Brought to you by Dollar Shave Club

Think of all the other things you could be doing instead of wasting time at the store buying overpriced razors. You could learn a new language. You could bake a cake. Or you could finally finish that novel you’ve been working on.

Don’t worry, Dollar Shave Club has you covered. They deliver amazing razors for just a few dollars. They’ve just released four hilarious new commercials, which will soon be all over your television. The commercials showcase the frustrating and primitive experience that is buying overpriced razors at the store.

If you’re not one of the million members of Dollar Shave Club that benefit from never having to step inside a store to buy razors, these spots should definitely hit home. 

Upgrade to the smarter way to shave. Get amazing razors delivered to your door for just a few bucks. Try the Club.
 

 
Tierney manages the New Orleans bar that her grandfather started forty years ago and ran until his death in 2001, but he’s always watching over her, literally from above the bar, where an urn of his ashes rests, as requested in his last will and testament.

But Tierney’s grandfather is not the only one to find his final resting place in her family’s French Quarter saloon, as you will find out in “Accidental Undertaker.”

Tierney’s tale is part of Jack Daniel’s sprawling new interactive project The Few & Far Between: Tales of Mischief, Revelry, and Whiskey. The website collects fantastic, often bust-a-gut funny anecdotes and strangely poetic, colorful stories that have taken place in America’s favorite watering holes, saloons and dive bars.

Jack Daniel’s is partnering with VICE to promote a photo contest. The winning image of an American bar will be featured in a future Jack Daniel’s ad in an upcoming issue of VICE magazine. More information at www.talesofwhiskey.com.
 

 
They say that “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” but behind the glitz, glamour and sleaze of the Vegas strip (literally right behind it, out of view) there’s the even more lawless underbelly of “Sin City,” that well-worn part of town now often referred to as “Old Vegas.”

It is against this less than glamorous backdrop that we hear Donna’s tale… ¡Eye, caramba!

(Trust me, there is no way, none, that you are expecting the punchline.)

Donna’s outrageous story is part of Jack Daniel’s sprawling new interactive project The Few & Far Between: Tales of Mischief, Revelry, and Whiskey. The website collects fantastic, often bust-a-gut funny anecdotes and strangely poetic, colorful stories that have taken place in America’s favorite watering holes, saloons and dive bars.

Jack Daniel’s is partnering with VICE to promote a photo contest. The winning image of an American bar will be featured in a future Jack Daniel’s ad in an upcoming issue of VICE magazine. More information at www.talesofwhiskey.com.
 

 
We’ve all had a “shaggy dog story” inflicted upon us by a convivial stranger in a bar. You know, the sort of tale with a long windup, lots and lots of detail and then an improbable, or even completely and utterly pointless ending.

In “The Babysitter’s Club,” another installment of Jack Daniel’s The Few & Far Between: Tales of Mischief, Revelry, and Whiskey, we hear Jimmy Sweetwater’s shaggy duck story and learn the lesson that when easy money just seems too easy, there’s usually a catch. And if walks like a duck and talks like a duck... well, let’s Jimmy explain.

Jimmy’s story is part of Jack Daniel’s sprawling new interactive project which collects fantastic, often bust-a-gut funny anecdotes and strangely poetic, colorful stories that have taken place in America’s favorite watering holes, saloons and dive bars.

Jack Daniel’s is partnering with VICE to promote a photo contest. The winning image of an American bar will be featured in a future Jack Daniel’s ad in an upcoming issue of VICE magazine. More information at www.talesofwhiskey.com.
 

 
In this episode of “Moving Portraits: Title Shots,” we travel to Santa Cruz to learn how a lifetime of surfing and skating has shaped middleweight Luke Rockhold’s fighting style.

If you’ve ever spent any time in a California coastal town, you’ve probably noticed dozens of people heading for the beach to surf every morning at sunrise. It’s like they have to be there. Ever known a surfer who you wouldn’t describe as an adrenaline junkie? The thrill that comes from riding the breaks seems mighty addictive.

