February 25, 2010
» Mr. Oizo – Nazis (Justice Remix) (3:50) – 7.3MB mp3 @ 262kbps
Munk One
The recent Upper Playground × Inglourious Basterds poster collaboration inspired me to finally watch Quentin Tarantino’s latest masterpiece (six months late is forever sooner than never).
All images via Arrested Motion (full-size images available, since my web-optimized crops don’t do the artwork justice).
L: David Choe; R: Estevan Oriol
Like most of my postmodern peers, I’m predisposed to like anything that Quentin Tarantino has a hand in (I actually genuinely like Jackie Brown) and it was largely a foregone conclusion that I would enjoy his fifth feature-length film. Even so, I would say that Basterds is somewhat unique, not just as Tarantino’s take on a war flick—homage-y, genre-agnostic and immanently quotable—but even within his oeuvre: the film relies heavily on the absolute moral compass dictated by historical hindsight, operating within a framework of unambiguous good guys and bad guys. This isn’t the clusterfuck of Reservoir Dogs or, say, Vietnam: the eponymous team of Americans is fighting goddamn Nazis, a.k.a. evil in its purest form.
NB: Spoilers ahead.
L: Alex Pardee; R: Rene Almanza
With history on his side, Tarantino can afford to instill the Basterds with a measured, weirdly heroic, sadism: the American boys sent to terrorize enemy forces in Nazi-occupied France can do no wrong. Scalping, clubbing, scarring, it’s all good—it’s nothing compared to the horrors of the Holocaust.
Nevertheless, Basterds is relatively tame for the auteur who made his name by transcending senseless violence by depicting it for what it is: nasty, brutish and short. Seasoned film viewers have certainly seen worse.
But Tarantino is (and arguably never was) going for shock value, and graphic violence is but one of his calling cards: he’s at his best when he’s spins tension out of talk, typically between arch-enemies (knowing or otherwise), over milk, strudel, whiskey or fashionable pumps (T has always had a bit of a foot fetish). Tarantino further demonstrates his mastery of dialogue with the clever but unforced play on language: if English is the lingua franca, America is the punchline—cheap shots, perhaps, but all in good fun.
L: Sam Flores; R: Grotesk
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January 17, 2010
» Autechre – Bike (7:58) – 9.2MB mp3 @ 160kbps
Mark Jenkins via Arrested Motion
The mild weather in New York this weekend has been highly conducive to activities known as “getting out of the house,” especially with regard to my favored mode of transportation, biking. Since I returned to the NYC three weeks ago, I’ve taken to doing laps around Prospect Park for brief cardiovascular excursions, while my single-speed has taken me to various destinations around the boroughs—most recently to dim sum in Bay Ridge.
In retrospect, I regret not biking at all when I was in China. While the feasibility, practicality and efficiency of biking in Beijing were debatable—rentals were clunkers and I didn’t want to buy a bike for a two month stay—I grossly underestimated the ecstasy of cycling. At the most visceral level, I find it liberating: not only from the limits of bipedal locomotion, but also from traffic laws, which also become very fast and loose—to spite every other form of transportation—at cyclists’ own risk.
Apparently, free association also becomes very fast and loose at bloggers’ own risk:
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January 6, 2010
–Pavement’s 2010 comeback continues, this time in greatest-hits form. The “fully remastered 23-track compilation”, entitled Quarantine the Past, “digs deeper than the hits” and is slated for a March 9th release. Matador has challenging fans to guess the final tracklisting in order to win a handful of Pavement-related prizes. (Matador)
–Arrested Motion is on top of its game as usual, with recent coverage of Blu, Os Gemeos, and Ryan McGinley (all of whom are worthy of fuller discussion in future posts), plus a nice December recap. Good stuff.
–Raphael Zarka = Richard Serra × DQM. Awesome. (DB)
–The Knife has posted a new mp3 (download link) from their forthcoming operatic (literally) recording Tomorrow, in a Year. More details here. (The Knife / Soundcloud / YANP)
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December 22, 2009
–Helvetica (the font, not the documentary) makes a strong showing in The Auteurs’ top movie posters of the decade. [I know 40 Year-Old Virgin lacks Helvetica, but, to quote Paul Rudd's character in the film: "This probably shouldn't be in here... This is just a good show."] Anyway, it’s good stuff. I may add a few of my own if they come to mind. (The Auteurs via Design Boom).
–The ABCs of Branding by Jason Dean. (Reminds me of the client list I did for the Joneses…) (DB)
–New York-based Chinese artist Alex Caifeng Guo does pixelated photomontages. (Obama vs. Abraham Lincoln above.) However, I’m not particularly impressed, since tiling the same image (varying the lightness to create gradients) seems a bit rudimentary—I’ll take Chuck Close any day. (PSFK / Alex Caifeng Guo)
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