And the winner is…
LANDAU EUGENE MURPHY JR.
This former car wash employee turned Sinatra-style superstar walked away with $1 million last night after winning NBC’s summer variety program America’s Got Talent.
The West Virginia native will be featured as a headlining act at Las Vegas’s legendary Caesars Palace®, hosted by none other than Jerry Springer.
Watch America’s favorite contestant perform his acclaimed rendition of “My Way” below, and remember, the American dream is not dead so FUCK ALL YOU GREAT GATSBY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD ZEALOTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
An Analysis of Action Bronson’s “Brunch”
If you’re at all familiar with independent music and hip hop, chances are you’ve been hearing a lot about Action Bronson this summer. Hailing from Flushing, Queens, the Albanian-American chef’s debut record Dr. Lecter was received with universal acclaim with its slick, sometimes self loathing, sometimes violent, other times just straight clever rhymes, not to mention his numerous comparisons to Ghostface Killah. Along with the album came a number of music videos, the most memorable of which I’ve chosen to break down with you today.
The video opens with the line “know you broke my heart [something] when you said goodbye to me” coupled with the image of fat being trimmed away from a cut of raw meat. The meat (“carne” in Spanish) represents the carnality of love. As it is trimmed away, then spiced, such is the speaker’s heart and soul cut open, salt rubbed into the wounds. Here, an unconscious woman is revealed in the foreground of Action’s cooking. The literal death of a once meaningful relationship.
All the Albums that Have Been Released in 2011 Thus Far that I Have Downloaded Illegally (with Commentary)
936 – Peaking Lights → I like this, but I’m not gonna get all excited about it.
A I A : Alien Observer – Grouper → This seems like alien music maybe? Just kidding, but am I? I think I liked this.
A I A : Dream Loss – Grouper → This is the same as the other one, right?
All Eternals Deck – The Mountain Goats → Forgettable. Forgiveable.
Angels Exodus – Lil B → Can’t go wrong, but also… can’t remember listening to this ever. Still seems good.
Apocalypse – Bill Callahan → One of my favorite albums of the year. Very funny, very smart. Excellent songwriting by a consistently excellent songwriter. Listened to this walking from East Village to West Village several mornings. Really good music videos.
yesterday it was golf wang, tomorrow it’s to be DEATH GRIPS
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orlbo9WkZ2E
Werner Herzog & Moondog in that thing that made Jeff Goldblum ‘The Fly’
Maybe you see all these videos and think “I don’t have time for this shit” and while I totally sympathize with that, I strongly suggest you make the time for this video if you have so much as a passive interest in the art of music, which you should because literature is music; cavemen played music; music is probably older than language, probably they are more or less the same thing, which is interesting because it seems to me the only thing separating music from noise is some form of repetition.
Skip to like 4:30 to avoid the usual b.s.
Thanks to my friend Eric Schaefer, who puts out Answering Machine Recordings, for sharing.
I’m not racist: I love white people
In their song “Hahahaha jk,” Das Racist proclaims, “We’re not racist: We love white people!”
[Sorry, I wanted to find a video of a live performance, but YouTube is sometimes inadequate. At least you can listen the song?]
I love Das Racist. They are smart and clever and funny and their lyrics are just plain fantastic. But that one line, it sticks with me. Partially because it’s true, partially because it speaks to racial issues in a very pointed and problematic way.
Imagine if Eminem had a lyric like: I’m not racist, I love black people. How many people would be pissed? (Come on. It’s not like we don’t all know it’s true!) But because Das Racist has at their easy disposal the “race” card, it’s not only funny, it comes to embody a certain degree of truth.
As a woman of color, I can say: I’m not racist, I love white people. No one would call me racist, at least not to my face.
†Illuminati∞Thug∆Mafia‡
So tell me about the name of the new record, Illuminati Thug Mafia?
