Archive for August, 2006
What Is It?
August 29th, 2006
No, we’re not talking about Crispin Glover’s transcendentally-weird film, we’re talking about this very dead, very strange thing found in Russia.
Is it a dead Skeksi? Or one of their “good guy” counterparts, the Mystics/urRu?
Or maybe a giant ground sloth?
Whatever the heck it is, credit for its “discovery” on the ‘Net goes to the lovely Monica, who managed to dredge it up and deliver the pics to me so as to redeem an otherwise boring morning with awesome cryptozoological specimens!
Mo’ Money, Mo’ Money, MO’ MONEY!
August 27th, 2006
Just so you know:
My blog is worth $1,693.62.
How much is your blog worth?
That’s enough money for me to either buy a really, really powerful MIDI controller to use with all my softsynths, or a whole ‘nother desktop computer. Any buyers?
The New Oldskool Electronica
August 24th, 2006
I’m obsessed with music. Have been since I was but a larva raiding my mom’s lounge-a-riffic collection of 8-tracks and vinyl LPs (The Carpenters, The Bee Gees, Engelbert Freakin’ Humperdink, and - best of all! - Don Ho)….Thanks to Solid Gold, I discovered disco. MTV led me to New Wave. WMBS, Uniontown’s very own AM radio station (and the only radio station my mother could ever pick up in her car) gave me oldies and polkas. And my redneck neighbors’ all-night parties and boomboxes introduced me to classic rock, heavy metal, and both oldskool country and oldskool rap (they were fairly eclectic, too, in their own weird li’l beer-and-coke-soaked sort of ways). All of this early exposure to so many different forms of music prettymuch programmed me to be a total Record Nerd…a fact amply demonstrated by my present collection of >1800 CDs, and nearly 80,000 mp3s. Yeah, I’ve got a problem.
But my problem is, sometimes, a benefit to others - because not only do I like to listen to a butt-load of music, I like to write about it, too! So, a number of friends have convinced me that it’s high time I start adding some music reviews to this good ol’ vanity-press I call Pegritz.com for the amusement, delectation, and - possibly - even edification of The Masses (and my friends, who generally come to me for suggestions on funk-ay new jams to seek out). So here we go, peeps: the hot, seXXXy, inaugural edition of Pegritz.com’s brand new record reviews feature: Listen To This If You Know What’s Good For You!
(Don’t worry, folks: I know a number of you go to Pitchfork Media for the scoop on Neue Muzik….You’ll find just as much pretentious babble, arcane music-nerd terms, and snobbish attitude here as you do there - except the music I thrust under your nose for consideration is Unconditionally Guaranteed by Pegritz.com to be GOOD or triple your money back.)
So, let’s begin. This week, we’re all about the contemporary rebirth of electrofunk.
To start with, I’ve been seriously grooving on this new collection I got the other day: Erotic Lounge 4 - Bare Jewels. Terrible name for a comp, I know: it sounds like it should be the latest direct-to-video release by Zalman King–and the cover art’s pretty godawful, too (even though, surprisingly enough, it does not feature Shannon Tweed)…but a better collection of slow, slinky, downtempo electronica, funk, and jazz you will NOT find this year. “Lounge” collections are generally pretty eclectic, I’ve discovered, usually mixing tracks that represent house, jazz, lo-fi, funk, etc. into a chilly melange of laidback sounds - and this particular lounge collection is just as eclectic, which means it’s definitely NOT a boring collection of homogenous music. Some of the tracks do partake, more of less, of the booty jam genre - “Europhone” by Pluto Project, for example, is a surprisingly explicit phone-sex joint that could be incredibly silly except that it has a HUMPIN’ beat and a wonderful sax solo - but for the most part, what this CD represents is everything from funky bedroom jazz (Sade’s “Lovers Rock”) to straightforward electropop (”Sink” by Tanga).
