the ghost robot

video content should be banned and

2008-04-22T23:01:00.000-07:00

my youtubes should be tied, but this was pretty funny.

2008-03-20T23:18:00.000-07:00

Dear Ambitious Television Producers of America,

Please start making Wire knock-offs post-haste, and set them in Houston. Feel free to cast members of the S.U.C. in key roles. Bun B would make an excellent Chief of Police, and if you got Dizzee Rascal a good voice coach, he'd be a pretty good fed.

Sincerely,

Blog Dudes

BEEP BEEP

2008-02-21T12:51:00.000-08:00

GLORIOUS

kanye west- flashing lights

2008-02-13T10:47:00.000-08:00

West, Kanye West. Fresh off a dignified Grammy night, Yeezy and co-director Spike Jonze deliver some Freudian wish fulfillment: Agent Provocateur spy girls, over-saturated dusk-for-night, George and Jennifer in Out of Sight, and the a bit of vehicular mystery cribbed from the "Karma Police" video. DJ Federico Fellini would be proud.

Rule Four

2008-02-12T14:55:00.000-08:00

Consider Everything An Experiment

No Age at Food Fight, a vegan grocery in Portland. Photos are from Pitchfork, and by Nilina Mason-Campbell. More supremely good looks of this rare instance of supermarket rock from Meghan Holmes, who has a great website.

Weekend America visited the Corita Art Center in Los Angeles, so click for that good old American Public Media.

Rule Three

2008-02-08T13:24:00.002-08:00

General Duties of A Teacher:

Pull Everything Out of Your Students

(illustrated example by professor thirteenyearold at left)

i must be in a good place now

2008-02-08T09:54:00.001-08:00

I found this on the Abe Vigoda blog. She's coming back.

Go get this Bobby Charles album from the Heat Warps right now. It's literally the Band and Dr. John wading through a swamp of fish, whiskey and Jesus. It's creep vine in your mind garden, sunlight in your sweet tea, Bud for breakfast with a side order of hashbrowns. Mr. Charles played keys on the Last Waltz, wrote hits for Fats Domino and Frogman Henry, and that's all you need to know.

BAWSSS

2008-02-07T11:48:00.000-08:00

Chioma Nnadi's style interview with Rick Ross is my favorite piece of music journalism in this young year. The TV guide summary might read: **** Promoting his forthcoming album Trilla, Miami rapper holds court on fabrics and sunglasses. A discussion of airbrushed Timberlands leads Ross to remove his shirt, revealing his numerous tattoos, symbolized personal history, and unexpected intimacy (2008).

Re-Up Gang- "Good Morning"

2008-02-03T23:42:00.000-08:00

They reloaded! New clips! Re-Up Gang Records: WE GOT IT FOR CHEAP VOL.3: We Just Think We Better: We Like Multiple Titles: Promotional Strategy and Powder Product Demonstration

On First Listen: Sure, it's nice to hear the new coke rappers tip their hats (and scales) to some earlier coke rappers on 'Rainy Dayz,' and yes, their versions of 'Dey Know' and 'Roc Boys' kinda rip it, but this isn't the Clipse/Re-Up of Vols. 1+2. Those mixtapes were with cut with wordplay and metaphor, but behind all the clever vial/vile talk was resignation, resentment and bitterness. The Clipse despised not only Jive, but also the entire dunce-capping and kazooing music industry. They weren't merely trying to outshine some others rappers, they were trying to completely obliterate the originals with hate-verses, erasing with one white line at a time. Label woes and a critically acclaimed album behind them, Re-Up Records are now very much part of the music industry. The lyrics are still graduate thesis material, but they kinda forgot the hate=great equation. Solo albums from Ab-Liva and Sandman as well as another Clipse are in the pipeline, and I'm looking forward to them, but I hope they either get mad again or find a salt-substitute by then. There's a big Wayne diss on the 'Re-Up Intro,' and maybe the can go beat for beat with Weezy next time on We Got It For Cheap Vol 4: What Really Grinds Our Gears: Album Delays and Wayne's Psychedelic Non-Sequitors

Image: Craphound

Sister Corita's Second Rule

2008-02-02T01:16:00.001-08:00

General Duties of a Student

Pull Everything Out of Your Teacher
Pull Everything Out of Your Fellow Students

The Guardian has a great Corita slide show.

Whole Foods was kinda getting hectic with the valentine's chocolate and pink champagne and the loud hits of motown, but this little dude taught me to relax and enjoy my checkout experience.

coulda been a contract attorney

2008-02-01T07:00:00.000-08:00

Bun B on a mother's expectations and college classes. From Nah Right.

More at the Houston Chronicle.

undo paste

2008-01-31T20:42:00.000-08:00

Cut Copy's Bright Like Neon Love came out in early 2004, back in the mesozoic era blog era. People kinda slept on it, but then they woke up and told the rooster that Cut Copy is pretty much the bright burning morning sun of this indie dance thing. Tim Goldsworthy, Chad to James Murphy's Pharrell, produced their upcoming record, In Ghost Colors. The title sounds like that Radiohead album, but the album sounds like everything I imagined the second Rapture would be. No offense; I guess imagined the KLF and love songs, not Brooklyn fun times. Anyway, I guess that's why this video looks like the album art from the first Rapture album. It's dreamy.

