STEVIE WONDER (DRUM SOLO)
Have you seen all these videos on YouTube of Stevie Wonder drum soloing?
BRILLIANTISM: August 2009
The minimal electro band Minotaur Shock make for one of the best Pandora stations I've yet to discover.
Apparently you get a free EP for becoming a fan on Facebook.
At the end of Sicko, Michael Moore anonymously sends a $12,000 check to the guy that runs the largest anti-Michael Moore website so that guy can afford health care for his sick wife without shutting down the anti-Michael Moore site!
Un-fucking-believable!
It's not important to me, but think I understand the confusion: the greater Los Angeles area is a series of facades, chaotic and garish, unorganized and unchecked. Anonymous developments inside arbitrary spaces. I find this exciting, as adventure is always behind the facade.
I live in a city that is seven miles square, and in my first 48 hours in LA I drove 200 miles. I see (but did not experience) the potential culture shock. San Francisco is tighter, more careful. The air is replenished by fog. LA can seem like an endless, graying surface. The following isn't a defense, but a description of a journey anyone can take if they look past LA's wilty mask.
We'll start randomly: The picture above is the intro to the meal I ate on my third night in town. In Koreatown, not far from where Biggie Smalls was shot, there's a micro chain of restaurants called "BCD Soft Tofu." BCD has four locations in about ten square blocks. Much of the food above (and the delicious fish below) is brought before you order.
This is my kind of treasure hunting: pulling into indiscernible parking lots and walking into strange lands of food and culture. The bigger the city, the more territory to hunt. For this reason, I feel SF loses points to everywhere south of Santa Barbara.
Culinary treasure isn't only the cement that fastens my love of southern California to the small, heart-shaped lump of bedrock in my chest. It's more of a seasoning, in fact. I'll case study this using Thursday, August 13 as source material.
The day began with astonishing Vietnamese food, the kind with fresh, bright ingredients that burn your dulled-by-the-outside-world-eyeballs. Remembering what was ordered or where I was doesn't seem important, though mint and fresh lemonade were involved. After, we moved to Laguna Beach, population: zero cares in the world. The town is it's own bubble, like a never ending fun-employment blog entry. We found Victoria beach, a "private" beach accessible via "public stairway" (also a good band name/you're welcome). I recommend it, as it's way less crowded than the real thing. Also, there's this mini-lighthouse on the north side (look above). It seems pretty useless, like it should have been built on the twice-as-tall cliff right behind it. But I'm probably misjudging its purpose. It's probably just some primitive symbol of ostentation.
On the south side of the beach we found an apartment complex and this boy's head. Reminds me of that scene in Arrested Development where Gob is looking for his son. Then I went shopping at Fashion Island, which looks funny from space.
Which came first: the chicken or this egg-shaped embryo of capitalism? LA is so enormous that the please-buy-anything-from-us-at-any-price sales haven't stopped, even though it's been more than a year of depressed recession. I bought some Asics Tigers for $35 from Bloomingdales. They were the last pair and didn't come with a box! Sign of the times...
After shopping I ate a vegan dinner on the above blanket. Turns out bananas are a great thickener for brownies. Then shit got interesting.
We parked in the midst of the downtown LA artwalk, a once-a-month clusterfuck of people livening up the high-rise-laden Garment District (or Fashion District?). Oakland has the same thing: a thousand people come to drink, mingle, and get their senses tingled. LA's artwalk is predictably ten times the size of Oakland's. Very exciting.
We start at the "soft-opening" of a bar decorated with hundreds of celebrity mugshots, where I had my second drink in 35 days. I also ate a piece of chocolate. Throughout the night, we would guess who belongs to what mug. This one was controversial:
The controversy was that I knew it was Andy Dick and no one believed me for three hours. (By the way, he was arrested at a Sam's Club in Riverside "on suspicion of sexual battery and marijuana possession after... [he] allegedly grabbed a 17-year-old girl’s tank top and exposed her breasts at a Murrieta bar/restaurant." Now you know!)
