Solja Boy

Solja Boy tell 'em. He likes Superman. And kettle drums. Some guy did a video mashup of his new #1 Billboard topper using exclusively Maury Povich paternity tests. This is clever because when the alleged father is exonerated (he is not the father), he gets up and starts dancing. Kettle drums kick, Soulja Boy joins the fracas, and Solja Boy tells em that Soulja boy does tell em.



On another YouTube clip, Soulja Boy is getting his haircut and 50 is talking about how Soulja Boy learned to dance on Rap City. Also: "I like Soulja Boy. I like Soulja Boy a lot. You know what I'm saying?" 50 jokes about the barber cutting off Soulja Boy's eyebrow by mistake, leading to subsequent promos in which Boy would have to play off his shorn eyebrow as the latest style. I'm guessing rap actually works that way only occasionally, like when Slick Rick lost an eye or when Hammer couldn't find his pants and had to use some Hefty bags instead (or, come to think of it, when Eminem was born white). It's a risk Soulja Boy is gonna have to take if he doesn't want Iovine to shelve his ass. That is, provided he loses an eyebrow.



But at least the "Soulja Boy dance" is outselling Kanye, who like I've been saying has been a bad rapper since the Dropout and probably even before that.

Addendum:

From Wikipedia:

[Soulja Boy] is the second person after Sean Kingston to be born in the 1990's and top the Billboard Hot 100 charts.

Interrupted only briefly by Fergie's incomprehensible week-long tenure at #1, two guys roughly my oldest little brother's age have made songs involving Jamaican things. (Kingston = Being named after Jamaica and also from there, not to mention singing like he's from there - - - Boy = Using kettle drums in a song about cockin.)

Finally, "Beautiful Girls" flows like Grade A Dark Amber maple syrup on a thick slice of French toast. Which is to say it is delicious, slow, and a little ridic (does anyone even eat French toast anymore?), but it'll make you fat (look at Sean [Kingston]). BUT: It's like I always say: Better happy and a fat than soulja and a boy.

Kate Bush

Try to picture being nineteen and having a record contract and somehow writing a song about an Emily Bronte novel, then deciding the best way to make a music video for that song would be to go out in the English countryside wearing too much lipstick and a red dress and doing some ballet moves and pelvic thrusts while you lip-synch the song you just wrote.



Imagine having such a naive misapprehension about the erotic that your weird convulsions are actually eroticizing, and that it's kind of hot that you might not know you're doing this but you are nevertheless doing this.

I have the hots for Kate Bush even more now that I have seen these videos.

Epicly Later'd

Something for the blogroll

Here's some cool Epicly Later'ds on Jason Dill and Neck Face. All in all an informative and occasionally fun look at skateboarding's controlling personalities.





The show is in some way affiliated with VBS.TV, an online video-centric site mainly about rap and skateboarding . . . Spike Jonze is the creative director, which explains both the level of their access (Kanye interviews) and their narrow impact ("WTF is VBS.TV?").

Belts and Wrenches

Here it goes.

Grunt.

Grunt.

Plop!*

The story of Fergie is inextricably interwoven with that of the Black Eyed Peas, so to tell the yarn correctly I'm going to have to take us back to the late 90s, a time of quiet desperation for Kosovars and me.

I'd heard the Peas originally on "The Box," a fuzzy channel-8 music video network we weren't supposed to get. I don't think it came with cable packages, and its provenance never really became clear to me, which makes me think now that maybe it was some un-FCC pirate deal used to raise cash for some cutthroat underground-media types, the same types who now poach YouTube videos for their blogs.

The Box's concept was that Milwaukee-area music fans could tune in and then call The Box to see their favorite music videos. I really started tuning in to "The Box" at the stage in mid-high school when white people such as myself start to understand that maybe they shouldn't be afraid of rap anymore.

The rap-appreciation scene at my school consisted of two kinds of kids; kids that dug The Roots and Wu-Tang clan as kind of a supplement to weed-induced appreciation of Bob Marley, and the kid who sat behind me in homeroom telling completely false stories of how a Honda Civic outran an Impala on 33rd street and the cop let him go because he was so impressed that anyone could bring a Civic up to the speed-limit, let alone beat out Milwaukee's (then) choice ghetto muscle car.

COP: Do you know how fast you were going?
GUY: Yeah! I beat an Impala!
COP: Yeah! I saw that! Normally I'd have to give you a ticket for running two red lights and doing eighty in a twenty-five, but because I've never seen something so funny as a Civic outrunning an Impala, I'm gonna just let you go. Nice job.

[COP and GUY shake hands.]

