The Brunch Table

God bless Pitchfork. Here are some snippets from their review of Plaid’s Parts in the Post remix compilation:

Based on my limited knowledge of Rolling Stone interviews, musicians are beset by mounds of corrupt execs, massive mergers, treasonous KaZaA-crazy toddlers, and the aesthetic discomfort of the new $20 bill. As if those mattered. All those afflictions were dropped into Malibu and Bel-Air by the CIA in the mid-80s to distract them from the actual problem: Warp Records. When will people learn? Between Autechre and Aphex Twin alone, this simple and poorly worded aphorism should have been memorized by kindergartners: If you have a new song, DO NOT send it to Warp. Wave after wave of demos and masters are quickly deposited in the clammy hands of madmen. If the original artists are a song’s parents, Warp remixers are those babysitters with gold eyepatches, tracks down their arms, fu-manchus, and babies speared on meat hooks in the basement.

…

But of the material I take issue with here, the two Nicolette tracks, “No Government” and “Wholesome”, are by far the most disheartening. I have no fear of the ruling elite. My opinion still stands: Nicolette is in a league of intolerability with Breakbeat Era’s Leonie Laws or Lamb’s Louise Rhodes. And what’s really frustrating? They’re two of the best tracks on the album, which wins them the dubious distinction of being perhaps the most stunning remixes of atrocious source material since Kruder & Dorfmeister’s “Bug Powder Dust”. “Wholesome”, in particular, is transformed into one of the best Plaid songs ever, managing to litter pockets of orchestral pop amidst a tense dub, and even finding room for a quick sample of The Meters. Why the hell did they have to put “Love is wholesome/ Love makes babies” at the beginning of it?

For the record, I think Parts in the Post is much better than their new album Spokes.

Triplets of Belleville (in theaters 11/21) I was stunned when I saw the trailer for this francophone-produced animated feature earlier tonight.

Avalon (on DVD 12/16) This one’s a lushly photographed live-action/CG film from Ghost in the Shell’s Mamoru Oshii. I’m not as convinced that this one is actually a good film, but it’s got a unique look that its trailer shows off well.

Innocence: Ghost in the Shell (in theaters spring 2004?) Speaking of Ghost, a sequel is scheduled for next spring–I read somewhere that it will arrive on our shores soon after opening in Japan.

Palm Pictures Directors Label (on DVD Tuesday) I wrote about them before, but these collections of works by music video directors Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry, and Spike Jonze are finally hitting shelves this week. What do these guys have in common? They’ve all done great videos for Bjork.

I got this card in the mail inviting me to a “Guinness Believer” event at the corporate sports bar complex where I was moonlighting last year. The deal is, they ply you with free food and beer while they extol the virtues of Guinness. While looking for reviews of previous events, I came across this gem. I feel so special to be a part of “a unique cluster of consumers who are less sophisticated”. You’d think that a modern marketing company would be more careful about leaving such things out in the open…

I will most likely be out of town on election day (Tuesday Nov. 4) here in Somerville, but I couldn’t find any information on absentee ballots on the city’s site. Fortunately, Paula Stuart answered a question I posted to PSDL:

…you can vote absentee by either calling the Elections Department and having them mail you a ballot, which you must send back in time for it to be received by election day, or by going in person to the Elections Department (in the basement of City Hall) and filling out a ballot in person anytime between now and the election.  City Hall is open 8:30-4:30 Monday through Wednesday, 8:30 - 7:30 on Thursday and 8:30 to 12:30 on Fridays.

As election day nears here in Somerville, MA, the mayoral race is heating up. With current mayor Kelly Gay having been voted out in the primaries, it’s down to Tony Lafuente and Joe Curtatone. I have to say that Curtatone’s campaign has been doing a better job of getting his message out to me personally—his flyers, with their excessively large type and relentless pimping of his cute kid, have become a weekly staple in my mailbox. By contrast, I think I may have gotten one piece of mail from Lafuente a while back, and the link to his platform on his website was broken until I emailed him. Also, this Weekly Dig article might’ve been more even-handed if they could’ve reached Lafuente for comment. Incidentally, that article noted that Curtatone was “challenging his opponent to run a clean campaign, free of negative personal attacks”; I guess he changed his mind, since today’s Curtatone mail was an attack ad (PDF, 370k) trying to pin Lafuente to the Mystic View Task Force’s efforts regarding the Assembly Square development. (more…)

Interesting story about a triumph of free-market capitalism in health care: the transcription of some patient records at UCSF Medical Center was being sub-sub-sub-contracted out to a woman in Pakistan. When someone in the middle of the chain (allegedly) became a deadbeat employer, the woman actually doing the work threatened to post patient records to the internet unless she was paid.

I just won a grant from Kodak for film stock. I’m not going to be shooting anything on film anytime soon, but I want to output a five-minute short on 35mm, which’ll cost just shy of $2,000. So the grant is cool.

Except, about six hours after getting the award letter, they told me that I was going to get disqualified because my project was “computer-generated.” (It’s not; it’s hand-drawn on a Wacom tablet.) Just to be silly, I asked, what if I print out the drawings on paper and rephotograph them with a camera? They said, hmmm, maybe that would work. They’ll get back to me.

I bet the Lumiéres confused a lot of people back in the day, trying to explain what they were doing without drawing a diagram or something.

It seems that morning shock-jocks at three separate Clear Channel radio stations have been encouraging drivers to run bicyclists off the road and throw bottles at them. Here’s a Chicago Tribune story (free registration required), and here’s a timeline of the events in Raleigh from a biking community site.

