hot wire my heart

Flying Lotus, Cosmogramma (out today 2010, Warp)
Sam Lipsyte, The Ask (2010, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)
Crime, San Francisco's Still Doomed (2004, Rhapsody)
The Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana performing at the Lod Cook center at LSU May, 4, 2010

I never realized "Hot Wire My Heart," the hotness jam from Sonic Youth's Sister, was a cover until subscribing to lit blog HTMLGIANT yesterday. It figures; the song bounds out of the comparatively contained pop introspection of Sister like a dog off its leash. No dis on Sister - it might be my favorite SY jernt if I was honest with myself.


Sonic Youth, "Hot Wire My Heart"

Anyway, the song is by early San Fransiscan punks Crime, a band I know only by cursorily but am on like spring gnats now. Thanks, death of print literature! You and the death of community supported public radio that is NPR.org are the best radio stations around.

I wiled away my morning at a Applesque tech conference for work that featured a performance by the Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana who thankfully gave me something to write about for tomorrow's 225 blog and let the audience play around with their iPad instruments. My turn at the "organ" is depicted above.

This was my first iPad experience and yes, yes, I hear your complaints and criticisms and high ideas and I'll raise you one that Apple has seen you and me as giant chicken legs in the manner of a starving cartoon wolf ever since it passed us that joint at the US Festival in '82, but man, the iPad is cool. Anyone willing to do so can give me one and I will investigate it as professionally, philosophically, critically, and journalistic-ally as my abilities allow. I will hot wire my heart with it and take you, the reader, for a ride. Just sayin'.


Crime, "Hot Wire My Heart"

The Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana (or cheekily, the LOLs) puts on a good show though, in action, looks a little like a pack of gamers trying to sink each others' battleships. There is probably a greater metaphor in that observation. There is something called "the fake Internet" that crept up in The Ask that might just inflate that metaphor a little bigger if worked into the mix.


The Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana in action