I bought this album by The Reddings for .99. I could tell it was going to be amazing because of the Platonic solids–it’s Back to Basics! Also, that one dude doesn’t have any glass in his glasses=WIN.
The Reddings/Back to Basics
But then I couldn’t listen to it till now. So I didn’t know how awesome. OMG! It’s all the deep cuts I wanted! And two of the dudes are Otis Reddings’ sons. Not to be confused with Shuggie Otis (son of Johnny Otis) and his superlative Information Inspiration. Oh damn I have to play that now in case you don’t know this song. It contains the line “here’s a pencil pad/I’m gonna spread some information.” I don’t know why, but this fills me with a deep, deep feeling of satisficing the criteria of a good life. John totally agrees (N.B. may not actually agree.)
I took the girls to Mint, the Singapore Museum of Toys. This place is just amazing! The girls got to be photographed in front of a 6-foot tall Tetsujin 28! ‘Nuff said. Plus:
Sooooo, the youngs. you may have heard they like Justin Beiber or Rhianna or something. They don’t. They like computer constructs, only one of which is human, and we hear her voice only, and anyway there is some debate about whether she’s canon. Vocaloids! The original technology was invented by Kenmochi Hideki at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain in 2000. Backed by the Yamaha Corporation, it developed the software into the commercial product “Vocaloid.” (ボーカãƒã‚¤ãƒ‰ BÅkaroido). (This product exists separately from the Vocaloids I’m talking about and is used to generate back-up vocals and other things like that in ordinary pop songs). The most popular is naturally 01, Hatsune Miku. You can even see her perform live! (You should really watch this–it’s not clear quite how bizarre the scene is till partway through.) Her ‘voice’ is compressed into the upper range of human hearing, and beyond what any human could sing. But it’s not merely a person’s voice sped up; it’s constructed (though some samples were taken from a Japanese actress). [click to continue…]
I think it’s possible–nay, probable–naw, it is a nigh-certainty that you have not seen one of the best music videos ever made, quite randomly for French electronica duo Justice (they aren’t even, they’re sort of a rock band. But not.) It stars a young Snake Plissken (presumably before he is inserted into, and subsequently [SPOILER ALERT] escapes from, New York, in the movie “Escape From New York.” I strongly encourage everyone to go on and click full screen and listen to the song and everything. Dudes this is so fucking awesome. C’mon. Did they actually program a computer from the 1980s to make some of the “high-definition” graphics?
My best friend from middle school and I once wrote a program like that which, by displaying a series of screens on which we had drawn the lines point to point, created the image of a rotating green wire cube on a black screen on her Apple II c. It took us like four hours or something. More? Her family’s cook made killer shrimp tempura, though, so that was sustaining. And then coffee milkshakes and chocolate cookies for afters. Actually she would ask you egg preferences the night before and bring us breakfast in bed every morning that I ever slept over, which was a billion. With fresh-squeezed OJ. With sugar in the coffee already how she knew you liked it. Mrs. Hong was the shit, but she was prone to get angry and would not let anyone go in the kitchen and make a peanut butter sandwich or anything. Or even a bowl of cereal. Eventually Sacha’s mom had to fire her when Mrs. Hong threw a huge-ass knife at her during an argument over menu planning and it stuck, quivering, embedded a good two inches in the plaster of sloping ceiling of the back stairs. Even then it was a struggle (internally, for her mom). Mrs. Hong claimed it was a “warning shot” and hadn’t gone that close to Sacha’s mom’s head, which was kind of true but kind of not super-relevant. Anyway, A ROTATING CUBE YOU GUYS RLY! We were siced. Just like how siced I am about this video right now.
ETA: sometimes the frame isn’t quite wide enough, so watch on YouTube if not.
