NOVEL DESIGNS

well, what you do best is the way you use your time

2009-12-21T15:38:00.000-08:00

also dug into a lot of Baldessari post MOCA visit this weekend. The novelty of word/image play conceptual artists (LeWitt, Weiner, Ruscha) really fails to wear off.

"I would drive around National City where I was living and randomly shoot out of the window with the camera without even looking and drive with the other hand. Wherever I shot, I would note down the location. In another series, I matched random photographs with statements. For instance, there'd be a statement about photography - about how the eye depicted, how the picture frame shouldn't be divided in half - and then I'd have a photograph with maybe a post right down the middle, and I'd match those two. Or in another one, I'm standing in front of a palm tree - you're not supposed to stand in front of trees because they look like they're growing out of your head - with an inscription that came from a book on composition about the right way and the wrong way. 8 You'd have the right image and the wrong image. I loved that there'd be wrong things, so that's why I titled it Wrong."

the man himself... in venice, no less.

a glowing, white rectangle

2009-12-21T12:53:00.000-08:00

this is really one of the coolest things i've ever encountered. it's a perfect intersection of cinema, photography and architecture. three of these photos were at the Geffen MOCA this weekend. more info in detail below, but basically since the 70s Hiroshi Sugimoto has been going to movie theaters all over the world and exposing single frames for the exact runtime of the feature films that play in them. the result is spectacular.

Since the 1970s, Sugimoto has worked on his photo-series entitled «Theaters,» in which he photographs auditoriums of American movie theaters, and drive-in movies, during showings. The exposure time used for the photograph corresponds with the projection time of the film. This allows him to save the duration of the entire film in a single shot. What remains visible of the film’s time-compressed, individual images is the bright screen of the movie theater, which illuminates the architecture of the space. That its content retreats into the background makes the actual film a piece of information, manifesting itself in the (movie theater) space. As a result, instead of as a content-related event, film presents itself here as the relationship between time and spatial perception.

"One night I had an idea while I was at the movies: to photograph the film itself. I tried to imagine photographing an entire feature film with my camera. I could already picture the projection screen making itself visible as a white rectangle. In my imagination, this would appear as a glowing, white rectangle; it would come forward from the projection surface and illuminate the entire theater. This idea struck me as being very interesting, mysterious, and even religious." - Hiroshi Sugimoto

"I'm a habitual self-interlocutor. Around the time I started photographing at the Natural History Museum, one evening I had a near-hallucinatory vision. The question-and-answer session that led up to this vision went something like this: Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame? And the answer: You get a shining screen. Immediately I sprang into action, experimenting toward realizing this vision. Dressed up as a tourist, I walked into a cheap cinema in the East Village with a large-format camera. As soon as the movie started, I fixed the shutter at a wide-open aperture, and two hours later when the movie finished, I clicked the shutter closed. That evening, I developed the film, and the vision exploded behind my eyes." - Hiroshi Sugimoto

I'm sure this may come as a shock...

2009-12-19T13:48:00.000-08:00

why don't we grab some real estate? maybe pull up a tabe?

2009-12-16T15:22:00.000-08:00

sweet dove
sweet dove
never to return again

...keats

where you learned to make the others look good so you looked good

2009-12-16T12:48:00.000-08:00

must read

mister lister

2009-11-20T10:00:00.001-08:00

unquestionably the greatest production company logo known to mankind. thanks to D. Wein for putting this masterpiece up on the utube. i could watch it on loop.

be sure to check out breaking upwards in spring '09

rainbow apocalypse album artwork

2009-10-30T17:02:00.001-07:00

ELP (sister of ASP and of neon gold fame) has a new visual blog, byzantium, featuring her own patterned artwork.

About: Database of Color

Newest Series: Database of Color

This series was directly inspired from Victoria Vesna’s book “Database Aesthetics; Art in the Age of Information Overflow”.

“Database Aesthetics examines the database as cultural and aesthetic form, explaining how artists have participated in network culture by creating data art…the ways information is ordered and organized become artistic choices, and artists have an essential role in influencing and critiquing the digitization of daily life.” (http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/V/vesna_database.html)

People use data as a way of trying to ultimately understand and control an environment of information. Vesna provokes artists to explore projects that represent different modes of databasing the self . How does one compile small and seemingly unrelated pieces of information to present a new form of a whole and a new way of relating all the parts? This new series of artwork “Database of Color” explores these questions by creating a database of the self and mind through my personal interpretation and relationship to color. The various geometric patterns represent visual databases of color (a network of relationships) within a pre-constructed host site (the pre-registered lines/boundaries) which ultimately serve as a synthesis of my personal history, experiences and influences of color that have shaped my relationship to art.

These designs thus represent my own relationship and categorization of information. They become an individualized web of identity, history and creation. Within the boundaries of the interface I organize a new way of clarifying the information. Vesna claims that the primary components of a database are navigation, organization and retrieval. My designs, though seemingly random, are in fact composed of several webs of patterns that are echoed somewhere else in the overall makeup. As a result, to navigate through the image one must find the ways in which design and color are repeated through mathematical equation or to try and follow my own personal logic. In this way organization and navigation seem inextricably tied and retrieval becomes personalized. Vesna asks, “how do you represent information without dehumanizing it?” I believe this can be answered by how the information is constructed and through the process by which it is organized. In this case using color as information and using information as a way to communicate a relationship to the self, a database of the self through color.

yo la tengo murders the classics

2009-10-25T21:39:00.000-07:00

this (brilliant) album name back story almost tops the band name backstory:

re: i am not afraid of you and i will beat your ass
"The title of the album is rumored to be a (paraphrased) quote by NBA player, Tim Thomas. Sitting on the bench together during a game, Thomas was caught on tape by the MSG Network in a profane exchange with fellow Knick, point guard Stephon Marbury. Thomas yelled at Marbury, "Everyone in this organization is afraid of you, but I’m not, and I will beat your ass."

also alternate track titles for yo la tengo's electr-o-pura:

"A Rehearsal"
"Sound Is Music And Quick Lights And The People Who Make Our Sound Their Own. That's When We're Really Turned On."
"It's The Start Of A Musical Dialogue"
"A Group Is Like A Jig-Saw Puzzle-Everything Must Fit Into The Groove"
"A Few More Beats-And Maybe, A New Sound"
"The Music Can Really Drag It Out Of You-If It Says Something"
"Waiting For A Break"
"Sometimes, Not Often, You Start A Number And Something Miraculous Happens, And Then The Scene Is Beautiful."
"The Sound Of A Guitar Is With Me All The Time-Or Am I With It?"
"A Break Like This Is Worth Its Weight In Publicity"
"By Now The Music Becomes A Little Like A Perpetual Diary"
"Play It Soft And Easy, Play It Hard-The Beat Still Comes Thourgh"
"One Of My Favorite Instruments-The Electronic Flute"
"Patterns Of Sound Are My Bag Right Now"

my alphabet is illusive

2009-10-22T10:54:00.000-07:00

------------

well my kind's your kind

2009-10-21T17:36:00.000-07:00

check out this link for some info on the map art below. some innovative cartographic stuff going on out there. thanks to ELP for sharing.

thats just the way it is

2009-10-16T11:52:00.000-07:00

more sabia

raise high the roof beam carpenters

2009-09-24T20:20:00.000-07:00

a while back, ND posted a few pics from the inaugural issue of uk-based imaginary zine. we knew they had good taste, and they proved it again today by naming longtime ND pal adrien debontin a featured photographer on the site. a few of our personal faves from adi's flickr:

i'm looking for the goddess. are you the goddess?

2009-09-18T11:56:00.000-07:00

Dating Montage
Uploaded by smithy00101. - Independent web videos.

while you wait for the others (bradley)

2009-09-11T14:56:00.001-07:00

if robin hadn't de-activated his twitter account due to overuse, we might have caught wind of this earlier....grizzly bear / sean pecknold collab:

hell of a lot of truth in it in my opinion...yeah, a hell of a lot of truth

2009-09-03T10:03:00.000-07:00

and now i must own this

just come up with an idea and make it

2009-09-02T16:02:00.000-07:00

cover article this coming sunday

supply and demand

2009-09-01T23:36:00.000-07:00

this is on ebay right now. starting bid is $1,000. which seems about right.

athletics not aesthetics.

2009-09-01T12:02:00.000-07:00

about a third of the way through herzog on herzog and there's a solid post coming somewhere down the line just listing the various gems of wisdom the man drops within. concurrent with reading i'm watching all his films that can be streamed on netflix. i'd never heard of the great ectasy of woodcarver steiner but it became an immediate favorite. a quintessential herzog film about an unsung hero/rebel. now trying to find a copy of the fantastic score by popol vuh. might have to make a homemade mp3 using garageband, a reminder of younger days spent recording tapes off the radio...check out some ski-flying.

the strangest little bird I'd ever seen

2009-08-07T15:59:00.001-07:00

a day late to this party. a pleasingly perfunctory post.

the last thing hollywood wanted in their teen movies was teenagers

2009-08-07T09:17:00.000-07:00

this video, just posted yesterday, was put together for John Hughes when he received the showest producer of the year award in 1991. a fitting tribute for a man who was rarely seen since. (gems at 3:24 and 5:48)

some knowledge

sunshine or noir

2009-07-29T19:17:00.000-07:00

william t. vollmann's epic new book IMPERIAL beats out infinite jest by a solid 200 pages or so. given that it took me an entire summer in college to tackle the latter, i have no idea when i'll find time to read the former. but sam anderson's review in nymag intrigues:

"I was sitting on the train one day chipping away at William T. Vollmann’s latest slab of obsessional nonfiction when my friend Tsia, who incidentally is not an underage Thai street whore, offered to save me time with a blurby one-sentence review based entirely on the book’s cover and my synopsis of its first 50 pages. “Just write that it’s like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker,” she said, “but with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz.” This struck me as good advice, and I was all set to take it, but as I worked my way through the book’s final 1,250 pages, I found I had to modify it, slightly, to read as follows: Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange. (Viking has my full blessing to use that as a blurb.)"

the nytimes offers a more informative, if less flavorful, synopsis: "The book is a little like the Imperial Valley itself: pathless, fascinating, exhausting. Its two great themes are illegal immigration — the struggle of countless thousands of Mexicans to sneak into the United States through the Imperial Valley — and water, which has transformed the valley, or parts of it, from desert to seeming paradise but at great environmental cost."

powerhouse books (a small publishing co. with an awesome storefront/gallery space in their DUMBO office) will release a companion set of vollmann photographs taken during his 12 years of research

(vollman's tome coincides with a new pynchon release (INHERENT VICE) partially set in recent ND haunt, topanga canyon. check out wired magazine's "unofficial thomas pynchon guide to LA")

have wild imaginings, transformative dreams, and perfect calm

2009-07-28T11:13:00.000-07:00

aaron rose's in-croy-able roadtrip photographs take the lomo aesthetic to a whole new level. i am dying to know what camera and film he is using to create these.

the artist himself. the only thing that could make this series cooler would be if that were actually barry o.

bold visionaries knew this

2009-07-28T10:12:00.000-07:00

in june, dave eggers offered to personally email anyone who feared that print was dead. now he's announced that the 23rd mcsweeney's quarterly will be a:
"one-time-only, Sunday-edition sized newspaper—the San Francisco Panorama. It'll have news (actual news, tied to the day it comes out) and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there. Expect journalism from Andrew Sean Greer, fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, dispatches from Afghanistan, and much, much more. We're going to try to sell this thing on the street in San Francisco, but it'll also go out to our subscribers and be in bookstores all over--sign up now to ensure you see it."

it sounds like mcsweeney's will also publish the business model behind the paper in an (admittedly quixotic) attempt to resurrect a dying breed of dailies like the recently retired rocky mountain times. check out the rumpus interview with eggers here.

in other mcsweeney's news, ND pal lucas k. published a parody of palin's resignation speech on the website yesterday. if you haven't read the full text of her speech yet, i highly recommend doing that first here. the overblown rhetoric about providence is marginally less depressing if you imagine her composing the speech in the setting below (that crab does not look like it would just "go with the flow"):

GOD'S RESIGNATION SPEECH.

BY LUCAS KAVNER

- - - -

Dear World,

I appreciate speaking directly to you, the people I live above, as your God. People who know me know that besides faith and family, nothing's more important to me than the world I created in seven days. Serving her people is the greatest honor I could imagine in the world. The one that I created, I mean, as God.