Like the artwalk, which brings in thousands of people that can afford to live someplace nicer than downtown, this bar is clearly a seed in an extensive gentrification garden. It lives in the ground floor of the once-glamorous Alexandria Hotel. By once-glamorous I mean that this was the spot in the first part of the 20th century. From Wiki:
In the Alexandria's heyday, movie stars and other celebrities, including Valentino, Mary Miles Minter, Sarah Bernhardt, Enrico Caruso and Jack Dempsey were guests. Charlie Chaplin reportedly kept a suite at the Alexandria and did improvisations in the lobby, and western star Tom Mix reportedly rode his horse through the lobby.[8][8] It was there that D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks met in 1919 to form United Artists. U.S. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson,[8] and many foreign dignitaries, also stayed at the hotel while visiting Los Angeles.Translation: the hotel has a seedy underbelly/dark nether-history. This was actually the subject of our tour-guide's thesis. The grad student leading us around was earning a criminology PHD from Irvine. She is focusing on crime in residential hotels. She is particularly curious about crime myth. She lived in the Alexandria for a spell and knew many generations of residents, from the white-haired schizophrenic 50-something looking lost at the new bar to the goony rich-kid royalty living "high" up in the penthouse. Our guide is, apparently, an excellent lock pick.
"The fact that taking a faux drug can powerfully improve some people's health—the so-called placebo effect—has long been considered an embarrassment to the serious practice of pharmacology."
Wired on why "Placebos are getting more effective."
The History Channel has "The Making of Dark Side of the Moon" up on Youtube. This clip shows how they made the 7/8 loop on "Money." Via Evan.
Bill Maher brought Brad Pitt onto Real Time to discuss the following: creating 150 architecturally progressive, environmentally sustainable homes in New Orleans, and to discuss a comment Pitt made on the Today Show about his hypothetical campaign for Mayor, which would involve a platform of legalized and taxed pot, legal gay marriage, and "no religion." Essential viewing!
Great sentence:
"Let us drink the blood of the earth and gargle it with great aplomb!"
Excerpted from Dave Eggers' Wild Things in The New Yorker
If you type your name (or a name) into this search box, it visualizes the search and colorizes your persona. Highly recommended (and seen on ycombinator).
Sometimes, I have so many tabs open for so many days on end that I can't remember how I came across the thing I'm rediscovering. So it goes with Michiel Schuurman, a great designer with an unrelenting blog of fascinating shit.
From We Love You So, aka the best blog out there: BonBonKakku! Custom fabrics, all of which look scrumptious.
Here's my entry into McSweeney's Columnist Contest. Locate the winners here.
GOAL
This column would answer the question: what if David Lynch wrote and directed every show on television? The goal would be to expand on themes common to reality, news, and fictive shows from the unfortunately uncommon Lynchian angle.
SAMPLE: Gossip Girl - “Season Three Premiere”
Treatment
“It’s a bright, perfect morning in the Upper East Side—perfect for shopping,” So notes the plucky voice of Gossip Girl as Blair Waldorf plucks glistening fruits off a silver platter presented by her nanny, Dorota. “Miss Blair,” Dorota says, “this arrived for you this morning.” With a coy look, Dorota sets down the platter and hands Blair a seafoam green envelope. Blair snatches the note, running her lacquered fingers over the embossed “B” on the paper face. She runs a nail under the lip and smells the contents before flipping her hair and collapsing into the decadent wonderland of silks and furs that is her bed. “Miss Blair,” Dorota coos as Blair reads the note, “Is it from a boy?” Then, carefully approaching the bed as if an alter, “a new boy, perhaps?” Blair is trembling, and a snowy pigeon perched on the sill peers in through the glass.
Cut to a tunnel in Central Park, where Chuck Bass slips out of the sun and into the shadows. Out of the darkness, a cigarette flares beneath a brimmed hat. “Did you find what I’m looking for,” asks Chuck. “Can I get a light,” the man in the hat asks. Chuck notes, with instant hostility, the cigarette was just lit. “Do you want an answer or not,” the man asks, dropping his cigarette to the ground, where it sputters in a puddle. The man procures another cigarette with a gloved hand. Chuck produces a monographed lighter and lights the second cigarette. “What we want to find and what we mean to do only seem like separate answers,” the man in the hat says, handing Chuck what seems to be a pewter cigarette case. He puts out the second cigarette without dragging from it, turns, and leaves the tunnel.
