Archive for category Pop Culture
Outside Lands
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Out and About, Pop Culture, Sounds on August 15, 2010
Day One
- Missed watching The Pimps of Joytime (even though I wore pants most suited to such an occasion) and only heard the last moments of Gogol Bordello (but those moments were very full of win mind you).
- Lunch was from Farmer Brown’s Little Skillet: fried chicken, waffle, red velvet cupcake. Not very healthy, but that is not what you at that for.
- A mint mojito iced coffee from Philz. I do not usually do coffee any way beyond plain black, but this was a pleasant departure.
- Dessert came in the form of a bittersweet chocolate number from Three Twins Ice Cream.
- The Rebirth Brass Band was quite impressive, including a cover of LeVert’s Casanova that goes well beyond the arrangement limitations of the original. The growth of a kind of regional sub-genre in New Orleans that merges second line jazzy brass with hip-hop and soul inflections is something anyone can enjoy casually, and for more studied ears brings new things with additional listens. Not sure if I like these guys as much as Youngblood Brass, but they are pretty close.
- Big surprise discovery for me was Beats Antique; part burlesque/belly dancing sideshow, part electronica meets middle-eastern expedition (think electric oud, clarient and accordion in the lineup), part percussive dance party, all awesome.
- Dinner was some “Argentinian BBQ” from Primo’s Parilla, and it was mad good. This was followed by more coffee -this time plain black, this time from Sabores del Sur.
- Wolfmother was ok, but oddly reminded me of Billy Squier live a lot, but when they did a cover of Riders on the Storm by The Doors they really came alive.
- Tokyo Police Club surprised me; they are still a tad dull in terms of stage presence but they sound much better live than they do on record.
- Bassnectar; not a lot to see, but you can certainly feel the vibe (mostly from the low end) they bring to an event. I love dirty, skeezy synth bass and monolithic breakbeats, and they provided an ample amount of both.
- Thanks to my buddy Vishal for the ride back into town and for hanging out during part of the Cat Power and The Strokes gigs.
- Outside the venue were scads of very haggard hippy wannabes selling “Ganja Candies” and the like. These people look less likely to “Make Love Not War” and more like “Make Scam, And Run”. Smelly little patchouli punks.
Day Two
- Only stayed a few hours; both K and I were pretty tired from yesterday I suppose, and just didn’t have the gusto for a full second day of OL.
- Al Green was a bit of a disappointment, with the venue just not suited to the kind of soul revue he does best. Singing tunes like Roy Orbison’s Pretty Woman wasn’t what we came for either. When he did sing though, it is safe to say that the Reverend still has chops and knows how to take the stage.
- Chromeo was excellent. Pat Gemayel’s use of the talkbox may put him as the only true sonic heir to Roger Troutman (and I am not saying that casually).
- Phoenix sounded quite good, as did Garage a Trois (the latter of which really comes off as some strain of Zappa meets the MC5 meets Ornette Coleman on major psychoactive drugs) which I kind of ex[pected. The surprises were how engaging The Temper Trap were and Janelle Monae wasn't (she also was annoyingly late). Amusingly, the very diva-esque Monae was later spotted in full regalia roving past us on the back of a dusty golf cart. It was an interesting juxtapositioning of random with WTF.
- Tacos from El Huarache Loco, jambalaya from Anchor & Hope, and more Philz coffee. All good, son.
- Sadly, I left the storage card for my camera back home, and have no images from the second day. Ah well...
DevArt 10th Bash
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Observations, Out and About, Pop Culture, Visual Arts on August 10, 2010
The Missus and I left for Los Angeles late Friday evening and arrived at our hotel room sometime just before 3AM. Sleep came quickly, and morning involved a slow start and meandering pace up through lunch.
Speaking of lunch; to the woman who was our waitress…your perfunctory service suited our needs, but whatever weird eyeliner you had made you look like a heroin-addicted raccoon. Stop that.
Arriving at the House of Blues shortly after opening we were greeted secondly by my old boss, Danie, but first by Llamas. Not Lorenzo…just llamas. Two of them.
