Posted January 19, 2012 at 12:19am
Posted November 7, 2011 at 8:47am
“But they can’t do this,” shrieked Lou Reed. “It’s my song! They’re just taking my song?”
“Are they really, Lou?” said the Buddha.
“Yes! Listen to it! It’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side.’ It’s just ‘Walk on the Wild Side.’”
“Only here and there,” replied the Buddha.
“What?”
“It’s only ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ here and there. The sample isn’t used everywhere.”
“But at the beginning and the end,” Lou Reed said, “it fills up everything and—”
“It’s not even ‘Walk on the Wild Side,’” the Buddha went on. “It’s the bassline. Did you play the bassline?”
“Herbie played the bassline.”
“So it’s like Herbie’s playing on this song.”
“But he’s not! He didn’t! He played on my song! Why— Why are you putting it on again?”
“Listen Lou,” said the Buddha. “Just listen.”
And they listened for a while.
“Do you hear?”
“Hear what?”
“‘Can I kick it?’”
Lou said nothing.
“‘Can I kick it?’” the Buddha said again. The silence stretched on.
“Yes you can,” Lou said finally.
“Exactly,” said the Buddha. “Exactly.” There was a long pause. “You can. It is not even a question, really. It is a question with an automatic response. ‘Can I kick it?’ ‘Yes you can.’”
“So?” Lou mumbled.
“So this is life, Lou. Live it in the present, in the instant. Hear it, say yes, accept. ‘Can I kick it?’ ‘Yes you can.’ Stop trying to interject yourself between the question and the answer.”
“What does this have to do with sampling?”
The Buddha stared at Lou. He stared at him with a grim stare, the stare he used when his blue children were misbehaving. Then the Buddha licked his lips. He began to dance. He answered Lou Reed with softshoe, one-step, two-step, three, soundless on the carpet.
Posted November 1, 2011 at 12:58pm
Posted September 21, 2011 at 4:17pm
Native Tongue was a thought experiment, with a time limit of ten years. My hypothesis was that if I constructed a language designed specifically to provide a more adequate mechanism for expressing women’s perceptions, women would (a) embrace it and begin using it, or (b) embrace the idea but not the language, say “Elgin, you’ve got it all wrong!” and construct some other “women’s language” to replace it. The ten years went by, and neither of those things happened; Láadan got very little attention, even though SF3 actually published its grammar and dictionary and I published a cassette tape to go with it. Not once did any feminist magazine (or women’s magazine) ask me about the language or write a story about it.
The Klingon language, which is as “masculine” as you could possibly get, has had a tremendous impact on popular culture — there’s an institute, there’s a journal, there were bestselling grammars and cassettes, et cetera, et cetera; nothing like that happened with Láadan. My hypothesis therefore was proved invalid, and the conclusion I draw from that is that in fact women (by which I mean women who are literate in English, French, German, and Spanish, the languages in which Native Tongue appeared) do not find human languages inadequate for communication
—
suzette haden elgin, on her science fiction novel native tongue. full láadan dictionary here.
it’s kind of messed up but i get more upset about the failures of constructed languages than the death of real ones.
the transition between the president’s address and it’s worth whatttt? was priceless.
Posted July 25, 2011 at 9:26pm
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
mercy mercy / extra happy ghost!!! [modern horses]
i just snagged their previous ep, how the beach boys sound to those with no feelings. v.nice.
Posted July 25, 2011 at 1:08pm
noir desir / la vent nous portera
said the gramaphone:
On 27 July 2003, the man who sings this song murdered his girlfriend. This is not a fiction. Bertrand Cantat attacked Marie Trintignant and three days later she died in hospital. He spent 3 years in prison. In 2010, Krisztina Rády, the mother of Cantat’s two children, the woman he left for Trintignant, committed suicide. Cantat was inside the house. An autopsy found that he was not responsible.
Long before these things, in 2001, Noir Désir released the song “Le vent nous portera”. The wind will carry us. It features guitar by Manu Chao. There is clarinet and vibraphone. The question is this: Can you hear the evil here? And this: Can you hear the despair? I hear a band playing a hypnotic song, playful and solemn. France’s U2, making something intimate and strange. I do not see a death’s-head, I do not see the horror. The wind will carry us. I cannot think of a more terrifying thing.
Posted July 25, 2011 at 1:03pm
Posted July 25, 2011 at 12:45pm
canning&canning&canning&mitch
