Am deep in the heart of NIN, so not too much updating this or next week.
That said, i created a myspace page for the pretty hate machine project. i may start a blog there too to chart my thoughts or to pose questions that would be too 90s and annoying here. if you're a fan or have curiousity about the project, sign up! I have to say i was sad that the real estate for .com/prettyhatemachine was taken, but the girl who has it is pretty funny. watch out!
Here's an old but good piece on Girlschool coming in repsonse to the recent flurry of talk on Joan Jett.
6.13.2006
6.08.2006
deus ex machina
Take 20 minutes out of your day to read this history of laptop music on New Music Box. The writer goes through all the usuals but with a good new music eye. Also, there is this lovely aside, which seems like something out of an 80s sci-fi screenplay:
I initially studied computer science in college, and before I opted for an English degree, my favorite professor was an esteemed figure in the field by the name of Alan J. Perlis, a man who won the very first Turing Award (often described as the Nobel Prize of computing) the year I was born. He would often digress from a sequence of code that he was reciting from memory in order to tell us stories about the dawn of the study of computing. From today's standpoint, in a time of iPods and Tablet PCs, my own college education feels like it occurred during the Stone Age, with those monochrome monitors and rudimentary programming languages. But for Perlis, our cathode-ray computer-lab terminals and the Macintoshes popping up in dormitories were generations removed from his Cretaceous-era schooling.
Prof. Perlis appreciated our difficulty with the problems he assigned each week, those all-nighters we spent eradicating bugs. He told us that when he was a graduate student there was a commonplace way that programmers went about wrestling with a faulty bit of programming: You'd open up the computer you were working on, enter it, sit on a cozy chair and contemplate the machine from the inside. That image has never faded from my memory. If anything, it's become more vivid as computers have gotten smaller. This primer covering the laptop and its role in music today is a peek under the hood, now that the machines have gotten too compact to be entered directly.
[on a related note, I saw X-Men 3 and realized that the only funny/amusing part of the film is that having superpowers allows you to literalize metaphors, however cheap that is a screenplay device]
I initially studied computer science in college, and before I opted for an English degree, my favorite professor was an esteemed figure in the field by the name of Alan J. Perlis, a man who won the very first Turing Award (often described as the Nobel Prize of computing) the year I was born. He would often digress from a sequence of code that he was reciting from memory in order to tell us stories about the dawn of the study of computing. From today's standpoint, in a time of iPods and Tablet PCs, my own college education feels like it occurred during the Stone Age, with those monochrome monitors and rudimentary programming languages. But for Perlis, our cathode-ray computer-lab terminals and the Macintoshes popping up in dormitories were generations removed from his Cretaceous-era schooling.
Prof. Perlis appreciated our difficulty with the problems he assigned each week, those all-nighters we spent eradicating bugs. He told us that when he was a graduate student there was a commonplace way that programmers went about wrestling with a faulty bit of programming: You'd open up the computer you were working on, enter it, sit on a cozy chair and contemplate the machine from the inside. That image has never faded from my memory. If anything, it's become more vivid as computers have gotten smaller. This primer covering the laptop and its role in music today is a peek under the hood, now that the machines have gotten too compact to be entered directly.
[on a related note, I saw X-Men 3 and realized that the only funny/amusing part of the film is that having superpowers allows you to literalize metaphors, however cheap that is a screenplay device]
6.07.2006
stupid girls, smart girls, pitchfork, rosen and dero
Okay. onslaught of links. Am back in Ohio and routing through old mail and catching up.
Here's a decent collection of commentary on Pink's "Stupid Girls". The more I think about the video the more disturbing it is to me that Pink elevates herself above the level of her pop/fem peers through such brutal satire. I'm not sure what I want from her, and I'm not 15, so maybe I'm way off base, but I think it's too easy and mean-spirited in a way that doesn't create conversation or actually...help...the stupid girls. I want to support the 'not stupid girls' but I REALLY want to convert the stupid ones...to our side. How to do it?
On the not-stupid girls, here's a New Yorker piece on Oriana Fallaci. Wow, what a profile subject...Clearly I don't agree with her views, but the bravado...Wow. Evil genius.
More not stupid girls. Eveyln McDonnell's amazing Q&A with Miami booty bass legend Luther Campbell. Talk about fearless questions, Q: Do men's bodies trap women? If ever I had the guts to just slap someone across the face with that.
Here's the Columbia Journalism Review's piece about Pitchfork. I know Keira and think it's a pretty good piece, and I like how Scott came off in all of it. Wish she'd interviewed some PF devotees/critics to get the larger framework of how the site has affected indie culture. Maybe call up Merge and ask them how the Arcade Fire did after they PF began to champion the record, for instance...
