Theme Week: Secret Cartography

This week, we will delve into the project of mapping the unseen, divining the secrets of maps and charting old secrets. We will explore imaginary geographies, and share anecdotes relating to geographical explorations in reality. We will make grandiose promises, with nothing more than a glimmer of hidden knowledge to back them up. We will map out the future and past, showing you hidden things about each.

In that last capacity, here's a post I wrote acouple months back about Daft Punk's 'live album'. I never posted it, and I think it fits the theme rather well:

-
Alive

So, yes. Daft Punk! They create music somehow. Magic may be involved.

Their new album Alive, is a strange beast. A live album from a pair of DJs, it contains no completely new songs, but instead mixes old favorites into new mashups seasoned with highly enthusiastic crowd noise.

The crowd is justified in their enthusiasm.

It is a very good album. It is also an interesting album, because the more Daft Punk you've listened to before, the more you will probably enjoy it. This isn't to say that if you've never heard a Daft Punk song before, you won't enjoy the album: depending on your taste in music, you might. It's very good music of whatever precise genre Daft Punk happens to be, and, as a dabbling Daft Punk fan, there are tracks that I don't really recognise. I still like them. However, in the tracks that I do recognise, a strange alchemy takes place.

For example, an entire song been compressed into background music-beats, abbreviated but perfectly recognizable, that underlay another song, changing its context. If I didn't know either song, I would just hear one song, with an interesting counter-melody of synth beeps. But I know and recognize both; they amplify and play through each other, each one carrying with it a full emotional context of history and place: the people I've kissed, the roads I've driven while that song played.

Unlike more lyrical music, techno doesn't tell a story: it creates a space for you to tell your own. Hearing these songs successfully interposed and amplifying each other is like discovering that the perilous forest you killed an ogre in fits in between the walls of the cloud mansion you've always dreamed of, that the tulgey woods can grow out of the pavestones of Ankh-Morpork--that Narnia is Amber.

I'm not sure that this album really deserves that sentence, but I like the sentence too much to remove it. Also, I'm pretty sure I have more to say about techno songs being places rather than stories. Maybe I can work it into that hypothetical One Piece rant I'm supposed to be writing.

Back to the album.

It is, in short, a little bit like finding that someone has taken many of your favorite landmarks and shuffled them into a single super-landscape, where you are cordially invited to walk. They've done it in a way that, while not always perfect, contains glimpses of transcendent beauty, where the new context raises familiar sights into new realms of meaning that abandon nothing.

It's a little less awesome because they were all built by the same architect, so they're probably just some places you're fond of instead of Narnia, Amber, Viriconium and so on. That said, it's a little more awesome because you don't have to worry about distortion of the artists' intent: they distorted it themselves.

There are the slightly awkward elbow-junctions of back-alley and cloud bank, but even these are always handled with a charming grace, and give you somewhere to walk between one transcendent glimpse and the next.

It's not a perfect album. But it's made me smile harder than pretty much anything else this week. When it's on, it's on. And when it isn't, it's building to bring it back harder than ever when the time is right.

And that's more than enough for me.
--

I wrote that on December 14th of last year, and never posted it, possibly because I had failed to beat James to the punch on reviewing the album, which we both eard for the first time simultaneously.

So there you have it: a secret brought to light, light shed on darkness, and a thesis about the imaginary geography of music brought, at least dimly, into view.

An entire week of such cryptogeographical expeditions await us. I, for one, can't wait.

The Writer is a Liar.

Hello. I'm Beth. I'm new here.

I guess I should tell you about myself.

Hm. I've re-written this part a few times, now. I can't get it right. It's just that, there's not too much to say. I'm not that interesting. I'm one of those girls with dark hair and glasses. I look like I majored in English (I did). I look like I may want to be a librarian (I do). I like books, cats and muffins. I'm 21. I have a tattoo; it's from my favorite book. I like snakes, and they've been known to like me in return. I'm a pretty bad speller. I only speak English. I've never been outside the country. You see? I'm just not too interesting.

But my house is.

The first thing you should know is that my house is a Fort, located on the south edge of the city. My house was a place of ill-repute, drunken brawls and drug trade before we claimed it, sailing through the sky in a teacup like Baba Yaga. We: myself and another you're acquainted with, the dispossessed rent boy, the Earl. Our local shaman, peacock and fish-monger. We claimed it with a kiss, and wine, and music. We throw parties for the seasons and ourselves and nothing at all with Bacchanalia's that have become epic legends in our own minds. We've even gone so far as to imagine (in our silliest moments) ourselves a live-in Butler, wildly disapproving of our antics and always ready with a tray of tea if required after a particularly ribald moment.

We decorate our house in feather and bone and velvet. There is no place like us, a Fort defending beauty and spontaneity, good taste and a true enthusiasm for the art of living. We are a Fort on the south edge of everything, defending ourselves against the mundane, the boring, the hopeless.

I promise, I'll tell you all about it.

Why Does Thomas Get All The Good Posts?

The simple answer is that the rest of us are busy leading very interesting, influential lives. Lives in which we make choices that impact the world and you know, change stuff.

The real excuse: probably laziness.

I, however, had food poisoning this past weekend. I dare any of you people out there to blog when you can't leave the bathroom for more than 45 minutes, and therefore didn't sleep for chronic fear that you would wake up covered in your own vomit. I am sure Thomas with his super frequent updating would have provided a blow by blow account of each heave and each rediscovery his body provided. Sadly I am just not as dedicated to the readers as he is.

Suffice to say, the past few days have not been full of fun carefree times. Therefor I bring you no lighthearted antidotes about my weekend, only tales of warning about eating anything with "fantastica!" in the name, no matter how good everyone says it is. Just reading that word now causes my stomach to lurch in fear.

Or maybe that is the hamburger helper I subjected myself to for dinner tonight . . . .

One thing I did manage to do was see Cloverfield this weekend. Now see is a relative term, since the whole movie is done in shaky-cam and my already addled stomach was having none of that. I had to cover my eyes more than a few times, not out of fear, but simply to not throw up on the person sitting next to me.

But motion sickness aside, it was a really good movie. And what is even cooler is the amount of internet hype that is out there about it. All of the characters have myspace pages, which of course show everything up until when the monster attacks New York. It almost makes me want to resurrect my myspace account and check it out. And if you are a huge internet junky there is a whole other level to the movie, because there is a movie somewhere online that shows an oil rig off the cost of Japan being attacked by the same monster as in the movie. It is times like these that I am impressed at how into this fictional tale some people really are.

This is one we need to keep an eye on since I have heard rumors of a follow up video that will be released either in theaters or on the internet that shows the whole things from a US Army solder's "perspective". This is totally one of those movies that I saw and thought was good, but now can't get out of my head.

Ok, well, my astronomy book has been looking at me in an abandoned manner ever since I started typing, so I guess I must go.