i feel a bit ungrateful, because i appreciate the hospitality, but i am staying at my friends house and he has the two worst couches for sleeping on, one has a huge bar in the middle, and one is half again too small. also, because of the ice storm, no eggnog. but, last nights church service was moving, and the sky is lovely, and soon a small child will come down the stairs with full wonder, and lifes good. thanks for everyone.

Album List Blurbs:

Vampire Weekend--Modern Vampires of the City.

When all of the discussions of capitalism and the city are about spectacle (Great Gatsby) or Burlesque (Spring Breakers) or satire (Bling Ring) or apologetics (Republicans); one about loss and ennui, taking up all of the best things that James Murphy ever had to offer is necessary. It is solemn and pious, but those are virtures.

Kanye--Yeezus

I hate its misogyny, I cringe at its homophobia, I worry about its racism--all of that needs to be said, but that he could chart a record that sounds this ugly is only half of his audacity. The other half, is how he interleaves all of that ugliness into genuine desires for political change. I don’t know if I hate him, but he never bores me. Plus, it’s only 40 minutes long.

Janelle Monae--Electric Lady.

A queer feminist reclaiming of an Afro-future, with much more hope than the apocalyptic future presented on the previous, equally brilliant Archnoid.

Montanna Roberts--Coin Coin Two

As a practicing Christian, who practices liturgics, and occasionally preaches, there is a conversation on how hymns are used. Priests can be authoritarian, and quite snobbish, and so there is much dismissive about popular favourites. In a keening, often difficult, always prophetic discussion on the nature of African American speech and music, Roberts makes an optimistic argument about a people’s faith. That she ends with the often lambasted hymn about walking with Christ in the garden, and  that she earns that sentiment, was this year’s spiritual highlight.

Miley--Bangerz

For a year that finally proved that Disco won--the song for the after party, and for someone whose godmother is Dolly, she channels Stevie less self consciously than anyone who tries to hard has (Ryan Murphy, I’m looking at you).

Earl The Sweatshirt--Doris.

His narcohaze flow, and the angular beats, sound like wind through a deserted street corner. It might be the most self aware album of the year--in the art of making music, and the failures of making lives.

Teagan and Sara--Heart Throb

The lesbian folk singer in the late 1970s, released a song called I Love Women, that worked the middle of a venn diagram of the first wave of liberation music, somewhere, between Olivia Records and Casablanca. Folk disco never really took off, but everytime I hear this, i think of the possiblities, and how much sense it made that the folk singers took this left hand turn somewhere north of Xanadu. (sorry, wrong Olivia)

Lorde--Pure Heroine:

I wasn’t convinced until Ann Powers on NPR placed it in conversation with Smells Like Teen Spirit, and  then the loneliness made sense.

MIA Mantangi:

The politics are dumb, and she isn’t any more naive, but ignore the words, and how the flowing of intellectual capital stiffens and she builds, further, wider, stranger. The excitement of the thing, is spending more than an hour for the thing to collapse, and how it never does.

Daft Punk--Random Access Memory:

For proving that Analog might matter still, for the rise of a disco paradise the Garage never imagined, for working new and historical, but not being nostalgic, for the cult of Giorgia Moroderer, who I will never not pay homage to, for hearing it in and out of deps, from car windows, in the mall, in night clubs, in clinic waiting rooms--how it stalked me from Edmonton to Toronto to Gaspe to Montreal, through the summer, not relenting past winter.

Singles:

Luke Bryan--Crash My Party

What might be the most controversial album on the list--his voice is calm, authoritative, and seductive. His surety, and his commitment to pleasure remixes what American music might mean.  

Titicia--Don’t Touch Me

A gorgeous, open, and polyrhythmic masterpiece of erotic longing, breezes through without losing a consummate vocalists skill.

Yoko Ono--Bad Dancer:

She doesn’t gloat when she notes she has been playing the Avant as Pop game for longer than most of her collaborators have been alive, she just invites them to a studio and lets them groove. The most open thing I have heard, in a fairly open year.

Blurred Lines--Robin Thicke.

It has the best chorus of the year. Pharell completely changed his game, which might be the third or fourth time he has done that. The falsetto is so un-natural (and the song is about the problems of nature) , and is used so well. It might be dumb, but it is hyper aware about being dumb, and that is one of the secrets of  the come on song. It’s hot. I don’t want to hug him. I want to fuck him. Or more importantly, I want him to fuck me. In an age of song, then response song, the pleasure filled, archly ironic remix by New Zealand Law Students bring pop this year to a full circle.

Carrie Underwood--Two Black Cadilliacs:

Domestic melodrama at its finest, the story song could be something straight out of Sirk, with the heavy formalism. That it manages to have a chorus so monstrous, thunder sounds, and keening guitars, that it becomes so formalist, and is not operatic or ironic, is a testement to Underwood’s  consummate skill.

Brigett Everett--What I Gotta Do

I got most of my music off of Youtube this year, and this cabaret icon, without an album but with a live show at Joe’s pub, is the gender queering soul anthem to the nature of what one can and what one cannot get on a New York Street Corner. Made even better by the fact that she might be the best belter since Mama Cass (and don’t lie to me, you can imagine Cass singing What I gotta do to get a dick in my mouth” )

Sissy Nobby--Loopy

A hedge maze of quotes and refutations, becomes the anti-eminem on the way to making the best bounce track of the year.

Laura Mvula--Green Garden

The percussion, including handclaps, are so summer, and so peppery, just a refreshing roll across the tops of Mvula’s gorgeous voice.

Kelly Rowlands--Dirty Laundry

All of those Spector produced artists, trying to work out what they feel, against the power of bad men, and monolithic producers--Rowland is one of those tell-alls, but with an autonomy. By making a record to dispute the records, she provides the best testimony that Beyonce, like all sorts of geniuses, might have been monstrous. The production is so spare, it makes this, and other revelations (domestic violence) even more stark in relief

Mapie--Don’t Wait:

Even over crappy laptop speakers, how this production doubles up, splits, and doubles again, like a slightly paranoid five line skink, is a masterpiece, made even more complex by a voice that roars towards the oceanic. If this is the future of Swedish pop, their future is long assured.

Angel Haze--Echelon

Such an angry dis track, so delightfully specific in its rhetoric, so well constructed in its pure hate, she enters the boys club almost to fuck shit up.

Ciara--Overdose

The overdose as love metaphor seems so overdone, so played out, but how Ciara sings Doctor, how she pops that middle c, and how she ends up sliding around a track that just plays at being taut, suggests a possible new way forward for pop vocals.

Best Coast I Don;t Know How

Messed up, roughed up, torn apart harmonies, stitched up, and made up into a perfect Frankenstein’s monster, but more Califonia, and less arctic moors.

http://harmonicait.tumblr.com/post/70932306726/country-music-is-only-awful-when-youre-slut-shaming

Wombat Tunnelling!

gorgeous example of hypertext writing.

Parr's photos taken out of car windows in Lagos, work on the problem in a different way than Friedlander's incorporation of the car into the frames of the shot, or Ruscha's building of an infastructure. IT might be an element of technology.

ellen altfest is like pearlstein, without  all of the still life elements, and with men, she paints hair really well

gary panter and charles burns monster mashup  by eric reynolds on vine.

extensive photos  and written text on drum kits from the 20s and 30s.


60s lutheran kitsch reworking of the creation.

on the 12 dollar phone

on cunninglingus and hiphop

Los Angeles' funiculars are democratic, and an example of excellent public transport, and this history suggests a kind of revival.

brilliant, heartbreaking reporting on the final days of Randy Savage.

i want to go here and learn how to auctin cattle

the naitonal instutie of mental health in the uk, is changing what it means to be treated for schizophrenia, suggesting more autonomy for people who have the disorder. 

dozens of examples of vernacular typography in florence

some interesting behind the scenes shots

photos inside the 70s era nagakin capsule tower in toyko

jack peirson Her ancient solitary reign 2006

great historical photos o women in mens tailoring

judges son kills himself on the edge of the temple grounds in vegas

119 assanaions ranked

okay, the lds ended up sending missonaries to the following places b/w let's say 1890 and 1950--Samoa, New Zealand, Arizona, Southern Utah, and southern Brazil. Assuming that after 5-10 years, the impetous to convert eruopeans in New Zealend and Brazil died off, and that in the Us and Samoa it never happened. 

each of those places had a third gender, the maori (20 000 maoris were lds) esp. so, five questions: 

a) could we do a queer reading where the proclamation of the family and its discussion of eternal gender could be used to discuss these people . 

b) according to Quinn (Same Sex Dynamics, 82-89) some Zuni were baptized by yound and compartiats, who were berdache...so when did the baptizing of the berdache end. 

c) was it b/c the folks were marginalized or b/c no one knew what to do w/ them or something else, that this discussion did not end up in the standard works of the lds and nz for example? 

d) if maoris practiced plural marriage until the 1990s, and were still mormon, or if they had both lds stake presidents, and tribal chiefs, who simultaneously held religious leadership i the ocmmunities, than third gender lds maoris must exist, and in significant numbers, why did not they not work in a similar capacity to race and brazil, was it b/c we did not have the language? 

e) the rise of queer language and queer theory enveloped and absorbed radical otherness in western plains cultures (a berdache is not a homosexual, though the universalizing instinct of liberationlist rhetoric would suggest otherwise), and this occured in the 70s, with the rise of gender and sexuality...failure of intersectionality and all that--this is going to be an awkard construction--but did race become unflattened in the 70s while gender became flattened, and if this is the case, did they sepeate then--because t he discourse arouind both the south pacific and plans aborgibanal people tied othernig languge to race and gender...

the hunger games movie was disappointing, too long, badly paced, dumb ending, cgi was ugly, but with some fantastic small performances, esp. with phillip seymour hoffman and donald sutherland, but it wasn't even good spectacle (we all get the dystopias we deserve)

frustrated by this paper in ways that i cannot even describe (well its the usual lds problem, people either avoid the lds, are unreliable, have gaps, or ask the wrong questions, this is esp. true about sex and gender.

hate the weather outside.

getting home from guy concordia, a woman was choking on her own puke, the two guys with her had no idea what they were doing, and the other woman who was with her was yelling at the pukey one about the coat and sweater. they were going all the way to angion, and i helped her get on the subway, held her hand, convinced her friends to take a cab from the end of the line, but i am worried that they aren't safe. left my half finished big mac to help them out, and i only have the yucky kind of oatmeal left in my variety pack.

major tooth problems still.

P1010506

P1010506, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

P1010509

P1010509, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.