Original London Cast

While searching for the song containing "24601" (or not, that being the question), I clicked some of my usual favourites, like "On My Own" and to my astonishment found out there's a full *movie* score (with Hugh Jackman and the likes)

And particularly "On My Own", in the original London Cast, is so amazingly beautiful, the rawness of her voice, the tearing and searing singing.

Humanwine - "Rivolta Silenziosa"

Cabaretesque, on The Pogues channel. Curious, particular the parlando piece in the middle.

The Killers - "Don't Shoot Me Santa"

Funny song, pop and catch.

Homer - Bellerophontes

But when he was hated of all the gods, then he wandered alone on the plain of Aleïum, eating out his heart, and avoiding the track of men.

Drs. P - "Komma"

[...]

Als u geletterd bent, en geen barbaarse heiden
En dus niet onbeheerst maar netjes en bedaard
Dan zult u steeds een zinsdeel van een ander scheiden
Niet met een bijl maar met een komma, uiteraard
Ja, bij exceptie mag het met een ander teken
Puntkomma en gedachtenstreep zijn hier veel waard
Voor wie verantwoorde de conventie wil doorbreken
Als u dat kunt, ben u stilistisch fijnbesnaard

16 Horsepower - "Golden Rope" (Low Estate)

Typical 16 Horsepower. Amazing.

Teho Teardo - "Still Smiling"

I don't even like this, I think, but it's so strange...

Parlando... still smiling... still smiling!! I'm still smiling!!

On the Quietus' best of 2013 list.

update: it seems this is an album in collaboration with Blixa Bargeld

Iamamiwhoami - "Play"

On the Quietus' best of 2013 list.

Strange synthpop swingster helium voices.

Fair Game (2010)

Naomi Watts and Sean Penn play the (partially truthful) story of an undercover CIA and her husband, being brutally exposed by the Bush regime when they reveal evidence was exaggerated.

Amazing dialogue about how little decisions become big ones. Liked it a lot.

The Coral Sea - "Lake and Ocean" (Volcano and Heart)

On Madrugada's channel: West Coast Indie rock collective the Coral Sea blends the lush, orchestral side of '60s pop with the modern sensibilities of neo-psychedelic outfits like Mercury Rev, Sparklehorse, and Secret Machines.

Not amazing, but nice enough. Haven't heard Sparklehorse in ages, by the way.

zapoi (Russian)

Two or more days of drunkenness usually involving a journey or waking up in an unexpected place.

word: teleologic

the explanation of phenomena by the purpose they serve rather than by postulated causes.

I'm not sure I understand this. But perhaps the thesaurus serves me best here: ORIGIN mid 18th cent. (denoting the branch of philosophy that deals with ends or final causes): from modern Latin teleologia, from Greek telos ‘end’ + -logia (see -logy ).

Alan Watts - 'Pain'

duhkha : duh = disagreeable/painful/bitter, kha = condition (duhkha ~ "chronic frustration")
sukha : su = sweet
ánanda : (the 'objective' of Buddhishm) ectacy, above sukha and duhka.

Look upon the pains of death as natural tensions, is this possible? why not.
We fear death we have a negative attitude of death largely because of social condition. It's what we've been taught.

Vomiting: regarded as disgusting (as children, vomiting, our mothers went "aaahugh")
It's rather the same with death. After all, death is benevolent.

We're afraid of going into very undignified motions (such as pain, crying). We're taught it's not manly to give in to pain.
Consider a cat. When the cat drops off the tree, does it say; "I'm gonna be a real tough cat. I'm gonna be all rigid and stiff"? No. Because it would become a bag of bones.

Lao Tze: Be like water. Nothing is softer. Yet nothing is harder to wear away rocks. Yet get a knife, and try to cut it. It yields completely. Strike it as hard as you like, you will never create a wound. The water triumphs over the hardness of the knife.

Fever boils out the disease. A steel bridge, when built completely, utterly rigid - it would break.

Be worried. And you will not be worried about being worried.
Be afraid. And you will not be afraid about being afraid.

Dish washing. the immense pile of dishes of the past. The immense pile of dishes of the future. But, you will only wash one dish. You can not wash more than one dish. You will only, in your whole life, wash this one dish.

Past and future are illusions.

Diagrams - "Famous Blue Raincoat"

On FIP, the strangest version of "Famous Blue Raincoat", a low male voice with a choir of backing vocals, on a bedding of electronic instrumentalism.

David Allan Coe - ....

Crazy x-rated songs in true country style. Crazy stuff.

Maurice Blanchot - "De stem en het schrift"

De narratieve stem ('hij/het' ofwel het neutrum)

"het dagelijkse [...] datgene wat gebeurt als er niets gebeurt"

het vertellende 'hij' stoot elk subject van zijn troon, en ontkracht elke overgankelijke handeling of elk objectieve mogelijkheid. Dit op twee manieren: 1) het verhaal geeft ons altijd het voorgevoel dat datgene wat verteld wordt, door niemand verteld wordt: het spreekt in het neutrum ('hij/het') 2) in de neutrale ruime van het verhaal komend e sprekers, de handelende subjecten - die vroeger voor personages doorgingen - in een verhouding van niet-identificatie met zichzelf terecht: iets overkomt hen, maar ze kunnen het alleen maar vatten door zich te ontdoen van hun macht om 'ik' te zeggen, en wat hun overkomt is hun altijd reeds overkomen: ze kunnen er alleen maar indirect over spreken, alsof ze zichzelf hebben vergeten. Die vergetelheid leidt ze binnen in een onheuglijk tegenwoordige tijd, de tijd van het vertellende spreken.

het verhaal zelf, los van zijn inhoud, is vergetelheid, zodat vertellen wordt: die eerste vergetelheid ervaren, die aan alle herinnering voorafgaat, haar fundeert en tegelijkertijd ruineert. In die zin in vertellen de kwelling van de taal, het onaflatende zoeken naar de oneindigheid van taal.

Marguerite Duras - mot-absence
een leemte-woord, met een gat in het midden, dat gat waarin alle andere woorden begraven hadden moeten worden.

Atheïsme en schriftuur. Humanisme als schreeuw.

Michel Foucault: 'Het is dan ook een troost en een hele geruststelling om te bedenkn dat de mens slechts een recente uitvinding is, een kleine plooi in onze kennis, en dat hij weer zal verdwijnen zodra die kennis een nieuwe vorm zal hebben ontdekt.'

Wie aan de mens raakt, raakt aan God.

... is het een klare zaak dat de mens niets zou weten, indien hij niet aan zijn einde zou komen, indien hij niet een verhouding tot zijn eigen einde en daardoor een verhouding tot de negatie zou zijn. De mens zou dan onbekend zijn met het vermogen te negeren, dat de grondslag is voor elk mogelijk weten. Juist omdat de mens sterft, komt hij tot kennis; ook het meest alledaagse, alsoook het meest positieve spreken [parole] praat slechts omdat de dood erin praat, de dood die dat wat is negeert, en in deze negatie de arbeid van het begrip [travail u concept] voorbereidt.

verlangende intentie: als een soort proces dat nadrukkelijk ongedacht blijft en onbewust. Deze en andere averechtse analyses van de fenoenologie transformeren en verdraaien haar, maar wat daaraan te doen? Ze zijn van nu af aan werkzaam, en ze zijn niet zonder belang.

Randall Breneman - "Bad Sometimes"

Groove and swamp-y. Not even on grooveshark yet.

Amy Macdonald - "This Much Is True"

I doubt I'd like to listen to a whole album of hers, but a song now and then (particularly now) tugs at strings lying around.

Oi Va Voi - "Dusty Road"

Swinging song, gypsy influences, simple but nice. Should perhaps look a bit more into the band?

From Up On Poppy Hill (2011, Ghibli)

From the majestic Ghibli Studios...

Was it the two Colombus beers, or the sneezing sickness? The film starts slow, and it's a simple plot, but it's beautiful and nice, how two young students fall in love, then find out they are related... then, of course, their love is still saved. And yet it does not feel contrived.

The music was nice, the story a bit slow, but all in all a great view.

Wax Tailor - "Hypnosis Theme" (Tales of the Forgotten Melodies)

the usual Wax Tailor stuff, but good enough to mention here. I've almost managed to forget his silly attitude at Sziget.

Maggi, Pierce & E.J. - "Jaded" (The Gold Album)

(via Pandora's Gogol Bordello channel)

Not sure how/what to call this. Cabaretesque singersong writers? Catchy.

word: defenestrate

To throw out of a window.

The Submarines - "1940 (Amplive Remix)" (Honeysuckle (Remixes))

I recognize her voice, or think I do. (Blake Hazard?)

This is a remix, so I'm not sure what the original is like, but intriguing enough.

Stanley Kubrick on mortality

I suppose it comes down to a rather awesome awareness of mortality. Our ability, unlike the other animals, to conceptualize our own end creates tremendous psychic strains within us; whether we like to admit it or not, in each man’s chest a tiny ferret of fear at this ultimate knowledge gnaws away at his ego and his sense of purpose. We’re fortunate, in a way, that our body, and the fulfillment of its needs and functions, plays such an imperative role in our lives; this physical shell creates a buffer between us and the mind-paralyzing realization that only a few years of existence separate birth from death. If man really sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should be bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?

The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

Melody Gardot - "Your Heart Is As Black As Night" (My One And Only Thrill)

Swinging, a trumpet, nightclub...

(this time on the Gloria Lynne channel, not Vaya Con Dios!)

Firewater - "Bourbon And Division" (Get Off The Cross... We Need The Wood For The Fire)

I remember getting tired of a Firewater-only Pandora channel, but with shuffle all it is a good addition to the random mix. This song isn't spectacular, but good cabaretesque.

word: apodyopsis

The act of mentally undressing someone.

jwz - after so many years, I hear another mixtape

134 to be precise.

• Chvrches - "Lies" : Quite poppy, but synthy enough that it might be quite interesting. Through jwz, no less. Wait, let me change the subject

Wooden Shjips - misc

Found through the Quietus. Repetitive long rockscapes, the Doors but with electric guitars, and I think this might be interesting.

Czars - misc

Because of Grant's latest album, listening to the Czars again. Love their melancholy, classical style (classical isn't the right word. Neither is it old fashioned.) There is something of the weeping surf guitar hidden in their sound.

