More obscure Japanese shoegaze, this time from Speaker Gain Teardrop off their album RENDERING ENCRYPTION (a title that will no doubt bring a smile to Cory Doctrow’s face).
Here’s both the live and studio versions.
More obscure Japanese shoegaze, this time from Speaker Gain Teardrop off their album RENDERING ENCRYPTION (a title that will no doubt bring a smile to Cory Doctrow’s face).
Here’s both the live and studio versions.
In which we learn, yet again, that mother nature really hate 18-wheelers.
I guess those annoying sirens are the new “TORNADOES WILL KILL YOU UNLESS YOU TAKE SHELTER RIGHT FUCKING NOW!!!!” warning.
Filmed off a TV, but impressive close-ups:
From Lancaster
Aftermath:
Welsh trio The Joy Formidable offers up dense shoegaze textures with poppy hooks, sort of like a cross between between Siouxie and the Banshees and Adorable.
Since they’re been on Letterman, I guess they’re hardly a secret…
Here’s a live version of Japanese threesome Lemon’s Chair song “Sonar.” It starts off as some very pleasant noodling, and then more than halfway in transforms into a sonic wall of sound that never quite loses the central groove.
They also have a nice solid slab of steady-state shoegazer sweetness called “Swallowtail” on iTunes, but there doesn’t seem to be a version of that on YouTube.
The second trailer for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus is out:
When this was first announced, it was disclosed that it was set in the Alien universe, but it wasn’t clear whether the xenomorphs themselves would make an appearance. After this trailer, I feel pretty safe in saying that they will.
Howard Waldrop and I will review this when it comes out.
So I saw this video on Fark on how to peel garlic in ten seconds by shaking the cloves between two steel bowls a while back:
I make fresh salsa from time to (and have won some honorable mentions at a local hot sauce competition for same), and one of the biggest pains in the ass is peeling 4-5 whole bulbs of fresh garlic (the jar stuff just doesn’t work as well). So I thought I would give it a try.
What do you know? It works. Not 10 seconds, or quite as well peeled as in the video, but my two steel bowls are smaller than this guy’s. Even so, this easily cut about 80% of my garlic peeling time, which adds up to over an hour in the course of a year.
This may be an old tip for many of you, but I thought I would share it for those who regularly have to peel garlic…
Try to avoid getting stabbed today.
In celebration, here’s an extremely abbreviated version of Julius Caesar, performed at a Little Caesar’s:
Never let it be said that my blog is short on highfalutin culture…
Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You” is the music Bruce Sterling would put on at the end of the party after every Turkey City Writer’s Workshop held at his house, mainly so people would leave. It worked too, not because it was bad, but because the waltz tempo, echoey steel guitar and smoky vocals make it the perfect “chill out at the end of a long day and feel your eyelids getting heavy” song. I bought the single off iTunes, but I think I might need to pick up the entire album, So Tonight That I Might See, as I’ve developed a craving for Hope Sandoval’s voice, which combines that smokey, chill tone of a classic jazz/blues chanteuse with peak-period Sinatra’s last-second, end-of-the-measure timing.
Is Mazzy Star shoegazer? I think they’re more sui generis, but I’ve seen “Fade Into You” on several Best of Shoegazer lists, and that’s good enough for me…
Flying robot quadrotors perform the James Bond theme:
This was done at Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science‘s Vijay Kumar, Daniel Melligner and Alex Kushleyev. The quadrotors are under computer control.
It’s not a particularly good version, but I’m sure they’ll have time to improve before the final enslavement of humanity. Now you’ll have to excuse me, I have to write a quadrotor heist novel…
(Hat tip: Derek Johnson)
Howard and I will review Brave, Pixar’s animated film this year, for Locus Online.
Given that it’s Pixar, we fully expect it to fall somewhere between “really good” and “totally awesome.”