Perhaps nothing epitomizes the Wonderland-like quality of the Japanese recession like the giant orange Hermes box in the heart of Ginza, Tokyo’s most exclusive shopping district.

For Hermes International, the building-sized box, complete with signature orange packaging and brown ”ribbon,” is not merely a marketing tool but a reflection of the company’s confidence that even in bad times, there will be plenty of Japanese willing to pay hundreds of thousand of yen for one of its handbags. Such confidence is hardly misplaced.

Sure, unemployment is at record levels, corporate earnings are sinking, bankruptcies are at a record high, investment is down and the banking system is at the brink of disaster. But luxury goods retailers in Japan are thriving, even as overall consumer spending has continued to fall. – NYT (1998)

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” Feeling Decadent ”

01. The New Frontiers - The Day You Fell Apart
Mending (The Militia group, 2008)
02. The Long Blondes – Here Comes The Serious Bit
Couples (Rough Trade Us, 2008)
03. Tilly and the Wall – Pot Kettle Black
O (Team Love Records, 2008)
04. French Kicks – Love in the Ruins
Swimming (Vagrant Records, 2008)
05. Pomegranates - Whom/Who
Everything Is Alive (Lujo Records, 2008)
06. Panda Riot – Like Flowers At Night
She Dares All Things (Panda Riot, 2007)

note: Feeling a bit decadent. This is a standard mood list, near shoegazer sort of texture. I like the minor key tension vs. up beat walking tempo. Music for shopping in time of recession. Hey, at least the music is good, in dark and edgy sort of way. But nothing too removed from known formula. Which could ruin the balance. At any rate, somebody better snap this site out of slower tempo. I need something with beat! :D (I don’t know where everybody is, except jungle. Probably they all die from heat stroke. Either that or baking themselves somewhere in Majorca’s beach. ) Go out and have a decadent life today…

image: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], [1, 2]
see also: Hacking Japan

Image: EnzoDavide

Dave Bowman: Hello, HAL do you read me, HAL?
HAL 9000: Affirmative, Dave, I read you.
Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL 9000: I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.
Dave Bowman: What’s the problem?
HAL 9000: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dave Bowman: What are you talking about, HAL?
HAL 9000: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Dave Bowman: I don’t know what you’re talking about, HAL?
HAL 9000: I know you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.
Dave Bowman: Where the hell’d you get that idea, HAL?
HAL 9000: Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.

Quote from “2001: A Space Odyssey”

01. Growing – Lateral
(Lateral / 2008)

02. Lindstrom – I Feel Space
(It’s a Feedelity Affair / 2006)

03. Jersey Devil Social Club – Child 13
(Milky Disco / 2007)

04. Cloudland Canyon – Dambala
(Silver Tongued Sisyphus / 2007)

05. Eluvium – As I Drift Off
(When I Live by the Garden and the Sea / 2006)

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Image: KiddyGrade

With striking frequency, roman female martyrs were describer by their authors as having masculine characteristics. Perpetua stared with a virile gaze directly into the eyes of their attackers, and not with the submissive look of a MATRONA. Blandina’s strengh is compared with that of a male athlete. The “masculinization” of the courage of the female marthyrs enters into a field of tension with the protection of their chastity. They are at once VIRAGO e VIRGO. The first virgins were in other words portrayted as heroines with the qualityes of a gladiator, and as virgins they died a “virile” death.

Johan Leemans, Jürgen – More Than a Memory

01. Bjork – Wanderlust (Ratatat remix)
(Wanderlust / 2007)
02. Lykke Li – Complaint Department
(Youth Novel / 2008)
03. Cocorosie – Promise
(The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn / 2007)
04. Joanna Newsom – Bridges And Balloons
(The Milk-Eyed Mender / 2004)
05. The Knife – Pass This On
(Deep Cuts / 2006 / Phantom Sound & Vision)

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Photo: Afremov

At this critical point in the story, it is necessary to take account of what seems to be the only coherent eyewitness description of the birth of the tango. This striking piece of evidence was brought to light by Josè Gobello, one of the wisest and most knowledgeable writers on the history of the tango and lunfardo and the moving spirit of the Academia Portena de Lunfardo (the main body that studies the traditional popular culture of Buenos Aires) since its creation in 1962. It is contained in an article printed on 22 september 1913 in Critica – Buenos Aires’ firts mass-circulation popular newspaper, itself founder only a few days earlier. The author signed himself Vieio Tanguero: he has never been definitely identified, but on the evidence of the piece he was an educated man who knew what he was talking about. Althrough the article was written thirty years after the events he describes, its testimony is impossible to ignore.
Viejo tanguero’s most serious claim is taht in the year 1877 the African Argentines of Mondongo (an area on the western side of the centrally located barrio of Monserrat) improvised a new dance, which they called a tango and which embodied something of the style and movements of the candombe. Couple danced it apart rather then in an embrace. Groups of , who apparently had the habit of visiting African Argentine dance venues and then parodying the gestures and movements they saw there, took this “tango” to Corrales Viejos – the slaughterhouse district – and introducet it to the various low-life enstablishments where dancing took place, incorporating its most conspicuous features into the milonga. From Corrales Viejos, according to Viejo Tanguero, , this new way of dancing the milonga spread rapidly to other districts. At this distance in time, we have no way of corroborating his claim, but an interesting confirmation that something like this was going on may be found in a book of Ventura Lynch published in 1883. According to Lynch, “the milonga is danced only by the compadritos of the city, who have created it as a mockery of the dances the blacks hold in their own places”. Moreover, Lynch further testifies to the popularity of the milonga at the time when it was undergoing this obviously important modification.

Nouzeilles & Montaldo – The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics

01. Daniel Melingo – Pequeno Paria
(Maldido Tango / 2008)

02. Luis Bacalov – In bicicletta
(Il Postino [The Postman] / 2006)

03. Daniel Melingo – Montmartre De Hoy
(Maldido Tango / 2008)

04. Ruichi Sakamoto – Tango
(Smoochy / 2007)

05. Gotan Project – Vuelvo Al Sur
(La revancha del tango / 2003)

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Photo: Elpidro

The Traitè introduced the famous explanatory fiction of the sentient statue was later highly vulnerable to the physiologists, but it well served Condillac as a paradigm to demonstrate how an individual organism might acquire faculties. The statue itself represents man’s perfect organic structure; were it depicted, it would doubtless appear with the regular and harmonious proportions and the generalized physiognomy characteristic of neoclassical beauty. It signified in Condillac’s exposition the universal organic substratum and sensorium, which was the endowment of all men and which provided the foundation and seat of all mental powers. As the exposition opens, the senses of the statue are described as “asleep”, and hence the “soul” which later animates the statue is conceived as totally lacking in “ideas”. It has by definition never been penetrated by any sense impression. In its course the text proceeds to awaken and unlock the sleeping senses one by one, beginning with smell as the sense which contributes least to human knowledge. Progressively step by step tries to demonstrate how from simple sense experiences alone (like the smell of a rose), the soul in the statue would acquire its full complement of desire and passions, and the faculties of memory, association, judgement, etc.

Michael Donnelly – Managing the Mind

01. Wynton Marsalis – Canon In D
(Portrait of Wynton Marsalis)

02. Bach – Aria De La Suite N°3
(Classical chillout lounge / 2006)

03. Ennio Morricone – Piano Piano
(The legend of 1900 / 1999)

04. Michael Nyman – The Heart Asks Pleasure First
(The piano / 2004)

05. Jethro Tull – Bourée
(A little light music / 2006)

06. Giovanni Allevi – Come Sei Veramente
(No concept / 2005)

07. Yann Tiersen – Le Matin
(Amelie / 2001)

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