Monday, December 15, 2008
Singles
Beyonce
Last Friday at about 2 am, just before last call, I was in a room full of the whole gay rainbow, bears and butches, drag queens and skinny club kids, and we all danced—and not only did we dance, but we knew every move, just like all of those dozens of fan videos on youtube knew all the moves---Plus my sister and my mother loves it, and for the first time in a while, this might be a genuinely universal single. Which is kind of worrisome, because no matter how fun it is to dance to (and it is incredibly, brilliantly entertaining to dance to), it seems to be so retrograde---sort of like Obama winning and Prop 8 passing on the same night.
Pink
So What
I love how punk she has gotten, and in a pop musical landscape, she makes anger palatable, not only palatable, but necessary and seductive. Best fuck you song in a decade.
Carrie Underwood
Just a Dream
One of the things I love about country, profoundly, is that it allows one to earnest, and to be earnest seems still to be taboo in alot of critical cultures. The domestic melodrama, about being a war widow at 18, says more about a ruinous American foreign policy then any dozen Rachel Maddows.
John Adams
Batter My Heart, You Three Person God
Unknown
The final aria of the last act, in Adam's confused and slightly unhinged opera about Oppenheimer. As performed by the baritone Gerald Finley, desperate, clear, and concise, with a rising apocalyptic terror. When can we have him as Nixon?
R Kelly
Son of a Bitch
Zomba
Unapologetically filthy.
Kate Miller Hiedke
Cannot Shake it
She encompasses perfectly English habit of making a exquisite ass shaking dance stomper about not being able to dance, high irony that manages to be both joyful and awkward.
Kanye West
Heart Break
Autotune, or electronically modulated voices as a way of making pop more artificial, has become overused of course--but the idea that pop is now defined by how it constructs it artificiality, how self aware it is as a genre of it's construction of "realness" is skittering into something really interesting. The slippages here, between presentation and emotion, between the coldness of the narrative, and the warming trends of the formal sounds, are a really excellent example of how the studio can be used.
AC Newman
10 or 12 Things
The story is heartbreaking, and the guitars jangle, and his voice is transparently lovely. It also has a hook laden chorus, and almost perfect percussion.
Johnathon Rundman
Dialysis Car Pool
Mostly about the small graces that occur in the spaces between living and dying, manages to be heady w/o overwhelming grief, and catchy without being shallow--a nice balance.
Death Cab for Cutie
This one I am slightly ashamed by, but I love that it manages to go for almost two minutes without words, and i love the audacity of a pop song that is longer then 8 minutes, and it all chugs towards an unsatisfying ending, and the music is too simple to be guitar wank, and this is the closest to Rock and Roll with capital Rs, that I have enjoyed in years.
Albums:
The Baseball Project
This is so insidery, that I do not know whether the legends are true or not, but there is something to be said for passion, and for desire, and for the seeking of narratives that historically focused w/o drowning in nostalgia.
Jenny Lewis
Acid Tounge
Unique, but not strange for her own sake, with an LA sensibility that cribs smartly from the Laurel Canyon crowd.
Nick Cave
Dig, Lazrus, Dig
The place where a worn out shtick gets renewed by a self lacerating sense of humour and a renewed commitment towards noise. (cf: AC/DC)
Toby Keith:
That Don't Make Me A Bad Guy
No pain, no anger, no haters, just a love of liquour, pussy, and Mexico--pop's most entertaining libertine returns.
Dolly Parton
Backwood Barbie
The secret might be finally out--that in the midst of all that hair and tits is America's greatest living musician, now that she is slowing down, and her voice is getting a little gravelly, really interesting things are going to happen.
Britney Spears
It is not as harrowing or brilliant as Blackout, but she never left us, and she still controls the narrative. Her MTV special would have made Fassbinder proud, and this album is too well constructed not to reward it somehow.
Madonna
Because she is still at the top of the relevant curve after 3 decades in the business, and because she finally realized that pop music for pop's sake is her great gift to the world.
Brazil 70
A perfect, not pretentious at all, peice of anthropology, and amazingly fun to dance to besides.
Foxboro Hot Tubs
Mostly because I found it a fascinating way for Greenday to finally be garage again, to care about the 3 minute ode to suburban ennui after a decade of being heavy, and because it was so good at the simulacra of experience, in a culture that maintains the best way to be authentic is to learn to fake it better then most.
Beyonce
Last Friday at about 2 am, just before last call, I was in a room full of the whole gay rainbow, bears and butches, drag queens and skinny club kids, and we all danced—and not only did we dance, but we knew every move, just like all of those dozens of fan videos on youtube knew all the moves---Plus my sister and my mother loves it, and for the first time in a while, this might be a genuinely universal single. Which is kind of worrisome, because no matter how fun it is to dance to (and it is incredibly, brilliantly entertaining to dance to), it seems to be so retrograde---sort of like Obama winning and Prop 8 passing on the same night.
Pink
So What
I love how punk she has gotten, and in a pop musical landscape, she makes anger palatable, not only palatable, but necessary and seductive. Best fuck you song in a decade.
Carrie Underwood
Just a Dream
One of the things I love about country, profoundly, is that it allows one to earnest, and to be earnest seems still to be taboo in alot of critical cultures. The domestic melodrama, about being a war widow at 18, says more about a ruinous American foreign policy then any dozen Rachel Maddows.
John Adams
Batter My Heart, You Three Person God
Unknown
The final aria of the last act, in Adam's confused and slightly unhinged opera about Oppenheimer. As performed by the baritone Gerald Finley, desperate, clear, and concise, with a rising apocalyptic terror. When can we have him as Nixon?
R Kelly
Son of a Bitch
Zomba
Unapologetically filthy.
Kate Miller Hiedke
Cannot Shake it
She encompasses perfectly English habit of making a exquisite ass shaking dance stomper about not being able to dance, high irony that manages to be both joyful and awkward.
Kanye West
Heart Break
Autotune, or electronically modulated voices as a way of making pop more artificial, has become overused of course--but the idea that pop is now defined by how it constructs it artificiality, how self aware it is as a genre of it's construction of "realness" is skittering into something really interesting. The slippages here, between presentation and emotion, between the coldness of the narrative, and the warming trends of the formal sounds, are a really excellent example of how the studio can be used.
AC Newman
10 or 12 Things
The story is heartbreaking, and the guitars jangle, and his voice is transparently lovely. It also has a hook laden chorus, and almost perfect percussion.
Johnathon Rundman
Dialysis Car Pool
Mostly about the small graces that occur in the spaces between living and dying, manages to be heady w/o overwhelming grief, and catchy without being shallow--a nice balance.
Death Cab for Cutie
This one I am slightly ashamed by, but I love that it manages to go for almost two minutes without words, and i love the audacity of a pop song that is longer then 8 minutes, and it all chugs towards an unsatisfying ending, and the music is too simple to be guitar wank, and this is the closest to Rock and Roll with capital Rs, that I have enjoyed in years.
Albums:
The Baseball Project
This is so insidery, that I do not know whether the legends are true or not, but there is something to be said for passion, and for desire, and for the seeking of narratives that historically focused w/o drowning in nostalgia.
Jenny Lewis
Acid Tounge
Unique, but not strange for her own sake, with an LA sensibility that cribs smartly from the Laurel Canyon crowd.
Nick Cave
Dig, Lazrus, Dig
The place where a worn out shtick gets renewed by a self lacerating sense of humour and a renewed commitment towards noise. (cf: AC/DC)
Toby Keith:
That Don't Make Me A Bad Guy
No pain, no anger, no haters, just a love of liquour, pussy, and Mexico--pop's most entertaining libertine returns.
Dolly Parton
Backwood Barbie
The secret might be finally out--that in the midst of all that hair and tits is America's greatest living musician, now that she is slowing down, and her voice is getting a little gravelly, really interesting things are going to happen.
Britney Spears
It is not as harrowing or brilliant as Blackout, but she never left us, and she still controls the narrative. Her MTV special would have made Fassbinder proud, and this album is too well constructed not to reward it somehow.
Madonna
Because she is still at the top of the relevant curve after 3 decades in the business, and because she finally realized that pop music for pop's sake is her great gift to the world.
