December 2011
29 posts
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februaryy:
I’m excited about Dash Shaw, Jason, Anders Nilsen, CF, Kevin Huizenga, Gabrielle Bell, Jillian Tamaki, John Pham, Robert Sergel, Taiyo Matsumoto, Nate Powell, Pete Toms, Blaise Larmee, Aidan Koch, Edie Fake and Andy Burkholder. It seems like there’s a lot of amazing new stuff that has nothing to do with DC or Marvel, it’s just that the people who have been famous the longest are...
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An observation from "Danny."
Here’s a weird thing! I’m still getting a bunch of angry letters in response to my Ben Roethlisberger column, and they typically fall into two categories: either the utterly incoherent, nutty ur gay and probably the one who is the rapist kind, and the ones that decide that they’re going to explain to me exactly why I’m just so stupid. The first kind are funny, and the...
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Post-script on hate mail and negative comments.
Also, I will never get over what opinions turn out to be controversial: Nazis are bad? Rape is a serious thing? People are sometimes racist and they shouldn’t be? Apparently those of us who think that sort of sentiment is common sense live in a bubble.
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So, I got a lot of hate mail yesterday. →
It’s weird — I don’t usually get hate mail. Negative comments? Those I get like crazy. I’ve had pseudonymous people on the Internet publicly declare that I am stupid/retarded/fat/gay/black?/racist/etc in response to things that I’ve written loads of times, but this is the first time that a bunch of people independently took it upon themselves to email me to let me...
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“A demagogue, in addition to hypnotic glibness, must also be intellectually...”
– This essay on Ayn Rand from Alternet is not particularly insightful, but this line is interesting.
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Charles P. Pierce on Tim Tebow and religion in the... →
Tim Tebow became “compelling” because he became a character in the great national dumbshow that is our culture war. And we should be very clear about one thing — he wasn’t dragooned into this. Nobody drafted him. He walked into this role with his eyes open. Before he ever took a snap in the NFL, he appeared in an anti-choice television ad with his mother that was sponsored...
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Chaos In Tejas update. →
Last night, I got word from someone close to the festival that Chaos In Tejas would no longer be featuring Disma, the New Jersey death metal supergroup whose lead singer’s was still endorsing his white power side project as recently as last summer.
I haven’t heard anything from the band or the festival directly — frankly, I’m not sure any of them are still talking to me at...
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“In the end, Gene Marks’ prescription for the societal problem of inequality is...”
– Chris Bird’s response to “If I Were A Poor Black Kid” over at Mightygodking.com touches on some really important things.
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More on this thing about Disma, Chaos In Tejas,...
I spent most of yesterday and the night before researching, emailing, and learning about Nazi skinhead heavy metal. As you might imagine for a dude named Solomon*, this is a scary world to look into.
I wrote about it for CultureMap, because three of the bands announced on Friday as playing the Austin music festival Chaos In Tejas have Nazi skinhead ties. (Two of those bands, Black Witchery and...
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The Santorum food stamps thing.
pearlsnapbutton:
“If hunger is a problem in America, then why do we have an obesity problem among the people who we say have a hunger program?” — Rick Santorum, pledging to significantly reduce federal funding for food stamps, arguing that the nation’s increasing obesity rates render the program unnecessary (via sleeplessinsouthie)
I think my jaw almost fell off.
eclecticspectrum: *blank...
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“Last September, a female reporter from Mexico named Ines Sainz showed up at the...”
– Charlies P. Pierce writes on the new MLB dress code for press over at Grantland.
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You can't be an underdog if all you do is win: How... →
Here’s a variation on the old theological question about whether God could make rocks so heavy that he couldn’t lift them: Could you have an overwhelmingly privileged segment of the population so utterly unrestrained by anyone else in the country, and so capable of doing anything that it wants, that it can even declare itself an oppressed minority?
This is the question that first occurred...
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Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn keeps it intimate... →
This was a pretty under-the-radar show, for the first-ever performance of solo material by the guy from a still-popular indie rock band. (Also: Lot of hyphens in that sentence, huh?) Craig Finn did a warm-up set in advance of his solo tour behind his upcoming Clear Hearts Full Eyes at my favorite hot dog restaurant in Austin, because of course he did.
The show was pretty great, honestly —...
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Interview tricks in action! →
How do you feel this situation is different than what Eli was facing when he came up? Well, every situation is different. I’ve read a little bit, with people speculating, “Would they do that?” That was the situation a long, long time that involved the Colts and involved the Elways. When Eli came along, there were a lot of circumstances there. I’m not very comfortable talking about. I...
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Kevin Seifert on the Packers stock offering. →
I found myself growing increasingly angry Tuesday at the condescension and elitist commentary connected with the opening of the Green Bay Packers’ latest stock offering. There was some rich irony in hearing financial experts — you know, the guys who nearly took down the world a few years ago with greed and incompetence — decry the “scam” of selling non-voting...
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“[T]ry to imagine Tebow as a jerk. Let’s say his performance on the field...”
– Chuck Klosterman writes about Tim Tebow on Grantland, and starts to get at something new.
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Passengers dispute Suh's account to police... →
That woman says she suffered a black eye and a busted lip which required stitches. Suh told police no one needed to go to the hospital, but the woman said she asked Suh to call for an ambulance and he refused, telling her she was fine.
She eventually left the scene and called her husband, who took her to the hospital. Another passenger that called 9-1-1 verified that Suh seemed to be...
Matthew Newton: Call For Submissions: Death of a... →
matthewnewton:
Background information: In June of 2009, while on vacation in the Pennsylvania mountains with my wife and three-year-old son, I received a phone call from my employer informing me that I no longer had a job. Earlier this year, I wrote about my experience in a three-part essay series titled…
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Did Childish Gambino deserve today's brutal... →
So, minutes after I posted the thing about Childish Gambino here, it was decided that it’d be worth expounding on more fully on CultureMap. Give it a read, unless you’re really and truly sick of the guy 100% (which is understandable).
He defended his work’s misogyny with comparisons to other artists and half-hearted deflections (“It sometimes can be crazy and misogynistic and...
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Pitchfork's review of Childish Gambino's 'Camp' →
Every attempt Glover makes to present himself as an inside operative confounding stereotypes about mainstream rap rings totally false. In “Fire Fly”, he brags about the ease of scoring college gigs and college girls (while rhyming “LSU” with “molest you”) and then complains: “No live shows because I can’t find sponsors/ For the only black guy...
On journalism and activism- drawing lines and... →
I found this post via somewhere-or-other; the title sounded interesting and I slapped it on Instapaper, and read it this morning while trying to cut a swath through the accumulated articles, posts, stories, etc, that I’ve got saved. So I don’t know the people involved — not the woman who wrote it or the woman who writes for the Phoenix who the piece is about. I haven’t been...
beepbeeprobot asked: For what it's work, Mark of Mark Reads actually just reblogged that whole tattoos conversation with his own experience (he's on tumblr at panasonicyouth) so I think it's definitely not a dudes-are-exempt thing, I think it's a sometimes-people-suck-in-general thing.
