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Thursday, July 31, 2008

Stuff Mafoo Likes

ION, my favorite NYC-area low-budget broadcast network, is showing The Neverending Story tonight at 8pm. Hell fucking yes.

Happy Week!

K, I've kinda noticed that my blog has been a little overly negative in recent weeks (months? years?). I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing - where better to air your grievances than in public - but I thought it might be nice for me to do with some enforced positivity. I also had a nasty migraine yesterday, so the usually attractive idea of starting my day out with a Mafoo Blog rant doesn't hold the same excitement as it often does. Right now thinking too hard makes my entire skull hurt.

So I thought I'd devote an entire week to things I like. Or rather, I'll have an entire week free of things I hate. Ya know, things like... Uph! Nope, not gonna do it.

To commence my wade into the waters of happyland, here are a few recent things I like:

1. I like watching low-budget slasher movies (grindhouse films) on YouTube. I watched two last night, Pieces and Scream Bloody Murder. I'd provide the link, but I don't want them to be found out and removed. Search YouTube for them though if you are interested, they shouldn't be too hard to find.





2. I like the Bershire Fringe Festival. Spent the weekend there, caught a couple shows, and hung out with some good friends.

3. I like the International Music Score Library Project. This is serious shit, check it out. Worth a whole post of its own.

4. I like the Montauk Monster:


5. I might might MIGHT be softening my hatred for Wraps. I still think they are weird bastardized burritos, but I had a couple this weekend that were ok...

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Morning Links

Huckabee has a good take on McCain, guess he's out of the veep running...

L.A. knows what's best for those pathetic low-income areas (sarcasm-alert!).

NYPD strikes again (short ad before the video).

Judy ain't gonna sit around and deal with no earthquake's bullshit.

Apparently the gunman in the Knoxville Unitarian Church mass murder was a big fan of... you guessed it: Savage, Hannity, and O'Reilly.

Jack White and Alicia Keys are recording the new Bond theme? Nice.

For the record, RNC plus humor equals awful.

That's some good police work there Lou.

Bennigans slowly dies, much like my soul the last time I ate a Bennigans monte cristo.

Monday, July 28, 2008

The W Trailer



I'm sorry, but this just looks retarded. From what I've seen and read about it, it just seems like the standard "Bush is an idiot" crap that you get from much of the left. Stone bought the best actors he could buy, shoved them into the roles of the top players in Bush's family and cabinet, and pushed it through the production process as fast as he could.

Look. Yes, Bush is a dreadfully incompetent president, probably one of the worst ever. I know it, Stone knows it, half of the country knows it, and this is a movie for that half of the country.This movie will not change anyone's mind, it is just candy to make people who hate Bush feel good about themselves. Fuck that. I don't want to see that. I want to see something that challenges my beliefs and ideas, not affirms them. Propaganda does not make good art, I don't care how much I agree with it. And this looks like a pile of crap.

I'm way over Oliver Stone, btw. He's a fucking 90s director. He's like Ron Howard with a chip on his shoulder. He makes romantic, idealistic films - especially his biopics - that fictionalize his characters into neat little dramatic packages. He started the trend of romanticized biopics that create superficial deities of his subjects, whether good or evil. But you can tell that he still thinks of himself as this maverick film maker. Yuck.

Anyway, the problem with this film is that it gives fodder to the critics on the right who tend to portray people on the left as sour, elitist, and mean-spirited. You'll never persuade someone with insults, no matter how good it makes you feel or how justified you feel. All you will do is perpetuate the fight.

NYPD vs. Critical Mass

Wow, fuck you NYPD:

Saturday, July 26, 2008

LOLCats Finally Stop Being Funny

7 Funniest Green LOLCats:

Sigh...

Ya know, this whole Carin'-for-the-Environment craze is getting old.

What? Huh??

Yeah, sorry. It's a fad. It's temporary. Give it another year or so and we'll be back to our old wasteful selves again. People are simply too selfish to endure minor inconveniences on a mass scale in order to help Save The Earth.

Don't think so?

Hey. Remember the 90s? After the excesses of the 80s, the early-mid 90s was a time of unusual social consciousness. I remember being taught recycling in schools, Earth Day was a hit, Captain Planet was chillin with the Planeteers, and people were cutting their plastic soda can holder thingys so fish and birds wouldn't get caught in 'em. Yeah, that whole thing went away a few years later when the economy started doing better ( music follows this trend as well: top band in 1992 - Nirvana; 1998 - Backstreet Boys ).

The economy sucks right now. The country is fucked because of Bush. It makes perfect sense that people will start caring about causes (that they will not be caring about in about 5 years). I just don't wanna sit through it.