Earth's mission? − to contribute to the Universe. It's really strategic IN the universe as the air crossroads OF the universe, as a gatekeeper of the universe. Bold visionaries knew this: Earth is a really important planet. This planet, blessed with air, water, wildlife, minerals, New Jersey, AND oil and gas. It's energy, you know what I mean? EN-ER-GY. I gave you energy.

So to serve the Earth is a really intense responsibility, because I know in my soul that Earth is of such import in our very volatile universe. And you know me by now, I promised a couple thousand years ago to show MY independence...that's why I rested on the seventh day. That was foreshadowing.

All in all, I think pretty much everyone can agree that I did my job to the best of abilities. My Earth accomplishments speak for themselves. I worked tirelessly for the Earth. Think of all the great stuff I've made in my time as God:

− Fire

− The Renaissance

− Mario Batali

− the iPhone

People rag on me a lot. I mean a lot of people love me, but generally I get a lot of flak. It's pretty insane − my staff and I spend most of our day dealing with other people's PETTY grievances instead of progressing our planet now. I know I promised no more "lording as usual," but THIS isn't what anyone had in mind for EARTH.

Generally, I now think I can do more for the planet as just a guy who used to be God instead of the guy who currently is God, you know what I mean by this? Life is too short to compromise time and resources...it may be tempting and more comfortable to keep your God-head down, plod along, and appease those who demand, "Sit down and shut up," but that's the worthless, easy path − that's a quitter's way out. You can't sit down and shut up when you're God, which is why when I'm not God anymore, I can stand up and do other stuff, like not doing stuff, which is also important, yes?

You betcha.

And besides, a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic for me to just hunker down and "go with the flow." So by stepping down as God I'm avoiding the flow, which makes me a better God. This makes sense for a lot of reasons, reasons of which I will not go into now for fear of giving in to pressure. And I am not one to "give in to pressure from other people."

I'm not really a "person" anyway.

So, as of tomorrow, my assistant Ashley will step in as God. I think it is obvious she will carry out my duties admirably and goodly. And it is my promise to you that I will always be standing by, ready to assist. We have a good, positive agenda for Earth.

In closing I'd simply like to repeat the words of General MacArthur, a great, big General of the United States Army many years ago. He said, "We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction."

And that's exactly what I am doing here today.

you'll come to know this about me

2009-07-27T14:45:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: AP didn't see CP's post below. doubles deleted.

some new flickr photos documenting time spent in venice, martha's vineyard and topanga at el ranchito de los pintos. i think an album of topanga photos will be in the works soon...

i will hold my house in the high wood

2009-07-27T11:44:00.000-07:00

recent additions to ND flickr gallery:
the 4th at obed dagget, MV

sequoia camping trip

guess i must be having fun

2009-07-22T12:56:00.000-07:00

proud to post this video from ND pal Miles Fisher. i think you'll get the reference. check out the website to fulfill your inevitable urge for more fisher, download his album for free and check out some ASP photos.

good old neon

2009-07-21T14:21:00.000-07:00

Message: 3
Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:05:26 -0700
From: unreliable narrator
Subject: Re: wallace-l: Oblivion Group Read: Good Old Neon (and
apologies for excessive length)
To: wallace-l@waste.org
Message-ID: <11CC94B8-F276-423D-9654-1D64E618C652@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=WINDOWS-1252; delsp=yes;
format=flowed

Hi everyone and thanks for reading what follows (or just deleting it and politely never referring to it again). To say I am nervous would be an understatement oif maximalist/hysterical realist proportions.
And thus all this is correspondingly overwrought and way too long. So there you have it, straight up front. As my French teacher used to say--on attaque!

So first of all, kind of self-evidently there's this whole narrative trick with "Good Old Neon," if by "trick" you mean "breathtaking, gobsmacking tour-de-force reversal of your received expectations about first-person narration and a general unravelling of the rug of narrative itself, leaving you openmouthed and holding just a big pile of kinked-up yarn in one hand and the sharp end of the string in the nerveless fingers of the other." Which I do.

But beyond noting this kind of flabbergastingly obvious technical end- game move on Wallace's part, I'm also nursing a current theory, based on my having yesterday both finished Infinite Jest then immediately started it again (page 17!), that in "Neon" he offers a kind of redaction of one of IJ's central themes: e.g., fradulence masquerading as excellence, per JOI's perceived ability to master one discipline after another and then discard it without its having ever mastered or disciplined *him,* so to speak ("Where Is The Master Buried?"), or without its having apparently informed his character or entrained him in behaviors reflecting some kind of increased sensitivity of the old moral compass, etc.

Though I may have abandoned this idea completely once we get through the story (and I promise to try to keep spoilers out of it, for those who are still Infinitely Summering). Finally, I apologize in advance for the way in which the Wallace sentence has colonized my writing-- of course all my imitations are pale, attenuated, and just plain
*bad* versions of his, but they're also completely helpless and slavish at this point, so there's not much I can do about it other than hope it passes quickly.

Right. So "Good Old Neon" starts out with various first-person reminscences of a young white guy who has always been accomplished in a bourgeois way, beginning with his achievements in school, but who hasn't necessarily been able to enjoy the fruits of his labors (which already makes me think of the E.T.A.'s insistence on teaching tennis prodigies not just how to succeed, but how to succeed and still feel a modicum of joy in the practice of the sport). Alas, this narrator hasn't had Schtitt's mentoring--instead we're led as readers to this terrific sense of his *aloneness*, his anomie or alienation, which more on that word later. The first example he gives us of his dissociative fraudulence is of his groping a girl in her parents'
basement and "not even really feeling the soft aliveness or whatever of her breast because all I was doing was thinking, 'Now I'm the guy that Mead let get to second with her.'" (141) I love, LOVE "or whatever," which lets us know that in fact he really *doesn't* know what it felt like, because he wasn't there; but also "soft aliveness," which lets us know that he *did* notice what it felt like--so already we are very nicely situated inside an epistemological double-bind, which is presumably exactly where Our Man wants us.

(Also, if you're me and you're obsessed with punctuation, you'll notice that Oblivion uses single quotes throughout, which quirk the list has discussed very thoroughly already I'm sure--but, just in case it hasn't been remarked already, don't you think it implies that the whole BOOK is somehow in double quotes, as in, it's an utterance
itself--?)

So the allegedly fraudulent narrator goes on to encapsulate quite efficiently what sounds like a very thoroughgoing case of dysthymia, with shadings into a commentary on the plight of postmodern literature and culture, if you have an overly heightened ear for such things, which sadly some of us do: "[I] wasn't happy at all, whatever happy means, but of course I didn't say this to anybody because it was such a clich?--'Tears of a Clown,' 'Richard Cory,' etc.--and the circle of people who seemed important to me seemed much more dry, oblique and contemptuous of clich?s than that, and so of course I spent all my time trying to get them to think I was dry and jaded as well, doing things like yawning and looking at my nails and saying things like 'Am I happy? is one of those questions that, if it has got to be asked, more or less dictates its own answer,' etc." (142) The etceteras and the withering tossed-off short category (which is of course also riotously funny--like his painfully familiar list of "things I tried" on the same page) are two of the narrator's little shorthands/strategies to signal his dysphoria/ennui. But then, zut alors, at the end of the same graf, he springs it on us, that this whole thing is uttered somehow posthumously by a narrator who has already committed suicide: "I know this part is boring and is probably boring you, by the way, but it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part where I kill myself...." (143). Well okay then.

The narrator then gives a painfully funny blow-by-blow of his attempt at, quote, psychoanalysis (which is kind of weirdly dated; why not call it psychotherapy? what's DFW doing here?) which leads him into precisely the same kinds of double-binds he's already encountered, ones again very familiar to any listers who work a sobriety program and/or those who really grokked the AA bits of IJ: "I was trying to show him that I was at least as smart as he was and that there wasn't much of anything he was going to see about me that I hadn't already seen and figured out. And yet I wanted help and really was there to try to get help." (143). There's a problem in symbolic logic which has pretty much exactly these parameters and for the life of me I can't remember its name or anything about it (so much for *that* semester of college tuition). What I think of instead is Philip Reiff's statement concerning Freud's famous hysterical patient Dora:

"This is not to say that Dora?s own insights were incorrect; they were at once correct and yet untherapeutic. Freud is not interested in all truths, and certainly not in Dora?s, except in so far as they block the operation of his own. Because Dora?s insights are part of her illness, Freud had to hammer away at them as functions of her resistance to his insight. Her truths were not therapeutically useful ones."

In which case the narrator, by definition, is unable to see his
problem: Because if he could see it, he wouldn't have it. (According to the rules of the psychoanalysis language-game, anyway.)

On 144 we get "alienated" (wasn't Matt just asking about this?): "[I] finally came out and told him about being a fraud and feeling alienated (I had to use the uptown word, of course, but it was still the truth) and starting to see myself ending up living this way for the rest of my life and being completely unhappy." Unfortunately Dr.
Gustafson (the analyst) walks into exactly the logical cul-de-sac the narrator fears he will: "the fraudulence paradox" (147-8).

But right before that, there's quite a little interlude between the narrator's resignation over Gustafson's "big reductio ad absurdum argument" (150) and the unveiling of said insight--an interlude during which the narrator first of all decides to go ahead and let the analyst have his big insight, because "[I] liked the way in which he seemed genuinely pleased and excited at the idea of being helpful"--and during which he suddenly notices the framed prints, a Wyeth and a C?zanne, hanging behind the analyst's desk. NB that he 'fesses up quite brightly to the fact that he wouldn't have known it was a C?zanne without there having been corroborating text on the framed poster; and though I have the feeling this has already been chattered about here and elsewhere I will nonetheless perseverate in saying, I think the perspectival eccentricities of this particular C?zanne image--the apples and the table--are no accident. Or the Wyeth.

The narrator then recalls having been in an intro logic class in college (cough*Amherst*cough) where "We only got to paradoxes like the Berry and Russell paradoxes and the incompleteness theorem at the very end of the term." A wee bit of Wiki + Wolfram convinces me that I am completely unable to recapitulate those for you here in any kind of meaningful way, and all I can really say is that they demonstrate in an elegant mathematical fashion that, basically, you can't pick up the chair upon which you yourself are standing. I.e., this is water.
(But then there is a tidy amateur-friendly breakdown of the Berry paradox on page 167-168.)

So then the narrator next plunges parenthetically into a childhood memory of having not only broken one of his stepparents' prized possessions but of having successfully framed his sister Fern for it via the simple expediency of actually telling the truth, but in such a forced and hammed-up way that he--well, here, let him say it (148):
"By lying in such a deliberately unconvincing way I could actually get everything that a direct lie would supposedly get me, plus look noble and self-sacrificing, plus also make my stepparents feel good because they always tended to feel good when one of their kids did something that showed character." (Avril Incandenza much?--and further, on 149, per how the stepparents are more concerned with honesty than with infractions, cf. Hal's concern that the Moms is going to be much more bothered by his secrecy than by his addiction.)

He admits that the flaw in his calculation was not thinking about how it would feel to know that he'd made Fern suffer: "The only part I'd neglected to anticipate was Fern's reaction to getting blamed for the bowl, and punished, and then punished even worse when she continued to deny [it]....It's horrible to be regarded as a fraud or to believe that people think you're a fraud or a liar. It's possibly one of the worst feelings in the world." And then a really important bit: "And even though I haven't really had any direct experience with it, I'm sure it must be doubly horrible when you were actually telling the truth and they didn't believe you."

(And here is where I personally find the gap in the narrator's sealed- up Ziploc-baggie-watertight language-game of alienation: He most certainly HAS had direct experience with it, because I think his feelings of fraudulence stem not from *being* fraudulent but from not being *seen*. When all along you *do* try to speak or represent your authentic truth, but you are in what dialectical behavioral therapy likes to call an invalidating environment, it would be logical to interpret the situation as favorable toward the environment rather than yourself--a childhood coping mechanism we all know well, e.g.
the Moms cannot possibly be the micromanaging nutbar she seems, so I'm clearly just a bad kid.)

