May 2011
1 post
“Burial is the Edward Hopper of our generation.”
– Mark ‘k-punk’ Fisher on the “In McDonalds” track.
April 2011
4 posts
“There’s a certain mainstream gay sensibility that tends to adopt blonde...”
– The Guardian’s Dan Martin in “The Lady Gaga backlash begins”
March 2011
1 post
Monocolumn – Japan focus: the media onslaught... →
The ever-optimistic Monocle’s take on how Japanese media cover the disasters.
February 2011
1 post
My interview with David LaChapelle, 15 Feb 2011.
January 2011
2 posts
December 2010
6 posts
Favorite Albums of 2010
In no particular order:
Mice Parade What It Means To Be Left-Handed
Like if Múm were born and bred in New York City instead of Iceland.
James Blake The Bells Sketch EP / CMYK EP / Klavierwerke EP
Exorcizing the ghosts in Burial’s urban elegies.
Beach House Teen Dream
Victoria Legrand. (lol)
Joanna Newsom Have One On Me
Less nine-minute opuses, more real songs—without...
Last.fm and the Most Listened-To Albums of 2010
My Last.fm listening habits from May to August 2010, visualized.
According to Last.fm’s data and other visualization/data-analysis web apps, the top artists I’ve been listening to in 2010 who have released an album or EP during the period:
Beach House Teen Dream (Had a long go—the album leaked late 2009)
Joanna Newsom Have One On Me
Seabear We Built A Fire
Eluvium Similes
Toro...
“I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking,...”
– Carl Sagan, who passed away on this day in 1996.
(See also: #sagan forever.)
Not one for sentimental platitudes, but hope he’s making apple pie from scratch somewhere.
The Age of WTFz
The problem I have with Sufjan Stevens isn’t his music, which tends to either live up to its vaulted ambitions (Illinoise) or fall flat on its ‘experimental’ face/phase (Run Rabbit Run). The problem is Stevens himself.
He’s made up to be this indie wunderkind, soft-spoken and sensitive, the man/boy of every hipster girl’s dream. He’s this quirky musical prodigy, the black sheep in the New Weird...
October 2010
8 posts
“The operators of LimeWire continue to tout how “proud” they are of their service. To be clear, for the better part of the last decade, LimeWire and its operators have violated the law, and in doing so, enriched themselves immensely.”
RIAA - Music Notes Blog - October 28, 2010
RIAA you pieces of shit what the fuck is wrong with you. There’s clearly something broken in the old...
Coldplay 'most sleep-inducing' band—Telegraph →
Not sure how anyone can doze off to Chris Martin’s annoying caw.
Fashion is Repulsive, and Other Albini-cisms
Mr Albini, your thoughts on the recording industry might be antiquated, but these witticisms will ring true forever:
“I don’t rate movies as an art form.”
“The same thing happened with the Internet—people said access to music on the Internet was going to kill the music industry. What it killed was the record industry.”
And my absolute favorite:
“I think...
The Idiocy of 'Lit' People
“Do we really want reading to be as effortless as possible? The neuroscience of literacy suggests that, sometimes, the best way to make sense of a difficult text is to read it in a difficult format, to force our brain to slow down and process each word. After all, reading isn’t about ease—it’s about understanding. If we’re going to read Kant on the Kindle, or Proust on the...
“My rap palate has greatly improved. Jay-Z used to be sort of what predominated,...”
– Obama in Command: The Rolling Stone Interview | Rolling Stone Politics
September 2010
2 posts
August 2010
6 posts
I don’t like words. I try to get rid of as many of them as I can.
Another snarky rant on the reblogging economy →
…and those old media giants that’ve taken up the Tumblr channel.
Nothing new, but funny.
I Love Paris in the Movies →
“Inglourious Basterds” is, as history, a florid and fanciful work of revisionism, no closer to the actuality of Paris than, say, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s cloying, everyone’s-a-tourist vision of the metropolis in “Amélie.”
Designing 'Mad Men' →
The whole thing — yes even the comments — is great. It’s almost never about content.
July 2010
2 posts
Setting Themselves on Fire
Omfg the new Stars album (The Five Ghosts) is quite possibly the worst thing I’ve heard all year.
Not only does it sound like someone stuck the master into a puddle of mud, they’re terrible songs to begin with. What an overwrought, hyperbolic, teenage wreck of a release; it’s as though all those life-affirming ‘anthems’ were written from the scraps of an 18-year old...
June 2010
10 posts
“For proof, just consider these cultural and technological high points of the...”
– Scott Dadich, Creative Director, Wired magazine
Wild Nothing - Our Composition Book Gemini...
Washed Out - You and I (Feat. Caroline Polachek...
A/S/L?: xviii →
I don’t see the point in setting up a Blog so I can wallpaper it with runway caps (also, don’t know how to use Photoshop) and intuitive, thought-provoking captions like “I love this”, “I love that”, and the prerequisite “I die”. No one wants to hear you gush about something you don’t even own, especially if the next chick on the Blogroll is going on about more or less the same thing, or a...
The Book is Dead, Long Live the Book
“This book party in Tribeca feels like a Historic Moment, like a 1982 convention of typewriter salesmen or the hunting party of Kaiser Wilhelm II with his coterie of plumed barons in the fall of 1913 before the Great War sent their world spinning off the precipice.”
Garrison Keillor’s op-ed in the NYTimes
I’m actually pretty excited to witness the dying gasp of print....
Favourite Albums This Half-Year
In no particular order:
Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma
Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me
Toro y Moi - Causers of This
Oneohtrix Point Never - Returnal
Clogs - The Creatures in the Garden of Lady Walton
Four Tet - There is Love in You
Beach House - Teen Dream
Autechre - Oversteps
Bill Callahan - Rough Travel for a Rare Thing
Wooden Shjips - Vol 2
Caribou - Swim
BJ Nilsen - The Invisible City
...
May 2010
23 posts
The fascination continues
From NYTimes:
Muji’s items in MoMA often sell at a 30 to 50 percent premium in dollars compared with original the price in yen on the labels. This City Room reporter made a faux pas when, influenced Muji’s chic presence in MoMA, she proposed shopping for gifts at Muji in Tokyo as a thank you for an older Japanese woman.
The horrified response from a Japanese-American friend: “You can’t do that!...
The National - Bloodbuzz Ohio
I really...