Serena van der Woodson stands in her foyer drinking black coffee examining two men on dueling ladders hang a massive new piece by Damien Hirst. She listens to Trent Reznor’s instrumental Ghosts suite and ignores a call from Blair. She sends Dan Humphrey a text: What happened? Blair texts instead: It’s happening. There’s a knock on the door, and Serena calls out “coming!” Approaching the door she trips and drops the coffee, but opens the door anyway, flustered. There’s no one there, but on the ground a seafoam envelope with a letter-pressed “S” begins to stain.
Dan reads Serena’s text on a rooftop in Brooklyn, holding Vanessa Abrams tightly. He doesn’t respond to Serena, says over the sound of the wind: “Everything’s gonna be alright. You know that.” Vanessa begins to cry. “Since everything happened, I feel as though we’re all disappearing,” she sobs. Gossip Girl notes that there are times when even writers (referring to Dan) don’t know what to say.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Erik van der Woodsen tells a flustered Jenny Humphrey over mocha’s at Rufus Humphey’s gallery space, which he’s having trouble selling because of the economy. Eric flips through Polaroid’s that show Jenny at night, crossing the street, half inside a subway train, and unlocking the front door of her father’s Williamsburg loft. “Do you think I have a stalker?” Jenny asks. Eric turns over the light green envelope that contained the photos, which Jenny found in her oversized Hermes handbag that morning. “If you do,” Eric says, “I hope he’s cute.”
Cut to a dim, gurney-filled hallway. The camera moves slowly through flickering fluorescents, ominous ambient noise accompanying echoing footsteps in the background. It turns into a room where Nate Archibald rests, unconscious and on life support. A gloved hand reaches forward and begins to pull out Nate’s breathing tube, and a voice whispers “I know what’s in there.” Nate’s eyes open in sheer terror, the ambient noise crescendos, and the screen goes black.
Chuck is riding in his limousine, the open cigarette case in his hand. He drops the case when the limo strikes a woman and her shopping cart, which, of all things, is full of milk bottles. Chuck, somehow still sneering, slowly exits the car and pushes through the gathered crowd. The woman sits up, apparently ok. She points at Chuck and screams, “stop following me.” On the floor of the limo, in the back seat near the pewter cigarette case is an old-fashioned 3.5-inch floppy disk.
Serena and Blair meet in the park above a tunnel. The sun is going down and they have shared mysterious notes. “I don’t understand,” Blair laments. “I didn’t ask for things to be like this.” “None of us did,” Serena consoles. The camera pans backwards to a man in a brimmed hat snapping Polaroids of the girls embraced.
Later in the evening, just after close, Rufus Humphrey is looking at the pictures of Jenny when Chuck walks into the gallery. Jenny sits with arms crossed, frustrated with her dad prying into her life. “Jenny, this could be serious, I just want you to be safe,” he says. “Where’s Dan,” asks Chuck. “What, no hello?” Rufus remarks. Jenny grabs her coat and bolts. Rufus sighs, and tells Chuck that Dan was at the loft when he left. Vanessa, Blair, and Serena walk in, surprised to see Chuck. They ask Chuck why he’s there, and he says he’s looking for Dan. Serena says they just came from the loft, where they ran into Vanessa who had just received a green envelope full of Polaroids of the other girls in the park. Vanessa thought Dan would come to the gallery. “We better find him,” Rufus announces. He’s comparing the pictures of Jenny with the ones of Serena and Blair with increasing concern. He keeps turning one over and over. “That’s it I’m calling the police.” He sets down the pictures and Vanessa picks up the one Rufus couldn’t understand, which, rather obscurely, shows the leg of a hospital bed. “Oh my god,” she whispers. “Nate.”
