Over Christmas, I received a mix CD that begins with Bright Eyes' "A Song To Pass the Time", closes with that "Mad World" cover that runs over the end credits of Donnie Darko, and covers a whole wrenching mess of emotional territory inbetween.

During the preparation of the repsonse mix CD I pulled out all my most emotional records, and some have stayed out ever since. In heavy rotation:

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, Pocket Symphonies for Lonesome Subway Cars

The Mountain Goats, All Hail West Texas

Jackson C. Frank, self-titled

If you ever feel the need to enter a nearly transcendent melancholy, try reading Robert Hass' Human Wishes while simultaneously listening to If You're Feeling Sinister. It will help if you also have a crush on someone.

Wednesday, January 29, 2003
11:06 PM
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You "sequential art" fans out there may be interested in checking out Prophecy Magazine, a high-end-lookin' comics anthology mag.

I'm speaking here as someone who misses the spectacular boondoggle of Buzz Buzz, the tabloid-sized comics magazine by the brilliant and frequently overcommitted Paul Pope.

Labels: comics

Saturday, January 25, 2003
9:47 AM
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Almost forgot about this weird bookmark: eleven microbiologists die, mostly violently, around the time that all that anthrax was going around in the mail. Perhaps oddest is Robert Schwartz, DNA researcher, stabbed thirty times with a sword. (Kyle Hubert, a teenager hearing voices from beings called "Sabba" and "Ordog," has confessed.)

From the Globe and Mail.

Thursday, January 23, 2003
4:20 PM
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A lightly-edited version of something I wrote elsewhere on the Web, in response to the question "what do you care about?":

At the top and most abstract part of the tower I care about a complex of things that I can only really categorize as "communication." A lot of things I care about intersect there: honesty, interpersonal kindness, empathy, love, conversations, articulacy, sexuality, art, writing, word-of-mouth, democratic media.

I care about playing and experimenting and improvisation.

Less abstractly, I care about the Spring Conference, I care about the well-being of the people around me and people in society at large, and I care about my creative projects.

I care about winning a game while I'm playing it (but not afterwards), I care about the characters on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I care about Oolong the bunny, who recently died.

So what do you care about?

Labels: empathy, personal

12:17 PM
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Massive September 11th conspiracy theory.

Friday, January 17, 2003
3:46 PM
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Had a nice dinner last night with Chris and Ray, and then played a game of Nomic.

Being the game dork that I am, I've played a lot of Nomic in this lifetime. These games have ranged from the very silly to the seriously hardcore, but I noticed (this time around) that I reliably try, usually early on in the game, to create a rule that serves no obvious initial purpose other than creating a mechanic off of which future rules can branch. I privately think of this as a "lateral" rule, in that it kind of directs the game sidewards, (mis-)directing the players away from the ("vertical?") purpose of accumulating the hundred points initially required to win the game.

Last night's "lateral" rule was "At the conclusion of a turn, a player shall receive a face drawn on a slip of paper from each of his or her opponents. The bank of accumulated faces will be referred to as a player's Population."

Worked great, by the way. A later rule someone passed specified that these little "people" needed to be named, and now I've got a pile of thirty cute little residents as a souvenir.

We also played a game of Eat Poop You Cat, which was fun, even though you really need more than three people for that game to reach its full potential.

Labels: game_commentary

3:39 PM
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It pleases me to no end to look around one day and see that I have a friend working on a project called Porn For Punks, another putting together a Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, and yet another writing a children's book called You Are Ugly and No One Will Ever Fuck You.

Somehow this feels like a certain kind of harmony.

Labels: personal

Thursday, January 16, 2003
4:41 PM
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So I'm currently reading a book I got for Christmas: Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music, a series of essays by the staff writers of The WIRE. It's nice to find a book so catered to my particular set of interests—although I fully recognize that I developed these interests in the first place mainly from reading The WIRE.

Anyway, still asking myself Monday's question—"who are the interesting cultural producers?"—I decided that this book might have a useful perspective, since it's all about twentieth-century cultural production. So I decided to put the question to the book's index.

The answers, in reverse order:

Antonin Artaud (6 references)
AMM (6 references)
William S. Burroughs (6 references)
Aleister Crowley (6 references)
Pierre Henry (6 references)
Susie Ibarra (6 references)
Charles Ives (6 references)
Harry Partch (6 references)
David Tudor (6 references)
John Zorn (6 references)
Sigmund Freud (7 references)
Matthew Shipp (7 references)
La Monte Young (8 references)
Sun Ra (10 references)
Luigi Russolo (11 references)
Filippo Marinetti (12 references)
Pierre Schaeffer (12 references)
Edgard Varese (16 references)
Karlheinz Stockhausen (17 references)
John Cage (26 references)

La Monte Young is the highest-ranked person who is still alive. And he has a website, complete with information on a cantankerous legal dispute.

9:18 AM
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Now that this weblog has passed its first birthday, I find myself seeking out new things to do with it.

It's served as a repository for a number of different sorts of things: recipes, things to apply for, the names of songs that Chris and I improvised in the course of an evening. But way back when I started I was intending more to use it as a storehouse for quotes taken from things I was reading—the very second entry, for instance, was a long passage from Interview With the Vampire.