It’s kinda like the unseen terrible, you know what I mean. All these things have a negative mythology to them. At the same time these organizations, you know that none of us completely know, have their own culture individually. You hear Illuminati, you hear thug, you hear mafia you kind of dismissed it instantly, or at least a degree where you prepare what the the fuck you’re gonna hear. You already prepare yourself to already not believe it, take it with a grain of salt. In a way combine all three of those and it kind of like it’s some real super power, the ultimate fucking ridiculousness.
I went to the Getty recently, and saw an exhibit of illuminated manuscripts. READ MORE >
Doug Hream Blunt on tv
I don’t know what’s wrong with this guy.
Syd Barrett on acid
Interview by Meatball Fulton (1967)
Transcription by Mark Jones
SYD: Well I’ll, I’ll say… for example, painting at an art school. Or painting, say, in infant’s school. The initial desire to paint or initial suc-first successes at painting arised, I think, out of a very genuine basic, um, drive one way or another. So, an-and because of family and social set ups are channeled into success or otherwise and, er, er, through schools and such like and one gets different things. And I think un-and, course, one comes across teachers and people like that, teaching and, sort of, instruction and to talk to and there came, and I feel now that having left art school that there are a lot of things… um… that I could do. A lot of things I see now, a lot of things went in to me, into my head and thinking that these would, perhaps, changing and altering things. For instance I made a painting the other day… and… it’s, I could see and hear very clearly, sort of, different instructions and different criticisms going in to the picture which were in fact p-um-criticisms that I could relate back to art schools and teachers and various things that’d come at that time. So… maybe… this would be very valuable, this break. I don’t know… and, er, sort of, to… try painting again after a break of going in to pop music and going to… playing this sort of music… just might work out that, get more, sort of, basic freedom. I don’t know, it’s something to d-, just things like shape of the paper and, er… seem to be a lot of assumptions taken place. READ MORE >
Western speech is like badgers & birds: free.
The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be “free” because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. The attacks against us by the US point to a great hope, speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade. — Julian Assange
Tyler the Creator’s “Yonkers”
Shit’s spreading across the net like something else but too good not to post again here.
Prisecolinensinenciousol
From an interview between Joyce and Djuna Barnes at Les Deux Magots in Paris, printed in Vanity Fair (1922)
Men’s Truation
From Thou Art That by Joseph Campbell:
Picture a little Bushman boy being nursed by his mother, weaned very late, a little boy already, but still nursing on his mother. That little boy, unlike the little girl, will never become the life-body himself. He must learn to relate to that. The woman need not learn to relate to the man because that is not the problem. The problem concerns how the man relates to the woman. She is Life. He is a way of relating to Life.
So what happens with the boy? Nothing ever happens. READ MORE >
If your instrument does not exist yet you build it. Then you fuck around.
This is Moondog with his Trimba, which he built himself. Moondog is a blind homeless man on the streets of New York City. It is 1953 (I think) and he dresses like a viking because vikings are rad.
“I am essentially not an instrument builder, but a composer. I am a philosophic music man who long ago was seduced into musical carpentry. As a composer and a musical philosopher I make my living by selling records of my music. I am both the manufacturer and the retailer. And I distribute the records very largely by mail.” — Harry Partch, 1958
Love will tear us apart cover
I found out from wikipedia today that Ian Curtis hung himself. Sorry I did not know this earlier. He was the singer of Joy Division, named after what Nazis called a special area designated for all the attractive Jewish girls to rape. Because I’m morbid, I often think about how bad it would feel being slowly herded towards my noose, seeing that circle from afar, that apathetic rope just hanging there. When you’re young and sad, maybe you gravitate towards Joy Division, and then in high school art class when the teacher asks you to draw something, you draw Ian Curtis. You draw it with paint or pencil, filling in your self-made lines like a coloring book, fleshing out the shading in the name of a human. And maybe when you hear “love will tear us apart” in that robotic monotone, you think of that boy or girl you really like, and how you’ll never be together, how love — that soft word oft used to describe, oddly, the pit in your chest those sacred moments they pass in the hall — has failed to tear you apart. It only punctured you. And you remember these people forever, each syllable that made up their name, until the past becomes the present in f , and each facebloat is a little bloated older, a little less mind-photoshopped as you remembered, and here we are.