Chuck’s limo is still covered in milk splatter as everyone rides towards the hospital. We learn (via Chuck Bass monologue and effected flashbacks) that since Nate graduated and quit his internship where the deputy mayor made a pass at him, the deputy mayor has gone missing. Nate was found the night of her disappearance in a subway tunnel badly beaten and mumbling “I know the answer.” He had no identification, and Chuck hired his father’s “best private eye” to locate Nate, as Blair couldn’t seem to focus on anything but the disappearance. Chuck learned Nate had been hospitalized via Polaroid (a picture of the hospital address, found in his fathers study), a fact he neglected to mention to Nate’s other friends, family, or Page Six. Rufus is particularly exasperated as the limo pulls into the ER bay. Serena and Blair share their green notes with the group, which both read “You’re next, from Nate.” Hysteria peaks when Vanessa exclaims, “is that Dan?”
Dan is watching a team of nurses tighten the straps on Nate’s gurney and wheel him into an ambulance. Blair and Vanessa each try to run to Nate, but are restrained. Rufus asks Dan what they hell is going on. Dan explains that something Vanessa said reminded him of the first time he visited Nate in the hospital, just over one week ago. “A man stopped me getting out of the elevator on Nate’s floor,” Dan explains. “He asked the time, then said he better disappear.” Chuck asks if he was wearing a hat and gloves. Dan confirms he was and Chuck rushes inside the hospital. As the ambulance doors shut Nate yells “She needs the answer! Get the answer!”
Chuck curtly asks the receptionist, who is drinking milk from a bottle, if they have an old computer sitting around the hospital that can read a floppy disc. “I think they have something like that down in the morgue.” Chuck heads downstairs, where the milk cart lady sits. “Have we met,” Chuck asks, coolly startled. “I don’t believe we have,” she says, “until right now.” Chuck squints at her, and hands her the disc. “I need to know what’s on this disc. Reception said you could help me.” She says, “Of course you do” and heads to a back room with an uncertain light source.
Chuck returns to the group with a crude printout. Dan examines Blair and Serena’s notes and denies that they could be from Nate. “That’s not Nate’s handwriting,” he explains, which he would know, since he’s a writer. Chuck’s on the phone. “Yes I’d like to report an emergency.” Chuck hands the printout to Dan and Rufus. It’s the address of the Williamsburg loft and, below that, the words “Next question.” Under his breath, Rufus says: “Jenny…”
Since storming out of the gallery, Jenny has managed some shopping and purchased a takeout dinner. She’s fumbling for her keys when she hears a strange noise behind her and sees a flash. The sound of developing film. She slowly turns and screams. The camera gets closer, and the Polaroid flashes illuminate her terror. Jenny drops her takeout and finds her keys. She slips inside and slams the door, just ahead of a black-gloved hand. A far off siren is heard, and the Brooklyn street appears empty, until the milk cart lady rolls up, a white pigeon on her shoulder. She picks up the takeout, then turns into the shadows of an alley.
“Sometimes disappearing is the easy part,” the narrator says, adding: “XoXo, Gossip Girl.”
New song from Zach Hill and Zac Nelson over at Prefix. They are called CHLL PLL and the song is "Dick Moves." I like the vibe; the singing's up front and on the Zach Hill scale of recording qualities this one hovers in the middle of the pack. That's sort of high praise, since a lot of these one-off side projects sound like broken radiators. Also, they have something called a MySpace. I'll do some research and let you know what that means.
Sasha Frere-Jones: "My experience as a musician, though, has demonstrated that the album is often a hurdle that artists vault simply because their record company needs a widget of a certain size to make a certain kind of profit."
Insane lighting. Seen on NotCot and DesignYouTrust. Because of Frank Buchwald and Mashinen Leuchten.
A blogger named Rod Holmes wonders if Microsoft is censoring searches. He asks Bing "is Microsoft Evil?" He sees this (I tried the same search and it now looks different):
"Then I turned to Bing and was dumbfounded. For the first time in my playing with this topic, Bing returned a news story in the number one position. And…the story was about Google, “How Good (or Not Evil) Is Google?” from the New York Times. The second news listing talks about the pros and cons of proxy servers?? And, the third news item is about Microsoft giving away money. Hmmm…. After that Bing does dish up the dirt with a link to www.microsoftisevil.com, but they quickly shift to focusing on how Microsoft is killing evil software bugs."