Brazil 70
A perfect, not pretentious at all, peice of anthropology, and amazingly fun to dance to besides.
Foxboro Hot Tubs
Mostly because I found it a fascinating way for Greenday to finally be garage again, to care about the 3 minute ode to suburban ennui after a decade of being heavy, and because it was so good at the simulacra of experience, in a culture that maintains the best way to be authentic is to learn to fake it better then most.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
TOP TEN COUNTRY ALBUMS OF 2008:
1.Brad Paisley Play
Ignore the actual songs here, they are either goopy or inappropriately jokey and admit that it not nearly as much of an independent gesture as he thinks it was, nevertheless it was a masterful extension/synthesis of the guitar as a country and rock instrument.
2.Toby Keith That Don't Make Me a Bad Guy
Country's primary libertine continues his long streak of odes to pleasure but not devotion. He still is as obsessed with women, booze, and a feral seeking of pleasure, the older he gets, the less apologetic he is about these pleasures,in a Nashville that seems to be more blanched and less outlaw, it's nice to have someone conquer Bocephus's crown.
3.Kellie Pickler
I always assumed that people who were young and recording were neither stupid, and had a sense of autonomy, that and a continued love of artifice, means defending the seemingly indefensible. This album was so much a Xerox of more effective albums, singles, singers. It has the angry break up songs of Miranda Lambert and Carrie Underwood, the mawkish and reactionary odes to pseudo-empowerment of Martina McBride, the teenage longing of Taylor Swift—it is so calculating, and I do not think she is smart enough to pull it off. All of that said, the album grabbed me, it made me feel sad where I was supposed to be, angry where I needed to bed, and turned on when she wanted me to do be. The twang was nice, and the songs were technically competent, and all of these things added up to something more significant then its mediocre whole. To put it another way, some of the magic of popular music, is the ability to emotionally manipulate the listener, and have that listener either not notice, or enjoy the experience---Pickle is a master at this.
4.Jenny Lewis Acid Tongue
What Laurel Canon grew up to be, lovely and difficult, melodic and broken.
5.Ricky Skaggs Honouring the Fathers of Bluegrass
You all know what this sounds like, and it does not disappoint. Skaggs is so good at just doing what he needs to do, no muss, no fuss, up the scales, down the scales, a little super fast picking, and on to the next track. Something so seemless, and so devoted to a minor craft, should be amply rewarded.
6.Dolly Parton Backwoods Barbie
Something interesting has happened here, Dolly's crystalline voice has grown older, and it can no longer do the adventitious sweeps that it used to. So she chooses material that is lower on the register, but there is nothing missing. She has done an album of summing up, of life experiences, and of history, that seems new. The new voice now allows a gravitas that was always present, but sometimes lost in the hair and the tits and the soprano.
7.The Baseball Project, Various Artists
I like the idea of using the most clichéd of American metaphors to tell stories about failure, loss and devotion. That it manages to be nostalgic, and self reflexive about its nostalgia is charmingly necessary, that it manages to be a serious moral document, while still be historical, and frankly, fun, would be an almost impossible task.
8.George Jones Burn This Playhouse Down
Hearing the Possum sing is pure pleasure, even if the duet shtick is a little dated.
9.Glenn Campbell Meet Glenn Cambell
There is something to be said, about how artificial, and how earnest Campbell has always been, how seamless the oily production matched the domestic melodrama of songs like Galveston or Wichita Linesman. Listening to him doing the American Recording thing, with a set of incongruous covers, one is reminded of how slippery earnestness can be. Campbell cannot slide by on Cash's gravitas or Nelson's democratic vistas, so he has his charm, and his sadness, and one is forced to spend a lot of time processing exactly what he is doing, exactly how meta he is being, especially since his voice is shot with too much booze and not in a whiskey and gravel pleasantness. It becomes fascinating in it's instability.
10.Jonathan Rundman Insomniaccomplishment
This Lutheran singer-songwriter, has been playing music, figuring out Jesus, and begging grace for two decades, this small and very intimate suite of songs done in the middle of the night while his children sleep, has a writing that is sophisticated, a music that is deceptively simple, and a discussion of issues that are vital but often forgotten.
TOP TEN COUNTRY SINGLES OF 2008:
1.Kenny Chesney and the Wailers Everyone Wants to Get to Heaven
I keep trying to figure out the racial politics of Chesney's cultural tourism, I suspect that it has some of the same problems as Paul Simon's relationship to Los Lobos or Ladysmith Black Mambazo, which is a problem that needs to acknowledge before anything else is written about this song. I like how the song swings, the percussion is excellent, the chorus is polyphonic, and anything that injects new instrumentation into an often moribund chart is appreciated. Plus, he is looking forward, and his cult of nostalgia was getting a little tiring.
2.Dean Brody Undone
He's an Alberta boy, now in Nashville, which might mean that I am a bit biased plus he is really cute, so my critical acuity is suspect, but his voice is lovely and young, the music is laid back, and he just doesn't reach. The album can be lazy, and the writing needs work, but this one song, about driving out to the country, having a picnic, with someone special, is full of precise details over a bed of accoustic guitars. Pretty and low key in a way that suggests Brody has a future.
3.Josh Turner Everything is Fine.
The song does not have a but, and this might make me a sap, but in a year of both disaster and hope, of crashing disasters and rising hopes, to have someone say the basic gifts of living—a truck that works, a steady job, somewhere to be on a Sunday morning, people that love you and people you love, is fine—and fine, that even keel without any rapids, is something to praise the lord for, is a message that sets me right and reminds me of my priorities.
4.Justin Moore Back that Thing Up
First things first, more country songs should have chicken noises in them and more videos should have women with very little clothing using a cross cut saw. Second things second, is the coded ode to anal that we have been waiting for, sort of a Baby Got Back for the jocks in the pick ups—because it does have an undeniable erotic frisson, or in the words of my friend RM Vaughn “He keeps calling himself Daddy, and he looks 11 years old!!! That is a type of genius, I guess. Idiot savant type. Not that I wouldn't blow him.” (for the record, he is definitely on the list of people I would let blow me) All joking aside, this is sort of like Honky Tonk Bandonkadonk—something so camp and absurd that it starts as so bad it's good and then moves into pure fun. Living in Toronto now, I have yet to see the obligatory line dance, but I suspect everyone west of Winnipeg has it memorised.
5.Carrie Underwood Just A Dream
Domestic melodrama at its red neck best, a Douglas Sirk mini-epic, with that heart breaking voice that moves somewhere between singing and talking, that skates on the edge of total collapse, the one line take away “a pregnant war widow at 18”, says more about the murderous and particularity inept American foreign policy then all of Nashville in the last 8 years , and I am glad that someone has mainstream as Underwood is finally speaking angrily at such senseless loss.
6.Randy Travis Faith in You
Delicious piano, and that sensuous croon, understated with a nice little pick up in the middle, and all about middle aged regret and the redemptive power of love, but as a series of socratic questions and gnomic decelerations---and it kind of makes me lonely, and kind of reminds me of my mama, and it makes me hopeful that I will find a husband and have children—what else do you need from a country song.
7.Eric Church Two Pink Lines
8.One of three songs about being knocked up that charted this year, this one gets the nod for having a pretty awesome central rock riff, and an innovative real time structure. Plus it has at my favourite verse of the year:
Yeah I was foolish and wild
she was classic and regal
we were fresh out of school, both barely legal
we were young and on fire and just couldn't wait
six weeks in, she was three weeks late
8.Shooter Jennings This Ol' Road
On Chelsea Lately, he admitted to not being very country, but he named his daughter Alabama, and likes speed more then coke, plus he loves his daddy, and for some reason they let him play the Ryman this year, but this single works like a bulldozer, laying flat personal history, genre differences, and family legend into one smooth rock riff.
9.Danielle Peck Bad for ME
Mostly for the twang, and how she sings the vowels in don't and won't
10.Lee Ann Womack—Last Call
Drunk and exhausted, a sort of louche desire to do wrong, and a moral responsibility to preserve the self, plus cleverly meta with out being obnoxious about it, and so bloody lonely, makes me want to drink myself into oblivion.
