08.04.10

not a bad idea at all

Posted in words, words about non-words at 12:04 am by electricvishnu

inception was not a very bad movie at all. if movies like inception arrived in theaters every week, no actually i’ll take once ever few months or years, that would be a very positive thing. and i can’t say inception really “fell short” or failed in its intended “mindf*#&” (as this seems to be the en vogue label)

however . . . inception left me feeling a bit like i had eaten only 3 or 4 courses out of the full five at a french restaurant. there were layers. there was savory meaty goodness. everyone at the table also had this savory meaty layery goodness. atop these rich and oft gamey layers, though, was the heavy heavy sauce that never once relented reminding me (and everyone else at the table) about the ‘point’ of dreams and their relationship with ones subjective reality and on and on and nom nom nom

i would warn of spoilers here, but i feel like our definition of spoiler would depend on the read we choose to make of this film, and whereas in most subjective Rorschach-esque splits, the Reality the viewer chooses to subscribe to illuminates something (read: some central idea, even perhaps a seeded “inception”) about the viewer’s philosophy, inception operates in a system where all roads lead back to that heavy sauce of “dreams certainly are weird and subjective aren’t they?” something must have been lost in the rush to get the film under 2:30; some of the dream-time spent playing out matrix-tribute fight sequences would have just as easily been used to flesh out some less physical character dynamics. likewise, while our dreams might be far from very verbal (and noone really dreams in kevin smith movie banter [or at least i hope not]) must the language in any sort of “thinking” movie really fall this flat? lastly, have we thrown ol’ uncle Siggy F so far under the bus that our video-dreamscape is now void of eros in all but its most clean-codified and (pg-13) drabness?

but after three courses – i must say it was sufficiently tasty. the ideas were there, and i’m feeling sort of full, but i still need dessert: notsomuch am i looking for specific questions to be answered as i am looking for a sweeter, more provocative non-answer to the questions they could have dreamt of asking.

it’s a solid B, 3 stars, whatever you might call it these days

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08.02.10

why i am taking the week off from pop music [and 90s rock]

Posted in words, words about non-words at 7:43 pm by electricvishnu

The short answer might sound something like “it’s tiring.” I could stop there, but it might also a bit more subtle than that. Initially, this was not a well thought out hopefully-life-changing journey taken with great fanfare. I am not post-pop, and I am certainly not better than the 3 minute 15 second pop song.

But it’s nice to take a break from the things you love. Let me count the ways I love the pop song – one metric we could use is the number of times that I leave a station on when said pop song is playing: so on a twelve minute drive to work if i catch said three-minute-pop-gem (from now on referred to as TMPG) four times on four stations and leave tuner all four times, that TMPG would score a perfect 1 (for that day) on the scale. Before I get sidetracked in some cockamamie scoring scheme . . . let’s ask the question, should it be probable that one can hear the same TMPG greater than two times on any twelve minute drive? further more, should it be possible that on more than one of these twelve minute drives (within one year) one can jump from station to station and hear this TMPG for more than ten of the available twelve minutes? [with the only discernible difference between iterations being the each FM station's flavor of post-loudness-wars super-boom-over-compression]

so I am temporarily removing myself from this environment where pop horses are beaten relentlessly. In asking myself why I need this vacation, the question comes of why these top five or so songs must dominate the top 40 playlists. Does quantifiable demand spur the play-count or is it the other way around? Do the ratios of (Requests for song A / Requests for song B) approximate the (play-count of song A / play-count of song B)? Similarly, how does the proportion of (requests for song A / count of all requests), and its change over time, predict how lasting a top 40 song will be? These questions need fleshed out quantitative analysis that is outside the scope of this immediate post:

I will argue in a future post that the incidence of said TMPG relative to other top 40 songs can be modeled using similar methods to that of modeling infectious microbes.

The topic of Facebook came up the other night amongst some friends. One good friend of mine explained that he had to quit it because he was finding himself spending way too much time consuming information about friends (and friends of friends) that was ultimately very inconsequential. To put it shortly, it was a waste of time (something we all are pretty much aware of.) I’m not going to launch an argument here about how pop music is similarly a waste of time, but

<rant>

let’s assume for a minute (or a few hours) that we can re-appropriate the time previously spend consuming trivial kernels of information to some sort of creative process. What would you do? What percentage of the information one takes in within 24 hours is reprocessed and used in any creative process?

