Not a good day, for some reason. This weather is making me crazy.

Nevertheless, this is worth reading, if only because it's so ambitious:

Pearls Before Breakfast

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L'ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans ( Read more... )

Why don't those stupid CSIs turn the damned lights on?! Especially in the damned MORGUE!

Did you know Jean Baudrillard died?

I didn't know he was still alive.

( Read more... )

I'm not particularly sentimental about music, in the sense that it doesn't tend to get me all emo, as the kids today say. I tend to find most popular music pretty manipulative when it's schmoopy enough to associate with lurve. I get irritated by clumsy music in any context, and by clumsy musicians even more. The soundtrack for "24" makes me scream ( Read more... )

Hip to be square.

What am I to do now? My grooveless corner of the zeitgeist is being infiltatred by seekers of authenticity. Argh! Go away, you posers!

...but I won't hold my breath.

I Want My Hyphenated-Identity MTV

Most of the applicants thanked MTV for thinking of them as a demographic ready for a music-video channel all its own. "It's so nice to be recognized," said Tara Austin, a Sri Lankan-American from Los Angeles. "I am just an American girl at the end of the day, but I have a strong ( Read more... )

There was an interesting article in Slate earlier this week (The World Is Phat: Reggaeton, grime, baile funk, and the globalization of hip-hop) that caught my eye because it mentioned some stuff about baile funk (pronounced bye-lee), which is home-grown, garage-made funk from the favelas of the big cities in Brazil, especially Rio. I have been ( Read more... )

I know there are some folks on my flist who might get their knickers in a twist about this. Be assured that I am not talking about you, but about some other person. Really and truly. If you're on my flist I love you. If you're not, well, probably not so much ( Read more... )

Minister of Soul, Still Preaching an R&B Gospel

Mr. Green has made a deeper, more obsessive study of soul music's central message - I love you - than perhaps any other pop musician. For him it represents the dual nature of life, the split between God and man, between being in the world and being of it.

And from the New Yorker of December 8, 2003 ( Read more... )