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12/31/02:

A plate of nights for the coming months -

I found a few interesting coming events that hopefully won't pry your tight wallet too hard. Apologies to non-residents for the Chicago-centric specifics, but you might still wanna check the links to find any of the following coming to a stage or screen near you.

Silver Rockets/ Kool Things - a bi-decade documentary on Sonic Youth is playing twice at the Film Center in January. A synopsis from the Sundance channel makes the filmmaking itself to seem a whole lot less radical than its subject matter, but I'm excited to see iffin' it can hit me with some newfound Sonic love. If you asked me "Who of all is the most important music to you?" Sonic Youth would be my immediate answer. Unfortunately, my distaste for most SY moments from Murray Street back to Washing Machine + the theft of all my high School-aged SY cassettes has kept them quite rare in my personal rotation these past few years. Hopefully this film makes a fresh listen for those frazzled old favourites.

A brief aside - though I'm still not really with the latest Sonic Youth records, I'm really starting to warm up to the Dim Stars collaboration 'tween Thurston Moore and Richard Hell. It's the only time I can remember honestly hearing these guys having a good time on some sloppy, sweaty rock. If this disc shows up in your used record bin, snap it up for its more than a few good mixtape sparkles.

Also at the Film Center next month - Remember Marvin Gaye. A short-ish document from the sexual healer's two-year tax exile to Belgium.

The Tortoise show at Metro hasn't sold out. Okay so Standards was a touch sub par, but hearing some of the daring numbers they roll out (like an instrumental quote of Joyce's "Aldeia de Ogum") makes for good jams always.

Damo Suzuki, of Can fame, will be at the Fireside Bowl in February with Defender. So far there's no mention of Cul de Sac, the band that quite confidently backed Damo up at the Empty Bottle last summer, but Defender are more clever than most of the post-rock pile and I most certainly would have regretted missing Mr Suzuki's firey bit of brilliance at his last show. If nothing else, a piece of out-rock history for six bucks is nothing to pass up.

And in March, nostalgic old cowpunks might want to check out the ever-witty John Doe (of X and the Knitters) or Tropical-philes like myself can dig up on Brazilian electronicist Moreno Veloso (son of Caetano Veloso) on seperate nights at the Old Town School of Folk Music.

If you recognise me at any of the above events, please wave as I look at you incredulously.

'til next year, stinky drunks!

posted by jeremy @ 6:51 PM

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While the Haypenny gang is watching, a very recent Bookslut interview with (and new shirtless photo of) Neal Pollack.

posted by jeremy @ 6:31 PM

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12/30/02:

Funkita for the paradigms

I'm usually trying hard to avoid contentious politicos. With the Festivus season and all, my head has been emptied of all the NPR headlines that rattle 'round my nodes, and replaced by the wild implications of all these irresistible "look-out!" links that fall out of the blogscape. It's not so much that I'm shocked, shocked - I just kinda see these and have to admit that the Holidays just make me feel really glib. So, today, I'm gettin' 'em all out then burying this page back into the music posts.

A CIA manual for Nicaraguan "freedom fighters" passed out in the 1980s. Great for practicing your Spanish and lots desktop images to pull a few confused stares into your cubicle (via No Sense of Place).

The top ten 11September conspiracy theories which, although intriguing, becomes kinda anticlimactic after a lead like this -

"For about thirty minutes after his chief of staff told him that America was under attack, George W. Bush continued to sit in an elementary school classroom listening to a second-grader tell a story about a pet goat."

(Link comes by way of Consumptive.org who very generously brought a pop in traffic to this green little weblog here (yes, indeed this is Jeremy of the evidence photo lab writing))

And with your conspiracy theories well-studied and water-tested, apply these long-suspected but newly detailed politico paradigms to Unocal's recent good news

or perhaps challenge yourself not to laugh OR shiver at Time Magazine's breezy story on that quiet kid from Wyoming.

And now that I've re-fictionalised my own senses, back to spiffy new sounds, bright lingo-isms, and all the all-around art-like phenomenals that keep all us dirty plebians from freakin' out.

posted by jeremy @ 3:14 PM

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L'annio del corpo

Okay, since I'm a sucker for end of the year top ten lists, I thought I'd scratch out my Ten Moments of Most Affected Corpola with which to remember this slightly crappy, mostly scary, quick and busy palindromic year -

in no particular order...

1. Strindberg and Helium and the Lincoln Park Trixie Society- respectively the funniest and the scariest things on the web that I couldn't resist mentioning.