I particularly recommend The Strike Boys’ “Playtime Theme,” which - check this out - would TOTALLY be the theme song for Foxy Brown if Foxy Brown had been set in the Year 2132 and Foxy’s main nemesis had been a posthuman streetwalker whose afro was a Moravec bush robot capable of dismantling johns into their component atoms and building ray-guns out of them. I shit thee not! If you like electrofunk, get this collection, strip down to your “Home of the Whopper” boxers, and let the synths pound.
Next, we’ve got MSTRKRFT’s debut album, The Looks. It’s…like, someone took Daft Punk and Out Hud and squished them together into an electronic dance outfit that is both surprisingly human yet still 100% robotic. A cyborg electrofunk outfit, and heretofore I’d been fairly impressed by their work remixing the likes of Bloc Party and Death From Above 1979 (whose keyboardist is, in fact, 50% of MSTRKRFT) - but what would an album of orignial pieces soung like, I wondered? Simply put, THIS IS A BAND OF TERMINATORS, and they have come to terminate the reign of shitty music on the world’s dancefloors in order to make the future safe for SKY_NET! None of the arrangements here are particularly creative, mind-blowing, or intricate - in fact, most of the songs are pretty basic house tracks with a distinct dance-punk influence (think The Rapture being remixed by Radio 4 back when Radio 4 were a good band instead of just another bland indie-rock outfit) - but, damn, the songs are just so much fun, so bouncy, and so robotic that it’s nearly impossible to stop listening to them long enough to realize how simple they are. The lead track, “Work On You”, is a basic beat/bassline/vocoded-vocal-line confection that defines the Funkay Terminator sound perfectly and should keep your booty busy for hours at a time! Great driving music, too.
And now: Cassius - 15 Again. You know, this album really does make me feel 15 again, because it sounds like it should’ve come out in 1988…but not the 1988 we knew. Instead, imagine a spaceship full of aliens sent to our planet specifically to study the Funk & Disco Era of the 1970s crashing near Paris around, say, 1982 and then trading all of their advanced production techniques and synthesizer technology to the Frenchies in return for a neverending supply of Parisian hookers. By 1988, the technology would’ve been fully understood and Cassius would’ve been able to put out 15 Again in Actual 1988 instead of Virtual 1988 (that is, 2006). I remember when I heard Cassius’ first album waaaaay back in…Idaknow, 1998 or so: it was very bland, run-of-the-mill late-90’s electronica. The kind of unremarkable crap that MTV’s Amp show used to play. Cassius since then has said, “Man, funk dat!” and, taking a cue from Sagat, asked themselves “Why is it that electronic music has to be repetitive and completely soul-less and boring?” This album is 12 straight tracks of robotified electrofunk make entirely by AIs built by Funkatech Incorporated, Makers of Funky Things to Play With. It’s fun, it’s very groovy and danceable, it’s surprisingly twitchy with a major IDM influence in some places (especially on “This Song”, whose tail end literally disintegrates into an awesome murk of synth-noodling and weird breaks), and yet, it’s still a very straightforward pop-electronic album. “ Worth a listen, especially if you believe that one day Humanity will create a machine capable of getting up on the downstroke.
OK, and finally, Basement Jaxx - Crazy Itch Radio. STUPID name for an album, but what a damn good album! The story with Basement Jaxx is the same as with Cassius: their earlier stuff didn’t impress me one bit, but with this album, they somehow figured out the exact frequencies and beats per minute that create sympathetic vibrations in my funk bone. “Take Me Back To Your House” is an absolutely BITCHIN’ club track that sounds like a house remix of oldskool En Vogue…only with a banjo solo. Yeah, you heard me. Not since The Grid’s magnificent “Swamp Thing” or the entire soundtrack of O, Brother, Where Art Thou? has a banjo hit me so squarely in the gluteus maximus. This is a VERY diverse album–even more diverse than the aforementioned Cassius joint. “Hey You” is an INCREDIBLE track with a Turkish/Indian flair that sounds like “Hindi Sad Diamonds” (from the Moulin Rouge soundtrack) remixed by Panjabi MC. We’re talking a jam so sweet it could make even Kali and Muhammud dance together! Best of all: it’s almost entirely live instruments - a surprising move for a band mostly defined by its synths. The Force is strong with this track. But then you got the swanky, jazzy “On the Train” and the M.I.A.-wannabe track “Run 4 Cover”…soon followed up by the sublime “Smoke Bubbles,” a slow retro R&B track that sounds like Beck produced by Jimmy Jam, with Fiona Apple on vocals (actually, it’s not Fiona Apple, but some chick who sounds a bit like her). The album is solid, diverse, and superbly produced. Just get it and thank me later.
