May 2011
April 2011
Cadillac On 22's
David Banner
David Banner
“Cadillac on 22s”
I had a minor epiphany this morning, which followed a great branding idea. In all, it averaged out to, like, a little bit of a fart or something. The residual ontos of which, though, is how much I Fucking Love This Song. But I couldn’t tell you why.
I’m still (still) writing some piece (“piece”) on why it is I like “hip-hop,” and it’s a real nut. There are so many avenues that seem automatically closed down.1 Which all screams at me (screams at me, I tell you!) that I’m thinking about it the wrong way. Because the right way to think about it, when you’re thinking about it the right way, you’re not met with impenetrable walls.
So, this post here is not, like, a paean to this David Banner song because I’m still not in the right place to write that. But I just wanted to tell you that sometimes when you’re writing something, you’re going to run against walls, and they suck. They mean you’re doing it wrong. But you can run into all the walls in the world and that doesn’t mean that you are wrong. It just means you need to turn around and look for another path there.
-
You’ll not at 1:43 in your right channel the sound of someone whistling softly. Note that, please. ↩
Derivative Stuck
You may find yourself bummed when you get Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok” stuck in your head. It happens. But here’s something worse, perhaps. Say you’ve actually chosen to listen to “Tik Tok.” (It happens.) And now, what gets stuck in your head isn’t the song itself, but rather some stupid video you saw of World of Warcraft things dancing along to “Tik Tok.” While it may be annoying to get a crappy pop song stuck in your head, I assure you it’s much worse to have some weird Shrek-like automatons dancing around in your head while you’re listening to “Tik Tok.”
“Pao Gasol recovered from the illness that afflicted him in the beginning of the series [and] the constant question of his manhood that followed.”
—
Laugh out loud, what? Did people think that because Gasol stunk it up in Round 1 that his penis disappeared?!
How I Came to Work at the Wendy's. →
imgur.com
I’ve seen this on my dash quite a bit the last few days. I (honestly, really) have to say, I don’t see what the big deal is. More specifically, I don’t find this sad or slightly tragic. I don’t find the protagonist at all sympathetic or appealing. I don’t know why anyone likes this or cares about it. What is wrong with you?
If you don’t feel like looking at the somewhat long webcomic, it describes a man and a woman in a relationship. They cohabitate. The woman has a job and the man does not. She asks him to get a job over dinner one night, “because, the rent.” This is a totally fair, honest, reasonable, and realistic request to make of someone you’re a) in a relationship with, and b) living with.
The man proceeds to “apply” for various jobs like a marine animal and old man at a bar. He doesn’t get any of these jobs. By the end, the woman leaves him, and he finally “breaks down and gets a job at Wendy’s.” There are so many fucked up things with how this is presented.
First. Getting a job is hard. Look a-fucking-round. Even a job at Wendy’s is not a guarantee. Really. No job is guaranteed. That the author of the comic thinks you can just automatically get a job at Wendy’s because he’s such a good… web comic (?) is facetious and insulting. I think the subtext is that the reason a job at Wendy’s is assured is that he’s a white guy who went to college. How else did he learn to be so infantalized and sure in his own employability at a “real/shitty” job?
Second. What’s wrong with working at Wendy’s? I know a lot of people who’ve worked in fast food. They turned out great. Just the nicest, smartest, best people. What. The. Fuck. Is. Wrong. With. Working. At. Wendy’s. It’s such a weak punchline that the comic seems like it was made to just be that punchline, as if the author just wanted a super SEO reddit viral link title for his stupid shit.
Third. What’s wrong with this asshole? Sorry you didn’t want to grow up. I know how that is; I have a tumblr! It could be that the whole trying-to-get-a-job-as-a-marine-creature is just a metaphor for being a useless web comic author. Is that the point? You did a good job proving your point! Your web comic sucks! Good work convincing me it’s a useless, fanciful, position that makes you both unemployable and unfuckable! Twist ending: You are actually a great web comic author!
