A Dozen for Twelve, Not a Bad Deal for Another Best of List
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Half a Dozen Disappointments: Titus Andronicus, Local Business; Flying Lotus, Until the Quiet Comes; The Beach House, Bloom; The xx, Coexist; Cat Power, Sun; and They Went On, Who’s Afraid of Richard Dreyfuss?. Thirteen Thirteens: Guy Capecelatro III, North for the Winter; Grizzly Bear, Shields; Dirty Ghosts, Metal Moon; Now, Now, Threads; Beak, >>; The… More
The X’s and Y’s of It
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Professor X noticed Student X weaving down the hallway towards him. Drunk, perhaps? Not Student X, thought Professor X. There must be some other explanation. And so he intercepted him as he veered toward a corkboard scrambled with out-of-date announcements. Are you OK, Professor X asked, looking into Student X’s saucered eyes. Oh yes, said… More
Mid-Year Playlist
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The following songs were all released this year, all on full-length LP’s. The exception, however, is the track “You and I,” which features Richard Hawley accompanied by The Arctic Monkeys (listed here as The Death Ramps)–a collaboration which I hope will yield more. Some of these songs appear on albums I’ve reviewed here already; the… More
Dreadful Impressions: Dictaphone’s “Poems From A Rooftop”
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Dictaphones became popular circa 1910, through the Columbia Gramophone Company, as a way of transcribing speech. Using wax cylinders, which by this point had been replaced by disc technology for most sound recording, these devices, resembling elaborate hookahs, were the last vestiges of Alexander Graham Bell’s revolutionary discoveries in sound fidelity. Some still claim that… More
The Art of the Effortless and Other Loveable Offenses: Three Reviews
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I am wary of sincerity. Is it because I am incapable of appearing to possess it even if I feel possessed by it? I joked with a friend recently that I am capable of competing with almost anything but the hint of sincerity. Its place in art necessarily troubled given that by definition the creative… More
They Went On–Who’s Afraid Of Richard Dreyfuss?
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Another finished RPM Challenge and more shameless self-promotion! I’m currently listening to Damien Jurado’s new album Maraqopa and Guy Capecelatro III’s North For The Winter. More
RPM Challenge 2012 Part III
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After having one of my songs featured on the first 2012 RPM podcast (I’m about twenty minutes in, the penultimate piece), They Went On (an odd moniker for a one-man band, I know) is glad… More
RPM Challenge 2012 Part II
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The RPM Challenge continues. Into the second week and I’ve got five unnamed rough tracks. I’m unclear exactly how things are shaping up, as I’m too in the middle of it to get a clear sense of direction. I do notice a piano-driven impulse on these, and I’m enjoying some experimentation with mini-moog. I got in… More
RPM Challenge 2012
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Each year musicians from around the world challenge one another to compose and record an album’s worth of material (10 songs or 35 minutes of music) in the month of February (this being a leap year, we get an extra day). This is not a competition, but rather a community effort to push ourselves into… More
Coming Home
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I’ve started a new project of scoring stock footage, which, by the way, is in danger of being made more difficult to obtain through new anti-piracy laws; look into the new PIPA and SOPA laws now put before congress, which though supposedly intended to protect corporations against privacy, will severely limit public access to public… More
2011 Playlist
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A few words on year-end lists: Those who make them feel important for doing so. More
Top Ten Reads of 2011
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he following list represents the highlights of a year of reading. It includes three novels, two works of creative non-fiction, two books of poetry, one biography, one work of criticism/theory, and one book of photography accompanied by poems. The diversity is unintentional. Some are recent publications, while others are new discoveries for me… More
Poetry, The Soul, Turds and Other Ideas of Order
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He begins somewhere in the back of the bookstore. The bearded guy who announced him looks befuddled at first until we all hear him approaching through the rows of real crime books. More
What is Language?
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The way in which we define language can limit or broaden our interactions with the world and others in it. As this brief video begins to explore, interlocutors take many forms, not all of which correspond to our “usual” understanding of sounds or gestures as referring to particular symbols. I am hesitant to aestheticize a… More
Ain’t None Bad As Tom Waits
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A friend of mine who’ll remain unnamed often tells a Waits story (most likely apocryphal, as if there were any other kind of Waits story) worth re-telling: This friend, see, is coming off a bender in LA–uncertain, for instance, of how he’d arrived in LA in the first place. He is certain only that someone has… More
Two Books I ‘m Currently Reading And Will Finish And Why
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Why review now and not wait until I’m finished? Two reasons: I’m no good at lying, and this will assure completion. You’re probably reading something that’s wasting your time and these books could solve that. The Instructions is a big ambitious beguiling book. Adam Levin is genius material (and, yes, I know the dangers and… More
Facebook, Satanism, Catholic Sacraments, and other Paradoxes
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I don’t know if all tattooists (I refuse to call them all artists; some are, while others are merely practitioners) are liberal with their privacy settings on Facebook, but I would guess many are; whether or not they are likely to be satanists, as mine turns out to be, is another matter. More
Bill Knott’s Art Of The “Malignant”?
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The enigmatic Bill Knott is at it again. OK, I already regret the tone of that first sentence; its suggests a ruse, which is probably the last thing (or at least somewhere down on the list?) poet and artist Bill Knott has in mind with his recent online activities. Since the abandonment of his cult-inducing… More
Reel Art of the Real
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The most stimulating films I’ve watched this summer have been documentaries (not necessarily new, but new to me). Here are the top three in order of overall impact (And, yes, I did like Exit Through the Gift Shop, but it inevitably missed the gut check for me): 1. Marwencol. Changed the way I think about… More
All Things Frankenstein
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Need some help here. I’ve been listening with continuing fascination and awe, frankly, to the album Spark of Being, the soundtrack, performed by Dave Douglas and Keystone, to Bill Morrison’s cinematic adaptation of Frankenstein. DJ Olive’s textures and Gene Lake’s nervy drumming, in particular, create a a sonic approximation of what The Creature may have felt stumbling… More