Sunday, January 29, 2006
new york cares
Hold on to Young Ideas™ will return to normal business hours starting Tuesday.
WE LOVE YOU.
(don't talk to strangers don't talk to strangers don't talk to strangers)
Friday, January 27, 2006
Faulkner and Bun B should have talked
Hot Chip- Keep Fallin'
I was reading William Burroughs' Nova Express and was wondering when did literature become so compartmentalized? I can't imagine someone outside of media whore Dave Eggers producing something like that to any commercial acclaim nowadays. Does being brown or black matter? I mean, when is another Ishmael Reed going to come out and write a novel (or graphic novel?) about something other than a pure coming-of-age story, a book that is more than a book. Sometimes, I just want to write some Marias-esque clunky narrative where things don't happen, thinking does--like Javier said in some magazine I read, there is a thing called 'literary thinking' like there is 'philosophical thinking'. And what was it that Camus said: Americans are the only writers who think they don't have to be philosophers.
TV!
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
1986
MIT graduates invade televisions like robotics departments
Bad Brains- Don't Need It
Mornings were made for this: toothbrush in right hand, ears glued to black punk. I'm in the middle of moving, again. It seems this will never end; post-college life is nomadic. Home is where you leave. I have been listening to whatever I can find in old boxes of CD's and records. A dusty 7" by this Chicago producer called Anomaly thats like wishy-washy Four Tet instrumentals. I found two collections of early electronic stuff like Early Modulations: Vintage Volts and OHM. Elsewhere, the first Unicorns album has been getting bump, UGK's Greatest Hits, Modeselektor's Hello Mom and Nas' Illmatic (I forget it's been 12 years since the record was made). Faust's The Faust Tapes and Babasonicos' Anoche have also been getting spins.
I have a soft spot for this show because one of the nerds is exactly like an old friend. I'm not proud.
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
disneyland!
Hypercapitalism as a result of black blood.
yee-haw:
+
Sunday, January 22, 2006
commercials are like sleep
Austinites should put down their open-toed sandals, Longhorn T-shirts and optimism for a walk to this museum. They're showing an exhibit by LA artist Jeremy Blake. I was in San Francisco last summer and went to his solo show at the MOMA and I never felt so alive. Nerves were buzzing. Like my heart was never going to stop beating. And I wanted to write a story like his psych-pop paintings, where some kind of hyper-realism and what I imagine Yamatsuka Eye of the Boredoms probably dreams, rubbed elbows.
Literature needs a Jeremy Blake.
And go to Glasstire for more Austin gallery love.
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Prince knocks down a giant plastic lamp
I found this old video on Poplicks, an already great blog made even better by this video where James Brown invites a black Michael Jackson onstage and then calls up Prince who goes nutso in a great way. This video is unbelievable.
Take notes!
synthesizers falling from the clouds
Lift to Experience- Falling From Cloud 9
XXL- (Pokey In Your) Gnocchi
I went to college in an ittie-bitte art town called Denton (like the ones in England). And Lift to Experience are the biggest thing to come out of that town (and indie-pop darlings that are like the Flaming Lips but not as eccentric, Midlake ), ever. Their shoegazer juicyness is what I dreamed of listening to years ago, heavier than My Bloody Valentine and with more coherent lyricism (I wish I lived on the cover of Loveless). And this song is from an old Peel Session.
And XXL is my friend Jamie Stewart from Xiu Xiu and the Italian band Larsen. They make red sounds. Gnocchi!
PS Long posts on books coming soon (Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Ian McEwan's Saturday, Sean Wilsey's Oh The Glory of It All and Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life).
(lluviaverdecaidelsuelo)
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
glow
Monday, January 16, 2006
4/4/4/4/4/4/4/4/4
DJ Koze- Hicc Up
Records wear scarfs. Buildings are made of beats. Analog clouds.
