The Brunch Table

Since there has been some curiosity about the music that I played in the “club room” at the end of last weekend’s Luau Jam, here’s the playlist, such as it was:

Orbital - Funny Break (Plump DJs Remix) (single) Hybrid - Kill City (Edit) (from Wide Angle) Nerva - Modo VII (from Global Underground 016 comp.) Dubstar - Stars (Motiv 8 Mix) (from Goodbye) Everything But The Girl - Before Today (Chicane Remix) (from Like The Deserts Miss The Rain collection) Basement Jaxx - Broken Dreams (from Rooty) Alizee - Moi…Lolita (single) I:Cube - Mingus in my Pocket (from Picnic Attack) Chemical Brothers - Under the Influence (from Surrender) Kamaya Painters - Endless Wave (from Trance Nation comp.) Acen - Trip II the Moon (from United Stance of Techno comp.) Moonface - Children of the Sun (from Stark Raving Mad soundtrack) Shapeshifter - Flood (from Stark Raving Mad soundtrack)

That party was like an Apple infomercial–three separate rooms of music (and one visuals projection) were being played by 2 iBooks, 2 TiBooks, and one Mac desktop, with lots of perverse Airport/Rendezvous streaming involved. It worked splendidly, and there was still a decent crew of party people dancing in the attic at 4 am. Big up the Arlington massive for hosting!

And check the date at the bottom–this is a currently running ad. (source: plastic.)

Somewhere, some invisible music has stopped, and everyone and their mom is suddenly getting married. The latest to go is the incomparable Bin (warning: link goes straight into the past), who just called me to announce her engagement to Paul. I guess I’d better join some frequent-flyer clubs and dust off my purple velvet suit, because I’m going to be busy with weddings for the next couple years. I think the narrative of my youthful life has now moved firmly into its epilogue.

While looking for that link, I came across the ghost of my old website–though my spiffy late-90’s design has been preserved, my bad student writing has fortunately been lost in the sands of time. Some of my other college friends’ sites have been caught in the amber as well–while my own design sense has clearly devolved since then, Nick’s has certainly matured a bit.

This is a transcript of a script conference between Stalin and Eisenstein, working on Ivan the Terrible:

STALIN: I am not giving you instructions but expressing the viewer’s opinion. It is necessary that historical characters are reflected correctly…Ivan the Terrible raises his head too often, so that his beard can be seen…It was not correct that Ivan the Terrible kissed his wife so long…The viewer has grown up and we must show him good productions.

I think I’m gonna make a short play out of this.

I’m back in West Virginia…the big news here is that Clear Channel is holding one of their “Rallies for America” this weekend in the local college football stadium…40,000 people are expected to visit for the occasion. Flags and themed billboards have sprouted up around town…one that particularly caught my eye shows a scowling minister, bible in hand, under the words “Prophecy and the Jew.” I’m taking the first bus outta town tomorrow morning.

My sister says I’m reading too much into it…it’s just one billboard, after all. Plenty of ‘em say nice things like “Freedom is More Than Just a Word” and don’t mention Jews at all. I wonder if the Rallies folks have got some extra-long, vertically-hung versions of our national flag? Nothin’ says “fascists on parade” like one a’ those.

Last week, our class took a tour of the Klasky Csupo animation studio. Near the end, after we were proudly shown interesting gadgets and several very nice offices (overlooking a parking lot raised from street level and topped with generous loops of razor wire)…we stopped by the office of their H.R. director. She showed us a closet full of demo reels…bricks and bricks of colorful VHS tape boxes, each one a long-shot chance at cracking our country’s elusive top-25-percent income tax brackets. And then she asked us:

“What do you think it means to become a success in Hollywood?”

“Getting a creative [design] job?” came one answer. “Getting to do your own show?”

She smiled, shook her head grimly, and spoke in a voice suddenly somehow reminiscent of Charlton Heston: “Get yourself into a supervisory position before the technology you trained on becomes obsolete. That’s the correct answer. When fashions change, they’ll fire a twenty-year veteran production worker in a heartbeat, but you will be sent for Maya training, or whatever, on the company’s dime, so you can understand a bit of what the new kids are doing.”

You could see that razor wire from her office, too.

After seeing X2: Manchester United last weekend, I was looking through a few reviews, and I started wondering if these people saw the same movie as I did. For example, sci-fi fan Ebert seems to get the plots of the two movies mixed up, saying:

in the first movie they were faced with genocide, and in this one their right to privacy is violated with the Mutant Registration Act

Clearly, he knows better, because he seems to have had a semi-coherent grasp of the plot of the first movie. He offers more puzzling “insights” later on in the article:

One might reasonably ask what threat could possibly be meaningful to mutants with such remarkable powers, but Magneto, who has serious personal issues with mutants, has devised an invention which I will not describe, except to say that it provides some of the movie’s best visuals.