2. The Official Adventures of Grandmaster Flash - a pivotal pop history lesson, Grandmaster Flash recreates an old school block party set from the likes of Parliament, Blondie, Kraftwerk, and Yellow Magic Orchestra which, heard in retrospect, pick apart Hip Hop's early alchemy in a really fresh way.

3. Saudade do futuro - if any of you have seen Berlin: Symphony of a City from the 1930's, Saudade becomes a similar sort of unnarrated urban portrait for Sao Paulo. Filmmakers follow a group of Repentistas - Brazilian buskers who improvise these silly, baudy raps to each other in the public parks - through a mad megalopolis, meeting up with an art director, a cab driver, barkeeps, and other recently emigrated Nordestinas from a variety of classes and contexts. There's plenty crammed into this sharply cut 60-minute film to whet interests in urban portraits, highly inventive reworking of classic documentary forms, or defiantly non-nostalgic and uncondescending introductions to some of Brazil's viable folk cultures.

4. Tuff by Paul Beatty - this is the closest I can come to citing 2002's most affecting book. I think it was published in 2000, but because I'm pretty sure that I haven't read anything from 2002, I'm throwing down Tuff as one of the strongest and most recent of this year's reads (aside from David Sedaris who's really beyond talking about at this time). Tuff, set in the still-rough blocks of Harlem, hilariously overturns white-boy notions of ghetto romance and an innocuously nostalgic Hip Hop generation clinging to the tropes of 70s black militarism. Some fine and original satire. (Others worth mentioning - Reinaldo Arenas's Palace of White Skunks and Ruy Castro's Chega de Saudade

5. Ellen Feiss - best phenomena of 2002 that entered my head most intensely then was forgotten most quickly (and I should be embarrassed for even mentioning it).

6. Madame Sata - this film won the grand prize at the Chicago International Film Festival, and it's well-deserved. I'm reminded of a Salinger story called "For Esme With Love and Squalor" where (if I remember right) a writer meets a prodigious young girl who asks him to write the most squalid and beautiful story possible - I'm sure as beautiful and squalid as this film. This stylish urban legend - about a cross-dressing, street-fighting pimp set in the water-stained slums of Rio in the 1930s - does well in satisfying one's occasional ache for a drunkenly precious Bohemian love story.

[Okay now, so that I can stop wasting precious Top Ten lines on all the good films I've seen this year, the cinematic runners up - City of God - a new Brazilian director's clever, hilarious and heartbreaking use of everyone's favourite Scorscese tropes, in 2003 it's coming to a "select city" near you; Shanghai Panic - in the blurry half-document/ half-fiction style of Larry Clark, this is a cleverly banal portrait of urban China's "little emperor" generation; most pleasant surprise from the mainstream - Minority Report; most disappointing waste of potential from the pseudo-indie fringes - Pumpkin; most chilling documentary (while intentionally overlooking Michael Moore) - the Trial of Henry Kissinger; best cinematic use of a bike - a tie between Donnie Darko and Beijing Bicycle.]

7. Favela Chic - Postonove 2 - a brilliant DJ set from the way-too-hip Favela Chic club in Paris (and by the sound of it I wouldn't even be allowed to pass out in a puddle in front of this place). Despite a few clunky Brazilian rap tracks (please prove me wrong, but so far I've found Brazil, like Japan, to export some of the world's worst hip hop), the track list on Postonove are going to be the perfect cheat-sheet for me next year while I search out ever more out-of-the-way Tropicalia discs that don't find their way to the crusty North. Postonove features some funky numbers from familiar favourites like Gal Costa and Rita Lee, names I've never heard before like Tony Bizzaro and Ney Matogrosso ("Freddy Mercury had nothing on Ney" according to the FavChic website), tastefully mixed with some newer drumn'bass tracks, more shitty Paulista hip hop, and a lovely ending from the even lovelier Cibelle.

8. The J Crew catalogue - worst newly discovered guilty pleasure (in a three-way tie between (2.) my new quest to find "the absolute most pathetic personal ad from a heterosexual male" in Nerve.com and (3.) finally succumbing to having a cell phone (the three are quite related when you think about it)).

9. Grad school - my most depressing encounter of 2002 (link found a while back on Pureselipsquarejaw).

10. the June 2002 Chicago Critical Mass Ride - that picture in the sidebar of me on my bike, is cut out of the background of this posted photo (to go with the whole "surveillance" conceit of this weblog). By October 2001, I got a little burned out with mass rides that were becoming increasingly soured by snotty young pseudo-anarchos taking their shit out on stranded drivers. But come June, on a friend's invite, I made it out again to a gorgeous long summer jaunt of more than 700 (!!) smiling cyclists coasting through Chicago's west side, greeted by rather thrilled residents, then culminating with an ecstatic descent onto the rush-hour choked Eisenhower expressway as surly cars gaped at whooping bikers sailing through the space between lanes (skirting mass arrest), temporarily but completely reconstituting urban space, resocialising the cities most deliberately alienating architecture, in short - the most fun thing I've done this year.

posted by jeremy @ 12:07 AM

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12/29/02:

That phony Beatlemania...

