Tuesday, March 21, 2006

 

The Future Sound of Jukeboxes



Physical State: bendy
Mental State: foggy
Music: Ladytron - Witching Hour - ("International Dateline" my favourite new single)
Fashion sense: grey t-shirt, jeans

Word of the day

kvetch

n. A chronic, whining complainer.
A nagging complaint: “a rambling kvetch against the system” (Leonard Ross).

***

Ironically I have nothing to complain about today unless you can count the college strike that has been on for two weeks already. One thing I have to applaud is the great website last.fm. This site is incredible because it's kind of a six degrees of myspace meets pandora. It tracks the stuff you listen to in itunes over the week and shows you your most played artists on your personal page. It also gives you links to people (or neighbours) who have similar tastes. One of the best features for me though is the last.fm player and it's similar artist radio station where you type in an artist and it finds you similar artists and streams complete songs (ALL DAY if you want it to!). So if you put in Ladytron say it would find other artists that sound like Ladytron (but often it goes pretty wide to include things like singers who sound like Helen Marnie, maybe some Raymond Scott, Astrud Gilberto, the Logan's Run soundtrack...etc.). It's like having a cool jukebox with amazing stuff on it. It also turns you on to artists that you may never have heard of. Here is the wikipedia description:

Last.fm is an Internet radio station and recommendation system that merged with sister site Audioscrobbler in August 2005. The system builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste, showing their favourite artists and songs on a customizable profile webpage, comprising the songs played on its stations selected via a collaborative filter, or optionally, recorded by an Audioscrobbler plugin installed into its users' music playing application.

Check it out!

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

 

Innocence



Physical State: achey
Mental State: boomerangy
Music: Efterklang - Tripper - YES STILL
Fashion sense: black t-shirt, jeans

Word of the day

sloth

n. Aversion to work or exertion; laziness; indolence.

Any of various slow-moving, arboreal, edentate mammals of the family Bradypodidae of South and Central America, having long hooklike claws by which they hang upside down from tree branches and feeding on leaves, buds, and fruits, especially: A member of the genus Bradypus, having three long-clawed toes on each forefoot. Also called ai1, three-toed sloth. A member of the genus Choloepus, having two toes on each forefoot. Also called two-toed sloth, unau. A company of bears.

***

Yeah so Innocence. Whew how can I describe this flick? It is a gothic tale based on a story by German playwright Frank Wedekind and it's a bit of an allegory about the transition from being a girl to being a woman (something I don't have a lot of experience with). The story takes place at this bizarre boarding school for girls that seems a bit Orwellian at first glance. Girls are brought into the school in a coffin, they take the ribbon of the girl above them in age and the oldest one takes off nightly for some kind of training until they're shipped off. The girls are taught how to dance and about biology and are not allowed outside the walls of the school. If you're truly exceptional you get chosen by the Headmaster and where you go is not made clear. Most of the girls go through this development process and then move on to somewhere else (which is never described until later). If a girl questions what is going on they are punished. One surmises that the teachers and some of the other servant women must have done some terrible things to have remained behind to be guardians for the young girls. It is all very confusing and allegorical (much like a lot of Wedekind's work). The film is beautifully shot and styled as well and I thought that at times it was like watching a Lynch film, exquisite and colourful and totally confusing. The dvd of course has no subtitled interviews with the director Lucile Hadzihalilovic so it remains very much a mystery to me. Maybe it's not supposed to mean anything and you are to make up your own decisions about what it says.

Monday, March 13, 2006

 

The perpetually non-updated blog



Physical State:lurchy
Mental State:tepid
Music: Efterklang - Tripper
Fashion sense: grey t-shirt, jeans

Word of the day

circumlocution

1. The use of unnecessarily wordy and indirect language.
2. Evasion in speech or writing.
3. A roundabout expression.

***

Yeah so where you been, man? The common question these days that seems to be on some friend's lips. Well my college is now on strike so for the past 4 days (and today) I have been living a bit of a quiet life. I hope that the school gets this strike resolved soon because I am B-O-R-E-D.

I've been listening to this album above by Efterklang from Copenhagen, Denmark. I think I could best describe them as a cross between Múm, Kim Hiorthoy, Bell Orchestre and maybe FourTet or something like that. The stuff is very moody and glitchy (lots of sped up drum programming and glitches mixed with sad cellos). Totally cinematic. I like it.

School has been pretty tough, lots of work to do on a regular basis and I should be practicing my announcing more often. I am often concerned about how I am going to make money these days as my income has pretty much disappeared since starting this course. The only experience I have to get part-time jobs is retail. I am considering things like IKEA for a part time job and maybe a bookstore too. I really would love to get a night job working as a board op for a radio station pushing the commercials and just generally seeing how a station runs, it would also help me out come Sept. for the internship I have to do. I am considering doing my two month internship outside of Toronto. I figure if I'm going to only be away for two months maybe it would be good to choose somewhere different. But then again if I interned in Toronto then maybe that would turn into a job right after. Hard to say.

Last week I had the great privilege to interview one of my all-time heroes Brent Bambury who's show Brave New Waves I pretty much grew up on. I am doing a powerpoint presentation on the show and also interviewed Patti Schmidt in Montreal which was equally as much fun. I hope I can do the show justice with my presentation (and I hope we are back at school by the time I need to present it).

I am off to watch this dvd I was supposed to return yesterday, a french film called Innocence (which I missed by a day when I was in London). I will tender my review soon.

Oh and if you wanted to hook up with me via myspace.com (which all the cool kids are doing these days) go over to myspace.com/radiosteven

Later!

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