Ghostproof Blanket

No, you don't get it, I'M the blanket.

2011-11-15T13:57:00.003-05:00

Sent, at 4:01 am, to my Ghostproof Blanket email address.

[This seems like as good a time as any to say that I'm permanently abandoning this site for my Tumblr. It was a good 4+ year run, this place as a repository for my ADD-addled thoughts and the songs I was obsessed with. But I'm on Tumblr way more often in general, and I'm trying to simplify my life. It's why I wear this same burlap jumpsuit every day now.]

Follow me on Tumblr here.

W.O.W

2011-11-01T15:35:00.000-04:00

Words to live by. Wendy O. Williams was legitimately famous in the mid 1980s and I'm hard pressed to think of anyone like her that exists these days. Lady Gaga is the closest thing we've got to a female musician who isn't afraid to be unpretty once in a while. Which makes total sense, given the current climate in pop culture, where anything less than cute virtually guarantees a woman's invisibility (and yes, Wendy was totally hot in her own way, but in today's world she'd be ripped to shreds by Internet trolls who probably need to get drunk to even dance in public).

"There's a lot of women out there with good heavy metal bands, but they persist to sing like pop singers."

2011-10-27T11:18:00.000-04:00

Tonight I'm seeing two bands I've wanted to see for a long time now: Metronomy and Class Actress. "Slightly melancholy dance music made by smart people" is pretty much my favorite.

Metronomy - We Broke Free from the new album The English Riviera

Metronomy - Heartbreaker (Kris Menace rmx)

Metronomy - Radio Ladio (Mac 3000 rmx)

Has anybody seen my tambourine?

2011-10-24T14:28:00.004-04:00

Tim Curry had an enormous impact on my tiny mind. I still watch this every Halloween, because it is perfection and has STATE OF THE ART video effects. So futuristic.

Most children's programming bored me when I was a kid (the rest of "TWW" included, sorry Fairuza Balk! Better luck next The Craft!). This might be because I had parents who thought that sitting me down and introducing me to Rocky Horror Picture Show was an important rite of passage at age 11. If it didn't have either Muppets or 'adult themes' I basically wasn't interested. I still feel this way.

2011-10-17T12:06:00.000-04:00

According to the Internet, some people don't like Lana Del Rey. After her first album flopped she changed her name, her sound, and sexed herself up — and it kind of worked, since everyone's talking about her now. I wouldn't call that story uplifting, but again it DID work, so I'm not sure she's the one we should be mad at here. Plus, reinventing one's self is pretty standard stuff in the music world.

I could do without some of her baby-waby cooing but I'm super into this song. And if we're all weighing in on her appearance, I do love that she looks like a lost member of the Carrie Nations, or the "in her heyday" picture of a ravaged old Hollywood starlet.

I'm Mortified

2011-09-27T13:46:00.000-04:00

If you're in Chicago this Friday at 7:30, you should come see me at the Mortified show at Schubas. I'm reading a piece centered around my 8th-to-12th grade diary entries (lots of LSD-addled poetry, my dilettantish attempts at being wiccan, and sundry 'nobody understands me'isms). The awesome and supportive producers of the show helped me put it together and it might be the hardest I've worked on anything all year. Well, the hardest I've worked on something that's actually finished. This weekend I got to hear a couple of the other readers and their stuff is funny-awkard-adorable. Come out!

Mortified Chicago Promo from Shay DeGrandis on Vimeo.

2011-09-26T14:04:00.000-04:00

I tried to watch the "New Girl" pilot without prejudice, but I just can't relate to Zooey D at all. I think it's because she strictly plays two kinds of characters: either girls that must have strawberry-scented farts, or girls that make NO farts. "I'm offbeat and wacky but never, ever in a way that makes me look remotely unattractive!" Zzzzz.

I'm practically STAR MATERIAL.

2011-09-24T15:19:00.000-04:00

Take the Narcissistic Personality Inventory

Remy Ma - Conceited (There's Something About Remy)*

*Currently serving time for shooting a member of her entourage

2011-09-23T19:17:00.000-04:00

Personal - Tony Hoagland

Don’t take it personal, they said;
but I did, I took it all quite personal—

the breeze and the river and the color of the fields;
the price of grapefruit and stamps,

the wet hair of women in the rain—
And I cursed what hurt me

and I praised what gave me joy,
the most simple-minded of possible responses.

The government reminded me of my father,
with its deafness and its laws,

and the weather reminded me of my mom,
with her tropical squalls.

Enjoy it while you can, they said of Happiness
Think first, they said of Talk

Get over it, they said
at the School of Broken Hearts

but I couldn’t and I didn’t and I don’t
believe in the clean break;

I believe in the compound fracture
served with a sauce of dirty regret,

I believe in saying it all
and taking it all back

and saying it again for good measure
while the air fills up with I’m-Sorries

like wheeling birds
and the trees look seasick in the wind.

Oh life! Can you blame me
for making a scene?

You were that yellow caboose, the moon
disappearing over a ridge of cloud.

I was the dog, chained in some fool’s backyard;
barking and barking:

trying to convince everything else
to take it personal too.

A toast to Courtney Stodden, or: You could just skip this post and read "Marriage" by Gregory Corso

2011-09-22T21:56:00.000-04:00

Last weekend I went to a farm in New Jersey and I watched two of my favorite people marry each other behind an old silo. A recurring theme of the toasts at the reception was how the two of them bring out the best in each other, and that's something you hear a lot in toasts like that. The difference was that in this case that old you complete me sentiment is absolutely 100% true. They turn a light on inside each other and you can see it happening. With a lot of other couples in my life —some married and some that will probably marry — I see the opposite, where being around their partner makes them a little duller and a bit less funny or fun, as if the other person has a tranquilizing effect on them. And maybe that's what some people need: someone that will make them more tranquil. I don't profess to know what's best but I know that's not what I want.

Two men have expressed the wish to marry me in my life. The first man later recanted his wish; it was ultimately the right decision and we parted with a lot of respect for each other. The second man proved to be so mentally unstable that I still half-believe he'll show up someday to turn my skin into a suit (for the record I never returned his sentiment). As for my own feelings toward marriage, I'm somewhere between indifference and skepticism. I'm not against the institution and if we all could have what Coach and Tami Taylor have then by all means sign me the fuck up. But between my lamentably short attention span and the impermanence that's characterized most of my life, I have a hard time believing I've got what it takes.

By "what it takes," I mean both the ability to maintain interest in one person for all of my days and the stones to jump in with both feet and believe with my whole heart that it will work. I went to dozens of weddings in my twenties and several of those marriages are over now. If I've learned anything it's that there's absolutely no rhyme or reason as to what lasts. A couple that dated for 6 months beforehand fared no worse than one that had been together for 7 years. When I was younger, hearing about a rash and probably ill-fated engagement would horrify me — I'd think they were making the mistake of their lives. Now I know so many divorced or remarried people that when I hear of two people getting engaged, somewhere inside I just do a standing ovation for their fucking bravery. Have I ever been so sure of anything in my life? These days I'm wondering what good things can possibly come out of caution and safe bets. I'm becoming increasingly averse to risk aversion. Good for them I say, good for all of them.

Little Dragon - Ritual Union

Ricky Nelson - Fools Rush In

Split Enz - History Never Repeats

Department of Eagles - While We're Young

Boyfriend Rap

2011-09-22T18:47:00.001-04:00

My friend Hanna and I totally took some time out of our busy prank-calling schedule to call that Vanilla Ice 900 line back in the day.

Sassy Nostalgia Corner: Funny Old Ads

2011-09-15T14:05:00.000-04:00

I thought "Nicolas Cage awoken by naked man with Fudgesicle" was the best headline I would read all day, but apparently not. [via Gawker]

Soft Cell - Sex Dwarf

2011-08-29T14:59:00.000-04:00

My mother died a year ago today. She loved David Bowie, and dancing, and driving so fast that it scared my high school friends. Her favorite Muppet was Animal and she was probably a lot like him before she quit drinking. She dyed her hair to match mine, she chain smoked and then she quit, I watched her make people laugh so hard they cried, she could go from sunny to squall to hurricane in no time at all, she could be meaner than most people couldn't be if they made twice the effort, she was beautiful, and she tried as hard as she could.

David Bowie - Golden Years

2011-08-25T16:13:00.000-04:00

Testament

by Connie Voisine

The cat wants to be a strong thing—a hand, a tree.

The girl wants to be a pirate, in a tree.

The tree wants to be the pond with its face of shining.

The pond wants to be the sun who dumps its sugar on the grass.

The grass wants to be the foot, its sole, its heel.

The foot wants to be the brain who always gets to choose.

The brain wants to be the feet dumb in their shoes.

The shoe wants to be the buckle that the girl shines with a cloth.

The buckle wants to be the magpie lifting what shines.

The magpie wants to be the egg in the nest touching its brother.

The egg wants to be the feather.

The feather wants to be the mite, devouring its plume.

from Poetry Magazine July/August 2010

This song is dedicated to Natalee Holloway/I feel for her daddy so I wrote this on Father's Day

2011-08-16T13:26:00.000-04:00

Is it insulting to say that I'm surprised by the level of female-positivity on this track? Well, except for the part where Game pronounces the women on "Basketball Wives" not cute enough.
Really? They're not cute enough? Nice face tattoo that covers up your old butterfly face tattoo, Game.

I love ya ass like Milhouse love Lisa, I love ya ass like the Ninja Turtles love pizza.

Game ft. Drake - Good Girls Go Bad

2011-08-11T15:01:00.000-04:00

Tiniest Lights from Randy Sterling Hunter on Vimeo.

I went to see Angel Olsen play last night at the behest of another talented Chicago-based singer, Angelina Lucero. Her performance was great and the music had a "ghost of an old country singer" vibe that this video captures really well. I was totally hypa-matized. If you get a chance to see her I highly recommend it.

Angel Olsen - If It's Alive, It Will by batheticrecords

2011-08-06T19:54:00.000-04:00

All of these signs are amazing.

My favorite might be: As Jesus said about gay people, " ."

Bronski Beat - Smalltown Boy

Little Dragon - Ritual Union

I want the entire Universe to get off my lawn

2011-07-31T14:45:00.000-04:00

Party of however-many-people-TMZ-is: Your table in Hell is ready.

2011-07-28T14:15:00.001-04:00

Telepathe - Chrome's On It (Gold Panda Remix)

[image via]

ssshhhh gal whine n flex yeah

2011-07-26T14:06:00.000-04:00

The quality of the music in the classes I take at the gym is usually Vengaboys-level of lowest com denom, so I was pretty psyched that a Bob Sinclar song played yesterday. I've probably posted this video before but it is the best so whatever.

It's blazing hot outside.

2011-07-21T14:09:00.001-04:00

The other night I heard somebody say the summer's almost over. NOPE! I'm squeezing out every little bit like it's a toothpaste tube full of funtimes, right up til it's sweater o'clock.

*Here's a mix of songs I've been listening to this summer and/or every summer.*

Tracklist:

Seu Jorge and Almaz - Everybody Loves the Sunshine
Yacht - Psychic City (Classixx Remix)
Boz Scaggs - Lowdown
Frankie Smith - Double Dutch Bus
MGMT - Electric Feel (Prince Language Remix)
DJ Quik - Pitch in Ona Party
Tommy Roe - Sweet Pea
Wavves - King of the Beach
The Soft Pack - Answer to Yourself
Mariah Carey - H.A.T.E.U. Remix
Blair - Hello Halo
Alessi Bros - Seabird
Sat Nite Duets - Peel Away

2011-07-14T11:16:00.001-04:00

I'd never seen this "Ignition Remix" cover before my buddy Noah sent it to me today. Usually 'indie' covers like this annoy me because I feel like they're making fun (unless it's Will Oldham who is an obsessive R Kelly fan), but this is pretty genuinely sweet. I also enjoy the completely airless, Disney show-style delivery of the pianist when she says Kels' intro at 0:15.

Things I saw on this trip back to NYC:

2011-07-09T18:01:00.000-04:00

Many people that I love and that make me feel loved.
The Alexander McQueen show at the Met (I'm pretty sure my eyeballs had an orgasm).
LonelyBoy Dan Humphre─I mean uh, Penn Badgley walking down 8th Street in a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off.
A roach the size of a small mouse, skittering purposefully down the street like he had somewhere to be.
A man of Indian or Middle Eastern descent standing on a street corner at 11 in the morning, holding cellophane-wrapped flowers and shifting his weight nervously from one foot to the other and looking around.
The charred shell of an SUV cordoned off with yellow police tape and the twisted steel remains of a wheelchair two feet behind it. Hopefully the car was empty and it expelled the (also empty) chair in the explosion.
Three women crying on the street: the first was walking briskly while talking on her cell phone, the second put her sunglasses on after sitting down on the N train and kept them on for the remainder of the ride, and the third was me looking at my own reflection in the Sephora window.

Adele - Hometown Glory (High Contrast Remix)

Things I Wish I Liked, but I Don't.

2011-06-23T17:55:00.000-04:00

Tea
Lentils
Architecture
Bob Dylan
Red wine (gives me a face-rash and headache)
The idea of giving birth
The idea of being a mother
Foot massages

The 12 Step Aerobics

2011-06-16T13:37:00.000-04:00

Me: The trainer I stopped going to at the gym is teaching a different class now. It's called "Rock Bottoms." heh heh.

Coworker Amanda:

Heh

All glutes, all the time

(I'm assuming)

Me: Yeah it's probably not an AA meeting

Coworker Amanda: It's a combo ass class/AA meeting

Me: The perfect storm

Coworker Amanda: weeping about drinking and exercise

Me: Just gritty stories and LOTS of squats

Coworker Amanda: Feel the burn (in your liver)

When your weiner is too flashy, haters gonna hate.

2011-06-12T16:13:00.001-04:00

[I used to love the guy, I voted for him in the ‘05 mayoral primary, I’ve been long past his last name etc. But I mean, come on.]

so stooooormy

2011-05-29T15:48:00.000-04:00

self portrait taken just moments ago

It's raining out, again. Now all the barbecues I was gonna to go to are cancelled and I can just stay inside wrapped in a blanket and focus on my neglected projects. What an exciting opportunity for me. I probably didn't need all that sun and liver damage anyway. It's like I always say when the lord closes a door he opens a window and then the rain gets inside and ruins all those stacks of newspapers you were going to read someday when you get around to i[GUNSHOT]

Classics IV - Stormy

Alela Diane - Can You Blame the Sky

Cat Power - Top Expert

Up for Grabs

2011-05-28T18:19:00.001-04:00

Two items I own* that I will never wear, unless I wake up as a Japanese teenager.

*One was a gift and the other was a thrift shoppie in Utah.

2011-05-24T12:50:00.000-04:00

Last night I was sick in bed so I watched Lost Boys: The Tribe. It's a 20 years too late straight-to-video sequel, but I chose to pretend I was watching a supernatural-themed Lifetime movie which really helped me enjoy it more. It stars the chick from when The OC got unwatchable and the scary vampire is played by Kiefer Sutherland's half brother, which is ostensibly his sole qualification for the job.

Corey Feldman also grits and grizzles his way through an uncomfortable-making performance as the lone Frog Brother. I was like, "Why do I find this so hard to watch?" and then I realized that it's because he is weirdly likable and watching him be such a terrible actor makes me embarrassed for him. But he's getting paid and stuff, Corey Feldman neither wants nor needs my pity so I will save it all for Corey Haim's ghost (Haimster is in the movie for two seconds at the very end).

Gerard McMann - Cry, Little Sister (Theme from the Lost Boys)

Why I Shouldn't Get Overly Familiar with People Who Don't Know My Sense of Humor, Part 45234820

2011-05-20T11:36:00.000-04:00

[At work, I call someone we've just hired to do a project. It's our first meeting.]

Me: Hi.

Her: Hi!

Me: 702, where is that?

Her: I'm outside Las Vegas.

Me: Oh! There was an all-girl R&B group in the 90s called 702, they must have been from there.

Her: Oh.

[pause]

Me: Wait you weren't in the group, were you?

Her: ...What?

Me: Just uh, just kidding! Um. Moving on.

*scene*

702 - Where My Girls At

The first bar it was just alright, the second bar was Friday night

2011-05-09T12:56:00.000-04:00

I saw Jonathan Richman last night at a sold out show at the (pretty tiny-sized) Hideout here in Chicago. Despite being a fan for years I've never seen him live before, and at 60 he still has the energy he had in every Conan appearance I've obsessively watched on Youtube.

My favorite of his many mid-song storytelling digressions was when he demonstrated the difference between the dancing that went on at the first bar, and then explained/showed us the clearly superior dancing that then transpired at the lesbian bar. What a weird and wonderful man.

Jonathan Richman - I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar

Modern Lovers - Dignified and Old

An oldie but such a goodie.

2011-04-25T13:50:00.000-04:00

Caterwauling

2011-04-16T15:06:00.001-04:00

It's pretty hard to sing along to Cocteau Twins but I do my best. The trick is to turn it up to 11, preferably with headphones on, to drown out how I actually sound like a deaf person trying to sing.

2011-04-15T16:23:00.000-04:00

White Hinterland - Icarus

[White Hinterland]
image via my new favorite Tumblr

This week in future TV Carnage clips

2011-04-11T12:04:00.001-04:00

His character's name IS Franco. Meta! So many layers to this onion.
The portraits. How much for the pink one on the left? Haha, just kidding. I never thought I'd say this but I'm starting to agree with Videogum on this overexposure thing. My love flame for Daniel Desario grows ever dimmer.
Odd pacing and general surreality aside, I'm pretty sure this scene is making fun of Steve Burton's Playgirl shoot from 1995 and speculation on whether he's had Botox. Don't ask me how I know this. I definitely haven't watched GH infrequently since the 7th grade SONNY AND BRENDA FOREVER —what? Who said that?? Look, I don't have anything to prove to you people.

Velvet Goldmine

2011-03-28T16:44:00.001-04:00

I love this beautiful mess of a movie. It's one of my favorites, and it's also one of the best soundtracks ever. David Bowie wouldn't let them use any of his songs, most likely because the film shows a fictionalized Bowie having an affair with a fictionalized Iggy Pop. This made the soundtrack 100 times more creative than it would have been: Interwoven with classic gems by Roxy Music and T. Rex are original songs by Pulp, Grant Lee Buffalo, and Shudder to Think that sound like they could have come from that era too.

The flashiest thing about the album are the covers recorded under the name of the two bands in the film, Wylde Ratttz (faux Stooges performing "T.V. Eye" with Ewan McGregor not doing terribly on lead vocals) and The Venus in Furs (the British glam band that alternates Thom Yorke and an also-not-terrible Jonathan Rhys Meyers on vocals).

The Venus in Furs - 2HB

Shudder to Think - The Ballad of Maxwell Demon

The Venus in Furs:
Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead)
Bernard Butler (Suede)
Andy Mackay (Roxy Music)
Paul Kimble (Grant Lee Buffalo)
Jonathan Rhys Meyers

Wylde Ratttz:
Thurston Moore and Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth)
Ron Asheton (the Stooges)
Mike Watt (the Minutemen)
Don Fleming (Gumball)
Mark Arm (Mudhoney)

The movie is also basically one GIF after another waiting to happen, from Brian Slade pausing to sniff cocaine off of a girl's butt while fighting with his girlfriend to Ewan McGregor and Christian Bale's characters making out. Velvet Goldmine really answers the question "Is campiness still fun if it's completely intentional?" Yes, 1000 times yes.

Forever and ever amen

2011-03-18T15:45:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago I was having dinner at my brother's house, my five year old niece Lina sitting to my left. The two of us were laughing over a joke I'd made when her eyes fell on the inside of my right wrist and stayed on it as I lifted my pizza to take a bite. For a moment she looked like was considering something and then said "Aunt Samantha...your tattoo is still there."

"That's because she hasn't taken a bath yet," my brother said. When I'd first gotten that tattoo I'd tried to explain to Lina that it was like a drawing that's permanent, but she wasn't even four at the time and I'm not sure when kids begin to grasp the concept of forever. From what I can recall of being that age I knew that I'd keep advancing to the next grade in school and the excitement of birthdays would come every year, but it was my understanding that absolutely everything else was going to stay the same. I was my only time marker for those years before things around me did start to change.

Earlier in the evening Lina had given me her review of Madagascar 2: It was good, but she had to hide in the next room during some scary parts involving a dam and a volcano where characters either died or might die.
"When did she learn about death?" I asked my brother after dinner, when my niece and nephew were off to bed.
"I'm not sure when exactly but it was around the time she started going to Sunday school. One day she came home with a drawing she'd made of Jesus on the cross. She explained his situation and there was a big frown on his face."

AA Bondy - Rapture (Sweet Rapture)

Glasser - Glad (Delorean remix)

Meet my new spirit animal

2011-03-02T21:37:00.000-05:00

The complete disinterest of the kid in the foreground in the face of such blistering awesomeness can only mean Grandpa does this ALL THE TIME. You, sir, are an inspiration.

The Secret History

2011-02-22T23:42:00.000-05:00

I finished Donna Tartt's novel The Secret History today. I was looking for a new book and Lesley Arfin — author of Dear Diary which I read and loved last year — said in an interview that she had separation anxiety from the characters after the book ended. At 600 pages you're definitely with the six (and then five) friends in their insular little world for such a long, harrowing ride that you can't help but think things like "Oh, that's SO Francis" toward the end.

