Saturday, July 30, 2005
DEEPLINKS: Random and compelling
There must be some psychological theorem to explain why a self-refreshing stream of the 50 most recent pictures posted to LiveJournal is so damn interesting...
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
IMHO: Five earworms
This story about the syndrome where your brain hears music constantly describes about 30 percent of my waking life. Just for fun, here's the top five singles burning up the charts in my synapses now:
5. Wilco, "Late Greats" (live version)
The addition of Nels Cline to the lineup has brought the band off that narrow King Crimson road it was heading down. Every live version of a track from "A Ghost Is Born" sounds far fresher with the new crew, and "Late Greats" gets that much better. Cline says Tweedy wants the record they're going to start this summer "to have a lot of groove." It's about damn time.
4. Herb Brown, "Never Gonna Dance," (from the 1936 musical "Swing Time")
Perhaps one of the more oddly depressive musical numbers of all time. "I'll put my shoes on beautiful trees/I'll give my rhythm back to the breeze/My dinner clothes may dine where they please/For all I really want is you." There's a wolf and a penny and Groucho Marx, too.
3. Brendan Benson, "Spit It Out"
Benson and Jack White are working on something of a Detroit-based superpop group called Raconteurs. Now would be a good time for Benson to do something different -- three albums of catchy pop songs should be enough to tide anyone over.
2. Imogen Heap, "Hide and Seek"
So I don't watch "The OC." So I didn't know Imogen Heap was in Frou Frou. All I care about is that whoever produced this little gem rescued the vocoder from its grim reputation as the reviver of Cher's career.
1. Sufjan Stevens, "John Wayne Gacy Jr."
I'll let Sufjan explain what he was thinking writing about a serial killer:
"I made a concerted effort to scrupulously evoke the series of events which led to his crime, and, considering the circumstances, that was not a pleasant task. In all the crime novels I'd skimmed and in all the news clippings I read, there was a deliberate obsession with finding the source of his depravity. What went wrong, everyone asked. What made him this way? Was it his abusive father? Was it a head injury? A doting mother?
"I'm less interested in cause and effect, in terms of human iniquity. I believe we all have the capacity for murder. We are ruthless creatures. I felt insurmountable empathy not with his behavior, but with his nature, and there was nothing I could do to get around confessing that, however horrifying it sounds."
It's a quiet folk song, with that patchwork sound that Stevens uses for much of the Illinois record. The lyrics are simple and descriptive -- "Folding John Wayne's T-shirts/When the swingset hit his head" -- and walk right up to the scene of the crimes.
"Twenty-seven people, even more/They were boys with their cars, summer jobs/Oh my --" and here, Stevens lets out a soft wail, stretching the word "God" over three measures, blowing a cold breeze through the rest of the album. It may be the best song I've heard in many a year.
5. Wilco, "Late Greats" (live version)
The addition of Nels Cline to the lineup has brought the band off that narrow King Crimson road it was heading down. Every live version of a track from "A Ghost Is Born" sounds far fresher with the new crew, and "Late Greats" gets that much better. Cline says Tweedy wants the record they're going to start this summer "to have a lot of groove." It's about damn time.
4. Herb Brown, "Never Gonna Dance," (from the 1936 musical "Swing Time")
Perhaps one of the more oddly depressive musical numbers of all time. "I'll put my shoes on beautiful trees/I'll give my rhythm back to the breeze/My dinner clothes may dine where they please/For all I really want is you." There's a wolf and a penny and Groucho Marx, too.
3. Brendan Benson, "Spit It Out"
Benson and Jack White are working on something of a Detroit-based superpop group called Raconteurs. Now would be a good time for Benson to do something different -- three albums of catchy pop songs should be enough to tide anyone over.
2. Imogen Heap, "Hide and Seek"
So I don't watch "The OC." So I didn't know Imogen Heap was in Frou Frou. All I care about is that whoever produced this little gem rescued the vocoder from its grim reputation as the reviver of Cher's career.
1. Sufjan Stevens, "John Wayne Gacy Jr."
I'll let Sufjan explain what he was thinking writing about a serial killer:
"I made a concerted effort to scrupulously evoke the series of events which led to his crime, and, considering the circumstances, that was not a pleasant task. In all the crime novels I'd skimmed and in all the news clippings I read, there was a deliberate obsession with finding the source of his depravity. What went wrong, everyone asked. What made him this way? Was it his abusive father? Was it a head injury? A doting mother?
"I'm less interested in cause and effect, in terms of human iniquity. I believe we all have the capacity for murder. We are ruthless creatures. I felt insurmountable empathy not with his behavior, but with his nature, and there was nothing I could do to get around confessing that, however horrifying it sounds."
It's a quiet folk song, with that patchwork sound that Stevens uses for much of the Illinois record. The lyrics are simple and descriptive -- "Folding John Wayne's T-shirts/When the swingset hit his head" -- and walk right up to the scene of the crimes.
"Twenty-seven people, even more/They were boys with their cars, summer jobs/Oh my --" and here, Stevens lets out a soft wail, stretching the word "God" over three measures, blowing a cold breeze through the rest of the album. It may be the best song I've heard in many a year.
Saturday, July 09, 2005
Thursday, July 07, 2005
DEEPLINKS: The end of BONG Bull
Charley Stough started the Burned-Out Newspapercreatures Guild (BONG) Bull e-mail newsletter in 1988, and kept dishing out its mix of an all-text comic strip, dusty newspaper parables and the occasional joke list on a nearly weekly basis until a few weeks ago. I started subscribing whilst learning The Craft, and find it hard to quantify just how much I picked up from the damn thing. BONG Bull was kinda funny, sometimes, and always well-put together, but through some mystical farrago it imparted more bedrock truth about journalism as we know it today than many years of urgent care from the brahmins at the review mags and pointy-head websites. I never did pick up Stough's merchandise, such as the typewriter-key cufflinks or my official Chagrin Falls Commercial Scimitar press badge (which was apparently used as a real press badge in hostile territories around the world), but the last tickets for Charley's nostalgia tour won't last forever.
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