April 28, 2010
Optimo flyers via RA (linked below)
Optimogeddon: a seven-hour Fin-de-Siècle blowout mix for your next seven-hour Fin-de-Siècle blowout. (I’ve only listened to Part 1 of 5 so far…)
On April 25th, the greatest club night in either Glasgow, the UK or the world (depending on who you ask) finishes. Optimo (Espacio), the brainchild of JD Twitch and JG Wilkes, arrived quietly at Glasgow’s Sub Club in 1997, and set about blowing the cobwebs off a stale, self-congratulatory Glasgow techno scene through a simple core philosophy: If it sounds good and makes people dance, play it.
Now, after 12-and-a-half years of sublime, genre-straddling, how-did-they-do-that acts of weekly musical witchcraft, combined with a zero-tolerance approach to “DJ culture”… it will all be over.
–The Nights That Dreams Are Made Of: An Optimo Oral History, Resident Advisor
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GQ’s “Rock the Suit 2010” editorial anticipates forthcoming (/recently released) albums from a handful of indie superstars: MGMT (above), The National (below), The Walkmen, (surprisingly?) The Drums [previously], and David Byrne with collaborators St. Vincent and Santigold [previously] decked out in this season’s (The notes about the designers read like Patrick Bateman’s internal narrative in Ellis’s American Psycho.)
The National performed and discussed their fifth LP High Violet at WNYC’s Greene Space on Monday (I made it out there for the live session, but honestly, the webcast is just as good as being there). In a potentially lucrative promotional move, the new album was streaming in full alongside a recent NYT profile of the band (only “Bloodbuzz, Ohio” is available now).
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Chuck Klosterman asserts that Beck’s “Loser” is the defining song of the 90′s because it illustrates how MTV was instrumental to the mainstreamification of alternative culture in the pre-Internet era. (Incidentally, Vice, which recently declared that it wants to be the new MTV, was founded that very same year.) (Spin)
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[I'm a little late on this one, but] blogosphere darlings Pomplamoose put the Indie Pop Fun back in Viral YouTube Sensation… or something to that effect. (NPR)
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New Holy Ghost! track; they’re opening for labelmates LCD Soundsystem for the four upcoming New York dates during the latter band’s current world tour.
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Flying Lotus’s forthcoming Cosmogramma streaming on his MySpace.
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Mister Cee’s Guru tribute mix for Hot97. (RapRadar)
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Oh My Gaga.
April 27, 2010
The video for M.I.A.’s “Born Free”—an ultraviolent, parabolic, hyperbolic crusade—stormed the buzzosphere over the weekend, hot on the heels of my most recent mu$ic post.
The song is a thrilling, aggressive, hardcore electric anthem and heavily samples “Ghost Rider” by Suicide (ca. 1977, buy MP3 here). As my friend Clayton wonders aloud, perhaps the lyrics “America America is killing its youth” in the Suicide song influenced the visuals in the M.I.A. video.
–Boing Boing
Incendiary political statement or crass PR stunt? Either way, we’re a long way from the fun/intelligence dichotomy: the overly gritty dystopian realism strikes me as a slightly-too-desperate bid for artistic credibility, if not authenticity in itself. At best, the short film is visceral to the extent that it is powerful yet reductive; at worst, it blurs the line between senseless and pointless.
UPDATE: Animal on the reference points; Diplo on the production.
April 16, 2010
Parisian turntablists Birdy Nam Nam are obviously the missing link:
Plus: Re-enter Sandman – Smooth Jazz or Dance Pop, take your pick.
April 12, 2010
Earl Woods did not live to see his son’s scandalous downfall, but he may be instrumental in restoring the good name of the shamed Nike pitchman… though I prefer the Christian Bale remix (below):
Most commentators see the commercial as distasteful or exploitative—Colbert notes that Nike is selling Woods instead of vice versa—though ad execs are rather enamored with the 30-second spot, insofar as it offers a curiously intimate moment with the athlete.
Visible Measures charts the spinoffs; via Mashable
I can’t say that I’m particularly keen on golf, but I do love pop culture, celebrity, and Nike—not to mention the role of marketing in all of the above—and I’m curious if this is the epilogue to the whole sordid affair. As per the title of the post, did William Blake portend the meteoric rise of golf’s biggest star?
Cheap Shot (Reprise) after the jump— Read the rest of this entry »
April 5, 2010
*Updated on 4/7.
So I happened to be in Midtown on Saturday morning (long story short: I was trying to get to MoMA early enough to see Marina Abramović) and I decided to swing by the cube.
While I didn’t have a chance to see the iPad in person, I’ll probably swing by an Apple store some time this week to check it out. I don’t plan on getting one at this point but I’m intrigued by the device, which may or may not revolutionize computing and media consumption as we know it. If the iPad has been criticized for being some kind of hedonistic Swiss Army Knife for entertainment at the cost of productivity (citation needed?), I should think that it is rightfully billed as more of a grown-up supertoy than anything else—it is neither overgrown iPhone nor underpowered laptop; the iPad is something else entirely.
Furthermore, insofar as the iPad represents Apple’s foray into the space(s) currently occupied by netbooks, e-books, textbooks, regular books, magazines, newspapers, television, digital picture frames, portable gaming devices, board games, and (lest we forget) tablets, I think it has the potential to redefine media in new and possibly unexpected ways. The fact that it is an easy point of entry for a mass audience to own a piece of the Apple brand (/marketing machine) almost certainly belies its true significance, whatever that may be.
