Filed under: Uncategorized
So I found this meme on the internet (I know, that NEVER HAPPENS) but I thought it was very interesting. It purported to be a list of books that the BBC only expects you to have read six of or something like that. The tumblelog I got it from had the wrong list, though, and I don’t know where the number six came from, because it’s not on the BBC’s version. The meme tells you to x those you’ve read, + the ones you LOVE, and * the ones you want to read. This is way too complicated for me. But here you go: the BBC top 100 books. Because British people are the best judge of fine literature. (The italicized grey ones are ones I haven’t read.)
Filed under: Video
“For two weeks? In fucking Bruges? In a room like this? With you? No way.”
It might be a repellant concept for Colin Farrell’s character in the film In Bruges, but it certainly makes for a wonderful movie. In the vein of “Lost In Translation”, the film similarly documents the escapades of two semi-awkward foreigners (in this case, British assassins) in a foreign city (Bruges, not Tokyo. I know, came out of the blue, that one). Farrell plays Ray, who obviously isn’t very enthusiastic about sightseeing (“Ken, I grew up in Dublin. I love Dublin. If I grew up on a farm, and was retarded, Bruges might impress me but I didn’t, so it doesn’t.”) Ken, played by Brendan Gleeson, takes the opposite view, indulging in all the sightseeing he can, and dragging Ray around with him.
In Bruges is a feature-length film that views like a short, but with lots more stuff crammed in. As the film takes a turn for the violent, it becomes more of a Lost In Translation/Pulp Fiction hybrid, except with all white people and, of course, in Bruges. (Hope I’m not giving too much away.) During a pivotal chase/gunfight scene, I got the feeling that fully half of the camerawork was still meant to show off the beautiful scenery.
Oh yes, and Ralph Fiennes swears. A LOT.
Below is a list of the things I learned from this movie.
When In Bruges:
- Make sure to do cocaine with midgets… er, dwarves. Even though you’ve been warned that he’s been taking horse tranquilizers.
- Never assume the douchebag sitting next to you is American, and accidentally knock both him and his girlfriend out, regardless of whether or not she comes at you with a bottle or even knows karate. He’s probably a vengeful Canadian who will get you killed.
- Be a prostitute — you’ll make more than you did in Amsterdam.
- Make sure you know someone who you can buy horse tranquilizers from. They’re a good excuse not to greet people on the street. Except maybe horses.
- When under great stress, the dried blood of Jesus reliquefies.
- Don’t do anything in half-measures. If you’re going to blind a man by shooting blanks into his eye, at least do it to both eyes.
- As long as you can introduce it in a charming way, pretty girls are all right with dating hired killers. Also, if you moan a lot about how you never thought a “girl like her” would “actually be into” a “guy like you”, she’ll give you a kiss before she takes her half-blind ex-boyfriend/con partner to the hospital to get an eyepatch. Which will then give you an opportunity to steal drugs from her, which she won’t mind even though it’s high-grade cocaine and ecstasy. And possibly horse tranquilizers.
Filed under: Uncategorized
It’s the beginning of spring semester, although I always feel a little weird referring to it as “spring semester” when it is still so very obviously winter. This semester I get to ditch nasty physics classes for some nicer ones, and although I am taking on a bit more difficult semester (18, maybe 19 credits) I think it will be more fun by virtue of the classes themselves.
Over the break, I had a very short-lived Tumblr account, before a friend introduced me to soup.io. Mine, under augustine, has become where I’m filtering most of the stuff I look at on the internets, mostly design-, illustration- or architecture-related. The nicest thing about soup.io is that it includes built-in automatic feeds for most common and some less common Web applications (last.fm, vimeo, youtube, del.icio.us, vi.sualize.us, and flickr are the ones that I find the most useful.) Its interface is lovely, and it’s easy enough to post things directly to your soup. It’s nice to have everything I find in one place, with a search box for easy finding.
I also did a wordle for this blog. The dominant themes aren’t all that surprising.
I plan on writing a little more this semester, partly because I will be writing things like response papers for art history anyway and I thought perhaps I could subject the internet to my thoughts on the history of film as art, as punishment for all its sins and wrongdoings. In the meantime, I’ll be posting things to my soup.
Filed under: music
Elvis Costello once said that writing about music was like dancing about architecture. If that is the case, then what is music about architecture? Asthmatic Kitty Records’ compilation Habitat, a collection of experimental electronic music written around the theme of architectural space, answers that question with two discs of original music by a variety of artists, and an equally varied different takes on electronic music in general.
