Lobster in a Bucket

Loving for Literacy

NYT has an essay up about romance and literary taste. It's mostly light stuff: "I like Proust. You like Da Vinci Code. Oh my!" and "It's easy to dismiss an ex because they didn't like your books" but "In the end relationships aren't built out of bookshelves, but lifestyle and values." But there is one idea that could have been developed a lot more. The writer comments about how our books, and our favorites in the age of Facebook has made these preferences intrinsic to our self-branding. By saying Milan Kundera is "my favorite Eastern-European post-modern writer ever!" I'm trying to get some sort of positive Kundera association to my brand identity.

Now apply to relationships. Theoretically I'm dating somebody, and that relationship is also very much contributing to my brand identity. If that person is associating stuff I think is posed, trashy, or lame then I'm going to have to accept the lame, posed, trash being a part of my brand identity, through my other. Perhaps, the point of the taste-driven breakup is not that it's post-fact posturing, but that taste matters more to us than ever. That something decidedly not to do with the nuts and bolts of relationship, still wields a tremendous amount of power over our decision-making process.

My Muxtape is Here

Here is my personal, permanent for the moment, mix on Muxtape. The site has been a bit wonky the past few days, but mainly because it's been so dang popular. They've done something very clever to keep from getting sued. There's no central way to search for songs, or even keep track of people. The front page just shuffles random accounts. You'd have to make a database of what songs are on there by hand. Or get a court order.

In other news, I just got my weekend pass for Pitchfork. That's like a lot of music 65 bucks. Please, come join me.

Matt

Bird is Blogging

Andrew Bird, of Squirrel Nut Zippers, Bowl of Fire, and solo extraordinaire fame is blogging the creation of his new album for the NYT. His first entry is up. Bird always write extremely competent songs, although his last few albums have felt like one extended thought, which is nice, but I hope to see something new, and better come forward in this next album. Without a doubt, blogging this process will have to change the process itself. Quantum physics says.

Sweetness

The Wright Modern Design Auction is happening right now in Chicago. Wonderful pieces in their catalog. Way out of my price-range range too. Way out of my price-range ever. But the upside is that I'm comforted by someone spending 7000 dollars on an artifact as opposed to a new italian leather sofa. Here's a sample of the goodness.

Estimated 7000-9000

Muxtape: Get it While it's Hot

I have no idea how this could possibly be legal. But for the beautiful present moment. Muxtape is here. The forementioned site allows you, me, and everyone else to upload one, and only one mixtape of our own fashioning. Then others, anyone and everyone can listen to your mix, for as long as this little place doesn't get buried under a mountain of legal gravel. I haven't had twenty minutes yet to devote to making my little bit of wonderful, but that's mostly an excuse. Making a mixtape, that everyone listens too, is not unlike going to school on underwear day. I'm not sure I want the peer review.

Outbreak

Check out this nice video representing Walmart's spread across America, all the way up to 2007.

Being in Beijing

According to people who're seeing it themselves, Beijing is almost convulsively transforming itself from an ancient city to some 21st-century modern contraption. Neighborhoods get torn down, towers go up. I suppose that this happens most all the time in cities all over the place. One need only look at Times Square a hundred years ago. But this essay points to the awe inspiring speed with which this stuff goes up.

I kind of wish that I could be going to Beijing this summer to see some of this delirious growth, but I'm also a little afraid. Business towers in a few months is impressive, but the environmental policies of the Chinese government casts a real pall over this stuff.

Storytellers and the Facts

While I am tremendously, wildly, and undeservedly blessed to be at Notre Dame, studying under who I am, and in the academic community here that is very healthy, when I read the wonderful stuff that Jill Lepore, an early Americanist at Harvard, I get a little wistful. Lepore is a writer par excellence, and it would have been a great honor to work with her.

Her latest piece in the New Yorker speaks to the relationship between novelists and historians, two storytellers in our culture.

Money quote:

Historians and novelists are kin, in other words, but they’re more like brothers who throw food at each other than like sisters who borrow each other’s clothes. The literary genre that became known as “the novel” was born in the eighteenth century. History, the empirical sort based on archival research and practiced in universities, anyway, was born at much the same time. Its novelty is not as often remembered, though, not least because it wasn’t called “novel.” In a way, history is the anti-novel, the novel’s twin, though which is Cain and which is Abel depends on your point of view.

