Lester Bangs and the Nature and Purpose of Rock n Roll: A Eulogy for My Imaginary Deadbeat Boyfriend Who Willl Never Love Me

fun essay from goodreads... kind of an extended riff on the "we're fans! we'll never be cool!" speech in Almost Famous. It's long and a bit circular... If you just start w the premise that "Leaster Bangs is the ultimate fan, but fans and rock stars are totally different animals" then you cld probably start at the 5th or so and be fine...

Highlight:

One night last year, I had a long, horrible conversation at a bar with a man over whom I was at the time absurdly heartbroken. After the conversation (or possibly during) we got in a cab and the most maudlin, heartbroken, self-pitying pop-rock ballad currently on the airwaves came onto the cab's radio as though cued to our entrance. "Yes," you're thinking. "Yes, stuff like that happens to me ALL THE TIME! Why does that always happen?!?"

I'll tell you why: BECAUSE ROCK N ROLL HATES YOU. And by you I don't just mean myself, or a general audience. I mean you, specifically, singled out, in particular. ROCK AND ROLL DOES NOT LIKE YOU. Rock 'n' roll does not want you to be happy. It does not want to be your friend. It does not want to hold your hand. It wants to make you cry, and then tell all its friends about it. It waits around corners, listens to your confessions, documents your break-ups, your losses, your failures. It dogs your steps when you walk home from the subway, it notices who comes and goes from your life, who you want gone but keep around and who you want back but don't call. It records your childhood traumas like Freud in a smoking jacket. It chronicles your past lovers like a backward version of Homer naming the ships. It hoards all this information in a sweaty much-thumbed pants pocket and it waits, like the thing under the bed with its red eyes drooling vemon out onto the carpet. It has infinite, terrifying patience, and then at the precise worst moment it lunges for your heart and that's how we end up having more meaningful relationships with songs than with people. It's what comes on the radio, what comes on the shuffle, what some regrettably sincere lover played for you without thinking about the intractable truth that the song will still exist when your relationship does not. This is why there is a whole website dedicated to ruined music. Music is semi-permanent; relationships are doomed. And then that same song ambushes you in the middle of a perfectly all right day when you thought you were finally over it and then you're lunging for the off-button, the next track, the ipod at the end of the headphone cord, oh fuck, why can't I get it to turn off, why is the computer being slow now no, no, I can't listen to this oh fuck oh fuck.

HEE!

Two Free Starbucks Drinks, Any Size

In a week, both my mom and sister wrote these folks complaining about poorly-made espresso drinks. They both received coupons for 2 free drinks, any size, no questions asked. Amazing to me that this type of thing doesn't invite abuse......or maybe it ends up generating more business for Starbucks due to the high margins on any individual drink.

http://www.starbucks.com/customer/contact_forms.asp?nav=3e

On Alchohol Use and Long-Term Neurotoxicity

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/29/opinion/29steinberg.html?ex=1356670800&en=508691b65b1306cc&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Hypothesis

Remember how back in the early 0t's Chan Marshall showed up with bangs and long layered hair, and it looked kind of weird? And then a few years later it caught on and now if you, like, go to the cobrasnake or look around chapel hill or whatever that's all you see?

You know? Like this:




(The girls on the end are not in a band, they are just illustrative hipsters.)

So, if that pattern holds true, does the fact that Chan is now apparently kiping a bit of Maya A's south asian/80's/grrly style and attitude mean that, by the end of this year, we'll all be kiping it as well?



ETA:

On the other hand, I just realized that this exact equation totally hasn't worked out with pink hoodies, as far as I can tell, so maybe not...

"i can say with certainty that i was in the senate debating as rome burned"

* * *

pop song of 2007?
http://hypem.com/search/black%20kids/1/

"Among Chuang-tzu's many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked
him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country
house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun.
"I need another five years," said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the
end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with
a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen."

after inland empire

Quoth Lynch: “I’m through with film as a medium. For me, film is dead.”

soap box -- the wire

been watching the wire which my friends effing love.......i don't get it, i think it's good, not great, could any tv drama be really great? the characters have nuance, the acting is pretty good, the street-level stuff has never been on tv before, along with allowing the street to speak somewhat like the street......but the whole pull of the serial form gets to me, the never-ending-story-ness of it. also, i fear that the show has no soul, in fact i know it doesn't; there are plenty of nihilistic shows on tv, where there are no good guys and no bad guys because everyone is trying to eff everyone else (my religious friends could talk about the bane of moral relativism).........in the first season, mcnulty sort of plays that hero eff the politics of the situation i'm gonna do what i have to do character, but even he is flawed and he knows it; i don't buy his earnestness to do the right thing because for him, vanity is king. look at that recap....why would you want to watch after that? but i will admit, there are some moments (see 2nd video).