Still not convinced that this whole carin' 'bout da environment/global warming-worrying thang is merely a fad?

Then here you go:



Two symbols of decendence, excess, and waste teaching us we ought to learn to restrain ourselves and be more conscientious about the impact of our actions. Yeah. Really. It's a show. Don't miss it.

Cuz nobody will care in a few years.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

I've got the dreaded "Nosebleed Disease"!!



Run for the hills!!

Ok seriously, here is an article in the Canadian Times Colonist about my condition, HHT. The article is oddly titled, The Nosebleed Disease. Umm, kinda catchy I guess. Definitely better than Osler-Weber-Rendu:
Rating 2T [HHT] is characterized by the presence of arteriovenous (artery-vein) malformations (AVMs) that involve direct connections between arteries and veins without the usual intervening capillaries. These AVMs can vary in size from a pinhead to a pea. The tiniest AVMs are called telangiectases. Telangiectases that are close to the surface of the skin and mucous membranes in areas like the nose are very fragile and tend to rupture easily and bleed.
...
For the most part, people with HHT have a normal lifespan, Vethanayagam says. But large AVMs can bleed in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, brain, spine, lung, liver and other sites and create major, sometimes life-threatening, incidents such as a stroke or brain abscess.

Jerome, who needs a blood transfusion every six months, counts himself lucky that he doesn't need a transfusion every five weeks, like his dad, who also had internal bleeding.

He dismisses his disease "as an inconvenience" because he says he doesn't want to come across as a whiner and because he is a private person. He's only talking about HHT because he thinks it may help people who haven't yet been diagnosed to notice similarities with their own situation."

I have an HHT Google Alert set up and it's surprising how rare it actually makes the news. But know you know about it. And knowing's half the battle.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Monday, July 21, 2008

That whole Michael Savage autism thing

I've been loathe to post on this, mainly because I think that publicity whores like Michael Savage should not be given more press, but I found a productive reason to post. AFLAC (ya know, the commercial with the duck) has decided to pull its advertising from Savage Nation. That's a good start.

In case you're unaware of the scandal, here's some of what Savage said:
You know what autism is? I'll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it's a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out. That's what autism is.

What do you mean they scream and they're silent? They don't have a father around to tell them, "Don't act like a moron. You'll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don't sit there crying and screaming, idiot."

Autism -- everybody has an illness. If I behaved like a fool, my father called me a fool. And he said to me, "Don't behave like a fool." The worst thing he said -- "Don't behave like a fool. Don't be anybody's dummy. Don't sound like an idiot. Don't act like a girl. Don't cry." That's what I was raised with. That's what you should raise your children with. Stop with the sensitivity training. You're turning your son into a girl, and you're turning your nation into a nation of losers and beaten men. That's why we have the politicians we have.

Yeah. I mean, it's really too stupid to even comment on. Really, just so wrong in so many ways and so misinformed, sigh...

Jeanne from Charlie in Wonderland takes up the banal task of explaining why he is so very, very wrong:
Savage is clearly unaware of some basic facts about autism:

* Half of all people with autism never learn to speak

* More than half of people with an autism diagnosis have an IQ that places them in the mentally retarded range

* The number of children diagnosed with autism has increased at a rate of about 15% per year for the past twenty years.

* 60 years ago autism was thought to be a psychiatric disorder caused by bad mothers, even though no evidence was ever offered to support that theory. This theory was rejected by responsible observers in the 1960s.

Regarding the call for a boycott: I am very against censorship. I don't think Savage should be arrested for what he said or forcibly silenced by the government. However, I think businesses should be accountable for which programs they air during, and people should be encouraged to put social pressure on those businesses who fund programs like his. Savage lost his show on MSNBC for telling a gay caller to "get AIDS and die". Remember that? This clown needs to be removed from the airwaves and people should pressure his supporters (his advertisers) to withdraw their funding.

For the record, I still believe in public pressure for causes in which I don't agree. A few years ago, when anti-war voices were being silenced by cowardly advertisers, I hated it, but I defended their right to do pull their funding.

UPDATE: Home Depot has also pulled its advertising from Savage Nation

UPDATE on the UPDATE:
"Sarah from Home Depot" says:

Just to clarify. We are not advertisers on the Michael Savage program.

Western Spaghetti



Awww... I find this so adorable. The candy corn as fire made my day. It's kind of like an Americana Svankmajer animation.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

The Dark Knight

Watched the Dark Knight last night. Overall, a great comic book movie. I'm not exactly sure how much it 'transcended the genre', as many reviewers have put it, but that's not exactly a bad thing. The important thing to remember is that Batman as a comic never transcended the genre, even in its Frank Miller days, on which much of this particular Batman is based. Perhaps it was because of the overhype of the film - and it was plenty hyped, Jesus - but I went into the movie half-expecting the first big budget arthouse-style superhero movie. It's not. It's a really good superhero action movie. But yet, the critics keep insisting it be more. Why must it be?