TOP FIVE COUNTRY REISSUES OF 2008:
1. Tim McGraw Best of Vol. 3
2.More Dirty Laundry: The Soul of Black Country
Why are all the best, histoicizng releases, that talk about the diversity of Country, coming out of Germany?
3.Best of Bob Dylan's Old Time Theme Radio Hour
Cheesy jokes, sweet little titbits of unknown information, an exquisite curatorial sense, and Dylan sounds like he is having fun, for perhaps the first time ever.
4.The Best Of The Johnny Cash TV Show: 1969-1971
In this two years, on national television, Johnny Cash played with, among others, Mel Tillis, Kris Kristofferson, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan and James Taylor. Each of these songs allows for both the best of Cash, and the best of who he is playing with, suggesting a lack of purity and a generosity of spirit that the best artists internalise.
5 Shel Silverstein Boy Named Sue and His Other Country Songs
COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST MALE VOCALISTS OF 2008:
1.Josh Turner
He is slowing down a bit, becoming more confident in his ability to deliver without perfection, and his learning how to use that bullfrog croak, he has moved from a brilliant technical singer, to someone more complicated and beautiful.
2.Eric Church
Rockabilly talk-singing, ballad crooning, and almost everything in between, the ability to move his voice to the narrative needs of the texts in question is almost unparalleled.
3. Kid Rock
I like how he has used what can be learnt from both rock and hip-hop and then re-contextualised it into a country argot.
COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST FEMALE VOCALISTS OF 2008:
1.Heidi Newfield
Listen to her live, for someone so young, she refuses to go to bombast, and in a delightful new trend, there is no real need for her to lose the lovely accent. Can be sweetly jazzy when she needs to be.
2.Carrie Underwood
She can sing. She knows how to deliver her lines, she knows that singing is at least part acting, and the emotional rawness is held in check by a devotion to technical perfection.
3.Jenny Lewis
Eccentric, and in control of an instrument that should not really be recording, without devotion to strangeness for it's own sake, Joanna Newsom should take notes.
COUNTRY MUSIC’S BEST LIVE ACT OF 2008:
1.Weston Johnson
Sweet kid singing all your favourite country hits via youtube live from his Wisconsin dorm room, his placement on this list is mostly a convenient excuse to point out some of the most interesting live singing is coming electronically, in a culture that sort of requires this constant documentation of media sources, the idea of live singing as going somewhere might be heading to the same place as the album format. That said, the intimacy, his controlling of texts, his wavering voice, and his gentility make me wish the best for him.
COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST SONGWRITERS OF 2008:
1. Rodney Crowell
2. Dolly Parton
3.Toby Keith
COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST DUOS, TRIOS OR GROUPS OF 2008:
1. The Roys
2. The Wreckers
3.
COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST NEW ACTS OF 2008:
1. Heidi Newfield
2. Jennifer Hansen
3.Dean Brody
COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST OVERALL ACTS OF 2008:
1. Toby Keith
2. Shooter Jennings
3.Carrie Underwood
1.Brad Paisley Play
Ignore the actual songs here, they are either goopy or inappropriately jokey and admit that it not nearly as much of an independent gesture as he thinks it was, nevertheless it was a masterful extension/synthesis of the guitar as a country and rock instrument.
2.Toby Keith That Don't Make Me a Bad Guy
Country's primary libertine continues his long streak of odes to pleasure but not devotion. He still is as obsessed with women, booze, and a feral seeking of pleasure, the older he gets, the less apologetic he is about these pleasures,in a Nashville that seems to be more blanched and less outlaw, it's nice to have someone conquer Bocephus's crown.
3.Kellie Pickler
I always assumed that people who were young and recording were neither stupid, and had a sense of autonomy, that and a continued love of artifice, means defending the seemingly indefensible. This album was so much a Xerox of more effective albums, singles, singers. It has the angry break up songs of Miranda Lambert and Carrie Underwood, the mawkish and reactionary odes to pseudo-empowerment of Martina McBride, the teenage longing of Taylor Swift—it is so calculating, and I do not think she is smart enough to pull it off. All of that said, the album grabbed me, it made me feel sad where I was supposed to be, angry where I needed to bed, and turned on when she wanted me to do be. The twang was nice, and the songs were technically competent, and all of these things added up to something more significant then its mediocre whole. To put it another way, some of the magic of popular music, is the ability to emotionally manipulate the listener, and have that listener either not notice, or enjoy the experience---Pickle is a master at this.
4.Jenny Lewis Acid Tongue
What Laurel Canon grew up to be, lovely and difficult, melodic and broken.
5.Ricky Skaggs Honouring the Fathers of Bluegrass
You all know what this sounds like, and it does not disappoint. Skaggs is so good at just doing what he needs to do, no muss, no fuss, up the scales, down the scales, a little super fast picking, and on to the next track. Something so seemless, and so devoted to a minor craft, should be amply rewarded.
6.Dolly Parton Backwoods Barbie
Something interesting has happened here, Dolly's crystalline voice has grown older, and it can no longer do the adventitious sweeps that it used to. So she chooses material that is lower on the register, but there is nothing missing. She has done an album of summing up, of life experiences, and of history, that seems new. The new voice now allows a gravitas that was always present, but sometimes lost in the hair and the tits and the soprano.
7.The Baseball Project, Various Artists
I like the idea of using the most clichéd of American metaphors to tell stories about failure, loss and devotion. That it manages to be nostalgic, and self reflexive about its nostalgia is charmingly necessary, that it manages to be a serious moral document, while still be historical, and frankly, fun, would be an almost impossible task.
8.George Jones Burn This Playhouse Down
Hearing the Possum sing is pure pleasure, even if the duet shtick is a little dated.
9.Glenn Campbell Meet Glenn Cambell
There is something to be said, about how artificial, and how earnest Campbell has always been, how seamless the oily production matched the domestic melodrama of songs like Galveston or Wichita Linesman. Listening to him doing the American Recording thing, with a set of incongruous covers, one is reminded of how slippery earnestness can be. Campbell cannot slide by on Cash's gravitas or Nelson's democratic vistas, so he has his charm, and his sadness, and one is forced to spend a lot of time processing exactly what he is doing, exactly how meta he is being, especially since his voice is shot with too much booze and not in a whiskey and gravel pleasantness. It becomes fascinating in it's instability.
10.Jonathan Rundman Insomniaccomplishment
This Lutheran singer-songwriter, has been playing music, figuring out Jesus, and begging grace for two decades, this small and very intimate suite of songs done in the middle of the night while his children sleep, has a writing that is sophisticated, a music that is deceptively simple, and a discussion of issues that are vital but often forgotten.
TOP TEN COUNTRY SINGLES OF 2008:
1.Kenny Chesney and the Wailers Everyone Wants to Get to Heaven
I keep trying to figure out the racial politics of Chesney's cultural tourism, I suspect that it has some of the same problems as Paul Simon's relationship to Los Lobos or Ladysmith Black Mambazo, which is a problem that needs to acknowledge before anything else is written about this song. I like how the song swings, the percussion is excellent, the chorus is polyphonic, and anything that injects new instrumentation into an often moribund chart is appreciated. Plus, he is looking forward, and his cult of nostalgia was getting a little tiring.
2.Dean Brody Undone
He's an Alberta boy, now in Nashville, which might mean that I am a bit biased plus he is really cute, so my critical acuity is suspect, but his voice is lovely and young, the music is laid back, and he just doesn't reach. The album can be lazy, and the writing needs work, but this one song, about driving out to the country, having a picnic, with someone special, is full of precise details over a bed of accoustic guitars. Pretty and low key in a way that suggests Brody has a future.
3.Josh Turner Everything is Fine.
The song does not have a but, and this might make me a sap, but in a year of both disaster and hope, of crashing disasters and rising hopes, to have someone say the basic gifts of living—a truck that works, a steady job, somewhere to be on a Sunday morning, people that love you and people you love, is fine—and fine, that even keel without any rapids, is something to praise the lord for, is a message that sets me right and reminds me of my priorities.