To be honest, I was much happier to be greeted by Danie, but the llamas were ok too. Got nothing against llamas, but Danie is a lot more likable, and she doesn’t spit arbitrarily.
While there were several panels, the one that I thought was the most significant was the public debut of Muro. A month ago I was at the DA HQ and got a sneak-peek at it with Angelo and Zack and I was floored. That being said, the polish and final additions they put in that months time were notable, and the final product is -and I am not prone to saying things like this often- something that changes the landscape not just a bit.
Seeing Stanley Lau do a quick demo with it also made me want to pull out my Pepper developmental sketches and complete at least one of them, maybe via Muro.
Most of the Bash was spent just catching up with old friends, and making new ones. I had not seen Danie or Richard or Bryan in ages (at the DevArt Summit at the Palladium in 2005), and I finally got to meet Keir and Stykera (who I now know is a fellow fan of Andy Patridge).
We ate “dinner” (read: bar food) with Spot, Penguino and Silvein, and cruised the floor running into ever more interesting folks (which admitedly is kind of expected and part of the reason you go in the first place). Also, nice to meet y’all (Mel, Rin, and anyone I may be missing).
The entire House of Blues was under DA control, and it was laid out with art and tools to make art (as it should be), with print galleries, Muro-stations (including a few using the Wacom Cintiqs) and an arts & crafts room. Of note, the third floor VIP Lounge is an amazing place with really cool crown moulding and stained glass. This was a great venue to have this kind of party in.
It was an incredibly well planned and executed little soiree. Kudos to everyone involved and my own thanks to everyone who attended. I still feel like DA is a real “social network” of people with a core set of interests (instead of just an aggregation of stuff), and I still feel like it has much more to offer than any of the comparable options available.
Looking forward to the eleventeenth bash.
Of note; spent the taxi ride home talking with the cabby (Armenian apparently) who really hated Turks and felt compelled to tell me about it in lurid detail. There was also something about St. Sargis, Kurds, and the beauty of the Russian language. I was not inebriated, however he may have been.
Also of note -and I wish I took a picture of it- was a huge sign on the freeway with a phone number and the words “I NEED DIRT“. Now realize this was in an agricultural area. There is lots of dirt there. I am wondering if the fellow with the sign just expects some random dude to call him and exclaim “NOW do I have some plenty heapin’ good dirt for ya!” or maybe “Sir, I do believe I may be -as a classy purveyor of fine soil products- be able to provision you with the dirt you seek.” but the sign was very LOL. Seriously, how do you arrive at the point in your life where you need to announce that, with your phone number attached, on a large sign at the shoulder of a major traffic artery.
@Barefoot Coffee Bar this Month
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Out and About, Pop Culture, Visual Arts, linkedin on August 5, 2010
While I have been suffering some logistical snafus all around, I managed to get part of a display up at Barefoot this evening.
I’ll be showing all of August, and I may rotate some pieces out midstream (I will definitely be adding some more in later next week), with most of the work being more recent items, as well as some developmental sketches.
VoTD: Rita Redshoes
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Sounds, Visual Arts on July 31, 2010
A Portuguese artist that sings primarily in English, Rita Redshoes (aka Rita Pereira) has a fun, earthy alt-pop sound.
The video has some quirky choreography that reminds me of stuff Toni Basil may have done in the 80s.
Album review: Vernon Reid – Mistaken Identity
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Sounds on July 30, 2010
I wrote this initially a long time ago for my original music blog, but figured I’d report it here and clean up a few formatting errors (and add a picture).
Vernon Reid
Mistaken Identity
1996 Sony550/Epic
Produced by Prince Paul, Teo Macero & Vernon Reid
Personnel:
Vernon Reid – guitars (both real and imagined), whispering
Masque:
Don Byron – clarinet, bass clarinet
DJ Logic – turntables
Leon Gruenbaum – samchillian tip tip tip cheeepeee, theremin, melodica
Curtis Watts – drums
Hank Schroy – bass, fretless bass
Additional personnel:
Lawrence Fishburne, Sekou Sundiata – spoken word
Graham Haynes – cornet
The Crazy Baldheads – percussion
Beans, Chubb Rock – raps
When I first picked up and listened to Mistaken Identity, I had been anxious for years. The album was Vernon’s debut with his name only on the marquis, and it had been delayed over 2 years. Rumors were few, because no one had any idea what on earth he had planned. By the time it made it to shelves, no one knew what to do with it.
