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Russian Circles in DIG BMX

DIG 072My recent feature on Russian Circles for DIG BMX Magazine has hit the stands. It’s in issue #72, if you’re interested. Also be on the lookout for their new record, Geneva (Suicide Squeaze), which hits the stores and sites on October 20th.

The full text from DIG is as follows:

The subgenre of instrumental post-rock has grown into its own over the last several years, and many of the bands emerging to represent the subgenre sound remarkably similar. The inherent irony of classification is that even as the category grows (i.e., the more bands there are that sound enough alike to lump together), the harder it gets to stand out (i.e., to be considered a part of the group, but to distinguish your work from the rest of that group). As My friend Max Bristol might say, Explosions in the Sky is a band — not a genre.

“I suppose it means there are quite a few more reference points,” says Brian Cook, who’s also done time in Botch and These Arms Are Snakes, “both for us as artists and for our audience. It means that we’re somewhat self-aware of what we do, and for the audience it may be tempting to weigh the merits of what we do against other bands and artists instead of judging it on its own terms.” Russian Circles stand out from the crowding in with sheer brut force. They are a power trio with the emphasis on power. Where other groups’ slow builds often leave one dissatisfied with the release, these guys drop it like it’s too heavy. They can simmer with the slowest of boilers and riff it up with the most metalest. It’s a difference difficult to describe but easy to hear, leaving many writers — myself included — sounding stupid.

At the time of this writing, Mike Sullivan (guitar), Brian Cook (bass), and Dave Turncrantz (drums) were just finishing up in the studio with Brandon Curtis (of Secret Machines) behind the boards, working on a follow-up to last year’s massive and majestic Station (Suicide Squeeze). “We were less concerned with perfect takes and more concerned with perfect tones,” Cook says of their studio time. “We switched up a lot of ideas as we were recording and we were less concerned with making sure we could replicate the material live as we were with making a compelling album. both Enter (Flameshovel, 2006) and Station were pretty faithful to how we play live, so we felt we could get away with doing an album where we elaborate on the material a bit more.” Apparently, the new album will incorporate strings and brass, as well as a howling dog — none of which they’re planning to take on tour.

“The new album is a bit longer than we had planned,” Cook continues, “but all the material made sense together. We don’t want to overstay our welcome, so we feel that six or seven songs is about the extent of material people can put up with in one sitting.” Of course, six or seven songs, an EP for most bands, for Russian Circles is an epic, album-length amount of time. Knowingly, Cook adds, “We’ll take our chances that our ADD-afflicted culture can put up with our self-indulgence.”

Upon seeing me ride my bike one day, jumping curbs and such, a friend of mine commented that while I was out learning to ride BMX, he must’ve been in his room learning to play his guitar. The same might be said of Cook. “Once upon a time,” he says, “my friend was packing me on the handlebars of his BMX. He went off a really big curb and my foot slid in between the spokes of the wheel. I was barefoot. I broke eight of the spokes with my foot and flew headfirst into the asphalt. Remarkably, I didn’t break anything, but that was the last time I’ve been on a BMX.”

So, no more bikes for Russian Circles, but they are planning to thin out the instrumental post-rock competition. “On a side note,” Cook concludes, “I am starting a ballot initiative that would require people to apply for a license before they can buy a delay pedal. That should help stymie the popularity of this brand of music.”

Russian Circles in DIG BMX

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They Deleted My Wikipedia Page

Wikipedia…And the one for Follow for Now. They (the deleting moderator-editor-wikiwhatevers) claim it was “just” self-promotion and that my book and I were not “notable.” Obviously, I beg to differ, but I can’t fix it myself.

If anyone else, especially the Wiki-inclined, wants to help me get back onto Wikipedia, the URLs are below. Thank you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Christopher

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follow_for_Now_(book)

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Chuck Close Exhibit at Austin Museum of Art

Chuck Close’s “A Couple of Ways of Doing Something,” now showing at the Austin Museum of Art, is a new look at some old photographic techniques. Close’s use of an early form of the photograph, called a daguerrotype, forms the basis of the exhibit.

