Michel Chion’s 1973 composition “Requiem” is a noisy and surreal deconstruction/recreation of the Funeral Mass. In retrospect it sounds positively pre-industrial and is jam packed with grating, annoy-the-dog high pitched frequencies, snatches of actual church music and some genuinely scary uses of the human voice. Listen loudly in the dark if you dare.

from Modern Illusions:

Chion’s Requiem probably represents one of the defining moments of the musique concrete canon, a work all other pieces must be judged by and one of the few absolute masterpieces of the genre. Things begin with a high pitched tone soon joined by an electro-acoustic, echoing wind and then just after 40 seconds, silence, a man narrating a few lines in French and the start of a slow buzzing, chant-like humming, dripping water, echoes, reverbs and more French vocals repeating the words ‘Requiem Aeternam’. And all of this is only two and half minutes into this labyrinthine construction which comes close to nearly annihilating the standard structure of a requiem. Traces of the traditional Funeral Mass remain (largely through the titles of the various movements), but have been so brutally deconstructed that it’s very difficult to know exactly at which point in the proceedings you are experiencing. In fact, it’s almost as if Chion wants to create all moments at once, stopping time so that everything and anything can happen simultaneously, purposefully disorientating and confusing the listener.

listen to the opening piece here
 

 
And here are two more excerpts with great sound quality but not great (mostly lifted) visuals added by the kind fan that uploaded them.

Apparently Warren Beatty slept with 12,775 women between the age of 19 and when he got married. How do people get this job?

Wilt Chamberlain is the current ranking champ, having claimed to have slept with 20,000 women (enough that his personal life merits its own Wikipedia article). In his autobiography, he urges the reader to realize that (I’m paraphrasing from memory) “It’s better to have one woman 20,000 times than 20,000 women one time.” Crikey. I wonder if Mr. Beatty feels the same way?

It may not be one of the great remaining mysteries, on a par with the nature of dark matter or the origins of the universe, but the question of how many women Warren Beatty, 72, has slept with certainly seems to have got New York’s media-land in a froth.

Peter Biskind, Beatty’s new biographer, estimates that the famously seductive star of Bonnie and Clyde and Reds has notched up 12,775 sexual conquests, including Isabelle Adjani, Diane Keaton and Madonna. If true, that is impressive. Don Giovanni could only claim a lacklustre 2,065, according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte.

Biskind writes in his book, Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, that he arrived at the figure by “simple arithmetic”. He appears to have worked out the number of days between Beatty losing his virginity at 19 and the date in 1991 when he met Annette Bening on the set of Bugsy and fell into monogamy, and applied the questionable logic that during that entire period Beatty slept with an average of one woman a day. Biskind, an accomplished writer on Hollywood and author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, adds that for these purposes he ruled out “daytime quickies, drive-bys, casual gropings, stolen kisses and so on”.

(The Guardian: Warren Beatty’s Sexual Conquests)

(Update: Apparently Warren Beatty debunked this.)

“Magic: The Gathering” was a popular teenage contraceptive device in the 1990s. Unfortunately, despite its pronounced effect in curbing premarital sex, it led its frustrated users directly to the occult. This edit of an instructional video demonstrates its use.

(Everything is Terrible: Magic)

U.S. growth prospects deemed bleak in new decade. A dismal job market, a crippled real estate sector and hobbled banks will keep a lid on U.S. economic growth over the coming decade, some of the nation’s leading economists said on Sunday.

And by leading economists, they mean Joseph Stiglitz, he of the Nobel prize, and people of that rarefied caliber. Here, have some more:

Many predicted U.S. gross domestic product would expand less than 2 percent per year over the next 10 years. That stands in sharp contrast to the immediate aftermath of other steep economic downturns, which have usually elicited a growth surge in their wake.

“It will be difficult to have a robust recovery while housing and commercial real estate are depressed,” said Martin Feldstein, a Harvard University professor and former head of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Housing was at the heart of the nation’s worst recession since the 1930s, with median home values falling over 30 percent from their 2005 peaks, and even more sharply in heavily affected states like California and Nevada.

The decline has sapped a principal source of wealth for U.S. consumers, whose spending is the key driver of the country’s growth pattern. The steep drop in home prices has also boosted their propensity to save.

“It’s very hard to see what will replace it,” said Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and professor of economics at Columbia University. “It’s going to take a number of years.”

And blah, blah, fucking blah. I’ve read so many articles on America’s decline in the past three years that I’m getting bored to tears with them. I think this will be my last post on the economy for some time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as convinced as the next guy that everything is in a hell of a mess, believe you me. I’m just sick and tired of reading about it. How many different ways can the media parse the main event: things suck, “the system” has run out of gas and it’s likely to stay that way for a long, long time unless something unforeseen happens.

And like what? What would prompt economic growth in America today? See any likely industrial contenders? Ones that none of the rest of us have heard of?

But I’m done with it. I get it and I am over it. I want to start reading reading about what we’re going to DO about it. I mean how will we live? This is what the next conversation needs to be about. While capitalism isn’t exactly finito yet, it’s running on fumes and anyone with half a brain can see that it will be a greatly diminished capitalism moving forward, with the world’s largest economy, run as it is on consumer spending, rampant, unbridled debt and obese greed, now a reluctant mare, unable to drag the rest of the world behind it. Maybe for good this time. We don’t know yet.

