How To Stain-Glass Watertowers.

-  Okay so I was actually able to find a hard copy of the new How To Destroy Angels at a major, corporate outlet.  I know what you’re thinking: “what’s a hard copy??”  I was there to pay bills, not to record shop.  So it was a nice treat; because — and I might be in the minority here — I do like owning a CD much better than just having it on my computer.  Granted, this will get thrown onto my computer at some point… I just have yet to do that cause I’ve been blasting it through the stereo for the past few days.

So how is it, right?  Fucking awesome.  I’m loving this album.  And it’s scary because like I’ve said in the past… I think I like this stuff more than I ever did NIN.  And I consider myself a Nine Inch Nails fan, too.  Mariqueen Maandig, as she’s credited in the liner notes, does a miraculous job breathing more life into into an ever expanding body of Trent Reznor production.  I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t enjoy this as much if it was a purely Reznor sung collection of music.  Not that he doesn’t sing.  He does, only a little.  It makes his vocal appearances all the more exciting, and even haunting, when he’s not around all the time.  To say this album is simply a showcase of Maandig’s etheral, spot-on vocals would be beyond misleading of me though.  Indeed Atticus Ross and Reznor alike really bring their A games to the table here: using their illustrious pasts apart, their work together on David Fincher soundtracks, and something new and simple as a very like-minded production team.  I guess when you go back and really listen to the soundtracks they’ve done — particularly The Social Network — it is pretty simple music, really.  On the surface at least.  Those more ambient leanings appear on “Welcome Oblivion“; they just sit behind some really catchy, borderline basic, Electro/Industrial beats that sound like they’ve ripped directly from a late 90′s MPC.  Catching a theme here?  This record manages to combine simplicity with a more organic brand of Electronic music, which oddly creates a forward-thinking sound.  “A house on fire/burning all the past away.”  Haunting, progressive, simple, organic… like the future.  This is future music.

-  Stained glass water-tower.  Brooklyn.  By Tom Fruin.

-  “Iran shipping Chinese weapons to Yemen” sounds like a Tom Clancy novel’s starting point… but:

THINGS GET WORSE.

“As the article makes clear, the Iranians, via the Revolutionary Guard Corps, are accelerating the volume and sophistication of weapons supplies transferred to extent and potential proxies in the region. In the case of Yemen, that’s the Houthi rebellion. In all cases, Iran’s support is to Shi’a or Shi’a offshoot groups fighting Sunni government or groups.  The qualitative escalation is symbolized by the presence of Chinese-manufactured manpads—the QW-1M. These weapons come from a Chinese state-owned company already sanctioned by the U.S. government for illegal arms dealing.

What are Iranian and Chinese officials thinking (and let me note that in neither case can we assume a monolithic government decision system)?”

-  SonnyW.

Tom Sawyering the Corps.

-  Last night I made the mistake of beginning to watch the Lance Bangs Pavement documentary “Slow Century”.  A mistake because I should have known it would’ve been too fascinating to turn off, no matter how late the hours got.  If you’ve got the time, here it is:

-  Sage Francis has resurrected the Tumblr Hello There, Racists after an apparent shut down.  I think it’s outrageous to say it isn’t fair to publicly chastise these people, knowing full well that Twitter and Facebook are publicly viewed domains (they’re basically the 21st Century “public square”).  It also serves to remind us of some very important things, two of which: you’re not invisible on the Internet, and if you want to say outrageous shit you’d better damn well be posting anonymously (then again anyone with half a brain can trace an IP address), and yes… racism definitely still exists.  Some of this shit is just disgusting.

-  Very interesting article, that very well might go over your head a little (went over mine at least), on the nature of dark energy.  Is it static or dynamic in its existence.  If it’s dynamic… yeesh, the philosophical implications of such a thing are astronomical; a form of matter whose density and composition and structure changes as it shifts though space time??

While hypothesized dark energy can explain observations of the universe expanding at an accelerating rate, the specific properties of dark energy are still an enigma. Scientists think that dark energy could take one of two forms: a static cosmological constant that is homogenous over time and space, or a dynamical entity whose energy density changes in time and space. By examining data from a variety of experiments, scientists in a new study have developed a model that provides tantalizing hints that dark energy may be dynamic.

The results are still far from conclusive, but the scientists hope that future data might narrow down the models with greater accuracy. They hope that observations by the Planck spacecraft (launched in 2009; first data available in April 2013) and the Euclid spacecraft (launch date is 2019) could help pinpoint the dark energy models that most closely describe our expanding universe.

-  Great piece of street art (graffiti, if you prefer that term; I really could care less what it’s called) from GOIN, who I believe works out of the UK:

-Sonny

Bohemian Chord Progression.

-  There awaits to excellent features at Guernica for you:

BAT-MYTHOS: Superhero idealogy, Batman, and the Aurora shootings

The decades since the ’30s and ’40s have witnessed considerable broadening of the superhero’s narrative and thematic ambition, an evolution (some would say cynical decline) that accelerated with the mid-’80s arrival of the glibly monikered Dark Age. Inspired by pop-culture touchstones like Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, the new strain of superhero comics attempted to incorporate greater psychological depth, artistic experimentation and gritty atmospherics, launching a bevy of condescending “Biff, Pow: Comics Have Grown Up!” headlines that continue to this day.

