April 2010
98 posts
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Kummune - Voice of the Seven Thunders (from s/t...
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“Thrill parties every night over on Hussel Street. That tiny house, why,...”
– First couple sentences of Megan Abbott’s Bury Me Deep.
Sometimes I’ll be talking about books with someone I don’t know very well and I’ll say that I read a lot of crime fiction, and I can see that tiny little nose wrinkle above the neutral reply smile. It’s like...
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coldwaves:
Ruth - ‘Polaroïd/Roman/Photo’...
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born free
I like to think there’s a sprinkle of kismet behind MIA releasing her new vid the same week Arizona began its torrid affair with police-statedom. Score MIA! Then again, Ms. Arulpragasam might want to take note of a lesser event this week: Courtney Love’s umteenth disastrous “comeback”. The wall separating great revolutionary mind and super-duper crazy lady? Made of...
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towerofsleep:
White Fence - the love between
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Wal-Mart to face massive class action suit →
Slowly chipping away at the real evil empire.
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“For years, I’d earned my living as a journalist, even though I hated...”
– Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. Dyer once called England “this grim rock” (Out of Sheer Rage), which always makes me giggle.
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“Good criticism is still possible—it just doesn’t necessarily pay....”
– More music & math! On a Village Voice blog, Zach Baron sensibly frames the debate as a matter of money—although I don’t agree that the “economics have changed,” only the specific technologies. Bottom line: If you want to get paid to write, write about things lots of...
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Chris Ware vs. Fortune →
FishbowlNY: “Chris Ware, the brilliant comic-book artist behind the Acme Novelty Library, designed a May cover for capitalist-cheerleader magazine Fortune, only to see it killed. We can sort of see why. A high-res version of the image reveals tiny figures celebrating with wine and music…
Obviously Ware was fishing for a rejection notice. I don’t want to say “publicity...
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On music journalism →
Watching this guy squeal about the death of music journalism (spoiler alert: the 5 of us at The Hype Machine killed it), I started to remember why I hated music critics. Think back to your college paper: they were the loud, obnoxious, Comic Book Guys who would spend a few sentences spitting on…
Oh, oh I’m so torn! Which side am I on? On the one hand, I wrote (emphasis on wrote) an...
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Support the bitter end
Dan Beirne of Said the Gramophone is asking people to help get the word out on his awesome web series. If I was on Facebook I would totally “become a fan.” If you are (I’m sure you are), you should definitely do so—after you watch the eps, natch.
As you know, I produced a web series last year called The Bitter End with some help from you. We received much critical acclaim...
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“It’s an imposition, being unwittingly enlisted in somebody else’s...”
– Laura Miller on “Mary Sues” over at Salon
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Something tells me it's going to be a very long...
In a press performance feeble even by his standards, Blagojevich accuses prosecutors of “sneaking into court” to prevent jurors from hearing all of the tapes the FBI made of his phone conversations. Otherwise known as filing standard pretrial motions.
And even better, Blago impugns US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s virility (or something … god, I don’t even want to...
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“Record Store Day was presumably intended to celebrate the act of buying records...”
– Alex Needham makes a couple good points in this Guardian music blog post. But the comments are even more instructive—fans expressing frustration with having to compete with resale vultures for limited releases (and largely losing out). Does seem to defeat the purpose of Record Store Day and...
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“There are times when helpful hints about turning off the gas when not in use are...”
– M.F.K. Fisher, “How to keep alive” (collected in The art of eating)
One of the best essays by one of the 20th century’s most humbling writing stylists. The title sounds ha-ha, until you remember this was written as the Depression segued into wartime food rationing and hunger was a...
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thingsiatethatilove:
southtwelfth:
Autoclave,...
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Jamelia - Caribou (from Swim)
Dan Snaith as soul...
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Animals: 1, humans: 0
projectgutenberg:
People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880) [full text]
Sadly, I only...
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record store day
Laurie’s Planet of Sound was packed! And it’s a very small space… I didn’t find anything I needed, but I picked up hard copies of a couple albums I have in digital form and know I’ll listen to for years—Caribou’s Swim and Bonnie Prince Billy & the Cairo Gang’s The Wonder Show of the World. Also, a Trojan dub box I didn’t already own. All in...
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“Certain books and movies are so bad — so crudely conceived, despicably motivated...”
– Walter Kirn on Ian McEwan’s Solar for the NYT Book Review
Ouch! The NYT pulling no punches. Panning is like blood sport over there.
I’ll play. For sure, costume dramas that used to (but not so much anymore) win Oscars for no other reason than venerability. And some of those PBS...
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Over at my other blog
Illustrations by Jason Jagel, David Korty, Jenkins
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Adam Haslett, Union Atlantic
booksinthekitchen:
In Union Atlantic, the debut novel from New York’s Adam Haslett, one little street comes to control billions of dollars of the capital that circulates daily through the United States and beyond.
But it isn’t Wall Street. It isn’t in the city of New York, for that matter, or even the state.
No, the hub of so much wealth is a residential road in a sleepy Massachusetts town...