Chuck Close: A Couple of Ways of Doing Something

Unlike artists who show us alternate realities that don’t actually exist, Chuck Close shows us what we’ve been missing in the world right in front of our faces. “I have always been fascinated by how one way of doing something can kick open a door to another way,” Close has remarked. “For me, the original image serves as a matrix, from which I can explore issues of scale, information, and perception.”

Chuck Close: Laurie Anderson

“A Couple of Ways of Doing Something” features Close’s use of digital pigment prints, tapestries, and photogravures alongside poems by Bob Holman. The exhibit’s subjects include Holman, Cindy Sherman, Philip Glass, Terry Winters, Laurie Anderson (pictured above), and Close himself, among many other New York creative luminaries.

The exhibit runs through November 8th.

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Moon: Duncan Jones’ Great Gig in the Sky

MoonForty years, almost to the day, after Apollo 11 landed on the moon, Duncan Jones’ directorial debut Moon (2009) was released. It is no secret that I am a big fan of both the moon and Sam Rockwell, so I went to see this (twice) as soon as I had the chance. There are probably spoilers in what follows, so read on with that in mind.

Ever since re-watching Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) recently, I’ve been wondering why Sam Rockwell isn’t way more famous. Maybe Moon will fix that. His performance is — as always — flawless, and although Jones wrote the role of Sam Bell specifically for Rockwell, it presented a challenging task regardless.

…and I am not frightened of dying, any time will do, I
Don’t mind. Why should I be frightened of dying?
There’s no reason for it, you’ve gotta go sometime.
I never said I was frightened of dying. — Pink Floyd

Sam Rockwell

“I have always been a fan of science fiction films,” Jones says. “In my mind, the golden age of SF cinema was the ‘70s, early ‘80s, when films like Silent Running, Alien, Blade Runner, and Outland told human stories in future environments. I’ve always wanted to make a film that felt like it could fit into that canon.” Moon definitely fits into that canon.

Moon tells the story of astronaut Sam Bell, who is on a three-year solitary contract harvesting Helium 3 from the far side of the moon. We catch him two weeks before the end of his stay and just before the daily routine of his mission starts to devolve into madness and second guessing. The clues mount slowly, but finally crest and cave in.

One of the most powerful aspects of the film is its ability to make you feel a slight sense of unease. In this way it reminds me of Shane Carruth’s Primer (2004). Just the subtle but unavoidable feeling that something here is not quite right. Referencing several sci-fi classics, Jones creatively borrows elements from the golden age and appropriates them. Pieces from films past include a resurrection of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in the moon base’s in-house computer GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey), a nod to the hallucinations of Steven Soderburgh’s Solaris (2002), and a similar use of the memory implants from Blade Runner (1982). While Moon borrows elements from older films, it mixes them in new ways. Duncan Jones addressed his references online, writing, “As much as anyone I know, I revere sci-fi from the past. If anyone feels I have overstepped the mark in the homages I pay, I’m sorry. But I would say this: I have talked to two of the three directors that made the films I mentioned above, and both of them loved Moon, and are thrilled that someone of my generation would care enough about what they made so many years ago to want to pay them the compliment of making a film like Moon.”

Here am I floating round my tin can
Far above the moon
Planet earth is blue
And there’s nothing I can do. — David Bowie

Moon Rover

The aesthetics of Moon are timeless, situating the story anywhere in the near future and the movie itself anywhere in the recent past. It also manages to avert cliché in several other ways. GERTY, for whom we wait to go amok and turn on Sam, stays true and helps him till the very end — even when it means erasing his own memory.

