#music
Material 2024
Berlin, Germany
Here are some of the coolest posters I saw in the city this year. Here's the collection from last year.
Material 2023
Berlin, Germany
Berlin has cash only bars, stickers to put over your phone's camera before you can come into the party, and a strong poster culture. The surfaces of the city are covered in a growing, shedding, and regenerating skin of posters. Most are good. Here are the ones I liked this year.
Links, November 2023
Right now I am in England. It's the first time I've been back since we moved away to Germany and being here has immersed me back in some old themes... like the British class obsession. A little while ago I read Bright Young People, about a certain set of upper class enfants terribles who were the first of a kind of person that is now splashed all over Hello magazine. One of that set was Evelyn Waugh, who wrote a send up of the whole gang that I've just finished reading: Vile Bodies. The book is full of social climbers,...
Links, May 2023
First, whimsy. I like it when people do something that could have been straightforward and to the point, but instead they inject a little bit of charming madness in there, the unpredictable human touch. Here is a band website that is old fashioned, simple, and yet deeply weird. Give it a minute. Here is a clock website that shows an excerpt from a book for every minute of the day, a bit like my favourite film installation, The Clock by Christian Marclay. Here is a hand-curated archive of fictional brands that appear in media. Here is a man who invented...
Good screen, bad screen
We are about to share a media experience together. Please switch off and put your phone away. Please switch off your smart watch and annihilate any other illuminated sources of time. Please strive to be entirely within the world created by the shared experience rather than in your own life or even your own body, whose use should be constrained to the sense organs need to consume the experience and the parts required for breathing, crying, and perhaps laughing. Limit then, itching, fidgeting, coughing, sneezing, farting, and throat clearing. I, of course, might start scrolling through my phone if I...
Lucian, Ann, Fred
So Popbitch (a very catty UK media gossip newsletter) reports that Fred Again's people have been trying to keep the fact that he is minor gentry out of his Wikipedia article. Fair enough. I understood his story to go as follows: young South London guy makes poppy dance songs during the pandemic, goes viral, becomes instant stadium-packing act once the restrictions lift, and boy he just can't believe his luck. Shucks! No doubt this narrative has been carefully shaped by him and his people, and the truth does endear me to him less. His daddy is a Baron and a...
Links, October 2022
First off, here's a DJ set I liked. Right now a lot of people are talking about leaving Twitter (here's mine). Many of those that go ahead with it and turning up in Mastodon (here's mine) and talking a big game about how the collapse of Twitter will beget a golden age for the decentralised internet. That's nice. I don't believe it's really going to be that simple, though. On the topic of decentralised internet things: the FBI seized the Z-lib ebook archive! That's a big pity given how hard it is to get ebooks without giving Amazon money. The...
Posting
POSTING. Why must you post? Why must the thoughts you have be assessed in public for their value? Be boring or interesting to yourself. For the sake of thinking unthinkingly don't show your thoughts to others. Otherwise, you'll never be able to think without an audience. — Open Mike Eagle, Informations
How Phoebe Bridgers Made 'Punisher'
— How Phoebe Bridgers Made 'Punisher', Angie Martoccio in Rolling Stone
Bob Fosse, Joseph, and Rihanna
I was watching Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1999) the other day. It's the height of camp, and I was trying to work out what the elements were and what they reminded me of. Then it came to the introductory Potiphar number and it clicked. The Rich Man's Frug is a dance number that appears in Sweet Charity (1969), a musical comedy directed by the choreographer Bob Fosse. It typifies Bob Fosse's style: absurdist elements, people-as-stage, and intense camp. It had to have inspired that Potiphar number, right? There's one more place it popped up recently: in Rihanna, DJ...
Music Is Changing
At its most basic level, music is simply a series of amplitudes and frequencies that make human beings move and vocalise in diverse and strange ways. However, like all other forms of human expression and entertainment, it is now a commodity. This commodity is now packaged to be sold, streamed, licensed and advertised to us. The people who distribute the music define our experience with this basic human commodity. These days there’s very little you can do to hear music without interacting with a third party of some kind, short of listening to a friend play guitar in your living...