Surfing is the ultimate man against nature sport. The ultimate man against man sport—at least that which doesn’t involve actual weaponry—is mixed martial arts and Luke Rockhold, has mastered both. He’s also a skater and believes that it is his agility on the waves and on his deck informs his fighting style and stance.

Rockhold grew up surfing in Santa Cruz with his father and older brother pro surfer Matt “Rocky” Rockhold (long the face of Rip Curl). The waves there spawn the world’s best surfers, but as he mentions in the video below, Santa Cruz may appear to be a sleepy idyllic place, but it’s a fairly hard town, especially the beaches which can get very territorial between groups of surfers.

Luke Rockhold seems to have channeled his need for that adrenaline rush with his professional aspirations. As he admits in the portrait below, he was a wild and crazy, aggressive violent kid. Today the former Strikeforce Champion is #5 in the official Ultimate Fighting Championship middleweight rankings.

On November 8th, Rockhold will be battling it out with British MMA fighter Michael Bisping at UFC’s UFC Fight Night 55 at the Allphones Arena in Sydney, Australia. If their hilariously shit-talking press conference is any indication, it ought to be a doozy!
 

 
Sponsored by Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum

 
For five decades Carlos Santana has been considered one of the world’s greatest guitarists, possessing a distinctly clear tone that is as unique as a human voice. In recognition of National Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept. 15-Oct. 15) Sony Music Latin is sponsoring a contest to win a signed guitar from the man himself.

Aspiring guitarists and fans alike, enter your email to win the signed guitar below and get signed up to receive news from top Latin artists as well.
 

 
The work of Boston-based visionary artist and architect Paul Laffoley has been exhibited extensively in recent years including major museum shows in London, Paris, Berlin and Seattle. His oeuvre is informed by fringe science, a degree in architecture from Harvard and the occult. In 2009 Laffoley was awarded a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for Creative Arts.  Next year an extensive catalogue raisonné of his art is set to be published.

Paul Laffoley’s work can be categorized into several different strands: His architectural pieces which are comparable to schematics or blueprints; his inventions of apparently far out sci-fi devices (keep in mind that every single thing Jules Verne dreamed up eventually came to pass); his plans for a working time machine and for a “living” plant house that would be grown from a single seed.

The artist claims that his “Das Urpflanze Haus” will help solve the worldwide housing crisis.
 

 
How did the idea of physically alive architecture first occur to you?

I don’t… I don’t recall… (pauses) I was thinking of how to make a link all the way from Earth to the Moon and I realized that it would have to be something which was self-repairing. Something like that would always be getting hit by asteroids and space debris, so only something alive could self-repair if you were gonna do that. Fixing it would just be too impractical.

Vegetation connects to itself and grafts to its own kind. That’s how vegetables survive, by sending out rhizomes in times of danger and becoming a single plant. The German poet Goethe was fascinated by the idea that there existed an ur-plant that could connect, or graft, all of the plants on Earth together as one big worldwide plant, but he never found it. The name “Das Urpflanze Haus” is a tribute to him. But the primordial plant, something that’s been around since the Jurassic period, is Gingko Biloba—kept alive by monks in their gardens—which has DNA common to every plant living today. The link to the Moon would be constructed from shapes like Buckminster Fuller’s spheres, but they would have to be alive, to be plants. They would have to be grafted together. There would, of course, also have to be a water source.

And then I started thinking that if something like that is going to be built to go to the moon, what could we do on Earth, and that’s where the idea came from. You might use bamboo in some parts of the home, for tensile strength—think of the plants as building materials—and a different kind of plant to thatch the roof, but they would all be joined—grafted together—and have a common root system. After you would make the first vegetable house, it would go to seed and then you could grow more.

Didn’t you run this concept past Buckminster Fuller himself at some point? What was his reaction?

