Netflix Two Cents: Screaming Streaming Edition

The Crazies (2010)

Verdict: Perhaps too efficient for its own good. Packs some thrilling set-pieces, but - like all other Romero remakes - lacks the chilling subtexts that really keep you up at night.







Session 9 (2001)

Verdict: Without a doubt, one of the absolute worst movies I have ever seen.

Roundball Ruckus

October 27th NBA Power Rankings

Previous (July) rankings in parentheses.

1. L.A. Lakers (1) - Pau Gasol is good. And looks like a praying mantis. Kobe will be good enough. And looks like a f****r.
2. Miami (2) - Losing first game to Boston in Boston doesn't change anything for me.
3. Orlando (3) - Vince Carter looks a lot more solid than last year. Most balanced team in the east.
4. Utah (5) - Undefeated preseason means more to a team with so many new pieces.
5. Dallas (4) - Tyson Chandler looks better than he has in years. Mavs with an athletic C? Sounds good.
6. Oklahoma City (9) - Jump to 6 more about concerns with other teams than belief in Thunder.
7. Boston (7) - Still old, but KG looks healthier than last two years. Will climb if they stay healthy.
8. Houston (10) - So many offensive options, such strong defense. Only concern is that with a hobbled Yao there's still no real go-to guy.
9. Atlanta (14) - Yes, they overpaid Joe Johnson, but that won't hurt them this year. New offense (Think Jazz with more improvisation) has looked like a perfect fit for personnel.
10. Portland (6) - Oden hurt again. Rudy sad. No backup PG. Nate McMillan still doesn't know how to coach.
11. Milwaukee (15) - Dirty Lip looking good. Maggete ready. Brandon Jennings another year older.
12. Chicago (11) - Funny that they only dropped a spot. Color me skeptical of Boozer's quick return.
13. Denver (8) - Carmelo Anthony doesn't strike me as the type to keep his focus through the trade/extension noise. Even if he does, injuries to Kenyon Martin and Chris Andersen have left them very thin up front.
14. Phoenix (12) - They are asking a lot of a Canadian who's closer to 40 than 30.
15. San Antonio (13) - They'll probably prove me wrong. It will still be boring.
16. Memphis (16) - Like Houston, but worse!
17. L.A. Clippers (19*) - Blake Griffin has looked like a force, if he stays healthy. . . well, it's still the Clippers.
18. New Orleans (20*) - Ariza is a much better fit alongside Chris Paul than he was in Houston, but this team is still too shallow to contend in the West.
19. Philadelphia (21*) - Evan Turner is the big name rookie, but second year PG Jrue Holiday will be the player that makes the 76ers better this season.
20. Washington (22*) - I'm starting to believe the Wall hype. Blatche should shoot less, JaVale should think more. Arenas seems to have been effectively neutered, which is good for the basketball team, bad for overall units of happiness.
21. Charlotte (18) - Aside from S-Jax and G-Wall this roster is really, really bad.
22. Cleveland (17) - When it rains it pours. I think Byron Scott was a bad choice, and is there a team with lower morale?
23. Sacramento (23*) - Tyreke's a freak, will take another step forward this year, and eventually be crazy good. DeMarcus Cousins will likely take more time.
24. Indiana (24*) - I think they'll be ahead of Cleveland and Charlotte soon. Collison's the real deal and Hibbert will take a step forward. A lot to like here.
25. New York (25*) - Stoudamire is a great player. And Raymond Felton is an upgrade over Duhon, but Nash made D'Antoni, not vice versa. Still I could see them making a jump similar to Indiana's.
26. New Jersey (26*) - They'll probably be better than last year, which isn't saying much.
27. Detroit (27*) - Poor Detroit. . . poor, poor Detroit. But hey, I heard Ford's expanding there.
28. Golden State (28*) - The idea that they can get better without changing strategies is laughable. David Lee is a good fit. . . for the failing strategy.
29. Toronto (29*) - Goodbye Hedo and Bosh, hello Linas Kleiza and Leandro Barbosa.
30. Minnesota (30) - How does this happen? If you were Ricky Rubio would you ever come to the NBA?

*I didn't rank 19-29 last time around.