Had this type of album been released in 1969-1970, it would have been placed on the same footing as Bitches Brew or A Tribute To Jack Johnson, by Miles Davis. This album is a colossal explosion of power, a calamity of finesse, and an atomization of primal force suited up in the finest arrangements.
It was also an album released to no promotion, by an artist who had been laying very low for a few years, and in the beginning of the era that we have now in terms of the music industry: if we do not know how to categorize it, we will ignore it.
And no one would have known what the hell this thing is. I love this album, have listened to it from every perspective, and still have my doubts as to what it really is.
Just looking at the line-up, you have a mix of some of NYCs finest underground avant-garde jazz and funk players, some serious heavy hitters in the production chairs, and a cross section of stylists brought together into one mans kaleidoscopic musical tour de force. No style or method was taboo, and nothing was played safe. This album is one of the 10 greatest albums in my collection of thousands, and is one of the top 5 of the 1990s as far as I am concerned.
Vernon came off the then dissolution of his band Living Colour, and took fragments of what he had done within LC (as well as his various session work and his stints in bands like Defunkt and Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society) and produced a form of Attention Deficit inspired sound collage and frenetic collisions of spiralling aural chaos. This is an album for someone that wants to sample all the sections of the music store in one go, but in a way that everything works.
This album works, both in that many tracks work on their own, but that in their wildly divergent characters, they actually produce a rather interesting collective result. It is King Crimson and James Brown and Bad Brains and DJ Shadow and Nirvana and Eric Dolphy and Zappa and Blaxploitation films and Stanley Kubrick musically interpreted paranoia and the kitchen sink and some of the adjacent plumbing as well as the main line back to the city resovoir. There is some underground hip hop, campy spoken word interludes, biting situational skits (including one as a bonus track), strange noises, serrated riffing, angular solos and the only time that clarinet and industrial have been melded in a way that works. This is the ultimate indie album.
The album was never followed up with a successor. Vernon’s sophomore album, while very impressive in its own right, was a much more straight ahead, linear affair. The closest you get to a natural heir to this is his debut under the Yohimbe Bros. moniker (with DJ Logic oddly enough), Front End Lifter.
Inception
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Film, Out and About, Pop Culture on July 18, 2010
10 observations about Inception
1. It isn’t as original and groundbreaking and cerebral as Bladerunner, as jarringly flashy as The Matrix, or as epic as almost any Kurosawa film, but it borrows all the right elements from all of those and gives us what is possibly the most intriguing film of the decade.
2. The casting of this film is the best outsized cast since Soderberg made the Ocean’s franchise work magic. DiCaprio may be the leading man, but it’s the net chemistry of this ensemble that makes the film work so well. Some are obvious; Ken Watanabe commands attention in any scene he is in, and Tom Hardy is a complete scene stealer, and even smaller roles -Pete Postelwaite stands out- are properly defined and portrayed. But Ellen Page is a great foil as a female who is talented and intelligent but not set into the Angelina Jolie uber-babe or the totally helpless naif, and Cillian Murphy as the neutral hue of eveyone’s interest were unexpected yet exactly appropriate. Even Tom Berenger, whose presence was a total surprise, was suited to his part.
3. Moving from #2, Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are bound for great things. Those guys are serious contenders for being new iterations of of Pitt, DiCaprio or Ledger.
4. The literal tone of the film; I rarely see films with subdued color palettes look right. The Book of Eli and Children of Men were rare examples used correctly in a dry, bleak way. Inception does the opposite and makes every scene seem both crystalline in its clarity yet very lush. This is a truly beautiful film without just being insane eye candy.
5. It isn’t complex for it’s own sake and it doesn’t insult the viewers intelligence. That is an amazing feat by itself.
6. It is the first film that makes me want to go back to the theater and see it again right away. That is rare. Part of that has to do with the possibility that I could reinterpret different parts of the film differently even though I’ve seen it already.
