Ah, the joy of discovery. Do you know the feeling of newly discovering an older band, when everyone else has tired of them but you're so into their stuff? And then you look and it's like, "Oh, they've already got ___insert a ridiculous number here____ other albums!" So it's even better because you don't have to wait until their next album comes out to hear more of their music, yet it's all new to you. Wow, that's wordy.
Anyway, the following are a list of the top 10 bands or artists that I've discovered this year. In no particular order. Thanks goes out to FM4, hypemachine and UTNE Reader monthly music samplers because that's where I discovered most of these artists. Most of them put out a new album this year, so I guess that makes this list a "Top 10 Albums from 'New' Artists of 2010" too.
At first I thought this song was about missing somebody but then I listened more closely to the lyrics...
When I first heard this is was at work in Ottawa. I looked Lone Wolf up on Myspace and noticed that he was coming to Toronto for a show (not even - it was a support act). The show was on a Monday night. I left for Toronto for the weekend and watched the show on Monday, rushing to catch the midnight bus back to Ottawa for work on Tuesday morning at 7.
Yeah, the last two videos? You can tell that I love alt-rock with prominent drums.
I've only heard two songs from them so far but I really like her voice!
Crazy stuff. But I'm afraid their stuff is getting repetitive, as in, the beats are good, and I know it's supposed to be remixed, but they don't know how to end their songs...
Psych-e-de-lia!
This band's name is funny because I tried some capoeira for a while, and whenever I search for the band on a search engine I get some Japanese thing or the capoeira thing.
Okay. That's enough. That's way over ten, isn't it?
Top 10 "New" Artists of the Year
Boo for TV
So I had basically no television viewing time over the last few years, because a) I like to watch TV on TVs b) I didn't really get into the whole illegal streaming thing and c) For a while I didn't have internet. So over the last few years I've amassed a list of TV Shows that have gotten great reviews and that I was really really excited to watch. Over these past few months, I've tried to get into a lot of them and all I have to say is that I want those hours of my life back. So-called "great" shows are not that great. With one exception. So I won't listen to people for advice for TV shows now. I think I'll go back to sit-coms.
Show I tried to like but it turned out to be boring
Note: when I say try to like I mean I've watched at least 5 episodes
True Blood
The Wire
Mad Men
Shows that I've watched one episode of but I may or may not like
The Sopranos
New Shows that I love
Archer
The Office
Yup. Comedy it is for me.
Films - Dreams - Psychoanalysis - Myth
When I started becoming interested in more than a film's plot - I became excited about a film's camera angles and shot types and sounds and the technical terminology. And so I thought it was so different from literary analysis. English was my favourite subject in high school because it was an escape from all the other courses I was taking by the end but at the same time I sort of hated it because it just repeated itself over and over: okay now, we're going to examine a character and the world that the author has created. At the end of the day, it was cool but deep down inside I was always asking, "Yeah, so, what's the point? I can't relate, really, to any of these characters." Not the guy from Fahrenheit 451 or Brave New World or girl from To Kill a Mockingbird or Hamlet.
So I started taking cinema classes and it's all this stuff about visual representation and whatnot but then when I write papers about the films it's all this other stuff you have to consider like the industrial complex and the social and historical circumstances (as well as the "aesthetic" bits). And then you have to explain the character's motivations. And interpret it. Well. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that cinema studies is psychoanalysis of a text, with all the other 'circumstances' thrown in for good academic measure.
Myths, films and dreams all do something to our subconscious that should be analyzed pscyhologically, and they intertwine, which is interesting, but shouldn't we be leaving these to the psychologists? Cinema studies should be a social science. I was tricked into thinking it was in humanities! Or the performing arts, even!
Well, we'll see where all this theory leads to eventually...
S.A.D., anyone?
