http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3QR3AC2WXWHIT/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm/

dude writes several paragraph long exigesis on the wonder and excitement of his new amazon-purchased bic ballpoint pen.

my roomates and i got a letter in the mail today from our renters saying we have till the end of december to move out of our apartment. we're not getting evicted or anything. our lease just happens to be running out then. the thing is we thought we had two months to move out, but turns out we didn't look close enough.cause instead of a presumed 12 month lease, it was only 11 months.

so now i have to scramble to find a new place in a little over a month. and for some reason all the resentment, frustration, and indignation i've had towards seattle has all come crashing down. basically - seattle sucks. it's completely unaffordable for anyone interested in doing anything non-professional (music in my case). sure you can live in the middle of nowhere or live in a closet (as i literally might do) to keep rent low, but that's the kinda shit you'd expect to have to do in fucking new york. and let's face it,  to live like that in seattle is simply not worth it. there's not enough keeping this city interesting to do that. which is my other big problem. keep in mind that the lack of affordability and dynamism are by no mean mutually exclusive.

basically, this city is completely beholden to two people named bill and paul. i couldn't believe it as i was about to go to bed fuming over this whole fiasco that i found this perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with this city on the stranger's blog. essentially, vulcan the real estate company owned by paul allen promised the city to invest 5 million dollars in affordable housing on the south lake union area they're about to develop the fuck out of. predictably, vulcan pulled out of the deal and the mayor's office relented. i can't think of a better illustration of how fucked up this city is. you have an entire swath of land completely  at the mercy of a single financier who can change his mind on a whim and a city that is either powerless to stop him or totally in cahoots with his bland, corporatist, suburb-in-a city vision of what seattle should be. in turn, you have the consequence of a cultureless, yuppie, condo wasteland that wraps its tentacles around every nook and cranny that used to make this city interesting.

is it a coincidence that all the new condos are built with corrogated steel? its like a northwest version of the rust belt. on the surface it looks clean and cozy but its just as decaying and decrepit as an abandoned factory in flint fucking michigan. and i don't know why i'm wasting my time scouring craigslist for the last crevice of affordability this city has left.

fuck it, i should just move to portland. at least its got a few years before the seattle virus spreads to its neck of the woods.

i've been absolutely obsessed with animal collective over the past few days, probably more than i have ever been. and i think it basically started after listening to a few new songs the group recorded live for the bbc. then after ingesting those songs repeatedly i proceeded to find the best quality bootleg i could from their latest tour. altogether, i'm completely floored. i've always been a fan of their stuff, but hearing them live is a revelation (i wish i could say i 'heard' them in seattle but unfortunately the sound was more or less inaudible). 

all of these new dimensions open up to me when listening to them live. i think especially apparent is a sinister playfulness i don't really get from their records. sure, the band is often defined as playful, but live you feel as though they're deliberately taunting their audience, making them uncomfortable. hearing them live it makes sense to me why so little of their current tour included recognizable songs. i first attributed that desire to keeping the ball rolling so to speak. but i also think it's a way of antagonizing the audience, something i think is largely absent from indie music these days if not pop music in general.

hearing them live made me realize why such a plethora of bootlegs exist of their shows. bands like that always used to irritate me, the whole phish/grateful dead paradigm kind of makes me sick. and it's funny that animal collective's fanbase has been compared to both bands. but in this case, i think their reputation as a live band deserves this recognition. cause unlike the utter banality of jam bands (whose brilliance and uniqueness i'd wager is more attributable to controlled substances than anything else), animal collective actually reveal something completely different live than what they do on record. they're one of the few bands i could think of who could put out a live album for legitimate reasons rather than a mere payday or lazy handout to their fans.

i never really understood devendra banhart much, or i should say all the fanfare surrounding him. his stuff just didn't strike me as that compelling or original. hippie folkie with wobbly voice sings about elves and pseudo-pedophilia, is that really so pathbreaking?

i suppose after finally listening to the first two t. rex records this week, my wariness of banhart has transformed into outright indignance. i mean, sure artists steal from other artists knowingly or unknowingly. but seriously, the similiarites between bolan and banhart are uncanny. and it's not only the voice, but the overall musical style as well. maybe it's not banhart's fault for sounding so imitative, but in all the years since he became so popular (at least in an indie way), i have yet to hear/read anything calling him out on it. and its  not as if his music was so innovative to begin with! so i don't really know who to blame, banhart or his boosters. let's just say both and call it a day.

I finally saw Control yesterday after much long-awaited anticipation, not to mention barrage of hype from my friends and media alike. It's always hard for me to see films later than anyone else especially in the context of getting such rave reviews. Whether I like it or not it just sets my expectations too high, or I simply can't help but see the film through the lens of everyone else who's already seen it. Then again, every now and then a film exceeds my already high expectations. Let's just say Control didn't really do that. Again, the context which I saw it must have had something to do with it. But regardless, it was still a beautiful film when all is said and done, not to mention crushingly depressing.

One thing the film led me to was an old post by this blogger dude named kpunk on joy division. It was a pretty interesting read. And then there was this passage which totally floored me cause it perfectly articulated what I had thought about for a long time - that is - the mythos surrounding not only Joy Division but the whole UK postpunk scene (and if I can generalize even further, art altogether). Summing up his post, kpunk says:

We should resist the temptation to be Lorelei-lured by either the Aesthete-Romantics (in other words, us, as we were) or the lumpen empiricists. The Aesthetes want the world promised by the sleeves and the sound, a pristine black and white realm unsullied by the grubby compromises and embarrassments of the everyday. The empiricists insist on just the opposite: on rooting the songs back in the quotidian at its least elevated and, most importantly, at its least serious. 'Ian was a laugh, the band were young lads who liked to get pissed, it was all a bit of fun that got out of hand…'

It's important to hold onto both of these Joy Divisions – the Joy Division of Pure Art, and the Joy Division who were 'just a laff' – at once. For if the truth of Joy Division is that they were Lads, then Joy Division must also be the truth of Laddism.

This really captures what has always puzzled me about the uk postpunk scene - that is -  how mythologized and quotidian it was at the same time. Unlike the first wave of punk bands like the ramones, sex pistols, etc. whose stylization seemed to roughly match the scope of their mythos, bands like joy division and the fall were so much more unremarkable, but simultaneously as, if not more, romanticized.

What most struck me about the film Control was how banal the members of Joy Division (including Curtis) came off. It's as if being in the band was  tantamount to having a few pints at the local pub, just another commonplace everday phenomenon. Nothin too remarkable. Of course this may make sense for a band without Joy Division's stature and progressiveness. But how could the members of the band square how innovative their sound was in such a casual, off-handed way? Reading kpunk's post reassured me that I was not alone in my confusion. But going further, he suggests that rather than being contradictory it was in fact an essential driving force; holding these two contradictory polarities at once. After all, what was Manchester in the late 70's if not utterly bland? At least that's what the mythos would like us to believe. But maybe that's what kpunk means - we have to simultaneously hold onto the romanticization of the bland and the blandness of the romanticization.

i think from now on instead of year end best album lists, we should have best minute lists. and i think the best minute of the year is on the song shell of light by burial. and now that he got best new music'd on pfork, maybe other people will hear that minute too. funny that this is the only artist i can think of who got that distinction that i actually agreed with. 

i just realized that black dice is what i listen to when i don't feel like listening to music. and i mean that in the best way possible. 

I got the new burial record today (legally! i might add). and let's just say, it wrapped me up after the first 30 seconds. but to be honest, it was starting to wear on me towards the end. i just attributed it to the intricacy and nuance of his music having yet to play itself out. after all, the first record took me a good while to get into, and to be honest, if it weren't for a handful of esteemed music scribes praising it to high heaven, i probably woulda never gave it a second look.  anyways, i'm just listening to it again except now instead of playing it through my crappy earbud headphones, i'm playing it through my relatively crappy speakers. and good god! the difference it makes is incredible, as if the record didn't already sound great before. it makes perfect sense though. music as expansive and intricate as burial needs to be played on a speaker system, ideally a much better one than mine. maybe i should invest in a subwoofer...

especially when it's rad, witty, and creative like this

I've been thinking about the whole filesharing thing a lot lately and one aspect I've come to realize is this weird value paradox. By that I don't just mean value in a monetary sense but literally how we've come to value and appreciate music when it becomes pure information. Before the advent of mp3s there was just music as a physical, tradeable commodity whether that be a cd,vinyl, etc. But with the creation of mp3s, music literally became pure information and reduced to binary code. Obviously without this transformation sites like oink and soulseek could've never existed. Eliminating the factor of time and space in terms of distribution and accumulation, filesharing sites were able to build up an unending amount of music/data and users were able to gorge themselves on an endless accumulation of it. The only physical constraints left were storage capacity, a pretty miniscule obstacle in comparison to storing actual physical objects in a space.

That fact has clearly had a massive effect on ideas of use value/exchange value. One of the things that really peeves me about filesharing naysayers is their implicit valorization of private property as an ineffable law. There's no preternatural reason why any objects should be bought or sold. That especially goes for 'intellectual property.' That term more than anything points to the constructedness of property in general. By abstracting itself from spatial concepts (i.e. landed property) into something as indefinable and mercurial as creative production, how could the whole idea of private property be anything but an ideological construct? What frustrates me about the indie community that shuns filesharing is how much this is lost on them. That's not to say taking Marxism 101 is required entry into indiedom. Clearly that's ridiculous. But what bothers me about all this is how symptomatic it is of the total lack of salience 'indie' as a term has these days. When people focus more of their attention on kids downloading illegally (god forbid!) and griping about its economic fallout; something is very very wrong.

And getting back to what I was saying earlier, the real problem with all that is how its basically trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Clearly, the logic of filesharing has torn the old notion of value to shreds. But the real paradox for me is this: to what end? Has mp3s made music more valuable or less? Wouldn't one expect, with the advent of filesharing, that the elimination of music as a commodity would make mp3s more valuable? Or at least in the Marxist sense, if we eliminate exchange value don't we get outside the grip of the commodity fetish into some realm of 'real value?' If anything though, mp3s have made music less valuable, not more. Being able to freely and endlessly gorge ourselves on music has muted our reception to it instead of making it more immediate. I suppose the troubling part about all this to me is the realization that we might need the commodity fetish after all to create value to begin with, whether that be for music or anything else. Without any constraints, whether that be fiscal or spatial, we value music less not more. But if that's the case, what are the consequences?