Sister Corita's Rules

2008-01-31T15:14:00.000-08:00

1. Find A Place You Can Trust and Trust It For A While

Sister Corita Kent was a Catholic nun and art teacher in Los Angeles in the 1960s. She produced serigraphs about God, typography, color, play, and the universal messages of embedded in mass media advertising. Her work is breath-taking, wildly creative and downright inspiring. Here's a list of her rules, which will be the basis of this next series of posts.

negative thinking can ruin your life

2008-01-31T15:02:00.000-08:00

The Motherfucking Deathset are the real deal: punk rock dialed up to two thousand and 7-11, triggering samples, splitting heads and jumping off stages. Sure, you can trash to it, but you can also hum in hindsight, I don't want be like/ the people that I liked to yourself in the elevator or in your boxy sedan on the way home from the show. This video is about joy, community and Baltimore, Maryland and does an incredible job of capturing a band in context. It reminds me a lot of the group portrait of No Age, the Smell, and their friendly family of Weirdo Rippers, and that's an important thing to remember: positive communities can create support great art!

2008: SHAKER STATUS.

one big yes to 2008

2008-01-11T21:59:00.000-08:00

It's going to be a rad year. Can you feel it?

Lounge Lizards- One Big Yes

Jazz, late horn modernism and John Lurie in the house.

happy new year

2007-12-27T14:48:00.000-08:00

Brion Nuda Rosch is killlling the holiday collages, so get hip like cosmic cat.

no age at other music

2007-12-17T09:02:00.000-08:00

The best part is the audience hugs at the end.

mailer for mayor

2007-12-03T17:38:00.000-08:00

The 51st state. It's huge.

r.i.p. pimp c

2007-12-04T16:06:00.000-08:00

Pimp C was found dead in a Hollywood hotel room today. I'm sure there will be more news at houstonsoreal.

"One Day" is an incredibly moving song about pain, suffering and unpredictable loss. It's monumental, and seems appropriate for Chad Butler's passing.

UGK- One Day

Oh, hello R. Kelly

2007-11-28T18:01:00.000-08:00

Sometimes DJ Khaled calls me, and I tell him, "Dude, for the last time, I know exactly who 'duh bes' is, ok?"

the haymaker

2007-11-16T10:08:00.000-08:00

Breece D'J Pancake has got to be one of the worst names.

image onslaught

2007-10-06T17:00:00.000-07:00

Dove_Onslaught

A warp speed British ad about the imaging of beautiful women. It's selling soap and the "Dove Self Esteem Fund," but it's thought-provoking marketing against marketing. Here's another one, very similar to this flash graphic on girl magazine cover photoshopping that ran here back in December 05. I guess it's still an issue, huh?

square-headed birds

2007-10-06T12:11:00.000-07:00

I like to imagine that the inside of people's heads look just like their apartments, with posters tacked up the skull wall, piles of unsorted papers and a maybe a cushy futon for guests. FFSF's studio visit series confirms most of my suspicions and gives a good look at both kinds of artist interiors. Check out their Dutch field trip to visit the excellent and omnipresent Parra.

They've also got new urban animal diorama paintings from Josh Keyes, and an oldish interview with Matt Furie, pen and ink of his tragic adult muppets and star of the current radness at New Image Art.

other tastes

2007-10-01T18:40:00.001-07:00

One of the pioneers of the New Journalism along with more celebrated writers like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, Terry Southern wrote short stories, a couple of novels, Dr. Strangelove and a good part of Easy Rider. Esquire sent him out to cover the 1968 Democratic convention with drug buddy William Burroughs and post-modern theorist Jean Genet, and it'd be a challenge to come up with better late-sixties cool credentials. At its best, his short story collection Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes approaches counter-culture lost gospel. "Twirling at Ole Miss" is a proto-gonzo investigation into the teenage baton battalion, and "The Sun and the Still-born Stars" is a moving piece about films and farms set in James Agee's America. Although a little tarnished (and dated) with a sixties liberal brand of soft racism, "Razor Fight" is a fantastic country bar crapshoot tragedy and " You're Too Hip Baby" is dead-on portrait of white college kids trying hard to be cool and get down with black music scenes. "Recruiting for the Big Parade" delivers a firsthand account of the Bad Day at the Pig Bay, and Kennedy's Cuban misadventure has some parallels with more recent botched invasions. It's not uniformly strong- the imagined apartment swap between Kafka and Freud is more What's New Pussycat? than Dr. Strangelove as far as farcical period comedies go. Anyway, just go to Amazon or the library and get hip already.

Catalog of Cool has an interview with Mr. Southern from 1982, when he was a staff writer at SNL.

cool kids- black mags

2007-10-01T13:21:00.001-07:00