no hana", where the arrangement is exactly the same as the studio version, but now the whole thing is bathed in echo (real echo, too), and the audience (sounding like about 20 people--I'm thinking it's one of those ultra-cramped Tokyo basement clubs, full of smoke) gets processed along with everything else, their murmurings turning into a little black stream of sound. Majestic.
Bangs' interview (it seems to be around 1981) ends with the author's anxiety about Eno's comfort of working with machines:
There is something just a little too comforting about this insistence that this stuff takes place totally outside of the world's arena. Music stirs people, in one way or another; it can be used for evil purposes, it can make evil things happen. One thinks of the stories of Jews in World War II who reported finding themselves excited by Nazi songs even as they knew there were the anthems of their own destruction. Rock is a form of music, let it be admitted, particularly susceptible to the creation of mass states of pointless rage and destructiveness, although Eno's music, if it ultimately has any social consequences at all, points in the opposite direction: towards pacification. His stance makes you sometimes wonder if he couldn't go merrily along creating his pleasant little ambient tapes under the most totalitarian regime, which leads you to further speculate that it might have been amoral in the first place.
Of course, Eno's outspoken essays against the Iraq invasion, his criticism of more modern technology (CD-ROMs, synthesizers and software made by programmers for programmers--not artists), have put those anxieties to rest. How threatening those analog machines must have sounded back then, how warm they sound now.
Addendum: Actually, the above description above applies to "Youthful Standard," the 2-CD of bonus tracks and demos that came with the 2000 reissue of this album. Because of various factors, I wound up listening to it first about five times before I even put on the studio version. And I can say I like some of these demos better! The studio versions do indeed have lots of synths and are exceedingly clean and airy, and "Coconut Fruit" reminds me of the first Pizzicato Five ep. In fact, Konishi appears on tracks 1 and 4, singing chorus. The album is produced by YMO's Harry Hosono (as was the P5 e.p.) and is a chirpy thing and good in its own way. But I'd rather put the second disc on first!
Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls - Edward E. Leslie
Mariner Books, 1988
When I started reading this anthology of tales of surviving (or not) shipwrecks, airplane crashes, and general lost-in-the-woods survival, it was pretty easy going. But 520 pages and something like two months later I made way to the back page, a little undernourished, slightly crazed, and vowing never to read any more anthologies on just this subject.
Well, I kid. But Edward E. Leslie is a pretty generic writer. He did his research, but most of this book is a paraphrase of survivors tales from the Elizabethan era onward. Only a few times does he fill in some of the historical data (a bit on pirates, a bit on the "survivor tale" cottage industry, a bit on the early days of aviation where barnstorming and daredevils were all the rage) as a context. There's a few pages on analysis on the psychological effects of surviving near-death experiences, on cannibalism, and, right near the end, a bit of modern commentary on the shallowness of the "life lessons" more recent survivors have gathered.
Most survivors who have come of age since the 1950s do not claim to find any deep meaning in their travails. Conditioned by popular culture, they report that what they have learned is to live for the moment and to appreciate the little things in life. It is remarkable just how often these sentiments are expressed using these very words. For instance, one recent surivivor, referring to an ordeal during which he was very close indeed to dying explained that "when God didn't let me go, I was sure He had something in mind for me. And now I think I know what it was--learning to really appreciate living. Little things I used to take for granted, i don't anymore. Just getting up in the morning or watching one of my boys hook a fish is an unbeleivable thrill. I never felt this way before--and it's wonderful."
Did God have Job and Jonah suffer just so they would notice the flowers beside the well-worn path or the play of light in a drop of water? Paul was struck blind on the Damascus road so that he might be able to open his eyes and see. Today, sitting atop the ruins of our lives, we do not reconcile ourselves to God, fate, or the laws of the natural universe; instead we find wonder in the petals of roses that push up through the ashes. We do not discover inspiration in the belly of the leviathan; rather we emerge from that enormous digestive tract to pay heed to the phosphorescent fishes that swim near the surface of the vast ocean.
As we kneel on that ancient thoroughfare, the scales having fallen from our eyes, we lift our heads and cannot perceive anything in the bright new light that our popular culture has not instructed us will be there. And this culture teaches us that nothing is of value except wealth and immediate gratification."
