Category: Media

This is a container category for media reviews and related drivel.

Summer Music Project 2008: Week Four

Week number four introduces the truly foreign material. (Four, foreign, oh look how clever I am.)

Let’s be clear on something: I’m not a Japanophile, really. I happen to like some of their animators and some of their musical acts, and that’s the bulk of my cultural fascination. To better enjoy the animated stories, I do want to know enough background material. Beyond that it’s a matter of taking in whatever happens to catch my magpie dilettante attention. I am, of course, a curious fellow.

But you came here for the music.

I’ve tried to explain before that what works for me isn’t the meaning of the words but rather their sound as part of the whole musical experience. I can’t illustrate the concept any more clearly than with three KOTOKO tracks. Enjoy the mellow “Hitorigoto,” the metallic “Suppuration -core-,” and the merry “Swift Love.”

If you find yourself hankering for words sung in English once again, you may find next week to be a vast improvement…

11 July, 2008
Summer Music Project 2008: Week Three

This one practically assembled itself, folks. Let’s see: It’s the 4th of July, and I happen to have a song which includes the lyrics, “I just flipped off President George.” Never mind that the song is from 1992 and is about George The First, Dada’s “Dizz Knee Land” fits the modern time very well, thank you.

Let’s go back to the early ’90s for a moment, though. If it wasn’t for the format switch at KGON then I might not be a Dada fan at all today. When Loren Steveson and I threw out all of the “non-classic” discs during the great purge, I snagged a copy Dada’s Puzzle album on general principle (I liked the single well enough but wasn’t sure if the band had blown their creativity on the one track), took it home, and fell in like. No, it wasn’t love, but there’s something about their jangly, trippy California rock sound that works for me when I’m in the right mood.

Picking from the other two Dada albums in my collection, American Highway Flower and their self-titled 1998 release, I follow up their original big hit with “All I Am” and “Spinning My Wheels.”

Enjoy, and we’ll meet again in a week for something a bit more… foreign.

4 July, 2008
Summer Music Project 2008: Week Two

I only ask fifteen minutes of your time, this go-around. The music is modern, innovative and toe-tappingly good. As a bonus, there’s a whole lot less of my aimless yammering to suffer through. What more could you ask?

By next week I’ll probably have the A/C unit in the window. That’s probably going to put a halt to the voice work for the duration of the project, I’m afraid. I had a hard enough time eliminating the outside noise with all of my windows shut, and the air conditioner is altogether too good at letting the outside world into my bedroom. How’s that for planning, eh?

That’s okay, though. I spent half of my time tonight just trying to hunt down the worst of the clicks and pops. Future weeks will be orders of magnitude easier to assemble if all I have to do is mix tracks and write up some color commentary…

27 June, 2008
Touched By An Atheist

Taking up a worthy challenge, I present George Carlin on Mad TV in, “Touched By An Atheist.”

(The Python-esque disclaimers are just icing on the cake.)

23 June, 2008
Summer Music Project 2008: Week One

Welcome to summer, friends.

I’ll warn you right from the get-go: This one’s a bit wordy, in part because of some introductory material that won’t need repeating. Future installments should feature roughly half the amount of jabberjaw on my part. With that out of the way… let the festivities commence!

Believe it or not, I had this thing done four days in advance. My plan is to have two more in the can by next Friday and maintain an at-least-one-week buffer through the course of the season so I’m not doing last-minute panicky stupid things or (worse) dropping weeks. Anything’s possible, they tell me…

I have no idea whatsoever how this is going to sound on different speakers or headphones from mine, and that scares me because I know how lousy the headset microphone I’m using really is. What might kill this whole project faster than anything is that I might just not be able to stand the lousy production quality anymore.

Oh well. Worse come to worst, you’ll get music mixes with written commentary. That counts for something, I hope.

20 June, 2008
From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming

I was handed a stack of Ian Fleming novels a couple of weeks ago, and I finally got around to reading through one of them.

“From Russia With Love” is the story of a well-planned, well-executed trap, one into which Secret Agent James Bond walks blindly, right up until the jaws are snapping shut. It’s a gentleman’s travelogue with occasional violence and one instance of sex. The book’s more interested in the meals and cigarettes than with setting and story, let alone characterization. The most meaningful relationship in the book isn’t between James Bond and Tatiana Romanova, but between James and his Turkish friend, Darko Kerim.

In short, it’s not at all what I expected. Bond’s hardly the supercool hero who has everything figured out from the start. For one thing, he’s a bit squeamish about cold-blooded killing. Perhaps this is because it’s ungentlemanly… as is smelling of rat tunnels. He makes an entire series of strategic blunders throughout, and in fact only survives through a combination of dumb luck, some preparation from Q Branch, and a suddenly stupid and self-absorbed opponent. Even then, at the very end of the book, he botches things again and is left for… well, not quite dead, but he’s in bad shape.

I mean, what?

It’s a very odd book, and certainly not timeless. A bit of research after-the-fact tells me that this is one of the best-regarded selections from the series. I think that’s my cue not to pursue Ian Fleming’s books further, don’t you?

19 June, 2008