A smattering of some awesome things I ran across today:
8in8 (which morphed into the album: Nighty Night)
In an effort to “show how record companies are becoming superfluous to building buzz and distributing music” (according to a release), Ben Folds, OK Go’s Damian Kulash, Dresden Dolls’ Amanda Palmer and author Neil Gaiman plan to write and record eight songs in eight hours at Berklee College of Music on Monday. (from Mashable)
They only managed to finish six songs, but they're pretty catchy.
You can listen to the whole album here
You can listen to the whole album here
The group asked fans to tweet ideas for songs.
One such idea: Nikola Tesla.
So the group wrote this song.
(The video is fan made but I thought it was pretty well done.)
Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart
It does have a killer start:
"Today I've made a major decision: I am never going to die. Others will die around me. They will be nullified. Nothing of their personality will remain. The light switch will be turned off."
What's the book about? ummm...
Shteyngart (Absurdistan) presents another profane and dizzying satire, a dystopic vision of the future as convincing—and, in its way, as frightening—as Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It's also a pointedly old-fashioned May-December love story, complete with references to Chekhov and Tolstoy. Mired in protracted adolescence, middle-aged Lenny Abramov is obsessed with living forever (he works for an Indefinite Life Extension company), his books (an anachronism of this indeterminate future), and Eunice Park, a 20-something Korean-American. Eunice, though reluctant and often cruel, finds in Lenny a loving but needy fellow soul and a refuge from her overbearing immigrant parents. Narrating in alternate chapters—Lenny through old-fashioned diary entries, Eunice through her online correspondence—the pair reveal a funhouse-mirror version of contemporary America: terminally indebted to China, controlled by the singular Bipartisan Party (Big Brother as played by a cartoon otter in a cowboy hat), and consumed by the superficial. Shteyngart's earnestly struggling characters—along with a flurry of running gags—keep the nightmare tour of tomorrow grounded. A rich commentary on the obsessions and catastrophes of the information age and a heartbreaker worthy of its title, this is Shteyngart's best yet.
Shteyngart will occasionally drop gems like these:
"Oh, dear diary. My youth has passed, but the wisdom of age hardly beckons. Why is it so hard to be a grown-up man in this world?"
"Joshie always told Post-Human Services staff to keep a diary, to remember who we were, because every moment our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities, so that each year, each month, each day we transform into a different person, an utterly unfaithful iteration of our original selves, of the drooling kid in the sandbox. But not me. I am still a facsimile of my early childhood. I am still looking for a loving dad to lift me up and brush the sand off my ass and to hear English, calm and hurtless, fall off his lips."
"One Chance"
It's a game that only takes ten minutes to play, but because of cookies on your computer you only get to play it once. This kind of finality didn't sit well with me. So I just watched the videos on youtube. But if you want to give it a try yourself, you can play One Chance here.
Or you can just watch it right here:
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