Surikogi: Grinding out the Good

Wow, I haven't seen or heard from these guys all century! The last time I tried to see them, they were playing some weird concert/ whiffleball/ picnic and Bob Weston threw his back out lifting equipment so the band cancelled the show after we got there. Yes, it's as weird as it sounds.

See the dates here.

Great article here about why The Searchers is considered a must see classic and is revered by the like of Lucas, Scorsesse, Paul Schrader, et al. Personally, I agree with the writer- the movie is painfully ill-paced, racist and masogynistic. John Wayne's character is no different than the extremists we cluck our tongues at who kill their daughters because they have been raped. And yet the movie demands that we take Wayne's character into our hearts. Even on a visual level, Ford has done better work. Someone explain why this is a must see movie!

I love stumbling across little movies that come out of left field. You really don't know what's in store but you have a instinctual feeling about them. Rushmore and Amelie were two discoveries in this vein.

Little Miss Sunshine could be just what the doctor ordered.

It's got a great cast. I like Steve Carell, but I don't think he's ever played a "real" person, only caricatures. This could really give him a chance to show us what he's got.

Pitchfork is hosting the title track from Chin Up Chin Up's new album, due later this year.
Another solid tune from these guys. Go check out something new, darn it!

This Harness Can't Ride Anything

I haven't been inspired by a martial arts flick since Crouching Tiger, but this one actually looks pretty cool:

Fearless

You'll appreciate this article on AVclub:

The 15 People You Meet on DVD Commentaries

I hate corset films, but this could be one I could actually make it through. Sophia Copolla has wonderfully mashed together European history, 80's melodrama rock and classic Sex Pistols punk rock graphic design.
Can we stop calling everyone "architects" and start calling everyone a "DJ" (I'm a visual DJ)  since the mash up is the new hot thing?

Watch the trailer for Marie Antoinette

From their forthcoming album (Sept. 12 release), "I'm Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass", I present:

Beanbag Chair

Pure pop genius! I'm so glad to hear these guys are putting out new stuff. Time to dust off "I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One."

Yes, it's sad the blog has been neglected.
So much going on. Renovations to the house, planning our European holiday, church activities, the list could go on and on.
I've just switched to Comcast and have been fighting with the internet connection for two nights now.
Everything's working now, but I was this close to scrapping the whole affair. I used to be able to figure this stuff out, but either I'm getting dumber, or this technology isn't as easy as it's promoted. I can't imagine how the average user handles computer issues. I wonder if I will be able to keep up, or will I just not find it worth my time and be as technologically illiterate as my parents one day.

Vic_Acid our literature tastes run in tandem. I've been reading the Tipping Point which is Gladwell's book before Blink. We'll have to compare notes. So far, I've enjoyed Tipping Point.
I've also read The Shipping News which was written by Anne Proulx (sp?). Took me a while to get into it, but it ended up being a wonderful meditation on love in real terms.
At some point, I need to read Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse Five.

Just finished reading Breakfast at Tiffany's. Love the movie and was inspired to read some Capote after seeing the movie last year. Some really wonderful passages in such a short story. Plenty of dog-eared pages.

Randomly listening to music: Still excited by Tapes n Tapes (can't believe I'm missing them come to town), Page France, Okkervil River. Threw on Fugazi's Repeater the other night- good memories! Excited about the new Futureheads and Sonic Youth albums. Decemberist/DCFC cover of Fleetwood Mac's "You Can Go Your Own Way" makes me laugh!

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Brick is the best movie I've seen all year, and will be hard to beat! Don't miss it!

Dang! This shack has gotten dusty with disuse... Let's see if we can't bring some love back to the place...

I've been reading more than listening to music recently. Books in the queueueue:
Anne Proulx "Close Range: Wyoming Stories 1" (includes "Brokeback Mountain")
Hagen Schulze "Germany: A New History"
Chuck Palahniuk "Survivor: A Novel"
Mary Doria Russell "A Thread of Grace"
Hermann Hesse "Siddhartha" (Dual language edition)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe "Faust: Erster und Zweiter Teil" (this one will take a while... :)
Bill Watterson "Fix und Fertig" (Calvin and Hobbes in German... gotta love it!)

