finds a bit of robot music
does a little robot dance

there's something so satisfying about music so severely choked by its own aesthetic, so focused, that it can be one thing and one thing only.

new Wired issue has an article on james cameron, hyperventilating about his history leading up to his big gamble on an articulated SyFy excursion called Avatar. It's written in such a way that, at best, it will be the doubters' comeuppance. at worst, an underappreciated gem of a personal project fulfilled. gg, Wired.
Cameron has an Oedipus complex about Lucas and wants to outdo him. cue a painstaking 15 year project where he invites linguists and biologists to make up a bunch of shit that takes months to do and doesnt exist. apparently a language is created with rules and correct grammar. an alternate form of biology exists for plant and animal life. they have their own taxonomies and every aspect about this planet and people is logged in an encyclopedia 350 pages long.

i dont mesh well with fandom in general but my impression is that for both the star wars and star trek worlds, there may have been a decent slab of detail put into them iniitially, but the huge databases of information on the highly obscure crap was motivated partially by years of existence and partially out of actual.. demand for these aspects? i thought the whole romance was that people could give themselves the illusion that this grubby product of fan service was made just for them.

being tossed a world where everything's already thought of before you care sounds like a vanity project inviting you to fuck around in someone else's xanadu. i'm sure they'll try to expand the fiction by hiring people to write companion books and all that.. nonsense. but the point is that the MOVIE kinda has to grab people to begin with before anyone is supposed to care about the books you get on the other rack at Bizarro World.

so: the movie.
it looks like the goddamn internet.
it looks like it's the nacho-xtreme-mountaindew version of ferngully
it looks overwrought and embarrassing and goofy as hell
it looks like i'd rather watch starship troopers because
it looks like the actors came from the same farm
it looks like i'll see it on tuesday discount anyway because wired knows how to write a plug peice and i want to see if 200 mil produced a decent movie or a schandentastic wreck

it's not like titanic was a well done epic. it was only awesome because the dialog was a lot of fun to laugh at with friends in the room. it was a bad movie. cameron probably made another bad movie.

if i end up liking it for some perfectly strange reason i guess i'll be pretty embarrassed.

ever since i was actually visiting france when they won the world cup i've always had half an ear out for whenever anything about them got a mention stateside.
so what's been happening recently has been a lol-a-minute.
Thierry Henry, star player and team captain, egregiously handled the ball during a playoff qualifying match against scrappy underdog ireland, breaking the tie of an exhaustive stalemate and securing the victory out of a generally uninspired performance from the french.

the ball handling was so egregious that henry himself said that he did it, but excused himself by saying "then again i'm not the ref"

this by itself is a perfectly acceptable story of trolling ireland hardcore, who are quick to anger and better off being shit at everything than decent because it all falls to peices for them eventually

but the fallout is paying in dividends here. the internet is ablaze with outrage, ignorant of or just ignoring the fact that the angrier they get, the funnier it is for people who know what's happening but dont give a shit for the sport altogether. the editorials inspired out of this under the guise of sportsmanship are really just a platform to complain as hard as humanly possible, saying henry missed his chance at legendary status by arguing with the ref about his own goal. the fans who ragequit the team, organization, sponsors, country, sport.... the higher the swearing goes the better it is. even france is mad.

the ultimate would be if henry deliberately provoked everyone by calling himself the greatest player ever, pointing at the press going:

Max Richter // November

1. Alva Noto | Xerrox Vol. 2

Like a plane hangar at midnight. Halogens, mechanisms, exposed yet brilliantly luminated and clean in a surreal sense.

2. Clark | Totems Flare

Described negatively by P4K as an unhinged rollercoaster. the fevered soundsculpting he does between delicacy and static is pretty powerful

3. Elegi | Varde

Electroacoustic musing on the knowledge of isolation and death in the Antarctic. as lonely and bleak as it promises, almost delusional.

4. Shadow Dancer | Golden Traxe

Boys Noize with less whimsy, Justice with less showboating. Motors like a motherfucker and with serious energy. This decades Dig Yr Own Hole

5. Machinefabriek | Gris Gris

Imagine Autechre’s ‘VI Scose Poise’ stretched out over 35 minutes. Delicate and shining in grey. Traces of voices and a carved space.

6. Kreng | L’Autopsie Phenomenale de Dieu

Chamber theatre as medical procedure. Dirge for the macabre and brilliant silent movies. Haunted wooden acoustics alone with its memories.

7. Mika Vainio | Aineen Musta Puhelin / Black Telephone of Matter

Sound as Nightmare ambient. Not as bare as Kesto’s CD3 but its cousin. Fans of silent hill soundtrack note this one. Hard frequencies.

8. Simon Scott | Navigare

As if Polmo Polpo and Svarte Greiner made an album together. beautiful and forlorn. claustrophobically overwhelmed with sound

9. Soap&Skin | Lovetune for Vacuum

A cold blue vein of melancholic piano songs vamp’d by electronics. Her voice is almost pretentious yet fantastic. Drags its heart through…

10. Florence and the Machine | Lungs

Brilliant pop LP w/ layers of intensive & eloquent music & an astounding voice beaking out above the waves. Too bad about the last 4 tracks.

11. Grizzly Bear | Veckatimest

The “Accomplished Indie Album™” that initially annoys with its perfectionism. Then one song hooks and the rest compulsively follow.

12. Years | Years

Swings between rustic simplicity and the most beautiful melodies I’ve heard this year. A DMST spinoff with a hard edge and a stunning closer

13. Neil Landstrumm | Bambaataa Eats His Breakfast

Short and confounding. Like Starkey on drunk goggles. A cumulative experience of 8-bit disorientation. Heavy legs and a surly attitude

14. Torngat | La Petite Nicole

A muffled record of blokes in a single-bulb basement making honest and endearing krautrock. Death in Vegas with the “cool” baggage excised

15. Nana April Jun | The Ontology of Noise

What it says. A pseudoacademic surmise of the natural property, possibilities, iterations, and emotional range of noise and static. Love it.

i cant imagine making a list of the best records of the decade. legitimately, anyway. i might still do it for the same reason the NBA Dream Team exists (an interest in mashing luminaries in one box at the expense of the finer details), but the first four years or so i listened to music like i read comic books like i watched movies. i was diffused everywhere and had no money and couldnt download. i was real interested but didnt bother to learn the specifics. even today i still have the same attitude, tho less abrasively i suppose. i'll learn but i still insist on prioritizing my own interpretation ahead of real knowledge about a genre. i think in the last 18 months or so i've immersed myself enough to be able to talk about a few things semi-substantially but the more i appreciate music the more i dont want to talk about it.

as ideas get less specific and more personal it becomes harder to justify 'stating' these ideas without using personal pronouns. so i think my opinion is worth sharing but it speaks to neither people that know the genre, nor to people who don't. i'd be more willing to decant it all if my writing was more than decent but it's not, really.

fortunately twitter has given me a fun/diverting gimmick for doing this year alone. 75 records, 50 eps (tentatively, probably less for both), each review 140 characters or less. distillation is a part of why i still use twitter because, as someone who likes to describe everything, compacting communication is a puzzle i kinda like.

i'm not actually doing it on twitter because i'd need to put down the album title and artist too, i'm just keeping to the 140 character rule for the review to see how much can be said.

the youtube thing i had planned may or may not happen, but:

I GOT THE JOB, BUDS

adrienne got the sesame street dvd where it's a clip show over 40 years.
needless to say, the first disc was a mess of giggling nostalgia. we were both in bed, and this came on, and i rocked the fuck out