Freezing rain forced an early return to Reykjavik — we’re cooling it in the Loftleidr Hotel now, exhausted from several days of driving and hiking. I couldn’t help but notice someone checking out this blog from Reykjavik on the stats page … if you’re out there still and want to get a drink tonight, e-mail me at andiamnotlying@gmail.com …
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Sometimes a piece of poetry, prose, visual art or music manages to transcend the perceived boundaries that separate us. On those rare occasions, disparities of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and political affiliation are stripped away, and we stand bare-assed and grinning, basking in the blinding light of our common ridiculousness. Click away, and soak it in:
(Via The Triumph of Bullshit. Requires sound and Flash player.)
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There are no guardrails in Iceland. At Gullfoss, a waterfall taller than Niagara Falls and a major international tourist attraction, there is only a thin rope stretched at shin height around the edge of the rock 6 inches away from white pounding oblivion. The rock leading up to that rope — where all the best photos can be taken — has never been dry. It’s been slick with cold waterfall mist for thousands and thousands of years. That rope might a well be made out of dental floss for all the protection it’s offering.
Remarkably, nobody seems to mind. There are only 300,000 people in all of Iceland, and not many of those are lawyers. Our guide on a glacier tour said “all the guides in Iceland have a joke. We say that if you get into an accident and there’s an injured American lawyer in your group, just finish him off right there. Push him into a geyser or something and save us all the trouble of a long, drawn-out lawsuit.”
Our snowmobiling guide told us before we headed up onto the ice: “You may want to zig-zig on the ice on these things, maybe go real fast and spin around. I’m not telling you not to. What I am telling you is that only 2 meters away from this track are crevasses and ice holes that go down to the bottom of the glacier, and they’re really hard to spot. If you fall in, nobody will come after you and anthropologists will find your body in a few hundred years. If you don’t fall in, but your snowmobile does, you’re replacing the snowmobile. And if you think beer is expensive in Iceland, try replacing a snowmobile.”
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I look like a meth addict — my face is in terrible shape, and my liver’s not doing much better — but my soul is happier and more fulfilled than a python at a day-care center.
I got a cigarette burn on my left cheek at 4:30 this morning at a crowded bar in Reykjavik, 2 hours of sleep and a terrific case of windburn and sunburn while snowmobiling on Langjokull Glacier, followed by a horrific shave from an overpriced vending machine razor. I’ll explain more later, but leave you with this photo for now:
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There’s just something beautiful about the cultural dissonance created when something saccharine and innocent meets something…well… not.
Case in point – these stellar YouTube mashups, which pair old Muppet Show and Sesame Street footage with death metal songs:
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In exactly 24 hours, Driller David and I will be aboard a plane flying to Reykjavik, where we’ll be taking a much-needed vacation. We’re spending a few nights in Reykjavik, taking this pub crawl that I’ve heard so much about, then the plan sorta peters out.
All we really know after that is that we’re renting a car and taking it to Jokulsarlon, where we’ll go kayaking among icebergs and seals. Here’s a photo, click to make it MUCH larger:
I can’t wait. If any of you guys happen to live in Iceland, reach out — let’s bend an elbow.
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Sometimes the Internet is nothing but a glowing wind tunnel filled with gas blasts from the intellectually obese. Even on the best days, the creatively flabby power this thing, gobbling information and repeating it with no regard for quality, just a quick hit of a familiar flavor in massive, constant quantities. Real insight can be a soap bubble lost in that hot, stinking howl.But not today. Today the Internet is a psychedelic sausage-grinder — feed stuff into it and turn the handle, and presto, flowers!
Let me settle down and explain.
A few weeks ago, both BoingBoing and Metafilter/MeFi Music linked to my story about the long-dead Royal Quiet Deluxe — b.k.a. “the chicken band.” This story was one that I’d prepared for The Moth, and never gotten to tell.
Twenty-four hours after posting, an old friend that I hadn’t heard from in ten years contacted me. He had what everyone thought was the only surviving copy of one of our performances on a dusty cassette — he ripped it to mp3 and sent it to me, and I posted it. A few days after that, I was contacted by one of the minds behind , a really, really fascinating podcast/radio show based in Mexico City, as near as I can tell. I don’t speak much Spanish.
I was finally able to get in touch with Tim after years of drift, and man, it was like no time at all had passed. The good news is, he’s got tons of old recordings, remixes, and other soundscapes we made way back then.
The better news is: we’re going to pursue performing in New York. If not at clubs and bars, in the subways. Chickens are easily available through botanicas here. The only catch so far is a place to keep them while we rehearse. If anyone wants to volunteer ideas or their apartment, send me the bat-signal through the Contact form above … I’ll keep you posted.
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Musically, our culture has achieved singularity. Every song ever recorded is dripping off the tip of the Internet’s long tail and into the ears of anyone with headphones and an iTunes account. Bands like the Black Lips and Interpol do solid service to sounds past, and Girl Talk mashes old songs together to make something new. While New York’s Francis and the Lights has one foot rooted solidly in Prince’s synth-heavy ’80s output, the other foot is rhythmically shimmying its way straight into the future.
I’ve mentioned them here before, several times, with good reason. They’re one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen, in New York or anywhere else.
This video for “The Top,” from the new mini-album “A Modern Promise” just made me scream. It’s shot on 35mm, pops in a giant new Quicktime window. Compared to Youtube videos, this is Batman in IMAX, except funky. Click the dancing Francis after the jump to see for yourself:
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Today’s edition of The Guardian brings us one of the best headlines that we have ever seen anywhere:
“Giant Dog Turd Wreaks Havoc at Swiss Museum.”
Just take that in for a second.
Okay, good.
Now, the turd in question is a mammoth-sized inflatable sculpture by Paul McCarthy, entitled “Complex Shit”, pictured here:
As noted in the Guardian article, the sculpture got caught in a storm and broke loose of its moorings outside of the Paul Klee Centre in Berne, Switzerland … (insert “loose stool” joke here) … and sailed through the air almost 660 feet, knocking down a power line and breaking a window before ultimately — and this is beautiful — landing outside of a childrens home.
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I can’t get enough of “Work the Walls” by Bay-area DJ Worthy, and the video’s nearly perfect, too. The song itself chugs along like a relentless earworm chewing a funky tunnel right through my eardrums and deep into my soft, soft brain. It kind of reminds me of Yello’s “Oh Yeah,” and the video is a perfect throwback to the videos I grew up with — back when hair was high, effects were cheap and videos were about STYLE, not fashion. I love the grinning, creepy, surreal announcer and the whole enterprise feels like the sort of thing that only came on late at night, blasting through a wave of static.
The remix is pretty solid too. You can hear it here, though the screen stays black.
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