4.Justin Moore Back that Thing Up
First things first, more country songs should have chicken noises in them and more videos should have women with very little clothing using a cross cut saw. Second things second, is the coded ode to anal that we have been waiting for, sort of a Baby Got Back for the jocks in the pick ups—because it does have an undeniable erotic frisson, or in the words of my friend RM Vaughn “He keeps calling himself Daddy, and he looks 11 years old!!! That is a type of genius, I guess. Idiot savant type. Not that I wouldn't blow him.” (for the record, he is definitely on the list of people I would let blow me) All joking aside, this is sort of like Honky Tonk Bandonkadonk—something so camp and absurd that it starts as so bad it's good and then moves into pure fun. Living in Toronto now, I have yet to see the obligatory line dance, but I suspect everyone west of Winnipeg has it memorised.
5.Carrie Underwood Just A Dream
Domestic melodrama at its red neck best, a Douglas Sirk mini-epic, with that heart breaking voice that moves somewhere between singing and talking, that skates on the edge of total collapse, the one line take away “a pregnant war widow at 18”, says more about the murderous and particularity inept American foreign policy then all of Nashville in the last 8 years , and I am glad that someone has mainstream as Underwood is finally speaking angrily at such senseless loss.
6.Randy Travis Faith in You
Delicious piano, and that sensuous croon, understated with a nice little pick up in the middle, and all about middle aged regret and the redemptive power of love, but as a series of socratic questions and gnomic decelerations---and it kind of makes me lonely, and kind of reminds me of my mama, and it makes me hopeful that I will find a husband and have children—what else do you need from a country song.
7.Eric Church Two Pink Lines
8.One of three songs about being knocked up that charted this year, this one gets the nod for having a pretty awesome central rock riff, and an innovative real time structure. Plus it has at my favourite verse of the year:
Yeah I was foolish and wild
she was classic and regal
we were fresh out of school, both barely legal
we were young and on fire and just couldn't wait
six weeks in, she was three weeks late
8.Shooter Jennings This Ol' Road
On Chelsea Lately, he admitted to not being very country, but he named his daughter Alabama, and likes speed more then coke, plus he loves his daddy, and for some reason they let him play the Ryman this year, but this single works like a bulldozer, laying flat personal history, genre differences, and family legend into one smooth rock riff.
9.Danielle Peck Bad for ME
Mostly for the twang, and how she sings the vowels in don't and won't
10.Lee Ann Womack—Last Call
Drunk and exhausted, a sort of louche desire to do wrong, and a moral responsibility to preserve the self, plus cleverly meta with out being obnoxious about it, and so bloody lonely, makes me want to drink myself into oblivion.
TOP FIVE COUNTRY REISSUES OF 2008:
1. Tim McGraw Best of Vol. 3
2.More Dirty Laundry: The Soul of Black Country
Why are all the best, histoicizng releases, that talk about the diversity of Country, coming out of Germany?
3.Best of Bob Dylan's Old Time Theme Radio Hour
Cheesy jokes, sweet little titbits of unknown information, an exquisite curatorial sense, and Dylan sounds like he is having fun, for perhaps the first time ever.
4.The Best Of The Johnny Cash TV Show: 1969-1971
In this two years, on national television, Johnny Cash played with, among others, Mel Tillis, Kris Kristofferson, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan and James Taylor. Each of these songs allows for both the best of Cash, and the best of who he is playing with, suggesting a lack of purity and a generosity of spirit that the best artists internalise.
5 Shel Silverstein Boy Named Sue and His Other Country Songs
COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST MALE VOCALISTS OF 2008:
1.Josh Turner
He is slowing down a bit, becoming more confident in his ability to deliver without perfection, and his learning how to use that bullfrog croak, he has moved from a brilliant technical singer, to someone more complicated and beautiful.
2.Eric Church
Rockabilly talk-singing, ballad crooning, and almost everything in between, the ability to move his voice to the narrative needs of the texts in question is almost unparalleled.
3. Kid Rock
I like how he has used what can be learnt from both rock and hip-hop and then re-contextualised it into a country argot.
COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST FEMALE VOCALISTS OF 2008:
1.Heidi Newfield
Listen to her live, for someone so young, she refuses to go to bombast, and in a delightful new trend, there is no real need for her to lose the lovely accent. Can be sweetly jazzy when she needs to be.
2.Carrie Underwood
She can sing. She knows how to deliver her lines, she knows that singing is at least part acting, and the emotional rawness is held in check by a devotion to technical perfection.
3.Jenny Lewis
Eccentric, and in control of an instrument that should not really be recording, without devotion to strangeness for it's own sake, Joanna Newsom should take notes.
COUNTRY MUSIC’S BEST LIVE ACT OF 2008:
1.Weston Johnson
Sweet kid singing all your favourite country hits via youtube live from his Wisconsin dorm room, his placement on this list is mostly a convenient excuse to point out some of the most interesting live singing is coming electronically, in a culture that sort of requires this constant documentation of media sources, the idea of live singing as going somewhere might be heading to the same place as the album format. That said, the intimacy, his controlling of texts, his wavering voice, and his gentility make me wish the best for him.
COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST SONGWRITERS OF 2008:
1. Rodney Crowell
2. Dolly Parton
3.Toby Keith
COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST DUOS, TRIOS OR GROUPS OF 2008:
1. The Roys
2. The Wreckers
3.
COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST NEW ACTS OF 2008:
1. Heidi Newfield
2. Jennifer Hansen
3.Dean Brody
COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST OVERALL ACTS OF 2008:
1. Toby Keith
2. Shooter Jennings
3.Carrie Underwood
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
1. Down in yon forest be a hall,
Sing May, Queen May, sing Mary!
'Tis coverlided over with purple and pall.
Sing all good men for the new-born Baby!
2. Oh in that hall is a pallet bed:
Sing May, Queen May, sing Mary!
'Tis stained with blood like cardinal red.
Sing all good men for the new-born Baby!
3. And at that pallet is a stone
Sing May, Queen May, sing Mary!
On which the Virgin did atone
Sing all good men for the new-born Baby!
4. Under that Hall is a gushing flood:
Sing May, Queen May, sing Mary!
From Christ's own side 'tis water and blood.
Sing all good men for the new-born Baby!
5. Beside that bed a shrub tree grows,
Sing May, Queen May, sing Mary!
Since He was born hit blooms and blows.
Sing all good men for the new-born Baby!
6. Oh, on that bed a young Squire sleeps,
Sing May, Queen May, sing Mary!
His wounds are sick, and see, he weeps.
Sing all good men for the new-born Baby!
7. Oh hail yon Hall were none can sin,
Sing May, Queen May, sing Mary!
Cause hit's gold outside and silver within,
Sing all good men for the new-born Baby!
North Carolina Version of Don on Yon Forrest, Elizabethan Carol
Sing May, Queen May, sing Mary!
'Tis coverlided over with purple and pall.
Sing all good men for the new-born Baby!
2. Oh in that hall is a pallet bed:
Sing May, Queen May, sing Mary!
'Tis stained with blood like cardinal red.
Sing all good men for the new-born Baby!
3. And at that pallet is a stone
Sing May, Queen May, sing Mary!
On which the Virgin did atone
Sing all good men for the new-born Baby!
4. Under that Hall is a gushing flood:
Sing May, Queen May, sing Mary!
From Christ's own side 'tis water and blood.
Sing all good men for the new-born Baby!
5. Beside that bed a shrub tree grows,
Sing May, Queen May, sing Mary!
Since He was born hit blooms and blows.
Sing all good men for the new-born Baby!
6. Oh, on that bed a young Squire sleeps,
Sing May, Queen May, sing Mary!
His wounds are sick, and see, he weeps.
Sing all good men for the new-born Baby!
7. Oh hail yon Hall were none can sin,
Sing May, Queen May, sing Mary!
Cause hit's gold outside and silver within,
Sing all good men for the new-born Baby!