The World, whose global music coverage finds artists that are either amazingly fascinating or ridiculous ethnic caricatures (never anything else), ran a really nice little eulogy for Joe Strummer last week.

posted by jeremy @ 9:26 PM

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12/28/02:

And a Happy Festivus to everyone...

firstly, my Xmas sentiments oh-so well-expressed -

nextly, some sad Xmas hyperbole

w/ lastly, my wishes for a merry new kuviasungnerk and my Xmas gift to my very good Haypenny friends from Detroit -

a feverishly elated announcement that the ("Haypenny editor-filled") rock band Havilland (that's two L's) have finished Havillandonline.com, complete with a coke-addled blog and the whole DL on catching some sweet and charming new jangle-rockin' on its way up next time you unluckily find yourself in Havilland's crap of a city.

posted by jeremy @ 1:27 AM

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12/23/02:

some jazz snacks for Monday -

just learned this fascinating did'ja-know from the latest issue of Straight No Chaser (unfortunately, SNC's content is only in print, not on the site) -

John Coltrane's A Love Surpeme "was recorded one winter night between 9pm and midnight" (!!!).

The Cover Art of Blue Note Records - a (hefty) new design book out now reproducing the work of Reid Miles, Blue Note's head cover artist since 1955, who took a quite stunning and distinctive early advantage of the size of the then-new 12" LP cardboard cover.

some more info from the Jazz on Two Levels exhibit.

posted by jeremy @ 4:36 PM

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12/22/02:

for anyone as currently obsessed as I am with the progressive potential of Brazil's administration-elect (that includes founding Tropicalista Gilberto Gil as Minster of Culture), the article
"Brazil and CIA" from Namebase.org should provide a particularly instructive (and unsettling) bit of background.

posted by jeremy @ 5:10 AM

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slightly cured...

God is terrible with names -

"As a result of our scientific culture, we have developed a very peculiar notion of religion in the West. Today faith is equated with believing obligatory doctrines, whereas originally it meant a struggle to find ultimate meaning and value in life. Doctrines are assumed to be statements of irrefutable fact, instead of myths; and a myth is now regarded as something that is clearly untrue, instead of a way of expressing a truth that is too elusive for ordinary logical discourse. When interpreted in an exclusively literal manner, religion becomes demonstrably absurd, and this becomes especially clear when we try to speak of God."

YES!! thank you...

(via Rebecca's pocket)

posted by jeremy @ 5:02 AM

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funkita for the dining rooms...

this year's winter solstice finds me a night in, sipping much Shiraz to ward off insomnia, full on gorgonzola/ pear salad and baked apples stuffed with mashed sweet potato and almonds, shivering comfortably, feeling slight twinges of guilt at having splurged on three new records for myself while stopping to pick up a birthday present for a friend. i'm seriously an addict. if i even walk into a record shoppe to pick up a free weekly, i'll end up burning through at least thirty dollars.

but my new copy of fragmentorchestra is warming me up perfectly on this slow sleepy Chicago night. it's pretty much the bossa-fied breakbeats one would find anywhere else in the Ishtar/ Schema catalogue, but added here is thick layers of synth washes - a perfect last chill-out disc for the morning. the usual tropes of the NuJazz genre are well represented, but there's much more in fragmentorchestra's ambient tastes, bringing to mind older electronic sounds like UK trance pioneers Black Dog and Speedy J, or classic Tresor 12"s like "Schizophrenia" or "Domina." (btw, ishtar's web site is quite gracious with free tracks)

so far I think I've gone through three favourite singers this year, warming my last winter with Joyce's crazy strength, then blown away by Elis Regina for a summer. now, not a day goes by without playing one of Gal Costa's brilliant 60's albums. this week's new one is Gal (1969), her first outing alone after Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil's exile, and here one easily opens a turbulent chapter in the Tropicalia story. she leaves the sweet melancholy of her preceeding album, produced by Gil, for a really twisted schizophrenic work ingesting much of Hendrix and American psychedelia into the Tropicalist continuum. brilliant.