The guy who told these stories brought a lot of CDs to class, but the only two I remember was a Slick Rick one where he's wearing a diamond-encrusted eye patch, and 8-Ball's Lost, one of many albums of the post-Pac Southern Rap fad of the late-90s. But we're getting off topic, in a way.

Around the same era, Bulworth came out and for some reason Warren Beatty's awktown freestyle didn't seem that awktown to me, so I started tuning into The Box because "Ghetto Supastar" was in the heaviest rotation The Box had ever seen; basically if you turned on Channel 8 you were going to get Mya Wyclef and ODB riffin on "Islands in the Stream." One thing led to another, I bought the Bulworth soundtrack, and "Joints and Jams" was Track 10. This is how I met Black Eyed Peas.

Meanwhile, downstairs in the family computer room (we used to have rooms dedicated to a single computer), Napster was not-yet illegally delivering "Weekends" and a BEP freestyle featuring Chali 2na from Jurassic 5, and I kind of became enamored with the goofy legumes.

My friends and I would drive around at night stealing lawnmowers and "Tom Shellak for School Board" signs and placing them in awkward positions on our friends' lawns. Not really pranks, because there was no cause-effect or even joke associated with it, not really even vandalism because we were too scared to do that, but a little gangster to us because we were listening to the BEP Family while we did it.

Flash forward a couple years to Eminem and college, the eventual return of hardcore, battle-based rap to my life via 8-Mile, and suddenly the cheeky fun-rap of BEP seemed stupid. Still, I bought tickets to their 930 Club performance and was going to go with a pretty girl named Steph who wound up transferring to Columbia later, but my roommate had made me go to a Rollins Band concert the week before and the second-hand smoke had made me sick, so I stayed in and my roommate took Steph. At that point, BEP and I basically parted ways. Kazaa and T-1 had rolled around, and I got possessed by that undergrad urge to find out "what this Minor Threat is all about," "who are the Bad Brains anyway?" and "Ooh! Radiohead!"

This worked until I left for Senegal and stayed with a rich Catholic family that was patched together after my host dad became a widower in 01, promptly replacing his Russian wife with a half-Vietnamese, half Wolof woman who ruled the house with sternness and not much care for the two newly-motherless children.

On the upside of the domestic situation, Tele5 broadcast in Senegal and my host brother had a big TV, so we sat around several afternoons watching a Box-like call-in TV show where people all over the French diaspora were requesting, of all things, Black Eyed Peas.

Only now, suddenly there was a blonde chick with them who appeared tacked on to the BEP Family's already tacked-together schtick, and this just confused the pants off me. Plus I was busy listening to "Frontin'" by Pharrell and Jay-Z, not to mention "Crazy in Love" by Beyonce and Jay-Z.

Pretty soon I came back to America, discovered everyone hated "Where Is the Love?" but still had bought it or requested it, and forgot about Fergie. Years passed without even the slightest hint of Fergie being anything. "Let's Get Retarded" came out and that was alright with me, such a stupid-fun song that now I could feel nostalgia for, almost five years post-high school, and everyone clowned on BEP because really, who can be serious if they're writing songs about becoming retarded? Moreover, Fergie didn't seem to do anything in that song other than just dance and prance in the video. Her purpose was always in question, which also led me to wonder about her viability as an individual performer and as a human being.

Now, finally, Fergie is fully in view, and I am free to judge her without the dubious buoys of the Peas to support her. Baby girl, fully busted out solo, is performing songs like "Big Girls Don't Cry" that remind me more of Shania than Mya. "Big" shows the degree to which Fergie was always an afterthought sex symbol, in that the purpose of the song appears mainly to have an accompanying video in which Fergie, who actually is kinda hot, walk around in her panties and a largely unbuttoned shirt.

Given that she started in funky hip-hop stupidity and now roosts firmly in jangly, unoriginal country-pop-Matchbox 20 stupidity, really, Fergie would have been better placed in a different age. In The Box era, music videos were hard to come by, and the Internet provided porn, sure, but alone-time in high school by the family desktop was rare, so guys named Chip were still selling stolen Playboys to freshmen. As a sex symbol/performer, Fergie belongs back in those days, when the scarcity of music videos would have kept a song like "Big Girls Don't Cry" out of my life, but I might've scored a photo spread of her in a worn, thumbed-through adult mag. This would be harsh if it didn't seem so close to what Fergie actually wants. Call it early-90s of me, but if a performer of music is serious about being a performer of music and not just a performer of her own underwear, she might have to do more than bang out some shellack and then walk slow-mo in front of a camera "givin em a little shoulder."

Soft porn or music, Fergie. The multimedia age was not made for constipated waffling. Time to shit or get off the Hot 100.