North Carolina Version of Don on Yon Forrest, Elizabethan Carol
thousands of mp3s of birdsongs
please buy me this prada watch, its all chunky and cubey and has slightly off colours.
farnsworth gingerbread house.
radioshack calendar from 1965.
bolts that light up when they are over tightened.
a charming interview with arthur russells partner--it makes russell sound quiet, easy going, and foundationally kind. i am glad that his music and his life are getting this kind of attention. (i also think that measures of queer domesticity, of the quiet every day banalities of our lives, mark a shift of what queer lives encompass.
f-18 Crash in a suburban neighbourhood in San Deigo yesterday.
the conservative anglicans mark the first formal moves towards schism.this ny times story has a telling qoute:
I wonder, sometimes, if Schism is inmevitable, if seeking ways to split that are loving and honest and accurate to the beliefs of both tradition and current practice, of leaving when things are utterly untennable, is the proper way to do t hings, and i also wonder about what the anglicans can learn from the lutherans---and also, if protestants believe that the church is constantly renewing, are not all times reformation times?
Mickey Mantle, Flordia, mid 50s
140 turkish writers and academics have formally apologized for the areminan genocide.
Ron Blagojevich Govenor of Illinois, is not only a corrupt motherfucker, he is not paticuallry creative or talented in his bribe seeking and bribe taking.
New Antacrtic robot meant for gathering information about climate change.
Small interview with the v. earnest Robert Adams, that sort of answers the is he being (ironic/critical/enmeshed/loving) towards his (new) topographies.
a storm troopers day on the beach
thank you for choosing the hyatt regency purgatory.
Edward Muybridge, Animal Locomotion 156, 187?
fantastic easy to use videos and recipes for indian cookery.
this might be my single of the year. kate miller heidke creates a perfect brit dance track (think totally addicted to bass or chewing gum or sugababes) and then sings a song about how she cannot dance. (really funny lyrics too)
steidl catalog entry on STernfield's Oxbow Archives, which I saw at Luhring Augstine when i was in NYC. The entry is a nice essay making connections b/w the landscape as STernfield sees it, and as Church painted it a couple of hundred years earlier, a historical overlay missing in the LA materials.
ARthur Fosik, Lion,2006 Painted Wood (shown at Scope, Art Basel, Miami)
Alison Malones daughters of job seires are a little too obvious, they document a masonic group of adolsecent girls, and have all of the pseduo mysticism, blankness masking anthropological gawkiness, mocking of small towns, and teenage girl gangliness that sells very well.
i do like how lurid and ugly gregory jacobsen's paintings are. (though they obv. have a profound fear of the vagina, and a hatred of women that verges on the pathological.)
Montanna legalizes doctor assisted sucide.
obama plans huge amounts of capital for infastructure programs.
the cia is hiring
Two On Set shots from the Creature of the Black Lagoon, from the google life archives.
an entire blog worth of owl tattoos.
Macy Thanksgiving day baloons from 1927
naked girls in halloween masks.
i want this house even if ray thinks it looks like a hotel (he is wrong)
The Northwestern team is currently in the process of securing funding to determine what ingredient in bourbon enables one to finally wrestle one's stepfather to the ground. via the onion.
Shape Note conference from 1996, Singing the Mercy Seat (look at the links on the side for more footage)
benny hinn reaches new levels of simony.
Annie LEbowitz shot of Michelle Obama in next months vogue
fantastic photos of the Faile studio in NEw York, including footage of their recent scuptural work.
gerald edwards photos of suburban churches are really boring in a most excellent way (what i want to do with the j/w seires)
kinky kong
koatar ide's shell house, just outside of osaka, has a perfect, skewed modernism, like the best of tezuka.
I kind of like Julia Roberts now that she is going all meta and plus this is Clive Owen making fun of his own personae, and it is directed by Tony Gilroy, and i fucking loved Michael Clayton. But it's going to be awful isn't it.
two inch cermaic tiles printed with your image.
esquires
Johns Hopkins reviewed 21 Studies and 150k people, and determined that Abortion and Depression are not related.
Glen Ligon, Gold, date unknown.
Songs, Drones, and Refrains of Death
Texts by Federico García Lorca
1968
Baritone, electric guitar, electric double bass, amplified piano/amplified harpsichord, and two percussionists George Crumb
south african youth are smoking and sniffing anti retrovirals to get high.
1976 scans of Avedon's The Family, portraits of promient Nixonians.
please buy me this prada watch, its all chunky and cubey and has slightly off colours.
farnsworth gingerbread house.
radioshack calendar from 1965.
bolts that light up when they are over tightened.
a charming interview with arthur russells partner--it makes russell sound quiet, easy going, and foundationally kind. i am glad that his music and his life are getting this kind of attention. (i also think that measures of queer domesticity, of the quiet every day banalities of our lives, mark a shift of what queer lives encompass.
As I cooked dinner most nights we would usually coordinate eating with watching the “Muppet Show” at 7:30. We both liked the silliness of the various characters and how they would tease and interact with the guest hosts. About an hour later we would have a nightly ritual of determining if we should go get some ice cream, who should go get it and what kind. Being somewhat ‘health conscious’, but still wanting a treat we would finally agree on Hagen Dasz honey vanilla, Arthur usually being the one to go up and down the six flights of stairs to get it! Since I had the “9 to 5” job I would soon be off to sleep while he put on his headphones and played the Casio keyboard, quietly recording into the night in the next room. I still have one of those keyboards, the Casio MT30, which he worked with many, many years ago. He often placed a battery on a key to create a sustained drone along with his playing and singing. Besides his interest in various drum machines, and keyboards Casio’s, DX7’s, etc., Arthur went through innumerable boxes of cassette tapes, each new version of the ‘Walkman’ and batteries, batteries and more batteries!
I have fond memories of Arthur preparing for various performances with his and Steven Hall’s group, the Sailboats or with Ernie Brooks and The Necessaries. As usual there might have been some frustrations for him if a particular music executive didn’t show up or a complaint about the sound system but I also remember the tenderness of our personal time together. I remember one particular late night walking home from a gig with him along a very quiet, desolate lower Broadway, just above Houston Street. It was perhaps 1:00 AM and there were no cars or businesses to be seen. We might have easily walked a few blocks right in the middle of the road. That gradually changed to the busy area it is now. I was so happy just ambling on home with him carrying his cello.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
f-18 Crash in a suburban neighbourhood in San Deigo yesterday.
the conservative anglicans mark the first formal moves towards schism.this ny times story has a telling qoute:
“We’re going through Reformation times, and in Reformation times things aren’t neat and clean,” Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, a conservative who led his diocese out of the Episcopal Church in October, said in an interview. “In Reformation times, new structures are emerging.”
I wonder, sometimes, if Schism is inmevitable, if seeking ways to split that are loving and honest and accurate to the beliefs of both tradition and current practice, of leaving when things are utterly untennable, is the proper way to do t hings, and i also wonder about what the anglicans can learn from the lutherans---and also, if protestants believe that the church is constantly renewing, are not all times reformation times?
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Mickey Mantle, Flordia, mid 50s
140 turkish writers and academics have formally apologized for the areminan genocide.
Ron Blagojevich Govenor of Illinois, is not only a corrupt motherfucker, he is not paticuallry creative or talented in his bribe seeking and bribe taking.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
New Antacrtic robot meant for gathering information about climate change.
Small interview with the v. earnest Robert Adams, that sort of answers the is he being (ironic/critical/enmeshed/loving) towards his (new) topographies.
a storm troopers day on the beach
thank you for choosing the hyatt regency purgatory.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Edward Muybridge, Animal Locomotion 156, 187?
fantastic easy to use videos and recipes for indian cookery.
this might be my single of the year. kate miller heidke creates a perfect brit dance track (think totally addicted to bass or chewing gum or sugababes) and then sings a song about how she cannot dance. (really funny lyrics too)
steidl catalog entry on STernfield's Oxbow Archives, which I saw at Luhring Augstine when i was in NYC. The entry is a nice essay making connections b/w the landscape as STernfield sees it, and as Church painted it a couple of hundred years earlier, a historical overlay missing in the LA materials.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
ARthur Fosik, Lion,2006 Painted Wood (shown at Scope, Art Basel, Miami)
Alison Malones daughters of job seires are a little too obvious, they document a masonic group of adolsecent girls, and have all of the pseduo mysticism, blankness masking anthropological gawkiness, mocking of small towns, and teenage girl gangliness that sells very well.
i do like how lurid and ugly gregory jacobsen's paintings are. (though they obv. have a profound fear of the vagina, and a hatred of women that verges on the pathological.)
