LOGANMIX2006: The Mercury Craze

My parting valentine to this year in music. And what a great year it was.

This should offer you a roadmap to my musical leanings throughout the year. And perhaps you will find some gems you missed while you were writing sins, and not tragedies.

Like a monkey with a miniature cymbal:

1. The First Song - Band of Horses [Everything All The Time]
2. 2wice - Mission of Burma [The Obliterati]
3. Steady As She Goes - The Raconteurs [Broken Boy Soldiers]
4. Wolf Like Me - TV on the Radio [Return to Cookie Mountain]
5. Incinerate - Sonic Youth [Rather Ripped]
6. Adventure - Be Your Own Pet [Be Your Own Pet]
7. What's Inside Of Me? - Starlight Mints [Drowaton]
8. We Are The Sleepyheads - Belle & Sebastian [The Life Pursuit]
9. If Looks Could Kill - Camera Obscura [Let's Get Out Of This Country]
10. Hey You - Basement Jaxx [Crazy Itch Radio]
11. Whoo! Alright-Yeah... Uh Huh - The Rapture [Pieces Of The People We Love]
12. The Mercury Craze (Edit) - Subtle [The Mercury Craze EP]
13. Over and Over - Hot Chip [The Warning]
14. Let's Make Love and Listen To Death From Above - CSS [Cansei De Ser Sexy]
15. Jique - Brazilian Girls [Talk To La Bomb]
16. Down - Herbert [Scale]
17. We Share Our Mother's Health - The Knife [Silent Shout]
18. Way Out - Ellen Allien & Apparat [Orchestra of Bubbles]
19. In The Morning - Junior Boys [So This Is Goodbye]

And as a special treat to you, my most treasured reader, I offer you my mixtape in digital form. So right click, my brother, and be merry.

I will only keep the link up for a week, so pillage while you can.

2006, In Review: Music

"as always this year's celebrity judges are only
of the most incredible persuasion
charles bronson's angry and gay only daughter,
ice cube back from when he was hard
and a framed 8x10 of joe namath's kneecaps."

Top 5 Concerts:

5. Anima/Sigur Rós, Civic Opera House, 5/9/06
4. Subtle, Abbey Pub, 4/15/06
3. The Presets/Ladytron, The Metro, 4/21/06
CSS/Ladytron, The Depot, 10/10/06
2. Junior Boys, Doug Fir Lounge, 9/28/06
1. The Presets/The Rapture, Empire Ballroom, 11/17/06

Top 5 Reissues/Compilations/Whatever:

5. Goldfrapp - We Are Glitter


4. Pavement - Wowee Zowee: Sordid Sentinels Edition

3. My Morning Jacket - Okonokos


2. Aphex Twin - Chosen Lords


1. Tortoise - A Lazarus Taxon



Album Honorable Mentions:

Basement Jaxx - Crazy Itch Radio
Be Your Own Pet - Be Your Own Pet
Belle and Sebastian - The Life Pursuit
Benoît Pioulard - Précis
Beirut - Gulag Orkestar
CSS - Cansei De Ser Sexy
Herbert - Scale
Hot Chip - The Warning
Joanna Newsom - Ys
Jóhann Jóhannsson - IBM 1401, a User's Manual
Junior Boys - So This Is Goodbye
The Roots - Game Theory
Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped
Starlight Mints - Drowaton
Tim Hecker - Harmony In Ultraviolet

Top 10 Albums:

10. Ellen Allien & Apparat - Orchestra of Bubbles


9. The Rapture - Pieces of the People We Love

The Rapture were in a no win situation with this album. Churn out Echoes redux and face critical backlash, deviate too far from their existing sound and risk having DFA get all of the credit for their past success. I think I may be the only person who loved this followup. Its one flaw: First Gear, a six minute dud of a track, where they needed another epic House of Jealous Lovers jam.

8. LCD Soundsystem - 45:33

Speaking of DFA, this is the biggest surprise of the year. This singular track, commissioned by Nike as a jogging mix, touches on all the important electronic albums in the alphabet: all the way from e2-e4 to Eno.

7. Band of Horses - Everything All The Time


6. Mission of Burma - The Obliterati

Best review I have seen on the web: "Motherfuckin’ '2wice.' That’s all you really need to know." True that.

5. Camera Obscura - Let's Get Out Of This Country

Easily the most crush worthy band of 2006. Tracyanne, I am ready to be heartbroken.

