Fractionals

Submitted without comment, again.

So it's (semi)official; I will be trying to have my MA thesis (on Roman Ingarden and the musical work of art) done in time to defend it by late June so as to finish it before Dr. Jeff Mitscherling (my advisor) leaves for Chile to teach. I am torn between panic and excitement.

And oddly enough, for a surprisingly sustained period (five days?) I have been unable to get Interpol's "Not Even Jail" out of my head. I still think a good 50% of Antics is crap, but not that song.

Great interview with Warren Ellis about his upcoming novel Crooked Little Vein:

This all started when I inherited a literary agent upon signing with the Writers And Artists agency in LA for film and tv work, years ago. Unbeknownst to me, W&A had a lit agency in New York, and one day Lydia Wills phoned me up to tell me that, now I was with W&A, she was my lit agent, and when was I going to write her a novel to sell? This went on for months. I nearly had her legs broken twice. Until, one day, I thought to myself, let's just shut her up. And I sat down and wrote the first ten thousand words of an utterly unsaleable novel. I figured I could recycle the material into comics later. So I handed her this horror of a thing, complete with Godzilla Bukkake scene, and said, take this and leave me alone.

Thinking, obviously, that she'd decide I was insane and never bug me again.

Two weeks later, she phoned to tell me she'd sold it to Harper Collins in New York.

It's one of the more epic backfires of my career, Chris.

Submitted without comment.

Doritos apparently now has a "Tandoori Sizzler!" flavour of nacho chips. As someone who loves tandoori chicken, I am a little curious. As someone familiar with how hideous junk food can be (and how far off the mark), I'm repulsed.

The Singles Jukebox is no longer a weekly column; it is now a blog. Entries for new songs by the Kaiser Chiefs and the View with blurbs by me are up; in general, I'm not going to link to every new post that I participate in there. Just know that you have a steady source for your pop music snark, if you wish.

Haven't sat down at my computer since Thursday, but I am excessively glad to see that mark k-punk has not only seen Children of Men but loves it; his take is, as always, cogent and a fascinating need.

I've been busy relaxing the past few days, but I've got an assload of work so I'll probably procrastinate a little by posting... for now there's my account of the Constantines show I went to a few weeks ago.

Feel good hits of the 25th of January, 2007 ("going out dancing" edition):

"Lizaveta" - Constantines
"Homage" - ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead
"Thiefcatcher" - Starometska
"Rock 'n' Roll" - Daft Punk
"Rock Lobster" - The B-52s
"Sandwiches" - Detroit Grand Pubahs
"Fight the Power" - Public Enemy
"Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above" - CSS
"And I Was A Boy From School" - Hot Chip
"Temptation (New Machines Mix)" - New Order

(first three listened to at home, alone, getting ready; next one at Nate's place, having a few beers; the rest at the Albion, dancing)

The military is inching ever closer to having ray guns. Non-lethal ones, but still. The fact that they make you feel like you're on fire just terrifies the shit out of me.

For archiving/nostalgia purposes: I recently had cause to drag up these links again, and might as well say something here so they'll be easy to find. In the middle of 2004 I took four months to do an On Second Thought for each of the four Berlin-era Bowie records. It remains the single sustained piece of writing that I'm most proud of, and one of the few things of mine I'd actually point people to as a source. I think they all still read pretty well, and I also flatter myself that they're a concise, fairly interesting introduction to the best period of a guy you have to care about if you give a shit about music at all. If you've got some time to kill, why not check them out?

Station to Station
Low
"Heroes"
Lodger

(and by the way, in my own opinion the proper order of these records from best to worst is "Heroes", Station to Station, Lodger and then Low, although I love them all)

A good friend, a really good friend, is one who will drive you to a bar, let you get slowly but methodically shitfaced (I bought him a couple too, thanks), carry on a good conversation the whole while, and then drive you home again.

I'm always happy when the brilliant Dogblog updates.

