Black Swan Songs

Had to post this beautiful song after an inspirational recording session earlier today with our band Norushi Minx. Now that I’m thinking about mixes and references for beautifully dreamy guitars, this sublime piece comes to mind. The Cocteau Twins created dream pop perfection too beautiful for the hoi polloi to even comprehend.

Some nice person was generous enough to post their high definition video of Thom Yorke’s new (and still unnamed) band during their live debut Saturday night at the Echoplex in Los Angeles.

The band definitely qualifies as a supergroup: Yorke in front on vocals, Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, Beck/R.E.M. drummer Joey Waronker, percussionist/multi-instrumentalist Mauro Refosco, and Flea on bass.

Check this video out! And don’t forget to blow it up to full screen. Or better still, cable it to your 1080 p television and check it out super large. The sound is decent and the HD digital video maintains so much quality that the bigger it gets, the more you feel like you are actually at the show…a strange effect of the HD video combined with the location in the room where the videographer is standing.

The five gentlemen from Oxfordshire, England have done it to me again. While In Rainbows continues to climb my all-time favorite albums ladder, I heard “House of Cards” this evening and tapped into the subtext of the lyrics at exactly the prefect time. I felt like Mr. Thom Yorke had penned the lyrics exactly for me. I researched the video and was reminded that in lieu of traditional cameras, the video’s director “shot” with lidar technology which detects the proximity of objects from a sensor and yields a grainy,  grid-like appearance.

Turns out the technology is not proprietary; the data used to make the video was released under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license and is available at Google Code.

While the story of the lyrics echoes a scene from the masterful Ang Lee film THE ICE STORM, I keyed into the initial couplet:

I don’t want to be your friend.
I just want to be your lover.

And then I got wrapped up in the next:

No matter how it ends.
No matter how it starts.

Luckily before I got too depressed thinking about lost love, I started thinking about M-theory string theory. I watched a documentary on the Science Channel that explained M-theory in layman’s terms. It worked out to be a much needed distraction for my brain’s solipsistic nature.

Once they broached the eleventh dimension and parallel universes, I was sufficiently safe from entering a manic episode.

Quimby The Mouse from This American Life on Vimeo.

I know…I owe you a real post, but I’ve been in songwriting and screenwriting mode. So until I can return to writing words for you, I leave you this work of a former Daily Texan colleague of mine, the brilliant Chris Ware. I was quite fortunate and worked at the Daily Texan during a time that it was teeming with talent: Chris Ware, Greg Weiner, Robert Rodriguez, Shannon Wheeler, John McConnico, John Moore, Joey Lin, Robert Wilonsky, Jeff Turrentine…it was ridiculous. Another one of those Pip from Great Expectations moments for me.

I’ll be back tomorrow…promise.

If you are digging the new STAR TREK film, or if you are a fan of Lost and its co-creator J.J. Abrams, check out his TED lecture wherein he explains how mystery is one of the most important motivating mechanisms in his storytelling.

Abrams falls into fast-talking director mode as he postulates on the inner-workings of LOST being one gi-normous mystery (What is the island? What is the smoke monster? What is Jacob?).  The inciting incident of STAR WARS…wherein R2D2 begins to play the hologram to Luke…sets up a mystery. JAWS and ALIEN – since the audience never gets a good look at the monster – propel their stories based on mystery.

All writers and members of the creative culturatti will want to view this short lecture.

Thanks to my buddy Eric Melin for pointing me (and now you) in the direction of this lecture.

I’ve seen Nine Inch Nails play a pretty great live show, but I’ve just never been a huge fan. I’ve never felt that dark and angry about anything in my life. I enjoy Gothic themes, morose subject matter and all dark things, but I can only listen to a little bit of NIN before I start feeling depressed.

But after watching Trent Reznor become the most creative music marketer during our transition from web 2.0 to web 3.0, I’m wanting to become a true fan just so I can enjoy all of the cool things that Reznor and his design team are accomplishing.

I was interviewing Chris Walla from Death Cab for Cutie this morning and Walla said, “Ten years ago who would have thought that Nine Inch Nails would be at the forefront of music (marketing) technology?”

I didn’t fully understand why Walla was mentioning NIN…at least not until I watched this video hours later: