Fractionals

There's a pretty awesome interview with Ryan North (who isn't exactly one of my heroes, but is pretty damn close!) over at the Webcomics Examiner. And if I'm bothering to link to a lengthy interview with some guy who makes webcomics, you know it's particularly awesome (because I normally wouldn't bother).

This is the sort of thing the future should be used for, not increasingly scary "non-lethal" weapons.

This week's singles are up - mostly stinkers, but one or two really great ones, and one (Three 6 Mafia's "Stay Fly") that really deserves to be a massive, "Drop It Like It's Hot" level hit.

This is just incredible. It really does have to be seen to be believed.

After further, obsessive careful listening, I think I've come around to Mr. Powell's view of things. The Vocalcity version of "Tessio" is indeed better than the rather overcooked version on The Present Lover, although this sugarrific "Single Mix" I have on my Mac that shoves the whole song into three-and-a-half minutes is pretty awesome too. That'll be on the Stycast, eventually.

I hasten to remind anyone wondering why they aren't linked on the side that the vast majority of my - what do they call it, a "blogroll" or something? - can be found here, and I refuse to duplicate it because that would complicate my non-home surfing to a ridiculous extent (so there). I probably still read you, I just read you whenever the RSS feed tells me to.

More importantly, this week's Playing God on R.E.M.'s UP eventually led me to the blog of the writer, the talented J. Edward Keyes, who has excellent taste in R.E.M. albums.

Screw cremation; this seems like an even better solution. I'd like my dead body to begin giving back to the environment as fast as possible, thanks, and if I was religious I guess it'd be nice that the church approves.

And yeah, having a tree grow from my corpse is an idea that appeals to me.

Interesting article at The Atlantic about unpublished journalism. Of course it notes that the internet has rendered this process instant and uncontrollable, but it doesn't spend as much time on that idea as it maybe should have.

K is now firmly in law school, and it sounds like it's going great. Have I mentioned she should update more? I want to read more detail about what law school is like!

Tom Delay has been indicted.

Tony Blair uses Sham 69's "If The Kids Are United" as a theme song, apparently. Slightly less "huh?" than Eric Prydz's "Call On Me", I suppose - or is that the other way around?

One of the two males washed ashore was found to have been accidentally inseminated - backing the findings of research in previous strandings.

And scientists now believe the males had either accidentally inseminated themselves during "violent" lovemaking sessions with females or been inseminated by other males after "bumping" into them in the dark depths of the ocean.

The fascinating and very, very creepy world of giant squid sexuality.

The Stycast I participated in with Mike Powell, Alfred Soto and Andrew Unterberger is up today.

My review of Night Is Invisible's debut is up today at Stylus.

Yeah, I've had class with that guy. I may even have been that guy a few times, but thankfully mostly they kept me confined to classes with no-one else but other Philosophy majors, in which cases we were all that guy (used in the non-gender specific manner, of course).

Today I got the copy I bought of Thieves' "Unworthy" CDS in the mail - I ordered it after Todd Burns included a proper link to where you can buy it on my Stycast. It's got two versions of "Unworthy", the edit I'm used to and a longer version with additions that I can't notice yet. It's just the same gorgeous thing for long. It also has b-sides "The Night" and "They Hide", the former of which is kind of undistinguished on first listen, but "They Hide" is pretty awesome.

I don't buy singles very often (and this is a promo copy, to boot), in fact this might be my third single purchase after Orbital's "Are We Here?" and Johnny Cash's "Hurt". But when they're good, they're perfect - it's so much easier to have four great songs than 10.

I forgot to link to it yesterday, but a booze-assisted Stycast by me went up; today we find my On Second Thought for R.E.M.'s drastically underrated Up, in counterrpoint to a interesting Playing God of same by J. Edward Keyes.

You have to scroll down a bit, but the guys at Penny Arcade write quite entertainingly about their run-in with Harlan Ellison.

(le geek, c'est chic)

Great interview with Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon over at Time, courtesy of Lexx at A Grand Illusion.

Excellent article by Rupert Christiansen on the power of art to surprise on repeat viewings.

