hey guys, sorry i haven’t really been pulling my weight with posting recently
miniblog: had a lot of fun crushing the mooshlock with a random deck and today i had oh!s for breakfast.

i also watched a documentary on the chiptune scene called “reformat the planet” that i found pretty interesting. it’s like watching this you can almost suss out who the heroes and villains would be if it were a heroic drama.

i think my favorite group of the bunch though is the depreciation guild, who come in kind of a ways through the documentary and have a very 4ad feel. coova is a shoe-in for mark’s fav, and could mark denardo be ripping off dan any harder? there’s one awesome shot of him (pt.3, ~6:50) when a chiptune festival is about to start and nobody’s even started playing yet and he’s just going out of his mind with joy and anticipation.

mostly posting this because it seems really ridiculous to me that something like this could be possible. it’s almost like why bother being an artist anymore – or at least a photographic one? i mean at the end of the road this video seems to be traveling down, you could imagine taking a photo and then using the “make good” tool to turn it into a classically balanced or artistic photograph. i’ve never been one to balk or fear any brave-new-world shit, so it’s not that i think this is bad. it just sort of gives you pause when you get a glimpse of something that’s basically commercially available when 30 seconds prior you would have snorted at even the possibility of something like that being created. any other thoughts?

chu and i adopted two brothers on sunday. haven’t decided on their names yet. the names they came with, azrael and memin (the archangel of death and a mexican comic book character, respectively), aren’t exactly names i would have chosen. so far we’ve just been referring to them as collectively “the guys.” i don’t know, what do you guys think? any name ideas?

It’s like now that the Academy Awards are over the studios can start releasing the good stuff:

Unofficial Bourne movie of the year:

I don’t know anything about the Halo franchise but it would be cool if we all got this from Netflix and posted our thoughts.

Crazies remake??

can’t post that without posting the classic original trailer. “….the CRAZIES.”

here’s a few photos from my first week, spent in beijing.

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I spent the last four days or so in Rio de Janeiro, mostly at an academic conference. Some interesting changes since the last time I was there:

1. The dog of choice for the carioca middle class now seems to be the chow-chow, as opposed to the generic white miniature poodle that I saw on the end of so many leashes the last time I was in Brazil.  The chow-chow has the advantage of still being “fofinho” (soft/cute), but it just might tear a criminal’s leg off.  

2. I’m increasingly of the opinion that the English words so often inserted into Brazilian Portuguese, whether spoken, written, or in advertising, shouldn’t be confused with English as we know it.  Sure, Brazilian cultural nationalists probably complain about slavish adoption of U.S. terms, but in many instances, it feels more like selective adoption and repurposing than imitation as such.  

Take “x-tudo,” which means “cheeseburger with everything.”  How, you ask?  You start with “hambúrguer,” add the English “cheese,” which sounds approximately like the Portuguese sound “sheesh” (represented by the letter x), go to “x-búrguer,” add “everything” (tudo), and you get “x-tudo.”  Derived at some point from English, but nothing like what we’re used to.

3. Copacabana beach is approximately 4 km long.  There are approximately one million opportunities to buy a coffee, coconut milk, McDonalds, bottled water, a figurine of the Christ the Redeemer statue, or a really ugly beach blanket contained in the Copacabana beach area.

4. An açaí shake can give you brain freeze.

Big ups to Rob for hosting me on Saturday and showing me the sights around Sacramento and Davis. Have to say the trip was pretty incredible on my end, don’t know how stoked Rob was to have to deal with me all day!

Anyway, like I said, the trip was good. Sacramento struck me in a lot of ways as like either Rochester with nice weather, or a slightly hipper, definitely more diverse Rochester. I caught a glimpse of Arnold but it was while I was on a shuttle from the airport to the hotel, so I didn’t get to snap a picture. I thought I took like 30,000 pictures, but in reality I somehow only took 30, and most of those were surprisingly crappy. When I was describing the trip to Chu I resorted mostly to Google street-view’ing where we’d been. Some pictures I did take, for whatever they’re worth, follow below the cut.

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Christmas came and went this year along with its usual bolus of albums to my collection.  It’s great to get lots of great music, but it presents a problem in that in order to give every album their due, you sort of have to focus on one for a while before moving down the queue.  I got two Animal Collective albums for Christmas, Strawberry Jam and Sung Tongs.  I should note that I didn’t ask for them, they were presents from my sister’s boyfriend, Todd.  I had already declared myself too cool for all of the Animal Collective hype machine and had sort of all but written them off without ever really getting to know what they’re all about.  I have to say, though, that after listening to pretty much nothing else for about two weeks I think it’s safe to say that they’re pretty good.  One of those bands where I think each of their albums sort of has a different sound, so I can’t really comment on those others.  But Sung Tongs is only about half of the full group performing, and has a sparer sound.  It has two songs, “Who Could Win a Rabbit?” and “Visiting Friends” which are easily better than anything on Strawberry Jam, but as a whole the album drags in parts and overall blends together so that I really find myself waiting for the standouts at the expense of the other songs.  Strawberry Jam, though, is very consistent from start to finish, with the song “Winter Wonder Land” as the only real clunker.  Its style is more varied than Sung Tongs, shifting even in the same song.

The wikipedia entries for the band seem to go to great lengths to paint them as an “avant-garde” ensemble, but I can only assume whoever has so dubbed them just has a very loose definition of avant-garde.  I guess because they do a lot of genre-shifting and genre-bending?  To me they don’t seem so meaningfully different than most other bands, and have a very strong sense of melody and pop instincts.  It’s like if you expand avant-garde to any band that’s boldly going where Beck has gone before, I’d argue it sort of loses its meaning.  Despite me getting on my genre high-horse, though, I confess I don’t really have any neat monikers to attach to the band that really describes them well.  So I’ll just leave you with some youtubes to give you some sense of what the two albums, and the band, are all about.

VIDEOS BELOW THE CUT.

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You know the drill, hanging out on the couch, watching some TV, commercial comes on. What’s that song? That sounds pretty good. I should check that out. Then you’re doing some research and find out you’re like 2 years behind the curve, all the hipsters 8 years younger than you have already been there, done that. Yeah, it takes the wind out of your sails a little bit when you come to the realization that you’re being out-gunned by the same sort of jerk you used to be. But sometimes you have to take the hit and think about getting into something that’s well behind the cutting edge. Here’s the latest hit-list of band whose commercial songs made me think about getting into them.

Ruby Suns – Tane Mahuta (their Oh, Mojave is in the Microsoft “Mojave Experiment” commercials):

MGMT – Time to Pretend (heard this on some snowboarding x-games thing on TV a couple weeks ago):

here (embedding disabled)

Chairlift – Planet Health (their song Bruises was in an ipod commercial):