Boys, Not Men

21Aug07

For those of you who don’t know, there’s a feud brewing between Kayne West and 50 Cent. It boils down to this: Fiddy claims he’ll outsell Kayne when their new albums are released on the same day next month and if he doesn’t, he’ll “retire from music forever.” [And Fiddy is telling people [...]

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Is my funny bone broken?

19Aug07

Kermit the Blog reminds me both that I have a lot to learn before I know “indie rock” and also that I have a long way to go before my post titles are “charming” or even, at a stretch, “funny.”  (Actually, I only have time to view this one post of his because I have [...]

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4 white walls

17Aug07

Today I went over to the Moma for the first time since I moved back.  Their permanent collection was a bit too jam packed with tourists to be truly enjoyable, plus there’s such an embarrassment of riches that I almost immediately go on overload.  This was true with two notable exceptions: first, and most obviously, [...]

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If by ‘ghetto’ you mean ‘graceland’

17Aug07

Words fail me in describing Lisa Marie’s “historical” duet with her dads in honor of his 30th death anniversary. The whole thing is wrong–doing a duet with your dead father, commemorating his deathaversary with said duet, picking this song, but most of all, most of all, what is wrong [...]

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DIY NIMBY

17Aug07

Sometimes slow on the uptake, I’ve just found two vids by U of Chicago grad students.  In both cases, the music’s oddish and charming.  So here’s the rap version, and here’s the drinking song (?) version.  And, in a play hard work hard spirit, here’s grad skool rulz.

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ASAs

16Aug07

 It doesn’t take a particularly bright person to realize that the “performativity of markets” was the hot-button issue at this year’s American Sociological Association meetings, at least among my extended tribe.  Of course, dear Harrison White (of the ‘will you breakdance for us at your dissertation defense?’ fame) has been writing about this shit for [...]

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HBOh my god

16Aug07

Almost the best show, song-for-song, has got to be Flight of the Conchords. I realize some of you don’t have HBO, and you will pay for this, dearly and forever.

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Poseurs

16Aug07

Apparently, in 1994 Dick Chaney forecasted that we’d be in this quagmire.
Merlin tells me that Cornel West has a new album out and Boston papers report it. The rumor is that the lyrics include the following: “Mercy mercy me/ We got a crisis in our ecology/ A system of legalized bribery/ Normalized corruption/ Leadership [...]

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The first post remaining

16Aug07

“You love like a coward. Don’t take no steps at all. Just stand around and hope for things to happen outright. Unthankful and unknowing like a hog under an acorn tree. Eating and grunting with your ears hanging over your eyes, and never even looking up to see where the acorns [...]

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Rest of 2005

16Aug07

A motherlode of ‘covers-better-than-the-originals’…or at least, contenders for the throne:
1. Nina Gordon (ex-Veruca Salt) on NWA’s ‘Straight Outta Compton’
2. Ben Folds on Snoop and Dre.
And on a different NWA front: the album with everything but the profanity edited out.
And now for something completely different: Becker, Howard S. on “How I wrote Art Worlds.”
And I’m loving [...]

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