The Return of John Grant

  • Posted Feb 6, 2010
  • Categories Music
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John Grant

Once upon a time, there was band called The Czars. And though they made incredibly and heartwrenchingly beautiful music, few people listened to them. But those who did became fans of the deepest and most intense order, and when the band broke up, it left a huge hole in their hearts that nothing could really fill… until now, that is.

John Grant, the Czars’ former frontman and possessor of one of the most beautiful baritones you’re likely to hear this side of Heaven, has just wrapped up work on his first solo album. Queen Of Denmark will be released in April 2010 on Bella Union, and also features the talents of Midlake (with whom Grant has toured in the past).

If you head on over to Grant’s MySpace page, you can listen to “TC & Honeybear”, the album’s opening track. It might just be the finest ‘70s AM soft-rock song you’ve never heard—and I mean that in the best way possible.

Waves

by Keith Canisius

When listening to Rumskib’s self-titled debut several years back, I was struck by the duo’s exuberance, by the sense of joy that permeated their recording. The shoegazer genre has often been called “the scene that celebrates itself”, and here were a couple of shoegazers that were truly keen on celebrating.

That same feeling permeates Waves, the second solo album from Keith Canisius (one half of Rumskib). Indeed, Waves picks up right where Rumskib’s album left off: from the very get-go, Canisius dives headfirst into an ocean of shimmering, ethereal sounds, and does so with such enthusiasm that it’s hard to resist diving in right after him.

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Viget Labs on Structure for ExpressionEngine

A Whole New Wooooorld: Structure + ExpressionEngine:

Even with the EE 2.0 release in December, I think the best ExpressionEngine event in 2009 was the rise of Travis Schmeisser’s Structure. While 2.0 lays the groundwork for a bright future, in the short run it’s more of a step backwards because so few of EE’s amazing community-built addons have been ported so far - even with new functionality, a 2.0 upgrade takes away far more than it gives at the moment.

In contrast, the Structure module immediately makes major improvements to your site’s UI, construction, and template codebase, and it also plays nice with other addons, creating a faster, smarter EE experience. No software I installed last year saved me as much time and effort as Structure did, and Travis deserves all the credit for that (and he got quite a bit, including Devot:ee’s Module Of The Year award).

I couldn’t agree more with that last sentence: Structure has quickly become an indispensable EE add-on, one that I use on almost every one of my EE sites.

Khoi Vinh on “Lost”

  • Posted Feb 5, 2010
  • Categories TV
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Pulling Over and Asking for Directions:

Granted, I’ve logged only a meager number of hours in the “Lost” universe but already it seems apparent to me that the pleasure that the show evokes has very little to do with unraveling its many mysteries. Rather it’s about the state of being mystified, bewildered and maybe a little bit frustrated too. Which is to say that, if you ask me, most of its devoted fans secretly don’t really want to understand what’s happening at all.

They watch each episode under the pretense that the narrative is moving towards some sort of resolution and that they’re participating in that resolution. But in fact they really tune in so that they can have their expectations and assumptions confounded, cut-off, detoured and further confused. In this, “Lost” obliges profusely and frequently, usually when the writers seemed confused or at a loss for purpose themselves. (To that end, I have to say that the show also has to be one of the most appropriately named television shows I can think of, exceeded in aptness only by “Cops.”)

For what it’s worth, I think Vinh ought to spend less time writing about grids and more time writing about pop culture—even though I disagree with his fundamental assertions.

PopMatters reviews Tsutomu Nihei’s “Biomega”

PopMatters reviews the first issue of Tsutomu Nihei’s Biomega:

Biomega shouldn’t be so much fun. The story sounds like a checklist of sci-fi cliches. Dystopian futureworld: been there. Corporations as evil overlords: yawn. Zombie apocalypse: what, again? A stoic good guy who wears black, rides a motorbike and…zzzz.

[...]

The story is so familiar that a summary seems redundant. It isn’t aiming to deconstruct dystopian/cyberpunk/zombie-virus motifs. It’s the all-out embrace of the cliches, the skill with which they’re handled, and the enthusiasm for them that pushes this manga into the win column.