This leads to a monstrous potentially “soul-sucking” flaw in the Apple app-centric model of interface and computing. We use computers to consume and create. We consume YouTube videos. We consume Flickr photographs. We consume iTunes (DRM-laden, but that’s a whole different warehouse full of self-replicating worms) audio. We consume terabytes of Facebook me-gossip. At work, we consume documents that are relevant to the goods and services we are providing a whole new set of consumers. Plenty of these goods and services are physical incarnations of information, but more and more are strictly in the digital domain. On the other end, we are also creating this same media. And because of exploding availability of cheap digital storage, there is a seemingly limitless void into which we can spew the media we create. This map of the cycle can itself be written off as somewhat trivial: I mean, no shit, people create a whole bunch of stuff and then we consume it and that’s that; garbage in, garbage out . . . but stuff has always been not-that-easy to come by. Stuff has always come from raw resources. Even the great libraries of stored knowledge required trees for paper, oil for ink, and plenty of man-hours and know-how to put together those books. Now, however, outside of the oil, nuclear, coal, wind, and solar resources we use to keep the flow of electrons healthy, (along with the somewhat cheaper metals and plastics used for hardware) what natural resources are required to transmit and store information? Consequently, there are fewer limits on media-worthiness in the world (here I apologize for generalizing [dangerously] . . . here in the “free-world”) We rely on reputation (New York Times, CNN), democratization (digg, likes, thumbs up, and the quickly self-healing wikipedia), and our own intuition and (sometimes overestimated) sense of rationality. But as the sum of all information grows exponentially, we still have limited time per day to seek out and parse out relevance from the great tangled mess.

Already in this post about essential and meaningful information I’ve wasted a hell of a lot of time and space and haven’t reached any semblance of a point, so let’s wrap it up here. It’s less of an experiment than it is a vacation. I’ve heard it all before (”so don’t knock down my door” ???) and it doesn’t really add anything more than it did the first time I heard it. It’s not exactly white-noise (information-wise) but it doesn’t add anything new.

Just because you can get something immediately, doesn’t mean you should. Why is the Walmart open at 11:30pm so fucking crowded? Just because I can get product X for the cheapest possible price at any time of night, does it mean I should? Am I being completely hypocritical given that I think the ability to query the internet 24 hours a day from anywhere (i.e. glaciers in the middle of non-inhabited Iceland) and pull down relevant information is not only important but priceless? Aren’t the goods being sold at Walmart just physical realizations of some information? Might they be just as important to someone as the release date of “Modern Love” is to me? Perhaps. So I guess the real question is how we all value information relative to everything else.
So my prediction is that this week I will not starve. This week I will not fall ill. This week I will not wake up in cold sweats yelling the name of lost loves in major pentatonic melodies friendly to the I-V-vi-IV progression. I might have to stretch a little bit. Already today there was a bit more scrolling up and down artists names while looking for the next album to play.

The rules (which are stupid-simple: no recent pop songs, no 90s rock (or 90s rock run-off); if there is even a question the answer is no) already prohibit 4 out of 6 CDs currently in my car [the two exceptions being (CD 6) strangers wasted demos: which yes, could be called partially derivative of the 90s rock template, but no, they have not existed in that exact (or even super-approximate) form until we put them down as-is and (CD 4) a collection of indie songs . . . although on further thought I find that the only songs here that are exempt from the explicit rules are songs that seem to only follow the roadmap of where Pop-town is and make the turn that takes them furthest away. However, no matter how many dimensions this roadmap might be in, this strategy is still derivative and strictly-dependent on the Pop it desperately seeks to not be: If I say right here and now “I am not an elephant.” I have added no information whatsoever to the system. If every question you ask about me, I just choose the least-elephant-like answer, I still have said nothing unique about what I am and where I stand in the spectrum of being that is not 100% dependent on elephant-ness. As this is the current state one militant sect of Indie-ism, I’d have to rule all (anti-)creation from these camp as also prohibited.

