Thursday, June 23, 2005

More New Songs

New song:
-Saturday Overture 1987
(Trance with new analog synthesizer and mellotron)

Soon to be uploaded:
-Detatch For Fun And Profit
(Mellow, flowy, very analog. Very spacey, I think.)

Go here:

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/0/drkrn_music.htm



I had to remove the last post because it was totally wanging my page layout because of the huge pictures. If you really want to see it that badly, go to my xanga page. http://www.xanga.com/h_r it's still there.

Sunday, June 12, 2005

Hayao Miyazaki Does it Again!

Howl's Moving Castle is everything you would expect from Miyazaki: Absolutely pure, delicately refined genius.


Howl Japan Poster
in Howl's Moving Castle. Miyazaki's trademark style of balancing adorable whimsicality with clever details and fascinating worlds carries on in this animated adventure which is an adaptation off of a European novel. Howl's Moving Castle has all of the pieces of a good Miyazaki film: The innocent main character, the misguided people who turn out not being antagonists, the adorable/humorous side-characters that follow the protagonist and the mysterious force or person who drives the magical mystique of the film. In analysis, it may come off a bit formulaic, but it's really quite very enjoyable and just unique enough from most of his latest work to hold it's own easily. I haven't decided where it rates by comparison to Princess Mononoke, or Spirited Away, but then again, that's the beauty of Miyazaki's work: It is consistently of excellent quality every time.You should all go and see this film.



You will especially enjoy this movie if you like some of Miyazaki's earlier work like Naussica or any kind of Steam-punkish, Turn-o-the-century-world anime. Although, the real awesomeness of Miyazaki's high-flying airship-bomber and steam-powered world is that it works flawlessly with the fantasy elements of this world being full of wizards, witches and unexplained super-natural forces. It is awesome.


Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Frank Lloyd Wright Day


Frank Lloyd Wright:
The Greatest American Architect of All Time and the
Father of Modernism.


That's right, the greatest American Architect of All Time. I stand by that statement because it is true. Frank Lloyd write was born on this date in 1867. Hard to believe that such a structural genious came out of an era when structure was pushed aside as secondary to ornamentation and homogeny. In his 91 year life, he created more iconic American buildings and influential architectural standards than any other American architect ever to exist. Few people understood what Wright meant about "organic architecture" back in his day. I personally believe the resurgence of soft modernism, a natural successor to the organic modernist movement that began as a result of Wright's philosophies of what a building should be, is proof that here was a man who actually knew what the visual and aesthetic implications of his theories were. A kind of clarity of thought and concept that has been almost lost in recent years to a swelling tide of aesthetic complacency. Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings are not beautiful because of what they symbolize, because they symbolize nothing more than the structural concepts of the buildings themselves. They are beautiful because they were created with the intent of looking beautiful. Wright's sense of making a building fit into it's place was quite possibly the most perfect in the entirity of architectural history. Wright's concept of "organic architecture" is now a theorum of how to make buildings that work with their geography in a personal and intimate dynamic that is so abstract that like the great masterpieces of art, film or literature, can not be completely expressed in the form of a methodology. If he had lived long enough to see, and respond to the postmodern theories of Robert Venturi (late 60's and 70's), he would have probably dismissed them all as, "Worship of distaste which in application is a recipe for an ugly world".
I beleive Wright is probably the very antithesis of everything Venturi.




Built after he died, Wright's Kaden Tower was originally the design for a hotel in India. This is a perfect, lesser known example of the degree of sensibility Wright appeared to have in how buildings should be designed to look and work with their surroundings. Modest and natural, by comparison to nearly every other style ever to exist, Wright's paradigm of how buildings should look is one all-too-often not considered anymore.


Since you all know what Wright's best-known house, Falling Water looks like, I won't bother finding a picture of it to put up here since I'm tired now.


Monday, June 06, 2005

Rhetoric

I'm going to make fun of my posts.

Bitch bitch bitch, moan moan moan something about postmodernism and/or stupid tasteless assholes having too much money.
Blah blah blah, something socialist.
Indict indict indict, accusing religion of human moral catastrophes.
[sudden change of mood]
Florb floorb floorb, something really weird/surreal/perverse
[insert allusion to strange sexual fetish]
Eeee eee eeee, something lighthearted


Everything is rhetoric after all, the choice of which rhetoric to agree with depends on the values each represents (supposedly).
But if this is starting to sound like Nietzche, that is as far as I agree with that philosophy. His whole Zarathustra-Ubermensch (Morality is defined by the alpha male) thing just doesn't work.


And I am somewhat proud that unlike far too many American men, I was not turned on in the least by the infamous, Paris Hilton-Carl's Junior "Car wash" commercial. In fact, because they used that horse of a person in a commercial at all, I will never, ever purchase a product from that company again. I suggest you all do the same.


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