Talking to the director of Arcade Fire’s We Used to Wait video:

My real motivation came from my desire for music videos to have the same equal soul-touching emotional resonance that straight music does. Honestly, I’m not sure they ever can. Music scores your life. You interact with it. It becomes the soundtrack to that one summer with that one girl. Music videos are very concrete and rigid. They don’t allow for that emotional interaction.

Taylor Mali - How to write a Political Poem. Spoken word for our insane political times.

Nice hacks, including one that scours your library and deletes “the music you are not supposed to listen to anymore”. Based on preferences you enter - surely it should be curated by Pitchfork as the über-arbiters of musical taste.

Interesting to see how different styles/size/margins can make a huge difference to readability. I’m sure the preferences vary greatly from person to person, but I wonder where the common ground lies (Athelas - Medium - Narrow for me).

A shrinking profession, with only one manufacturer left a lot of neglected machines piling up in garages:

There is a drawback. “Nobody sells a working pinball machine,” says Clay Harrell, who edits old repair manuals and writes a daily webzine called Pinball Repair Tips & Tricks. “If it was working,” he says, “they wouldn’t sell it. If you buy one, it’s always broken.”

How hashtags evolved in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake: 

I returned to the Twitterstream which had now exploded with tweets mentioning “new zealand”, “earthquake” and “christchurch”. And pretty soon the first hashtags started forming: #earthquake, #quakenz, #nzquake, #nz, #christchurch and combinations of these. And of course there was the inevitable question after Indonesia, would there be a #tsunami? By around 5am one hashtag began emerging: #eqnz.

Paul’s Boutique always rates higher, but Check Your Head was what did it for me. There’s a sample in Funky Boss that jolted me big time when I first heard it - a reggae riff from an unmarked cassette tape my Dad used to play on car trips to Byron. Took me years to track down the source - Big Youth’s track Solomon a Gunday from Screaming Target - and it’s that depth of sampling that marks the B-Boys out for greatness. Sample-riffic and tight tight tight. 

YouTube: Pass the Mic / So What’cha Want.

Pitchfork’s 90s overview concludes. Enjoy their top 50 videos: Sabotage, Praise You & the double-shot horror of Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker & Come To Daddy are rightly high. 

Also the top 200 tracks - but that’s too many so check the top 20 and start arguing. Pavement? Maybe in the US. Teen Spirit outside the top 10? Trolls.

On early Beasties:

To me, the most amazing thing about Licensed to Ill’s success is the youth of its audience. That children of the ’80s are buying it proves how universal its ideas are. Because to get all of the details, you have to be a child of the ’70s.

There’s been five no-hitters this baseball season, but probably none thrown on LSD. Also told in animated form.