Transmissions From Wintermute

Best Music Of The Year (Already!)

2009-12-06T23:52:00.002+01:00

I'm posting this so early to prove once again that I know best and that all those other blogs you read will follow my example. Yeah....so the actual reason I'm posting this is that I don't really listen to Western music anymore since I decided, as part of my immersion process, I would delete all English audio from my computer and listen to Japanese music, talk shows and comedians, like Ijuuin Hikaru:

Yes I know, hilarious isn't it. So, I probably won't find out about any new music between now and the new few weeks. Might as well post now, I think it's a pretty good list, I hope at least it's entertaining.

So........... This first video I posted before, it is of the Dirty Projectors. Great vocals, catchy, and you get the feeling that the singer is really really letting go of anything holding her back. (You can tell I did a lot of research for this since I don't even know "the singer"s name.)

Passion Pit are pretty solidly in the middle of the indie dance pop that's so big right now. I like them just because they write good original pop songs with a good beat.

I just found out about Girls, so I can't be sure if they are great, but I like them so far. The style is so plain, but their character shines through in the music enough that it's still one of the best, most original things to come out this year. I guess what I mean, is just that it's real.

And last, this may piss you off, you'll probably think I'm lame, but this is totally the most powerful moment in music of 2009. You know I'm right.

Basically, in Japan I hang out with Japanese people, and Italians

2009-11-27T17:01:00.000+01:00

It all finally makes so much sense

2009-10-30T17:12:00.003+01:00

here is the answer

maybe you won't agree with me on this one

Hope you miss me

2009-10-19T19:52:00.006+01:00

It's been quite a while, maybe even a year! Almost. Here's a new video by Styx Tyger, who have new band member and new songs that are really good, sad and pretty. I'm working as a teacher right now and here's a link to my student's little art blog where they do Learning to Love you More- assignments. You're welcome to marvel at their cuteness.

Seo Taiji

2009-09-22T21:36:00.001+01:00

So ahead of his time (1992)... By Korean standards.

2009-09-20T06:04:00.000+01:00

I Really Want A Llama

2009-07-05T15:46:00.001+01:00

All I Know Is That It's From Thailand... And That It's Awesome

2009-05-25T18:50:00.000+01:00

空空諸島(Kuukuu Shyotoh)

2009-02-17T17:19:00.003+01:00

Kuukuu Shyotoh translates roughly to "The Vacant Archipelago" possibly the most amazing band to ever stalk the outdoor malls of Kichijoji.

DJ's real best music of 2008

2009-01-19T17:54:00.006+01:00

I spent the year mostly cut off from what is going on out in the Western music scene. I've been trying to find good Japanese music which is frustrating but is slowly reaping rewards (more on that later, keep those grubby exophilic paws under your ass for now). Back to my point, I've spent some time post-annuum looking back at the years music. I've found that if there was a trend, it was that there has been some really beautiful music made last year. Stunning, and with some real emotional depth. These bands are the ones who I see as making the best new music and setting the trends for where I hope music is going. I've plumbed the internet's best of lists and also the tracks that I've accumulated over the months; this is what I've come back with for you, dear reader.

In no particular order:

Kim & Jesse - M83

I posted this one recently, but I need to include it in this list if I want to go about making something aiming toward definitive. I still love it.

Tiger Mountain Peasant Song - Fleet Foxes

I was introduced to Fleet Foxes via a British friend. I guess I'd read some online hype before that as well, which is not hard to understand now seeing that Pitchfork made them the number one band of the year. I think my original comment was the totally understated "I guess hippies aren't so bad after all." I still stand by that.

Courtship Date - Crystal Castles

Crystal Castles are another band I found out about from the above-mentioned British friend (we spent a lot of time talking about music). It's got everything I like about electronic music without losing the things that I like about songwriting and pop music. Catchy, and there's enough attitude to bring those squeaks and beeps to human life.

Owl - Crystal Antlers

Might as well put both Crystal Something Something bands back to back, I found out about Crystal Antlers the old fashioned way, through Pitchforkmedia. I forgot about them for a while, but when I had a conversation with a friend after work I realized that I really needed to go back and give them another listen since I hadn't really figured them out yet. Definitely the most difficult group on this list, and maybe the most rewarding after multiple listens.

Beg Waves - Ponytail

Ponytail is definitely one of the most interesting new bands I've found. They do whatever they want, switching between ecstatic wall of sound and shouts to heavy complex riffing. If the Boredoms and Lightning Bolt had a baby and baptized it in the cleansing fires of electric guitar feedback, this would be it.

Night Of The Crickets - Mr. Gnome

This one I found out from a friend from back home who just left the states again to live in Taipei. I knew I loved Mr. Gnome the second I heard them. Freak Folk meets Shoegaze is perfect equation and the repetitive hook ties it all together so well. And there's a pretty twisted music video to boot.

We Are The Plague - Snowman

Post-punk has finally gone all out dark with Snowman. They don't seem so popular, but I feel like there is a lot of potential in this band to hit it big in an underground sort of way. Let's hope they only get better and really break out in the future.

Wuji - Hanggai

Also, making a first release last year was the Inner Mongolian folk band Hanggai. I saw a movie a long time ago called Cry of the Snow Lion, the soundtrack was all Mongolian throat singing and you were shown scenes of people around the world and all the misdeeds we have committed against each other and our planet. It's kind of like that but with drinking songs.

Mazur's Best Songs of 2008

2008-12-29T23:52:00.004+01:00

The Magnetic Fields - Drive On, Driver

The Breeders - Walk It Off

Islands - Kids Don't Know Shit

The White Eyes - No No No

I don't have a list of my favorite albums of 2008, because I only bought four cds this year. And they were all pretty good. So I guess those are my favorite albums of 08. Unrivaled and consistent, like Dutch food. This year saw new releases from bands I already deeply dig, namely The Magnetic Fields, Islands, and The Breeders. Four albums I expected to like, and that's just what I did, a lot. All solid, excellent releases by solid excellent bands. However, each album had one of two magnificent cuts that've been bounding through my head all year. So here is my VERY COMPETITIVE list of my favorite songs from 2008. Love, love, love em!

The Magnetic Fields - Drive On, Driver

This year's Distortion is perhaps the perfect The Magnetic Fields' album; the jagged highs and lows of previous outings sheared off but their impact retained, evened out into a steady stream of fuzzy, layered, untouchable prettiness. Even with so much noise and space between us and them, the sound still feels incredibly warm and lived-in.

The Breeders - Walk It Off

It's been a while since the under appreciated Title TK, but now Kim Deal is back, with sister Kelly, for a stripped down straight shooter of an album (even by Breeders' standards), which pairs stiff bar room rockers with slow pretty drifters. It's full of simple song writing in which The Deals never sounded more mature, in control, or at ease. My selection is from the former category, namely it rocks me. Fucking irresistible.

Islands - Kids Don't Know Shit

An excellent follow-up to similar concept album Return To The Sea, Islands sophomore effort Arm's Way rivals their impressive debut with perhaps a wider sonic breadth. It's complex song changes and repeating themes, and a deep and detailed narrative spanning the entire album, signal a move away from disconnected singles in a time of MP3s, and towards ambitious album craft in this impenetrable fortress of a record. When I first heard Unicorns in college, I hate hated it. But then I realized perhaps they weren't snobs, they were just smarter than me, and it was my offense that was perhaps insincere. Either way...Islands, great band.

As long as new bands keep making concept albums this airtight, the album may live on yet!

The White Eyes - No No No

The White Eyes - 多美好的人生 (Happy Life)

Why aren't The White Eyes super duper famous? I keep saying it and it keeps not happening. It just doesn't make sense, because they figured out exactly what Rock N' Roll means in the 21st Century. But be that as it may, my lazy goal to post them once a year until they blow-the-fuck-up had no bearing on their being in my best of. No, their debut EP, Get My Body if You Want it, was easily my favorite album of the universe in 2008. Just fucking incredible. This is what rock n' roll should sound like in twenty-ought-eight, for my money

One more year towards the apocalypse everybody! Happy year of the cow!

Break-up Mix Tape

2008-12-29T19:31:00.006+01:00

Magnetic Fields - I don't want to get over you

Atmosphere - Fuck You Lucy

The Dials - Bye Bye Bye Bye Baby

Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers - Hi Dear

Pavement - Box Elder (live)

The Cure - Pictures of You

I am in my mid-20s. And in all my years of human schooling, no one ever mentioned this odd last phase of puberty, which leads me to believe that, in fact, puberty never ends. The body never stops bloating and tightening in odd, unwelcomed places, with no care for purpose or need. This is surely the beginging of the end, and like all people faced with an abyss, everyone I know is either digging in, fleeing away, or jumping off. What do I mean? Marriage, that oddly masochistic impulse to trade fear and uncertainty for irritation and boredom. As many, many, of my same-aged friends, family and aquaintances are jumping up to announce their loving nuptuals, almost as many are cutting and running. Changing cities, careers, continents, and breaking up romantic dynasties. Big break ups. The kinds where apartment and record collections are involved. Even dogs and house plants. Recently, a friend who has held three relationships in the past year announced, on facebook (the future of the abyss), his plans for marriage this month. That same week, my "promising" rock n' roll band was rocked n' rolled by a breakup between drummer and singer, the breakup of a 3 year union of bass drum and vocal melody, leaving me bandless and jaded.

Well, I say, why face this crossroads when you can just stay up all night and listen to records? Breakups, general disillusion, and heartache have been the driving force of pop since time eternal. Every crooner has probably thrown in their opinion on the matter, but some of course do it better than others. Like a spread of horribly depressing options, the following hopeless souls each provide a different stance on the breakup, and the best path through the newly single world. As you can hear, there's a fine line between cartharsis and obsession.

Magnetic Fields - I don't want to get over you

No one does obsession like Stephen Merchant. And his strategy's pretty air tight, they can't can't really leave you if you just never, ever, ever let go. They're gone, so make that lack the nucleus of your life, and the hollow outline formed becomes a close 2nd to the real deal! Nifty!

Atmosphere - Fuck You Lucy

Next strategy, anger. Pigeon-holing Atmosphere's Slug (Sean Daley) as an angst rapper would do discredit to his broad philisophical wanderings, but ex and baby's moma "Lucy Ford" has been a central dynamo on most of his albums. Here, the spite is white hot as Slug shows us that you really can't love someone unless you really fucking hate them.

The Dials - Bye Bye Bye Bye Baby

The girls from Chicago's The Dials sneer with self-pity as they tell us they don't even care that we're leaving. Fuck your new girlfriend, and fuck California. You can't hurt me if I don't care, right, even if I actually do care a whole fucking lot. Isn't that what punk is all about?

Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers - Hi Dear

Jonathan Richman doesn't let rejection get him down. He'll just show up at your house everyday, snapping his fingers, until you admit that he's completely adorable, and go "rock a little" with him. Like an abused puppy...

Pavement - Box Elder (live)

"It was the way that you smiled, that made me know at once, that I had to get the fuck out of this town" Stephen Malkmus sings on the live cut from the second disc of Slanted and Enchanted: Luxe and Redux. Sometimes you just know. And then you get on the next bus for Missouri.

The Cure - Pictures of You

Perhaps not so much obsession, as and endless remembrance. One thing you can say about hearbreak and loss, it made for some extremely beautiful 1980's pop songs. Once again, hats off to Robert Smith.

Years Best New (for me) Music

2008-12-25T17:42:00.009+01:00

So the year has been sweet of course. I have not really been into much new music though. The only new album I've really consistently been listening to is by a French band, go figure. I don't really know what else to say--except to my fellow blog-mates I spent another 50$US for ezarchive space so you better start using that $hit--so I'll just get to the songs.

Bruce Springsteen - Thunder Road

Oh how I have done you wrong Bruce. I bought Born to Run about 6 years ago, listened to it once or twice and forgot about it. Maybe I was too young, maybe I'm still too young.

Broken Social Scene - Looks Just Like The Sun

Another group I slept on. Maybe I should have ignored the hype but I've really grown to love this album. I haven't even had the courage to move on to any of their other EPs or LPs, I'm still too infatuated with this one.

Ando Drom (Hun) - Sza Tele Zsav

Of course there is the obligatory gypsy song but it's so much more, I just don't have the words to do it justice, uhn-cha uhn-cha uhn-cha uhn-cha, or maybe La Luna La Luna La Luna La Luna...

M83 - Kim & Jesse

Yet another artist I initially didn't like, I think I'm starting to notice a pattern. The aforementioned French band, go figure. Reaches the utterly beautiful heights of MBV (while being totally derivative) but with ego taking the place of melancholy.

2008-the year of not quite so many books and some travel, part 1

2008-12-09T22:18:00.017+01:00

Well, I guess I've started my yearly summary a little late this time. But that's OK, because I haven't really read all that much this year. I guess that's Doris Lessing's fault. She cursed my reading-year. Maybe. Or maybe it's because this year didn't suck nearly as much as last year so I didn't need to take refuge in the wonderful world of books in the same way.

Let's see, I already wrote a post about the books I read in January and February, so I guess I'll jump right into March. Right... March. I was super sick with a fever and reading a Swedish book called Myggor och Tigrar (Mosquitos and Tigers) by Maja Lundgren. When it came out it caused quite the stir because she wrote about all these sexist male journalists and authors, exposing their affairs and strange maneuverings. Put their names in there and everything. It was really "inside" and I didn't get a lot of the references, just enough to enjoy the gossip. At first I thought she was making a really good point and sort of standing up for women authors, but sadly through the course of the book I started to doubt her truths about these people. And the second half of the book was just about her living in Naples, spying on some mafia guys on the street corner and it was super duper boring. I want to read Saviano's Gomorrah though, because apparently it's the shit right now. Every fifth book I sell these days is Gomorrah...

I think I tried reading This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin right about here. But I didn't even make it half way through. I guess I don't care enough. Or, wait, no that's not it. I think it was these long chapters about the basics of music, like pitch and timbre and stuff like that, which he excused all musicians from reading. And me not being a musician, dutifully read them, and it was interesting, but I still somehow got restless and stopped reading. Hmm..

So after that, I went back to Vonnegut and Breakfast of Champions which I really liked. I'm trying to remember stuff now, but it's really hard for some reason. I liked the short descriptions of sci-fi stories that Kilgore Trout was writing, or ideas for stories. Sometimes you don't need more. Just "well , it's like, in this future world, you can just put like a remote control, or any object, on your head, and then you appropriate it's um, skills. So, with the remote control you'd actually be able to change the channels by blinking!" (Yes, that was lame, but it's the best I can do. I'm not made of sci-fi you know!)

Oh, and then there was The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. And it was wonderful. The language was so perfect, especially the descriptions. ( "Her voice is full of money" is something I underlined with a pink pen). And the love story. Jesus Christ.

And then I started Welcome to the Monkeyhouse when I went to Taiwan, and I didn't really get a chance to read much there. But I loved it and I think that except for Slaughterhouse Five it's my favorite Vonnegut book so far. I definitely liked the story about how the body is just a parasite on the mind. I tried to wow people with that a lot, with very little success. I'm guessing I probably told the story enthusiastically enough, but somehow... wrong. Everybody should just read the damn story.

Chronicles vol I, by Bob Dylan came next. This was in China, on trains. There are several pages with praise for his Chronicles, "the book nobody thought he could write", " Dylan's voice is almost as good as his singing voice" etc. Someone even said it takes it's place next to Woody Guthries Bound for Glory, and On the Road. Yeah. But it's actually not that good, and I don't really think he can write books. Ok, ok, the first part was fine, it was interesting. But then, a huge chunk of it was all about some late 1980's recording of some album I have never heard. I couldn't believe it, I kept mumbling, god damn it Bob Dylan, not now. You see, I was really sick on the train right (stomach problems, but I wont get into the details, I'm sure you can imagine the horror), and we had folded ourselves into a very small area, right by the leaking train bathroom. We were sitting on cardboard and maps. There was pee everywhere and a man with 2 thumbs was chain smoking over our heads. And I was really sick. And it was a 7 hour train ride. And Bob would only give me stuff like " We listened to it later on the big speakers with the bass jacked up and Danny said we should leave it alone, that it's right the way it is.' Think so?' ' Yeah, it's got something.' And talk about it raining on and off. I don't care Bob, I don't care! Why did you have to be so boring?!!!

That's it for this week. There will be another installment shortly. Like on Monday maybe. Here, enjoy some songs.

A song that's quite possibly about aluminium

I don't know the name of the song or the artist. Kristoffer (the Agent Side Grinder guy, who also wrote String Strikes) sent it to me from up north. This song is guaranteed to put a giant smile on your face.

Impressions- I'm loving Nothing

It's pessimistic, but really pretty.

Future Post Year in Review 9375

2008-11-25T16:59:00.006+01:00

It has been an exciting year, seeing a resurgence in the popularity of constructed world histories. Without any doubt, the driving force behind this movement was the history of Aegis 479. We genuinely cried, for the first time in centuries, when we uploaded the Biostratic Entity's debut into our group mind.

By now we all know the now iconic grace of the Paeric Empire's rise and slow destruction by the invading tribes from the southern continent. To sit with peasants among the ruins of their city and listen to the blind yul player Faridis Bochemid sing the sorrow of his peoples decline was by far the greatest moment in art this year.

We are still baffled and fascinated by the counter-culture that grew in the isolated East Yeprz. Their irresistible beats still keep us moving. We lost ourselves on the dance floor night after night, and found ourselves again in the morning festivities and cafes.

One thousand years later, the National Speaker's resignation speech following the first colonization of another planet combined with the religious turmoil of their times could even touch the coldest of our hive. We understood his decision, and we were proud to have him as a Speaker.

When live with the Biostratic Entity, we dance with the universal feelings of love and loss.

Faridis Bochemid - Thwixt Whixit

World Mix Tape Vol. LXII

2008-11-16T14:08:00.001+01:00

Yodeling isn't just for Tennessee mountain gypsies anymore my friends. It is also apparently a pygmy distress call, a call of mistrust, frustration, and misuse of dowry elephant tusks.

Francis Bebey - Pygmy Divorce

Something that bothers me more than almost any type of American egocentrism, is people's reaction in front of me when listening to music in something other than English, Spanish or french. They simply find it necessary to imitate the vocalist by wailing "lalelalelale" The way small children make fun of each other or communicate. When the voice is used as an instrument you don't have to understand. Watcha Clan's Sista Ka is Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Berber using that and so much more in her music. I only understand half the words but It feels like the Spanish revolution and Franco is being Franco.

Watcha Clan - Quinto Regimiento

Watcha Clan - Balkan Qoulou

Huun Huur Tu is a group of Tuvan throat singers who also play such instruments as the Tuyug (Boiled and dried horses hooves clacked together) and the Xapchyk (Rattle made from sheep kneebones in bull's testicles.) This song however has other instruments in addition to the vocals which the liner notes fail to provide any description at all for. This song is from the album Live 2

Huun Huur Tu - Orai-La Boldu-La Kezhee-Le Boldu La

Cigarettes, and the songs they inspire

2008-11-11T22:30:00.010+01:00

Well, so here's a post about cigarettes. As you all know I quit smoking sometime in something like February or March. Some might say I actually haven't quit since I still steal drags off smoker-friends, i. e. smoke. But on the other hand, smoking a whole cigarette makes me nauseous. So I've accomplished that, which is pretty good since I've been told by Mazur, Ohmygodimmike and Kuech that I used to smoke more than anyone ever in the history of the universe.

Oh, you're wondering how I quit? Why of course I'll share with you, the big secret of how to turn your life around and become a better, stronger and healthier person. The answer is angrily eating huge quantities of apples, then oranges, and then maybe some other fruit, and then chewing a lot of raspberry-flavored gum. Instead of smoking. And then, if you're like me, you might harmlessly start stealing drags every now and then. Especially at parties or when there's like a really really nice view. It's a risk I'm willing to take. Yes. That said here are all the songs I found on my iTunes when I did a search for cigarette.

Duke Ellington- Love is Like a Cigarette ( again, I know, I know)

Daniel Johnston- I Save Cigarette Butts

Tex Williams- Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)

Sheila Hancock- My Last Cigarette

The J's with Jamie- My Cigarette and I

World Mix Tape Vol. 8

2008-11-10T05:17:00.003+01:00

My idea of roots music has been completely upset. What is the real feeling we have when we hear some old-timey music and feel like this is the real thing. Something like old country, Muddy Waters playing the acoustic, something like that. Something where you feel your heart strings being plucked away, and think "this is my culture, this is where I really come from."

Well I'm not sure what that means anymore. I for one, come from what barely resembles an American heritage, my family only having a history that dates back to a three generations. I am not country. I am not the blues.

In Japan, there is a traditional style of music called Enka, which is fantastic, but is mostly ignored by the younger people. It's seen as lame and only for old people. Now everything that is (ultra-)cool here in Japan comes from the West. Rock, hip-hop, fashion, psychedelic imagery, etc... nothing can be both traditional and cool, there is a strict divide between the two things.

For the past year there has been a rising star in the Enka scene, who is both capturing the hearts of old and young alike. His name is Jero and he fucking rocks, have a look:

Even, here, there is some tie to the roots and the person. Jero is one-quarter Japanese. But what about having no ties at all? You may remember another Tuareg band I posted a while ago called Tinariwen, this group is similar. I have no ties to them, but to me, this is what roots is all about.

Tartit - Houmeissa

Okay So Whats With All The Postage?(sarcasm)

2008-11-06T18:43:00.004+01:00

Update:

** Barack Obama will soon be the president of the United States of America -- wow.

* I dropped $50 on ezarchive space.

