Like a Morricone-style dirge recorded by The Mamas and The Papas, Violent Femmes’ cover of Gnarls Barkley’s infamous “Crazy” is like nothing you’ve heard from the legendary alt-rock trio before. Their oft-imitated folk-punk sound is flavored with surf-rock guitar and Theremin, creating a tranquility that is somber and otherworldly.

Violent and Crazy

Your daily McLuhan:

JEFF LEEDS, former NYT music reporter: I’m not sure that it’s so easy anymore to write about the art without acknowledging the commerce or vice versa ... I think the message and the medium are much more intertwined than they were ten years ago.

SASHA FRERE-JONES, who writes about music at The New Yorker: This behavior parallels the world of online friendships, at least in form. People who could just as easily call or e-mail each other decide to make conversations public through blogs or Twitter or MySpace comments. The platform chosen for each message changes the effect of the words, who can read them, and how long they will hang in the air. (The Web is creating a multiple-exposure version of memory: words remain, reappearing over and over, even if nothing more than cocktail chat. “Nice dress!” echoes in the hall of mirrored servers. An LOL is not an LOL is not an LOL.)

LEEDS: I think that sort of transparency, where we’re all declaring our positions publicly, is here to stay. In music it means that all these little tribes and congregations of fans can mobilize in really powerful ways. And that in turn is contributing so much to the changes you see in the relationship between the artists and the machinery, the industry underneath and around them. It’s a crucial space to watch. I always think of music as Patient Zero in all the disorder that is changing everything in entertainment and media, including, by the way, newspapers. It’s worth paying close attention.

Dept. of Smaller Departments | Sasha Frere-Jones

This site contains an archive of flyers for mostly hardcore punk gigs from the era 1982 to 1984 that took place in Tucson Arizona, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. Historical narrative and observations are included as well as photos, stickers, various handbills, MP3s, and other curiosities from the same era.

arizona hardcore punk rock flyer archive 1982-1984

A building or town will only be alive to the extent that it is governed by the timeless way.

It is a process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves; it cannot be attained, but it will happen of its own accord, if we will only let it in.

There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.

The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person ... It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.

The more living patterns there are in a place, the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire which is the quality without a name.

... Like ocean waves, or blades of grass, its parts are governed by the endless play of repetition and variety created in the presence of the fact that all things pass. This is the quality itself.

... language, and the processes which stem from it, merely release the fundamental order which is native to us. They do not teach us, they only remind us of what we know already and of what we shall discover time and time again, when we give up our ideas and opinions, and do exactly what emerges from ourselves.

The Timeless Way of Building, by Christopher Alexander

Having recently watched the BD release of Blade Runner: The Final Cut [2], and with the observation that this film is among the favorite films of ubernoir [2], flynn23 [2], Jello, Hijexx, Wraith, and Bob the Great (among many others, likely), I note that even Deckard doesn't realize he's a replicant, and Rachael has a hard time believing this about herself even after Deckard explains how her memories have been implanted.

I quote, from a reviewer who disagrees with Scott's Final Cut but summarizes nicely:

Deckard is greeted by a young woman named Rachael (Sean Young), who visibly resents his occupation. At first, Deckard doesn’t understand why Tyrell insists on having him administer the test to Rachael before trying it out on a Replicant, but eventually it dawns on him that Rachael herself is a Nexus 6. In fact, she’s an experimental second-generation model, equipped with a lifetime’s worth of implanted memories borrowed from her creator’s niece. She’s so close to human that even she doesn’t know she’s a robot. The rationale behind the experiment is that reports from the field indicate that ordinary Nexus 6’s frequently do develop considerable emotional capacities even despite their short lifespans, but of a strangely stunted and unhealthy type.

...

Ever since Blade Runner first appeared, observant viewers have been arguing over whether or not Rick Deckard was supposed to have been a Replicant himself. Even the original theatrical version contains plenty of subtle clues to that effect. Like the Replicants he hunts, Deckard keeps a collection of photos which have no apparent connection to his own life. He is as emotionally flattened as any android, and at one point, Rachael asks him bitterly whether he had ever taken the Voigt-Kampf test himself.

If this review is representative, then it seems that even the declarations of the Creator himself cannot satisfactorily end the debate.

The local accent was Yankee cracker, but it was cracker all the same.

Country music made between about 1950 and 1970 is a secret history of rural, working class Americans in the twentieth century -- a secret history in plain sight ... Country music knows that the dark heart of the American Century beat in oil-field roadhouses in Texas and in dim-lit Detroit bars where country boys in exile gathered after another shift at Ford or GM. Bobby Bare might've pleaded in 'Detroit City' that he wanted to go home. But we all knew he wouldn't, that he couldn't. Country profoundly understands what it's like to be trapped in a culture of alienation: by poverty, by a [lousy] job, by lust, by booze ... If you truly want to understand the whole United States of America in the twentieth century, you need to understand country music and the working people who lived their lives by it.

Jazz went abstruse and elitist while country went slick and pop, but both lost track of their roots.

Jonathan Yardley on 'Sing Me Home'

For some reason, when our upstairs neighbors came home tonight, their footsteps sounded different – as if someone had come up a staircase I didn't know about, only to begin speaking inside a room I'd never known was there, located somehow behind the kitchen wall – which got me thinking.

Sounding Rooms

Anthony Lane:

The tactic here is basically pornographic—arouse the viewer with image upon image of what lies just beyond her reach—and the film makes feeble attempts to rein it in.

In short, to anyone facing the quandaries of being a working mother, the movie sends a vicious memo: Don’t be a mother. And don’t work. Is this really where we have ended up—with this superannuated fantasy posing as a slice of modern life?

The Wordcount rank of "superannuated"? 52417. That's three down from "purloined" and ten down from "uhm".

Carrie

WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

WordCount was designed with a minimalist aesthetic, to let the information speak for itself. The interface is clean, basic and intuitive. The goal is for the user to feel embedded in the language, sifting through words like an archaeologist through sand, awaiting the unexpected find.

Observing closely ranked words tells us a great deal about our culture. For instance, “God” is one word from “began”, two words from “start”, and six words from “war”. Another sequence is "america ensure oil opportunity". Conspiracists unite! As ever, the more one explores, the more is revealed. Some of the best sequences people have sent me are here.

WORDCOUNT / Tracking the Way We Use Language /

Luc Sante:

Why it's so hard to let go of books in a language I can't read... or duplicate copies of 'True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality'... or Tijuana sailors' pornography....

The Book Collection That Devoured My Life