PJH Studios

Author: Patrick

  • The Black Keys – Brothers

    Brothers by The Black Keys is a dirty blues rock album. You can hear The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix coming from two guys. With bass and drums leading the way on what seems like every song, it gets a bit repetitive. There’s enough diversity in the arrangements that you can tell the difference between songs but only after a few listens. The Only One, Ten Cent Pistol and I’m Not the One are stand out tracks.

  • Dennis Hopper – Bucharest Nights

    Eccentric and edgy Hollywood actor Dennis Hopper avidly collected art, and photography was a lifelong active hobby. In 2005, he published Bucharest Nights, a collection of “digital paintings” at night with a digital camera. The majority of the images are ghostly and ethereal. Stark figures in golden tones against a black backdrop, light trails down a street, neon glows from a casino. A few are stunning but for the most part the book contains good pictures that work better on a whole as a body of work. The random photos of naked women taken with film, jarringly contrasts the preceding 30 or so pictures as if you were listening to soft trance music and someone turned on a buzz saw.

  • Peter Gabriel – Scratch My Back

    Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back continues the trend of cover albums. However, Gabriel covers both his peers and those who may have been inspired by him.

    The album begins softly with David Bowie’s Heroes that builds into an aching crescendo. All the songs have a lush, symphonic, orchestral arrangements–strings, pianos, horns–and often to a repetitive degree. Sometimes this works, in covering the Magnetic Fields’ Book of Love, it becomes a tender ballad despite the odd lyrics. Paul Simon’s The Boy in The Bubble and Arcade Fire’s My Body is a Cage become soulless. He closes with Radiohead’s Street Spirit which goes out in a baritone drone.

    Covering songs is always risky, and there are risks on Scratch My Back. They’re interesting choices, but none will reach the level of Johnny Cash remaking Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt.

  • Finite and Infinite Games

    James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility philosophically explores the premise of life as a series of games and infinite games.  Finite games have an end and rules may not change, whereas infinite games are never ending and the rules must change. Directly, think of Super Mario versus World of Warcraft.  With the Mario games, there’s a set of rules (stomp the mushrooms, fireball the goombas, save the princess, don’t die), but with Warcraft, there’s an entire world with a constantly changing set of rules and dynamics of play.

    Understanding that, there are several other tenets:

    • Finite players play within boundaries, infinite players play with boundaries
    • Finite players are serious, infinite players are playful
    • A finite player seeks to be powerful, an infinite player plays with strength
    • A finite player consumes time, an infinite player generates time
    • A finite player aims for eternal life, an infinite player aims for eternal birth

    Zen koans aside, it’s interesting to distinguish that from a finite standpoint, resources are scarce and must be consumed, but with an endless, infinite perspective, resources are plentiful and can be created. Carse discusses resource issues briefly, however, he mainly applies logic to his thesis to different areas of life–learning (training vs. education), sex (body vs. spirit), family (choosing vs. having), stories (plot vs. themes).

    Finite and Infinite Games is a good book for anyone looking for perspective, but it’s not an easy read in the sense that it’s tediously and brutally logical.  Perhaps that’s what’s needed to fully explain infinite concepts in a finite span of pages.

  • Click: The Ultimate Photography Guide for Generation Now

    Charlie Styr published Click: The Ultimate Photography Guide for Generation Now using pictures from the Flickr Teenage Photography group. It’s aimed at the beginner or wanna-be-a-little-bit-cooler-by-by-taking-cool-pictures photographers. It’s balanced covering all the essential photography topics-exposure, aperture, shutter speed, light, composition, etc. It goes a little further with the example photos and includes camera settings. This comes in handy when wanting to figure out techniques specific to certain situations, such as macro, low-light, creating light trails or portraits.

  • Flipboard

    Flipboard is a damn, clever iPad app.  It takes streams of content such as Twitter, Facebook, various RSS news feeds and transforms the assortment of text, hypertext and pictures into an enjoyable experience.  Flipboard uses a newspaper-like metaphor for pulling content together and users swipe to flip pages.  Tweets are artfully rendered, and those that link to articles elsewhere, the articles are expanded.  Logging into Facebook makes browsing the Newsfeed like you’re catching up on your friends with a digital late edition newspaper–minus the spam of quizzes and Farmville clones.  Further, if logged in to Twitter or Facebook, you can comment and interact with the content.  What’s interesting is that the web page fades away and content becomes forefront to the experience–which is how it should be.

  • 1000 Fences and Gates

    1000 Fences And Gates by Jo Cryder should contain the subtitle Wrought Iron of the American Southeast.  The majority of the pictures are snapshots and hardly vary.  I’m not sure if it meant to be a coffee table book or a sampling for Southern belles to fence in their magnolia trees.

  • Art Space Tokyo, a Kickstarter postmortem

    After a project, it’s a good thing to capture your thoughts on how you did.  This includes everything from the initial idea, the the steps you took to get everything together and complete it, for better or worse.  Craig Mod did a writeup about the whole process of creating Art Space Tokyo using Kickstarter as a means to raise funds for his project.

    Kickstarter.com is a fund raising website. You create an account, describe your project and set a money goal to be obtained within a specific time period. Anyone in the world with an Amazon account can pledge money to help fund your project. Pledges are tiered, with each tier offering different incentives. If your project doesn’t reach your pre-set (unchangeable) monetary goal in the (unchangeable) time limit, nobody pays. If you reach your goal before the time limit, you continue to raise money until the time limit is up. This system has several interesting implications.

    Backers simply can’t lose — if you can’t complete the project, they don’t pay. And if you can, they get both their tier award and the satisfaction of knowing they were instrumental in seeing your project through to completion.

    I really wish I had heard about this as money was being raised. The book looks amazing.

  • Inception deconstructed

    The Awl deconstructs Inception as a movie about making movies, or the act of creation.

    Like 8½, Inception is a movie about making movies; it’s not that the whole movie “is a dream,” though, but rather that the whole movie is an allegory of creation.

    Upon second viewing, the metaphor for creation makes sense across the entire 2.5 hours–seeking a muse, finding inspiration beyond that muse and persevering to bring your vision to reality.

  • Sleigh Bells – Treats

    Sleigh Bells, creators of my summer album pick, consists of rip roaring guitars and bass heavy beats intertwined with cooing vocals. Treats spans for a few minutes over a half hour, and on first listen, can be overwhelming. It’s loud. Bone rattling loud. Indie kids in their Prius can go head to head with the dude blasting Eminem in their Impala. After the third listen, you can begin to tell the songs about and discover that they’re catchy. I suppose they could be best described as indie-electronic-noise-pop.

    Tell ‘Em sets the tone for what to expect, and Rachel, Rill Rill and Crown on the Ground provide the most accessible and pleasing stretch to play for your friends.