(some guy named Dan the bass player for whatever reason happens to have a ton of Gal Costa pictures on his site)

also, I've been passing up the re-issue of Nelson Angelo e Joyce for too many months now. this lovely mostly acoustic album is up there with Joyce's best later work once she struck out on her own. Nelson Angelo, for me, is quite a pleasant surprise as well - I know that he was Joyce's colaborator on her early 70s songs (which in mind are her best work, culminating with Feminina in 1980 and downhill after that), and I knew that he and Joyce are the parents of contemporary Brazilian pop singer Anna Martins, but I am quite surprised at his own musicianship on this album - stunning solo vocals and a really lovely compliment to Joyce's complex voice when they harmonise. If you buy this one and The Essential Joyce, you pretty much have the best there is from Ms. DeJesus.

Slipcue.com has an informative (though somewhat acerbic) Joyce discography.

posted by jeremy @ 3:31 AM

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sueisfine...

while recently thinking about gratuitous swirl pop worship and the brief but lasting mark of MBV, I happened upon this witty little comment from
a brief history of amazing disappointments -

the only reason we still deify kevin shields is because he had the sense to disappear before he turned into something awful. a smart move. what would we think of my bloody valentine today if we had just suffered through ten years worth of ill-advised drum n'bass experiments, the post rock years, and then ... er ... rock revisionism.

another reviewer of the Guitar album (I can't remember to credit him/ her - apologies!) said something to the effect of recently subtly seeing neo-shoegazer bands slip by unnoticed for all the loud hype around the whole garage rock revival. as a 25-year old, this is the first time I'm seeing my own seminal music being nostalgically rehashed - a milestone, to be sure.

posted by jeremy @ 2:49 AM

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alrighty, so although I tested Emusic.com and found it to be a bit sub-par for the globally-scoped sounds of now (okay, so I only checked to see if they had Suba or Nicola Conte - not much of a test, i know), Sixdegrees records - home of Suba (check this late great brilliant man out - you'll giggle w/ joy) as well as Zuco 103 (decent), Bebel Gilberto (gorgeous!), and
a myriad of other sounds, locales, and genres - is beta testing a new music on demand site w/ an okay smattering of lesser-known globe-trotting beats - so get em free while you can.

there's a page of remixes including the likes of Batidas (NY-based Afro-Latin house) and Euphoria (a Toronto-based guitar player w/ a knack for layering ambient slide strings over hip hop beats) that looks promising. also, plenty of offerings from Cheb I Sabbah, an Algerian-born DJ who cut-n-pastes Eastern sounds into a swirling electronics, who I'm not necessarily drooling over, but I did catch him at the MCA's Solstice party last summer and he was interesting alongside traditional Indian dancers and subtly wrenching video of the Asian third world that gave the festivities a tinge of discomforting ambivalence.

La beta corpo promises to light a fire under my ass and search out some better resources soon enough - I just happened to have found this today. do give a listen though and let Sixdegrees know that they're onto something.

posted by jeremy @ 2:16 AM

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12/20/02:

La corpo nova...

My very dear friend Li'l Drey just got an "http://www.emusic.com">Emusic.com subscription for Xmas and asked for some recommendations. Always eager to give out (and get) some new musical nods, I thought I'd copy my four picks here -

Suba -Sao Paulo Confessions. thick and insanely complex Dubby electronics and Afro-Brazilian beats from the (sadly late) producer of Bebel Gilberto's Tanto Tempo. really sexy vocals top it off.

Nicola Conte - Jet Sounds Revisited. a good taste test for whether or not you can dig the whole European NuJazz scene. bright and funky jazz horn licks swing loudly through everything from wild samba sessions to bumping house tracks to a zoot-suited homage to Cab Calloway.

Lali Puna - Scary World Theory. from Morr Records, a really fun use of New Order-like pop hooks and crazy post-Aphex Twin electronics. after seeing them cover Slowdive's "Mellon Yellow" at the Empty Bottle, I knew I was in love.

Guitar - Sunkissed - Lali Puna's labelmates prove there's nothing wrong w/ a little gratuitous swirl pop worship (see "Mellon Yellow" above). the best album Kevin Shields never made.

Unfortunately Emusic has none of these (although you could easily find any of these at brick-n-mortar Tower Records - what gives?), so I still contend that peer-to-peer swapping Napster paradigm is the only Internet music way to go.

Last musical finding - in searching out good links to introduce the aforementioned bands I happened upon Almostcool.org, a nicely thorough (maybe obsessive) homepage-ish site of regularly updated reviews. La beta corpo certainly would aspire to also offering this sort of resource. unfortunately, I find myself currently starving so I can get a thousand dollars saved up by March, so I must to stay far far away from the records shops.

posted by jeremy @ 5:56 PM

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the only cheer you'll hear from me...