</rant>

Ultimately, it falls on one’s attempts to add anything to a universal set of ideas where it looks that it’s all already been said and done. Instead of mining the hills of tried and true (or the exact opposite coordinates in spite and the name of individualism) unplug, pull up anchor, doze off, and begin wherever you may wake up, and let your memory of the better elements guide you, but remember that sometimes the maps (mental or printed) are very very wrong.

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02.13.10

best of the aughts in music [albums]

Posted in hot jams, words, words about non-words at 12:14 pm by electricvishnu

the top 3 albums overall from 2000-2009, ranked (by medal, in the spirit of the olympics)

bronze | john mayer | continuum | 2006 | link
silver | sigur rós | ( ) | 2002 | link
gold | saves the day | stay what you are | 2001 | link

note: if hot fuss, by the killers, was released primarily on vinyl or cassette tape and therefore had two discrete sides, then side A (ending after “All These Things That I’ve Done”) might be the best side of all time. however, this is not the case, and the remainder (side B) is, as they say, “weak sauce.”

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01.04.10

my top hot jams of 2009

Posted in hot jams, lists, words about non-words at 6:40 pm by electricvishnu

[or a slightly audited and seasonally adjusted list of heavily played (iPod) songs]
in some particular order

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01.03.10

best of the aughts in music [songs]

Posted in words about non-words at 9:13 pm by electricvishnu

the top 4 songs of each year from 2000 to 2009

Radiohead – “Idioteque”
Modest Mouse – “3rd Planet”
New Found Glory – “Hit or Miss”
Eminem – “Stan”

System of a Down – “Chop Suey”
Saves the Day – “Freakish”
Abandoned Pools – “The Remedy”
Gorillaz – “Clint Eastwood”

Our Lady Peace – “Innocent”
All-American Rejects – “Swing, Swing”
The Flaming Lips – “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Part I”
Sigur Rós – “Untitled 4″

Outkast – “Hey Ya”
E-Town Concrete – “So Many Nights”
The Postal Service – “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight”
Something Corporate – “Konstantine”

Green Day – “Whatsername”
The Killers – “Mr Brightside”
Kelly Clarkson – “Since U Been Gone”
Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers – “¡Americano!”

Saves the Day – “Ups & Downs”
Death Cab For Cutie – “Summer Skin”
Mars Volta – “The Widow”
Jack’s Mannequin – “Dark Blue”

Less Than Jake – “The Rest of My Life”
Muse – “Starlight”
John Mayer – “Slow Dancing in A Burning Room”
Gnarles Barkley – “Crazy”

Rihanna – “Umbrella”
M.I.A. – “Paper Planes”
Mika – “Grace Kelly”
Radiohead – “Reckoner”

The Airborne Toxic Event – “Sometime Around Midnight”
Pink – “So What”
Okkervil River – “Lost Coastlines”
Ten Feet – “I’m Yours”

Jay-Z – “Empire State of Mind”
Third Eye Blind – “Bonfire”
Kings of Leon – “Use Somebody”
Black Eyed Peas – “I Gotta Feeling”

some honorable mentions (in no particular order):

Third Eye Blind – “Forget Myself”, “Water Landing”
Wilco – “Jesus, etc”
Our Lady Peace – “Paper Moon”, “In Repair”
Regina Spektor – “On The Radio”, “Fidelity”
Dashboard Confessional – “Again I Go Unnoticed”, “Remember to Breathe”
Big Pun – “It’s So Hard”
Blink 182 – “Feeling This”
Brand New – “The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows”
Coheed and Cambria – “33″
Fountains of Wayne – “Mexican Wine”
Linkin Park – “The End”
Damian Rice – “Delicate”
Matchbox Twenty – “How Far We’ve Come”
Bedouin Soundclash – “When The Night Feels My Song”, “12:59 Lullabye”
MGMT – “Time To Pretend”
Phantom Planet – “Anthem”, “Always On My Mind”
Smashing Pumpkins – “With Every Light”, “Starz”
The Streets – “Dry Your Eyes”, “Blinded By The Lights”, “All Goes Out the Window”
Sugarcult – “Pretty Girl (The Way)”
Toby Keith – “I Love This Bar”
Down AKA Kilo – “Lean Like a Cholo”
The Tragically Hip – “The Darkest One”
Kelly Clarkson – “Already Gone”
Ratatat – “Seventeen Years”
Telepopmusik – “Breathe”
Miley Cyrus – “Party in the USA”
Matisyahu – “Jeruselem”
Takagi Masakatsu – “J.F.P.”
Vampire Weekend – “Walcott”
Elliott Smith – “Wouldn’t Mama Be Proud”
Coldplay – “Yellow”
Cypress Hill – “Rap Superstar”
New Found Glory – “Eyesore”
American Hi-Fi – “Flavor of the Week”
Nine Inch Nails – “The Great Destroyer”
The Killers – “When You Were Young”
Rick Barry – “Stupid American Song”
Foo Fighters – “Best of You”
Taking Back Sunday – “You’re So Last Summer”
Outkast – “The Whole World”