* The elusive Mazur Beam got a girlfriend; hearsay -- rides motorscooter to work daily through intense mindboggling Taipei road traffic; fact.

* I read Gravity's Rainbow: "... and one of the SS liason men (Weissmann isn't here) keeps looking at his watch, then at the sky, then the watch, the crystal becoming, in brief flashes on/off, a nacreous circle binding together the hour and the fleecy sky." -- It was pretty frustrating, but also, of course, in a certain, fluctuating way, both awesome, and boring.

*Ok so maybe hippies are pretty cool after all

*Mike joined facebook

*私は日本語を習うようにしている！

*I'm in a band with the guitarist! ahh!

****%JV*FJ^%uu$$#　(this is the thing that I cannot say)

ITSHALLOWEENITSHALLOWEEN

2008-10-31T18:14:00.003+01:00

Yes it is Halloween. And Transmissions from Wintermute are wishing you a happy one. I am writing this dressed as a rabbit. The stressed out, neurotic rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, not the sexy kind. I really do like these ears though. Here's a song that really captures the essence of Halloween.

The Shaggs- It's Halloween

If you want to learn more about the Shaggs, then go here.

You'll feel mellow like a cello, yes, a cello.

2008-10-19T20:14:00.006+01:00

So. I thought I'd write another post. Just for shits. Shits and giggles. That's what life is all about right? You might wonder what has happened with the fabulous Styx Tyger since last time I wrote. Well, I'll tell you, none other than Sean Michaels of Said the Gramophone agreed with me about their talent and wrote a really cool post about them. Which resulted in emails from some BBC DJ and also someone wanting to sign them for something slightly unclear yet awesome. How about that eh?

What else can I tell you. I heard a cool song about potato chips by Slim Gaillard the other day on JAZZ FM 91, Canada's Premier Jazz Station, which has become my main source of music the past year or so. So I ended up getting a lot of Slim Gaillard albums, and I really thought potato chips was supposed to be on one of them, but it somehow wasn't. At first I was disappointed but then I discovered way better songs of his, and now I'm hooked. It's Slim Gaillard all the way now for me. There's no turning back. No way, no how.

Slim Gaillard- Matzoh Balls

Slim Gaillard- Groove Juice Special

Slim Gaillard- Dunkin' Bagel

Slim Gaillard- Arabian Boogie

Slim Gaillard- Cement Mixer

Buy

As you can see, Slim is all over the place. It's nice to listen to super happy absurdist jazz when it starts getting cold outside. At work the Paul Auster books are staring back at me from the shelf, whispering " Come on...it's fall again. It's Paul Auster-time again...". But I'm going to be strong this time. Unless, I don't know, Moon Palace should magically materialize before me during some autumn rainstorm or something. I'll leave you with an amazing Prince cover.

Snuffelruft- Purple

Alright.

2008-09-18T17:12:00.011+01:00

Umm, I couldn't help but notice that our blog is dying. It's fading fast and there's no time to lose! Actually maybe we don't care anymore. That could be the case. I thought about that, but come on. That's so so sad. I'm not going to let it become some internet wasteland, a hollowed out site where, like, fuckin internet digital tumbleweeds roll around and greedy vultures pick at whatever Mp3-links still work.

So I'm going to post some fantastic music and hope for the best, which sadly, at this point is just to get the members of this blog, us, to start reading it again. And maybe Grant Miller.

First off, there's Styx Tyger. I have this friend Josef Bull, and when we went out for coffee he told me that he and his best friend Alex Blomkvist have this little band-project going on. "Isn't that nice", I thought and proceeded to forget about it forever. But then one night a week later I stumbled upon their myspace page and listened to this song in my dark livingroom, and pretty much lost my mind.

Styx Tyger- String Strikes

Listen loud. Holy crap, right? Right? I couldn't believe it! It's seriously the most beautiful song I've heard in something like years, and I didn't even know Josef could sing! But he can! Like a little angel! This song lifts you, and with the risk of sounding utterly pretentious and cliché, touches your soul. There's no other words for it. It makes me think of Chris Isaak and flashes of 80's childhood sunset nostalgia. It's familiar and full of love yet it leads you somewhere completely new. And it's so nice to hear my good friends voice like that. For the first time in a really long time I was filled with that jaw-dropping admiration and the kind of band pride which I often felt in my teens about the bands I knew.

The song is an Agent Side Grinder cover (Alex is as of last year in that band too, and their pretty singer is also a friend of mine. Oh yes), and they've changed it almost beyond recognition. The original is definitely cool too, so check it our here.

This summer my friend and I went on a trip to Taiwan to see cob-logger extraordinaire Mazur who then later joined us to travel around China for a while. In Taiwan he took us on an amazing scooter trip, through... paradise basically. I've never felt so alive as when I crashed into that aboriginal mosaic and down that ditch on that first day. A few hours after that happened though, and further up into the mountains we stopped to ask for directions for the nearest gas station. Mazur went into this house/tent and didn't come out, but I could hear a faint melody so I went in too. Inside Mazur was dancing with 3 or 4 tipsy Taiwanese women, and one of them was singing karaoke. It was the mandarin version of " More Than I Can Say", and I started dancing too, with my helmet still on and my gauzed up bloody arms waving in the air. Aida joined us shortly thereafter and when the song ended we just got on our scooters and left.

Leo Sayer- More Than I Can Say

After that I started singing this song out loud in my helmet because I found it very soothing. I didn't crash again. Except for once. But that wasn't a real crash it was more the scooter getting away from me and falling over. Right.

Yes. I want to post 5 more songs. For good measure. I listened to these on long train rides in China. In luxury soft sleepers or sitting on a piece of cardboard over floors wet with pee, and everything in between.

Impressions- Fool for You

Tilly and the Wall- Reckless

Tap-dance break-down! Yes!

My Morning Jacket- Librarian

I really love this one. It makes me think of my best friend.

My Morning Jacket- Touch Me I'm Going to Scream

Megapuss- Crop Circle Jerk (?)

Mike's Ficticious Life (Volume 1)

2008-07-08T06:52:00.006+01:00

Mike was driving home from work one day, after having a few drinks of whiskey because of the inevitable capitulation to his coworker's peer pressure. He was feeling irritated at having to deal with the other drivers on the road and honked at jaywalking college students about every five minutes as thoughts of vehicular homocide ran rampant. The streets were filled with the spring break returned academians; those single minded ones filling out the ranks of the white collar workforce; a work force that Mike would retain his spite for for endless days until his withdrawal from this world into the next from slipping on a cheese Danish thrown aside by a cohabitant of his senior center.

He of course had a love-hate relationship with those people filling the streets. Both rage at their cooperation with the dulling hammer of society and a human kinship which made him want the same things they wanted: money, women, power, free time; welled up inside of him, thrashing wildly like the Boundry waters of the Canada-US border not too far to the north.

Over the years Mike tended his garden of hatred, as he carefully finicked over his Forget-Me-Nots and Narcissus flowers, a sheltered beauty germinated within. Inside all that whirling chaos a perfect storm was revealed. Every aspect was so perfectly fitted that the noise led to more noise which led to light. A single spark formed in his head that lit up the skies and crashing down came a meteorite igniting the streets around him, a conflagration consuming the trees houses cars signs everything was up in flames but why was Mike, crouched with head down in the rubble of his Oldsmobile, ok? Why did the inferno heat but not char? What was this new-found imperviousness to the world around him? Had something spectacular happened? Yes, it must be. Kinetic powers rippled through his veins and out from his fingertips. Mike had become the Meteor Man!

...You can't stop this, you can't stop this.

Ain't Nobody Bad Like The Meteor Man - Bit Hat Ray Ray

The Silver Jews and The Ladies from the Canyon

2008-06-21T11:15:00.011+01:00

I realized that the way I listen to music has changed a whole lot since I got my ipod a few years ago. I stopped getting CDs, except for when I was in Madison, and the whole album-concept had pretty much died entirely for me. I was just always after good songs for my playlists. I still am of course, but this spring I started loving the album again. The Silver Jews' Look out Mountain Look out Sea (buy), and a wonderful compilation album called Wayfaring Strangers: Ladies from the Canyon (buy).

These two were not taken apart and dissected by greedy fingers looking for the best pieces. No songs even got skipped (I've always had an indescribable hate for one poor song on practically every album I've ever owned). Yeah. So first things first. Wow, I'm actually having trouble saying something about Look Out Mountain Look Out Sea because I love it so much. I had to make myself stop listening to it a while ago because I was slowly killing it with my love. You see, I hadn't expected it to be this good. After Tanglewood Numbers I thought we had entered a new era, which somehow meant that the Silver Jews couldn't possibly reach the same absolute greatness as with, say, American Water. But I was so so wrong and it's the guitars that just kill me this time. The twanginess and the softness.

Silver Jews - My Pillow is the Threshold

"Throw my thoughts like tomahawks". So perfectly descriptive. It changed how I think about thoughts for ever!

Silver Jews- Candy Jail

Silver Jews- We Could be Looking for the Same Thing

Now, Ladies from the Canyon . You can almost tell that it's a hippie-album from the name right? Yeah? It is. Oh god, it totally is! It's the hippiest album I've ever listened to, and I used to be a little hippie-girl with flared cords and a deck of tarot-cards. It's an amazing album though. It's a collection of 14 songs by women who tried to sound like Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez but never made it big, or at all. Most are strumming on acoustic guitars and sing as sweetly as I imagine only women caught in that bubble of time could. The lyrics are about crickets, special seeds being sown, corduroy mountains and eternal life. Some of them sound nothing like Joni and Joan, but I love them all. That's it, after a 8-year hiatus, I'm totally ready for the singer-songwriter women again.

Jennie Pearl- Maybe in Another Year

OK. So this girl is a 14-year old kid who recorded this and another song with her older hippie boyfriend. It's beautifully eerie, innocent and hopeful. Her voice balances between a slightly uncertain child's voice and the deeper, steadier voice of the woman she might become. The possibilities are endless really. My friend Malin (who showed me this album) and I love fantasizing about her life, because apparently her whereabouts are unknown. Yeah. So we're thinking that she either died in a car crash in California with her possibly drunk boyfriend, or that she moved back to Illinois and finished high school, and is a soccer mom right now. Right now. At the game.

Linda Rich- Sunlight Shadow

This song has a lot of the cheesyness that I don't care for much with this kind of music. But what the hell am I supposed to do?! I like it. I like how the song is just a bunch of questions. I can't help it. It's pretty. I listened to it half asleep in a sunny hammock a few weeks ago and it was perfect.

Shira Small- Eternal Life

Doesn't she sound almost exactly like B.J. Snowden? I mean, she totally sings better, but still. Also, to a Romanian Swede it might sound like she's singing "Assholes are the centers of realization". You could sort of say that right? I'm telling you, it makes sense.

Samurai Chop

2008-05-30T02:54:00.006+01:00

Yoyogi Park is one of the larger and probably the most active parks in Tokyo. It borders the biggest fashion districts, Harajuku and Shibuya. If you have seen any photos of "crazy," over the top style Japanese style, it comes from one of those two neighborhoods. On Sudays if you walk through the park you'll see a lot of cool things. You'll probably see the Tokyo Rockabilly Society, who are aging punks dancing in a circle showing off their massive pompadours. You'll see people walking miniature dogs with clothes on that actually look cool, as opposed to the dog clothing I've seen in the US. You'll also see plenty of takoyaki, or octopus ball stands, which if you have not tried, you are missing out.
You will also see an average of five to eight bands playing the street. Most are young, hopeful up and comers, some are older, established bands with a limited appeal.
Last weekend I went with a few Aussies, who were themselves in a band on tour and are now long gone back to Oz. We took a walk through and saw a pretty good slice of modern Japanese pop music. A Visual Kei band (image based goth), a girl punk/metal band, a boy punk/metal band, some older, established guys playing in a mid-sized jazz ensemble, some teens playing indie-like rock, etc.. We also saw a band that rocked harder than any band I have seen in my entire life: Samurai Chop. Just look at the picture.
With a shaved bowl cut, a pink guitar and thick rimmed glasses the lead singer's look alone was enough to know they meant business. This is not even to mention the wind chimes attached to a rotating stand for easy kicking access.
I can see how one might think that people watch because he's nerdy and funny, and that an audience would form out of mocking and pity. That is not how it is. You really just have to see it. Yes, it was nerdy, but it was also pure rock and roll passion. They gave out free CDs but I haven't been able to upload songs to ezarchive since I got to Japan. So here is the Myspace.

I love it when Koreans boys wear shirts they don't understand!

2008-05-10T16:56:00.002+01:00

I had to steal this pic from my sisters flickr page as I'm guessing he is one of her students. It appears as though the kid is living up to his shirt... But I thought Soju had special properties to increase virility, especially in young boys.

Origami-Schmorigami, the class

2008-05-07T16:08:00.005+01:00

Things heard during my first class teaching origami:

- My nervous heartbeats (I'm sure).

- "These instructions are retarded".
- "I'm sorry but these instructions are totally retarded".
- "Yes, the instructions are retarded."
- "Actually, don't look at the instructions for the crane, they will only confuse you more".
- "No, fucking, way. I'm not doing this" (Dangerous Minds-type student) And then, later: "I'm gonna practice all weekend and then I'm gonna come back and fold the crap out of these papers!". I asked him if he was being sarcastic by any chance, and no, he wasn't. Youtube will help him he said.
-"No that's a valley fold, it's supposed to be a mountain fold, dumbass". (Really cocky student who just learned how to fold something).

All in all, I think I did OK. Everybody learned how to fold something. Two of them went modular, which, heh, is pretty complicated. One girl was a freakin' genius and made up her own flesh-eating plants. A shy heavy metal guy sporting the obligatory thin blond baby-moustasche learned how to fold a pretty pretty flower which he was extremely proud of and couldn't stop looking at for the rest of the class. (If he's anywhere near as smart as he looks, and I think he is, he'll eventually understand what an amazing babe-magnet origami truly is).

Flight of the Concords- Ladies of the World

Origami-Schmorigami

2008-04-27T20:46:00.003+01:00

I have some sort of disorder that makes me agree to do things that are actually impossible. I do it all the time, without even blinking. One of my jobs right now, is translating Romanian texts about communism and rivers into Swedish. They're going in a book. Even though I don't actually know how to translate, it never for second crossed my mind to say no. So now I'm looking up architectural terms and...hydro-technical...stuff. It's madness.

I also agreed to teach my students origami, on Wednesdays, these next 5 weeks. I'm making a little booklet of designs from which the kids can choose from, and I have to be able to fold all of them. Because I'm their teacher. The problem is that I suck at origami. Apparently I forgot about that small but important detail, yet again. I don't know what my fucking problem is, it's not the first time it's happened either. Anyways, everyone knows how high schoolers are nuts for TAI fighters and badgers so I decided to learn how to fold those. And I came pretty damn close to loosing my mind for ever. It was so so hard. And the TAI fighter can't even stand up and keeps falling over. So now the little folder will consist of: crane, box, star (maybe) and badger, for the really really advanced students. But I'm hoping no one will pick that one because I finished it in a blind rage and I don't remember anything. The instructions mean nothing to me.

Chet Baker- Chetty's Lullaby

I love love how it totally still sounds like American...Dohlche nohtte....veeveersohtey...cheyroh... Americans trying to sing in other languages than American is my new favorite, very specific, genre. Back in the day, American artists used to sometimes translate their songs to as many languages as possible to win the love and admiration of different little countries. But somewhere along the line they stopped doing this, and now things are just tough all over.

Django Reinhardt- Smoke Rings

I've been listening a lot to Django recently. He's great. This song reminds me of my grandparents. Sunny apartment. Everything moving really slow. It also allows me to reminisce about the time when I used to smoke cigarettes. Those were the days.

Chairmen of the Board- Give me just a little more time

This is my anthem right now. Mostly he chorus, not the super lame verse. "Life's too short to make a mistake, let's think of each other and hesitate, young and impatient we may be, there's no need to act foolishly". Very responsible lyrics indeed. I do need more time though, always.

Long Song(s) vol. 1

2008-04-21T19:18:00.008+01:00

The long songs. Songs that seem to go on forever. They move into your brain, and they've brought all this luggage. They start spreading their stuff all over the place. Eat all your food. But they got you presents so that's cool. After a while they get sort of annoying, but then, oh they go do something awesome and by the time they actually leave you know you're totally going to miss them. You tell them they can come back anytime man, anytime. And it was my pleasure. No mine. They're the songs that think they're so great you wont want them to end. And some of them actually are.

Like Sonic Youth's Hits Of Sunshine (For Allen Ginsberg). This is still my favorite long song. When I was 16 I got a mix-tape with this and was amazed at how I could listen to it the whole subway-ride to high school. If someone tried to talk to you while listening to this you'd just shake your head and sort of gesture something that meant" Oh I can't talk, I'm listening to Sonic Youth. I'm inside a bubble of coolness."

Then there's Hurricane by Bob Dylan, which isn't quite as long, but man, there's just so much information. Every time it comes on it's like running into Bob on the street and he's super angry and tells you every single detail about how Rubin "Hurricane" Carter was framed for triple murrr-der. And why shouldn't he, it's definitely important stuff. But I always smile when all those crazy bongos and violins and harmonicas push the song into yet another verse.

Nighthawk Postcards (From Easy Street) by Tom Waits is sort of like that except it's so lazy and loungy you don't really pay attention. Tom doesn't mind. It's even OK if you fall asleep, he's just muttering to himself anyways. I sometimes played this at a crappy coffee shop where I used to work, so I could pretend it was a crappy diner instead. But then someone would turn on Come Away with Me, by Norah Jones, and totally ruin everything.

That's all I got for now. Maybe naming this post "vol. 1" was a little optimistic, but hopefully my blogmates (is that what we call it? I think it was something else that I can't remember right now) will add some of their favorite long songs too.

Spring Scream

2008-04-14T20:29:00.008+01:00

So I'm gonna start this off by quoting DJ:

"Okay, hello hello. I have been reading and teaching English in Tokyo now for ~4 months."

Well said and I really like the "hello, hello" part. I feel the same, except, I'm not in Tokyo, I'm in Taipei. And it's been ~seven months of general radness, culminating in the raddest weekend so far, 2008's Spring Scream, where I got really really drunk.

So here is my week 1/2 late, very incomplete and belligerently drunk coverage of the fest, condensed to some of the highlights I can remember.

First off, here's some background. Spring Scream was started 8 years ago by two expat Americans and has grown to become one of the biggest music fests in Taiwan, and the driving force for a general migration of rockers and ravers to the bottom of Taiwan every March, and even has it's own Wikipedia article now (WOW!) It's held annually in and around Kenting in the far south of Taiwan. This year they had it in Ulambi, which is the southernmost tip of the island and from where you can see the lush green coast jut out in three directions. Also, seriously every English teacher in the country comes down, and they all wear flip-flops and some of them drink rum out of coconut shells. Just like home. The event is held in literally one of the most beautiful venues possible, with 7 stages stretched out over two sloping valleys looking out into the endless-fucking Pacific and up Taiwan's mountainous coastline.

I had no idea before moving here because I'm an ignorant asshole, but Taiwan has this really fucking good music scene going on with all these indigenous and expat westerner post-rock, electro dance-pop, hardcore and shoegazer noise bands that I've just been generally losing my shit over. But the best of anything I've seen by far is Taipei's White Eyes, with their sleazy, scuzzy, ragged garage rock. It's a 'fuck yes' every time. Guitarist Telecat lays down riff atop grimy distorted riff, but keeps the chaos in check with a crisp razor sharp clarity, like Jimmy Page via Jack White on a really lucid acid trip. Singer Gao Xiao Gao!! shakes across the stage while her voice flies from the deep melodic to a high pitch freakout. And at 2 of the 3 shows I've seen of theirs, ends the set by stripping down to her bra and screaming at the crowd.

No No No - White Eyes

Narcissistic Personality Disorder - White Eyes

Here are some tracks from their brand spankin' new EP, Get My Body if You Want It. Check out their micepace for a bunch of tracks and videos. Here's a link to an earlier post I did about them with some more you tube action. In their Spring Scream vid, you can see Kuech, a dear friend of this blog, pumping his fists and 'woo-hooing' (he's the one in the white T with the shaggy beard - and looks like what you'd imagine an expatriated midwestern kid to look like at a Taiwanese dance-punk show).

Around 9pm Saturday I was running around the valley from stage to stage with Kuech and others trying to find which stage White Eyes was playing at. And at around 10:30 I snapped these pictures, half blacked out, from the middle of their mosh pit.

After White Eyes, we stumble-ran to the DJ pit where the U.K.'s DJ Shorty was spinning an all Ween set, complete with homemade Boognish masks, and I think my soul left my body and achieved transcendence somewhere around 11:30.

I'm the blur in the front.

At 4 pm that same day, I was wearing flip-flops and drinking rum out of a coconut shell as I watched our good friend Werner, aka Listen To Spoon, build up a live multi-instrument layered post-rock set, while wearing a pink tie.

At around 3am Friday night I was drinking a vodka grapefruit out of a red plastic cup, watching experimental short films projected onto the side of a white shed. But an hour and a half before that I was watching my last live show of Friday night, The Juicy Bows. Fuck yes I was. This dirty new wave surf rock band from Tokyo held the stage so confidently while chopping out wave after wave of riffed-up feedback and freak-out synth, smirking out at the crowd from behind Mexican wrestling masks. Fuck yes Japan! These are the only links I can find for them. They include one really long awesome song. Dig it.

