Church revivalist meeting + rave music = massive lulz.
By way of The Internet Now In Handy Book Form.
Month: August 2008
Searching for the One
A quote from Infinite ThØught’s culture blog:
Films that appear to be ‘all about women’, such as Sex and the City are paeans to a curious combination of ultra-mediation and a post-religious obsession with ‘the one’. You go to the City in search of ‘labels and love’; the one mediating the other – the nicest thing your boyfriend can do for you is have a giant wardrobe installed for all your ‘labels’. Drinks with ‘the girls’ are dominated by discussions about whether he is ‘the one’ or not. What does this obsession with ‘the one’ mean? The bourgeoisie may have ‘drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation’, as Marx and Engels observed, but certain religious motifs are harder to shake than others. The ‘one’ as the transcendent culmination of an entire romantic destiny demonstrates a curious melange of the sentimental (‘we were always meant to be together!’) and the cynical (if there’s a ‘one’ then the ‘non-ones’ don’t count; the sex with them is of no importance, there is no need to behave even moderately pleasantly towards them).
Sorry for the break
I was getting back into blogging when my domain with the always-hard-to-reach Onestop.net expired. Because they still, after asking them several times to change it, have my old (8 years+) email on file, I didn’t know it was coming up for renewal. So, for a few days you may have thought I was gone for good. Onestop.net: why do you guys only work eight hours a day?
NASA’s Forgotten Ambient Albums
I was trolling the intertubes yesterday and came across the five-volume set of “Symphonies of the Planets,” a 1992 release on the truck-stop and Ross Dress-for-Less label , LaserLight. Five tracks of “space music” 30 minutes long. But here’s the deal: this “space music” is purportedly real space music.
In 1990, we made the Symphonies of the Planets series from raw, uncatalogued space sounds data as a promotional series… We did not go through the lengthy process to document specific planets, moons or rings. Rather we selected random information from the raw data and processed it to produce Symphonies of the Planets. However all sounds are Space Sounds. There are no engine sounds from the space probes.
The finished result, which I fell asleep to last night, sounds close to Eno’s “On Land” album. No sweetness, just grumbling drones and weird sweeps of sine-wavery. Five tracks in all, and all, I suppose, are linked to a certain fly-by. But it doesn’t say which. And the NASA site has nothing on it. Horribly out of print, check it out here.
Out of Retirement with a CG stupidity
Jon Crow, who now blogs way more than I do over at WITMOT, keeps pestering me to blog more. “June 12, dude…June 12!!!” he reminds me.
But he recently posted a selection of CG dumbness on his blog so good it has brought me out of lazy retirement to tell y’alls. “Apple Daily” is Hong Kong’s “trashiest tabloid” and when murder, mayhem, and molestation happen, they are there not just to report on it, but include CG illustrations of what could not be photographed. That includes:
Man AND CAT in propane explosion!!!
Child pranged in nuts by crazed teacher!!!
and undoubtedly, the best one so far:
Dramatic firsthand CG sketches of the Morgan Freeman car accident.
Way more at the above link. Crow, you are a genius.