4. Yo La Tengo - I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass

Listen haters, Summer Sun is not nearly as bad as you are making it out to be, so none of this "return to form" narrative that you have been tossing around. That being said, this album is ridiculously better than a band twenty odd years into their career should be creating. Better than I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One? I don't know. Does that one have a 10+ minute opener called "Pass The Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind"?

3. The Knife - Silent Shout

The first person I gave this album to turned it off a minute into the first song. Maybe it was the maddening arpeggio synth lines. Or maybe it was the hermaphroditic pitch-shifted vocals. Or maybe it is because I am the only person I know who likes dark, syncopated electronic music. Not exactly recommended, but intensely rewarding. The four singles (and their respective remixes) are massive.

2. TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain

The consensus album of the year (if you ignore all of the Britishers with their self-parodying love of the Arctic Monkeys -- these are the same presses that proclaimed The Strokes as the saviors of rock).

1. Subtle - for hero: for fool

I am not going to tell you this is the album of the year (it is), or that Doseone is the best performer currently working (he is), or that you have never heard lyrics this profoundly abstruse (you haven't). What I will tell you is that I haven't heard a record this dense and imaginative since Kish Kash -- and J.C. Chasez certainly never wrote anything like Middleclasskill.

In the news...

Nancy Tessman gets a loving retirement sendoff from the Salt Lake City Tribune.

And a little bird that reads the blog thought we should all watch Rocky Anderson on national news repping local action on global warming.

2006, In Review: TV

I don't have much more to add on the state of the American long form narrative that is television.

You know the drill: Heroes and The Office rule, OK?

30 Rock is comedic gold and, although I hate to say it, slowly occupying that gigantic Arrested Development shaped hole in my heart. [Watch Mean Girls again while you are at it, Tina Fey is a genius.]

Mark can chastise me all he wants, but I am going to see Lost through to the end of the season. Let's hope Brian K. Vaughan can teach the producers a thing or two about narrative economy.

And while I wouldn't call Dexter my favorite show of the season, I cannot think of any other series that I more looked forward to week after week.

That's it for this round.

Actually, I need to say a word about Battlestar Galactica, possibly the most critically overrated series in the history of the medium. Which is not to say the show is bad. Far from it. But it has become so allegorically heavy handed as to sabotage the basic soap-opera dynamics that made the show such an entertaining surprise. Nor can I stomach the Mormon mythos draped in the trappings of the science fiction genre. Seriously, it makes L Ron Hubbard look subtle.

Kate! Fire! NO!

Fire Destroys Home of 'Lost' Star Lilly
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: December 20, 2006

Filed at 9:02 p.m. ET

HONOLULU (AP) -- Fire destroyed the rented home of ''Lost'' star Evangeline Lilly in coastal Kailua on Oahu island Wednesday, officials said. Lilly was not at home, and no one was injured.

Two roommates were also not home when the fire broke out sometime after 6:30 a.m., authorities said. Investigators were searching for a cause.

''Unfortunately, it is true that the home she rented in Hawaii did burn down this morning,'' Lilly's publicist Cara Tripicchio said in an e-mail. ''Evangeline was on set already when the fire occurred and luckily, her roommates were not in the house either.

The home was ''fully involved'' in flames when firefighters arrived, said Capt. Kenison Tejada, spokesman for the Honolulu Fire Department.

''We stopped the fire from spreading,'' he said. ''It took us maybe 15 to 20 minutes to knock down the main body of fire.''

Only the roof and a couple of interior walls were left standing, and most of the home's contents were destroyed, he said.

Lilly plays Kate on the hit ABC drama, which films in Hawaii.

Just "Maui"-ed

For those of you who aren't against pictures (Mark!):

The view from our Condo.

Us.

A sunset (Condo view).

A nice picture of Lahaina.

Me, modeling Bad Ass Coffee.

Rachel The Great.

There were high tides warnings the entire week,
which made the waves look like they do in the movies.

Our last sunset in Hawaii.

One last picture of my beautiful wife.

No Garden Party

November 19, 2004. Detroit, Michigan. “The Malice at the Palace.”

Ben Wallace drives to the basket only to be fouled hard by Ron Artest. Angry at the hard foul when the game was already over, Wallace shoves Artest. The refs settle the small bustle that results and Artest lays on the scorers table.

Then all hell breaks lose.

Results (via wikipedia):

Nine spectators injured
Two injured spectators taken to the hospital

Suspensions:
Ron Artest: remainder of the season (73 regular season games, 13 playoff games, 86 total games).
Stephen Jackson: 30 games.
Jermaine O'Neal: 25 games (reduced to 15 games on appeal).
Ben Wallace: 6 games.
Anthony Johnson: 5 games.
Reggie Miller, Chauncey Billups, Elden Campbell, and Derrick Coleman: 1 game each for leaving their respective benches.

