I have been posting of late, just not here. I’ve put up three posts over at Lithchat discussing the Eurovision Song Contest, in particular the song chosen by the Lithuanian people to represent them at the contest, the subversive “Eastern European Funk.” The first post merely introduces the song with a few video clips thrown [...]
Continue reading about Eurovision and neoliberalism: the case of InCulto
Sometime around 1987, our whole family went on a trip to the Club Med village at Punta Cana, in the Dominican Republic. Each of the big trips we took (about biennially) left lasting impressions on me, and the Club Med experience completely floored me. There is so much I did there that I have never [...]
When Free came out in 1993, “The Gun and Bible” was instantly my favorite track. It’s a funny and absurd song, funny and absurd in the way that genocide is funny and absurd, that manages, by twisting and repeating one bizarre sample (discounting the coda about drinking and shooting), to efface the cold objectivity of [...]
Continue reading about The Gun and the Bible carved this nation
Quickly. I oversold the IDM-ness of Kid A. I let “Idioteque” speak for the album as a whole (this is probably largely since when the album would come on at parties, it was when it reached this song that I knew for a fact that it was Radiohead. Up until then, it was just noise). [...]
Fellow combattant Chris broke down with a few sentences the entirety of the Radiohead œuvre in a comment to my last post, in which I announced my new year’s resolution: to finally listen to some Radiohead and see what the fuss is all about. To figure out, in other words, what I’ve been missing. What’s [...]
Continue reading about Kid A and why this is going to be hard
It’s New Year’s resolution time. Last year’s resolution, to get hooked on coffee, was a runaway success to the degree that I’ve quit coffee for a week to see if I’ll sleep better (early reports: yes). The first helper in the process was the Bodum travel French press I bought from Amazon for like $12. [...]
Continue reading about My resolution: See what Radiohead is about
It is hard for a way of life whose priorities are secular, rationalist, materialist and utilitarian to produce a culture adequate to these values. For are not these values inherently anti-cultural? This, to be sure, was always a headache for industrial capitalism, which was never really able to spin a persuasive cultural ideology out of [...]
[I'm not entirely sure why I'm turning this into a post. It's essentially my final project for my Advanced GIS class. I think it's rather provocative, however, and it shows a few immediate possible further directions for analysis.] In my earlier geospatial analysis of the U.S.A. trilogy by John Dos Passos, I decided that I [...]
Continue reading about Nearest Neighbors and Monte Carlo Simulations with Dos Passos
Congratulations! You’re sick of Microsoft Word! This post is a very quick and dirty introduction to writing a regular, run of the mill English/Humanities college essay or term paper using LaTeX. I’ll show you how to get the software, write the paper, format it, put together the bibliography / works cited, and generate the pdf [...]
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Seems like the in thing these days is to spawn. I’m now an uncle, and several of my friends are about to have their first children, just had children, or have recently added to their brood. So I started imagining a mix of baby songs this morning in the shower. Right away, I thought of, [...]
Continue reading about Well, Our Love Was often Averred, and Spontaneity Has Brought a Third
