LOLPUGZ* (XMASS Edition)

I'm sorry but I do sort of love the aesthetics of the Lolcats meme and I couldn't help but subject our little dog to the indignities of LOL-ization . . . you know for the holidays!?!

* Inquoris would like it to be known that she finds
this image to be demeaning reactionary bullshit
and that if she would have known to what end her
image was to be used she would never have posed so
nicely for her picture to be taken. And especially that
if there were some fantasy universe where she could
actually speak, she would speak proper grammatical
English albeit w/ a cute Daffy Duck lisp.

That's Right Bitches* . . .

I just found Luboš Fišer's soundtrack for "Valerie and Her Week of Wonders"!




Now, granted this wonderful aural delight was something I didn't know that I was looking for less than an hour ago but that doesn't take away from the fact that I'm enjoying the hell out of it now.



I saw the classic Czech coming-of-age gothic surrealist creep-fest a few years ago and I'm sure I enjoyed the soundtrack being as it's so completely right up my alley musics-wise. As w/ most things (especially those that I enjoy) though, I completely forgot about it. Until a little while later Broadcast had a tribute song called "Valerie" (funnily enough?) on their great 2003 release "Ha Ha Sound".



Now Listening to the "Valerie and Her Week of Wonders" soundtrack I can hear the melody used in the Broadcast song was lifted from a motif Fišer uses throughout his soundtrack. The lyric of the Broadcast song is pretty much just a synopsis of the movie, which w/ the movie being so crazy actually makes for a great song.

. . . Now I have see if there's a soundtrack available for that other Czech new wave classic "Daisies",which I actually liked better than "Valerie and Her Week of Wonders" but I don't know about how the soundtrack will stack up?

* At this point do I really have to say NOT THAT ANYONE CARES!?!

MERRY XMAS III

IMAGINE PEACE

Auf Wiedersehen Karlheinz

I just found out a little while ago about Karlheinz Stockhausen's passing. I've never really ventured that far into his massive body of work but he'll always hold a special place in my personal music listening history.

When the internet was still a new thing for me and I started exploring music that wasn't familiar to me, he happened to be the first composer that I started reading about. I have a very distinct (hazy) memory of reading something about his early work w/ tape recorders when they started becoming available right after World War Two and it fascinated me. It was something about him taking a second or so of recorded material and stretching that to last an hour and how it would take him an incredibly long period of time to do that in those tape splicing analog golden days.



It must've been in that same article (or around that time), talking about his use of ring modulators or something else I was reading at the time? But I developed a pretty healthy obsession w/ ring modulation; what a ring modulator actually was, what they looked like, and more importantly what they sounded like. A little while after that mini-obsession began I chanced upon a used copy of Stockhausen's 1970 piece Mantra. I bought it I'm pretty sure just b/c it was by Stockhausen not knowing that it was utilizing ring modulators (and two pianos and various small percussion instruments). I've listened to that piece so much since I first bought it that I can hear it in my head now as I type this nonsense and I'm sure it's been at least two years or so since I actually listened to the disc. Finding that disc though is still one of greatest used disc finds among a handful or so that I still remember fondly but w/ some disbelief.



After Mantra though I never really pursued Stockhausen much further, I moved onto other things Messiaen and Minimalism and then I found Morton Feldman and that re-awakened an interest in John Cage. I think though that if more Stockhausen discs would have been available when he was still new to me I would have listened to him more.

After just having read an article in the New Yorker about the resurgence in classical music sales or something(?), that article though, had this great passage by a pianist talking about an ecstatic experience he had while playing Messiaen's "Quatuor pour la fin du temps" that was so beautiful, it got me thinking about how little modern classical, avant garde (whatever you call it) musics I listen to anymore. Maybe once I dig out my copy of Mantra and give it a few listens that will get me listening to that type of music more?

Karlheinz Stockhausen
August 22, 1928 – December 5, 2007

Ne Travaillez Jamais

"A Girl With A Leika" snapped by the Leica of Alexander Rodchenko

Some pictures and quotes, the products of a day and a half of television and internet drifting. Like any other day and a half just w/ a little something to show for it - of course for no particular reason.



"Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them, or perish." - Bertrand Russell byway of William Carlos Williams



"Suicide carried off many. Drink and the devil took care of the rest." - Robert Louis Stevenson byway of Guy Debord byway of Richard Linklater from his film "Waking Life"




"A functioning police state needs no police." - William S. Burroughs





I keep thinking what did I do before obsessively looking at the same dozen or so blogs all day and night and of course before the gloriousness that is Wikipedia?

. . . Oh yeah, obsessively download music.