Last Thursday I went to the launch party for Katie Green’s Lighter Than My Shadow (just published by Jonathan Cape) a graphic memoir in which she tells the story of her descent into and recovery from anorexia (and quite a bit besides). It is a big book, 524 pages in all, which somewhat belies its title, yet I read the whole thing in one sitting. I know I’m not alone in having done this: once you start, it is very hard to stop. It is compelling but a hard book to read: I felt the tears welling up several times. It is also a great book. The graphic format works perfectly for the story and Katie – a terrific illustrator – has managed to convey very vividly some little part of what it felt like from the inside. The black cloud of despair, the screaming monsters in the head, the desperate urge to control, control, control and the sense of alienation from those closest to her, the pain she knows she’s inflicting on them but can’t help doing so.
When she spoke at the book launch Katie said that she hadn’t written the book to help anyone. Nevertheless, I’m sure it will help one very large group of people, the people who can’t imagine what it is like for someone in her position, who can’t understand the sense of compulsion, and why the sick person can’t just “pull themselves together”. In giving voice to this inside, Katie has pulled off something comparable to what William Styron did for depression in Darkness Visible. That’s a pretty high standard of comparison, I know, and I’m feeling swayed by the immediate experience of just having read Lighter Than My Shadow, but I don’t think it an unfitting one.
I should disclose a slight interest. I know Katie slightly (she’s a friend of one of my children) and a photo I took is on the cover flap. So I’m not entirely impartial. Still, I think this is, objectively, a very great achievement. And I don’t mean to relativise in a way that suggests that it is great for someone who has gone through her experience to have produced something this good. I mean that it would be great for anyone to have created this, even though her experience is a condition of having done so. Anyway, people out there, this is a book that most of you ought to read. You can get it at Amazon of course, but better to buy from somewhere else. (The Guardian had a feature on the book last week.)
“All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.” – J. K. Galbraith
Kickstarter is glorious insofar as it is a well-earned kick to a rotten door.
That’s why a lot of people are griped about Zach Braff funding his Garden City sequel this way.
The idea – and it’s a great one – is that Kickstarter allows filmmakers who otherwise would have NO access to Hollywood and NO access to serious investors to scrounge up enough money to make their movies. Zach Braff has contacts. Zach Braff has a name. Zach Braff has a track record. Zach Braff has residuals. He can get in a room with money people. He is represented by a major talent agency. But the poor schmoe in Mobile, Alabama or Walla Walla, Washington has none of those advantages.
Here is the cover of my copy of Der Herr der Luft [Master of the Air], a 1914 anthology of ‘tales of fliers and airtravellerstories’ [Luftfahrergeschichten].
[Click for larger]
It’s illustrated by Kley, and you can find the various plates in Lost Art, vol. 1. But for some reason they left out the cover illustration. (Or you can download the book from the Internet Archive. But, again, the cover image is omitted.)
Why do I like the cover so much?
It is, I believe, the first occurrence of a phenomenon that would become tragi-comically common, in the decades to come: a fantasy or science fiction book – especially an anthology – with a cover that promises some way cool [am oberaffengeilsten] story that isn’t actually in the book. Usually the book is ok, of course. But there is a special, bitter-sweet feeling in the soul of a 12-year old boy (mostly boys, but I by no means hereby deny the existence of female nerds) when you realize you aren’t going to get to read that awesome story about the naked airdude (probably he is wearing a tarzan loincloth) and his friend, the fierce flying fish dude. You will just have to wait until Mike Mignola invents Abe Sapien to read about anyone who looks half that good. (And even Abe can’t fly.)
Here’s the table of contents for the volume.