Morr Records, a Berlin-based label with a fine stable of mostly German electronic pop music (including some of my current favourites Lali Puna, Ms. John Soda, and Guitar), is taking a maddeningly long time
getting their damn website in order. However, after seeing this freaky Christmas animation, I'll forgive them completely. Now hurry it up with the site, the info, the free MP3's!!

posted by jeremy @ 5:29 PM

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Happy Friday!

posted by jeremy @ 5:04 PM

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12/17/02:

better living through...

from rebecca's pocket I found the New York Times' annual Year in Ideas - 100 of this year's most profound, amusing, ridiculous, redundant, or even truly frightening innovations, patterns, and emerging cultural phenomena of the year. for most of them, one can only wish a quick demise for 2003....

and some personal ideas of note from disturbing - featherless chickens; to unnerving - the know nothing CEO; to, well, something I might consider for a moment - Open Source Begging..

and, I would like to add one more new idea (new to me anyways) w/ some amusingly scary cultural implications -

the Angle Adjustable Steering wheel Table Auto Tray -

some ad copy -
It has been more than one hundred years since automobile was invented. It has been said that people are living on wheels in the U.S.A. When a driver is resting in an automobile, he or she may want to read, write, eat meals, apply cosmetics or use a portable computer. However, he or she surely has experienced uncomfortable for these activities [sic] due to a steering wheel that causes many inconveniences.

oddly, I don't see any way for the little shelf to not turn with the steering wheel.

I just HAD to find out about this steering wheel table thing after reading ph8's amusing
post on massively over-featured consumables that blitz the late night airwaves and wondering if such things really exist (without cable television, I'm really out of the loop on such things).

and one last inane but oddly tempting idea to remember 2002 by - Botox parties!!.

posted by jeremy @ 4:17 PM

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12/15/02:

urbanphoto.org - an interesting hodge podge of "photo galleries [that] aren't meant as art, they're meant as windows unto the cities they represent."

photos as windows? lofty, yes, but the photo contributions tend toward really lovely uses of unnaturally bright web colours. essays like "Rise of the megacity" and "So much for spectacle" makes for good reading - good transient thinking. there's a section on Montreal, my favourite N.American city, and a linked map of my my own hometown's Wrigleyville - an unpretentious celebration of healthy design.

posted by jeremy @ 3:04 AM

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12/14/02:

greetings, again. La Corpo welcomes you to a all-new and now semi-original (hack) layout to finally move it out from behind the myriads of other less-loved blogs that would also feature the handsome but too-prominently-listed "Chrome" template. honestly, I only chose Chrome for its nice wide text field right of the links offering plenty of room for stolen images. its dashing good looks can be resisted.
basically, I'm posting this irrelevant announcement to publicly disclose that the tables from Chrome have been stolen and worked into my new layout and all rest - c'est moi, merci beaucoup. so now I can comfortably add tags by hand whenever I please. and I'm really into green this year. the only problem now is that Blogger seems to have purged all of my previous month's posts from the archives - so my New Orleans and Vancouver write-ups are no more :(

and with that bit out of the way...

Chicago friends - tired of all the vapid Drumline, Maid in Manhatten shite being hurled onto the screens this month? Music Box is showing The Trial of Henry Kissinger this week only. I saw this in Vancouver last September and it is easily one of the most precise and sharply edited documentaries I've seen - not to mention, a timely insight into the kinds of Machiavellian tactics that inform the ugly will to power seeping out of the US's current administration (wherein we notice the Nixon playbook lying around more and more each week).

posted by jeremy @ 6:19 AM

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oh, this is so freaking funny. find out how a simple hack listed a gay sex manual on Amazon's page for Pat Robertson's book.

Robertson book is paired with something naughty.

alas, it's just this sort of cleverness I Iack in my bid to bluster the Christian right

(link by way of chrisafer who lacks no cleverness in working a little Tina Yothers into his weblog)

posted by jeremy @ 3:36 AM

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12/13/02:

more fuel to my theory that sports are the most immobile, dialectically locked form of culture (like hearing British English slip into nonspeak when the BBC turns to its athletic coverage) -

Forever Charlton - an undecipherable weblog about - um - Soccer??

posted by jeremy @ 6:07 AM

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"Rock and me, Rock and you..."

