zelo•magazine

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

PJ Harvey: "The Mountain" (Live for Norwegian radio)

Polly Jean Harvey stopped in Oslo on Wednesday for a Norwegian radio interview and also played five songs from her forthcoming White Chalk. Luckily, the performance was filmed, and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation has posted this performance of "The Mountain" from the session for all to see. If you've heard fellow White Chalk track "When Under Ether", you might not be surprised by the piano or the high vocal register. The shadowy lighting and the intense performance still make this riveting viewing, though, and there's no preparing yourself for when Harvey's voice leaps up for a Tim Buckley-esque flight of vocal fancy. "I feel nothing," she complains, describing dying trees and betrayal between lofty howls. It's still intriguing how quickly she can go back to an easygoing chuckle after this, too.

SOURCE: Pitchforkmedia.com

This just in from Pitchfork…

Weather Report founder Joe Zawinul Dies

Keyboardist, songwriter, and jazz fusion pioneer Joe Zawinul passed away today, September 11, in his native Vienna, according to a Reuters report. The report cites local news agency APA as saying that Zawinul succumbed to a rare form of skin cancer at age 75.

Boxer briefs

The National: "Apartment Story"

If you've seen the cover of the National's Best New Music'd Boxer, then the latest video from that album might look familiar. Filmed in a Brooklyn church, the Banner Gwin-directed clip for "Apartment Story" shows well-dressed singles shyly introducing themselves to each other, tapping their fingers and their toes to the National's thrumming anthem. From a stage behind them, the band plays, and eventually the spiffy young folks start moving out to the dancefloor. "We wanted to capture the sweet but awkward vibe of a wedding reception or singles mixer," the National's Matt Berringer tells Spinner, which has the video. Funny, my wedding DJ thought it would be a good idea to get things going with some Kenny Rogers.

SOURCE: PitchforkMedia.com

Monday, September 10, 2007

If you happen to see either of these men…

…ask them when they are going to get off of their fat asses and produce something close to good music again.
Damn!

Sincerely,
Bart Silverfish
Blissink Records

Black Lips

Black Lips
Good Bad Not Evil
[Vice; 2007]

Rating: 8.3

Black Lips can, to date, be depended on for raucousness, irresponsibility, occasionally pissing in their own mouths onstage, and sloppy garage tunes indebted to noise and punk as much as the band's Southern roots. Given all that, the idea of them hitting anything outside of a niche audience seemed slim. They're a go-to band for filth-rock puritans, even as their unhinged live shows have helped them slowly gain a larger audience with each album's release.

SOURCE: PitchforkMedia.com

Print enlightenment

Art as interaction

Local Projects is turning museums into places where people interact with information—and each other. Its latest commission will have the whole country joining the conversation.

By Angela Starita

SOURCE: PrintMag.com

Animal Collective

Animal Collective
Strawberry Jam
[Domino; 2007]

Rating: 9.3

In March, Animal Collective's Panda Bear (aka Noah Lennox) had his breakout moment with the release of Person Pitch. It was his first solo album that didn't sound like what we'd previously heard from Animal Collective; sample-heavy and based on loops, the album's songwriting devices favored expansion and contraction over conventional chord changes. Person Pitch reflected Panda's interest in dance music-- even when it veered toward the angelic pop innocence forever associated with the harmony-drenched hits of the 1960s and 70s. Both the album and its transcendent centerpiece, "Bros", are deservedly being widely considered among the year's best.

SOURCE: PitchforkMedia.com

I love you, in Irish

Gilliam's Island

The alternative to
the All-American,
family-fun movies
of the last 5 years.

NOTE: Not for the faint of heart

Salad Fingers (7 episodes)

OMG!

A poem: If I Owned the Internet

How many poets could cram eBay, Friendster and Monster.com into 3-minute poem worthy of a standing ovation? "If I were in charge of the Internet," Rives says, "You could Mapquest your lover's mood swings/Hang left at cranky/Right at preoccupied/U-turn at silent treatment ..." Enjoy a unique talent.

About Rives

SOURCE: TED.com

A Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo

A Cross-modal, cross-user, multidimensional experience
Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation.

About Blaise Aguera y Arcas

SOURCE: TED.com

Sunday, September 09, 2007

Dave Eggers: Where you at?

Before he started reading, he was talking about his process
for twisting Deng's voice into his own. This excerpt is one
of the first things he wrote when working on the book.
Moe's Books, Berkeley

There seems to be a suspicious lack of Dave Eggers on television these days. A scant few years ago you couldn't swing an old issue of Might without hitting a mention of the D to the E. He was last sighted at the 2005 Hay Festival of Literature & Arts.*
Upon further investigation we found this at McSweenys.com:

… In 1998, he founded McSweeney's, an independent book-publishing house in San Francisco that puts out the McSweeney's quarterly literary journal; the monthly magazine The Believer; a daily humor website, www.mcsweeneys.net; and Wholphin, a DVD quarterly of short films. In 2002, Eggers opened 826 Valencia, a writing lab for young people located in the Mission District of San Francisco, where he teaches writing to high-school students and runs a summer publishing camp; there are now branches of 826 in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, and Ann Arbor, and in 2007 a seventh center will open in Boston. With the help of his workshop students, Eggers edits a collection of fiction, essays, and journalism called The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He is also the co-editor of the Voice of Witness series of oral histories.
His fiction has appeared in Zoetrope, Punk Planet, and The New Yorker. He has recently written introductions to new editions of books by Edward Wallant, John Cheever, and Mark Twain.
His most recent work is What Is The What:
Valentino Achak Deng, real-life hero of this engrossing epic, was a refugee from the Sudanese civil war-the bloodbath before the current Darfur bloodbath-of the 1980s and 90s. In this fictionalized memoir, Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) makes him an icon of globalization. Separated from his family when Arab militia destroy his village, Valentino joins thousands of other "Lost Boys," beset by starvation, thirst and man-eating lions on their march to squalid refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, where Valentino pieces together a new life. — Publishers Weekly

*In 1988, the festival was described by Bill Clinton in 2001 as "The Woodstock of the mind".

SOURCE: zelo research

Panoramas of the Moving Image: Mechanical Slides and Dissolving Views from Nineteenth-Century Magic Lantern Shows

September 12, 2007–February 25, 2008 Painted or printed images on glass were among the earliest forms of projected "motion picture" entertainment. Mechanical glass slides were manipulated to simulate various kinds of change in the image, and multiple projectors allowed for superimposed and dissolving views. Brightly colored, handcrafted slides, depicting human activity, fantasy figures, and landscapes, were typically presented with live narration, music, and sound effects, in what became popular by the 1870s as Magic Lantern shows. Experimental media artist Ernie Gehr's Panoramas of the Moving Image (2005) is a synchronized five-channel video installation that uses eighty-seven original slides and views selected from Gehr's personal collection and that of renowned pre-cinema collector David Francis. Projected side by side, the slides create a mesmerizing wide-screen spectacle. A selection of vintage paper Zoetrope strips and Phenakistiscope discs—complementary artifacts of nineteenth-century moving-image technology—are also on display.

Organized by Jytte Jensen, Curator, and Ron Magliozzi, Assistant Curator, Research and Collections *All dates are subject to change
SOURCE: MoMA.org