Ebert writes:
“Batman” isn’t a comic book anymore. Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” is a haunted film that leaps beyond its origins and becomes an engrossing tragedy. It creates characters we come to care about. That’s because of the performances, because of the direction, because of the writing, and because of the superlative technical quality of the entire production. This film, and to a lesser degree “Iron Man,” redefine the possibilities of the “comic-book movie.”

“The Dark Knight” is not a simplistic tale of good and evil. Batman is good, yes, The Joker is evil, yes. But Batman poses a more complex puzzle than usual: The citizens of Gotham City are in an uproar, calling him a vigilante and blaming him for the deaths of policemen and others. And the Joker is more than a villain. He’s a Mephistopheles whose actions are fiendishly designed to pose moral dilemmas for his enemies.

What these reviewers seem to be missing is this: many comic books are this smart. TDK is not necessarily better than its roots, and I believe that Christopher Nolan was careful not to let this happen. Let's leave the transcending for the Watchmen movie, which is based on Alan Moore's expansion of the comic book mythology into the world of realism.

The most striking facet of the film, that kept it firmly tethered to its pulp roots, was the dialog. From the opening scene, the bad guys spoke as bad guys and the cops spoke as cops. Well, the grunts on both sides tended to have the primary deficit in eloquence. It wasn't quite so bad as the 60s Batman-style "Gee, Boss! What're we gonna do now?" thang, but Nolan kept them in their place. Sometimes, though, the dialog seemed a might too stodgy. Batman, especially when in character, growled through his usual two-dimensional morality, but with a bit more depth. The Joker probably had the best dialog of all, but it was purposefully cartoony and Ledger played it artfully.

Sidenote: Ledger was very good in the role, bringing a convincing mania to the character. I dug the grimy, lip-smacking, creepy vibe he gave off, which was in direct contrast to Nicholson's polished upper-crust parody. Still, I don't think it is Oscar material (whatever that means anymore). He's very good at becoming the character, but it is primarily a comical character. There simply isn't that much depth to the character, and Nolan kept it that way. The closest we get to a motivation is a vague description of his 'anarchic' philosophy - which is actually not an anarchic philosophy in my opinion (for the record, anarchy and chaos are not the same thing; anarchy means literally: no ruler). But Ledger will win the Oscar. Why? Because he died. There, I said it. If there is one thing the Academy cannot resist, it is sentimentality, whether in film or in real life. I will bet 20 dollars to the first person willing to take it. Ledger will get the Best Actor Oscar. Hmmm, now that I think about it, maybe the role is Oscar material, seeing that Oscar material tends to require forces unrelated to the actual performance in the film.
/cynical rant

I'm a huge fan of Gary Oldman in the role of Gordon. His bland, mustachioed cop that you can't help loving is exactly what the pulp adaptation needs and he plays it to perfection. The more I see and read of Oldman, the more he strikes me as the seminal professional actor. Outlandish in roles that call for it and subdued in the roles that call for him to step into the background. He never steals a scene, but yet gives you a few moments to say, "Fuck yeah Gary Oldman!, I mean Police Chief Gordon, I mean Commissioner Gordon."

K, to sum it all up: great performances, so-so dialog, plenty of nail-biting moments, lotsa explosions, beautiful cinematography. Definitely go see it in the theaters.

Saturday, July 19, 2008

The Rite Remixed and Deerhoof at Celebrate Brooklyn

I went to the Wordless Music show in Prospect Park last night, featuring Metropolis Ensemble and Deerhoof. I had heard good things about the Rite Remixed project (Stravinsky's Rite of Spring arranged for electronics, percussion, and brass) and I'm a big Deerhoof fan. Make it free and booyah!, I'm there. Nice.

Let's start with Deerhoof. Fucking awesome. There. Oh wait, more? Ok. Well I've been spending practically all of my time arranging The Little Death for a five piece rock band for an upcoming performance in about a month (I'll post an official announcement soon), so exploring the colors of a standard rock ensemble has been my modus operandi like fer sure. Jesus. Deerhoof. 4 people. Two guitars playing a lot of unison, a bass, and a 3-piece drumset. But what a huge fucking sound. Damn. I felt like I was in school the entire time, learning how to create a massive sound from limited means. I've been stressing over hihats and rides and crashes and shit, and their drummer just killed it with a kick, a snare, and a ride. Pretty incredible. See 'em live if you get a chance.