Economies of Scale

I know the pricing of digital media is still the Wild West as far as the internet is concerned, but this is ridiculous:


$9.99 seems reasonable enough for standard definition, but double the price for HD? That is a particularly hard sell when I can flip over to TV shows and purchase, let's say, an entire season of The Wire for the same price. And why are audiobooks still so expensive? I could buy a used book and hire somebody off Craigslist to read it to me for cheaper.

LOGANMIX004: Music For Non-Existent Dance Floors

In 2007, dial records released two of the best electronic records of the past decade: Pantha Du Prince's This Bliss and Efdemin's Efdemin. Both albums represent the high-water mark of - as well as the catalyst for my well-documented obsession with - the electronic sub-genre minimal techno.

"Minimal" and "techno" are two terms that have little context or association for the average music listener, much less when they delimit each other. As a electronic music dilettante myself, I usually rely on my own "I know it when I hear it" test. Thus, I defer to the experts:

Philip Sherburne, in his essay Digital Discipline: Minimalism in House and Techno, categorized minimalism in electronic music as tending to take one of two paths: skeletalism or massification.

"Skeletalism is the imperative to carve everything inessential from dance music's pulse, leaving only enough embellishment (syncopation, tone color, effects) to merit the variation…

Massification, on the other hand, represents the strain of electronic dance music that attempts to create extreme densities with a relative paucity of sonic elements."

Pigon's "Promises" represents perhaps the best illustration of the genre. Constructed around a steady drum beat and a hypnotic synthesized rhythm guitar loop, the track builds tension by slowly adding (massifying, if you will) - and, for the climax, subtracting - percussive elements to the mix. With its skeletal palette and repetition, "Promises" is essentially an electronic "Boléro."

Perhaps this is still a bit academic, so let me provide an oblique analogy:

The dominating visual metaphor of IDM was the couch as portrayed in the cover art of Warp's seminal album, Artificial Intelligence, signifying that this was dance music for the headphone crowd.

Minimal techno, for me at least, is all about travel -- particularly on rails. Michel Gondry's music video for The Chemical Brother's "Star Guitar" - which, strictly speaking, is not a minimal techno track, but nevertheless - captures this feeling: the repetitive percussion provides the locomotion, while the melodic and rhythmic building blocks provide the variation in scenery. Tim Finney acknowledged as much when he opened up his review of Pantha du Prince's This Bliss by confessing that the album "hit [him] hardest during a train ride on a foggy evening." I had my own augenblick moment while listening to Superpitcher's "Black Magic" while catching the Amtrak Cascades on the way back from Decibel.

In essence, minimal - like IDM before it - is electronic music for non-existent dance floors.

In honor of dial record's 10 year anniversary and in hopes of introducing the lurking masses to minimal techno, I have corralled together a mix from the label's accomplished stable of artists.

For a change of pace from my usual and cumbersome form of disseminating mixes, I enlisted my good friend DJF to seamlessly blend the tracks into a single set. Via Soundcloud you can stream it straight from the blog or download and take it for a future train ride. Either way you decide to listen to it, just be sure to sport some quality headphones.



LOGANMIX004: Music For Non-Existent Dance Floors (DJF's Logan is Cosmos Megamix)

00:00 - Promises - Pigon [Promises]
06:50 - Along the Wire (Superpitcher Remix) - Lawrence [Along The Wire]
14:23 - Happiness (Lawrence Remix) - Superpitcher [Lowlights From The Past And Future]
20:15 - Saturn Strobe - Pantha Du Prince [This Bliss]
25:50 - Swap (Carsten Jost Dub) - Lawrence [Swap]
33:01 - August - John Roberts [Glass Eights]
36:50 - Le Ratafia - Efdemin [Efdemin]
42:17 - Berkeley - Pawel [Berkeley]
47:38 - Bohemian Forest - Pantha Du Prince [Black Noise]
54:55 - Bergwein - Efdemin [Bergwein]

The Muse

Is it just me or does Uma Thurman look like a female Quentin Tarantino in Pulp Fiction? I don't mean this as a slight against Uma; I just find it amusing that Tarantino's muse should bear such an uncanny resemblance to himself.

