Superman's Chest

Busy - busy busy!!
Busy at work, busy over the weekend...
I need a vacation.

So anyway, Friday night was the Robotmedia event at The Parteehouse. This is the place where Pascal and I spent the 4th
of July. He DJed and I chatted with people. Oh yeah, and food was consumed. And I was consumed by bugs.
This time, Robotmedia kicked off at 8pm with videos from the "Work Of Director Chris Cunningham" DVD.
Aphex Twin insanity, Bjork robots and Squarepusher asylum ahoy!
Robotmedia is a showcase for budding directors' short films. So the line-up is never boring.
After the videos, the sibling DJed and turned the event into a dance party!
We wound up leaving at 5am!! Blargh! I was hoping we'd be done by 1 or 2.
So naturally, we crashed at 6am and slept late.

We woke up eventually, and had lunch. Then we went to see "Pirates Of The Caribbeans 2: Dead Man's Chest".
Then we saw "Superman Returns" right after that. See reviews below.
And then it was night-time and time for dinner. I think we went to Swinger's on Beverly Blvd, and I had a Cobb salad.

Sunday, we did some shopping. Blank CDs, labels, CD cases, cartridges for the printer, some clothing for me.
I got a killer deal on slimline CD cases. Staples had an online deal for 100 cases (50 black, 50 color) for $2.49.
Read that again! That's two dollars and fourty nine cents! This is a $15 item normally. I went to the local Staples
and bought two boxes. The salespeople got some for themselves when they found out about the deal! Hee!
I got some good clothing at the big and tall shop for half-price: 2 t-shirts and a pair of shorts.
We had to go back to go The Parteehouse to help clean up and to strategize the next event there. Looks like it will be
a record "throwing" party (as opposed to a record release party, har! My brother is so funny!) for some hush-hush
underground vinyl of white label remixes. The vinyl is called "Discoterrorism". Awesome!!

So yeah, busy weekend. Managed to also food-shop. The rental car died on Friday, so we had to get a replacement, and wound
up with the Tractor anyway (we didn't want to rent the Tractor. It's a Ford Explorer with a manual transmission and it
drives like a tractor, except faster. It's also not very fuel-efficient. And it's more expensive than the normal cars.
We tried to not rent it, really, we did, but we got stuch with it anyway. They gave us a deal though, so that's good.)

Work this week has been busy - busy -busy.
And the weather has been hot - hot - hot.
I hope it cools down soon.


Cinéflixing
Pirates Of The Caribbeans 2: Dead Man's Chest - "Now where is that dog with the keys..."
Wow, you know, that was just a whole boatload of fun. Everybody is just superb in this. They know who they are and they
know what they have to do. Lotsa big fun and lotsa smaller fine-detail fun. Davey Jones and his crew are awesome.
And OMGWTFBBQKRAKEN!!! I want to see it again!

Superman Returns - "Weren't there two of those?" (Most disturbing line in the whole movie, for me)
It's a chick flick.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. It's just, the whole experience is very emotional.
Brandon Routh does okay as Superman. He makes a better Clark Kent. I still think he is too young and too thin.
Kevin Spacey is awesome! And ruthless. I had my doubts when I saw the trailer, but he pulls it off.
And hey, our friend Kal Penn from "Harold And Kumar Go To White Castle" got himself a summer blockbuster gig! Way to go!
(I recommend that movie, it's pretty funny. Heck, I bought it on DVD!)
Damn sound effects people still can't get some things right though. They inserted a typical two-bladed rotor Huey
"whop-whop" sound effect for Luthor's helicopter. It's a flippin' Agusta 109 with FOUR BLADES! It's not gonna sound
like a Huey or a Jet Ranger or any other two-bladed chopper! But I digress...
It's a good movie and I enjoyed it, but "Pirates 2" just walks all over it.


My eMusic downloads regenerated themselves yesterday, so it was musicgasm time!!
I downloaded the following albums IMMEDIATELY:

The Art Of Noise - Reconstructed. . . . For Your Listening Pleasure, a live album of the reformed Art Of Noise
("reformed" as in "back together", not as in "having renounced their evil music-mangling ways". That would suck.)
Anyway, they toured after releasing The Seduction Of Claude Debussy, which is fantastic, by the way, so "Reconstructed"
features AoN playing reinvented and reengineered tracks mostly from "Seduction", along with ealier bits like "Peter Gunn".
There is one new track on there, new to me anyway, "Information". It sounds like something Underworld would knock out in
about 2 hours of noodling in the studio, provided they kept it to a short and completely non-Underworldly 3 minutes.

Propaganda - Outside World, a collection of remixes and rare tracks from Propaganda's first (and best) album,
A Secret Wish, which is an absolutely incredible and overlooked album from the mid-80's.
All of these are on Trevor Horn's ZTT label, which was originally created as a distribution tool for Art Of Noise releases.
It grew and became the home of other groundbreaking bands: Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Propaganda, 808 State...
I was thrilled when eMusic added ZTT to its roster, but I never expected a whole album of alternate Propaganda tracks.
I mean, there was already a remix album, Wishful Thinking, which I bought on CD back when Universal Music
signed a distribution deal with ZTT and reissued EVERYTHING on CD (I think that was in 1999 or 2000).
Thank you baby jesus!!


My lepine buddy porsupah recently linked to an article talking about Napster's ever-dropping market share.
The surprise in the article, and a datum that tickled me pink, was that eMusic is now the second most-popular online
music purchase thingy, second only to iTunes. Yea team!! The article is here for those interested.
I am a cheerleader for eMusic, for many reasons:
1) NO DRM!! That's right, the MP3s have no protection. You can stick 'em wherever you want.
2) All independent labels covering every genre possible. Some of these "independent" labels are actually quite large and
not exactly fly-by-night operations. Ninja Tune, Instinct, Platipus, Matador, Rykodisc, XL Recordings, V2 Music, TVT,
Cleopatra, Nettwerk, Thrill Jockey, Six Degrees, !K7, Eighteenth Street Lounge, Ubiquity, Ohm, Delicious Vinyl,
and these are just a small sample plucked from the electronic/industrial section of eMusic.
3) The price is right. I pay $20 for 90 downloads. That's 22cents per track. I initially got eMusic because they had a
nearly complete set of Fax Records albums, which were hard to find (released in small numbers) and also too numerous to
be able to collect ("one CD a week" promised founder Pete Namlook). A lot of these CDs only had 3 or 4 tracks on 'em, so I
was getting Fax albums for A BUCK!! WOOHOO!!! But they were MP3s at 128, so the sound quality was "heh". That's changed.
4) Variable-rate MP3s. eMusic switched over to these about 2 years ago. Sone of their old MP3s are still at 128.
They've been converting the 128 files but they're not done. 128 MP3s are marked as such so the user is warned.

It's not all Skittles and beer though, there are some problems:
1) They're taking their time converting the older MP3s to variable-rate.
2) Downloads don't roll-over from month to month. If you have 5 downloads left and your billing date comes around,
those 5 downloads are replaced with your new batch of downloads for the month. I learned that the hard way.
3) Sometimes, the 30-second track samples don't help gauge the music at all. This is true with other services though.
4) Missing tracks due to licensing issues. Sometimes, an album will have 1 or 2 tracks you can't download because of a
recording industry licensing issue. This is annoying but it seems a pretty rare occurrence.

All in all though, it's a great little service, easy to use, and cheap.


Next time, Netflixing!!