K, so The Rite Remixed, The Rite Remixed... Let me preface this with the fact that I was in a pretty bad mood when I first arrived at the concert, for reasons I shan't delve into. My mood definitely affects my perception of a performance, a bad one can amplify my cynicism and make me less skeptical of a performance/concept/performer. So, in the aftermath I've been analyzing my thoughts on the project and trying to be honest with myself about how I feel about it.

Ok, so the performance of the Rite consisted of a full brass section (well actually a few people short of the original), extra percussion, and two guys on laptops a-doin' their thing. The brass and percussion sounded great, straight-up. There were several good friends of mine in the horn section, who I know as killer players. I think it was mostly Juilliard alumni, with some Manhattan Schoolers sprinkled in. Really strong loud brass playing, although the there were some balance issues related to the sound system/guy. It was kind of hard to hear the trombones, ironically, and I could have used a bit more percussion.

It soon became apparent though that this performance was not about the brass and percussion. The two guys on laptops, who arranged the piece, were the focus, both visually and musically. One was sitting (Leo Leite I think), and the other was standing and essentially being 'laptop performer extraordinaire' (I believe this was Ricardo Romaneiro, but since I'm not positive I'll refer to him as LPE). So LPE came out just before the performance and I let out an involuntary "Oh, goddamnit!". He was decked out in full hip hop attire: Kangol hat, preppy polo shirt, black sunglasses. Now if there is one thing I despise in classical music, it's when classical people try to act cool. Just... just, don't. Embrace your inner geek. Being a classical composer will never be cool. Sorry. For the entire performance LPE played the role of the... well, of the Laptop Performer Extraordinaire. He bopped with the rhythms as if he was DJing at a deep south crunk party. He did the customary tweak-the-knobs-as-if-you-are-trying-to-save-a-child's-life thing (ya know, how they'll grab the knob of their MIDI controller - likely controlling a simple filter-sweep - and turn it like it weighs 300lbs). He generally acted as different, and above, the standard black-clad musicians behind him as he could.

Now, I know what you're thinking right now. 'Damn Matt, that's, um... that's just kind of bitchy. Tearing apart the appearance of a performer at a concert? That's so Gawker.' Well, Dear Reader, I believe I prefaced this "review" by saying I was generally in a bad, sour ass mood when I saw the performance. My little rant was just to indicate my thoughts on the overall appearance of the performance, which was one of minimizing the contributions of the brass and percussionists - to be honest they looked like ringers or a back-up band, rather than part of the Ensemble - and focusing on the soloists. The problem with the performance musically, was that this focus became apparent in the music as well.

As I said, despite my minor gripes about a couple sound issues, players sounded fantastic, but they were constantly being buried underneath the electronic arrangement. The backing track - there seemed to be an attempt to make it appear live, but it was primarily on track, with some minor tweaks here or there (filters sweeps, cuts, etc.) by LPE - consisted of the orchestral parts of The Rite of Spring, played by analog-modeling soft-synths. I mean these were serious old-school sounding synths. Whoever did the primary programming and sequencing has a hardcore analog fetish. And most of the synths sounded good, but they were way too high in volume, essentially burying the orchestra. Couple this with the fact that many old school synths sound to most people actually quite silly (sorry synth geeks!), and it made for a strange overall timbre for the piece. Pretty much the entire backing track was synthesis, and all of it these audacious old school sounds. After about halfway into it I had reached synthesis overload. I wanted to hear some beats, some noise, some samples, something other than what my Moog-freak friends would get off on.

The overall effect seemed to resemble a Wendy Carlos-style Switched-On Bach synth arrangement, but with real brass and percussion in the background. The synths were so loud, and LPE was so much the focus visually, that it resembled more of a vanity project than an effective arrangement. Many sections sounded really cool (I mean, I am kind of a synth geek myself), and at times the combined timbre created very unique textures. I thought to myself: 'Maybe the fact that they "remixed" this in such an old-school fashion is actually really far-out', 'Maybe I'm just being a sourpuss'. I'm not sure though, which I guess means I'm not convinced. Its audacity was certainly admirable, both in ambition and in style. I asked Mell, who was with me what she thought. "It sounded comical" was her take. I have to agree, the whole thing came of as comical: sonically, because of the overemphasized silly analog-style synths; in appearance, because of the obvious attempt at impressing the cool hipsters of the crowd who, for the record, seemed to be somewhat entertained by the spectacle, but mostly eagerly awaiting Deerhoof. Btw, Deerhoof kicked ass.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Watchmen Trailer



Damn.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Shards Of Glass Looked Like Blood-Coated Icebergs

Dayamn boy! That's a helluva subtitle from this sad sad story of a dog being fed glass.

