Hedphone Sex

We have not been overly enthused about matters media of late. Even the not very volcanic Novak pissy fit, which looked frankly staged, has barely roused us from our torpor. The inicdent somehow lacked the nobility of Arthur Chien's f***-strewn outburst on CBS. We do want to talk about this new NY1 show called The Call, but we suppose that blogger ethics oblige us to watch the stupid thing on a FRIDAY EVENING first.

So, like any other good self-absorbed capitalist, we'll talk about our new merch instead. Those of you that were too lazy to follow the links at the bottom of yesterday's post aren't alone, so we will recap. We had hoped a few weeks back to travel to the legendary home of legendary headphone manufacturer Grado Labs in Sunset Park to purchase a pair of their deliriously chunky SR60s, but after a pointless sweaty march gave up.

An email later, and after reading this from Forbes we smellt the "don't come round our townhouse begging for headphones" coffee, and bought them at engagingly unctuous hi-fi emporium Sound By Singer. The first thing you'd notice is that they're huge. Even the cable reminds one of the antenna cord for a TV rather than a headphone. And one's head is inclined to get rather sweaty in this weather. And it looks like the BBC from the 1930's has attacked said head, and was only persuaded to retreat by an evil cloud of Skycaptain debris.

But the sound is absolutely divine, about up to snuff on the subway, perfect in the office, and pretty effective on the street. They'd probably attract quite a few stares in a location other than New York, but in this fair city qualify as almost tame headgear. Seventy sheets and they're yours. Somewhat bulky.

We would also like to draw your attention to this blog spawn of a limey up on nerve.com. Forwarded by a mole there who may or may not be engaged in viral marketing, it is by a single young gentleman living in the north, not far from Huddersfield, if we're not mistaken.

It contains one central, powerful and important truth: limeys don't date. At least not willingly, consciously, or well. A limey on a date will deny it until they can maintain the fiction no longer. Many dates are often arranged after the drunken hook-up to solemnify a connection that is frayed from the start. The ideal limey date would be in a brewery, or maybe just a vast lake of Stella Artois. This one looks sensitive, so we put a tapas bar seduction past him, mind.

We're going to have a little go at posting an mp3 now. As far as we can tell the main game with such exercises is to post something with as many external singifiers as the post can bear, and to make it as rare as possible. Well, we've got something vaguely close, and more importantly it seems to have been rendered by the confounded iTunes in mp3 rather than AAC, as too many of our babies have.

We promised you ninjas, once, lots of ninjas. It was to have been an epic meditation on those black-clad freaks and why we love them so. It would have touched upon the enormously influential Commodore 64 classic Last Ninja 2, and take in the night we flitted from the heavily ninja Batman Begins (marred only by the Liam Neeson character saying "ninja, rather than "neeenja") to the pretty ninja, but mostly manga South Park episode. But we failed you.

You seemed to take it all in your stride, for which we are grateful. But it struck us, what would be MORE POWERFUL than a ninja, more rare and samplable than James pre-show fart-purges, and yet show what an engaging little limey we are? Ah, nous savons, a little ditty from the Ghost Dog IMPORT Soundtrack. That's right, not the one you get in America, you helpless rubes. But you can, and indeed should, buy it through the previous link.

This one demonstrates that RZA (pronounced Rizza, we hear, rather than enunciating the initials, as any overly earnest TOY might suppose) has a flair for the eastern-sounding, rather than just eastern mumbling in his music. RZA, more than you'd imagine, has the ability to knuckle under for the right director, and Jim Jarmusch thus obtains a delightful little loop for the purposes of making his aerial shots seem even more weightless. And, according to El Times, Jarmusch doesn't let you pull that crap for nothing.

Unleash THE SAMURAIS! Or not, as the case may be. Yousendit, aka .mac for teenagers, is also throwing a pissy fit today, thus granting this post more internal consistency than it has any right to. We'll have another go this evening.

UPDATE 08/06/05: Welcome to multimedia, bitches

'RZA - Samurai Theme'

But It Fresh From Japan