Andy’s favorite tracks of 2009
Download here. The commentary below is his own; great selections Andy!
–
Harmonia and Eno
Atmosphere
Recorded in 1974, released this year
Burial
Fostercare
Click, thump, whirrr
Oni Ayhun
OAR003-B 12″
The male half of the Knife slips under the radar
Baroness
Steel That Sleeps the Eye
I love indie-metal in the Aeolian mode
Canis Lupus
woof woof
Harmonia and Eno
Les Demoiselles
Jesus Christ (the indie band)
Is This Really What You Want?
“And I will be cold and alone in my coffin”
Culoe de Song
The Bright Forest
Jungle gives way to some épiques cordes
Favorite Reissues of 2009
Stone Roses: I Wanna Be Adored (Demo) + Made of Stone
Chameleons: In Shreds
Pere Ubu: tracks 2 and 3 from Dub Housing
Eno and Harmonia: Aubade
The Smiths: Girl Afraid, What Difference Does It Make?; Rubber Ring
Burial: South London Boroughs; Distant Lights
First Atwood
I just bought an Atwood Nibble pocket tool for my keychain. Beautiful. Will replace the stock pic when mine arrives and hopefully murder it with a matte DLC coating at some point. Atwood’s UFO knife is my (and my sister’s) favorite folding knife ever. Totally bonkers. I see a Chris Reeve Sebenza in my future – possibly with mammoth ivory inlay – but the UFO is just next level.
Closing thoughts for the 00s
What a weird decade just happened. Seriously. I have a couple forward-looking notes.
IN
Curation. I know I’m one to talk, but I can’t handle any more accumulation for accumulation’s sake. Digital or analog, no difference. To return to an old refrain: quality, quality, quality.
OUT
I don’t know, everything. Brian Eno said recently that we’re living in a “stylistic tropics,” which is a sweet way to put it. But I think that means nothing’s cool, not everything. Look at poor chillwave, a not even year-old musical micro-genre (which I like, by the way) that has been hated on since demos of unreleased albums under its chilly umbrella appeared on Mediafire. It almost seems like once something flocks together enough to be named, it’s finished.
PREDICTIONS for the 10s
- It will be shocking how fast books and magazines leave their corporeal shells when it all goes down. At first, yes, it’ll be rich nerds with their iSlates and college freshmen saving money on textbooks but by 2020 Coby will be selling a $12 reader with a Google Books interface at the train station. And at some point you will gaze upon your hoard of A-C size paperbacks and think to yourself, I have read these, and weigh getting all that space back against the cost of repurchasing a digital copy of something when you need it. And you will divest.
- I think rapid prototyping is going to make it into the home. I do. Part of the allure will be the post-consumerism of it, making things when you need them and then throwing them back to be remade when they’ve served their purpose. Momus has more on the dream of a 1:1 production/consumption society, which is what I hope we’re headed towards.
- There’s going to have to be some kind of reckoning between people who are committed to social justice and those who aren’t. This is not a democrat/republican issue or a religion/doubt issue, it’s the future versus the past. Aaron Schwartz wrote recently on the shifting of the Overton window re: slavery and murder, both of which were perfectly acceptable in American history as long as you were targeting the right ethnic groups. Put in proper perspective, there’s a lot of insane shit going on right now domestically. 49 million of us were living in food-insecure households in 2008. In America. You can’t think clearly if you’re hungry; you can’t function. We have way too many people in prison, for the wrong reasons. One group of citizens has legal rights another group is denied. If you can reflect on these facts without being upset on some level, you have a chip missing. And yet many among us seem to be missing that crucial part. Something must go down between these two tribes. I realize I sound like a humorless socialist but I’m not against classes or capitalism, just for some FUCKING MINIMUM STANDARDS OF LIVING FOR EVERYONE. This is not an unachievable utopia, it’s Denmark with guns and Jersey Shore.
Also, robots are going to kill the shit out of us
Acronym history from Relax magazine, May 2002
I have quite the clothes-crush on Acronym; I own four jackets (down from seven) and an indispensable bag I take with me everywhere. Naturally I’ve become a little obsessive about the brand, and recently I scanned this article from Relax for a friend of mine – it shows an archive of some of Mr. Hugh’s pre-ACR designs for Burton, Recon, and others. UPDATE: Errolson was kind enough to send me the English translation of the article, which I present to you at the bottom after the images. Amazing!
