josh blog

Ordinary language is all right.

One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.

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10 Dec '04 04:32:21 AM

Did Ted Leo just say 'bourgeois'?

Sigh.

10 Dec '04 03:30:29 AM

Low provoke more lazy reviewing than most any of the music I like. Slow! Oh! My! God! It is slow! They are slow! Hey! Slow!

8 Dec '04 08:52:12 AM

I don't see how John could ever get sick of all five thousand songs on his new iPod; I've had mine for a few months or so and 3551 out of 5200 of the tracks I share between iBook and iPod are still unplayed.

7 Dec '04 08:05:27 AM

'a teenage love that didn't feel no hurt yet'

7 Dec '04 01:36:43 AM

'Why, Doctor Wong, what brings you here?!'

7 Dec '04 12:47:36 AM

The spy-guitar shit on Britney's Toxic seemed to have vanished once I listened to it for the first time on my decent headphones, and the bendy bassline gained prominence.

6 Dec '04 08:03:41 AM

Undergraduate humanities educations are sincere but premised on things that aren't really possible with a normal life outside the academy: leisure time and a community of intellectual friends. They are possible, but only by rejecting much that is difficult to reject.

6 Dec '04 07:24:32 AM

It seems as if the tracks on this Akufen mix tend toward a consistent sound, where the beat and the bassline and maybe some other clicky ffft things are separable from a midrange sound or sample or something or other, often a vocal from an original track; this is noticeable because over the course of the record, since the beat is let's say polite, and the other component has a certain distanced smallness to it, it begins to sound as if the record is just a chain of episodes of these little fiddly midrange bits. Maybe playing it louder changes things; it does seem less monotonous (in that good way) than the last time I had it on, and up much louder.

6 Dec '04 07:14:05 AM

Lately I've felt more pressingly the sort of lack in music that must be what makes some people eventually defend one of two positions - and the military connotation should be taken seriously. Either, that there is great art and then there is the disappointing remainder of the field; or that art, no matter what level, has no claim to truth and is ultimately mere entertainment or stimulation. On the one hand, crossing one's fingers hoping that by a vigorous enough defense (and thorough enough repudiation of what is 'ephemeral'), what hasn't yet betrayed you will be able to be saved; on the other hand, folding early.

I feel this lack more acutely when I also think that my inability to write something that feels significant about a record is a sign of the whole enterprise not really being worthwhile in the first place.