Montanna legalizes doctor assisted sucide.
obama plans huge amounts of capital for infastructure programs.
the cia is hiring
 |
| From Untitled Album |
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Two On Set shots from the Creature of the Black Lagoon, from the google life archives.
an entire blog worth of owl tattoos.
Macy Thanksgiving day baloons from 1927
naked girls in halloween masks.
i want this house even if ray thinks it looks like a hotel (he is wrong)
The Northwestern team is currently in the process of securing funding to determine what ingredient in bourbon enables one to finally wrestle one's stepfather to the ground. via the onion.
Shape Note conference from 1996, Singing the Mercy Seat (look at the links on the side for more footage)
benny hinn reaches new levels of simony.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Annie LEbowitz shot of Michelle Obama in next months vogue
fantastic photos of the Faile studio in NEw York, including footage of their recent scuptural work.
gerald edwards photos of suburban churches are really boring in a most excellent way (what i want to do with the j/w seires)
kinky kong
koatar ide's shell house, just outside of osaka, has a perfect, skewed modernism, like the best of tezuka.
I kind of like Julia Roberts now that she is going all meta and plus this is Clive Owen making fun of his own personae, and it is directed by Tony Gilroy, and i fucking loved Michael Clayton. But it's going to be awful isn't it.
two inch cermaic tiles printed with your image.
esquires
70 Best Sentences, including: Twenty-four years later, on Wednesday, August 28, at nine-thirty o'clock, in full view of ten million people, the little door in William F. Buckley Jr.'s forehead suddenly opened and out sprang that wild cuckoo which I had always known was there but had wanted so much for others, preferably millions of others, to get a good look at. --Gore Vidal, "A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley Jr.," 1969
and
Jen comes to meet Nan and Tom and John and she's determined to keep it cool with Tom, to show Nan that she honors her position as Tom's primary. --John H. Richardson, "Scenes from a (Group) Marriage," 1999
Johns Hopkins reviewed 21 Studies and 150k people, and determined that Abortion and Depression are not related.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Glen Ligon, Gold, date unknown.
Songs, Drones, and Refrains of Death
Texts by Federico García Lorca
1968
Baritone, electric guitar, electric double bass, amplified piano/amplified harpsichord, and two percussionists George Crumb
south african youth are smoking and sniffing anti retrovirals to get high.
1976 scans of Avedon's The Family, portraits of promient Nixonians.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Monday, December 08, 2008
Friday, December 05, 2008
Auter Personality Test:
It’s not strange to disagree about movies that are wildly different, and there are surely a few random movies that are very polarizing. What I find most interesting is which movie people consider the best movie from a particular director, as it is usually very telling and polarizing in a different way, so to this point I will propose a new personality test where you reblog your favorite movie from each of these directors:
1. Joel Coen: No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski, Fargo, The Hudsucker Proxy, Miller’s Crossing, Raising Arizona, etc
2. Wes Anderson: The Darjeeling Limited, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Royal Tennenbaums, Rushmore, Bottle Rocket, etc
3. Hal Ashby: Being There, Shampoo, Harold and Maude, etc
4. Kevin Smith: Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Dogma, Chasing Amy, Mallrats, Clerks, etc
5. Quentin Tarantino: Grindhouse, Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, etc
Mine: Fargo, Tennenbaums, Shampoo (this was the hardest), Chasing Amy, Kill Bill
It’s not strange to disagree about movies that are wildly different, and there are surely a few random movies that are very polarizing. What I find most interesting is which movie people consider the best movie from a particular director, as it is usually very telling and polarizing in a different way, so to this point I will propose a new personality test where you reblog your favorite movie from each of these directors:
1. Joel Coen: No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski, Fargo, The Hudsucker Proxy, Miller’s Crossing, Raising Arizona, etc
2. Wes Anderson: The Darjeeling Limited, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Royal Tennenbaums, Rushmore, Bottle Rocket, etc
3. Hal Ashby: Being There, Shampoo, Harold and Maude, etc
4. Kevin Smith: Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Dogma, Chasing Amy, Mallrats, Clerks, etc
5. Quentin Tarantino: Grindhouse, Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, etc
Mine: Fargo, Tennenbaums, Shampoo (this was the hardest), Chasing Amy, Kill Bill
Thursday, December 04, 2008
Iris Dement, God Might Forgive You, But I Won't
Odetta, who i listened to thruout my childhood, and who was hoping to preform for Obama's inaguration, died yesterday at 77.
this is me
48 criterion box covers
speigel choses 21 photos that best depict the recent mumbai disaster. including one that eeriley evokes the munich crisis of 1972
james jowers new york street photographer, 50 images from the george eastman collection, carefullly annotated on flickr.
the harper government is looking to bankrupt the liberals and npds, and have attempted to do this for some time.
toronto zoo had a monorail?
several recent public buildings, including the Oslo Opera House are intended to be used as underground skate parks.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Michelle Obama, Annie Lebowitz, 2008
patchwork pavillion a hi tech, patterned scrim around a gallery reminsecent of the barcleona house, designed by DOMA in Brasilla
nicholas hughes photos of trees shrouded in mist, have a gothic fairy tale qaulity, that is so swooningly romantic, the cliches kind of evaporate.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
I think i am becoming a pissqueen
british rugbyd has designed strategies to combat homophobia by its audience
fascinating discussion of the free speech concessions that google makes world wide, in order to get market square
what would i do with a case of the bibles?
RAchel Maddow lists (extensively) every bushie that was arrested, charged, or indicated/
chinese toy factory workers riot in dongguan.
Smores made via microwave!
shave my yeti
frying panda
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Whale Roadside Attraction, Californa,
actor bots
christian nymphos tell you the ways to have sex that would make jesus happy
keith urban makes a rock and roll erotic ode to the wearing of the white dress shirt.
5 centuries of board games
a really nice formalist essay about Durer's The Large Turf, from 1503.
indonesia devolps a paticuallry genocidal solution for the local pwa population
patrick leger does all those drawings the hipsters adore , but with an anglophillic, sexy edge.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
James Dobkin, Newark Waterfront, 2008
a miami judge has ruled the most recent anti gay adoption bill to be unconstituional.
temporary convent for swiss nuns manages to have a profund respect for both their faith and the location.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Louis Kahn, Plan 5 for the Fisher House, built 1960
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Monday, December 01, 2008
In 2008 there were at least country singles about teenage pregnancy, all of which charted. Two of these singles were in a rock argot, and two of them were the more traditional country argot. All of them were about how keeping the baby, about not seeking an abortion, or an adoption, was the expected course of action. Two of them were written and performed by women, one of them were written and performed by a man. One of them, Carrie Underwood's, Just A Dream, elucidates a narrative about being a war widow at 18. One of them, Eric Church's Two Pink Lines, is an innovative narrative constructed in real time, with a strange Deus Ex Machina ending, One of them, Knocked Up, has lyrical and musical mirroring of Brenda Lee's Let's Jump the Broomstick, and all of them forget the 2002 Tim McGraw single, Red Rag Top, with it's then scandalous mention of abortion as not only an option, but a done deed.
These texts are unsettled, popular, and often lead to more questions then answers. Including was McGraw such a famous person in 2002, that he could safely mention the politically infeasible? Is this another example (with the Underwood weepie) of melodrama being used to safely couch dangerous political or social thought? Is there an autonomy to teenage pregnancy, and a rural/suburban attitude towards problem solving and against frank discussion of sexualities that inform these texts? Is there a connection between the discourses of Sarah Palin's granddaughter and the parents who direct these texts? How do they fit into the proto-feminisms of Loretta Lynn's the Pill or Jeannie C Riley's the Rib, for example? Is there something similar in the recent move by radical anti-abortion advocates against direct action and in favour of houses for unwed mothers?