Good examples:

• "Black Is The Colour" (Sorry I Made You Cry)
• "Where The Boys Are" (Sorry I Made You Cry) - weeping guitar style

John Grant - "Pale Green Ghosts" (2013)

• Sensitive New Age Guy - very 80's synthy, not very interesting
• You Don't Have To - classic John Grant verbal vitriol. Love it.

Ghost World (2001)

With Scarlet Johannson, Thora Birch and Steve Buscemi.

Two teenagers wonder what to do with their life after highschool. Thora Birch gets into a strange friendship with loner Buscemi.

Slow start, though still fine for me, until it picks up, story wise. Some gems of moments. Some amazing songs, like 'Devil got my woman' by Skip James, though while listening to it an evening later, it seemed quite a different song. Must listen to more of his stuff.

Also pretty amazing: "Miranda" and "Venezuela" by Lionel Belasco. Not for every moment, jazzy 1920's music, but melancholy in a swinging way.

Wonderful film. Personally, the ending is symbolic; for Birch there is only one way out.

Spiritual Front - (misc)

• Slave (Armageddon Gigolo) - gypsy, punk! great
• Song for the old man - on the brink between horrible and wonderful

 Some songs are horribly poppy though.

Carate Urio Orchestra - "Sparrow Mountain"

"In Carate Urio Orchestra, Joachim Badenhorst brings together seven musicians from his different ongoing projects." the website says.

Curious jazz, almost poppy, interlooped with near-Gregorian chants.

Tango No. 9 - "Oh, Those Dark Eyes" (Radio Valencia)

A tango, on Pandora's "Gotan Project" radio.

Haven't listened to tango for a while. It's pretty good. Perhaps good to listen more.

(turns out I have heard them before. Figures.)

T.S. Eliot - "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock"

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question….
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
  So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
  And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
  And should I then presume?
  And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
  Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
  That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor
And this, and so much more?
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
  “That is not it at all,
  That is not what I meant, at all.”

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Hell On Wheels

First season started slow. Westerns are supposed to be slow, but not this kind of slow. Them were aiming for Emmies and whatnot. Poses and the such.

Season two is getting better. Buchanon (spelled differently) is a bit more of a bad-ass with character, instead of just a pining poor soul.

I Am Kloot - "Avenue Of Hope"

In one of my Q's. So glad I saved them.

"No one's born / No one died / ... / And we wait to see / Just what we'll become"

Tom Barman & Guy van Nueten - "Nothing Really Ends" (live)

again, for the log. To sit down, and cry. Silently.

Goran Vejvoda - "My Dear Friend"

Simply had to log this. So beautiful in its sadness.
Immortal (Ad Vitam)

Album Leaf - (misc)

A good friend sent the link to "The Light" and after that one, started listening to a random collection of their stuff on grooveshark.

All instrumental, non-intrusive, piano-electronic with gentle rhythms. Perhaps good background/coding/writing music.

Cryptex - "Broken Interface"

Not too bad glitchy electro. Heard on di.fm's "Glitch Hop" channel.

Eivor - "All Blue" (Larva)

heard on soma.fm (Iceland Airwaves)

Ethereal girly voice. Nice. Perhaps boring after a while.

Kevin Kiner - "Hell on Wheels" OST

Still hate the fact I cannot find Deer Tick's cover of "Death To Everyone", but anyway. The OST is nice enough, particularly "Going Hunting", which is the most Western film music in style.

Codex Seraphinianus

http://the-dimka.livejournal.com/6645.html

in the late 70s italian architect, illustrator and industrial designer luigi serafini made a book, an encyclopedia of unknown, parallel world. it’s about 360-380 pages. it is written in an unknown language, using an unknown alphabet. it took him 30 month to complete that masterpiece that many might call “the strangest book on earth”. codex seraphinianus is divided to 11 chapters and two parts - first one is about nature and the second one is about people.
btw five hundred years ago there was another book somewhat like that - voynich manuscript.

word: splorp

"I was at the beginning of a movement that rose like a wave and quickly crashed over us in a splorp of thoughtless ornamentation."

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/brainpickings/rss/~3/dC37xJfMwWE/

Deer Tick - "Death to Everyone"

featured in "Hell on Wheels" but unable to find that version. Beautiful.

word: madrugada

(Spanish)

The period between “the dead of night” and “early morning”. Roughly 1am-4am.

James Joyce - "Araby"

A boy, in absolute love with a girl he has hardly exchanged a few words with, leaves his childlike ways and tries to visit a bazaar to buy her a present. His uncle, having forgotten his wish to go, comes back home late and when the boy finally arrives, only a few stalls are still open. He does not dare to buy anything, and “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” [the end]

From a storytelling point of view, I love the descriptions that Joyce gives us. The houses gazing at each other. “where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothes and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness.” These are amazing, gripping descriptions of a boy’s world. Even the romantic descriptions, which can be very cliche written from a young boy’s perspective, are good.

I am not sure though that I ‘get’ the story. It is a coming of age event, he is finally acknowledged by “his” girl and can’t wait to fulfill her request. He fails… and then considers himself the fool of vanity. Wasn’t it his uncle’s fault? Is it an event that describes both the coming of age and the realization that we’re all love’s fools? I cannot seem to care much for the boy’s anguish, and the revelation after the conflict does not truly seem to resolve for me.

Barry Hannah - "The Agony of T Bandini"

His character, in the raw way Hannah describes it - “near vomitous with joy” - is not somebody one would quickly love to hang out with, but the reader is almost forced to acknowledge the honesty in his approach to life. There’s a brutal, raw directness to them. “Don’t take the cheap way out. Nobody is really… anything. Everybody is just a collision.”
There is no overwhelming urge in this story to see what happens next, no “whodunnit” feeling, but his character is intriguing in its disgust, its directness, that the reader is kept on a leash all through the pages.

Richard Selzer - "The Knife"

Amazing short about the scalpel in an operation theatre. I shouldn't say more, just reread it, time and again, and see how it accomplishes just that, the story of a knife, through the words and sentences.

Shilpa Ray - (misc)

Championed by Nick Cave, she plays raw punky song. Nice enough, nothing crazy though.

London Calling sampler

• Nadine Shah - "Runaway" : grungy-guitars with an echo-y voice. Repetitive and interesting.
• Outfit - "House on Fire": rhythmic, hard to place.

28 Days Later

Cool. Thought I had seen it, but not sure.

Lydia Davis - "Television"

There is no plot - in the traditional sense - but a state is being described that slowly arcs from happy, “They say it will be exciting and it always is,” to intensily sad: her own life has become complicated, “so hard to understand, that I want to watch a different movie… simple and easy to understand.”
Television as a drug, as an escape, is nothing new. What this story lacked, for me, was increasing the depth of her pain, her longing, a hint at why her own life has become too complicated. To tell us it is complicated without describing - or even just suggesting - why it is so, seems to use it as a stock trait of life: difficult, complicated, making us want to escape.
The format of the narration does not really change. She keeps using shows and show details as examples, superfluously to explain why she likes them, but indirectly to tell us what her life lacks. I missed a deeper caring for her situation, I lacked a convincing “truth”, and the repetition of the storytelling format did not help.
I couldn’t help but compare it to “As I stand here ironing”, and unfortunately Davis’ story suffers greatly in the comparison.

Grace Paley - "An Irrevocable Diameter"

Question: How is the emotional state of the narrator used in the story

Observation: The narrator tells us of the events that led up to him marrying Cynthia, a sixteen year old girl, “wild” in her own words, who is utterly bored with life in the small community where she lives. He describes her despair with people of her own age, with her parents.
Told from his point of view, though once he says he copies her words exactly, we never get a truthful look inside her mind. The narrator is a careful observer though, and his description of her and the life she lives, is detailed in texture, using various senses to recreate them truthfully. As a reader, you never get the feeling he is playing you.

Despicable Me 2

Almost as enjoyable as the first one. Had a slight feeling that more slapstick moments were used that did nothing to push the story forward, but still a fun watch.

word - true

the great idea True, an emotionally charged symbolic construct ... we must first stare thoughtfully and long at a tree, Old English treow, which gave us the word true (treow), the "deeply rooted" idea.

word - aleatory

depending on an uncertain event or contingency as to both profit and loss

Taarka - "My Angeline" ("Seed Gathering For A Winter Garden"

Gyspsy, a bit too poppy chorus, but pretty nice nonetheless.

the Unseen Guest - "Let Me In" (Out There)

not exactly my kind of music, but gypsy and sad and intriguing.

On the Woodkid channel.

Cinema Musica - het beste van de Vlaamse film muziek

Found on Grooveshark, with just one song. Interesting?

Julia Stone - "Winter On The Weekend" (The Memory Machine)

Soft, lost in sadness, hints of "Your Ghost" and yet not at all. Harsh lyrics, a ripped heart.

JJ - "My Life" (No. 3)

Strangest echo-girl-voice'd of this song. Or is it. There's parts of it I hate, and overall I love it.

It has the "na nananah.. it goes around the world" at the end... but that's just the cover bit...

Emily Browning - "Sweet Dreams" (Sucker Punch)

Very theatrical version of the Eurythmics song. Strange.

On Woodkid channel.

The Glitch Mob - "Warrior Concerto" (We Can Make The World Stop - Single)

interesting breakbeat-ish. woodkid channel

AWOLNATION - "Sail" (Back From Earth EP)

Is there such a thing as quiet easy-going dubstep??

Never heard of this, but intriguing. On 'Woodkid' channel.

Imagine Dragons - "Radioactive" (Continued Silence)

On the Woodkid channel.

Pretty strong pop-oriented, but catchy. This might become tiresome pretty soon, but a song here and there will probably spice things up.

Ane Brun - "The Opening" (Rarities)

Sad, and soft, as all her songs are. And again, the beautiful balance of minor and major chords, neither one gaining over the other.

Plus, look at that poor moorhen on the cover of the album!

Darjeeling Limited

Amazing soundtrack. Check it out, grooveshark or whatever.

Nice feel-good movie about leaving your historical ballast behind. Three brothers, one train. India.

"He said the train was lost."
"How can a train be lost?! It's got tracks!"

 Rita: What's wrong with you?
Jack: Let me think about that. I'll tell you the next time I see you.

"We haven't located us yet."

Great example of silly-story. Melodramatic? Yes. Who fucking cares. 

Butthole Surfers - "Pepper" (Electric Larryland)

Haven't heard this one for ages. Love it still.

Tillie Olsen - "I Stand Here Ironing"

Amazing, terrific short story about a mother contemplating the life of her daughter. (that *so* does not do it justice)

The strange thing is that I cannot immediatly point out how this story affirms life, how it instructs. Yet I will definitely defend it as a truly moral story. Is it for “Life’s potential for turning tragic” as being “a fact of our existence.” For describing this so well, so pointedly, with so much feeling? It is in no way didactic. On the contrary, the mother tells us of all the things she didn’t do, or the things she couldn’t do, for her daughter. Olsen shows how much the mother mourns this, is unable to change anything about it, though still asks desperately - knowing the answer too well - ‘but what could I have done?’ Is it this torment that can nudge us, that can help us fix our moral compass? Perhaps, perhaps. This story really, really got to me and perhaps that is why this is rambling along.

Tangerine Dreams - "Canyon Voices" (Canyon Dreams OST)

Instrumental, think Vangelis. But good as background music.

(Pandora's "Angelo Badalamenti" channel. Too bad about the panflute.)

Francine Prose - “What Makes a Short Story?”

(from Alice LaPlante's "the Making of a Story")

[p168] “the anecdote, stripped of its trimmings, is insignificant and often inane.”
[p168] “a short story must be an idea … It must be a picture, it must illustrate something … something of the real essence of the subject.”
[p169] “It cannot be summarized or reduced without sacrificing the very qualities that do in fact distinguish an amusing dinner-party anecdote from a great work of art - depth, resonance, harmony”
[p170] “if we find a way to describe what the story is really about, not its plot but its essence … there is always something there” But this is so very true of novellas and novels as well. This is not a unique aspect of the short story.
Poe: everything should work towards an effect.
[p172] V.S. Pritchett: “The novel tends to tell us everything whereas the short story tells us only one thing, and that, intensely… It is, as some have said, a ‘glimpse through,’ resembling a painting or even a song which we can take in at once, yet bring the recesses and contours of larger experience to the mind.”
[p176] “To claim that every short story should include a moment of epiphany is like insisting that every talented, marvelous dog jump through the same narrow hoop.”
Why should everything in the world of a short story be “put there for a reason” [p177] Can its internal dissonance not be a major part of the story’s impact?
[p178] “we understand something new, something solid”, again, that is true for truly artistic (moral) novels too.

Anne Lamott - "Shitty First Drafts"

A fun enough read - I would definitely shoot the little buggers in the head - about first drafts and the big Don’t. Be. Afraid. Of. Them.
It is well written, in the sense that a writer reading this must recognize his own behaviour in the words, his tremors and angst. Followed by her calming, soothing advice: don’t worry. We all do it.
It is trying a bit too much to be funny once or twice, and I wouldn’t say it is amazing in its coverage and examination, but… maybe that is exactly the point. Don’t get all academic about it. It’s just a first draft. Just go with it. Hate it as much as you like, definitely don’t analyze it, but know that it *will* help you.
I recognize a lot and will definitely try the mousy voices exercise. Won’t hurt. How I feel after a first draft? Depends on what I was drinking while I wrote it. I’ve been everywhere: from elated to depressed, from curious (hey this might actually be something) to downright nihilistic. The latter mostly happens when I look at my bookcase, see all these splendid writers, and start to convince myself: I will never be able to come even close to that.
The next steps after a first draft do not follow the same path. Sometimes I totally neglect it. Sometimes I remember the thoughts and feelings that made me write it in the first place, and even though it is shitty I sent it to a good friend. Sometimes I start working on it. Rereading, or drafting characters, plotlines, style. In short, I mess around. And sometimes even that works.

Squarepusher - "Iambic 5 Poetry" (Budakhan Mindphone)

Instrumental, on Pandora's "Angelo Badalamenti" channel.

Perhaps good for writing?

House of Cards

Amazing series (Netflix) featuring Kevin Spacey as a ruthless Democrat from South Carolina, playing the majority Whip while secretly aiming for the job of vice president.

Not a single boring moment. Fast script, intriguing characters. Can't wait for season 2.

Moby - "Innocents"

All very Moby-like.

Damien Jurado : sounds both like the Crazy Clown guy from David Lynch's album, as well as Flaming Lippish... and his song "Almost Home" irritates me big time.

Atlantis - "Omens"

Experimental? Soundscapes. Dutch, they say.

Some interesting moments.

words from Gardner's "On Moral Fiction"

• sequacious - lacking independence or originality of thought
• audiculous - timorously audacious
• timorous - showing or suffering from nervousness, fear, or a lack of confidence
• audacious - showing a willingness to take surprisingly bold risks
• abnegation - the act of renouncing or rejecting something

Joyce Carol Oates - "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"

from Alice LaPlante's "The Making of a Story"

A teenage girl is stalked by a strange guy. It gets intense near the end, but the moment when she is engulfed by insanity (my impression) is not very strong.

Denis Johnson - "Emergency"

'Fuckhead' - the main character - and Georgie leave the hospital and go on a tiny drug fueled trip. Some pretty intense sentences where he states the facts don't matter, but there is still truth in it.

Joan Didion - "On Keeping a Notebook"

Nice read because it explains so well the urge to record everything, even though out of context it looses its meaning, and over time it looses any coherence it once might have had.

Alice LaPlante - "The Making of a Story"

A Norton Guide to creative writing.

Wonderful book with exercises. Too many things to quote here, except; "It's important to understand that there are two aspects to creating truly compelling writing. ... what's needed is both method and madness. The method is what can be learned in an academically rigorous, systematic manner. ... But then there's the madness part - what is more frequently called the inspiration."

Tindersticks - "Across Six Leap Years"

Pretty amazing, very Tindersticks. Old songs, never published before, have been recorded in the Abbey Road studio.

"Retreat / Read me to sleep / Palace of Winds"

"Retreat / Read me to sleep / Palace of Winds"... by Gabriel Yared. Piano, almost like a 18th century example of music, but turning strong and melancholy and intense in seconds, falling into popular requirements... until it continues, beyond....

Jeff Beal - "House of Cards theme"

Haven't watched the series yet but listened to this right after his work on "Carnivale" and... it sounds very, very similar. I like it a lot, but the distant trumpet, the rhythm, the dark overtones in both melody and repetition...

Amanda Palmer goes Down Under

The vegemite song is a classic as ever, but her rendition of The Ship Song saddens me. It lacks the rhythm of the original. Nay, rhythm is not the right word. "Bad Wine and Lemon Cake", the duet with the Jane Austen Argument, is still soft and gentle. "Formidable Marinade" with is exquisitively cabaretesque.

word: quiddity

quiddity: the inherent nature or essence of someone or something.
a distinctive feature; a peculiarity: his quirks and quiddities.

word: machicolation

(in medieval fortifications) an opening between the supporting corbels of a projecting parapet or the vault of a gate, through which stones or burning objects could be dropped on attackers.

Visionist & Fatima - "The Call" (Al Qadiri)

Instrumental and it reminded me of the beast, the unheimisch synths, the slow progression.

James Joyce - "Dubliners"

Lauded by John Gardner, started reading the shorts in Dubliner.

Didn't care much for the first about the old priest. The second one was much better, the trepidation of the boy meeting the old queer man almost tactile in the words.

"The Dead": "The men that is now is only all palavar and what they can get out of you."
It's an amazing story. The ending is beautiful and.. not chilling, sad and gripping. Listen to "The American OST" by Herbert Grönemeyer while reading it, and lock everybody out. These are words that consume everything.

God Is An Astronaut - "Origins"

Irish, istrumental, post-rock. Good enough. Nothing amazing (yet).

Herbert Grönemeyer - "The American (OST)"

Still have to listen to the full album, but the "Main Title" track is amazing. Suspenseful, musical... Reminds me of "24 hours" somehow.

Jabberwocky / Wildstars - "Photomaton"

Electronic and of a very specific kind of voice... She sounds a bit like the girl who did the soundtrack of "Drive".... (Cliff Martinez, but it's not him I mean,... "Night Call" by Kavinsky)

Bettens - "Waving at the Sun"

Brother and sister from K's Choice, yes indeed. Some songs... rather, those with lyrics, are so-so.

• We Are Glaciers - an almost Morphinish, GY!BE buildup of sound! Unexpected...
• Away, more increased flooding of instruments
• Daydream - a little diamond, instrumental, piano.
• Whiteout - another instrumental diamond.
• Hell Like Heaven - ugh! skip! skip! skip!

Mark Lanegan - "Imitations"

Covers by the silk 'n silly voice (silly := good, remember that, peoples)

• You Only Live Twice - strange, because it is so recognizable yet has lost a bit of the shazzle of typical James Bond songs (the girly voice, the strings). Interesting. In a good way, not British, sorry Ian.
• Pretty Colors - who did the original? Nice. (Oh, mr Sinatra ey...ugh! it - the original - has horrible backing vocals)
• Autumn Leaves - oh... no no no no! I love this song! Remember the Coldcut version?! Mark, oh Mark, why did you have to make it into some silly waltz??

Trentemöller - "Lost"

A very soft, low-key album. Might be good for writing...

• The Dream - smokey
• Come Undone (feat Kazu Makino) - repetitive and dreamlike 
• Constantinople - (Istanbuuuuul!) energetic 
• Haze - piano false, very film score

Star Trek - Into Darkness

Enjoyable, though plotholable and ... well, it was good for a tired Saturday night.

Mark Twain - "Baker's Bluejay Yarn"

(the bluejay)

"It looks like a hole, it's located like a hole - blamed if I don't believe it is a hole!"

Nicholas Delbanco

"... by the age of four one has experienced nearly everything one needs as a writer of fiction: love, pain, loss, boredom, rage, guilt, fear of death."

[John Gardner - "The Art of Fiction"]

Pulp Music's Tales of the Bizarre - "Surf's Up, Death Island"

Crazy surf radio play. Listen to the whole thing! What the hell...?!

[update, years later]
The "voice actor" must be Matt Berry , the crazy business man from the IT crowd.

Goldfrapp - "Tales of Us"

Much quieter than the glam-electro albums of yore, maudlin violins, soft voices...

• "Annabel" - dreamy
• "Stranger" - truly channels Ennio Morricone, as the Quietus wrote.

gnostic and hermetic texts

• The Cloud of Unknowing
• The Book of Breathings

Michel Foucault - "Death as the destruction..."

"Death as the destruction of all things no longer had meaning when life was revealed to be a fatuous sequence of empty words, the hollow jingle of a jester’s cap and bells.”

Tarantella

Found through searches of swamp blues and gothic americana.

• "Bonus Track #1" - cabaretesque
• "Elder Tree" - Ennio Morricone guitars
• "Esqueletos" - slow swinging guitars with East European accents.

Cees Nooteboom (excerpt)

De wezel in het veld die niet weet
dat hij een wezel is
maar een wezel is
tot hij geen wezel meer is.

(uit: Vuurtijd, ijstijd)

gothic americana

Based on this description of 16 horsepower, some searching ensued.

• Jay Munly (definitely more consistent in playing darker songs than many others)
• Circle Round My Bedside - cabaretesque, with long stretched violins
• Dar He Drone - chanting with swamp blues guitars
• Jim White
• A Perfect Day to Chase Tornadoes - borderline melancholic and non-interesting.
• Phillious Williams
• Oh My Old Love - dark, for sure, though borderline again, screaming
• Sweet Debris - maudlin, longing, sad

Tasseomancy - "Ulalume"

melodious near-medieval close harmony singing by twins. Canadian?

Found through Timber Timbre who produced their album

Timber Timbre - "Magic Arrow"

strange. found through 3rd season (ep 2) of Breaking Bad, so a soundtrack, nonetheless.

(I heard about them before! Craziness in a glass, what's happening here... And it's an interesting post! Tagging this as "must-look-into" (fucked up the search right then and there))

Luther Allison - "Cherry Red Wine"

Screaming melodic blues. I think the version I just heard was by Luther Allison, but it could have been Jonny Lang as well. Better check them both out.

Two Star Symphony - "Junkyard Jig" (Danse Macabre PartII: The Consummate Host"

the title says it all, maudlin mewing violins and a rhythm which forces you to dance around the campfire. On Pandora's DAAU channel.

Hurray for the Riff Raff - "Dance with Death"

(yes, Pandora, I'm BACK!)

Gypsy slow-punk waltz. Accordeon. I probably listened to this band via the very same way, but it's a cool song. Should look into them.

Kavinsky - "Nightcall"

Title song of "Drive" and it immediatly took me back to the mood of the film.

Welcome to Night Vale

The weirdness of Twin Peaks brought in a matter-of-fact newsreader voice.

It's fun, and original, but I wonder whether it'll won't get boring after a while. The items are very small, and at some point you'd like some longerlasting narratives? Perhaps I'm misinterpretating the podcast and I shouldn't listen to them in a row.

Also, perhaps my attention span is simply too long. Only at ep 2 right now, so stay tuned.

Primer

Scifi of the loop-time kind. Low budget and lots of talking and I think it's really good but need to watch it again when my mind is actually working.

Tin Cup Prophette - "Liar and the Thief"

Sometimes near triphoppy, and her voice sounds so familiar... or is it the way she sings?

• 80 Days - "Too much of you and I waste away"...
• Until the Dust Settles - triphop
• All Is Lost - instrumental, and softslow 

Flaming Lips - "The Terror"

The beginning is very Flaming Lips, and nice, but it becomes a bit unhinged towards the end. "You Are Alone," for example, keeps on droning.

9-eyes

http://9-eyes.com/

Boy Robot - "Last In Paradise"

A lot more vanilla and plonky soundscapism than "Live in Vanilla".

Ok enough, but not something to be repeatedly listened to.

Shpongle - "Museum Of Consciousness"

As nice as ever, perhaps a bit more filmscore tinted than previous albums?

Still great while coding.

Leningrad

Heard while walking to some other stage, an interesting, busy enough sound.

Not for quiet or messy days though.

Woodkid - "Golden Age"

Discovered at Sziget. Album just as amazing.

(turns out it has been suggested by Pandora, an aeon or two ago.)

Dezsö Kosztolányi - "Skylark"

Short tale of two parents whose only daughter, ugly and unmarried forever, leaves them for a week, suddenly making them break out of their habits and austere existence.

I should reread the end. I'm not sure I grasp everything, but it was a wonderful read.

Brain improvement

Richard Restak:

On a very basic level, you are what you remember — your very identity depends on all of the events, people and places you can recall. Improving your memory will help you develop a quicker, more accurate retrieval of information that will increase your intelligence. Sharpening your short-term or “working” memory requires concentration. For instance, study four unrelated words for 15 seconds, then set an alarm for five minutes. Pay attention to another activity until the alarm sounds. Then try to remember the words. As you get better, change and add to the number of words and increase the amount of time. You can do similar exercises with numbers, visual designs, spoken words or even try to recount the scenes of a television show you just watched.

When you do these exercises your brain will require extra oxygen, blood and glucose. Just as with physical exercise, this can tire you out. Many “tricks” to sharpen your recall use memory pegs, systems to attach an association or meaning to what you desire to remember. There are visual and story memory systems, some dating back to Ancient Rome. One of these systems is called “the memory palace,” in which you associate the things you want to remember with vivid mental pictures, which you then imaginatively place in a familiar setting such as your living room. Later, you can “tour” in your mind the living room to observe the remembered objects in their familiar places. This technique can be so effective it is often used by memory contest champions.

Shturmovshchina

Shturmovshchina is the practice of working frantically just before a deadline, having not done anything for the last month. The first element means storm or assault, the second is a derogatory suffix.

 Shturmovschina originated in the Soviet Union. Factories would be given targets and quotas and other such rot by the state. However, they often weren't given any tools or raw materials. So they would sit around with their feet up and their tools down waiting until the necessaries arrived, and it was only when the deadline was knocking at the door and the gulag beckoned that they would panic, grab whatever was to hand, and do a really shoddy, half-arsed heap of work.

source (of course) : http://blog.inkyfool.com/2011/07/shturmovshchina.html

Shane Jones - "Light Boxes"

Incredibly amazing little novella of a town trying to free itself from the grasp of February.

Written in that estranged style halfway between prose/poetry and madness.

Parov Stelar - "Princess"

triphop, strings, looped vocal... cool!

• Milla's Dream - evocative
• Nobody's FOol (feat Cleo Panthe) - very poppy, catchy
• Silent Shuffle (feat Jerry Di) - jazzy, ring-a-ding!
• This Game (feat Anduze) - ugh, blerghy
• Requiem for Annie - piano, scratch effect, nice

Zorita - "Amor Y Muerte"

Accordeons, slowly increasing rhythms, life and death... Tom Waits, if he could sing a tad better and had more of a Spanish temperament.

Awesome.

• Weeping Willow (Waltz Macabre) - good start
• The Clyster of the World - fast, contains sex and cocaine so you know it's good
• Lost At Sea - "oh Amsterdam you're a bitch built on rotting poles". Ain't it so.
• Señor Presidente - trumpets, that special one, and in that particular minor chord
• Don't Forget To Breathe - dark, swampy
• Dance Me To The End Of Love - yes, the very one. In an E-powered roma version. 

Hunter S. Thompson - "Kingdom of Fear"

Amazing read of rants and columns. I keep being amazed by how much about politics he knows. And he says so: once you get sucked inside...

Dubravka Ugrešić - "Baba Yaga Laid an Egg"

The first few pages were amazing. Then it diverted from what I expected, and things became different.. but still good.

I think that honestly I wasn't much in the mood to enjoy it to its true depth. Particularly the last part, basically facts on Baba Yaga, could not hold my attention.

But still nice enough.

NTK

Have I never quoted NTK here before? 'tis about time...

"It's still the anti-changelog to our lives."

Shannon and the Clams - "I Wanna Go Home" and "Sleep Talk"

I can't find their latest albums "Dreams in the Rathouse" on grooveshark yet.

It's raw and very '60s, but much, much rough. More punk. More grunge.

Karsu - "Confessions"

Sleepy, nightclub, dreamy.

• Crime - swinging, about self-defense, somehow reminded me of Chicago
• Gesi Baglari - err... oh? Persian? nice
• Something on the Rocks - sad, hints of French chanson (Ne Me Quitte Pas, to be precise. It isn't, but there's strong hints.)
• Cok Uzaklarda - no idea what it's about, but maudlin and beautiful

Tarot - Virgo and her wish for death

(I have no idea how to tag this.)

The Hermit card is linked to Virgo, who has her own problems with the loneliness that perfection brings. The Virgo longs to be whole, unsullied by humanity. At some point, she will have to face the fact that the quest for perfection is a secret death wish. Being whole, being sealed and purified and perfect, soaked in bleach and boiled to sterility, is the opposite of life. To breathe is to sully oneself. It’s kind of the point.

hypocoristic

http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19990714

The word hypocoristic is not uncommon in linguistics. As an adjective, it means 'endearing, as a pet name or a diminutive'; as a noun, 'a hypocoristic form; a pet name or a diminutive'. The adjective is much more common.

 Hypocoristic forms are, as the definition says, generally either pet names, or nicknames, such as Harry for Henry or Betsy or Beth or Liz or about a zillion others for Elizabeth, or they are forms with some sort of diminutive element, such as the suffix -y/-ie, yielding such words as preppy (prep (school) + -y), kiddie, birdie, cutie, and the like.

Mo'Horizons - "Coming Home"

Wonderful compilation! At least, the first two songs are amazing.

In de Coming Home serie verschenen eerder compilaties die werden samengesteld door o.a. DJ Hell, Jazzanova en Nouvelle Vague. Deze nieuwe van Mo' Horizons is een aanwinst in de serie. Een mooie selectie tracks (voornamelijk soul, funk en jazz) en dat alles smaakvol achter elkaar gezet. Denk qua sfeer en muziek aan de LateNightTales serie. Op deze verzamelaar staat ook het nummer 1960 What? van Gregory Porter dat afgelopen jaar in de top 10 van de zwarte lijst van Radio 6 stond.

• Clay Hammond - "You Threw Out Your Lifeline", slow, catchy
• Betty Everett - "Someday Soon", swinging
• Oscar Aleman - "Besame Mucho", crazy swing!

Nadine Shah - "Love Your Dum and Mad"

Dark.