Yes (laughs). It was 1980 and I was a member of the World Future Society. We went to Florence and I did a presentation on this that got absolutely no reaction. I couldn’t sleep and I went down to the hotel lobby and there was Fuller, who couldn’t sleep either and so I presented him with my idea to build a link to the Moon and I asked “Don’t you think this should be a living creature and not a mechanical model?” and he agreed, but eventually I must’ve cured his insomnia because he fell asleep right there in the lobby. The next day he avoided me like the plague!

More after the jump…

 
North Carolina native Jason Trammell began collecting records when he was a kid, first buying 45s at the local mall before becoming a full-fledged vinyl junkie and obsessive music fan (with the encouragement of his parents). Along the way he also picked up the drums and a keen interest in the mechanics of audio design and film soundtrack work that serves him well in his career as a drummer for Brooklyn-based group Sinkane and as an electronic dance music remixer.

In this short video profile, Trammell shows the camera around his apartment (and part of his floor-buckling record collection) and rehearsal space and he discusses the passionate craftsmanship that goes into creating his music. Tonight in San Francisco at the Warfield and Thursday at the Greek in Los Angeles, you can catch Jason playing live with Sinkane as part of the big David Byrne-led musical celebration, “Atomic Bomb! The Music of William Onyeabor”
 

 
This sponsored post is brought to you by Ketel One.

 
A few years ago I bought a “vintage” copy of Esquire (September 1971) and much to my delight, tucked inside was a small insert of a dozen or so pages intended to guide the incoming collegiate freshperson on cultural matters such as books, movies, and music. I’ve taken the trouble to transcribe the contents of that insert into this here post, for your enjoyment.
 

The cover of the insert
 
It’s fascinating to see opinion on the ground, before posterity has a chance to congeal it. You’ll see names you don’t recognize treated with respect, and names you do recognize treated with great disrespect. The Esquire writers divided the list up into hits and misses, basically. On the “good” list are the Stones, Aretha Franklin, Chicago, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Kate Taylor, and Captain Beefheart, On the “bad” list are The Stooges, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Alice Cooper, The Steve Miller Band, and something called P-Nut Gallery.

The text is transcribed verbatim, down to every comma, colon, and ampersand. It’s reproduced exactly, as far as I can discern.
 

Barely legible scan of one of the pages
 
Where possible, I’ve tried to link to the albums that are being discussed—as I learned when I checked the albums, this is a highly imprecise endeavor, and in many cases I’m sure it’s not correct. Basically, consider it a guide at best, not an actual resource. The lesson here is that the journalists of the early 1970s were working in a veritable wasteland of information compared to what they have today, and also that Amazon and Allmusic.com are highly imperfect resources (CD information tends to trump original LP info, and so on). In many cases the artist in question didn’t release anything at all in 1971 or 1972! (At least according to popular online resources.) Please don’t write in pointing out that one of the links isn’t so super awesome; I already know that. Beyond that, your certainty is misplaced, or at least, your certainty as to what the Esquire people “must” have meant; all too often, it’s a puzzle. (Clarifications and explanations about puzzling entries are, of course, welcome.)

Having said that, do enjoy this: I’ve wanted for a while for this peculiar resource to live on the Internet, and now that’s happened.
 

Watch for [this means “good”]

Charlie Mingus: Better Git It In Your Soul (Columbia—fall). Any Mingus record deserves a listen, but beware a growing cultishness.

The Firesign Theatre: I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus (Columbia—Aug.). Rapid-fire satire.

Big Brother & The Holding Company: How Hard It Is (Columbia—Aug.). True underground music. And they can play.

Chicago: Chicago Carnegie Hall Concert (Columbia—fall). If you don’t listen to jazz but would like to, here’s a way to start.

Billie Holiday (Columbia—Sept.). Reissue, sings jazz, rhythm and blues. Buy this record.