Also! XKCD has summed up why Wikipedia is the most effective procrastination tool ever devised by man. The number of hours I've wasted, learnin' useless stuff...

Feel good hits of the 24th of January, 2007:

David Bowie - "Red Money"
Tom Waits - "Downtown Train"
The Tragically Hip - "Boots and Hearts"
Hefner - "Painting and Kissing"
Elastica - "Mad Dog God Dam"
Easy Star All-Stars - "Electioneering"
Tindersticks - "I Know That Loving"
Chris Whitley - "Cut the Cards"
Ryan Adams - "Wish You Were Here"
The Good, the Bad & the Queen - "History Song"

My review of the new-ish Goslings record is up. What a band.

Usually when music fans talk smack about The Menace (often in favour of Elastica's inferior but still fun debut) I just kind of shrug, but if it's right after I've listened to "My Sex" I tend to actually get a little angry. Not that there's not good stuff on Blur's 13 as well, but Justine Frischmann makes me feel much worse for her. Hearing the (perfectly paced, more varied than you'd think) album with that song on it called shallow and trite bugs the shit out of me.

Another fine Slacktivist post, that you really have to read. It clarifies an important misconception about the States 'winning' in Iraq.

How the holy blistering fuck did Children of Men only get nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography and Editing?

I mean, in Best Actor it's great to see Whitaker and Gosling, but DiCaprio? Will Smith?

In Best Picture... how the hell does Babel, The Queen or Little Miss Sunshine (pleasent/competant as they all may be) crowd out Children of Men? Did it come out too late? Did none of the jagoffs at the Academy actually watch it?

And as for Best Director, don't get me started. Cuaron didn't have a chance anyways (Scorsese is a mortal lock), but as pleasing as The Departed may be, it's not even close to Scorsese's best work, and I loathe the way the Oscars tend to award past work each year.

God, unless I get invited to a good party there is no way I'm going to watch this year. What total bullshit.

The first Singles Jukebox of the new year is also the last in its old format; I'm not exactly sure how the new one will work (there's an explanation at the link), but I'm excited anyways.

I'm glad I read Steven Brust's Livejournal for a variety of reasons (not least because he's one of my favourite authors). In this case, he's just had a short but extremely great post on Firefly:

If I were to boil down the theme of that show (I can't speak for the rest of Whedon's work) to a single declarative sentence, it would be this: You can't trust people, but you ought to anyway.

Beautiful and true. There's good stuff in the comments, too.

It's been a shockingly long time since I've said this, but I've got something up on Stylus today; Here's my take on the Wedding Present's bravura, exhausting "Take Me!"

This should not have made me laugh as much as it did. I almost fell off my chair.

I know the blog has tended to be a little slow on the weekends; it's all the boozing and writing and marking. I do still waste time with memes and such, but that tends to happen at my Livejournal (I got it to comment, okay?); I've just posted one there now, actually.

Feel good hits of the 18th of January, 2007:

Low - "Walk Into the Sea"
Six By Seven - "Bochum (Light Up My Life)"
The Goslings - "Croatan"
Tamas Wells - "From Prying Plans Into the Fire"
David Sylvian - "The Shining of Things"
Oneida - "$50 Tea"
Queens of the Stone Age - "First it Giveth"
Japan - "Ghosts"
Tom Vek - "I Ain't Sayin' My Goodbyes"
Low - "Take Your Time"

How annoyed am I that the tour for Low's upcoming, fucking amazing Drums and Guns (mark my words, it may be my #1 album of 2007 already) doesn't come to Toronto?

I just watched last night's Colbert Report, which meant I saw Stephen Colbert absolutely destroy Dinesh D'Souza. Which I'd feel bad about if he wasn't such an evil little prick. Just an astonishing demolition, though.

It's sad how much of the BBC's Guide to Fanfic isn't new to me despite not reading fanfic as a rule, thanks to my internet perambulations. I still find that whole world pretty fascinating, though.