• "Are you with me"

and many more. Dark. Echochambers.

Sziget 2013

• Carbonfools - bit like Doe Maar (yes)
• Zagar - poppy
• Belmondo - "guy with guitar" (meh) or nasty vocoder-obsessed electro?
• Kowalski - poppy, bit too smooth
• Itim Torra ... - happy poppy, soso
• Ivan and the Parazol - rock, ok
• Supernem - garage/grung-y, a Oasis/Greenday
• Subscribe - (awesome titles!) - but deathmetal... and probably a no go, unless drunkers
• Alvin és a Mókusok - (wiki: California punk?) - soso, interesting bits
• Vad Fruttik - "Goa" : oriental, beat, stringe guitar, nice. Interesting enough. Definitely not everything goa ish... happy-go-guitar-on-an-escalator... and then not? are there more bands with this name?
• Anna and the Barbies - too smooth poppy, then reggae?
• Nemjuci - tres poppy
• TheShowCrew - hiphop, meh
• DSP - hiphop, soso
• Sena - reggae, nice enough
• Péterfy Bori & Love Land - strange, echo chambery, definitely a go
• Grand Mexican Warlock - aaaaaaaaaah, boys with guitar. nope.
• Leander Rising - deathmetal, noooo
• Halott Pénz - rap (drop a beat, yo!)
• Irie Maffia - reggae, soso

Carbonfools - "Bag of Candy"

This sounds, strangely enough, very 80's, "Doe Maar"

Not to mention their "Suck My Chi" which is plain silly.

Stump - "Buffalo"

"How much is the fish?! / How much is the chips?! / Is there chips with the fish?!"

How about that. The influence behind Scooter's "How much is the fish". Think The Residents, in weirdness and plonkiness.

Now I only have to find out where the hell he got the line "Transform the juice!"

Morphine - "Cure for Pain"

Have been listening a fair deal to Morphine and Madrugada lately. This album seems a bit too happy (can I? can I say it? oh please?! ...trippety-hop!) but "Miles Davis' Funeral" is a soft slow neigh sanctimonious ending.

Matthew Von Baeyer and David Gossage - "The Jack of Hearts by Lawrence Ferlinghetti"

Beat poetry with a beat. Ahem. Typical English alliteration.

Busy, pouring into your ears without a single gasp for air.

Kenneth Rexroth - "Married Blues"

Did poetry sessions "Poetry in the Cellar" asking young Lawrence Ferlinghetti with him.

This one is jazzy. Don't know if it's from those sessions, but it's... smooth.

Fun enough words. Look him up.

Pet Shop Boys - "Electric"

Well, I just had to mention them, hadn't I?

It's sometimes very Pet Shop Boys, to the point of... errhm, nothing new?

And sometimes it's not. And then it's not interesting.

David Lynch - "The Big Dream"

Same half-step dub'd clown-singing.

Seems they used exactly the same tones for the voice melody.

It's all very much of the same. It doesn't have the weirdness of "Crazy Clown Time" and it's simply not very interesting.

Mark Forsyth - "The Horologicon"

Book about crazy words, ordered by the hour of the day.

Not one you should read from front to back, but a wonderful read, even though his little jokes are a bit too much (or, too little?) sometimes.

The Event

Ok, I think I saw one episode. Something with aliens. Something with can't be bothered.

Homeland

Clare Danes' character becomes more interesting at the end of season one.

I hate how flat the vice-president's character is. The ultimate Republican. It seems too easy.

Somehow my devotion can't be grabbed.

Jewish Mysticism

"Middrash" (?) - Jewish / Rabbinian interpretation of the Bible

Four periods

• First, +/- 1500 BC (or 'BCE') to 200 BC : around polytheism
• Second: 200 BC - 500 AD : Roman and Greek occupation
• 500 AD - French/American revolution : dispersian of the Jews, no homeland, no common lands. They are tolerated in other countries. Most other religious are monotheistic.
• French/American revolution - now : the modern era, during which the Jews are persecuted and murdered in WW II and during which they come in contact with "notheistic" like Buddhism.

The worship and offerings used to be completely silent. To start using words, the Bible, prayers, was a very significant change. Words have meaning. Words bring you closer to God.

Jewish mysticism is "down and inwards", as opposed to Christianity and the Islam who are "up and outwards"

It is "normal" mysticism, God is found everywhere, in every day life, also down here on earth.

He gives some interpretations of scripture, for example the Song of Songs, where breasts are actually Mozes, leading the people out of Egypt, and Aäron, the first priest, as they should "nourish" the people. This makes kinda sense. But his interpretation of "Where many women have been virtuous, you were the most virtuous of them all" refers to Mozes again, being most virtuous as compared to Abel, Jacob, etc. He does not, though, explain the "logic" of referring to those people and Mozes as women.

Between Earth and the divine being of God there are 7 heavens.

Three layers:

• the senses, the memory, storing "real" things
• the creativity, which can combine memories and create new things out of them
• the intellect, which is the highest level, the most according to God

God created the universe starting at the highest level (the "intellect"). Man has to find God starting the other way around.

"Appalaphian" methods, divised by "Appalaphia" (??) around the 12th century, try to disentangle the soul, to free the mind from its associations, so behind the real objects, behind the words and sounds, the divine can be glimpsed.

It's interesting, but often he gives explanations, or tells how certain mystics described the essence of God, or how many heavens there are, without hinting at how *they* came to those conclusions.

More about layers:: the Torah to the stories and the words, is like God to the universe: God needs the universe, like wine needs a jug, in order not to spill, not to (how audacious!) go sour.

Kabbalist consider evil a "necessity": "Without evil, chickens would not lay eggs, houses would not be built". We need to be prompted, otherwise nothing happens.

Madrugada - (misc)

• "Hands Up - I Love You" (The Nightly Disease) contains the sentence "Do you miss me baby, when I fall asleep". Which is awesome.
• "Whatever Happened To You?" (Madrugada. Is this their last album, after the guy died?) Awesome song.

Gongoozle

gongoozle (third-person singular simple present gongoozles, present participle gongoozling, simple past and past participle gongoozled)

To leisurely watch the passage of boats, from the bank of a canal, lock or bridge.
To observe things idly.

Madrugada - "Electric" (Industrial Silence)

Pack your bag, run away

Along a freeway, out of town

Murakami quote on writing

Now, though, I realize that all I can place in the imperfect vessel of writing are imperfect memories and imperfect words. 

Naff wine bars.

A spot of lunch.

(I honestly don't know whether I added the last two lines, or whether they belong to the quote. It probably comes from "Norwegian Wood")

Twin Peaks

I've been slow watching this show for more than a year now. Last night I realized that the reason this works so well for me (David Lynch' work in general, and others like him) is because when every day logic is stripped away, everything - including people, places, objects - becomes laden with emotion and relative meaning. It exposes a rawness of what we feel, want and fear by removing the thick layer of 'normality'.

The reason why so many Lynch wannabe's fail is exactly because they don't realize that. They just muck around with the storyline, create weird situations, crazy characters and illogical or impossible plots and think they did the same. But you need to have an idea of what you expose if you want to do it right. Otherwise the abyss is just a plain black square and nobody will care.

Radiohead - "2 + 2 = 5" (Hail to the Thief)

On a dreary Sunday morning I suddenly rediscover this song. Or no, it's no discovery, I am simply by its full force.

Radiohead makes songs about the disintegration of friendship, how even that has a structure, an inevitability that everybody, always, must question.

Ernest Hemingway - "A Moveable Feast"

Is this one of his masterpieces? A little gem? Or just a novelle from the great master?

I can't shake the all too common "but where is this going?!" feeling. He is talking about his life in Paris, and yes, parts of it are interesting to read, but it just meanders on, softly and slowly, and... where are the arcs, the tension?

Danzig - "Thirteen"

There's something alt rock, punk, and Chris Rea about this.

the Hangover

Silly film. Not bad as far as comedies go (everybody kept telling me to watch it, even people who usually don't like this kind of film) and they managed to evade some of the terrible clichés, both in storytelling and jokes, but it wasn't particularly good. Can't say I remember laughing for real, once.

Some interesting songs on the soundtrack.

Wrecked Ralph

An amazing film for geeks, and truly Pixar. A bit over the top, perhaps, and nothing tremendously exciting, but I had a great time watching this.

24 (season 8)

Honestly, just in the mood for something easy. Supposedly this was a good season (I bummed out of the previous one. Probably had had enough of Jack Bauer for quite some time.)

I enjoyed it, although there were some serious stretches of plausability. Jack's transformation in the last few hours is intriguing. Is he really that beast? Is he forced into it? Does everybody he connects to, always dies, and why?

I'm not saying this is a deeply philosophical series, but it's a fun thing to contemplate.

But, wondering; the whole idea of showing things that happen simultaneously, seems to have been let go. It's only used to show the same sequence from multiple angles, or as the cross-over mix into commercial breaks. Too bad.

Yonderboi -"Splendid Isolation"

I forgot how much I loved this.

• All We Go To Hell - strange fake-comment style (but uppermost in our minds...) with a Röyksopp sound.
• Before You Snap - (how much can you take?) Haunting. I must have searched whether this is Jack Nickolson's voice or not. Some site says this samples Erik Satie's "Gnossienne No. 4". Wikipedia doesn't mention Jack Nicksolson or any other performer for this song.

Harlan Ellison - "The Beast That Shouted Love At The Heart of the World" (The Deathbird & Other Stories)

Amazing story - read by the author himself - of the essence of madness and humanity. Scifi, strange, and told in an incredible way.

Also found "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream", the story about 5 people trapped in a computer ("AM") that killed all humankind and slowly drives them mad because it cannot accept that it cannot feel, touch, make love...

Elias Canetti - "The Secret Heart of the Clock"

"It would be beautiful to disappear. Nowhere to be found. It would be beautiful to be the only one to know that you have disappeared."

Amy Hempel - "Weekend"

A mere 1,5 pages, of which I'll cut and paste the last quarter, and this is as beautiful as it gets...

    The women smoked on the porch, the smoke repelling mosquitoes, and the men and children played on even after dusk when it got so dark that a candle was rigged to balance on top of the post, and was knocked off and blown out by every single almost-ringer.

