December 2011
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HFNx24
Just noticed I have twenty-four longish pieces under the ‘HFN’ tag, from this year, or an average of two a month - which work as a pretty good list of the new and old (or mostly old, and EMA) music I’ve listened to that has made me think and write over the course of 2011:
24. Elite Gymnastics, RUIN (dubstep, relationships, the Nitelink)
23. Fugazi - ‘Cashout’ (politics,...
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Look Good in Ruins (or: Twenty-five Tangents about... →
“Amerika kennt keine Ruinen,” art historian Horst Janson reputedly wrote in 1935. America knows no ruins. Ruins, as such, serve as a marker of history; of the past, of civilization ascendant or waning. In its sui generis exclusivity, America embodied modernity. History was for the Old World. To acknowledge history is to enable fatalism and determinism, and thus to enable the notion...
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DIY Album Art: Paper Bags and Office Supplies →
Just ordered myself a post-Christmas present: a book that “celebrates the hand-made record packaging that came out of the 90’s hardcore and punk scenes”. There’s an 80-page preview via Issuu at the link above - the cover has the tree from the Indian Summer 7”, and the introduction starts off with the Struggle and Heroin 7”s. The whole thing looks amazing, can’t...
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Elite Gymnastics' RUIN
A lyrical and musical examination in 11 bursts
“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains.”
My second favourite record of the year hasn’t inspired much writing in me before now, certainly not compared to EMA, but in its own way I’ve found it tremendously interesting and self-revealing. If there’s a theme to RUIN, it might be about being places and...
A Politico-Social Critique of the Guardian's...
(link to the Grauniad)
“While the rest of Ireland is collectively bent over all bowed and cowed due to the seemingly never-ending recession, at least Jedward are still keeping their heads and their hair high.”
I’m not aware of our national posture having changed during the recession, and really this constant portrayal of us as a physically oppressed people seems like an...
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lord, have mercy
I’m not going to midnight service this Christmas Eve, nor have I for the last couple of years, but I just got a brief, vicarious yet intense experience of it in all its unassuming Anglican glory through watching the final episode of This is England ‘88. so real to hear those repetitious intonations that I could feel the cold texture of my coat on my skin and the wood of the pews...
nosmo replied to your quote: The anglicisms may simply be pre-emptive…
It has already been decided that it wouldn’t travel in some places it seems:imdb.com/title/t…
thanks! I obviously forgot to scroll down. still, there are no alternative English-language titles listed; and some are similar (O Guarda, Brazil) although others are, um, not (Un poliziotto da happy hour, Italy).
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“If on and after tomorrow the entire Irish Times should be printed in Irish,...”
– Myles na gCopaleen’s first Cruiskeen Lawn column (originally all in Irish) on October 4th, 1940, as quoted in Taaffe, p. 96
As Taaffe describes it, this was a parody of the Irish-language “revival’s limited image of the language”, but also obviously a riff or commentary on...
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“The anglicisms may simply be pre-emptive concessions to O’Nolan’s...”
– of course, linguistic oddity cuts both ways - Carol Taaffe again, on The Third Policeman:
“Time and space are displaced in a realm where none of the earthly laws hold good, so this is admittedly a strangely amorphous Ireland: post-Parnell, it seems, but probably pre-independence. As Kenner...
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“(the conflict’s official title in Ireland, ‘the Emergency’,...”
– KEEP CALM agus cupán tae.
From Carol Taafe, Ireland Throught the Looking Glass: Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen and Irish Cultural Debate (Cork University Press, 2008), p. 129 on Myles’s Cruiskeen Lawn columns during the period of the Second World War, so-called.
This is the best...
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a blogpost about the Malaise of 'America'
something about the fetishization of executive power, not having seen the entire UK Skins, a misunderstanding of dubstep, disappointment in Barack Obama, and Skrillex. concern that a small but significant percentage of its cultural exports rely on the increasingly wacky antics of right-wing politicians, but now that Canada has gone anti-environmental and Germany has become a deficit hawk for an...
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Three good guest posts from the five years of end...
signifyingdrugs:
- Michael Healy, ‘CM Punk, Success and Disaster, My Fragile Emotional State’ from today.
- Hardcore For Nerds, ‘HRO 2k9: a ‘culturally relevant’ year’ from 2009
- Brian Kelly from So Cow, ‘Free Download Of The Year’ and Bobby Aherne from No Monster Club née Dublin Duck Dispensary, ‘Homemade, Stapled Together, Super-Limited EP Of The Year’, or ‘The time I tricked So Cow and...
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am i the only one who doesn't like this hypnagogic...
whenyrlivinginafascistdream:
i’m a stickler for the ‘all great art has to have eternal value’ thing and yeah, i can be a bit of a purist about that sort of stuff.
but seriously, folks, half of this music’s appeal is the exact context (i.e. circa now) that will soon fade away — the context where mainstream 80s music is both an instant and obvious joke for its unfashionability but also has this...
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Martin Douglas' Top Five Entries from Flavorwire's...
douglasmartini:
Not including the Frank Ocean / Drake / Weeknd trio, because Jess has already proven that they work best as one entry. Here is the full list Flavorwire published. It’s always pretty funny.