And this is the last page where it starts getting interesting. I would have liked to have seen a bit more of this quasi-Christian editorializing, disagreeing with some of it as I do--(Is Leslie hoping that all survivors will gain deep wisdom, that of a prophet? Does he favor the Old Testament God to Jesus? He throws the bit out there about popular culture, but spends an early chapter discussing the survivor narrative. The fact that some of these sailors returned repenting their sins. Is that a better reaction? Can't it be just as shallow?) As I said, he barely goes into it.
Mostly, though, the book is just paraphrasing.
There are some good stories to be found. Most chilling is a diary kept by a man marooned on an island by pirates for what we take to be buggery (on the high seas, as the comedy sketch goes). He does well to survive 150 days, but he makes some crucial mistakes, among them wasting entire days repenting to God. Reading the diary excerpts, I assumed he had made it home. But no, he goes crazy from hunger and illness and dies. The diary was then purportedly found by soldiers a year later (sitting next to a skeleton, perhaps?).
I also liked this WWII story of three men in a life raft in the Atlantic, slowly going insane, until there's one man left. It's grim stuff.
Leslie leaves some trivial but important details out, too. But then, in other places it seems like all he's concerned about is the trivial. For example, he leaves a whole chapter to the tale of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and friend, who survived being stuck in the Libyan desert. Not that it's essential to the story, but it was my friend who reminded me later, as I told him the story, that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry went on to write "The Little Prince." You'd think that would at least deserve a mention.
And in a final story about a woman whose plane crashed into a cliff in the Sierra Nevadas, he uses a photo of her "with Blair Brown, the actress who portrayed her in the movie version of her story." Wouldn't you like to know what movie that was? Well, Leslie doesn't tell us.
(But I will: it was a TV-movie from 1978 called And I Alone Survived, a title that kind of ruins the suspense when she starts off with two other people.)
Also, by the end, Leslie is jamming in as many 20th century survival tales as he can. Somebody needed to edit this book a bit more. In fact, someone else should have written it. Leslie doesn't have the black humor to pull off these tales of human misery. My candidate: John Marr, who used to write a great zine called Murder Can Be Fun, whose gleefully wrote about themes such as postal worker shootings without sounding cold-hearted or callous. I think you can still find some of his writings online that may pertain to our subject.
September 11, 2003
20 Unanswered Questions on 9/11
Okay, if I post only one 9/11-themed article today, it'll be this one.
WHY DON'T WE HAVE ANSWERS TO THESE 9/11 QUESTIONS?
By WILLIAM BUNCHNO EVENT IN recent history has been written about, talked about, or watched and rewatched as much as the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 - two years ago today.
Not only was it the deadliest terrorist strike inside America, but the hijackings and attacks on New York City's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington were also a seminal event for an information-soaked media age of Internet access and 24- hour news.
So, why after 730 days do we know so little about what really happened that day?
No one knows where the alleged mastermind of the attack is, and none of his accomplices has been convicted of any crime. We're not even sure if the 19 people identified by the U.S. government as the suicide hijackers are really the right guys.
Who put deadly anthrax in the mail? Where were the jet fighters that were supposed to protect America's skies that morning? And what was the role of our supposed allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan?
There are dozens of unanswered questions about the 2001 attacks, but we've narrowed them down to 20 - or 9 plus 11.
Paul Krugman: The Buzzflash Interview
On the anniversary of the day the terrorists attacked but the fascists took over, here's a great interview with Paul Krugman, the NYT columnist who tells it like it is.
Paul Krugman, New York Times Columnist and Author of "The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century" - A BuzzFlash InterviewBUZZFLASH: As a professor, if you were giving a lecture and you had to define the economic policy of the Bush administration, could you get your arms around it? How would you define it?
KRUGMAN: There is no economic policy. That's really important to say. The general modus operandi of the Bushies is that they don't make policies to deal with problems. They use problems to justify things they wanted to do anyway. So there is no policy to deal with the lack of jobs. There really isn't even a policy to deal with terrorism. It's all about how can we spin what's happening out there to do what we want to do.