    Then the children went to bed, or at least went upstairs, and the men joined the women for a cigarette on the porch, absently picking ticks engorged like grapes off the sleeping dogs. And when the men kissed the women good night, and their weekend whiskers scratched the women's cheeks, the women did not think shave, they thought: stay.

Headphone - "RIOT"

From Belgium.

Very Thom Yorke, and 'The Children" has a strong Matt Bellamy feel to it.

Nantucket sleighride

Immediately after harpooning the whale, what followed was known as a nantucket sleighride.

the Forty Immortals

The French Academy, or the Institut National de France, has "forty immortals", created by Richelieu, who decide which words are added to the French language.

They have no legal authority, but their opinion weighs heavily.

This has been going on for more than 400 years. As Stephen Fry puts it, "a very strange, and very French system."

(from the 2nd episode of Fry's Planet Word)

Tangerine Dream - "Boat To China"

Like a score, a camera dreaming...

James Salter metaphores

Have never read anything by him, but feel I should. This is amazing:

http://www.berfrois.com/2013/06/apples-explode/

It isn’t Salter’s language alone that numbers him among the masters, but it is what strikes you first. From Light Years of 1975: ‘On the stands in nearby orchards were hard, yellow apples filled with powerful juice. They exploded against the teeth, they spat white flecks like arguments.’ From the story ‘Am Strande von Tanger’, on the death of a bird: ‘A heart no bigger than an orange seed has ceased to beat.’ From his first novel, The Hunters of 1957, a description of fuel tanks jettisoned by fighters, falling from high altitude over Korea: ‘There were a dozen or more, going down like thin cries fading in silence.’

There is the imagery of human actions and mannerisms. From ‘Comet’, a short story, the characterisation of desire: ‘He could have licked her palms like a calf does salt.’ From the same story: ‘He was mannerly and elegant, his head held back a bit as he talked, as though you were a menu.’ From Light Years, a young girl smitten by love: ‘She could not eat, like a dog that has been sold.’ And there is another kind, the imagery of states of being. In The Hunters, he writes of disappointment: ‘There had been many ambitions … They were scattered behind him like the ashes of old campfires.’ In Light Years, Nedra describes her marriage: ‘I love the familiarity of it … It’s like a tattoo. You wanted it at the time, you have it, it’s implanted in your skin, you can’t get rid of it. You’re hardly even aware of it any more.’ From All That Is, Salter’s new novel, an image for the urgency and sacrifice of love: ‘Love, the furnace into which everything is dropped.’

Besides their precision each image is distinguished by dynamism, by an organic nature. Apples explode and spit, a heart is a seed; the human life is the dog’s life, the life of the skin. Salter’s images are not static points observed by a character or narrator but conduits through which narrative flows. They are an aspect of the virtuosity that makes him singular, his mastery of time, the raw material of narrative fiction. There is a Salterian unit of time that partakes of a moment (when you live it, intensely), a season (it is that time of year), and eternity (there have been such seasons, and always will be). The particular instant of time emerges from the general mood of the season, its light and temperature and smells and colours. Others do this but few achieve it so smoothly, in such a way as to create, in the reader, the duality that is the trick of our consciousness of the actual passage of time, where a specific event, and the mood of the era in which it occurred, are two linked but distinct memories. The moments we remember are embedded in states it seems we have always known.

Salter was still working out this technique in The Hunters, set among American air-force pilots dogfighting Communist MiGs in the skies over Korea. ‘In June came ponderous heat and mornings like eggshells, pale and smooth,’ one chapter begins; the paragraph continues in the same mode. But the next paragraph starts with the conventional ‘It was on such a morning that’. Ten years later, the opening paragraph of A Sport and a Pastime shows how he has moved on:

September. It seems these luminous days will never end. The city, which was almost empty during August, now is filling up again. It is being replenished. The restaurants are all reopening, the shops. People are coming back from the country, the sea, from trips on roads all jammed with cars. The station is very crowded. There are children, dogs, families with old pieces of luggage bound by straps. I make my way among them. It’s like being in a tunnel. Finally I emerge onto the brilliance of the quai, beneath a roof of glass panels which seems to magnify the light.

In a short space the time-focus tightens from season to the days of the Parisian rentrée, to a moment in the life of the narrator. The sentence ‘The station is very crowded’ acts as a hinge, referring back to the generality of the beginning of the paragraph and forward to the specificity of the end.

A shiver in the workshop of the brain

Amazing drawings. Dark. Empty in strange ways.

http://butdoesitfloat.com/A-shiver-in-the-workshop-of-the-brain

Depeche Mode - "Wrong" (Sounds of the Universe)

After listening to their most recent album, I listened to some older stuff (1981! "Speak and Spell") but that's too plinkyplonk synth stuff for me.

Now listening to 2009's Sounds of the Universe, and it's much more to my liking.

This song is strong! Head nodding strong!

Depeche Mode - "Delta Machine"

• "Heaven" - can't get more Depeche Mode than this. I think I've already heard it. Nice, though it doesn't give me the shivers that "Little 15" still does.
• "Angel" - a drone and a voice like Nick Cave (with his kind of lyrics). Intriguing.
• "Broken" - dark.
• "Goodbye" - catchy waltz rhythm

Madrugada - "Grit"

• "Madrugada" - which...side....are... you... on
• "Majesty" - sad, slowly

Taxi, Taxi 2, Taxi 3

Particularly 1, but 2 as well, were amazing. Fast, nice action (from 1998? still good!) good dialogues, incredibly funny. True Luc Besson humour.

But 3 sucked. Spoofed itself, and spoofed its spoofing. Ugh.

Denis Johnson - "TRAIN DREAMS"

A wonderful novelle of a man born in the early 20th Century, who loses his wife and daughter to a great fire ravishing the valley. He keeps living in his own hut on his own acre, and once sees her, an apparition, and another time, his daughter.

Written in a way that is hard to describe. Very simple, very direct. You could say "not much happens", and yet it won't let itself be put away.

It's nearly poetry, of a harsh rustic kind.

Sir Sly - "Gold" (Ghost (single))

Catchy, though it is tinged with the kind of modern music fancies that I'm not a fan off. But there's a hint of pomp (and a vocoder, aiaiaii) and a good head-nodding rhythm.

must look into? maybe, unsure.

Mono - "Mopish Morning, Halation Wiper" (One more stpe and then you die)

Must've listened to them before but can't remember. Instrumental, near soundscapish, not really ambient, but slow and... amazing.

Ok, true, I did blog this just for the sheer title. Blame me!

(Also, the rest of the album is just as great. Good writing background music. Also also, the near off-key synth tones are amazing.)

Parataxis

Parataxis is a literary technique, in writing or speaking, that favors short, simple sentences, with the use of coordinating rather than subordinating conjunctions[1] (from Greek for 'act of placing side by side'; from para, beside + tassein, to arrange; contrasted to syntaxis or hypotaxis).[2] It is also used to describe a technique in poetry in which two images or fragments, usually starkly dissimilar images or fragments, are juxtaposed without a clear connection. Readers are then left to make their own connections implied by the paratactic syntax. Ezra Pound, in his adaptation of Chinese and Japanese poetry, made the stark juxtaposition of images an important part of English language poetry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parataxis

Hodejegerne (Headhunters) (2011)

Entertaining Norwegian action thriller of a story by the famous Jo Nesbø.

Nothing extremely fancy, but well done.

One scene made me wonder why the heck Dutch acting often looks so bad. Does this look as bad to Norwegians as Dutch acting does to us? Hard to say. (To make myself absolutely clear: the acting in this film *was* good, hence I wondered.)

Synecdoche, New York

Wonderful film. The usual Kaufman themes are there - uncertainty, death - but the theatre that becomes a stage for New York with actors for real people...

It's such a simple concept, and I loved it. A film well worth watching a couple of times.

Haruki Murakami - "Norwegian Wood"

Ok, no magic realism! To be honest, yes, I had expected that. No, I had not read anything about it first. Why would I?

But the story was written wonderfully, and it did grow on me. The struggle in the book, chosing between Midori and Naoko, doesn't start until the last quarter of the book or so, which makes it a kind of silly spoiler.

The beauty of his writing is in the soft, undemanding poetic way he describes everything, including the distant character of the protagonist. You cannot feel angry at the guy for the distance he keeps between himself and the world. It is an utterly natural thing for him, and as such, makes you wonder about your own compulsions.

Nick Cave - "The Flesh Made Word"

You could call it the B-Side of his "Love Song" lecture.

A wonderful listen of how Nick Cave relates to the Bible, the word of God.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3p_gzuLaVM

Kurt Vonnegut - "Bagombo Snuff Box"

Early, unpublished stories. None of them really stuck with me.

Hugo Claus - "De Geruchten"

Het eerste deel was verreweg het meest intrigerend. René die terugkomt, de Kap die een donkere rol speelt, een gevoel van onbehagen tegen de achtergrond van Claus' België, de verschillende personen in een klein dorpje.

Maar het verhaal van zijn zotte broer Noël die verhoord wordt, en via wiens (verwrongen, gelogen) beelden we de achtergronden achterhalen, konden me veel minder boeien.

Een enkele mooie zin:

"Ik lees die woorden af in mijn hoofd. Veel van die woorden komen boven uit de tijd dat ik in de klas van Meester Arsène zat, voor mijn ongelukkige moeder mij heeft laten met haar tandem. Ik was de slimste van de klas. Ik las toen boeken. Soms komen de woorden, de zinnen zelfs, terug uit die boeken en dikwijls herken ik wat zij willen zeggen."

Cat Empire - "Cinema"

Couldn't listen properly to every single song, but...

• Shoulders: very ska-ish.
• The Heart is a Cannibal: yuck! Then it turns uptempo.
• Reasonably Fine: very music-al.

Alex Boyd - "Point of Deliverance"

http://www.themorningnews.org/gallery/point-of-deliverance

Avishai Cohen - "The ever evolving etude"

(or is it really "The ever evoling etude" ?)

It's like Philip Glass going mental. Well, more mental than him. Mental and on mescaline.

Artie Kaplan - "Bensonhurst Blues"

Melancholy swing of yore. With banjo (mandoline?) and weird mouth-singing!

Seems a common song. Oscar Benton has an amazing version as well.

Nick Cave - "Lamentation" (Grinderman?)

Sounds amazing. Search for it on grooveshark.

Layer Cake (2004)

It has been said Daniel Craig got his James Bond role because of this film.