7. The film was way too overhyped. That is not to say this isn’t an epic, amazing film, but that what it was portrayed to be was a standard no one could meet (or arguably should meet). A film cannot be so many things to so many people without suffering depth or breadth. Instead we get a compacting of what is generally accepted working for major blockbusters and wrapped in layers of interesting stuff. Some of it is quite inventive and the film should stand by its own defined territory.
8. Michael Caine, even if he only speaks a handful of lines, is a pimp. The man can do no wrong.
9. I like that the use of CGI was kept to a minimum, and when it was used, it was seamless. It felt so natural in the way it helped the viewer suspend disbelief that my normal habit of pondering all the ‘faults’ I was actually fully immersed in the alternate realities director Christopher Nolan constructs and reshapes almost arbitrarily.
10. Inception does not need a sequel, but it deserves follow ups in more films that try to do something other than bombard the senses with expensive retinal amphetamines or dull the senses with rehashing old franchises or making insipid rom-coms or anything with Dane Cook (who frankly should never be allowed in front of a camera or microphone ever again).
Ryuichi Sakamoto – Out of Noise
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Sounds, Visual Arts on July 14, 2010
I have had this on rotation intermittently since it was first released, and it occupies a really nice pivot in the relentless explorations of Sakamoto. It bears earmarks of his cinematic scores in spots, the minimalism of his collaborations with Alva Noto, and even some of the more subdued moments he has recorded with David Sylvian, but it sits well as its own statement.
The opening nine minute Hibari is an almost Steve Reichian bit of taking a seemingly simple motif and repeating it with never ending subtle variations until it takes on a melancholic kind of pulse. A lot of the electronic drones and washes have a certain grit that prevents any new-age flatness. If anything, the lushness is hidden behind a thin veil of the aforementioned austerity. Closing track Composition 0919 is also very Reich-like, but is arguably the only aggressive, staccato cut, and it closes the album.
Depending on how your ears arrive at it, this album could be music for nocturnes, or a soundtrack for elegaic winter mornings. In the Red really made me think of the latter; like it’s something I should have playing while drinking black coffee while looking out a window into a gray morning near the shore of some rainy beach.
Tama is the closest that the album comes to something sounding more sinister and menacing than sad or plaintive. It is held together by a lot of found sounds and minor key swells, and it would be very suitable for a David Lynch film.
For all its austerity, I find myself never getting irritated or bored with Out of Noise; the tone of his piano performances, and the fluidity of his phrasing is some of the best in his long career. The arrangements he chooses are emotive and rich, even when at the most ambient and seemingly ready to dissipate moments. Some of the emotional capital is tucked in loosely under pithy, occasionally scattered snippets of sounds and pads. It is graceful music, sometimes -I find shortsightedly- called “cinematic” (a term seemingly used by most others for tunes that people think belong in an art film but aren’t symphonic/classical enough for their tastes otherwise) when really its probably better to say that under the right environment, it becomes narrative music, making you tell a story to yourself…out of the noise.
A Stone on the Corner
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Out and About, Pop Culture, Sounds on July 8, 2010
Halfway down the first leg of my commute on the Vasona trail last week, I burst my back tire and had to hoof it to the Lightrail station. But before I got there, I sidetracked on a whim to On The Corner Records, where they had stacks of vinyl and cd’s from a purging at college radio station KSCU (Santa Clara University).
As I filleted through the selections, I noticed the person the proprietor was having a conversation with sounded very familiar. So familiar I felt compelled to wedge into the exchange and “ask a stupid question”…was he who I thought he sounded like?
It was, in fact, exactly who I thought it was…Greg Stone.
Yes, Greg Stone, of Stone Trek, was hanging out at On The Corner. Stone Trek was the radio show I listened to uninterrupted the longest; from about the age of 12 to my early 20s, I gorged once a week on a buffet of prog and jazz-fusion, which included my first exposure to bands like Giraffe, Marillion, King Crimson, Gamelon and Allan Holdsworth. Greg seemed to know everyone in those scenes and could get them to visit and/or play unreleased or bootleg material regularly. Somewhere I still have a live version of Giraffe’s This Warm Night on a TDK cassette that I consider a personal favorite, recorded off his radio show, as well as bootleg GTR, and other esoterica.