I don't care how many exams I have to take, just give me the sun! In the meantime, here is a sunny song:
Incredible meatless quesadilla recipe
1. Sautee half a medium smalley-diced onion but do not brown it.
2. Add a can of that tomato paste stuff which is nasty by itself but delicious with other things.
3. When the rest is warmed thoroughly, add half a pack of Yves' Mexican Veggie Ground Round.
4. Take a corn (or flour) tortilla and warm it in the microwave. Meanwhile, when the above mixture is warmed, add some cheese and red peppers or jalapeno to the mix.
5. Spoon the mixture onto the tortilla. Add a thin layer of cheese onto the surface. Microwave until the cheese melts.
6. Either roll it up if you can or press another tortilla on top and cut into triangles.!!
Challenge: Spend Less Time on the Computer
People (used to) complain about watching too much TV and wasting your life away, but now that TV and movies have shifted online or onto harddrives, we have too much TV AND too much computer. I think out of all the challenges I have on 43Things, this will be one of the most difficult.
Almost none of the best memories I have in life were spent in front of a computer (except reconnecting with some people through social networking or Skype), yet I spend maybe 50% or more of my waking hours in front of a computer (my waking hours are about 16 in total. I absolutely need 8 hours of sleep.)
The worst for students is that now basically all essay writing (Microsoft Word), studying (PowerPoint presentations) and research is done online, so I can't really escape the computer.
All last year I had an office job where I sat in front of a computer all day and it was ugly, both for my body and my mind.
Even my current job requires me to do most of my research online.
So how am I going to get away from the computer?
First of all, let me define my goal the SMART way:
Specific - I think "turning off the computer" is pretty specific. It does not mean I can hibernate then go back on it at night.
Measurable - I want to cut down my total computer use (not just Internet use but computer) to 1.5 hours a day.
Attainable - People have lived for thousands of years not having a computer stuck to them daily. It's not like I won't have Internet, or other entertainment within my reach, and I will have other off-line projects to work on (baking, anyone?)
Realistic - Well, other than my research-oriented job and writing some stories on my computer, I don't have much else I absolutely need to do for more than 1.5 hours other than if I wanted to listen to music or watch a show. But this is a daily thing, so if I listen to 1 hour of music a day, then I'll just have to watch a show another day.
Timely - I want to do this by March. By then I will know more of what I'm doing when I move back in with my parents. Or, rather, less of what I'm doing...
So that's it. I can't really start the challenge until all my exams are done because that's just unfair to myself, but once I start I will allot some of my 1.5 hour quota to updating on here!
Epic
I was at my university's FreeStore the other day and I was milling about, looking around, looking around, seeing nothing, and then within the span of two seconds I pick up two great books, both hardcovers.
1. Edward Rutherford's massive London
2. Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential
and then my friend handed me her copy of Atlas Shrugged so that'll help me with my challenge. So even after January when I have no more school I have a bit of reading to do. I'm excited, actually!
Note to Self
I am suddenly struck by an interest in World History, Historiography, and the Philosophy of History.
I am interested in history through metanarratives (Lyotard), cyclic and time-dimension -type history (Nietzsche) and Mythemes (Lévi-Strauss).
I think the idea of evolution as a narrative makes me think that there is some climax to the "story of humankind" and that each generation or century thinks that they are living in that climax (maybe. or not. maybe that's just my theory, me with no training in history. I'm just brainstorming ideas here).
I would also like to think that no, there is no "end", no "impending doom", no "apocalypse" and these are all just made up. Magazines like this because they grab you with headlines like "The end of ______insert thing vital to this culture here_________." "The end of food." "The end of technology." "The end of..." etc.
So what if it's the end? I'm trying to think of something that was vital for past civilizations but nowadays we don't even consider it a real thing. At a smaller scale, this would be something like the Vinyl Disc, or not even...maybe the Laser Disc. Probably when the Laser Disc was put out, some media were writing headlines like "The end of video." But no.