(themattsmith:theycallmebruce:absurdlakefront:thisistheglamorous:bwall05)
phiLOLZophy: Wut Philosopher do Y'all Most Want to Punch in the Gut? →
philolzophy.tumblr.com
Kant
Sorry. Wrong. Incorrect. Not right. Quite erroneous. Off the mark. A few pints short of all the pints. Perhaps libelous.
Kant is one of the most entertaining to read and also pellucid thinking philosophers ever. He pretty much never left Könisberg, yet devised an entire system of thinking that included aesthetics, religion, morality, politics, science, logic, epistemology, and “pure reason” itself. Aside from creating the dominate way that we still look at looking at the world, he was also such a reliable person that the people of Könisberg could set their watches based on his regular walks.
Oh, and according to his Wikipedia page,
So based on the admittedly sometimes shoddy logic of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, Kant is even that much better. Plus he was right: You can’t know reality “as it is in itself.” Shame on you, Ayn Rand. You are no philosopher.Ayn Rand was a critic of Kant. She referred to him as a “monster” and “the most evil man in history.” Rand was strongly opposed to the view that reason is unable to know reality “as it is in itself,” which she ascribed to Kant, and she considered her philosophy to be the “exact opposite” of Kant’s on “every fundamental issue”
marathonpacks: danah boyd is pissed at Tumblr, and rightfully so: A few years ago, I... →
marathonpacks.tumblr.com
danah boyd is pissed at Tumblr, and rightfully so:
A few years ago, I learned that there is a technology consulting company called Zephoria.com. And apparently, they’ve become a social media consulting company. In recent years, I’ve found that they work hard to block me from using the handle…
Oh I thought it was just Pitchfork-hating domain squatters that Tumblr killed?
/SARCASM
Update, from Danah Boyd’s blog:
10:39PM: I just got off the phone with John Maloney. We had a lovely conversation which began with him apologizing for what he described as a human error in customer service and saying that he looked into the issue and has reinstated my account. He explicitly stated that they are working hard to have strong customer service processes where things like this don’t happen and that he feels terrible that it did happen. He said that Tumblr has only had four issues like this in the past and that they are committed to making certain that legitimate active users do not face these issues.
On Birthing
The birther situation doesn’t have anything to do with evidence, because to be a birther is to fundamentally reject the notion of evidence. This is a very truncated/shoddy philosophical perspective on why the birther thing happened and why it’s important.
Philosophy has something to do with this. Specifically, the branch called “epistemology,” which roughly means “how we know things.” Back in the day, the way we thought we knew things was by
- Having the thing be true.
- Believing the thing to be true.
- And having some good reasons for believing the thing to be true.
This model worked for, like, ever. And it’s still a pretty good model for living in the world. So it’s true that Obama was born in the United States, and people believe it’s true, and they have good reasons for believing it’s true. Right? If you don’t happen to believe he was born in the United States, then you probably have reasons for not believing it.
So you can see, knowing Obama was born in the US hinges on having good reasons for believing he was. This point doesn’t actually depend on whether he was born in the US or not. It’s also the part of knowledge that, to me, is where epistemology starts to veer into ontology (“the study of what is or exists”), which seems a little counterintuitive, since the first point seems to have to do with what is.
But since it seems we’re all in the state of radical subjectivism (as it were), anything goes. The fact of Obama’s birth depends on one’s believing in it because, as my buddy Wittgenstein tried to prove (and yet failed at proving…) the world is as it were subsumed in the system of language used to describe the world. The map—as China will tell you—constitutes the reality of the terrain.
This map-terrain problem just is the whole problem. When you say, “the fact of Obama’s birth in the US is incontrovertible,” you’ve already made it not-incontrovertible. You’re no longer arguing facts; you’re arguing arguments. But why is it an argument?
Till The World Ends (The Femme Fatale Remix) (Feat. Nicki Minaj & Ke$ha)
Britney Spears
Britney Spears
“Til The World Ends” (The Femme Fatale Remix)(Feat. Nicki Minaj & Ke$ha)
Hah, I have no idea what the hell this is, but I like the folks on it.
