Filed under: art, gay, heterosexuals, hookers, Italians, lists, magazines, movies, music, Norwegians, people from rhode island, porn, tv | Tags: aceyalone, afro picks, anne geddes, censorship, death, denmark, fashion, gossip girl, gray hair, hookers, kathryn bigelow, mcsweeney's, new york times, publishers weekly, reality tv, rhode island, sex workers, sheena beaston, sondre lerche, statuettes, street art, the advocate, time, twink porn, watermelons
Sheena Beaston just posted her top 10 albums of the year. Dizzee Rascal, Fever Ray and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs might all be on my list as well if I ever got around to making one, but how have I never heard of this Aceyalone person before?
Someone my age in my hometown was profiled in The Atlantic for being homeless. Also, hookers! (Don’t read the comments on that second one unless you want to start hating people.)
If you’ve ever wanted to see watermelon-themed twink porn–and shut up, of course you have–now’s your chance. My favorite part might be the scrubs or whatever that the guy’s wearing at the beginning. Unless my favorite part is the subtitles. It’s hard to say.
I guess maybe I should start watching Gossip Girl. I didn’t even know Serena’s brother Eric was a major character on the show. (He’s not in the books. Or at least in the books I’ve read.) But hey, he likes Sondre Lerche!
McSweeney’s imagines what an Anne Geddes baby might be like as an adult. Anne Geddes jokes never get tiresome.
New York Times film critics Manohla Dargis likes to swear a lot. I still don’t know if I want to see The Hurt Locker. I’m still reeling all these years later by how stupid Strange Days was; I also don’t know how I feel about everybody being like “this movie is awesome, a woman directed it!” when Kathryn Bigelow’s been making very well-known (if not exactly well-respected) movies for twenty years now.
And, oh yeah, Publishers Weekly made a pun this week.
Gray hair is a trend? I wouldn’t mind that, actually, especially if it distracted people from the emergent Navajo sweater craze.
I wish more news stories used the word statuette.
Jesse Corcoran’s Olympic frowny faces, located on the side of a Vancouver gallery, were censored after someone allegedly complained about it being graffiti.
And here’s three stories I covered for Carnal Nation:
Reality TV creeps me out in all kinds of different ways, but the most extreme example of why can be found in this story about a gay porn star choking to death while police shot him with a taser and a TV crew filmed the whole thing.
I meant to post about this last week, but the prostitutes of Copenhagen are offering free services to anyone with a pass from the global climate summit; prostitution is legal in Denmark, but the mayor sent postcards to hotels asking employees not to hook up climate summit attendees with escorts. The postcard actually said “Be Sustainable: Don’t Buy Sex!“ In English, too, that’s not just a weird translation from the Danish or anything.
Finally, Time thinks that Advocate readers are all porn-crazy sluts that want nothing more than to stick their dicks into the nearest inflatable person.
[image via Men and Machines]
Filed under: design of a decade, lists, music | Tags: 2004, design of a decade, the streets
10. The Streets, Fit But You Know It
After Mike Skinner set Anglophile hearts ablaze with his 2002 debut, the man known as The Streets followed the commercial and critical success up with A Grand Don’t Come For Free, a darkly funny concept album about desperation and boredom. It’s bleak and miserable and not especially fun to listen to. The tracks on Original Pirate Material proved their point by sounding really awkward; it was the sound of a frantic Englishman trying to make rap songs and producing something giddier and more immediate; but that style can’t quite convey the levels of drama that Skinner’s trying to channel on A Grand Don’t Come For Free. The songs are still funny, but the album’s concept seems simultaneously glossed-over and never ending.
Well, except for track seven.
(more…)
Filed under: design of a decade, lists, music | Tags: 2003, cat power, design of a decade
1. Cat Power, Good Woman
The 00′s seem to have been a good decade for Chan Marshall, the singer-songwriter who had spent had most of the nineties cultivating a career out of misery and paranoia.
At the beginning of this decade, she plumbed previously undiscovered depths of lonesome despair with The Covers Record. But over time she seemed to get happier and happier, less afraid of herself and less afraid of the music she was making. In 2008 she recorded another covers album, Jukebox, which bears little resemblance to The Covers Record; Jukebox is pretty good, classy in a Starbucks way, polished and featuring a full band. Marshall made it into a lot of magazines, toured without having breakdowns mid-performance, and even appeared in Chanel ads. Those are all good things, regardless of what fans of her older material might think of the shift.