Ps attention jerks of the world, can you stop feeding dogs glass? Thanx.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Sneak Preview of Miyazaki's Ponyo



Just try and tell me you're not gonna to be singing, "Ponyo, Ponyo..." in your head all day.

Friday, July 11, 2008

My Shared Items

I've finally gone ahead and posted my Shared Items from Google Reader on my blog. They're on the left, just below my list of Covers and Remixes (that are FREE for download!!!!!). After months of ridicule from Melly for not posting them on my blog, I've bowed into the pressure. It's cool though, Shared Items fulfills that area of interest on a story where you're not quite fired-up enough to post on it, but you'd still like to, ya know, share. So, for example: Film Blog X has a post about Tarantino mentioning that Inglorious Bastards has hired a new grip. Hella exciting for Mafoo, less so for your hatin' ass. Into the Shared Items!

Get it? Cool.

If you're a Google Reader whore as I am you can alway view my page in Reader by clicking the title of the post, where you'll be able to see my shared items, download songs, listen to my podcast, see my list of bloggy pals (recently updated!), and um see a picture of me dressed as a sexy 70s Macbeth from 1996.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Joe Queenan is the Ann Coulter of classical music criticism

In this article, Joe Queenan makes the same generalizations about contemporary music as most classical-centric conservatory freshman: ie. it is not immediately engaging, the most far-out modern works will never be as revered as the most complex classical masterpieces (um, duh...), the 'white hairs' don't like it and will never like it. The thing is, these are age-old arguments about modern music. In fact they are ancient arguments about modern art, indeed what teenagers tend to think upon viewing the most established works of abstract art.

So why would The Guardian print the article? Well, because I'm writing about it right now, and you're reading about it right now, and chances are you clicked on my link and generated a few cents of income to the advertisers on The Guardian page. It's like our quandary of dealing with the Ann Coulters of the world. We want to ignore them, but their arguments are so childish, so brazen, so offensive that not responding seems to be an act of appeasement.

So when Queenan writes:
Would contemporary music attract more listeners if a truly great composer came along? The last time the American public got excited about a living composer was when Leonard Bernstein was in vogue; but Bernstein, a superb conductor and Broadway tunesmith, never developed into a great composer. At present, the American public seems most taken by anachronisms (Henryk Górecki, Arvo Pärt), infantilists (Glass), eclectics (Corigliano) and atmospheric neo-Brucknerites (John Adams). Even when the public embraces the new, what it is really looking for is the old. It is hardly surprising that so many composers simply throw in the towel and compose music that will be ignored in their own lifetimes, hoping it will find an audience with posterity.

What? Wtf?? He called Adams an "atmospheric neo-Brucknerite"??? What does that even mean? How is Adam's music anything like Bruckner's, just because it is repetitive?? And he honestly believes that there have been no "truly great composers" in the last century?? Where to begin?

See, don't you feel the urge to pound out a response right now, email the article to your contemporary music-lovin friends of yours, put Joe Queenan on your New Music Dartboard? Yeah, that is what he wants. Just as when Ann Coulter said that in response to 9/11 that 'we should invade their countries and convert them all to christianity' or whatever, you have to stop and think, "oh, wait, she's a clown. She's not to be taken seriously." Same thing with Queenan. He is exactly like that 18 year old drunk trombone player at the party who drunkenly slurs that good music ended with Wagner. You can argue with him all you want, all you're going to end up with is about an ounce of Natty Ice periodically spat onto your face.

But, if you'd like to, like my misguided ass, post a rant of your own in response, feel free to do so. Tom Service wrote an interesting response. Just remember the cardinal rule of the information age:

Do not feed the trolls.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Inglorious Bastards Update

Gwuh??
Quentin Tarantino has just gone out with his long-anticipated script about World War II. But here's the weird thing sources are telling me: not only is Laurence Bender attached to produce Inglorious Bastards, but also Harvey Weinstein who will be producing as well but not financing it.

... just confirmed that Quentin Tarantino is talking to Brad Pitt to star...

Won't Somebody Please Think of the Honor Killers??

There's an oddly sympathetic tone in this story of a father killing his daughter in an "honor killing" because she wanted out of an arranged marriage:
Chaudhry Rashid, 54, later said he was "very disturbed" and "not in a state of mind" to talk because of the death of his daughter, Sandeela Kanwal.

A somber and tearful Rashid made his first court appearance Tuesday. He was advised through an Urdu interpreter of the murder charge and his legal rights.

A judge also admonished Rashid, of Jonesboro, Georgia, to not make any statements without clearing them with his attorney.

"My client is going through a difficult time. As you can imagine, he is distraught," attorney Tammi Long said after the hearing.

She requested that Rashid's family be given privacy, but said Rashid is holding up as well as can be expected.