What probably started me thinking about this was my Climatology course's class on Climate Change and how everything needs to be looked at in terms of scale. Humans have been here only a tiny portion of earth's life, and yet me studying in Humanities, it seems like we're all that matters. I guess there's a biological need for it, I guess if we "evolved" thinking that all that mattered was, say, (ugh it's so hard to think of something universal to humans) Pine Cones, then we would spend most of our time and energy on pine cones and not enough to actually feed ourselves or warm ourselves and then we would've died. I guess.
Another thing that started me thinking about this was viewing The Edukators, how one generation of activists just slowly fade away and another one comes along and raise caine. Stuff like this makes me think that history comes in cycles. Once something is forgotten, and oh how easy it is to forget, then it just repeats itself. I remember learning about the Holocaust in high school and they said that the most important part of why they're telling us all this is so that it isn't forgotten.
To have history, there has to be a belief in such a thing as a past, and there has to be a belief in a future, and then a present has to be defined from past and future. But what if there is no past and future? What if it is just a big circle and that archaeologists and historians and all those who are digging up the past...what if the past is actually the future?
There also has to be a belief in something called progress. I've read countless times texts in which there was the claim "Today we live in a state so much better than people in the past. Despite every problem we have today, we have this and this and that and look how much we've improved." Yeah, I guess you can claim that if you're measuring "betterness" by stuff like "social justice", "development", "(right to) education" (I'm putting EVERYTHING in quotes because I'm really tired), "equality", "non-discrimination", "peace", "meeting of basic human needs such as food, water, shelter", "dignity", "social mobility", "democracy", "freedom of speech"...for some places more than others at least...(notice how none of these include "having lots of money", "being famous" and "having a bigger house" [maybe except for equality...not equality of opportunity, which is merit-based, but equality]?)
The problem is...only back for a couple of generations, you're still comparing the present to the present if you make the above claim. You're still comparing today's interpretation of indirect documentation of the past to today. You say, "Unless there's time travel!" But that's just it. Even with time travel, you were born into a certain time period in a certain culture (though with globalization I think that culture is spreading-not transmission-wise but more like a spreading out, thinning of peanut butter onto toast. although there is the issue of cultural imperialism.), and even if you travel back in time, like being raised in one culture and then living your adult life in another, you are still of your own time so you are immersed in the ideas of that time. Getting back to the point of time travel, say you went back to, oh I don't know, the 1st century A.D. You go and you say, "Look at what they eat and look at what they wear! And how they treat their squirrels!" And then you go back to your own time and you think that what you have in comparison is better. Well maybe if/when we do get time travel, some people would fall in love with the place and choose to stay in it (Crichton), but then maybe that's due to exoticism or grass is greener on the other side syndrome.
First and foremost of all, we do not have time travel so we have only one life (well even with time travel we only have one life with different time-domain alternatives; right now we only have space-domain alternatives i.e. moving to another place if we don't like it here barring borders and barriers), one perspective - that's right one perspective no matter how educated and open-minded you are because as one person = one vote, one person = one perspective. So anyway of course the idea of progress is relative and I guess like everything else in the social sciences progress is also dynamic and along a continuum. So, say that "we" are aiming at progress. Then we're aiming at a moving target, not just moving towards "higher" progress (another topic to discuss are the loaded superlatives such as higher and lower and majority and minority in discourse), but aiming a target that is shifting according the society's "needs" and "wants", probably with a lag time of about oh I don't know.
I guess this is also the tenet of Orientalism (Said). Europeans looked at people living in the Arabic Peninsula, saw that they desperately lacked the comforts of the current European civilization, and decided that what they needed was "progress".
I am really skeptical of governments now because they tend to go by either their own interests or what they think is right for the masses (actually advertising goes the same way, except it is usually "What is marketable to the masses to earn the top dollar"). This links in with the idea of control and power (Chomsky).
Even with an idea of reincarnation...what am I getting at here I am too tired I no longer know!
But what do I know? I am merely a product of my society, right?