The white hot thoughts of Jody Rosen on the never-ending success of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Heard that ridiculous "Dani California" song maybe 5 times driving back from NYC to Ohio. The video for it is depressing with moments of extreme ugly-ness (I mean, dude. You are so not allowed to parody Kurt, he was your...peer?). Plus the lyric "Price you gotta pay when you break the panorama" is just exactly the kind of Kiedis-m you'd expect to be sho be dooped into the song just to show off the..skillz... Barf.
Dero on 33 1/3 is unfair not for the least to my dear Matos, who is many things but guilty of not knowing his facts and figs on Prince? I dare you. Dude, Dero so doesn't get it. They aren't Cliff's Notes, they aren't in a house style, they aren't supposed to be perfect scale models of the albums that they reference. It's a...writing....prompt...for people who love these albums more than anything and want to go riff on it. Yes, I said it. A writing prompt. Do what thou wilt. If it's good enough for Crowley, it's good enough for my NIN book. And so it begins, the anthropologist/sociologist intervention on the rock critic mentality is what stretches the form beyond its constraits as news hook-based periodical genre. Dare I say it, it is the personal that makes it...art...It is assumed that you know all the facts, ma'am, the real writing question is, what do you do after that?
Okay okay, I have a piece in the Voice today. It's on the Polish nightclub scene in Greenpoint. It's been a long time coming and I'm pretty proud of it, though it is more fact than style. Feedback welcomed.
More later. Gotta jam some Da Capo stuff. Will have a press release out in the next week or so announcing the pieces for Best Music Writing 2006. Are you excited or what? Email me if you want to be added to press for the book. musicwriting@gmail.com
Here's a decent collection of commentary on Pink's "Stupid Girls". The more I think about the video the more disturbing it is to me that Pink elevates herself above the level of her pop/fem peers through such brutal satire. I'm not sure what I want from her, and I'm not 15, so maybe I'm way off base, but I think it's too easy and mean-spirited in a way that doesn't create conversation or actually...help...the stupid girls. I want to support the 'not stupid girls' but I REALLY want to convert the stupid ones...to our side. How to do it?
On the not-stupid girls, here's a New Yorker piece on Oriana Fallaci. Wow, what a profile subject...Clearly I don't agree with her views, but the bravado...Wow. Evil genius.
More not stupid girls. Eveyln McDonnell's amazing Q&A with Miami booty bass legend Luther Campbell. Talk about fearless questions, Q: Do men's bodies trap women? If ever I had the guts to just slap someone across the face with that.
Here's the Columbia Journalism Review's piece about Pitchfork. I know Keira and think it's a pretty good piece, and I like how Scott came off in all of it. Wish she'd interviewed some PF devotees/critics to get the larger framework of how the site has affected indie culture. Maybe call up Merge and ask them how the Arcade Fire did after they PF began to champion the record, for instance...
The white hot thoughts of Jody Rosen on the never-ending success of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Heard that ridiculous "Dani California" song maybe 5 times driving back from NYC to Ohio. The video for it is depressing with moments of extreme ugly-ness (I mean, dude. You are so not allowed to parody Kurt, he was your...peer?). Plus the lyric "Price you gotta pay when you break the panorama" is just exactly the kind of Kiedis-m you'd expect to be sho be dooped into the song just to show off the..skillz... Barf.
Dero on 33 1/3 is unfair not for the least to my dear Matos, who is many things but guilty of not knowing his facts and figs on Prince? I dare you. Dude, Dero so doesn't get it. They aren't Cliff's Notes, they aren't in a house style, they aren't supposed to be perfect scale models of the albums that they reference. It's a...writing....prompt...for people who love these albums more than anything and want to go riff on it. Yes, I said it. A writing prompt. Do what thou wilt. If it's good enough for Crowley, it's good enough for my NIN book. And so it begins, the anthropologist/sociologist intervention on the rock critic mentality is what stretches the form beyond its constraits as news hook-based periodical genre. Dare I say it, it is the personal that makes it...art...It is assumed that you know all the facts, ma'am, the real writing question is, what do you do after that?
Okay okay, I have a piece in the Voice today. It's on the Polish nightclub scene in Greenpoint. It's been a long time coming and I'm pretty proud of it, though it is more fact than style. Feedback welcomed.
More later. Gotta jam some Da Capo stuff. Will have a press release out in the next week or so announcing the pieces for Best Music Writing 2006. Are you excited or what? Email me if you want to be added to press for the book. musicwriting@gmail.com
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