Toys, Toys, Toys

Yesterday I made the questionable choice of ordering one of the new 27-inch iMacs. There are many reasons I’d avoided an iMac in the past: it doesn’t allow end users to upgrade the hard drive, it uses mobile processors that cost more than buying an equivalent (and faster) desktop CPU, and it comes with a integrated (albeit beautiful) display – meaning that once the iMac has outlived it’s usefulness, the top-of-the-line Apple monitor goes with it.

While the hard drive on these new models remains outside the reach of all but the most dedicated hardware jockeys, they’ve fixed my other two complaints. The 27-inch iMac now has options aiming at the professional who doesn’t want a Mac Pro – including high-end quad-core desktop processors from Intel (the Mac Pro line uses server-class processors, which while having up to 20% higher performance than similar desktop processors carry a massive price premium… of sometimes over 200%). And that’s not all – check out this awesome piece of info from the official features page [apple.com]:

Mini DisplayPort.
The Mini DisplayPort lets you connect an external display, including the Apple LED Cinema Display, to your iMac. On the 27-inch iMac, the same port offers input, too. So you can connect any external source that has DisplayPort output … and use your iMac as a display.

Cheers Apple. This iMac is going to have a long life on my desk, even if only as an high-end monitor.

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