Anyway, books I want to read are:
The Postmodern Condition (or not. it's too demanding)
Guns, Germs and Steel (I started this like 2 years ago but have yet to pick it up again)
What Technology Wants
Any book recommendations would be good!
How far? You never seem to know
I can't get this song out of my head. Possibly because the whole song has about two lines.
Couldn't Resist
I love love love lists. Granted, most of the bolded ones were for high school required reading. I now absolutely hate dystopian fiction because that was basically the curriculum for all of high school.
Have you read more than 6 of these books? *Allegedly* the BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.
• Bold those books you've read in their entirety.
• Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Reads
Here's a list of books I want to read in the upcoming months/weeks or whenever I get around to reading:
Barney's Version
The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Atlas Shrugged (long!)
Room
They seem like pretty heavy books so I want some lighter fare too. Around Christmastime I like to read Christmas-related books, so I've got Holidays on Ice on hold and I also want to get my hands on The Stupidest Angel.
Here's to good reading!
Aguirre, the Boringness of God...
I apologize if the title offends anyone, but I was just playing on words.
Anyway, yesterday I was so stoked because my German film class was going to screen Werner Herzog's 1972 Aguirre, the Wrath of God. I love looking forward to watching classics because it's like eating a savoury full meal instead of chocolate cake for dinner.
Then last night I watched the film and though I liked the opening scene, that was it. Oh, I tell myself, am I not to be a movie fan? Another classic that I don't like.
Alas, maybe I had too high of an expectation for the film. I forced myself not to look at the clock on the wall, but time ticked on and on. I thought the runtime must've been 2.5 hours but when I checked this morning the maximum runtime was 1 h 40 min! It was that strenuous to watch.
You might say to me, "Maybe you just don't like arthouse films." Maybe not, but then I could list some arthouse films that I do like. "Maybe it's just that you grew up in the MTV generation." Maybe, but I like other slower-paced films. I'm just disappointed by this one. Unfortunately. Well, I've been watching mediocre films again lately but I'm always on the lookout for the next gem!
Ich liebe FM4
Why does it take an Austrian radio station streamed through the web at their 1 AM in the morning for me to hear local Canadian artists?
Other than campus radio stations, I have never heard of The Acorn or Sid LeRock and I find it amazing that they're from the backyard of Ontario, yet you won't hear them on the airwaves unless you're in Austria (or on the Internet)! I find it hilarious.
On Laughing Cats and Weeping Bats
I'm currently reading a classic called The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov from Russia.
Apparently it's a critique about Stalinism. Well, la-dee-da because with that knowledge I feel like I'm in way over my head and I every time I pick up the book I feel like I need a copy of SparksNotes to my right and never has leisure reading been so nerve-wracking for me. I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of symbolism and allegory and whatnot.
Most of the time, though, I try to relax and take it as another entertaining read, taking everything for what it is - the whole magical realism and people turning into witches and the devil coming to town as a fantasy story. And it works, except for the little voice inside my head saying that I should've had so much more background before diving into all this...
B&W
I love well-cinematographed black and white films. They harken to theatre style of lighting.
The depth of field that you can see, the play with shadows and light.
Colour doesn't show that as well. For colour films that are filmed with film and not video, even if you see the focus and the blur in the background and you say to yourself, "Ah, so it's film and not video," there seems to be a more paltry sheen of flatness to it.
I especially love looking at still shots of black and white films because of the lighting.
Why I Refuse to Follow 1001 Movies You Must See
I love lists, I love movies, I love ticking off the movies that I have seen on movie lists. As testament to that, I have this account which I update every few weeks or so.
So why on earth would I pass on adding the "1001 movies you must see before you die" to my list? I respect Steven Jay Schneider as a film scholar. But looking through the list, I do not want to waste my time on westerns, on action and sci-fi flicks. I see a lot of Kurosawa films and I always feel nauseous after watching Kurosawas. I'm sure there are some great hidden gems in that list but I am not going to push myself to watch films that may waste my time.
