On the train, during a commute downtown, I was listening to Mike Rep and the Quotas. If that name doesn’t resonate with meaning, that’s alright. The group is/was something of a local and acquired taste.

Either way, the group, which specialized in moving between a Kinks conception of rock and out noise, worked during the seventies. And as any good Midwesterner, Rep had an opinion on Watergate, albeit distanced by freeway miles. “I Resign” takes on a first person narrative for the chorus while the rest of the track apes some sort of smart ass critique of the situation. Decent song, average if not pointed lyrics.

The point I’m gonna make is that while there were no doubt countless songs written about Nixon, perhaps the most amusing/listenable/engaging seem to come from seemingly obscure bands. So, Mike Rep? Who else?

Read more >

It seems like culture has accidentally run amok. There’s not center. There’s no commodity – unless we’re talking about the over priced spate of low run singles and collectible garbage being spewed out by the countless independent labels that are so pervasive now. Of course, a huge part of all this mess comes as a result of mindless drones moving from the hinterlands to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin or wherever else you’re supposed to live in order to impact the larger culture.

Over the last week, I’ve heard New York denigrated – its publishing industry being figured as working through its death rattle. And while that’s probably the biased opinion of a spurned would-be artist turned educator, she still lives in a major city. And that major city is filled with the same crap as NYC. It’s all a tremendous bummer.

Read more >

Influencing not just visual art, but music, Gerhardt Richter has worked through decades which have birthed various insular movements and perspectives on painting. Yet, he retains a unique outlook on not just the medium, but what images are portrayed and how.

Richter’s varied approaches focus on different objects, human and otherwise, but still toy with the viewer and refuse to reveal any specific meaning. Obfuscating intent, though, is mirrored in his work.

In 1982 he began a series of works centered on candles. Some images depict a pair and others only a single stick. Occasionally, there’s a draft of wind pushing a flame askew, only hinting at the surrounding atmosphere. It seems as if only candles and drably painted walls exist in this universe.

Read more >

If the Carter Family were an inept garage band with its own songs, it would have been the Shaggs. I think.

Either way, the mythical Shaggs, comprised of a trio of sisters from New Hampshire. The story goes, their father was always interested in music, thought it would bring his family together and sprung for music lessons. Whether or not those lessons were of value is still up for debate today.

Read more >

It’s definitely a blurry, backwards glance, but the seventies seem like a time when the DIY thing was still vital and unique at the same time. Today, everyone has their own record label, some venue in an abandoned whatever, a community garden and a bicycle co-op. That’s overstated, but forty years ago all of that was kinda revolutionary. The downside, though, was that it was kind a revolutionary and looked at as some weird subversive animal. It wasn’t, obviously. And without all those folks who took it upon themselves to better their neighborhoods, culture that defines itself as diametrically opposed to mainstream nonsense would be drastically different, if it existed at all.

Read more >

Is the album dead as a practical thing?

Maybe. But it seems to not matter for most folks as increasingly mp3s are snagged off blogs as single downloads, leaks or mixtapes. Of course, the difference between a mixtape and an album is becoming increasingly obscure. At the same time, though, the concept of compiling a sometimes random assemblage of sounds and passing it off as a cohesive whole has worked for a good many years while folks pass tapes back and forth.

With electronic music and hip hop being the most malleable of modern sounds, it makes sense that this practice of soldering together tracks has gained currency on the internets. So, we all should have figured that these Frankensteined pieces or work would eventually be available for sale.

Read more >

It's impossible to tell what's going to be timeless. When something is new it seems as likely to be a fad as anything else. This is especially true for music, double that for pop. It took a few decades to establish jazz as the go-to sound for class and leisure regardless of era, just like it took a similar span to name the throbbing 4/4 beat the standard for dance clubs whether it's disco, techno, industrial or any other style. In the past few years I think a similar canonization has occurred for jangly folk-rock. It was a sound made popular by the likes of The Beatles and The Hollies, later to inspire the singer-songwriters of the 70's like James Taylor, fuel the 80's college music of R.E.M. and the sensitive alternative scene of the 90's a la Counting Crows. These days, the emotional, intellectual sound of evolved folk is a favorite of the indie world and it's no less affecting than it was fifty years ago. For a pleasant tour through that sound, look no further than The Clientele and their new mini-album Minotaur.

Read more >

My generation was the last in America to grow up on an exclusive diet of hand-drawn animation. By the time we entered our teens, computer animation had asserted itself in highly successful films like Toy Story and in trendy TV shows like the Canadian tech-fancy toon Reboot. With the slickness and relative simplicity of CGI, cartoons lost a lot of the depth and fluidity that characterized those late-period traditional toons. Still today, CGI is about spectacle. It's used more often than not to generate ooh's and ah's from the audience, whereas hand-drawn animation (especially in the Western tradition) spent the 80's and 90's attempting to be as complex and expressive as possible. This combination of artistic drive and increased marginalization led to some of the strangest, most affecting cartoons in history. One such hand-drawn oddity was the unlikely Felix the Cat: The Movie, an attempt to revive a beloved character for another generation that, in failing to do so, achieved an unforgettable artistic stamp.

Read more >

Feeling nerdy? Want to learn about code and take some free classes to pass the time? Check out the Google "Code University" Video and Multimedia Courses and learn something new. Google has now compiled their own internal courseware for their engineers and made them public. The code courses are geared towards C++, Java, Python and Go. This is like getting a free education! There is a plethora of geeky stuff to learn about and regardless of your profession or interests - this stuff is always good to know - especially for people in the business, scientific, research, statistics and education fields. Check out some of the fun stuff they are teaching - for free:

Read more >

For whatever reason, country music hit its financial stride during the seventies. With Willie Nelson issuing no less than four classic (there were others, but we’re talking about stone classics) during the decade and Merle Haggard reconfiguring the general populace’s perception of the genre, it was a good time for the music.

Read more >