May 2012
33 posts
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Austin City Limits Festival lineup talk →
KUT radio invited me to come on to talk about the lineup for the Austin City Limits Festival. We talk about a bunch of things, and I address the criticism that this is, like, “the whitest festival lineup ever.” Which, I mean,I get it— there are three rappers on the entire bill. (Four, if you count Die Antwoord, which I do not — I wouldn’t have counted Fred Durst if...
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How Does It Feel? →
Over on ThinkProgress, Alyssa Rosenberg reacts to the (excellent) GQ feature on D’Angelo by Amy Wallace. Specifically, the following section:
But as D began to fall apart, the video would be the only thing many fans remembered. “The video was the line of demarcation,” says Harris. “It sent him spinning out of control.”…The trouble began right away, at the start of the Voodoo tour in L.A....
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“Adult Swim: When you met him did you think, “This guy should be a talk show...”
– Adult Swim had me interview Hannibal Buress about The Eric Andre Show, and he was every bit as much like your idea of Hannibal Buress as one could possibly hope.
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"Perhaps the blogger feels empowered because she’s... →
“Does it seem outlandish that perhaps the blogger feels empowered because she’s taken on the “masculine” trait of building muscle? That interpretation of events probably doesn’t apply, but there needs to be some degree of critical analysis beyond bandwagon back-patting.”
Now, I am very much interested in conversations about valuing the traditionally masculine at the cost of the...
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The difference between Parks & Recreation and...
I love Parks & Recreation so much, I can’t really imagine anyone else not liking it.
I love Community so much, I can’t really understand how anyone else does like it.
That’s the thing about Dan Harmon leaving the show that’s such a bummer.
Parks & Rec is a sitcom that tells stories about people; they’re people you love, and it tells its stories with a heart...
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“They all decided they needed to start working out, so that if anyone messed with...”
– The Rolling Stone article by Josh Eells about Tom Gabel’s transition to Laura Jane Grace is full of endearing moments, and this one — taking place in the car among the stunned, stoned other members of Against Me! after Gabel told them that it would be Laura going forward — is...
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All that really needs to be said about Joe...
…is that anyone who signs Carlos Marmol and Kerry Wood’s paychecks is probably not someone who we should spend too much time listening to about who we should hire to run the whole country.
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"The Truth About Fleshlight" →
Steve Shubin, the owner/founder of Fleshlight, wrote a letter to the editor at the Austin Chronicle in response to the cover story I wrote about him and his company for the paper last week. He wasn’t, as it turns out, especially thrilled with it.
I kind of expected that might be the case as I was working on it. I don’t think I wrote anything unfair or unkind, but Shubin struck me very...
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“Call me cynical, but I didn’t think his views on marriage could get any gayer.”
– — Rand Paul, on Obama, yesterday.
I am gonna feel really sad for the Ron Paul fans when they realize that all of their enthusiasm, passion, and devoted organizing was just part of a long-con game to position this integrity-free judas goat slightly more prominently in a party that stands in...
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Community renewed for fourth season →
I’ll stop posting about my precious Thursday night NBC shows shortly, but I figured it’s worth noting that none of the reports about the fact thatCommunitywas renewed say anything about this being the last season.
That’s always a possibility, of course, but it’ll probably depend on what happens during its 13-episode run next year, and not on a pre-determined basis like 30...
Parks & Recreation, Community, and 30 Rock... →
staghunts:
dansolomon:
whynotshesaid:
staghunts:
NBC has decided that Ryan Murphy should get another sitcom along with Bill Pullman, Matthew Perry, and Anne Heche.
I suspect they admire Two And A Half Men.
They could also just be really upset about Hulu requiring paid cable subscriptions.
Maybe corporate suicide?
For fuck’s sake. And with that, there goes my last reason to watch...
Parks & Recreation, Community, and 30 Rock... →
whynotshesaid:
staghunts:
NBC has decided that Ryan Murphy should get another sitcom along with Bill Pullman, Matthew Perry, and Anne Heche.
I suspect they admire Two And A Half Men.
They could also just be really upset about Hulu requiring paid cable subscriptions.
Maybe corporate suicide?
For fuck’s sake. And with that, there goes my last reason to watch network television.
Not a...
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“Here’s one reason you might find it creepy: the product line called Fleshlight...”
– The Austin Chronicle, “Pressing the Flesh” by Dan Solomon
My opinions are fit to print ON PAPER.
THAT’S RIGHT. PAPER.
(via garlandgrey)
Here’s another excerpt from the Fleshlight story in the Austin Chronicle.
Fair warning, I am going to promote this story a bunch this week. I worked...
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derasso:
thecountryfucker:
Will has a new video for a reworked “I See A Darkness” and is apparently writing a book called “Will Oldham on Bonny Prince Billy”. Also, I just wet myself.