MORE AFTER THE JUMP
Gobble Gobble
Happy Thanksgiving everybody. Not to get all sappy on you but the older I get, the more I am exclusively thankful for my family and the wide array of wonderful people in my life, without whom I could feel and accomplish nothing. Having said that, I’ll be back on Friday with pen and ink drawings of Japanese girls with their heads splitting open and cows fish flying out.
Were I cooking, it would be capon
Society memberships
Not all mine…
My favorite bingo
In Scrabble, which I’ve been playing AN AWFUL LOT OF ON MY PHONE, a bingo is when you use all seven of your tiles, resulting in an additional 50-point bonus.
So this isn’t my highest-scoring bingo, but it is my favorite. The computer played entasias (the plural of entasia, “a sudden, abnormal, involuntary muscular contraction”) and I was able to respond with reality – which lined up with entasia to spell another seven two-letter words. I felt like a young Michael Jordan winning a slam-dunk contest. Maybe.
Yes
YES
Just had my fasting blood glucose tested
62 mg/dl, boyeeeeee
oh yeah
I’ma go eat some fried chicken
Wu-Tang pause tape #2 “Diabolical Brutality”
Two years since the last one? Too long. My love of Wu is undimmed. Download, 97mb. Tracks:
1. U-God “Wu-Tang” – U is always overlooked but if not the spine of the team the S1 vertebrae at least. Great new album with a fly Bloody Beatroots remix to boot.
2. Raekwon/Killa Sin Ron G freestyle – From way back. Biggie and KRS-1 (!!) were on the mixtape track too but I cut them out.
3. Wu-Tang Clan “Rock Steady” – Nice clan track.
4. Inspectah Deck, U-God, Streetlife “Semi-Automatic” – I had to work the INS in here somewhere
5. Raekwon “Kids That’s Rich” – Produced by Pete Rock, this was an OB4CL2 leftover.
6. Raekwon/Ghostface Killah “The Badlands” – OB4CL2 UK bonus track. Ghost begging to go in is claaaaasic.
7. Ghostface Killah “Holla (Kankick remix)” – Just a killer remix.
8. RZA “My Deadly Venoms” – This is RZA transitioning out of his Prince Rakeem supalover disguise and putting on royal Razor robes.
9. Raekwon/Carlton Fisk freestyle for Doo Wop – Who’s Carlton Fisk, you ask? Probably the most overlooked Wu-Affiliate because he was IN AND OUT OF PRISON a lot and couldn’t get in the booth. Too bad, because’s he’s great although I can’t wholeheartedly recommend 2004’s Inspectah Deck presents Undadogz because DJ Storm screams over every fucking track like DJ Aziz Ansari.
10. Shyheim freestyle – On the other hand, it’s hard to call someone like Shyheim overlooked when, you know, he was on stage with Biggie and Pac when he was six or whatever. In another world he and Big L put out a classic tag-team album on Rocafella in 2002.
11. Wu-Tang Clan & The El Michael’s Affair “Trumph” – This whole live session from XM Radio is wellllll worth seeking out.
12. Wisemen “Iconoclasts (Salute version)” – The Wisemen are the group that, to me, look most like Wu-Tang Clan: The Next Generation. Bronze Nazareth has a lot to do with that.
13. Method Man “Spy Hunter” – This is actually a Cappa track but I cut him out. Meth is bananas.
14. Cappadonna “Anotha Riddle” – Ah, Cappadonna. Always real. I almost put on a concert freestyle where he’s like “you might catch me coming out of K-Mart / I’m just like you.”
15. Masta Killa, Inspectah Deck, GZA “Street Corners (MF Doom remix)” – Doom makes it saucy.
16. GZA & RZA “Life Is A Movie” – Just a Wu-Tang Gary Numan interpolation. No big deal.
17. Ghostface Killah & Tre Williams “I Wish You Were Here” – An R&B warm-up for Ghost’s forthcoming Wizard of Poetry album. I hate R&B but how can you be mad at Ghost silky singing “What up boo / I get butterflies when we hug and kiss / do you?”
