Whit's Blog / 1000 Recordings

I Win! My Father's Day Had an Orange Slug

Joe and I went to a local nature park today, a nice little one where there aren't any signs that say you shouldn't go down in the water to tick off the bugs and worms and other creatures that really probably pretty much wish you would just Stay A Higher Life Form And Stop Bothering Them.

So we bothered a bunch of creatures. We looked at the damselfly nymphs and the little worms and the frogs and the whirligig beetles who Failed To Get Away. Also at the water striders. And I think my favorite, the "Small Unidentified Creatures." The word "rotifers" springs to mind, but heaven knows why. Pinnipeds. Homophones. Whatever.

There were also snails. Snails! What is this, a mangrove swamp? Their shells were transparent, or at least translucent, and they slooged down grassblades for all the world like alien creatures of Great Wisdom. Which they weren't.

Joe told me what a wonderful time he had. We saw a blue-winged warbler. That's three for me, ever. They are so beautiful, as beautiful as a pickle jar with a frog in it, and as cherries pitted while you sit on a board walk where an iris is blooming.

No flipping!

Joe built a clubhouse and put in a TV. This is what he refers to as a flip TV show. I regret not getting his version of "LOST," in which the dialogue went, roughly, "We're lost," and "We're home," which, all in all, pretty much covered the first three seasons of the ABC drama.

The Thinker

Joe: Why don't trophies ever have any clothes on? It's kinda gross.

links for 2008-06-14

• Belle de Jour - Movie - Review - The New York Times
  Tight, sharp, and in the time capsule.
  (tags: deneuve luisbunuel catherinedeneuve belledejour)

Kills

I been listening at The Chemical Brothers and I have to say they appear to have an attitude problem which will not be cured.I have been listening to "Believe" and I think that they got the sample if off Gravity Kills unless the Brothers got it from somewhere that also Kills got it from. Which would be forked recursion AND NOBODY WANTS THAT.

But you listen to this and you have to ask yourself WHAT is it when performance is private and digital and ultimately incrementally iterative and explicitly allusional? My friend Clare dances once and that dance is irretrievable. She can't get it back and splay her toes just a bit more like that. Which makes her work final in a way. Now you can sit down there if you want in the pit with Derrida and Foucault and all their bags of ink and tell me that The Chemical Brothers are never the same twice and at least tonight, when the sweat is pouring off me, I will call you a liar and I may even get down in the pit with you and show you just what the business end of my Target Clearance Men's Shoes look like. Because the truth is that The Chemical Brothers are no more done than Clare is. But they cut and print. And away they go.

I think the problem (was there a problem? I am the only person referring to a problem) is that they -- the Brothers -- SOUND done. So in other words I am saying that the Brothers appear and sound done because they are doing this in a deeply synthetic way. They are bringing their music in not just a genuinely but also a putatively synthetic way. They are climbing down into the music and shooting it through with plastic threads. Whereas the Counting Crows, who came up next in the Playlist, are expert at sounding organic.

What are we saying here? We are saying that the Chemical Brothers also rock out. And now that we are listening to the Violent Femmes ("Gimme the Car") we are saying that what is good, what is really good, is to have a Playlist titled OW OW OW. Because that is what the Playlist is titled and WE ARE ALL ABOUT OW OW OW.

Flush with Pride

So, Joe and I are at his gymnastics show. He's getting ready, putting on shorts and a shirt in the rest room.

He comes out. I've been thinking about how grown up he is, how much has changed, how adult he is now. He's just seven years old, but he's gone in the bathroom and come out, his clothes in a bundle where I can take them and get them in his knapsack, filled with homework he's done right.

I turn to him, the sentence on my lips: You are so grown up now; I can rely on you to change properly and sit here nowhere near you.

He drops a wet sock on my hand. "Sorry, Dad," he says. "My sock fell in the toilet."

links for 2008-06-09

• The Greatest Dot Bombs (and What We've Learned)
  (tags: ink)

Keen

The new record from Portishead, Third, has music – what would have been instrumentation when there were instruments – that supports perfectly a female and feminine wail that serves as a deep groove of a trench in the bottom of which lies the terrible reality of incontrovertible age and life. I only listen to them, but I admit to adoring the genre – Massive Attack, Radiohead, Portishead, Morcheeba – and I think that Portishead’s new work is terrible in its power. It may not last. Maybe in 10 years it will sound reedy and quaint. But for now it’s stunning work; the new record is the best new music I’ve heard in a year.