Work of Art in the Age of Cultural Overproduction

A couple of thoughts from the Decibel Music Festival:

1) Although it was fun being around likeminded electronic music nerds, discussing artists whose names I had never spoken aloud, my euphoria eventually settled into ambivalence.

This is, after all, probably how members of the Flat Earth Society feel when they meet up at their yearly convention: "Finally, people who really understand me!"

And an Electronic Music Festival is a fairly large umbrella to organize underneath. Confessing to being a fan of melodic ambient music often felt like admitting to being an atheist libertarian at a Tea Party rally.

2) As I was surfing artists' websites during downtime at the festival, I came across a blogpost by an artist encouraging people to buy albums.

It is a quaint idea, but a bit antiquated.

Although I still buy records, I doubt anybody from my brother's generation sees music as having any monetary worth. Instead of appealing to people's altruism, artists need to reintroduce the concept of scarcity.

At the Optical 3 concert, Tycho was selling beautiful print reproductions of his album cover artwork. Festival attendees were snapping up these limited edition prints, while his albums were laying on the merchandise table untouched.

Tycho's label, Ghostly International, exemplifies this strategy: its website not only offers albums for sale, but also other album-related totems -- literally. In conjunction with the release of Matthew Dear's new album Black City, Ghostly International is selling a totem that sculpturally represents the themes of the record. It is certainly not priced for everyone, but the devoted, in essence, subsidize the freeloaders. For example, back in 2008, Trent Reznor released Ghosts for free but made a killing selling 2,500 Ultra Deluxe Limited Edition sets for $300 a piece.

Surely not everyone has obsessive as a fanbase as Nine Inch Nails, but a favorite local artist of mine, Benoît Pioulard, has probably a fraction of the audience, yet limited handmade editions of his records sell out in a matter of hours. A benevolent soul, he only sells them for $25, but could probably still exhaust his inventory at $100 a pop.

I wonder if this, in part, explains the reemergence of cassettes among a generation who never had to deal with them in the first place. A nostalgia for the ephemeral and tactile in an age of cultural overproduction.

Schadenfreude, or Boooooooo!-zer, Boooooooo!-zer, Boooooooo!-zer

The Salt Lake Tribune is reporting that Carlos Boozer officially filed for divorce on Aug. 13, days after his eighth anniversary.

This news breaks days after word of his latest injury. You know the one. Where he broke his hand in a manner remarkably similar to what is commonly known as a boxer's fracture.

I'm not usually a conspiracy theorist. Boozer could have actually tripped over a bag and broken his hand because he was racing to answer the door. Rather than "the impact of a clenched fist... a hard, immovable object, such as a wall or a door."

But it isn't like he's known for being honest and truthful.

The kind of wishing of my heart

As I mentioned in Logan's like-minded post, my dreams have taken a turn to consumerist existentialism.

Instead of pushing a rock up a hill, I'm getting lost and turned around inside of an overcrowded store.

It's a grand opening, and the music is too loud and the lights too bright and we have too little time because Rachel has to go to work. I get lost inside and separated from Rachel. I struggle to get outside—knowing that she's probably already left—only to discover a blizzard that is so heavy, cold and wet that I can't see. My cell phone isn't working, so I have no choice but to take refuge in the store and wait for Rachel to return after her day-long shift.

Or I'm trying, hopelessly, to direct David to his parked car. In that dream logic, David is both driving me around in his car and we are trying to find where I parked his car. I can't remember exactly where I parked it, but I know the general location. But I can't see very clearly and David won't listen to any of my directions or, when he does, we don't end up where we should. We endlessly traverse a labyrinth of suburban sprawl and an unnamed university that is inexplicably designed in a tangle of neverending circles without a clear center (an oddly apropos metaphor).

Somewhere along the line, I stopped worrying about showing up to school without studying for the test or forgetting I was fired and showing up to work anyway.

Now, my subconscious is much more bothered by the idea that I could be trapped in everyday life without the agency to solve a problem or change a situation.

Hell, apparently, is an eternity in Best Buy where my eyes are barely functioning and the manager won't allow me to exchange my defective copy of Halo: Reach.