Again on 150-151, just as the narrator is about to let the analyst make his big speech, he parenthizes off again into yet another delectable disquisition, which is actually not (I think) a disquisition but which is actually the point (I think) of the story, this time a speech on time and thought, deserving to be quoted at
length:

"I know that you know as well as I do how fast thoughts and associations can fly through your head....enough material can rush through your head in the little silences...that it would take exponentially longer than the whole meeting just to try to put a few seconds' silence's flood of thoughts into words. This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person's life are ones that flesh through your head so fast that
*fast* isn't even thr right word...." and on through the rest of that magnificently etiolated sentence, ending, "and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English...to try to convey to other people what we're thinking and to find out what they're thinking when in fact deep down everybody knows it's a charade and they're just going through the motions."

I.e. one interpretation of this phenomenon is: I am (we are all) fraudulent. And another might be: This language-game is inevitably going to leave us feeling lonely and misunderstood (even by ourselves); the speech-acts of *language* are fraudulent, betraying the felt life and thought itself, but because I am a good child I will blame me rather than my mother. (What Would Kristeva Do?)

(My own parenthetical to assert that precisely this, when stylistically enacted, is why I love Wallace's work: "What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant." But he *tries.* And the result is anything but boring, Dale Peck.)

By p. 152 you should be feeling very pleasantly completely lost. I think that's right. I've made this totally unhelpful non-chart to fail to guide us in our happy bewilderment:

*****

VARIATIONS OF PARADOXES INVENTED/DISCUSSED IN "GOOD OLD NEON":

1. the fraudulence paradox
a) (150) you can't be a fraud if you admit you're a fraud
b) (147) the more you try to be liked, the less likeable you will be
c) (147) "But here was the other, higher-order paradox, which didn't even have a form or name--I didn't, I couldn't." (cf. again the AAers' paradox in IJ, that you want to stop using but you don't stop using so obviously you don't want to stop using except that you do, and so forth ad nauseam, literally)
d) (153) "I pretended to myself that my loneliness was special....
[but] we've all got it. In spades."
2. (150) the non-sequential time/thought paradox 3. (151) the closely related paradox of having to use language to express the inexpressible (i.e. non-sequential time and thought)
4.(152) "the really central, overarching paradox," which is how are we able to comprehend any of this via our admittedly not only flimsy but fundamentally inadequate mediated communication techniques.
5. (152) "Not to mention...if I really did kill myself, how can you even be hearing this? Meaning am I a fraud. That's OK, it doesn't really matter what you think." (Cf. again the Program's insistence on not needing to know/understand in order to practice.) AND
(155) "corollary to the fraudulence paradox"--always desperately hoping to get busted whilst simultaneously priding yourself on your unbustability

*****

And yes I realize that was not at all actually useful and this is taking way too long. Okay.

An accellerando follows, which, happily, also takes place in the story right about this time, as if Wallace knows that he is on the verge of spazzing out the reader for good. And it's this signal sentence which kicks us off again--these little driblets of information in which Our Man specializes, just enough shards of narrative to keep you dangling along: "All I'm trying to do is sketch out one little part of what it was like before I died and why I at least thought I did it, so that you'll have at least some idea of why what happened afterward happened and why it had the impact it did *on who this is really about.*" Emphasis all mine. Because who *is* this really about? What *about* the Death of the Author?

(And the sly question on 153, "How much time would you even say has passed, so far?" Which reminds me of an occasion when I apparently sat bolt upright in bed and, still asleep, asked my partner, "How tall were you when you were little?" and he, desperately amused but trying not to laugh and wake me, though a minute, and then answered, "About three feet tall," which answer apparently satisfied me, and I fell back into bed without further comment.)

By this time Dr. Gustafson goes ahead and delivers the expected ineffectual paradox-buster. We learn that Fern's eyes are green (suspiciously incestuous details of her physical appearance, to be explained later), and there's a terribly moving description of going from loving a sport in its heady physicality to just worrying all the time about one's performance in that sport (156). Neal (we've finally been given his name, though he's careful to say on 153 that he was given it as well--"it was on my birth certificate when I got adopted," and thus somehow distanced from him) further describes his fakery as a charismatic Christian, feigning speaking in tongues (which I myself did as a small guilty girl, peer-pressured into "being filled with the Holy Ghost") and being slain in the Spirit.

He concludes with his mendacity in jogging (oh, but like who
*doesn't* speed up when someone's watching?!) and, most tellingly, during meditation. Frankly this is the part (158-160) that really gets me where it hurts, as a former Zen student. Neal avers that through "sheer force of will I'd always force myself to remain totally still with my legs crossed and back perfectly straight long after all the other students had all given up and fallen back on their mats shuddering and holding their heads." It amuses me still when people who haven't practiced meditation view it as lazy navel- gazing etc., just like people who think riding a horse isn't work, after all you're just sitting up there, how hard can it be? I secretly desire to kidnap those people and force them to sit zazen for a week, and/or ride ten hours a day.

Anyway Neal's instructor (Master Gurpreet) is Indian and the kind of meditation they're doing sounds more Hindu than Buddhist (prana,
e.g.) but the agony Neal describes is completely familiar to me, and rather makes me cackle internally ? la the Boston AA Crocodiles.
Neal's narrative unreliability I think lies in the fact that he thinks he's not doing the meditation "correctly," because he's only
*pretending* to do it correctly--which is in fact, sorry Neal, you are doing the meditation correctly. Because there's not really a wrong way to do it. Because if he'd kept doing it for a few more weeks, or months, or years, or decades, eventually "keeping totally still and in the correct posture and having a deeply peaceful and meditative expression on my face" would have worked a kind of inevitable alchemy on him. And perhaps was already doing so. I think.
And so do the lineage of Buddha ancestors. But ANYWAY.

Then there are a couple of patently transparent dreams ("I'm not saying it was subtle or hard to figure out") and Neal's seemingly random insertion of his stepmother's posthumous gift to him of a family pocketwatch with the motto RESPICE FINEM (161), which means basically "Think it through," as they say in the Program--that is, consider the consequences; think about your impulse all the way through to the end before you get all gung-ho about it, and Neal takes this to be a sign that his stepmom saw right through him the same way that Master Gurpreet did, in his sarcastic certificate- addressing. And he concludes his Crimes of the King style litany of fakery with his career in advertising (Mr. Squishy! Veals & Vinal,
etc.) and then on 162 blessed white space in which to catch our breaths.

Then Gustafson and Neal interfact further, both during life and afterward "outside linear time and in the process of dramatic change." Yay for the bardo! Pages 164-165 give a spare, pithy retelling of Gustafson's one genuine insight: that it's only ever either either Love or Fear which guides our choices. This overlaps on
165-166 with the insight of a rejected girlfriend (Beverly- Elizabeth), who accuses Neal of having an amazing ability to perceive, yet one utterly without care. Which then overlaps, again almost soundlessly--they're not so much parenthetical remarks as overlapping ripples in a pond--with another section on time/thought/ the afterlife and what it does to these. It's creepy, incoherently lovely prose.

On 168-169, Neal realizes, during an insomniac viewing of the TV show Cheers (IJ again) that he has to, you know, eliminate his own map.
(Which I have also felt while watching reruns of Cheers in the middle of the night, but for possibly different reasons.) But again with the sneaky insertion, look: "You're thinking here's this guy going on and on and why doesn't he get to the part where he kills himself and explain or account for the fact that he's sitting here next to me in a piece of high-powered machinery telling me all this if he died in 1991." Narrator shell-game!

There's some amazing stuff I'm now going to pass over without comment. But you, don't you do that. You comment! Especially on those brilliantly tortuously convoluted paradoxes in Neal's suicide note to Fern (173). Even though this whole process, with our readerly awareness of an author and his fate, has been achingly painful up even this far, and now becomes outright excruciatingly painful. I.e., "Basically I was in that state in which a man realizes that everything he sees will outlast him. As a verbal construction I know that's a clich?. As a state in which to actually be, though, it's something else, believe me."

Or, "I'd somehow chosen to cast my lot with my life's drama's supposed audience [double possessive!] instead of with the drama itself." Which we can read and ache through, and weirdly, at the same time, just like Neal, invested or maybe *infested* is the right word, with that terrible double-consciousness, we can read and hurt over, and at the same time admire the wild headlong rush of a sentence ending, "...and instantly kill me," followed by a brilliant terse run- on with not one but *two* usage errors, a one-two punch sentence which nails the paragraphs structurally and brings it *home*: "Self- loathing is not the same thing as being into pain or a lingering death, if I was going to do it I wanted it instant. DAMN it feels good to be a gangsta.

Except, it doesn't feel good enough.

So Neal takes his self-conscious self out into his car, Benadryl'd to the suicidal gills yet still anticipating the perceptions of others ("This is the sort of shit we waste our lives thinking about"--right, gentle reader? Wallace nudges us into agreeing) and then the accellerando begins for real, via the device of the hearer being *in* the lethally speeding car with the teller (178: "Because listen?we don't have much time....").

Page 179 is just killer. Text and footnote both. Neal at last acknowledges the fallacy of his supposed paradox: "Of course you're a fraud; of course what people see is never you."

More sneaky stuff has been happening. Neal has been talking to someone, a You, telling us/him/them that he, Neal, knows that the You really wants to know what it's like to kill himself/yourself/ ourselves (but come on, it's *himself*, I should just man up here and use the third-person masculine): and that he also knows the You thinks that he, Neal, is going to try to talk him out of it. But that he, Neal also says it would totally be okay not to do it, even though it doesn't hurt and is over instantly. All this obviously makes more sense when Wallace writes it: top of 178, top of 180. I just wish he'd listened. To Neal. Because even after the years of "literally indescribable war," the firepower still wasn't apparently (contra p.
181) quite enough. Dammit.

And now of course 180-181 is where the narrative rug just comes all to yarn-tangle in our stupefied hands. Because suddenly here's a character named David Wallace, inserted casually amidst a catalogue of others, perusing yearbook photos and thinking dimly (as we are invited to reconstruct it, though it's very pointedly not in the
text) something along the lines of: Hey, I remember that guy?what was it we used to call him, yeah, it was Neon! Good old Neon. Whatever happened him again, did he--wait, that's right, he died in a fiery single-car accident, now why on earth did he do that, that guy had everything going for him, I wonder what it felt like, everything seemed so effortless for him in school, academics and sports, he never screwed up at Legion ball, he always had a quick put-down for me, and damn his sister was totally hot. (Which in retrospect explains why Neal had this like prurient interest in his sister's developing figure--the interest was actually "David Wallace"'s interest, from a distance, in Neal's "witchily pretty sister").

"if only in the second his lids are down...." (= the time it took for "David Wallace" to think all this, all blooming forty pages of it)

And it has already been explained by several that [--> NMN.80.418] represents presumably: Neal's initials; '80 being the acme of his seniority; .418 being his batting average; and --> being some kind of fancy symbolic operator which again I should be able to remember from Philosophy 210: Logical Thought, but I can't.

Isn't this just a *magnificent* story? It's so deeply, conflictingly, implicatingly, pleasurably wounded--the up-front statements of fraudulence only bring the narrator closer to the reader, somehow, like Orin's transparently transparent pick-up lines reel in the Subjects despite themselves....And speaking of preemptive declarations of facility and fraudulence--Dear LORD this is so inappropriately, sickeningly long that I practically have ABD stamped on my forehead. I really apologize. But thanks again for your patience and I can't wait to hear what you smart people think about all this. Now: "Not another word."

Except PS only: thanks also for letting a confirmed lurker play along. :o)

self-organizing emergent patterns

2009-07-21T11:58:00.000-07:00

so this is what sufjan has been up to for the past two years. i left brooklyn a month before the performance at BAM, but heard rave reviews that inspired my first bout of nyc envy.

THE BQE- A Film By Sufjan Stevens from Asthmatic Kitty on Vimeo.

The BQE is available as a double-disc format (CD/DVD), which includes the original 16mm/8mm film (in widescreen "triptych" display), the original motion picture soundtrack, a 40-page booklet (with extensive liner notes and photographs), and the stereoscopic image reel (playable in all View-Master® viewers).