daniel day-lewis

i'm sorry but everything daniel day-lewis has the feel of a put-on, school of look-at-me now what i can do, the fury and the sensitivity that ultimately renders it monodimensional and feels mentally over-rehearsed. maybe he is the most beautiful skin-deep actor working. from the article, you get the sense that he takes his own personal philosophy very seriously, which is comic for an actor spouting common sense.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/magazine/11daylewis-t2.html?ex=1352523600&en=f980f1016d4d112b&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

watership down

name a better film critic than phillyweekly's sean burns

The underlying material is so sharp, Charlie Wilson’s War easily could’ve rivaled Three Kings for sickly comic realpolitik shock. So sad then that Mike Nichols has directed it more like a sequel to Ishtar, softening the script’s poli-sci body blows with cartoonishly broad sight gags, loud costumes, silly wigs and a puzzlingly jaunty tone. Even more disastrous is his casting of Julia Roberts as a hawkish Southern man-eating millionaire. She’s too young, sexless and brittle for a role Susan Sarandon was obviously born to play.
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/articles/16069

not that he's usually this good, but in 200 words, it confirms everything i already suspected.

dear mia

dear m.i.a.: nobody cares about your precious gunshots being deleted from that song. it's poppy and the lyrics are bad. diplo made you a catchy tune and you sang it. yay! go back to being an airhead virtuoso who's dun too many drugs to not be scatterbrained. have you seen yourself in that vice tv bit (with spike jonze?)? it's kind of vapid.


http://blogs.villagevoice.com/statusainthood/archives/2007/12/mia_and_the_dou.php#more

everything's so serious now, but speaking of independent film, why not take that camera of yours and point it at the street and see what happens (as you were saying)? i was watching pulp fiction again the other day and it struck me how much of that movie tarantino shot in shallow focus. to see the ridges and pimples on samuel l. jackson's face caught by sunlight is a wonderful thing. style wars. culture wars. have you seen the graffitied style wars on a cow? can find a pic of it but it's by banksy. you would think the cable movie channels would blow up the spot now that there is no sitcom programming, but no, same old tripe, X-men 3; although i did catch l'eclisse the other day....monica vitti is pretty stunning,,,, it is as if she is standing atop the celluloid speaking to you, all mixed up in her desires;;; kind of adrift in an age before take-home pharmaceuticals, and such big hair! and a racist african jungle bit in the middle, blackface and holding a menacing spear. antonini....have you seen "the passenger".....so boring, and jack nicholson hadn't taken up his over-the-top self all the time, only in moments.

mountains over mountains -- stopping.

"i knew a man who loved food but could not cook a bed of rice, so sad was he."

barrington levy - shaolin temple - dope song

http://www.sendspace.com/file/y8lp4y

thanks to harvard metaperson

Big Sur, Jack Kerouac's best book?

i hate helping out a car company, any car company, but this radio-mix is worth it:

http://www.scion.com/broadband/index.html?ch=1&sh=11

dj premier and dj monk one

DEVOLUTION

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole_rat

FRIENDS SHOULDN'T LET FRIENDS HAVE FRIENDS

overheard at starbucks, 77th and 2nd Ave.

NO ONE
GIVES A SHIT
ABOUT
YOU AND
YOUR BAND!

WHY DO I
DESERVE
TO DIE?

I NEVER
THOUGHT
IT
WOULD FEEL
SO GOOD
TO CUT MY OWN FACE.

good soul mix -- FLEA MARKET!

http://souledonmusic.blogspot.com/2007/08/somethin-that-means-somethin.html

the thin blue line errol morris (funes the memorious)

we are all funes the memorious (funes was famous because he could picture the world as it was every moment for the last X years, but he could not generate abstract thought. the leaf of 7:54 was different than the leaf of 7:53. there was no "leaf", a priori).

for funes, on one side of the brain is the times of all things, in sequence. on the other is the pictures of every event.

the idea to take some of those connections and reconfigure them into a new abstraction was repellent to him.

so the question becomes, what do each of us find repellent?

for funes, obviously, it was the question of generating an abstraction, any abstraction.

and for lots of people, working exclusively with abstract ideas is difficult.

so what was wrong with the cops who arrested and charged randall adams with homicide.

a cop had been killed and they needed to find their killer.

if they pinned it on randall adams they didn't care.

they, including the DA Mulder, went to extreme lengths to frame this innocent man.

To them, Adams had been taken on the host of the abstraction. they were not proscecuting a man, they were procecuting a vacuity, a not-being. He was foreign, inanimate. They did not need to rationalize that his death in the electric chair would mean nothing -- that belief was immanent to their being. Nothing in the world would be lost in exchange for his life.

"Without effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details." -- from "Funes, His Memory" by Borges

jay-z amerie "one thing" break @ 1:45

old school jump stop
http://www.tradebit.com/usr/scheme05/pub/8/Oh--Calcutta-.mp3

attorney street link

oh no nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh

good old days good old days, let's talk about those sh_ts, ghostface, gladys knight

http://www.tradebit.com/usr/scheme05/pub/8/Try-To-Remember--The-Way-We-Were-.mp3

tip of the pin to attorney street