…a blessed distraction from the hours of studying I have been involved in. After hours and hours of the calm and meditative music I’ve been listening to while trying to soak in pages of anatomy this list is my happy escape. Every hour I give myself a one song break, plug into my nano (Lola) and dance and sing away the mind haze.

February Music

The Hill – Bombay Bicycle Club

I like the hint of accent he has while sing/talking. You don’t usually hear peoples accents in songs and that’s what makes this sound different to me.

Painter In Your Pocket – Destroyer

Transom swears he’s heard this song before performed by someone else, and I just feel like I’ve heard it before. Which is why I like it. I think it has some Paper Astronomer sounds to it.

If Nothing Happened – PaperDoll

Yup. Another commercial song. The only thing good about t.v. ads lately is their music. This is from the Vicks sick day commercial if you were wondering.

Poster of a Girl – Metric

A great Canadian group. Go Canada! (That’s for good music and the olympics.) These folks used to work with Broken Social Scene, which I had on my last list, but decided they wanted to produce a different sound. And it’s awesome. They also sing the song “Help I’m Alive” which I had on a list last year. And I would highly recommend it as well.

Use It – The New Pornographers

I’ve never been a fan of this group (however always been a fan of their name). But this song totally caught me by surprise. I love it.

Follow the Arrow – Human & Rosi Golan

Just a happy simple song. Feels like it belongs in a commercial or indie movie.

Vertigo – Anya Marina

Another song that sounds like it should be on a commercial. Probably a phone ad.

Horchata – Vampire Weekend

Love Vampire Weekends last album. Happy this new album is still fun and playful like the last. Taking everyday things and making songs around them makes me happy.

Pursuit of Happiness (Nightmare) [feat. MGMT & Ratatat] – Kid Cudi

I’ve liked this song since it came out, but just haven’t put it on one of my mixes yet. So here it is. It seemed personally relevant. Socio/economically relevant too.

Glitter In the Air – Pink

Another Pink song. She really put something good, real, and amazing together with this last album. And if you haven’t yet seen her Grammy performance please youtube it immediately. It was mind blowing and awe inspiring.

Hey Baby – Stephen Marley featuring Mos Def

Offspring of Bob. I listened to a lot of Bob Marley music in highschool and this brings back some of the same mellow vibes with a more refined sound. Definitely a good “romantic moments” song. And Mos Def is great too.

Major Tom – Shiny Toy Guns

I first heard this song on a Lincoln commercial. I had to have it. I searched for months. Not available on itunes. No one even knew who performed it. There were rumors of Cat Power. And then finally, a light from heaven and it was available on itunes! And performed by Shiny Toy Guns. I love them. (Missed their $5 concert here a few years ago by a day. Poster misprint!) This song is by far my favorite on this mix. Close your eyes while dancing to this one.

Bad Romance – Lady GaGa

Yup. Also a big Lady GaGa fan. And no, she isn’t the next Madonna. GaGa does for music and art what Madonna did for music and sex. So while she does push the boundaries and she is sexually inclined she is not removing the musical virginity of the “like a virgin” masses. She is opening our eyes to personal expression, oddity and the fame game and I love it.

Home – Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros

I had to end the mix with this song. It’s so goofy, happy and sincerely romantic. I dedicate this song to Transom. And the lyrics are awesome. “Well hot and heavy/pumpkin pie/chocolate candy/jesus christ/there ain’t nothing please me more than you”. Fabulous!

Well, that was a 14 song break. Now back to empowered thoracic inhalation, constricted thoracic inhalation, paradoxical inhalation, abdomino-diaphragmatic inhalation, and thoraco-diaphragmatic inhalation. But maybe just one more one song break first. .

Jacques Derrida has captivated me most of my adult life.  First, because he was a theoretical bad boy.  According to my hermeneutically-conservative undergrad he was off-limits, as the crazy guy who said, “words don’t mean anything” (a laughable claim).  Second, he spoke and wrote in French.  Half of my family speaks French.  Ooh la la.  Mostly, though, I love Derrida for the way he writes.

Many people claim that deconstruction is a dead end, and I think part of that has to do with the fact that we approach Derrida as scholar and neglect him as artist.   The folks that tend to engage his ideas usually do so on linguistic or philosophical grounds.  This leaves out the poetry.  This leaves out the way he played with words making them, “slide–without mistreating them–to the point of their nonpertinence, their exhaustion, their closure (Positions, 10).”

Part of Derrida’s genius was to blur the imaginary boundaries between disciplines, and for that, I think his work deserves attention as poetry as well as prose.  I do think his “philosophical ideas” have extraordinary merit.  But we have no access to them if we divorce them from his method.

So here’s to you Jacques, thank you for the beautiful mess . . .

How to touch upon the untouchable? Distributed among an indefinite number of forms and figures, this question is precisely the obsession haunting a thinking of touch–or thinking as the haunting of touch.  We can only touch on a surface, which is to say the skin or thin peel of a limit . . . But by definition, limit, limit itself, seems deprived of a body.  Limit is not to be touched and does not touch itself; it does not let itself be touched, and steals away at a touch, which either never attains it or trespasses it forever (On Touching . . ., 6).

Since the invention of the radio, the television, the computer, the cell phone, information is more accessible than it has been at any time in human history. Television news shows broadcast 24 hour a day. Blogs are updated by the hour. Blackberry’s route breaking news by the minute. RSS feeds disseminate new information at the speed of light. And human beings? We still move at the same speed we always have.

Relative to our technophile culture with its Baudrillardian suicide looming on the fringes of our collective unconscious, human being seems to be moving slower and slower. There are days when we lament the effective deceleration. But for Badiou our slowness isn’t slow enough. Referencing our cultural velocity he says, “this speed exposes us to the danger of a very great incoherency.” In Infinite Thought he argues for a philsophy that insures lugubrious action, a slow appropriation of the impossible number of truths being created. Philosophy becomes for Badiou a truth analyzer rather than a creator of truth.

I wonder if we have entered a similar phase of art in human culture, a phase where the once prescient artist is blinded to an impossible future and turns attention instead to the present, to the past. Which begs the question, is the new art retrospective rather than prophetic?

Cezanne relativized points of view decades before Einstein produced his theories of relativity. Picasso fractured the portrait well before we became aware of the cracks in the foundations of our self image. Rilke spoke ecstatically of the act without its symbol decades before talk of the murder of signs, or the hyperreal, or deconstruction, or the death of meta-narrative.

This is only a guess, but I’ll hazard it anyway. As the technological dissemination of our constructed reality approaches full realization, we are estranged not only from our being (our ontos), but we are removed from any meaningful context of the present. The artist then is constrained to work retrospectively. They cannot look forward, because their senses, their unique sensitivity to the warp and woof of our iteration, are blinded by the infinite having been presented as reality.

Two modern poets come to mind as I close this blog. I’ll leave you with their thoughts.

Bob Dylan: “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there…”

And I think Thom Yorke may have said it best on In Rainbows: “Has the light gone out for you / cause the light’s gone out for me / this is the twenty-first century / this is the twenty-first century…”

Here’s a time-lapse video of Will, Tim H. and I painting together.  We did this while all the fires were burning and everything smelled like Mordor.  I think it influenced our subconscious.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This leads me to a question about art. What kind of art satisfies you? To some people, the most beautiful painting is one that is nature art, or maybe a painted portrait. To others, impressions of the subject are the most satisfying. I like this. I like that we all connect to different avenues of the creative. It’s amazing to me that someone could have a transcendental moment with a nature painting…as it is amazing to that same person that I love Van Gogh.