Yuck — Yuck People who buy one record a year but consider themselves “indie.”
Shabazz Palaces — Black Up Dudes who look like Dev Hynes, own a large proportion of Warp’s back catalogue, and...
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Hardcore for Nerds: tinytinybirds answered your... →
whenyrlivinginafascistdream:
hardcorefornerds:
tinytinybirds answered your question: crowdsourcing the ordering of my year-end list:
[…]
yeah, that’s pretty much how I feel too. it’s just that the quality of the Tim Hecker album is so […] ironically it’s the atmospheric distortion of screamo that makes me so appreciative of the aggressive crunchiness of Hecker’s sound - mixed in both...
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HFN 2011: 5-8, in Order of Pitchfork Review Scores...
5. PJ Harvey, Let England Shake (8.8 BNM!)
I really liked the sound of this record, although I’m not sure if I have anything to say about it (UK militarism aside, which isn’t really a topic that engages me much beyond ‘should Irish people ever wear poppies?’). I rather liked White Chalk when it came out, and it was one of the first LPs I bought for my turntable. Not having...
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The Chaff #3: Liveline
signifyingdrugs:
I’ve been posting my TN2 columns on my Real, First Decade Of The Millennium-Style Wordpress blog, but I’m in the middle of the end of year thing over there and I’m falling behind with these so here’s the second most recent one. The occupants of Dame Street, in their anger, are relatively clear about one thing. They do not think that our current political system, with its...
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tinytinybirds answered your question: crowdsourcing the ordering of my year-end list:
i was more a fan of the tim hecker album, but it’s absolutely the best album raein has ever put out.
yeah, that’s pretty much how I feel too. it’s just that the quality of the Tim Hecker album is so good, you can’t not place it higher, but I haven’t been quite as excited by it as I am...
crowdsourcing the ordering of my year-end list:
not that it matters anyway, but is anyone familiar with both Tim Hecker and Raein, and is prepared to say which of their albums is better?
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“hope is a gracious term, aligned with the faith that reason has a course to take”
– Hot Water Music, ‘In The Gray’
just noticed this piece of pure poetry & philosophy today
despite it being on my favourite album
a flight and a crash, epitaph
two thousand and one
and always being one of the songs I most liked
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“The key point here is that the early RTÉ actually typified a long-established...”
– Culture Shock - Fintan O’Toole - Television didn’t bring sex to Ireland - just reruns of ‘Get Smart’
From a column which begins - quoting John Bowman’s new history of the national broadcaster - with the RTÉ Authority meeting in 1965 to agree that in the anniversary...
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“Geinnti oc Duiblinn beos.”
– Kinda obsessed with these four words. Annals of Ulster, 842. “Foreigners at Dublin still.”
Except not foreigners, geinnti, which I assume has got to be a borrowing of ‘gentiles’ from the Bible. It might not be but these are monks, and monks writing about heathens, so it fits.
And not Dublin,...
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Jacob and I analyze the symbolism in California by...
likeapairofbottlerockets:
Jacob Caactus Moore: Like it might be about menstrual blood but I think that is open to interpretation, and when does she even mention selling them to someone? It’s a really good line because it’s open to tons of different interpretations but still manages to be a really striking image whichever way you think about it. I don’t really like how they think...
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a grand metaphor for human relationships
my internet’s been acting up, so in Gchat if I type in an emoticon, like “;)”, I know I still have a connection if it swivels around to turn and face me
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marathonpacks:
“I have been perplexed for some time why Newt Gingrich is routinely acknowledged even by his bitter enemies within the Republican Party as a ‘genius,’ but the answer turns out is simple: he acts exactly like one of those obnoxious elitist intellectual know-it-alls that the right-wing no-nothings think is the hallmark of an intellectual. He is constantly reminding us of his...
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whenyrlivinginafascistdream replied to your photo: Just what you wanted for Christmas: the 48 states…
this is reductionist, anti-utopian and half-joking but — seems like a crisis would come round one way or another, oof. even the EU/eurozone divide is lost on a lot of relatively informed Americans (operative word = relatively)
oh sure, although the European Union (27 member states) and the...
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tomewing:
“Only… supposing that this malevolent AI comes from a military source is pure Hollywood. Such systems are built with high priority to systematic reporting, accountability, multiple redundancies, fail-safes and obedience to chain of command. No, there are other complex computer systems that seem far more likely to suddenly become self-aware in powerfully dangerous ways. Take those...
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Poptimist: Take Me To The River - Features -... →
Just got around to reading this today - I know, it sailed gallantly past on Friday and I’m missing the proverbial here - but it seems appropriate to me that Tom Ewing’s last Poptimist column for Pitchfork isn’t really about music, and only mentions it obliquely as an entrance and exit point. Instead it’s an as-ever engaging essay about ‘the stream’, renamed as...
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“It is typical of O’Nolan that he casts an ironic eye on the student’s supposed carelessness; there is more of a structure to At Swim than there should be, given the student’s boasts about his disregard for his manuscript. In a similarly ambivalent move, his discreet mention of unmentionable matters - and partial elision of others - wavers somewhere between criticism of...
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