Bill Murray versus RZA
From the incredible mind of Jim Jarmusch comes Coffee & Cigarettes, a movie about life’s two essential nutrients. Among all the great names associated with the film, I am esspecially looking forward to the scenes with Bill Murray and the Wu Tang’s RZA. That’s a screen pairing that’s way overdue.
It Was a Robins Egg
The sun is trying to warm this place and I try in vain to encourage it with ill-fated sun dances and late night prayers. The wind is strong and defies my attempts to bring spring out from its long hibernation. A fine wood bird feeder was bought to liven up the aviary that has begun celebrating with abandon in the back yard. It’s a Wild Kingdom competition between the ground squirrels and my flock of northern cardinals, house finches, and chickadees. The squirrels are winning out on the feeder right now. Their intimidation tactics and basic playground bulling have secured their position nicely. The cats are in heaven. They watch intensely the battle being fought, hoping for a chance to get in on the action and prove their superiority. I’m certain that both the squirrels and the birds thank me for holding the kittens at bay. Quite often, while staring out the window, the cats get worked up into a mad ecstasy; delirium takes over there little brains and they run around the house chasing nothing but air and imaginary ghosts. It’s fun to watch them tear their claws into dreamed up opponents with outbursts surfaced from lunacy. Good times.
I’ve become slowly addicted to the seasonal treat known as the ‘Robins Egg’. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s basically a malted milk ball that’s been dressed up for a spring fashion show. Speckles are the new black! Delicious in any color. A beautiful treat to have sitting in a nice bowl when dignitaries and guests arrive at your home. Martha is going away for awhile so it’s important that we all chip in and keep her spirit alive in our hearts and in our kitchens. The Robins Egg is my contribution.
A Sudden Rush of Boohbah to the Head
There are secret messages everywhere. I spent years on the farm trying to emulate Neil Pert beats on all the Rush albums. I even went so far as to read up on my Ayn Rand to properly understand the heavy messages the band was trying to get across. Little did I know that these blazing rock pioneers were just trying to decipher the codices of Samuel Morse. Fantastically, Rush’s rock opus ‘XYZ’ is an exact rhythm attack of the Morse Code letters XYZ. Damn! All this time we were playing records backwards trying to find the devil, while the real messages went unnoticed. This just opens the door to further musical speculation!
Are there any current bands carrying the torch for musical message mysteries? Certainly, the new Squarepusher record looks like a contender. The album ‘Ultavisitor’ strikes me as being loaded with hidden math-rock telegrams. It could take years to get to the bottom of this one. The album should have come with a decoder ring. I made the mistake of listening to the record while reading Chuck Palahniuk’s new short story Guts. I wouldn’t recommend this combination of media to anyone.
As a youth, I just wasn’t equipped with the proper education to handle these mysteries. The biggest brain-twister of my early childhood education came from the guy on the Electric Company who had toilet paper for ears and eyes. That one left me scratching my pre-cynical dome for quite a while. Todays kids are getting what they need. I believe this only after catching a glimpse of the PBS show Boohbah. Have you seen this thing; micro pod-creatures that run around in an ambient rainbow colored world who make farting noises and dance hypnotically to chilled out techno beats? That shit is crazy. But good. I look forward to a world run by the children who grow up on this stuff. They would have decoded that Rush song in a nano-second. Perhaps these kids will only speak in code when they get older. A whole new language based on farting noises. Should be interesting.
Barroom Hero
Lustron: House of the Future
There was a great documentary on PBS a few weeks ago called Lustron: The House America’s Been Waiting For. The Lustron home was supposed to be the ideal home of the future in the wake of a post-WWII housing shortage. The bright idea of engineer Carl Strandlund, the homes were to be all metal with a baked-on porcelain finish. The idea was to build a prefabricated maintenance free home that could be cleaned by simply hosing the thing down with a gardening hose. Demand for the homes skyrocketed, but a series of bad loans and poor management led the company to go bankrupt before they could blanket the world in baked porcelain. Only a few thousand homes were built. They are spread out all over America. It just so happens that in my neighborhood, on the 5000 block of Nicollet Avenue, there stand seven of these relics all lined up in a nice row. Only a few of them (like the one pictured above) maintain their original old school metal tile facade. Others have tried to hide and compromise their Lustron with stucco and bad limestone brick work. Mike Dust has a nice photo collection of all the Lustron homes on Nicollet. He’s also got a good collection of Lustron links.