I hope to use these three new songs, and Red Rag Top, to start discussing these questions using a variety of lenses including reportage, statistical analysis, critiques of media, psycho-geographic analysis of the American west and south, recent attempts to queer melodrama, protestant theologies of the body, arguments from a wide variety of sources about autonomy and abortion, histories of childhood, and studies of critical whiteness in rural societies. I hope then to not answer anything, but provide a map of strategic engagements around such difficult sites.
These texts are unsettled, popular, and often lead to more questions then answers. Including was McGraw such a famous person in 2002, that he could safely mention the politically infeasible? Is this another example (with the Underwood weepie) of melodrama being used to safely couch dangerous political or social thought? Is there an autonomy to teenage pregnancy, and a rural/suburban attitude towards problem solving and against frank discussion of sexualities that inform these texts? Is there a connection between the discourses of Sarah Palin's granddaughter and the parents who direct these texts? How do they fit into the proto-feminisms of Loretta Lynn's the Pill or Jeannie C Riley's the Rib, for example? Is there something similar in the recent move by radical anti-abortion advocates against direct action and in favour of houses for unwed mothers?
I hope to use these three new songs, and Red Rag Top, to start discussing these questions using a variety of lenses including reportage, statistical analysis, critiques of media, psycho-geographic analysis of the American west and south, recent attempts to queer melodrama, protestant theologies of the body, arguments from a wide variety of sources about autonomy and abortion, histories of childhood, and studies of critical whiteness in rural societies. I hope then to not answer anything, but provide a map of strategic engagements around such difficult sites.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Toby Keith Don't Make Me The Bad Guy
Kenny Chesney---Everyone Wants to Get to Heaven
Dean Brody Undone
Josh Turner Everything is Fine
Justin Moore Back that Thing Up
Carrie Underwood Just A Dream
Randy Travis Faith In You
Eric Church Two Pink Lines
Shooter Jenning This Ol Wheel
Clint Black Long Cool Woman
Kenny Chesney---Everyone Wants to Get to Heaven
Dean Brody Undone
Josh Turner Everything is Fine
Justin Moore Back that Thing Up
Carrie Underwood Just A Dream
Randy Travis Faith In You
Eric Church Two Pink Lines
Shooter Jenning This Ol Wheel
Clint Black Long Cool Woman
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Long List of Country Singles
1)Toby Keith Don't Make Me The Bad Guy
2)Kenny Chesney---Down The Road
3)Kenny Chesney---Everyone Wants to Get to Heaven
4)Heidi Newfield---Cry, Cry (Until the Sunshines)
5)Heidi Newfield Knocked Up
6) Shawn Hammonds—Everything
7) Dean Brody Undone
8)Gary Allan She's So California
9) Lee Ann Rimes—What I Cannot Change
10) Joshn Turner Everything is Fine
11)Trace Adkins Muddy Water
12)Justin Moore Back that Thing Up
13)Carrie Underwood Just A Dream
14)Lance Old Back in the New School
15)Toby Keith—She Never Cried in Front of ME
16) The Roys, Working Girl Blues
17)Darren Kozeslky—I only have good days
18)Lee Brice---Upper Middle Class White Trash
19) Lee Ann Womack Last Call
20) Keith Urban You Look Good In My Shirt
21) Steve Azar Soilders Song
22)Becky Schelgel Spotlight
23)Sherry Lyn Love or something like it
24)Randy Travis Faith In You
25)Alan Jackson Good Time
26)Rodney Atkins Invisbly Shaken
27)Eric Church Two Pink Lines
28)Shooter Jenning This Ol Wheel
29)Kenny Chesney Better As A Memory
30)Mark Thompson Perfume and Gasloine
31)Clint Black Long Cool Woman
32)Rachel Williams Firestarter
33)Shannon Willaims That's Why God Made ME
34)Randy Owen Braid my Hair
35)Carters Chord Youre Gonna Miss This=
36)Keith Urban Sweet Thing
1)Toby Keith Don't Make Me The Bad Guy
2)Kenny Chesney---Down The Road
3)Kenny Chesney---Everyone Wants to Get to Heaven
4)Heidi Newfield---Cry, Cry (Until the Sunshines)
5)Heidi Newfield Knocked Up
6) Shawn Hammonds—Everything
7) Dean Brody Undone
8)Gary Allan She's So California
9) Lee Ann Rimes—What I Cannot Change
10) Joshn Turner Everything is Fine
11)Trace Adkins Muddy Water
12)Justin Moore Back that Thing Up
13)Carrie Underwood Just A Dream
14)Lance Old Back in the New School
15)Toby Keith—She Never Cried in Front of ME
16) The Roys, Working Girl Blues
17)Darren Kozeslky—I only have good days
18)Lee Brice---Upper Middle Class White Trash
19) Lee Ann Womack Last Call
20) Keith Urban You Look Good In My Shirt
21) Steve Azar Soilders Song
22)Becky Schelgel Spotlight
23)Sherry Lyn Love or something like it
24)Randy Travis Faith In You
25)Alan Jackson Good Time
26)Rodney Atkins Invisbly Shaken
27)Eric Church Two Pink Lines
28)Shooter Jenning This Ol Wheel
29)Kenny Chesney Better As A Memory
30)Mark Thompson Perfume and Gasloine
31)Clint Black Long Cool Woman
32)Rachel Williams Firestarter
33)Shannon Willaims That's Why God Made ME
34)Randy Owen Braid my Hair
35)Carters Chord Youre Gonna Miss This=
36)Keith Urban Sweet Thing
fame, intimacy, devotion to, and branching away from common texts, desire, the gaze (both given and returned), and live in the most real sense--the acapella of it. (there is also something in his humilty, the running commentary over the intro to the river, even in a culture that sort of requires this constant documentation of media sources, the slippage and the punctum is the awkwardness at the beginning, where one is not sure how to begin, the interpreting of the text becomes more impt then the creation of new texts or even annotations of old ones) (or how he puts qoutes around "biz" and "video world")
(he also cannot sing v. well, or at least, maybe used to studio mechanics to autotune, to the perfection of voices, the cracked and awkardness makes one think that singing becomes difficult) (its the why wont tom waites end up on american idol question) (not that this guy is tom waites)
(his version of hallejuah with the chorus being much closer to protestant praise songs, and the line "remember when i moved in you" rushed and the holy chorus extended...and he can sing.)
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
The relic hunters were at Cape Kennedy, scouring the burning saw grass for instrument panels and flying suits and — most valuable of all — the mummified corpses of the dead astronauts. These blackened fragments of collarbone and shin, kneecap and rib, were the unique relics of the Space Age, as treasured as the saintly bones of mediaeval shrines.
Ballard, Dead Astronaut
Ballard, Dead Astronaut
slide show of black metal logos by Christophe Szpajdel, (its oddly comforting to know that there is a master of everything)
Sontag riding an elevator is just about as sexy as Jackie O evading the paps or Jean Seberg smoking.
excellent defense of Hilary as SoS via Andrew Sullivan. Money Qoute:
Prince Williams' Penis, as he pisses during a polo game.
flash makings of mad fold ins, there are several from the vietnam era, that made me realise that mad was angirly, explicitly political, about actual events, as opposed to just generally teenage era subversion.
beautiful vintage video of seatlles world fair monorail.
Timothy Griethner is the new president of the federal reserve.
long historical interview with obama about religion. his first answer is basically, i think, a solid, answer to the liberal xian problem of exclusivity and multiculturalism,
natural harvest: a collection of semen based recipes.
Xray of Womans Foot, wearing hobnail boots, ca 1891
mike munerio
s urban zen drawings, large white helvetica text on black fields, have a machine made quality, but are v. funny.
robot to aid children's care,
10 photos of somali pirates via the gaurdian (frankly, i am trying to find a reason to be against these people, i mean outside the usual worries about overly romanticising outlaws and mercanaries.)
a translation and essay about the implications that Obama's two FCC transition team heads are WOW players.
PJ O'Roake decimates current conserative thot, and then attempts for a revival.
Chrysler Ford and GM CEOS took private jets to go to washington to beg for money.
gulf war syndrome has been proving to be accurate.