December 16, 2006. New York, New York. Madison Square Garden.

Allegedly upset that the Nuggets still have their starters on the floor despite the game already being a blow out, Mardy Collins commits a hard foul on J.R. Smith. Nate Robinson jumps in, escalating the incident. Then everyone else jumps. Right when everything seems to be settling down, Carmelo Anthony (current league leading scorer) takes a giant swing and punches Mardy Collins in the jaw.

Marc Stein of ESPN.com says the common suspension would be five games for Anthony and Robinson, one-to-three games for Collins, Smith and Jeffries, and one game for anyone else involved.

But this isn’t likely to be average. David Stern is still trying his best to make everyone forget about the Detroit-Indiana brawl. And a fight like this brings it all back to public memory.

I’ve never had any love for the current Knicks roster or Carmelo Anthony anyway. And in some ways, this shows that I’m right (and have been) right to see them all as the kind of players that are bad for the game.

2006, In Review: Books

Mothers lock up your daughters.

It's that fearful time of year again when I unleash my woeful end of the year opinions onto my disinterested audience.

One of the benefits of spending most of the year as an underemployed hack was having the time to keep relatively abreast of recent books. And as a Man of Letters who likes his literature dead, white and male, I must admit that 2006 has provided some works of considerable quality.

My humble picks for the five best of the year:

Fiction

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The bleakest novel of the year, but also the best. The book's existential leanings should be apparent from the title, but the terseness of McCarthy's prose belies the book's poetic structure and its stunning moments of fleeting beauty.


The Emperor's Children by Clarie Messud

It's hard for me to write about The Emperor's Children without referencing Meghan O'Rourke's wonderful review in which she manages to perfectly capture the distinct tone and the syntactical complexity of Messud's writing. Simply a joy to read.


Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon

Okay. This is cheating because I am only 200 odd pages through this 1,085 behemoth. But somewhere between the army of Arctic subterranean gnomes with laser crossbows and the Russian captain Igor Padzhitnoff who drops Tetris blocks on his foes, I decided Pynchon was quite possibly my favorite author.


Non-Fiction

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

"The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and the passive" -- William Ralph Inge. Pollan employs the old Sartrean trick of inverting the subject and object to reveal all that is absurd and abhorrent in our daily consumption habits. This should be required reading for every American.

Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins

Jenkins supplies the analytical tools to comprehend the social ramifications of information communities in the age of New Media. The six case studies, which range from Survivor Spoiler Message Boards to corrupt Cyberelections in The Sims, are both enlightening and enormously entertaining.

BREAKING NEWS:

"'We never thought in our wildest dreams a sky bridge would be proposed for Main Street', said Stephen Goldsmith, who is reprising the anti-sky-bridge effort today as the Mormon Church and its mall developer partner, Taubman Centers, propose the sky bridge of his nightmares."

Source: A Bridge Too Far in this week's SLC Weekly.

the sky bridge of his nightmares.

the sky bridge of his nightmares.

the sky bridge of his nightmares.

An Enhanced State of Being...

There was the determined excitement before the flourish of a very best day that is equally delicate and permanent in my memory. Limo rides. Wine red dresses. Gold paisley tuxedo vests. Emotion. Dancing. Ceremony.

As everyone knows, I was eagerly in anticipation of my wedding and my marriage. I had a running countdown on my whiteboard at work since there were 113 days to go. We planned out honeymoon almost instantly after we booked the reception site.

The honeymoon was incredible. Usually on vacations, I get bored after a few days. I’m ready to go home or at least move on. Not this time. I felt like I could have stayed there forever. And the days felt profoundly full –– yet too short.

Hawaii is interesting anyway this time of year. More so for a honeymoon. You have the vague disconnect of being away from the normal urban sprawl Americana, but still seeing a Starbucks on every corner. There’s the inevitable iconoclasm of Christmas lights in a tropical paradise. There’s the pleasing ordinariness of perfect weather (a high temperature near 80 and a low near 70).

It was gloriously relaxing. The first day, for instance, we slept late, woke up, had breakfast, and then took a three hour nap. (The wedding was really that tiring.) There were other adventures and stories, perhaps. The Dinner Cruise with its subtle awfulness and peculiarity. How much Rachel loved the beach. My ultimately unachievable goal of buying Gwen Stefani’s new CD. (We couldn’t find anywhere to buy mainstream music on the side of the island where we were staying.)