The book and some of the characters are such a slow burn at first and then things become so vivid and epic that I kind of can't believe it's never been a movie. In fact I wouldn't be mad if it was adapted, so long as they kept it set in the early 90s. The psychological thriller interwoven with Darren Aronofsky-type CG camp for the dream sequences and the bacchanal with Dionysus in the woods? It could be like "Kicking and Screaming" meets "Heavenly Creatures" meets "Heathers." And just this month someone fantasy-casted it on Flavorwire, with choices I mostly agree with except let's switch out Jo-Gor-Lev with Jesse Eisenberg for Richard the narrator, and maybe Wallace Shawn for Julian.

The icing on the cake was Tartt's fucking pitch-perfect satire of how ridiculous a tiny elite liberal arts college can be. It takes place in Vermont at a thinly veiled fictional Bennington called Hampden and the faculty, the drug-drenched student body, everything just rings so true. One main character wears pince-nez which of course turn out to be lensless, the way so many people at Sarah Lawrence had some affectation-by-way-of-prop like a cape or exotic pet. We used to call one kid "The Mayor" (of McCheese fame) because he tried to get all WC Fields with a top hat and cane every day.

"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion. I remember well, for instance, the blind animal terror which ensued when some townie set off the civil defense sirens as a joke. Someone said it was a nuclear attack; TV and radio reception, never good there in the mountains, happened to be particularly bad that night, and in the ensuing stampede for the telephones, the switchboard shorted out, plunging the school into a violent and almost unimaginable panic. Cars collided in the parking lot. People screamed, wept, gave away their possessions, huddled in small groups for comfort and warmth. Some hippies barricaded themselves in the Science Building, in the lone bomb shelter, and refused to let anyone in who didn't know the words to "Sugar Magnolia." Factions formed, leaders rose from the chaos. Though the world, in fact, was not destroyed, everyone had a marvelous time and people spoke fondly of the event for years afterward."

The fact that the story takes place in this environment goes a long way in making the cultish central friendship believable enough, and lends a sort of No Exit feel to their dynamic by degrees as the book goes on. I won't say I have separation anxiety from the characters, but I'm definitely thinking about them and wondering what they're up to.

The Velvet Underground - Ocean

Let's Get Romantical

2011-02-13T23:51:00.000-05:00

In 2002 I had a job at 43rd and Lexington and would walk through Grand Central every day to get on the 6. On Valentine's Day that year, heading to the subway at around 6pm, I saw a line of men about one city block long leading up to the tiny Godiva shop in the train station. Men of all age, race, and class, some holding cellophane-wrapped flowers but most not, collectively sent me the indelible message that roses and candy on this day of all days said: "I have put the minimal amount of thought into this."

I've never been into Valentine's Day because of that sort of by-the-numbers feel, and I ended a relationship pretty recently so I'm rollin' solo this Monday. But maybe that's exactly why this year's Valentine's Day Mix is 100% free of bitterness and irony. Just 15 of my favorite love songs of all time (let it be known that "Nitemare Hippy Girl" is for my money the most romantic song ever written). We've got to keep loving love, right?

LUFF SONGS: Click here to download

I Need Love - Sexton Blake
Nitemare Hippy Girl - Beck
Just Really Wanna See You - Shudder to Think
Tim, I Wish You Were Born a Girl - Of Montreal
A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off - The Magnetic Fields
Intimate Friends - Eddie Kendricks
Good Timin' - Jimmy Jones
Everyday Clothes - Jonathan Richman
I'm on Fire - Bruce Springsteen
You Are the Blood - The Castanets
Love Profusion - Regina Spektor
The Way I Feel Inside - The Zombies
T Ser s Mi Baby - Surfs
Put Your Hand in My Hand - Lungfish
I Touch Myself - Scala & Kolacny Brothers

bitch bitch bitch bitch make me rich

2011-02-04T12:37:00.003-05:00

It’s hard out there for a pimp—especially now. Changes in the sex industry have rendered them superfluous. I met 11 pimps working out of midtown Manhattan in 1999, and all were out of work within four years. One enlisted in the military; two have been homeless. Only one now has a full-time job, working as a janitor in a charter school. I asked one of them how pimping experience helps him in the legit economy: “You learn one thing,” he said. “For a good blow job, a man will do just about anything. What can I do with that knowledge? I have no idea.”

-The most riveting article I've read all week via The Hairpin

Too $hort - Pimpology

2011-01-25T22:21:00.001-05:00

Grimes is a woman named Claire Boucher from Montreal. Her stuff sounds kind of like if Pictureplane and Enya had a baby, and the result makes me want to hold onto a unicorn's silvery mane and ride deep into some Legend-type woods to consort with furry tree-dwelling creatures that speak their own language. My sloppy pastiche of 1980s fantasy movie references does no justice to the genuine imagination present in the entire Halfaxa album.

Grimes - Devon
Grimes - Weregild

Nerd Alert: I See What You Did There, Fringe.

2011-01-22T18:27:00.000-05:00

“These were created by my old friend of mine, Dr Jacoby from Washington State.”

Fringe has gone from mediocre to good with this season. Finally, having no standards for the sci fi shows I watch pays off! I'm not just in it for the Pacey anymore.
It's the point of winter in Chicago when it is so cold that I've been watching Hulu in bed all Saturday, which I felt guilty about until I remembered that sports fans spend EVERY Saturday and/or Sunday just sitting and looking. With beer. Ooh, a beer does sound kind of good right now though.
The Twin Peaks soundtrack (and by extension Julee Cruise's album) got a lot of play in my parents' house circa 1990.

Angelo Badalamenti - Dance of the Dream Man

I like big bones and I cannot lie

2011-01-08T14:17:00.001-05:00

A: This is totally not weird at all. Definitely mention the 'bones are the only things left behind when we die' thing on the first date as you take one of her hands, testing its heft and running your fingers over her phalanges to see if they protrude enough. Say it exactly like you said it here.

via Time Out Chicago

1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and get them sit ups riiight and

2011-01-06T23:38:00.000-05:00

I joined a gym this week because, as I wrote as my reason on the registration form, "it's a real slippery slope to suddenly being full on fat." I have a crippling fear of exercising in front of others. This is why I like jogging, because I can just run right by people so even if they know me they barely have time to realize it before I'm gone. But it's cold, and fears were meant to be conquered, and the fat-slope has gotten slipperier in the past few months. A beefy man with a shaved bald head and beady eyes sold me my membership. He looked like a guy who would get into a fight at a bar. Actually, he looked like that idiotic cop Herc from The Wire.

Tonight I went in for my free training session, in which I explained my aforementioned crippling fear to the nice lady and asked her to show me how to use all of the machines. Even the ones with actual instructional illustrations on them. She was the only employee wearing glasses who didn't have a creepy hard face to go with the hard body, so I lucked out. I saw two coworkers and I'm afraid I'll totally see more people I know basically every time I go. Damn you, Chicago! I did alright, meaning I managed to completely ignore the fat 50 year old man sitting on a weight machine, blatantly staring at all of our squatting and lunging and not even pretending to exercise for 15 minutes.

Oh and when I stood by the front desk, nervously fiddling with my paperwork while waiting for the personal trainer and staring into space, some older dude started asking me to help him sign up. I said I just joined and he was like "Oh I'm sorry, you look like you work here!" I guess I just command an air of authority and have an amazing body. Definitely wasn't because I was standing right at the door holding a form. Yup, 35% body fat according go this weird gadget, jeeealous?

That happened, I knew you, we were there.

2011-01-02T12:32:00.001-05:00

My mom's memorial was five days ago. She's in a purple flower patterned porcelain urn and I touched the top of it to make it feel more concrete to me, the whole concept in general. Relatives that I haven't seen in years came and it turned out to be more welcome than nerve wracking. I read, and then her siblings said some stuff, and then a Kenyan priest from my uncle's church in New Rochelle arrived to say some prayers. After he asked who everyone was, he asked if I had any brothers or sisters. I don't have any from my mom, so he said in his South African accent, "Jesus was an only child. You should be the female Jesus." During his prayers and wandering strange homily (my friend Jeff: "You know, I didn't know where he was going for a while but he totally brought it back around, kind of!") I stared at the flowers and checked out. We couldn't bury Mom with her mother that day because the cemetery was closed from the blizzard, so we all drove to an Italian restaurant in a small strip mall and ate a lot. People brought a lot of great photos from family parties decades ago in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and the Bronx.

Standing in front of the podium next to my mother's ashes, with everybody staring at me while I got ready to read my eulogy, was one of the strangest experiences I have ever had. Definite life milestone. Anyway, I wrote it the day before but I think it turned out pretty well, and so I'm posting it for my own posterity:

This is the strangest thing I have ever had to write, because reflecting on someone I have known since I was born feels a little like trying to objectively describe my own hands. For a significant part of my life it was just me and Mom, and we spent so much time together — at home or driving somewhere in the car or sitting in a diner or at Friendly’s eating Reeses sundaes — that when I look back it’s hard to remember what we talked about, and fought about, and laughed about.

But here are some things I do remember: The thunk sound of the microwave door closing and the beeps that would get her coffee reheating when she’d been called in to the hospital to log more of the countless hours she worked there to support us. I know that being a nurse wasn’t her dream, and she would say she had really wanted to be a doctor, but she was proud when she got to help a patient or comfort their family members and I could hear it in stories she would tell sometimes.

I have a lot of things she made, like a patchwork quilt and of course drawings and paintings. There was a period in the eighties where I think she stenciled geese and teddy bears on every available surface. She would sew Halloween costumes for me, including an amazing dress for when I was Sally from “Nightmare Before Christmas.” One year she even made matching fairy princess costumes for me and my Cabbage Patch Kid.

I remember her phone calls to me when I was away at college where she’d ask, “What is this?” and hold the phone up to the radio. She was constantly seeking out new music and even today I will sometimes hear a song and think that Mom would have liked it. In the last few years, after we’d lost every mode of communication, when I would visit her I would make a playlist on my iPod and put my giant headphones on her head, holding her hand as I played her Neko Case and Bjork, and other things I thought she would enjoy. She loved dancing too, and I am thankful that she raised me to have her inclination to start dancing anywhere at any time when (and only when) the song playing moves me to, whether it’s in a bar or a grocery store.

I remember she way she would shake her finger in time to the beat when she was dancing, like she was reprimanding some invisible person who wasn’t sold on the message of the song. And how every Christmas she would insist on getting a tree so large that maneuvering it into the apartment was a feat and getting it out was even funnier — one year we just rolled it down a hill behind our building and ran away like we’d never seen the thing in our life.