Obama on Race in America

The Signal House

So I often would rubber neck heading up Signal Mountain to the Mountain Opry every time I went by the UFO house coming up the mountain. It was a perfect saucer, perfectly weird, and on the way up to decidedly normal Signal Mountain. It just sold today at auction, someone stole it for 130,000. This low price is a little depressing, only on a mountain ringing Chattanooga, TN would such a weird treasure command little interest.

Tracy Morgan on Obama

BTW. This video is being hosted by a new service backed my some of the big tv networks. It's called Hulu. As big business attempts to get the program go, this one is impressive. The selection so far is kind of weak, but on the upside you can watch a movie without interruptions by just watching a single trailer to start, video quality beats youtube, and the speed is much better than the bootleg Korean sites that host most of the online streams of films.

Frankie Goes to Switzerland

Frank Schaeffer has been making quite a splash in Reformed circles with his new book about his early life with his father Francis Schaeffer. In the Reformed and pseudo-Reformed circles of evangelicalism, where Francis Schaeffer's ideas still have a lot of traction, and devotion, Frank Schaeffer's new book has been raising the hackles of more than a couple folks. His reviews have run the gamut from sympathy to outright scolding.

I haven't read the book yet, and as a first year grad student, my pleasure reading list is going to next see attention sometime this summer, but this brief essay on the Huffington Post just makes me want to punch Frank Schaeffer in the face. The way he uses the cadence of "my dad" could not be crueler or more sensational. Boo hiss.

Francis Schaeffer, like most Christians, was not always the greatest person. I'm comfortable with this. And I think that we can't pretend to completely separate his character from his ideas. But I do think that Schaeffer was right about a lot of stuff, namely that there is a way to make Christianity a dynamic part of the story of our Western Culture, a story that extends into right now.

And She's on Myspace

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the Eliot Spitzer/Pricey Prostitution scandal is that Spitzer's paramour is on Myspace. That's right, Ashley Alexandra Dupre is socially networked in more ways than one.

According to her page she'd really like to get out of the high price call girl business and into the pop-music form of prostitution. The best irony here is that even as former Governor Spitzer's hypocrisy has totally ended his career, I imagine that the pop-music potential for Dupre is now totally "Off the Hook". Provided she can sing, I would totally want to here her over Brittany, and who wouldn't buy her album?

Pattern Tap

My good buddy Matthew Smith is putting together a pretty exciting new website. Pattern Tap is an attempt at being a focused site for pooling excellent web design applications that makes it easier for developers to get good ideas on design solutions. Pattern Tap will let users subscribe to someone else's collection of solutions, as well as make their own, so it will be pretty flexible. I'm looking forward to seeing the finished product!

Pitchfork 2k8

So the start of the Pitchfork Festival lineup is up on the Pitchfork site. I suspect they will add a lot more acts, but the start is pretty solid. I've seen M Ward a couple times, but the thought of him and maybe Zooey Deschanel up there is exciting, and I've definitely drunk the Vampire Weekend cool-aide. Several of these outfits I know nothing about too. El Guincho? Extra Golden? So props to Pitchfork for bringing out some fresh stuff.

Tickets for the three day weekend are only 65 bucks. You're all welcome.

I don't like you, but I love you

She and Him's cover of You Really Got a Hold on Me is some kind of wonderful. "She" is Zooey Deshcanel of All the Real Girls fame and "him" is M Ward, of M Ward fame. The song really works, and so does the album too. Deschanel's voice at times sounds unconventional to the point of being flat, but that's only for a few fleeting moments. Overall their new album, Volume One, is good music.

50 Blogs

The Guardian put up this list of the 50 most powerful blogs. Reading through the list I was struck by a couple things. First, it's a bit scary that so many of these blogs are celeb-gossip blogs. Second, why are these the most "powerful"? What about non-english blogs? And finally, I'd never heard of about half of these, and only actively read maybe 5.