The limited edition vinyl is available as a double gatefold and includes the soundtrack on 180-gram vinyl, a large-scale 32-page booklet with liner notes and photographs, and a black-and-white version of the 40-page Hooper Heroes comic book.

cut the last sentence

2009-07-14T12:47:00.000-07:00

rick moody can write leafy connecticut suburbs as skillfully as post-apocalyptic new york city, but i'm excited to hear that his latest novel (working title THE FOUR FINGERS OF DEATH) promises to be more of the latter, ALBERTINE NOTES variety. also "montese crandall" sounds like a character in a flannery o'connor story....what luck. novel should be out spring 2010. interview, plus moody's "13 rules of revision" here:

NT: Let's talk about your newest novel. Unless you are superstitious, could you talk about what it is about and how long you've been working on it?

RM: Not superstitious, really, but it's a hard book to talk about. It began in two ways: 1) I really love bad, old horror movies, the b-film variety, the drive-in variety, especially from the late fifties and early sixties, which was the period of horror films that I watched a lot as a kid. I just loved them. In this novel, I wanted to try to make my own one of these films, so I picked a particularly embarrassing example, THE CRAWLING HAND (1963), and began adapting it. 2) Meanwhile, I wanted to write a book about the desert, because I have been spending a lot of time in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona in the last ten years. Or, if not a book ABOUT the desert, at least a book LOCATED in the desert. Then (3) if those things weren't enough, I allowed a name from my book to be auctioned off by a first-amendment-related charity in California. The winner, he who paid the top dollar, got to have his name in my book. The winner was one Montese Crandall. Upon having control of this name, which I loved so much, I had to create a context for him in the novel, so he became the narrator and controlling intelligence thereof. In ways that will become clear when you see it. Well, there's another factor, too. (4) I wanted to write a novel in the style of the novels I first loved when I was a teenager, viz.,Vonnegut/Brautigan/Robbins/Pynchon/Dick/Heinlein. It's a sub-literary genre in some cases, but I never care about that sort of thing. I want write into the condition of my early enthusiasm, you know? Anyway, the result is a 900 page comic novel about a disembodied arm set in the desert in 2026.

knit on!

2009-07-10T19:42:00.000-07:00

hope everyone has a rad weekend. team ND will be in topanga, soaking up rays, crushing waves, and communing with nature.
fort ticonderoga mix

fergus and geronimo - tell it (in my ear)
kurt vile - freeway
the hot tickets - dancing with francis
devendra - get off your high horse
the love language - providence
tuneyards - providence
cat stevens - miles from nowhere
fleetwood mac - i know i'm not wrong
dan rossen - waterfall (judee sill cover)
the oh sees - ship
ganglians - voodoo
dirty projectors - temecula sunrise
highlife - f kenya rip

one word for your fans? astronaut.

2009-07-10T14:59:00.000-07:00

jon carling's drawings remind me of untold hours spent in my mom's libraries as a kid. contemplating purchasing the bobby d. "tarantula '66" print for the promise of personalized envelope and extras. nothing beats mail art.

the native american word for internet

2009-07-08T16:25:00.000-07:00

the only thing these videos have in common is that they're awesome.

"Streaming Gradient" by Jen Stark from Jen Stark on Vimeo.

(note rod stewart's amazing line at the beginning ~40second mark "you've met string have you?")

no message could have been any clearer

2009-06-25T15:53:00.000-07:00

i tell people sgt. pepper's was my first album, but really it was bad and i distinctly remember sitting down to write out the lyrics to man in the mirror by stopping and starting the tape for an hour. this was before i realized liner notes existed. i'd give anything to have those handwritten lyrics right now. rip.

and then we came to the end

2009-06-24T22:18:00.000-07:00

thankfully my "office" now consists of a lawnchair on the roof of the alamo. yet my year in the corporate world was recent and regrettable enough that this art still totally resonates. made entirely of office supplies by david fullerton:

and you sir...in the eye patch?...i love it

2009-06-24T09:45:00.000-07:00

not much of a wilco "fan" per se, but last they put on one of the finer shows i've seen lately at the wiltern. the combination of an appropriate venue and a pretty flawless set list won me over early on. tweedy dropped incredible banter, nels cline absolutely shredded and kotche looked like he'd taken a shower with his clothes on by the end of his stint behind the skins. they opened with live favorite via chicago which was professionally captured in the video below. there's no reason for the camera on anyone other than glenn around 2:10, 3:25 or 4:00.

This is a quote from a recent interview with jeff, which i love. really humble, but i think also very basic and relatable. every time a wilco track irks me for being a little too palatable, i think of this quote and forgive it.

"What keeps you writing songs?

It doesn’t hurt anybody. It’s something I love to do, and it doesn’t hurt anybody. And the world probably doesn’t need any more songs, but I need more songs. It’s satisfying and lovely to do. I feel better, and as a band—I think I can speak for everyone—we feel better making something that wasn’t there ten minutes ago. Whatever spirit there is in the universe, I think that puts you closer to it. The act of creation, you know, it’s a very powerful thing, and very gratifying. I wish it on everyone. I wish everyone could enjoy making something that wasn’t there before."

does anyone remember laughter?

2009-06-18T11:16:00.000-07:00

apatow's upcoming funny people features a slew of fake studio comedies starring sandler's character george simmons. today a bunch of mock one sheets were released. have to appreciate the attention to detail in them especially in the billing block. the regulars are included on every front. with actors there's rudd (in every one), jonah hill, jay baruchel, catherine keener... and producers include carrell, robertson, jon poll. humble too that apatow puts his own name at the helm of these flicks.

i wish the ideas were a little funnier (though re-do and sayonara davey somehow manage to elicit a legitimate chuckle), its sad how easy these are to not just mock up one sheets for, but imagine as actual releases. if anything, they're not absurd enough. too close for comfort.

the other half is what we do

2009-06-02T15:17:00.000-07:00

truly top notch mail deliveries today.

first up - the california surf project.
two guys, one photographer and one pro surfer, drove the length of the cali coastline surfing all the way and documenting the experience. sounds pretty ideal.

a very exciting addition to the surf/coffee table book collection. but it's hard to top this:

highly anticipated would be the understatement of the century.

to quote from devendra's opening remarks: "the heart draws in love. love draws the heart in. thank you forever. love above all. onward - devendra banhart, tuesday afternoon, bolinas"

i think dev obsession may be reaching boiling point...

t. allen fenway will be there, will you?

2009-05-30T12:39:00.000-07:00

alex cornell designed a branding campaign for a hypothetical wes anderson film festival in austin, texas. i'd sold. look close...he nails the details.

Wes Anderson Trailer from Alex Cornell on Vimeo.

soundtrack

dvd set

catalog

other awesome stuff

while you still see more than you used to see

2009-05-29T12:50:00.000-07:00

when has the nytimes not crushed it? between great pieces on zach g and the merits of manual labor it's been hard to keep up. these harlem in flux photos are stand outs for me.

i only ever want to go out here:

buy vinyl here:

and get my hair braided here:

also, some recent updates to flickr gallery here. shots include evidence of pretty heavy beachside living and the immortalized dev b. coachella performance. wish i'd had a zoom lens for the olympus at this show. in the man's words: "love is the light igniting and everyone is on fire."

i told them i was the editor of a famous etiquette book

2009-05-24T09:41:00.000-07:00

happy birthday bobby d

"A person is a success if they get up in the morning and gets to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do."

(btw can't believe i've never youtube'd bob dylan up till now. treasure trove).

what about the night makes you change

2009-05-22T16:30:00.000-07:00

hasty posting on asp's part below. nd's getting a little music video heavy these days, but here's another one to sort of compensate for weirdness below. the song: 10am automatic. the band: black keys. the director: david cross. the guest star: jon mothereffing glaser. black keys looks totally different than they do now. ah. youth.

quarter half the mile

2009-05-22T12:49:00.000-07:00

haven't even watched it yet.

Two Weeks

you're right, it's true

2009-05-21T08:26:00.000-07:00

chalk me up as a sucker for found footage compilation music videos like this new one for crystal stilts.

this is the quintessential example by roman coppola. much more deliberate assembly here.

well that settles it

2009-05-20T16:11:00.000-07:00

i desperately want an alaia board. perfect for novel designs' neo-luddite leanings. doesn't it look like surfing on a snowboard? or, you know... a plank of driftwood!

Tom's Creation Plantation Trailer from Cyrus Sutton on Vimeo.

that's a mysterious occupation

2009-05-19T19:29:00.000-07:00

been making some solid vinyl purchases as of late. the collection just passed the one hundred albums mark (104 now). new/overdue additions include:

you can't think of nothing

2009-05-17T16:10:00.000-07:00

on a big eric rohmer kick at the moment. between l'amour d'apres-midi and la collectionneuse i'm a confirmed fan. his remaining four moral tales have been pushed to the top of my netflix. below are the screen captures from the interstitials/credit and title cards of la collectionneuse, showing rohmer enjoying the availability of color in his first non-black and white film. one other interesting tidbit, every shot in the film was done in one take (the shooting ratio was a remarkable 1.5:1). even more incredible given nestor almendros' beautiful cinematography on 16mm (a format mandated by rohmer to keep costs down). makes you think about all that film stock going to waste out there...

this is water

2009-05-15T09:15:00.000-07:00

time has posted the "ten best commencement speeches" aggregating some legendary words of wisdom in one place

1) Steve Jobs - really practical, if pretty macabre - "Stay hungry, Stay foolish"

2) Conan O'Brien - i've posted this before, it's a delight - "Fall down, make a mess, break something occasionally"

3) Simon Baker - i'd never read this before, so brilliant - three favorites because it's new to me: "Being dumb is not the worst thing in the world, but letting your clothes shout it out loud depresses the neighbors and embarrasses your parents. " / "It's good for the soul to hear yourself as others hear you, and next time maybe, just maybe, you will not talk so much, so loudly, so brilliantly, so charmingly, so utterly shamefully foolishly." / "Sleep in the nude."

4) Winston Churchill - time description nails it, this is a battle cry - "You cannot tell from appearances how things will go."

5) George Marshall - dry stuff indeed. not particularly quotable but - "An essential part of any successful action on the part of the United States is an understanding on the part of the people of America of the character of the problem and the remedies to be applied."

6) JFK - this is like a state of the union speech - "the peace is not secure because the freedom is incomplete."

7) Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) -brimming with lemon lyman charm, good old "whitty" drops some pleasant knowledge and a billy madison reference - "You've got to want to do whatever you want to do more than you want to be whatever you want to be"

8) Barbara Kingsolver - hadn't read this before either and really loved it - "Wisdom is like frequent-flyer miles and scar tissue; if it does accumulate, that happens by accident while you’re trying to do something else."

9) Stephen Colbert - mostly just one liners, albeit great ones - "There are so many challenges facing this next generation, and as they said earlier, you are up for these challenges. And I agree, except that I don't think you are. I don't know if you're tough enough to handle this. You are the most coddled generation in history. I belong to the last generation that did not have to be in a car seat. You had to be in car seats. I did not have to wear a helmet when I rode my bike. You do. You have to wear helmets when you go swimming, right? In case you bump your head against the side of the pool. Oh, by the way, I should have said, my speech today may contain some peanut products."

and

10) of course, DFW. i could post the whole address. should. buy it amazon. it works in that suspect one line per page format. if i had any semblance of daily discipline i'd read it every morning. hard to extract but here goes -
"A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real -- you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues." This is not a matter of virtue -- it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self."

is this better than what we're already working on?

2009-05-14T19:36:00.000-07:00

the last song/post reminds me of this old classic now that i think of it. this version remains the best i've heard. too bad pj never recaptured the energy from their early post-mookie blaylock days. pretty dull on the old proscenium.

we stuck around cause nobody wanted to die

2009-05-14T19:24:00.000-07:00

cap tipped off here we go way back when. video isn't much to see but it's a blast to listen to. luke temple...smart dude. waiting on a live video for everything's big. credit to dbs for g-reader share.

take a stress pill and think things over

2009-05-12T12:38:00.000-07:00

it's been two days and i'm still reeling from seeing a 70mm print of 2001: a space odyssey on sunday night. so much so that i sat through the flat out terrible sequel 2010 and read the synopses of 2061 and 3001, the third and fourth installments of arthur c. clarke's space odyssey series, last night to satisfy my craving for more. such attempts only served to further drive home how incredible kubrick's film it. i won't go into the how's and why's of the film's awesomeness. as i've learned in the last 48 hours through my own frenetic online research, there's more than enough analysis and written appreciation. i'd seen it once before on dvd (might even have been vhs it was so long ago) and i feel like i saw an entirely different film on the big screen. seek it out. it's worth it. because every frame of the film is meticulously composed and captivatingly deliberate i may be going overboard with these screen captures. who cares. i can not get enough.

ah! see? complete control!

