Creator: Robert Cochran, Joel Surnow
2001
This was the quartet of episodes when things cycled back around. Jack was reunited with his family; Jack returns to the office after several hours on the run; Palmer finally confronts Jack; the plot and its motivation is finally explained to us. And almost immediately things began to fall apart. Possibly this structure will be mirrored in the end–we’ll have to wait an see.
Another note: it’s really hard to do research into 24 without running into massive spoilers on the web. There’s been a few times I’ve nearly learned some shocking truth about the ending, only to turn (or click) away in time. Yes, I know it’s not going to end well (and it’s going to be a cliffhanger, but of course). Yes, I know there’s more twists to come–and more death.
Author: tedmills
Kenji Jammer – Hula Hula Dance 2
UUTWO records DDCU-2002
2003.04.16
Or: the problem of listening to remix albums without knowing the original.
Who has a truer listening experience? The person who picks up a remix album without knowing the originals, or the one with a deep understanding of the material to be remixed? And does it matter if the remixer winds up using little of the material (70% of all remixers)? What if the remixer uses nothing but the material and then reconfigures it into something new (Sean O’Hagan’s remixes of Cornelius and Pizzicato Five, both of which are wonderful)? What is the criteria? How “danceable” something is? How much something is “rescued”? How faithful to the material? How sacriligious?
Kenji Jammer is the pseudonym of Kenji Suzuki, of whom I know nothing except he seems to have started in the ’80s, done his time playing hard rock (opening for still-famous-in-Japan Deep Purple and Stevie Ray Vaughan), moved all over the world, and now in this alter ego explores acoustic and lap steel sounds with a definite mellow bent. Fortunately, the CD ends with two of his originals, or one would never know what’s being remixed here. “Sail On” is a skanking jam, and takes nearly all of the track until the steel guitar comes in. Okay, so it makes me wonder what Hula Hula Dance, the original, sounds like. It also reminds me, for the third time in a row today, of the Orb.
So then, the best of the mixes are Fantastic Plastic Machine’s mix of “Daddy’s Delight,” which seems to mix a vocoder with Kenji’s slide guitar, and the “Across the Border” mix of “Universe”, which toodles along very politely, even seeping into the background. It’s pleasant.
Blasthead – Landscape
Lastrum LACD-0049
2002.08.30
Sounding a bit like Harmonia or the more electronic side of Krautrock, Blasthead appears on the same label as The Calm. It’s a similar mix of jazzy instrumentation, Mo’Wax downtempo beats played live (or at least I think so), a series of groove experiments.
It reminds me most of the Orb’s first album without the spoken word samples, or more likely the Orb’s version of ambient. Unlike the Orb, Blasthead feel no need to keep the dancefloor in sight. Rhythm, when it comes, arrives unexpectedly, sometimes fast, like an exploding drum circle, other times slow, like the multi-layered handclaps that remind me of Eno/Schwalm’s Drawn from Life. Lots of hammer dulcimer. At one point, some very discordant free jazz sax makes its way into the mix, waking up all the stoners in the chill out room.
There’s liquid bass, bubbling synths, a general blue-purple sound.
“Scene 4” grooves for for five minutes before blossoming into a big-beat, organ-drenched psychedelic rock freakout. At the moment, these two albums are hard to tell apart.
The Calm – 1969 Before the Dawn
Lastrum LACD-0040
2001.11.20
Last time Jon returned from japan, he came back with some very strange CDs by groups I had never heard of, all supposedly coming out of this one record shop/label in Tokyo. I’ve heard them in passing and very pleasant they are in an acoustic ambient way. This time he has returned with two that I can properly listen to. The Calm make this wonderful blend of ambient synths, distant, echoey trumpets, melancholia, and slightly danceable beats.
Track 8 has something approaching a drum’n’bass riff, mixing in Reich repetition, wandering sitar, lonesome shakuhachi.
Imagine if Tortoise hadn’t sprouted from reformed punks, but psychedelic rockers. Imagine if they listened to DJ Shadow, not knowing it was madefrom samples, and tried to recreate it live (though for all I know this is all done in someone’s bedroom on ProTools.) That’s the Calm. They like their sound samples too: the good old moonshot countdown sample, and some French lady saying I-don’t-know-what.