And that’s about it for this week’s installment, folks. Next week, I’ll be tossing some fresh new New Wave jams your way, so be sure to do something weird with your hair (Elmer’s Glue makes a great styling agent), break out the mod suits, and the skinny ties!
Before I go, though, I must give a shout-out to my boy aRvin Clay over at Radio2019, one of the smartest new music blogs on the ‘Net. You owe me one for Khoiba, son!
Obligatory Snakes on an Obligatory Plane Post
August 21st, 2006
Snakes on a Plane is a not a Hollywood blockbuster. It is not Summer 2006’s version of War of the Worlds or Independence Day. It was never meant to be.
Practically from Day One, Snakes on a Plane was very obviously designed to be a Cult Film, and nothing more - and that’s exactly what it has proven itself to be: an amazingly good, entertaining, and oftimes even downright scary Cult Film whose greatest strength is its cinematic honesty, telegraphed unequivocally in its title. This is a movie about snakes on a plane. The end.
Whether Snakes on a Plane turned out to be any good as a film, or whether it proved to make tons of money or just break even, would ultimately be irrelevant to its fans, its stars, and its scriptwriters/director: as a Cult Film (much like The Blair Witch Project), it had earned its Cult and therefore its place in Cinematic History even before it hit theatres thanks to its creators’ brilliant viral marketing strategies and their brilliant willingness to actually make the film’s audience active participants in the film’s creation.
Snakes on a Plane was a guaranteed hit - albeit of a somewhat “limited” sort - from the second information about its production hit the net. First of all, the name: a true disaster-flick title if ever there was one, beating out even Towering Inferno, Meteor!, and Volcano by not only announcing exactly what the film was going to be about but also doing so in a catchy, tongue-in-cheek way that was bound to get peopled interested. The title was so great that Samuel L. Jackson purportedly signed up for the project just because the name was so great. Whether this is true or not, you now had Samuel L. Jackson, one of the Internet generation’s most beloved quote-generators, starring in a film called Snakes on a Plane that featured - what a premise! - venomous snakes loose on a plane!
Now, the film could’ve easily gotten by on its own merits at this point: it had a catchy title, and interesting basic plot, and a great actor in the lead - but the internet hype was only beginning. In the months following, the studio attempted to change the title of the film to the more understated Pacific Air Flight 121 - and the film’s “fans”, none of whom even really knew what the film would be about other than that it would have snakes plus aviation, went ballistic. Even Samuel L. wouldn’t take none a’that shite! So the title remained, and it was at this point that the nature of the film and the buzz surrounding it began to change.
The Blair Witch Project, arguably the first film to rely on Internet promotion to become a major hit, courted interest through its mysterious official website and by encouraging viral marketing (which back in my day was called “word of mouth”) to drum up excitement. This is prettymuch how Snakes on a Plane got started - but it went a step beyond when the filmmakers actually began to take input from people who wanted to see certain things in the film!
At some point, somebody said, “It just wouldn’t be a Samuel L. movie if he didn’t motherfuck the snakes at some point, as in ’I am tired of these motherfuckin’ snakes on this motherfuckin’ plane!’” Weeks of humor and parodies and the usual Internet silliness ensued. And, apparently, the meme was so strong the film’s producers finally decided to add the line to the movie! The film was originally being edited and shot for a PG-13 rating…but fans (or should I call them pre-fas, since, remember, no one had even seen the damn film yet!) wanted more hideous snakebite deaths, more violence, more Samuel L. Jackson cussin’ a blue streak!