It's good. It's typical British underworld-Guy-Ritchie style, including incomprehensible dialects and lightning-fast-dialogues.

20Hz storm animation

http://semiconductorfilms.com/art/20hz/
http://semiconductorfilms.com/art/

"Two Chips" (animated short)

oh love, you leave me giggling.

http://vimeo.com/65102146

Saturday words

http://feeds.feedburner.com/better_than_english


Yoisho
Yoisho is a Japanese word that has no real meaning at all – it’s what Japanese people say when they flop into a chair after a hard day at work, where others might just exhale or grunt loudly.

Ayurnamat (Inuit)
A word describing the philosophy that there is no point in worrying about events that cannot be changed.

Bothántaíocht (Irish)
From ‘bothán’ meaning ‘hut’ or ‘cabin’, the word refers to the act of going around the neighbours’ houses, collecting gossip. ‘Bothánach’ is an adjective describing someone who does this.

Eigengrau (German)
Lit. meaning “intrinsic gray”, but also refers to the dark grey colour seen by the eyes in perfect darkness, as a result of signals from the optic nerves.

Ikigai (Japanese)
Ikigai is a Japanese word meaning “reason for being.” On the island of Okinawa, it is thought of as “a reason to get up in the morning,” a philosophy which has been linked to the longevity of the people there.

Steven Hall - "The Raw Shark Texts"

Loved this book, it blew me away. It was funny, great writing, and an amazing story to the likes of "The End of Mr Y" and "Neverwhere".

There were a few issues with the notion of conceptual fish and its conceptual world. In particular, the boat and how everything changed seemed sometimes a tad too easy... and yet it made sense on a fundamental level so deep that there are no proper words for it.

It was so good that I dread opening, nay, even picking out, a new book to read next.

Some amazing metaphores.

"The Orpheus was listing strongly now, the starboard side several feet nearer the water than the port and the mast pointing to five past the hour. It made matters worse that the winching arm was fixed to starboard and when we lowered the cage down over the side it added another minute to the ticking-away mastclock."

"I wanted to say, No, really, and explain how Ian really wasn't a getting-to-know-you type of cat or even a caual-hello kind of cat, more a sort of whirlwind made of blades."

(about his deceased-girlfriend's family)
"I know I probably won't see any of her family again. It's just too hot and too sharp and we'll only cut ourselves on each other if we try to stay in touch."

Focus Group - "The Elektrik Karousel"

http://www.emusic.com/album/focus-group/the-elektrik-karousel/14015432/?fref=202710

Crazy carnaval music. Childlike and insane psychoscapes.

Scarlett Thomas - "Going Out"

Enjoyable enough, an easy read, but there were quite a few things that bothered me. First and foremost perhaps, it was the lack of something special, something intrinsically magical, going on. Not magic in the it's-impossible way (after all, there was a with who might or might not have been a real witch) but something intense in the words and the story.

Things were too easy, it seemed. (Why am I thinking of Nick Hornby's novel ("Falling"?) that disappointed me? Similar feeling.)

Luke's trouble with comprehending things outside his house was sometimes difficult to imagine. I told myself over and over: he's never been outside. But it is mentioned time and again how much television he watches. He would know hotel floors are all the same. That there are numbers indicating which floor you are on. Or, if you have never experienced it, is it too much, still? Can you not connect the tv images with what your own eyes see?

Rezsõ Seress - "Gloomy Sunday" aka "The Hungarian Suicide Song"

Published as "Vége a világnak" ("end of the world")

Diamanda Galas' version is breathtaking.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWBJCOSgIrQ

Andy Rantzen - "The Plaza At Night " (3:00am Eternal)

heard on soma.fm

Very slow soundscape. Nice enough.

Tricky - "False Idols"

Great album!

• Jesus Sins - nice remix
• Parenthesis
• Nothing Changed - Moby-like

The Cat Empire - "Steal the Light" (album)

Catchy uptempo music, with scratch effects and a South American swing to it, including trumpets and the such.

• "Go" - great!
• "All Night Loud" - don't like the chorus much, but inbetween there are pieces reminiscent of Leonard Cohen.

Definitely not all songs are good. But many are happy.

Genevieve Valentine - "Mechanique"

Recommended by io9.com when you liked Carnivale, and the comparison goes deeper than "it's about a circus." There's the estranged world, the eerie physical and mental world that has become.

Love her style. Lots to be learned from. Amazing book, finished it in 1 day.

Hanna Bervoets - "Alles wat er was"

Een klap, mist, en dan niets meer. Acht mensen in een school. Langzaam vermindert het eten, de gezondheid, fysiek en mentaal.

Het verhaal springt heen en weer in de tijd. De aankondiging dat er iets gaat gebeuren ("toen was Barry er nog") werkt goed.

De uiterste sprongen moeten je verwarren (alles lijkt goed) of hoop geven?

De verteltrant is goed, al hou ik niet van de moderne vergelijkingen die in een verleden tijd worden gezet: "vroeger schreven we allemaal continue wat we aten en lazen we wat iedereen at" over Facebook en tumblr &etc.

Abre los ojos (1997)

Liked it a lot, even though I did fall asleep and watched it in two sessions. Good film, good story, though not overly exciting.

I really don't need to see Vanilla Sky anytime soon. It's a bit of a trick. Once you know the story...

Barfly (1987)

Raw, hash. At one point his acting felt a bit like a trick, until it hits you that that is the whole point. No escape, no difference. There are attempts, oh yes, fish do want to see the sunset too, but it won't work. Not for a barfly.

the Rum Diary

was looking forward to this one a lot. Had the cubra libre, had the heaven of no companionship.

It was alright. I enjoyed it, but could not shake the feeling they tried too hard. Too much Fear and Loathing (the side kick!), too much weirdness, but it was Holllywood weirdness, planned weirdness, and it didn't work that much.

I *did* enjoy it, and it wasn't a failure. Just not what I expected.

Leonard Cohen - "Old Ideas" (Old Ideas)

• Going home - standard as compared to his late stuff
• Amen - oh! Sounds like older Cohen (though with the background choir). More rough at the edge, still slow. This could be right from "The Future"

Ludovico Einaudi - "In Principio" (Nightbook)

Strange dreamy instrumental music, with eerie effects.

It's nice, but after a while a bit repetitive. Good to block background noise while working though.

Rock Plaza Central - "Anthem for the Already Defeated" (Are We Not Horses)

Catchy gypsy tune, featured in "the Battery" $6k zombie film.

Have listened to other songs, but none of them come even close. Got the impression it's Christian-inspired, in a sadly-boring way.

This song rocks, though.

Lucy Clifford - "The New Mother" (1882?)

Wonderful folk-ish fairy tale, inspiration to Neil Gaiman for his "Coraline" though very different, about two children who desperately want to be naughty to see a small man and woman dance.

What this, like other good fairy tales, does so well is take a concept "be good, or else", and use that, or rather its inverse, as an important trope throughout the story.

A.C. Wise - "Where Dead Men Go To Dream"

magic story (a girl with a skin of mirrors, a woman selling dreams, loss) with an interesting enough premise, yet it never really grabbed me. Can't say what was lacking.

Helen Marshall - "The Mouth, Open"

Interesting short about an (oversized) American boy visiting an East European culture. Magic realism.

Nice character description.

Hemingway: all bad writers are in love with the epic

This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an effect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic quality. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.

Sneha Kahnwalker - "Kaala Rey"

"gangs of wasseypur" soundtrack. (part 2)

One song struck me, yet proved in-shazamable. Now, without lyrics, is it still as good. Is this actually even the one?

China Miéville on the weird, the strange

I’ve been thinking about the traditional notion of the “sublime,” which was always (by Kant, Schopenhauer, et al) distinguished from the “Beautiful,” as containing a kind of horror at the immeasurable scale of it. I think what the Weird can do is question the arbitrary distinction between the Beautiful and the Sublime, and operate as a kind of Sublime Backwash, so that the numinous incomparable awesome slips back from “mountains” and “forests,” into the everyday. So…the Weird as radicalised quotidian Sublime.

There’s a big default notion that “spare,” or “precise” prose is somehow better. I keep insisting to them that while such prose is completely legitimate, it’s in no way intrinsically more accurate, more relevant, or better than lush prose. That adjective “precise,” for example, needs unpicking. If a “minimalist” writer describes a table, and a metaphor-ridden adjective-heavy weird fictioneer describes a table, they are very different, but the former is in absolutely no way closer to the material reality than the latter. Both of them are radically different from that reality. They’re just words. A table is a big wooden thing with my tea on it. I think they also are surprised by how much they enjoy making up monsters.

I spend a lot of time arguing for literalism of fantastic, rather than its reduction to allegory. Metaphor is inevitable but it escapes our intent, so we should relax about it. Our monsters are about themselves, and they can get on with being about all sorts of other stuff too, but if we want them to be primarily that, and don’t enjoy their monstrousness, they’re dead and nothing.

 it’s what Toby Litt brilliantly called the “Scooby Doo Impasse” – that people always-already know that they’ll pull the mask off the monster and see what it “really” is/means. The notion that that is what makes it legitimate is a very drab kind of heavy-handedness.

I’m tempted to say that part of the job a monster can do best is refuse to satisfy me, completely — which is good, because what I want for satisfaction is a kind of satiation, which usually translates into too much information, into overkill, into shining a light where a light has no business shining. In other words, the frustration that I feel at not understanding everything about a monster (indeed the weird, indeed anything fantastic) is both a sign that I am not fully satisfied and the only way of doing this with anything approaching success, I imagine. I want to know everything, but I don’t want that desire to be fulfilled.

Given the somatic impossibility of monsters — without which they are nothing – their simple there-ness and specificity is indeed part of what makes them what they are, a self-contained, if highly and, one hopes, effectively hermetic, narrative, an implied “There was a thing that was, impossibly, like this.”

Denis Johnson - "A Car Crash While Hitchhiking"

Intense short about a raving high hitch hiker describing the car crash he was into. The intro analyzed and read more into the story than I could. Should read again, without the intro.

vatic

vatic: literal; describing or predicting what will happen in the future: vatic utterances

Jeffrey Eugenides on writing

about short stories: "..., writing short fiction is mainly a question of knowing what to leave out. What you leave in must imply everything that's missing."

