What We've Been Listening Too

Music is constantly playing, even in these last days of the Daily Wenzel offices. While we focus mostly on pop music, we've been known to play everything from classical composers, to experimental works by the likes of Conrad, Stephen Reich, and Philip Glass. Heck, even Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music has put in a few appearances and it was in this context that we gave Mars Volta's Omar Rodriguez Lopez's Old Money a chance.  Mainly guitar noodling over drum beats, samples and keyboards, it's highly abstract take on twentieth century robber barons is still leaving us scratching our heads.

More easily accessible is Asobi Seksu's Hush, a wonderful and ethereal pop gem, that complements the wierdness of CocoRosie's  The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn, another album that's been on fairly constant play. Joining the rotation this week was Beirut's latest offering, The March of the Zapotec/Holland a dual EP masquerading as an album. We're huge fans of Zach Condon, and Zapotec is consistent with the other Beirut releases, given an extra bit of flair by the 19 piece Jimenez Band, but the interesting feature here is the Holland side of the project which features Condon making keyboard music under the moniker Real People

Are You On The Bus

Edmonton Transit recently announced a whole new kind of bus would be joining their fleet. It's impressive, click here for more information.

Any chance it shows up in Calgary?

20-second movie review, or we like whimsy

The Jack Black film Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny was on television last night and it made us realize that sometimes watching a particular film is all about waiting for the payoff, the moment in the film that makes us laugh, cry, or experience some form of emotion far-out of the range of normal movie going experiences. The odd thing about "the payoff" as it were, is that the films that contian them do not necessarily need to be of superior quality. Hence, while Tenacious D And The Pick of Destiny, on balance, is nowhere near as funny as one would hope, the final scenes of Jack Black and Kyle Gass facing down the Devil (as played by Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters) is something we find unbelievabley funny, in no so part because of the enjoyment that Grohl finds in poking fun of hard-rock stereotypes.

Photo of the Day

There's so much about this photo that we want to say, about how much is being signified, of capturing a moment in time - we promise one day we'll write it all down.

Right now however, we just want to highlight one of our favourite photographers, Glen E. Friedman, billed by dailyDuJour as "the most significant photographer of his generation", and frankly, once you look at the breadth of his work, it's hard to argue. Friedman is currently the subject of a retrospective entitled, "Idealist Propaganda" and organized in part by Shepard Fairey, of Obey Giant fame.

We would love to go, or at least decorate our halls with some of Friedman's pics.