Michael Dirda makes me extremely eager to finally read Herman Melville.

I've been behind on my reading, but if you're a fan of laughing a lot go read this. The rest of the article is pretty funny, but that page almost killed me.

The whole record hasn't quite settled in yet, but Luomo's "Market" is an incredible song. A whole bunch of people pointed out Vocalcity to me, but I feel especially grateful to Mike Powell (who, as someone I think of as more of a fan of Animal Collective than Luomo, pushed me over the edge).

I also bought some comic books today, including the collected edition of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's We3.

I am torn between praising it to the skies (as it deserves) and talking about how sick it made me feel. Not just because Morrison and Quitely depict the violence in a way that perfectly captures the chaos, mess and horror of it, but also just in the story. Wow, that's inadequate. If you've read it you might know what I mean. This is, of course, from the same writer who used the death of his cat as a springboard for one of the finest comics ever (if you haven't read Morrison's run on Animal Man, you wouldn't believe me if I told you about it), but the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach started on the first pages of We3 and only got worse.

It is one of the finest, most powerful works of art produced in the last couple of years. It deserves to be read by one and all. It is the closest art has ever come to making me want to be a vegetarian (and that's not even the story's real point). It is definitely the most affecting thing I've read in what, a decade? And I'm not sure I ever want to open it again, or more accurately if I could bear to.

Which means I probably should. The Filth will probably always be more my speed, but if Morrison deserves a place in history, this alone would have sufficed. Quitely responds with gorgeous drawings full of horrible things. It raises some serious issues without skimping on the "action" scenes (although those scenes have rarely been harder to take), but all of this is just talking around the central horror of the thing.

Just read it.

So today I managed a fairly good run at the used CD store, where I had a significent credit from selling some CDs a while back. I went in looking for The Very Best Of The Stone Roses, which I eventually got at HMV while hanging out with Jeromy (who is briefly in town) but the Beat Goes On reported that it was apparantly unavailable, even as a new copy (they had trying to order a new copy for me for a few weeks). I did, however, walk out with all of the following for $8:

Natalie Imbruglia - White Lilies Island
Booker T & The MGs - The Very Best Of Booker T & The MGs
The Nau Ensemble - The Eternal: Variations On Joy Division
The Cardigans - Gran Turismo ($4 in the discount bin, and it has my favorite song by them on it!)
Ghostface Killah - Supreme Clientele

Plus of course the aforementioned Stone Roses comp. All of which indicates I'm not selling records fast enough, if I'm bringing them in at this pace.

Another week, another thrilling installment of Singles Going Steady.

(I really do enjoy reading this column, and I've got a long habit of linking to anything on Stylus I have a hand in, but you try to think of an interesting way to do it each week)

My piece on "Aside" is up again, with listening material.

I'm not a huge fan of Andrew Sullivan (or maybe it's more accurate to say that I often enjoy his writing but disagree with his conclusions), but he absolutely nails it here, writing of The March Of The Penguins and attempts to use it as a political football. Best lines:

"Not everything is political. And not everything is about us."

I have, sitting in front of me, a device the size of roughly two sticks of gum. It holds around 500 megs of data, or enough to hold significant chunks of the "great works" of, say, English literature or classical music or what have you. This would amaze your "average" person from the 1800s (not to mention what else you can do with the information you could have on it).

To even begin to interpret the data, though, you need to use several more things that would baffle/amaze/seem magical to that same person. They might not react that much just to the little metal stick. And that's what interests me - the idea that imagining the future is especially futile, because the amazing things will be predicated on a series of other, equally amazing things, and humans are notoriously bad at going beyond the first order when trying to be futurist.

Of course (says the devoted fan of Dick, Brunner and Whedon), that doesn't mean the failed attempts can't be interesting...

"Keyboard clacking" - if you can hear it, you can crack it. There are some holes, of course, but how science fiction is this?

My music criticism essay is up today. I think it's worth your time, but then again, I would...