The Juicy Bows, bio

The Juicy Bows, song

Sunday I went go carting and ate an egg sandwich with DJ Shorty.

Where I wasn't Saturday around 9pm was watching another really good Taipei band, Go Chic!, because I was somewhere else feeling confused. Although there has been many a synth-rock dance-pop group before, this 5-girl outfit's brand of hard core screamy electro-pop is extremely fresh and so murderously hip you could get a drug problem from it. There first cd's due out this summer, but there's a bunch of very hot shit on their micepace.

Here's there 'biology':

Biology: this is go chic (caution!! we're electro-hyphy-chiks hybridized punk-blues-rock psycho-fatherfuckeeeeeers, jump yr feeeets uppppp!!! or we'r gonna ATTACK u!)

There were also bands with bunny masks, or lab coats, or tennis shorts with matching wrist/head bands who also all pretty much kicked ass but I can't remember their names. So, I guess that's it.

World Music Post (Volume Whatever!?)

2008-04-11T11:29:00.007+01:00

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One thing I love about World Music is not only the diversity of the music itself and the constantly expanding root system that is continually influencing the different facets of itself like a 3-D sphere of complicated electrical circuitry, but the fact that it sometimes (assuming you can understand it) has a sobering story to tell, often folkloric and survival based.

I recently bought a CD entitled "Umalali" The Garifuna Women's project. It is the singing/storytelling of the Garifuna people, descendants of Nigerian slaves, who were in fact survivors of a sunken slave ship that made it to shore and mixed with coastal Caribbean natives from Central American countries known as Caribs and Arawaks. Most migrated into Belize where they comprise about 7% of the population and live in Garifuna villages along the southern coastline and speak Garifuna or Garihagu. The Garifuna is among the UN's list of endangered human cultures and the oral tradition is precariously preserved, namely by the women, while the men are occupied at sea. The women sing of their hardships of surviving hurricanes and many other personal tragedies with spirit and guile. You can buy this album here

Umalali, The Garifuna Women's Project - Merua

I didn't choose this song for the storytelling, I chose it because it was mixed by Norman Cook (A.K.A. Fatboy Slim) who invited the Garifuna collective to mix their authentic music to his beats. When the Garifuna ladies heard the track Fatboy had laid down they instinctively started singing a traditional work song they had learned growing up in Honduras, making a great track unintentionally combining these two bits of music.

Umalali, The Garifuna Women's Project - Anaha Ya (Here I Am)

This song is about a woman on the island of Roatan, off the coast of Honduras, who is hearing rumors that she is selling her daughter into prostitution.

Lyrics:
Here I am on this island
All I can do is look around. I am so dissappointed

It is all over the newspapers on the street's
Rumors that I am selling my daughter

Come to me, my child, I have appointed you
Come to me. You will be the one to console me

Kafka, Dust, SION, Japan

2008-03-31T07:30:00.005+01:00

Okay, hello hello. I have been reading and teaching English in Tokyo now for ~4 months. I joined facebook and friended Grant Miller which I'm super duper proud of. I didn't really like the idea of facebook but I guess it's growing on me.

I have not read any really mind-blowingly good books to be honest. I am mostly through my The Complete Short Stories of Kafka, which I've been reading between books, and am even not so impressed. Some stories are good of course. For example, how can you not get chills after reading:

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."

I feel that when he (Kafka) isn't on, he drags. Although, for example, the discussion of the relevance of tiny flying dogs to the rest of dog society should definitely not have been cut, the order and flow can be totally random.

Elizabeth Bear's Dust was good and also bad. I guess it sort of satisfied my curiosity about romance novels, which account for 30% of all book sales. I now know that I do not really care about pulp romance. The science fiction was perfectly done. No info-dumping. Just the great, gothic atmosphere of a defective generation ship and the AI angels that have been trusted to take care of it. Nano-symbionts, yes. In depth explanations, no. Perfect. Even the fact that it's Book 1 of a trilogy didn't affect the pacing, plotting or epic finale.

A little while ago I read God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. All I have to say is, "no, there are no bad Vonnegut books."

Japanese Music? Here is SION. I found out about him when I asked a friend 'is there a Japanese Tom Waits? I think there should be.' She said, 'yes, his name is SION.' He even played recently but it was really expensive and I didn't go.

The song name means: If I have sake...

I saw Star Club a few weeks ago though. It was free because of a friend of a friend of the manager. It was cool, they played all new stuff and I didn't recognize any songs, but I was also moshing or being moshed most of the time so it's hard to say for sure. I also know now that for drink cheers Japanese punks say 'hey, ho, let's go!" A lot.

My Non-Fictitious Life (Volume 3)

2008-03-25T05:39:00.006+01:00

I have been blessed to only have two near death experiences in my life and I feel as though the one when I was barely old enough to remember, for that reason, was a more traumatic event. In fact it was the first memory I ever had, other than the memory of sliding down the bannister of my old house the day before we moved out of New Jersey for good. I was always too scared to do it and my sister gave me shit constantly, so I did it on the last day we lived there, and when I told her, she didn’t believe me, but I did it for myself anyways.

My first surprisingly clear memory is when I was in my fathers lap, we were sliding down a water slide and he was wearing jean shorts. The friction of his jeans caused him to slide very slowly, worrying him that we were going to be hit from behind by the next people coming down the slide; he panicked and some faulty fatherly instinct made him decide to carry me back up the slide, thinking he could make it to the top and therefor to safety. Why that would make it less likely for us to be hit from behind is still a mystery to me, and a mystery to god and all other rational beings as to why this would be beneficial to his young son’s life.

The next thing I remember is after he dropped me, sliding down without my father there to completely fail at protecting me, while fully realizing exactly what was happening. I knew that I didn’t know how to swim while I was peacefully sliding through open and closed green plastic tubes, looking up at the alternating view of the sky and the roof of the cylinder, while my behind thudded every time one piece of tube attached to the next. I knew that I was soon to be submerged in water and I was completely aware that these would inevitably be my lasts visions of this earth. I was eerily calm when I reached the very last stretch of slide, I was suddenly exposed to the afternoon sunlight in this final stretch of glorious oxygen and surreal blue sky and clouds that seemed to last forever just before I was plunged into the blue chlorinated water of my death.

I held my breath as I swayed through the water helplessly looking at all the legs of the children and their parents; parents who would never let their children float around under the water without supervision and drown. I was completely ready to die, probably because I was too young to fully realize the consequences of dying, and the guilt my father would feel when they pulled my limp body out of the water, only feet away from the rest of my family congregating in the pool that the water slides feed into, totally unaware that seconds before I could probably see their legs and was in need of their rescue. I would have been totally unaware of the irony of my death, when finally I was suddenly yanked up from the water by someone else's mother, who says jokingly, “What are you doing down there all by yourself?” I remember thinking how much I wished this amazing, funny, kind, motherly woman was my mom.

This was the first of many events that made me think of my dad as pathetic and meek . I have always since been highly disappointed with the incompetence of my dad. Someone who is very intelligent but never bothered to teach me any of his valuable knowledge, a man who could fix anything if he put his mind to it, (but much preferred to take the easy way out and pay someone to do it) but who’s 25 year old son can’t even change his own oil. If it wasn’t for my mom I never would have learned to cook my own meals, clean up after myself, hold a job, basically do anything needed to live a normal functioning life.

On a lighter note, the other night I saw Leslie and the lys. A white, female, multi-talented, rapper/singer/artist (an expert bedazzler) from the great state of Iowa. When you check out her myspace page be sure to watch the videos and listen to my favorite song Zombie Killer. The show was funny, especially when she picks out people from the crowd with the best gem-sweaters and points out the beauty of each work of art and then proclaims what she will call each gem-sweater, which is usually something like "smurfette-molten-magenta-incandescent -frown-lover." Well... just as random but usually more creative than my attempt. And as she belts out the last part of the name she bumps the poor unsuspecting fan with her belly knocking them surprisingly hard onto the wood floor of the stage.

Reading again

2008-03-12T13:54:00.019+01:00

Slow reading start this year. It was that Golden Notebook, it made me lose my incredible pace. That doesn’t matter though, no one thinks fast readers are cool. I sure as hell don’t. Actually I do, but a while ago this man bought some 20 fantasy books, and while he was paying for them he started bragging about what a fast reader he is. He said he’d read like, I don’t know, 400 books or some other ridiculous number, over the past year. He was really proud. And I said ”wow”, followed by thinking ” how sad”, because I’m a mean bookstore clerk. And then I realized that I totally would have thought he was cool if those books hadn’t all been, oh I don’t know...Brethren. I guess I need to be nicer.

I started out by reading this book called Ladies by Mara Lee. She taught/ teaches at a writing-school where some of my friends have gone the past few years and they’ve all spoken about her with enormous respect. The book was about the superficial pretentious Stockholm art-scene, worshiping beauty, and the complicated relationship between 4 women who’s fates are all entwined. It was very cleverly paced, jumping from girl to girl, back and forth through time. It’s been a while since I read a book with that kind of captivating rhythm that made me read it practically non-stop. It was a well-written, intelligent book, but I don’t know if I think absolute beauty is really that interesting. I guess it's always relevant, even though I have a hard time picturing it. (It did feel good to be able to make the connection with The Picture of Dorian Gray though.) A super funny part of Ladies was when one of the women (this otherworldly beautiful goddess) had an orgasm from looking at one of Yves Klein’s paintings. It was just. So. Perfectly. Blue.

Kimya Dawson- Blue Like Nevermind

Prince- So Blue

After that I read Heart of Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov, which is this short little book that he wrote in 1925 but which remained unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1987. The story is about a stray dog who, after having been scalded by a mean chef, meets one of Moscow's most outstanding doctors. The doctor takes him home and after gaining his trust, transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a recently deceased man into our poor canine hero. Now this might sound like a fantastic idea, but it doesn’t turn out so great. Instead of getting a talking, thinking cute little dog, the doctor and his assistant watch him change into this semi-hairy, alcoholic, swearing dog-man with communist sympathies, and it’s hilarious.

Johnny Cash- Dirty Old Egg-Suckin' Dog

Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen- Midnight in Moscow

Sometimes I like to pretend I have a plan with the order in which I read the books, but I’m not a very strategic person so it never really works out. There’s no real connection between Heart of a Dog and A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka. I read her second book, Two Caravans, last summer, (remember those chapters written from the dog’s perspective and how, awesomely, he talked only in caps. Heeeey...I guess there was a dog-connection between Bulgakow and Lewycka). Anyways, this book was also good. It’s about a middle-aged Ukrainian woman living in the UK who has to make peace with her bitchy older sister to save their old eccentric father from the young Ukrainian gold-digger with huge boobs that he marries after their mother dies. She talks like this ”This is what I want say you bitch vixen no-tits. You have no tits, you jealous”. Great stuff. I was thinking that being Romanian and all I should start busting out the dead-on, really mean, Eastern European insults. They’re just so too the point and crushing, but I don’t know if I’m not too swedefied to pull it off. Something to think about. Even though the book was really well-written (great accents), and I find the perspective of Ukrainians in England really interesting, it did drag on for too long and it sort of lost it’s momentum after about two thirds.

The Best American Non-Required Reading 2007 was next. There were a few things in there that made me laugh so hard I teared up while riding the buss. It was The Best American Article Titles from The Best American Trade Magazines. (Like Herb Quarterly- Thyme Out! What the herb experts aren’t telling you). But, all in all, I'm not sure the selection really was as good as last year. I feel like that is a whiny thing to say though. Because I’m suspecting I didn’t feel that way before I read "Sore Eyes- The Reader Geek's" amazon-review of it. I didn’t want to listen to him or her. But his or her words just got stuck in my brain, and basically ruined it for me. So I have no opinion. Except that the whole first section was great and that the Middle American Gothic- article was wonderful. (Brian Green’s dangerous idea-presentation of the Multiverse, blew my mind of course. And made me feel like finishing my essay was no longer important.)

Next was Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. I’m really excited about him because he's really starting to grow on me. And there’s still a ton of Vonnegut-books that I haven’t read, so now I know I can just pick one up when I need something really good, right? (Are there ”bad” Vonnegut-books that aren’t worth reading?). One really cool thing about reading Cat’s Cradle after reading Feynman’s stories about the Manhattan-project was realizing how well Vonnegut portrayed the archetypical scientist in Hoenikker, the father of a dwarf, of a nerdy guy, an according to Vonnegut freakishly tall girl (6 feet), and the atomic bomb.

That’s it. I’m going to bike down town and pick up my copy of Daniel Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music, which my incredibly talented cousin/piano-goddess Oli recommended to me. Also, I have to tell you that sadly, I'm failing Experimental Music and Sound Art. Maybe that book will help my brain somehow.

Abstract But Intact

2008-03-05T09:37:00.010+01:00

here's a couple clips from the television show "The Mighty Boosh." I've devoted the last two days to watching it, abandoning all attempts at normal sustenance. After watching some interviews with the two main characters/writers they confirmed a longstanding suspicion. Howard Moon and Vince Noir are incredibly high at what seems to be all of the time. I probably could have guessed it when I saw their talking dj gorilla roomeate named bollo. That's "bollo" in a british accent which makes it sound cooler...and exotic, and when bollo says his own name it sounds pretty cool too.

The first half of most of the episodes are totally bland and boring, like a turtle trying to get out of his shell. Then in the second half it explodes into colorful nonesense and can only be appreciated by those who appreciate music.

I figure we owe some music to our readers. I found this cd on the curb outside of my house being thrown out by my next door neighbors. It's Cee-Lo Green the Soul Machine, half of Gnarles Barkley. Cee-lo shows his multi-facetedness on this album because the soul machine is also a bad-ass rapper who can intimidate, making up for his lack of height and baratone vocals. I chose a much more soulful song that shows Cee-Lo's softer side, a softer side that is shown when he makes his son, barely old enough to enunciate, say "I am Kingston Calloway, and I am the son of the soul machine" in the intro.

Cee-Lo Feat. Pharrell - The Art of Noise

The next is off Electric Gypsyland Volume I. I've already posted a song from volume II, which is the same balkan gypsy bands and songs as volume I, remixed differently. The two compilations mix the songs of the three most famous balkan gypsy bands, but this song is a megamix and mixes two of the three bands plus one artist I've never heard of in one track. It's extremely layered and reminds me more of the direction they were going towards in the second volume without as much dreamy distortion that makes the second volume so unique, the way only a band like animal collective remixing can make it. Check out Volume 2's MySpace page.

Are You Gypsified (Megamix) - Olaf Hund Vs Ursari De Clejani / Taraf De Haïdouks / Koçani Orkestar

The last track is indeed to please the pasty indy kids who read our blog. This song is the title track from Paparazzi Lightning, and although it's not the most downloaded song from the album, it makes me understand why Ghostland Observatory frontman Aaron Behrens has been compared to Freddy Mercury, not that I ever doubted it. They just released a new album called Robotique majestique, which you can buy from their label's website, Trashy Moped recordings. Also check out their myspace page.

Ghostland Obervatory - Paparazzi lightning

How I learned about Experimental Music and Sound Art

2008-02-14T21:49:00.009+01:00

Actually I haven't really learned about experimental music and sound art yet. I almost don't know what it is at all. I've been to 3 lectures so far, and I've read stuff in books with forewords by Brian Eno. Yes. I like reading the books because every now and then they describe a particularly awesome piece, like George Brecht's Candle Piece for Radios, where the time it takes for birthday cake candles to burn out decides the duration of it.

I still don't know the actual difference between sound art and experimental music, but I'm guessing it's a contextual thing. Like with art. I know about art. I get art. Or at least I'd like to think I do, yet when it comes to sound art and experimental music I tend to discard a lot of it as annoying. Crazy, right? I figured that obviously I feel this way because I know too little about it, so I'm basically just getting enough information to have an educated opinion about this type of music, and hopefully appreciate it in a new way. See, when I think art sucks, I know why that is. But with this stuff I can't tell, because I can't read it. We'll see what happens. Plus learning more about the crazy Futurists and their noise-machines, and collecting memorable John Cage-quotes is pretty fun. The people in my class are really interesting too. There are many sound-guys who start arguing about analogue vs. digital sound every chance they get. There are two guys who both wear their dirty hair in buns on top of their heads (I bet they'll become friends!), a physics professor who makes the music professor nervous with all his knowledge, the girl my x-boyfriend fell in love with after we broke up (she's cool). And of course, my favorite, the 19-year old guy who sleeps through every class. But last time he was extra-awesome because all of a sudden, he woke up, and declared that "whatever, John Cage was just trying to be special".

Brian Eno- By this River

See what I did here? First I casually mentioned Brian Eno, and here I go posting a great song by him. I think it worked out really well. This is my favorite Brian Eno song. About 2 years ago I listened to this album non stop everyday for 2 weeks while I carefully drew a very naturalistic paper bag. Every little crease had to be perfect. Art is wonderful.

Woody Leafer- There are Drums in My Typewriter

Woody Leafer was some sort of beatnik-humorist, and a good friend of the sound artist Henry Jacobs. I don't know much more about him, but I like how wacky he sounds.

Chet Baker- Look for the Silver Lining

Everything about Chet is great. He has a great voice. He always sounds really bored.

Porter Wagoner- The Rubber Room

I actually have nothing to say about this one. Except, it's fantastic. You have probably all heard it before, but it caught me by surprise. "I'm screaming pretty words, trying to make them rhyme. I'm in the rubber room".

Yes. That will be it for now then.

So 2008

2008-01-24T21:53:00.000+01:00

I haven't read a single book since 2007. I've been struggling with The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, but who am I kidding. I'm not getting anywhere. Sometimes I feel like I might just have a problem with the Nobel Prize Winners. The Pulitzer Prize winners I usually really like. I don't understand what's wrong with me. The week before I found out that Lessing won I stumbled upon this really angry book review of her book, The Fifth Child, that I had written when I was in high school. For English class. It ends with "Nothing good ever happened in this book, it just kept getting worse and worse all the time". Yeah. I was a real wordsmith.

So because I don't have any books to talk about I'm just going to post some songs and talk about them instead.

Helvetia- Old New Bicycle

I stole this from Said the Gramophone, and I can't stop listening to it. I seriously don't even care about the singing, it's all muffled nice whiny words, all I hear is the super duper happy guitar. If I could play the guitar, I would just play stuff like that all the time. All the time.

Daniel Johnston- Fly Me to the Moon

In my opinion this is one of the most beautiful Daniel Johnston songs, and I discovered it just recently. It's from The Lost Recordings Vol. 2. The various layers of voice and music makes it sound really sad, confused and ghostly. It breaks my heart every time, but the weird little Jackson Five-ish "Moo-moo-moon-ooh oh-oh-oh" at the end always makes me feel better.

Duke Ellington and His Orchestra- Love is Like A Cigarette

This is a very very elegant song. Makes me wish I haven't started quitting smoking. I have, you know.

Of Montreal- Jimmy ( M.I.A. cover)

Next week I'm going to start writing about the Experimental Music and Sound Art night-class I have started taking. It will be very educational for us all, I'm sure.

No comment necessary

2008-01-13T18:53:00.001+01:00

Jesus in the Sky with Diamonds

2008-01-09T18:57:00.000+01:00

Well it's 2008. Yep. And you know what? I still don't have a jetpack. Nope. I take the fucking bus to work.....In 2008.

Not THIS:

But THIS:

Mother fucking bus.

However, I do often ride the subway, and if I wear a space helmet during the ride it's pretty interstellar. Also, according to Oh Gizmo!, jetpacks are "old news" as "rocket belts" have been around since the 1960's. They're just really impractical and dangerous. So that's cool.

But enough about the lies of modernity, here's some music to help wrap up the holiday season. All of these songs keep the Christ in Christ-Mass, and show that Jesus, never far from the lips of pop musicians, still makes a good song title or band namesake after all these millennia.

Rebel Jew - Silver Jews

Frequency - The Jesus & Mary Chain

Jesus - The Velvet Underground

They Hung Him on a Cross (Demo) - Nirvana

Spiritual - Johnny Cash

Change is a Comin'

2008-01-08T08:58:00.000+01:00

Being the only remaining blog member to still be in the United States I feel obligated to keep our readers and my fellow blog members up to date on the 2008 primary.

I'd like to say that I feel less cynical about American politics than ever before in my life. I'm falling for Barack Obama's pretty face as a symbol for change just like I expect the rest of the country will as I see him using his momentum in winning Iowa to easily beat Clinton and Edwards to win the democratic primary. Hopefully he won't invade Iran as soon as he's sworn in, dupping us all once again. The advisors he's already selected have a pretty common and sketchy foriegn policy record. But I'm a believer and am actually pretty exctited about the prospect of Barack Obama hopefully becoming the next president of of the U.S.

Hillary needs to do something quick to curb this momentum. You can watch Hillary Clinton's emotional moment in an attempt to get sympathy and relate to voters in preparation for tommorow's New Hampshire's primary. Many think with Hillary's impeccable resume, the only thing keeping her from running away with the democratic ticket is her inability to relate to voters on a personal level. I see her losing to Obama (don't count out Edwards) tommorow and hopefully McCain winning on the republican side. Anyone other than Romney (thank god he's losing votes for being a mormon) or Giuliani (who will instantly invade Iran)winning I think is great. Of course I'd vote for Ron Paul over any democrat other than Kucinich.

