general

Recently found Kevin Saunderson's Faces and Phases on beatport and d/l'ed it. He is one of the "Belleville Three" (Detroit Techno) guys along with Juan Atkins and Derrick May.

Gritty, direct, occasionally straight-up acid house-sounding, but where it's diverging into techno is the use of noise and potentially grating samples. Percussive sounds such as hats and claps rarely vary. It's just pow-pow-pow-pow while low-res samples growl and wail (well, not really, it's more musical than that). Nowadays software makes it so easy to add randomization and subtle filtering to the percussion so these hits sound deliberately minimal, when it was really probably the best the machines could do. (Am guessing it's mostly the 909 drum computer since the hats sound like samples of hats rather than synthesized hats.)

Was searching around online for the Virgin (sublabel) disc from 1988, Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit that introduced the Belleville Three and others to Europe. Surprisingly it seems not to have been reissued. Would love to hear that time capsule and imagine how it sounded to ears unfamiliar with these musical strategies. I actually know people who think electronic pop music innovation started and stopped with Kraftwerk but that's just wrong.

[Related: Pitchfork interview with some of the innovators.]

[Unrelated: Philip Sherburne on the malaise in the current dance scene. I am not feeling this because I am not producing tracks for the dance floor. It's still fun for me because I have no rules to obey.]

Jim Henley: "John McCain is the downer cow of American politics."

Recommended non-serious film entertainment: Grandma's Boy, 2006. A Mike Judge-sharp script without Mike Judge and the regular Adam Sandler cast without Adam Sandler. The setting is a heavily SoCal-ified videogame company called Brainasium. The protagonist Alex, played by Allen Covert, is a 35 year old accountant turned game designer who through various plot foolishness has to move in with his grandmother. Typical sitcom situations: (1) Alex needs to get grandma out of the house so he can get stoned and work on his "levels" for the game Brainasium is on deadline to produce*; (2) Grandma and her friends find Alex's pot and mistake it for tea--when Alex comes home they are rolling on the floor watching a Spanish-language game show; (3) child prodigy game designer thinks his long black leather coat makes him invisible; (4) pot dealer buys a lion to guard his house, etc. Can't totally vouch for this because only saw two thirds of the bleeped TV version (have GOT to get rid of this cable) but that sampling was a laff riot.

*Jeff: What's up, shitlips.
Alex: Hey, I need a huge favor.
Jeff: You're not jerking off on my dad.
Alex: Funny. No, I was wondering if you could do some of my levels.
Jeff: No, why can't you do them?
Alex: It's my roommates. They won't stop watching... porn. I can't get any work done.
Jeff: You're dead to me. Over.
[hangs up phone]
Alex: Well, Jeff's a good friend.

The fact that the New Yorker has a racist, anti-Obama image on its cover shouldn't surprise. The magazine has in the past slimed Al Gore and its editor, David Remnick, cheered on the Iraq war in 2002-3. From a Guardian article about Remnick:

He came out in favour of the war in Iraq, for instance, on the grounds of concern about weapons of mass destruction, and says now that 'I was wrong about that, totally wrong, as events proved very quickly.'

Remnick is currently defending his decision to smear the Obamas--let's see how quickly he decides he was "wrong."

Update: We are discussing this over at Paddy's.

Update 2: The headline of Gary Kamiya's Salon article on this topic is "Rush Limbaugh was right: The blogosphere's reaction to the New Yorker cover proves that the Bush era has killed a lot of liberals' sense of humor. And that's not funny." What's funny is watching Salon striving so hard to be centrist that it cites the concern trolling of a hate radio star. What's not funny was watching that image spread to every mainstream and middlebrow organ yesterday (including Salon), so that undecided voters see the media approvingly putting out the message that racial caricatures of the candidate are A-OK. Karl Rove, "unofficial" adviser to the McCain campaign, must have been cackling.

OK, one more Lost in Space synopsis and the nostalgia binge is over.
"The Magic Mirror" is another Penny episode that mirrors "My Friend, Mr. Nobody" but backtracks on its magic.
In this one, tweener Penny frets about growing up because she doesn't want to indulge in romantic "goop" like her older sister Judy does with Don the spaceship's stupid second-in-command, and doesn't want to spend the better part of her day thinking about hairstyles.
(Unspoken but implied feminist reading: she also doesn't want to live in a world where she makes sandwiches for the rest like Mom.)
For her attitude Judy calls her a "tomboy" and yes--"ugly." Penny is palpably crushed by this insult.
A magic mirror appears for no reason on the ground near the Jupiter 2 and through a series of plot complications, Penny falls into it.
On the other side is a world dreamed up by the producers after smoking much reefer and watching every Cocteau film.
It's a shadowy world of draperies, knickknacks and Egyptian statues. Mirrors are portals to the outside, but are mostly one-way. Things, and unfortunates such as Penny, fall in and are forever trapped. Tantalizingly, she can see out of any mirror anywhere (including ones on the spaceship, where she spots her family) but those looking in the mirrors cannot see her.
The sole human inhabitant of this interstitial dimension is homely '60s cult actor Michael J. Pollard (later cast as C.W. Moss in Bonnie and Clyde.)
This 26 year old "boy" has spent eternity watching other people through his mirrors, living in a room that he "never has to clean," and having fun between chased among the museum relics by a hairy one-eyed monster (I think we know what that symbolizes) that periodically comes to kill him. He has so far avoided the creature for aeons of doom-laden entertainment, and has watched Penny the tomboy through his mirror and wants her to join him in his merriment.
After initial disgust the same open-minded Penny that befriended Mr. Nobody 14 episodes back learns about the boy and his world through polite questions but she knows he is a ghoul and she must find a way out. She invites him to join her but he cannot leave the mirror world.
After another series of plot complications she returns to the Jupiter 2 and at the end of the episode mends fences with the womenfolk by asking how she would look "with my hair piled on top of my head like this." The line is delivered in front of her shipboard vanity mirror where the boy will be watching her acquisition of seductive adult moves, while he is doomed to remain in pre-adolescent neverland hell.
Thus where "Mr. Nobody" casts Penny as the wise character finding her own emotional place outside the patriarchal structures of the ship, "The Magic Mirror" is a scary object lesson to girls who would deviate from the nuclear family model. Disappointing backsliding by the writers, if subverting basic American values is considered good. Though a glimpse of Pollard's "goth" world might still be powerful medicine to some, in comparison to the bland interiors of the Jupiter 2 tract home.