That nagging refrain from Superchunk's "Hello Hawk", which I lack the technical vocabulary to really describe. It's the part that repeats before suddenly cutting out so McCaughan can sing the chorus over a quieter version of same. I'm not really familiar with Come Pick Me Up (yet), but this song is pretty awesome.

There is exactly one good line in Steven Van Zandt's little tantrum to a "Radio & Records Convention":

If to a punky consciousness the Ramones are sugar and the Ronettes are broccoli you play the Ramones into the Ronettes and, because Joey learned to sing from Ronnie and you can hear it, the Ramones become hollandaise and it works.

The rest is bullshit that is, well, I'll let Alfred Soto say it for me: "reactionary, tone-deaf, and stupid".

Things might be slow for a little while, as the source of our wireless connection at home has broken and is being fixed, which means I only have internet at work.

And yes, I'll be spending my non-lunch break time here actually working, sadly.

Yeah, it's Talk Like A Pirate Day. I thought it was a cool idea too. We get it. Please stop now.

New A Touching Display up today; and while you really should read Nick Southall's first Soulseeking, you should also read this afterwards.

The whole trip was great (well, except the actual transit, and even that wasn't bad, the plane rides weren't that long), and there were some neat little details (Alfred Soto and I kept trying to order the same things in restaurants, we always went to Thai restaurants, we got lost on the subway, etc), but most strikingly for me aside from the whole getting to see these people in person thing was the shopping. I can't remember the last time I went record shopping and wasn't incredibly frustrated. This was fun, and I'm very pleased with my haul:

Luomo - Vocalcity (yes, it's as good as they say, although I prefer the later version of "Tessio")
William Basinski - The Disintegration Loops I (it's got the first two ones, if I love it I'll get the rest)
Broadcast - The Noise Made By People (out of print, dammit! The single most expensive thing I bought and the only thing I was explicitly looking for. It's the English version with slightly cooler packaging though, so that's nice)
Spacemen 3 - Dreamweapon ("An Evening Of Contemporary Sitar Music" = maybe my favourite long form drone ever)
Coil - The Golden Hare With A Voice Of Silver (incredible 2CD Russian comp reissued on an English label)
The Mountain Goats - Tallahassee
The Avalanches - Since I Left You (these last two were used)

Times like these, I can see the appeal of living in the big city.

[Edit: We forgot the Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset"]

Four hours of kareoke. 9 Stylus writers (Alfred has a list, bless him). The names in brackets are who picked the songs, but most of these (especially in the second half) were group performances. Beer was involved (Heinekin, Corona and Pabst). The most fun I've ever had? Well, up there. The ones in bold were the ones we seemed totally unanimous about, and they paint a disturbing picture...

By the way, I didn't pick many songs, nor sing solo very often, for one simple reason: I am tone deaf when singing.

Elton John - "Bennie and the Jets" (Mike Powell)
Murray Head - "One Night in Bangkok" (Andrew Unterberger)
The Coasters - "Charlie Brown" (Mike Powell)
Phil Collins - "Against All Odds" (Ian Mathers)
The Killers - "Mr. Brightside" (John Cunningham)
Depeche Mode - "Personal Jesus" (Andrew Unterberger)
Sugar Ray - "Fly" (Anthony Miccio)
Maxwell - "This Woman's Work" (Anthony Miccio) (this one really was all Anthony, and possibly the single greatest performance of the night)
The Verve Pipe - "The Freshmen" (Andrew Unterberger)
The Smiths - "How Soon is Now?" (John Cunningham) (I know, so stereotypical - also tons of fun)
Kylie Minogue - "Love at First Sight" (John Cunningham)
Ying Yang Twinz - "Wait (The Whisper Song)" (Anthony Miccio) (if I recall, Miccio and Burns destroyed this one)
Akon - "Lonely" (Anthony Miccio)
Lil' Jon & the East Side Boyz f/ the Ying Yang Twinz - "Get Low" (Anthony Miccio)
Hall & Oates - "I Can't Go for That (No Can Do)" (Andrew Unterberger)
David Bowie - "Golden Years' (Alfred Soto) (WOP WOP WOP!)
Stevie Nicks - "Stand Back" (Alfred Soto) (Class. Alfred probably ties with Burns for best voice, although Cunningham was right up there)
Elvis Costello - "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace Love & Understanding" (Ian Mathers) (I was laughing too hard to sing half of the verses)
N Sync - "Bye Bye Bye" (Alfred Soto)
Weezer - "Undone - The Sweater Song" (Anthony Miccio)
Guns n Roses - "November Rain" (Anthony Miccio) (fucking interminable)
R. Kelly - "Ignition" (John Cunningham)
Billy Joel - "Pressure" (Andrew Unterberger) (never even heard of it before, and I loathe Joel, but any excuse to scream out "PRESSURE!" at the top of one's lungs...)
Len - "Steal My Sunshine" (Anthony Miccio)
Limp Bizkit - "Nookie" (Anthony Miccio) (surprisingly enjoyable)
Ted Nugent - "Cat Scratch Fever" (Anthony Miccio)
Queen & David Bowie - "Under Pressure" (Ian Mathers) (possibly Stylus' theme song, based on our collective performance)