It's the Greatest's 65th birthday today. Pay homage: he's was/is one pithy, funny, language-loving motherfucker, above and beyond being one hell of a fighter.

In the guise of a book review, the New Yorker has a fascinating overview of vegetarianism up:

There was no distinct category you could call moral, because all of them were, as they remain, intensely moral. Vegetarianism has always been less about why you should eat plants than about why you shouldn’t eat animals. And so arguments about vegetarianism, by drawing attention to rights that we claim for ourselves but deny to other animals, inevitably involve basic questions about what it is to be human.

Mates of State - Bring It Back

One of those albums I'm surprised to see on one of these until I put it on again. But then I remember; I love pretty much every setting on Kori Gardner's keyboard (especially the ones that sound like organs or anything else that buzzes), "Think Long" is a strangely rousing opener, and I've never heard any of their other albums so I don't think this is any sort of a let down.

But mostly, I just love the way she and Jason Hammel yell. Not at each other - with each other. Whether it's the "Think long, think think long, think think!" from the opener, "And you will surely find this news pleasing to your ears!" in "Fraud in the '80s," "I've been thinking it's an afterthought!" in the ridiculously great coda to "Punchlines," "Nothing! And everything!" in "So Many Ways," or a bunch of other examples scattered across the punchy, hooky but tightly-plotted Bring it Back, it's one of the most willfully exuberant sounds I've ever heard. They really are like the anti-Low, where their voices don't go together at all and it does sound like two people, always, instead of one other... thing, but it's still amazing and alive and wonderful. And the record is perfectly paced (yes, I even like the ballad-y "Nature and the Wreck"); the closing "Running Out" is a bravura change of pace. A massed group of voices all yelling "Ooooh, tired of singing!" out of the ashes of the good-but-stark song the duo was playing somehow fills nearly 7 minutes without getting bored or boring.

I don't want them to add more people, or more instruments, or anything else. Just more albums of sugarbuzz surprisingly complex drum-and-organ-and-yell pop, please.

So they've got supposedly people and animal safe RFID ink now. More than a little cool, even if not all of the possible uses are exactly reassuring.

Espers - Espers II

"There are shocks to the system hidden within II, but they're so pleasingly cushioned you never notice until afterwards. It’s an album that leaves you both soothed and disturbed, lulled and shaken by the group’s masterful blend of the comforting and the uncanny, slightly dazed as if returning from time travel or a knock on the head."
(Me)

Space-age crystalline sludge-folk about deceased royalty, magick, storms, visions, hypnosis, living nightmares and the fugue state. Uses everything from an Omnichord to a dholak. Their publishing company is called "gonedarkside." This should be insufferably twee and/or goth but is instead strangely touching and genuinely weird. If Joanna Newsom was into writing songs with actual choruses and lovingly exploring the varieties of drone in the context of popular song from the Elizabethan era on down, she might sound a little like this. Only one of the strengths of Espers is that they very much sound like a collective instead of a person or group of people, and while the rugged individualists have long been lionized in music criticism, maybe we should be paying a little more attention to the gains made by groups that have more fully mastered the seeming mind-meld. It's probably just planning, but on the slow motion waltzing drift of "Dead Queen" and the almost schematic (in a good way) "Children of Stone" it seems more like telepathy.

Feel good hits of the 13th of January, 2007 (special "out, dancing" edition):

Low - "Blue-Eyed Devil"
Hot Chip - "Over and Over"
New Order - "Bizarre Love Triangle"
Scissor Sisters - "Don't Feel Like Dancing"
Kool and the Gang - "Jungle Boogie"
Rose Royce - "Car Wash"
Edwin Starr - "War"
Royksopp feat. Karin Dreijer - "What Else Is There?"
Tom Tom Club - "Genius of Love"
The Strokes - "Fear of Sleep"

The Walkmen - A Hundred Miles Off

Except for "The Rat," I never liked these guys before. I hated this when I downloaded it. And then I got a hangover. A Hundred Miles Off is a headache, a blearily bawling pain behind the eyes, an almost determinedly ugly record from Leihauser's yowl on down. I mean, "Always After You ('Til You Started After Me)"'s main hook is the sound of the drummer trying to kill you after the title is wearily intoned.