Just finished reading:
Kurt Vonnegut "Sirens of Titan"

Currently reading:
Kurt Vonnegut "Slaughterhouse Five"
Malcolm Gladwell "Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking"
Louis Crompton "Homosexuality and Civilization" (Deeeeeep and dense... something to savor)

Music-wise, I've picked up some new releases but not been floored with them.
Flaming Lips "At War with the Mystics": hasn't floored me like I was expecting it to. The first couple songs set me back before the low-key, plaintive goodness of the inner songs. Figuring this needs a few more listens.
Haven't listened to the last Animal Collective album "Feels" yet.
Still need to pick up the new Liars disc.
New Tool album next Tuesday; hope it will be better than "Lateralus."

I decree this Summer's music theme to be:

Bossa Nova

Listen and enjoy!

Seneca, the lead-off song from Tortoise's 2001 album Standards, is one of my favorite songs by the band. As much as I love it, something always bothered me about the song, like a promise inadvertently unkept. It's taken a while, but I think I know now how this great song could be made even better.

Starting off seemingly in medias res we hear what could either be the band warming up or concluding a performance—a muscular, room-filling roar captured with a live essence that could be a studio demo or concert space. As this punch-in section simmers down with a dual drum roll, couple of traded off crashes, and bass sustain, the drummers come to the fore with a pair of heavy, syncopated, phased backbeats they punctuate with bass tones that rattle your speakers. The energy is strong from the outset, and builds more so with a twinset of phased drum rolls leading to what should be 4th gear, keeping the acceleration going.

It's at this point I think the song falters. The promise of continued heaviness and muscle thins out as a guitar ostinato joins: clean, understated, gently phased, it is mismatched to the insistent rhythm and booming bass line propulsing the song forward. In the background a more impressionistic overdriven guitar caked in reverb from the songs beginning punctuates harmonically, strongly contrasting with this foreground choice of voice and revealing more of its weak sensitivity. Add to that a lightly buzzing vintage synthesizer countermelody wandering anemically overhead in half-time, and one gets the impression of a band throttling the tune back out of timidity of what might happen rather than juxtaposing texture and timbre to reveal a more balanced creation.

Thinking about this song in the shower yesterday for some strange reason—blame the Budos Band playing on the bathroom CD player if you wish—I started to dissect what it is about the song I don't like or think could be made better in order to fit my expectations while listening to the song. Piece by piece, I began to hear opportunities to reconstruct and rerecord the song and, in my opinion, make it better. I say these with all modesty and respect for the members of Tortoise and for what they have created over the years, and hope it will not be misread as any kind of failure on their part.

The song itself seems too eager in its postmodern desire to cannabalize the sounds of late 60s hard and experimental rock: cavernous reverb atmosphere, sunny handclaps, clavinet counterpoint, noise and feedback, flanged and phased instrumentation, studio self-consciousness, red-lined analog tape warmth, free voicing and collective expression, heavily syncopated, booming rhythms. All of these are great things, and the excitement of putting them together in a digital soundstew is a valiant effort. They practiced an admirable amount of restraint when constructing this track, reining it in from potential chaos and excess. In the process, I fear they may have been too eager to reconceive the individual elements rather than using those elements' sometimes cliched strengths to the song's advantage.

For instance, I think the melodic ostinato played by the clean guitar is more appropriate for a bass guitar. Voiced by a bass, this element would regain some of the depth and force it lost with its guitar voicing. Doing this would also fit the common jazz practice of placing melodic ostinatos in the lower ranges as a framework to support improvisation and melodic/harmonic exploration in the high range. By putting this element in the high range, I think listeners focus more on it than on the rest of the instrumentation, and may become bored or bothered by its repetitive, almost stagnant nature.

Other changes I considered:

• in addition to the revoicing mentioned above, keep the current bass melody by adding a second bass to the song's orchestration
• replace the current buzzy keyboard melody with fuzzed or overdriven guitar
• use the buzzy keyboard as an occasional duet element for the guitar or bass lines
• keep the existing backing atmospheric guitar elements for contrast of mixing depth
• keep the drums the same
• add the group's trademark xylophone to the modulated key segment (I hesitate to call this a bridge or chorus section). I think this would create a nice, appropriately subtle melodic and percussive texture to this pleasantly "conflicting" part of the song.

Doing these things I think would deliver on the muscular, propulsive expectations the group sets in listeners at the beginning of the track.

Like Prince again?
A: Maybe- Prince "Black Sweat"

Get into Grime?
A: Time will tell- The Streets "When You Wasn't Famous" (Link and hosting provided by the awesome Fluxblog)

Find any new bands to get into?
A: Definitely! Tapes n' Tapes

Dalek and Meat Beat Manifesto
Smith's Old Bar
Feb. 23

Was the Masquerade booked?