(At this point I went with Powell on a beer run, missing...)

Sean Paul - "Get Busy" (John Cunningham)
Green Day - "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" (Anthony Miccio)
Avril Lavigne - "Complicated" (?)
Human League - "Human" (Andrew Unterberger)
Gwen Stefani - "Hollaback Girl" (John Cunningham)

(returning for)

My Chemical Romance - "Helena" (Mike Powell) (YES)
Bell Biv Devoe - "Poison" (John Cunningham)
Prince - "Darling Nikki" (Alfred Soto)
The Cranberries - "Zombie" (Todd Burns)
Jimmy Eat World - "The Middle" (Andrew Unterberger)
Roxy Music - "Love is the Drug" (Alfred Soto)
Tommy James & the Shondells - "Crimson and Clover" (Mike Powell) (fucking a, Mike)
Baha Men - "Who Let the Dogs Out" (Anthony Miccio)
Garth Brooks - "Friends in Low Places" (Mike Powell)
The Ataris - "The Boys of Summer" (John Cunningham)
James - "Laid" (John Cunningham)
Liz Phair - "Extraordinary" (Todd Burns)
The Platters - "My Prayer" (Mike Powell) (featuring Mike Powell as Michelle Feiffer circa The Fabulous Baker Boys, and dedicated to the rest of us. Class)
Natalie Imbruglia - "Wrong Impression" (Todd Burns)
Johnny Cash - "Hurt" (Anthony Miccio) (in the dark, all concerned singing their lungs out - a perfect finish)

Man was that trip fun. Completely worth it. Mike, Alfred, Andrew and I did a Stycast that will go up in a week or something which - I have no idea how it will turn out, but was loads of fun to do. It was great meeting everyone (and great seeing Todd Burns again, as he's basically one of my favourite human beings who doesn't live in Guelph), special thanks to Alfred and Andrew for putting up with me near-constantly, especially Andrew who gave us a place to stay. And Mike for letting us invade his apartment when he had a hangover. And Nate de Young for letting me babble about Gene Wolfe. And William S Fields for taking it gracefully when I drunkenly apologized for an old review. And John Cunningham for giving me the last promo copy of his band's album. And of course Todd for putting the site together and keeping it together, because otherwise this wouldn't have happened...

Same time next year, guys?

My trip back was so fragmented I didn't get a chance to pull out the Discman, but I had soundtrack anyways.

01. Luomo - "Market"
02. The Strokes - "The Modern Age"
03. Guided By Voices - "I Am A Tree"
04. Readymade - "No Longer Ortona"*
05. The Beastie Boys - "An Open Letter To NYC"
06. My Morning Jacket - "Steam Engine"
07. Wilco - "Via Chicago"
08. The Smiths - "How Soon Is Now?"
09. The Chameleons UK - "Mad Jack"
10. Coil - "Amethyst Deceivers"

*(now On Point And Red - that is music for airports)

...and on 4 hours of sleep (or that's what it would be if I'd been able to fall asleep when my head hit the pillow), I'm off to NYC.