I first read about Habitat on It’s Hard To Find A Friend. I was immediately sucked in by the idea of music written around and within architecture, and KO’d by the fact that proceeds went to Habitat For Humanity. And if that wasn’t enough, the power of the titles compelled me. Titles like “Your God Is A Lion Recently Fed, Drowsy” and “Utiliterranean“. Even “Staircase And Water Pipes, 42 Broadway“, which sounds more suited to a high-contrast black and white photograph than to a song, seduced me with its evocative loveliness.
The CD shipped promptly, so much so that it surprised me in my mailbox (you know the feeling). The CD was a present from myself, arriving early and unexpected. Rushing upstairs, I popped the CD into my laptop and began to listen.
The first track, entitled “A Cross Section Of Clown Mountain“, is partially the work of Asthmatic Kitty’s most famous son, Sufjan Stevens, whose work introduced me to the label. This, his collaboration with cofounder Lowell Brams and Bryce Dessner, The National’s guitarist (the three together under the moniker Tidal River) is a captivating opener, expansive, stately, and rather epic.
On that night, not too long ago, the first CD had progressed to its third track, “Little Furnace” by Jim Guthrie, a mellow industrial track evoking the titular machine, which I imagine as a stationary Little Engine That Could. As I listen, I read the artist statements for each piece, each one only slightly less nebulous and impressionistic than the piece it’s meant to represent. “Little Furnace,” for example, is “combustion at the bottom of the sea onboard a tiny metal submarine. Each note competing with the one before it; reverberating heat in an otherwise cold abyss.” Sigh. Bliss.
Meanwhile, my roommate, watching television in the living room, asks me, “What’s that noise?” I looked at her strangely. Oh, you mean that semirhythmic clanking in the other room? Just some ambient music I’m listening to, in case you didn’t find my musical taste strange enough.
The tracks are almost wordless to a man, with a couple of exceptions. One of my favorite tracks, “A Long Way From Home” by Moth!Fight!, is one such, but the words are Dadaist, chaos-filled. “I flew … to the castle … which was the only way to get there … the only way was to fly,” a male voice declares before it devolves wonderfully into something that sounds like a schizophrenic blend of the Polyphonic Spree, Animal Collective and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah after three straight espresso shots.
According to Moth!Fight!’s statement, the song revolves around creating the atmosphere of a new home. This isn’t a conclusion that can simply be pulled out of the music, which for the most part lacks revelatory lyrics. Like most of the tracks on the album, “A Long Way From Home” relies on the narrative power of sound to create a sense of the exploration of space and architecture. The tracks use the statement, only posted online (not part of the album booklet at all) in the absence of lyrics, to sharpen and pinpoint the reader/listener’s understanding.
This leaves the tracks sounding something like architecture – without a specific narrative, but storytelling nonetheless. Definitely not for everybody, but I love.
Filed under: music
I’ve got a couple of CDs in my “to write about” line, a result of a regrettable lapse in fiscal judgement which resulted in a CD-purchasing binge. But while procrastinating in the apt this afternoon, I ran across a couple of things that cannot wait.
Firstly, you already know about my unabashed love for the Fleet Foxes. So you understand how excited I was when La Blogotheque posted a session of the Fleet Foxes performing a medley of “Sun Giant” and “Blue Ridge Mountain,” filmed in an abandoned wing of the Grand Palais in Paris (pictured above). So this appeals to both the architecture and music geek inside me.
Then, I ran across (via Fuel/Friends) these Myspace Transmission sessions with Bon Iver. Including four songs (“For Emma”, “Flume”, “Lump Sum”, and “Blindsided”) and interview clips about his process, leaving the cabin, and (perhaps best) his tattoos.
And in related news, on Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands are a great collection of “Flume” covers on Youtube. It doesn’t get any better for fans of etheral harmonization than this.
LATER: Cute kid. A baby Amelie?
My second project for ARCH 100 was to create a birdhouse for a wren, in the style of a famous architect (we were given a list, and I picked Luis Barragan, a Pritzger-prize winning architect from Mexico, who happens to be a major influence on my favorite architect of all time, Tadao Ando.) In conjunction with my professor, the dean of the school of architecture decided this year to pick the top five of these designs to be actualized, commissioning them for $100. My design was among the five chosen.