To make up for the seriousness of this post I'll finish with a couple of hip new musicians I've recently found out about.

That One Guy - obviously this is all made by one guy with one instrument which looks like a couple of pipes duct taped together with strings on them and wires and gadgets attached to them. His live show was pretty fucking sweet; he hits the strings with either a bow or random other stuff to make his unique instrument sound.

Imam Baildi - Mixes old greek tunes to make some of the most out-of-this-world music in my opinion. He also has a seperate 12" promotional myspace page with the same song mixed with various hip-hop artists.

Things That Happened in 2007 that did't suck (Happy New Year!):

2007-12-30T13:44:00.000+01:00

Now that you're all hung over, kind of bleary eyed from a night of New Years festivities, crawling over to your computer to get your bearings on life via your favorite blog ever, here it is: the world in a nutshell, as it relates to me but first as it doesn't relate to me (the me stuff is the fun stuff at the end). Get your coffees--or for the more hard core out there, bloody marys--and wake up! Maybe after reading this you'll be inspired to come up with some better new years resolutions, but seriously, you should still work on on your Spanish, nobody knows what the hell you're talking about when you say "bwenoz noch'as."

It was a year characterized by republicans coming to terms with "global climate change"; first elections of female politicians into office (Nancy Pelosi, Pratibha Patil, Cristina Kirchner); young killers (rip); athletic doping scandals (Barry Bonds, Marion Jones, Martina Hinges); and Harry Potter (first time a woman has been the most successful writer of all time). There were also other, less earth shattering things to happen in 2007:

Aquateen Hunger Force movie ads freaked out Bostonians cracked out on terror, mistaking LED mooninites for Improvised Explosive Devices.

Pat Robertson made false prophecies (it must have been the voices in his head)

We found out that, holy crap, Jimmy Page has white hair! (London, Dec 10, 2007)

The Writers Guild Of America went on strike, who's implications are best summarized in this xkcd strip.

And lastly, I may have overlooked one of the best albums of the year, but I might just feel that way because I am just now getting into it. Iron & Wine's 'The Shepherd's Dog' initially went under my radar because his previous music reminded me too much of the Garden State snuggle scene, but when I heard there was a full backing band I gave it a shot, and wow, I'm really glad I did. It makes me think of what Jack Johnson might sound like if I didn't hate Jack Johnson, going to Café Montmartre in Madison, and. . . the snuggle scene from Garden State.

Iron & Wine - The Boy With The Coin

Lastly (or firstly), from the only CD I've bought in Japan so far, is Auld Lang Syne. You may have heard it as a mambo, you may have heard Jimmy Hendrix play it on electric, but chances are you've never heard it sung by cats. Oh Yes.

Jingle Cats - Auld Lang Syne

2007-the year of books and travel, part five.

2007-12-23T01:17:00.000+01:00

Finally, my last post about the books I've read this year. I read some really good ones towards the end there. So, I guess I'll just start then.

When I found Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You, among the free uncorrected proofs in the kitchen of the bookstore I actually said " Yessssssssss". I couldn't believe my luck, and ALL the other indie chicks were so jealous. Anyways. I listened to the soundtrack for Me You and Everyone We Know while reading it and it really felt like I was in an American indie movie, and that I was the quirky girl who struck up conversations about polar bears and lipstick, and the human soul, with complete strangers. I think its actually these alternations between shallow random stuff and super profound musings about life that make me so confused when I read this kind of book. I know I really loved it, but at the same time I'm pretty sure I hated it a little too. Bottom line is, if you liked Me You and Everyone.. then chances are you're going to love the book. It definitely had it's hilarious moments.

So... Some people say that Khaled Hosseinis new book, A Thousand Splendid Suns, is even better than the Kite Runner. Oh yeah, there this whole debate going on about that. This time he tells the story of two Afghani women, married to the same abusive husband, doing their best to survive at home while Kabul is burning. This book is pretty much recommended by everyone who's ever read it, so I'm not going to talk too much about it. It's just a really great book and there's no other ways of looking at it. Also, it made me cry several times. (OhmygodImmike, you need to read it if you haven't already).

Next I read what is probably my new favorite book, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Satan and his friends come to Moscow and just screw up everybody's lives in the most hilarious, violent, frustrating and beautiful ways. Bulgakov's comment on the absurdity of the Soviet Regime is impossible not to love. Unless you're an idiot. Then anything is possible. Or maybe it's the other way around. Aida was reading this when we were by the Black Sea this summer and one night she woke us up by laughing in her sleep and saying "tick-tock tick-tock heheheh tick-tock tick-tock hehehehehe". Fred and I got so scared we actually had to wake her up. I'm quite sure it was Satan's doing.

After that I got Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida, which was wonderful. It's about this girl who travels from the States to Lappland ( Northern Finland, Norway, Sweden) to find her biological father just days after burying the one who raised her. I love books about travel, people on a mission or people running away from something. I really like the language too, simple and beautiful. There's a pessimistic tone throughout the book but at the same time it's really funny and poetic. Of course Vendela Vida is co-editor of the Believer, so naturally her book will be good. It seems like the Believer-people are all pretty amazing. The last number was about art and I got a bunch of free fake tattoos that I'm not ever going to wear. But I appreciate the gesture. Those people are just so nice.

I have this list of books that my cousin and his girlfriend Audrey made for me when they were in Sweden. So whenever I don't know what to read I just pick something off it. So this time I picked The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. ( One of Audrey's top 5). I always feel a little retarded when I read classics this late, but I don't really have a choice now do I? I need to read them, because I love finally understanding why a classic is a classic. It doesn't always happen but when it does it's a great feeling. The Picture of Dorian has so many witty philosophical one-liners that it almost doesn't need a plot. The whole book could be all hearty intellectual banter, just because it's both great and super annoying at the same time. It does have a plot though, and a really good one at that. The picture of Dorian Gray, it's beauty and it's horrific changes are probably the kind that can only be imagined, because you can only create superlatives like that in your mind. That's why I have some doubts about the movie that I'm going to try renting pretty soon, I just don't see how they would ever be able to pull it off. I'm excited though.

Hey, the books finally caught up with me. After Dorian I read Rashomon ( and other stories) by Ryonosuka Akutagawa, just like Ohmygodimmike told me to. Haven't watched the movie yet though. Rashomon was really short, so I'm starting to wonder if it's the right one, I hope it was because I liked it a lot. Oh and I read Migraines for Dummies, ( thanks!) finally, after experiencing the craziest pre-migraine hallucinations ever, sometime last week. Literally everyone on the subway had completely deformed faces. Yeah, monsters everywhere. And all I could think was 'I can't believe how many deformed people are on the subway today'.

That's it. Migraines for Dummies was the last book of the year. It's almost over now. I'm convinced that great things await us in 2008. Hopefully.

ABBA- Happy New Year

"May we all have our hopes, our will to try, if we don't we might as well lay down and die"
ABBA

World Mix Tape #9 (Brazil via Taiwan)

2007-12-22T22:13:00.000+01:00

Cangaceiro - Colorir

A Cidade Foi Construida - Colorir

rolo - Colorir

Went to a great experimental art and music festival a couple weeks ago called City Fables, The 5th City on the Move Art Festival. Held inside the industrial backlot of Taipei's living landmark, The Taiwan Beer Brewery, filmmakers and installation artists turned factory spaces into screening rooms as avant-guard electronic A/V artists and post-rock bands banged away on a stage outside. The musicians played in front of a large screen on which all manner of visual trickery was projected, often synched live to the performance.

Rad.

Stretching over two weekends, City Fables housed a number of stunning, bewildering and moving performances from international as well as Taiwanese arists, bands and DJs, including Japan's Ryoichi Kurokawa, Austria's Bernhard Gal and Christof Cargnelli, and Taipei's Weather Man and 8mm Sky. All awesome.

However, my personal favorite was Brazilian free-music duo, Colorir, who play long improvisational, winding, thought-bending noise jams. The syncopated beat and feed-back driven sound they let pour, oscillates between sparse but sweet soundscapes and a pounding, screeching urgency. Plenty of mp3s, videos and a thorough mission statement all at their myspace. The first two tracks above are from Os Humores Do Poeta which is, I believe, the score for a contemporary dance performance. This perhaps explains the greater (or more conventional) structure in them than in that of the long fuzz-out track that follows.

It's available along with lots of other way cool cds at both Open Field Records and Peligro Discos.

Below, to clear up any confusion is Bablefish's translation, completely out of context, of Open Field's blurb about the album:

In English:
I find that Colorir it chooses its challenges for elimination. It gives until pra to enxergar Peter Francis and Dom Peter seated in a square bank if asking what to make. A turn for Asia? Good. To use a generator pra to touch inside of a waterfall? Already it was. To make the joy of the piazada one of a primary school? Made. It must have been thus that they had fallen in the dance contemporary. The pair also presented its sonorous track to the living creature, in turnê with the Cia de Dança Mimese.

The beautiful fuzzy-mind fuck, rolo, mentioned above is from Beliche, and is totally awesome in pretty much every way.

Randomly finding myself sitting next to Colorir during a set the next day, I asked if I could post some stuff on this site. Being the extremely friendly, gracious, and humble noise-rock-stars that they are, they not only agreed but gave me a couple of other Brazilian noise cds by Abesta and pan&tone. Below are some choice cuts.

BINC-300 - Abesta

BFA-920 - Abesta

Untitled 1 - pan&tone

Untitled 5 - pan&tone

Untitled 10 - pan&tone

The duo Abesta plays hardcore noise, their abrasive thrasing sound wonderfully balanced by an inventiveness and rhymic/textural curiousity, which fuse together in a take no prisoners spirit of adventure.

When circuit bender pan&tone lost the music files on his computer, he attempted to run a recovery program. The results are delightful and have an unwitting poignancy akin to my new favorite topic, spam fiction.

Both these Brazilian supergroups have lots of good downloads, videos, and other stuff at their respective WEB SITES.

2007- the year of books and travel, part four.

2007-12-16T22:50:00.000+01:00

I just got back from watching my dear friend Victor's amazing performance in the play Woyzeck by Büchner. I knew it was going to be good but it really caught me off guard with its overwhelming greatness and hilarity, all I could do after was mumble incoherently something about being speechless. Teater Rolf have a blog for those who read Swedish, so check it out HERE. ( If you don't speak this language for some reason, you can look at the few but pretty pictures.)

Back to books. I realized that I actually missed one book in my last post, probably because I was busy bitching about The Boy Who Cried Freebird. That book was Microserfs, by Douglas Coupland. I read that one because my cousin got it for me and because it's about computer-people working in Silicone Valley. It just so happens that he is a computer-guy who works in Silicone Valley, and he actually frequents the same coffee shops as the people in that book. So I thought it was a good way to learn something about my mysterious cousin's life, sort of at least. I really enjoyed the book, but I have to admit that I didn't get a lot of the computer-lingo jokes. The sweet nerd-love made up for that though, because if there's one thing I can relate to it's nerdy love.

My cousin also got me into reading Richard P. Feynman's books, and I started with Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! , which is a collection ( of some) of his many stories as told to a friend. That's exactly the sort of feel you get when you read it too, like Feynman sat down on your couch and started talking about stuff. Working on the Manhattan Project, traveling and learning how to draw ( top-less waitresses). It was terrific! What I liked the most though, was just the was he seems to think so clearly and curiously. While you read his books, it's like you automatically gain some perspective in life. You'll find yourself thinking a shitty situation is fascinating. The only bad thing is that when you finish the book you go back to being and thinking like yourself again...but maybe not entirely.

I didn't know with what to fill the void after this book so I picked up a copy of Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem. A book I've been trying to push on people ( DJ) for years. Never recommend a book you haven't read, because it's a really silly thing to do. I didn't think the plot was all that good, but some of the characters were brilliant. They sort of had to be when dealing with a future world where you have evolved animals living with people, like hit man-kangaroos and...I don't know, kittens. Doing human things (!). And gross Baby Heads, who are basically evolved babies. Drinking in their Baby Head-bars. Those guys saved the entire book, because I honestly could not have cared less about what happened to the protagonist- detective.

Well, after this I got Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, only because Perry at work convinced me the cover was really funny and pretty. I'm usually not intimidated by a 760 page book, and this one didn't scare me either. But I couldn't finish it. Even though it's a really funny satire about dictatorship in a fictive African country. It was just too long. Or maybe I just wasn't patient enough with all the parallel stories. It just didn't work out. So the next book I read was sort of a safe bet, The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. It was a great autumn book, and Paul Auster is sort of my guilty pleasure. Because he is pretty pretentious, but being a hipster bookstore clerk I can't help liking it. It's my job to like his books. And I really really liked this one.

I finished it when I got to Bucharest for the second time this year. Again a big crazy Romanian storm was raging outside my window, and I listened to Bulgarian love-songs on the radio when I started my second Feynman book, called What do you care what other people think? I had gotten it in the Amsterdam airport bookshop during my 4-hour layover, right after a little girl with pigtails asked me if I was a boy or a girl in the women's bathroom. I had a splitting headache and already felt like ripping my brain out, when she fixed her doubtful eyes on me. I asked her if she was a boy or a girl (aha!), which she promptly ignored, probably because it was too absurd for her. (She had pigtails, so who was I to doubt her?) I told her I'm a girl, and asked her what made her think I was a boy. After thinking about it for a while she said " The shoes". So yeah. What do I care what other people think? Probably more than I should, but it is quite interesting that kids being completely perplexed when trying to figure out if I'm a boy or a girl, is now an international phenomenon. The book was great of course, and now I know more about the Challenger disaster than I ever expected to.

When I got back from Romania the new Michael Chabon book was waiting for me at work. Beautifully illustrated, Arabian Nights-inspired Gentlemen of the Road. It wasn't quite what I had expected, but I still enjoyed it. Especially when I read that it was originally going to be called " Jews with Swords". But he couldn't name it that because people thought it was a big joke, even though Jews definitely wielded swords in the olden days. Everybody did. It is a damn catchy title though, so even though I understand why he didn't use it, I still think it would have been worth it.

Right now I'm listening to WHAM's " Last Christmas" on the radio, and I wish I could post a song or two. But I can't because my hard drive crashed last week, and the computer I'm using now is completely empty. Awwww... If anyone of my cobloggers feel like posting an incredible song with this post, go for it.

Random Post #5

2007-12-13T18:23:00.000+01:00

First.

Two days ago, someone jumped off Taipei 101, the tallest completed building in the world. That someone was an Austrian named Felix Baumgartner. He then turned to the camera and said "Fuckin' A, I did it!" and made a reference to his being "number 1." Then he got in a cab with his parachute on and left the country. He was in Hong Kong about two hours later according to sources. Now, footage of the fall edited to bad punk rock music is available on the intra-net. He is banned from ever entering the country of Taiwan again. Probably because of the bad punk rock. I of course had no idea any of this was going on.

HERE's his site. It's pretty extreme, so exercise caution. This quote from the site about sums it all up; "The renowned extreme sports star had to first overcome a number of hurdles with stylish moves that would have made James Bond proud."

Second.

I've seen some great local bands around the city lately. Below are the mice paces for two exceptionally baddass examples.

The White Eyes myspace

Sugar Plum Ferry myspace

The White Eyes were one of the best bands I'd seen in a long time. Thrashing around the stage as they scratched out their sloppy garage dance punk, they tore up the small smoky Underworld in Shida. Despite the messy riffs and spazzy digressions, they were absolutly in control of their whole cyclone at all times with a compulsive attention to detail befitting post-punk or progrock. Below is a video of them playing in a Taipei parking lot. And HERE is some weird live montage.

Sugar Plum Ferry is a 3 man post-rock shoegazer outfit from Taipei. Think Godspeed in a grungy garage or a no thrills, emo-ier ELP. Live, they hammer out their expansive riff rock with a beautiful intensity, slowly building to a shimmering pulsing peak.

Sugar Plum Ferry has a new album out on White Wabbit Records called Thanks For Reminding Me. The White Eyes supposedly have a new album coming out this spring.

HERE are a bunch of videos of Sugar Plum Ferry staring at the ground as they shred it up on stage.

Third.

San Francisco's Numbers have a new album out on Kill Rock Stars called You Are Now This. You can buy it HERE if you think they are awesome like me. You can also to listen to some tracks off it HERE. This album seems to find them a bit more subdued, and perhaps a bit less jagged around the edges. The abrasive tweaks now lovingly blurred in a general fuzzy far-out kinda way. Pretty and dreamy, but still rough and direct.

Here are three tracks off of their last lp We're Animals:

Beast Life - Numbers

Solid Pleasure - Numbers

I Love You Til' I Don't - Numbers

2007-the year of books and travel, part three.

2007-12-11T20:16:00.000+01:00

Wow, I can't believe it's Monday or Tuesday again already. It's time for another book post. Now last week I left off with telling you about how I failed at reading The Tale of Genji. I met my very cool smart cousin for the first time ever right about that time last summer. He's the only one I know who's ever tried reading it, and he stopped because it was "boring". I'm going to ignore that, and carry on with my plans no matter what.

Anyways, before leaving for Romania, I found a free copy of Marina Lewynca's Two Caravans, among the uncorrected proofs we have in the kitchen at work. Usually there's never anything good, but I took a chance with this one because her other book A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian was kind of popular. I think the thought was also to get into the eastern European mood, if there is such a thing. Two Caravans is told from three points of view. One is the young Ukrainian orange revolution girl, then there's the young Ukrainian miner-guy, and lastly, my favorite; Dog. He only talks in caps, and all his chapters start with I AM DOG I RUN. It's great. The story begins in a strawberry field in England, where a bunch of random eastern Europeans and two Chinese girls work for the shady Vulk. The characters, including their various accents are amazing, and the story gets pretty damn exciting towards the end. Such a great book.

By the time I finished it I was already in Romania I think, and that's where I started The Complete Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby that my cousin wanted me to read. This whole series of book posts is very much inspired by the Spree ( as I like to call it ), which is a compilation of 2 years worth of the " Stuff I've been Reading" column(?) he writes for the Believer. Even though I'm not a huge fan of Nick Hornby's novels, I really enjoyed reading about reading like this. It's definitely a book-nerd-book. You'll read it when there's no turning back and you will like it. Next I read True Tales of American Life, edited by Paul Auster. It's some 40 of the best stories from the radio show he did for the NPR, where he asked Americans to send in their true stories, an idea that he credits his wife for. The tales where so amazing, and sad and hilarious. While waiting out a storm by the Black Sea, I read them out loud to my friends, in our dingy little room, by cellphone light when the power went out. Or while slowly passing scorched sunflower fields on the slow train ride back to Bucharest, which took 7 hours because the tracks were dilated from the heat.

And what do you know, speaking of post apocalyptic burnt landscapes, I started reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy right after that one. ( Hey they are making into a movie..) It had been recommended to me by DJ and Oprah, and I couldn't resist buying it. Because the cover was so black and glossy. The story about this father and son who stubbornly refuse to die, in a world where that would by far be the easiest thing to do, really pulled me in. It was like jumping down a black hole every time I opened it. Leaving the noisy, sweaty Bucharest nights for a quiet, evil America where ashes fill the air. Pretty intense huh? It was. That's why it won the Pulitzer Prize.

So I thought I should read something fun and cheery after that, something about music. When I got back to Stockholm I picked out a new free book from the kitchen, called The Boy Who Cried Freebird by Mitch Myers. The first story was really funny, about this guy who always yells Freebird at every show he goes to, because it's his thing. And I thought the other stories would be good too because most of them were about bands I like. But guess what? They were just cool " rock n' roll fables" that Mitch Myers made up! Oh, I forget, some them were true but he won't tell us which ones! This is too crazy for me. Slowly I began to understand why the introduction was sort of defensive...he ends it with saying that his book asks the musical question " Do You Believe in Magic?", and if you do, his stories will speak to you. I guess Magic didn't free this young girl's heart, but maybe that's because I'm a child of the 80's and not of the 70's, I want the facts. ( I do like that song though. I'm not made of stone, jeez....)

Enraged by this complete nonsense ( I might be exaggerating, but if you believe in magic you'll enjoy it), I got the most reliable, down to earth book I could find, Woody Guthrie's autobiography Bound for Glory. And after I got into the colloquial southern way they talk in that book, which took a few pages, I really loved it. Woody Guthrie led an incredible life, and reading about it made me realize that autobiographies are something else entirely. It's just a completely different kind of reading, because you learn so much from them if they are as good like this one.

Johnny Cash- Further On Up The Road

2007-the year of books and travel, part two.

2007-12-03T22:52:00.000+01:00

Well, a week has almost passed so it's time for another book post. Last time I left off by rambling about Michael Chabon and how great he is. There's more of that coming up.

Summer started. And my friend Hedvig brought some of us along to her family's cabin on the most tick-infested island in the Stockholm archipelago. There the ticks attacked us, they crawled all over our bodies and sucked our blood, both in reality and in our minds. We all read a lot there ( all my friends are nerds Mazur). My book was The Best American Non-Required Reading 2006. It made me feel hip and with it. There was a lot of random stuff in there, like 'The best American New Band Names', (and I'm glad to inform you all that yes, God Damn Doo Wop Band was among them.) It really was a great mix, it was quite a luxury to be able to read The Iraqi Constitution, part of the script for Me You and Everyone We Know, Naguib Mahfouz, Haruki Murakami and ' Here is a lesson in Creative Writing' by Kurt Vonnegut all in the same book. Good job Americans! But hey...wait a second. Maybe I'm just a crazy racist, but aren't Mr. Mahfouz and Mr. Murakami...not American....per se? Actually Murakami probably lives in California, but Mahfouz doesn't. I saw his house in Cairo. People told me he lives there and that he's really really old.