And the filmmakers agreed. They called Samuel L. and company back in to film some more snake-attack scenes and, of course, the now-famous “Motherfuckin’ snakes on a motherfuckin’ plane” line.
Hell, you could even send personalized phone messages from Samuel L. Jackson to folks to encourage them to see the film! (I was driving to Washington DC when Samuel L. called me, and, believe me, I wasn’t about to NOT do what Samuel L. told me to do!)
In the week before Snakes on a Plane officially opened, the ‘Net was seething with buzz and anticipation of the film. Hell, some fella even went out and got a Snakes on a Plane tattoo - and he hadn’t even seen a preview for the movie yet! It seemed like every Internet geek in the world was going crazy for the film. Why, when this thing opens (some industry analysts and film-critics noted), it may very well even beat Pirates of the Caribbean 2’s box-office opening records! How could it not with the entire Internet poppin and fizzing with excitement over the film’s opening?!
But Snakes on a Plane only made about $15.3 million on its opening weekend. Now, this is not a bad sum, considerig the film only cost a modest $30 mil to make - so in three days’ time, it made back about half the money spent on it. But, of course, film pundits and blockheaded industry analysts are calling it a failure and saying “so much for the Internet hype” because it didn’t earn enough money to buy a mid-sized African country on opening day.
As usual, the media has equated “internet buzz” with the term “guaranteed blockbuster” - and that’s like comparing “cult” to “Catholic Church”. They’re two totally different things, two completely different orders of magnitude. Devin Faraci of CHUD.com, one of my favorite cinema-related news’n'reviews sites, has this to say about the nature of the hype surrounding Snakes on a Plane and its so-called “disappointing” opening weekend numbers:
What’s funny is that Snakes’ modest showing now positions it to be a legitimate cult movie. You see, a cult movie can’t be touted as such by the studio. It can’t be designated as one before release by glossy Time-Warner magazines. And it certainly can’t be a big hit. By not breaking through to the mainstream, Snakes may actually become the cult movie New Line always thought it would be.
Now, Faraci prefaces this with a rather point-missing explanation that the internet buzz surrounding Snakes on a Plane arose through people mocking the absurdity of the premise, and that Samuel L. Jackson was going to star in it. Oh, certainly - a sense of “WTF?” was always present in the film’s hype from the very beginning…but, no, the film did not do “poorly” on opening day because its hype had burnt out by the time it actually opened. The filmmakers knew, at some point during the filming, that they were creating a Cult Movie, not a blockbuster. One look at the talk circulating around on the ‘Net for the past however-many years clearly would’ve indicated that this film was gathering a small but dedicated, damnear obsessed following…and that come opening day, most of the film’s earnings would come from that relatively small group of people more so than it would come from the General Public, who might be lured into the theatre by the title or the trailers, but certainly hadn’t been sitting around for the past three years creating hundreds of fan parodies, writing fanfic, and otherwise creating an almost Rocky Horror Picture Show-esque air of celebration about the film.
It seems to me that the studio was WELL AWARE of this….Else, why would’ve they brought Samuel L. Jackson back in to film the movie’s fan-supplied punchline? Why would they have spent the money to bump the film up to an R rating when, certainly, a PG-13 would’ve potentially drawn more people in to the theatres? Simple: the film was even before birth destined to be a Cult Movie, and what better way to please your Cultists than to let them take part in the process?
So. If you thought the film was going to be the Next Big Summer Movie of 2006…sorry, but that’s not what it’s all about. As Samul L. himself as said, “It’s not Gone with the Wind. It’s not On the Waterfront. It’s Snakes on a Plane!”
And it will live in film history forever not just due to its director, or its cast, or the studio that produced it…but because of all the people who got so worked up about the film that they literally ended up being a part of it.
And so we come to the Big Question I’m sure you’re dying to know: “Pegritz, what did you think of the film?” Simply put: it’s a great thriller with a great basic concept, a great cast, and a great tongue-in-cheek sense of humor. It is exactly what I expected it to be - no more, no less - and as such, it’s just a damn fun movie. Don’t expect High Art. Don’t expect Great Feeling. Expect snakes. On a plane. It’s almost Zen in its wonderful simplicity.
