October 2010
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It’s weird hearing people talk about Carl Paladino outside of the context of New York. I mean, he’s awful, of course, but when I listened to this NPR story today while driving home from the gym here in Seattle, I just couldn’t get behind their effort to frame him as violent and aggressive. I mean, sure, telling us that he “threatens to clean up the New York state capitol...
September 2010
thevidsarealright asked: Watching this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6xXl3Ku-S8) just now - do you have an opinion on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Also, there hasn't been a Taco Bell in the UK for about 18 years. Do they really do those nose-bag things?
Dipset’s Return and the Tyranny of Promise →
Nick Sylvester:
There was something fun — that’s really it, just fun — about rooting for the little guys. We charted the progress of J.R. Writer, found that one good Hell Rell song. 40 Cal got his due. I was editing the tracks section of Pitchfork.com, a music recommendation Web site, and this was where we shared our findings in meticulously unkempt, highly allusive, usually bad prose. Over...
“i tell Himanshu that i think Das Racist is a project about race with some jokes...”
– - Pitchfork Reviews Reviews on The Awl
The article is good, but this point of view kind of bums me out. I talked a little bit about how I liked Das Racist a few days ago, and I have to admit that I did frame my liking in terms of shared heritage. And yes, they’re called Das Racist, so they’re...
Swans - New Mind
Here in gray, gloomy Seattle, it...
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katiebakes replied to your video: I dunno, something about Meredith just really…
LOL, the embed showed up weirdly on dashboard so I thought it was an mp3 so I was like Meredith? (thinking) Meredith Brooks! Oooh, I haven’t heard BITCH in awhile!!!!! Got really excited, then it wasn’t that, but now I’m downloading #allrolledintoone
In case anyone else now needs to hear it:
Meredith...
Palace of Pleasure →
rustbelts:
Douche chill.
There are too many amazing parts of this to pick just one. Basically, the “pimp” from the ACORN videos tried to embarrass a female CNN reporter doing a story about him by luring her onto a boat outfitted with like party-store sexy-sex items and hitting on her, though it’s unclear how this would embarrass her, exactly. Do read.
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Rachel is reading Super Sad True Love Story
And she likes it! We discussed this the other night because she was like “I know people didn’t like it, but I didn’t know why,” and I pointed her to Miles’ Awl piece and we sort of kibitzed on it. And I obviously haven’t read it yet (we went to Powell’s last week and split up the haul), but here’s what we sort of came to, conclusion-wise.
The...
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WatchI dunno, something about Meredith just really resonates with me. It might be her utter lack of shame, or her laid-back approach to nudity, or her cheerful approach to alcoholism. Regardless, I think she represents something integral to my personality. And now that I’ve spent a hot second trying to figure out what that thing is, I’m becoming aware that my affinity for Meredith may...
meghanagain:
As the audience filed out, we were each handed a stuffed monkey (I can almost work it, now) and a DVD box set of Glee, S1. My bag was small and I could not fit either item into it. Or maybe I could? But I had new concerns. On the elevator, I spotted the time on someone else’s watch. 6:55. I turned to Christine. I said when this elevator stops I am going to run. She said I...
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The Wrestler and the Cornflake Girl: Ring legend... →
bg5000:
This is a really amazing article and proves yet again that Mick Foley is a national treasure. (ht biggray)
He donated his book advance to RAINN and is a weekly volunteer for their support hotline! Bless.
(Some interesting stuff in here about gender as performance and the experience of physical pain, if you don’t care about Mick Foley or Tori Amos.)
Doomed to repeat
Here are some excerpts from a July 15, 1994 USA Today article by Bob Minzesheimer entitled “In the heartland, ‘92 campaign’s glow has faded: Electorate disappointed in politics.” It’s about Bill Clinton, but it’s creepy how exactly it replicates the language being used about Obama 16 years later:
These days, Vandalians still use words like euphoric and...
WatchI can’t imagine why you’d be interested in my opinion on the subject, but How To Dress Well’s cover of R. Kelly’s “I Wish” is pretty great. It’s hard to cover Kells if you’re a white dude - too much slang and culturally-specific speech, which works fine when you’re listening but is hard to sell when it’s coming out of your mouth. But...
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Boys to Men | Music | Portland Mercury →
I wrote about Hanson! You might enjoy it. Here is the conclusion:
A better question to ask, then, may be what it means that Hanson still exists. I’d argue they resonate with their fans as the last of the rock stars, a species that still exists but has been deprived of breeding stock. The music industry is dead, reduced to niches, pop stars, and a long tail. But where music once...
To be less obtuse about my previous post
It struck me in seeing the reactions of people who hadn’t previously read the PRR house style how much more professionalized blogging has become in the last 5 years or so, a sentiment which I imagine you receive with some mixture of “no duh” and “hey, that sentence doesn’t make sense.” I wrote under a pseudonym when I started blogging because I didn’t...
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6 ways of looking at Pitchfork Reviews Reviews,...