These aspirations were regularly confused by over-zealous creators with an open license to escalate violence and sexual content, but often enough, the writers and artists succeeded in taking the genre to new places. These were not happy destinations, rife as they were with anti-heroes and psychopaths feeding off each other’s pathologies. The defining quality of the deconstructive new tales was a readiness to say uncomfortable things about the sort of person who might actually be inclined to put on an outlandish costume and run around attacking sociopaths. In short, it was no longer possible to generalize about the basically hopeful nature of superheroes.

Street Art and the New Bohemian: A conversation w/ Eric Drooker and Molly Crabapple

Art grabs people by their eyeballs, it seduces them. Especially if the picture is very beautiful or very sexy or just really weird, if it has some surreal element in it. It makes people do a double take and then, if they’re looking at the picture, maybe they’ll read the text under it that says, “Come to Union Square, For Anti-War Meeting Friday.” I’ve been operating that way ever since—that art is a means to an end rather than simply an end in itself. In art school we’re always taught that art is an end in itself—art for art’s sake, expressing yourself, and that that’s enough.

Drooker’s work:

And Molly’s:

-  There’s more to the recent scientific finding that music has become less original and louder over the years.  In terms of volume, we’re using significantly better tech to both create and consume music.  It’s hard to drive a V-10 at only 40 MPH when you know that’s only a quarter of its power.  Know what I’m saying?  Then there’s a cultural aspect to everything being louder (literally and figuratively) now: to block out the world with headphones nowadays requires more volume in a city than it probably did in 1952.  And in terms of notation… well that is easily debunked.  Or questioned, at the very least.  Obviously as time goes on and on more and more musicians have to use the same chord progressions and melodies and structures.  There is only so many keys to use.  And within that limited number of keys there’s only so many ways to rearrange chords.  And within those structures there’s only a percentage of them that are consonant (a fancy musical term for “feels good on the ears”).  Clearly scientists, not musicians, did this research.

-Sonny

Simpson Cells of the Underclass.

Depending upon which version you’re watching, the Simpsons couch-gag from this past Sunday by infamous British street artist Banksy has been viewed anywhere from 1 million to nearly 3 million times on YouTube.  And, depending upon where you chill on the web, chances are you’ve seen the thing embedded in about 13 blogs and Facebooks and Twitters and whatnot.  It’s everywhere right now.  One guy I know — who actually I respect quite a bit — said it was “the best thing the Simpsons have done for a long time”.  I first learned of the bit from one of my favorite websites/bloggers John of SuperPunch.

It’s ballsy.  I’ll give Matt Groening and co. that much.  If you haven’t seen it (I’ll provide the link again), the end showcases the famous 20th Century Fox as a sort of barbed-wire internment camp.  But since the mid-90′s — when the show absolutely owned the ratings — the Simpsons have been making cracks about the evil that is NewsCorp.  A clip compilation from that time would work well to Springsteen’s “Glory Days”, wouldn’t it?  I guess I’m saying this is nothing new.  Sure, the inclusion of a guy like Banksy is… a street/graffiti artist who’s shit has been painted over time and time again from the streets of London to Bejing… but the concept itself is much more like the 2010 iteration of the show: stale, tired, and more self-parochial than self-deprecating.

The unicorn and panda bears are what really twists the knife in the ribs with this bit.  By including those, the gag goes from a serious indictment of the way the global economic machine works (and not just NewsCorp, the system in general) to a over-the-top laugh factory who’s laughs are also manufactured somewhere in India.  If you’re gonna go this route, go balls to the wall.  Don’t go half-way, then pull back the curtain to reveal abused unicorns and panda bears hauling wheel-barrows full of Bart Simpson dolls.  You can’t have it both ways: either be hated and feared by your bosses, or don’t go this way at all anymore.

I mean, I get it.  It’s Banksy we’re talking here and the trademark dark-humor of his pieces needed to be on display.  I still think the unicorn and panda bears destroy the gag.  Speaking of Banksy, if you look up any of his street art you will rarely, if EVER, find his name overtly obvious in the piece.  Maybe he signs in the corner, but a piece of Banksy graffiti is recognizable enough without him signing.  So, I thought it was incredibly lame (maybe this wasn’t his idea, I don’t know) that his name had to be so obviously splattered all over a Springfield billboard for all the world to see.  You wanna get paid by a massive international corporation, and one as shady as NewsCorp?  Fine.  I ain’t even gonna call you a sell-out or lose respect (trust me, enough people already do and have).  Get paid.  But don’t be the guy who cashes in a check from a corporation (as a “socially conscious” street artist) and also say, “oh, and in case you didn’t know, this is ME doing this” for the publicity on top of the check.  Especially when your regular art doesn’t do that to begin with.

I dunno.  Like I say, it is ballsy perhaps… but the entire thing just don’t sit right with me.

-Sonny