I am happy with the way the wedding went. And I wish I were still on my honeymoon. Yes, everything flew by. But I’m pleased that everyone at the wedding and reception seemed to have fun. And that there wasn’t the drama or disaster I’ve experienced at or in other weddings. (Rachel’s dress did, unfortunately, get torn. Someone stepped on it a short time before we left. However, it can be repaired.)

I am even happier to be married. It’s only been 10 days and we’re barely back to our “normal” lives, but I absolutely love that Rachel is the first person I see in the morning and the last person I see at night.

Nerd Alert #819

Dragon Quest 9 in DS exclusivity shocker!

Proof that the most important video game system is the one no on is talking about.

Netflix Two Cents: Battle Royale

Battle Royale (2000)

Verdict: A modest proposal, of sorts. And the existential half of the Tarantino ouroboros. "At least... I thought I'd live until tomorrow."

Why I hate Fantasy Basketball

It's true. Hideously Wrinkled is breaking the story. I fucking hate Fantasy Basketball.

It keeps me up at night. I panic. The questions fill my head. Is Yao worth trading? Should I drop Jones, or Foster? What's more valuable, a steady rebounder, or a hot but irregular 3-point machine? Is someone talking smack on the message board? Are there any free agents to pick up? I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE.

As the season progresses, my productivity level steadily drops. How can I write an article when I'm checking the waiver wire every ten fucking minutes? How can I read the paper when live scoring keeps ticking?

Perhaps worse, I've developed emotional attachments to some players. I had to drop Nate Robinson a couple of weeks ago and I almost cried.

And my team goes up against Ben's, uncle Mark's, and cousin Jesse's. If I lose, they get bragging rights. And if I win? I will feel like an asshole for breaking the spirit of a loved one.

I'm too much of a socialist to play fantasy hoops. Or maybe I mean sissy. Either way, I'm taking bids for control of my team. The entry fee was $40, and the winning team gets something like $400. We were good until today, when A.I. ran his mouth and got sent home. Oy.

Status anxiety.

Yesterday, The New York Times finally showed a brief respite in its coverage of the American Psycho-esque obsession between the rich and the very rich, to report on the world wealth gap.

Some food for thought:

The top 1% of the world's population accounts for about 40% of the world's total net worth.

The bottom 50% of the world's population accounts for about 1.1% of the world's total net worth.

But, you know, whatever.

People That Like You Want To See You Suffer

The thirteenth season of Survivor is coming to a close, and against all odds, it is still as entertaining as ever.

People who think this season is some experiment in racial Darwinism have probably never seen Survivor before. Rarely does the million dollar winner actually outwit or outplay anyone, let alone out-survive them. Jenna Morasca could not survive an hour inside a pillow factory. Amber Brkich has all the virtues of a burr. On the contrary, having survival skills has a beneficial peak at the merge after which it becomes a social disadvantage (along with any other likable qualities).

Survivor, if anything, is about Freud's narcissism of minor differences.

In seasons past, tribes have fissured along age, race, class, gender, and work ethic. There is no consistent social marking that can predict fractures. Instead, each voting bloc temporary colludes around a (seemingly) mutually advantageous decision. These disparate bonds, however, rarely last. The Vanuatu contestants' dream of having an all female final four fell apart spectacularly amidst personality conflicts.

Indeed, the current power voting bloc of five consists of at least one individual from the originating four racial tribes.

But Survivor's allure has never been about social commentary as Mark has suggested (although it has provided some fascinating subtexts such as the conflict between the hyper-cerebral Hatch and the self-professed working class Sue).

Instead, its appeal, as proposed in Henry Jenkins's Convergence Culture, stems from the friction between an unpredictable plot and an omniscient narrator, and the knowledge communities that develop around this tension. As Haralovich and Trosset write, "Narrative pleasure stems from the desire to know what will happen next... In Survivor, unpredictability whets the desire to know what happens next, but how that gap will be closed is grounded in uncertainty due to chance... In its invitation to prediction, Survivor is more like a horse race than fiction."

Reality shows are invariably more social than comedies and dramas, and Survivor's unpredictability, created by immunity challenges and volatile tribal councils, added to possible clues from Mark Burnett's knowing editing, lead people to collectively speculate. In college, dormmates of mine would attempt to forecast jury temperament (oh, those wild college days), and a girlfriend and I kept a running competition on who could most accurately predict the final four.

And it is this central mechanic that causes viewers to turn in season after season.

Dear Santa,

All I want for Christmas is to see this movie.

Anyone care to join me?

"A very best day."