Cardinal classic: The basketing of balls
This column originally ran March 26, 2009.
Use the fields below to perform an advanced search of The Daily Cardinal's archives. This will return articles, images, and multimedia relevant to your query. You can also try a Basic search
128 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
This column originally ran March 26, 2009.
This column originally ran on March 26, 2009.
In the United States of America, the First Amendment to the Constitution is sacred - the free press honors no commandment above it (excepting, perhaps, the Second Amendment in the case of Soldier of Fortune"" and Guns and Ammo Magazine).
This column originally ran on March 26, 2009
The past decade saw an overflow of tightly wound dance music and hilariously sharp lyricists, but no one in the past ten years was tighter or more incisive than James Murphy, aka LCD Soundsystem.
It would sound absurd to call platinum-selling, arena-filling, most-critically-beloved-band-in-the-world Radiohead an underground act. But on the other hand, they don't operate or sound anything like a mainstream, best-selling rock band (even the ones that have gotten popular aping mid-90s Radiohead): You'll hardly ever hear them on the radio or see them on TV; their idea of promoting an album is mentioning it on a blog ten days before it comes out; and they've built their reputation on some of the strangest, most original music of the past two decades.
The music of Mathangi Arulpragasam (aka M.I.A.) finally broke through to the mainstream in 2008 when two of the year's biggest movies—""Slumdog Millionaire"" and ""Pineapple Express""—helped bring her joyous, Clash-sampling single ""Paper Planes"" to TVs and radios everywhere. But for anyone with more than a passing interest in pop, rap, indie rock, electronica or dance music, M.I.A.'s aggressive, genre-hopping jams had already been a fact of life for several years.
When most of the musical world became acquainted with Arcade Fire via their 2004 debut Funeral, there was no trend or gimmickry by which someone could easily characterize the band; they weren't wearing futuristic costumes, rehashing '60s rock 'n' roll, or auto-tuning their vocals. All anyone could talk about was how fucking good the album was—like, astonishingly, breathtakingly good, and even more-so because just a month earlier, almost no one had heard of the band.
Before the 2000s, post-rock music was virtually unknown to anyone other than serious music geeks. Sigur Ros changed that when their second album, Agaetis byrjun, was released internationally at the beginning of the decade. It was the first almost anybody outside of Iceland had heard of the band, and in the history of first impressions, it was a landmark moment.
'
Back when Dan Deacon was touring in support of his 2007 breakthrough album, Spiderman of the Rings, he set his one-man show up in the middle of the floor, using his own awkwardly frenetic dancing to draw the audience in to the action, namely the ecstatic dance music pumping out of his sequencers. Having expanded his lineup to a 15-piece live ensemble for Monday's show at the Majestic in support of this year's excellent Bromst, Deacon was up on the stage again with no trouble firing up the packed crowd for a show that was part concert, part group therapy session and part all-night hokey-pokey.
Hi. Hello. Yes. Hi? Yes.
Hello friends!
No doubt you've seen or heard the advertisements printed on bulletins at your place of worship, aired on late-night television or even shouted at you on the street, warning you about the dangers that threaten your soul. The script is familiar:
If a thought occurs to you first thing after waking up, it's always best to write it down immediately. Is it good? Is it bad? Where does it come from? Those are questions to ask later, when you know for certain that you're awake, since it's a fact there's no use asking questions if you're still in a dream—no one ever has the decency to give a straight answer, that is, if they're talking at all.
February 4th, 2015
On many weeks this column is a place of complaining, so much that a person reading sometimes might worry that I had a sickness of the feelings. But this week is different!
Even among fans, Dan Deacon's 2007 electronic album Spiderman of the Rings is often pigeonholed—somewhat unfairly—as a record of non-stop manic goofiness. It's a forgivable misapprehension. First off, there's the title. Then there's ""Woody Woodpecker,"" a track built on looping the title character's laughter at different speeds, and the frenetic sound of the album itself, derived largely from circuit-bending—re-wiring and altering audio equipment to produce different effects.
After seven or eight years of taking guitar lessons, I took what might seem like a logical step and began to teach students of my own through the university. I'd considered teaching lessons in the past but had always stopped short. The prospect of seeing ""Instructor"" or even ""Student Teacher"" next to my name in a staff directory made me nervous, as if, decades in the future, one of my pupils would look back on a lifetime of drug addiction and trace the cause of their problems to the failure of a guitar instructor they'd had in college.
Once1, years ago, I convinced my girlfriend to humor me by playing a round of Risk2. As unsatisfying an afternoon as the two of us had ever spent, our nominally two-player game began with my 30-minute explanation of the basic rules and gameplay3, and proceeded from there with me reprising this explanation several times at length while moving all of her pieces around the board as well as my own4.