Now if you ask what do the people who keep pushing for one tax cut after another want to accomplish, the answer is they are basically aiming to create a fiscal crisis which will provide the environment in which they can basically eliminate the welfare state.
September 03, 2003
Mike Davis on the California Recall
While I was grinding my way through a piece on the recall for the Valley Voice (check the main page this Saturday to read it), here comes Mike Davis, author of the brilliant City of Quartz in a much more informed piece on the same subject--well, sort of--than I could write with a huge deadline looming.
Cry California
By Mike DavisEvery candidate in California's dark recall-election comedy should be obliged to answer the question: 'Whither Duroville?'
'Duroville' is the California visitors never see and that pundits ignore when they debate the future of the world's sixth largest economy. Officially this ramshackle desert community of 4000 people in the Coachella Valley doesn't even exist. It is a shantytown -- reminiscent of the Okie camps in The Grapes of Wrath -- erected by otherwise homeless farmworkers on land owned by Harvey Duro, a member of the Cahuilla Indian nation.
The Coachella Valley is the prototype of a future -- Beverly Hills meets Tijuana -- that California conservatives seem to dream of creating everywhere. The western side of the Valley, from Palm Springs to La Quinta, is an air-conditioned paradise of gated communities built around artificial lakes and eighteen-hole golf courses. The typical resident is a 65-year-old retired white male in a golf cart. He is a zealous voter who disapproves of taxes, affirmative action, and social services for the immigrants who wait on him.
24 (Season 1, Episodes 21-24)
Creator: Robert Cochran, Joel Surnow
2001
Aaargh, you got us! We didn't see that coming, no way. So the final episode of Season One is over and the clock ticked silently full circle. We're going to take a break from non-stop suspense for a couple of weeks, or at least until Season Two is out on DVD.
What began to annoy us was woman-in-turmoil Teri, who should have considered herself lucky to be allowed access to what is surely a high-security location (the CTA offices), but instead spends the final episodes continually wandering around, getting up in people's faces, asking them for continual updates on Jack and Kim. And would anybody really let her storm up into Mason's office like she does and demand he do something? Couldn't they have locked her in a room? And see?See? What happened to her when she continued to walk around, nosing about, near the end of the final episode? Exactly.
We were also glad to see Sherry Palmer kicked to the curb at the end, so tired were we of her Lady Macbethisms and Machiavellian trickery. Too bad Patty, the assistant, was let go as her sacrificial lamb. Senator Palmer, on the other hand is so honest a presidential candidate that he takes 24 into the realm of pure sci-fi.
And Dennis Hopper was a bit out of place with a quite unconvincing accent, but oh well.
24 (Season 1, Episodes 17-20)
Creator: Robert Cochran, Joel Surnow
2001
Although we're enjoying 24 a lot, by the 20th episode it's apparent to us that the show's view of women is pretty bleak--they're either duplicitous, or dense, and the latter seem to be the majority. Is Jack such a bad father that Kim has to continually act out and seek out Rich, the bad boy moron who got her into this mess in the first place? Her inability to leave Rich's hovel when it was apparent some pretty nasty drug dealers were on their way over was infuriating. And why on earth did Palmer's assistant screw up her set-up with Drazon, electing to hang around after planting a tracking device in order to run him through with a letter opener? Frailty, thy name is woman!
Another group who fail in the mental division (and who overlap with the women) is the teenagers. It's refreshing to not see teens as bastions of wisdom, I guess, but Kyle Palmer isn't as smart as he thinks he is, and Kim...well, we all know about Kim's wise decisions. Their stubborn behavior becomes a bit much after a while.
24 (Season 1, Episodes 13-16)
Creator: Robert Cochran, Joel Surnow
2001
This was the quartet of episodes when things cycled back around. Jack was reunited with his family; Jack returns to the office after several hours on the run; Palmer finally confronts Jack; the plot and its motivation is finally explained to us. And almost immediately things began to fall apart. Possibly this structure will be mirrored in the end--we'll have to wait an see.
Another note: it's really hard to do research into 24 without running into massive spoilers on the web. There's been a few times I've nearly learned some shocking truth about the ending, only to turn (or click) away in time. Yes, I know it's not going to end well (and it's going to be a cliffhanger, but of course). Yes, I know there's more twists to come--and more death.