I can’t for the life of me figure out what he’s referring to in any part of that sentence. Anyone?

When Justina and I went to a preview screening of I Spy (hey, it was free), we sat right behind the press row, and we overheard one reviewer telling another something to the effect of “I’m ready for this one–I’ve had three martinis!”. Now, I can’t say I blame her in the case of that particular movie; but it does help explain some of the more puzzling reviews that I’ve come across.

Stanford is using a new Swiss-designed robot to digitize some of their library holdings:

Inside the room a Swiss-designed robot about the size of a sport utility vehicle was rapidly turning the pages of an old book and scanning the text. The machine can turn the pages of both small and large books as well as bound newspaper volumes and scan at speeds of more than 1,000 pages an hour.

The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players will be performing at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh on May 16th. Alas, I won’t be in town yet, but if you will be, check out Kottke’s capsule review and see if you aren’t intrigued.

“Other than Ronald Reagan, Republicans have not done spectacularly well at wooing Jewish voters. Indeed, George Bush only managed to get 19 percent of the Jewish vote in 2000, and his father only managed to get 11 percent of the Jewish vote in 1992. Certainly a number of Jewish voters were probably offput by Bush’s stated belief that Jews probably couldn’t get into heaven (a belief he has since renounced).” (emphasis added)

(source: plastic)

Brothomstates, MDRMX (from Claro)

Even though it’s a bit repetitive, this is the sort of clicky, crystalline electronic track that makes me feel like I’ve just drank a mug of hot cocoa. Incidentally, Brothomstates is an old demoscene composer for the group “Orange”–I first heard of him when I was listening to the commentary track on the Mindcandy Vol. 1 DVD.

Sporto Kantes, Car Video (from Act.1)

This is a wonderfully goofy, upbeat track by a couple of French downtempo pastiche noodlers. The loping dub beat and ridiculous pitch-shifted vocals samples make me want to go on a road trip so that I can blast this song with the windows down.

I:Cube, Mingus in my Pocket (from Picnic Attack)

“Hey, you got your driving tech-house beat in my echoing vibraphones!” “No, you got your vibraphones in my tech-house beat!” Beautiful.

Sporto Kantes, XX Live by 1 Smith Lane (from French Girls)

I haven’t been able to dig up any details on this “1 Smith Lane” entity that I presume remixed a so-so original track into one of the highlights of the “French Girls” compilation. What started out as an off-kilter dub/blues tune with male vocals ended up somewhere between a Portishead tune and Sophie B. Hawkins’s old Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover track, with a few raw female vocal snippets to punch up the energy.

Everything But The Girl, Corcovado (from Like The Deserts Miss The Rain)

This track starts with Tracey Thorn singing in Portugese over a percussionless minimal synth bed, then morphs into a breathtaking drum-n-bass bossa-nova.

Kristin Hersh, Heaven (from Live at Noe Valley Ministry)

Live at Noe Valley Ministry is a 2-disc “official bootleg” that is mostly sold at Hersh & Throwing Muses shows, and it’s a great tour of her solo work. I don’t have Strange Angels, so I hadn’t heard this track before. I’m a sucker for Hersh’s raw voice and poignant melodies.

I just started reading Lionel Casson’s Libraries in the Ancient World, and I just came across this gem from the colophon of an ancient clay tablet:

He who breaks this tablet or puts it in water or rubs it until you cannot recognize it [and] cannot make it be understood, may Ashur, Sin, Shamash, Adad and Ishtar, Bel, Nergal, Ishtar of Nineveh, Ishtar of Arbela, Ishtar of Bit Kidmurri, the gods of heaven and earth and the gods of Assyria, may all these curse him with a curse that cannot be relieved, terrible and merciless, as long as he lives, may they let his name, his seed, be carried off from the land, may they put his flesh in a dog’s mouth!

They need to figure out a modern equivalent for rental DVDs–judging from the condition I get them in sometimes, people must use them as frisbees or cutting boards.

This week’s edition of The Onion AV Club includes a great interview with Peter Chung, the creator of Aeon Flux.

Few things are more nerve-wracking than watching an unproven disk utility slowly have its way with your precious data.

Let me back up a bit. A couple weeks ago, after a rash of system crashes, my iBook started taking excessively long (like, 20 minutes) to start up. I booted up into text mode (by holding command-S during startup) and ran fsck, the built-in drive repair utility. (This is what’s running behind the scenes when your Mac takes a long time to boot.) It reported some volume structure problems. It would say something like “you have 203126 whatsits but it should be 203125–fixing it”, but then later on, it said “no, this 203125 whatsits should be 203126–let me take care of that”. Great. My operating system is spending 20 minutes chasing its own tail every time I start up. (more…)