Der Kondor. Adalbert Stifter Der Türmer Palingenius. Karl Hans Strobl Hans Pfalls Mondfahrt. Edgar Allan Poe [trans. “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall”] Der Unheimliche Gast. Jules Verne [transl. “Un drame dans les airs”] Luftpilot Jacquelin. Otto Rung Die Geliebte. Karl Vollmöller Geflügelte Taten. Hermann Heijermans Die Reife um die Erde in vierundzwanzig Stunden. Maurice Renard Das Flugtreffen von Ardea. Gabriele d’Unnunzio Die Melodie der Sphären. Jage von Rohl Das Lebendige Mastodon. Paul Scheerbart Der Ozeanflug. Leonhard Ubelt Der Flieger. Wilhelm Schmidtbonn Die Luftschlacht am Niagara. H. G. Wells Der erste Mensch. Alfred Richard Meyer
Now, I have a confession to make. I actually haven’t read it. Much of it, anyway. The blackletter type stabs my eyes, and my German is weak after years of disuse. But I’m reasonably sure there’s no flying fish man to be found, because fish guys are just one of Kley’s go-to motifs. He likes ’em. He likes ’em in Victorian bathing outfits (fishman and mildly nsfw lady under the fold.) [click to continue…]
I was going to review a couple of new books I picked up – The Lost Art of Heinrich Kley, Volume 1: Drawings & Volume 2: Paintings & Sketches. (Those are Amazon links. You can get it a bit cheaper from the publisher. And see a nifty little video while you’re there.) But now I seem to have lost vol. 1 of Lost Art. Turned the house over, top to bottom. Can’t find it anywhere! Oh, well. Bottom line: I’ve been collecting old Kley books for a while. It’s fantastic stuff – if you like this kind of stuff – and these new books contain a wealth of material I had never seen. I wish, I wish the print quality in vol. 1 were higher because the linework really needs to pop. The color stuff in volume 2 is better, and harder to come by before now. One editorial slip. Kley’s Virgil illustrations come from a ‘travestiert’ Aeneid, by Alois Blumauer, not a ‘translated’ one. Parody stuff. (There, I just had to get my drop of picky, picky pedantry in there.) That said, the editorial matter in both volumes is extremely interesting. Volume 2 has a great Intro by Alexander Kunkel and a very discerning little Appreciation by Jesse Hamm, full of shrewd speculations about Kley’s methods. He’s a bit of a mystery, Kley is.
The books are in a Lost Art series that is clearly a labor of love for Joseph Procopio, the editor.
In honor of our Real Utopias event, I’ll just give you Kley on politics and metaphysics. (These particular images aren’t from these new volumes, but they’re nice, aren’t they?)
One of the ways in which blogging has changed in the past decade is that there are far fewer posts just pointing to recommending stuff. That business has gone elsewhere, to Facebook and Twitter, whilst blogging takes the form of longer (and longer) essays. That’s understandable, but in some ways a pity, and risks turning blogs into sequential slabs of dull but worthy texts (with the occasional gem of course). Anyway, I was just about to plug Iconic Photos to friends on FB, but I think the recommendation deserves a wider (and different) audience. The author (A.A.S. Holmes, whoever he or she is) takes, as the title suggests, an “iconic” photo and supplies fascinating commentary, often focusing on who the protagonists were, how they happened to be there, and what happened next. Particular favourites of mine are his commentary on Robert Capa’s L’Épuration, and Marianne of ’68, where things aren’t what they seemed. Enjoy.
I’m reading a book on Mannerism [amazon] and stumbled on a pair of amusing quotes. The first, from Alberti’s On Painting (1435) really ought to be some kind of epigraph for The Hawkeye Initiative. (What? You didn’t know about it. Go ahead and waste a few happy minutes there. It’s hilarious. Now you’re back. Good!)
As I was saying, here’s Alberti, warning us that, even though good istoria painting should exhibit variety and seem alive with motion, you shouldn’t go all Escher Girl boobs + butt Full-Monty-and-then-some:
There are those who express too animated movements, making the chest and the small of the back visible at once in the same figure, an impossible and inappropriate thing; they think themselves deserving of praise because they hear that those images seem alive that violently move each member; and for this reason they make figures that seem to be fencers and actors, with none of the dignity of painting, whence not only are they without grace and sweetness, but even more they show the ingegno of the artist to be too fervent and furious [troppo fervente et furioso].