What sticks out the most is something I found out when I was in college. Every Easter growing up Mom would give me Cadbury eggs, which were my favorite. I don’t remember how it came up, but one day she told me that every Easter she’d take time to pick out Cadbury eggs with as many different colored foil wrappings as possible because she thought the amount of red, blue, or yellow on the foil meant they were different flavors. Picturing her fishing through the tub of candy eggs in CVS, for some reason there is nothing else that makes me know she loved me more than that.

Van Morrison - Sweet Thing

My New Year's Wish.

2010-12-22T15:58:00.007-05:00

I don't know what my plans are yet for New Year's Eve, and I don't really care since it is so often filled with the pressure to have fun due to some weird collective magical thinking about the night's implications for the coming year. My happiest New Year's Eves (was that the right way to say it? It looks funny) were spent in my own damn house. There is one thing that I really want though, and it's GOING TO HAPPEN next year — if not after midnight on 1/1/11 then on some other night. Its something that's been a dream of mine for so many years, gone unfulfilled. And here it is:

Can someone pleeease toast with me so hard that our glasses shatter? In my long-running fantasy it's been two glass steins. But I realize that between the heft, the mess, and my lack of upper body strength it's just not realistic. It can be two flutes. Two delicate flutes, you guys! How satisfying would it be just put all of the mixed bag that's been 2010 into the force of your toast and just SHATTER that bitch. Here's to us!

My ex-boyfriend was willing to do this once a few years ago, but then he started talking about protective eyewear, and tarps, and I got so overwhelmed with logistics I took the whole thing off the table. But I'm older and more mature now, and I know that there's nothing uncool about safety. Does anyone have those steel wool gloves they use at delis to clean the blade?

There is nothing more tragic than an attainable goal, unfulfilled. Don't make me post a Craigslist ad like that one guy who wanted people to come to his garage and pose on his homemade crucifix, which I didn't want to do but wanted to watch someone do or at least ask the guy some questions? ANYWAY, 2011. Toast smash. Let's do this.

2010-12-12T14:12:00.015-05:00

I just downloaded A Very Special Christmas because it reminds me of baking cookies with my Mom as a little kid. For a caustic, chain-smoking recovering alcoholic who considered her unwillingness to cook a form of feminism, Mom could get pretty domestic around the holidays. Halloween too — for a few years she'd even sew a costume for me and a matching one for my Cabbage Patch Kid.
Growing up I spent every Christmas eve at my great aunt Eileen's house in Philadelphia, helping her decorate her giant tree. She had those great giant multicolored bulb lightsthey only make in LED now because they were probably enviro-murder, and I had a favorite ornament that I have in my apartment now because I asked for it after she died. It's a beaded velvet faux-Victorian thing, so heavy it strained even the thickest branches up top. Deep purple in color and covered in pearl pushpins, it is basically Prince in Christmas ornament form and in my few years on earth I had never seen anything more glamorous in my life.
I'm not sure when I found out that my Mom had made it for Aunt Eileen, from a kit, when she was in her twenties. This added a whole new layer of meaning to My Purple Precious. I'd heard enough from Mom speaking at AA meetings, half listening as I colored in the back of the church multipurpose room, to know that her life before she got married and had me was very different (how weird was it when you first realized your parents had a whole life before you?). She'd had a convertible, and an Airedale named Martini that rode shotgun, and her "rock bottom" was when her head nursing teacher at Bellevue found her wandering in traffic blackout drunk. It all sounded kind of dangerous and as unpredictable as her moods still were. Maybe that's why it blew my tiny mind picturing her buying the materials for the ornament, and sitting down to push the pearl pins in and then glueing on the gold curlicue trim. It's like I had a hard time reconciling the hurricane person with the calm, crafts-inclined person. Both lived in there obviously, just like older versions lived in the Mom that raised me.
I don't have a Christmas tree this year but the ornament is hung up in my window, as I bake today listening to our old favorites.

Eurythmics - Winter Wonderland

I'm probably the 800th person to make an 'I'll Tumblr 4 Ya' joke.

2010-12-04T15:53:00.003-05:00

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT:

I have a Tumblr now because even grandmas are sexting these days and it's time I stepped into the Now. I'm not abandoning this site (any more than I already have), but for pithy statements and random Internet detritus --

http://ghostproofblanket.tumblr.com/

styrofoam sandwich

2010-11-10T21:03:00.003-05:00

Tselanie: and another thing.... what's the deal with macaroons?! its like they were just invented yesterday or something!

me: hahaha

they are a trend-food for sure.They're like a wedding thing now, the macaroon tree has replaced the cupcake towerTselanie: dude! it's out of control. my co-worker brought some in a few weeks ago. they are all over blogs. i like the "classicism" of them, but geez louise! they are NOT tasty!

me: I think I have had the thought "I wish I was enjoying this macaroon more," which is stupid because why do I wish that? because they're so pretty and cool to like? You're right they're not that good.

Tselanie: yes! we want to like them because every acts like they like them all the time. actually the artificial coloring freaks me the fuck out

all in all, macaroons make me pretty angry

me: Finally, someone is brave enough to say it

Tselanie: i just put up two facebook posts. i'm going to wait a few hours and rant this one out on there

me: hahahaha

I may blog it!

it's time to admit this emperor has NO clothes

Tselanie: he is literally nude

Mischief Nights

2010-10-28T21:59:00.004-04:00

I wasn't sure if I was sold on Diamond Rings, because it's the sort of Gay Boy Electronic Posture Music I will listen to for awhile and then never really listen to again (see: Tiga, Baby Dayliner, and Patrick Wolf). But there's nothing wrong with that really. I'm super into this song right now and the video is DELIGHTFUL.

I looove when an already great music video goes into a totally different song at the end, like Fabolous' Holla Back and Missy's Get Ur Freak On.

Soon there will be Five Leaves Left

2010-10-17T21:11:00.007-04:00

Joel Sternfeld is probably my favorite photographer after Weegee. Oh, and Helen Levitt too.

The days are getting shorter and then it will be November, aka 'Nick Drake and mild seasonal effective order o'clock.'

I've been getting back into sweaters and spookiness, that kind of thing. What are you being for Halloween?

Sufjan Stevens - From the Mouth of Gabrie l

(from the All Delighted People EP not the new album)

Perfume Genius - Mr. Peterson

"Tragic" only looks good on Anna Magnani

2010-09-27T22:15:00.014-04:00

I heard back from the social worker at my mother's nursing home today. I had left messages, wanting to know why they never called to tell me she'd gone into hospice and died. "I guess it was all a miscommunication" was pretty much the answer I got. "Someone (she refused to specify who) tried to call you, but they couldn't get an answer." It seems that a nameless someone had called the cell phone number I've had since 2002 and claimed that they didn't even get a voicemail message. Since this is the first time I have ever heard of this happening with my phone service, I asked the social worker how many times one tries a dying person's Power of Attorney/child before giving up. Her response was "Uh...well when's the last time YOU called the doctors to see how she was?" This is the same woman who told me two years ago that I was doing the right thing by leaving New York, that my mom was vegetative and it was time for me to start my non-caregiving life. "Look," she said towards the end of the call, "I wish it had happened differently but this is what happened and now it's over."

What is over: My mom's life is over, the course of her awful disease is over and my trips to Yonkers are almost over. When I get a better and more truthful explanation from St. Joseph's (and I file a complaint with the Department of Health) my dealings with the nursing home will finally be over too. What I'd like to be over the soonest though is this one feeling that comes and goes when I get sad about her being dead. It's kind of like being alone in a dark bar in the middle of the day, with no music on so the only noises are glasses being washed or a stool scooting across the floor. Like this weird and very specific kind of loneliness which probably everyone gets when their parent dies, or some variation of it anyway.

Also: A few of my mom's cousins have offered up memories of what she was like before she had me, which I can't get enough of. But they've also said things like "Your Mom was a survivor and so are you" — the word "survivor" was used by more than one person when talking about her, or saying the two of us had been through a lot. It reminded me of a quote I read from Donatella Versace right after her brother Gianni was murdered. She said something like 'so many people are telling me how all of this made me so strong, well I'm strong enough now and I don't want to be any stronger.' That was the first time I wondered if calling someone a "survivor" isn't just kind of polishing a turd. Isn't it really just saying you're the kind of person that crappy things happen to a lot, and you handle it with the natural human response that is survival? Where is the honor in that? I don't want to be lumped into this Survivors Club they speak of. I'm totally good with running the Getting Good and Bad in Equal Measure and Dealing with it Okay crowd.

I promise this is like my next to last post about my mother dying and the next one will be a playlist! I found this Warpaint cover of one of Mom's favorite Bowie songs while I was compiling it.

Warpaint - Ashes to Ashes

It Gets Better

2010-09-23T11:31:00.018-04:00

I love all things Dan Savage and this video made my day. It's the first post from the It Gets Better project, started by Dan to encourage LGBT teens to stick it out until they get out of high school and realize that the provincial half-wits that bullied them can't affect their lives anymore. Dan and his partner tell their "how we met" story, talk about their son and generally talk about the awesome lives they carved out for themselves.

This message is great not just for LGBT kids but for anyone who's bullied in high school and might be losing sight of the big picture. As a teenager I was harassed constantly for dying my hair purple and dressing funny ─ things were thrown at me, I was spat on and called a freak and a dyke, barely a day went by where I wasn't called ugly or repulsively weird. My mom would tell me the exact same thing that Terry says toward the end of this video: "Living well is the best revenge." The brilliance of clinging to this advice was that it helped me ignore the bullies (most of the time) and by the time I started living the life I wanted to, I didn't care about the revenge part because I was happier. Thanks Dan and Terry. Thanks Mom.

My mom died a week ago and no one told me.

2010-09-09T12:45:00.003-04:00

The nursing home told my uncle that they didn't have my contact information (I've had the same phone number for almost 10 years and they've called it many times). I had no idea she was in hospice, that she got better for a minute, that she had a respiratory infection, that she died and was cremated and there was a death certificate and an empty hospital bed. I don't even know what day she left.

I walked around for days and my mother was dead. I rode trains, and two planes, I hugged old friends, I abused my body in several different ways, I drank a margarita with fresh watermelon juice, I woke up on Sunday in an apartment I'd never been to with people I'd mostly just met, I watched Seth play the ukelele, I had terrible meetings at my terrible job, and my mother was ashes the whole time.

on the wangs of my dreams

2010-08-31T22:17:00.003-04:00

Perfectly Strange from Dan Meth on Vimeo.

My friend Dan visited Chicago this weekend and it was so fun! We went to lots of good-kind-of-touristy places, like Kuma's and that fountain that spits up on children. He made this video featuring our (fa-lawlessly staged) reenactment of five seconds of the "Perfect Strangers" credits.

