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Le Tigre

Oh yeah, I saw Stereo Total and Le Tigre last week too... God, what a fun show! Stereo Total does a kind of wacky, offbeat, Euro-kitsch stage show that's just hilarious.

And I'm so glad I finally caught Le Tigre. It was refreshing to get back in touch with that counterculture, activist energy (And Kathleen Hanna is just divine). Denmark is great because its culture is so socialist and progressive, but it misses that frenetic underground counterculture that you find in more fucked up places. I guess its harder to be some kind of badass screaming anarchist here because there's not as much to react against. But damn it was good to jump around to some loud, fun, positive punk music again!

Here's an interview with Kathleen Hanna and Johanna Fateman on NPR, from way back in 2000.

Ghost in the Shell 2

I just saw Ghost in the Shell 2 on DVD last night. I really wish it had come to the big screen theaters here, because the visuals were just mindblowing.

Just like the first Ghost in the Shell, this film pushed out the limits of what is possible with the current state of the art of animation technology. Character design was interesting if fairly conventional, but the sets and landscapes were detailed to an exquisite level of layered complexity that I've never seen before.

I'll probably have to watch it twice (poor me), because there was no English dubbing available, and I'm sure I missed some details in the complex, philosophically deep plot by trying to divide attention between the subtitles and the visuals. I highly recommend this one.

Neubauten

I'm listening for the first time to the live recording from the Einstürzende Neubauten show last week and it's bringing back some really strong memories.

Frantic, melancholic, apocalyptic at times, the music has what I can only describe as a religious quality--it takes you someplace else, someplace strange and dark, and wonderful, with a feeling that seems to flow more from the desperation of the 80s than today--that feeling of trying to cling to a faint thread of hope for the future despite all evidence. And the feeling of being here now and nowhere else.

My favorite line from the show, Was ist ist. Was nicht ist, ist möglich. (What is is. What is not, is possible.)

Despite the heavy percussion, E-N are never mechanistic. There is such a strong sense of humanity, of "survival despite" running through the music. I keep going back to what Blixa told Mondo 2000 in an interview about 15 years ago... He said all Einstürzende Neubauten songs are love songs.

Yeah.

Podcasting

"Podcasting" is a hip word that sounds scary to non-tech geeks, but it's just a codeword for a pretty simple, pretty cool concept. A podcast is just an audio or video program that you can subscribe to. Once you subscribe, the programs are downloaded automatically to your computer, and from there to your iPod (or whatever portable you use to take your music on the road).

When you're stuck on a long morning or afternoon commute, it can be refreshing to listen to a comedy show, or the latest narrowcast on a specific flavor of news, politics, science, TV or movie reviews, or whatever you're into. It's much better than radio because you choose the exact content you want. The cool thing about it is that it's almost zero effort. Subscribe to a feed topic you like and it just keeps coming.

How do you do it? Ignore all the talk about RSS 2.0 or XML. All you have to do is download the free application iPodderX if you're on a Mac or iPodder 2.0 if you're on a Windows box.

Once you install the app, there is a directory inside the program (at least there is on the Mac version, not sure about Windows) with a bunch of pre-loaded podcasts. You can pick any of these podcasts or go to even bigger directories at iPodder.org, Podcast.net or Podcast Alley, and copy and paste the addresses of the podcasts you want into iPodder. Or just do a Google search on "podcast" and you'll find tons of stuff.

So how good is all this material? Not very good, usually. The production values are very low and the podcasts are often targeted at an extremely narrow audience. But that's also what's great about it. Anybody can make one of these things because the technology is virtually free. That way the topics can be laser-targeted at tiny audiences that mainstream radio wouldn't touch. This is what the whole Internet felt like in 1994--very low production values, but a wide open space for alternative voices. And the potential is obvious. BBC is already podcasting some of their radio programs, and other high-quality content providers are certain to follow.

This isn't going to make you trash your television or stop listening to music, but it is a cool new way to get information and ideas.

Neubauten

Just got back from the Einstürzende Neubauten show in Copenhagen. Whoa, just gorgeous, beautiful sounds... they're so amazing.

