April 2010
“And yet, the album opens with a song called “Tired of Sex.” About, yes, Rivers...”
– Sady Doyle, “Sex Offender Week: Rivers Cuomo Messes You Up Forever,” The Awl, April 27, 2010
Whatever happened to a girlfriend, the kind of girl who makes love cause she’s in it? I know you want all that stupid old shit, Rivers, like letters and sodas. But that girl wants to be falling in love with...
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By the by pt. 2
Since I’ve had a few questions about it, I wanted to mention that the Awl piece got bumped back a day due to the server troubles they were having yesterday, which Choire says is a scalability problem but I think is some sort of deliberate attack by the Jim Toomey ads on the Awl’s liberal readership. I don’t know how that works, technically, but I wouldn’t put it past a...
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Rachel is giving out tiny American flags
aceterrier:
screwrocknroll:
This is kind of obvious, I think, for those who deal in the field I do, but America’s entire idea is wrapped up in recapturing for itself a state that never existed. This is a powerful evocation of that state, but it is the same evocation that has rung through American history for decades, centuries.
In short: the idealized America is that envisioned in the...
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By the by
My entry in a certain series the Awl is running will be up tomorrow, i.e. Wednesday. The first two entries, one of which is unreservedly awesome and the other of which gives me feelings, have gotten great responses. Mine is about gender and Mad Men, sooo…we’ll see how that goes.
On whether Bret Michaels will get an obit in the...
R: They were all over Farrah Fawcett. M: I think she’s more famous than Bret Michaels. R: Nuh uh. He’s, like, super famous now. M: He’s VH-1 famous. R: He is on the Celebrity Apprentice! *mutual embarrassed silence*
Weird sentences we now have to say
“Well, I grew up with print.”
Lou Reed's next album
It should be him covering all the songs that mention him or the Velvet Underground. So Art Brut’s “Bang Bang Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Pixies’ “I Been Tired,” Jonathan Richman’s “Velvet Underground,” etc. I just think it would be fun to hear Lou croak “Once is enough…once is enough…”
What am I forgetting?
A crazy idea
I’m sure there’s a good argument against this, but why not just register everyone to vote automatically when they’re born? Why not just do it at the same time you get your social security card? It wouldn’t work if your family moved before you got to voting age, I guess, but most people don’t, it seems like. Is there something I’m missing?
An alternate theory of the decline of music...
To take the point I made about Sleigh Bells more broadly: particular pieces of pop culture serve particular purposes for us collectively, and that purpose changes over time. That’s because the utility of a form isn’t inherent to that form; it depends precisely on the historical moment in which it finds itself. In the middle of the 20th century, movies were a way of arguing about the...
My new computer →
In case you were interested, for some reason. Mostly it’s just that I’m excited. Thanks to keflex for pointing me toward Lenovo, which sure seemed hard to beat for the money. Hopefully this computer will not make me sweat if I have it on my lap for more than 5 minutes, like my old Dell did. Coulda fried an egg on that thing.
Sleigh Bells, Neumo's, 4/20/10
If you were worried about Sleigh Bells losing the loudness, let me tell you this: don’t. When the first bass comes in (as in actual bassline, not a kick sound with a lot of low end, which starts right away) around the end of the second song of the set, your vision blurs for a second; your eyes cross, you’re forced back on your heels. That shit vibrates the small hairs on your...
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On Gizmodo "outing" an Apple engineer for getting...
I love it when tech industry crypto-libertarian “personal responsibility, self-reliance, transparency” types all of a sudden stick up for the little guy because they can actually empathize with his situation. Good job, guys! Next up, we’ll try for poor people and women.
Ugh my laptop died
Any advice on a sub-$500 laptop that’s not a netbook? Not going to be doing anything heavy on it, just the web and word processing and stats and maybe watching mpegs. Any ideas, or things to avoid?
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Oh hey
Apparently I am listed in Tumbr’s “creative writing” directory, which makes as much sense as anything does, and besides I am in good company, it looks like. I have whatafoolbelieves to thank for this, so, thanks! If you also want to recommend me, you can…click here, apparently?
Confidential to Tyler Coates: the band at the faux-Irish pub is playing an acoustic version of “Night Moves.”
WatchAlso required viewing, for humans: Natasha Bedingfield’s “Babies” video.
WatchThis report from PBS on how Florida benefits from federal tax dollars should be required viewing if you want to talk about government spending.
Unexpected etymology of the day
Main Entry: glam·our
Etymology: Scots glamour, alteration of English grammar; from the popular association of erudition with occult practices
Glamour - Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary
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I get the Bieber obsession now. It’s like someone bet Usher he couldn’t make the human version of Poochie popular, and then he did!
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NYT: Retirement of Justice Stevens Is Political... →
Guys, he has been President for like 15 months now and passed fucking health care reform. Can everything stop being a “test”? Can’t they just be challenges? Do we have to keep portraying him as a n00b? Because that’s starting to look a little…funny.
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A Middling Marvel: Rush's longevity says a lot... →
So the Rush joke is about middle class shame, and it’s funny because so many of us are in on it—begrudging members of North America’s white, middle class majority, with its ambition and status anxiety (which Rush enacts through its conspicuous instrumental virtuosity, managerial professionalism and literary allusions), aggrieved entitlement (Peart’s Ayn Rand–inspired messages about...
The Men's Room: Man v. Tool Academy →
I have a thing in The Awl, about masculinity and Old Spice commercials and Obama. And Tool Academy, obvs. I couldn’t find a way to work in the observation that one couple this season was functionally indistinguishable from Cletus and Brandine from the Simpsons.
Some of My Best Friends are Tea Partiers | The... →
desnoise:
Good article about the left’s infatuation with the Tea Party movement, which (music critics take note!) touches on the “authenticity” appeal, but I still feel like Doonesbury explained all this best in a series of strips last week.
This (for those averse to click-throughs, anti-Obama activists on the left are contemplating alliances with the tea partiers) is sort of the chickens...
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ittookseconds:
Four minutes and forty-three...
May 16: Commencement or corporate ceremony? →
Students at Syracuse University (not exactly a bastion of populism, if you’re familiar) are causing a ruckus over the choice of the CEO of JP Morgan Chase to give the commencement speech. (Last year it was Seymour Hersh.) Their Facebook group has 300 members so far. I’m no great fan of the New Populism, especially as practiced by Jon Stewart (see his recent interview with Liz Claman...
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You don't stop
Catching up on my reading, I was absolutely shocked to discover that Ke$ha is controversial. This boggles my mind. Her music is fine! It is decent pop music, but nothing about it is extraordinary enough to merit comment. How are people reading so much into this?
Well, I know how, of course. (She’s explicitly telling us to!) But I don’t like it. It seems like what this new...
ohrohin:
via extrafirmhold & sushioutlaw.
...
Just out of curiosity
What’s your favorite Beastie Boys song?