Spoon - Chicago at Night

Just Act a Fool, It's Okay If You Drool Cuz Everybody's Gonna Strip and Jump in the Pool

2010-08-23T22:17:00.010-04:00

The first album I ever bought that had a Parental Advisory was Digital Underground's Sex Packets. I was in seventh grade, the year Mom and I moved to Philly. On my first day the three class Mean Girls—Brandy, Brandi, and Latisha—asked me what my favorite music was. "Red Hot Chili Peppers," I mumbled. Their laughter instantly shamed me into liking what everyone else liked, instead of just tapes my dad indoctrinated me with. Lucky for me, 1991 was obviously an amaaazing time to start getting into hip hop. Little did I know that 20 years later (FUCK!) I would still find myself drunkenly rapping along to the exact same songs I taped off Power99 and Q102 in junior high.

My mom wanted to go to the mall in the suburbs and she would sometimes buy me a tape as a reward for the hours logged at Macy's or wherever. I handed Sex Packets to her and she gave it to the cashier, a twentysomething South Philly-looking chick. "Ma'am I have to let you know that this has a Parental Advisory sticker on it." My heart sank into my stomach. "I'll listen to it before I let her get anywhere near it," my mom replied as she handed Tipper Gore Jr a twenty. When we got back to the car she tossed the bag with the tape in it into my lap without even looking at me. I still know every word of every song by heart! Yes, "The Humpty Dance" is on it but it's so much more—so extremely goofy and creative and weird. I mean, there's a song about riding a hoopty down into the ocean and chilling with mermaids and an octopus cutting nine records at a time.

Digital Underground - Freaks of the Industry

Digital Underground - DoWatchaLike

Shock G is kind of underrated - he also produced my two favorite Tupac songs ("I Get Around" and "So Many Tears"), but most people only know him as his alter ego Humpty Hump. There's something really noble about achieving the height of your public recognition while wearing Groucho-type glasses.

White Lightning and Wine

2010-08-12T22:28:00.003-04:00

When people ask me that 'If you could travel back in time to see any band live?' stoner-y question, this is pretty much my answer. I hope the Wilson sisters got crazy laid because they were untouchable back then, as far as I'm concerned. And check out Luke Skywalker shredding at the 1:45 mark! Everyone's outfits are banaynayz in the best way. I fucking love this song. I used to have the Dreamboat Annie cover framed in my bedroom!

nostalgia songs

2010-07-05T13:23:00.007-04:00

How good was The Adventures of Pete and Pete? I'm rewatching it right now and it's still completely brilliant. Even Iggy Pop was delightful in it and not at all like a terrifying meth skeletor with latex for flesh. I saw older Pete in San Francisco about 10 years ago and he looked like a bike messenger, a super cute ginger bike messenger. Oh, and the theme song makes me so happy that I put it on my iPod. And now I'm posting it strictly for da 90s heads.

Polaris - Hey Sandy ("The Adventures of Pete and Pete" theme)

Speaking of songs from movies/TV that make me really happy: This summer mix from the singer for the Morning Benders is cool because it has a Joanna Newsom-sort-of-cover over a J Dilla beat. But the genius of is how it starts off with Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters' duet from "The Jerk"! Cutest song ever.

The Morning Benders Summer Mix via Say Mayday

Summer Anthemz 2010, So Far

2010-06-06T14:04:00.009-04:00

I'm having a great summer so far, which is part of the reason I haven't been posting. Remember to drink lots of water and protect your face from the harsh aging effects of the sun. Sunscreen, people! For real, there's a reason I still get carded.

A few songs from my June playlist. Some classics, some Classixx:

Brazilian Girls - A Good Time

Seu Jorge and Almaz -Everybody Loves the Sunshine

I've never met a cover of that song that I didn't like [like this D'Angelo one, see?]

Deee Lite - Picnic in the Summertime

In the mid-nineties Lady Miss Kier represented everything I aspired to be, style and life-wise.

DJ Cam - Dieu Reconnaitra les Siens

Yacht - Psychic City (Classixx Remix)

Dancing On My Own by robyn

Robyn's whole album is so good and you can stream it all on her SoundCloud.

Kid Cudi - Make Her Say ft. Kanye West & Common (Sammy Bananas Remix) by Sammybananas

CSI MyFreddy

2010-06-01T20:32:00.004-04:00

I just made the GIF that I'll get on my body as soon as scientists FINALLY figure out how to make animated GIF tattoos. Where are we with this? It seems like Japan should have something by now.

Dramarama - Anything Anything (I'll Give You) [ysi]

Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Grownup Child Actors

2010-05-28T15:40:00.007-04:00

Q: What do you have against Gary Coleman?

A: We have nothing against Gary Coleman[...]we have the utmost respect and admiration for Gary. We love how he knows who he is and knows that people are taking pleasure in his downfall ("Schadenfreude"), and we love that he appears all over the place poking fun at himself and the pitiful downward slide of his acting career. Have you seen him on "The Simpsons"? On "Star Dates"? We love him.

We sort of idolize him too, in a way, because one of the most important themes in Avenue Q is that life isn't as easy as we've been led to believe. Our parents told us we were special; Mr. Rogers wanted to be our friend and neighbor; we thought we could grow up to be anything we wanted to be, from a fireman to President of the United States. Even in college, we thought we were pretty hot shit, ready to set the world on fire. But when we got out of college, we were faced with rent bills and temping and entry level jobs, if we were even lucky enough to get those. It wasn't nearly as easy or nice as we expected it was going to be. We found to our horror that we weren't all that special after all. And who better to symbolize the oh-so-special-as-a-kid/but-not-so-special-as-an-adult thing we all were faced with than Gary Coleman? He's practically the poster child -- we prefer to think of him as the patron saint -- of grown-up reality sucking. We looked around and found it really sucked to be us, and we knew that if our lives sucked, it must really suck to be Gary Coleman.

The Bass Drum Jungle Music

2010-05-28T12:51:00.012-04:00

This archive of jungle mixes from 1995-1998 is taking me back to the days of Konkrete Jungle parties at Coney Island High and buying tapes from vendors at the flea market next to Tower Records on Broadway. One of my favorites opened with a jungle version of "Born to Roll" that I wish I had on mp3.

I completely lost interest in drum and bass when it started taking the turn toward Roni Size and LTJ Bukem's whole jazz-inflected armchair jungle thing. Box of yawns, if I want "intelligent" I can read a book. The Mickey Finn/Navigator mix is my favorite because it captures the exact sound of what I heard the first time I ever came across jungle. One reason I know I need to do some serious traveling abroad is that I can't remember a time in the last 10 years where I've been as blindsided and enthralled by something completely new to me, not like the way I was when I wandered into a room at a rave in New Haven at 16 and saw people dancing to this super-fast music that I had absolutely zero prior context for. I still get fascinated, entertained, amused, etc. but that "mindhole: blown" feeling is something I still want and can't quite find now that I often feel like I've seen and done everything. This reminds me why I keep chasing it and that I probably just need to look in different places.

One in the Jungle Archive

gonna make ya sweat til ya BLEED

2010-05-24T22:51:00.007-04:00

image: Date Farmers

It's fucking hot finally and I wish it was like this every day. It stretches time out longer and makes things smell stronger and better to me, even burning charcoal becomes a good smell. Summer 2010, let's get on this, more killer less filler. I'll even make an effort to enjoy the street festivals here that Chicago is so obsessed with, despite my failure to understand the appeal of drinking plastic cups of beer penned in with hundreds of people who can't handle their liquor? Summa madness.

Bananarama - Cruel Summer [ysi]

Natural Ingredients - Vilify [ysi]

Gyptian - Hold Yuh [ysi]

I had a dream about someone I knew a long time ago

2010-05-18T22:26:00.007-04:00

I met C the first week of college, in that first semester that seemed like an endless game of cultural catch-up. My classmates all seemed to know each other from some summer dance/writing/theater program and would make offhanded references to people like Maya Deren that I now know were anything but offhanded. I'm told I seemed surly back then but underneath it I was just a sponge, hungry to become one of those people who "knew from stuff." C's style was impossibly perfect and our first conversation was about her trouble finding a good dry cleaner near campus. A dry cleaner! I was a raver whose jean bottoms were frayed from scissors and I was flattered that she'd even pretended I might have an opinion on the matter.

C would say the most jaw-dropping things with a wide eyed guilelessness that, it took me four years to realize, wasn’t an affect at all. One time as I was finishing up my lunch she shuffled up to my table and within five minutes she was telling me about her brief stint as a stripper, which ended when the management informed her that she couldn't actually turn down lap dances. "I mean, gross, you know? They can't expect me to do that to those guys, lap dances," she said matter-of-factly in between bites of frozen yogurt. I watched her like television. You didn't hang out with C, she just kind of happened to you from time to time.

She started dating the son of a TV director who was a year ahead of us. He was friendly in that chatty LA way but had the livewire energy of a snake set to strike. They were always together; she would make him give a ride to any student they saw walking down the main avenue lugging bags. Once my friend Laura described how earlier that day she'd seen C sneak up on him on the lawn and how gracefully she had leaped forward and wrapped her arms around him from behind. I remember watching her point a banana at him like a gun, squinting from behind her hand. They were sweet together, and also they were on drugs.

Our last conversation was one of those "we don't hang out enough but we've always been friends, you know?" talks that people have in the weeks before graduating. She died two years later and I still think of her at least once a year. When I do, I get just as sad as I was when I first learned that she’d overdosed — even just writing this makes my stomach feel like it’s full of ice. We were never even particularly close. Isn’t it funny who stays with you? In my half-baked theory about the afterlife, when you die your reward is returning to the primordial soup with absolutely no sense of who you were. You take the love with you, but all of life's slights and your earthly sense of self is totally forgotten. Freedom from the everyday idiocy of pride seems like the greatest gift you could get. I guess that would mean C. doesn't know she's still thought about by me or by anyone. But she is, and what I'm thinking right now is the world is less interesting without her in it and at a certain time in a certain place, she was leading by example.

The Cure - Catch (ysi)

Sonny and the Sunsets - Death Cream (ysi)

[buy Sonny and the Sunsets]

already assembling the summer playlist

2010-04-06T14:00:00.005-04:00

Listening to Mos Dub - a Mos Def + dub mashup album - is helping me pretend that the weather is like it was just a few days ago. You can download it for free here.

