December 2011
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Selected Items From The Latest Thought Catalog
Radical Doubt — $2,500
Descartes’ Radical Doubt inaugurated modernity as we know it. Do the church doctors — or maybe just your ‘rents — got you down? It could be the case that they’re totally wrong about everything. After all, only things seen in a clear, natural light can be thought to be true. When you wield Radical Doubt, virtually everything is blemished by skepticism....
David's Top 20 Rap Tapes of 2011 →
So many truth bombs here.
One of the effects of this niche-ification, though, is that everyone starts cosigning anything that fits their narrow notion of what hip-hop is supposed to sound like, whatever the quality of product. While I fuck with a few Juicy J songs the long way, none of his records this year were all that strong, and a few were straight-up lazy. Spaceghostpurrp had some nice...
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“Life! Life! To have erections! That is everything, the only thing that counts.”
– From one writer to another.
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Instructions For Listening To A New Lil B Mixtape
Sign up for Twitter or Tumblr so you can learn when Lil B has released one of his like septa- or octo-annual mixtapes. Alternately, hit refresh on thefader.com a few times a day. You’ll see it there.
Download it.
Unzip or ‘Unrar’ the download file.
Drag the uncompressed folder onto the iTunes icon on your doc.
Wait a few moments. The mixtape will probably start playing...
FauxSweeney's: Useful Stereo Types
Yamaha MCR-040DG Micro Component System
Sony MHCEC709iP Mini Hi-Fi Shelf System
Denon D-M37 AM/FM/CD Player Micro System
Onkyo CS-325 CD-Receiver Shelf System
Audio-Technica AT-LP2DA LP-to-Digital Recording System
Harman Kardon HK3485 High Current Stereo Receiver
Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin Air
A List Of The Best Rock Albums Of All-Time, In No...
The Meadowlands
Poor White Blight: How Rapper Yelawolf (and Eminem... →
A few weeks ago, I was really hot in the biscuit to write about Yelawolf. And even though his album was not that good, it made me think about a lot of things, especially my own personal experiences among the largely white poverty in upstate New York. I wrote about it.
AlterNet:
It’s interesting to compare Eminem, self-affirmed “trailer trash pioneer,” with Kanye West and Jay-Z,...
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Drake Is Some Sort Of Passive-Aggressive Genius
I was thinking about this at the gym a few weeks ago, but it just re-occurred to me reading Jonathan Bogart’s latest singles tumblr post.1 Drake created one of the catchiest hooks of the year, to me, in “Marvin’s Room”. Except, statistically speaking, most Americans really can’t sing along to it. He even sort of talks obliquely about it toward the end of the...
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“Would anyone have read anything Marie Calloway wrote, would she have secured...”
– Nerdshares
I think this makes so much sense. As a person who makes image macro jokes about Lana Del Rey and Marie Callender, I know it’s hard to discern between something that’s making fun of the subject versus something that’s making fun of the form of expression versus...
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“Woman-hatred may be too active a term here. (Except when you’re talking about...”
– Ann Powers, author of the essay most used to justify uncritically loving Odd Future
Essentially, I incorporated into my daily life the... →
jennydeluxe:
Young, Black and Frisked by the NYPD
If I were a young black man, I would just not get hassled by the cops. It’s that simple.
“Liquorice shows Banks to be one of the most inventive rappers since Missy...”
– I like Missy Elliott as much as the next person, but she hasn’t been “inventive” for a decade, which means rap must be really fallow lately. I’m glad there’s such a promising young rapper occurring right now.
The last bit is just funny.
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Azealia Banks “LIQUORICE”
New song....
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Calling all Eileen Myles fans...
orbooks:
Send blank email to badmirror@orbooks.com and see what happens! (Don’t worry: it’s free.)
So… you should do this.
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Clams Casino: Artist Of The Year
My favorite album of the year was — by far — EMA’s Past Life Martyred Saints. I wrote in my year-end piece on Fuse:
Part of the album’s glorious expansiveness is due its first song, “The Grey Ship”, which sets your expectations for the album in the neighborhood of Cat Power-esque. As the bottom hits you around the 2:50 mark, though, you realize the past is preamble to a...
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Longreads: Sady Doyle: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011 →
longreads:
Sady Doyle is a writer and the proprietor of Tiger Beatdown.
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“The personal is political” is how the unspeakable, “private” issues of women—the men in the radical protest group who made rape jokes, the arrogant dismissals at the mostly-boy punk rock shows, the boss who made weird sexual comments, the date who raped you, the husband who beat you—became political concerns. It’s...
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Media In Which It's 'OK' To Be Popular, In...
Web
Video Game
Fine Arts
Dance
Music
Film
Literature
“The third cause of trolling is incompetence. If you disagree with something,...”
– Paul Graham (via Gruber)
Sounds like an old white guy talking.
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“‘A Britain which leaves the E.U. will be considered to be irrelevant by...”
– Oh, well played, Harper’s Weekly
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Watchfelixsalmon:
I can look at this NYC income map for hours. Fascinating stuff.
This is hell of fascinating or interesting. It’s not a video; if you click play, you get an interactive map.
“This is the Internet and there’s no point in bitching about a mediocre record...”
– Jeff Weiss, saying the most thoughtful things about Yelawolf that people are likely to say about him.
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Top 10 Songs Of The Year, Rated On A 0 To 10...
Note: It should simply be accepted that a song on this list receiving even a 0 score is still better than any song not on this list that would have, using different criteria, received a 10 out of 10 rating. (You can download these ten tracks as a non-mix mix here, or just click through the songs to stream them.)
1.7 | “Santa Fe” by Beirut
I could hardly ignore this song...
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The Horrifying Post-Date Rant Allegedly Sent by a... →
In addition, you arrived about 30 minutes late for our date. I’m sure you wouldn’t like it if a man showed up thirty minutes late for a first date with you.
I literally cannot stand it when someone uses numerals to denote something and then uses, like, normal words to denote a similar thing, for no apparent reason. This person is irrational, and he’s not a philosopher.
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Martin Douglas' Favorite Albums of 2011 That He... →
douglasmartini:
I’ve cried many times while listening to this record, from end to end. I used to think about my life and its utter worthlessness, and Bradford has an intrinsic knowledge of what that’s like. There are things about abject loneliness that you just can’t explain to people with words, but where Bradford does with music. It sometimes sounds like you’re on an island all by yourself...