Aww... Are you doing Ok Rashid? Does somebody need a hug? Wanna talk about it Tiger?

Maybe I'm finally showing my Melly influence, but c'mon CNN! Honor killers are some of the worst people out there, I believe. Homeboy killed his daughter. I don't think too many readers are worried whether Rashid's kinda down in the dumps right now...

'Yuck' is now a racial slur

Britain takes another baby-step towards fascism.
The guide, titled Young Children and Racial Justice, warns adults that babies must also be included in the effort to eliminate racism because they have the ability to "recognize different people in their lives."

The bureau says to be aware of children who "react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying 'yuck'."

"Racist incidents among children in early years settings tend to be around name-calling, casual thoughtless comments and peer group relationships," the guide says.

I hated hated mayonnaise as a child. I used to think this was because most children lack the faculties for recognizing complex flavors and textures, hence the term 'acquired taste'.

Know I know the real reason:

Growing up middle-class and white I had my share of white guilt that manifested itself as an innate revulsion with the symbols of the casual tyranny of the caucasian bourgeoisie. Being the child of 60s-era baby boomers, who themselves attended peace and civil rights rallies, my desire for social justice and equality was not merely learned - it was hardwired into my genetic make-up. Thus, when confronted at a young age with this insipid spread - its ghostly white paste most commonly splayed thin across white bread - my intuitive rejection arose from the depths of my humanity, that gentle core inside of each of us that yearns for fairness and mutual understanding between cultures.

Unfortunately, not all of us are imbued with this breadth of instinctual PLUR as I was. A similar, albeit unjustified, rejection of flavors and consistencies is present in many of our children. These are the infants and young children who cry at the sight of brown curry, yellow rice, black licorice. Just as subconscious gestures of social responsibility must be celebrated, so must similar signs of intolerance be discouraged, and even punished. I recommend using social pressure to educate our young. If your child sees fit to display a racist scowl at the sight of 'ethnic' food in his/her bowl the parent should utilize the common stratagem of our society, such as: ostracization - ignoring your child until he/she eats the food, thereby accepting the culture in question; detention - a significant time-out to allow your child to discover their core humanity; restriction - loss of the use of toys, TV, computer time, stressing that it is only through mutual honor and respect that we deserve the freedom to have what we love. We have it in our power to create the children we want, with the values we cherish. Let's not let the naturally unenlightened children follow their own paths to ignorance and despair.

Monday, July 7, 2008

The Fly Opera

Early reviews are less than laudatory, but I can't help holding out hope. I think it is an awesome idea for an opera, the perfect tragedy for an opera and the type of offbeat adaptation we need more of in opera and musical theater. I'm optimistic about the score though. Howard Shore, best known for mainstream scores such as Lord of the Rings, has actually a pretty awesome dark, experimental side. He tends to let himself loose on his Cronenberg scores, especially the more twisted films.
Check out the opening from Crash (ignore the Alliance theme at the very beginning):

The metallic twang of the electric guitars works really well with the imagery of the twisted, jagged steel of the crashed cars.

Here is the main theme from Videodrome, which sounds like a lot of IDM from today (it's from 1983!):


His Dead Ringers soundtrack is much more straightforward, but how it complements the grotesque and violent imagery makes it almost more creepy than his more "experimental" works:



Here is a video on The Fly opera that features some of the music and set design. I'm not terribly stoked with the musical selections they feature, but I guess we'll see:

Sunday, July 6, 2008

Google Trying to Take Privacy Seriously

Here's another screenshot in my Google Series.
From Google News:


Truuuust Uuuuusssssss...

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Revolution 9 Press from the Bang on a Can Marathon

It's been a long time coming. Literally, directly after the performance up until a couple days ago I was away from regular internet access, so I couldn't really do a nice long post. Anyway, here are some more interesting things that were said about my arrangement of The Beatles' Revolution 9, performed at the 2008 Bang on a Can Marathon by Alarm Will Sound:
The vibrant chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound kicked off the proceedings at 6 p.m. with a movement from John Adams’s “Son of Chamber Symphony,” and much later offered a staggeringly creative arrangement of the Beatles’ abstract sound collage “Revolution 9,” arranged by Matt Marks. - NY Times

Matt gave a very entertaining introduction to his arrangement, wherein he likened Alarm Will Sound's penchant for creating acoustic reinterpretations of electronic music to Harry Potter fanfic: "Basically, we're giant geeks." So yeah, it's pretty much straight-up fanservice for the small but obsessive subset of Beatles fans who were actually intrigued by the White Album's penultimate, ah, "tune." (A Venn diagram would probably show considerable overlap between that set and the set of people who show up at the Bang On A Can Marathon.) Anyway, this painstaking recreation is wholly absurd and I loved it -- Matt's chart is wildly entertaining and theatrical, with members of the band honking car horns, screaming into mutes, imitating backwards tape loops, and screaming in each other's faces. ("Hold that line! Block that kick!") Does my fanboyish enjoyment of this arrangement make me a giant hypocrite? Yeah, probably. So what else is new? - Darcy James Argue

