For whatever the hell stupid reason, the internet is not working at my house again. I have determined that a) it’s not bill-related, b) it’s not wireless router-related, and c) it’s not computer-related. Which, I think, means it’s Cox’s damn fault. AGAIN. Even though they were over like two weeks ago to replace the modem.
Anyway, so now I’m at my boyfriend’s house being anti-social in the corner. So no updates, World Cup or otherwise, today.
Filed under: copouts
I’m going to the big city today, for the New York Art Book Fair and also to pick up some art for the show I’ve got opening in a couple of weeks.
Yep.
I’ll be back tomorrow.
Filed under: copouts, gay, heterosexuals, hookers, magazines, music, not hot, personal, porn, shameless self-promotion | Tags: bikinis, books, chairs, crack, drake, dubai, hookers, kerry washington, marketing, paris hilton, porn, pride, punk, records, rubber soul, sarah palin, self-promotion, tender morsels, terrible band names, transsexuals, y?n-vee
I didn’t have enough links on Sunday for a wrap-up. But boy is there a lot to talk about now! Sorry about that!
Romance novels can be written by smart women! This article made me want to try my hand at it, too, even though, you know, I’m a man and don’t really read romance novels.
AAG responds to a letter by a guy concerned about the ethics of watching porn. Nothing new to people that read about this all the time, but pretty interesting anyway. I like the idea that some people think of it as performance art. [via Debauched Domestic Diva]
Drake, the Degrassi star/rapper/general annoyance, is (thankfully) doing his part to revive the jimmy-wrapping era of hip-hop. [via Idolator]
Punk. It’s a lot like social media, you know?
A Russian woman can lift 14kg with her vagina muscles. That’s one of those articles that make me wonder about how, exactly, the newspapers got wind of the story.
FiveThirtyEight mentions Sarah Palin’s resignation, commenters start hurling insults.
Bitch Magazine continues to be really juvenile and irritating. Now they’re offended because Paris Hilton hired Middle Eastern cultural experts before she started filming her new TV show in Dubai, as though that’s a bad thing. Also they don’t like that she wore a bikini to go swimming. Which, since Dubai is 82% foreigners, is actually both legal and fairly ordinary common (and probably got the OK from her cultural advisors.) [via Natalia Antonova]
Australian writer Margo Lanagan’s new Tender Morsels is causing a big to-do in Britain . The updated version of Snow White and Rose Red, which is actually intended for children, includes a gang-rape scene, a detailed description of a miscarriage, and in its very first paragraph has a sex scene between a witch and a dwarf. [via Bookslut]
UPDATE: The second I hit send The Book Bench also posted about this. Apparently the book’s been out in the US since October and nobody here paid it any mind at all.
At some point in my complaining about stupid 3oh!3 and their stupid name, I remembered early nineties r&b girl group Y?N-Vee, who weren’t really any good either but who at least didn’t make Helen Keller jokes in their songs. Though the chorus to their song Satisfaction did have a really awkward line about how “it melts in your mouth and not in your hands.”
Kerry Washington will be playing a cracked-out transsexual hooker in Life Is Hot In Cracktown, and it may or may not be the first time a black biological female actress plays a trans character on film. (On TV it’s happened a bunch of times before, oddly, at least according to the comments on that post.) [via Clay Cane]
Studio 360 came up with some ideas for a new Gay Pride flag. My favorite was the squares one, because it re-instituted the turquoise and pink–symbolizing art and sex–that were taken out of the real Pride flag in the past. Also, it reminds me of the new Pet Shop Boys album.
Charles and Ray Eames debuting a new chair on NBC in 1956. [via Joe Gebbia's Posterous]
And, finally, my 1000th Tumblr post went up about fifteen minutes ago. Trying to do something memorable/milestone-y, I went with a photo I shot myself, though it’s not a self-portrait so don’t get your hopes up.
Filed under: copouts, music, personal | Tags: freda payne, kari ferrell, magazines, print, stupidity, the internet
I spent most of the last two days re-reading everything I’ve ever written, more or less, and decided that I’m getting dumber. This will be important in a minute.
