'One Sec'

The human race continues it's free fall into extinction. Good.

Above you can see an image from Gizmodo.com, entitled 'One Sec' (click image for link). I saw this image a while ago as it appeared on my friends "Google Buzz" thread through gmail. While the image encapsulates present day discussion and controversy regarding technology and the role it plays in our daily lives (especially when discussing naturalism, transcendentalism, post modernism, etc), it also is a clear comic display.

I found this description of gizmodo.com: "Gizmodo.com is a "technology weblog about consumer electronics...It's known for up-to-date coverage of the technology industry and the personal, humorous, sometimes very inappropriate writing style of the contributors." (thank you Wikipedia...)

From this description, it seems that gizmodo.com is making fun of themselves by posting this picture.

When looking at this picture, I thought back on our discussions on so many texts and authors (naturalism writers from the beginning of the course, Amy Lowell's "The Captured Goddess", Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow," Robert Frost's poems, various writers during the New Negro movement as they reminisce on their homeland (Africa), Dos Passos's piece of newspaper headlines, Proulx's Postcards, and the list goes on). The freedom found in nature vs. the poisonous captivity (so it seems) of industrial and technological advancement is conquered time and time again in literature, particularly in literary movements before and during post-modernism. I'm interested to see how nature and the natural world is going to creep into the "time of terror" movement (or whatever movement comes after post-modernism), or even if it will be worth noting, as we begin to reading Zigzagger this weekend.

You Made Me Realise

I thought I would give you all a taste of the song (and band) that give this blog it's name, My Bloody Valentine's classic track "You Made Me Realise."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9qLnmEN7S8

"You Made Me Realise" starts out like a pretty run-of-the-mill punk song, even for My Bloody Valentine, but things get pretty turbulent around 1:40 where the song bursts out into shards of hard noise and atonality. At concerts, the band would extend this relatively small span of noise into a span of over twenty minutes that they called "The Holocaust." Witnesses say the experience was much like standing with your head right next to a jet engine, and plenty of people have cited MBV concerts as having given them ear damage. Also note the phantasmagorical video subject. It's hard to say what it all means, let alone how all of it fits together, maybe a more extreme example of the fast, jittery Postcards that we have been reading. I'd say this track and this video are actually pretty postmodern.

This was only the beginning of MBV's progressive noise experiments. They would go on to accomplish much more with their subsequent albums Isn't Anything and Loveless.

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