6/6/06

National Day of Slayer. I can’t decide which would sound better pumping from my Honda Civic’s stock speakers: “Dead Skin Mask” or “Necrophobic.” Discuss.

For Those About to Support Preemptive Unilateral Force in Order to Achieve the Long-Term Goals of the Project for a New American Century, We Salute You!

This is funny–The National Review’s John Miller has offered up “the 50 greatest conservative rock songs.” The NYT covers it (umm, might want to change that pic of Pete Townshend given the whole kiddie porn thing).

This is funnier–Jeff Chang (of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop fame) responds. Choice quotation: “23. ‘Brick,’ by Ben Folds Five. You guys can have this.”

Funniest–RudePundit on the list.

More snarkgasms available here, as usual.

This has about as much worth as me offering up a list of the 50 best golf courses in the world. Probably not as unintentionally funny though.

Gil Sorrentino

Author Gilbert Sorrentino died recently. I only read two of his books, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things and Little Casino (the latter based on a deck of cards: 52 vignettes). It seems he's most famous for Mulligan Stew, judging by the number of used copies that were floating around Charlottesville (with a horrible muggy gray cover no less).

Maybe I was lucky in my random selections for Sorrentino, because I loved the two I got my mits on. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things is an early work, and a must-read for anyone interested in the lives of New York artists and writers in the 1950's and 1960's (hence the awesome picture of the Cedar Bar on the cover) ranging from the drunken deities of AbEx to my favorite, the little poet guys with day-jobs like Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery. It's entirely fictional of course, but that's probably the only way the lives of these people could be contained in writing.

Little Casino is also great, and I'm kicking myself for not owning a copy. I wanted to put up a passage where the narrator asks the reader why it is he can never imagine his mother, at a younger age, enjoying herself the same way he does on occasion (something about bending over and grunting mutually if I remember correctly).

Anecdotally, a former roommate told me he was a nice guy at Stanford, wore only orange, and that his poetry is worth checking out. R.I.P. (via)

“Stay glued to your TV set”

The first three Wire albums have been reissued–”Pink Flag” (1977), “Chairs Missing” (1978), and “154″ (1979). It’s a cliche to mention how they’re criminally overlooked when it comes to punk, if not post-punk, but the proof is always in the listening. Wire remains the ultimate rejection of any band looking for “their sound.” Why settle for just one? From straight up punk to dub to electronica, there’s a breakneck freedom on the first three albums that remains unique in my mind (and it’s probably no accident that they disbanded after “154.” Who could possibly keep up with that sort of creative output?).

Hitch v. Cole

I've been reading Juan Cole's blog for a few years now, and link to it off my front-page. He's unashamedly anti-war, but on a simpler level he's capable of doing something that no other American pundits and talking heads seem to be able to–he's multilingual (in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu as far as I can tell). That alone makes him worth taking seriously, along with his knowledge of the cultural and religious nuances of the Middle East.

Apparently, the "drink-soaked former-Trotskyist popinjay," Christopher Hitchens, tried to take Cole to task and called him, among other things, "a minor nuisance on the fringes of the academic Muslim apologist community" in Slate. Cole fired back, and made Hitch look like the raving dipsomaniac that he is, although he couldn't control his understandable anger and ended up on one of the more invigorating rants I've seen on the Intarweb in a while regarding the chicken hawks' cries for war with Iran.

(Andrew Sullivan also wanted to let people know he still exists. Yawn.)

Slings and Pitchforks

J. Freedom du Lac has a piece on the rise of Pitchforkmedia as an arbiter in the music world. I put up an FPP on mefi about it.

The article and the discussion struck me as fairly balanced. I've been reading PFM for over five years now, and consider it to still be the best place for finding out about new music. A lot of the hate on PFM seems misdirected, and for all of their foibles, I tend to check it out, if not read it, every weekday morning. It's hard to hate on Ryan Schreiber for doing something he loves, and making enough to hire some other similarly dedicated folks to do the same thing. As mentioned multiple times in the mefi thread though, the kingmaking abilities of PFM are overstated.

As for du Lac, I like his energy but still can't figure out who his audience is. He seems to criticize bands and/or band boosters of the NME/"next big thing" variety, which I can appreciate, but at the same time he loves to unwittingly name-drop bands and trends that most of the music world has known about for a long time. As someone who used to write music reviews part-time, I can attest to how tough it is to keep up with everything out there, good and bad, but it shouldn't be that difficult if it's your full-time gig. It should be your job.

“Reality Has a Well-Known Liberal Bias”

I was one of the haters who didn't think The Daily Show had nearly the momentum necessary to spawn a successful spin-off. Not only was I wrong, but it turns out Stephen Colbert is one of the few people who has the guts to stand up to Bush II and let him know what a failure he is as a president, a leader, and a human being (unlike any "real" journalists I know of).

Crooks and Liars has video of Colbert at the annual White House Correspondents' dinner. It's Kaufman-esque, to say the least, and entirely brilliant. Bush and dear Laura were not amused, apparently. Good.