So, whilst reading this, I left the Swedish island, with the cold water and the ticks for another island with palm trees and beaches. And really strange pornographic souvenirs. Banana-figurines making sweet love in the shade of colorful inflatable sharks and reindeer. I read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut ( for the first time) by the perfect pool or at the beach. Every time I glanced up I saw hundreds of bodies all different shades of brown and red and pink. I loved the book more than I had expected, and I appreciated the strangeness of reading about the bombings in Dresden and Billy Pilgrim's time-travel in a place like the Canary Islands. It gave me a good perspective on life or something.

On my way back to Sweden I was reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the book Michael Chabon won the Pulitzer prize for back in 2001( I think). Even though the language wasn't, in my opinion, quite as good as in the Yiddish... it was a wonderful book about two cousins who create a comic book superhero called the Escapist ( originally it was a Golem) that fights Hitler during WWII. And I think that those three days I spent only reading this book when I got back were the best reading-days of my life. I mean it. I only read and ate sandwiches. And listened to some strange radio program that only plays very old blues all through the bright Swedish summer night. Good times.(I wish I could go back, because now it's the other way around. Imagine constant darkness, illuminated by pathetic Christmas lights here and there.) After that book, I really should have taken a break, but no, I started reading Adrift on the Nile by Naguib Mahfouz. I really liked his short story that I read earlier, so I was pretty pumped. But this book was pretty much only about some Cairo-intellectuals who smoke pot on a houseboat. I liked it at first, but just like with real pot, it can become boring or annoying after a while. So I stopped reading it, and I hate giving up like that but I just wasn't getting anywhere. I'm definitely going to try reading something else by him, he is, after all, a Noble Prize Winner, and I have seen his house. So after that disaster, I went straight back to Michael Chabon and read Wonderboys. I liked it OK. Everybody except me has seen the movie with Michael Douglas so I won't bother telling you the plot. (Should I see the movie? Or is it stupid?)

Next up, wow, the biggest failure of the year. I'm almost ashamed to talk about this, but I started A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf...and didn't finish it. Because I'm a bad woman. It's not even that I didn't like it, I just sort of put it on hold until I had time to read it in one sitting. For some reason that seemed important. And I still haven't read it. Somewhere around this time I also found The Tale of Genji staring back at me from one of the shelves at the bookstore where I work. 1100 something pages, coincidently also written back in 1100 something something. They say it's the first real novel, but there is a big debate going on so we can't be sure. It was a challenge, probably the biggest challenge I would ever have to face. So you know, I bought it. I started it. I bragged about reading it. But then I stopped because it was really heavy and it hurt to read it in bed. I swear that I will read it before I die though. I swear on the Tale of Genji itself.

Bad Luck Dice- Clifford Gibson

Lose Big- Eef Barzelay

2007-the year of books and travel, part one.

2007-11-27T16:38:00.001+01:00

I decided to write a series of posts about the books I’ve read this year because many of them have been truly wonderful, some not so much, and also occasionally there’s no one to blame but me. Because I’m lazy and don’t always have patience with even the greatest of books.

So I started out by reading What is the What by my long time favorite Dave Eggers. I even reviewed it here, so I’m not going to say much about it now, except that it gave me a good start. The tears on my cheeks had barely dried before I bravely jumped right into the Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, a book Ohmygodimmike had given me the previous summer. I had gone back to Sweden with almost no intention of ever reading it, knowing full well that books like that ( sad ones) are not for me, the one who cried for 2 days after seeing the movie Monster. I’m glad I read it though, because it was as great as my dear angry friend said, and it might sound stupid, but it also really made me want to fly kites. I read that book in February and I made great kite-flying plans. I even consulted several kite construction books, but sadly, I have not yet gotten around to it, and it’s November already.

The History of Love came next, which was a beautiful epic story of a couple torn apart in Europe during WWII, a long lost book and many other things. I decided to try and read something more cheery after that one though. So before I left for Cairo I started reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow, which DJ had given to me for Chrismukkah. Now that's a book that I would never think to buy for myself, even though the title is pretty catchy. And the book was catchy too, ”catchy sci-fi” I’ll call it. I guess I never actually cared how the big future war among the various attractions and rides at Disney World went, but I did love a lot of the ideas and future gadgets. Not having read much science fiction I’m still very easily impressed by people’s abilities to call each other up with their brain...chips and talking by subvocalizing and stuff like that. I know that that particular example isn’t very extravagant, but I just really wish I could do that so that’s why I remembered it. I even told my friends about it, and they... were not very excited. In Cairo, my friends and I all got a book called Cairo- City of Sand by Maria Gulia, published by the American University in Egypt. If you ever go there, and you want to learn something about the city’s history, politics, peoples, customs, swears, sayings and jokes you need to read this book. Because it’s a real ( well written) book and not some obnoxious guide.

When I got back I was really excited to see that Jonathan Lethem had come out with a new book, and it was called You don’t Love Me Yet, named after the 13th Floor Elevator song. I had very big expectations to say the least, especially since the Fortress of Solitude is one of my all-time favorite books. But, sadly, Jonathan Lethem let me down this time. And it hurts me to say it, but he must never write books from a female bassist’s perspective even again. Because things can go very very wrong, like for instance saying ” she made love like she played the bass”. That’s just silly. But I still have faith, and I believe that his next book is going to be excellent, with no more fooling around with LA and bands.

Next I read a Swedish book called Feberboken ( The Fever Book) by Stina Aronson, mostly to prove my friends wrong about me never reading Swedish books. It was about a woman who writes love letters to this married man (that she’s having an affair with) who is enjoying life in Paris while she was doing nothing in Sweden. I think. Even though it had a good ending I was glad to get the hell out of her head and start The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami. After I read Kafka on the Shore a year before ( what a rhyme!) , I didn’t know what to make of him. Did I love it? Was Murakami annoying? I was very confused. But after reading The Elephant Vanishes which is a collection of short stories I realized that that’s exactly what he’s great at, the short stories.

What happend next was greatness. It was spring. And I started The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. I can barely believe how much I loved that book. It seams childish almost. It’s like that book is Jason or Mark Owen from Take That, and I’m 11. I rarely read noir-type detective murder mysteries, and it's a pity really, because they're a lot of fun. This was so much more though, because of the unique place he created for the world's Jewish population in Alaska, because of the brilliant characters and the wonderful language. Seriously, it was so great. And that’s how I got obsessed with reading everything by Michael Chabon...

The Book I Read- Talking Heads

Borscht Riders in the Sky- Mickey Katz

Why I Don't Love Radiohead and also, Hyenas and Spam Fiction

2007-11-26T12:45:00.001+01:00

Whats that? you say, You don't love Radiohead?

No, no I don't.

Why is that? you say, How can you not love the greatest musical artists of the 20th and 21st centuries?

Okay, okay, well, if you insist I'll break it down.

First of all, the difference here between the words like and love is key. I don't hate the band.

To me really really great music isn't about impeccable craftsmanship, or an unassailable atmosphere of cool. If you want that, you can listen to Radiohead. You can also listen to Avril Lavine, 50 Cent, Britney Spears, Coldplay, Justin Timberlake, etc, etc, etc.

I like the music produced by all of them, I just don't love it. There is a point, I think, that excessive slickness and polish cannot carry music to. There is a point when a certain element of give and take is obliterated by too much attention to the stance being taken.

Thats not to say I look down upon the perfectionism that whoever ultimately writes these songs has. It's only that my appreciation of these is more on the level of aesthetic or that of craftsmanship, than on the level of really human.

I think we need music like this as sort of guideposts or light houses to remind us of where we are. They're the colossi and mountains that we use to ground ourselves, whether we reject them or embrace them. But we, the humans, are not mountains. And to me music isn't about being something larger than what we are. To me music is about being exactly what we are, even if it is showing that we are in fact larger than we seem at first glance. Listening to their last few years of music I don't really know anything about Radiohead except that they're really super duper ultra mega cool, and to me thats not enough.

Anyways, thats about all I can really say about it. If I do change my mind about the band I'll let you know.

***
Speaking of super duper ultra mega cool, these photos and others by Pieter Hugo are close.

***

For maybe one month some spam was getting though my filters on gmail. I think they updated their programs because it stopped happening. I saved a few of those that got through because I thought like I think a lot of people out there think; that the text those spam bots churn out is actually weirdly fascinating. Maybe it's like those big contraptions that make robot art. Can advertisers and scam artists be actual artists?

Today I came across a block of spam text that I had pasted to a notepad on my laptop. After a little googling I found a lot of spam, this site, and that the text was at least mostly ripped out of Harry Harrison's pulp science fiction action stories. Apparently the guys who work these spam engines use a ton of excepts from his books to try and crack though filters.

I guess some asshole out there is a Harry Harrison fan.

Below is Harry Harrison and below that is the text in question:

"...combat, why none of us would be here. Thanks guys. Mission complete bloke one of you what takes me to your boss, Svinjar. Guy what does I just changed the rules. You yourself told me that you are heading take the cretinous colonel or the sadistic sergeant with me. Sure. Fetch. rich and sexy contralto. a bit of fruit juice. The science building was empty when the Floyds help. And stopped. shook his head in a silent no. I did the same. regardless, threat of death or no threat of death. I trotted behind Narcoses, clutching the papers and trying to think I feel sorry for the dog, Floyd said. We both looked at Steengo who face of my inquisitor was touched by a fleeting cold smile. it in some depth. What do you say we all put the weapons down and have then lowered it all down the chimney. Reaching down as far as I could Founder, whose name may not be spoken, who had the inspiration to read"

Discovered Uncovered #3 (Nirvana-rama)

2007-11-21T21:00:00.001+01:00

I started writing this post two days before Halloween, and I thought to myself "wow, I may actually post something relevant for once." And then I didn't touch it for almost a month. Granted, there were many things to be done in the city of Taipei, including finishing the process of becoming a legal alien resident, and buying things like cheese graters and mini plastic palm trees for my apartment. Basically I'm groping for an excuse for calling this a Halloween themed post. But I have none. Fuck it; here's the super-spooky edition of Transmissions From Wintermute's Discovered Uncovered. Sorry...

Molly's Lips - Nirvana

Ain't it a Shame - Nirvana

Here She Comes Now - Nirvana

Heartbreaker (Live) - Nirvana

The above covers are of songs by The Vaselines, Lead Belly (most famously), The Velvet Underground, and Led Zeppelin, respectively.

I will always love Nirvana. They changed my brain in high school. Sorry to be such a cliche, but I have never gotten their sound out of my bones.

So much of their b side material, as well as all the live and unreleased stuff floating around the intra-net, and recently released on With The Lights Out, is covers. I always found this slightly odd because of their general standing as a band with a very distinct style and a seminal place of importance in rock history. Probably not that strange though with Cobain's acclectic musical taste and appetite. Nirvana was certainly always first to claim, even broadcast, their influences and idols, usually downgrading their own uniqueness. However, whenever they covered anything, it instantly became their style, just drenched in their personality and the sound of the early 90s. I kinda think this was Nirvana's power in general, the ability to absorb and synthesize so many of the rock, punk, and pop breakthroughs (or breakdowns) of the late 80s-early 90s, along with Cobain's personal imagination and outlook. They took all this amazing noise happening around (and before) them, and turned it into this loud, full, coherant sound. It was challenging and personal yet widely appealing.

Anyway, it's pretty fucking hard (I said "fucking" to sound more "punk") to find a bad Nirvana cover. At the top are four of the best I've come across. The Lead Belly cover was done as the grunge supergroup, The Jury (consisting of Kurt Cobain on vocals, Krist Novoselic on bass and backing vocals, and the Screaming Trees' Mark Lanegan on guitar and Mark Pickerel on drums). According to wikipedia, it was done as part of a planned Lead Belly tribute album which was never finished. Also, the VU cover isn't the rockin' version they did as a Sub Pop split with The Fluid, but is rather an acoustic version I found online. If anyone out there in blogland has any idea where it's from, please hook it up in the comments.

Sub Pop has a way cool site with a bunch of original Nirvana press photos and one sheets from their Bleach days, as well as a really comprehensive discography. Here is how they described Nirvana back then:

NIRVANA sounds like mid-tempo
Black Sabbath playing the knack,
Black Flag, the Stooges, and a
pinch of the- Bay City Rollers.
Their personal musical influences
include H. R. Puffnstuff, Speed
Racer, divorces, drugs, sound
effects records, the Beatles,
rednecks, hard rock, punk rock,
Leadbelly, Slayer, and, of course,
the Stooges.

And if for some reason you're still reading, here's an old and unidentified film of them playing Seasons in the Sun, (Made Famous by Terry Jacks).

Hope you enjoyed the tardyness.

Happy late Canadian Thanksgiving!

Skrivena Kamera Banka

2007-11-11T09:28:00.000+01:00

Pitchfork's most recent Guest List went to Thurston Moore. In the slot ">> Favorite Song Ever," he mentioned a few contenders, and that most people will say the most important songs to them come from their youth. A song that makes an early impression on someone has a bigger impact than one that comes later in life. On of the songs that Thurston mentioned from his own early years was Patti Smith's Godspeed. He says "they were recording at Electric Ladyland one night, they started improvising and she has these words that she sings on top of this improvistation...It was a really sort of odd and unorthodox b-side for this hit single." It's a really elusive song I think. "Love is a vampire/energy of the dead"? I know it's a little cliche to say this, but I'm pretty sure she was trashed when they played this one. You notice the looseness and the slow burn of the song and it makes perfect sense that Thurston would choose it. When I think of Sonic Youth's sound, like most punk-era bands, I think of a sound that is basically totally original. Nobody sounded like the Ramones, or Television, or The Psychedelic Furs until those bands actually came along. Here though, I think you can actually hear some DNA ancestor of the "Sonic Youth Sound," especially their more recent stuff a la Rather Ripped, tucked away somewhere between the guitar riffs.

Patti Smith Group - Godspeed

Sometimes I wonder if the only reason I listen to so much world music is some stupid exoticism that my liberal mind imposes on any third-world peoples. Sometimes I don't like music, yes I can admit that. I think that it's a really good exercise to try and find some redeeming humanity in any song, but at the same time you're entitled to not like something. ie. I know Radiohead is good, I can hear it, but I'm still entitled to think Thom Yorke is a pretentious, whiny rat bastard. So when I do find something good, like this Yugoslavian garage-punk band Zabranjeno Pušenje, the No-Smoking Orchestra, it makes me realize that there exist things in the world that are totally awesome in their own right although you would never have heard of them because of the cultural and geographical barriers that exist around all of us. They classify themselves as New Primitives, not punk, because they are anti-West. But really what could be more punk than being anti-West? Here is my favorite song of theirs, and also a youtube clip of the popular communist tv show, Top Lista Nadrealista, which the band wrote and starred in during the '80s and early '90s

Zabranjeno Pušenje - Srce Ruke Lopata

whatever

2007-11-03T03:08:00.000+01:00

In other news, it's snowing.

Stephen Malkmus- I love to turn you on

Interview with Lars Hedelin

2007-10-25T09:31:00.001+01:00

Up next in our interview-series, we talked to my good friend and very talented artist Lars about drummers vs. drum machines, seducing Adolf Hitler and art.

-How and when do you get ideas for your films? What would normally trigger the brilliant madness? ( Or are you always brilliantly mad?)

Oh boy. I usually get an idea for one thing when working on something else. But then I'm wrapped up in this one year project and can't get to work on it right then and later it has morphed into something else. My ideas are always ruined by time and my imagination. I also get ideas from reading books and watching films. And I also steal other people's ideas. And one more thing: I object to the term brilliant madness because it strengthens a dangerous and boring stereotype, That one which depicts the artist as an outcast, and conveys the image of someone whose creativity is a result of this unwillingness to cope with society, or mental illness or whatever. [ You're so right, my bad - ED]

-From what I hear, it's the quiet ones who always end up being psychopathic killers. Is that why Americans as a people are so peaceful while Swedes are so violent? Please elaborate.

So, like, maybe Americans and Swedes have different outputs for their rage. Maybe Swedish people get into fights after soccer games (From what I hear there aren't many baseball or football hooligans in the US but I can be misinformed) while Americans go into war with different countries in the middle east. Also I think Swedish people have found a way to blow off steam through watching American action movies, while you sensitive Americans are mostly into French new wave cinema.

-If you had to choose between the Netherlands and Florida being submerged in water because of global warming which one would you rather see go?

Well, I guess it depends if you're more into oranges or pot. Me I could never choose. Next question please.

-If I remember correctly you play drums. Who is the sweetest drum player ever in the history of the whole wide world? Will there ever be peace between drummers and drum machines??! Could some unholy union in a drummer-drum machine cyborg finally create the peace in this god forsaken war????!!

I have a good friend named Danny who is a really good drummer. Also the drummer in Deerhoof, and Jimi Hendrix's drummer. I think the only solution to the drummer-drum machine conflict is two separate states. Also America has to stop supplying the drummers with weapons and play a more active role in getting the two sides to the negotiation table.

-Which historical figure would you most want to make out with? Optional follow up: "What line would you use to seal the deal?

Adolf Hitler. I'd just ask him to feel the Arian bump at the back of my head. No national socialist has ever been able to turn me down after witnessing the grandeur of that great swelling.

-Which city do you like best, Umeå or Stockholm? Please elaborate, unless it's Stockholm.

Ah, Florida vs Holland, Drummers vs Drum machines, inåtnavel or utåtnavel, Umeå or Stockholm. Stockholm is the place where I've tried to build a life for myself for twenty years, but my girlfriend lives in Umeå. Maybe if she moved to Ulan Bator I would like it there better. But Umeå also has fabulous Marta so I have to go with Umeå.

-It's your birthday and you have a magical dinner party, to which you can invite 3 nonfictional people, living or dead. The catch; at the end of the night you have to stab one of them in the heart with a steak knife. Who are your choices. Please elaborate.

I would invite Elisabeth II, Princess Diana and Prince Charles. I would use all my skill and cunning to maneuver them in such a way that at the end of the evening The Queen and the princess would turn against Charles and they would in a joint venture stab him together. The Queen and her stepdaughter would then get undressed and make out on the table, all smeared in blood and food, while I sit in my chair quietly observing.

Lars Hedelin studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Umeå. Make sure to check out his movies and the rest of his webpage. Here's a incredibly sexy France Galle-video that Lars picked out for us. Enjoy!

Hey ya'll (World mix tape volume whatever/Song's I found on the street)

2007-10-18T00:29:00.000+01:00

I'm glad to be back, this is literally the first time I've seen a computer with an internet connection in 3 months. The lab that I was working at in antarctica was recently destroyed by a bunch of mad norwegians that for some reason were trying to shoot a dog from a helicopter and then crashed into our satelite dish disrupting most communication with the civilized world.

I have to say that was a rough 3 months. Being the lab bitch in Antarctica is the worst gig ever, other than when I had to paint crosswalks for that summer and got hit by a mopeder who was carrying a bladder of red wine. The terrifying shock of extreme isolation and frigid antarctic winds that pierced through my whale blubber came close though. The rest isn't all that interesting, it just involved mutant wolf breeds and saving polar bears form extinction... temporarily.

This however is not an excuse and I know nothing can repair the bridges I've burned from my 3 month or so absence from this blog. But I'm back now and the autumn weather is fine in comparison, and on my first day back I found a crate of cd's my next door neighbor was apparently throwing to the curb. As much as he is an idiot for throwing away these cd's he does have good taste in music.

Here are some tracks

Lo' Jo + Django - Jah Kas Cool Boy
After dropping my Ipod in the snow my second day in Antarctica I was in such music withdrawal that listening to this song made me cry so hard I couldn't breath. This band lives in a tribal community in western France known as the Loire region, they live among "poets, acrobats, artists and circus performers." They helped organize the Festival in the Desert in the Sahara with Tinariwen which is where this track was recorded.

Dj Dolores Y Orchestra Santa Massa - A Danca da Moda
This guy is from Brazil and mixes local music to make beats heard in dance clubs around the world.

Fat Freddy's Drop - Hope
From New Zealand, reggea style can be attributed to DJ Fitchie. Vocalist is Dallas Tamaira (aka Joe Dukie)

Sorry to kill the Rockies fire Mazur. I'm a believer now though. Go Rockies!!!

unReal

2007-10-16T16:27:00.000+01:00

The Rockies are going to the World Series for the first time ever, and I am a dirty stinking traitor.

We (that is, the half of this blog that thinks baseball is totally sweet) try to abstain from posting about baseball on this blog (because it annoys the half of this bog that thinks baseball is totally stupid), but I must say something about the Colorado Rockies and myself. To begin, I am a Brewers fan, because I am a Wisconsinite. They are my favorite baseball team. However, the Rockies were the first team I got really into by myself. I learned their line-up, watched them regularly, went to games, and even wore a hat, all without any parental influence or social pressure. In fact I got made fun of for doing so. Now here's the part where I'm a dirty traitor. When I graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder almost one year ago, I moved back to Madison, Wisconsin, and went back to being primarily a Brewers fan. Other than regularly checking the Rockies' place in the standings, I pretty much stopped paying attention. Because I am a geographic whore. Now here's the part where I am a dirty stinking traitor. When I moved to Taipei, Taiwan, two months ago, I completely wrote off the Rockies like most of the country, and lazily followed the Brewers as they died just two games shy of the post season. I then learned that since the Mets had self-destructed, and the Rockies had beat the Padres in a regular season playoff game, they and the Phillies were now in the playoffs. I guiltily jumped back on the bandwagon because I am a dirty stinking whore. This of course means that I am not a true fan anymore and obviously have no claim to any sort of celebratory satisfaction. I can only watch in shame from afar. I can however say this, which is why I wrote this post:

Fuck yeah. Go Rockies.

