Someone with a camera -- one that could film video of some sort, a nice one that could shoot highspeed -- recorded a movie of you as you were being surprised. You were then placed in a room, seated in a lone chair which faced a screen occupying an entire wall's worth of your surroundings. The footage of you, the footage of you being surprised, lit up the screen. The light in the frame gently strobed, and you thought you could detect minute variations, the way the light behaved like a thousand coinciding decisions to exist, a cloud of anomalies surrounded each bright centered pulse.
This is not "Changes in the City." This is "Sheets of Easter."
"Sheets of Easter" is very thoroughly iterated and very staccato. "Changes in the City" gathers force around a repeated bass line. Instead of a strobe, the light is more of a constant steady glow that the bass line's pulse gradually feeds. The bass line sounds like the opening bass line to the Twin Peaks' opening theme song, a little. Every so often there is critical mass; the song whirls, and collapses, and the intensity redoubles.
This is not "Changes in the City." This is "The Adversary."
The bass line reconfigures, slowly, across a series of diminishing climaxes. The bass line is smothered by the sounds it has nurtured. You are watching a sunset. Shrieks of data blink duskward. The iteration is tired but relaxed; resigned yet content. The light fades out.
So this happened last Thursday and I've been meaning to say something about it. At first I was going to blog about how Colbert never mentioned Bill's sexual harassment debacle from some moons back, but after repeat viewings I noticed that he actually got that jab in quick, early, and a little nastily (if also a little obliquely, I guess).
The general vibe I've noticed on the web is that it was over-hyped -- true, probably -- but Stephen's last line is classic, and like a lot of what he does on The Report, kind of casually profound. O'Reilly is going on about how he's actually a "sensitive, effete" guy and that his tough, hard-nosed television persona is "just an act." Colbert retorts, "But if you're an act, then what am I?"
Of course, all that talk about sensitivity is just his regularly back-handed attempt at framing the debate, unless it's actually a fairly pathetic attempt to either reach out to The Report's audience (in which case, good luck, but I don't think his base will increase at all from now until the end of his career) or -- more likely -- an appeal to sell books by equating himself with intelligence and sophistication. Because, you know, sensitive people are also all those things, too, right? And they write big, important books? And they totally get the humor of shows like The Colbert Report?
Bill just doesn't get it, does he? Though, you know, whatever his failings as a "journalist," at least he had the sense not to go into comedy.
One of these days I'd like to write a long post about "The Culture War" in its many guises and facets, but that will have to wait until another time. Here's a teaser, though: The Culture War both does and does not exist. Discuss.
So I decided my life needed new gadgetry and decided to spring for a couple of things. It's probably my way of nursing the wound created when I realized I will never have an iPhone. Not for like three years, or something, anyway.
First of all, I got an iPod shuffle, one of the new ones with a clip. I've been wanting an iPod for awhile but could never decide if I would be able to put up with the shuffle's lack of a display and direct track choice (the other option was to go all out and get one of the really big ones -- the nano's never seemed like such a great middle road to me), but the new design pretty much sold me on it. Anyways, I've been enjoying it quite a bit. I do a fair amount of walking here in Oxford, so my Shuffle makes for a good alternative to the quaint, small town chorus of construction and traffic we Oxonians are so lucky to enjoy. Plus I went jogging with it (only once, so far, but it was earlier today) and even have ended up wearing it around the house.
I also got a portable flash drive. Sometime last year (Early fall, I think?) I visited my sister in Hattiesburg, and amongst other things we went to a Best Buy where she was going to get a flash drive for herself. A 1-gig drive cost, like, seventy bucks! I had no idea. She ended up not buying one there, which has proven to be a good thing. The 1-gig drive I just got from some random internet store cost me less than 20 bucks, and works great. I guess the moral here is to shop around for your options, and that the internet is probably the best place to buy techy gadgets.
The last thing that I bought was also my biggest purchase: an external HDD. I've been getting by on practically no free memory for quite a while. Every time I added an album to my iTunes, I was having to delete something else, which I actually liked in some ways, since it sort of forced me into making value judgements about what I really wanted to keep, which made me really listen to some stuff that I would otherwise have left to flounder in the nethermost crannies of my hard drive (if a 30-gig drive actually has nethermost crannies, which is unlikely).
Anyways, I will no longer have to put myself through such harsh cerebral rigamorale, as my new LaCie 320-gig drive will be able to store all the albums, torrents, and whatever else I'm likely to run across for the next 10 years. Or atleast the next 5. Plus it was very reasonably priced at a mere buck-fifty.
So I haven't provided links or anything but if anyone wants more details on where to get such awesome and affordable merchandise, please leave a note in the comment box. Especially with the external HDD, I learned a lot scouring the comment threads on plenty of websites, so I might have some useful information for you.
In other news, I watched a recommendable movie lately: Tristram Shandy; A Cock and Bull Story. It has Steve Coogan! What else do you need to hear?
I've been trying to keep an eye out for an official release of this very fine documentary, and apparently it is being made available through McSweeney's Wholphin DVD magazine. For those of you who want more immediate gratification, here are some links to Google Video.
The film focuses on the rise, convergence, and similarities between the Neoconservatives and certain Islamic fundamentalists. I just watched the first one and will probably watch the other two tomorrow.
I also didn't know that Blu-Ray discs run cheaper, even though they haven't been on the market as long (though the actual HD-DVD drive is cheaper than the Blu-Ray drive). How much longer are we going to be using discs, anyway?