Ohio Players - "Funky Worm"

really strange breakbeat-ish, vocoder-voiced song. "you gone too farm"

Should look into for the weirdness of it.

Elephant - "Skyscraper"

70's sound, melancholic & dreamy.

Eels - "Wonderful, Glorious"

In short, an amazing album. Looking forward to the show tonight.

Bing Cosby on speed reading

(not something in years past I thought I would've enjoy reading)

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/16/how-to-read-faster-bill-cosby/


Bill Cosby may be best-known as the beloved personality behind his eponymous TV show, but he earned his doctorate in education and has been involved in several projects teaching the essential techniques of effective reading, including a PBS series on reading skills. In an essay unambiguously titled “How to Read Faster,” published in the same wonderful 1985 anthology How to Use the Power of the Printed Word (UK; public library) that gave us Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 timeless rules of writing, Cosby offers his three proven strategies for reading faster. Apart from their evergreen application to the printed word, it’s particularly interesting to consider how these rules might translate to the digital screen, where structural factors like scrolling, pagination, hyperlinks, and adjustable font sizes make the text and the reading experience at once more fluid and more rigid.



1. Preview — If It’s Long and Hard

Previewing is especially useful for getting a general idea of heavy reading like long magazine or newspaper articles, business reports, and nonfiction books.

It can give you as much as half the comprehension in as little as one tenth the time. For example, you should be able to preview eight or ten 100-page reports in an hour. After previewing, you’ll be able to decide which reports (or which parts of which reports) are worth a closer look.

Here’s how to preview: Read the entire first two paragraphs of whatever you’ve chosen. Next read only the first sentence of each successive paragraph. Then read the entire last two paragraphs.

Previewing doesn’t give you all the details. But it does keep you from spending time on things you don’t really want — or need — to read.

Notice that previewing gives you a quick, overall view of long, unfamiliar material. For short, light reading, there’s a better technique.

2. Skim — If It’s Short and Simple

Skimming is a good way to get a general idea of light reading such as popular magazines or the sports and entertainment sections of the paper.

You should be able to skim a weekly popular magazine or the second section of your daily paper in less than half the time it takes you to read it now.

Skimming is also a great way to review material you’ve read before.

Here’s how to skim: Think of your eyes as magnets. Force them to move fast. Sweep them across each and every line of type. Pick up only a few key words in each line.

Everybody skims differently.

You and I may not pick up exactly the same words when we skim the same piece, but we’ll both get a pretty similar idea of what it’s all about.

To show you how it works, I circled the words I picked out when I skimmed the following story. Try it. It shouldn’t take you more than ten seconds.



Skimming can give you a very good idea of this story in about half the words, and in less than half the time it’d take to read every word.

So far, you’ve seen that previewing and skimming can give you a general idea about content — fast. But neither technique can promise more than 50 percent comprehension, because you aren’t reading all the words. (Nobody gets something for nothing in the reading game.)

To read faster and understand most, if not all, of what you read, you need to know a third technique.

3. Cluster — to Increase Speed AND Comprehension

Most of us learn to read by looking at each word in a sentence — one at a time.

Like this:

My — brother — Russell — thinks — monsters…

You probably still read this way sometimes, especially when the words are difficult. Or when the words have an extraspecial meaning, as in a poem, a Shakespeare play or a contract. And that’s okay.

But word-by-word reading is a rotten way to read faster. It actually cuts down on your speed.

Clustering trains you to look at groups of words instead of one at a time, and it increases your speed enormously. For most of us, clustering is a totally different way of seeing what we read.

Here’s how to cluster: Train your eyes to see all the words in clusters of up to three or four words at a glance.

Here’s how I’d cluster the story we just skimmed:



Learning to read clusters is not something your eyes do naturally. It takes constant practice.

Here’s how to go about it: Pick something light to read. Read it as fast as you can. Concentrate on seeing three to four words at once rather than one word at a time. Then reread the piece at your normal speed to see what you missed the first time.

Try a second piece. First cluster, then reread to see what you missed in this one.

When you can read in clusters without missing much the first time, your speed has increased. Practice fifteen minutes every day and you might pick up the technique in a week or so. (But don’t be disappointed if it takes longer. Clustering everything takes time and practice.

James Salter - "Bangkok"

One dialogue between ex-lovers. Rancune.

As Dave Eggers points out; the amazing thing to create tension: he does not want to be there. Good read.

Jane Bowles - "Emmy Moore's Journal"

Paris Review collection.

Never heard of her. The story is intense, not happy, though a few 'humoristic' notes (as the introduction called them. They might just as well be labelled "sad") about a woman writing letters to her husband to explain, to clarify, her stay in Hotel Henry. Why exactly, where her fascination with Turkish women comes from, what the war is about, nothing is explained. Not much even happens. But it is an intense picture nonetheless.

The author died around the age of 57, and was an alcoholic, which made the story chave.

Lana Del Rey - "Chelsea Hotel nr 2"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj_myXdOLV0

Beautiful cover.

Leonard Michaels - "City Boy"

Another one from the Paris review. Not amazing, but interesting to read the introduction and see it happen: from real to absurd, then back to reality again. It creates tension. Good lesson. Also, it'll be a tightrope not to get too absurd.

Joy Williams - "Dimmer"

About the boy Mal, whose father dies in the first sentence, and his mother in the second. How he moves around, no friends, though sometimes people leave him food. How he saves an old lady, and they don't know what to do with him, so they thank him and send him to America. From LAX he is rescued by a girl who drives cars back and forth.

Finished reading "Dimmer" by Joy Williams, the first in the Paris Review short story collection bought not too long ago. Strange story. Sometimes I literally didn't understand sentence after sentence. The words, yes, most of the time. But the sentences were strange. I cannot say I liked it much, but it put my mind in a weird place, which is a compliment.

Thomas Truax - "Everything's Gone Halloween"

https://soundcloud.com/thomas-truax

Strangest musical clic-n-plop music. From England. Nice stuff. Spoken word at times.

Dave Eggers - "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"

He's a great writer, and the beginning is gripping, but after a 100 pages I know that semi stream of conscious style, that blurting out of sentences rolling down the hill, tumbling over each other, segueing...

And then, what's left? No character arc, unless it's Toph (who *just* started to do something grown-up)

It's kinda amusing to read, but the 'I' character just ambles along. He has a lot of difficulties in his life, but never seems to change, hop, another challange, hop, another difficulty, hop... deeper emotions? Somehow I fail to grasp them.

I think I sometimes see the meaning, and zeitgeist, weltschmerz, oh give it a name. But for me it's over the top, it's forced.

no more hanging up

"Ian Bogost writes about a cultural tradition we've mostly lost as smartphones have become ubiquitous: hanging up. While we still use the terminology (in the same way we say 'rewind' when skipping backward on our DVR), the physical act of hanging up a telephone when we're done using it no longer occurs. And we don't get that satisfying crash and clatter when hanging up on somebody to make a point. 'In the context of such gravity, the hangup had a clear and forceful meaning. It offered a way of ending a conversation prematurely, sternly, aggressively. Without saying anything, the hangup said something: we're done, go away. ... Today a true hangup — one you really meant to perform out of anger or frustration or exhaustion — is only temporary and one-sided even when it is successfully executed. Even during a heated exchange, your interlocutor will first assume something went wrong in the network, and you could easily pretend such a thing was true later if you wanted. Calls aren't ever really under our control anymore, they "drop" intransitively.' It's an interesting point about the minor cultural changes that go along with evolving technology."

Utopia

British thriller miniseries about a graphic novel whose second, never published, part falls into the hands of a group of nerds, who in turn are chased by "The Network".

Amazing look & feel. The music by Cristobal Tapia de Veer  is amazing.

The story is wonderful. I liked how they did not let it end well. How the 'brother' is confused, a hit man with no soul, and confused that he is different.

Teknolust (2002)

Strange film featuring Tilda Swanton, about robots (or, "SRA") who need male chromosomes. One of them, Ruby, goes out to seduce men and so obtain "substance". The sequence in which a used condom is boiled into tea is amazing.

Amusing, a bit slow.

Music by Klaus Badelt.

Maxim Gorki - 'Kinderen van de zon'

Een groepje / familie intelligentsia bespreekt diepzinnige problemen van de mens terwijl buiten de revolutie en cholera woeden.

De geprojecteerde beelden waarin ze op het toneel rondrent, waren cool. Een deur ingaan die dicht blijft, is intrigerend.

Verder deed 't me weinig. Deels de tekst, het hoogdravend soort spreken over "de mens kan alleen gelukkig zijn.." (ik doe het hier geen recht), deels het acteren, de klucht humor.

De link met de buitenwereld vond ik minimaal. Was het juist het idee om te laten zien hoe soap-achtig ook intelligentsia zijn, daarmee de werkelijke problemen negerend? Misschien, maar dan is het idee te uitgesponnen. De beelden van dictators, wat moesten die?

How big is infinity? and The Continuum Hypothesis

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/08/07/how-big-is-infinity-ted-ed/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+brainpickings%2Frss+%28Brain+Pickings%29
or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UPA3bwVVzGI

Wonderful animation showing how Cantor proved that the infinity of irrational numbers is bigger than the infinity of rational numbers, how you cannot list every fraction, and the description of his Continuum Hypothesis: are there infinities of different sizes between the infinite set of whole numbers  and the (larger) infinite set of decimal numbers (this is probably horribly wrong. One of those videos where you think "I understand!" while watching, yet as soon as you try to explain...)

And the most amazing thing:
Gödel proved that you cannot prove that the Continuum Hypothesis is false.

soundworks - The Dark Knight Rises

http://soundworkscollection.com/videos/darkknightrises

Five "foodgroups" of sounds.

Hans Zimmer: using 40yo moog modulators.

Robert Greenberg - How to Listen to and Understand Great Music

Did I not mention this amazing series before?! I must have.

On the 5th Symphony of Beethoven, 3 courses!

The Allies used it as their victory: ta da da daaaa... short short short long.... = v in morse code! Ironic, considering Beethoven was very German.

The opening unit is called the Fate Motive. His assistent said Beethoven had told him he once thought of Fate knocking on his door... Apocryphal! He was using a bird song! But that didn't sound angst laden enough.

Beethoven, though still called a composer of the classic era, uses much more rhythm; in his Fifth, rhythm is almost more important than melody.