Like Solaris, Moon is more concerned with inner space than outer space (and Clint Mansell’s score recalls Cliff Martinez’s best work). It was written and directed in the style of the “golden age,” and in many ways, it’s the polar opposite of modern-day action sci-fi like I Am Legend (2007) or District 9 (2009). As Jones put it, “…there were quite a few personal things I wanted to put into this film. My feelings about how people change over time, questions that I felt we all have about our sense of worth, feelings that you go through during long distance relationships. Personal and human things. Things that, like the Moon itself, we could all relate to.”

Indeed.

———-

Here’s the trailer to Duncan Jones’ Moon [runtime: 2:07]:

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Slayer: Show No Mercy

There is no other metal band that compares to Slayer. No other band has been together as long, destroyed as much stuff, ripped as hard, nor kept their collective foot so heavy on the pedal. Slayer has never let up. Ever.

I finally got to see them wreck shit live on stage at the Mayhem Festival on August 14th in San Antonio, Texas. Thanks to Matt and Nate Bailie, whom I’ve known since the ninth grade, I can now die happy. The set list included “Psychopathy Red” from their forthcoming World Painted Blood record, but also featured highlights from their nearly three decades of chaos, including “War Ensemble,” “Dead Skin Mask,” “Mandatory Suicide,” “Born of Fire,” “Ghosts of War,” “South of Heaven,” “Angel of Death,” “Raining Blood” and “Hell Awaits.”

Here are some of the photos that Jessy and I took from the seething floor of the arena.

SLAYER

Tom

Devil Sign

If you had to sum it up… That probably does it.

Flaming Slayer eagle

Hell Awaits

Thanks again to Matt and Nate for getting us there and getting us in.

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The Clutter of Pop

Dave Allen: The Clutter of PopIn the mid-1990s my friend Dave Allen published a zine called “The Clutter of Pop” (followed by a record of the same name). In one of them he wrote an essay about the glut of entertainment media choking our attention spans. I’ve long since lost the zine and I can barely remember Dave’s insights, but I do keep thinking about it in light of the ever increasing glut since its publication.

It is often said that  we only use ten percent of our brains. While that’s not exactly true, we often do only use about ten percent of its capacity at any given time. Another way to look at it is as a giant sieve. When we’re awake and alert, our brains are filtering out a vast majority of the stimuli around us. Don’t check my math, but think of it as only ten percent of the world getting in. Contrast that idea to idea that when we’re asleep and dreaming, the filters are only partially on or completely off. This makes using less of your brain — or stimulating less of it — not only an advantage, but a necessity to your sanity.

As amazing as the human brain is, it still has plenty of limitations. Some of its limitations are what have created the aforementioned glut. We externalize our knowledge and the processing thereof to free up our internal bandwidth. Hieroglyphs, language, books, keyboards, archives, databases, cassette tapes, websites, and iPods are all products of our mental offloading. We’ve emptied our heads so much that now it’s difficult to find a signal among the noise. The digital shift from bits to atoms only exacerbates the issue, problematizing the filtering process in altogether new ways.

For instance, with the impending demise of the printed page the debate regarding digital books is in full swing, following closely after that of the compact disc. Though the nature of reading the printed word and listening to music lend themselves to digitization in very different ways, there is a major overlooked similarity in the transition: The organizing principles of both are being irrevocably reconfigured.

What is a book but an organizing principle? What is an organizing principle but a filtering device? The book works for printed language just as the album does for recorded music: it filters and organizes it in a meaningful way for mental consumption. As David Weinberger pointed out, analog media like books and albums filter first, whereas digital media like websites and MP3s filter last. That is, by the time you read a book it’s been through a thorough rigorous organizing, writing, editing, proofreading, and design process. When you run a search on Google or Wikipedia, what you end up reading is filtered and organized on the fly as you request it (Wikipedia actually has an ongoing organizing process, and Facebook and Twitter are filtering digital information in still new and different ways).

None of this filtering and reorganizing means that the book as we know it is going to go away anytime soon. What all of this means is that some things that were never meant to be books will now have a place to be themselves. Let’s face it, just as some records only have one good song, some books would be better off as blogs.

