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Bruce Sterling, on his blog, steers us towards Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Dance Music, which definitely merits a moment or two of your time. It's a handy manual to all the different electronic dance genres, where you can hear samples and go "Ah, that's what Nu Style Gabber sounds like!" On the other hand, it's a novel and fairly persuasive form of criticism. Ishkur makes no bones that this is his take, and by combining a flowchart taxonomy with written argument and clickable soundbites, he's made a formidable first draft of pop music history.
I like the way he includes Dub as a forerunner of House (along with Disco); that's a little less America-centric than the usual version, which has NY djs moving to Chicago and reinventing disco with more electronics. (Curiously, Hiphop is treated as sui generis--under "Breakbeat"--when it also had a strong Caribbean influence, e.g., DJ Kool Herc.) He gives Techno short shrift, though, treating it as a genre for boring purists when it in fact has interpenetrated and informed almost all the other styles. It's interesting the way he divides early 90s breakbeat rave techno into Rave, which becomes the progenitor of Hardcore, and Breakcore, which spins off Jungle and Drum & Bass, but mysteriously, Rave never intersects with the "Techno" timeline and Breakcore never intersects with the "Breakbeat" timeline.* Also, I'm not sure I understand the distinction he makes between two 80s styles: EBM (Electronic Body Music, posited as a forerunner of Goa Trance) and New Beat (a Hardcore antecedent). When I hear both I just say "Belgian."
One style new to me is Speedbass, which sounds like a cross between Noizecore and what Ishkur's calling Experimental Jungle (AKA Drill'n'Bass). It seems very DIY and upload-oriented (see website at www.speedbass.net), and while it's a bit more chaotic than my usual around-the-house fare, it's hard to resist anything with repeated samples of whips cracking and Hollywood extras crying out in fake pain, for example, DJ Tendraw and the Gypsies Dog's "Vocal Tripe (I'm Gonna Hurt You Mix)."
*If I was going to collect a genre in depth (meaning spending a fortune tracking down 12-year-old vinyl and dubplates) it would probably be the one Ishkur calls Breakcore [in version 2.5 he changed it to "Oldskool Rave Hardcore"]. The energy and sheer creative nuttiness of that particular musical moment has never been duplicated.
UPDATE: There was so much to say here I forgot to mention that the writing on Ishkur's site is lively and funny. Some excerpts have been posted here.
There's a nice mix of video game and game-related music over at cuechamp. A good chance to hear artists frequently plugged here, including 8-Bit Construction Set and Monotrona, as well as punchy electro tracks such as Knifehandchop's "Ryu vs. Sakura," with samples of a Real Don Steele-type announcer (from "Streetfighter Alpha 3") yelling out stuff like "Select your fighting style!" and "Beat'em up guys!" Here's the link to the .mp3 of the mix; it's a 22MB file so you probably need broadband. And here is the playlist:
1. super mario brothers - london symphony orchestraWhile at cuechamp, I followed the link to Hektor, a graffiti-writing robot that produces some really clean, seductive imagery with a spraycan rigged up on pulleys. The principle recalls the Etch-a-Sketch, or I suppose what happens inside a mouse, only in reverse: the program translates data into sweeping movements of the dangling, spritzing can, within imaginary horizontal and vertical axes. The device is documented on the under-construction website with pop-up jpegs, a quicktime movie and an extensive pdf file. Now to figure out how to get it into the trainyards.
2. video computer system - golden shower
3. bmx kidz theme - input 64
4. saucemaster - 8 bit construction set
5. ah, enemy - monotrona
6. ryu vs. sakura - knifehandchop
7. manhunt (rephlex manhood remix) – lords of the dance
8. computer games - yellow magic orchestra
New Yorker movie critic David Denby's self-lacerating book about losing all his money in the late '90s stock bubble, discussed briefly a few posts back, fits into a larger story, but not the one told here--of Denby the noodge dispensing crappy criticism. No, the real story, according to this month's Vanity Fair, is that Denby's wife left him for a woman, and his daytrading binges grew out of his rage over that, or some such. Katha Pollitt, mentioned here briefly, also has more interesting things to offer than her discussion of the hypocritical standards applied to campaign wives: in this month's New Yorker, she discusses her obsessive cyber-stalking of her ex.
I know people think that weblogs emphasize the confessional and the private over substantive analysis, but the reverse is increasingly true. Lately, if you want to discuss art and politics outside the usual defined boxes, parse the contradictory positions of institutionally compromised critics, and find a wealth of links to Internet metacriticism, you'll likely find that in the blogosphere. If you want a good gossipy wallow in the tawdry personal misfortunes of these same institutional critics, the major media is for you!
You may have heard that CBS refused a Superbowl ad from the grassroots organization Moveon.org, because it dared to criticize the President. Where are we living, North Korea? The ad emerged from a competition among independent film and video makers called "Bush in 30 Seconds." The finalists from the competition are here. I haven't seen all of them but my favorite so far is "What Are We Teaching Our Children?" (high bandwidth) / (low bandwidth). In this parody of a junior-high school election debate, kids stand up and enthusiastically attack Bush's sorry record on the War, the environment, the economy, and so forth. Reaction shots from parents in the auditorium show the discomfort so-called adults feel at such bracing exercises of free speech in our current McCarthyite climate. This was CBS's reaction, too. I recommend watching the ads tomorrow and experiencing the exhilaration of still being free. I also suggest sending the links to a Republican friend with the note: "See, we can still do this!"