Boz Scaggs (Columbia). Blues and country rock. Two years ago, his Atlantic album died from lack of hype. Columbia is smarter and will recognize Boz’s great worth.

New Riders of the Purple Sage (Columbia). Country rock. The Grateful Dead’s spin-off group is now more vital than the parent band.

Vintage Apollo Theatre Performances (Columbia). The Apollo was the birthplace of Aretha, Bessie Smith, Pearl Bailey, Ida Cox and The Mills Bros., and the audiences are as tough as those in a Milan opera house. Therefore, what is recorded there should be good.

Move (Capitol—Aug./Sept.). Good English hard rock.

The Band (Capitol—Aug./Sept.). Their first two albums were classics; they created country rock. Their last album was a disaster. This may be better.

John Lee Hooker (ABC/Dunhill—fall). Still the most compelling blues singer around.

John Coltrane (ABC/Dunhill—fall). The late Mr. Coltrane was one of the master innovators of free-form jazz.

Ray Charles (ABC/Dunhill—fall). 25th anniversary album. Five-record set, containing the best of Ray’s stuff from Atlantic and ABC. If you don’t like the raw material, you’ll like his middle period best. We like raw material.

Harry Nilsson: When the Cat’s Away (RCA—Sept.). This is the guy who did the good version of the theme from Midnight Cowboy.

The Guess Who: So Long, Bannatyne (RCA—Sept.). Excellent commercial group.

Julian Bream: Villa Lobos Concertos (RCA—Aug.). Superb classical guitar.

Judy Collins (Elektra—fall). This will be a live album, recorded during a spring-summer tour. Judy has enormous taste and has matured into the country’s finest female folk singer.

Incredible String Band: Relics of the Incredible String Band (Elektra—fall). A very strange folk group. Somehow their gentle appeal was at its peak during the era of hard rock. Now, when softer sounds are back in, they seem to have waned. Some mysteries are inexplicable.

Carly Simon (Elektra—fall). A fresh new singer and Esquire movie critic Jacob Brackman writes some of her lyrics. What could be bad?

The Rolling Stones (Atlantic—Sept.). Always buy any Rolling Stones album immediately.

Aretha Franklin (Atlantic—Sept.). Little Sister is frequently uneven but there are usually a couple of memorable cuts per album.

Kate Taylor (Atlantic—Sept.). Kate is okay, particularly if you like what her brothers James, Livingston and Alex have been doing.

J. Geils Band (Atlantic-fall). Possibly the best white blues band around.

Jerry Lee Lewis (Mercury—Oct.). Country music; always great.

The Statler Bros. (Mercury—Nov.). Honest-to-God foot-stomping country music.

Rod Stewart (Mercury-Dec.). Very hard rock. A hoarse, grating voice that tries so hard you have to listen.

The Kinks (Warner Bros.—fall). One of the few groups left from the first English invasion. Dependable.

Tom Paxton (Warner Bros.—Aug.). Tom was always one of the best singers among early Sixties folkies, but his tendency to preach is irritating. Lately, he’s been trying to overcome that.

The Beach Boys (Warner Bros.—Aug.). Good, solid Los Angeles plastic has its charm.

Neil Young (Warner Bros.—Sept.). A good songwriter with a strange voice. Interesting.

Captain Beefheart (Warner Bros.—Sept.). This man may be a genius. He is trying to invent new sound patterns and a new language.

The Jackson Five (Motown—Sept.). The hottest soul act, at the moment.

Jr. Walker & The All-Stars (Motown—Sept.). Tough, gritty, bluesy.

Stevie Wonder (Motown—Sept.). Great singer and harmonica player.

Watch out for [this means “bad”]

Ian & Sylvia (Columbia). Commercial folk music. Mediocre.

Santana (Columbia—Sept.). Two-record set. Music to speed by.

Barbra Streisand (Columbia). Your folks and older siblings will like her vocals.

Ten Years After (Columbia). British rave-ups have had it.

