Tuesday, January 31, 2012

It's free, if you want it

More free/pay what you will music from Bandcamp.
Born to Deal in Magic: 1952-1976 byShooting Guns is instrumental stoner metal that's surprisingly tight and concise for a rambling genre.

Lugar's Concrete Light is Spanish Kraut in a Stereolab vein.

Tumbleweeds by Across Tundras is low-key prairie rock.

The Teenage Stranglers' Dark Sun E.P. sounds like Beat Happening; lo-fi jangly teenage fun.

The Times We Didn't Have Fun by Diehard is a Brooklyn album of '90s-style indie rock like you loved from Archers of Loaf and Magnapop.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

MOAR FREE MUZIK

Witch Mountain's South of Salem is stoner/gloom metal with a female vocalist. Sounds like PJ Harvey with the knob turned two more clicks toward "heavy."

Jake Kaufman's Mighty Milky Way/Mighty Flip Champs is epic 8-bit gamer music.

WATCH YOUR BACK by Butchers is noise slacker psych.

Cheaper than music

Oroborus, by Hypatia Lake. Solid stoner rock.

Sedan s/t. Simple, hypnotic piano/guitar and drums.

Kösmonaut 1, by Kosmonaut. Tangerine Dream-ish space rock.

Going Up, Coming Down, by Sudden Death of Stars. French psych in a sitar vein.

Psychonaut, by Cosmic Dead. Boy, the names of band and album really sum this one up. Good stuff.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Corrupt Autopilot's Inside the Crystal Palace.

I know Crystal Palace mostly as a dirt-cheap rotgut vodka. Turns out it's also some fuzzy indie fun. Stream/download the whole thing free.

Rainy day music


Julian Lynch's Mercury


Au Revior Simone's Another Likely Story (Neon Indian remix)

Saturday, January 14, 2012

A world I want to exist

Watching Veronica Mars episode Green Eyed Monster, and this guy has all these Nick Cage posters up all over his house, and it turns out that it's actually Nick Cage's house. Which makes perfect sense because you just know that Nick Cage has Nick Cage posters up all over. Amy says Nick Cage doesn't stop there, he's got a room for every movie.

But you know Nick Cage can't afford separate rooms for sequels, so he's got a National Treasure room all done up with dark wood and brass, full of fake bookcases and Ben Franklin's glass throwing stars. Ghost Rider's obviously the garage; that crazy one with the numbers (Knowing) would make a great chalkboard kitchen decor. And who wouldn't want a Wicker Man apiary.

The really weird thing is that this guys' girlfriend thinks the incipient Nick Cage museum he's housesitting is supposed to be his, which means believing that you're dating the world's biggest Nick Cage fan, like, the only person that would have a Face/Off themed bathroom (it's got a mirror that makes you look like John Travolta), have a copy of World Trade Center, and a picture of Lisa Marie on his mantle.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Who funded that?

Tonight, some guy stopped to talk to me who said that it was all well and good to teach kids about tolerance, because it wasn't gays' fault that they were like that, it was their parents' fault. See, kids turn gay because parents don't love them enough, and that means the first time they feel affection for somebody, they confuse it with sex.

"Uh, I don't think that's right at all," I say.

"No, they proved it with studies. There was a study in Germany where they took ten kids and the nurse only touched three of them, but five of them could hear her singing. The ones that were touched turned out normal; the ones that only heard singing grew up messed up, you know, gay; the other five died," he said.

"When was that study done?" I ask, because my guess is, Sir, that's some Nazi shit you're spouting.

"I don't know, but two years ago, they did the same thing at UCLA."

"Sir, I'm sorry, but there is literally no way at all that they did that study again at UCLA."

"I read about it in the Times."

"Well, then, either you're misremembering it, or the Times got it wrong, because there is literally no way that an Institutional Review Board would let researchers kill kids."

"I read about it in the Times."

"There is absolutely zero chance that either of these studies happened after World War Two, and I know enough people in academia that there is no way that could happen. I'm sorry. Anyway, back to the Fair Education Act — it protects kids now, since you agree that it's not their fault that they're bullied."

"Oh, bullying, that's terrible. We just need to get parents to stop plopping the kids down in front of the TV, ignoring them, you know, so they can work an extra job to buy more cars or whatever. Then they won't be gay or bullied."

"So, can I count on your support for the Fair Education Act?"

"No, it's the parents we need to work on, not schools. If parents just loved their kids, no one would be gay."

"Uh. OK. You have a great night then," I say, thinking that this guy needs professional fucking therapy, and if I have to talk to him for 30 more seconds, I'm going to slip and tell him exactly how stupid I think he is.

I get home, and I start talking to Amy about it. Like, seriously, what kinda department would let you just start killing babies? And what's the lit review there look like? What are the previous baby-killing experiments? "Multiple Modalities in Confined Infant Head Traumas?" Oh yeah, that's when we put 'em in a sack and hit 'em with hammers. But, you know, small sample size. To be sure, we're going to have to kill a lot more babies.

"Oh yeah, Amy says, "what about throwing them in rivers?"

"What kind of sample size do we need to get this published?" I say.

"What methodology are you using to distinguish your sacks of babies in the river from other people's sacks?" she asks.

"How long do we have to keep the bodies to make sure they stay dead once they're drowned?"

Thursday, January 05, 2012

Reading room

From Obama and Geithner, no real fixes for fraudonomics. Matt Taibbi questions whether the executive is serious about dealing with systemic financial abuses.

The Nation looks at how climate change became a key plank in the anarcho-capitalist kulturkampf, and whether we're willing to pay the price to save our planet.

Speaking of capitalism, Matt Stoller, author of Naked Capitalism, points out ideological problems that Ron Paul highlights for the liberal establishment. (I tend to think that Stoller oversells the efficacy of Paul's critique of central authority's expression in military-industrial terms, but it's a good, brief essay about a thousand times more coherent and less cherry-picked than Glenn Greenwald's customary hate-on for Obama that linked to it.)

Similar to Stoller's discussion of historical plates in American liberalism, Haaretz looks at shifts in the Israeli left, in the context of the Occupy protests.

And speaking of Occupy, this (now outdated) article from The Nation, "Hard Times at Occupy Boston, looks at the problems of small self-government and describes some of the challenges that were overlooked in the national unsympathetic coverage.