Anyway, so now I’m at my boyfriend’s house being anti-social in the corner.  So no updates, World Cup or otherwise, today.

I am working about 70 hours this week, in addition to DJing a party on Wednesday and scratching my eyes out at some point because it’s allergy season and that just seems like the less uncomfortable option.  But I will not forget you, pumpkins!  I will be back soon.  In the meantime, might I suggest you read Joanne McNeil’s thoughts about Facebook and about the word curator?  I was actually planning to do a big Facebook privacy post (and a George Rekers post) last week, but I think I’ll have to pass those up because this week is all deadlines, deadlines, deadlines (and parties.)

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.

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.

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.

Which leads me to wonder what’s going wrong.

I just read Doree Shafrir’s New York Observer article about The Hipster Grifter, and it’s a pretty compelling read.  But at the same time, I had a problem with it. “This is so long,” my naggy brain kept saying. “I know there’s like a million details and people and bizarre twists and refused calls for comment, but I just wish it was happening faster.”

And I know the problem isn’t the article.  It’s me.

In the same Tumblr post that alerted me to her article, Shafrir linked to today’s Times piece about Observer editor Peter Kaplan’s plan to leave the paper.  This means nothing to me, really, since I don’t live in New York and only visit a couple of times a year and am doubtful as to whether I’ve ever even picked up a physical copy of the paper.  But the article compared the Observer’s style of hipster journalism to Gawker’s.  Gawker picked up on the story, and they’ve been posting updates as they happen, something that the Observer can’t really do.  And that’s when it became sort of clear to me–for maybe the first time, although it’s probably very obvious–that my stupidity might be more than just twentysomething slacker brainfreeze.

I’ve never been very savvy of any news that wasn’t entertainment-related.  I’ve always liked books and magazines, but I’ve never really been into newspapers. I think the most excited I ever got about current events was when I discovered 10X10, Jonathan Harris‘s fascinating hourly visual representation of the world’s most important news stories.  I set it as my home page at work, so every time I opened my browser I’d learn about whatever was happening internationally (which, when I discovered it in 2005, had a lot to do with rioting Parisians.)

But, like most other webby things I like, I eventually forgot about it.  I ended up spending too much time reading news at work, so I switched my home page to the much less time-consuming jesusswimming.com.  And since then I’ve only gotten news through my RSS reader, which means a lot of different voices, some of which aren’t so reliable and many of which link to dodgy source material like the websites of local TV news affiliates. And everything I read is filtered through the opinions of people I like.  Which in a way is nice, but in another way is probably turning me into a very stupid person, the kind that knows no facts but has very strong opinions about everything, anyway. (There are several such people in my extended family; my mother, for whatever reason, is also friends with a lot of people like this.)

Everything I read now–from book reviews to music news to information about where my friends are–comes in the form of vertically-oriented feeds.  The Facebook, the Twitter–and, lately, I’ve had to restrain myself from Miley Cyrusing everybody by updating my own feeds every 24 seconds–and the Google Reader.  Or Google Readers, since I have three, each linked to a different e-mail account.

Since I started writing this post–about two hours ago now–I’ve checked my e-mail four times, my Facebook twice, the Twitter twice, and now I’m listening getting distracted listening to Kim Deal on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, which I found while doing what people would have called surfing the web twelve to fifteen years ago.  I seriously can not concentrate on any one subject for more than three seconds.  It worries me.  Because two hours ago I actually thought there was an interesting link between Freda Payne and this Hipster Grifter article, and now I can’t even remember what it was.

[via The Doree Chronicles; Kari Ferrell photo via Flickr]

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.)

The author also thinks that Britney should be listening to lots of Bikini Kill, which, fine, whatever.  The author thinks Spears’s music is terrible.  Pop music is beneath the author, etc.

But that’s just irksome in a predictable way; it’s some of her other comments that really get me mad.  Like her insinuation that Sinead O’Connor is a bad mother because her kids have different fathers.  Or that Britney’s vocabulary is too small to articulate–even to herself, she says–Stevie Nicks’s thoughts about the glitter fading.  (That song, which according to the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test is written at a second-grade reading level, is about how “the dream keeps coming even when you forget to feel.”  Oooh, deep.)

Anyway.  Gould recommends that Britney listen to O’Connor’s Daddy I’m Fine and the KLF’s Justified and Ancient, both of which are excellent songs that I think everyone should listen to often.    Her comments about Justified And Ancient–that it’s ” insane and illogical and totally catchy and awesome”–are unquestionably true, but then she feels the need to add an addendum that Britney’s insane and illogical and totally catchy and awesome If You Seek Amy is somehow inferior.  With, of course, no explanation about why that might be the case.  I thought this kind of “pop music is never good, except maybe when it’s made my performance artists trying to be witty” thing had gone away with the nineties.

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.

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.