*UMG won't let me embed this, I suppose to suppress proliferation of this song throughout the Internet. Good idea.

Denis Johnson Update

In his NYT review of Tree of Smoke, Jim Lewis has his own idea about the "Again for H. P." dedication up front:

it’s dedicated “Again for H.P.” and I’ll bet you a bundle that stands for “higher power”

Maybe it stands for Hewlett-Packard. Typewriters are slow, and that's a big book!

I Broke My Kingpin

No, no, no! Like this!



I was trying some half-cab kickflips on a slanty part of the school playground (you couldn't even call it a bank, really, more like a credit union) near my apartment today (thanks, unemployment!) when of a sudden the metal thing that holds two of my wheels to my board (the truck hanger) flew away from the board in a curlicue motion that looked a lot like a helicopter after James Bond shot the tail propeller.

This is doubly unfortunate because tomorrow I return home to visit my family and watch an old friend get married (gift: silicone measuring cups, set of five - I gave matching track suits to the last friends who got married, but that was before I heard of online gift registries). I had planned on checking out a new skatepark they built by my old high school since January when I last visited, but now I'm going to have to sample the wares using someone else's equipment.

Here's what a half-cab kickflip looks like.



Time for bed, because I'm waking up at 3 a.m. for a change.

ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz.

OMG I Went to a Gay Bar

Not to do the whole chatty Kathy thing but I went to one and Oh My God.

Met with a friend for drinks when we were joined by a third friend, a gay friend, who as according to his reputation, wanted to go to a gay bar to score some gay pussy. The gay friend, whom I don't know very well, asked me "So do you have any women in your life?"

This question has plagued me since I moved to Tacoma and I'd hoped it would stop in New York City but even though I have not shut down libido-wise, sometimes the cards don't stack right and I've always had to be somewhat ashamed when I reply "No."

I said "Not really."

He said "That's too bad. You really are very attractive. If I had any hot girl friends I'd be sure to hook you up with them."

We talked for a little bit about this and before long some questions arose about the size of my penis (I said jokingly that it was tiny, which is normally a funny response but in this case was taken seriously; my friend said "I've never been able to get with a guy with a very small penis") and my straight friend mentioned my weight, which I'd previously said was around two hundred pounds. I took it down to one-ninety in this conversation but the result was still the same.

"All muscle," he said. "Feel his arms."

My gay friend did not feel my arms. I pressed him about the penis thing and he said "It's all immaterial anyway, since I'm not in your domain." I had missed a beat in trying to rib him about his penis preferences anyway, which to me made me sound closeted (which, if I am, I'm so deep I don't know it and it will be a long before I find a nice pair of shoes or searsucker slacks). I wondered if anyone else thought similarly. At any rate, I decided to chicken out of the macho one-upmanship and just said "Yeah [you are not in my domain]."

Along we went, stopped at a bar that just had a neon sign of a cock (like the male chicken, get it?) but there was a three-dollar cover and no one inside, so we went next door to a bar with a one-syllable name that wasn't "Hump" but I like to imagine it was.

Inside there was a drag-queen calling out bingo numbers and on a couch in the corner three dudes were pawing up on each other. No one appeared very drunk. My gay friend, surprisingly, averred that "Drag queens are the worst people on earth." My straight friend didn't have a problem with her, though; he thought she was funny.

We played a round of bingo but no one was hitting on any of the three of us so before long our drinks were done and so were we.

Before we left, though, we decided to go to the bathroom. On the door was a sign that read "Only One Person in the Bathroom at a Time" (gay bars use MLA-style capitalization). I went into one, where there was a trough, and, you know, when all of a sudden a lanky dude with a mohawk exploded into the place, leapt over to the sink, and he must've already had his pants unzipped because he began very promptly to precipitate all up in that sink.

I've never had a bashful bladder before, but of a sudden I couldn't even buy a trickle for the trough.

It got even worse when another guy, this one with a faux-hawk and checked shirt, busted in and started using the trough with me. I got started for a minute then stopped, then the sink-soiler left and I started to groove.

When I got out of the bathroom my gay friend said to my straight friend "Nice job watching the door." Apparently he got busted in on as well. Sheepish grins all around.

We left the Hump and my gay friend decided he'd try his luck at the Cock. My straight friend and I (the normal people) chose rather to take the train home.

I admire the persistence and sexual frankness exhibited by some young gay men, not to mention their reckless talent for laying tons of people. I normally consider myself pretty sex-libbed, but recent toe-to-toes with serious sluts have prompted some reconsideration on that front. Oh well, as a good friend of mine used to say, "Tons of unprotected sex, no bugs and no kids. This guy did all-right!"

Jenga.