[Edit: This song is pretty cool. Not sure what the original sounds/ed like, but this one seems like a real pop music winner. There’s some lite Minaj and Ke$ha hook singing, which are not their fortes, but it works. And there’s like a “Windowlicker” moment before a “house music” moment, and both of them are pretty neat.]
A Dynamic
- Tune Yards has a name that sounds like a Twitter client. But
- Dirty Projectors sounds like birds, and
- They have a bunch of songs about birds.
- It’s a great thing for their career that Tune Yards toured with Dirty Projectors, but
- They don’t compare favorably to them; they do
- Look a lot better on paper than Dirty Projectors, though, since
- D. Longstreth makes me think,
- Charles Ives, LOL, but about birds instead of American Transcendentalists.
- On the other hand, I’m kind of sad
- That M. Garbus seems to have traded in her pick up-ed uke for
- Some maple necked Fenders.
“The four right chords can make me cry. When I’m with you I feel like I could die, and that would be all right. All right.”
—everyone ever everywhere
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy Baseball Team
HOW DID I MISS MAKING THIS JOKE (well, “joke”) UNTIL TODAY?!
A Few Thoughts On Lady Gaga's "Judas"
The song’s first verse conflates a couple of Biblical events. She says she’ll “wash his feet with [her] hair,” alluding to a figure traditionally contrasted with Judas, the woman who washed Jesus’s feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair (Luke 7:44). She goes on to say she will “forgive him […] even after three times he betrays [her],” which is not a reference to Judas, as it would seem Gaga intended, but rather to another disciple, Peter. On the one hand, she compares herself to a woman forgiven by Jesus for her hospitality, and on the other, to Jesus as betrayed three times by Peter. These comparisons make sense as a sort of imagistic self-portrait of someone with a Jesus-complex, which is born out by the chorus.
“I’m just a holy fool, / Oh baby it’s so cruel, / But I’m still in love with Judas” could again describe Christ-like thinking. After all, in order to redeem humankind, Jesus had to be sacrificed, and Judas was the efficient cause of his sacrifice. The two need each other. Taken this way, “Judas” would be an extremely controversial song. It would describe an illicit love between Jesus and Judas, with Lady Gaga taking on the role of Jesus. It would speak to the paradoxes of Christian faith, wherein Judas is damneded for a predestined act wholly out of his control (he was born that way), and it would even carry an extremely sacrilegious undercurrent of homosexual love. That seems like a hell of a song, but based on the rest of it, it’s not the one Lady Gaga wrote.
The second verse loses its Biblical focus, instead invoking vague imagery: Forgiving prophets, crooked ways, sinking bodies. Jesus was crucified, and Judas died of hanging or being split open.
The half-spoken bridge is perhaps the most direct part of the song in that it relates Lady Gaga herself. Calling herself a “fame hooker” who “vomits her mind” refers directly to the themes of her previous records, The Fame and The Fame Monster. And Gaga touched on the mind vomiting part in “Gagavision 43,” when she said, “The creative process is approximately fifteen minutes of vomiting my creative ideas in the forms of melodies and some sort of a theme.” The rest of the bridge speaks to Gaga’s self-image (if not command of grammar), saying she “speak[s] in future tense,” commanding Judas to kiss her or wear an “ear condom,” which is probably an allusion to the Annunciation, the archangel Gabriel announcing to the Virgin Mary that she would bear Jesus, which has nothing to do with Judas.
In all, “Judas” is a glorious wreck of a song. It’s hard to see the text of the song support Gaga’s assertion that its narrator is Mary Magdalene. With the twin assertion that god sent the song to her, it would seem she’s more like the Virgin Mary—somehow a more blasphemous account.
SPIN: "The Debate About Rap, Misogyny, and Homophobia." →
spin.com
This week’s column is a bunch of related but all-over-the-place thoughts on Ashley Judd, Frank Ocean, Mister Cee, and Lil B.
Mr Soderberg’s recent Spin columns have been really really good. It’s the sort of accounting for music that does the “insert -ist word here” thing without saying, “Hey look at me, I’m doing the “-ist” thing.” Ie, the sort of music writing that’s good writing.
Liking Gwyneth Paltrow Is Like Linking To Yourself Continuously? →
fuse.tv
It’s come to my attention that somewhere Gwyneth Paltrow was on TV last night, so I thought I’d repost this thing I wrote about her. I have not significantly changed my thinking on it; rather, it’s a bit more narrow or focused, if you will.
It seems like there’s genuine, tabloid-style hunger to relate to stars as someone just like us. It’s not even that their lifestyle is more attainable because they wear sweatpants to Starbucks; it just makes you feel better because one part of your life is very similar to the life of someone incredibly rich and famous.
The ways in which we’re all similar are when we’re at our worst. The similarities between Paltrow and her haters are when they’re both at their best (or when her haters are at their best and Paltrow’s at her, well, normal).
I think there is a class of celebrity that’s just gallingly annoying—not necessarily for their privilege or out-of-touch-ness (which Paltrow and Jay-Z, say) have in spades—but for their, yes, ease of living a life that specifically seems awesome. Like, do I wish I had tons of money? YES! Would I spend it on eating ridiculously awesome healthy food? YES! Would I spend it on dressing really, like, awesomely? YES!! I don’t see how my aims and Paltrow/Jay-Z’s aims are very different. In fact, I’d probably do the whole philanthropy thing much worse until Warren Buffet sat me down at the monthly Rich Persons Meeting and told me the best ways to give versus the tax/PR benefits accrued.
My point is that I really dislike all these blithe people as much as the next person with a Tumblr. And I am one of those blithe people. Er, and I don’t want to tell anyone whom to loathe or like. But I myself am compelled to look at why Paltrow and Jay-Z—the thing I wrote about Jay-Z’s website that’s just like Paltrow’s GOOP is here, which is why I keep mentioning him—seem to get the best of it and the worst of it all at once. And more specifically, if there’s a reason why their being super successful and fabulous at their apex may be the reason why they got to be super successful and fabulous in the first place. And if the pathology that lends itself to doing great things may necessarily lead you to becoming a rank caricature of yourself once you get to be successful, which may be a cautionary tale or at least an interesting feature of something or other.
See also: Cartesian concern with the disparity between language and meaning. It might seem conservative to necessitate a link between words and material cultural meaning but, well, the opposite is a complete breakdown in meaning. Which isn't bad (add italics to that "bad"), per se, but it isn't really possible when you apply it to people and cultural products. People will always attach meaning and connotation to language; always. That's why people just enjoying "the music" isn't possible. If you want to connect this back to Odd Future and feminism, look at the way that you defined feminism. That single word means two completely different things to you and me. Can it exist just as a word, without meaning? No. Nobody can say, "Well feminism is fucking stupid" and not have it mean something. Just like Odd Future can't say "All you fuckin' bloggin' faggots" and have it mean nothing. You're looking to remove meaning from the language because it's just "the music". The problem with that is, well, is that really possible? And if it is, is that really what anybody wants; especially the artists?
Duality aside1 I’m just a little disappointed in some of the writing (my writing, included) that focuses more on the zeitgeisty connotative aspect of music rather than on the music itself. I understand this is a problematic concept for you. There are ways to go about writing about texts that talks about the texts. It can thoughtfully explore an array of meanings inspired by the text. You can write about the marxist implications of ideology in Bleak House without writing about German idealism and Feuerbach because last time I checked, even though everyone in that book has a ridiculous name, none of them are Feuerbach.
There’s a big difference between writing about a song and writing about these ten other blog posts about the group that made the song. For real.
Plus, see https://skitch.com/b.michael.payne/r5bc1/twitter-frisco-tsc-i-just-like-to-let-my-work-
So I guess sometimes people really do just want to be judged by their work and not the falling tide of sentiment on Twitter that one day.
