l-dopa

The Conet Project is a really creepy collection of number stations, which they’ll be happy to explain to you and I posted about a couple weeks back. I was sufficiently charmed by their sinister strangeness — enhanced by the use of music boxes and toy pianos — that I made a piece of music to go with one of them, Swedish Rhapsody. Give it a listen. It’s part of a larger music project I’m doing in my noisy basement studio. Some of it’s noise, some of it’s trancy music.

Here’s the first track good enough to show around the neighborhood,

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(This was crossposted to Monkey Do, Monkey See)

Sometimes– occasionally — Pitchforkmedia.com music reviews assume that you’re familiar with every 7-inch side project that they’ve ever tangentially mentioned in every mid-afternoon cell-phoned-in-from-the-tour bus news update they’ve ever published. Bear witness:

The Dan Bejar/Spencer Krug/Carey Mercer triple-team performs spirographic sprints around, say, Amalgamated Sons of Rest, the 2003 Will Oldham/Jason Molina/Alasdair Roberts gangwarble. In the event that you are an anxious consolidator of last.fm stats trying to weed out fluke acts, you might switch “Swan Lake” to “Destroyer” in the artist-blank and not totally be lying, since Frog Eyes have already backed Dan Bejar, and Bejar’s preoccupations seem to win the album’s field day: “A Venue Called Rubella”, as the title hints, plays like an outtake from Rubies (okay, like a trippy, prancing alternate take of “3000 Flowers”) and its lyrical shout-out to Streethawk continues Bejar’s habit of mythologizing his own discography, which he, um, continues via “The Freedom”‘s repine for City of Daughters.

…whaaaaaaaat? The “indier-than-thou” record store clerk name dropping on display is overwhelming. William Bowers usually writes solid, evocative stuff — reviews that inform to the qualities of the music itself, but this review presupposes too much indie cred for any one sodden hipster to bear, and as a result winds up referring mainly to itself.

~jeff

I always suspected Wall Street analysts were high, but I could never prove it — until now. Directly out of an AppleInsider article about the 2nd (!) rumored Apple cell phone:

Wu said it’s his belief that Apple is fast approaching a resolution to its market strategy and the he remains high that the company’s first cell phone will be released in 2007.

(Thanks, John Gruber!)

~jeff

Whew.

Nice initial offering from “Dot Comedy”, NBC’s stab at a You-Tube-style online comedy channel.

~jeff

So, I’m thinking, “Robert Gates? Don’t I know that name?

Oh, yeah!

A quick refresher for those who haven’t thought about this for 20 years:

The Iran-Contra Affair was a conspiracy where Ronald Reagan used the CIA to illegally sell weapons to Iran, our enemy and enemy of our then-ally at war, Iraq, in exchange for American hostages who were never received, and to give the money to the Contras, a group of guerrillas and cocaine traffickers trying to overthrow the democratically elected Leftist Sandanista government while the US government pushed its “Just Say No” drug campaign.

Gates was Director of Central Intelligence at the time. He was either involved and escaped prosecution or was unaware of what his agency was doing.

A Democratic organic farmer and high school teacher named Robert Paulson Jon Tester has won Montana. If Lieberman doesn’t count (if he ever did) that means that the Senate is now tied. Only VA, which looks good* remains to be seen.

Group hug, everyone.

*I’m using the word “good” here to mean “like it doesn’t encourage Imperialism, alienation from the world community, violence, hatred, war, xenophobia, paranoia, and fascism. You may define it differently.

Well, Rummy’s been fired. While the Prez was out, campaigning and telling everyone that Rummy would be there until the end of his Presidency, he had already interviewed his replacement. With friends like that, who needs enemies. And he’s got enemies.

Please be reasonable. There’s important work here that’s more than who gets to touch their genitals to someone else and get a tax break.

What the hell are you doing reading blogs? Go vote!

Without further ado, the winner of ldopa’s halloween costume contest is…

dis guy: