I wasn’t much on school. I was 2 busy listening 2 the grass grow.
Letter from Prince to a fan, June 1984. Look at that cursive!
November 10, 2011
Never be ashamed of how you live or where you from.
You stack a mill’, ***s will see how far you come.
T.I. - Be Better Than Me. My favorite song on Trap Musik besides Look What I Got. Here’s T.I. on the proper ingredients for success:
Stay down, stay on your grind and yo digits’ll come.
Bottom line? You gotta shine, no matter what you become.
These streets is 40 percent of yo’ mind and 5 percent muscle,
10 struggle, 10 time, and 35 percent hustle.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
November 10, 2011
New Tumblr by Rob Walker (who you should be following at murketing)
Background: Rob Walker: The Work of Art in the Age of Googled Reproduction: Observers Room: Design Observer
This is awesome. Related: a high school friend I was catching up with last night has this tattoo:
Which is awesome.
The New Inquiry - Consider the Humblebrag
If you made a Venn diagram of self-promotion, the phenomenon of humblebragging sits in the overlap of two distinctly American pathologies — where manipulative self-consciousness meets our maniacal desire to succeed. What feels better than an ego boost? An ego boost everyone knows about.
November 9, 2011
A crusade in reverse, we marched forth to lose what religion we had and be conquered.
Wen Stephenson in Travel: Lonelier Planet.
my mortifying month
There needs to be room for music writing that’s not just about the author performing taste and making value judgments. So much of the life of music — the ways we hear it, the things we want from it, and so on — exist in a huge, complicated context, and someone needs to describe that context.
November 4, 2011
November 3, 2011
WhoSampled.com
We’re building the ultimate database of sampled music, remixes and cover songs. Dig deeper into music by discovering direct links among over 116,000 songs and 44,000 artists, from Hip-Hop and R&B via Electronic Music through to Rock, Pop, Funk, Soul, Jazz and beyond.
I wish I’d known about this site a long, long time ago.
Four Senior Citizens Plotted Killing Spree at a Waffle House | Mother Jones
November 2, 2011
KAREN: What difference does it make? Who cares if she doesn’t like you? Does everybody in the world have to like you?
GEORGE: Yes! Yes! Everybody has to like me. I must be liked!
George Costanza on being liked. Episode 73 - The Masseuse. (via via)
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Interview with Andrew Potter: Travel and the Search for Authenticity - World Hum
I think we need to keep in mind that the backpackers you’re talking about, who go to new areas and beat new paths by living close to the people and close to the earth and so on, they are in a sense—and this isn’t my line, this is from an old book I came across—the shock troops of the mass tourism industry. They’re the ones who go into a place that has no infrastructure for tourism and basically create the market for other people to come in behind them. And that may or may not be a bad thing. But we need to be aware that that’s actually what’s going on.
Interview with Andrew Potter: Travel and the Search for Authenticity - World Hum
November 2, 2011
When an artist brings me their work, I treat it like food — like a frozen chicken. Like, I have my stove and I didn’t make the chicken, but I can put the right spices on it, and put my stove at a certain degree.
DJ Drama in an interview with Brandon Soderberg/@notrivia.
Idler Q&A (3) | HiLobrow
Mark Kingwell and Joshua Glenn discuss their sequel to The Idler’s Glossary, The Wage Slave’s Glossary. Kingwell:
The idler/slacker distinction is a powerful lever. It makes clear that idling, unlike slacking, is not about work at all: it’s not avoiding work, or resenting work, or hiding from parents or spouses who think you should be working more. Idling offers an independent value which, in being independent, constructs an implicit (sometimes explicit) critique of the work-world’s norms. […] The idler says, don’t grow (if growth just means bigger markets). Instead, play! We are trustees of our time here, not owners of it. When it comes to selfhood and our time here, there is no property; there is only care.
I loved Mark Kingwell’s book In Pursuit of Happiness.
Idler Q&A (3) | HiLobrow
Scarface (1932)
Scarface (1932). Ambition, bloodlust, cowardice. Good flick, especially after you get used to the 1930s-y acting. (My wholly uninformed but standing assumption is that the 1983 remake is far inferior.) I was pleasantly surprised with some of the tracking shots and felt proud when I figured out the X motif (spoilers!). The only other Howard Hawks works I’ve seen are The Big Sleep and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
November 1, 2011
There’s no such thing as not playing. Music has rests in it. So you’re on a rest right now, and the music will begin shortly.
Tom Waits. Via austinkleon. Cf. Ralf Hütter of Kraftwerk:
We have to start the concert at 8:00 and we have to stop sometime because the halls are rented for a certain time but the music goes on in your mind before and after you play. It’s really just an agreement you make to stop at a certain time. On record, it goes for 40 minutes because an album has these dimensions. It’s just an agreement. But really the music goes on.
October 31, 2011
Oh you have a dream? You should pay a lot of money for that dream and maybe at the end of a lot of debt you’ll be better at that dream.
Annie Clark on education at Berklee College of Music. Another take in an earlier interview:
At some point you have to learn all you can and then forget everything that you learned in order to actually start making music.
I think a lot of people, if they’re not careful, can err on the side of the quantifiable and approach it like an athlete. Run that little bit faster, do that little bit more and think you’re being more successful. But the truth is that a lot of times it’s not necessarily about merely being the best athlete, it’s about attempting a new sport.
October 31, 2011
It is hardly surprising to find that the two areas of human enterprise most concerned with sincerity as opposed to truth–namely, politics and advertising–are also the two areas most steeped in bullshit. Or would it be better to say that politics and advertising are the two areas most concerned with the appearance of authenticity? This might be a distinction without a difference.
October 31, 2011
St. Vincent, “Surgeon,” 4AD Sessions
Seeing her pull off those guitar lines up close…hot damn.
Filed under: St. Vincent
Saw St. Vincent on Friday. First time. Freaked out like I thought I would. There were some obscenely talented musicians on the stage. Dang.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Baseball Umpires Aren't Perfect, OK? - NPR
Corresponding to the umpire-as-instrument idea is External Realism. According to External Realism, there are umpiring-independent facts of the game — balls are really fair or foul, runners are either safe or out — and the questions we face are merely epistemological, how best to determine the facts, how to find out.
Corresponding to the umpire-as-player idea is Internal Anti-Realism. According to Internal Anti-Realism, umpires don’t call them as they see them; umpires, through their calls, make it the case that a pitch is a strike or a ball, a runner safe or out. There are no umpire-independent facts in baseball.