-
Of course, there’s a lot of post-Cartesian thinking that doesn’t see the frankly ridiculous need to set things in terms of objects and minds, especially when we are actually engaged in the world and a shared form of life with others, which living and life tends to create lived-in meanings that are fluid and resist gross categorization. ↩
I heard you were asking about whether or not people can just like Kanye West for his music. Objectivism alarms ringing aside; that's like asking whether or not people can just like pizza for its taste. Sure people like music and highly controversial performers "just for their music". But they also can only understand that music in the cultural and personal contexts that they come from. You can't just say, "Well this is music and there's no connection to the culture around it." Just like you can't say, "I love pizza but I hate the smell of it. And the feel. And the price it costs to purchase it." There does not exist a single attribute, like "just his music", that exists outside of the expansive and infinite context it is born and operates within. Because as long as you're focusing on what "the music" just is, you're taking into account and excluding every other function that that music performs. "The music" exists with "the culture" and "the economics" and "the politics" just off in the periphery.
You also have to ask if the performers themselves want to be understood just for "the music". If their image-related aspects (Kanye's twitter, "George Bush doesn't care about black people", etc.; Odd Future's... everything) are so important to their presence as artists, then they have to have an impact and bearing within the music. Focusing on "just the music" means, ultimately, you aren't listening to the the music. If you're just focusing on "the music", you might as well be listening to the same song over and over and over again by one artist because cutting out the cultural signifiers behind "the music" makes it meaningless on the artistic end.
I guess, ultimately, your question simply is: is it possible for people to judge cultural artifacts without contextualizing them. The answer, just like the answer to the pizza question, is no.
Oh I started writing you a long Ask, and then I decided I wasn’t into it. Let me start by addressing this first thing (to my mind) which comes before this, but this comes before mine because I saw it on your Tumblr, but only after I ceased writing my long Ask.
It doesn’t make sense to me to talk in an academic way about the bigger isms with regard to someone like Syd saying “I’m not a feminist” because it comes from an entirely different area of knowledge. It’s like, I imagine, sending someone a letter in Italian when they don’t read Italian. Why talk about one feminism as if there’s one feminism? Well, because that’s why we have words. Otherwise, we’d talk by throwing printed matter at each other—it would be more violent, but would play out very slow like. But there is a large idea of feminism that I think is in the air, not one that everyone shares, but enough of one that when someone says the word, it makes a bit of sense within almost any context. And from there, you can talk it out with them and see where the edges of it are and where its hinges are and you can start to have a meaningful exchange of thoughts and ideas. But saying 1) It doesn’t make any sense at all to talk about a concept called feminism, or 2) you’re not allowed to talk about it until you read all the syllabuses in all the possible worlds is not really something I’m interested in.
There is such a thing as listening to music while you’re running or dancing or at a party, and there are connections you make between yourself and the music and between yourself and the world, which are spurred on by the music. And these non-intellectual connections can be analyzed in various ways. But—
The thing about Kanye West is this: I Do Not Trust Anyone Talking About Kanye West Unless They Talk At Least As Much If Not More About His Music (The Stuff He’s Ostensibly Good At And Famous For) Than How Much They Talk About What They Think “Predominantly White Males” Think About Things.
End.
Of.
Story.
Rebecca Solnit: Men Explain Things to Me →
tomdispatch.com
The archipelago of arrogance.
Tom Dispatch || April 13, 2008
I love this title. It makes me think of that one Foucualt book.
Grumpus
Lambchop
Lambchop
“Grumpus”
I noticed that inthefade is posting songs and ephemera surrounding our date in song, viz. the date being 4/19 and song lengths being 4:19.
Some of my song lengths are weird for reasons, but I think this one should be pretty legit. It’s my second- or third-favorite Lambchop song, I think, but it’s the one I’ve most listened to while I was high, to think about how the guitar lead told me all sorts of cool things about the world if I could follow it with my “mind’s eye,” as it were.
But anyway, this is such a cool song. It’s my Sunday Best, snappy-dressed Silver Jews. The ones you’re going out to a big breakfast with after church, and then play catch in the yard while some of the other ones are drinking beer or coffee and talking in the kitchen. Given the band is so damn big, I can’t help think it’s nicer, too. Or maybe they all get really high and come up with this oddly affecting pieces of music that make world-breaking sense to high people.
Odd Future Writing B-Sides
-Or- Someday I Won’t Find Odd Future Entirely Fascinating (If A Little Tiring To Keep Writing About) -Or- How I Learned To Finally Stop Worrying And Love The Split Infinitive (Working Title?)