And like a real hangover, it winds up being richer and more complex than you'd think at first. It helps that Leithauser is, no shit, one of the few great personalities in modern indie rock (I love Chutes Too Narrow to bits, for example, but Mercer is basically a cipher). What's he actually saying? Who can tell? Who cares? Making something like "Emma, Get Me A Lemon" not only tolerable but a highlight is real yeoman work, in frontmen terms. This record, from the quietus of the far-off storm in "Lousiana" to seething spit, sweat and raw ache of most of the rest, reminds me of too many late nights out and too much of the texture of my actual life in 2006 to be ignored. I'll be unpacking what I love about it for years.

CLINIC Lee's Palace. $15 at RT, SS, HS, TM. Mar 12.

EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY w/ The Paper Chase, Eluvium. Opera House. $15 at RT, SS, HS, TM. Mar 24.

Andre the Giant: One hell of a drinker.

Robert Anton Wilson has defied medical experts and left his body.

I don't feel sad, not really; as the man himself said, "Please pardon my levity, I don't see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd."

I have to make time to re-read Illuminatus! in the near future.

I've seen this a couple of places, but I can't not comment; thousands of birds have fallen from the sky in Australia and no-one knows why.

I have a very bad feeling about this.

Mogwai - Mr Beast / Excepter - Alternation

So a little delayed, but I'm finally getting started; since tackling the whole thing at once or even in chunks is way too much effort for me right now, I'll be doing these one at a time, and hopefully (at least) one a day. This is the list I submitted to Stylus, with one addition in this entry, and I don't even pretend this is still what I'd put down as my twenty favourite records of 2006; but it is twenty good ones, mostly not too terribly overexposed, and I certainly don't feel any regret.

So, to begin with, my #20 and the one that narrowly got bumped off the list once I realised I'd forgotten Phoenix (that would be Excepter). I went back and forth quite a bit on which of these I liked more, but ultimately Mogwai is the one I'd rather listen to for pleasure. Because I don't quite get "pleasure" from Alternation, even if what I do get might be more valuable.

But one at a time! Mr Beast may not have the best songs Mogwai has ever done (or at least, not all of them - although I'd make a case for "Travel Is Dangerous," "Glasgow Mega Snake" and the deceptively swooning "Friend of the Night") but it is resolutely their best album,* one where even the weaker tracks make perfect sense as parts of a whole, where brevity and power and nuance manage to collide perfectly. They pull off the same trick here that Constantines did on the underrated Tournament of Hearts, making their best record without quite hitting the heights they did before - maybe because they don't aim that high? Or maybe because both albums are so obsessively cohesive that it's harder to see highlights. "Team Handed" and "Emergency Trap" may not be songs I'll be putting on mixtapes, or even ones I can remember real well, but in context they, bluntly, work.

It doesn't hurt that Mr Beast manages to be both the hardest and the softest Mogwai have ever been on an LP; it avoids the absurd excesses of their first two records, the oddly unsatisfying sheen of Happy Music For Happy People and barely outshines the great Rock Action by dint of better sequencing and the fact that it turns out that a lack of epics suit the band. This is the first Mogwai album I love where I'd like to see them build on this sound; Come On Die Young and Rock Action felt more like they'd gone as far as they should and it was time to try something new.

As for Excepter, I'm just going to go ahead and post a conversation we had about it on the Stylus staff message boards.

Derek Miller: [Alternation] is a rather odd space for the band after their first few releases, more in the vein of Sunbomber.

Jeff Siegel: Yes. I quite like it actually. It's literally the most basic, fundamental thing they could possibly do. Ennui in a bottle. Yeah.

Mike Powell: Yeah, totally agreed. They're officially one of the most bored-sounding bands ever.