Of course, I suppose that anyone who is curious about said significance has already been inundated with news, reviews, photos, videos, etc.—the iPad has been broken, jailbroken, jailbait, photoshopped and photo-opped—from the likes of Engadget, Gizmodo, TUAW, et al. Love it or hate it, we’re far past the point of making jokes about its name.
For superbly-curated and less overwhelming opinions and aggregation, I recommend John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. Similarly, I still think that Dan Hill’s essay on the iPad is the best analysis of the its true significance (I buried a link to it in another post, but here it is again).
There are tons of demo (and demolition) videos already out there, but I happen to like this overview of magazine app art direction:
April 3, 2010
Industrial designer Andrew Kim has come up with a concept for an eco-friendly (or greenwashed, if you’re cynical) Coca-Cola bottle. (DB)
See also: Harc Lee’s green(er) monochrome Coke can.
Meanwhile, Karl Lagerfeld has come up with a concept for a fashion-friendly Coca-Cola bottle:
colette via HB
Finally, as an HTML/CSS designer, this “Pure CSS Coke Can” never ceases to amaze me:
March 23, 2010
“You can’t make art with business in mind.”
Photographer Danny Clinch directed this ‘documercial,’ featuring Brooklyn’s beloved HOVA, for the “World’s Most Iconic Vodka.” To be perfectly honest, I didn’t find it that interesting—in fact, it struck me as annoyingly overbranded in the beginning and the end—though I’m a sucker for the unabashed glorification of New York City.
Related: A full explanation of the line “If Jeezy’s payin’ Lebron, I’m payin’ Dwayne Wade.”
March 22, 2010
Last year, Klaus Biesenbach extended MoMA’s permanent collection of performance art beyond video & photo documentation to the performance itself, a move that foreshadowed the current Marina Abramovic retrospective. (It’s quite good, at least for someone who has had nominal exposure to her work. Highly recommended.)
Today, in what they are regarding as a similar move, MoMA expands its definition of design—or perhaps its role as an arbiter of design—by celebrating the ‘acquisition’ of the @ (at) sign, imbuing the symbol with a new layer of meaning as it becomes “art object befitting MoMA’s collection.” In other words, if the ‘@’ sign “does not declare itself a work of design,” then it is befitting, if not altogether necessary for the institution to do so, knowingly asserting itself as a conceptual creator à la Duchamp.
I don’t know how I feel about the smug implication that MoMA is doing us a favor by sharing this design gem with the world—the ‘@’ sign isn’t quite the same as, say, a UNESCO World Heritage Site—but it’s nice of them to share its history and significance (without mentioning Twitter).
March 19, 2010
or, What Hipster Means to Me
Hipster. Reject the label or embrace it, Sisyphus does not envy you though your path is clear: you like art (check), music (check), design (√), fashion (√), film (√), food (√) and biking around Brooklyn to jam with hipster friends or go to (i.e. be seen at) art happenings and step out for smokes (√√√√√). And you blog about it (√). There is no possibility that you have freely chosen to do these things: the hipster is a sheep, a cartoon, a robot, a target market—anything but a living, breathing human being. The hipster is Sartre’s waiter.*
[It would be too easy to populate this post with photos from LATFH, Vice, Cobrasnake, Last Night's Party, Lookbook.nu, etc. etc., so we're going with photos from Beijing's Ren Hang, via Neocha Edge. Are Chinese hipsters more or less authentic than their Western idols? Is Chinese anything more or less authentic than Western versions of the same? Meta-migraine...]
The New York Times recently ran a blurb on the (decline of the) hipster with a handful of decent and not-too-hateful comments. The piece cites Salon’s recent article on Hipsters+Food Stamps—which itself has elicited the usual anti-Trustafarian screeds and counterarguments in defense of food(ies), etc.—as the latest development in the ongoing culture war between “Young, Creative Urbanites” and regular people. Meanwhile, Adbusters is over it, which is probably for the best.
In any case, it’s worthy enough of an occasion to reflect on What Hipster Means to Me. (Ok so that’s probably an inappropriate, if pithy, exordium for what is intended to be a thoughtful, unironic and somewhat ambitious essay, but it was just too good to pass up.)
In other words, I’m not in denial about my hipster proclivities, so long as I might be granted the possibility of unironically self-identifying as a hipster. Similarly, Idolize Your Killers is (to borrow WordPress’s felicitous phrasing) “Just another hipster blog”—lest we forget that meta-commentary is the trademark of postmodernity and, by extension, hipsterdom and digital culture alike.
Yet “hipster” has been a pejorative term for nearly a decade now—a pigeonhole, a pariah, or worse: a Platonic “idea of Hipster.” This archetype finds infinite variations of empirical manifestations, though it is never fully realized; instead, an individual is reduced to his urban outfit, fixed-gear bike or love of Animal Collective, etc.
A brief overview on the case against hipsters: as the indie nation evolved alongside American Apparel*, so too did pent-up indignation at their smug, unleashed most memorably in Adbusters’ seminal July 2008 cover story “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization.” Time Out is known to dabble in hipster-bashing; Paste did its part last year; Gawker and Gothamist hit the hipster hot button when they want to pander for pageviews. (I’m sure I’ve omitted many a rant; those are just the media that come to mind.) Conversely, the proto-hip tastemakers at Vice have somewhat validated the hipster with VBS’s ongoing alt-journalism efforts, which are now featured on the likes of CNN and Huffington Post.
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