2009-05-08T12:21:00.000-07:00

so negligent in posting. this should make up for it though:

if you have a good acid trip you conclude that

2009-05-01T16:46:00.000-07:00

in this li'l interview devendra drops countless gems from describing the "freak folk" scene with different bands comprising various elements of a beachside paradise (antony is the palm tree with hanging suns instead of coconuts) to explaining how drawings become songs and vice versa. it's so damn earnest and because it's dev you can't help but dig it. oh he also suggests he might stop putting out albums. this was shot almost three years ago.

pics from this show to come.

no matter where it went, no matter who listened

2009-05-01T11:15:00.000-07:00

i've revisited this song "hatari" pretty regularly since hearing it amidst tune-yards sxsw buzz a few months back. really the thing to do with this song is just listen to it and try to imagine how it's played and by whom. the chances of predicting the actual artist, merill garbus, are just about nil. rhythmically and melodically this song continues to blow me away and the fact it was recorded on free/gifted software entirely by garbus (deliberately so it would all be hers) is really admirable, even if it absolutely sounds like it was recorded on a dictaphone. it's part of the charm and, as it turns out, selling her diy cassette tapes has resulted in turning a tidy profit. the video below is a stripped down version of the track but it's still captivating.

all it takes is a good idea

2009-04-28T15:12:00.000-07:00

i love these postcards from the "advice to sink in slowly" series. per grain edit they're part of an ongoing series of posters designed by recent graduates aimed at helping and inspiring first year students. all incoming students at participating universities receive one of the posters.
every one of these maxims and adages certainly applies to life after school. i should do better to remember them all on a daily basis, especially "finish what you start" and "call your mum." (appropriately these seem like something kjm would particularly enjoy).

we had a choice we chose rejoice

2009-04-26T18:03:00.000-07:00

its been a week since returning from coachella. it's hard to articulate just how amazing a weekend it was. incredible music, people, accommodations (horse ranch/makeshift rv park)... an all around great scene. i'm left counting the days till next year and looking forward to outside lands all the more. musical highlights were black keys, beirut, tv on the radio and devendra banhart, devendra banhart, devendra banhart. also devendra banhart. DB will get his own personal post once the photos from that show are developed. below are some favorite shots culled from the flickr gallery. i want it back.

let's go out in this community

2009-04-24T16:08:00.000-07:00

been listening to the album "...and girls club" by the strange boys on pretty much constant rotation (perfect album title) for the past week. heavily blues and surf rock influenced quartet out of austin just drip cool despite looking like a band of fourteen year olds.

here's a video for their single "woe is you and me" as well as two vids from a show cap and asp attended at the smell in '07. so so good.

the idea of the forced proximity

2009-04-24T10:48:00.000-07:00

nytimes today has an article about asp obed daggett neighbor livingston taylor. the article and pics make me want to be there now. thanks to wap for forwarding.

meet me at the FROPJF

2009-04-23T17:41:00.000-07:00

as an apology for not posting in a week i invite everyone to this party

fresh beats without rap

2009-04-15T14:58:00.000-07:00

apologies for being truly delinquent when it comes to posting lately.

this interview with avant garde roots musician will oldham is getting attention for his talking smack about wes anderson's soundtrack choices (a little bit deserved on the darjeeling front, but also not given how much native music was used and the fact that the kinks were originally slated to comprise the entire rushmore soundtrack and this kind of made up for that but let's not delve too deep here...). anyway, the real gems in this interview come up when will shares his take on working in film and expounds on his admirably stubborn thoughts on music supervision, righfully referring to jonathan richman's participation in there's something about mary as being a stroke of genius before discussing the role of credits in film, music and, interestingly, publishing:

AVC: You’ve been doing a lot more movies lately, after a long layoff. Do you find acting more satisfying now than it was when you first started out?

WO: It’s only satisfying because these specific things have come up with these people I trust. It can be more like a friendly and open and trusting working relationship, which is not the norm in the film industry, and wasn’t when I was trying to pursue it professionally, and wouldn’t be now if I tried to do that again. I think everybody works from a defensive position, for the most part, in the film industry.

AVC: How so?

WO: First off, every job is short, relatively. Like, an insanely long movie would take six months or something like that. So everyone is either living in the present or living in the future, and they’re personally guarded because they’re in an intense situation for a short period of time. You have to protect yourself when you’re working with people who are talented and strong like that. You just have to ask, “Is this a friendship, or is this a working relationship? Is this a love affair, or is this whatever?” And then professionally, it’s always, “This is my agent, this is your agent. You got that job? How’d you get that job?” And not ever just, “Yeah, I’m happy with what I’m doing. Are you happy with what you’re doing? Good.” With these situations I’ve been in lately, it has been happier, because everyone knows that acting isn’t what I do full-time, so I don’t feel any sense of competition, or I don’t feel like I need to be professionally on the ball outside of the work situation itself. All I have to do is pay attention to the work at hand, and that works out for everybody, I think.

AVC: You mentioned talking to Richard Linklater and Caveh Zahedi about your ideas on movie music. Can you summarize those ideas?

WO: Well, for a while, it seemed like you were always seeing movies where all the music was determined by the music supervisors and their special relationships with certain record labels. And I just felt like, “Wow, I’ll bet they spent months or years writing this screenplay, and I’ll bet they spent months shooting this, and I’ll bet they spent months editing this, and now they’re spending no time at all picking these completely inappropriate songs with lyrics to put under a scene that has dialogue.” How does that even work? How can you have a song with someone singing lyrics under spoken dialogue and consider that mood-music, or supportive of the storyline? As somebody who likes music, when that happens, I tend to listen to the lyrics, which have nothing to do with the movie. And then I’m lost in the storyline. Not only is that a crime, but it’s a crime not to give people who are good at making music for movies the work. It’s like saying, “We don’t need you, even though you’re so much better at it than I am as a music supervisor.”....But again, someone wrote me recently and said, “We wanna use your songs in our movie, and we’ve already got this artist, this artist, this artist, this artist.” And I was thinking, “Well that makes for like, no integrity to your movie. All these different voices combined with the actors’, writer’s, director’s and DP’s voices. That sounds like the worst place to be. That sounds like a music festival.” [Laughs.] I liked it when those crazy, dirty, Rhode Island brothers made movies like There’s Something About Mary.

AVC: The Farrellys?

WO: The Farrelly brothers. Was it Something About Mary that had nothing but Jonathan Richman songs in it? I like Jonathan Richman a lot, and while those weren’t my favorite Jonathan Richman songs, I liked that whole idea of lacing one voice throughout the whole movie and having it be a conscious decision made somewhere during the writing and pre-production, and not during post-production. “This is the voice that we wanna have, and these are how we want songs to work with this movie.” That’s all I ask for, that a little bit of time and respect is given to the musical part of filmmaking.

AVC: How much do you consider mystery to be an element in what you do? Keeping things shrouded?

WO: Shrouded like how?

AVC: Some of your earlier records don’t have a whole lot of information on them, so it was difficult for fans to find out who was actually making the music. And you haven’t been big on doing a lot of interviews until more recently.

WO: I guess I don’t know where any information other than what I choose to provide on the records is really anybody’s business. That’s kinda it. I understand that doing interviews… Look, the record labels like that to happen, and I understand on some level why they like that to happen, because it provides some sort of eye-catching thing. It’s like some kind of advertising, for a minimum expenditure of energy and money. But to me, the best purpose of an interview would be to illuminate some things about how somebody works for the benefit of somebody else who wants to do those things. And that’s not where most interviews go at all, so to me, they seem like strange exercises in small talk and wasted air.

And printing credits… I think for those of us who make records, it’s our business how we put it together. Same with a book. You know, the publishing industry has somehow avoided having a light shone on their process. In a book, you basically have the name of the publisher and the name of the writer, and you’re led to believe that those are the two things that created this book. And you and I both know that’s not the case. There’s an army of people involved with the production of each book, most essentially the editor or editors who work closely with the writer on shaping and forming and developing a piece of work, plus the writer’s agent, blah blah blah. And yet somehow it doesn’t matter to us that all of that information is never publicly, readily available. Yet we want that on our records.

I mean, look at all these endless bullshit lists of credits at the end of movies. I guess it works as a résumé for the best boys and the key grips and everybody else, but I’d think that would be something that you could just tell a prospective boss, like “I was the assistant costume designer on Forrest Gump.” You can check their references. You don’t have to watch a two-and-a-half-hour movie about a mildly retarded guy to prove that so-and-so was the assistant costume designer.

AVC: Can you be sympathetic to the idea that people who are fans of a certain artist are curious to know more about their process?

WO: I can be sympathetic to that, but I’ll say that if enough energy is generated by a piece of work to develop that kind of curiosity, then I don’t necessarily think that satisfying that curiosity is the best place for that energy to go, you know? Like if somebody makes a movie like Milk, which to me was a very exciting and emotional, inspiring movie, then I don’t personally want—nor would I want any audience member to want—to take the excitement and energy that came from that viewing experience and spend it on the IMDB, researching the other films that, like, Diego Luna has been in. I would hope that part of the point of the movie would be to do something that had a little bit less to do with movie-making, and a little more to do with real life. And if I don’t have access to that information, then I have no choice but to push that energy into something ideally more specifically related to my experience of the world and my relationship to other human beings.

Plus there’s the satisfaction that comes from finding out privileged information. It used to feel great to use a card catalogue at the library to find the information that you were looking for. One thing that the Internet has created is the sense that information is at your fingertips, when it’s really only a very, very limited, specific, and slanted kind of information. Even though you might be able to enter Diego Luna’s name in your search field and get 7,942 hits, there’s so much information that’s not available about him. But you’re probably going to feel satisfied with having done just that minimal amount of research, you know? And it just seems worthwhile to me to remove myself from that process and encourage people to realize that there’s more to learning about what a record means or how it’s made than just giving you this weird, superficial, nuts-and-bolts information.

AVC: What if, for example, in reading an interview with Gus Van Sant you learn that he shot part of Milk in the exact location of Harvey Milk’s original camera shop? Couldn’t that help enhance the viewing experience?

WO: It depends. Again, when you leave the theater after watching a movie like Milk, there should be a lot going on inside you. And if the first thing that you do is sit down and get that weird little facsimile of an important piece of information, some part of you is going to be satisfied—quieted—by that weird little bit of insider knowledge. And what a terrible place for your satisfaction to lie, when it should or could lie in something, I don’t know, that might benefit somebody else, or might benefit you tomorrow, rather than just in this five minutes today when you feel like “Oh, that was the real camera shop. Neat.” I mean that’s the kind of thing that could be neat to know in five years, if you work in film or you work in progressive civil rights for homosexuals, and in casual conversation someone says, “Oh yeah, in the movie Milk, that was actually Harvey Milk’s camera shop.” That’s when it’s a valid piece of information. But not when it’s just in a magazine article or on an IMDB page.

and this is just as great as always:

sometimes they rock and roll, sometimes they stay at home

2009-04-08T13:07:00.000-07:00

if you ever find yourself with the means to set a christmas tree on fire at sunset on a beach in malibu, i highly recommend. it is so...choice

more recent shots on flickr site

soon right away, right away

2009-04-03T16:45:00.001-07:00

it's been two consecutive weekends without getting wet. the longest i've gone in over two and a half years, so i'm jonesing for a wave slide like the one pictured above.

whats new to me is old news to you

2009-04-02T17:31:00.000-07:00

white denim destroyed it at spaceland last night. we caught a glimpse of them at the troub a few months back, opening for tapes 'n tapes, getting an appetite whetting taste of their skills, but last night, despite playing to a crowd that had bizarrely thinned out after a mind numbingly boring set from the pains of being pure of heart (why are WD playing with these horrible bands?), they put on one of the most impressive live shows i've ever witnessed leaving spaceland's collective ear ringing. somewhere between hendrix, yes, and the bad plus, they play with more power and energy than one could reasonably expect from any three piece. i wish there was a higher quality video out there that demonstrated the raw musical talent that these bros demonstrate, but this rad video shall suffice.

pour me a grey goose and red bull

2009-04-02T11:25:00.000-07:00

another video destined for viral greatness here from the mind of dj lubel. with a song reminiscent of jonathan richman doing five years time by nd pals noah and the whale. reminds me of my own days at lehman and evenings spent pregaming at windsor court...a very different time in my life.

can i hear you say "hey now"?