I surmise Google's search will stay superior, since the brand is built around that engine, unlike Microsoft, who's legacy remains a for-beginners OS.
"Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse." So says an increasingly verified report about why we've spent $672 billion (and counting) lowering the world population and putting gold flakes on the food on the table for 'private contractors' everywhere.
Sullivan's been tracking this, and I really hope Bill Maher brings it up on Real Time (he didn't). It's nice that money - like suffering, greed, war, and everything else - seems more real because of this administration. But everyday Obama keeps the Iraq farce going is a vote for our costliest and most reprehensible absurdist fantasy: religion.
What a wonderful week it's been at Mcsweeneys.net. Here now: three most sidesplitting web exclusives of the week:
1. STATUS UPDATES SINCE MY MOTHER BECAME MY FACEBOOK FRIEND
2. METROID'S SAMUS ARAN SPEAKS OUT ABOUT GAY MARRIAGE
3. CHARACTER FROM A THOMAS PYNCHON NOVEL OR SOMEONE WHO RECENTLY SENT ME SPAM?
I'm listening to the playlist at the bottom of the Audio Dregs page. It's making me hyper-productive. I just subscribed to the podcast, too. The songs are like croutons in fondue.
On the way to see Rod Stewart, I was asked: “What’s your favorite kind of music.” That’s the sort of question I’m always over prepared to answer, yet never really expect. I spent the rest of the evening honing in on a super-answer, which is this:
Q: What’s your favorite kind of music?Compared to all the music I’ve heard, the stuff I voluntarily come back to on a regular basis is a fragment of a fraction of a tiny minority of the whole. Seriously, comparing my repeat listens to my first time listens is like comparing a molecule to a planet. I prefer the mystery of the unheard; I’d rather meander in a foreign place so I can call it an exploration. I believe in curiosity more than certainty, and seek out the feeling of encouragement that comes with any song exceeding my expectations, which many songs do.
A: The kind I’ve yet to hear.
Wired explores "Alaska's Answer to Area 51" where, "self-directed 'researchers' like Nick Begich say the collection of transmitters and receivers is conducting secret tests of monstrous weapons for the Defense Department: mind control, weather manipulation, long-distance spying." The above picture is the Northern Lights, which, apparently, can now be artificially replicated with ionosphere-altering abilities of this base.
Begich is worth googling for his long history of conspiracy hunting (he's discovered some unbelievable patents). His dad, an Alaskan Senator, disappeared in a plane crash in 1972. Like the plane, his body was never found.
Not worth missing: The Onion's two-week takeover by a Chinese fish supplier. They went all-out.
This is my new favorite addition to my burgeoning postcard collection: 100 McSweeney's postcards! Obtained with very little resistance!
"The energy shortfall could also limit the collider’s ability to test more exotic ideas, like the existence of extra dimensions beyond the three of space and one of time that characterize life."
Just submitted a piece called True Connection to Opium Magazine's bookmark contest! That means if I win, the 237 words I wrote will be printed on a bookmark. My submission was inspired by this Takashi Wada song of the same name:
"True Connection" by Takashi Wada (from Araki)
I planned an insanely awesome dinner, anyway, but tonight's homespun meal was accented by a passionate Michael Pollan sermon. Pollan attacked cooking shows for keeping us on the couch and out of the kitchen. He starts slow, making some yawning points about how Julia Child managed a subtle yet faceted societal upheaval, and about how Guy Fiero is fat. Pollan gets pointed three quarters through, when he points out the following:
"Freed from the need to spend our days gathering large quantities of raw food and then chewing (and chewing) it, humans could now devote their time, and their metabolic resources, to other purposes, like creating a culture."I think the cooking/culture analogy is apt. My mom asked me why I like to cook: I said it's like writing a song. You put a bunch of shit together, experimenting with flavors and orders and lengths of time and presentation. The you enjoy the finished product a little more than normal, because you can call it your own.
Here's another favorite from Dave. Written, submitted, and rejected for a Crayola commercial. We've been discussing a video, as a sort of thank you for helping me move. It will be awesome and probably hand drawn. Get fired up, dudes.