One year ago on February 16, 2011, as Odd Future made their television debut on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, maniacally performing “Sandwiches” in their nerd/hipster-thug stage presence, a girl dressed as Sadako from Ring (1998) and/or its remake The Ring (2002) listlessly stood around in clear view on stage with them, as if recently excised from hikikomori, a “midbrow” pop-conscious nod which I’ve always found interesting, if not brilliant. Where Warhol and Koons seem to didactically curate their references, attached to their affected semiotic detachedness, it is rap’s erratic and somewhat manic collision/collation of culture which is our “true,” or at least more effective commentary. At one point, near the loud climax of the song, cymbals crashing, bros screaming, Sadako cowers with hands over her ears — as if suddenly transported into the NBC studio on 49th street. Though it may be her fault, one imagines, her voluntary entry into our real world as she climbs out of the television, scaring the shit out of everyone in front of their own televisions at home. The artifice’s protective medium of the screen was now broken, its very transgression part of the narrative. And when Tyler the Creator jumped on Fallon’s back as the latter bid his audience adieu, the former made odd (somewhat unfortunate, immune to irony) Blackface expressions with almost apelike movements. It’s hard to know how subtle, if any, his sarcasm was. Was it the self-critique of concession to corporate complicity (a la Cobain’s “Corporate Magazines Still Suck” t-shirt for their Rolling Stone cover), or Tyler simply now had a friend in Fallon, a fellow conspirator in the conspiracy of success. One year later, they are not news anymore, the future turns old; another group of young highly intelligent men in an alt-rock or rap band will be heralded as the real deal. Every generation wants to believe what they see before them on a screen somehow transcends the shallow vapidity from which it cometh, even a cute girl on your floor, actually smiling behind all that hair.

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I did this sort of post last month. Thought I’d do it again.

It’s Saturday. I’m reading L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine issue #6, which opens with a special section devoted to three chunks from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Michael Davidson offers the first contribution in the issue, which he begins by making a distinction between the two ways that Stein scholars tended to categorize her work (granted this issue came out in 1978, but the categories still seem to be pretty paradigmatic examples of orthodox Stein interpretation): on the one hand, Davidson argues, her writing is seen as all play, deriving strictly out of her early research work with William James and automatic writing and later invigorated by Cubist formalism; on the other hand, her writing is seen as hermetically Symbolist, concerned with encoding sexual and biographical information in complex little verbal machines which contextualize their own environments. Both views, Davidson says, operate on either side of a referential paradigm: one wants her to mean nothing and the other wants her to mean intrinsically. But what makes Tender Buttons so vital, Davidson argues, is not the strategies by which meaning is avoided or encoded but how each piece points at possibilities for meaning.

I like this argument. It’s not about meaning vs. meaninglessness, it’s about exploring the possibilities engendered by the confounding nature of the text.

Anyway, here are five albums (plus two extra bonus albums!) I’ve recently been spinning, which I thought you might find interesting (hint: if you click on the artist and title it will take you to the magic place):

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