2009-03-31T13:59:00.000-07:00

the larry sanders show was just before my time so i'm coming to it way late, but my hunch that i'd dig it hard when i finally took the time to investigate appears to have been on point. shandling, tambor, torn and garofalo en fugeo.
here's the pilot in all of its hysterical wonder.

with my lightnin' bolts a glowin'

2009-03-25T11:05:00.000-07:00

to love is temporary, to post on the internet is forever

2009-03-24T16:44:00.000-07:00

a great contribution from b. caplan in nyc working on some top secret manuscipture in a vintage book filled coffee shop. nice find. let this open the flood gates to camera phone submissions... or not.

traced out but dreamin'

2009-03-24T16:02:00.000-07:00

my favorite posters from SXSW below. see more here.

sjælens fissehår

2009-03-23T14:51:00.000-07:00

picked up some old-school penguin paperbacks (updike's the music school, d.h.lawrence sons and lovers) and an original olympia press version of lolita at the booktrader in copenhagen.

the store owner lars has been collecting books with one-letter titles and has them lined up along the front wall with this james joyce quote:

"Books you were going to write with letters for titles.
Have you read his F?
Oh yes, but I prefer Q.
Yes, but W is wonderful.
Oh yes, W"

i was going to take a picture of it, but the store was closing and i didn't get a chance. luckily a quick google search turned this up. here are some of my faves and the story behind lars' search for the whole alphabet:

"After having read the Joycean quote, I decided to try gathering a complete alphabet of books that only had one letter for titles. After three years of intense collecting, the whole alphabet was on display in my shop, however lacking the two Scandinavian letters Æ and Å. Believing that those two book titles simply didn't exist, I left the collection as it was, and it took a further three years before my friend, Odd Noreger, from Stavanger Antikvariat (aka The Odd Bookshop), triumphantly arrived with the two titles. We celebrated the completion of the alphabet with a bottle of Norwegian Linieakvavit. Later, my other true friend, Georg Oldskov, has written a short story about the alphabet collection and another, not less fascinating collection of secondary alphabet literature. The short story is included in Oldskov's anthology, Sjælens fissehår (The Pussy Hair of the Soul), published by The Booktrader."

it's nice to meet you coley, max has told me nothing about you

2009-03-21T19:33:00.000-07:00

i recently discovered the free application capture me and it's completely changed my dvd viewing habits by allowing me to snap stills as i watch. here are some favorites from mikey and nicky and the opening sequence of scarecrow, two quintessential seventies american flicks.

happy birthday novel designs

2009-03-21T19:26:00.000-07:00

novel designs is now one year and three hundred and eighty eight posts old.
a heartfelt thank you to those who comprise our modest, but devoted reading audience. more to come...

it's been a regular festival of dionysus, if you know what i mean...

2009-03-19T09:08:00.000-07:00

granted this isn't hi-lar-ious, but 1) it's a sign that we can expect more showalter and a.d. miles (the head writer) appearances on late night with fallon, which is a straight up blessing, and 2) it's sort of funny because CAP is on her graduate student spring break and is about to spend it in the quintessential party town of copenhagen. keep those patches on!

it's as if genghis kahn got together for breakfast with oliver wendell holmes and virginia wolfe and ordered just a bowl of homemade granola

2009-03-18T23:52:00.000-07:00

tonight ASP saw many heroes in person. standup from david cross (who confirmed the arrested development film looking to shoot this fall), dave grohl trading anecdotes about acid trips, meeting eddie money and embarassing himself backstage at a U2 show, and a performance by grohl and jon brion, all hosted by the brilliant greg proops at the consistently quality largo. tonight, i count myself among the lucky ones. to commemorate the unique experience below is cross' contribution to pitchforkmedia.com taking his sardonic wit to the highfalutin rhapsodic waxings of pitchfork's reviewing staff.

David Cross: Albums to Listen to While Reading Overwrought Pitchfork Reviews

May 16, 2005

Hi, I was a somewhat surprised that Pitchforkmedia.com would ask me to participate in this. Here's why:

"The devastating paradox of David Cross' pre-recorded comedy: Is it funny that everything Cross says is nauseatingly smug, yelped out in smarmy, supercilious prose? Or is David Cross just a giant fucking asshole?"

"That Cross is such an immensely unlikable live performer-- condescending, defensive, arrogant, patronizing-- is both his greatest asset and his most crippling flaw."

And while the above review of my second cd It's Not Funny is certainly more thoughtful than, "David Cross? Yeah, he's funny" or "He sucks", it's still a bit shitty. "...immensely unlikable"? The paradox is "devastating"? How is it devastating?

And that's just one reviewer, Amanda Petrusich.* There's another one, William Bowers, who claims to: "...having developed a strange, extra-textual concern for David Cross. Likeminded futon-psychoanalysts fret over his fluctuating weight, his fitfulness, and despondence..."

Fretting over my weight? Oh well. But regardless of their opinion of me and/or my act, they've asked me for my Top Ten List®, So here is my contribution to the Top Ten List® For Pitchforkmedia.com

Top Ten CD's That I Just Made Up (and accompanying made-up review excerpts) to listen to while skimming through some of the overwrought reviews on Pitchforkmedia.com

1) While reading over Pitchforkmedia.com's review for the Arcade Fire, here's a brief excerpt: "Our self-imposed solitude renders us politically and spiritually inert, but rather than take steps to heal our emotional and existential wounds, we have chosen to revel in them. We consume the affected martyrdom of our purported idols and spit it back in mocking defiance." May I suggest listening to Until it Happens/You Let it Happen, by Maximum Minimum. The fourth album (not counting the re-release of the first three 7-inches on HugTown Records) reaffirms the band's status as the godfathers of the Taos, N.M. "crying scene." Like a gilded phoenix rising from the toxic ashes of the death of mercurial lead guitarist, Peter Chernin, Maximum Minimum snarls back like a taunted tiger on steroids (also on acid). RATING: 8.2

2) While reading the review of Daft Punk's Human After All: "Ideally, the physics of record reviewing are as elegant as actual physics, with each piece speaking to the essence of its subject as deliberately and as appropriately as a real-world force reacting to an action," is a real albeit brief excerpt. May I suggest listening to Elegant Nuisance by ButterFat 100. With this, their second album since signing with Holive Records, ButterFat 100 return to their psychobilly/emo core roots. Let its volcanic rapture overwhelm you like a 19th century hand-woven blanket made of human hair might have done back in the days when they enjoyed such things. RATING: 5.5

3) While reading the review Animal Collective's Sung Tongs. (Here's a brief excerpt): "'The Softest Voice' layers clear-toned guitar figures upon each other, as Tare and Bear whisper in harmony above, as if singing to the vision peering back at them from the skin of a backwoods creek. The rustic, secretive manner of their voices and the barely disturbed forest around them suggests that whatever ghosts inhabit these woods are only too happy to oblige a lullaby or two. Likewise, the epic 'Visiting Friends' gathers in faceless, mutated ghosts (i.e., oddly manipulated vocalizations from the duo) to hover over their dying fire in visage of nothing better than the tops of trees." Why not listen to As I Became We by Tishara Quailfeather.

The virulent and hermetically sealed pinings of the world's only triple gold selling Native American artist living in an iron lung. It's as if newly dead, and thus still pure angels, reached down into The Virgin Mothers throat and gently lifted out the sweetest and most plaintive sounds man will ever hope to hear in this life. RATING: 7.17

4) While reading the review of Blonde Redhead's Misery Is a Butterfly: "The word 'lush' doesn't quite capture the fluttering whirls of strings, keyboards, and delicately plucked guitar that open 'Elephant Woman'; I'd go so far as to label such enveloping richness of instrumentation 'baroque,' perhaps even 'rococo.'" is but a brief passage. Give a listen to Turndown Service, the forthcoming album by DotCom.com. Hopefully this foray into the electronic sector of the British no-fi/wi-hi scene (with apologies to Dr. Reverend Billy) is only a temporary diversion and not a full-fledged career move for Bix Xhu and friends. With a nod to early Creatures via the Monks, DotCom.com manages to wrench what little empathy one might have for the entire British working class (nothing you wouldn't find at an "Alive With Pleasure" show) and sashays it right up and down Trafalgar Square. RATING: 6.22

5) While reading the review of The Boards of Canada's Music Has the Right to Children: "The incredibly simple melody of the short 'Bocuma' becomes a lump-in-the-throat meditation on man's place in the universe through subtle pitch shifts and just the right mist of reverb. The slow fade-in on 'An Eagle in Your Mind' is the lonesome sound of a gentle wind brushing the surface of Mars moments after the last rocket back to Earth has lifted off." Why not listen to, Only the Proletariat Floss's by Screaming at the Mirror. With a truncated syncopation and approach that rivals only Tosh Guarrez pre "FartFlap", "S.A.T.M" has taken steps to dismantle what was previously only dared mantled by the great Gilda Thrush when she fronted "Cycle Clause". It's as if Genghis Kahn got together for breakfast with Oliver Wendell Holmes and Virginia Wolfe and ordered just a bowl of homemade granola and then skipped out on the check. RATING: 11.-111

6) When you're enjoying the review of the M.I.A. / Diplo album, Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1. Here's the beginning of that one: "Santa Claus, the Virgin Mary, and Terrence 'Turkeytime' Terrence just got the shaft this holiday season. Why bother with presents? 2005's Tickle Me Elmo was supposed to be a chicken-legged Sri Lankan with so much sex in her self-spun neons you might as well get wasted off penicillin with Willie Nelson at a secret Rex the Dog show." Huh? Check out University of Blunts' Dirty Dirty Dirty Dirty Dirty Dirty. It's like a 505 Groovebox as designed by someone who reads only Braille. Actually, to clarify, only if that same designer got caught in a transformer with Brindle Fly and decided to travel 50 years into the future and bring back what might have sounded retro thirty years from now if the future takes it's more than lugubrious, predictable course. RATING: 4.001

7) Hey, are you reading the review to The Mountain Goats' CD The Sunset Tree": "As one would hope from a songwriter as smart as Darnielle, The Sunset Tree comes from a 19th-century religious song, 'The Tyrolese Evening Hymn'." Why not have the latest Wittgenstein's Mistress CD playing in the background? On Gift Code, WM's latest offering, we find flutes a flutter, strings a stringin' and melotrones a melotronian. In what is likely to be remembered more for its' chorus of "Get on the bed bitch...now!" then it's subtle and rich tapestry woven, (most likely by candlelight) and suffused with an undercurrent of malaise and ennui, the titular track bends, breaks, and ultimately regenerates into a malevolent whirlstrom of angst and twee. RATING: Four Point Six and One Half.

8) Trying to make sense of the review of Autechre, Untitled? It's a one-act play that starts with:

(Sitting in the dormitory room just after class on Thursday, Achilles changes into his gym clothes as his roommate Tortoise bursts through their door in a fit of happiness.)

Tortoise: Achilles, have you seen this?

Achilles: What?

Tortoise: Do you see? Yes? I'm referring to the object, though small in size, quite interesting in stature, I am holding in front of you now.

Achilles: It's a CD.

And ends with:

Achilles: And my point is, if it's driven by form, it's a pretty messy, lazy form-- certainly no more structurally sound than any other software wank music. On top of that, if I'm supposed to "feel" this, to pick up on some obscure metaphysical in-joke, I'm not-- isn't it the job of a good artist to make that shit clear? Either way, it fails for me. Autechre decided to go their own way, fine, you know, just don't expect me to call them "geniuses."

Tortoise: [Sigh] Alright, Achilles, I can see we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'm sorry to have wasted your time.

Achilles: Oh don't worry, dude, just wear headphones when you play that stuff.

(With all apologies to Douglas Hofstadter and Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, which I'd send you if I had an extra copy.)

Why not give a listen to: Pillow Logics new disc, Treason to Live, a wiry concept album that gives new meaning to the phrase, "Now, I've seen everything!" Ostensibly about a young girl who loses her shoes in a cockfight she mistakenly attends during Thanksgiving 1959, it's really about the universal themes of loss, angst, candy and damp clothing. Taking its cue from the early commercial work of Deloite and Hughey and filtering it through the "I cut myself shaving" piousness of Throm Tillson, Pillow Logic re-works early sock hop chop flop and allows people like me to enjoy enjoying it. RATING: Two T-Shirts and a cup of jizz.