Awesome. The new version (produced by Steve Albini) is way more Outlaw country and a lot less elegiac than the original. I hope the video spawns a Girls with Will Oldham Eyes meme.
Okay, yes, capital...
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derasso replied to your photo: I don’t think I’m depressed, but I am buying a LOT…
What IS IT with you and the deep dish?
Sometimes I am filled with pride at the fact that I am a member of a species that realized that perfection — i.e., thin, flat, cheesy/tomato-y pizza — could actually be improved upon by preparing it on a thick, cornmeal-based crust, inverting the placement...
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Putting this out there.
Somebody pay me to write a 4,000 word essay on what we could have/should have learned from the Lana Del Rey debacle, the collective decision we all apparently made to forget she ever existed or that we cared SO MUCH about her for a few months, and how fucking good her album is when it’s just a bunch of songs without heavy cultural semiotic meaning draped all over it, please.
April 2012
24 posts
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“Well, I got bones beneath my skin, and mister
there’s a skeleton in every...”
– I fucking love Counting Crows and I do not care at all who knows it.
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Our “white people problems” problem: Why it’s time... →
[T]hat’s the big problem with the eruption of “too white” as a putdown: It turns real complaints that deserve a fair hearing into part of the nagging buzz of self-satisfied snark that pervades our culture today. There are too many people who disingenuously gripe about how “white” something is when they’re really trying to say that it’s not brassy or badass enough for their taste—that it’s...
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Record Store Day 2012: The Do’s and Don’ts →
The Best chance to revisit the glory days of this past January: Lana Del Rey, Born To Die (Damon Albarn Remix) / Blue Jeans (Penguin Prison Remix)
It was a simpler time. Youth was in the air, and the promise of a new day blossomed before us like a beautiful field of wildflowers. Then Lana Del Rey was kinda mediocre on SNL, and a thousand bloggers wrote a thousand blog posts about how they hated...
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Amid backlash over dog shooting, police reviewing... →
Carter said that in the aftermath of the shooting, police officials are reviewing “every aspect of the incident,” including the 911 call and how dispatchers responded to it, the officer’s tactics, and what happened afterward. Carter said the department is also examining its policies and training when it comes to officers who encounter animals.
“Is our policy sufficient? Is our training...
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Bo Diddley →
Just wrote a thing about the new Jack White album for MTV Hive. (Spoiler: It sounds like a Jack White album, and that’s a good thing.) One thought that didn’t have a spot in the write-up — on “I’m Shakin’,” which is Jack doing his best vintage bluesman, he drops the line, “I feel like I’ve been run right through the mill / I can’t run...
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Justice for Cisco →
pearlsnapbutton:
inlumino:
An APD (Austin Police Department) officer shot and killed a dog when responding to a domestic disturbance at the wrong address. The cops are out of control. Please repost and help get this story out there.
The APD doesn’t give a fuck about shooting PEOPLE why are we shocked that they would shoot a dog?
Well, that’s the point. Everybody loves dogs. Dogs are...
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Puppycide →
That link up there goes to a Facebook page, “Justice For Cisco.” Cisco was a dog here in Austin who was killed by APD a few days ago. You may have heard of him by now if you logged onto Facebook on Sunday night — the page had 500 “likes” when Kat sent it to me this evening, but is up to nearly 6,000 of them as of two AM. Presumably by morning, there’ll be even...
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George Zimmerman and where justice lies. →
Trials are not supposed to be public rituals of expiation. (Sentences are, but that’s another discussion.) They are not vehicles for forgiveness, or mechanisms by which a town or a city “gets past” something. (Neither, it should be said, are they supposed to throw a body to an angry crowd just because it demands one.) To turn this trial into a public ceremony by which Sanford...
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Talking to W. Kamau Bell, part one: How religion... →
Is this an unusually bad time to be a person of color in America, do you think?
In general, as a black person, it’s hard to say that this is the worst time to be a black person because the further you go back in time, it gets worse and worse and worse.
For example, I like the fact that I’m not owned by anybody. I find that to be pretty good. There’s always a fight, and what...
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Notes From the First At the Drive-In Show in 11... →
There’s an old line about the Velvet Underground, about how only 500 people bought their first album when it came out, but every one of them started a band. With At the Drive-In, there were only a handful of people who got to see them before their heartbreaking “make-a-genre-defining-record/start-to-blow-up/break-up-almost-immediately” cycle began. But you can’t overstate the band’s importance,...
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"Lost In The World" / "The River" →
Summer Anne Burton is guest-blogging at Buzzfeed this weekend, and in a post that she writes detailing where her love of Kanye West and Garth Brooks overlap, she stumbles upon this bit of magic that occurs when you interpose lyrics from “Lost In The World” with “The River,” creating a song that is thematically perfectand still entirely coherent:
“A dream is like a river...