We ended up talking for the better part of an hour about his salad days at KOME, the more recent run at KFOX (abruptly brought to a close for reasons that make no sense, since he was #1 in his time slot for rock stations in the area) and about random bands like Pete Bardens, Genesis, and Kevin Gilbert.
It was one of those really strange moments when someone you listened to religiously on the radio -no face to the voice for all those years- all of a sudden materializes in a rather startling way. In a cool way actually, but nonetheless totally randomly.
New illustration: Mekanixa – Miss Boux v5
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Visual Arts on July 6, 2010
Steampunkish robotic fun.
I still do not think I am done with this, but I want to work on the other variant I have on the desk (as well as a few other working pieces, including one for a friend’s home)
This is a radically reworked bit of biomechanical madness, with the reference model being Andrea Boux.
I would not have even gone down this route initially, as I planned to do a more traditional portraiture, but when I noticed the electrical socket on the wall of the ref image, my head kind of wandered in this direction.
pencil, acrylic ink, gouache, granulation medium & some digital post processing.
Giant Robot needs You
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Visual Arts on July 5, 2010
I don’t buy very issue, but I have been a spot reader of Giant Robot (along with Hi-Fructose and Juxtapose) for many years. The print business is a tough one, and GR is in need of some love.
VoTD: Afghan Whigs – Debonair
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Sounds on June 27, 2010
Just because Ty Wenzel reminded me recently of how good Dulli & Co were one of the highlights of the 1990s. This was their first appearance on Conan. For more, hit up Last.fm
Vinyl Remix: Leonard Froen
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Visual Arts on June 20, 2010
I’ve been tooling around with a lot of abstracts, but took a weekend break to finish something that had been lying around for at least 5-6 months (basically about once every other week I’d work on it for about 10 minutes before bed…getting nowhere slowly. Then I just kind of sped things up the past few days.
I have this habit of doodling afro-clad people in my notebooks, memos, margins of napkins (even on the tablecloths at certain restaurants, like this) and in this case, I kind of merged that habit to the head of revered songwriter and rather peculiar-voiced Leonard Cohen.
The 1967 album this was sourced from has been effectively obliterated under acrylic ink, acrylic paint, alcohol-based Posca pens, gouache, Pentel brush nib pens, graphite, acetate, torquing in PS CS3…and an afro. The finished iteration is at DA, and here are a bunch of the variations that led up to it.
subZERO Festival
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Observations, Out and About, Pop Culture, Sounds, Visual Arts on June 5, 2010
Yesterday was the 3rd annual SubZERO Festival. It was also Drawing Day 2010. I scribbled with a brush-tip pen in a small sketchbook while commuting up in the morning, and on the way to downtown SJ.
Ate at Eulipia and reminisced about the remains of what once was 10 feet above me (the Ajax Lounge). Eulipia still has a passable, but largely staid menu at this point. What it does have is location and aesthetics, as I ate street/patio-side and watched some of the live music, a fashion show and various species of pop culture casualties stroll on by.
I ran into Avery of Corpus Callosum (he was hauling a rather large bass drum, pictured below) and he told me that besides their stage gig they were also doing music for a puppet show. Bear in mind, I’ve seen ‘puppet shows’ done by CC and its associates, and they are quite impressive in style and substance, but any puppet show involving a 12 foot puppet robot operated by three people with teeth made of knives is worth seeking out.
Stopped in the Anno Domini Gallery, which is now my favorite spot down in SOFA these days; they had some great stuff overall (I had never heard of Dimitri Drjuchin before, but I am happy I know of his work now), but of particular interest was a show of Bob Dylan inspired material done by the uber-alpha illustrator Barron Storey.
It was the closest to the days of the old SOFA Street Fair that I had seen in that area since the days of the first SOFA Street Fairs (read: before it turned into a pay-at-the-gate for a lite, sanitized version of what it started as).
I wish I had taken more photos, but the camera battery went kaputski.