Mos Dub - 05 - Travellin' Underground by maxtannone[ysi]

When You're Feeling Good the Whole World Knows It

2010-03-28T23:19:00.005-04:00

Hot Chip ft. Bonnie Prince Billy - I Feel Bonnie (Club Version) [ysi]

If you don't think Will Oldham is one of the more interesting musicians/people in the world, read this New Yorker article from last year. Or even just his IMDB page.

image via the tirelessly tit-tastic Lazertits

Margaret Moth, 1951-2010

2010-03-22T20:51:00.008-04:00

Given her jet-black hair, thick black eyeliner, black clothes and combat boots (which she often slept in while on assignment), people didn't always know what to think upon meeting her. She was quirky, the sort who excused herself from a social gathering by saying she had to wash her socks. And she was fearless, the kind of woman who not only kept the camera rolling while under fire, but zoomed in on a soldier who was shooting at her.

I had never heard of war zone camerawoman Margaret Moth until I read her obituary online today, and it is well worth reading. Depending on your mood her story will either inspire you or make you feel like you have done little more with your life than glass-eyedly shovel Cool Ranch Doritos into your mouth while watching "Do You Think You Can Be Smarter than America's Dancing Marriage Ref?" She jumped out of planes barefoot, worked in war zones and even got shot in the face working in Sarajevo, and then WENT BACK as soon as she got better. She enjoyed cigars and playing "who would you rather?" and was kind of a cat lady, except her cats were strays in Istanbul. What an interesting life packed into a such a short time.

photo via CNN.com

The Her Wants What it Wants

2010-03-15T10:44:00.000-04:00

My (crazy talented) friend Tom asked me for some hip hop recommendations last week so I made him a mix. For a 24-hour turnaround, I think it's a pretty good representation of what I've liked in the past eight months or so? I'm posting it here because partly I'm too lazy to generate any real content, the Mixtape Recovery Project posts are popular, and because part of me wants this blog to get shut down so I'll be forced to make good on my threats to take my randomness over to Tumblr.

1. Gucci Mane - Dangers Not a Stranger (Diplo Remix)

2. Snoop and Kid Cudi - That Tree

3. Lil Wayne and T Pain - Waist of a Wasp

4. U God - Lipton [ysi]

5. Kid Cudi Simple As

6. Shine Blockas - Big Boi ft Gucci Mane

7. D-Lo - NoHoe (Remix) f/ E-40, Jacka & Beeda Weeda [ysi]

8. Fat Joe - Slow Down (Ha Ha)

(I like this "ha ha" better though)

9. Freeway & Jake One - One Thing feat. Raekwon

10. Jams Dean - No Stopping [ysi]

PS: If you watch this Law and Order: Sexy Victims Unit clip with the CC "transcribe audio" on it's pretty funny.

PS PS: This Elle interview with Tracy Morgan is the best thing I read on the train this week. Only part of it is online, but if you're in line at the grocery store or something: back page.

previously on GPB:

The Mixtape Recovery Project, Part 1

The Mixtape Recovery Project, Part 2

RIP Corey Haim

2010-03-10T08:46:00.004-05:00

In fifth grade my best friend Hanna and I plastered our walls with Bop magazine posters of Corey Haim. Did anyone ever prefer Other Corey? He had awesome style in "The Lost Boys" to be sure but he looked like a lesbian to me.

The Haim made this video "Me, Myself and I" in the 80s as part of a comeback attempt at the beginning of his lifelong downward trajectory as a drug addict. I hope in heaven he is listening to that Japanese funk and finally starring as the older brother, or the only brother.

Is This the Fulfillment of a Fantasy Hoped For?

2010-02-25T22:16:00.003-05:00

Bongwater - Chicken Pussy [YSI]

Bongwater

Anne Magnuson at IMDB

In the Classic Style

2010-02-22T17:23:00.016-05:00

It took awhile for me to decide if I liked Marina and the Diamonds — partly because her voice made me think of a cross between Regina Spektor and that chick from Evanescence, and partly because the album's sound is so chintzy to me. Like production-wise, if one of her songs was a dress, it would be from Forever 21 and made of flammable fabric and the sequins would fall off all the time and stay on the floor of your closet forever. Her material kind of doesn't need all the swishy layers? I wish all of her stuff sounded like this instead.

Marina and the Diamonds - Hollywood (Chilly Gonzales Version)

You should [download the Chilly Gonzales "Pianist Envy" mixtape]

Update: I like this remix too:

Mowgli's Road (Steve Wishes He Was A Man Cub Edit) by markfountain

2010-02-10T22:50:00.004-05:00

Little Boots - Earthquake (Disco Death Threat rmx)

It would be super meta if British Knights remixed the (white hot) jingle from this 1990 BK commercial. But can you really improve on total perfection?

The Reeling (Kids Go All Ravey Remix) by BritishKnights

One in a millon (British Knights Juke it out Remix) by BritishKnights

Dream Date

2010-01-31T15:16:00.004-05:00

Class Actress - Let Me Take You Out

Elizabeth Harper's voice is pure made-of-spun-glass magic.

Journal of Ardency comes out February 9 on Terrible Records [buy]

Download "Careful What You Say" at RCRDLBL

image: Lauren Weinstein

Feeling Blank Again

2010-01-18T00:00:00.007-05:00

When I heard that Jay Reatard —a preternaturally talented and prolific songwriter that I regret never seeing live — had died last week, my immediate reaction was that it wasn’t surprising. In one regard that's fair enough: When his touring band quit last October it suggested behavior that was erratic at best, and with song titles like “It Ain’t Gonna Save Me” and “Death is Forming” — not to mention their lyrics — I had always assumed that he was as cripplingly depressed as he was talented. On its face the Elliot Smith Formula is pretty straightforward.

But then, Elliott Smith’s death was never officially ruled a suicide and there are rumors that Jay’s death is currently being investigated as a possible homicide. Experimentation with drugs may be sensation seeking as opposed to addiction and an artist’s tendency to explore dark subject matter doesn’t mean they need to be kept away from sharp objects; they may just be less afraid to think about certain things than most people are. Most people are afraid a lot of the time and it governs not only many of their actions but how they react to what the people around them do as well. Thinking about my initial response to Jay’s death brought me back to when I first fully absorbed that fact, which happens to also be the time in which I listened to Jay Reatard the most.

In the summer of 2008 I had just moved to Chicago and was apartment sitting in a non-neighborhood situated between Lincoln Park and Cabrini Green. At the other side of the street there is a warehouse and on the other side of the warehouse is a strip of clubs — the kinds that attract men who would urinate just outside the window of my garden apartment before they hopefully hailed cabs but more likely got behind the wheel, and the sort of women who'd stagger past the door screaming "Lindsay! LINDSAY!" at 2 am on a Thursday night. I’d made the terrible decision to quit the sleeping pills I’d taken almost every night for years at the same time that I was putting some 800 miles between myself and my entire support network, my vegetative mother who no longer recognizes me, and a city I knew like the back of my hand. My brain chemicals were in revolt just as the reality that I knew almost no one in Chicago started to hit me, and it was also starting to get very hot and loud outside. Since I had way too much free time on my hands I did what I often do to burn my excess mental energy: I went running. I ran all the time, no matter how hot it was, usually up and down Halsted so I wouldn't get lost. I ran until I thought I might pass out and I was soaked with sweat, as far as I could go, at least once a day. Part of me hoped that if I went far or fast enough my skin would slide off and my bones would clatter to the ground and I'd be free from the constant exhausting effort of finding a job/friends/my way around. Or maybe I'd get just get hit by a car; either would have been a welcome way out at that point.

I couldn't outrun my impending mental breakdown forever, obviously. What happened that summer and fall left a black stain on me that won't ever go away completely, the memory of how it felt steps on my heels sometimes and scares me. It’s less about how far down I got but more about how easy it was to fool everyone, and the ways in which that compounded the loneliness of the whole thing — but learning that I can never guess what’s going on in somebody’s head at any given time is another lesson I wouldn’t trade for anything.

These days I'm afraid of getting hit by a car when I run because I like the life I’ve made now. And when I think of Jay Reatard I will always associate him with death just like I already have for years. It's hard for me to listen to Singles 06-07 without remembering what I almost did back then, the morbid but practical plans I made, before my last vestige of sanity prevailed and I realized badly it would fuck up five other people's lives forever (it was five people, I had a list, and five was enough). Jay Reatard probably deserves an honorable mention on that list because the running times were my only respite from constantly turning things over in my mind. All that mattered was staying in perpetual motion and going as fast as the music was, and I didn’t want the running or the song to end.

It's All Too Beautiful

2010-01-15T09:11:00.000-05:00

Avatar: It's like living in a Lisa Frank sticker set!

Avatar: Wait, no I think I saw those tribespeople on a rave flyer in 1994.

Avatar: That army was NOT the way the National Guard trailer ad portrayed things.

Avatar: Ugh, don't you hate it when people become EXACTLY like the person they're dating? Like matching hairstyles and everything?

Avatar: Careful! If your life is super empty you might experience crushing depression about how non-Pandoralike everything is all the time.

Small Faces - Itchycoo Park

Mixed Bag, Twentyteen Edition

2010-01-13T21:38:00.003-05:00

Haaay. Long time no post. I was on vacation, and then I got a new job, and I've been going through this weird phase where I only listen to the same 10 songs all the time. Would it be too oversharey to say I also listen to these songs under the covers with headphones on when I get early-morning insomnia, which is often? I find it oddly satisfying, like I'm stealing time (I am stealing time, from myself, valuable sleep time).

ANYWAY. Fellow Chi bloggers Boy Kings sent over their latest intallment of BKTV featuring a live performance from local dance-rock band Gemini Club. Do you think the girls in this —who are depicted as the inconsequential eye candy for the old boy's club— are their girlfriends or just incredibly amenable friends? "French each other! Now french that guy!" As a former AV nerd I appreciate how nicely done these videos are from a production standpoint. I also like what I've heard from Gemini Club and the lead singer looks like the petri dish child of one of my exes and Logan Huntzberger, which I'm pretty into.

Speaking of videos: I can't believe I had never seen the commercial for Booty Pop before this weekend. Apparently the people watching Saturday afternoon repeats of "The Outer Limits" are the target demographic for buttcheek inserts, i.e. me. You know, it's becoming increasingly clear that I should be an inventor. I bet this person is making thousands of hundreds of dollars and it probably all started with two shoulder pads + some really tight underwear + a dream.

Only slightly more gross than Booty Pop is my discovery via Videogum that someone in the world calls himself a "swagger coach" and may get paid actual money by Justin Bieber('s creepy stage parents, probably). From what I can gather he is like a combination of the two Jays from ATNM except for guys.

And finally — look how many different kinds of Kit Kats you can get in Japan! No seriously look how many, and this is just the tip of the iceberg apparently. I want a wasabi one so bad.

So You Think You Can Dance Mechanically

2009-12-01T16:07:00.003-05:00

How come no one invited me to the Robot Dance Competition!??! Robots mimicking the natural movements of humans is one of my favorite things (to be deeply unsettled by).

