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As promised, here's the 2-Step Garage Mini-Mix: [.mp3 removed]. By way of background, this music combines the trickier rhythms, vocal science, and hiphop atmospherics (e.g., sped-up scratching) of drum & bass with the party vibe and divas of UK garage (a house variant). You may recall Ishkur (now in V.2!) called 2-Step "so fucking boring," complaining about its "idiotic" basslines and all the guest popstars. He's right about the guests: usually an electronic dance producer jumps the shark when vocals are added (see Swayzak, Chemical Bros.). But the basslines kind of crack me up. They make me think of the original intent of the Roland TB303, which was to be a kind of automated "bass genie" for pubrockers. The three tracks in this mix are light on vocals, guest or otherwise, and heavier on the atmospherics. All are "classic" 2-Step, meaning about 4 years old: "Scrappy" by Wookie, "True VIP" by Youngstar, and "Romantic Call" by DJ Deller. Any help with what the singer's saying in the last (after the lines "I'm on a romantic call/Talking to my baby down at the yard") would be greatly appreciated.
To the extent Mel Gibson's ego, I mean, faith, is forcing us to think about The Christ right now, you could do worse than looking at ionarts' rundown of the art historical Jesus (like, seeing Gibson's movie). Something I learned about Matthias Grünewald's beautiful, take-no-prisoners altarpiece:
That work was made for a hospital run by an order of monks whose mission was to serve people who were in terrible pain, especially those who had lost limbs. The fact that Jesus chose to die in one of the most painful ways possible, it was thought, is a consolation to a person in pain. In that sense, there is no particular reason, either religious or artistic, to sugarcoat the details of what Jesus suffered.
Below, a new .gif from my Animation Log.
Cintra Wilson's report on the Oscars is super-catty as always but worth a read (Salon subscriber-only text liberated here).
Janet Jackson ruined tits for everyone, so the vast majority of dresses were strictly Mormon prom. Even Elvis Costello wore a plain black jacket, for The Christ’s sake. Nobody even had interesting new plastic surgery, apart from Joan Rivers, whose face looks like it was gnawed out of marzipan by the savages of Easter Island, and Angelina’s Billy Bob-shaped laser scar.Damn. Don't ever make this woman mad at you. Her takedown of Seabiscuit (among other nominees) is more abstractly brutal, but still great:
"Seabiscuit" was a stink-pony – superclean schlock from nose to bumper. Spare me the sight of quaint, depression-era crowd scenes that look like they’ve been swaddled in tweeds by J. Crew, surging in rapture to majestic life-insurance violin orchestrations. That shit was strictly for Burl Ives, Pepperidge Farm and creamy ranch dressing.