Microsoft Live Writer
August 16th, 2006
This post is being composed on Microsoft’s latest little beta toy, Microsoft Live Writer - a nifty, if somewhat limited, WYSIWYG blog editor aimed squarely at bloggers familiar with Microsoft Word but, perhaps, not so familiar with XHTML tags and formatting.
I’ll admit: I hate to write XHTML code by hand. Compared to just firing up Word and writing, posting to this blog using my installation of WordPress’s built-in editor is rather annoying, as instead of just clicking ctrl-i to italicize something (as I frequently do) or just highlighting a snippet of text and cut’n'pasting a URL to it, I have to bother with typing my own <em> and <a href> tags all over the place…which makes writing a long, link-filled rant a tedious and error-prone Major Effort. The latest version of WordPress does come with a WYSIWYG editor, yes, but it generates very ugly code and is, quite frankly, very clumsy - even clumsier than hand-coding. Of course, I long-ago thought of writing article in Word and then saving them as XHTML, which I would then just cut’n'past into WordPress - but have you ever seen the XHTML code that Microsoft Word vomits up? It makes the WordPress “rich text” editor’s subpar output look positively utilitarian in comparison.
But someone at Microsoft recently had a great idea: let’s code up a nice little basic desktop blog composer that offers Word-like wordprocessing capabilities but also features handy layout functions such as image positioning and blog category/tag support. And while we’re at it, let’s make the XHTML it outputs as clean and serviceable as possible. Well, here’s to you, J. J. Allaire and the rest of the Microsoft Live Writer development team - you’ve done a great job!
Microsoft Live Writer is a very lean, easy-to-use desktop program specifically designed as a blog composer. The interface is quite intuitive, and offers users access to all of the most common blogging tasks: adding links, positioning images, formatting lists and block quotes, and so forth. It allows one to save local as well as remote drafts of posts-in-progress and offers writers a variety of views to let one write away, preview what the articles will look like when published to the web, and even get under the hood and work with the raw XHTML code when necessary. A quick look at code view will show that the code generated by Microsoft Live Writer is extremely stripped-down and elegant.
Live Writer contains a number of convenient tools for posting pictures and even inserting maps from Windows Live Local into posts - but, as you no doubt have noticed, I don’t usually slather my entries here with pictures, and have no real need of maps at present, so I haven’t yet tried out these features. But considering how strong and functional all of the features that I have used have proven to be, I’m sure these will be equally sterling.
Best of all, the programme works with a wide range of blogging packages and services. Of course, it naturally asks whether you want to use it with a Windows Live Spaces blog first, but it also supports TypePad and WordPress installs (obviously), blogs hosted at WordPress.com, Blogger, and the ubiquitous Livejournal - as well as many others.
The software is completely free to download, though at present it is still listed as a beta release, and as such has some bugs. I’ve not run across any myself, but they’re bound to come crawling out of the woodwork sooner of later. (Besides, this is a Microsoft product: it’ll probably still be coughing up cockroaches even when it’s hit the positive integer point.)
And WordPress users please be aware: though it does handle categorizing and tagging posts, as well as allowing you to set TrackBack, comment, and permalink options, it does not (yet) handle post excerpts and custom fields.
Nonetheless, if you’re looking for a convenient WYSIWYG desktop solution for putting together blog entries with all the ease and quickness of a standard wordprocessing app, then Microsoft Live Writer is an ideal tool. And it’s not like you can’t edit your posts later to add excerpts and the like. The Live Writer development team is actively accepting suggestions as well, so drop ‘em a line with development tips and requests!
(BTW: Microsoft Live Writer is most certainly not the first programme of its kind. There are others, including Performancing, a nifty little Firefox extension which many folks have praised in the past but which I personally found a little cunky. But Live Writer is my new personal favorite, and - I reiterate - is free. Obviously it’s Windows-only, however.)
