Gurdonark dug up a motherlode of work by E. Pique, the arranger of Slightly on the Mash. He got it from an interesting source — a branch of Creative Commons for scientific work, called Science Commons.
Forced to choose my favorite American rock guitarist of the last dozen years, I’d need two seconds to answer: Carrie Brownstein. If you want a showoff guitarist who plays arpeggios with her teeth while wearing a bucket on her head, she’s not going to be your axeperson of choice. And sure, I have moods that demand the range of Nels Cline, the subtlety of Ry Cooder, or the visceral rush of Bob Mould. But riff for riff, I’ll take Carrie for her grasp of what the guitar can say within a song, and for almost singlehandedly restoring the legacy of the late, great Ricky Wilson of the B52s. Almost two years after the breakup of Brownstein’s signature band, Sleater-Kinney, I still miss their combination of raw power, depth of purpose, human compassion, and sheer rock and roll fun. Sleater-Kinney also saved my love life, but that’s the subject for another post.
Carrie hasn’t been resting on her laurels. ThunderAnt, her new duo with SNL’s Fred Armisen, has released what is, scientifically speaking, the perfect pop song (clip below). Slate featured her test-drive of the Rock Band video game. She coaches and promotes a rock camp for girls. Best of all, her Monitor Mix column for NPR’s website has, in just over half a year, become one of my favorite sources of music writing; her written work is passionate, personal, and refreshingly free of hipster posturing. In recent posts, Carrie delivers a great road trip playlist (Wipers, Go Betweens, Music Go Music, Richard and Linda Thompson, Cal Tjader), captures the gift of the Replacements’ Paul Westerberg (“his songs have an adult acuity sung in an adolescent idiom”), admits her weakness for reality television (“I suppose that I’d rather get that artifice-parading-as-truth from The Bachelor instead of my government”), and explains why she enjoys, but can’t bring herself to love Vampire Weekend (“if you take preppy yacht rock too far, you end up back at Jimmy Buffett”).
The posts in Monitor Mix are thoughtful and reflective, even when Carrie is giving simple shout-outs to recent favorites, such as Bon Iver and Blitzen Trapper. One great recent piece uses the strange worlds of underground Christian/ alt-rock pioneer Larry Norman and Colorado hardcore obscurities Bum Kon to segue into the fertile subject of bands that fall under the radar screen. And instead of just sneering at the reviewer recently caught rating a Black Crowes album he’d never heard, Brownstein uses it as a springboard for some hilarious fictional music reviews. Here’s Brownstein on the Shins’ nonexistent opus Honey Poke Shimmy Lantern: “James Mercer and crew can do no wrong. They’ve added the Decemberists, the Thermals, and Spoon to their lineup. Recorded inside a deer carcass, the sounds on Honey Poke are haunting and cervid. These songs will change your life back to the way it was before The Shins changed it the first time.”
ThunderAnt, “Perfect Song”
After the click-through: Carrie on Saddam Hussein and Liz Phair.
A post discussing the impending re-release of Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville captures Brownstein’s writing at her best. She captures Exile’s still-beguiling magic better than anything I’ve read: “The first thing I noticed about Liz Phair was the voice. She wasn’t screaming, she wasn’t being cloying, she wasn’t an amazing singer, but there was something serious about the vocals, something deadly. Part of it was the flatness; the strange deadpan delivery, like someone is singing on their back, like they woke up one night and decided they’d had enough and so they made an album. But the songs weren’t victim anthems just like they weren’t merely come-ons; they spoke of the fine lines between power and powerlessness, autonomy and isolation, they depicted epiphanies and the subsequent letdowns. The album was a journey vacillating between interior and exterior landscapes, the lyrics evoking halcyon moments always on the verge of implosion, either by the author’s own hand or by someone they loved. And the album was drenched in desire, of wanting and of wanting out.”
“Strange” and “deadpan” are also good descriptions of ThunderAnt’s low-fi sketch comedy. The skits have a loose, improvised feel that will seem familiar to fans of Chicago-style improvisation. Rather than relying on heavy dialogue or dramatic punch lines, Carrie and Fred start with an outrageous premise that has a ring of human truth and milk it for its awkward emotional nuance. You never know quite what to expect, whether it’s passive-aggressive employees of a feminist bookstore quietly arguing about which flyers to put up in the store, proprietors of Portland’s worst restaurant responding defensively to online criticism, or my personal favorite, Saddam Hussein reimagined as an aging indie rocker appearing on a Cable TV show.
The clips below include some favorites from ThunderAnt and Sleater-Kinney’s gonzo-heavy2005 swan song, The Woods. For news and updates on Carrie Brownstein and her former band mates, check the unofficial Sleater-Kinney news blog Tiny Suns infused with Sour. Another fan-run site has a gold mine of covers and obscurities.
ThunderAnt, “Boink!” (featuring Saddam Hussein)
ThunderAnt, “Feminist Bookstore”
Sleater-Kinney, “Jumpers”
Sleater-Kinney, “Modern Girl”
Sleater-Kinney, “Entertain”
I've talked before about our innate predilection to like cute friendly robots... 'bots like Keepon, and R2-D2, and WALL-E(*).
