Windless Meridian and Sci-Fi Shopping

Wednesday, you windless meridian of life. The working week's doldromian ass-crack. The furthest point away from any weekend past or future, you are the nadir of fun in the cycle of time. We are not powerless against you though, we can use the powers of blog-posting to wreak our spiteful revenge.

We will do this by posting Super Roots 9 by the Boredoms. In which the Boredoms' ecstatic polyrhythmic assault is joined by the wordless vocals of a large choir, a choir so eminently talented and precise it really sounds like a mellotron, or other amusingly old piece of sampling technology. An afro-Scriabin vibe predominates.

It has been brought to our attention that we are perhaps a few weeks or so behind in posting this, that any good boredomian has most likely procured it by now.

The intention of AC is not to be the first place to go for music. Or the best place. The intention of AC is to be a strange place to go for music.

One key editorial policy here is the well-known maxim from Hegel: The owl of Minerva flies at dusk. This owl, whose trajectory mirrors that of Understanding, has to wait until all the wildness is over, until shadowy calmness has begun to spread, before it can take flight.

So while you may already have Super Roots 9 by the Boredoms, there is a strong chance that you were not aware that it was recorded in a shopping mall. In Harajuku. And that this shopping mall is called LaForet, and that it is a very advanced shopping mall. This should be evident by the fact that: the Boredoms recorded Super Roots 9 there. In Japan, this is not even a big deal. If Sonic Youth went and recorded at one of the overweeded, abandoned shopping facilities that now litter midwest America in a very Dawn of the Dead fashion, it would be conceptual art.

LaForet, Harajuku, Tokyo



LaForet has several gallery/museum spaces built into it. For example, when I was there, Brian Eno was showing his newest work, "77 Million Paintings".

77 Million Paintings





LaForet often gets art director Nagi Noda to do campaigns for them. Noda's work is so surreally imaginative, one forgets that the Japanese don't even do drugs really. Can you imagine if they did? I don't want to think about it.



Not sure if it is clear from the image, but the idea is to have a model in a funny outfit and then have another model dressed as the cute, haunting shadow of the first.

Here's a Coca-Cola video she directed. It's not CGI. That's to say, it is a huge room full of actors standing perfectly still in imitation of a kind of Eadweard Muybridge early-photography stop-motion effect.

Muybridge's "The Horse in Motion"





And here is a video she did where poodles exercise. It follows the artistic logic of coming up with a bizarre premise, and then simply letting that premise run on a little too long. This is a highly effective strategy, as it makes the viewer begin to question whether it's not actually a real thing, a thing in the world, which goes on with not much point to it, as things in the world often do, as opposed to an elaborate art joke, which makes its point and then exits the stage.