In
"The nutty Brazilian rock," philosopher Olavo de Carvalho, through a hyperbolical satire that becomes a bit opaque in translation, mocks the wild contradictions of the Brazilian rock star - holding an empty Coke can, denouncing the imperialist New World Order, bellowing patriotic words over a wholly American rock beat. (more of DeCarvalho's short essays pull a similarly fatalist Baudrillardian wit through other vernacular topics.) I only mention this to shows how little good I am at navigating the lines between Brazil's contenious political history and it's cultural backlash as it meanwhile both eagerly ingests and repudiates its non-native influences. I am, however, enthusiastically aware of the result of this unfamiliarly slippery position - one of the world's most momentously innovative musical cultures

this week, La Corpo's nutty rock department had a variety of variety of encounters with Caetano Veloso stories and interviews, coinciding with the publication of the English version of his memoir -

from Brazzil, 120 years of music, meaning the ages of sextagenarians Veloso and fellow Tropicalista Gilberto Gil added together.

on NPR's Fesh Air, an excellent interview with Terry Gross (whom I don't usually particularly enjoy) where he details his torture and imprisonment in the 60s, imagery in his lyrics in (some English light at last!), more-than-surface insights into Tropicalismo and Brazil's artistic, political, and ethnic contexts, and how his radicalism has changed and grown over the decades.

and brief introductions on Sunday Morning Edition and PRI's the World which weren't much new to me but still quite a thrill for hearing an intimate voice over a wide and mainstream radio signal. on both shows Veloso repeats the same wonderful quote :

We had bossa nova being prepared and it was very sophisticated, and we listened to high quality music. We thought of rock and roll as just low quality music, you know just commercial rubbish.

La Corpo's encounter with Mr Veloso was last November 14 at the Chicago Theatre. A half-sold auditorium. what must have been every Brazilian in Chicago in attendance ('cuz I don't see many otherwise). some onstage technical difficulties causing Mr Veloso to cantankerously halt the second song halfway through ("this fucking guitar. I can't go on like this"). it was a strange thing to witness a spectacle like this breaking down so fully. the performer continued stiffly, with little to mask his frustration. then, the army of musicians and percussionists leaves Mr Veloso onstage alone with acoustic guitar for some of his sad airy 60s favourites, some Bossa standards, and a few cheeky riffs on forgotten American popular song. Mr Veloso talks to the crowd a bit, jokes in Portuguese as the auditorium of Every-Brazilian-in-Chicago laughs amicably, then Mr Veloso says: "I should speak English now. there might be 4 or 5 people hear that don't know Portuguese." a warm and wonderful show follows.

music historian John Krich writes that "There is no exact North American counterpart [to Veloso]: not quite Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, somewhere in between John Denver and Jim Morrison." I always see the wit of John Lennon in Veloso. The World's feature says Veloso is to Brazil what Bob Marley is to Jamaica, Dylan to the US, and Paul McCartney to England. I nod to all of these, but would add the major difference between Dylan or McCartney and Veloso - Caetano's current work is never in the shadow of an earlier legacy. his continual Tropicalista ingestion of contemporary post-rock, hip hop, electronic sounds, nujazz, folk music, and so much else continually surpass earlier work, and most importantly, keep him far from the innocuous categorical ghettos of so-called "world music" or nostalgic Northern pictures of Brazil.

posted by jeremy @ 4:22 AM

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an image -

and a context.

although I'm not so sure why it appears to have six fingers, I feel my bitchy, jaded Xmas sentiments thoroughly embodied - is the only honest holiday expression I've seen so far? on the 25th, I'll be giving my family in Detroit the gift of an extradordinarily, lovingly made organic vegetarian dinner - slow-cooked, well-practiced, sweet, hearty, referencing a more traditional Ham-n-Cranberry feast, but far from gorging and hopefully waste-free.
until then, the season just clutters my way more glib things to ignore.

posted by jeremy @ 2:51 AM

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12/12/02:

"But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow..."

from Salon,
Peace kooks - "The new antiwar movement is in danger of being hijacked by bizarre extremist groups -- and most protesters don't even know it."

finally, an insightful overview of the political makeup within the large swells of recent anti-war actions - and the danger of popular attention directed only toward the most radical (and usually most misinformed and inarticulate) wings of the group.

posted by jeremy @ 6:24 PM

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really shitty news of the month -
Stereolab Singer Dies In Bike Accident.

that short article pretty much has the whole LD - Mary Hansen was killed by a car on her bike in London. she died last Monday at age 36.

it's so proverbial, it's awful... fuck cars!