I want to go to Berlin.
window, window, window
Kopernik- Found Photograph
Larsen- Intermezzo
Like when you opened the door and saw an ocean of green eyes.
Friday, January 13, 2006
Neil Gaiman and Young Jeezy should talk
Ricardo Villalobos- Duso
Ricardo, hombre, de que planeta vienes? This dude is on some bonkers, maximalist shit. I love listening to the needles of guitar (Kaoss pad popular in Germany?) wash over the bubbly beat. I wonder what Villalobos-produced hip-hop would sound like. That's it, the new thing in 2006: genre-less music. We're halfway there, aren't we? Overlapping strata of overground, underground into something else. No-ground. David Bowie and TV on the Radio, yes. Jon Brion and Kanye West, sure. Borbetomagus and Madonna--not yet. But, back to Villalobos: minimalism, like Philip Sherburne noted on his review of the Achso EP where this MP3 is from, is a dead horse. But, minimalism is cute.
Cute is dead.
But dead things are alive again! Kelly Link is post-whoa. Her second collection of stories, Magic for Beginners, is bulbous, complicated and well-written. She's like Neil Gaiman, but, you know, better.
Thursday, January 12, 2006
you got me all wrong
I wanted to write about Miguel Mendez in my upcoming XLR8R column but deadlines are no one's friend.
Let him in your heart, peoples. He will build a Lego city of acid-drenched mannequins.
Yay.
blackfuturepop
dalek- Images of .44 Casings
I first met this former trio several years back. They were playing a tour with lame-o DJ Spooky. Will once told me that on that tour they went out to eat once and they were at this fancy restaurant ("I'm lucky if I get a bag of chips and a sandwich on tour, man" he told me then) and Spooky ordered a filet mignon. Wow.
With a William Burroughs sample starting things off and a sick beat, this is one of my favorite tracks of theirs from the hard-to-find Negro, Necro, Nekros album.
PS Somebody tell DJ Spooky that turntables aren't theoretical: they're weapons.
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Thomas Friedman is going to steal this and put it in his next book
I once walked into a bookshop in Monterrey and asked the clerk if he had any new books by Gabriel Garcia Marquéz. He looked at me like my accent marks were retarded. Then he said in nasally Spanish, "you mean, Garcia Marquez?" emphasizing the "a" which would have an accent mark over it right now but ironically I can't figure out how to do it. I felt so American.
You just had to be there, I guess.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
a million little pieces
For the record, James Frey's novel is shit. Something white American modernists could have scratched onto paper while sleeping. And isn't Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly and anything by William S. Burroughs the best drug novels ever? Do you need the stamp of "nonfiction" to believe that being strung out is oh so bad? And now the idea of 'fiction' is being questioned by millions of unimaginative people. Memoir-as-fiction is certainly not new, but fiction-as-memoir is indeed offensive to all the writers who slang imagined worlds. "The material of fiction is the texture of experience" Samuel R. Delany once said. Wordbomb: don't read tv novels. Yet.
And then, you get JT Leroy. Turns out he/she is a walking character. There are too many levels of irony here. I like the idea of JT Leroy: a marketing construction where a ghostwriter proves the spectacle of the publishing industry. But, I don't like the idea that people sympathized with this terrible "writer".
Thumbs down.
poodle sleep
Lightning Bolt- Dead Cowboy
We Likes:
Perfect Hair Forever.
New York magazine.
Larsen.
Neutral Milk Hotel books.
Kafka on the Shore by Murakami.
Can't Stop, Won't Stop by Jeff Chang in paperback.
Cosmopolitanism by my favorite academic, Kwame Anthony Appiah.
The Squid and The Whale.
White Rainbow.
Joan Didion.
Edan.
Filastine.
The Color Pink.
Thai Ruby.
Bodies.
St. Petersburg.