18. RZA & Masta Killah “Grits (alternate)” – “When I was small / we had nothing at all”
19. ODB “Forever” – This song has a million names, but whatever you want to call it, it’s the capstone of Dirty’s life in a way and it breaks my heart.
Strong new addiction
to Omegle, this site that randomly matches you up with an anonymous conversational partner. It’s fascinating. Needless to say, I save EVERYTHING.
what is geoff up to/what geoff is up to
- Spent basically all of August rewriting with my sister, which is why it’s been so quiet around here.
- I’m building a DAVID 3D scanner. I’m eventually going to use a pico projector to project a moving line, but for now I’m waiting on a FOUR DOLLAR line laser from DealExtreme. Since I already have a little video camera, that’s pretty much the cost of the whole rig. Astonishing. I thought about building a MakerBot Cupcake but honestly I’d rather make the scans myself and pay for higher quality printing at Shapeways. Especially since there’s some stuff I want to print in metal. Home 3D scanning/printing is very much where personal computing was in 1974 (dedicated hobbyists building stuff from kits) but I assure you pretty soon we’ll all have printers.
- Also working on a new Wu-Tang pause tape. Is there a more rhizomatic musical entity? No. As a preview, here’s a little-heard blasphemous Biggie guest spot: It’s weird that Biggie would be on a Wu-Tang posse cut with Raekwon, although it was before the whole Cuban Linx thing…who knows.
- Also, me and Louis‘ secret iPhone project will be shipping soon – I’ll make a full-blown announcement when that happens. Proud and excited. It will be v.v. useful for the twenty minutes a year you need it.
- I have heard so many good things about Spelunky, it’s next on my to-play list. Windows only, unfortunately.
- What else. Read Sum, thought it was simpleminded. Antichrist and Lymelife are queued up after District 9. Kind of want to buy a YG 1802 with a black dial and open an Italian restaurant in North Jersey. Instead might buy HF’s Personal Effects book, which I find fascinating – I have Nigo’s 8TV25CH video and Fujiwara-san’s taste seems more refined but no less obsessive. And now I have to go to AutoZone to buy some power steering fluid.
ultimate fantasy (via Art of the Arcade)
Ramp Champ
So I got obsessed with Ramp Champ, this great skee ball game for the iPhone by the Iconfactory and DS Media Labs. Blame it on the time spent on New Jersey boardwalks in youth. Anyway, I took ten minutes and wrote a walkthrough.
Defenders and Offenders
Do yourself a favor and download the 22mb PDF of this amazing book from 1888. (Or read it on Google Books.) It’s a catalogue of criminals and their crimes, and the police of the day. Like a 19th century Cops.
Too lazy to think
- I literally cannot wait to read Haruki Murakami’s new opus, 1Q84. I have the feeling it is the capstone of this decade although I won’t be able to read it until it’s translated, which is going to be a while seeing as it’s 1000+ pages. I caught myself wondering if I’d be able to become literate in Japanese faster than it’ll be published here. (No.)
- I’ve caught a whiff of a developing meme – Jake Lodwick, who’s an interesting cat, has started systematizing his life based on an intriguing rule – evolve the other rules once a week – and Buster Benson picked up on it and I expect to spread around the web as a kind of post-Getting-Things-Done movement. I personally find myself thinking more about applying the Situationist notion of detournement to my own life – for the sake of phenomenology, not art. Right after I eat this cheeseburger.
- It is time to start thinking about the 00s being over, though. I’m nervous about the kids who were born in the mid to late 90s and grew up with this last decade as the norm. Maybe the years 2000-2007 only screamed CRISIS to me because I was formed in the beanbag chair of the 90s?
Making the changeover
Catching up
- Personal grooming: my brother was here yesterday and he was like THE WAY YOU LOOK IS A REFLECTION OF HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT YOURSELF hippie so get a haircut, shave and wash your car. Ok ok!
- Movies: let down by Visioneers (although Mia Maestro is so fine, wow), loved loved loved Shotgun Stories, didn’t understand the ending of Daytime Drinking, admired the camerawork of Ima, Boku wa but otherwise thought it was boring, Tokyo Sonata was great and more than made up for Kairo, liked Moon although it left me with questions. Soon I will hunt down Frownland and I very much want to see Bobcat Goldthwait’s World’s Greatest Dad.