Jeff Siegel: Bored, but not boring. That's the key isn't it--how Uncle Andy put it?

Mike Powell: (The sound of our brains humming in unison, shattering the fragile champagne flute of mediocrity)

Jeff Siegel: Great minds.

I didn't think it was possible, but I've somehow managed to get "Ice Cream Van" stuck in my head.

Mike Powell: Because it is so awesome

Jeff Siegel: This is the fucking weirdest, most out-of-the-blue thing I've come across in a long time.

Mike Powell: Do you really think it's out of the blue? It makes perfect sense to me... and I'm not saying that to be weird or anything.

Ian Mathers: I won't be able to tell whether I like this or not for, oh, another ten or so listens. But I can tell I'm going to enjoy the process.

Stewart Voegtlin: Excepter certainly enjoys the process. The only other band who's patient enough to let songs "develop on their own" is NNCK. I think Excepter is stunning, and they ain't gettin' as much love as they should be. Dada dance band? Angst ridden disco? Coil meets LFO? All the above, yo.

Ian Mathers: Okay, I don't think I've been able to go a day without listening to this since I last posted (24 days before) in this thread. And that's fucking bizarre for me. Alternation is pretty severely eating/rewiring my brain.

Mike Powell: I find this admission both disturbing and laudable.

Stewart Voegtlin: That's funny, Mike. I felt the same way when I read it this a.m.

Ian Mathers: I finally managed to delete the damn thing off of my iPod (although not, of course, my hard drive**) tonight. My coworkers were, seriously, beginning to complain. They said it was "creepy". I find myself listening to it and half the time enjoying it without thinking, and the other half of the time sort of listening with part of my mind removed from the experience, asking the rest of me "and what are you getting out of this, exactly?" "The Rock Stepper" is pretty much the only song I know that I wish was an hour long.


*My favourite Mogwai album is Come On Die Young (absurdly long running time and all), so if you're one of many who thinks they stopped being good after the over-rated Young Team, go fetch some salt.
**Yes, I bought a real copy.

The New York Times has a good article up today about the music in Hitchcock's movies.

That was one hell of an episode of House. Hugh Laurie continues to have the best genuinely pained look on TV. I watched it so late tonight because I spent a solid hour after work knocking the worst of the rust off of my badminton arm - God, I've missed that game.

I was never going to be 100% happy with this round of selections (or any of them), but with both R.E.M. and the Ronettes getting into the Hall of Fame, I'll take it.

In addition to our regular year-end festivities, I always look forward to January so I can read what William B. Swygart has to say about all the good stuff we may not have lauded properly. The Swygart puts in yeoman work putting together the Singles Jukebox every week, and I wish he had time to write more, but he absolutely deserves as much space as we can give him.

Excellent, thought-provoking article up at Psychology Today on mating intelligence. It's too long and there are too many good bits to precis effectively here, but trust me, it's worth the read.

Feel good hits of the 8th of January, 2007:

Songs: Ohia - "The Black Crow"
Tamas Wells - "Valder Fields"
My Majestic Star - "Half Measures
The Futureheads - "Skip to the End"
Low - "Blue-Eyed Devil"
Bloc Party - "Waiting for the 7:18"
Readymade - "Under the Networks"
Tindersticks - "Sweet Release"
The Afhan Whigs - "John the Baptist"
Alfie - "Manor House Farm"

Excellent article at the CBC about poetry, and what sounds like an excellent site I'll need to check out... what a great way for Poetry to use the massive endowment they got from Ruth Lilly!

So, when you feel ill - just stay home. I don't get sick that often, but I've definitely done this (without thinking, albeit not with the actual flu); it's made harder by the fact that if I take off a night, none of the tracers can come in for a shift either.

So. If you haven't seen Children of Men, I assume you're planning to do so soon. I haven't seen a film that good in theatres in a long, long time - damn near ripped my heart out. I just sat there when it ended, I didn't want to speak or move. Cuarón has absolutely arrived, and if he doesn't win Best Director something is wrong.

