This blog has laid fallow for far longer than I would have liked. In my defense, I've been fairly preoccupied in the time since my last post: working out the logistics of a move from one of the country's least humid cities to one if its most humid, officially getting my doctorate, and then the actual moving process itself, which involved me putting in a 16 hour day behind the wheel of a Budget truck towing an extremely bulky car carrier. I probably could have still managed to write a post here or there, but that would have involved cutting back on my prodigious schedule of time wasting activities, and obviously that wasn't gonna happen.Now that I'm pretty settled in over here, though, I'll be posting more regularly. I'm trying to make it a goal to update this blog with more frequent, but less lengthy, posts. I'll probably fail at both those goals, so caveat emptor and all that.
However, by way of fighting the good fight, I wanted to discuss briefly the new Arcade Fire music video. It's actually only kind of a music video; it's billed as an "interactive film." The hook is that you enter the street address for your childhood home and it pulls Google Maps data to incorporate images of the street you lived on into the onscreen action. The whole thing is synced quite nicely with "We Used To Wait," one of the strongest tracks on Arcade Fire's pretty excellent new album The Suburbs, and will probably strike you either as a neat trick or a deeply evocative work of art, depending on your emotional response to the sight of places you formerly lived. Personally, I'm a bit more on the "neat trick" side of the fence - the piece's use of pop-up windows as a method of editing seems more innovative to me than its incorporation of Street View and GMaps pictures - but I can definitely see how it could be genuinely affecting. It's certainly worth four minutes of your time. I watched it with Chrome, as the site recommends, but according to the Onion AV Club, it works in Firefox as well as long as you have a release version that supports HTML5.
P.S.: This probably goes without saying, but you don't have to enter the address of your childhood home. Here's a version of the video that centers on a Captain D's down the road from where I went to high school.