And when I read about how the “new” Republican party and these knucklehead teabaggers clamoring for a return to the ideological conservative purity of the Reagan era where all it took was a whopping good tax cut to to right all of our wrongs, I gotta say it, these people seem as dumb as shit to me. Are they living in the same country that the rest of us are living in?

It’s about time America turns off the FOX News and gets used to the idea of Socialism and get used to the idea quickly. Because we can all agree to agree on something—like we’rel doomed—and get organized—fast—or people are going to get hurt, and go hungry and lack health care. How much longer can the government wait before they start to at least make plans to make plans about all these stubbornly unemployed people?!?!

Here is a handful of articles from recent weeks that are coming at it from different angles, but they all agree that things suck and we better get used to it:

U.S. growth prospects deemed bleak in new decade (Reuters)

A Decade of Self-Delusion (Pat Buchanan writing in Human Events)

An Empire at Risk: How Economic Weakness Endangers the U.S. and The U.S.-China Economic Partnership is Through (both by Niall Ferguson, writing in Newsweek)

So there you have it. Case closed. Happy New Decade and probably at least part of the one beyond that barring some sort of unexpected miracle.

What are we going to do next? How are we going to live? This is what we need to be asking each other.

Talk amongst yourselves. And play nice.

 
David Tennant’s tenure as The Doctor has ended and now Matt Smith’s has begun.

Via Minds Delight

 
February 2010 is when the Chinese Year of the Tiger starts, but alarming news about the world’s tiger population might mean that by 2022, the next time the Year of the Tiger rolls around, there might not be any left. ...

Due to deforestation and poaching, the tiger population has fallen more than 40% in the past decade, which translates to just 3,200 of them left in the wild, worldwide, mostly found in India. That’s not a typo; there are but 3,200 wild tigers left, period. Can you imagine a world with no tigers in it? Unless drastic measures are taken, it will most likely take place during your lifespan. There are six subspecies of tiger: Bengal, Amur, Indo-Chinese, Sumatran, Malayan and South China, the latter of which is already functionally extinct, as there have been no sightings of it in the wild for more than 25 years now.

Much of the problem lies in the poachers of Nepal and the nearly insatiable desire for tiger parts in China, where things like “tiger glands” are supposed to have rejuvenating health qualities, although this is considered bunk by medical science. The World Wildlife Fund, the World Bank and other organizations are putting pressure on the Chinese to crack down on tiger poaching and to end the cruel “tiger farms,” where the big cats are bred, then slaughtered for their skins and parts. The farmers claim the farms are helping increase the tiger population when, in fact, they are serving only to enlarge the market for illegal tiger poaching by increasing demand.

What’s surprising is that the largest population of tigers in captivity is found in the United States, not Asia, where their population exceeds 5,000, with just 6% of them living in accredited zoos; the rest are in private hands with almost no government oversight.

Cross posting this from Brand X

 
Taking an ever-so-tasteful cue from the Nacho Libre playbook, here’s something from a new British campaign designed to encourage train-riding in its citizens.  Let’s see…he’s Mexican, he’s in England, and he’s equipped with no more than a cape and a kooky accent.  Oh, Loco, you so loco!

 
(via Sociological Images)

 
Interesting article in the Guardian about Noah’s Ark, and how our understanding of its traditional shape might be in need of an overhaul.  Anyone familiar with In Search Of Noah’s Ark, Evan Almighty, or even the incredibly odd “Arco giveaway” knows that the lore suggests a cruise ship-like shape to the Ark.  Well…

According to newly translated instructions inscribed in ancient Babylonian on a clay tablet telling the story of the ark, the vessel that saved one virtuous man, his family and the animals from god’s watery wrath was not the pointy-prowed craft of popular imagination but rather a giant circular reed raft.

The now battered tablet, aged about 3,700 years, was found somewhere in the Middle East by Leonard Simmons, a largely self-educated Londoner who indulged his passion for history while serving in the RAF from 1945 to 1948.  The relic was passed to his son Douglas, who took it to one of the few people in the world who could read it as easily as the back of a cornflakes box; he gave it to Irving Finkel, a British Museum expert, who translated its 60 lines of neat cuneiform script.  There are dozens of ancient tablets that have been found which describe the flood story but Finkel says this one is the first to describe the vessel’s shape.

“In all the images ever made people assumed the ark was, in effect, an ocean-going boat, with a pointed stem and stern for riding the waves ?

 
All hail the power of Captain Hyman Shocker!
 
(via YBNBY)

 
Ahem, Radiohead? From Youtube user Kjd100:

Marvin, the manically depressed robot from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy TV series (were *you* old enough to stay up and watch it?) makes a special “personal appearance” on the BBC’s flagship Kids’ TV show to “perform” his first vinyl single release. (Don’t know what you think, but I reckon he’s miming!) As ever, Stephen Moore provided the voice, with a special recording for the part where Marvin speaks to the BP presenters.

(via Nerdcore)