Denis Johnson

Nothing really "somehow" escapes my attention. If I don't a thing it is my own fault and not that of unknown forces. In the spirit of honesty I confess that Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson's forthcoming book about Vietnam, escaped my attention despite the fact that press-release emails about it have been going around the Internet for a couple weeks now and, more incredibly, that an advance copy is sitting in my roommate's bedroom (Thanks, journalism!).

At any rate, I'm interested in several elements of this advance copy that do not include Johnson's narrative itself. For one, FSG publisher Jonathan Galassi included, where the "cover flap" is supposed to be (I believe - I didn't go to publishing school), a letter to his "Friends," the journalists who are, as we speak, reading this book. In this letter he expresses that the memory of this book has somehow not escaped his attention since he finished reading it, it's the best book of the century, and other such laudatory comments that I am inclined to believe because I read Jesus' Son.

My roommate doesn't have any other advance copies laying around, so I can't really compare, but I wonder about the function of this friendly note. Does it appear inside the cover of all books produced by all publishers, or is it a flag to journalists that they'd better read this one because it is actually fairly good? My gut instinct is that this cover-flap thing is an oft-used marketing strategy (I used to send an email version of cover-flap things to bloggers when I worked for a magazine), but there's a heartening chance that Jonathan Galassi really cares more about Denis Johnson than other writers that hit his presses. If so, the two of us have something in common.

The second element is basic - the dedication that reads "Again for H. P. and those who." There is no period at the end and presumably the dedicated already know what they did. Johnson is normally pretty confessional in his writing and candid in his interviews so I'm curious why he would trail off in his dedication. Maybe he needs a trimmed sentence to preserve his image as a druggy bumbler - by not saying what these folks have done he leaves in the reader's imagination some heroic acts heretofore undescribed in his fiction. But probably he's just respecting people's privacy.

At any rate, I'm not going to read DJ's book just yet, for ethical (Journalism) as well as book-club (The Corrections :'() reasons. But more on book flaps and dedications as the situation emerges.

The Island

The YouTube post below should have served longer as a tide-me-over but here I am shaking and nauseated, still nursing a hangover from Last Night's Party, and Ideelz is calling me again.

I don't do transitional material, though, so I'll just plow right into the fact that Tacoma is upwards of 3,000 miles behind and I now live with Sulky in Fort Greene. Parties were thrown, tiles were broken, old friends were seen/offended/saddened, people were talking, and other specific things were rendered as general to protect me from having to actually relate them.

I've been in survival mode trying to decide between a job for a CIA type operation (but not the actual CIA), Penguin, or a magazine about prescription drugs, so I haven't even really had time to notice the differences between New York and Tacoma, except the predictable ones like everything happens three hours later here and as my dad said "if you're smart for Tacoma you're not that smart. If you're smart for New York then maybe . . ." He trailed off cause I had called to ask him to lend me some money.

Perhaps after I get on the 401(k), Dental, and Medical bandwagon - a wagon I fell off pretty hard when I started in the food-service industry eight months ago - I will have more to say about the cancerous growth of the white population in this town, the awful process of determining how much money your labor is actually worth (in my case between 10K and 100K per annum), and of course my best friends' blogs. Meantime go to LOLPizza.

This boulder will start to roll when I am a little stronger.

So Far From Home

Sometimes it's good to know they're holding it down lakeside.


Thanks Patrick.

Ideas Re Bourne Ultimatum

the Bourne movies have left behind perhaps the strongest residue of mainstream anti-government paranoia since '70s thrillers like The Parallax View and Three Days Of The Condor. (Tobias, Scott. "The Bourne Ultimatum." The Onion A.V. Club. August 2, 2007.)

Amid the new and familiar faces (David Strathairn and Joan Allen), it introduces a couple of power-grasping, smooth-talking ghouls and stark reminders of Abu Ghraib that might make you blanch even if you don’t throw up. (Dargis, Manohla. "Still Searching, but with Darker Eyes." New York Times. August 3, 2007.)

Before we go into the Bourne movie, let's jog over to YouTube for a sec to watch Slavoj Zizek deliver an incisive look at what is wrong with September 11 and the two 2006 movies that depicted its events (for those that don't know, that's United 93 and World Trade Center).

[. . .]

Apparently the clip I watched on YouTube yesterday violates the terms of use, so I'll have to sum up the points Zizek made. Since we're talking Greengrass here I'm going to leave World Trade Center largely out of the discussion, although most of the points apply to both films.

