orbis quintus

Phayngula posted about the Cosimo Cavallaro work “My Sweet Lord.” I don’t see any reference to Tom Waits’ “Chocolate Jesus” though. I used to love that song until some crazy bastard played it every single Sunday night this past fall and winter at a local pizza place that we hang out at.

It’s not often that one sees the Straussian-neocon school of thought, prog rock, and Cormac McCarthy (plus Oprah) tied together. I don’t think it would have been gilding the lily if Mike had worked in some more references to Rick Wakeman’s The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table on ice… very Straussian interpretation.

Google has taken it upon itself to restore New Orleans to its pre-Katrina glory in Google Maps. The problem with this is that New Orleans is not remotely close to that state, and may never be again. New Orleans and the surrounding area are still incredibly devastated. There is no practical use for the old satellite photos except for nostalgia. Google only responds to the change enigmatically:

Ohazama, the Google product manager, said he “personally” was not asked by city or state officials to change the imagery but he added Google receives many requests from users and governments to update and change its imagery.

The locals deny knowledge of any such request. Want to bet the Bush administration had something to do with the requests?

I’m demanding that the maps be changed back obviously. You can email Google too if you give a damn.

Get your shit together, Google. Don’t play political games with information like this. It’s bad enough that you buddy up with the Chinese government. Don’t sell out over Katrina as well.

Since i abandoned Vellum, it seems that i have completed only one book, Observatory Mansion by Edward Carey, only to discover as the further into the book i went, the more certain i was that i’d read it before after all. Bill mentioned the book to me recently, but was puzzled when i jumped at it, as he said that i turned him onto it at the first place, when we used to work in the Baton Rouge bookstore. Even with the blogs and journals, my memory is pretty fucked.

Still have at top of TBR pile…. The Master & Margarita as well as Against the Grain. I even loaned one to a friend, who devoured the whole thing in a night, then kept it for a few weeks, and then absentmindedly returned it. I barely even noticed the book’s absence.

What the hell have i been doing? I dunno… i haven’t even been reading comic books recently.

There should not be too many surprises here. For the most part, 2006 would have been a bust for me, even if i had been on top of things. There were more than enough good albums, perhaps great ones, but in paring down the lists, it was never an overwhelming task. I knocked off a bunch of old favorite artists because they were too pedestrian. In fact, the reason why it’s nearly April before i got around to this is because 2007 seems far more interesting.

On second thought (…more like tenth thought, as i have been overthinking this post for days…) i like 2006 an awful lot. I’m not done with this list yet either.

Here it is. The whole fiasco disappointed me. I enjoy some good fringe beliefs, but when they doggedly stay in the news despite all evidence contrary, it’s very fucking annoying.

Iran holding those British soldiers may be turning into a crisis. I am in no way comfortable with (or capable of) even a half-hearted attempt at analysis of this situation, but I will say that things like this:

“The incident in 2004 was less tense, there were fewer gathering clouds, so they may well be held for longer,” said Alex Bigham, of the Foreign Policy Center. “There are probably also internal political battles in Iran over what to do next.”

Some hardline groups in Iran suggest the case could be a bargaining chip in its nuclear and other rows with the West, exposing what analysts said were divisions with more moderate voices who want to build bridges abroad, not exacerbate tension.

In Iran, a crowd of hardline students chanting “Death to Britain” gathered on Tuesday on the shoreline close to where the Britons were captured and demanded firm action against the sailors, Iran’s semi-official Mehr news agency reported.

make me nervous.

I hope we don’t see a general conflagration in the Middle East.

The excavations at Rakhigarhi have exhibited evidence of writing and town planning as early as 3,000 BC.

Not breaking news, but it’s worth remembering.

…if i had been even remotely informed. I feel remotely informed now. My tastes are still idiosyncratic, but at least i’ve now heard enough. I have a long way to go before catching up, and am fully aware that 2007 is slipping away.

I’m looking at the Jackin’ Pop and Pitchfork lists to refresh my memory. Lemme get some stuff outta the way…

Now onto what my favorites of 2006 are today.

Staring at video of pipes is causing me to listening to music differently just as much as the new iPod is affecting me. A few weeks ago, when i knew for certain that i had the new job, i bought one of the 80 GB monsters, as i probably already mentioned. (The friend that got me hired warned me that without music, i was going to go batshit insane with boredom.) The new iPod left me with a single minded obsession of tagging my mp3s comprehensively, and reacquiring the stuff lost in the Great Hard Drive Crashes…. and yeah, this has affected my devotion to the blog. Even if i am still keeping up with the news, when i got home from work, all i could do was making sure that i knew what i was listening to later. With the old iPod, it was nice to load an unfamiliar album or two to acquaint myself with, then fill the rest of the 4 GBs with comfortably familiar music.

With the new one though, i just dump anything on there, whole albums of stuff that i am only passingly familiar with, and set it on shuffle. Yeah, it’s simple, but that’s just been outside my established behavior. I just couldn’t relinquish control of a playlist to a computer. I had imagined that i was going to be carefully assembling dozens or hundreds of playlists, for every possible mood or situation, a new Golden Age of the Mix. No. I surrender. At some point, i accumulated more music that i want to be able to assess. It never felt comfortable ranking and classifying all of this music. It should have been obvious that this would be a natural experience for me when i never developed a rational system for shelving my CDs and albums, but i clung on, with my listening being narrowed by whatever rose to the top of the stacks. Bands that i haven’t thought of in ages are popping up, and i curse myself for months of laziness.

Damn… the purpose of this post was to address the nature of the job itself changing my listening. As i read online, the shorter the song, the better. My attention span has been awful for the past year or two, and punk turned into the ideal music for my spastic fits on the computer. (Wire turned into the the Perfect Band.) Now i’m supposed to focus, and it’s not as impossible as i feared. It was easy enough to hypnotize myself back into passivity with some Spacemen 3 and Mingus, but it’s getting odder. Stuff like Lightning Bolt and Black Dice has turned into the soundtrack for staring at sewer pipe. I used to use that stuff as a palate cleanser if i had been listening to too much melodic stuff, and my brain had turned to cotton candy, or after hours at the bookstore, just to annoy or amuse my coworkers, but now i’m finding that it’s easy to rewire myself to listen to this stuff for hours at a time. It’s hypnotic, and speeds the time, but jarring enough to keep me from trancing out too much….

…which brings me to the new Panda Bear album. That can wait though.