get the ö

The rotating, cosmic game menu in the Biophilia app. The constellation in the top left corner spells björk when you come at it from the right angle.

Monday:
Sandro Perri, "Changes" (via Pitchfork) and Tiny Mirrors
Sondre Lerche, Sondre Lerche
Arabian Safari, "Flood"/"Newspaper Man" (via their Bandcamp site)
My Brightest Diamond, All Things Will Unwind (via NPR)
Sufjan Stevens, All Delighted People
Erykah Badu, Worldwide Underground
The Abyssinians, Satta Dub
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road


Tuesday:
Björk, Biophilia
The Knife, Tomorrow, in a Year
Radiohead, The King of Limbs

• The secret to getting an education is readily admitting one's ignorance and admitting that knowing how to do things makes doing things easier. For instance, I usually have to copy and paste Björk's name or use the clunky insert symbols thing in Word to get the ö, and it took a decade plus of doing so before I looked up the diacritic keyboard shortcuts. It's like someone showed me I've been using the wrong end of the hammer all this time.
     
• I've been listening to Biophilia for months now as the fractured soundtrack to her album-as-Universe-as-video game suite-as-iPad-app, and am just now loading up the whole thing. The app might be revolutionary, but I think it's more of a prototype of revolutionary. Björk fans are the types of obsessives that will jump through the hoops to get her apps and do updates and then buy things through the app and then not even be sure what they have at the end. Björk's fans will go through the lengths required to type her name. But others' fans, not so much. I think Gwen Stefani or Kanye West could take this album/platform  thing, simplify it, and really do make it happen. Imagine if Peter Gabriel had iPad album/app capability available during his heyday. The Sledgehammer app would've been the Angry Birds of its time.
  
  
  Björk, Biophilia live set. Having David Attenborough do the introduction is a smart touch.
  
  Biophilia as an album is lovely, maybe as engaging an album she's done since Vespertine. Parts of it sound that that really pretty backwards vocal part at the end of the Purple Rain album extended all the way out to touch the dying sunset. I've yet to full explore the Biophilia app/universe to have a real take.
        
• Think about the lengths we go to use new technology when technology is supposed to make things easier to do and how we pay for extension of our abilities with frustration with the means. We tear our flesh over changes in Facebook which is ostensibly something we don't need or want to use for myriad perfectly good reasons, except when you do use it, you use it all the time, right up to the limit of need, so you bend around the interface changes or the shortcomings of how it works on the phone now or whatever. Total princess problems compared to the needs of people tearing their flesh about changing their governments, going forth into a palpable, potentially fatal unknown platform change and using old free-ass Facebook and whatever to help do it because everything becomes a great tool when everything seems broken. I didn't see anyone abandon the Arab Spring because they didn't like the ticker.
      
• I am quite enjoying being the LSU Reveille's go to app expert interview subject. Someone was just here to talk about the pros and cons of location services on your phone and my insights on Google+ and Blendr can be found therein, once their site comes back up.
     
• Speaking of creating a universe in one's art and not understanding the interface changes, Revolutionary Road makes a world as brutal as The Road set in the desperate apocalypse of the middle class family. I'm sure everyone's read it ages ago, but I'm a late adopter in some things. I'm scared to read the next page and witness how that guy is going to fuck up things this time. You wanna yell at the page like people do at the screen in horror movies. No, man! Don't go in there! Just say she was good in the play! Don't try to fix things!