Three words: Puppy Bowl II -- Animal Planet's tactic for filling in 3 hours of TV time on a slow Super Bowl Sunday afternoon. 3 hours of puppies filmed playing together on a small football field-decorated play pen. With only music and random "crowd noises" as the background sound, punctuated by occasional yelps, barks, snarls, and yips by the puppies themselves. Lots of butt sniffing. Occasional shots from the bottom of a water bowl at pups sticking their heads in to lap up a little. Once in a while a creepy guy in a referee's uniform appears on the "field" to throwdown a flag, call a timeout, or clean up an accident.

It's all very strange and absurd. With the lack of dialog, occasional grunting and yelping, rollicking background music and "focus on the action" it's very porn-like. It's also very close to one of those Baby Mozart or Einstein sorts of toddler "education" videos big with parents -- it's easy for a viewer to get wrapped up in watching... well, nothing really. All you're watching is 3 hours of puppies filmed while playing in a themed pen. Oh, and it's repeated through out the day's schedule, right after itself, from 3pm to 3am.

You scored as Public Image Ltd.. Public Image Ltd. were one of the first British 'post-punk' groups, having been formed by John Lydon after leaving the Sex Pistols. Their music was a doomy yet compelling blend of disco, dub, experimental guitar and Lydon's trade-mark vocals, best heard on 1979's 'Metal Box'. </td> Public Image Ltd. 77% The Teardrop Explodes 73% Joy Division 73% The Slits 73% Throbbing Gristle 73% Wire 70% Cabaret Voltaire 70% The Fall 67% Gang Of Four 67% The Pop Group 67% Which Post Punk band are you? created with QuizFarm.com

I guess you can tell where my interests lie these days with all of these postings about photography lately. Here's one that's a bit more upbeat. While surfing last night I discovered that National Geographic sponsors specialized photography expeditions several times a year to some really cool places around the world. This year they've got trips lined up for Tuscanny, Polynesia, Mexico, and several other places... including Santa Fe, New Mexico. Each trip is led by a National Geographic "expert" photographer on photo assignments, critiquing, and at the end of the week, a showing of the "best" photos from the week. The groups are limited to 25 per trip, and you gotta bring your own gear (SLR, laptop, photo editing software, etc).

Deb & I are actually considering going on the Santa Fe trip, so I decided to ask a friend out in Dallas if he & his wife would be interested as well. He's got to run it by his wife first, but in the meantime, he sent me back a link to an expedition taking place next February (in 2007), led by photographer Andy Biggs (I've personally never heard of him, but it sounds like he knows what he's doing as far as photography is concerned). This trip is quite a bit more expensive, but man, 12 days exploring east African wildlife among a group of photographers who are there with the intent to shoot lots and lots of pictures sounds like a LOT of fun. :)

Anyways, I wanted to post this here in case anybody would be interested in either trip. Here are the links to the trips:

Santa Fe, NM (National Geographic)
African Safari

Another week, another camera company pulls out of the marketplace. This time it's a little harder to comprehend - Konica Minolta withdraw from camera business. Certainly one of the most influential camera and photographic equipment manufacturers of the 20th century, they're essentially tranferring all of their photographic business assets to Sony to focus on other optics related industries. It doesn't sound like they'll be selling to consumers at all after 2007, and will essentially be targeting strictly vertical markets (B2B).

Well, I'm sure everyone's been listening to this for 9 days now, but I'm throwing it out there just in case:

New Shins Song

First Kodak announced it was discontinuing film camera sales in the U.S. and Europe last year... now Nikon is making a similar announcement:

(excerpt)
As a result of the new strategy Nikon will discontinue production of all lenses for large format cameras and enlarging lenses with sales of these products ceasing as soon as they run out of stock. This also applies to most of our film camera bodies, interchangeable manual focus lenses and related accessories. Although Nikon anticipates that the products will still be in retail distribution up to Summer 2006.

In recognition of Nikon’s commitment to professional photographers we will continue to manufacturer and sell the F6, our flagship film model, as well as a number of manual interchangeable lenses. Sales of the manual FM10 will also continue outside Europe.


So basically we're down to nothing from Kodak, two cameras from Nikon, and so far, Canon seems to be staying the course. There are also other manufacturers (Leica, Konica/Minolta, Sigma, etc), but Kodak, Nikon and Canon make up the lion's share of the market for sure. Interesting to see what Canon will do in the near future.