I kind of drifted away from that idea, in part because I don't always have access to a computer when I'm reading things (and I don't plan to begin moblogging anytime soon), and also in part because there's no easy way to link to something I'm reading in the real world.

So anyway, I had this idea that what I'd do in the new year was seek out more interviews and profiles on the Web&151;authors, scholars, artists, interesting thinkers of all stripes, just talking—and I'd do an occasional series called "First Person," where I'd link to an interesting person talking about an interesting topic—maybe a topic that they were a known authority on, but maybe not.

For instance, here's Thurston Moore on the Spice Girls:

"Well, I was watching the Spice Girls movie, and when they cover Gary Glitter's 'You Wanna Be In My Gang' I got goose-bumps. It was chilling. When they came out in those costumes with all the dancers I thought to myself, this is as great as the first time I saw Blondie at Max's. This is as exciting as sitting behind Sid Vicious at CBGB's right after he lost his mind. I could just see being an eight-year old girl, and wanting to be that. At the same time, there was something freakish about it, and it struck me as this completely total rock thing. God bless them all, that's what I say."

(link)

Could be interesting. Of course, this begs the question of who out there really is producing interesting cultural work / ideas at the moment... recommendations are welcome, as always...

Monday, January 13, 2003
5:00 PM
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I'm back.

After a truly absurd amount of internal debate, I think my list of the best CDs of 2002 is ready to go:

1. Thuja, Ghost Plants

The thirteen tracks on this disc reduce the forms of rock, jazz and world music to postapocalyptic artifacts, weathering them down to faint vestiges and provocative hints. These archaeological remnants are then buried within a thick mix of sounds drawn from a industrial world crumbling back into nature. The resultant 39 minutes are transporting and utterly beguiling. Music for the tribes inhabiting our collapsed future. On Emperor Jones.

2. Taj Mahal Travellers, Stockholm 1971

Reissue of a long group improvisation utilizing bowed bass, amplified violin, electronics, small percussive instruments, voice and delay. Early on, the three performers stake out a territory which is both claustrophobic and vast, and they stick close to it, patiently exploring it for over two full hours, and producing a black soundtrack to your innermost drugged-out epic in the process. On Drone Syndicate.

3. Black Dice, Beaches and Canyons

Black Dice have the transcendent energy of a psychedelic jam band, but their desire for ecstatic ascension is countered by their love of unconventional structure and a good old punk fondness for thwarting expectations. Their first full-length release ends up ultimately more interesting than a dozen of psych freak-outs: it sounds like someone disassembled the Boredoms’ Vision Creation New Sun and decided to weld funky ugly junkyard sculptures out of the component parts. On DFA.

4. Minamo, .kgs

Simple patterns played on acoustic instruments, microsound-ish knocks and crackles, and electronic drones that range from the lulling to the piercing—this album takes these incongruous textures and integrates them into an enormously appealing mix. Another example of the tendency of Japanese music to erase the division between the synthetic and the organic. On 360 Degrees.

5. Anti-Pop Consortium, Arrythmia

A document of an inventive hip-hop group at the absolute top of their game. Verbal ingenuity, genius sample-work, electro fuckery and sheer charisma are combined here to produce an album that surpasses their previous domestic full-length, the superb Tragic Epilogue. Now that the group’s split up, they can truly be said to be retiring undefeated. On WARP, "pioneers of weird electronic dance music."

6. Mighty Flashlight, self-titled

Most likeable hybrid of the year: stream-of-consciousness folk blues ornamented with unusual samples and laptop frippery. This album is too slack and modest to qualify as the feel-good album of your summer, but its affability and warmth will serve you well through the colder seasons of your year. On Jade Tree.

7. Keith Fullerton Whitman, Playthroughs

A minor minimalist gem, a worthy addition to a canon that includes the works of Stars of the Lid and Rafael Toral’s Aeriola Frequency pieces. By making incremental adjustments to sets of simple tones and pulses, Whitman gradually develops sonic gardens which teem with life. Possibly the best album to fall asleep to since Brian Eno’s Music For Airports. On Kranky.

8. Tyondai Braxton, History That Has No Effect

An effects pedal is an instrument. Beginning from this principle, Braxton (son of avant-garde jazzman Anthony Braxton) uses his pedals to build an entire backing ensemble, and from them he coaxes sounds that the world has never before heard, ranging from cascading forcefields of crashing cymbals to mutant beatbox to sheer hellish noise. The audacity and promise of this debut eclipse the few moments of indulgence. On JMZ Records.

9 / 10. Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot / Various Artists, Antifolk Vol. 1

These discs make up a set based on the way they serve as antipodes to one another. The Wilco record relishes in unorthodox instrumentation and inventive production; many of the Antifolk contributions remind us of the pleasures of a single guitar recorded on crappy lo-fi equipment. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is ambitious in scope, occasionally sinking under its own self-importance; the Antifolk contributions are idiosyncratic and modest, to the point where they sometimes degenerate into juvenilia or mere novelty. Each album misses as often as it connects, but together they cover an enormous range of emotional territory, testifying to rock music’s continued ability to teach us about how it feels to be human. On Nonesuch / Rough Trade.

Labels: music_commentary

Tuesday, January 07, 2003
10:01 AM
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