Science observer Kevin Kelly has been thinking along the same lines, inspired by recently seeing some extraordinarily graceful robotic jellyfish.
The jellyfish come in two varieties, one that moves through water and a balloon-based one that gently pulses through the air. They're the creation of a German automation company called Festo, put together to demonstrate their technical prowess. But Kelly says they accomplish more than that...
I think we are primed to find lifelikeness in machines. E.O. Wilson calls it our biophilia -- our intense attraction to living things. As we design machines to approach the complexity of organisms and mimic their behavior (as these do), we will be very quick to include them in our love.Isn't it strange we rush to love these bots, but not to the same degree, say, automobile fuel pumps? The pumps are no less complex or capable. These mechanical jellies tell me that when we make artificial intelligences even 1/2 as smart as a dog, we will love it to pieces.
Read Kevin Kelly's thoughts here. Check out a video of the robotic jellyfish on Design News.
(*)Disclosure: I work for Disney, which owns Pixar, which made WALL-E.
This was the view out my back window in New York City for more than ten years. That time (1979-1990) was the heyday of Wild Style, when graffiti truly became an artform, as is documented most vividly in Henry Chalfant's photographs. These tags, though, are primal. You can imagine them--in chalk--festooning an alley a century ago, or even earlier. Gang tags probably go back to antiquity. Today, owing to a couple of decades of outsized police response to graffiti, much urban tagging, accomplished under great pressure, is even cruder than this primal sort.
As if you needed more evidence that Tom Waits has big ears, excellent interview (”True Confessions,” actually) with He Who Fears Giant Squid at the Anti-label blog. Excerpts:
Q: What’s the most curious record in your collection?
A: In the seventies a record company in LA issued a record called “The best of Marcel Marceau.” It had forty minutes of silence followed by applause and it sold really well. I like to put it on for company. It really bothers me, though, when people talk through it.
Q: Most interesting recording you own?
A: It’s a mysteriously beautiful recording from, I am told, Robbie Robertson’s label. It’s of crickets. That’s right, crickets, the first time I heard it… I swore I was listening to the Vienna Boys Choir, or the Mormon Tabernacle choir. It has a four-part harmony it is a swaying choral panorama. Then a voice comes in on the tape and says, “What you are listening to is the sound of crickets. The only thing that has been manipulated is that they slowed down the tape.” No effects have been added of any kind except that they changed the speed of the tape. The sound is so haunting. I played it for Charlie Musselwhite and he looked at me as if I pulled a Leprechaun out of my pocket.
Q: What’s wrong with the world?
A: We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. Leona Helmsley’s dog made 12 million last year… and Dean McLaine, a farmer in Ohio made $30,000. It’s just a gigantic version of the madness that grows in every one of our brains. We are monkeys with money and guns.
It's widely agreed that the United States has the ugliest money on Earth, while countries such as the Netherlands have currencies that have become hallmarks of design.
Great Britain is furthering the tradition of innovation with the new design of their coins. Each coin shows a section of the Royal Arms, placed together you get the impression of the coins being cut out of a larger symbol. This page shows the full effect.
The design is a result of a nationwide competition, with more than 4,000 entries. The winning design is the work of Matthew Dent, a 26 year old graphic designer who now has a hell of a item to add to his professional resume.
As new concepts enter the world, our language must change to keep pace. But language is more than just words, we also depend upon a rich, varied and subtle visual language...signs and symbols that speak to us throughout our day.
So where do new visual "words" come from? They must be invented of course, a task that usually falls to graphic designers. Here's an example... the English designers Jack Schulze and Matt Webb recently gave their design students the task of designing a symbol to represent the concept of commerce via RFID technology...using those little wand-like devices to make everyday purchases(*).
It's a subtle and complex topic to try to boil down into a simple gylph. One of the students' attempts is pictured above. Check out some other examples here.
You got a better design? Let's see it!
(*) And yes, I know that the use of RFID has been fraught with technical and personal freedom issues for years. I'm not saying it's a good idea, just that it's becoming a more widely used idea.
I went to Wisconsin. I stayed in the perfect B&B. I gave a good talk. I read a good book. I ate orange cheese. I had no idea that Western Wisconsin looked so much like Vermont, except for the cheese, of course. I had good bus karma; my flight arrived in Logan early and I caught the bus I was going to just barely miss. I got back almost before dark. I slept.
I am formulating a plan for dealing with the front yard. I’d like to just mow it with the push mower, but when I try to do that one of my neighbors will invariably hassle me to use their mower and then watch me (clumsily, ineptly) do it. Maybe I’ll sneak out at night with nail scissors. If it were up to me I’d just let the damned thing grow.
I can't remember what I was doing. I was doing something, then I went to lunch, and now it escapes me. This would not be too bad except that the powers-that-be sense liminality, and appear in force from above to crush it. If I don't come up with something in the next few minutes, they will be here with another fire that just jumped the trench. I can already hear them in the hallway. I'd better start making a list.