Kenji Jammer - Hula Hula Dance 2
UUTWO records DDCU-2002
2003.04.16
Or: the problem of listening to remix albums without knowing the original.
Who has a truer listening experience? The person who picks up a remix album without knowing the originals, or the one with a deep understanding of the material to be remixed? And does it matter if the remixer winds up using little of the material (70% of all remixers)? What if the remixer uses nothing but the material and then reconfigures it into something new (Sean O'Hagan's remixes of Cornelius and Pizzicato Five, both of which are wonderful)? What is the criteria? How "danceable" something is? How much something is "rescued"? How faithful to the material? How sacriligious?
Kenji Jammer is the pseudonym of Kenji Suzuki, of whom I know nothing except he seems to have started in the '80s, done his time playing hard rock (opening for still-famous-in-Japan Deep Purple and Stevie Ray Vaughan), moved all over the world, and now in this alter ego explores acoustic and lap steel sounds with a definite mellow bent. Fortunately, the CD ends with two of his originals, or one would never know what's being remixed here. "Sail On" is a skanking jam, and takes nearly all of the track until the steel guitar comes in. Okay, so it makes me wonder what Hula Hula Dance, the original, sounds like. It also reminds me, for the third time in a row today, of the Orb.
So then, the best of the mixes are Fantastic Plastic Machine's mix of "Daddy's Delight," which seems to mix a vocoder with Kenji's slide guitar, and the "Across the Border" mix of "Universe", which toodles along very politely, even seeping into the background. It's pleasant.
Blasthead - Landscape
Lastrum LACD-0049
2002.08.30
Sounding a bit like Harmonia or the more electronic side of Krautrock, Blasthead appears on the same label as The Calm. It's a similar mix of jazzy instrumentation, Mo'Wax downtempo beats played live (or at least I think so), a series of groove experiments.
It reminds me most of the Orb's first album without the spoken word samples, or more likely the Orb's version of ambient. Unlike the Orb, Blasthead feel no need to keep the dancefloor in sight. Rhythm, when it comes, arrives unexpectedly, sometimes fast, like an exploding drum circle, other times slow, like the multi-layered handclaps that remind me of Eno/Schwalm's Drawn from Life. Lots of hammer dulcimer. At one point, some very discordant free jazz sax makes its way into the mix, waking up all the stoners in the chill out room.
There's liquid bass, bubbling synths, a general blue-purple sound.
"Scene 4" grooves for for five minutes before blossoming into a big-beat, organ-drenched psychedelic rock freakout. At the moment, these two albums are hard to tell apart.
The Calm - 1969 Before the Dawn
Lastrum LACD-0040
2001.11.20
Last time Jon returned from japan, he came back with some very strange CDs by groups I had never heard of, all supposedly coming out of this one record shop/label in Tokyo. I've heard them in passing and very pleasant they are in an acoustic ambient way. This time he has returned with two that I can properly listen to. The Calm make this wonderful blend of ambient synths, distant, echoey trumpets, melancholia, and slightly danceable beats.
Track 8 has something approaching a drum'n'bass riff, mixing in Reich repetition, wandering sitar, lonesome shakuhachi.
Imagine if Tortoise hadn't sprouted from reformed punks, but psychedelic rockers. Imagine if they listened to DJ Shadow, not knowing it was madefrom samples, and tried to recreate it live (though for all I know this is all done in someone's bedroom on ProTools.) That's the Calm. They like their sound samples too: the good old moonshot countdown sample, and some French lady saying I-don't-know-what.
The Key to Furni
Well, there goes my fantasy that all IKEA names are actually rude words. This article in the German magazine Stern decodes the system for naming things in IKEA. Book shelves are named after occupations, bathroom articles are named after Scandinavian seas, rivers, and bays. And so much more. You are linking to the Babelfish translation of the page, so some things are a bit funny sounding, not unlike IKEA furniture.
By way of Boing Boing
September 01, 2003
Bush: Dog Dropping Doofus
Not only can't the monkey fascist look after the country, but apparently he can't even look after his own dog. Is this payback for just sitting around when Bush was choking on a pretzel?
