August 2012
"Blight Curvature (Trashcan Beats)"
"Blight Curvature (Trashcan Beats)" [mp3 removed]
Beats made with turntable sounds. Not too obvious until the halfway point when you start hearing definite scratchy sounds. Heavy reverb (the audio equivalent of Instagram filters?) reminds me of hearing a trashpail-drumkit banger from several blocks away (somewhere in lower Manhattan).
we hated tony scott's films
Made some mean tweets after ultra-crap director Tony Scott did himself in, but they didn't seem as cruel after I found the mother lode of justified Scott hate.
The heinous film that made Scott an A-list Hollywood director, Top Gun, helped define that truly, mindlessly despicable era of 1980s American culture. For the rest of his life, Tony Scott proudly wore the red baseball cap he’d donned while shooting Top Gun, till it turned pink and ratty with age atop his bald head.
Commenter thomzas (same link):
In both Man on Fire and The Last Boy Scout the broken man has to kill as many people as possible to gain acceptance from the family unit. Typical action stuff maybe, but the docile smiles the mother and daughter wear at the end of Boy Scout are like something out [of] Jonestown.
Man on Fire was [a] fucking nasty piece of work. A man regaining his self respect through torture and bloodletting, with Christopher Walken (as Tony) telling us it’s all for a righteous cause. It’s like the morons who wholeheartedly cheer on Travis Bickle at the end of Taxi Driver have made the film they really wanted to see.
Commenter CensusLouie (same link):
Enemy of the State: Someone took a look at The Conversation and decided it needed more Will Smith. WHY, Gene Hackman!
[...]
Man on Fire: Anyone who says this was a good movie needs to watch the subtitle scenes again. Those things would embarrass a music video director.
"Blight Curvature"
"Blight Curvature" [mp3 removed]
Bass, piano and some atmospherics done with the Linplug Alpha softsynth. The percussion is all turntable sounds manicured and run through various effects.
Music housekeeping: I had always intended for the content snake to eat its long tail. Have finally started doing that - as I put up new mp3s I am taking down the oldest ones (except for my Mac SE songs from the '80s - am leaving those up for now). The snake is about seven years long so this is not a big issue.
Harry Harrison
Simon Reynolds has a nice obit for science fiction writer Harry Harrison, who died a few days ago.
Harrison's Make Room, Make Room became the kitsch stinker classic Soylent Green but the novel is a superior treatment of the overpopulated world theme. As Reynolds notes, in the book "soylent is not 'made of people,' it's made of soya and lentils. That and krill and seaweed crackers make up the diet for 99 percent of the population."
As a child I read Deathworld and a few other Harrison books and I am one of the few people on Earth who read The Man from P.I.G. (1968), the author's 1960s spy spoof. As Jared Shurin summarizes it:
The book - a slightly extended version of a novella - is quick and slightly dirty. It follows a simple problem/solution format, with every problem solved by the judicious application of pig. Harrison is clever enough - and funny enough - to keep this going, but were The Man from P.I.G. any longer, it would cease to be amusing.
The overall plot, the mystery, its inevitable resolution and even the characters - they're all actually fairly meaningless, with twists and turns introduced at random by Harrison. The book is an extended joke about how pigs can solve any problem. A funny joke (fortunately) but not a particularly deep one.
Hey now - this book is called The Man from P.I.G. - it has to be good (I remember enjoying it).