Am I being closed-minded for declaring this? Maybe. Probably. Oh well. But saying that an average film is 1 hr 45 min long, watching all 1001 films means about 73 (non-stop) days of my life. Although film-watching is basically my life, watching films that make me bored or nauseous or want to look out the window and play with the real world is not part of my life.
In the past few months I've seen some bad, boring movies and for that reason and others, I have slowed down my summer movie viewing craziness from past years (from my film log, I'd have to say the start of the new year is when I view the most movies and then summer is the lagging time of movie viewing).
Here is a sample of the really movies I disliked that I've seen in the past few months:
Russian Ark - disappointing!
The Last Days of Disco - I wanted to slap all the characters and shove them into a bodybag
Sex, lies and videotape
Ordinary People - boring!
A Serious Man - the main character was annoying, not unserious, just annoying
Machuca - disappointing
To counter that, here are some movies I really liked:
Paris, Texas - I thought Wings of Desire was pretty boring (don't hate me!), so I hesitated to see this from Wim Wenders. It turned out to be a true masterpiece.
Together (Tillsammans) - I saw this last night and it was hilarious.
Knocked Up, 40-Year-Old Virgin, Funny People - Judd Apatow is my newest addition to my favourite directors list
Thelma and Louise
Inglorious Basterds
Croupier
Mysterious Skin - JGL is so good
Music that Makes Me Wish I Knew How to Dance
You know I love lists. And I love hit summer songs until they get overplayed on the radio. Unless, well, they are more under-the-radar. Here is a list of songs that I have recently discovered that anyone, even the most soulless enemy, would feel the groove to (in no particular order)
Mark Ronson & Business Intl - Bang Bang Bang (Russ Chimes Remix) ... the original's really boring!
Swedish House Mafia - One and One (Your Name) feat. Pharrell
Edward Maya feat. Vika Jigulina - Stereo Love
Megan C - I Got It
Sunloverz - Summer Love
Film Lists
About 6 years ago in English class I was handed a list of AFI's (American Film Institute) top 100 movies, told to choose one, screen it and write about it.
I chose Citizen Kane because I knew there'd be lots of material about it. I then took the list and made a conscious decision that I would view every one of the films. Thus started my foray into film craziness and more of a film education than I feel like the education I would've gotten in 4 years of film studies (if I had gone into film studies for university, for example).
Fast forward (or skip, but even DVD-speak is going out) 6 years and I have two more films to go! Two more! They are 1931's Frankenstein and 1939's Gone With the Wind. After I'm done these it would feel to me like what watchers of Lost felt when the show ended, probably: something is missing.
But no matter, because there's always the BFI's (British Film Institute) top 100 list and IMDB's top 250 lists I'm working on and this and that list. Along the way, I've watched a lot of (mostly European) foreign films and read a lot on films and film analysis while I was actually supposed to be reading stuff for geography or linguistics.
I'm not done yet, but if you asked me which movie was my favourite of the AFI 100, I wouldn't be able to tell you. Indeed, the list is pretty sad now that I look over it again because it reminds me that cinematic history is reflective of history in general: written (or directed by) white males. I could add in all sorts of identity markers too, like straight and rich and on and on but race and gender are the two annoyances I have with AFI's list. Even in other countries and on international lists, females really do not have a place in cinematic history as of current. I look at lists like Jonathan Rosenbaum's 1,001 films to see before you die lists and the Criterion Collection I think I really don't want to spend my time watching yet more Japanese movies about samurai or westerns about avenging someone or other. Michael Kaminski wrote a good article about why more women need to be producing and receiving film.
Another upcoming landmark is my 1,000th film logged in my film log (as of today I have watched 948 films since June 23, 2003). Okay I think that you'd think me more crazy than wanting to celebrate with me since I told you this.
Update: Music
Here is what I am listening to right now:
The XX. I love the duo singers. Their voices complement each other really well.
Lone Wolf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aogO8ODj4PE
Janelle Monae.
