thursday morning shopping spree
lkjashdfglkjahsdfgkljahdfgljkahdfgasdfgh
The most important/terrifying two seconds of the new anti-Obama ad.
(Source: alexbalk)
nobody asked my opinion on this (haha, whatever—blogs!!) but i just had to get this off my chest because a lot of people were hating on TED talks today and i started feeling that protective sort of feeling you get when a thing you’ve hated on so tirelessly for so long ends up on the receiving end of a lot more widespread hate and it’s like seeing your little hate baby all grown up and leaving the nest and that’s weird.
but anyway TED talks are stupid for the same reason the curator’s code is stupid: mutual admiration societies for people who think mere thinking—about anything at all, really!—oughtta get a gold star.
as if the the daily feeding at the trough of ‘infotainment’ (ugh, that word) has so lowered the bar of what passes for baseline intellectual cognition that the mere intention one displays by googling, idk, “[jacques derrida/walter benjamin/some other bro i read in my intro to crit class] and the effect of [something relevant to the latest episode of ‘mad men’]” is the new normal of intellectual curiosity.
but intellect when donned as a twee affectation leads generally only to puerility (or a TED laminate, i guess?). oh you spent the last 5 minutes reading a wired article instead of playing farmville? mazel tov, kiddo, here, have a 20 minute panel to tell us all about the emancipatory implications of helvetica neue at a conference that establishes exclusivity not with intellectual rigor but with a $7,500 ticket price.
anyway, moral of the story, if you ever catch me looking for a pat on the back because HEY YOU GUYS LOOK I JUST USED MY BRAIN please just push me out a fucking window thanks.
“Colleen the Socialist, ironically, is not a fan of social media, because she thinks it’s still ‘nascent’ and doesn’t really have its shit together yet. ‘I’m sure the first thing that came out of the Gutenberg press wasn’t that great,’ she said. ‘The Bible?’ asked the startled moderator. ‘No, I’m sure there was a lot of crap before then…’ ‘No, I think the Bible was the first thing.’” — ahahahahhahahahaahahahahahahahaahaaaa
“Possibly”
Good lord, a mixed-race person who is president of the United States just endorsed gay marriage several years after passing health care reform. Do you know how many of those things were inconceivable 5 years ago? You can be happy about this without having to be happy about everything else the man or the country does. Tomorrow morning we should certainly go back to being unhappy about drones and torture and global warming and everything else, but for today, let’s not pretend this was inevitable. This moment is a reasonably big deal. It’s a good thing, and it didn’t have to happen, but it did. The fact of its happening can be good without saying anything about the goodness of the person doing it. There’s still a ways to go, but this had to happen before we got there, and now it has. Hooray. Have a small drink.
“I’m a fan, personally, of art that sucks at marketing itself, that doesn’t have a cute backstory or a built-in ‘platform,’ that is not cuddly or ‘adorkable’ and doesn’t immediately lend itself to a hierarchy of ‘rewards’ for ‘backers,’ that is antisocial and prickly and deeply strange. So the trend towards crowdsourced funding for exactly the opposite kind of art leaves me cold. But if someone like Justin, whose blog posts defy description, wants to give people access to his work in exchange for money and he’s found a way to do so, then I’m sorry if $2 is too expensive for you but to me it seems like a really, really, really small price to pay for A GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING LITTLE SCRAP OF HOPE FOR WEIRD NEW WORK IN THIS SHITSHOW OF A MARKETPLACE.” —
Things I Ate That I Love: Shitloads of Money
Ok, 1) this is a nice quote but also 2) I think some of you people on the internet who consider blogging enthusiastically about a $2/mo creative project an act worthy of a “go fuck yourself” really do need to put the internet down for a bit and go take a walk.
“
strange memories—
this was a time of COP SHoot COp, STP , FLY ASHTRAY, LOVE CHILD, SURGERY, dust-devils era MAX FISH…..i guess the fact that Sean SUrgery, JIm from COp shoot cop, or MIchael DUane, could actually like Pavement—- a wimpy “student” band in comparison, was strange…..
inaccuracy— new york is better now: The early nineties were the best time ever in New York since the the early 1900’s. THe beasties went to LA and played their instruments———- but JIm FOetus stayed. Stu SPasm came. Charles Gayle appeared again. THe THinking Fellers got signed by a New YOrk Label. Stereolab got signed by a new york label by Terry TOlkien. THe pYramid, THe space at Chase—great gigs. WIlliamsburg—Muggs, Earwax, THai Cafe in greenpoint.
” —Stephen Malkmus, The Twentieth Anniversary of Pavement’s “Slanted & Enchanted” (via zachbaron)
Wait does Stephen Malkmus even know how to use a computer because it’s unclear, maybe he has someone else do his fantasy sports drafts for him I guess.
(via zachbaron)