I love the atmospheric Huntsville hiphop of G-Side and Block Beataz. Even more so after hearing an hour-long documentary about the Huntsville scene on Swedish radio. It’s mostly in English with lots of interviews, so make sure to check it out (hit the “LYSSNA”-link at bottom of post to listen, it’s available until April 14).
I especially found the explanation of how the city’s space industry has influenced the sound fascinating:
»Space science and hiphop absolutely go together in Huntsville. It’s actually what Huntsville hiphop is. Everyday we ride down the Interstate, and we look at the big Saturn 5 rocket. That’s the space. It’s about Huntsville, it’s about a movement, it’s a sound, it’s a whole village of people trying to get across our struggle.«
As someone who has a high chance of appreciating idealised dreams of space as well as great hiphop, I naturally love this.
As I go to bed at night, there are new problems with the cooling at Fukushima. When I wake up, there’s a new fire. No matter what the outcome of this will be, these have been truly terrifying days.
In the midst of the disaster, what I think about is how things must be for the fifty or so people that are still there, trying to get the thing under control.
There’s a documentary called »Battle of Chernobyl«, dealing with the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster and the race against time with the efforts to try and stop it from getting even worse. There are lots and lots of unsung heroes in that one.
People who gave their lives trying to do prevent burning graphite to do more damage, and to stop the core from melting into the groundwater.
Someone once told me that the hardest character an actor can play is a believable portrait of a bad actor. I don’t doubt it, but I wonder if it isn’t even harder to be a great actor and do a meaningless character? Like Olivia Dunham was in »Fringe«. Who’s there to see you’re really good when the character is bleak? Read more
While my laptop is older, greasier and more used than Hollis Henry’s, I had to take a photo of my workspace to create the desktop wallpaper that Milgrim imagines.
“Hollis’s desktop was a digital representation of interstellar space. Mauve galactic clouds. Was she interested in astronomy, he wondered, or was this something from Apple? He imagined the laptop displaying an image of itself instead, and of the tea press, on the white laminate. And in that imagined screen, another, identical image. Tunneling down, Escher-style, to a few pixels.”
William Gibson, »Zero History«
The only downside is I’ll never be able to move the things on my desk without losing symmetry.
EDIT: I didn’t put the wallpaper full-size here because I didn’t think anyone would be interested in it. After all, the concept is about having a representation of one’s own workspace repeated on the display. But since it was requested by some people, here is the 1200×800 wallpaper for download. Sorry, I don’t have the original image left so I can’t make it for higher resolutions.
Who could guess an accidental simultaneous playback of Istanbul field recordings and Nick Cave’s soundtrack for “The Road” would lead to the creation of an ambient track? One rainy night, it just happened. Read more
Going through a second hand shop today, I found this LP. What first caught my eye was the beautiful design, but a moment later I frooze and realized: I really had no idea that The Comedian recorded an album in Poland 1984 under the moniker of Jan Dietrzak.
Across the park from where I live is an office building. And best believe something fishy is afoot on the top floor in the nighttime. But what are they doing?
During evenings and nights, a room in the building is flashing peculiarly. Not every night, but more often than not. Sometimes it does this with a repetetive pattern, like in the clip below, and sometimes it’s more irregular.
It’s very Lovecraftian. Or maybe this is where Maximillian Cohen resides?