Despite 93's vaunted realism (it was in real time, it was coldly neutral in its dealing with the terrorists), its apparent neutrality gives it an unexpected political message. Because 93 deals primarily with ordinary people in an extraordinary moment, its main message is one of humanity triumphing over adversity. In this way, 93 is not an exceptional film, plot-wise. By making September 11 into a heartwarming tale of the human spirit, the film robs the day's events of their necessarily political context. That Greengrass uses a cinematic technique we call ultra-realism makes this robbery all the more insidious, in that we come to believe that, in watching United 93, we're actually watching history as it happened. This, of course, is an absurd belief; United 93 is a Hollywood picture that takes place projected on a screen. It is as unreal as The Bourne Ultimatum.

Greengrass's way of dealing with violence has not changed much since The Bourne Supremacy. The camera wobbles furiously, fight scenes are fraught with confusion - as with cock-fights, it's difficult to tell in Greengrass's world who is winning until one man lays on the floor unconscious or covered in blood.

This technique employs so many conventions of films we consider realist (homemade video, cell-phone cameras used to capture a trajedy, the jiggly footraces of the COPS TV series) that Greengrass has succeeded in convincing his audience that his movies produce a transcendent truth. Dargis talks at length in her review of Ultimatum about the consequences of violence, how we are robbed of the thrill of violence by being thrown in the middle of the fights; the camera reels as a blow is struck, and presumably, so do we.

More insidiously, the movie flashes to scenes in which Jason Bourne experiences simulated drowning and executes a man he does not know, a man who wears a black cowl over his head. These gestures toward torture at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib firmly situate the Bourne movies in our political context. How we feel about violence as depicted according to the conventions of hyper-realism in The Bourne Ultimatum reflects how we think we feel about it in real life.

One cannot mistake the political message of the first two-and-a-half Bourne movies. It is one of natural and necessary skepticism toward the American intelligence community, which throughout the trilogy is a society of thieves, zealots, and the power-mad, where the good die young in dark basements at the hands of their superiors or are unceremoniously fired for objecting the the atrocities they commit.

In the final scenes of the Ultimatum, this skepticism is nearly completely subverted. The baddies are brought to justice, the stern but feminine Pamela Landy presumably gets promoted to run the CIA, and a new era of ethical black ops begins, the illusion rule of law returns, etc. Meanwhile, Jason Bourne, a character rivaled perhaps only by Jack Bauer in his status as a U.S. foreign policy action figure, lays inert, floating in water. The audience is uncertain as to whether he is dead, until the final moment of the movie, when he jerks back to life. America applauds; their superhuman master of violence and torture has been resurrected (the Guantanamo-style simulated drowning no doubt served as preparation), and now, finally, the CIA is an organization we can trust.

It may be that Paul Greengrass more effectively articulates the American inability to deal with its current political situation than any other director currently making films. By shaking the camera around during a fight scene, Greengrass places us into the situation we think we face in the real world. When we're there, we cheer as our American boy fights foreigners and toughens himself up with torture. The resolution we feel at the end of the Bourne trilogy is not a resolution of our feelings toward violence; we're still glad Bourne is there to fuck some shit up. Instead, our feelings have changed toward American institutions of violence - we've come to trust them. In this sense, perhaps Paul Greengrass is not actually as courageous a filmmaker as we thought. Riveting? Certainly. But honest? Probably not.

The Bourne Ultimatum rocks out. It's awesome to see America win. But Bourne's ultimate message - that we should be comforted that the evil and power-hungry in our nation's inner circles are exceptions and not the rule - is not as hyper-realist as the shakey cameras we're treated to during our American boy's fist fights.

HOLY SHIT WHO THE HELL IS SEAN KINGSTON

It's getting so a man can't leave his keys for a minute to pursue career opportunities. It's getting so things like this begin to happen:



It's getting so I am losing my keys (more on Sean Kingston in a second).

I set them on the coffee table before I go out to The Matador to get some Carne Asada tacos (they were on happy hour but I just had to have some black beans and rice with it). I sit alone listening to lawyers gabble about their "PROBLEMS." When my plate is empty I throw a twenty in the big black wallet they use at nice places, then an extra ten because my waitress is pregnant, then stand up, when a barfly leans over the fence (I was sitting on the patio):

"HEY! MIKE!"
"HI STEVE I'LL MEET YOU OUTSIDE."

Just as I'm crossing the threshold a meaty skinhead with a black button-down shortsleeve accosts me with some restaurant politesse:

"HEY ARE YOU LEAVING YOUR TABLE?" (In floor-manager talk this means "I think you just skipped out on your tab but I can't say exactly that so I'll say this instead.")

"YEAH I'M LEAVING. THANKS FOR ASKING."