9). Slogging through the review of Emperor X's Central Hug/Friendarmy/Fractaldunes (And the Dreams that Resulted) (sample: "...the aesthetic of Emperor X's recording belies its craft. Homemade and sometimes grungily recorded, the latest record by Chad Matheny's one-man band delivers jitter-- and indie pop that practically gnaws its own arm with excitement") to try to find out if you might like it

Then don't listen to: ThunderPussy When the Wild Birds Sing. You can only shine a turd so many times before it gleans as bright as a six-year-old girl's ass cheek on Christmas morning. ThunderPussy answers the question, How many times does one need to shine a turd before it gleans as bright as a six year old girls ass cheek on Christmas morning? The answer according to ThunderPussy is, 12. 12 is the number of tracks on this cd each one of the same song, "Star Wars!" And they all suck except for the last one which shines just like a six-year-old girls ass on Christmas Morning. It's true. RATING: 4.Point

10). Enjoying the self-referential Franz Ferdinand review which includes the following: "Ryan, that cow is dried up. It's Gordita meat. I've even done the I'm-not-going-to-do-a-concept-review-anymore concept review," I said.

"Hear me out. I'm seeing a comeback for one of your zany characters," Ryan said, making stupid TV-producer gestures with his hands. "I'm seeing the interpretive dancer Santa Schultz, the Revolutionary War soldier Ham Grass, advice columnist Professor Rok, Diapers the glam-loving lab monkey, Justin Davies the bass player of The Hold My Coat, The Bummelgörk, Kelly the Masseuse, Volodrag the Yugoslavian sycophant, Paul Bunyan, Wolfie. Besides, you promised me the Franz Ferdinand review months ago."

Then don't listen to Thar She Blows, the terrible new cd by The Original Apple Dumpling Gang. If you like shitty, regurgitated slop as evinced by the overlauded production team of Dr. Snagglepuss and Oppressor, then you're gonna love this. Daring to delve into his worn out bag of used tricks, Dr. Snagglepuss turns to his old SugarSnaps partner, TreacherousFace ZombieHead, and spits out beats that sound like two dying frogs farting in your face. If that's your idea of an aural good time then you're probably the kind of person that likes early Faust meets pre-post-op Neutron Bitch also meets Blunder (with a nod to Iceland's Achilles Healed) but then a fight breaks out and DNA Groove comes over and separates everybody and quickly escorts Neutron Bitch out through the service entrance where they make love on a pile of day old lettuce (like in the movies). Either way, T.A.D.G. do themselves a disservice by trying to milk some more milk from an aids infested cow called "their old music". All in all it's a big disappointment, but then again if you like aids milk then I guess this is for you. RATING: 2.shit

*One part of Amanda Petrusich review I would like to respond to (and several people made this mistake it wasn't just her) is the misinterpreted intent of the title of my second cd, It's Not Funny, of which she said, "(oh, and the knee-jerk critical reaction to pre-emptive album titles? It's not funny)". It was meant to be a reflection of my feelings about the subject matter I was covering. Like when you're a kid and you're trying to tell people something that's important to you but no one is taking you seriously and everyone keeps laughing and your response might be, "Guys come on!! I'm serious! It's Not Funny!" So there's that for the record. I could quibble about some other stuff but just clearing the title issue is excitement enough for one day.

everything from a baby alligator to a mexican jumping bean

2009-03-18T12:50:00.000-07:00

an assortment of classic bands playing classic tunes
in classic outfits in classic black and white.

always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said

2009-03-18T12:45:00.001-07:00

leslie miles is blowing up the visual blog scene right now. LM kindly posted a CAP shot of ASP in his blog post today two wheels. check it out and make a regular habit of it.

this taught me a lesson, but I'm not quite sure what it is

2009-03-14T09:22:00.000-07:00

i'm jealous of everyone who saw mcenroe live during the "early angry young man" days. what a legend. some examples and killer quotes from the man.

“Do you have any problems, other than that you're unemployed, a moron, and a dork?”

“I'll let the racket do the talking.”

“You are the pits of the world! Vultures! Trash!”

(do i hear the beginnings of a slow clap at the end of this one?)

“We should be trying anything and everything, like all sports are doing, ... It's amazing to me how little has changed in tennis. This big innovation is having a blue court. That's a major change in our sport? That is like putting a Band-Aid on something".

“That, ... is going to require some deep thought.”

it's all right to shake, to fight, to feel

2009-03-13T10:51:00.000-07:00

many updates to the novel designs flickr gallery today.

first there are some truly beautiful photos from CAP taken in and around venice:

some shots from a recent daytrip to the santa anita race track (more forthcoming):

and here are some snaps from last week's urban iditarod and team "rad in plaid":

i hear what you're saying, i hear what he's saying

2009-03-13T10:47:00.000-07:00

this so adequately captures my mood going into what is going to be yet another rowdy sun and surf filled weekend.

too bad the actual show was a disaster.

and here we test our powers of observation

2009-03-12T14:34:00.000-07:00

team novel designs saw jazz trio the bad plus at the mint last friday. i've seen them perform more than any other band and there really aren't enough superlatives in the english language to convey just how stunning they are to behold in person. youtube has been lacking good footage of the band playing for quite some time, but it seems the touring they've been doing behind the new album has prompted some more posts.

while ethan iverson on piano and reid anderson on bass are incredible musicians in their own right, it's always dave king who steals the show. it's hard to imagine a better drummer on the face of the planet. these clips give a sense of his virtuosity, but you have to see him live to truly witness his idiosyncratic skin slapping style with that mischievous grins plastered on his face. humbling.

Just for the record. their second set at The Mint with Wendy Lewis on vocals was: lithium
radio cure
blue velvet
New years day
long distance run around
how deep is you love?
comfortably numb
barracuda
heart of gold

their cover of radio cure has set me on a pretty much uninterrupted listening spree of the original wilco track:

their blog is also a great source of info. the guys have killer taste in everything from music to film and literature... all they're missing is some wave sliding knowhow.

read, walk, communicate

2009-03-08T22:36:00.001-07:00

since christmas i've been on a serious woody allen kick, developing a more informed appreciation of his work. beyond reading woody allen on woody allen, as well as a collection of his screenplays, i've rewatched manhattan and hannah and her sisters about a half dozen times and started viewing the films i've missed (sleeper, bananas, interiors etc). i'd say i'm about 70% of the way through the full catalogue and the most satisfying surprise so far has been stardust memories. it's an immediate entry into my top 5 allen films (displacing sweet and lowdown from the company of annie hall, manhattan, hannah and mighty aphrodite).

also listen to django reinhardt's body and soul which accompanies the closing credits.

- What do you think was the significance of the Rolls-Royce?
- Um, I think it represented his car.

open up your purses for the boys who reimburse us

2009-03-07T19:39:00.000-08:00

happy pavement saturday.

it's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear

2009-03-06T16:03:00.000-08:00

so, credit for this post goes to t. moffett for drawing attention to this dick cavett interview with updike and cheever. i can't embed, but do take a look. cheever's voice and demeanor is so classic and engaging that you can't help but wait for the camera to revisit him. it was taped less than a year before he passed away.

anyway, turns out the dick cavett show was sort of awesome. who knew? below is a selection of interviews, and i'm pulling these up after a cursory at best youtube search. all i know is suddenly, i'm like, a dick cavett fan.

this is video 1 of 4 - check them all out. cassavettes, falk and gazzara are "promoting" the brilliant film HUSBANDS (still frustratingly not on dvd). charming amateurish camera work aside, it's incredibly entertaining seeing these three ultra hip guys, giggling like idiots, goofing off and just having a good time being celebrated for doing what they love. gazzara rolls out with a lit cigar and a highball, falk waits a full minute before sitting down, cassavettes takes a pratfall when it hits a commerical break (and what a commercial break it is). who's got a match?

i don't think i've ever actually watched hendrix talk and i'm suprised by what an awkward, gentle demeanor he has. very humbly intelligent, and kind of comfortably lanky. I love the line "thats why we play so loud...to go inside the soul of the person." when he gets into "i don't really live on compliments" there are definite echoes of david byrne ("i try to write songs about small things, paper, animals, a house "). there are a lot version of this video so worth investigating further.

bowie, smiling deviantly and sniffing liking a banshee is quite dylanesque in his evasive answers, "what do you think i'm like?"

capote and groucho marx. "all of it libelous"

george harrison, ASP favorite beatle, is very witty ("yoko sat in that very chair" at 2:48), but also comes off as a very sensible person. and quite sad, re: liking talking: "sometimes, if there's something to say, but there's nothing to say these days."

zappa. total genius. no question. waltzes out cool ad a cucumber and proceeds to succinctly describe the history of punk, announce that all popular music trends have been the consequence of a popular clothing trend, recommend new wave and the record he just got by a band called the slits (per his suggestion, check out Bleeker Bobs), and provide his sociological take on the international popularity and uniformity of disco. absolute genius.

ali and frazier. cavett is agitatin'!

John Houston. The template for Daniel Plainview.

cavett found him.

last but not least, an obvious pick, but man oh man, it's impossible to like yoko. she's just so horrible. speaking at the wrong time. barely coherent. damn yoko. lennon, obviously, is a delight.

honestly, who cares about joaquin on letterman? this is real gold right here.

tangled roots

2009-03-06T15:51:00.000-08:00

come the end of march the paperback edition of Tangled Roots will be published. the novel is written by ND supporter Sue Guiney and i can't recommend picking up a copy strongly enough either here (free worldwide delivery) or here . take the time to check it out.

hall with the temptones and oates with the masters

2009-03-04T17:32:00.000-08:00

like the flame that burns the candle, the candle feeds the flame. think about it.

ok, mr. depth, wallow in it

2009-03-03T19:20:00.000-08:00

CLASS first came to asp attention one late night circa 1998 when it was playing on the uk "paramount comedy channel" at about one in the morning. unbeknownst to fourteen year old me, I had stumbled upon perhaps the quintessential eighties new england boarding school coming of age comedy. the next night, it was taped on vhs. CLASS blends all the classics: animal house, ferris bueller's day off, the graduate, say anything...addressing all the great themes of growing up in any decade. in CLASS though, the trying times of being a teenager are set against the backdrop of the extra rad world that was 1983. not to mention, in addition to rob lowe, andrew mccarthy and jacqueline bisset (as ellen burroughs, the sixteen year precursor to ms. stifler), you've also got memorable turns from john cusack, alan ruck and virgina madsen. somehow the film has failed to garner its due public/critical acclaim and remains elusively outside the canon. fortunately a chosen few have taken it upon themselves to go to commendable lengths to make the film available to a modern, web surfing, audience.

"balderanddash" has posted the entire film on youtube. part one below:

so that's awesome

but it's nothing compared to what this site has compiled: seven hundred and thirty two screen captures. crazy as this sounds, each and every one is an absolute delight. a sample below.

huge shout out to chaunceygardner for sharing this stills, providing overdue inspiration for this post.

something to put something on

2009-03-03T12:52:00.000-08:00

i'm woefully undereducated when it comes to conceptual art, abstract painting, geometric abstraction etc, not to mention, the distinctions between such movements, but my love is steadily growing for guys like josef albers, max bill,john baldessari, sol lewitt...
i just ordered as far as they eye can see by lawrence weiner, a new favorite.

a great shot of the man himself:

the life you save may be your own

2009-03-01T13:04:00.001-08:00

just ordered a very large shipment from amazon, mostly for school but also this new biography of flannery o'connor. if you've never read any of her work, check out the volume of complete stories (or read everything that rises must converge). it reminded me how perfect these farrar, straus and giroux reissue covers are:

fill the past with friendly nights

2009-02-28T22:29:00.000-08:00

photos from the inaugural "adventure" issue of imaginary zine. issue two will be themed "ritual" and the editor is accepting submissions here, so get creative.

this is gonna be primo

2009-02-24T18:50:00.000-08:00

as an introduction to new blog all things RAD, here is a collection of offerings from the warriors of radness blog. the world can never be too radical a place.

