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Tuesday, Jul 30, 2002

babar sings!

"First it was Frogs of North America invading our record bins, then it was Antarctic Seals and Penguins, followed by Insects in Stored Foodstuffs... now it's Elephants from Thailand! Brilliant recordings by non-human, um, sound-artists that we just can't get enough of here at Aquarius. In this case, the elephants are not just making their natural noises, they are indeed playing instruments! You may have read about this project in the New York Times -- when we found out about it we immediately contacted the label and ordered a whole bunch (based also on the on-line sample we heard at www.mulatta.org) and now here they are. These are elephants from a elephant preseve in Thailand who have been trained to play specially-built instruments (many marimba-like instruments similar to the traditional Thai renat, as well as such things as harmonicas, drums, and even a stringed "electric bass"), but they haven't been trained *what* to play, it's all improvised with minimal human guidance! Yet it's definitely music. It was kind of an experiment to find out how the creatures might express themselves, and we'd say it was very successful indeed. If we didn't know these were elephants, we'd think this was a strange No Neck Blues Band recording or something. Imagine a stumbling, primitive hippy folk jam on gamelan instruments, but not one that's random or erratic. The elephants play steady beats, the struck gongs or chimes interspersed with their vocalizations as well. With no overdubs and few edits this is certainly a very impressive recording!"

le meow

"Francoiz Breut is the modern Brigitte Fontaine, with a healthy dose of Cat Power thrown in. Acoustic loops, soaring strings and skittering drums all frame absolutely beautiful songs, full of emotion and intensity. Breut's voice is husky and deep, the lyrics all in French, making the songs dark and dreamy and romantic."

Monday, Jul 29, 2002

newport news

"Next Saturday, Dylan, now 61, will return to the Newport Folk Festival for the first time since that evening. It would be easy to read too much into the occasion. If there is a general remark that might be true about a figure like Dylan, it is that general remarks are almost always distortions. The opposites contained in any real artist prepare an ambush for generalizations."

chimichanga

"At approximately 2 a.m., Rosenblatt was finishing a particularly difficult course-pack reading on the impact of feminism, post-feminism, and current 'queer' theory on received notions of gender and sexual preference/identity. Realizing he hadn't eaten since lunch, the Ph.D candidate picked up the Burrito Bandito menu. Before he could decide on an order, he instinctively reduced the flyer to a set of shifting, mutable interpretations informed by the set of ideological biases�cultural, racial, economic, and political�that infect all ethnographic and commercial "histories.""

Friday, Jul 26, 2002

take me home

"The Department of Homeland Security: An Alternative That Will Work"

rush to judgement

"When AOL bought Time Warner, the New York Times asked me to write a comment piece. "What does it all mean?" my assigning editor asked."

"What I wrote was that AOL's purchase of Time Warner heralded the end of the dotcom bubble. AOL was cashing in its casino chips. And just like the gambler who trades in his coloured plastic disks for real cash, AOL's Steve Case understood that his run was over and that it was time to trade in his stock certificates for those of a company that had genuine assets."

"The New York Times refused to run the piece. They told me I was misreading the landscape to such an extent that for them to publish such a view would be irresponsible. See, all the experts - at least all the experts the Times was listening to - believed that the AOL purchase of Time Warner indicated "new" media's domination of "old" media. Interactivity would take over. Time Warner's only hope of getting in the game was to be absorbed by a new media company."

imperfect storm

"Dahl's main points form an argument that goes roughly like this. Wise and great though the framers were, their vision was circumscribed by what they knew, what they mistakenly thought they knew, and what they lived too soon to have any way of knowing. Even within those limits, they were hobbled by the political necessities of a particular moment, which forced them to swallow provisions to which the most eminent among them were strongly (and rightly) opposed."

Wednesday, Jul 24, 2002

golden statement

"In a move toward making San Francisco the first city to defy openly the federal ban on growing marijuana for any reason, the Board of Supervisors approved a ballot measure on Monday that would explore growing marijuana on public property as a way around the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration's continual closing of medical marijuana clubs."

Tuesday, Jul 23, 2002

rib roast

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. -- Woody Allen"

pop tarts

"Needless to say, the flavor of the Fanta ads is more about borderless fun than the gritty details of the global commerce machine. But in a funny way it was the ads themselves that reminded me, indirectly, of Fanta's origins: The commercials are basically a clever repackaging of almost every youth-marketing trope in recent memory�their leavings, if you will�with plenty of pop culture scraps besides. In the jargon of a pitch meeting, it's a post-ethnic, multinational, transracial, global village, lip-syncing girl band meets prefab boy band, retro-swinger, Austin Powers/Ocean's 11 semi-camp, quasi-kitsch, virtual nostalgia, club remix, neo-urban, alterna-brand, anti-Cola � vibe. Oh, and any of these ingredients may contain some irony�but it's the all-natural kind."

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