I have one tequila drink and some tacos in me, and the carne is pretty tasty, the tacos gourmet-tasting with all that cilantro, but even that is not enough to put me in a good enough mood, thanks to baldy. It's getting so a man can't be unshaven and wear a T-shirt into an upscale place in downtown Tacoma without people thinking he's a meth-head in for a freeload.

So I greet Steve the barfly on the outside and he asks me about the move to Brooklyn. He's got the dog he got back from his ex wife and he looks happy. Maybe that girl who left him in San Francisco finally called him back. I'm listening halfway because I've stuck my hand in my pocket and:

1) My box of cigarettes is empty
2) My keys are nowhere on my person

Shit I never leave home without a set, but here I am, looking over at the shaven floor manager's piggish dome as he buses my table. Our eyes meet again, and I give him one of those head-nods with my lower lip under my teeth to show him I'm not gonna say the "F" word in front of all these nice people but I sure have that first letter ready in case the scene changes. And I'm doing this all without the comforting metallic sound and feel of keys jangling in my pocket.

Long story short, I ride the 11 all the way to Matt's winebar to pick up his set and ride back downtown to, ironically, help some "I like the lights" girl back into her apartment ("Locked herself out," but carrying a ring of keys that would make a dungeonmaster envious). We sip on some Budweisers and she tells me stories from her childhood (hiding in the clothes racks, likes The Fountainhead) and I ask her why she's always hanging out with at least half a dozen men and no ladies in sight.

[. . .]

"...and I never cry."

"I bet you cry all the time."

"Humph! THAT'S REALLY FUNNY."

One thing leads to another, (strictly) conversationally, and finally the question:

"YOU DONT WANT TO FUCK ME TOO DO YOU"

"YEAH I DO" I am an honest man.

"OH FUCKING GREAT" She's sitting in the window that overlooks the trash compactor, petite with tattoos all over her chest and one full sleeve. She drags off her Camel Menthol (I had one too so I can't say much about that) and looks like an upset tough-girl who's had too much to drink. She might even be fighting back tears, I don't know, I've been doing online marketing for a magazine since 7:30 a.m. so I'm a little bleary-eyed.

Pretty soon we're just watching Green Street Hooligans in silence and she goes to the bathroom (faucet running). She comes back suddenly K.O.ed, which is good cause I was trying to figure out a decent way to leave her apartment, but I'm too distracted by the water running, which doesn't cover anything up it just makes it sound like this chick has a fucking flume between her legs.

So I check back across the hall to my place, put on some "Banging Camp," and sip on a Keystone Light while I wait for Matt to get back. He does, we drink and smoke a while, then it's lights out.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you step away from your blog for too long.

There used to be a band, no a "group" more like, called the Kingston Trio, with a girl and two guys. She probably saw each one of them naked, and after the first couple tours she stopped running the faucet every time she used the bathroom in their shared Motel 6 room. Maybe one night she got into some nasty nast with the mandolin guy and lil' Sean was on his way of a sudden. Maybe she read Atlas Shrugged while he lit a cigarette. Maybe all of this happened in Kingston, Jamaica. Anyway, everything in this paragraph is absolute truth, for all I know about Sean Kingston. So I'll have to get back to you on that.

"Hey There Delilah," in the meantime, is a piece of lovelorn shit.

Security Update: Tacoma Public Library

A twenty-something dude's girlfriend approached him as he was using the computer card catalog*:

"What's taking so long?"

[Voice louder than appropriate, even if used outside a library, which it wasn't (it was used inside)] "I'd be done already, but there's bum cum all over the keyboards!"

There is some serious class conflict in this library. I wouldn't be surprised to see an increase in already-ludicrous levels of security.

*Cannot access internet/porn.

Island Nations: A Thing Thereabout

1) Quatloos, a "Cyber-Museum of Scams & Frauds" discusses a scheme involving a fictitious island nation called the Dominion of Melchizedek. From Quatloos:

The so-called Dominion of Melchizedek (hereinafter "DoM") is a fake nation which exists only in cyberspace, or in the literature and actions of the scam artists who perpetrate this fraud. There is no real Dominion of Melchizedek, but this doesn't stop the scammers from selling utterly worthless bank licenses for tens-of-thousands of dollars.

The DoM attempts to hold itself out as some sort of quasi-religious body, even to the point of having its own version of the Bible. But for all their self-righteousness, the truth is that the DoM not only commits fraud, but also materially facilitates the fraud of others by creating phony banks, stock exchanges, arbitration forums, etc., in an attempt to give some illusory legitimacy to criminals who are directly defrauding the public by way of pyramid-scheme bank debenture scams and other criminal schemes.

According to Melchizedek's Web site (which DOES EXIST), the President of the country, whose name appears below a Star of David, is a former law enforcement official from Los Angeles (he doesn't really exist, but they have a photo!).