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09.11.09

blueprint of hype?

Posted in words about non-words at 5:00 pm by electricvishnu

there has been much twit-buzz around my neck of the digital woods about this blueprint 3 (or is that blueprint iii) album by the uber-prolific shawn carter, aka jay-z.

how does one mass-market a product (specifically, musical) in such a way that generates the most buzz without seeming outdated and lame [what the hell was with all this 9 9 09 beatles crap? i love the beatles but gimme a break. i will do a google search for the numerical significance (1 after 909?) a few moments after hitting Post and will probably say "oh." because there was something obvious that i'm missing here. so i apologize in advance for being a be-at-les n00b. i dig the beatles. i dig them entirely, but . . . i'm not about to run out and celebrate some phony day by buying useless crap i don't need [hahaha that was unintentional, i swear]

</rant>

but i’m honestly intrigued. i heard some (new?) jay-z song on the car ride home and my shazam couldn’t shazam it and it was a terrific jam – a new york city boast with a sad undertone and what sounded like real guitar tones under some half-broken-soul singing (whatever that means?)

[nytimes, about the hype-generation machine]

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02.21.09

Posted in words about non-words at 3:54 am by electricvishnu

is atonality the new (or old) amorality?

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09.27.08

the weezing of lot 49

Posted in words about non-words, words about words at 2:38 pm by electricvishnu

upon conversating via the ol’ buddy chat with a librarian (no, not this librarian) it came to our sudden realization that there exists a one-to-one mapping of thomas pynchon novels to weezer albums that are analogous in quality, tone, and critical reception:

(in randomized order)

the crying of lot 49 – weezer [blue album]
it’s that “accessible” word – they’re both quite short – catchy – people dig them on first read and might not ever return for the really good stuff below the surface

mason & dixon – weezer [red album]
cuomo and pynchon both begin to get a little conscious of their age – they both edge toward the nostalgic at some points

against the day – weezer [green album]
on the sugary-sweetness side – pynchon’s most hopeful book – amazing first time read/listen for both

gravity’s rainbow – pinkerton
the classics

v. – maladroit
some sweet spots – gone fishin’ – and stories of the whole sick crew

vineland – make believe
california is an entirely deranged place, no?

talk amongst yourselves . . .

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09.20.08

severely truncated live show reviews

Posted in hot jams, words about non-words at 9:43 am by electricvishnu

roger clyne and the peacemakers = something from a cormac mccarthy novel – in its more classical and romantisized form

mars volta are a later mccarthy novel – with all their wide open tumbleweed desert spaces – but with more thunder rumble than gringo trouble to the west. it’s that same novel brought to film form in some stanley kubrick / david lynch collaboration.

and jónsi birgisson is billy corgan in middle earth.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmVkxKKVyrM]

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Posted in words about non-words at 9:25 am by electricvishnu

. . . and it’s thousands of miles away
[in earth distance and spirit]
from the pounding, the blasts, and the screeches of a mexi-prog-rock explosion.

the mars volta show is a jazz club that exists somewhere in that nook between the second and third circles of hell. [not a bad thing at all]

but as i step off the train [i'm the only stopper] -
this ain’t such a bad place

the sprinklers make their rounds
as the last chance train moves northward

and the first night you need
the long johns
is
never
as you expected it.

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