Must sleep now but more soon.

Evening

Thomas steps outside into the cold wetness and looks upwards. The sky has changed from the indistinct white it had been all day to a dark and deepening grey. No clouds or detail, just a color, or a non-color, a sense of the familiar world being closed in by and dissolved into a diffuse, featureless void. He shivers and pulls his jacket closer, beginning to walk down H. Adzymoshka, aware of the muted sound of his heels on the concrete, as if the haze was softly soaking away even the sound of his footsteps. He hears a deep but distant sustained rumble, to his left, in the direction of Prospekt Kirova. Maybe the sound of diesels from a convoy of ORMO BTRs heading out of the city towards the Ukrainian frontier. But nothing moved on the street before him.

It was late February easing into March, but there had been no increase in sun, just this cold, bleak mist, thicker every evening. He thinks of the derivation of that word, ‘evening,’ and finds it appropriate for this strange place. Evening, meaning to make even, to lose with the failing light the ability to discern the character and separateness of different things.

Would it ever be spring again? Or had the sun begun a slow and permanent decay? Will he have to begin to try to trap and conserve an ever-shrinking supply of energy, heat, even light?

And what right does he have to long for a new spring? He’s had his spring, and spent it. But how long in this even darkness, he wonders, will he be able to continue to pretend that the things he can no longer see have any meaning at all?

Gulag

Real nice. I had a vivid dream last night that I'd been sent to a Gulag forced labor camp (probably because I'd read just before going to bed that the Belomorkanal had been built by Stalin in the 30s using Gulag labor).

Yeah that really put me in the mood to go to fucking work when the alarm rang!

So I biked to the metro stop and found out that the Metro workers were on strike. Great. I got to work late and had a pretty crummy day. When I finally left, the train system was completely foxed because a train caught fire in one of the downtown stations. Now I'm finally home and have ten minutes to get ready for conference calls with the US, lasting till 9pm.

Some days are better than others.

Belomorkanal

A friend of mine brought me a packet of Belomorkanal cigarettes over the weekend. I love the charming old-school, though perhaps politically incorrect, design of the package (notice on the map that the Baltic states are still colored "red").

These cigs are cheap, filterless, and very strong. I'm told they're popular in the Russian navy because you can run out topside and choke one down in about a minute for a huge nicotine hit... also because there's a piece of cardboard on one end that you can twist around your finger, making it easier to hang on to the cig if the ship is pitching in heavy sea.

A bit much for me (I've been trying to quit smoking again and was thrown for a loop by the harsh taste), but a good experience to chalk up under "research."

The Life Aquatic

I just saw The Life Aquatic, the latest Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) movie--we get everything a few months late here. Anderson forges deeper into the territory he began exploring with Rushmore, but I think Rushmore is a more coherent and elegant script. Bill Murray is playing basically the same character as in Rushmore (and Lost in Translation)... the sad sack former star whose fame has run out. Because we've seen it before I think it starts to wear a little thin in this movie.

There are some really good moments in Life Aquatic though, and the secondary characters are fantastic. I'm glad the other characters get enough screen time- from the intense German first mate who only wants to be liked, to the deck hand who throughout the movie plays David Bowie tracks on acoustic guitar and sings the words in Portuguese. Like another review I read somewhere, it's weird, but good weird.

My next assignment?

Man, what a dream I just woke up with... I dreamt I was on contract with the CIA, working with Kurdish leaders to prepare for the ceremony in which they'd finally be given an independent Kurdistan in eastern Turkey and northern Iraq.

So I'd been tasked as a PR consultant, apparently, and I was trying to hook up the news and publicity machine for the event. Then an assistant handed me a copy of the speech the Kurdish leader was going to read, and it was like 25 pages long, with tons of poetic references to Kurdish history and past heroes I'd never heard of.

I got on the phone and was like "Guys, guys, you're killing me! CNN is never going to show this in prime time! You've gotta cut this down to like five minutes and make sure there are some ten second soundbites they can use!"

So I guess this means my job is leaking into my subconscious now.