via The Commercial Appeal, thx Ned Raggett
Fuck, I’m gutted.
Pop hitmaker, cult icon, and Memphis rock icon iconoclast Alex Chilton has died. The singer and guitarist, best known as a member of ‘60s pop-soul act the Box Tops and the ‘70s power-pop act Big Star, died today at a hospital in New Orleans. Chilton, 59, had been complaining of about his health earlier today. He was taken by paramedics to the emergency room where he was pronounced dead. The cause of death is believed to be a heart attack.
Not that I give a toss about the holiday, but it’s a good excuse to post this awesome and somewhat obscure jam by Thin Lizzy. Evidently it’s an adaptation of a trad Irish chant, so there ya go.
thx JZ !
I dare you to slip this into the playlist for some people hammered off their faces tonight.
And props to all painfully uncool songs with painfully important messages.
(Related, from today’s Letters of Note: “Send cask arsenic exterminate aborigines”)
h+ magazine just published a significantly re-written, revised and expanded version of my essay “Lady Gaga and the Dead-Planet Grotesque,” updated for the “Telephone” video.
If David Bowie’s chameleonic posturing prefigured the hypertext web, Gaga may be the first version of a human being we have seen capable of thriving in the era of the social web. She is shiny, clickable, and malleable in the face of endless attention fragmentation. She is an adaptive strategy. Without any solid or “real” self, her identity becomes whatever it needs to be, immune to the toxic shock of the incoming century, fully geared up to party in the ruins. Is it any wonder that she’s provoked the response she has, both adulation and hatred? She’s the first non-boring thing to happen in pop music for almost fifteen years.
Consider Lady Gaga in prison in the beginning of her new video. That’s all of us, “held captive” in the modern condition — but Gaga is the Magician, able to transform any situation to her will. Five minutes in and she’s reassembled her outfit from chains and cigarettes and is wrapping herself around the girls in the prison yard. The other people in prison are already listening to her songs on her branded Lady Gaga headphone… she set the context before she even arrived. Though she may be in prison, she already rules the world. This is what adaptation to the 21st century looks like. The brand “Gaga” can be reassembled from anything, even in a vacuum, even from trash, just as we must learn to do with our own masks of self…
Die Tödliche Doris (The Deadly er, Doris) were a bloody-mindedly brilliant 80’s German post-punk band/ performance art concern, part of the self-styled Geniale Dilletanten movement (along with Einstürzende Neubauten and Malaria!) if you will. As a seemingly central tenet, manipulation of expectations is the rule, extending most fantastically to their 1984 release “Chöre & Soli” which consists not of conventionally playable records but rather a set of 8 miniature colored plastic discs and dedicated player. The sound content is limited to mere seconds per side, as befits the original use of the devices: the internal voice boxes of “talking” dolls. Needless to say these things are now rare as hen’s teeth. Anyone have a spare ?
I honestly don’t know what to make of this one.
This is an absurdist art piece from an ongoing project in which the artist David Livingston wears a 6’ long flaccid felt penis that he sewed and stuffed with sofa upholstery. All of his video art pieces thus far have taken place in various New York City neighborhoods.
From New York Press:
I find its childish humor appealing, and I am fascinated by my sudden transformation from anonymous pedestrian to attention-grabbing street performer. I don’t have to say a word, and it affects people in a whole host of ways. Most people either laugh or look away awkwardly. Some people are curious and want to start a conversation. Some people respond with anger. For me, the performance is about overcoming fear, but I like that it means something different to everyone who encounters me.
(via Nerdcore)
A UCLA study finds a jump in 2009 to 8.2 million adults and children from 6.4 million in 2007 stemming largely from job cuts and the loss of employer-sponsored coverage amid the recession. 1 in 4 people do not have health insurance in the richest and most populous state in the country? This is simply astonishing news and yet there are still people who doubt the need for universal health care? It pains me that people really exist who are so mean and so cheap they’d deny their fellow man a life free from worries that they’ll go bankrupt or become homeless as they go through chemo. It’s sick. It could be them next time! Do these idiots not realize this?
PUBLIC OPTION NOW!
From the front page of today’s Los Angeles TImes:
People who were uninsured for part or all of 2009 accounted for 24.3% of California’s population under age 65—a dramatic increase from 2007 driven largely by Californians who lost employer-sponsored health insurance, particularly over the last year.
Among those over age 18, nearly 1 in 3 had no insurance for all or part of 2009, the UCLA researchers found. The ranks of uninsured children also grew.
First there is Vernon Robinson for Congress. This is just fuckin’ terrible. He’s really trolling after the low IQ voters, isn’t he?
And then there is this one, for Diane Benson from Alaska. I think the message here is supposed to be “She’s got experience cleaning up messes” (and of course “She loves dogs!”) but they don’t really spell that out all that well and the ad goes from being merely ineffectual to actually being confusing for the viewer. Ultimately it gets no point across whatsoever.
The same cannot be said about the video below…
The problem I have with this one is simply that it doesn’t have the courage of its convictions. If he’d had the balls to portray the evil, grinning Wall Street magnate actually pissing on the little people, this man would be in office now (or at the very least have made a guest appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live after a fleeting YouTube viral video success).
And then there is this one where the old guy forgot to take his meds, then throws a rock in the lake. What’s he supposed to be running for???
Here Mike Gravel tries gamely to explain the rock throwing video. Here he does a rap. I think he should do a duet with Ron Paul.
Via Huffington Post