josh blog

Ordinary language is all right.

One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.

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15 Jan '05 10:23:02 AM

Maybe it turned into a 'more' somehow.

15 Jan '05 10:22:05 AM

I swear there was a 't' there.

15 Jan '05 10:21:12 AM

Asli Bayram aus Köln is die neue Miss Deutschland. So sez Die Zeit in the fluff-story behind Das Tagesbild (caption: who is the most beautiful in all the land? at least, I think) for today. Reading shitty non-news is so much more more rewarding in languages I'm not fluent in.

15 Jan '05 09:18:06 AM

What I said about that Missy-Nelly Furtado thing was totally about what I remembered. Because I listened to it tonight for the first time since it came out (four years ago?!) and it didn't sound anything like that!

Sigh.

15 Jan '05 05:56:54 AM

'Finer distinctions' like: what they're saying, how the records make me feel. I don't know that well what the Junior Boys or Sonic Youth are saying, or how they make me feel, but that indeterminateness is less pressing.

15 Jan '05 05:54:14 AM

I wish the verb 'wife' would become more popular.

15 Jan '05 05:53:23 AM

If I had made this today only, you know, different because I would be making it today, I'd put Ghostface at #6. This is only one among many instabilities in my list caused by my having to make it on the basis of shallow relationships with the records that stuck to me in some way.

I notice that #6 (and it could well move up) is not enough to change the number of points I would have given it on a Pazz and Jop ballot, but given some more time I'll become indecisive about whether I might like it more than the Madvillain or De La records. Yes, I am comparing it to the other rap records above it. This doesn't bar it from settling into one of the top two spots - but the fact that among the records I've heard in the past year, the Junior Boys and the Sonic Youth are more sonically isolated (partly because I just haven't been looking at anything else like them, whether they're especially unique or not) from anything else on the list, means that it's easier to make confident list-pronouncements about them. I'm forced to make finer distinctions between these three rap records and so am less confident about doing so. I suppose in that way my list, all the way down, is in order of decreasing confidence of how much I like the records. It's for a similar reason that a handful of more commercially-inclined rap records I liked ended up bunched together (down past ten, sadly) in a list I didn't share.

I suppose it's clear that the different numbers of points I assigned indicate different levels at which my confidence stratified - four of them.

14 Jan '05 10:51:09 AM

It's been years since I listened to Mahler's seventh. I'm surprised it sounds so familiar. It's not as if I ever really got it down.

Jesus, the first movement is still going? It's 23:25 on my Boulez / Cleveland Orchestra recording.

14 Jan '05 10:48:25 AM

I got that broken link directly from him and so I'm going to leave it that way. Hmph.