Futbol Fever
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Observations, Out and About, Pop Culture, Visual Arts on June 1, 2010
VoTD: Yeasayer – O.N.E. (live)
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Sounds, Visual Arts on May 22, 2010
So they are a little on the posturing hipster side in terms of just about everything else, but their tunes pull all the elements of 80s new wave and synth-funk that I enjoy. I first heard this track as part of some mix on KSCU, but this live version works really well (and shows that they can actually perform what they record).
This is likely appealing to the same people who drool over MGMT (hence the pretentiousness factor that the Pitchfork crowd requires)* but I find this generally more listenable than anything I’ve heard from MGMT so far.
* Is it just me, or are Pitchfork bands (and their fanbases) the new Prog-Rock scenester hell?
FOSS funnies, XKCD style
Posted by zeruch in Law, Pop Culture, Technology, Visual Arts on May 21, 2010
About the only thing wrong with this is that the year dates may as well both be 2003 or 2010 (or any of the several years before 2003, between 2003 and 2010, and probably for a few years to come after 2010).
Watercooler talk 2010-05-17
Posted by zeruch in Observations, Pop Culture on May 18, 2010
Around the group office space today was discussion about animal life in Australia falling into (roughly) three categories:
1. animals that are hungry and seek to kill you for food
2. animals that just hate you because you exist and kill you
3. koalas
We also reached consensus that Koala bears are the Fast Times At Ridgemont High Spicoli character of the marsupial world. Basically they are stoned up in trees and too bonked out to actually attack and kill anything except eucalyptus leaves. And now, a stoned Koala:
VoTD: Karin Park – Don’t Stop Now
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Sounds, Visual Arts on May 15, 2010
Karin Park is someone I discovered recently via a remix of Ashes by Grey Ghost & Mezzir. Her general sound is pretty stark and catchy, with a clean proto new wave sheen.
Herbie Scores Miles Biopic!
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Sounds, Visual Arts on May 4, 2010
Herbie Hancock is going to be scoring the Miles Davis biopic starring and directed by Don Cheadle. I am a rather large fan of both musicians (with my favorite Davis lineup being the famous ’second quintet’ in the late 60s with Hancock, Ron Carter, Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams). And now, two works named for Herbie and Miles tunes; Mwandishi and what is possibly one of the greatest album titles ever, You’re Under Arrest You Have The Right To Make One Phone Call, or Remain Silent So You Better Shut Up.
Truth be told, I think Cheadle is quite underrated; between Hotel Rwanda, Traitor and his spots in the various Oceans films, he’s a consummate performer, and well suited to playing Miles.
Forget Ozzy… (or Tony Stark)
Posted by zeruch in Out and About, Pop Culture on May 4, 2010
…THIS is Ironman.
Spinning Around Fo(u)r Decades
Posted by zeruch in Pop Culture on May 2, 2010
Resource Shelf was the first place a I read about this, but I’ve spent part of the last few weeks going through mostly the early years of Spin magazine, of which its entire archive is freely accessible.
Spin was an erratic mag, which vacillated between good writing and a good mix of material, to pedestrian puff pieces with then scenester darlings and a lot of fixation on catering to people with severe verbal ADHD. But it was still a good part of my then insatiable diet of music related reading (my formative period started around 1985 through the end of the 90s, but which point I became essentially open to almost anything).
Vinyl Remix: Grace Jones
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Sounds, Visual Arts on April 30, 2010
I haven’t put one of these out in a while. The vinyl remix series lives on, this time with one I started working on in 2004-5, based off of the sleeve to the 12″ release of Slave to the Rhythm from the incomparable Grace Jones.
I sincerely love her late period music (her first few albums were pretty much pedestrian disco), which combined a keen pop sense with a weird mix of dub, jazz and avant-garde bits thrown in. While Grace gained celebrity for her completely larger than life appearance and brash behavior, her music really has become sublime with age. She collaborated with everyone from Brian Eno and Sly & Robbie to Tricky, Wally Badarou and Wendy & Lisa.
I quite like her voice in both its modes: stentorian talk-singing, and torchy chanteuse.
This has rice paper, acrylic ink, acrylic paint, halftone, alcohol-based markers, pentel brush pens, and God knows what else, processed via Photoshop and Inkscape.