knowing Stereolab's 12-years constant and prolific output, plus numerous side projects and appearances (Turn On, Luna, High Llamas, Uilab, Mouse on Mars), one of my favourites was Ms Hansen's vocals on Brokeback's "The Great Banks," where she "La's" the continuous "jetty" melody over an eerily lilting slide guitar and double bass. the song is on Brokebacks's Field Recordings..., a remarkably loose and moody album of off-the-cuff bass n' percussion hooks that moves with a slow and dense inertia. it's a slow and fairly difficult work on first listen, but Mary's voice popping in suddenly on the second-to-last track becomes this momentarily giddy relief (especially if you get the Tortoise/ Isotope217 continuity).

awful, awful

posted by jeremy @ 6:42 AM

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12/9/02:

Engrish.com! - a site celebrating ads, signs, and other commercial text written in a wonderfully broken (often more transparent) English syntax.
a "trendy feeling, traditional feeling" indeed

(found via consumptive.org)

posted by jeremy @ 4:01 PM

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12/8/02:

How Green Is BP?

posted by jeremy @ 9:33 PM

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12/7/02:

can you get my song?

more crazy japanese commercials at
Yogatori
and dark city productions.

i'm going to go have a seizure now.

posted by jeremy @ 10:24 PM

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new bike racks in NYC and elsewhere are known as "Chicago Style Racks" - easy on the eyes and inexpensive, but doesn't take a jewel thief to saw the thin metal, so beware.

posted by jeremy @ 9:44 PM

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DJ Martian's Page - a fully music-themed weblog, w/ what appears to be a healthy interest in the more avant strains of electronica and lots and lots and lots of links. a good portal for a long music web-cruise for sure.

if any readers here happen to run a similarily broad music-weblog, let me know and I'd be more than happy to link it here.

posted by jeremy @ 4:22 PM

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la cucaracha - a "hilarious, edgy daily comic strip with plenty of satirical Raza attitude."

see also, Pocho.com- "Satire + Cerveza." Muy pinche cool!

posted by jeremy @ 3:18 PM

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12/6/02:

And now, dear reader, I leave you to your weekend with this lovely, sad Flash animette from Mantlepies.com

(link via ph8)

posted by jeremy @ 7:31 PM

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From NoLogo.org -

"Sharon, LaPen, and anti-Semitism" by Naomi Klein

This article does quite well in clearing up supposed contradictions between Leftist views critical of Israeli aggression and concerns with rising anti-Semitism in Europe. Klein argues that fears sparked by right-wing politicians like Jean-Marie Le Pen is covertly useful to shoring up support for Sharon's militarism, a rhetorical strategy which works to confuse distinctions between Zionism and the multi-faceted global forms of Judasim. For secular lefties like myself, Klein is quite helpful toward sorting out a more humanitarian critical strategy out of a dizzyingly complex web of global relationships - a difficult task of articulating and absorbing condemnation of Israeli (and US) policies without being misinterpretted as anti-Jew. (a worthwhile article to be sure, but beware of some rather scary replies at the bottom of the page).

posted by jeremy @ 7:15 PM

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From the BBC News -

an illustration from the recent Pew data on World public opinion of the US -

some mighty high highs there.

posted by jeremy @ 6:35 PM

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Some Internet nostalgia for you, written in May 1996 (with few updates since) -

The Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design

calls for "standard link colours" (blue and purple), "human-readable directory URLS" (meaning concise, easy to memorise URLS (like old Yahoo) as opposed to long, unreadable scripting URLS (like anything else)), and
pages so long the user must (god forbid!) scroll! However, the author did rightfully admonish the Blink tag.
Oh, the fun of instant cyber-quaintness

and now, to be fair, The Top Ten Mistakes Revisited, from 1999, although the author is still sticking to most of his earlier guns.

posted by jeremy @ 6:15 PM

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a succinct little archive of Ivan Illitch's life and work.

posted by jeremy @ 4:59 PM

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Last month, in San Lorenzo in Lucina di Roma, Italy, families of victims of car accidents staged a silent protest, commemorating their loss with a makeshift cemetary of a couple hundred crosses. If you happen to know a little Italian (or want to see more photos that really are quite fascinating), here's a write up of the event.

posted by jeremy @ 4:55 PM

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a delightful Canadian blog... full of inimitable Canadian sarcasm... and lots of horrid scenarios involving Howie Mandel.

A Day On Vancouver Island
I'd call my Toronto kin now if it weren't 3:53am

posted by jeremy @ 6:45 AM

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for Chicagoans -

a letter to the Sun-Times with disheartening observations of the "improved" Wacker drive...