My design currently consists of a plan, two elevations and a SketchUp file, so I have some work to do when it comes to figuring out the way I’m going to fit it together. However, keep tuned for more updates, as well as (hopefully) photographs of the birdhouse in progress. That is, if I can afford a memory card anytime soon.
And Kadie:
Gobama.
Filed under: life
As a transfer student to UWM, my sophomore year has been feeling like a second freshman year. None of the reasons I decided to come here panned out; with the end of a long friendship and my rejection from sophomore studio classes. So I am stuck here, questioning why I am here in the first place. In the end, being in Milwaukee turned out for the best, with my uncle’s diagnosis this summer and death this fall. But what kind of reason is that to be glad I am back here? It’s good that I was back here for my mother, but to have the only good reason I am here be my uncle’s death is somewhat more than depressing.
The upsides to things are when I can let myself get lost in images – the figure drawing we’ve been doing in my drawing class (I’m in 102 this semester), and the work we look at in ARCH 100. It’s things like this that assure me that I’m going the right direction, and that if I can just continue with these subjects I’ll get to where I want to be.
My problem is not that I don’t know where I want to go. My problem is that I wish there was some alternate way to get there. After two years of attending large state schools, I think I can say that I wasn’t made for a large university like this. If there’s something I’ve learned in my 2 months here, it’s that I’m not the type who likes to get drunk every weekend and go to parties, which seems to be a prime objective to most college kids I know. Not that I find anything wrong with that; it’s just not for me.
So I guess all I can do is trust that if I keep going in the direction that I know is the right direction for me, the path will eventually become what I want it to be – a place where I can find solace and comfort in my surroundings rather than feeling out-of-place and in transit.
In other, more immediate but by no means less depressing news: I seem to have lost my memory card for my camera! This is obviously a tragedy of the very first class, and so as soon as I get my hands on my paycheck (which should be in a week exactly) I am going to buy a new one, as well as some new batteries, and go out on a photo exposition before it gets too cold. Hopefully.
Should go to bed soon, as I have to get up early to vote tomorrow morning. Gobama!
“Penniless and tired,
With your hair grown long
I was looking at you there,
And your face looked wrong
Memory is a fickle siren song
I didn’t understand”
I bought my tickets to see the Fleet Foxes at the Pabst Theater on the strength of these lines (music video here, lyrics here). At the time (on my birthday, at the Bon Iver show at the same venue) the only song I had heard by the Fleet Foxes was “He Doesn’t Know Why,” but I took the gamble and bought the $10 tickets to go see them in October, which seemed ever-so far away at the time.
From the Sub Pop website:
Drawing influence from the traditions of folk music, pop, choral music and gospel, sacred harp singing, West Coast music, traditional music from Ireland to Japan, film scores, and their NW peers, Fleet Foxes ranges in subject matter from the natural world and familial bonds to bygone loves and stone cold graves.
Exactly two months later, the show has been over for four days and I’m still excited about it. I joked to my roommate that for me, the latest show I’ve been to is always the greatest show I’ve ever attended. However, in this case it’s absolutely true: Fleet Foxes in concert were up there, if not at the top.
Let’s start at the beginning. I took my little brother to the concert (appropriate, in hindsight, given the amount of references to brothers in the lyrics of Fleet Foxes songs), and we ended up arriving at 7:00pm, an hour before the show was scheduled to start. We got seats in the second row, left section: not too shabby, considering that the place was absolutely sold out when we got there. Yay for presale tickets!
The opener, Frank Fairfield, seemed to only play songs that ended in “Blues”. As others have noted before me, he sounds like he came straight from the thirties via time machine, instrumentally and (more uniquely) vocally as well. He had the whiny, accented, and hard-to-understand singing style that you usually hear overlaid by crackly vinyl hiss – definitely not what I expected, given the soft choral arrangements that Fleet Foxes use. However, he was absolutely fantastic, and was sad when I read Frank’s last.fm page to discover that he hasn’t been signed or even really recorded anything substantial (further support for our time-machine hypothesis?). He seemed to be making up the set on the spot. I’d be interested in seeing Frank again sometime.