(note: surfed this break, county line, on saturday)

when i was your age i was seven

2009-02-24T18:11:00.000-08:00

so today was a watershed day for ASP who may have joined twitter for purely informational reasons (like needing to know if michael showalter's cats are fighting or not). have to say, i'm already feeling the need to tweet. i haven't. but i can tell right now that i will. why? i really couldn't say. when? only time will tell. to who? i suppose my three "followers" who i feel an obligation to. you can join them and "follow" my nonposts here. the day of reckoning is nigh.

to counterbalance this potentially gross lapse in judgment i want to share some of my favorite works by ed ruscha which i think represent a core aesthetic component of novel designs and are incredibly almost all available online here. remember, brave men run in my family.

it's nonrefundable. he wanted me to tell you that

2009-02-22T00:40:00.000-08:00

daniel everett's departure series

and this might replace the time trucks as my new anti-procrastination laptop background (click to zoom):

there was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air

2009-02-21T11:18:00.000-08:00

paul shaw documents the typography of brooklyn, including the "hotel montague" lettering near the promenade. apparently the montague, along with next-door neighbor the grosvenor, was one of brooklyn's first apartment buildings! it became a hotel at the turn of the century, turned into welfare housing in the 70s, and reverted back to co-op apartments in the 80s. two decades later, i moved in. standard gentrification.

i don't mean to vilify an entire country, but mexico is a horrible place

2009-02-19T22:22:00.000-08:00

just caught a sneak preview of rian johnson's new film the brothers bloom. the film features a brilliant score and soundtrack in addition to a noble commitment to visual gags, paying a heavy debt to the work of wes a. max records lends a somewhat disappointing performance as a younger bloom, which doesn't bode well for where the wild things are. alas, otherwise a fun film that deserves to be seen. a worth follow up to brick.

this is overdue

2009-02-18T13:42:00.000-08:00

i will do this until i inevitably say something i regret

2009-02-12T13:42:00.000-08:00

in the past month or so, twitter seems to have transformed from a fringe blogger thing into a national phenomenon. i'm still not totally sure how it works and my only real engagement with it is keeping up to speed on ed droste's latest antics/the status of new gbear album. this talking points memo post peaked my interest though. apparently, the republican party is trying to get in on the twitter game, ostensibly to reach out to the obama generation. as could be expected, they massively f'ed up their first foray into the new technology:

Yesterday the Virginia GOP came very close to taking control of the state Senate, nearly luring a Democratic Senator to switch parties and put them at a 20-20 tie, which would have been broken by the Republican Lt. Governor. Then Jeff Frederick, a state legislator and the party chairman, ruined it all by Twittering this:
Big news coming out of Senate: Apparently one dem is either switching or leaving the dem caucus. Negotiations for power sharing underway.
The Dems then read the message, quickly mobilized to talk the renegade out of it, and stopped the GOP coup before it could happen. We usually don't cover state-level politics, but this is just too much. Really, Mr. Frederick, you don't live-blog about ongoing secret negotiations!

historians are going to have a field day with this in the future.

and so with the sunshine and great bursts of leaves

2009-02-09T09:16:00.001-08:00

last weekend when ASP and i were surf camping, we decided that RVs could be great in theory, but with the exception of airstreams sadly lack any sort of design aesthetic. this teardrop trailor is a little more up ND's alley:

the photos are from the blog of foster huntington, a student at what appears to be colby college, who takes beautiful photographs and has a pretty sweet name.

i believe every man has a path laid out before him

2009-02-06T18:41:00.000-08:00

a little crass for ND (i think this is about as fas as "red band" trailers have been pushed), but this trailer is just so impeccably put together: the music, the editing, the cinematography (by tim orr of david gordon green and michael showalter fame) this is how every trailer should be. despite the crude, tasteless humor you can tell just watching these few minutes that jody hill has followed up foot fist way with a film that will yet again bizzarely warm hearts against better judgement. plus i'm spotting jesse plemmons and aziz in the mix.

you remind me of someone in my car who is me

2009-02-05T17:02:00.000-08:00

more purdy things to look at. these are all by cristiana couceiro, a portugese artist. definitely demonstrating a cali vibe. em segundo somente ao urso de panda na hierarquia portugese de impressionante, sua merda é assassino

nothing is as far away as one minute ago

2009-02-05T15:28:00.000-08:00

ruscha inspired photo/word play from the ffffound universe. i don't know where these came from or who made them. they're a little angsty post-hardcore lyricky, but they remain nd approved.

hadn’t we seen it all a hundred times?

2009-02-04T23:06:00.000-08:00

a brilliant piece of short fiction from milhauser, one of his quintessential tone/genre blends, in this week's anniversary issue of the new yorker.

THE INVASION FROM OUTER SPACE
by Steven Millhauser
FEBRUARY 9, 2009

From the beginning we were prepared, we knew just what to do, for hadn’t we seen it all a hundred times?—the good people of the town going about their business, the suddenly interrupted TV programs, the faces in the crowd looking up, the little girl pointing in the air, the mouths opening, the dog yapping, the traffic stopped, the shopping bag falling to the sidewalk, and there, in the sky, coming closer . . . And so, when it finally happened, because it was bound to happen, we all knew it was only a matter of time, we felt, in the midst of our curiosity and terror, a certain calm, the calm of familiarity, we knew what was expected of us, at such a moment. The story broke a little after ten in the morning. The TV anchors looked exactly the way we knew they’d look, their faces urgent, their hair neat, their shoulders tense, they were filling us with alarm but also assuring us that everything was under control, for they, too, had been prepared for this, in a sense had been waiting for it, already they were looking back at themselves during their great moment. The sighting was indisputable but, at the same time, inconclusive: something from out there had been detected, it appeared to be approaching our atmosphere at great speed, the Pentagon was monitoring the situation closely. We were urged to remain calm, to stay inside, to await further instructions. Some of us left work immediately and hurried home to our families, others stayed close to the TV, the radio, the computer, we were all talking into our cells. Through our windows we could see people at their windows, looking up at the sky. All that morning we followed the news fiercely, like children listening to a thunderstorm in the dark. Whatever was out there was still unknown, scientists had not yet been able to determine its nature, caution was advised but there was no reason for panic, our job was to stay tuned and sit tight and await further developments. And though we were anxious, though quivers of nervousness ran along our bodies like mice, we wanted to see whatever it was, we wanted to be there, since after all it was coming toward us, it was ours to witness, as if we were the ones they’d chosen, out there on the other side of the sky. For already it was being said that our town was the likely landing place, already the TV crews were rolling in. We wondered where it would land: between the duck pond and the seesaws in the public park, or deep in the woods at the north end of town, or maybe in the field out by the mall, where a new excavation was already under way, or maybe it would glide over the old department store on Main Street and crash through the second-floor apartments above Mangione’s Pizza and Café, with a great shattering of brick and glass, maybe it would land on the throughway and we’d see eighteen-wheelers turn over, great chunks of pavement rise up at sharp angles, and car after car swerve into the guardrail and roll down the embankment.
Something appeared in the sky shortly before one o’clock. Many of us were still at lunch, others were already outside, standing motionless on the streets and sidewalks, gazing up. There were shouts and cries, arms in the air, a wildness of gesturing, pointing. And, sure enough, something was glittering, up there in the sky, something was shimmering, in the blue air of summer—we saw it clearly, whatever it was. Secretaries in offices rushed to windows, storekeepers abandoned their cash registers and hurried outdoors, road workers in orange hard hats looked up from the asphalt, shaded their eyes. It must have lasted—that faraway glow, that spot of shimmer—some three or four minutes. Then it began to grow larger, until it was the size of a dime, a quarter. Suddenly the entire sky seemed to be filled with points of gold. Then it was coming down on us, like fine pollen, like yellow dust. It lay on our roof slopes, it sifted down onto our sidewalks, covered our shirtsleeves and the tops of our cars. We did not know what to make of it.
It continued to come down, that yellow dust, for nearly thirteen minutes. During that time we could not see the sky. Then it was over. The sun shone, the sky was blue. Throughout the downpour, we’d been warned to stay inside, to be careful, to avoid touching the substance from outer space, but it had happened so quickly that most of us had streaks of yellow on our clothes and in our hair. Soon after the warnings, we heard cautious reassurances: preliminary tests revealed nothing toxic, though the nature of the yellow dust remained unknown. Animals that had eaten it revealed no symptoms. We were urged to keep out of its way and await further test results. Meanwhile it lay over our lawns and sidewalks and front steps, it coated our maple trees and telephone poles. We were reminded of waking in the morning after the first snow. From our porches we watched the three-wheeled sweepers move slowly along our streets, carrying it off in big hoppers. We hosed down our grass, our front walks, our porch furniture. We looked up at the sky, we waited for more news—already we were hearing reports that the substance was composed of one-celled organisms—and through it all we could sense the swell of our disappointment.
We had wanted, we had wanted—oh, who knew what we’d been looking for? We had wanted blood, crushed bones, howls of agony. We had wanted buildings crumbling onto streets, cars bursting into flame. We had wanted monstrous versions of ourselves with enlarged heads on stalklike necks, merciless polished robots armed with death rays. We had wanted noble lords of the universe with kind, soft eyes, who would usher in a glorious new era. We had wanted terror and ecstasy—anything but this yellow dust. Had it even been an invasion? Later that afternoon, we learned that scientists all agreed: the dust was a living thing. Samples had been flown to Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C. The single-celled organisms appeared to be harmless, though we were cautioned not to touch anything, to keep the windows shut, to wash our hands. The cells reproduced by binary fission. They appeared to do nothing but multiply.
In the morning, we woke to a world covered in yellow dust. It lay on the tops of our fences, on the crossbars of telephone poles. Black tire tracks showed in the yellow streets. Birds, shaking their wings, threw up sprays of yellow powder. Again the street-sweepers came, the hoses splashed on driveways and lawns, making a yellow mist and revealing the black and the green underneath. Within an hour the driveways and lawns resembled yellow fields. Lines of yellow ran along cables and telephone wires.
According to the news, the unicellular microorganisms are rod-shaped and nourish themselves by photosynthesis. A single cell, placed in a brightly illuminated test tube, divides at such a rate that the tube will fill in about forty minutes. An entire room, in strong light, will fill in six hours. The organisms do not fit easily into our classification schemes, though in some respects they resemble blue-green algae. There is no evidence that they are harmful to human or animal life.
We have been invaded by nothing, by emptiness, by animate dust. The invader appears to have no characteristic other than the ability to reproduce rapidly. It doesn’t hate us. It doesn’t seek our annihilation, our subjection and humiliation. Nor does it desire to protect us from danger, to save us, to teach us the secret of immortal life. What it wishes to do is replicate. It is possible that we will find a way of limiting the spread of this primitive intruder, or of eliminating it altogether; it’s also possible that we will fail and that our town will gradually disappear under a fatal accumulation. As we follow the reports from day to day, the feeling grows in us that we deserved something else, something bolder, something grander, something more thrilling, something bristling or fiery or fierce, something that might have represented a revelation or a destiny. We imagine ourselves surrounding the tilted spaceship, waiting for the door to open. We imagine ourselves protecting our children, slashing the tentacles that thrust in through the smashed cellar windows. Instead, we sweep our front walks, hose off our porches, shake out our shoes and sneakers. The invader has entered our homes. Despite our drawn shades and closed curtains, it lies in thick layers on our end tables and windowsills. It lies along the tops of our flat-screen televisions and the narrow edges of our shelved DVDs. Through our windows we can see the yellow dust covering everything, forming gentle undulations. We can almost see it rising slowly, like bread. Here and there it catches the sunlight and reminds us, for a moment, of fields of wheat.
It is really quite peaceful, in its way. ♦

i'd rather play records than break them

2009-02-04T14:49:00.000-08:00

nd really does strive to not post information or images that spread like wildfire through the blogosphere. nothing is more uninteresting, disappointing even, than redundancy. it's like a joke told twice. sometimes it's easy to draw the line, like yesterday when i watched david after dentist about 6 times, but knew that it would never find a home on nd (i'm not even going to link to it to make this point, the way things move these days by now ben silverman is probably hatching a pilot based on it). other times when i want to embed something from pitchfork it feels too obvious, but i'll make a concession for anything in any way relevant to the gbear clan. anyway... this is all an excuse for posting the following reimaginings of classic video games as vintage novels. they just touch upon too many things i love to not enter the novel designs canon, so i can get over the fact i first saw them on notcot. check out all sorts of coolnes at oily moss .