Wacker rehab ignores most users -

If the resources spent reviving Wacker Drive had been allocated in proportion to Wacker Drive's users, we could have built space for parks, plazas and transit improvements, along with automobile access.

Instead, we got eight lanes of traffic, a world record for pouring concrete, and a broken promise of a riverwalk. By overlooking transit improvements, and not adequately considering the value of riverfront pedestrian space, Wacker Drive perpetuates a cycle of congestion, smog and dependence on foreign oil for the next 100 years.

I've noticed that since Wacker's been blocked for two years, everyone seems to have forgotten it's there and never uses it. I can always snuff the red light (on my bike, of course) w/out any problem. Maybe that's the new cutting edge traffic calming solution - ground cars from the street for a year (seems to work in Bogota).

For next punished street, I nominate North avenue 'tween Halstead and the river so I can finally shop at Whole Foods without getting killed.

posted by jeremy @ 6:26 AM

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12/5/02:

From the American Library Association, the top 100 most banned books in the '90s. #1 is something called Scary Stories by Alvin Schwartz, which I'm not familiar with, and the next two are Daddy's Roommate and I know why the caged bird sings. From these three you can pretty much see the lines alongwhich the anti-intellectual sentiments are described throughout this list.

Harry Potter comes in #7.

posted by jeremy @ 11:24 PM

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12/4/02:

Electronetwork.org/Exhibits

Web art dealing with "discussion of electromagnetism, its infrastructure, and the civilization it defines."

posted by jeremy @ 3:51 PM

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Blog yer Vinyl

Although the codekeeper of recordnerd.com seems to be MIA, I do enjoy browsing through these lists by people w/ not a whole lot better to do than inventory their entire music collections (too bad the search function doesn't work (and the last copyright date is 2001)). By chance, a couple months ago a co-worker w/ some recently purchased turntables said he's but some stuff from me (then flaked out) so I already have a typed list of tracks I'd be willing to sell... a little tedious cutn'paste action... and here we've my Recordnerd list of wax I'd be willing to part w/ and for not a whole lot. Some of the stuff is truly horrid (and I'd tell you if it was) but there's some good finds lurking there too. Dj Andy Smith (of Portishead fame)... Juan Atkins (godfather f Detroit techno)... 4 Hero (as heard on Ursula Rucker's brilliant disc)... might be worth a look...

also I finally looked up the homepage of "The Freak" -www.freaked.co.uk- who writes a great column on Internet music findings in Straight No Chaser. His own site is a cool Flash portal for digging out some deep, rare, out of plain sight grooves. have a look.

posted by jeremy @ 6:43 AM

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12/3/02:

a girl's guide to going out en nueva york

a very original (and spicey (and apparently necessary (not that I would know))) duo-lingo weblog...

posted by jeremy @ 4:10 PM

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someone from the CCM listserv was kind enough to post a link to this ESPN column. It's basically just more SUV (and Humvee) derision, but the concluding paragraph is sure to send any-n-many a biker into an ecstatic "yeah!!" -

Of course, when you get right down to it, a real Sports Utility Vehicle doesn't have all-wheel drive or four-wheel drive or even four wheels. A true Sports Utility Vehicle has two wheels, requires actual physical, athletic effort to operate and doesn't pollute the planet in the slightest bit. It's called a bicycle. And we would all be better off if we rode them to run our errands a little more often.

thank you, Mr Caple...

unfortunately for me, I'm still awaiting another paycheck for the necessary gloves, goggles, and balaclava w/ which to tackle these crisp and spooky Chgo winter nights w/ my tough slick-wheeled track bike. yesterday, doing some foot-messengering around the Loop, I puffed cold hands and envied the skidding bikers who all know that sweating under Gor-Tex and blasting head down through snowy wind is as much a rush as skiing with the added tricks of winding through moose cars but w/out the alienation of leisure.

interested?? see Chicago Bike Winter or Icebike for everything you'll ever need.

posted by jeremy @ 3:44 PM

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12/1/02:

earlier I made bad notes about automated authorship and instantaneous translation. I found a few relevant reads to expand this thought -

1. fiction from Salon -

"Literary Devices" by Richard Powers:

"We've written a query language that can treat even unstructured text as a database, chaining inferences and matching patterns. All we need is a sufficiently large text base to tap into. And look what we have out there, ready-made: two billion pages of collective unconscious, and growing! Think of this thing as Google meets Babelfish, tied to an accreting expert system."

2. English speakers, have fun deciphering this funny little Danish site assisted by the one and only grand global gesture fuckfinger.dk:

"Du har f?et fingeren!"

(via no sense of place.)

posted by jeremy @ 3:14 PM

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