Earl released one of the most divisive mixtapes in the Odd Future oeuvre. On the one hand, EARL showed the young rapper to be the group’s most talented on the mic, but his work also sets the ceiling for Odd Future’s much-hyped hyper-violence and misogyny. But a few days before Complex published its Earl story, the group released an early track of Earl’s on their website. Accompanying a download link is a block of text (in Tyler’s All Caps Twitter Style) saying, “Our Soldier, Wolf, Bother And Friend Is Currently Not With Us. Stop Asking Where He Is, We Like To Keep This Private Because It’s Very Personal For Us. And No, He is Not As Some Boarding School And Blah Blah Blah, None Of You People Know Because NONE of You Know Him Personally. Free Earl. ” The song, “Dat Ass,” is thought to have been recorded for a pre-Odd Future mixtape when Earl was probably 15. He’s precocious, with an impressive flow.
Perhaps surprisingly, “Dat Ass” is largely bereft of the violence and misogyny weighing down his “later” work. The track is a sunny excursion into rap self-aggrandizement: “Hypebeasts highly likely to bite me, / And try to high five me, / But I just give ‘em high threes, / Coz y’all don’t get to touch me.” The song displays all of Earl’s strengths—great flow and tricky internal rhymes.
While the two events are clearly not related, they do serve to show Odd Future’s more vulnerable side. The group is often painted as rape-happy nihilists or horrorcore disciples of Eminem, but it seems more true that they’re just a tightknit group of teens and young adults. Like everyone else, some members get the full support of their parent(s), and others get sent away to boot camp. Either way, they’re not exactly a well-coordinated group of professionals but rather young people trying still trying to figure it out.
Earl’s brief career arc can teach us a few things about fame: You can garner a ton of love from your friends and fans without any of them knowing where you are; and you when you do rap, it’s better to be good than to be parent-pleasing. Well, as long as the parents you offend don’t happen to be your own.
Gorgeous
Kanye West
Kanye West
“Gorgeous”
A few programming notes.
- I listen to MBDTF about four times a week, still. Probably more, but that’s a lowball estimate.
- This is my second- or third-favorite song on the album. But it’s probably the best rap song?
- I walk around Queens “rapping” along to it whenever I listen to it, cf, this morning, for about thirty minutes.
- I want to do this song on karaoke.
- I know this song is about like race wars and stuff, but it’s still the one that resonates the most with how I wish I could be:
Is hip hop just a euphemism for a new religion?
The soul music for the slaves that the youth is missing?
This is more than just my road to redemption.
Malcolm West had the whole nation standing at attention.
As long as I’m in Polo, smiling, they think they got me,
But they would try to crack me if they ever see a black me.
I thought I chose a field where they couldn’t sap me.
If a figga ain’t shootin a jump shot, I’m running a track meet.
But this pimp is at the top of mount Olympus,
Ready for the World Games. This is my Olympics.
We make ‘em say ho’ cause the game is so pimpish.
Choke a South Park writer with a fish stick.
I insisted to get up offa this dick,
And these drugs, ligatures cant resist it.
Remind me of when they tried to have Ali enlisted.
If I ever wasn’t one of the greatest, mista, I must have missed it!
Kanye’s good at stuff, and so am I.
The Real History of Twitter →
businessinsider.com
Wow. Lotta sourced quotes on this. Wish I’d been paying more attention to gossip when these guys were still a dinky company that a few geeks used.
This is the sort of “news” and “reporting” that I’d be willing to pony up some cash for. It’s a genuinely interesting piece that makes you go, WTF.
“Fact: The birth agonies of the New IRS led to one of the great and terrible PR discoveries in modern democracy, which is that if sensitive issues of governance can be made sufficiently dull and arcane, there will be no need for officials to hide or dissemble, because no one not directly involved will pay enough attention to cause trouble. No one will pay attention because no one will be interested, because, more or less a priori, of these issues’ monumental dullness. Whether this PR discovery is to be regretted for its corrosive effect on the democratic ideal or celebrated for its enhancement of government efficiency depends, as it seems, on which side one takes in the deeper debate over ideals vs. efficacy.”
—
“David Foster Wallace,” The Pale King
I am really glad that Wallace (or “Wallace”) makes some of these larger political points that he broached candidly about in interviews (cf, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself), which were fixed almost bromidically in the mid-90s optimism boom, and which by the post-McCain mid 00s landscape seemed almost tame, harmless.1
-
(An unforseeable benefit of reading The Pale King is that I’ve discovered a practical convention for the capitalization (or not) of parenthetical asides within footnotes, either mid-sentence or post-sentence, note-wise.) ↩
Boredom As Religious Experience →
therumpus.net
My friend Mike has a review of Pale King at The Rumpus!
I'm not a business, man, etc. →
fuse.tv
If anything, Life and Times collects the latest passing trends and refracts them through the prism of present-day Jay’s affluence. So it’s kind of like The Blueprint III.
I wrote something last week about how lame Jay-Z is getting. It’s called prescience. Look it up.
Crowdsourcing Papaya
I am not allergic to papayas, and I like them. Sometimes I buy them at the grocery store. I try to get ones that are a little green, and not too Mr Squishee. Anywhoo, whenever I eat the store-bought ones, they burn my mouth and taste terrible.
Now, I have a philosophy. When you see a shit tornado, you just run straight into it rather than away from it. I read a message board about papayas that almost answered my question, but here it is to be confirmed hopefully: Are the papayas you eat supposed to be super ripe, like really soft and falling apart ripe? I suspect that makes them taste less acrid?
A Few Things Wrong →
mlb.sbnation.com
Someone got beaten almost to death in LA for wearing a Giants jersey to a Dodgers game. A columnist wrote a piece saying it was kind of that guy’s fault, since he was wearing A) the wrong jersey, and B) wearing a jersey at all—come on, grow up.
Rob Neyer links to the offensive article, saying “Isn’t blaming a sports fan who’s almost beaten to death for wearing enemy colors a little too much like blaming a rape victim for wearing a mini-skirt?” Which makes sense.
But that got me to thinking, isn’t it the case that people are always blaming rape victims for dressing too provocatively? Isn’t that the explicit premise of most mainstream coverage of rape victims -or- the subtext of those stories? And aren’t professional athletes notoriously, well, rape-y?
I find Neyer’s appropriation of one disgusting journalistic habit to condemn another one, well, a little disgusting. That’s all.
Pertinent to My Interests: Gwyneth Paltrow and Jay-Z are SO BFF 4Life →
lifeandtimes.com
Oscar-winning actress and my sister Gwyneth Paltrow emailed me and said, “I love your new site. Can I ask you five questions about it?” I said, “I’ll show you mine if you let me see yours.” Here are mine. Go see hers at goop.com. It’s fresh.
Further:
Sean Carter: Personally I was very surprised at your extensive knowledge of hip-hop songs. Particularly how you can sing ’90s hip-hip songs word for word. I can’t even do that! How does a girl from Spence discover hip-hop?
Gwyneth Paltrow: I first was exposed to hip-hop when I was about 16 (1988) by some boys who went to collegiate. The Beastie Boys were sort of the way in for us preppie kids. We were into Public Enemy, Run-DMC and LL Cool J. But then I went to LA the summer between my junior and senior year of high school and I discovered N.W.A which became my obsession.
Also pertinent to my interests are pretentious ways of talking about things, so “went to collegiate” is something I may start peppering into my conversations.
Oh, ALSO, I love the idea of Jay-Z calling Paltrow “my sister,” but not in an accented way. He’s just like, ‘This is my sister, Gwyneth. We hang out in that European nation they talked about on 30 Rock. It’s real.’ I suppose I’m less interested in celebrity privilege and more interested in the hyperreality of it all. The postmortem I mean postmodern thing.
NowPlaying for Mac →
itunes.apple.com
So, if you’re like me, you’ve spent some time on this frivolous thing, which is actually really important to you. This program costs a buck, and it doesn’t take up any memory or CPU. It displays current iTunes song and artist, and it’s perfect.