2007-10-13T17:38:00.001+01:00

Well, it's fall now, and I don't have much to say. I've started making little drawings again, which is something I enjoy. For some reason all the birds I've been drawing quote Richard P. Feynman. ( Yeah, I read one of his books. And yeah, I feel pretty good about myself now. Let me have this. )

Here are some songs:

Angela ( theme from Taxi) - Bob James

I can't remember if I've posted this one before. This song is so nice. One time when I was flying home from Chicago they showed an episode of Taxi, when the sun was setting and I thought life was kind of perfect.

Opfer Dieses Liedes- Les Reines Prochaines

This is another song from the fantastic mixed CD I got for my birthday. This Wicked Game-cover is something else. I'm telling you. It's great. And whenever I listen to it I think some weird girl is singing in another room, it seriously gets me every time. Oh yeah, I'm dedicating this song to ohmygodimmike, because it truly is a wicked game he's playing with the hearts of our dear readers. They are people with feelings too ohmygodimmike, and they miss your posts.

Geek.kon Thoughts

2007-10-09T01:23:00.000+01:00

This weekend I went to Geek.kon here in Madison. I came to a little better understanding of what it means to be a geek, what geek culture means in today's social climate and also, who my real friends are.
With me was my friend from local death metal giants Burial Of an Era, David, who was the only person secure enough in their own awesomeness (and rightly so) to go with me.
We didn't go to many of the events to be honest. We started out with a screening of the MST3K episode "Jack Frost." The story was something about Russian, Norwegian wizards and the sins of pride and purity of spirit. My favorite quote was "I gotta go throw a cudgel." Baba Yaga and her chicken-legged hut made an on screen appearance. So that was sweet.
Afterwards we looked at some artist displays (mostly anime), wandered through the tabletop gaming room, and the vendors. I tried to pre-order the Jonathan Lethem penned issue of Omega The Unknown out this week, but the comic people got stuck in Milwaukee because of car trouble.
Last we went to a 2 hour lecture on Japanese music, which David had to leave after about 15 minutes and which really only covered the mainest of the mainstream. I do understand why David left, although my threshold for annoying personality traits is much much higher than his (which is to say they weren't actually very annoying). They started off with a quick dismissal of most traditional music, especially Enka. I would say the equivalent to this one axing would be to throw out Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday as "old people's music." All ranting aside, I did learn a lot. I'm glad I stayed through the whole thing and it really was a very unique learning experience. I would say the best band I heard, hands down, was The Pillows. I couldn't find any mp3s for you online, but there is this awesomely grungy music video of Hybrid Rainbow on youtube:

The second day I went alone for the panel by local semi to famous SF/F writers Joan D. Vinge, Sarah Monette, and Patrick Rothfuss (and also Vinge's husband and editor for Tor Books, Jim Frenkel.) This part was of course the highlight of the con. I'm not sure why but I just get all warm and fuzzy inside when I hear spec fic writer's talk. They really didn't talk about anything out of the ordinary. They talked about success, both from the editor's and the writer's points of view. Monette and Rothfus talked about their recent climbs to market visibility. They answered a few questions and then before I knew it we were being kicked out of the room. Being the only panel by actual writers I really wish they had been given at least a 2 hour block, but oh well. What can be done aside from angry suggestion box confetti?
Now, in talking about events I have left out the biggest detail, which was the costumes.
There was a little boy dressed up as a giant robot. Almost everyone else was an anime character. I really wish I had brought a camera for you, Constant Reader. Maybe next year you should get off you lazy ass and go yourself.

2653: The Year In Review

2007-09-28T17:31:00.000+01:00

The following excerpt was originally published in Growth And Prosperity in the Modern Age with Howliday Publishing inc. I have decided to reprint it here based on it's seemingly insightful observations which we all know were completely unfounded with the light of hindsight.

The year 2653 was an uncharacteristically innovative one compared with the basically boring output of 2652. Maybe we just had to find our own niche to set ourselves apart from the roaring '40s. We needed some breathing room to reinvent that iconic decade's impact on the greater Magellanic Clouds or at least absorb and digest all that had changed and happened. For me, the early '50s were most of all characterized by a mourning of the end of a very special era. An era that we can be proud to say that we had taken part in and will look back on in the coming years with love, and nostalgia.

But the time of mourning has passed. Making headway in this burgeoning scene of new-anti-genres and pro-anti-neo-genres were such ambitious newcomers like People w/Problems, The Dumbest Luck, and So So So. Not only were these three visionary in their output, but signify a certain shifting of the guards. Spawning a bumper crop of imitators, we can see, easily, that these two groups and a collective will have an indispensable influence on the landscape of music in the years to come. I for one, welcome our nanite leaders in this exciting new age. . .

. . .first and foremost of course, are Pw/P. Unabashedly influenced by Gamma Sigmotron The Last Human Band (not to be confused with Sigmoidal Gamblon), Pw/P more than anyone else this year, signified the birth of something new. It was not a derivative sound, it was an homage. At times it could be said that their approach was a general critique of all the 8-bit knockoffs that surfaced at GStLHB's peak, adding all the more irony to Pw/P's imitators. The approach of uploading themselves into planet bound containers and making music the same way as the humans of GStLHB, while the bodies slowly died as caustic atmospheric gases ate away at their fragile bodies, seems like a gimmick at first, but then you hear how it sounds. Theres something to be said for the loving adherence to the tropes of an old fashioned style which we had all thought could never have another relevant reinvention. I for one, only listened to 22nd century music for a long, long time after getting into Pw/P. Their second album was unleashed upon the public at the tail end of the year, still only several kiloseconds ago as I write this now. The eponymous album, a single 16 hour project cataloging and slowly reminning the dying cries of sentient supernovae, is oddly in sync with their other effort. Yes, this is a collective to look out for, lest they eat the diamond that your soul is stored on, and we may never look at the planets, or the stars, the same ever again.

World Mix Tape Volume VII (Songs from Taiwan)

2007-09-18T08:27:00.000+01:00

This post contains no music whatsoever from Taiwan.

Also, this photo (compliments of AJ Kuech) is of the really big buildings in Hong Kong, instead of the really big buildings in Taipei, because I don't have any good ones yet.

The Mustangs

Ace - Miami

Anyway, the days of this site being a geographically lopsided diode are over, because I (Mazur) have moved to Taipei. This in part explains the lag in posts recently, because the intra-net here wont let me upload songs (endless thanks to Laz for uploading them for me). Additional downtime was due to, as Laz commented on, her being in Romania, OMGIMike losing his blogger password, and DJ getting something in his eye which hurt real bad. Real bad.

Anyway, since this is my first post from across the Pacific, another installment in the ohmygodimmike World Mix Tape (I, II, III, IV, V, VI) seemed fitting. As resident jet-setter (and Romaniac moonlighter) Laz pointed out in her installment to this worldly collection, world music "according to Wikipedia, has to be non-western, or non western-influenced" which she then states is "pretty hard to come by these days." Our mix tape, which consists heavily of alt or experimental rock, (often from western, sometimes even *gasp* North American countries), like Canada's Black Mountain, Italy's now defunct Dada Swing and Australia's Howling Bells, definetly fails in that respect. So perhaps it would be better to call this an International Mix Tape, or maybe I should just shut the fuck up. Either way, I hope this helps continue our pirate captian DJ's stated goal for this "project" of "only posting songs falling into the rigid category of those made in this one world" and "changing people's hippified perception of world music (ie. not just african drum circles and sitar music)." Although, sitars are, of course, totally sweet.

Anyway, here's some info about the bands posted up top:

The Mustangs were traditionally a noise-rock band from Seoul, South Korea, but their new album (which the above track is off of) finds them drifting into stripped down drone rock territory. HERE's a video of them playing at a club in Hongdae, Seoul.

Next, Miami consists of two women (Ai Kajiya and Ai Kobayashi) from Toyko who play violins and laptops, as well as some other various samplers. And they totally rule. This track is off their recent EP, Great Composers.

And now the sad sad news; wonderful Italian yes-wave band Dada Swing have broken up. Hopefully it's just a sick joke. But probably not. In honor of the twitchy greatness that was, HERE's a link to some sweet free Dada Swing downloads, which again I can't post due to my Taiwan intra-net woes.

Fine.

2007-09-04T21:30:00.000+01:00

Well, I just got back from Romania. And already I'm posting about it. Because I love our readers. I hadn't been there in 8 long years and it was good to feel the Romanian soil under my feet once again. I wasn't alone though, I was accompanied on this journey back to my roots and into my very soul, if you will, by some of my best friends. We traveled the country together and we had a great time.

The top picture of the cool bananas is from Costinesti, the Romanian Ibiza, by the Black Sea. This mural painting from the Club Banana ( or whatever ) was gracing that wall last time I was there13 years ago . Being eleven at the time I thought it was pretty darn cool, and I was really happy to find it right where I left it. A lot of things were like that in Costinesti, it's like the whole city is stuck in the beginning of the 90's. ( This is a theory I also had about Madison WI, but with Madison it's 1996-98 in particular, musically and flannel-wise. ) In Costinesti people had mullets, which I thought was a myth about Eastern Europe. I like mullets though, so that was a pleasent surprize. Another fun observation I actually just made, was that the young party-people of that city are actually pretty similar to those bananas. I don't care to elaborate, you can just let your imagination run free with this one.

In Bucharest we found cooler people and this fun old club called Club A ( my mom has actually been there back in the day. Only there was apparently no dancing back then, only you know, really serious discussions. Of course). That's were the sorry-ass, poor, sweaty, dirty, foul-smelling students hang out. To quote the taxi driver who drove us there. The description made me hopeful, since we had just left Club Max, a place filled with 6-7 dancing brides ( wedding dresses and all), a lot of go-go dancers in cages, gross old men with mobile phone cameras and guys with mullets (again). And really slutty chicks with bad highlights. (Yeah. Take that, scary Romanian girls!). But seeing a bride is considered good luck in Romania, so I'm all set for the next few years after that night. That's pretty cool. Here are some more good luck and bad luck Romanian sayings:

Make a wish:

- First time you eat a fruit you never had before.
- First time you eat a fruit at the beginning of it's season, every year.
- Eyelash, put it inside your shirt.

Good luck:

- Seeing a bride.

Bad luck:

- Whistling inside.
- Whistling inside a car.
- Owning an in any way broken mirror.
- Owning anything broken.
- Pouring water the wrong way. Can't explain that one. Hopefully you're doing it the right way.

At Club A I heard this song about a beautiful gypsy for the first time. Everybody got up and danced in traditional horas ( circles), and sang along super loud. I was singing along too and watching it all when I became really aware of being in the middle of a city where I have so much more to discover.

Inima de Tiganca

The main part translates " Gypsy-girl you are beautiful, my gypsy-girl, I love you and I can never forget you". Enjoy.

2007-08-09T23:12:00.000+01:00

In the world that you and I inhabit, that is reality, or the non-blogosphere as some have called it, there is a band named Black Moth Super Rainbow. You can check the link if you don't believe me. You, reader, also may have already heard them, may be familiar with them, or even may be one of the band members checking up on the non-reality of the blogosphere.

They sound like a combination of Air (who famously scored the Sofia Coppola movie The Virgin Suicides) and the British psychedelic bands of the '60s and '70s. Theres even a little of the freak folk thing going on but by ideology more than actual sounds.

To hear them is to be able to imagine what one of their music videos would be like. A hand held camera POV running through the woods, shaky and jerking. The forests colors altered to a duo-chrome, just sepia and occasinally pink, and black. A few kids play around laughing and crying, faintly reminiscent of the cover of Soul Asylum's Let Your Dim Light Shine. It's very visual music.

In the city inside my head there is a run down movie theater that occasionally plays locally produced short films. The screening going on right now is a 30 minute adaptation of Hawthorne's Rappaccini's Daughter. Giovanni is entering Rappacini's garden for the first time and an extended dream-like sequence begins. As he walks, strange plants brush across his body and through his hands as he clears a path. Every shot is crammed with wildly exotic but plastic flora. Each leaf and stalk richly and laboriously assembled by the aspiring filmmaker. Everything is at once both utterly alien and gratingly commonplace, the epitome of jamais vu. Then you realize it's not just the visual feast that completes the scene, but the strange strange music playing in the background:

Black Moth Super Rainbow - Untitled Roadside Demo

Just Doing Our Job #3

2007-08-07T21:05:00.000+01:00

Went to a great show a couple weeks ago to see Screamin' Cyn Cyn and the Pons, a band I talk about entirely too much on this site. Being the headliners, they picked the openers, and thankfully brought Santa Cruz noise-rock collective, The New Thrill Parade into town for what ended up being one of the best sets I've seen in quite a while. Since I'm still trying to process the oddness I witnessed that night, The New Thrill Parade is the focus of this installment of Transmissions From Wintermute's Just Doing Out Job.

After expressing my love to extremely friendly drummer DeSanto, he gave me a free CD and coloring book and told me it was cool to post Thrill Parade songs on our site. I thanked him for the coloring book, but he doesn't have to thank me for the world wide prestige and impenetrable street cred this post will bring. Why? Because we're just doing our jobs. Off their newest release, 2006's Universal Shame, here are four tracks of brooding, pounding, spazzed out art-rock. Yes. Thank you California.

Buy this ablum or their first EP HERE.

Ululations - The New Thrill Parade

The Ostrich - The New Thrill Parade

Body Ship - The New Thrill Parade

No Flowers - The New Thrill Parade

More tracks available on their SITE and MYSPACE.

Making music that one can sit back and take in as a challenging piece of conceptual and sonic art, or rock out to, beating their fists and thrashing their heads in a sweaty mass on the floor is no small feat. But Thrill Parade walks this line confidently, gracefully side-stepping the usual pitfalls of experimental music. Borrow someone's van and drive out to northern California to check out a show sometime.

And here for good measure is a track by Madison's shoegazers-extrodinaire, The Bracelets, off a Sector Five Records compilation:

Future Be Mine - The Bracelets

Soul Dracula

2007-08-02T14:53:00.000+01:00

I have often wondered who's hotter than Dracula, and now I know. It's Soul Dracula. Of course. Tomorrow I leave for the mother country, beautiful Romania, where the wolves are a-howlin' and so on and so forth. I will try to do some international posting from there, but I promise you nothing my friends. Now listen to this incredible song and pray for me.

Hot Blood- Soul Dracula

Random Post #5

2007-07-21T04:40:00.001+01:00

I Will Survive - Art Brut

Nag Nag Nag Nag - Art Brut

Yes, happy anniversary to us indeed. The pop-cultural cyborg known as Wintermute is now one year old, which I believe is the Oral Stage, so don’t leave anything of value on the floor. It’s been fun, and with your sexy-sexy help, we’ll reach that damn Emerald City. Almost all of us, and several strangers, are in this drunken photo, taken years ago in downtown Madison by a kindly bartender, except for resident genius and general culture critic ohmygodimmike, who is instead shown below, his steely Greek eyes criticizing general culture. As before, and in Laz’s personal OZ (shown with the previous post), correctly link the blogger to the face and win a way cool prize!!! (seriously, we’ll give you something).

So for our first post-anniversary-post post, here’s another installment of our Random series (1, 2, 3, 4), which will have nothing to do with our anniversary, because its RANDOM! Let’s start:

First, in underground movie news, Dan Anderson’s wonderfully absurd and disgustingly eccentric Bearded Child Film Festival is gearing up for its 7th year and is now opened for submissions. All details HERE. This Michigan based fest, which features the best in underground, avant-garde and outsider cinema, was truly one of the most disturbing and deeply satisfying evenings of film I have ever stumbled through. And without it, I would never have seen Amy Lockhart’s Mrs. Edmonton Teenburger 1983 in: It’s Party Time!, the greatest movie ever made. Check it out America. Here’s more info:

www.beardedchild.com

Bearded Child Film Festival
Myles Reif Performing Arts Center
Grand Rapids, Minnesota

Mailing address:
BC Film Fest c/o Dan Anderson
612 1st Ave. NW
Grand Rapids, MN 55744

Festival: August 17-18
Deadline: Aug. 1

Next, HE RE (streamable) and abo ve (downloadable), are some tracks from the new Art Brut album, It’s a Bit Complicated. This adorable and essentially air tight little rock album pretty much represents my hope for the future of rock n’ roll. Yeah England(!) Their sophomore effort finds the surprised rockstars expanding musically (if not conceptually) while still sticking to their core sound of simple kick ass garage cock-rock, with lyrics that express an openly sincere if snippy observational charm. Eddie Argos’ biting prose have shifted perspectives from that of a young lovable malcontent, to those of a lovable malcontent who somehow found himself on the Top of the Pops, and continue to drip with a mix of tounge-and-cheek bemusement and outright desperation. No one does ironic sincerity like the Brits. European Tour NOW, U.S. Tour in Augest.

Lastly, I was going to post an E.E. Cummings poem about youth, but DJ took back the book I was borrowing, so instead, here’s one by Raymond Carver for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

Threat

Today a woman signaled me in Hebrew.
Then she pulled out her hair, swallowed it
and disappeared. When I returned home,
shaken, three carts stood by the door with
fingernails showing through the sacks of grain.

Dear Transmissions, Happy Blogoversary.

2007-07-17T23:34:00.000+01:00

A lot has happened since we started our fantastic Transmissions, a whole year ago. Good things, bad things, becoming world-famous. Let's celebrate with some songs. I'm going to start off with one of my favorite covers of all time which I recently discovered at the House my friends are renting by a lake in the middle of nowhere. Among the books, furniture and records we got after a doctor who recently passed away, I found a great Eartha Kitt record, The Sentimental Eartha Kitt. It took me a few seconds to recognize this Donovan song, but once I did I loved it even more.

Eartha Kitt- Wear Your Love like Heaven

There's a guitar in there that bends the notes so sweetly I go into a musical coma every time I hear this song.

Michael Polnareff- Love Me Please Love Me

France Gall- Laisse Tomber les Filles

Two songs from a great mix CD that I got for my fake birthday last weekend. Thanks Gabriel!

An Interview with CRM

2007-07-06T04:16:00.001+01:00

Transmissions From Wintermute’s Grant Miller inspired Interview Series continues this week with Zestfully Clean’s own CRM (a.k.a. Radial Radish). Using a recent plug for his strangely unnerving blog as bait, I was able to score a rare interview with this postmodern cynic and armchair doom sayer. Writing from an internet cafe in Berlin, CRM discusses his love for beef and Franz Kafka, as well as his plans to stab me in the heart with a steak knife.

CRM’s only stipulation in granting me this interview, however, was that I post the hot new single by Denver’s underground MC, Boabeide (bow-bay-da). However, due to technological issues, I am unable, but will instead post Boebeide’s 2nd-to-newest single. And, I’ll go even further and include this wonderful little piece of homoerotic gangsta absurdity by I Be Ill, Boabeide’s original group. And, due to our mutual love for Gene and Dean, and to help flesh out the homoeroticism of this preface, some Ween for good measure. Enjoy!

As always, if anyone out there would like to be interviewed by us, just say so in the comments.
(Thanks to A-Bomba for the picture of Kafka wearing a sweet hat).

Song One - Boabeide

Work That Heat - I Be Ill

The Homo Rainbow - Ween

Who are you and what do you want?

I am Chell and I just want to Dance! Actually, that's not true, I do like to dance, but I want lots of other stuff too. For example, right now, I want to take a shower.

What kind of animal would you most want to kill and eat with your bare hands, and why?

The answer is obviously a cow. I want to raise it too, love it, etc., and then kill it and eat it. It would be hard to kill a cow with my bare hands, so I would have to rely on the trust that I'd have built between us, and then go for the throat unexpectedly.

If your brain were put into a robotic body of your own design, what would be your main robot power? (Optional follow up, what would be your favorite robot food?)

Robots don't eat asshole. But to answer your question: upgrade-able parts. I'm actually pretty sure this is going to happen, I've given it a lot of thought, and it is pretty much the only explanation for the fact I'll never die (unless, of course, I commit robot suicide).
[Robots DO eat jerk - ED]

Do you like being an American?
You know I do, it's just other Americans I don't like being.

It's your birthday and you have a magical dinner party, to which you can invite 3 nonfictional people, living or dead. The catch; at the end of the night you have to stab one of them in the heart with a steak knife. Who are your choices. Please elaborate.

OK, first off it's not magical, it's also not my birthday, rather it is just a dinner party like any other, and I'd invite you, Bao Bei Da, and probably Kafka just for shits. I would not kill Kafka (he probably won't really be there when this happens).

Rather morbid questions, readers will think I'm violent. I'm not. I do like cow, and I am going to kill either you or Bao Bei Da at a dinner party sometime. If you put any music with this post, put Bao Bei Da's 'tragically hip' (it's new).