It also features the best use of "In the Court of the Crimson King" I've ever seen.

I didn't previously have any problems with Keith Ellison getting sworn in on a Qu'ran, but his choice of which particular copy to use is priceless.

Via Mike Powell; I know it doesn't 'mean' anything in the way I want it to when I read the headline, but this species of moth is still fascinating.

Feel good hits of the 3rd of January, 2007:

Six By Seven - "New Year"*
Tamas Wells - "The Opportunity Fair"
TV on the Radio - "Wolf Like Me"**
My Majestic Star - "You Greet Me With Night Laughter"
Low - "Violent Past"***
Tindersticks - "Chilitetime"
Bloc Party - "Song For Clay (Disappear Here)"****
Massive Attack - "Live With Me"
Bertine Zietlitz - "Obsession"
Richard Hawley - "The Ocean"

*(Yes, my traditional New Year's Day airing of one of my favourite songs ever.)
**(I never came around to most of the album (and some of the comparisons people have made strike me as truly bizarre), but I did finally begin to realise the glory of this single. Someone wrote that it is a great getting-ready-to-go-out song, and they were precisely right.)
***(Holy shit is the forthcoming Drums and Guns fantastic. I thought I loved The Great Destroyer (and I did), but at this early date I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Drums and Guns will be in my top 3 for 2007, possibly even #1.)
****(I'm not entirely sure yet, but I think I might like the next Bloc Party album. Listening to it while circling around the wrong route on the bus might have helped, weirdly enough.)

Jeeze, it's a good thing I didn't read this at work. Maybe I should check if the women I know have smoochitis? It'd be a shame to leave that uncured.

I've been following the story of the $100 laptop for a while, and I'm terribly pleased it seems to be actually happening. For anyone who hasn't seen previous posts, this isn't about giving us cheaper computers, it's about making information technology accessible to children in poorer parts of the world. Even better, it's not based upon existing OSs:

"In fact, one of the saddest but most common conditions in elementary school computer labs (when they exist in the developing world), is the children are being trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint," Mr Negroponte said.

"I consider that criminal, because children should be making things, communicating, exploring, sharing, not running office automation tools."

Urgh. Last night was supposed to be productive, and I was supposed* to get up early and go in to work today. Instead I couldn't get to bed until 7 am, and had trouble getting to sleep. I've been sleeping fine all vacation, but time to go back to work and wham - insomnia. Gee, I wonder why?

I also wonder (seriously, and I've wondered this for years) what it means about me that I identify so fiercely with "Once in a Lifetime." I'm not sure it's something positive. Time isn't holding us, time isn't after us...


*(and by "supposed" I mean that was my plan - my boss doesn't expect me until tomorrow, so no harm done there)

The Boston Globe has an entertaining (and maybe even in part insightful) article up about kareoke:

Karaoke is above all a space, an absence haunted by the missing vocal line. The instrumental accompaniment, generally a synthetic redaction of the original track, is ghost-music, tinkling with its own deadness -- and that unsung melody is spectrally beckoning, beckoning. The heart of the karaoke performer swells: Into this vacancy he must project his beautiful essence, his soul. He -- or she (karaoke knows no gender) -- may be emboldened or confused by alcohol; wild with a private grief; or, worst of all, suffering from a genuine desire to excel before his peers. Regardless, in the performance that ensues, something will be brought to light.

So edge.org has again asked a bunch of scientific (to varying degrees) figures what they're optimistic about for 2007. The overall gist seems pretty familiar from the last couple of years (and far too many of them are basically gloating about the way they think science* will beat religion,** like this guy), but I am more than intrigued by a couple of them, such as Cornell prof Steven Strogatz on why we sleep and good old Rudy Rucker on something that would be awesome if it actually, you know, happened.

*or rationality, secular humanism, etc.
**or irrationality, superstition, etc.