Does anyone (well, anyone local) want a computer? Free? Including monitor and keyboard and mouse and all that? It's just a Pentium 900, 256 megs of ram, but it's got an "100 gig" hard drive (in practise about an 80), and it always worked well for me. I don't really want to throw it out. Anyone?

Also, Aaron has super powers. By which I mean I can't always hear turn signals, and his voice always sounds quiet to me.

Excellent post over at Popular on "Paint It, Black". Good to see Tom hasn't given up, as busy as he is.

My review of Madagascar is up today.

Never let it be said that I ain't sentimental.

We've already had at least one reader go "...huh?" in response, but I think Stewart Voegtlin's essay on music criticism is one of the finest things on the subject I've read anywhere, anytime. I really wish mine didn't have to follow his, but thems the breaks.

I've been too busy to do much of anything for the last few days (err, except get in some late night Adventure Quest), but hopefully that will chance today.

One of the big reasons I've been busy, of course, is the fact that I will be in New York City this Friday to meet and drink hang out with a number of Stylus people, including (but not limited to, because my memory sucks) Todd Burns, Andrew Unterberger, Alfred Soto, Mike Powell, William S. Fields, John Cunningham and Anthony Miccio. There may be, at some point, kareoke.

To say I'm excited would be an understatement.

On a slightly less personal note, today also finds the North American chart contingent tackling some UK songs (and vice versa). Also, the article for the week is Stylus Magazine's Top 50 Basslines Of All Time; part one is up today with subsequent installments being unveiled as the week goes on. I've got two entries in there somewhere.

My review of the new Elbow is up as our album of the week.

This sort of thing is why I read Partially Clips.

Thanks to Alex over at A Grand Illusion for linking to the story of Rehnquist's sedative addiction, which makes some good points about the lopsidedness of the War On Drugs.

Craigslist has been pressed into service as a sort of informal news service for people trapped by Katrina; my friend Jobe over on the D.O.W. message board has posted a pretty harrowing account.

Hey, anything that cuts down on needles is good with me.

Because the man was a vicious, nasty little shit. Also why I've never seen The Motorcycle Diaries.

Nice to see the connection made so bluntly.

David Edelstein at Slate on why The Exorcism Of Emily Rose is worse, and maybe more harmful, than all those merely-awful horror movies.

(clue: it's hidden agenda time!)

Hmm. I like the name, but I prefer our version to this one; we do teams of two, you can put your beer down, but whether or not you hit the cup one team always drinks. We just call it "Cups", though.

R Stevens, after seeing Sufjan Stevens (no relation) in concert, gives all fifty US states new slogans.

I particularly like Ohio's: "It seemed like a good idea at the time".

Jon Stewart had this clip on last night, but it's good to be reminded. I'd imagine "go fuck yourself" is closer to the average reaction those trapped in New Orleans for so long have to the federal government right now than whatever pablum Cheney was trying to feed to the media.

Tom Ewing, he of Freaky Trigger fame, is currently posting and expanding on his "top 100 singles of the 90s" list over at his livejournal. He's only up to #98, and it's good stuff, so get in on the ground floor.

Now if only I could find the "top 100 albums of the 90s" feature that was my first exposure to FT again...

Hunter S. Thompson's last note.

It's really nice that a Canadian rescue team was able to help out in St. Bernard parish, a suburb of 68,000 people that "was initially ignored by U.S. authorities who were scrambling to get aid to New Orleans".

But we got there 5 days before the US government got a look in?

So Apple gives us an iTunes enabled phone, and even-smaller iPod and a slightly tweaked iTunes.

I really like my new computer, but why exactly do some idiots go nuts over this sort of thing?

A lot of the talk about the people who remained in New Orleans during Katrina has been bugging me for a while now, and I've finally been able to put my finger on why.

The people asking why the poor of New Orleans didn't just leave have been called out on their lack of insight to the material challenges facing the poor, and rightly so. As Cherie Priest said, "If every single person in New Orleans had a spare $300 and a car, most of them could have run." But there's an element to that question that hasn't been addressed, at least not to my knowledge:

Why are we assuming the poor have as much access to information as we do?

