Dancin’ Shoes

Not only can this woman move, but those shoes are damn slick.

How to Win at Chat Roulette

Here, Ben Folds shows how to win at Chat Roulette [youtube.com]. Here’s the original that he is paying homage to [youtube.com].

An Excellent Diversion

Take a few minutes of your time today to enjoy this music video from, of all things, a game soundtrack [youtube.com]. There’s just so much life in these cute little robots. I love how this is put together, the zooms to the beat, the understated visual effects, the short depth of focus. If I ever shot a music video, it would likely be something similar to this.

Sports

Amazon.co.jpのお客様へ、

Amazon.co.jpで、以前に東京事変のミュージックをチェックされた方に、このご案内をお送りしています。『スポーツ』、2010年2月24日発売予定です。

Signal-to-Noise Rock

Over the past several months, I’ve often found it easier to expound on the things I want people to know via Facebook – more of my friends were there and reading it more often.

Until ‘more’ became ‘too many’.

Now, my posts drowned out by the dozens and dozens of other friends they desire to keep up with, even my friends don’t see and comment on my status updates. I know, because I’ve become the same way. Clearly, it’s time to start blogging with more frequency again! Here we go!

There was a time where a band who tried to use noise artfully would have gotten the cold shoulder from me, but those days have certainly passed. Ages ago boo [utau-inu.com] started exposing me to music that skewed towards a noisy aesthetic, but it wasn’t until I’d spent a good amount of time with (and seen live) the Japanese band fra-foa that I really began to hear the possibilities. Years later, another of my musically-inclined friends Andrew [goviolet.com] gave me a proper introduction to shoegaze [wikipedia.org] – a genre of rock music known for it’s noisy ‘wall of sound’ guitars. First came Asobi Seksu [wikipedia.org], whose second album Citrus [amazon.com] is a multi-layered masterpiece, revealing itself to tenacious listeners as an album of increasingly rare qualities. He then reached back to the early 90s for the seminal shoegaze pioneers My Bloody Valentine [wikipedia.org] – a band I’d been recommended before but never investigated (their name conjured mental comparisons to Type-O Negative who had always failed to engage me). Recently, he turned my tastes toward The Twilight Sad [thetwilightsad.co.uk], a fantastic four piece from Scotland whose recently released second album Forget the Night Ahead [fat-cat.co.uk] is a melodic shoegaze masterpiece (and is available for streaming in it’s entirety at this link). Still, it’s hard to blindly recommend the genre, because it represents a challenge to the average listener.

Ultimately, I luxuriate in a well-crafted noise aesthetic in music the same way I do one of Paul Signac’s [wikipedia.org] masterpieces. Unlike well-crafted pop music or art (for both of which my love is well known), these more complex manipulations of the media challenge me – but as I invest more time in trying to enjoy them, they continually reward me with more to enjoy. It’s simultaneously exhausting and exhilarating. And certainly not for everyone.

But it might be for you?

So tell me what you know and then it will be said and done
She said, be gentle, be fair was the fog even there
You’re looking at the guilty one
I only want some honest fun
I’ll always be your honest one

Old Age Draws Near! Command?

I’ve long awaited the day where I would have that ‘you kids reduce your decibels!’ moment – when some technological breakthrough would lead the the youth down a path I would view with despair. Well, my friends, that day has come. And the offending device is the humble camera.

Not that cameras are new; they’ve just passed a critical threshold from the price-to-features standpoint. Everyone can afford a tiny, pocket-sized digital camera with an LCD on the back for framing pictures, and a movie capture mode. Being that photography is one of my primary interests lately, you’d think this would make me very happy. And although there are a few arguments I could make against rampant camera use, it’s actually the attitude with which people approach their camera’s purpose that pits me against them.

Recently I’ve been floored by everyone’s obsession to capture, to record, to possess every experience in their life in some form. People don’t seem to be able to enjoy an experience anymore. They must focus on getting dozens of photos or as much video as their memory stick will hold. Where is this most frustrating to the rest of us? Concerts. I’ve been to a half-dozen concerts in the last year where my primary experience wasn’t watching the band perform live. My experience was limited to seeing the band perform via the LCD screens of the four cameras being held over the heads of concert-goers, directly in my line-of-view. And there seems to be no stopping it; last weekend I went to see Japanese rock giants GLAY in a small venue in Hollywood. The ticket purchase website, the confirmation email, the venue doors, and even the tickets themselves all said ‘NO CAMERAS’ prominently. And surprisingly, this seemed to help: only about one in every three fans was obsessively snapping photos. Last night’s Yeah Yeah Yeahs show in Pomona featured a much younger crowd and no such prohibition. And over half of the fans I could see from where I was standing in the general admission section of the floor were recording, capturing, preserving. Instead of living, experiencing, and enjoying. It makes me want to shake my cane and issue an edict about how ‘we would never have done that back in my day… why, you went to a concert to enjoy the show and the only things you took away were your memories and, if you were lucky, a cool t-shirt.’

Point, Counter-Point

Grizzly Bear’s new album Veckatimest is on my short-list for album of the year; Andrew [goviolet.com] drew my attention to their beautiful Two Weeks music video:

Little did I know that someone right here in Orange County, CA was creating a bit of an internet explosion [google.com] by animating his own fan-made video for Two Weeks:

I mentioned in my previous post that I’m a sucker for the underdog. In this case, I’m not sure that Gabe Askew is, in fact, the underdog.