Inherent ViceTime is the one truly finite resource. If we are to optimize it, we need better filters and better organizing principles. Instead of slogging through a whole book on a topic that would’ve just as well made a decent magazine piece, we’ll read it as it develops on the author’s blog. When we want to get lost in some convoluted alternate reality, we can still read a thousand-page Thomas Pynchon novel on good ol’ paper (his newest is out today and is roughly half that long).

These changes change the way we think. They literally change our minds. With more and more choices for our filtering pleasure, I believe it’s mostly for the better.

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A New Level

Level MagazineThe old Level Magazine was one of those titles that put the Life in “lifestyle” magazine — and it’s back online starting today! Editor/publisher/leader Chris Noble invited me to contribute, so I’ll be posting bits over there on a regular.

Here’s the history of the magazine direct from Chris:

In 1999, the magazine Level was born. Brothers Mark and Chris Noble, publishers of a BMX magazine and a core MTB magazine, got bored of going into their local newsagent and seeing nothing on the lifestyle shelves for them or their like. The US had produced Grand Royal, a happy-go-lucky hobby, more or less, of The Beastie Boys, and Mark and Chris felt that there was a gap in the UK market for something along those lines.

How hard could it be?

After several months of masterminding, almost-disastrous back-and-forth wrangling with the bureaucracy of WH Smith (the main wholesaler/retailers in the UK), designing and redesigning and getting editor Chris Quigley on board, Level quietly appeared on magazine shelves across the UK and beyond.

With the contributions of various luminaries—some of whom grace these web pages—and a remit of “All Things Good”, Level went down well. Unhindered by strict genres or target niches, it really did fill a gap. The talk was underground but very complimentary. Issue 01 picked up the UK’s inaugural Magazine Design Awards’ “Best Designed Consumer Magazine” prize.

From then on, the only way was, well, neither up nor down. The high-budget, low-moral advertising vultures of the London-based competition had a stranglehold on the ad spends of the rich and famous brands. Despite an increase in promotional spend and advertising sales strategy, Level, without a desire to sell its soul, found its pages to be a hard sell. Only the most discerning of brands supported the magazine, and it just wasn’t enough. The brakes came on in November 2000, after only eleven issues.

But it’s always been there. Gnawing away in the back of our minds, especially that of publisher/designer Chris Noble. The brothers parted ways with the publishing company at the end of 2006, but Chris saw to it that he took Level with him.

Since then, Chris has had more time to think about bringing the magazine back in one way or another, and during the first half of 2009, he dove head-first into the world of web code which he had so far largely managed to avoid.

And the rest is browser history.

level screenshot

Many thanks to Chris Noble. I am damn proud to be a part of the new era of Level.

Check it out.

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Blanks for the Memories

“The tape cassette is a liberating force…” proclaimed Malcolm McLaren thirty years ago. “Taping has produced a new lifestyle.” Cassettes made recording and customization possible. Cassette players made listening on the go possible.

Tom Waits by iri5

More than any other subset of culture, youth culture was created — and is enabled — by technology. The telephone supposedly created the Teenager, and even if it didn’t, those formative years of the socialization process wouldn’t be the same without the dialtone (even metaphorically), and for my generation, the same could be said for the cassette tape.

“Home taping is killing music.” It sounds funny now, but the British Phonographic Industry — sister of the RIAA — was incensed. Their attitude was that every blank tape sold was a record stolen. “BPI  says that home taping costs the industry £228 billion a year in lost revenue,” McLaren said in 1979, “so they’re not happy that Bow Wow Wow have already reached No. 25 on the singles chart… ” The home-taping controversy was handcrafted for McLaren. He was managing Bow Wow Wow who had a hit with a song celebrating home-taping called “C-30! C-60! C-90! Go!”  “In fact,” adds McLaren, “it’s the classic story of the 80s. It’s about a girl who finds it cheaper and easier to tape her favorite discs off the radio… which is why the record companies are so petrified.”