The story rapidly gets less slightly less interesting when reality kicks in. The guys behind the Dominion are just a father-son team of felons convicted of evil doings numerous times.

The story gets more interesting again when you realize there are several fictitious island nations on the Internet. Presumably they could declare war on each other in some sort of Battlespace Involving Information.

But back to the main thing: Tlon kind of happened in 1996!

My Job of Many Colors

Applying for a job at a major media research company, I came across the following (optional) drop-down-menu question (if I knew HTML I could probably actually program the thing right in here. Maybe I'll get a book from the library today, but probably not):

Ethnicity:
-Hispanic (Spanish-Speaking)
-Not Hispanic (Spanish-Speaking)

I mean they had a separate category for "Race," but still pretty funny that a company openly parses job applicants along the Hispanic-Not divide.

This brings me to a larger point mostly about the Facebook, but about other Web sites too. For a while, the "Political Views" category on the FB's profile information yielded a drop-down menu with, I think, five categories: Very Liberal, Liberal, Moderate, Conservative, Very Conservative. People responded (at least I picture it this way) largely by gleefully placing themselves in one of these categories ("Conservative"), thinking about it for a second then deciding that it wasn't that big a deal even if the labels weren't perfect ("Liberal," "Very Liberal"), or out-and-out flouting Zuckerberg's categories and refusing to answer the question (the soon-to-be-added "Others").

Right, right. We took Anthropology and Sociology in undergrad so we all got that factoid about the Census and college applications forcing people to identify themselves using problematic categorizations. But it appears that we could easily allow people to type in their own categorizations, then dump the entries in a database, control for misspellings or variations on the same concept, and get a more adequate distribution of data. If we felt like imposing problematic categories on the data ex-post, we certainly wouldn't have a problem doing so; we'd just have to, for example, include "biracial" self-identifiers in the larger "minority" category. At least the underlying data would be more specific.

In my mind I'm picturing infinitely divided pie-charts. Each slice is a slightly different shade of the color next to it. Look at it one way, it's a color wheel; just some red, some yellow, whatever. Look closer, and there's a bajillion variations. With computers, we should be able to make job-applicant pools act in a similar way. There seems precious little reason for the multiple-choice cop-out now that we have Google or even, God help us, Concordance.

Executive Thrasher

From the guy over at Water and Vegetables, in case you haven't seen it:



I can do this because it's skateboard related. Sorry about not blogging for a sec but I've been doing edit tests for magazines pretty nonstop. It can drain even the savviest of sieves, including me. See you tomorrow with some actual ideas. Or maybe in a couple minutes.

COME OUT TO PLAAAAY

Like Cam throwing that laughable dis at Hov in '05, I feel I will ultimately lose a battle with Hua Hsu but someone has to throw a shot here.

The impetus for the gig comes from a Hsu Slate slideshow documenting in slapdash fashion the way YouTube has caused the demise of rap battles.

My main beef here is that, according to Hsu, rap battles go back to '96 (some might say they go back further but let's stick within the guy's argument). Despite this long and storied history and the elapsed time between the epic battles (often years), it's only been like six to twelve months since rappers have been using YouTube, and although maybe some of this idea about using a new medium to replace dis tracks has some weight, I can't help but think that in six more months we'll have a "The Rap Battle's Rebirth: Rappers Using YouTube To Do Awesome Freestyles," all because rappers went back to rapping after dabbling in the vids.

I'm thinking it'd be very easy for a rapper to say something like "You don't even rap you just YouTube" but making it rhyme, and suddenly everyone will be back on the mixtapes. But it might not even have to go that far ... Allhiphop.com shows Gucci Mane dissing T.I. in a (strictly!!!) audio file that was uploaded two hours and thirty six minutes ago, showing at least a little heartbeat on the dis track's monitor.

Beyond all that, Hsu's claim that YouTube vids are unimaginative neglects the creativity involved in the new artform. Cam and 50 are throwing cool video shots at one another, the disses aren't as "unimaginative" as is claimed, and video and audio are by no means mutually exclusive, so even if YouTube replaces the mix tape, who's to say it's bad for the music or the creative expression?

Add those shakey stilts to the massive counterexample of Lil Wayne's audiofiles actually posted on YouTube (often only with only a still shot of himself kinda like the TK thing I wrote about earlier). The "Ether" and "Show Me What You Got" disses on Jay-Z basically put the one nails not hammered by Kingdom Come firmly in the pinebox. I'm shaking mad at arguments made more to get a piece together than to show something really happening. Like the YouTube thing is a bit in itself, why throw in "It's bad for rap" for almost no reason.