Look at this fucking hipster.
A sort of highbrow Hipster Runoff.
Basically Dave Eggers.
“Something something Gary Benchley.”
A dirty cheese eater.
Possibly Gerard vs. Bear.
“I like talking about people who don’t have any power. And it seems like...”
– Stephen Colbert, testifying before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and Border Security, September 24, 2010.
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The false consensus march
agrammar:
The first time I caught the Daily Show in ages was the day Jon Stewart called for a “March of the Reasonable.” The idea bummed me out. To a severe extent. It sounded like a show that likes to be sharp and attentive leading its audience into exactly the kind of aggrieved, inattentive pose that allows politics to seem so shallow and comical in the first place — this pose where it’s all...
Anonymous asked: What do you think about Jonathan Franzen's Freedom?
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“I have cried only once at a culinary event: the 2007 James Beard Foundation...”
– Christiane Lauterbach, “Automatic for the Diners,” Atlanta Magazine
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The false consensus march
When I heard about the upcoming Daily Show rally, it was in the form of a rumor about Colbert doing a rally on 10/10. The site organizing this effort was supposedly a fan-organized grassroots thing, but I was pretty sure it was astroturfing, a way of making it look like there was this fan-driven demand for the rally rather than having it come from on high. Partially that’s because it...
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The Men’s Room: Let’s Get Physical
(in light of Newsweek’s current cover story, I thought I might offer up this Men’s Room column that ended up on the cutting room floor.)
“They were careful of their demeanor that they not be thought to have opinions on what they heard for like most men skilled at their work they were scornful of any least suggestion of knowing anything not learned at first hand.” - Cormac McCarthy,...
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Anonymous asked: Can we have your thoughts on the Jon Stewart / Viacom rally soon please? I'm trying to marshal my thinking about it, but not getting much further than exasperation. I appreciate you may be bored of talking about Stewart, but I reckon you've something to contribute here.
“Don’t we want our artists’ reach to exceed their grasp? Wouldn’t we rather be...”
– Team Balk. (via rustbelts)
Yeah, I’ve been kinda baffled by people’s hatred for I’m Not Here too. If it’s shitty, fine, but why is it worse to be shitty in trying to make something weird and different than to be shitty in trying to make Letters to Juliet or something?
Cure or enabler?
I was watching a Law and Order episode from 2000 yesterday (for fans: episode 10-21, “Narcosis”) which concerned the idea of “Internet addiction.” L&O is a great tool for seeing what the socially conservative reaction was to new trends when they first emerged, and it’s especially interesting to revisit them when that trend has turned into an integral part of our...
thenotes:
CFCF /// Do U Like Night Bus?
A...
jenniferanne replied to your photo
people actually use those things in the states? is it actually common to see them? i heard that cops in the club district of montreal ride them now but i have yet to observe it for myself. wow.
Unless there has been a major demographic change in the student population over the summer, I think this was directed solely toward the campus security force, who tool...
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WatchIn this interview:
Amount of time Tony Blair, former British prime minister, spends speaking: 2:57
Amount of time Jon Stewart, former star of The Faculty, spends speaking: 4:52
Hopefully Tony learned something from being lectured at by Jon Stewart. Because the rest of us sure didn’t!
WatchSpeaking of: here’s Christine O’Donnell, Republican candidate for Senate, helpfully embodying the midpoint in the evolution of the process of homophobes figuring out how to talk about the gays acceptably.
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“Stewart is a somewhat left-of-center Bloomberg/Springsteen Democrat, but he’s...”
– Why the Worst of Times for Politics and Media Has Been the Best of Times for Jon Stewart and ‘The Daily Show’ — New York Magazine
In the context of my piece about Stewart last week, this is telling, I think. If, as Brian Williams says, Stewart is “a necessary branch of...
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“When this sort of thing happens, it is important to remember that about 5...”
– Gail Collins, “The 5 Percent Doctrine,” NYT.
The media as fictional universe
takethecityandrun:
Not to take away from your interesting take on the situation, but when I saw the title of the post, I immediately started to imagine “the media” as some sort of comic book universe, like Marvel’s or DC’s and half-expected you refer to Jones ret-conning something into continuity.
This was what I was going for! I didn’t know how to incorporate both comic book and TV...
The media as fictional universe
To me, the most interesting aspect of the whole book-burnin’ pastor saga is that not only did he think he could cut a deal to trade his stunt for the closing of the lower Manhattan community center - he actually thought such a deal had been cut. How would this possibly work? What would the mechanics of this be? Who, exactly, would he be negotiating with that had authority over both...
Perfecting Sound Forever: Selections by Greg...
perpetua:
DOWNLOAD IT! In case you missed it — which is weird if you are viewing this on the Fluxblog site itself — this is a mix of songs selected by Perfecting Sound Forever author Greg Milner. This mix isn’t meant to be any kind of definitive statement, it’s just stuff that Greg thought of as being good examples of well-recorded music off the top of his head at the end of my two-part...