I Like This

2009-11-30T16:09:00.004-05:00

I like this song. And video.

I like this low concept but amusing and visually engaging Web site.

I like this site of Helsinki street style.

And this ends my trenchant cultural commentary for the day.

FDBD (Sooner or Later You'll Bury Your Teeth)

2009-11-20T13:54:00.005-05:00

The air gets colder and thinner by the day, leaves are crunchy brown on the ground, pumpkins somehow surviving on porches have mouths that curve inward as they rot so they look like toothless old men smiling at me as I walk past. Everything I see seems witchy-spooky in that autumn way, still. Maybe that's why most songs I've listened to these last few weeks could be the soundtrack to pagan rituals in the woods. I only like magical faerie sprite music now. FDBD For Druids By Druids.

Joanna Newsom - Monkey and Bear

I completely slept on Ys because I found The Milk-Eyed Mender pretentious verging on unlistenable when it came out. Ys won't let me even think about whether I like it or not, because it's too busy exploding my brain.

The Wicker Man Soundtrack - Maypole

The 1973 "Wicker Man" is one of the few movies that truly creeps me out and the soundtrack really captures its amazing Ren-Fair-gone-horribly-awry spookiness.

The Incredible String Band - The Minotaur's Song

My friend Howard recommended The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter after learning of my Ys obsession and yes exactly.

Tyrannosaurus Rex - Cat Black (The Wizard's Hat)

I get that Rolan Bolan is Marc Bolan and Gloria Jones' son and he probably DID dance himself right out the womb and stuff, but just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Sometimes I feel like I have stack of pancakes for a head

If Hatin' is Your Occupation I Prolly Got a Full Time Job For You.

2009-11-17T22:41:00.002-05:00

The fact that my first reaction to this was "Awww, Dirty Jerz!" means that I have officially been away from the Tri-State for so long I'm even romanticizing the most terrible parts. Fist pumpin' like champs! Whatever, I've loved two boys from New Jersey. They grow good tomatoes there.

Mixed Bag

2009-11-12T12:06:00.003-05:00

This site started as a way to distribute stuff I was already e-mailing to friends who asked for mp3s after I played them at parties, and then also sort of turned into a depot for my inane ramblings, so I've never considered it a music blog. As such I ignore about 90% of the songs I get e-mailed every day, but here are three recent ones that I like a lot.

Future Islands - Old Dreamer (Pictureplane remix)

If I made an actual non-ADD "best of 2009" list Pictureplane's Dark Rift would be on it. I won't, but it would.

Chew Lips - Seven (Labyrinth Jackals remix)

Chew Lips' songs, unremixed, sound to me like they'd play in an 80s movie montage where a bunch of nerds are building something. At the very least someone would be touching a plasma lamp. If that sounds like it could describe a lot of bands these days: Fair enough.

State Bird - I Don't Love U Anymore

This is off a sampler from The Record Machine and you can grab more State Bird mp3s (as well as some from other artists on the label) on their site.

Anything Can Happen on Halloween, Your Dog Could Turn Into a Cat

2009-10-30T19:36:00.004-04:00

Halloween has always been my favorite because I love spookiness, the ramshackle quality of homemade costumes, candy, pumpkins, decorations, and most of all horror movies. My friend Swati and I used to watch them constantly when she lived in her studio on 2nd Avenue; we'd show each other the ones we were obsessed with as kids and look for new ones that made us get that fun-to-be-scared feeling again (with mixed results). Our top 10 favorites — and it should go without saying this means the original and never the remake:

The Evil Dead

The Last House on the Left

Motel Hell

The Stuff

The Watcher in the Woods

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Fright Night

The Gate

House of 1000 Corpses

Cabin Fever

Honorable mentions: Revenge of the Living Dead, Phantasm 1, 3, and 4

Splatter, basically. Giallo is cool but it's too arty and cold for my taste. Lurid 1980s era Tom Savini-style grossness is best. These days I never watch horror movies anymore because it's just no fun without the one girl who fully shared my obsession. When she finally visits Chicago we probably will just stay in and watch some skulls get stop-motion crushed.

My putting-on-my-costume playlist for tomorrow night:

Laura Branigan - Self Control

(I've talked about the sexy-spooky "Self Control" video before.)

Yacht - The Afterlife

Wave Machines - Keep the Lights On

Scanners - Lowlife (LA Riots rmx)

Black Moth Super Rainbow - Born on a Day the Sun Didn't Rise

(My buddy Collin gets disemboweled by a cult of scary girls in the video for this song. It's pretty badass.)

Happy Halloween!

Gigantic

2009-10-22T20:23:00.004-04:00

Two things I am super into this week:

Videos of "The Berlin Reunion," a several days-long performance involving two GIANT puppets walking through the streets of Germany. He rises out of the water! She eats a giant popsicle! So beautiful and what mind-bending planning it must have involved. Like I always say, if there's one thing that excites me more than tiny toy food it's giant puppets (this is a thing that I am saying to everyone, all the time). Amazing pictures here too.

Part 3 from Erroll Morris's seven-part series for the New York Times, "The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock," where James Agee's descriptions of rooms in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" are compared to Walker Evans' photographs, cataloging discrepancies that suggest Evans moved items around for aesthetic purposes. For the most part I subscribe to the 'there is no What Happened' school of thought when it comes to accuracy in documentary anything, but I find this stuff endlessly fascinating.

And as for me: I turned another year older on Sunday and to quote a far better writer than me, something has me in its mouth and it's chewing. It's not an unpleasant sensation; kind of nice actually. Movement is movement and all the directions I'm being gnashed in are good ones.

Dreamy stuff I've been into lately/always:

Feist - I Feel It All (Diplo's Plastic Remix)

Kurt Vile - Don't Get Cute

[Kurt Vile]

The Association - Never My Love

Kate Bush - The Sensual World

The Magnetic Fields - The Dreaming Moon

Mariah Carey + Ghost Town DJs = Magic

2009-10-12T15:07:00.007-04:00

Mariah Carey is a total Friend in My Head (TM Wendy Williams). It's her half teflon/half coconuts personality, sandpaper speaking voice, cougar-y marriage, and the perfection that is the first three songs on The Emancipation of Mimi. And as big a fan as I am of Beyoncè, Sasha Fierce wouldn't last one round with Mariah Cray-cray. She's the real deal.

Mariah Carey - H.A.T.E.U. remix ft. Gucci Mane, Big Boi, OJ da Juiceman

I Like Food Food Tastes Good

2009-10-05T17:22:00.004-04:00

I was pretty bummed out when the news broke this week that Gourmet magazine had folded. Not because I've ever bought a single issue; I've pored over it at other people's houses but I generally like my food porn to resemble things I would actually make myself. Everyday Foodand the like. Its demise sucks partly because it was a beautiful magazine, but also because — like many others who make their living with words — I get a 'what the eff are we all doing here anyway' sort of feeling when I hear that a big dog like Gourmet got put down.

If you are someone who has "ever loved food and/or magazines," read this Time Out Chicago blog post on Gourmet's closing. As an editor who used to get letters from puzzle solvers who said we helped them through a hard time (sometimes actual hard time if they were incarcerated) or even taught them how to read, I'll never tire of stories about the way magazines can affect people's lives. It's cold comfort to the newly jobless staff, but I hope they read it too.

Some songs about food and drink, some more tangential than others:

Louis Jordan - Beans and Cornbread

[Louis Jordan is king]

Roots Manuva - Cornmeal Dumpling

Dead Milkmen - Filet of Sole

I'm too poor to see Dead Milkmen at Riot Fest this Saturday. Hot tears.

Ohio Express - Yummy, Yummy, Yummy

Jeff Buckley - Lilac Wine

I was just thinking the other day how it is weird that there hasn't been a Jeff Buckley biopic, when of course there is going to be a Jeff Buckley biopic. James Franco, yeah okay. Robert Pattinson, take your weirdly Eastern European sounding stilted-ass American accent elsewhere.

All Summer in a Day

2009-09-29T11:59:00.006-04:00

When I was a kid I saw a TV adaptation of a Ray Bradbury story called "All Summer in a Day" about a bunch of kids who live on Venus, where the sun only shines for one hour every seven years and it rains the rest of the time. They have to stand under sun lamps to get vitamin D, and the only one who remembers what the sun was like is a girl named Margot who was old enough to remember seeing it back on Earth. They learn about the sun in science class, "about how like a lemon it was, and how hot," and then they write about it. Margot's poem goes, "I think the sun is a flower/That blooms for just one hour."* Everyone is jealous of Margot and her poetry and her sun memories, so they lock her in a closet and she totally misses the sunshine. And then she becomes a goth. No she doesn't! Well not in the story anyway, but where else does a sun-starved and misunderstood schoolgirl poet go from there really.

At age 8 I already had some broody turned-inward tendencies, so naturally I was obsessed with this and it remains one of the saddest stories I've ever heard. As good as the adaptation was and as beautifully written as the story is, I'm still not entirely clear on the takeaway and given that it's geared toward children there must be a point. Enjoy the sun while you have it? Don't be a bully because you'll feel kind of bad about breaking someone's spirit later? If you have one great memory just hold it tight as you can in your brain and hope it will keep you warm for the next 14 years?

I guess if you read deeper, arguably much deeper than any child or at least child-me would read into things, it's a starkly drawn parable about the damaging effects of being afraid to hope for things. The part I still trip over is that the one person who did the hoping is the one who gets punished. So it's meant to elicit empathy from kids? I didn't fully develop morally until my mid-twenties, but maybe that's just me.

You can watch it here if you want, the end is happier than the in story, kiiind of.

The Temptations - Ain't No Sunshine

Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band - Sunshower

[Solid Rock is the coolest Temptations album but good luck finding it.]

[Dr. Buzzard's OSB]

*This is my final mope about what a cold summer it was, but SERIOUSLY. When are we going to reap the upside of catastrophic climate change? It's barely 50 degrees and it's not even October yet, I'm wearing a thermal, I'm looking Minnesota/feeling Minnesota. When did we move to Venus?

There's Been a Wonderful Mix-Up

2009-09-23T11:59:00.003-04:00

One of several awesome things I have found about via @questlove's Twitter: Kutiman, a dude in Israel who makes songs by remixing other people's Youtube videos. This was inevitable, wasn't it? He's doing a really, really good job with it.

Questlove compares him to Jay Dilla but it reminds me more of the Emergency Broadcast Network (watch this video for my favorite song by them). Like any remix/mashup fan I am in love with the postmodern pastiche; I recognize all the references in a Girl Talk song and get excited by the great way they've been repurposed and I express my excitement by dancing. But Kutiman's take is more interesting than Girl Talk in a sense, since he's working with this deep well of completely obscure source material. Not obscure like Moby's obsession with the Alan Lomax recordings circa Play but like, some girl singing to her laptop camera in a basement obscure. I feel like Kutiman has really thrown down the gauntlet in terms of digging deep.