Filed under: design of a decade, lists, music | Tags: 2003, beyonce, crazy in love, design of a decade
[My second-favorite song of 2003.]
2. Beyonce feat. Jay-Z, Crazy In Love
Beyonce is problematic.
With Destiny’s Child, she had a #1 hit singing about independent women. But from the very beginning, the career of Matthew Knowles’ elder daughter has been almost Victorian in its emphasis on female dependency: Knowles was led into the music industry at the age of nine by her show business parents; her dad managed her career and her mom made her skimpy yet ersatz outfits. Then, when she outgrew her group and opted for a solo career, Beyonce immediately fled into the thuggish arms of Jay-Z, with whom she would duet on two of 2003′s biggest singles.
Filed under: lists, music, personal | Tags: 2009, countdowns, me me me me me, pop chart
This Sunday, December 6th, be sure to listen to the second half of The Pop Chart 100, wherein I count down the year’s 100 best pop singles. Rankings are based on The Pop Chart I do every week; weekly charts are based solely on my own whims.
It all starts at 10:30 AM EST. To see what’s happened so far, you can listen here or just look at the pretty pictures here.
Filed under: design of a decade, lists, music | Tags: 2003, cry me a river, design of a decade, justin timberlake
[In order to finish my decade-end song recap, I'd have to write two of these each day between now and New Year's Eve. I have a feeling I won't even make it through 2004...]
Something is sizzling. An operatic-sounding man is going “eeee-eeee-eeee-eeee.” Then the sound of, what, a meteor landing? The thirty seconds that open Justin Timberlake’s second solo single are strange and epic, and after hundreds of listens and seven years they’re no less strange and no less epic. The song builds and builds as it slinks along for almost four minutes before crashing down with a wave of falsetto histrionics and gospel choir.
Cry Me A River is, I think, perfect.
It’s perfect in the way that the Shangri-Las’ Remember (Walking In The Sand) and Lil Suzy’s Take Me In Your Arms are perfect, where human emotions we’ve all spent ages dwelling over are encapsulated in tight little songs that somehow seem even more mind-blowing than they are when we actually feel them. Sure, we’re supposed to believe that this song is about Justin’s breakup with Britney, and the song’s admittedly rather sexy video capitalized on that in a rather unfortunate way, but are you really thinking about Britney Spears when you hear this song?
Filed under: lists, music, shameless self-promotion | Tags: countdowns, the pop chart
The Pop Chart year-end countdown starts tomorrow. It’s my recap of the year’s hundred best singles, ranked on a weekly basis. It’s quite different than the sort of year-end list I would make today, which sort of surprises me. But time is a fickle princess, or whatever that expression is.
Anyway, if you like pop music and trivia and hearing slow-talking people reciting numbers that don’t actually mean anything, tune in tomorrow from 10:30 AM Eaastern Time. Songs 100-51 will be tomorrow, and then the Top 50 will be the following Sunday.
Filed under: design of a decade, lists, music | Tags: 2003, belle and sebastian, design of a decade, mike piazza, stuart murdoch
4. Belle and Sebastian, Piazza, New York Catcher
I’ve been a stereotypical Belle and Sebastian fan from the first time I pressed play: I bought If You’re Feeling Sinister on a high school trip to France because Jarvis Cocker told the papers that he liked it; I got a third or fourth-generation Tigermilk tape from a stranger on the internet; I bought The Boy With The Arab Strap the day it came out and then carried it to school the next day for no reason whatsoever, just on the off chance that someone might ask me if there was anything new and exciting in my backpack that day. I wasn’t making lifesized models of the Velvet Underground in clay, but I may as well have been, and I did get very uppity when people didn’t know who Scott Walker was. (I only knew who Scott Walker was because someone on B&S’s Sinister list put him on a mixtape they sent me.) Stuart Murdoch was shamelessly high school-ish and I was shamefully in high school.
That was the nineties. By 2003 I had grown up, and so had they. While it was cool in 1996 to flaunt anti-social bookishness, the new millennium was about exploring New Things. In Belle and Sebastian’s case, New Things meant producer Trevor Horn, he of the Buggles, fresh off producing the breakthrough album for tAtU. With Horn’s guidance, Belle and Sebastian’s fifth full-length ventured off in all kinds of different directions, most notably on Stay Loose, which sounds downright clubby.
