My friend Todd asked me to post this. 

Now Hear This

Carrie Brownstein, of Sleater-Kinney and Portlandia fame, released a top 23 "punk" albums list this past week, which has properly received some attention.  Although many of these bands are more accurately described as Post-Punk or New Wave, as DFA Records first suggested on its Twitter feed, it is a good list for discovering some of the better music the 70s had to offer (why wasn't I listening to Pylon more?). 

Here it is (I underlined a few that would certainly make my own list):

• Wire, 154
• Au Pairs, “You” 7-inch
• Delta 5, “Mind Your Own Business” 7-inch
• Undertones, “You’ve Got My Number (Why Don’t You Use It?)” 7-inch
• Wipers, Is This Real?
• Talking Heads, Remain in Light
• Bad Brains, “Pay to Cum” 7-inch
• Fugazi, 13 Songs
• Mo-Dettes, “White Mice” 7-inch
• The Slits, Cut
• The Jam, All Mod Cons
• The Stooges, Fun House
• X-Ray Spex, Germ Free Adolescents
• The Clash, Sandinista!
• Rites of Spring, Self Titled
• Buzzcocks, A Different Kind of Tension
• Minutemen, Double Nickles on the Dime
• Hüsker Dü, Zen Arcade
• The Replacements, Let It Be
• B-52’s, Wild Planet
• Television, Marquee Moon
• Gang of Four, Entertainment!
• Pylon, Gyrate 

Also, for god's sake, you should be listening to Phoenix's new album Entertainment! (not a typo, it shares a title with the Gang of Four album, above) this week.  There are a couple of tracks that don't quite manage to soar, but it's a big wet spit in the face of impossibility to follow an album as essential as Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix with something as strong as Entertainment!   

The mix they concocted for the Paramount last month let the voice-of-god low end of the synthesizers resonate in your chest cavity.  The album further demonstrates that that element of their sound has fully matured.  The buzzy warmth of the synths on this record is like a bed I don't want to get out of.

April is the cruellest month

We at tCL are pleased to note that demolition of our headquarters is over and construction has begun in earnest.

There is no there there

It is a funny thing about addresses where you live. When you live there you know it so well that it is like an identity a thing that is so much a thing that it could not ever be any other thing and then you live somewhere else and years later, the address that was so much an address that it was like your name and you said it as if it was not an address but something that was living and then years after you do not know what the address was and when you say it it is not a name anymore but something you cannot remember. That is what makes your identity not a thing that exists but something you do or do not remember.

- Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography

Home is a Junk Heap

Our kitchen resides in the future music room.

Kepler 62f

An artist's impression of a sunrise on Kepler 62f.

“This is the first planet that ticks both boxes. It’s the right size and the right temperature." - David Charbonneau, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

This is Happening

Modern Is Not Contemporary

To the Wonder

Upcoming Films of Note

An Atheist Responds to Death

Faith offers the comfort that, despite all conceivable evidence to the contrary, death is not the end. Sadly, the ability of an idea to comfort us is no measure of its truth; if anything, our most comforting ideas are the ones we ought to be most careful to interrogate and verify.

Death, and the fear of no afterlife, are often cited by believers as the reason they still cling to beliefs for which our human tools of understanding - the sciences - offer no support.  If there were more atheists who could write with the simple confidence of Roger Ebert, there would be fewer relying on fantasy for solace.  This is beautiful: http://www.salon.com/2011/09/15/roger_ebert/

Pools at Night

(Pool Party, 2010 by Jonathan Wateridge. Oil on linen. Courtesy of All Visual Arts/London)

The doorbell sits on a sandstone wall set perpendicular to the front door which is glass and oversized and mounted on a brass pivot and blends with the glass walls on either side of it. A girl I don’t know and who doesn’t say anything but acts friendly answers the door and I follow her through the house to the back where the pool glows sedately under the balmy summer night sky.

Tyrone is sitting on a deck chair on the other side with two girls sitting nearby. The girls are skinny but attractive, well-dressed, good teeth. House music plays from speakers hidden here and there. I can’t see them, but I can hear the sound swell and recede as I walk past them.

The light refracting from the surface of the pool plays on the surface of Trini’s skin in intricate designs like subatomic explosions. The borders always possess the most beauty and beauty is expensive. Houses on the beach or with mountain or ocean views cost something, because they have access to the border areas, the places where two distinct environments come together and interact. And the surface of the pool is one of these. A membrane between two worlds that defines beauty.

From The Heat Death of the Universe, copyright R. White, unpublished.