How come no one invited me to the Robot Dance Competition!??! Robots mimicking the natural movements of humans is one of my favorite things (to be deeply unsettled by).
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Monday, November 30, 2009
I Like This
I like this song. And video.
I like this low concept but amusing and visually engaging Web site.
I like this site of Helsinki street style.
And this ends my trenchant cultural commentary for the day.
Friday, November 20, 2009
FDBD (Sooner or Later You'll Bury Your Teeth)
The air gets colder and thinner by the day, leaves are crunchy brown on the ground, pumpkins somehow surviving on porches have mouths that curve inward as they rot so they look like toothless old men smiling at me as I walk past. Everything I see seems witchy-spooky in that autumn way, still. Maybe that's why most songs I've listened to these last few weeks could be the soundtrack to pagan rituals in the woods. I only like magical faerie sprite music now. FDBD For Druids By Druids.
I completely slept on Ys because I found The Milk-Eyed Mender pretentious verging on unlistenable when it came out. Ys won't let me even think about whether I like it or not, because it's too busy exploding my brain.
The 1973 "Wicker Man" is one of the few movies that truly creeps me out and the soundtrack really captures its amazing Ren-Fair-gone-horribly-awry spookiness.
My friend Howard recommended The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter after learning of my Ys obsession and yes exactly.
I get that Rolan Bolan is Marc Bolan and Gloria Jones' son and he probably DID dance himself right out the womb and stuff, but just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
If Hatin' is Your Occupation I Prolly Got a Full Time Job For You.
The fact that my first reaction to this was "Awww, Dirty Jerz!" means that I have officially been away from the Tri-State for so long I'm even romanticizing the most terrible parts. Fist pumpin' like champs! Whatever, I've loved two boys from New Jersey. They grow good tomatoes there.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Mixed Bag
This site started as a way to distribute stuff I was already e-mailing to friends who asked for mp3s after I played them at parties, and then also sort of turned into a depot for my inane ramblings, so I've never considered it a music blog. As such I ignore about 90% of the songs I get e-mailed every day, but here are three recent ones that I like a lot.
If I made an actual non-ADD "best of 2009" list Pictureplane's Dark Rift would be on it. I won't, but it would.
Chew Lips' songs, unremixed, sound to me like they'd play in an 80s movie montage where a bunch of nerds are building something. At the very least someone would be touching a plasma lamp. If that sounds like it could describe a lot of bands these days: Fair enough.
This is off a sampler from The Record Machine and you can grab more State Bird mp3s (as well as some from other artists on the label) on their site.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Anything Can Happen on Halloween, Your Dog Could Turn Into a Cat
Halloween has always been my favorite because I love spookiness, the ramshackle quality of homemade costumes, candy, pumpkins, decorations, and most of all horror movies. My friend Swati and I used to watch them constantly when she lived in her studio on 2nd Avenue; we'd show each other the ones we were obsessed with as kids and look for new ones that made us get that fun-to-be-scared feeling again (with mixed results). Our top 10 favorites — and it should go without saying this means the original and never the remake:
The Evil Dead
The Last House on the Left
Motel Hell
The Stuff
The Watcher in the Woods
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Fright Night
The Gate
House of 1000 Corpses
Cabin Fever
Honorable mentions: Revenge of the Living Dead, Phantasm 1, 3, and 4
Splatter, basically. Giallo is cool but it's too arty and cold for my taste. Lurid 1980s era Tom Savini-style grossness is best. These days I never watch horror movies anymore because it's just no fun without the one girl who fully shared my obsession. When she finally visits Chicago we probably will just stay in and watch some skulls get stop-motion crushed.
My putting-on-my-costume playlist for tomorrow night:
(My buddy Collin gets disemboweled by a cult of scary girls in the video for this song. It's pretty badass.)
Happy Halloween!
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Gigantic
Two things I am super into this week:
Videos of "The Berlin Reunion," a several days-long performance involving two GIANT puppets walking through the streets of Germany. He rises out of the water! She eats a giant popsicle! So beautiful and what mind-bending planning it must have involved. Like I always say, if there's one thing that excites me more than tiny toy food it's giant puppets (this is a thing that I am saying to everyone, all the time). Amazing pictures here too.
Part 3 from Erroll Morris's seven-part series for the New York Times, "The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock," where James Agee's descriptions of rooms in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" are compared to Walker Evans' photographs, cataloging discrepancies that suggest Evans moved items around for aesthetic purposes. For the most part I subscribe to the 'there is no What Happened' school of thought when it comes to accuracy in documentary anything, but I find this stuff endlessly fascinating.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Mariah Carey + Ghost Town DJs = Magic
Mariah Carey is a total Friend in My Head (TM Wendy Williams). It's her half teflon/half coconuts personality, sandpaper speaking voice, cougar-y marriage, and the perfection that is the first three songs on The Emancipation of Mimi. And as big a fan as I am of Beyoncè, Sasha Fierce wouldn't last one round with Mariah Cray-cray. She's the real deal.
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