Joe from Joe.My.God just updated his Facebook status and mentioned that Freda Payne was on American Idol tonight. I had no idea, and don’t really know why she was there since this was disco week and Payne’s last hit was in 1971. However, she is awesome. I haven’t mentioned my love of Freda Payne much–though her excellent Easiest Way To Fall was on one of the mixtapes sixteen months ago–but she’s really fabulous. Reviews of her performance tonight aren’t so good, though I refuse to acknowledge the opinion of anyone who starts off an article in the misinformed style of whoever wrote this thing. (It was the first story when I did a Google news search.) Not that I’m pursuing journalism jobs or anything, but how is this nonsense acceptable in an era with so many unemployed writers? (His getting the song title wrong bugs me, too, because I just spent an hour thinking I had missed Payne singing Since U Been Gone, which was sort of blowing my mind.)
Payne’s appearance is sort of funny to me because this morning I reread the one other post here where I mentioned her, the one where I used Band of Gold as an example of why pop is just as valuable, if not more so, than the Rolling Stone-endorsed canon of rock is. (It was a pre-emptive defense of why I thought that Mary J Blige’s Real Love, and not Smells Like Teen Spirit, is the best single of the nineties. Which it is, by the way.)
Anyway. As I was saying before, I’m getting dumber. These days I rarely write anything longer than two pages, I don’t read books criticially, and I can’t remember the last time I actually tried to argue a point in any kind of meaningful way. I mean, I’m also not in college anymore, and that’s obviously a huge part of it. But rereading older stuff I’ve written, a lot of it’s really pretty okay and not nearly as pretentious as I would have expected.
I don’t know if any of you gentle readers are in Chicago, but I’m going to be in town for the opening of this show next Friday. I’m heading out Wednesday afternoon and between now and then I doubt I’ll be posting much, because there’s hours and hours of editing left to the video the BF and I are showing.
Filed under: copouts
Sorry about that last post. I wrote about a third of a draft and then lost the internet, but I guess somehow I hit the publish button first. So, expect to hear more about the Hookie nominations tomorrow, when I’ve actually found pictures and whatnot.
This article, in which hoity-toity* n+1 writer Emily Gould makes a hypothetical mixtape for Britney Spears, is annoying. Seriously annoying, to the point where I might have thrown my computer out the window were it not for the fact that I am currently in a windowless basement.
Gould makes the strange and ultimately very pointless argument that Britney makes “music that sounds like it was made by a person who has never heard any other music before.” Which would be an okay thought if you were, say, twelve, but if you’re any older than that then you’ll remember that Baby One More Time (the song that prompted the thought) sounds pretty much exactly like Robyn used to, back when Robyn was good and actually popular (as opposed to now, when she’s not good and only blog-popular.)
I’m giving in to all the pointlessness. I’ve signed up for Twitter.
Since I’ve semi-declared 2009 to be the Year of Austerity, I figured I should spend less time painting the town red and more time informing my friends and relatives about everything I do, all day long, even if all I do is already well-documented in my Facebook status and I don’t really do that much of note to begin with.
But you can follow me here, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Filed under: copouts
Expect regular(ish) posting to resume soon, now that I’m done with my albums of the year. I still need to do my songs of the year list, too, to count them down on my radio show, but that will be next week. This week I’m doing a top 50 Christmas songs countdown on the show.
I’ve also got two out of three holiday DJ parties over with. Thursday I did one, nobody had any kind of sound equipment ready so I just used my (non-Apple) mp3 player. Which would have been fun, if I had known, but as it was people had to listen to whatever happened to be on there which was not, uh, party music. (It did give me a reason to finally delete I Am…Sasha Fierce and the terrible September album, though, which have both been haunting me for weeks now.)
Then last night the BF and I did a four-hour DJ thing for a Christmas party/art opening/unveiling thing/tenth anniversary of something. It was excruciatingly long, although I did play She’s Lost Control and Wrote For Luck and the BBC Sessions version of Sleep The Clock Around. And something hippie-ish in Italian that was on a mix I made, but which I’ve since forgotten the artist and title of.
So, next Wednesday’s the BF’s and my Christmas party. That one will actually be fun. And that’s it, as far as DJing this month goes. But not as far as Christmas parties go… Tonight we’re headed up to Boston for one, and tomorrow there’s a holiday party involving a raclette. So, if I’m not too obese to type by Monday, regular posting will resume.
