Soundscapes comes through again. Not only do they have the new Big Takeover before anyone else in the city, it’s $4 cheaper than the newsstand. Some good solid reading material for the holidays. They also confirmed they’d be having a Boxing Week sale starting the 27th, but didn’t specify what that sale would be, exactly. I figure I’ll still take part in the big Rotate This orgy of spending on the 26th, and pick up everything else I want at Soundscapes after.

Today started out as terribly, with the morning devoted to my favorite of all bureaucratic activities, writing emails and memos, but thankfully turned into an afternoon of just coding and playing with barcodes. I got a barcode scanner sent to me by a client working, and reading barcodes I was dynamically generating online. Cool. And it made fun beeping noises! Does it get any better than that?

I don’t know if anyone is going to band rehearsal tonight, I’m heading down to tidy up the room which was a bloody mess when I swung by on Monday, and play some drums if nothing else. Thought maybe I’d be ready to try a vocal session but I spent last night on the phone instead of writing. Soon, though. It’s coming.

Apparently Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel has a radio show on WFMU out of New York City. They have archives of the broadcasts available to stream here. Bizarre stuff – the one I’m listening two opened with what sounded like four minutes of ocean noises and now there’s church bells sounding off the hour while crows cackle in the background.

Madness.

Bit of a slow day, blog-wise. Not a helluva lot going on – work, work, work.

You can vote for your choice of new World Trade Centre designs here.

The Two Towers is opening today, and I’m not going till Friday. I’m curiously okay with that, but don’t look forward to tomorrow as Mark and Scott are going to see it tonight and I’ll bet you dollars to donuts they don’t shut up about it for weeks.

np – Quasi / The Sword Of God

Saw Spirited Away tonight, and I loved it. Unequivocally. I haven’t seen much of Miyazaki’s stuff before, just Princess Mononoke, and the English dubbed version at that. I’m not ashamed to admit that I lost track of the plot in Mononoke fairly early on and by the end was just appreciating it for the animation, and I sort of expected the same result with Spirited Away.

Happily, I enjoyed Spirited Away completely, no disclaimers. Miyazaki creates a wonderfully imagined and realized fantasy world that’s just amazing to visit. It’s the story of Chichiro, a young girl who becomes trapped in a fantasy world at a spa for the supernatural and must rescue her parents and escape. Every scene is an absolute joy to behold, from the animated balls of ash working the boiler room to the flight of paper dolls doing battle with Haku the wolf-dragon, there’s a vibrancy and – for wont of a better word – spirit that permeates every cell of this film. And while there is a fair bit of CGI in the film for special effect sequences, it is still very much a hand-drawn traditionally-animated film, and I think it’s telling that it was more breathtaking to me than any computer-generated animation I’ve seen yet. All the computer processing in the world still can’t measure up to someone with pencil, paper and vision.

Ironically, Ian and Vic walked out of there claiming to have found it incomprehensible. This astonishes me – this had the most coherent, albeit simple, plot of any anime I’ve ever seen. Savages.

So yeah, if you’re partial at all to anime, fairy tales or just great fantasy films, go find a theatre screening this film and watch it. It’s just terrific.

np – Stereolab / Emperor Tomato Ketchup

A discussion about the power of the Corey’s in the 80s with Kyle yields this little nugget. Wow. Don’t be a Corey.

Going to catch Spirited Away tonight. It’s hauling in some serious cinema awards hardware. I still bet you $5 that by 2/3 of the way through, I have no idea what’s going on.

“I screwed her

And she screwed me

But we never once had sex”

— Doug Martsch, “Joyride”

np – Built To Spill / The Normal Years