- TV: The 2009 version of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is predictably rad, although they’ve done something structurally daring I think is amazing that is driving the fans insane. I watched the first season of Durham County from Canada and it was surprisingly fun. True Blood is obviously kicking ass – I realized part of the reason I love the show is because it has no subtext of any kind, at all – and I couldn’t be more psyched for Mad Men to come back.
- Books: Reading Kapuscinski’s Travels With Herodotus and actually bought the Grene translation of The History to go with, but frankly I’m more interested in Kapuscinski’s travels than his extrapolations about what Herodotus was leaving out of his ancient narrative. Looking forward to William Vollmann’s Imperial. Also, my Kindle is on eBay for obvious reasons – DRM is fine but memory holes are not. Update: Jeff Bezos’ apology is sufficient, I think. I’ll start using the iPhone app again.
- Music: Not engaged with the scene at the moment, although I would like to point out that the new U-God record is significantly better than that Wu-Tang Chamber Music album. Also, in a fit of missing the 90s, or something, I found Mad Season – Above. River of Deceit is kind of a great single? slash horrible?
So I turned 30
I feel old, man. It’s not so much that I thought yeah, three decades, I’ll be totally settled and everything will be awesome! because I’ve never been big on lying to myself. I certainly know people with wives and kids and houses and Serious Business careers who don’t. So that’s okay.
Part of the reason I feel old is that our new way of being, never being fully present and never alone, feels more acute than ever this year. And I am not simpatico with it. I’m old enough to remember when being online meant firing up my modem for an hour to log into my rented unix shell for Usenet and the web via Lynx and today I’m stressed out because I’ll be out of circulation for 12 hours on my way to Athens on Tuesday. Do I think this is bad? Of course not. Look at poor Neda, how her death will make a difference because our little connected computers are as much machines that kill fascists as turntables ever were. And they play music too. But I wasn’t born with a cell phone in my hand like the kids these days. Never in my life have I felt out of time with the dance. Not until 2009, a date that at least feels sufficiently futuristic.
Don’t rush me!
I’ll post more soon. last man on earth to watch the wire/louis is here/coconut water/iphone os 3/script rewrite/moon/that rye rye bang song/etc etc
Movie update
Saw The Girlfriend Experience – Sasha Grey was better than I expected (nervousness under a cool exterior was a good match for her character) but there wasn’t much substance to the film itself; watch Bubble first if you haven’t or better yet Schizopolis. Tried five minutes of The Ramen Girl, Brittany Murphy’s Japan-only (right?) film about a girl who gets dumped by her boyfriend while visiting Tokyo, distractingly bad production values, turned it off. Also saw FILM OF THE YEAR, Crank 2. That’s right, Crank 2. I didn’t see Crank 1, and you don’t have to either, this film stands alone. Get past the superficial racism and sexism and you’re left with a pretty astonishing…live action experimental cartoon. Tomorrow: Star Trek. Looking forward to: Trick ‘r’ Treat, District 9, Mother (Bong Joon-ho – you guys remember how much I liked The Host and parts of Memories of Murder) and above all, Soudain le Vide/Enter The Void.
You know how sometimes you stumble across a Zen koan that’s so funny you can’t wait to repeat it?
This is one of those times.
—
The Zen master Mu-nan had only one successor. His name was Shoju. After Shoju had completed his study of Zen, Mu-nan called him into his room. “I am getting old,” he said, “and as far as I know, Shoju, you are the only one who will carry on this teaching. Here is a book. It has been passed down from master to master for seven generations. I have also added many points according to my understanding. The book is very valuable, and I am giving it to you to represent your successorhip.”
“If the book is such an important thing, you had better keep it,” Shoju replied. “I received your Zen without writing and am satisfied with it as it is.”
“I know that,” said Mu-nan. “Even so, this work has been carried from master to master for seven generations, so you may keep it as a symbol of having received the teaching. Here.”
They happened to be talking before a brazier. The instant Shoju felt the book in his hands he thrust it into the flaming coals. He had no lust for possessions.
Mu-nan, who never had been angry before, yelled: “What are you doing!”
Shoju shouted back: “What are you saying!”
Not a dream or an imaginary story
I realize I look insane.
I write