The next notable event was music collective Alarm Will Sound’s orchestral re-interpretation of the Beatle’s “Revolution #9” sound-collage off the their 1968 White Album. Though the piece didn’t quite sit with me, the performance was solid, with individual members doing a great job of both playing their instruments with precision and providing their own vocal interpretation of the multiple sampled voices in the original work. Justin at Hey Student

Matt Marks's arrangement of Revolution 9 (performed by Alarm Will Sound) was also delightful and endlessly imaginative (although there seems to be some disagreement over this piece in the NewAm camp... more on that later). Michael Hammond on his New Am Blog

UPDATE: Forgot about this one, they call me Matthew so I missed it:

Because Revolution #9 wasn’t notated (it’s a sound collage), AWS member Matthew Marks took it upon himself to transcribe the piece in its entirety for the 20-person ensemble. And it’s a knockout. Hundreds of sounds are replicated with precision and impeccable timing. Tip o’ the cap to The Kitchen for presenting this piece and others by AWS earlier this year. Plog

Here is an highly unauthorized video of the performance (I may be dooming its existence by even posting it, but it's kinda fun):



My favorite part: at the end of the performance, the guy taking the video says, "That guy that said that's his favorite song on The White Album's a fucking idiot!". I can't remember if I said that in my introduction or not. Ha, I probably said some shit like that! Oh yeah, and according to the YouTube description, we are apparently a "String ensemble"...

Here's a couple cool vanity pics taken from Darcy's review:


"Um, we're like geeks and stuff..."


"The Good Fish iiiin the Ke-ttle, agaaaaaaiiinnnnn, in the Ke-ttle..."

Cool, it was a blast. If you missed it, please come check it out when we do it again and again this coming season, all around the country. If you were there, and wrote anything on it, good or bad, or have any pics, please let me know! I'd love to see/read it.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Preshish Moments Album Out Now!!



Yo, my dog Preshish Moments (aka Sutros Sutros Ghali, Mickey Cizzle, Northside, and The Schwag King) just released his new album, Let's Be Friends on Daly City Records. Daly City was started by Mochipet, an artist Alarm Will Sound covers on our upcoming album, Arhythmia.
Presh's music is sick: complex without having that IDM pretension, sample-heavy based on obscure sources (for the thrift store record-collector in all of us), funny as hell, and like shockingly groovy. I highly recommend you checking it out.

Here's one of my favorites, try to not want to eat a puppy after hearing this:

Best Friends

He's also a ridiculous laptop battler, having won last year's San Francisco Laptop and Machine Music Battle. Here's a video of him in action:



So go pick that shit up right now, it's on iTunes

How Californians See America



Ha, pretty true. I def saw the country like this until I moved to the mysterious Northeast and became a "Loud and obnoxious New Yorker".
(-via Robert Gable)

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Legalized Marijuana in California?

I'm sure it won't pass, but still. Maybe?

Back to Blogging/New York Hospitals Suck

Sup all. I'm back in the city after a month in Quebec and looking to get back to blogging and stuff. Eventually I'll get around to posting some press about my Revolution 9 arrangement at the BOAC marathon, but first, um, this:
Video from a surveillance camera at a Brooklyn, New York, hospital shows a woman dying on the floor of a psychiatric emergency room while people nearby ignore her. The video was released Monday by lawyers suing Kings County Hospital. The lawsuit alleges neglect and abuse of mental health patients at the facility. The video shows the 49-year-old woman keeling over and falling out out of her chair on June 19.

Yeah. I had a similar experience about a year ago at a hospital in Brooklyn. I sat in the waiting room at New York Methodist for over an hour with - unknown to me at the time - a perforated duodenum and sepsis, really only a few hours away from death. You would have thought that the spectacle of me slumped over a table, giving delirious one-word answers to a gruff old lady (her voice an octave below my own) would have clued them into the seriousness of my condition. Nope. I laid, near unconscious from the pain, across several seats in the waiting room as the few other people present watched television on those little waiting room TVs. After about an hour and a half, when they finally let me in and performed a couple tests (after waiting in the emergency room another hour or so), I remember shocked exclamations, "Oh my, your septic!" "We need to get you into surgery!" "You need a lot of morphine!". Um, yes.