Another reason why Pitchfork is played out
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Observations, Pop Culture, Visual Arts on April 26, 2010
see more hipster robot webcomics and pixel t-shirts
…when DS can make these kind of punchlines with it.
Work in Progress: Imani Coppola
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Visual Arts on April 25, 2010
So I did the pencils for this in 2007 (using Cretacolor graphite ) referenced from an interior image on Imani Coppola’s debut record, Chupacabra, which sported the top 10 US hit Legend of a Cowgirl back in the late 90s. She recently popped back up with collaborations on Mike Patton’s Peeping Tom project and her own new band, Little Jackie.
Visually, she is a striking figure, musically she is just as odd since she wraps really accessible pop structures with very eclectic bits of ‘other stuff’ thrown in. What can I say, I dig a gal who can sing well, play violin nicely, be influenced by Faith No More *and* Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam, and sport the most gravity-defying hairstyles imaginable.
I started adding paint and junk last month in small 5-10 minute bits, which has started giving this thing an interestingly disjointed look.
VoTD: Devo studio
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Sounds, Visual Arts on April 24, 2010
Devo probably conjures up very specific memories for people of a certain age. Much of their artistry was in their ability to chokeslam popular consumer culture with tongue rigidly planted in cheek.
The video is also pretty good for people who are pure outboard gear heads.
Mingus
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Visual Arts on April 22, 2010
On this day, in 1922, Charlie Mingus was born. A firebrand both personally and musically, he inspired everyone from Dizzy Gillespie and Henry Rollins, to Joni Mitchell, Q-Tip and Derek Sherinian.
The above was done in pencil, acrylic ink, acrylic paint, gouache, pigma microns, triplus pens + digital. An alternative version is here, and a different Mingus image I did is here.
8 Bit Pixel Attack!
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Technology, Visual Arts on April 19, 2010
PIXELS by Patrick Jean from ONE MORE PRODUCTION on Vimeo.
For anyone who spent too much time at a Golfland, or the arcade portion of your local pizzeria, this should bring back memories.
Listening Skills
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Sounds on April 14, 2010
Over at Noiseaddicts they have a little audiotest to see if you can “hear like an audio engineer“.
…a series of approximately 1khz sine waves, in sets of two. In each test I’d like you to try to discern which tone is sharper than the original tone. Pitch is measured in tones, and cents. A semi-tone is considered one pitch. Thus, A# is a semi-tone higher than A. A cent is a percent of a tone. So 50 Cents up from A would be half way between A and A#.
I can apparently, but given my proclivities at record shops and music clubs, this should not be terribly surprising.
QoTD: Henry Rollins
Posted by zeruch in Observations, Pop Culture on April 12, 2010
…you know, when you buy the flannel shirt that already had the fleece cut off so you look like Kurt Cobain—we can buy that at Macy’s. And you know, it’s just, anything in culture becomes some marketing thing. You know, they’re going to sell you a version of it soon. That’s capitalism; that’s consumerism. I’ve got no problem with it. But it’s funny when you are that thing. When something you’ve been part of becomes swept up. Like my friend Ian MacKaye. He came up with that thing, “straightedge” a long time ago. It’s now in Webster’s. Straightedge: Young people who don’t do drugs. Like “Wow Ian, that’s interesting!” When you can walk into any tattoo shop and see the Black Flag logo as part of their kind of in-house [art], “We put this on one guy a week” kind of thing. That’s interesting, but that’s what we do. Everything eventually gets absorbed. A lot of kids all over the world wear T-shirts of Che Guevara. They don’t know where Che Guevara comes from. They’ll tell you he’s Cuban and that he was really cool. He was a murderer an[d] died in Bolivia. And kids walking around in Tokyo wearing a CBGB’s shirt. They don’t know what that stands for, what it was. Or who Hilly Kristal was. That’s kinda how it is.
Henry Rollins reflects.
I find a certain irony in the fact that I am typing this while watching Beautiful Losers, and seeing the pre-controversy Sheperd Fairey, and seeing his peers and the sorts of parallels to the above is striking.