Monday, January 09, 2006
white rainbow
If sincerity is the avoidance of being false to any man through being true to one's own self, we can see that this state of personal existenc is not to be attained without the most ardous effort. And yet at a certain point in history certain men and classes of men conceived that the making of this effort was of supreme importance in the moral life, and the value they attached to the enterprise of sincerity became a salient, perhaps a definitive, characteristic of Western culture for some four hundred years.
-Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 1973
Why is sincerity so important in pop music? I can feel when someone is conveying glossy emotions, usually through how they sing, their cadence, the breaths in the words. Heart and thoughtfulness like to play tough but its the recognition of sincerity and how authentic it is in a singer's voice that makes me listen harder. Or rather, turn it up. One of my favorite albums last year was Jamie Lidell's Multiply because there was a balance of squiggly electronics (harking back to his Super_Collider days) and an Otis Redding realness that warms me. And realness is relative, but still real, that is to say a state of actuality, of being. Put your pencil down Adorno, pop music is more complicated than we think. Bun B has been putting it down for years and he's one of the few Houston MC's I can stomach because you can hear--truth as invisibility--the sincerity in most of what he says. Nas, John Lennon, TV on the Radio: a list without end.
But then, I've also always liked plastic sensibilities: a post-sincerity. Those who are shades of gray: The Beta Band, Kool Keith, MF Doom, Cafe Tacuba, Hot Chip and a thousand more. Musicians who can blend goofy pathos with bigger ideas and still stay 'true' to themselves. I like Saul Williams' idea to replace weed with LSD in rap and maybe then we can explore broader concepts: masculinity as elastic, brown and black folks wanting to play guitars, weak beats, World Music, the rise and fall of lyricism in hip-hop, electronic music without software.
I love software.
We should really talk.
Saturday, January 07, 2006
masta killa was my literature professor
Mutamassik and Morgan Craft- End
I think this track by the wonderful DJ Mutamassik and Morgan Craft from a couple years ago is what France sounded like when last year's riots were going on. Post-racialism said "wait, I want to be racial again" and turned into some not-so-media-friendly thoughtclashes. Like, I bet all these white Frenchmen were yelling soft-tongued Parisian phrases into the air and then the dark wind caught them and tore their fleshy bodies until letters littered the pavement. Words as sidewalks. And then George Bush turned into an elephant and was put into a zoo.
Cartoons will ruin your brain.
Streets is watching!
all beautiful and shit
Happy Birfday! We're Two!
(change channel)
Saw Brokeback Mountain last night and it's that good. Pathos wears a cowboy hat as the complexity of the Larry McMurtry-penned screenplay feels warm, real and complicated. Take in the fact that DP Rodrigo "Those pretty shots on 21 Grams were my backyard" Prieto and Gustavo "No, I'm not the Mexican Rick Rubin" Santaloalla had their hands in it and waaamo I wanted to press rewind and watch it again. And yes, its all DJ Screw at the beginning but just when you think you have it figured it out, Larry & Ang throw you a Pedro Martinez curve and watch it twirl. Heath Ledger plays the part with ease and comfort and makes his internal struggle of whether he be gay and stuff quite real. Jake Gyllenhaal ain't too shabby either. Freaks and Geeks star Linda Cardellini plays a fucked up waitress well and this film is prime for a post-Hollywood classicism.
I'll be outlining some of last year's cinematic gems in the next few days.
No, wait. I'll just do it now.
1. Me and You and Everyone We Know
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
3. 2046
4. Junebug
5. Last Days
6. Sin City
7. Brokeback Mountain
8. Mysterious Skin
9. Walk the Line
10. Paradise Now
11. Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room
12. Batman Begins
13. Broken Flowers
Films That People Say Are Great But I Haven't Seen Yet But Will See Soon:
1. King Kong
2. Oldboy
3. A History of Violence
4. Capote
5. Breakfast on Pluto
6. Mirrormask
7. Oliver Twist
8. Hustle and Flow
Special Girlfriend Jury Prize:
Calvin's World
