Counter Terra

Electronic Music Primer

This is an absolutely amazing attempt to provide a guide to electronic music genres. Know the difference between Darkcore and Darkstep? Glitch and Noizecore? This will give you an idea.

This is the first I've heard of the "infamous" Rio Funk:

The street ghettos of Rio de Janeiro are the setting of this fucked up movement in which impoverished youths beat each other to a bloody pulp while listening to this music in insane pseudo-rave type gatherings (Funk Balls) that behave more like anarchic Fight Clubs than plurry love-ins. Girls gouge out each other's eye sockets with high heels. Guys gang up and pulverize the weak. Deaths are not uncommon.

Okay. But the music is almost like some kind of proto-Ragga hip hop reborn in Brasil. I'm intrigued. Alas, the rest of the site leans heavily on the american side of the dance side of the electronic side of music. Bleh. But it's still great fun.

For the record, pretty much anything under Breakbeat, Jungle, and Downtempo (except New Age--spare me the grief) is my cuppa.

Thanks, Metafilter.

Planet of the Apes meets Bucky

Université Tangente has some interesting maps of things you might not expect--communisms, networks of corporate political power, the prison-industrial complex. If you can get past the politics (assuming you want to), they're playing interestingly at the edges of the quasi-panoptic aspects of maps as art, entertainment, and political instrument. This essay touches on a few of the key concepts, including some references to the connection of maps to games.

Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, created a "Dymaxion map" to undo those distortions. First the earth becomes a geometric figure, an isocahedron: its 20 triangles are disjointed and laid flat, so the land masses radiate from a nexus in the north, without splitting continents or enlarging polar regions. Fuller based his politics on this map: at the '67 World Expo in Montreal, in the dome of the U.S. pavilion, he wanted to lay out a vast Dymaxion projection, and animate it with the most up-to-date statistics, so visitors could watch the flow of resources across the earth -- and identify the patterns, the inequalities, the most wasteful and efficient solutions. Delegations from different regions would meet for cooperative sessions, in a problem-solving process called the "World Peace Game." The basic idea was simple: radical democracy. "Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone."

I've been meaning to read up more on Buckminster Fuller (who is on track to become a bit of a personal hero, even putting all the idealism aside) and this seals the deal.

More Quicksilver

Neal Stephenson has a wiki for Quicksilver annotations. I guess 944 pages wasn't enough.

Modern Japanese Woodblocks

Making Light's post on the art of Yoshida Hiroshi points to an amazing set of images--mostly woodblock prints of Indian landscapes. They are not unlike some of the better landscapes by Moebius, some of which have made their way into my dreams over the years and even inspired an attempt or two at non-sequential art.

They also bring to mind one of my personal favorites, Masami Teraoka. I first came across his work in Honolulu and immediately bought all the prints I could find. I'm particularly fond of some of his Hawaiian series, which look like traditional ukiyo-e prints from afar but incorporate decidedly modern elements when examined more closely. Among his works are "The Garden of E-mail" and "McDonald's Hamburgers Invading Japan". His more recent work (which I'm not as fond of), includes some high-brow(?) tentacle sex, so be warned.

Yo La Tengo

...kicked my ass tonight. Damn.

Thanks, Paula!

News Flash: Baudrillard Denies All Responsibility for Keanu Reeves

A rough mix:

Le système produit une négativité en trompe-l’œil, qui est intégrée aux produits du spectacle comme l’obsolescence est incluse dans les objets industriels. C’est du reste la façon la plus efficace de verrouiller toute alternative véritable. Il n’y a plus de point oméga extérieur sur lequel s’appuyer pour penser ce monde, plus de fonction antagoniste, il n’y a plus qu’une adhésion fascinée. Mais il faut savoir pourtant que plus un système approche de la perfection, plus il approche de l’accident total. C’est une forme d’ironie objective, qui fait que rien n’est jamais joué. Le 11 septembre participait de ça, bien sûr. Le terrorisme n’est pas une puissance alternative, il n’est jamais que la métaphore de ce retournement presque suicidaire de la puissance occidentale sur elle-même. C’est ce que j’ai dit à l’époque, et qui n’a pas été accepté. Mais il n’y a pas à être nihiliste ou pessimiste face à ça. Le système, le virtuel, la Matrice, tout ça retournera peut-être aux poubelles de l’histoire. La réversibilité, le défi, la séduction sont indestructibles.

The system produces a realistic illusion of negativity that is integrated into entertainment products much as obsolescence is built into industrial products. This is the most effective way of foreclosing all true alternatives. There's no longer any exterior point of reference to support our thinking of that world, no longer any antagonistic function, no longer anything but fascinated conformity. However, we must realize that the closer a system approaches to perfection, the closer it approaches complete catastrophe. It's a form of objective irony that means that nothing ever enters into play. September 11 is an example of this, certainly. Terrorism is not an alternative form of power, it is nothing more than a metaphor of that almost suicidal returning of Western power back upon itself. This is what the times we live in have told us, and which we have not accepted. But we need not be nihilistic or pessimistic in the face of this. The system, the virtual world, the Matrix, all of that will wind up on the dust heap of history. Reversibility, defiance, and seduction are indestructible.

How to Use the Intel Teraflop

The amazingly good and highly recommended Idle Words has this post on Sandia National Laboratory's "comet porn."

"Naturally they followed Ceglowski's Law of Urban Celestial Mechanics, which states that all computer simulations of objects hitting the Earth must be shown destroying Manhattan. This particular bad boy hits south of Brooklyn, ejecting eight hundred cubic kilometers of ocean, along with a fair number of Williamsburg hipsters, into low polar orbit. I particularly like the head-on views, which show a really bad day for the Boston-La Guardia shuttle."

MetaCounterTerra

"Like National Geographic. With an edge."

All God's Anthropologists Got Politics

Margaret Mead, Tony Soprano, and the New Right. Micaela di Leonardo discharges a shotgun on a shocking spread of interesting memes in one article.

Originally went down this road thanks to this post on Easily Distracted.