To Chicago

I'm going to Chicago in T-minus 70 minutes. It will be excellent. Last time I went I finished the night at a little place called Danny's Tavern. It's hipster excellence. Good space (and old Wicker Park bungalow), good DJ, and PBR. This Flickr search gives you a fair idea. Living in South Bend I'm too deprived to mind that the only thing I can afford is PBR.

I will finish my night there again. Last time I was dancing with my peeps just loving life. A chica with snap buttons, cute hair, and major BO was next to me, grinding on this guy like her life depended on it. It was fascinating to see. Things became a touch more intense when she swiped my PBR out of my hand, threw it back for about 2.5 seconds, and then kept on working at saving herself. I looked at my beer, looked at her, gave her the beer.

I hope she's a regular.

Pitchfork Interview

There is an interview up with Pitchfork founder and owner Ryan Schreiber on the Chicago Sun-Times website, the interviewer comes off like a Fox News attack dog, but his line of questioning is interesting. The interviewer Jim DeRogatis questions the journalistic integrity of Pitchfork based on it's recent expansion beyond the daily music web-update. Pitchfork is premiering a new music video site called Pitchfork.tv as well as hosting a large 3-day festival in Chicago for the 4th year (July 18-20: be there, or be square) in a row. DeRogatis argues that by being into promotion through the new music video thing and the concert promotion thing, Pitchfork looses it's credibility as critics engaging with indie music. This is a decent argument made stronger by Schreiber sort of sounding naive in his responses: basically, we really believe in what we're doing so we can't sell out!

But I think that this all comes down to process. As long as you have the right process within the company, you can avoid conflicts of interest. As long as the PR people don't tell the reviewers what to review or what to say, great. And, as long as Pitchfork is reviewing band's album before they are making big music video hooplas or festivals with said band, I think things are more or less okay. Besides, Pitchfork has basically built it's brand on being the snobbiest, but pretty accurate, music site out there. If that changes, because of some "corporate synergy" shenanigan, I think it'll be painfully obvious.

Santogold Video

Some people have criticized Santogold for just being an MIA protege, and, well knockoff. But I have a hard time imagining MIA making this video. It's pretty brutal, even just with fabric and flashy paints.

Sundown in the Town

This is a fascinating academic website about the phenomenon of Sundown Towns. Mainly occurring in the North, these towns had laws on the books that African-Americans had to be outside of the town borders by a certain hour or face getting thrown in jail. For something that basically functioned like segregation, Sundown Towns are not generally known (I didn't know anything about them until I found this website). But the site is interractive to the point that you can see if your town is one. Enjoy

Hallelujah

Dear Mom,

I promise you that I'm still not watching American Idol. But I think this performance is kind of quality, and could maybe be used to justify watching this season as long as this guy is still on the show.

Matt

PS- I still think you've wasted too many hours of your life feeding the monster.

Fresh Notwist

Neon Golden was a favorite album of mine way back in my junior year of college. Since then, I haven't heard too much of The Notwist, but apparently they have a new album coming out. It still sounds like the Notwist, but I wonder if The National haven't taken something of The Notwist's sound and run with it, making The Notwist something of an also-ran. You Judge.

Pitchfork.tv

The people at Pitchfork miss 24 hr music television, and they're doing something about it. Starting in April we will be treated to Pitchfork.tv. The details, as they are now, can be got here. But the thing I'd like to know most is who's paying for it? Is there enough non-trash indie content out there to fill up a 24hr channel? And most importantly, does anyone at Pitchfork actually remember when MTV was only videos?

Garfield Minus Garfield

What happens when you take the garfield out of the strip?

Renegade Handmade

I miss the DIY crafting ethos in Philadelphia. Art Star, the Punk Rock Flea Market, many many smaller galleries. People were making and selling tons of beautiful things there. Not so much in South Bend. Crafting is still stuck in the realm of the hobby, of the domestic, and of the kitschy.

So it was kind of wonderful to find that Chicago has got DIY in full swing. Note Renegade Handmade. It is like an antique mall populated by the screen-prints, handbags, and crocheted beanies of the younger set. They have a cool craft show too.