I came across this in the bookstore the other day and liked what I saw. Then again, I’ve always found Nihei’s vision of a transhumanist/post-apocalyptic future intriguing. I even enjoyed—or perhaps, “appreciated” is a better word—the six-part Blame! animation that came out a few years back.

Kairos

by Caul

I’ve been a fan of Caul’s (aka Brett Smith) music for some time now, ever since I got The Sound of Faith back in the mid 1990s. Like Raison d’être, Smith’s brand of dark ambient music has always had a ritualistic, even sacred component to it—and not simply because he occasionally included angelic, choral samples in and amidst his cavernous drones and sonic drifts. Listening to those albums was like wandering through a ruined cathedral and catching glimpses and fragments of the holy ceremonies once performed there, ages ago; all in all, a very heady and affecting experience.

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N.Design Studio

N.Design Studio

If there’s one design-related skill that I wish I was much more proficient in, it would have to be illustration. Oh sure, I can fire up Illustrator or Freehand and put together a couple of vectors, and I’ve done fair share of sketching in notebooks, but there’s a knack there that I just don’t have. As such, I’m both incredibly jealous and incredibly in awe of someone who really and truly knows their stuff. Which brings me to Nick La and his recent redesign of N.Design Studio, which serves as his blog and design portfolio.

When done right, illustrations can add a nice organic touch to a website design/layout, and that is precisely the case with La’s site. As you travel through the site, you’ll see bright, richly detailed illustrations with a decided Asian bent to them, lending the site both an organic and an exotic look and feel.

But the attention to detail doesn’t end with the illustrations. It continues on through the playful typography in the headers, the tiny icons used for rollover effects in the main menu, and the navigational flourishes. However, there are times when there’s so much detail that the design becomes a little overwhelming and cluttered (e.g., the layout of the blog entry comments).

But overall, a very lush and gorgeous design that, as I mentioned before, leaves me both insanely jealous and very much in awe.

Related: Process of Redesigning N.Design

Midnight Eye’s Best (and Worst) of 2009

  • Posted Feb 1, 2010
  • Categories Movies
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Midnight Eye recently published their list of the best and worst Japanese films of 2009. The big winners include Sion Sono’s Love Exposure, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Air Doll, and Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer Wars.

We Are Hunted

  • Posted Feb 1, 2010
  • Categories Music
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We Are Hunted collects and lists the “99 most popular emerging songs in the world”. It pleases me to no end to see The Radio Dept.‘s “Heaven’s On Fire” is currently at #1. Other songs include Efterklang’s “Modern Drift”, Lali Puna’s “Remember”, The Album Leaf’s “Falling From The Sun”, and The Knife’s “The Height of Summer”. FYI, here’s how it works:

We listen to what people are saying about artists and their music on blogs, social networks like Facebook and MySpace, message boards and forums, Twitter and P2P networks to chart the top songs online everyday.

More info at Mashable.

The Saturnine Age and the Modern Genius

  • Posted Jan 29, 2010
  • Categories Art
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Michael Toscano on how the definition of artistic genius has changed throughout history:

When a modern person thinks of artistic genius, they imagine an individual. Some have quantified genius by standardized exams—for example, the I.Q. test—but most know a genius by his work. The Brothers Karamazov is proof that Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a genius. Be it Shakespeare, Mozart, or Michelangelo, the man of genius is epoch-making because his work acutely affects history and seems to redefine our basic categories of human potential.

Yet in our common imagination, the artistic genius is not only an individual of excellent output, but an individual of a certain disposition. The man of genius is exceptional in intelligence, originality, and creativity. While free from all that restrains the average person, he bears the greatest burden of all: the burden of being him.

What the modern person misses, however, is that this particular sort genius is but a newborn—and not just a newborn, but a bastard. The modern artist-genius, and the entire modern notion of art, was engineered in the cultural and philosophical laboratory of the Renaissance. The Renaissance assault on millenniums-old beliefs about genius gave birth to both the modern idea of Art and artist. History has forgotten what truly made the Renaissance radical—their re-writing of the classical world.

In the classical world, the genius was not a man at all. It was a god.