iShucking & eJiving on Form and Utility
[Originally appeared in productdose, December 2006]
We got this Insignia NS-DV2G 2GB MP3 Player in the mail last week and played around with it over the weekend. First thoughts: It’s a lightweight (2.4), pocket-sized (4″ x 1.8″ x .6″) device with a decently sized 2.2″ high-resolution LCD color display for images and video. The player is really easy to use, makes for smooth navigate between media, and the more I play around with it, the more I like it.
[Originally appeared in productdose, November 2006]
I’m getting really close to giving up my landline for good. With a national plan, I make all my long distance calls with my cell phone; everyone I want to regularly call is programmed into my cell phone; and, of course, whether or not I’m in my living room makes no difference. Only problem is, I’ve never really enjoyed holding my Razr to my ear for any length of time–it fits better in my pocket than my hand, although I love everything else about the phone. This Bluetooth Retro Headset from ThinkGeek may not be the most ergonomic solution out there, but it feels great in the hand, sounds great, and it’s just clever enough to make me chuckle every time I wirelessly engage it with my cell phone.
Philips sent over this photo frame for us to test out, and I have to admit I wasn’t looking for much. As someone who generally prefers picture frames to encase prints rather than photographs, the idea of a digital picture frame has never struck me as much more interesting than a standard frame. But after playing around with this digital frame, I’m willing to suggest that this is the one that has changed my mind.
[Originally appeared in ArtistDirect.com, October 2005]
Like a lot of British pop music fans, Sinead O’Connor claims to have discovered reggae in London in the ’80s. Despite the weirdness that has often punctuated the artist’s work, it’s still a bit of a shock that she has actually gone through with an album of reggae covers — not to mention that she has reportedly converted to the Rastafarian faith.
Recorded at the legendary Tuff Gong Studio in Kingston and produced by internationally renowned producers and musicians Sly and Robbie (who also played drums and bass, respectively, on the album), Throw Down Your Arms has been described by O’Connor as her “way of expressing gratitude to the Rasta people.” She event insists that she “would not be alive today if it was not for the teachings of Rastafari.”
There’s a nagging tendency to over-intellectualize the music of Scanner. This inclination is less related than you might think to the compelling tendency to over-intellectualize ambient music in general. Ambient music is often bolstered by heady description merely because there is literally so much space within the music, and so little going on, that it effortlessly incorporates the assault of validating rhetoric. One might say that the space in ambient is filled by theories of the music’s value. Scanner, on the other hand, creates art – a subject matter that, nonetheless, is in constant need of elucidating explanation.
While a grim reminder of the events of September 11, 2001 stands as the cover image of The Terrorism Trap, and the book’s back cover describes it as “a powerfully argued analysis of the deeper causes and meaning of September 11,” Michael Parenti’s newest book is less an indictment of those powers at fault for the instigation of terrorist plots — specifically the World Trade Center bombings — and more a primer on the manner in which US-based big business has taken advantage of the economic ramifications of the bombings in pursuit of crass financial profit.
Fan’s of Chicago’s Drag City Records may or may not be surprised to find out that the label has a print press that has heretofore churned out a short story collection, a book of poetry, a Royal Trux comic book (written by Neil Michael Hagerty himself!), as well as the continuing evolution of the the eclectic journal Minus Times.
Drag City’s newest print release, “Warm Voices Rearranged,” a collection of anagram record reviews, brings together the spry repartee of Gregg Turkington (better known as his alternate identity, comedian Neil Hamburger) and Brandon Kearney (of Caroliner fame), which correctly posits this collection as being informed more by comedy and rock music than by literary aspirations. The quicker the reader comes to grips with this caveat, the more enjoyable the reading is. “Let us draw a chalk circle,” the authors note in the preface, “wherein we may safely rest while reviewing terms and methodology,” before going on to refer to the current era as a “post-literate age” to which this book is in small part an attempt to respond.
Part of the success of Zadie Smith’s first novel “White Teeth” had to do with how accepting the literary public is these days of a plotless, sprawling text with no definitively central character. Readers accept this sort of thing, that is, if the wit and wealth of characterization are as forthcoming as the devices were in “White Teeth”; if it speaks so eloquently and directly to that most particularly contemporary concern, the negotiation of race and ethnicity in a post-colonial metropolis. The novel was received so well, with such an embarrassment of accolades, that it’s now difficult to assess the novelist’s second offering, “The Autograph Man,” without referring to the first.
Sarah Vowell’s second collection of essays is an examination of her own patriotic tendencies and their relation to her dubious assessment of American mythology. While she is at once a self-described “history buff” who at an adolescent age “pined to vote,” she also spends a great portion of “The Partly Cloudy Patriot” waxing bored and unfulfilled on her adult encounters with Gettysburg and Salem, the 2000 Presidential Inauguration and the legacy of President Bill Clinton.
The book’s essays unfortunately describe little more than a kind of undergraduate epiphany. As an adult, Vowell attentively watches contemporary history unfold as she also begins looking closer at the history that inspired her as a child. What she discovers is a discrepancy between popular record and fact. Disappointed that her youthful, idealistic notions about the magic of history don’t pan out, Vowell grapples with simultaneously being a flag-waving patriot and a jaded skeptic.
In the opening scene of “Prague,” five players take turns making four seemingly sincere statements to the others in a game called Sincerity. Three of the statements must be untruths; the fourth must be true. It’s an engaging setup, a prologued motif about the guarded search for honesty in a jaded and cynical setting.
The story takes place in Budapest in 1990 and focuses on a group of circumstantial friends tenuously linked a by a common language. Scott Price, the most immediately recognizable character, teaches conversational English to “the local savages.” He’s a clever, condescending malcontent hiding from his future at home. As standard a character in a novel about expatriates as Scott may be, he eventually is exposed as a far more complex individual with real reasons for avoiding his future, which is inextricably linked with his painful, abusive past.