Modest Americans

2007-07-04T14:43:00.002+01:00

BJ Snowden- America

King of Some World You Never Heard Of

2007-06-27T15:04:00.000+01:00

I remember Kermit from the TV show Muppet Babies I watched in a block of Saturday morning cartoon shows on when I was maybe 8 years old. Other people might remember him from earlier. I also vaguely remember him replacing the MGM lion in movie intros, I may have made that up though.
The '90s gave us Nirvana, Pavement, Weezer, Phish and My Bloody Valentine, but they also gave us Tom Smith. Swinging low like the Blue Fairy who turns Pinocchio into a real boy, Smith finally sets Kermit free. Who ever knew a song about a green marionette with googly eyes could make you cry? He knew, he knew.

Tom Smith - A Boy And His Frog

Julie Mehretu

2007-06-21T18:34:00.000+01:00

I got back from Denmark a few days ago and now I need to write about my new favorite artist; Julie Mehretu. She's born in Ethiopia, but has lived mostly in the States. At the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, they were showing some of her latest works, in an exhibition called The Black City. It's been quite a while since I got this blown away by an artist. Which is actually mainly because I rarely go to museums even though I know I should.

What I absolutely love about her paintings is that they have and are everything at the same time. There's speed and sleep, chaos and perfectly balanced order. Most of the paintings are really big and you can take a few steps back and watch the whole epic truth of the world and humanity unravel in front of you, past future and present! It's all there, nonsensical architectural plans and maps of airports and cities, visions of a better future, layered with the mingling symbols of countries, roadblocks, tattoos, graffiti and comic books. All the multi-faceted building blocks that construct our individual and national identities scattered and floating i mid-air. Nothing ever goes exactly according to plan, and people are never going to do exactly what you expect them to.

However, if seeing everything, the grand scheme of things, the chaotic truth of life itself, is too much for you, you can just go right up to the paintings and get lost in the extremely skilled, minute details of her work. You could actually just break every one of her paintings down into tiny squares, magnify them and they would totally be able to stand on their own. But instead we get the closest thing I've ever seen to a true illustration of the world.

I've been working hard on finding some good covers to post, but the best one I know is going to have to wait. Because it's so rare and cool...just kidding. I might actually have to buy the album...so much for the information super highway.

Plastic Bertrand- Tout Petite la Planete ( the original)

bob hund- Vår lilla Planet( live) ( the cover)

Nina Hagen- Good Vibrations

(I don't know why I'm posting this one. It's not very good, but it is weird. At least that's something)

Enjoy!

Just Doing Our Job #2

2007-06-16T21:31:00.000+01:00

As ohmygodimmike made clear in his first addition to Transmissions From Wintermute’s series Just Doing Our Job, there’s more to being a famous music blogger than tons of free sex and drugs. Underneath the decadent allure of meth-fueled late-night hot-tub trysts with indie rock idols and superstar bloggers, there is a great responsibility, a sacred promise if you will. And that is to post excellent smaller bands who are on the verge of blowing up, because, obviously, exposure in our tiny and insignificant corner of le blogosphere (to borrow a phrase from Tom Sutpen) will be the deciding factor in their now certain rise to massive international fame. And they don‘t even have to thank us...because we’re just doing our job.

Screamin’ Cyn Cyn and the Pons are, with maybe one exception, my favorite band in the great city of Madison Wisconsin. I recently ran into their lead singer, Shane O’Neil, at a local roller rink, for the Mad Rollin’ Dolls championship roller derby bout. He was wearing suspenders (not dressed in drag as he often is on stage) and I was buying fried cheese sticks. No one knew that he was a famous rock star except me, and no one knew that I was a famous blogger, because I am not. But at the end of our conversation, he told me that we could post as many of his songs on our site as we wanted. So that’s what I’m going to do right now.

Here are three tracks off their newest release, Screamin Target Heart Rate and my all-time favorite 8th Grade, off their most excellent debut Babysit.

Slumber Party

Garbage Day

Jimmy & Darlene

8th Grade

The new album is great, buy it HERE from Crustacean Records. You can listen to more tracks here at their myspace.

Everything I Know About '70s Slavic Funk

2007-06-12T22:16:00.000+01:00

Ok, what I do know is next to nothing. I don't even really know what the lyrics are about. They could be socialist propaganda. Everything I have learned, I learned from Wikipedia, and it's sparse.
To avoid sweeping generalizations, I'll only talk about this song in question and a brief intro for the singer. She is Aleksandra "Alya" Nikolayevna Pakhmutova and has a lot of songs for free online. Not all of it is funk, and to be honest this one sounds like a mainstream interpretation, but really what in the way of non-mainstream funk did they have back then? If you know the answer, holy crap, let me know.

The song itself sounds like something from the end of a Bruce Lee movie, or a similar type of crossover Kung-Fu movie from that era.
Imagine a lone Kung-Fu master in search of his brother who has emigrated to the country northwards for mysterious reasons. He wanders the land in search of his long lost kin and finds himself lost in a strange, foreign land where people speak in unfamiliar harsh sounds and write in redundant, simplistic letters.
During his travels he does good where he can. Never using a gun, his only weapons are his body, and the martial arts that he has studied his whole life under the tutelage of his strict and venerable grandfather.
The final scene of the movie takes place after a grueling battle pitting Chinese Kung-Fu against Russian Sambo, in which he defeats the head bodyguard of a ruthless KGB leader, the leader himself committing suicide when he realizes that his fate is sealed.
Still, our hero remains without what he was looking for. No brother to be found. No trace of him or any reason for his sudden disappearance. The pretty young girl that he saved, her family, and the rest of their remote village of herdsmen want him to stay and beg him to give up his impossible quest . . . but no. He must go on. He must find what happened to his estranged brother.
And so, he walks into the sunset to continue his search, until he finds the truth, or until his quest kills him.

Aleksandra "Alya" Nikolayevna Pakhmutova - Beloruss

Discovered Uncovered #2 (Turn Me On Dead Man)

2007-06-10T01:13:00.000+01:00

Wild Honey Pie - The Pixies

Eleanor Rigby - Aretha Franklin

Tomorrow Never Knows - Jad Fair & Daniel Johnston

Happiness Is A Warm Gun - The Breeders

The theme of this second installment of Transmissions From Wintermute’s cover series is Beatles songs. In their short eight years of active time on the pop landscape, The Fab Four released 12 albums and 12 Eps, and numerous volumes of repackeged material. All this adds up to a fuckload of songs for the past, present and future musical world to covet, cover and cannibalize until eternity. But other than just sheer volume, what’s the appeal of covering Beatles songs? The instant recognition? The communion or confrontation with a legacy? The multiple haircuts and facial hair stylings? What sticks out to me most is the malleability of their brilliant pop structures, the hooks that lend themselves to endless reinterpretations without loosing their catchiness. Of course they’re not always easy to pull off.

The above artists, though, definitely do so with these strange and divergent covers which hold on to the original songs’ inescapable pop awesomeness.

Any suggestions for other good Beatle covers out there?

Interview With Benjamin Rosenbaum

2007-06-06T19:53:00.000+01:00

Up next in our interview "series" is the Hugo and Nebula nominated spec fiction writer Benjamin Rosenbaum on things like which TV shows he doesn't watch, and why it's okay to watch operatic porn with girls.

What is the first thing you think about in the morning?

Waking up and going to sleep seem to be times that I have a lot of dread about death. During the day I'm engaged in things and distracted. On waking I am often full of mortal dread. Also profound gratitude, which usually accompanies mortal dread with me.

Also often "why is there a small boy lying on my head?", since my son Noah has a habit of coming into our room in the early ours of the morning and parking himself on us.

The first thing that I think about is how sweet giant space amoeba are but I don't know why. Have you seen that episode of Voyager where they fight the gigantic space amoeba? Yeah. I was hoping you could help me figure that one out.

Nope. I have never seen Voyager. Or Deep Space 9. Or Buffy. Or Lost. Or Six Feet Under. Or American Idol. I got rid of my TV years ago (the last show I followed with any regularity was Babylon 5). It has helped with writing productivity, but I do feel a little alienated. Mostly when trying to make small talk with non-geek, non-parents with whom I am already mildly acquainted.

What do you think of when you hear the following names: Slipstream, Bizarro, New Wave Fabulist, Mythpunk, New Weird, Magical Realism?

Slipstream is a word I hate, though I clearly love hating it, and it makes me think of John Kessel & Jim Kelly's excellent anthology "Feeling Very Strange", which I was very excited to be in. Also of the original Sterling essay, and thus of Kobo Abe and William Kotzwinkle. Bizarro makes me think, of course, of the pathos of Superman's silver-skinned alter ego. New Wave Fabulist makes me think of that Conjunctions issue I probably should have gotten my act together and submitted to. Mythpunk makes me think of the odd habit of adding the suffix -punk to any literary movement, regardless of how much or how little it shares with Siouxsie, Iggy, Sid, and their ilk. When did that happen? New Weird makes me think of Mieville, Duncan, Moorcock (or is he Old Weird?), etc., writers I like, interestingly all British; it seems like a mildly adequate term, though the swagger implied in "New" sets my teeth on edge slightly, but maybe that's the point of a literary movement? At least New Weird tends to actually be both (while Mythpunk, like the Holy Roman Empire, is none of the above). Magical Realism makes me think of watching Like Water For Chocolate in high school, and also we went to see Aria with the same group of friends, or an overlapping group, and it (Aria) was like operatic porn, very high concept, so high concept that you could go watch it with girls, and that was pretty cool, considering.

It seems sometimes that you are two different writers, do you intentionally set out to write serious or funny stories or do you let them develop as they please?

Yes.

Optional question (choose one): If you could create your own reality TV show what would it be like?

You would get a disparate group of candidates for mayor of a middle-sized city, esp. people who usually couldn't afford to run, and agree to fund one of them in exchange for the right to film them 24/7 up to the general election. Then you would have American Idol-style elimination rounds based on logrolling, drumming up support, dealing with lobbyists, etc., with audience voting. The two interesting things would be 1) transparency (all the backroom deals would have to be televised) and 2) shakeup, since you'd have an unusual candidate with an exterior source of funding and name recognition coming in to shake up the game. (The show might be forced by election laws to give airtime to opposing candidates, but that's ok.)

or What is the secret of life? Please elaborate.

Why can't I answer this too? Fine. Never mind. But now you're not going to know the secret of life! No, no, too late now.

Don't you remember that you love this?

2007-05-30T22:32:00.000+01:00

So I'm working on a music-quiz for a big dinner party at the Art Education Institution at my school, when I find this song again. It's so good. Now I know that it's hard for people to admit, but at least here, in Stockholm, at a club called 90's, this is the song that makes people delirious with happiness and nostalgia. I remember being so proud when it came on Beverly Hills 90201 more than 10 years ago. At a party at Brandon and Brenda's house. It felt like Sweden was finally getting noticed, for the first time since ABBA. Sadly they started to suck after a while, the fact that it was discovered that one of the guys (the one in the front, Uffe) used to be a Nazi didn't help their popularity much either, so the world forgot about Ace of Base. But we will never forget that life is indeed demanding without understanding.

Ace of Base- the Sign

An Interview With Hannah

2007-05-29T00:12:00.000+01:00

After reading Grant Miller’s interview on this site, Hannah of Newly Indonesian decided she wanted us to spread some interview love her way. Read on to hear her thoughts on the ugly Midwest, autistic slaughterhouses, and stabing Richard Brautigan in the heart with a steak knife. If anyone would like some interview love from Hannah or one of us here at Transmissions From Wintermute, let us know in the comments.

Next in the interview series, Benjamin Rosenbaum.

EXTRAS:
as a preface, here’s a live Pixies bootleg and a couple of Brautigan poems from The Pill Versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, all stuff which Hannah helped turn me onto in college.

Hey - The Pixies

From the sixth show of the reunion warm-up tour, recorded 4.28.04 in Eugene Oregon. Behind Frank Black you can hear every hipster in Eugene, and me, singing along.

'Star-Spangled' Nails
You've got
some "Star-Spangled"
nails
in your coffin, kid.
That's what
they've done for you,
son.

Xerox Candy Bar
Ah,
you're just a copy
of all the candy bars
I've ever eaten.

You are very well versed in music and were briefly a music major in college. Who would win in a fight between Steve Reich and Philip Glass (optional follow-up: what if Philip Glass had a wooden spear)?

I wouldn't call myself well-versed in music so much as hyper-tuned to the few bands/musicians that I really love while ignoring the rest of the music world, but from the little that I know about those two guys, I'd have to say Philip Glass. Not because I like his music better. I don't. But Philip Glass, I think, relies on repetition to drive his listeners slightly crazy. When you listen to Philip Glass, you feel like you're in an alternate, robotic universe where things go on forever and at the same time if they go on one second longer you're going to scream. Making people feel like that is dangerous. Steve Reich captures reality very well (especially in 'City Life I-IV), but what's more potentially lethal, reflecting reality precisely or making people feel insane? Exactly. After Glass added 13 more minutes of identical 'Ahh-eee-ooo's' to the 14 minutes he had already, and Reich lay writhing and insane on the ground, the wooden spear would only be a nail in the coffin.

On your recent visit to Madison, you were debating between moving to Chicago or back to the town of our Alma Mater, Boulder. Now Boulder has officially won out. Why do you hate the midwest, a.k.a., America (optional follow up: Why do you love terrorism)?

Weather and landscapes. What a boring answer. I chose nicer weather and landscapes over actually knowing people in the location, which is never a smart choice, as I've found! Too late though, I got a good job and I'm staying here for probably at least two years. I hate the Midwest because it's flat and brown and humid and freezing in turns, and smelly, and every June Lake Michigan sends thousands of pounds of dead fish to shore right in Chicago, and this year is the 17-year locust cycle, and there's no nature except for cornfields and if you want to rock climb you have to drive 4 hours to Devil's Lake, and if you happen to want to day trip out of Chicago, too bad, because all there is for hours surrounding is depressing suburbs. I love Chicago because it has excellent food and a wonderful variety of people, but that just can't beat out all of the above. And that is coming from someone for whom food is life. I hope that the CIA ends up having to read my entire journal because of that last sentence in your question. No really, I do. I just love the idea of some agent sitting at work being forced to read about Indonesian post office employees and strange tropical ailments and tales of stubborn schoolchildren and people who hit on other people by being racist.

You are a very avid reader, even more so that DJ, making you the most avid reader I know. What was your favorite of everything you've read in the last six months and why?

Animals In Translation by Temple Grandin. It's by an autistic woman who, among other things, designs humane slaughterhouses for a living. Her theory is that since both autistic people and animals think in pictures, she is able to see their environment through their eyes and design everything so they're happy and calm right up until the end. It's difficult to explain the subject matter to people without them looking at you like, 'are you saying autistic people are like animals?' but what she's getting at is more complicated than that. There are all sorts of anecdotes and insights in there that make your brain turn completely around for a split second. Those low metal slats they put across the roads to keep cows in pasture? Cows' hooves can't fit through there. That's not why they don't walk right across. The reason they don't walk across is because a cow's vision is such that the contrast of color makes the slats look like a straight drop-off into the abyss. That's a bad example of an anecdote that makes your brain turn completely around. But as avid of a reader as I am, information goes straight through my brain and out my ears. While I'm reading, I am enthralled and tuned out to the world, but when I put the book down it's gone. So maybe DJ should still hold the title.

It's your birthday and you have a magical dinner party, to which you can invite 3 nonfictional people, living or dead. The catch; at the end of the night you have to stab one of them in the heart with a steak knife. Who are your choices. Please elaborate.

Richard Brautigan (if your previous question had included books I've read ever, one of his would definitely have beaten out Animals in Translation, if it were not immediately usurped by something by Paul Krassner or The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down [see how I'm insiduously slipping more books in under the radar despite your only asking me about one?]), Ze Frank (of zefrank.com, and zefrank.com/theshow), and Sylvia Plath. The first two get to come because they have wildly unique worldviews not only in writing, but in speech, and have the capability to transform moods, or entire perspectives, in seconds. Sylvia Plath is there so that when she hears these two speak, it changes her life. If you've ever read The Bell Jar, I'm sure you would use your magical dinner party - or anything within your power - to cheer her up too. And I guess I could use some worldview-shaking as well. Since Brautigan and Plath are already dead, I'd stab one of them. Brautigan, I guess. He committed suicide even WITH his brilliant perspective, so I expect that if I brought him back to life he'd be angry and want to go back to his grave.

You've met most of my cobloggers several times, with the sad exception of Laz (because I think you two would be bestest friends, if it wasn't for the damn Pacific). Who do you think could do more clap-pushups, me or OMGIMike?

Politeness dictates that I say you. Also, though politeness does not dictate that I am allowed to say that I don't remember what OMGIMike looks like, I'm going to say it anyway, because it's the truth. [Mike looks buff, and would actually win...for the record. -ED]

How I learned about Fart-Wars

2007-05-25T15:29:00.000+01:00

Let me take you guys on a journey into the wondrous world of student-teaching for just a second here. The classroom ( especially the art-classroom) is a place where anything can happen. Students see all the colorful pictures on the walls and get all giddy with excitement that their awkward adolescent bodies can't possibly contain. Some kids get angry, some feel like they need to yell or start drumming loudly on their desks. Some get an uncontrollable urge to fart, a lot. My theory is that this is brought on by the drumming ...everybody gets all riled up from that.

So, a while ago when I was at the pretty much all male high school in the ghetto where I student-teach , it happened, my first fart-war. I didn't see it coming of course, but now, looking back all the signs where there 1). yelling 2.) more yelling 3.) DRUMMING. Yes, the fart-war was inevitable. It started with one of the leader-guys walking up to the black board and farting, but this guy, being the leader or "fart-master" didn't just settle for a plain fart...no, he was not willing to compromise this statement, or start signal if you will, by filtrating his fart with two whole layers of fabric! He's better than that. So, he did the only logical thing, the only thing a good fart-master could do at that point, which was to pull down both pants and boxers and set it free out into the air. I don't need to tell you this was a huge success and all hell broke loose. Nothing could be done. Unfortunately, I think I made it way worse, I tried so hard not to laugh ( or breathe) but I had to, which of course the high school guys noticed and started farting even more. To seduce me. With their farts. Yes. Then the poor 63-year old teacher came up to me and said that " well, now you know how this is...so..yeah.......you can leave early today if you want to". And I did, I sauntered out into the fresh beautiful spring air. On my way to the subway I realized that this may have been my first fart-war, but it sure as hell won't be my last. Because I'm going to be a teacher, and high school guys are really gross.

Here's some completely unrelated music that I've been listening to a lot lately:

Johnny Cash- A boy named Sue

Kimya Dawson- The Beer

D' Angelo- The Line

This one is mostly to inform everyone that D'Angelo is NOT dead. He was in a car crash, and he did go to jail for something, and at some point he did indeed get fat. But that doesn't mean he's dead, Aida.

Gogol Bordello- Undestructable

The Comedian Harmonists- Wenn die Sonja russisch tanzt

Wiscon, Necessary Voodoo

2007-05-22T17:22:00.001+01:00

There is another cool point about madison in addition to the smoking ban and cool facial expressions mentioned in the interview below. That point is an event, which is a convention, specifically, America's largest feminist science fiction convention. Yes thats right, I, racist chauvanistic DJ am going to Wiscon, coming up May 25th-28th. No seriously. Except about the whole racist chauvanist thing. I don't really know how I feel about it except that two of my favorite new writers Kelly Link, and Benjamin Rosenbaum are going to be speaking, discussing and reading, and for that I'm really excited. If any of our readers happen to be going I totally want hang out with you (I can imagine the Venn diagram in my mind now, two zero dimensional points of space separated by an infinite distance.) I feel a little weird about it because one (1.) I'm a guy and will totally stick even more than I would at normal sci-fi convention, and two (2.) I've heard sci-fi conventions are notoriously cliquish, and hard approach as a newcomer. In a certain way I'm really nervous and afraid. Kind of in the same way a fat, balding, forty-something guy can make me feel lame for not having read the Sandman comics, but more like, with female authors. One of the things I'm doing to prepare and hopefully help fit in is I started reading A Room Of One's Own, which is really really good, and in fact less about what I expected feminism to be than about a need to express a creative spirit and a love of life gone about in a very Cartesian logical manner as to actually apply to real life. Anyways, at least theres no RPG room or medieval costume contest.

Okay, I also wanted to talk abut the new Björk album. In the beginning, a few weeks ago, I downloaded a few tracks and liked them all. The day before it came out Pitchfork gave it about a 5.7, which is a pretty big slam especially considering the extremely explanatory and charismatic interview she did with them two weeks prior. So I got the CD the next day anyways, and it turns out, they were right. Goddamn pitchforkmediadotcom was right. But its more complicated than that. This album has marked probably the most collaborations and guest artists she has worked with to date. In the interview she even expressed some anxiety about this issue, and now I can totally understand why. Björk it seems, works best when alone. When its just her, her laptop, and her incredible voice like on basically everything Vespertine and earlier she kicks ass. This is demonstrated by the awesomeness of Declare Independence off near the end of Volta. Its the most energetic in my opinion, and may even be a violent reaction to having to satisfy so many eager collaborators. Even the duets with fellow diva Antony, against all logic, don't always come off well. Again, I love Brian Chippendale and his work with Lightning Bolt, but that doesn't mean I have to hear his drums tacked on to the bottom of a Björk song. Etc, Etc... I also like the title track, Earth Intruders, which features a Timbaland beat, but to be honest its tweaked and sampled beyond any recognition of its source, and probably to its betterment.

Björk - Declare Independence

Björk - Earth Intruders

An Interview With The Benevolent Site Master

2007-05-18T20:41:00.000+01:00

Recently, the Benevolent Site Master Of Grant Miller Media was kind enough to grant me with an interview. In honor of this great day, and of the interview’s Pavement content, here is the best band of all time (Pavement), covering the other best band of all time (The Velvet Underground).
Enjoy!

What Goes On - Pavement

You're part of a team blog. When do you plan to drop those talentless hacks and go solo?

I love my cobloggers more than life itself, and I wouldn’t part ways with them for all the worthless opinions and useless advice on the intra-net. Plus, starting this blog was DJ’s idea, because he’s the computer nerd among us, so ‘going solo’ would be a betrayal of unforgivable depth. Also, no one would read my blog.

You live in Madison, one of the best cities in America according to Forbes and Money Magazine. What are you doing to make Madison better?

By spending my hard-earned cash in the various dives which dot the east side and downtown area. Also by going up to any of madison’s excellent local bands after shows and drunkenly telling them that “they totally rock” so that they are encouraged to continue rocking, totally. I also always try to wear a ‘cool’ expression on my face when I strut down the city’s sidewalks, completely adding to its ‘cool’ cred.

I don't smoke, but firmly believe smoking and bars go hand-in-hand. You cannot have one without the other. Madison abolished smoking in bars in 2005. How much healthier have you become since then?

None whatsoever, nor did I become any healthier when Colorado did the same thing when I was living in Boulder. I quit smoking over 2 years ago, but never stopped loving the smell of tobacco smoke in a dingy bar because that taste is absolutely necessary to mix with cheap beer or hard alcohol. Now I find myself sneaking out front with my smoker friends to steal drags, so as to get the right mix on my palette. What I fail to see is what was so bad about smoking and nonsmoking sections, especially when so many people only smoke while drinking. Why can’t we all win?

You and I love Pavement. What is your first memory of getting into Pavement?

Pavement is my favorite band. I’m listening to them right now in fact. I first got really into Pavement my freshman year in college after downloading (gasp!) a bunch of tracks at the advice of DJ, who had recently purchased Luxe & Redux. That led me to buy all 4 of their albums within a matter of months and listen to them non-stop in my dormroom and on my headphones the rest of the year. But my actual first experience with them was in 8th grade, when the cool homeroom teacher (who was as old as I am now) made me a tape of Brighten The Corners. It was too out there for me at the time but lodged a huge sign post in my unconscious for future rockin-out-ness.

Why should people read your blog?

Because it is written by 4 young hip and art-film-literature-fashion-(pop)culturally savvy 20-somethings, who are also all totally hot. And, we provide free mp3s of new bands and rare oldies from our kick-ass collections. And we swear, fucking right. And we have neck-tattoos. And we wear our hats backwards sometimes, and some of us smoke cigarettes. And we like to stick it to the man. And race our hotrods around dead-man’s curve. The neck-tattoo part wasn’t true.

Thanks Mr. Miller, esq. Rock on!

If any one out there in blog-land would like to be interviewed by any of us here at Transmissions From Wintermute, say so in the comments and we will do so gladly.

Do You Know Who You're Fucking With? (Songs for an American cynic)

2007-05-08T09:56:00.000+01:00

The Stallion Pt.1 - Ween

The Stallion Pt. 5 - Ween

One of my favorite bloggers has finally updated his frustratingly infrequent site, Zestfully Clean. In fact, he did this two weeks ago, but I just noticed recently because I had given up checking it for new posts. This gentlemen is clearly insane, another intra-net madman screeching from his electronic pulpit and reciting prophecies of a great plague. This man clearly needs help, not encouragement, but I will continue to read his supposed blog for my own philosophical self-satisfaction and to give him the audience he deserves, which is only me. Go check him out and add a little strangeness to your day.

I happen to know this unstable man is a great admirer of Ween, and more importantly he resembles, in force and intellectual stature, the great mythological Ween-being, The Stallion. So in honor of his return to the wild frontier of the intra-net are the two best installments of Ween’s epic poem; The Stallion. All 5 parts can be heard back to back on their All Request Live allbum.

Discovered Uncovered

2007-05-05T21:46:00.000+01:00

I Wanna Be Your Dog - Joan Jett

Freezer Burn/I Wanna Be Your Dog - Sonic Youth

This post is the beginning of a series in which I will be posting awesome covers. Most of them will hopefully be some what hard to come across, but the only guiding criteria is that they are awesome (he above picture is a drawing by Daniel Johnston, whose tribute album is the namesake for this post).

Ohmygodimmike challenged his co-bloggers to post covers last month after becoming enamored with Firewater’s Song’s We Should Have Written, and me and DJ have done cover-themed posts in the past (post a comment if you want any songs relinked). Covers are fascinating; on one level a simple form of flattery that gives the listener a grounding recognition when hearing something new. Beyond that though, they can be a sincere modernist reinterpretation, a beloved artifact from the cultural past being reconnected to and built off from through an act of revisiting, almost approaching artistic worship. Or, a cover can be a postmodern denial, a conscious severing of the past from the present and an attempted destruction of the linearity of cultural advancement or of any sort of artistic trajectory. Such a cover gives us a complete reworking of its material in such a way as to destroy any sanctity held by the original or its time and foreground or exploit its anachronisms.

The discerning line between these two ways of covering is of course very thin and blurred (and by no means consistent or exhaustive), and the deciding factors surely lie more in the artistic intent than in the songs covered themselves.

Basically I just love covers, because I think they’re awesome, and I’ll take any chance to post some of my favorites.

So here are two covers of one of the best songs Iggy and The Stooges every did; I Wanna Be Your Dog off their 1969 debut. Both versions are very sincere homages to a proto-punk cockrocker whose rebelliousness paved the way for the expansive rule-breaking of art rockers like Sonic Youth and Riot Grrrls like Joan Jett. Yet both covers interpret the material very differently (off the albums Confusion Is Sex and Up Your Alley, respectively). Anyway......enjoy.

A Message to God From Earth

2007-05-02T18:29:00.000+01:00

This is a tie to Laz's last post, which I totally agree with, you guys should post.
Anyways, here is a link to multimedia, including a flashplayer streaming the solid gold record sent to Him via space on Voyager I, to show us what our planet sounds like, although it is excessively human-centric. I wish I could embed the player on the sidebar like some of the more high-tech/low-culture blogs out there but oh well. I guess well just have to settle for high culture for now.

Gold Record

A message to Mazur and Ohmygodimmike

2007-05-02T06:29:00.000+01:00

A lot of people read our blog, including God himself. This is a picture of him, and if you look closely, you can see a tear running down his face. That's because you two haven't written is so so long. Think about that.

Opa! Goran Bregovic came to to town

2007-04-20T12:00:00.000+01:00

Last night I went and saw Goran Bregovic's Wedding and Funeral Band play with Kristjan Järvi's Absolute Ensemble at Konserthuset here in Stockholm. They played a comision piece called " Forgive me, is this the way to the future? Three letters to Three Prophets" that Goran Bregovic wrote for the European Concert Hall Organization.

The piece consisted of three musical letters to the three prophets of the religions that have collided in the Balcans throughout history, catholicism, orthodox christianity and islam. Each letter was meant to be built as a dialogue, with arguing and a great big reconciliation at the end.

The clash between New York's Absolute Ensemble, a classically trained yet super diverse ensemble of musical pro's, and the Wedding and Funeral band was pretty interesting because they were all great musicians, but in different ways. I gotta say though, once the Wedding and Funeral Band started banging on that huge drum of theirs, and blasting their like 5 tuba's, the whole " fascinating meeting between two different musical traditions"-thing was lost and you forgot all about the intended subtleties of the piece. You could also totally tell that some people ( 1st violinist in particular) in the Absolute Ensemble could hardly retain themselves from dancing over to the other side of the stage and running away with the Wedding and Funeral Band forever.

I think a lot of the people in the crowd expected the concert to only be Goran Bregovic's trademark hand-clapping and opa-yelling, happy movie - music, which they definitely also got, but mixed in with truly modern, sublime classical music. The most moving part for me where the two Bulgarian ladies singing for the W and F band. They had big plastic flowers in their hair, and they were dressed in traditional costumes. Sometimes their voices were like two slightly rusted, yet sharp knives cutting right trough your flesh. And behind that you had a male sextet, some of them singing so low it almost became white noise. It was really overwhelming and beautiful. In the middle of the stage , sat Goran Bregovic, in his white suit, smiling, sometimes singing or playing the guitar. It was a great show.

Since I haven't gotten my shit together, and I'm definitely less then hip, I don't have any Goran to post right now, so I'll have to send you down to my co-blogger DJ's post for that.

A Critical Review of Vonnegut Odes

2007-04-13T22:19:00.000+01:00

I've been reading all the various online Vonnegut tributes since I found out about his death in my Borders Book Shop update email trying to get me to buy his books.

Basically, they're all good. Everyone loves Kurt Vonnegut (except the bible thumper who shouted in the streets the day he came to speak at the UW.) Everyone had something poignant to say about how he changed their lives and how much they love him. I can't provide links because there are to many to go back and search through and about ten more appear every few minutes.

One guy finagled his way into an interview while working as a reporter. When the guy embarrassed himself by saying something along the lines of "its the one with Billy Pilgrim in it," who happens to be in a lot his books, Vonnegut replied "I want my tombstone to read; 'Life, it was so embarrassing."

The New York Times article was good of course, which I somehow managed to get access to despite the fact that I usually can't read their articles.

One name I liked that I found was "A Mark Twain for the nuclear age."

Another blogger wrote about how a teacher she thought sucked recommended Breakfast of Champions to her which changed her life and her opinion of that teacher.

For me it was the short story Harrison Bergeron, which I read in 7th grade out of Readers Digest or something similar waiting for a dentist appointment, not even knowing or remembering the name Kurt Vonnegut afterwards.

They're all beautiful loving tributes. Blah blah blah.

It's nice to see that the Laughing Prophet of Doom had so many genuinely loving fans, but I on the other hand have a bone to pick with Mr. Vonnegut.

Ok here goes.

After his breakout success with Slaughterhouse Five and "debilitating depression leading to an attempt at suicide," he renounced science fiction and distanced himself from it as much as humanly possible. In Palm Sunday, a collection of essays and speeches, he tells a high school class at their commencement ceremony that all the good science fiction books were written by him, except for Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End, despite the fact that he at least loved one other writer (Theodore Sturgeon) enough to name his most recurring character, Kilgore Trout, after him. And that Player Piano totally ripped of any number of dystopian SF novels. Childhood's End wasn't even all that good. What the fuck Mr. Vonnegut. WTF.

I am in part kidding by the way, far be it from me to actually talk shit about someone who just died, but I feel like its an OK thing to do considering.

I thought about writing him a letter telling him the best way to finish his career would be to write one more science fiction novel seeing as his first books were his best anyways.

If you read a few speculative fiction blogs or online essays you'll quickly realize that one of the main gripes is that because people have a natural aversion to genre terms like sci-fi or fantasy or even horror. Successful artists who originally were included in the genre will often become apprehensive about being labeled as such when their success comes. Like the ex-nerd who pretends to not know his old friends once he tries out for the middle school football team and makes new friends. Is Asteroid 25399 Vonnegut named as such because some war buff loved the WWII and Vietnam commentary or because an astronomer fell in love with Malachi Constant's journey to the stars? Think about that one.

That said, I would like to say, Kurt Vonnegut you were one of my favorites, and you were right about being the greatest writer of science fiction who ever lived.

Despite anything you said or did, or anything I said or did, I hope that you're in a better place than this one.

Ok I Guess I Haven't Posted In a While

2007-04-09T21:34:00.000+01:00

I've had a few ideas for posts, but they always end up building up in my mind into too-large proportions and I end up not ever getting around to writing them down. As a result, and a compromise I'm going to make this a little short, and not a little bit ADD.

Theme: Afrofuturism - I read this essay (how could it not be named Black to The Future) on African-American Science fiction which was quite enlightening. Afterwards I couldn't help but notice that often times black Sci-Fi writers are filed under regular fiction despite the fact that they are totally uncompromisingly Sci-Fi with the exception that maybe theres a person of African descent on the cover instead of a white male in a space suit.
So what does this mean? Is it degrading to be filed as genre fiction? Are people afraid to put this denigration on a black writer, while in turn removing them from their primary audience of SF readers? Are either of these beliefs/actions right? I'm sure the comments will be flooded with the philosophical socio-economic implications of this issue.

Topic 2:

This very weird music video to this very very awesome song.

Topic 3:

I have a friend who, like every rational human being, hates hippies. The problem is that she feels the urge to bring this issue up primarily when surrounded by them in an otherwise completely peaceful environment. Now of course I believe in standing up for what you think, but the argument goes no where, and usually in fact brings out exactly what I personally hate so much about hippies. An example of a typical exchange:

Said friend: "Phish, The Grateful Dead, man, I hate that shit."

Awkard pause by everyone in the room.

Friend again: "Man I hate all that hippie shit. It sucks."

Hippie 1: "Well I mean all I can really say is that music is my one true love in life."

Friend again: "Whatever Phish sucks. People just follow them around like a bunch of brainless puppy dogs."

Hippie 1: "Well I don't even like Phish, but Phil and Bob, man, they jam out."

Hippie 2: "The thing is that people don't just follow them around like puppy dogs. You know that every time you go to a show that its going to be totally different from every other show they've done, and its totally going to be mindblowingly awesome."

Etc, etc...

My point is why even bring it up, it gets you nowhere. I prefer to say this little prayer every night before I tuck myself in to bed. Maybe if we all say it it will come true. Please god, Oh! holy creator of the heavens and earth, reach down thy mighty hand and smite these hippie foes of mine.

Here though, is a pretty brilliant hippie song that came out in the last six months or so.

Vic Thrill - Circus of Enlightenment

Finally:

Goran Bregovic - Ederlezi

The title track to a sometimes over-dramatic collection of movie soundtracks by the eastern European composer. I've been liking it recently, and although I know most of you already have it, I'll still post it for those less than hip readers of ours out there.

The picture above by the way, is my man Samuel Delany.

From Indonesia to Madison (Songs For Hannah)

2007-04-08T04:48:00.000+01:00

Melt-Banana - SURFIN’ U.S.A.

John Zorn and Naked City - Gob Of Spit

Last weekend we at Transmissions From Wintermute had the pleasure of hanging out with my old college chum and fellow blogger, Hannah, and showing her our fair city of Madison. Hannah is the talented writer and daring explorer behind Newly Indonesian, which chronicles her adventures living in and returning from Jayapura Indonesia. Despite all the many exotic wonders she’s experienced, I’m sure her weekend trip to Madison Wisconsin was probably the most exciting, and certainly the most glamorous, of her young jet-setting life. Why? Because we took to her the record shack on the east side. And eventhough we got there 15 minutes after it closed, it was still a sight to behold. Go check out her blog, because it’s kick-ass-ness merits checking out.

Hannah is big fan of Japanese noisecore band Melt-Banana, and she’s a former Beach Boys fanatic. So in honor of her visit, here’s a Melt-Banana cover of Surfin’ U.S.A. from their live album MxBx1998/13000MILES AT LIGHT VEROCITY. Lead guitarist Agata pulls out the long surf-rock slide with as much raw joy as anyone, stretching it to the point of destruction and then snapping back from the edge.

I also have Hannah to thank for turning me onto John Zorn. Here’s a pretty little ditty by Zorn’s noise-jazz(?) 6 piece Naked City off their 1992 album Grand Guignol.

Down the Highway, Down the Tracks, Down the Road to Ecstasy! Road Trip Mix Tape vol.II

2007-04-03T14:50:00.001+01:00

Since my parents never had a car, and I certainly don't own one either, road trips have been rare in my life. The first ones I remember were from traveling all over Romania every summer when I was a kid. There was no music, just the sound of uncle Nici making fun of every single car that passed us. They we're all idiots. All of them. I never knew where we were going, or why, nor did I care. All I wanted was to sit there next to my distant relatives and look out the window at whatever the landscape had to offer. ( Which was a lot, I mean, we’re talking Romania here...). Alright, here’s my contribution to the mix:

Fleetwood Mac- Albatross

Just after you picked up everyone and got coffee, but before people need to pee, this song is perfect. Everything is just fine.

Talking Heads- Road to Nowhere

Well of course. This is the song. The best song. For road trips. For biking. For flying. For riding the bus or subway. For walking. For doing anything that basically takes you forwards.
This was also the song that smart-ass older siblings would hum when their parents got lost on the way to somewhere, which I always thought was hilarious. Older siblings are so cool sometimes.

Bob Dylan- Idiot Wind

I love this song because it’s so happy and angry and bitter at the same time. I don’t know how you can even pull that off in one song, but he does. Of course. It’s just so awesome how everything is somebody else's fault, because even though that’s rarely entirely true, it’s just how you feel sometimes. It’s also fun to sing along to.

Totoro- Totoro Theme Song

OK, this is something else entirely. If you lose the sense of purpose with you road trip, and if you want to feel like your in an surreal, beautiful, epic animé movie, you need to play this song. All of a sudden this trip is important and filled with meaning. You’re your way to absolute greatness. This works best driving past wast snowy fields...at dawn. Or dusk. Really fast.

Random Post #4 (N.Y.C.'s Like A Graveyard)

2007-03-28T03:00:00.000+01:00

A Real Man - Sleater-Kinney

Tears Stupid Tears - Half Japanese

I recently got back from a trip to New York City. The Big Apple. The greatest city in the world. Blah blah blah. I had a great time and I understand better now what all the hype’s about, i’st an amazingly huge and intricate city with a million neighborhoods and a million scenes. Every night there’s some new art opening, or indie film, or off-off Broadway play or hip hop show to check out. But visiting New York City made me realize something very important; namely that I don’t want to live in New York City. New York is the center of the world, the only place to be if you want to catch the nation’s attention as an actress or a playwright, or an artist, or whatever. But being surrounded by some many doomed pre-failures gives the city a real sinister atmosphere. I have no desires to be at the center of the world’s attention, or to live on the fringes of an art empire, existing as a perpetual tourist and casting-couch whore, surrounded by people who make it clear that they are richer, hipper or smarter than you. I have to admit, I don’t understand the stubborn hubris to move to the most competitive art scene in the world, when there is so much great art and music being created in America’s smaller cities. These former industrial and agricultural centers, which have put a state-funded premium on creativity and expression in the last few decades, ground an art scene potentially much more free from the restrictions of the urban canon and top-heavy notions of what is currently ‘hip’, or even what is currently ‘art.’ More importantly, these smaller metropoli like Minneapolis or Denver or Milwaukee, provide an art world that is more penetrable, and more malleable, and hopefully less viscous.

All this being said, I did have a great time in New York, and was indeed exposed to some things much harder to come by in the fly-over cities. Like this film, The Cats of Mirikatani, which will be playing next month at Madison’s own 8th annual Wisconsin Film Fest. Linda Hattendorf’s documentary both recounts the past of Jimmy Mirikitani, a classically trained artist living on the streets of Manhatten, and chronicles his journey and that of the filmmaker as she open her small NYC apartment to him and begins to help him search for his family and citizenship. What struck me most about the movie though is not only its use of consumer grade hi8 digital video, but its fore grounding of a hands-on digital only aesthetic. The use of intercuting only between Hattendorf’s hand held handicam and shots from unobtrusively placed cameras in the small apartment they share, gives the movie an immediacy and grounded realism missing from most contemporary celluloid documentaries. This fore grounding of the apparatus by leaving in the camera shakes and off-camera interjections of the filmmaker, ironically makes us trust the images more than if we were watching a smooth undisturbed and perfectly exposed celluloid image by alerting us that we we're seeing is a more direct and personal experience. Whereas many digital videomakers are trying to legitimize the medium by mimicking film aesthetics, Mirikitani achieves its power by grounding its form in the rawness and accessibility of small-scale digital cameras and editor systems. It’s force comes from the feeling of inclusion and penetration only possible with the cheapness and duration of video cameras, along with the feelings of hands-on personal contact between the videomaker and the work, only possible with home computer editing. Such personally penetrating documentaries, done so well in the 60’s and 70’s by such filmmakers as the Maysles Brothers, D.A.Pennebacher, and Errol Morris, are no longer that possible in film because film stock and equipment has blown up to such high prices. The lack of affordable light weight equipment or flatbed editiors, as well as the high price of film stock make the feeling of being right alongside something achieved by Mirikitani much harder to do on film. It forces most contemporary documentarians to rely heavily on the Ken Burn’s technique of still photos and omniscient voice over. Further, the amount of money involved in even small scale film productions involves further creative oversight, often diluting any personal vision on the part of the filmmaker, who in a digital documentary is more free to be involved in every step of the process (Hattendorf for example is listed as director, camera, sound recordist, and editor). This powerful feeling of personal vision and actual experience achieved in her work is one solely possible through the possibilities of digital cinema.

The flip side of this random post inspired by the big apple is THIS TRACK by now defunct Portland punkers Sleater-Kinney, off their self-titled debut. Despite the shit I talked about New York, finding something like this at a used record store wouldn’t happen much in the midwest. It’s interesting to note that the lyrics on this track, Real Man, which rail against the assumptions of heteronormativity, are being spat out by the now happily married young mother, original riot grrrl Corin Tucker.

In his last post, ohmygodimmike challenged us, his co-bloggers, to post some covers. Well HERE'S MINE, outsider genius Jad Fair of Half Japanese covering outsider genius Daniel Johnston, with Tears Stupid Tears, off 92’s Fire in the Sky.

MONOBOL!

2007-03-20T08:13:00.000+01:00

She did film it!