The Key to Furni
Well, there goes my fantasy that all IKEA names are actually rude words. This article in the German magazine Stern decodes the system for naming things in IKEA. Book shelves are named after occupations, bathroom articles are named after Scandinavian seas, rivers, and bays. And so much more. You are linking to the Babelfish translation of the page, so some things are a bit funny sounding, not unlike IKEA furniture.
By way of Boing Boing
Completely Booty.
Well, ho ho ho! It turns out that Lapdance Island was a sham by some Channel 4 “Candid Camera” knock-off. I got a letter that read in part:
The show promised to take ten hot blooded male contestants to a deserted tropical island and have forty lapdancers gyrate around them 24 hours a day.
The truth is there are no lapdancers. There is no island. There is no show.
We made it up to promote The Pilot Show, a genuine series starting on September 8 at 10.30pm on E4. The Pilot Show hilariously dupes unsuspecting celebrities and members of the public into appearing in bogus TV shows.
Sorry about the lapdancers but, as compensation, you can laugh as other people get taken for a ride on The Pilot Show by watching the special preview clips at http://www.channel4.com/pilotshow.
Oh, very witty, ha ha ha. I think that Channel 4 missed out on making some real gutsy TV here, as I would have loved to have seen grown men having nervous breakdowns while surrounded by equally unstable lapdancers in a Lord of the Thongs scenario.
And to think I sent in my answers to their poll:
Drill King Anthology
Holy Moses and the Tournament of Roses! Not many people survive being impaled through the head by an 18-inch long, 1 1/2 inch thick drill bit, but this guy did. (Includes fascinating X-Ray pic).
Splitting Headache: Man survives horrific construction accident
Truckee resident Ron Hunt, who has been dubbed ‘Miracle Man’ by friends, survived being impaled through the eye with an 18-inch long, 1 1/2-inch diameter chip auger drill bit.
While using a drill above his head on Aug. 15, the six-foot ladder he was standing on started to wobble, Hunt’s nephew Ben Hunt said. ‘The ladder started to ‘walk’ on him,’ Ben said. ‘He lost his balance and threw the drill down – which is normal for us (construction workers).’
Then, he fell off the ladder face-first and onto the drill, which went through his right eye and out his skull, just above his right ear. According to Ben, doctors told him the drill pushed his brain aside, rather than impaling it, which could have caused further – and most likely vastly more extensive – damage.”
By way of Metafilter
24 (Season One, Episodes 9-12)
Creator: Robert Cochran, Joel Surnow
2001
Phew, this is gruelling, yet so very exciting. Patience slightly tested with the usual uselessness of Women in Peril, who spend their time speaking loudly of how they’re going to get out of their predicament (don’t they think somebody is listening?).
24 is definitely a post-Clinton pre-BushJunta thriller, raising issues of realpolitik in both the Bauer and Palmer storylines. Palmer reminds us of the theory that Clinton was named “the first Black president” by some analysists. Yet his Chief of Staff seems to clearly be modeled on Tricky Dick Cheney (the crooked smile, especially).
Palmer is too upright and honest (as far as we know at the moment) to really be a stand in for Clinton, but he certainly does feel your pain. In fact, he just feels pained. The Bosnian angle now coming into the plot also reflects on Clinton’s major war, now feeling like years and years ago. Did we ever fear vengeance would be enacted upon us by angry Serbs?
And would 9-11 have ever happened if the CIA and FBI were as hi-tech as such agencies are made to look in the show? As the 9-11 investigations are showing, some of these offices barely began using email a couple of years back.
I also note with some irony that the actress who plays Palmer’s wife also plays Condoleeza Rice in some made-for-TV movie about 9-11.
24 (Season One, Episodes 5-8)
Creator: Robert Cochran, Joel Surnow
2001
The night turns into day and Jack Bauer becomes entrapped himself. I don’t know if I could really watch more than four episodes in a row of this, but it does remind me that some British cinema nearly did show a run of the first season in one straight 24-hour block. What would the effect be of watching the show in real time? Would it be interesting to have the screen go black during the space allotted for commercials? What about keeping the black screen but overlaying a stopwatch during the space?
Or how about splitting the show into its requisite parts, screening Jack’s storyline on one monitor, the kidnapped family on another, the CTA on another, and Palmer on yet one more monitor, switching them on and off when need be? Just a thought.
The themes of 24 are starting to come out: family vs. job, sacrifice (of yourself, of others), upholding the law vs. bending it.
And L.A. looks really, really smoggy.