So the whole thing just makes me a lil frowny on the edges.

Power to the People Making AdSense with Their Mouths

Is Jessica Hopper Dennis Hopper's hard-partying, hard-faced, wildly fuckable daughter who ultimately just wants to be cuddled in the middle of the night?

[. . .]

[. . .]

Of course not.

Sulky points me to this tinyluckygenius, who judging by her screen name thinks some pretty good things about herself, and suddenly I'm reading pseudo-art blog posts that try to take a Strokes angle on the trials and tribs of loving music and being a feminist at the same time (apparently these things are at odds, sometimes).

None of this would really be a thing if Sulks didn't point out to me that this lady did some simmering a summer ago by starting a big thing about the Magnetic Fields guy being a racist, all of which was pretty ridic in the wash (I'm not together on all the details, but from what I hear Hopper dissed the singer for writing in the Times that he liked music and listing only white performers), but illustrates the power of baby girl's angles.

My knee-jerk has me urged to riff all over this as lamezoid bligablag in a similar way that Keyhole dissed Manohla Dargis for taking a throwaway feminist jab at Transformers.

But on second thought, are we so wrong to hate on someone for being unnerved by Kelly and The Game? Feminist reactions to chauvinism in hip hop are usually beside the point in my mind but not totally without merit, and it's not like the genius doesn't have any moves. Plus you don't want to always be the guy who's defending meatheaded stuff about hating women as not really hating women or "just words."

The cityskape is alive with a lot of ugly stuff, and some of it is probably even worth blogging. Living in Taco-town has taught me that much, so I gave the tiny dancer a chance. I zipped to her most recent post and suddenly she even had me going with her on a ride for a sec:

So out of desperation, you and your friends go the bar you hate trying to make good on yr efforts, and the vibe is like an episode of Cheaters and everyone is acting like the James Spader character in an 80's teen drama and you sit there sucking down yr ice water and thinking "I put on shoes for this?!"

Good refs, the sentence has speed and the lady is doing some observations. The shoes thing is maybe a little Sex and the City, but hey it's 2007 and L7 and Bratmobile now mostly appear on XM 54 between midnight and one a.m., so I can't blame Hopper for some pomo third-wave pogoing, even if generally I'm not for it. We can at least relate to hating what you're doing in the search of fun, and there's some directions you can take with an observation that's acute like this.

So, Hoptown, where you driving this motorcycle? To a graveyard with a pocket full of acid tabs? In other words, are you taking this lonesome cityskape snippet to a place that will make us understand this internet-and-80s-mediated world a little better? Do you love them ho's?

You walk home with your best friend, each carrying an end of yr bent up bike, trying to remember the chronology of the Husker Du discography and it's all the lame-fun you need right there. Aging loners waxing nerdy in the night light.

NO!

Hoppers doesn't even close us out with a complete sentence. Yeah you're a feminist but you ain't [got] a predicate.

But this brings us to an interesting juncture. I've thought before about music being largely a thing that mediates our life and permeates through our personalities, illustrating our prejudices and highlighting our personal experiences more than being a thing that just sits outside ourselves that we can critique in a sorta highfalutin' way. I've also claimed that I would rather read reviews that contain anecdotes and illustrative examples and bracket notions of whether a tune is good or not in favor of discussing its intersection with real life, something music writers are rarely interested in.

So maybe the situation is that to get at this arty approach to "culture" minutely defined as that which media-savvy people with B.A.'s and some connections to magazines think about, we're going to get some stuff/criticism/anecdoting that isn't totally heartfelt, maybe even a little hateful, and / or not really interested in the right things. And a bajillion people are sometimes going to read it.

Blogger/journalists who can sometimes write a sentence can get surprisingly far in this game, regardless to the level of thought in their ideas or the checkability of their refs. And sometimes an odd perversion of PC comes through and people can even be attacked over it??? And without complete sentences! I'm gonna write awktown and I'm gonna mean it.

But, as they say, we're all just bloggin.

A Good Typo

Faceboom.com

Thought about Wrestling and Rap

John Cena Reverses Mystikal's Career Trajectory by Rapping First Then Joining the Military

Early Cena



Wrestling contains some of the most heavily mythologized personas in the New Era age, as discussed in the previous post on Chris Benoit and Owen Hart.

Rap might benefit from the application of wrestling's model by developing a McMahon-type "heel" and "face" structure. Labels could recruit wack or one-trick rappers to join a sub-stable and then pretend to feud with their face rappers. Some of the greatest moments in rap stem from beef but beef often turns mad-cow and people get shot, so why not just fake the feuds, save some lives, and let everybody listen to some crazy dis tracks.