Demozilla
Rewind Selector
Totally kick-ass dub style flash animation (via The Morning News) that lets you try your hand at being Lee “Scratch” Perry and Kruder & Dorfmiester. I could listen to this action in the background all day.
Also: more poster’s than you can shake a designer at – more bloggers with downloadable mp3’s than you can shake a lawsuit at. And because it’s Friday…Jay-Z being remixed with Kenny G and Janet and Justin Super Bowl Halftime dolls.
MOA versus American Pride
An interesting article on Atlantic Online called The Mall of America by Ian Frazier finds the author visiting Minnesota’s top tourism attraction and reflecting on it’s relevance to American culture. I especially enjoyed this bit of irony:
Not a single item in the USA America Pride store was made in America. I knew that already, just from common sense, but I began looking at the labels anyway. Blue baseball cap with the letters “FDNY” in white outlined in black on the front: Honduras. Black T- shirt with “Born in the U.S.A.” in red-white-and-blue letters: Honduras. Black baseball cap with “American Pride” in red-white- and-blue spangles: Bangladesh. T-shirt with comical image involving bin Laden and a camel: Dominican Republic. Coffee mug with picture of Twin Towers: China. And so on.
The Twin Towers mug really gets me. The commodification and misappropriation of disaster is more foul than a Todd Bertuzzi cheap shot. Why are American’s so monument/memorial obsessed? It’s fascinating following some of the debates around what is an appropriate memorial for the September 11th attack now being planned for Ground Zero. Many contend that whatever is built must be the monument of the millennium. The pyramids at Giza should be dwarfed and humbled by America’s architectural response to terrorism. Might we learn something from the Japanese who’s humble monument for the victims of the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima is little more than a photograph affixed to a marble tombstone.
The Melvins 20th Anniversary Show
Wow, March 20th is really heating up to be the day of days this month. See the post below for more of what’s going on during the day. But at night?!? Whoa at night The Melvins are playing their second of two shows in Minneapolis at Grumpy’s Bar. They play at Grumpy’s Coon Rapids on the 19th and Grumpy’s Minneapolis on the 20th. The Melvins are on a micro tour celebrating 20 years of rocking the spot. They will also bring with them a new book/CD called “Neither Here nor There” that goes on sale today at Ipecac Records. The book is chock full of stories and pictures from the last 20 years and features the top of the crop in graphic artists, many of whom have had shows at the OX-OP gallery. They include Obey Giant, Dalek, Camille Rose Garcia, Tim Biskup and more. Opening both shows will be Minnesota’s own wonder rockers The Dames. There is already a tantalizing Aesthetic Apparatus poster for the show.
March 20th Global Day of Protest
Today, Geoff Johnson, from United For Peace wanted me to put up this flyer for the March 20th Global Day for Peace and Justice and drop some science in the name of solidarity.
What is the Global Day for Peace and Justice? Well…
Anti-war groups throughout the United States and around the globe will take to the streets on Saturday March 20, the one-year anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, under the banner “The World Still Says No to War.” Over 150 protests are planned in cities across the United States, from Alaska to Florida, Hawaii to Maine, calling for an end to the occupation of Iraq. Similar demonstrations will take place on every continent in the world, making March 20 a global day of coordinated action in the spirit of last year’s historic February 15 protests.
For those local folks here in the Twin Cities. There is local organizing information for what’s going to be happening in Saint Paul. For more information get in touch with Minnesota Neighbors for Peace. For those of you in Canada, please check out stopwar.ca or Canadian Peace Alliance. Even more information and flyers are available at International Answer.