“The other big advantage of cassettes, of course, were that they were recordable,” elaborates Steven Levy in a recent Gizmodo piece celebrating the thirty-year anniversary of the Walkman.

You’d buy blank 90-minute cassettes (chrome high bias, if you were an audio nut) and tape one album on each side. (Since most records were shorter than 45 minutes, you’d grab a song or two from another album to avoid a long dead spot before the tape reversed.) And you’d borrow albums from friends and tape your own. You could also tape from other cassettes, but the quality degraded each time you made a copy made from a copy. It was like an organic form of DRM. Everybody had a box with hand-labeled cassettes and before you went on a car trip you’d dig in the box to find the tunes that would soundtrack your journey.

TapeThe magnetic tape was as much a part of the journey as the road. The portability and recordability of cassettes, which all sounds so very labor intensive now, were the precursor to today’s MP3s and iPods. Just as the book individualized the exchange of stories and information, the cassette tape and its attendant technologies individualized music listening.

Seeing the iconic cassette tapes on the shirts of the teens these days, like some technological Che Guevera, confirms Heraclitus’s conjecture that generations cycle on thirty-year intervals. You’re not likely to see the same thing come of the compact disc (it’s more of a RuPaul than a Che), so here’s to the cassette tape, the 3.5″ disc of the stereo.

[Tom Waits cassette art by iri5]

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You Will

In the early 90s, AT&T ran a series of commercials that posed some futuristic, technologically enabled task (e.g., “Have you ever borrowed a book from thousands of miles away?”), and then answered it emphatically (“You will.”), claiming they’d be the company to technologically enable such a task. I believe they’ve all come to pass except one. As Stewart Brand once said, “Technology marches on, over you or through you, take your pick.”

You Will

I can’t help but think that many of the technological advances we debate and marvel about were downright inevitable. In 1982, when I first got a computer, one of my main intentions was to get a modem and connect to databases. My eleven-year-old self wasn’t as hungry for information — I could’ve gotten the same stuff from the “database”  down the street known as “the library.” I was hungry for the idea of connectivity. The idea that I could connect my computer to other computers and exchange information. The idea was exhilarating.

Doesn’t that feeling, one that I shared with plenty of people by then, make the internet inevitable?

Didn’t your first unassisted ride on a bike feel like flying? Riding that two-wheeled bridge of balance is like taking off on wings of your own. In more sober tones, Marshall McLuhan (1964) aligned the two activities as well, writing,

It was the tandem alignment of wheels that created the velocipede and then the bicycle, for with the acceleration of wheel by linkage to the visual principle of mobile lineality, the wheel acquired a new degree of intensity. The bicycle lifted the wheel onto the plane of aerodynamic balance, and not too indirectly created the airplane. It was no accident that the Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics, or that early planes seemed in some ways like bicycles (p. 182).

Supposedly birds evolved the same way. Dinosaurs became bipedal via their large, counterbalancing tails. Eventually the same concept morphed wings.

Karl Popper (1968) called it “exosomatic evolution” (p. 238), adding that now we don’t grow faster legs, we grow bicycles and cars; we don’t grow bigger brains or memories, we grow computers. McLuhan continues, writing, “The transformations of technology have the character of organic evolution because all technologies are extensions of our physical being” (p. 182). Software and city blocks are as natural as ant hills and broccoli.

The argument that technology is organic begs the question of what to do about it: How do we maintain control over our contrivances?

The argument that technology is organic answers the question as well: We maintain control over our contrivances in the same way that we maintain control over our lawns. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t.

References:

Brand, S. (1988). The media lab: Inventing the future at MIT. New York: Penguin.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Popper, K. (1968). Objective knowledge: An evolutionary approach. New York: Oxford University Press.

——–

And here they are, the AT&T “You Will” commercials from 1993:

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