If you have any interest in the nightlife of your respective locality, you might want to check out Upcoming.org, a collaborative event-listing site that launched a month ago. The value proposition is something like Friendster-meets-Citysearch. You can indicate which events you’re going to (if they’re not listed, they’re easy to add yourself), and then you can see a combined list of things that your friends are going to. Will this be more useful than reading your local weekly? Time will tell, but I think that the site’s RSS-feeds-for-everything approach will probably help remind me of all the events I want to go to…

Here are some upcoming shows in Boston that might be worth checking out (if you’re me):

Interpol w/Elefant & The Occasion; Avalon, Oct. 16 & 17 Prefuse 73 w/Dabrye & Beans; Paradise, Nov. 4 Kid Koala Presents Short Attention Span Theater: Featuring Kid Koala w/very special guests DJ P-Love, DJ Jester and Lederhosen Lucil and with animated short stories by Monkmus; Middle East, Nov. 4 Kristin Hersh w/ Howe Gelb, Andrew Bird; Middle East, Nov. 6 Plaid w/ Luke Vibert, Chris Clark, N.E.D.; Paradise, Nov. 8 Broadcast w/ Manitoba; Paradise, Nov. 22

Alas, this little exercise made me realize how many of these will be happening when I’ll be out of town…

“I put McLuhan in the same category as Andy Warhol, who was described in a recent magazine article as a ‘honkie bullshitter.’” –Cecil Rhodes

The other evening, my landline phone rang. “That’s odd,” I thought, “what happened to the do-not-call list?” Turns out it was a political pollster, which I think might still be allowed these days. Judging from his questions, he was a pollster hired by the Republican national machinery to help them fine-tune their message. I can’t imagine that they learned much from me (other than that I’m definitely a lost cause, as far as they’re concerned).

I’ve conducted polls before, so I know the level of question that you can realistically ask, but some of this guy’s questions annoyed me. There were many vague statements that I was asked to agree or disagree with, like “lowering taxes will help the economy”. Which taxes? On whom? I refused to answer a really vague question that went something like, “if congress passes certain legislation that affects tariffs, more jobs will be created”. How the heck could I know until I knew what the legislation was proposing? And then there was one that really struck a particular nerve with me: “A plan to spend money on building roads would create more jobs.” Well, sure, but if you’re going to give handouts to create jobs, how about spending it on something like public transportation that will help everyone, not just people who own cars and can legally drive?

Incidentally, the caller had a weird way of pronouncing “deficit” so that it sounded like “deficient”–I had to ask him what the heck he was talking about the first few times.

I was going through some old files, and I found the political column I used to write for the school newspaper in college. A lot of them are a little silly now…except that a couple bits are really creepy. I will excerpt here…

Sep ‘98, “Whose Good Is It Anyway?”

Today’s DEA can commit civil-rights violations (such as the confiscation of property, imprisonment without trial, and searches and arrests without a warrant) in broad daylight that used to have to be performed covertly, and a Good Samaritan law would only reinforce their highly questionable authority. For those of you who don�t feel personally threatened by the War on Drugs, this only one example of the potential abuses a such a law could lead to. What if the well-cultivated fear of “terrorism” filling the newspapers today evolved into a full-blown witch hunt a few years down the road?

Good thing that didn’t happen, I guess.

Oct ‘98, “Two Birds, 75 Cruise Missiles”

Was the Afghan target a real terrorist base? Or was it a regular army training camp? Was the alleged Sudanese chemical-weapons factory only a pharmaceutical plant? Were the chemical byproducts that our intelligence agents cited as proof of evildoing actually traces of an innocuous antiseptic?

I actually said “evildoing.” Okay, and here’s the big one.

Jan ‘99, “Bombing Baghdad”

I realized that I didn’t know very much at all about the people we were killing some ten thousand miles away. The next day, our local paper (the Herald-Dispatch of Huntington, West Virginia) crowed that “Iraq is Desperate,” running a gleeful tally of the destruction caused by the latest bombardment that listed military and civilian targets alike. And I wondered if that had been the purpose of the attack–to provoke desperation in a country that may or may not have the capability to strike back at us on our own soil.

I’ve got the full text here if you want to read on:

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Lately, it seems like great cartographically-oriented discussion forums are springing up all over the place. First, there’s Jonathan Crowe’s Map Room blog, which consistently turns up nifty things like this collection of ancient map images. Then there’s the wonderfully-named geowanking mailing list, which is full of electronic map tinkerers swapping tips and fresh-baked tools. Finally, Owen Massey is doing a nice job of kicking off a new LiveJournal community called Cartographica with interesting links like this one about new vs. old bus maps in London. (Tip for non-LiveJournal people, you can get an RSS feed of any LJ user or community by tacking "rss/" on to the end of its URL.)

A while back, Steven Frank had mentioned that you could use the OmniWeb browser to dynamically edit the source of any web page you were looking at, and see the changes reflected immediately. He was using it to put LiveJournal text into the WashPo page (this was the precursor to the amusing LJ Times site), but today I found a more interesting use. If you’re looking at a complex, JavaScript-infested form page, and you’re curious about the actual form values that get generated, you can pull it up in OmniWeb, view source, search for "<form", and then change the “POST” to a “GET” (to see if you can get a bookmarkable URL), or perhaps redirect the form action to a useful script of your choice. From there, you can figure out how to get the same results out in a more straightforward manner. Of course, if the site uses gratuitous cookies as well, it’ll be a little more work.

…to all the LiveJournalers out there. If your friends page is full of posts from my blog, blame RSS b0rkenness. Does LJ support the RDF version with the actual timestamps for posts?