Johns. Crosshatch, Lithograph, 1971
(fascianting, because it is cruder, and more muddy, more painterly then similar paintings of that era, that he was willing to make the processes of mechanical repro contain the same aesthetic questions as the abstracted paint on canvas, break down the category in formally similar ways to Warhol, who was about to work return to painting about this time, and to Lstein who was making t shirts and limoges pottery--the 5 to 10 years b/w handpainted pop to mechincal repros, and then back to handpainted pop, is really found in this basically disposable peice.
increase in poaching thruout the UK, including lamping (blinding stags with haolgen lamps), and the prying of mussels loose from their beds.
in what should be a model for North America the Indianapolis musuem of Art has purchased the Miller house, a brillaint modernist rectangle, designed by Saariean (imagine Miami art musuems buying Paul Rudolph houses. MoMa buying that Johnson townhouse, the Art Instiute of Chicago doing the right thing and sponsoring the Farnsworth house, Kansas City buying Louis Sullivan propeties, but not LAMoCA, because it is losing mroe money then ever)
i think that the problems with LA are mostly problems of management, no musuem in a city that wealthy and that large, should "burn thru" 20m in a year with out a solid plan and a real endowment. A city of 9.9m should be large enough to sustain at least two musuems as well.
modular cabinet, laminate and wood, scandavian grace, 2008
i have been playing D and D every couple of weeks for the last 3 months or so, and i have enjoyed it, but the politics, and the choosing of violence over story telling has been bothering me, this discussion of race in the game is a well thot out, well written discussion of these issues.
Kate Moss knows how to pose
the corperal implications of the soul, seems to be uniquely part of the abrhamic covenant, as recent discussions and uncoverings of near eastern, non isrealite sources, have been found.
Catholic Priest Signing, mid 50s, from the Gaudlof(sp) collection
3 pages of fake moustaches and beards, on the same bald, middle aged, and oddly teutonic model.
production notes from Thomas Kinkaide, about hsi movie.
motley vision the lds culture blog, interviews stephanie meyer about the lds implications of her work (i did not realise that she was devout)
Neil Hannon deconstructs Eurovision.
jewel store robbery at the waldorf, is it the 70s again?
first diagram of modern art i remember seeing.
new york magazine more carefully discusses the problematic gender that occurs with discussions of both Palin and Clinton.
poodles, creatively groomed
David Chiperfield, National Library of Germany, Berlin (cf the Rohe Musuem of Modern Art)
Sontag riding an elevator is just about as sexy as Jackie O evading the paps or Jean Seberg smoking.
excellent defense of Hilary as SoS via Andrew Sullivan. Money Qoute:
There’s also the small question of Iraq. Think of the appointment this way: “You voted for this bloody war, Hillary; you can end it.” Withdrawing from Iraq will not be easy and it may well be gruesome. I have no confidence that the place won’t erupt into an even nastier civil war when the United States pulls out than it did when the United States didn’t fully push in. How does a president avoid the domestic blow-back of essentially cutting his losses on a doomed adventure? He uses Clinton as a protective shield from domestic critics.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Prince Williams' Penis, as he pisses during a polo game.
flash makings of mad fold ins, there are several from the vietnam era, that made me realise that mad was angirly, explicitly political, about actual events, as opposed to just generally teenage era subversion.
beautiful vintage video of seatlles world fair monorail.
Timothy Griethner is the new president of the federal reserve.
long historical interview with obama about religion. his first answer is basically, i think, a solid, answer to the liberal xian problem of exclusivity and multiculturalism,
natural harvest: a collection of semen based recipes.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Xray of Womans Foot, wearing hobnail boots, ca 1891
mike munerio
s urban zen drawings, large white helvetica text on black fields, have a machine made quality, but are v. funny.
robot to aid children's care,
10 photos of somali pirates via the gaurdian (frankly, i am trying to find a reason to be against these people, i mean outside the usual worries about overly romanticising outlaws and mercanaries.)
a translation and essay about the implications that Obama's two FCC transition team heads are WOW players.
PJ O'Roake decimates current conserative thot, and then attempts for a revival.
Chrysler Ford and GM CEOS took private jets to go to washington to beg for money.
gulf war syndrome has been proving to be accurate.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Johns. Crosshatch, Lithograph, 1971
(fascianting, because it is cruder, and more muddy, more painterly then similar paintings of that era, that he was willing to make the processes of mechanical repro contain the same aesthetic questions as the abstracted paint on canvas, break down the category in formally similar ways to Warhol, who was about to work return to painting about this time, and to Lstein who was making t shirts and limoges pottery--the 5 to 10 years b/w handpainted pop to mechincal repros, and then back to handpainted pop, is really found in this basically disposable peice.
increase in poaching thruout the UK, including lamping (blinding stags with haolgen lamps), and the prying of mussels loose from their beds.
in what should be a model for North America the Indianapolis musuem of Art has purchased the Miller house, a brillaint modernist rectangle, designed by Saariean (imagine Miami art musuems buying Paul Rudolph houses. MoMa buying that Johnson townhouse, the Art Instiute of Chicago doing the right thing and sponsoring the Farnsworth house, Kansas City buying Louis Sullivan propeties, but not LAMoCA, because it is losing mroe money then ever)
i think that the problems with LA are mostly problems of management, no musuem in a city that wealthy and that large, should "burn thru" 20m in a year with out a solid plan and a real endowment. A city of 9.9m should be large enough to sustain at least two musuems as well.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
modular cabinet, laminate and wood, scandavian grace, 2008
i have been playing D and D every couple of weeks for the last 3 months or so, and i have enjoyed it, but the politics, and the choosing of violence over story telling has been bothering me, this discussion of race in the game is a well thot out, well written discussion of these issues.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Kate Moss knows how to pose
the harper's cover story this month, actrually state that this was the mnost efficient, but least likely option to prosceute Bush and co for war crimes. hope it works.
A South Texas grand jury has indicted Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on charges related to the alleged abuse of prisoners in Willacy County's federal detention centers.
the corperal implications of the soul, seems to be uniquely part of the abrhamic covenant, as recent discussions and uncoverings of near eastern, non isrealite sources, have been found.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Catholic Priest Signing, mid 50s, from the Gaudlof(sp) collection
3 pages of fake moustaches and beards, on the same bald, middle aged, and oddly teutonic model.
production notes from Thomas Kinkaide, about hsi movie.
motley vision the lds culture blog, interviews stephanie meyer about the lds implications of her work (i did not realise that she was devout)
Neil Hannon deconstructs Eurovision.
jewel store robbery at the waldorf, is it the 70s again?
 |
| From Untitled Album |
first diagram of modern art i remember seeing.
new york magazine more carefully discusses the problematic gender that occurs with discussions of both Palin and Clinton.
poodles, creatively groomed
(who said romance was dead)
Attention PVPer's: You have the chance to make a guy settle down, force him to submit to one woman for the rest of his life. If you want to essentialy do the same as pod a 'carebear' in his best 'titan' ship - only in real life - please read on.
My bf joked today that if I filled a choron with corpses, he would marry me. He's kind of fond of testing peoples commitment, but he always follows through with his bets if they prove themselves.
I have known him for a while, and he would not say this unless he meant it. Thing is, looking at the charons cargo hold I dont think I can do it all myself.. but then again he never said I had to do it alone.
So here is the deal: I need your corpses. Contract, trade, I need them. I'm still kinda new and I dont have a lot of isk (I'm told that some people have millions of isk) but I want to try becouse I think he's worth it.
I know this is a strange thing to ask, but from what I have seen in this game so far Eve is filled with people who could help.
Please?
EDIT:
Thanks guys!
1. When I asked him he said that he was not aware of the limit of items in a container; He told me the number of corpses is what matters here.
2. He knows how difficult this will be and said that was the idea; His quote: "Something easily gotten is not highly valued.".
3. I like to mine ore in Amsen, so if the corpses show up there I would be really happy. :)
Thank you for all your support!
 |
| From Untitled Album |
David Chiperfield, National Library of Germany, Berlin (cf the Rohe Musuem of Modern Art)
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