 I've recently created an "Animation Log," a record of animation projects that have appeared in this weblog or that I am currently working on. Includes found .GIFs, html appropriation pieces, "remixes," goofy kids' art, and my own deeply austere work. |
Political Musings Around the Web, Part Whatever.
"Why do they hate us?" was the big question on many people's lips right after 9/11/01. My stock answer: "Well, how about us having military bases all over the world when we're not actually at war with anyone?" Frequent response to that: "Bases? We have bases?" OK, as belated evidence of my assertion, please read Chalmers Johnson's report. He says we have 700 by a conservative count: it's hard to know for sure because the Pentagon plays shell games--pun intended--with the true numbers. How do you suppose that makes people in base-saddled countries feel? Glad because we're protecting them? But from what? People in their own countries that might otherwise overthrow their governments? Johnson points out the crude indiplomacy of the military's term for the geographical parameters of our control. It's called "the footprint."
I'm not planning to see Errol Morris's The Fog of War, a capital-I important film consisting of interviews with Kennedy/LBJ-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. A principal instigator of US escalation in the Vietnam War, McNamara now claims with pride ("No, shame." "Pride, Precious." "No...") that he encouraged low-altitude flights during the fire-bombing of Tokyo--a conflagration that killed more civilians than the A-bombs further south. Of course, he would have been too junior to have that power in WWII. Anyway, no way I'm going to sit in the dark for 90 minutes listening to the self-justifications of that 83 year old pathological liar. Alexander Cockburn makes me feel better about my decision. He says McNamara really got the better of Morris.
Lastly, Cockburn and his Counterpunch co-editor Jeffrey St. Clair filed an amusing, dyspeptic campaign report from Iowa. Kucinich is probably the candidate closest to their views on the war (and mine, FWIW, although our "getting the UN involved" as a solution sounds pretty presumptuous--surely only Iraqi citizens can make that call?). In any event Cockburn/St. Clair aren't Deanies, which makes the following quote more in the nature of an unbiased, general ad hominem slam:
What’s Kerry got going for him, apart from the money of his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who has propelled the sputtered Kerry campaign forward on a sea of ketchup dividends? Not much. Kerry is a chronic fence straddler on issues. Gore Vidal hit it on the head when he remarked that Kerry “looks like Lincoln…[pause]… after the assassination."Yes, that's mean, but does anyone actually buy Kerry's "poor pitiful me, Bush fooled me into giving him a blank check for war" argument? He should just admit he was afraid and went along with the Congressional pack, and then stop running.
Denby used to write terrible, boring, just-plain-wrong film reviews for New York magazine and now he writes them for the New Yorker. He's an earnest chin-stroking type that always holds movies to some ridiculous (or ridiculously conventional) standard of moral responsibility.* Well, it turns out he's also the Bill Bennett of sober left establishment pontificators--a gamblin' man who pissed all his money away in the stock market Bubble. That's pretty funny, but unfortunately he's now written a self-flagellating book about his experiences. Walter Kirn's sympathetic NY Times review is here. A choice excerpt from the review:
Denby, when young and living in California, had been something of a radical, dancing to the Grateful Dead and defiantly pitting culture against commerce, but he'd mellowed into a propertied intellectual who sneakily admired the system for its ability to supply the good life even to those who held it in partial contempt.Now there's someone I want to read about. And here's another quote, the sheer liberal piety of which might lead one to believe the reviewer is Denby's separated-at-birth twin:
As Denby's [investment] pile fluctuates his exact gains and losses are quoted in the chapter subheads, but the chapters themselves are an eccentric mix of often lacerating confessions about his rocky love life and seminarish meditations on capitalism, conspicuous consumption and the psychological roots of greed. His tone can be pedantic, but his intention -- to freeze and analyze the mental gyrations that allow a deep thinker to become a shallow speculator -- is worthwhile and appropriate. Denby even drops in snippets of movie reviews he wrote at the time to help show us where his head was at, but they don't add much. (bolding of inert words supplied)Excuse me, what was that about deep thinking? It's supposed to be surprising that the same person who can find "the good" in one packaged Hollywood movie after another also bought into the myths of the "Dow 10,000" years? It all sounds of a piece to me. I'll take a pass on his hard lessons on love and investing, thanks; it's bad enough that we're still stuck with his reviews.
* Take, for example, his review of the movie Monster, about a recently executed serial murderer. As always Denby finds something edifying and uplifting to justify our attention: "[Monster] is one instance in which art clearly trumps documentary 'truth.' The real Aileen Wuornos is too will-driven to show us more than one side of herself. In the end, you need a sane person and an artist [Charlize Theron] to bring out the humanity in a crazy person." Oh, we do, do we? If the "truth" is that Wuornos was an irredeemable mad dog killer, isn't "trumping the truth with art" the same as sentimentalizing it? Maybe the filmmakers had noble motives for distorting reality, if in fact that's what they did--to make an anti-death penalty tract or feminist bad-girl fable, say. But is the critic's job just to be a mindless booster for good causes? Based on this assessment I'd rather watch Man Bites Dog again and feel some real conflicted feelings, as its psycho hit man protagonist charms me into as much complicity as I can stand.