Before the show started, I bought Fleet Foxes’ self-titled album on vinyl, which turned out to be a great idea on several levels. Firstly, it came with both their self-titled album but also the Sun Giant EP. Secondly, it came with download codes for all the tracks included on the two albums, so I was able to download all the tracks as mp3s and put them on my lovely and well-fed new iPod. And thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the album art. I bought the record pre-show, and my brother and I spent at least half an hour identifying exactly what each person on the cover was doing. Turns out it’s a painting called “Netherlandish Proverbs” done in the 1500s by a guy called Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Pretty interesting stuff, and a great painting to boot. And its combination of obvious antiquity with controversial and downright weird subject matter parallels the way that Fleet Foxes fuse together folk and postrock influences to make their unique style of music.
The main event was mindblowing. I had loved the choral arrangements on the songs I had from the album, and was bracing myself for the tiny imperfections that you inevitably get in a live set. They never came. If anything, the choral arrangments were even more flawless in concert than they were on the record. (They’ve claimed in an interview with the BBC that they get the arrangements from “witchcraft”, but then admitted that in reality it’s just practice and hard work, which is much less exciting. Download the interviews at Aquarium Drunkard! Do it!)
I realized this within the span of the first (a capella) number. After they threw themselves into their set, it was impossible not to throw yourself after them. Between the songs that I knew I would love already (“He Doesn’t Know Why”, “White Winter Hymnal”, “Blue Ridge Mountains”) and ones I had less exposure to (“Ragged Wood”, “Oliver James”, “Drops In The River”, and the heartbreaking “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song”), I basically fell in love. The music itself, vocals reverberating through amps like monks’ chants through a cathedral, has this beautiful sense of spiritual grandeur. Watching lead singer Robin Pecknold’s facial expressions throughout the set made me feel almost like a voyeur, as if by watching him sing I was somehow spying on some kind of religious experience, with Pecknold baring himself to the audience and, perhaps, to God.
Or maybe I’m over-analyzing it. OK, before I further reveal what a huge fangirl I have become: the long and short of it: great band, great set, greatly recommended. See you at their next show!
PS. Bonuses!
Backstage Sessions : Fleet Foxes – Oliver James from Hard to Find a Friend on Vimeo.
And you can stream Radio 88.9’s live recording of the show here. Enjoy!
Filed under: life
This summer, my uncle (on my mom’s side) was diagnosed with primary amyloidosis. As far as I can understand (and I may be wrong), amyloidosis is a disease in which the body produces proteins that cannot be broken down; and over time these proteins deposit in various places around the body, eventually causing organ failure. The Mayo Clinic pamphlet I read said:
While amyloidosis has many types, the most common is a disease of the bone marrow called primary systemic amyloidosis. Bone marrow makes antibodies that protect against infection and disease. After performing their function, these antibodies are broken down and recycled by the body. In amyloidosis, cells in the bone marrow produce antibodies that cannot be broken down or recycled. These antibodies build up in the bloodstream. Ultimately, they leave the bloodstream and can deposit in tissues as amyloid.
My uncle died this morning. He was vulnerable to organ failure and to a whole host of diseases due to his weakened immune system, but ultimately he bled to death, internally.
For the last couple of weeks, I had been writing things about him in my moleskine, just jotting down lines that I was going to string together into a poem at some point. I can’t write it anymore, so I’m just going to put it out there as it is. I don’t think I can finish it, at least not now. I don’t like it, but it’s all I can do for him.
He was the most awesome uncle ever, and was just generally a great guy. His funeral is on Monday. Please pray for my mother, who has already lost a brother to cancer, and of course, for my uncle Andy.
He is in the ICU, they tell me
He’s got tired yellow eyes
Dragging his bruised voice behind him
The ragged voice of a broken prizefighter
Talking clinically about his own rebelling body
The disease inflates his yellow, jaundiced skin
Infects organs with disorganization and anarchyDo I know this man?
Once we were the fighters, he and I
He made me the featherweight champion of the world
He let me box him into the bloody burgundy carpet
As my mother laughed from her ringside seat
On the couch that my grandmother thought was called
A davenport.Now it’s not a tiny girl
But tiny proteins
And his own body. This disease,
Born in the USA, inside his bones
And exported to vital organs
These proteins, now unrecyclable
His body litters itselfHe can’t dance away from the words they throw at him now
Words like:
Chemotherapy.
Stem cells.
Amyloid protein.
Dialysis.I am connected to this man by blood
By bone marrow
But I don’t know him when he’s in pain
I don’t know this man without his laughter
And I can’t afford to understand the consequencesAs dust settles through his veins, undissolvable
It’s won the title from me
It’s the new featherweight champion of the world
Or at the very least, of my uncle’s fragile body.