I'm pretty good with pain and discomfort - not naturally, I made it a point a long time ago to learn about the management of pain - so I'm never really one to bitch and moan about it. I will with just about everything else, but I have a certain conservative pride against showing or acknowledging debilitating pain. In this particular example I downplayed the very real pain I was feeling to a large degree, so that I went to the hospital several hours later than I should have, I waited patiently in the waiting room instead of demanding to be seen, and felt a certain shame in requesting pain-killers when I obviously needed them. I remember being asked what my pain level was on a scale of one to ten, having just enough mental coherence to be shocked at such a ridiculous subjective question. I think I said my pain was an '8', knowing that perhaps this would doom me, but seriously, was my pain as bad as being burned alive? As a frequent tourist to the many Torture Museums in the various cities of Europe, I can think of several situations in which my pain would be exceeded: boiled alive, skinned, impaled, etc. Compared to those, how could I honestly say that the throbbing fire that was enveloping my torso was a '10'? Sure it was a '10' in my experience, I had never experienced anything worse, but even in my pitiful state I wasn't romantic enough to lay claim to that perfect '10'.

A few weeks later I had to return to that same emergency room, under much less dangerous circumstances - my white blood cell count was too low and I needed a transfusion. I wasn't really in any pain, just felt very tired and weak, so I packed a little bag and hopped a cab to that same white-tiled purgatory. Ironically, I was admitted in less time, I casually strode to my emergency room bed and prepared for a boring night as I awaited my transfusion. It turned out to be one of the most psychologically-trying nights of my life. The place was packed to the limit, so my night, or rather my first 24 hours or so, were a constant complex antiphony of screams, cries, whines for the nurses, and curses. I was by far the most quiet person there. I heard young men shrieking in Spanish, elderly women weeping and asking for their mothers, middle-aged men screaming until they were hoarse for the nurse to bring them a different pillow, and the discordant shouts for nothing in particular. The composite sonic atmosphere was one of intense need, the increased desire for anything when we feel ourselves deprived of something. I am reminded of the interview with Herzog as he filmed Fitzarraldo in the jungle, describing the constant drone of life around him as "the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder".

I think the thrust into this dependent society of little white beds and sour attendant nurses strips many of their faculties for reservation, patience, and any recourse to strength. Their submission makes them child-like and precocious, willing to demand their whims without a second thought, expose their pain with sobs like a stubbed-toed presented to mommy. I felt shy asking for ice to suck on - I wasn't allowed to drink or eat anything for increasingly obscure reasons - because I didn't want to appear as dependent, yet even this meager request drew the ire of the nerve-seared nurses. But as the time passed and my ordeal grew my patience thinned. 24 hours had passed without me eating or drinking anything, I was alone, and my sanity was weakening. I began to adding my own little line of counterpoint to the epic opera raging outside of my small, draped bed.

At first I started, as horn players often do, with a gentle request as the main theme would whizz by, separated by seemingly endless bars of rest. After that would fail, as the hours passed, to do anything I began abandoning my pianissimo "excuse me"s for some mezzo-forte "Nurse!"s. Eventually some friends of mine came, with their strength of fortissimo that I lacked, and formed a little section for my cause. I became an integral part of the orchestra of want, the wailing community of selfish desire, toward the momentary alleviation of discomfort through a cube of ice, a new pillow, a complaint toward one of the tentacles of bureaucracy. Eventually it worked. I finally got my own room. I eventually was allowed to eat (after 50 hours!). I simply needed to need it more. I had to revert to the childish method of screaming for the toy I wanted, crying when I didn't want to take a bath, impatiently demanding an answer to how my dad could pull that coin out of my ear.

It was my perceived strength that almost killed me in that previous trip to the ER (well, that and an incompetent doctor in New Haven that perforated my duodenum in the first place). For my next trip to the ER, I don't care if I'm there for a hangnail, I'm circling the '10' on the pain chart. Fuck it, I'm writing in an '11' and circling that. The problem is though, the waiting room is the opposite of the ER. It is the place in which you see calm faces with blood running down them, sick children sitting quietly in their parents laps, the air still and quiet as a library, but with the shadow sibilants of the low-volume televisions propped high near the ceiling.

The last time I was there, I remembered it as a low-key, cordial affair. There were a group of girls who seemed to have come from a high school dance, sitting in a row in gowns, placidly watching the elevated televisions with the rest of us. I couldn't tell which of them was injured or sick, they all seemed rather comfortable. In fact, the waiting room that night was a relatively relaxed one. There was a slight air of tension because of our proximity to the hell that lay in the room over, but mainly we all sat, with our heads slightly inclined toward the heavens, watching the banality of local news on tiny TVs. Who knows? In that placidity, there very well could have been a woman lying beneath us on the floor, patiently dying without us noticing, as we all saved our tension and grief for our performance in the next room.