On the other hand, here’s a quote from Pietro Aretino, praising Vasari’s cartoon of “The Fall of Manna In The Desert”:
The naked man who bends down to show both sides of his body by virtue of its qualities of graceful power and powerful ease draws the eyes like a magnet, and mine were held until so dazzled that they had to turn elsewhere.
Oh, I know what y’all are going to say. You’re going to say it’s wrong to like R. Kelly because his music is bad. No. Unnnh huuh. “But it’s got T-Pain in it!” You like “I’m on a Boat,” don’t you Sherlock? Further, “I’m a Flirt” is insanely catchy. Now you object that the Venn diagram of insanely catchy and bad has a large overlapping area, because you wrongly hate hillbilly-from-the-future Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe,” but nonetheless, “I’m a Flirt” is just a good song. No. You know why else? Because I told you so. Also, everything silly you wanted in a video. Expensive cars? Stupid big jewelry? Honeys up in the VIP room? So many honeys. I’m gay for this video.
But it might seem as if it’s wrong to like R. Kelly’s music because he’s committed statutory rape on multiple occasions. [click to continue…]
Zoe picked Comic Sans for her school report on tigers. I explained to her that many people would take issue with the selection of this font for body text in a long document, particularly one of an academic nature. Even as display type it is suspect. I explained about Microsoft Bob and that whole sad history. That said, it’s the best font in the world for someone like her, so she shouldn’t worry about it. Used in moderation.
I’ve just finished the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s _A Death in the Family_, the first volume of his sequence of autobiographical novels, _My Struggle_ . The novel, if novel is the best word for it, is at once brilliant and horrible. Brilliant, because of Knausgaard’s talents for description and for self-observation; horrible because of the meticulous way in which he sets out the decline of his father and grandmother. In the novel, and doubtless in real life, Knausgaard’s father is an alcoholic, who at the end of his life, barricades himself into the house of his semi-demented mother and drinks himself to death amidst his own waste. The final third of the book consists of the author’s description of himself and his brother cleaning up the mess and preparing for the funeral. Incomprehensible to the author – and to the reader – is his father’s sudden mid-life transformation from being reserved, proper, distant and controlling, first to would-be bohemian and then to hopeless drunk. Though this change provides the organizing principle of the novel, it is only one of its parts. Much of the “action” (if action there is) consists of an alienated Knausgaard recalling his adolescence and observing himself struggling to write somewhere in Stockholm. In the course of this, we get his reflections on art – and what it does for him – his feelings towards his pregnant girlfriend and children (less warm than he thinks they should be), on death, alcohol, music and much besides. I can’t say that it is anything other than compelling, even though simultaneously revolting. Of course we cannot know what Knausgaard holds back, but he gives a good impression of total candour: he notices the difference between what he ought to feel and think and what he does, actually, feel and think, and tells us anyway. [click to continue…]
A lot of people probably won’t like this because they won’t be impressed by the whole Octopi Wall Street-as-Burlesque aesthetic. But who cares! Don’t give money! Anyway, it’s already fully funded. You don’t like it? Sit n’ spin on your sense of aesthetic superiority! [click to continue…]
Answers to Questions No One Asked Me, Part 1 of n+1 where n > or = 0
Belle, what’s go-go music? Many a time I have heard that question not asked by someone moving to the DC area, or not asked by a person who hasn’t heard about go-go and knows I went to high school in DC. I have failed to be asked this question on literally countless occasions. That’s all over now. Go-go is a distinctive sub-genre of music popular only in the DC metro area (including Baltimore). It has always been dance music (as in “Going to a Go-Go”) and has always relied on this one beat. As far as beats go it sounds a distinctly Latin one, but there’s no Latin influence on any of the rest of the music ever. Wikipedia claims that “unique to Go-Go is an instrumentation with 3 standard Congas and 2 “Junior Congas”, 8″ and 9″ wide and about half as tall as the standard Congas, a size rare outside of Go-Go. They were introduced to Rare Essence by Tyrone Williams aka Jungle Boogie in the early days when they couldn’t afford enough full sized Congas, and are ubiquitous ever since.”