Johnny Cash: Greatest Hits (Columbia). At least it wasn’t recorded live in a prison.

The Steve Miller Band (Capitol—Aug./Sept.). Without Boz Scaggs, the group has floundered.

Quicksilver Messenger Service (Capitol—Aug./Sept.). Was one of the finest San Francisco bands, but with the addition of loud, banal Dino Valente, it has plummeted.

B.B. King (ABC/Dunhill). B.B.’s success was long overdue, but now that it’s come, he’s begun to get sloppy.

Mamas and Papas (ABC/Dunhill). This group’s huge reputation was built on only two songs, Monday, Monday and California Dreamin’. Then they broke up. Their reunion is no cause for rejoicing.

Steppenwolf (ABC/Dunhill). Harmless schlock.

3 Dog Night (ABC/Dunhill). See above.

Pharoah Sanders (ABC/Dunhill). Pharoah performed with the Coltranes and put out some good sides with his own band a few years ago, but has become redundant.

Elvis Presley (RCA). El has been enjoying an undeserved revival of late. The Presley from which the myth derived ceased to exist as soon as he left Sun Records in Memphis, immediately before fame struck. What we got was a homogenized version. Why revive that?

Jefferson Airplane (RCA). The Airplane still has its hordes of loyal fanatics, but has been screaming for revolution for so long it has gone hoarse. Besides, there’s a paradox in screaming for revolution from the confines of a Bentley. This can no longer be ignored.

Sha Na Na (Buddah/Kama Sutra—Sept.). Specialize in Fifties rock. Never very good, but now that many of the original Fifties groups are actually playing again, worthless.

P-Nut Gallery (Buddah/Kama Sutra—Sept.). The second coming of Howdy Doody; the roots of the Acid Generation.

Brewer & Shipley (Buddah/Kama Sutra—Sept.). Mildly appealing soft sound, especially if you like mild appeal.

Curtis Mayfield: Roots (Buddah/Kama Sutra—Sept.). Curtis was okay when he sang with groups, but his recent Rod McKuen act has been silly.

Edwin Hawkins: Oh Children (Buddah/Kama Sutra—Sept.). Contrary to popular belief, the Edwin Hawkins Singers did not invent gospel rock.

Melanie (Buddah/Kama Sutra—Sept.). Undigested St. Joan, Edith Piaf, Ethel Merman and Buffy Ste.-Marie.

Buzzy Linhart (Buddah/Kama Sutra—Sept.). Buzzy has been around the Village folk scene for a long time without doing anything remarkable, and there’s no reason to expect him to do anything now.

The Stooges (Elektra). Lead singer Iggy Pop leaps into audiences, smears his half-naked body with peanut butter, tears his lips open by hitting his mouth with the microphone, and stabs himself viciously with shattered drumsticks.

Joan Baez: Blessed Are . . . (Vanguard—summer). It doesn’t matter that Joanie does songs by Little Stevie Wonder and Jagger/Richard on this LP because she still makes them sound like Silver Dagger. Damn all dying swans.

Buffy Ste.-Marie (Vanguard—Sept.). Buffy is a professional Indian. She also sings badly.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (Atlantic—Sept.). The group has fragmented frequently, with each member doing his own solo albums.

Bee Gees (Atlantic—Sept.). Slick Beatles? Yes, slick Beatles.

Led Zeppelin (Atlantic—Sept.). The death of rock and roll.

Jerry Butler (Mercury—Nov.). Rhythm and blues. Good voice, but he’s been suffering from bad material and overproduction.

Jimi Hendrix (Warner Bros.—Aug.). Since his previous album, Cry of Love, was posthumous, this must be odds and ends from his last sessions or rejects from earlier albums. Unpromising.

The Grateful Dead (Warner Bros.—Aug.). The Dead have been making a conscious effort to come up with a salable product. Since their only appeal is extra-musical, this has proved disastrous.

