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Here’s a bright idea. It’s a bicycle with a little motor module attached, so that you can pedal like normal or turn on the motor when you need to climb hills or dodge the crazy traffic here. I’m surprised I haven’t seen more bikes like this in San Francisco, since it would always be nice to have a little help going up streets like Jones. Then again, the hills in SF would probably burn out the motor, so maybe it’s more suited to this flat city that is surprisingly spread out despite its enormous population and relative density. I’m not sure how it works exactly, but I assume that it’s an electric motor, and that you can plug it in to charge the battery. It would be even cooler if it can also be charged by pedaling or going down hills.

(Christina and I are playing our own, real-life version of Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego. For more clues and background on this surprise trip, check out Christina’s blog.)

The reference is a bit old in internet-time, but an idea this well done deserves to be recognized.

It would seem that Posterchild has escaped from Aperture Science (and managed to smuggle out a Weighted Companion Cube while he was at it). Citizens of Toronto are advised to steer clear of the “porthole”, as side effects known to be caused by contact with the spatial anomaly include nausea, temporary discomfort, ringing in the ears, loss of appetite, inability to use the word “anxious” correctly… and death. Contact with the Weighted Companion Cube, however, is apparently safe, as one source (who preferred to remain anonymous) noted that the Weighted Companion Cube “will [definitely] never threaten to stab you.”

More on this story as it develops…

I was riding the BART on my way to work one morning last week, when a well-dressed woman in an off-white business suit got on at the Embarcadero station. She gave a brief glance over the car, assessing the distribution of riders. Being either too shy or too stubborn to sit next to a complete stranger, she chose to remain standing, wobbling back and forth on her three-inch heels under the train’s acceleration. While awkwardly clinging to the support post she reached in her purse and produced a compact, lipstick and eye-liner. She then opened the compact and proceeded to re-apply her… wait. That’s not a compact… it’s a pink DS Lite.

I’ve always been really interested in symbols and logos, so I was happy to discover a compendium of Rock Band Logos (no, not that Rock Band) while searching to see if there were any reports of a d-beat with in the aforealluded to game (there are not, as of yet). Every day David Cotner picks a band (or three) and its logo and gives equal parts origin story (of the logo), band history, and/or design analysis. It’s the perfect intersection of art, music, and design. There’s a lot of diversity there, everything from Naked Aggression to Joy Division to Motörhead including a number of particularly obscure bands. I love the writing style, concise and witty (everything I am not), but my favorite aspect is the use of unconventional links.

Who came up with the idea of naming things using temporally transient modifiers relative to existing ideas, anyway?. The worst of these is “postmodern”. Seriously, that word has about as much intrinsic meaning as post-structuralism. “Modern” was bad enough—adopting a name for an art/philosophy movement that means “relating to recent times” when the present remains anything but. Why stop there? Let’s name the next one based one the first, but without adding any useful content. So “postmodernism” is what comes after modernism (note that it has nothing to do with “futurism” either); or more specifically, an extension and/or rejection of modernism. Don’t even get me started on “contemporary”. I take that back… at least you can tell post-structuralism is, in someway, related to structure.

Now we’ve got the same problem with music genres. Progressive rock, which started out as an extension—a progression, if you will—of rock (in various directions); taking rock and making it moreso; is now a stagnated, strictly defined niche sub-genre. If you want to be considered “progressive” nowadays, you have to sound exactly like certain bands from 50 years ago. And the list goes on. I’ve seen Velvet Underground labeled both a “proto-punk” band and a “post-rock” band (although they pre-date the term post-rock by about 30 years). Ironic, since punk itself evolved as an extension and/or rejection of rock (but in different directions than progressive rock); a post-rock that is much different than the, er, modern (canonical) post-rock. Then we have post-punk, an extension and/or rejection of punk, also pre-dating post-rock by about 15 years, which I suppose could be considered proto-post-rock. Sooner or later, someone will come up with a web app diagramming the relationships of all the rock sub-genres that begin with a prefix that begins with ‘p’. Now with bands like Isis and Pelican, we have “post-metal”. I downloaded some Cult of Luna tracks recently and found them labeled, hilariously and somewhat fittingly, as “post-crust”. Aaaand I haven’t even gotten to “alternative” rock…

Post-Script: http://www.qwantz.com/archive/000502.html

I’ve been listening to a lot of… I guess it’s called “post-rock”, lately. Without going off on a tangent on why “post-rock” is a horrible term… let’s just say that I’ve been enjoying more complex beats and rhythms, layered compositions and, when applicable, my usual taste for the juxtaposition of crushing heaviness and beautiful harmony. I picked up the latest Pelican album, City of Echoes, from Underground Sounds when I was in Ann Arbor a few months ago, along with Maserati’s Inventions for the New Season (top notch) and a tip from the owner to check out Ypsilanti-natives Red Light Chamber Choir (a little derivative of some Constellation bands, but definitely worth (more than) the price).

So, back to City of Echoes. It’s a good album; I’ve listened to it countless times since. It’s lighter than their other stuff, from what I’m told (it’s the first I’ve heard of theirs), so perhaps they are on a similar trajectory as their obvious influence, Isis. Though, it reminds me, curiously, of a band that I haven’t thought about in a while, The Honor System. Incidentally, both bands hail from Chicago, which may have more than a little to do with their similar influences and sounds.

Tracks like City of Echoes, Spaceship Broken - Parts Needed, and Far from Fields sound reminiscent of the slower, meandering, instrumental parts in The Honor System’s songs like Facelift, and Flight from their first album, Single File. Released in 2000 by Asian Man Records, the album was somewhat ahead of it’s time, and also a little out of place on its label. While their sound was a logical extension of previous Asian Man band, The Broadways—they shared both guitarist/singer Dan Hanaway and drummer Rob DePaola—on a label full of upbeat pop-punk and ska releases, especially during the oversaturation and subsequent fall of ska(core), one can imagine they had a hard time finding an audience, especially with their slower, heavier, more complex post-punk/rock/metal leanings.

For example, their use of jarring, repeated, monotonic guitar riffs towards the end of Facelift (@2:35) pre-dates Isis’ similar approach in Deconstructing Towers (@2:50) on their 2001 album Celestial, although, staying true to their punk roots, The Honor System’s take is shorter and faster. Even the guitar tones foreshadow (modern) post-rock, particularly Pelican, with cleaner leads poking holes of harmony through the wall of dense distortion provided by the rhythm guitar, with a wandering bass line behind it. The drums are slightly more standard, supporting the conventional verse structure, which is punctuated by more experimental, instrumental interludes instead of choruses. If you were remove all the vocals from Single File (which I would highly discourage, as they’re wonderful) I suspect it would sound very similar to City of Echoes.

Anyway, since I started looking up The Honor System again, I found out that Dan and Honor System bassist Chris Carr have re-conspired with a new band, Whale|Horse, and just released an album, Count the Electric Sheep (er, on closer inspection it was released back in late 2006). My copy just arrived, and I can’t wait to listen.