Emergency Broadcast Network - 3:7:8

Emergency Broadcast Network - Shoot the Mac-10

[buy EBN]

Tidbits

2009-09-21T17:24:00.002-04:00

The brilliant UK-based music obsessives at Noncollective are back with a new mix, "From Brazil With Love." I love Noncollective and I love everything related to Brazil and Portuguese, so this is my favorite thing of the week so far.

This article is still well worth a read, despite the fact that Kanyegate (and all of its attendant Internet memes and other jokes) is officially a dead-and-beaten horse:

Beyonce and Taylor Swift: Sisterhood is Powerful, Especially When Male-Directed

And also, this:

"Keeping in touch with the things that help us feel alive – music, books, movies, even the theatre, if, mysteriously, you are that way inclined – becomes a battle, and one that many of us lose, as we get older; I don't think enough of our cultural pundits, people who write about that stuff for a living, fully understand this. It's one thing to have an opinion on Little Boots remixes if you earn your living hanging about in cyberspace; quite another if you're a full-time teacher with three kids."

I would read a Nick Hornby essay on how he selects jelly at the supermarket.

What Makes a Motherfucka So Damn Fresh

2009-09-15T16:15:00.000-04:00

I meant to write about Chrissy Murderbot after meeting him this summer and getting into his weekly mixtape project, My Year of Mixtapes (I'm so in love with this week's hardstep mix, which I'm forwarding to all my mid-90s raver cohorts). In the month or so since I completely slept on doing that post, he's pretty much blown up.

Which is as it should be, because Chrissy's mixes and music reveal a love of/depth of knowledge about dance music's past that I really don't hear in most of the mixes that land in my inbox, and I definitely don't read in many dance music blogs I look at. That could be largely due to the Hype Machine culture's obsession with newness —which I don't see as inherently negative, by the way — and there's also the obvious fact that most of these kids were in elementary school the first time it happened. I never ever want to be one of those over-30 year olds who thinks my scene was more authentic and legitimate because we did it earlier than the people who were born later than us. Hell, if anything I WISH I thought what's coming out today is garbage so I wouldn't find myself at the Crookers show scolding yuppie assholes for shoving teenagers on ecstasy out of their walking path like I'm some twisted mama bear. Maybe I wouldn't still get so irate when people say "it's music for people on drugs" or laugh like I should be embarrassed about the fact that I spent 1995-1999 in cartoonishly large Liquid Sky jeans, doing some very stupid things like all teenagers do. But no, instead I just explain that I'm still good friends with many of the people I met sitting outside the club or holding court in the bathroom for hours. I tell them that I had more fun in just that time period than some people have in their entire life. It more amuses than unsettles me to walk by NYU's Palladium Dorm on 14th St and remember the time I lost Rich and Doug for two hours in the club that used to stand there, just wandering and letting it all blow my tiny mind all those years ago.

I'm not a neuroscientist; I have no idea if my experiences did in fact rewire how I hear music resulting in this lifelong addiction — one that I honestly wish I could kick as I head towards advanced-stage "I'm too old for this shit" Danny Glover Disease. It could be that hearing the Hype remix of "Blue Flowers" just excites me because it's ringing some Pavlovian nostalgia bell. What I do know for sure is that beyond the shallowness, hedonism, and aural A.D.D. that does admittedly present itself in club culture, there's also a rich history of incredible, endlessly self-referential music and there's always something new and old to be excited about. I can hear in Murderbot's work that he really gets that aspect of it. I like that.

DJ Ayres - Push It Higher (Josh Wink vs Salt and Pepa)

[DJ Ayres]

Deee Lite - Good Beat

Utah Saints - Something Good

Orbital - Impact (The Earth is Burning)

Combating a Case of the Tuesdays

2009-09-08T16:04:00.004-04:00

After hearing several good remixes of this song I'm actually starting to enjoy Ezra Koenig's voice, as opposed to my usual "meh" feelings on it/Vampire Weekend.

The Very Best - Warm Heart of Africa (Alan Wilkis rmx)

Tomorrow: A look back at the summer playlist.

my day just got a little more Joe Francis.

2009-09-04T11:44:00.006-04:00

[The setting: A parking lot on Milwaukee Avenue. Trudging home and kicking the dust after receiving some disappointing news on the career front, I remember that I need paper towels. I mean, just because you underperform on the hardest edit test ever written doesn't mean the world stops making countertop messes for you to sop up. As I walk to the drug store I can't help but notice the giant pink bus out front, so I stop and gawk. Within seconds a white pickup truck pulls up next to me; inside are two boys not older than 22 wearing safety-orange vests.]

Boy 1: Do you want to go inside?

Me: What! Just...you do this right here? In the CVS parking lot?

Boy 2: Yeah. Well, we'll also be at the club later on tonight [gestures over his shoulder to a club that often has a line of chubby women teetering on heels after 10]. Sure you don't want to come in?

Me: Ha! Uh. No thank you! I'm too...wow. [starting to walk away]

Boy 2: You have what it takes!*

Curtain.

Duran Duran - Girls on Film

*What it takes: big boobs, the rank stench of vulnerability and failure

Return as an Animal

2009-08-28T00:27:00.005-04:00

Return as an Animal from Bruno Dicolla

It's sweater weather this week and Walgreens has its Halloween stuff on the shelves, but instead of moping about the season's end I'm welcoming the 'back to school' vibe of autumn for once. Though we had some good times, I'm perfectly happy to wave goodbye to Cold Morbid Summer 09. The most recent high-profile death —DJ AM — was also the one I found the most depressing, not least because of his mammoth talent and young age. Read A-Trak's eulogy to his friend and colleague here, or download this live set of AM's from 2007.

Here in Chicago another much talked about passing this week was that of Radley, the cute old black cat that held court on the Empty Bottle's couch. From his loving owners:

We’ll be sitting shiva for our departed friend on September 1 and revealing a permanent memorial to our favorite feline – the naming of “The Radley.” Friends of the Bottle have long claimed that Radley could be caught cozying up to unaccompanied pints of vodka, grapefruit juice and soda – previously known as a Yachtsman, the popular beverage will be known at the Empty Bottle as “The Radley.”

We should all be so lucky as to get a namesake drink when we go. Personally when my time comes I plan on haunting everyone I know to make sure nobody forgets about me.

I'll post my summer top ten playlist soon, but here are some songs from the inbox got a lot of play this week.

The Raveonettes - Suicide

from the forthcoming "In and Out of Control," out October 5.

The Sounds - No One Sleeps When I'm Awake (La Dolce Vita remix)

[The Sounds]

Lily Allen - The Fear (DOCTOR ROSEN ROSEN Rx)

You can download the rest of this remix album for free here.

Sean Bones - Turn Them

Sean plays the Beat Kitchen on September 21.

Dale Que Tu Puede

2009-08-25T16:13:00.002-04:00

A major whiskerwatch alert is in effect here.

A major mixtape alert is in effect here: Logan De Gualle vs. Pitbull

vid via everythingisterrible

mix via RCRDLBL

The Very Best - aka Radioclit and Esau Mwamwaya - are selling their debut, Warm Heart of Africa, months before the physical release comes out in October. Huhuh, I said "physical release."

The Very Best ft. MIA - Rain Dance

I'll Admit It

2009-08-22T23:21:00.000-04:00

I am totally jealous that this 7 year old's dutty whine has more fiyah than mine does. As the friend who sent me this said, this girl is my babychild (this is my other babychild). My poor downstairs neighbors had to endure the stomping as I mastered her moves the first 800 times I watched France's National Treasure.

Just Call me Miss Rollings

2009-06-11T12:07:00.004-04:00

Even though I'm sick in bed today I wanted to post these because I'd dance to them if my body didn't hurt so much.

N.A.S.A. - Gifted (Treasure Fingers rmx) (divshare)

Lykke Li - Dance Dance Dance (Buraka Som Sistema rmx) (divshare)

Ghislain Poirier mix for Sinden (divshare)

SoCa reminds me of riding in Brooklyn cabs late at night or Bobby Konders show on Hot 97. The kids love it now! I think Diplo is to blame/congratulate for this. Speaking of, the entire Major Lazer album is streaming on their myspace. Next Tuesday I'll even buy it with actual real money when it comes out.

Ok, off to convalesce.

Hey, Look Over There

2009-06-04T16:15:00.004-04:00

I'm guest-editing Radio Free Chicago for a bit. In the meantime I'll probably just be using this as a "Jams Depot," which is all most people probably use this site for anyway and the reason why I feel perfectly fine about writing LiveJournal-y entries like the one a couple back.

Posting this video from Brooklyn band Suckers because not only do I like the song, upon closer examination I realized it features Cute Quinn, the freshman with the pretty eyes who had more of a hip hop thing going on back in high school:

Suckers

On the Wings of Love

2009-05-28T11:56:00.005-04:00

If I buried my face under that wing/radiation growth/unborn twin, I bet I'd find heaven.

Richard Swift - Lady Luck (div share)

Richard Swift

Rabbits and Carrots - Everyday People (div share)

Rabbits and Carrots

Sly and the Family Stone - If You Want Me to Stay (div share)

I Am the Starfish

2009-05-27T21:51:00.007-04:00

A year ago this Monday I woke up at 6 am, shoved my screaming cat into a bag and got on a plane to Chicago. I told myself I was going just for the five months that my free housesitting situation allowed me, because five months would be enough time to get to know a new city and the people in it. Did I know on some level how entirely preposterous that theory was? Maybe it was a way to protect myself against the fears that come with jumping in with both feet, alone. Or else I was just naive and thought I'd instinctively know which direction to head on the el train (I didn't) and that a city of strangers would welcome me excitedly with open arms (they didn't). The past twelve months have brought me a job and a layoff, many new friends that I worked like a damned dog to make, and some painful separation of wheat from chaff in the life I left behind. I'm happy here. I now know that I, and anyone with an ounce of sense, should follow their instincts. I don't *love* Chicago like my bones love Brooklyn, but it still hasn't been that long really. I do like it an awful lot though. And the people in it. And I like myself far more than I did a year ago too.

Blind Pilot - The Story I Heard (div share)

All That and a Bag of Chips

2009-05-14T13:01:00.004-04:00

Watch Phone Sex Pranks: Early 90s Slang and more funny videos on CollegeHumor

My buddy Dan made this cartoon with comedian Gil Ozeri, and it makes me laugh.

I wonder how much it cost him to eventually find an operator good enough to get the job done, as it were.

Candy Man - Knockin' Boots (div share)

Salt N Pepa - Shoop (div share)