Mothers of Invention (Warner Bros.—Aug.). Frank Zappa was always too smart for his audiences. His contempt is no longer entertaining.

Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood (Warner Bros.—Aug.). Phoney sexiness & phoney country.

Jerry Garcia (Warner Bros.—Sept.). The Dead’s leader has degenerated into a kind of acid Rod McKuen.

Tony Joe White (Warner Bros.—Sept.). Tony Joe does heavy, bluesy rock, but he only knows a couple of chords and runs.

Alice Cooper (Warner Bros.—Sept.). Posthumous rock by four guys in drag.

The Supremes (Motown—Sept.). Without Diana Ross, the vocals are merely pleasant.

The Temptations (Motown—Sept.). Waning.

 
This is one of those books that I reckon you can judge by the cover…

This curious little volume is by a fellow named Ed Hurst. It’s a free ebook you can acquire—should you want a copy—via the author. Hurst is a prolific self-published writer. His other titles include The Mind of Christ, The Chronicles of Misty, The Laptop Oracles,  A Course in Biblical Mysticism and Mystical Tales of Romance. He’s written 22—that’s right, 22—books in the past couple of years. On his website, Hurst declares “I am called to prophesy against Western Civilization as a whole, because it is fundamentally hostile to God’s revelation.”

Just so you know where he stands, K?

After telling the reader how he’s been faithfully married to his wife since 1978, Hurst gets… personal:

“I can claim a history of total fidelity, but you’ll have to decide for yourself how true that might be. Further, I am at the age and level of exposure to environmental pharmaceuticals that my libido is about gone. It still works somewhat with my wife only because of the vast ocean of trust she has earned. Otherwise, the wiring between my testosterone and my sense of taste in flesh is largely burned out. Not much of anything or anyone turns me on, so to speak.”

Why does Hurst inflict this information upon us? He explains:

“This helps to establish me as an objective observer. All I hope to gain is an opportunity for people to peel away the layers of social mythology and find peace.”

Ah ha! So when it comes to dispensing sexual advice, impotence = objectivity? Apparently in the parallel universe that Mr. Hurst resides in this is the case. He’s clearly not interested in bringing sexy back…

Hurst blames church leaders and feminism for the decline in Christian marriages. Specifically he blames the church leaders for feminism.

“What most preachers assume is good moral values still leaves the door wide open for feminine domination in the home and all the attendant problems that come with it. What part of “be submissive” in God’s Word do we not understand?”

According to Hurst, this feminism shit, why, it’s anti-Christian…

“Men tend to be a little lazy, particularly about enforcing moral boundaries. It requires a bit of indirect prompting, but direct nagging is a guarantee of failure. He is wired to bristle and resist. Rather, she has to devote herself to strengthening him according to his nature. A conspicuous devotion that others can see will provoke him to genuine heroism as much as anything can. Treat him like a hero until he feels the vibes and acts accordingly; a woman has no power to remake her man’s nature. He naturally gets angry if his woman embarrasses him in front of others.”

You hear that ladies, make your man feel like a hero.

Here’s Hurst’s (free) advice for the menfolk:

“Guys: Know your mission first. You simply have no business messing with women until you know who you are and what you must do with your life. That means delaying your start when gals your age are raring to go. Don’t be ashamed to come back when you’re ready and “rob the cradle,” but realize it is highly risky most of all because ten years is forever when it comes to cultural trends in the West. She’ll be quite foreign to you unless she’s partly retro. The biggest mistake you’ll make is allowing your hormones to run you off a cliff. Is she hot? Close your eyes and get a hold of yourself. Her beauty doesn’t mean a thing, except that she’ll probably be very hard to get, in one sense or another. The last thing you want to do is advertise your willingness to be a slave by staring like every other drooling loser.”

So says the guy who introduced himself to his readers by telling them that his dick is dead…

Via Matthew Paul Turner’s blog