I mean, do they have the internet, or the leisure time to use it? Do they read the New York Times or similar sources? I don't think poor people are ignorant or anything hateful like that, but access to information costs money, both directly and in terms of the amount of time we spend accessing that information that (since it's not a productive working hour) might as well be money when you're poor. I would be willing to bet that for an awful lot of those poor people there was a lot less foreknowledge about how bad this would be. Not because they're stupid, but because the cost of access to information and the wherewithal to use that access is just another thing that goes up as you cross class barriers in North America.

The Daily Show last night was great, and in a similar vein, here's Eric Burns, being "far far far past the point of being 'fair to everyone involved',".

On a more balanced note, last time I read the discussion in the comments below that post, it was extremely helpful and informative.

I watched and loved all four broadcasted episodes of the wildly ahead of it's time Profit when they first came out, and it's kind of nice to see it's out on DVD. But really, I don't know whether I'd like to see it again. My memory of it is both indelible and unlikely to be improved by repeat viewings.

I've got something on Leonard Cohen's "Take This Waltz" up at Stylus.

Stylus handicaps the Mercury Music Prize with our customary not-taking-the-piss-at-all attitude. There's some good stuff there, and I actually would like to hear Polar Bear now. The Independant also has a story that makes me feel surprisingly good about the process behind the prize.

Completely fascinating piece in the Boston Globe on Native American technology. I would love for someone to do some serious research and write speculative fiction on what might have been. It's easy from this vantage point to assume that the technology that developed out of European society was somehow inevitable; "Living in the bubble of our own computers and automobiles, we tend to think of technology in terms of electricity, plastic and metal, motors and wheels." But it wasn't, and a good writer could do really interesting things with that insight.

You really should go watch the video for "Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo". I was/am a big fan of "The Bad Touch", and this one is just as good.

A new Stycast by me is up.

Mike Powell is one hell of a writer, and you should be reading his blog anyway, but you owe yourself a look at his post about Kanye's performance on TV.

1. An open letter to Bush
2. Who is the government official who has been lying to Newsweek and the Washington Post?

There are no words. Just go read it.

In my childhood I experienced a small amount of those things (the minor ones), and...

There are no words.

I swear, if one more lily-livered media source refers to Kanye "ruining" the Katrina telecast I'm going to puke. John Darnielle says it best.

(I'd upload the image, but the software I'm used to using is Windows and it too late to get new stuff and learn how to use it tonight)

Jordan Flaherty posts his experiences in the refugee camps and adds in some valuable background on New Orleans, including some notes on the reconstruction.

Ellis is right - this just keeps getting more surreal.

Worth a thousand words. It's like a bad movie, one we'd watch and half way through start making fun of, saying "that would never happen in the real world. The government would intervene before it got this bad."

This week's singles are up, and I'm a little surprised I'm the only one who hates the new Franz Ferdinand single.

"Falling in love," he said, "is basically a process where both sides feel they're getting a good deal."

Am I alone in finding this sort of thing terribly depressing?

That sound you heard earlier today? It was all the FEMA employees slapping their foreheads in disgust/shock simultaneously and wishing they didn't have such a stupid dickhead for a boss.

FEMA warned the rest of the US government about this sort of thing happening to New Orleans in 2001? And Bush took money away from improving the levees?

How much more damage does he get to do to his own country before enough Americans start getting mad?

My brother has arranged a Flickr account detailing the various and sundry adventures of a bunch of guys we know. I'm more mentioning it here for personal reference than anything else, but I'm putting up links to photos anyway (I'm in there somewhere).

Also for future reference, I'll need to be able to decide which of these two pictures of Jobe is better.

Don't ask about the pirates. Just don't ask. Especially about the spanking.

Of course, my brother, the guy who put everything up, isn't getting out of this. He's in the middle.

And equally obviously, black-and-white makes everything classy. Everything. Even this.

The Superdome down in New Orleans is not being evacuated because one of the rescue helicopters has been shot at.

What the fuck? This is the part where Batman comes in or something, right?