Yeah OK, but Chuck Brown, with or without The Soul Searchers, is considered the “Godfather of Go-Go,” did everybody change their kit later? And do all mostly black musical sub-genres have to have someone named “Brown” be the godfather of them? And “it was because they couldn’t afford bigger congas” has urban legend written all over it. Anyway, yeah, a whole bunch of congas and bells and whatnot. The only time a white DC audience ever heard that many drum solos was when Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” concert was in town. (Before Randy Rhoads died in that tragic plane accident at Ozzy’s ranch. Who knows what magic might be flying off the fretboard of his distinctive “Flying V” right now. I’ll tell you all about my deep, deep love of “Tribute” and how I cry when I listen to “Goodbye to Romance” another time.)
Yeah, anyway, why two Rare Essence songs? OK, they’re my fave go-go band. But also I think this shows the evolution of the genre from something like funk to an intriguing version of hip-hop backed with live percussion and horns. It has continued to evolve, and is still popular in the DC metro area despite never making it anywhere else. Well, that’s not quite true, in that the music has been heavily sampled for other hip-hop songs which are then, perforce, go-go.
This is ye olde skuel, “Body Moves.” It’s special because it includes the DC slang word “sice” in the call and response at the end. “Sice” is more or less entirely equivalent to “psych,” (I’m siced for this party!) but can’t be negative (you can’t “sice someone out.”):
Back in the crack epidemic years go-go clubs were the site of lots of crime and shootings, and since the DC City Council is a bunch of morons, they decided to solve this problem by banning certain clubs from playing go-go. Ha ha pretend. NO RLY! One wonders whether, if such a club were to play, say, Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” (not that it would be a good idea, mind you) whether the club would be in violation, since the main loop is a sample from Chuck Brown’s “Busting Loose.” (Notice Chuck saying “give me the bridge now,” in 1978, that’s the oldest song I know that does that.) “It’s go-go!” “But it’s just a sample. It’s as if there are invisible quotes around the go-go that make it safe!” I could imagine the liquor license board debates getting pretty metaphysical. Next up is Rare Essence’s most popular ever song. It even made it to Yo! MTV Raps, as you can see (video way worth watching).
It is a testament to how not gentrified parts of DC are that I still don’t know where the hell Montana or Minnesota Avenues is. They’re getting the shout-outs, I assume they’re in S.E., but damn, that’s a lot of not knowing shit about your hometown. Go-go’s just weird in that none of its practitioners have ever hit the big time, even though it’s more or less next to New York. Even little old Savannah, GA has had more success in this regard (Outkast). I was originally going to defend disco from its detractors in the Don Cornelius thread who complained there was only one beat and the bass could never stray, and that was bad, by showing a) the bass can walk all over the damn place, and b) no harm in having generic constraints. Do you hate Loleatta Holloway and the SalSoul Orchestra, I intended to ask? Do you hate dancing (N.B. there is a go-go break in that song, “212 North 12th St.”)? Do you hate life itself? Then I got distracted. Squirrel! What? John insisted on the title. Brought to you by Stuff White People Like.
DISTURBING UPDATE: People born on the day Blackstreet’s “No Diggity” was at #1 are old enough to comment on youtube now. I mean, I know stray dogs comment on youtube, but still. Possibly more disturbing: I have a sweet-tooth weakness for this song.
NOT PARTICULARLY DISTURBING AT ALL UPDATE: If you find the openly proffered go-go unpalatable, then listen to the more funk-like Chuck Brown track linked above. You will probably like it more. If you like funk, which you probably do, because it’s funk, and all.
& 
. (Those are Amazon links. You can get it a bit cheaper from 
[amazon] and stumbled on a pair of amusing quotes. The first, from Alberti’s On Painting (1435) really ought to be some kind of epigraph for 
[amazon – it’s quite inexpensive! order today!] – so let me give a boost to her new Kickstarter project: