YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: From Nakameguro to Everywhere

Like Béla Tarr or (of late) David Fincher, Japanese headphone masterpiece-maker Cornelius doesn't release work very often, meaning you get unduly worked up over something you'll have plenty of time to digest and generally mull over. I was for a long time a bit let down by his previous album, Point (2002), whose mellow, laid-back tones stood in sharp contrast to the near-constant nattering of its predecessor, Fantasma (1998). But when I broke it out two years later, it immediately jumped to pantheon status. So I'm pretty cool with the fact that I find his latest, Sensuous -- which finally arrived here after hitting many other parts of the globe last fall -- to be, you know, only pretty really good. After five years, I was hoping for something a little more different than Point (not to say something more like Fantasma). But really, my opinion's not wholly valid till, say, 2009. (That said, if you can listen to "Beep It" without doing a really terrible robot, you're a stronger listener than I.)

(By the way, please advise: at least on my copy (and one friend's), there are two second gaps between each of the songs. It's pretty obvious that each song is supposed to bleed into the next. Has everyone else found the same problem? Is this a problem? Is it, in fact, a radical artistic decision, perhaps a satirical comment on how older iPods -- but not the latest -- had this short but irritating gap between each of the songs? Wtf, Cornelius?.)

Here, in celebration, is his video for my favorite song off Point, "Smoke":



Two weeks of the Weekly!! (I slacked. Sorry.) From this week, an interview with Paul Laverty, screenwriter of Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a review (second down, after Sean's awesome take on Barley) of the cycling docudrama The Flying Scotsman, a buncha blurbs on films being shown in our area's Black Lily Festival, and Rep. (Also, Sean is so, so right about S-Man 3. Get our your handkerchiefs.)

From last week, I had a review of the three-hour monk doc Into Great Silence, a Six Pack thingie on actually decent courtroom movies, and Rep, which has a lot of wordage on the traveling Russian Fantastik program that finally hit our neck of the woods. Ruslan & Ludmilla is pretty unbelieveable.