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What a lot of people thought they heard on ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’, and everywhere else on the album, is cloying cuteness. But it turns out you can say a lot of things— things like ‘go fuck yourself’ (‘3 Legs’), ‘everything is fucked’ (‘Too Many People’), and even ‘let’s go fuck, honey’ (‘Eat At Home)’— with a big, dimpled grin on your face.
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Chapter.
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Personally, the mainstream pop culture of the seventies never seemed entirely comprehensible until I started thinking of it as something like a bubble economy, full of irrational exuberance and an earnest, often-naïve sense that some grand new door had been opened. A bubble, specifically, in terms of people’s belief in a self (not just a set of socially dictated roles and responsibilities, but a malleable, improvable self, one you could purchase books about), and in terms of sensuality and sophistication (a decade of luxurious hair, and the mass-marketing of the waterbed, and glitter and silk and sun-dappled fields of wheat, and sighing, sensualist hit songs like ‘Lovin’ You’), and boy, oh boy, oh boy, in terms of sex.
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“These portraits were discovered by Dan Oppenheimer, a stained-glass designer in Memphis. They are the work of the late Jack Robinson, who shot celebrity portraits for Vogue in the 1960s.”
Via Bryan Waterman
There’s toughness, and then there’s “toughness.” Last night, the Pacers continued their sad performance of toughness, triggered by a general “lack of respect” from the national media, for whom Power Rankings are nothing in comparison to a starless team in the 25th-largest TV market. The Pacers are tilting at windmills, picking petty fights with a far-superior team, because they’re insecure. They’ve adopted the ill-advised Dazed & Confused strategy of “most fights get broken up before a single punch is thrown.”
The Pacers are not the late 80s Bad Boy Pistons, for whom rough play was part of the architecture (and it worked). They’re not the late ’90s Knicks (pure thug), or even the ‘04-‘05 Pacers, a hyper-talented leading title contender with a Dr. David Banner-style psychotic streak waiting to make itself known. They’re a smart, decently talented group of unassuming guys who got past the first round with relative ease (because of Howard’s injury) and whose basketball dad has now called them wusses in front of their friends.
In his “Fresh Air” interview with Terry Gross, Jay-Z replied to her adorably naive question “why do rappers grab their crotches so much” with this response:
“They don’t have any experience on how to perform in front of people, hold the mic — all these different things you need to know as a performer. So you get up there, you feel naked. So when you feel naked, what’s the first thing you do? You cover yourself. So that bravado is an act of, ‘I am so nervous right now. I am scared to death. I’m going to act so tough that I am going to hide it, and I have to grab my crotch.’ That’s just what happens.”
This is the Pacers’ approach in the second round of the 2012 playoffs: acting tough because they’re otherwise scared shitless of having expectations placed upon them to perform on a huge stage. It’s understandable, but it’s far from pretty.
No one knew who Danny Granger was before this series, and now he’s begrudgingly reknowned by pundits as the guy who repeatedly gets in James’ face for the slightest transgressions. I despise LBJ’s brand-centric persona as much as anyone, but he’s rightfully taken the high road in these non-incidents. There’s something about his expression when it happens—seriously, who knew Granger was this much of a churlish punk?—that just exhales an “I’m far too valuable for this” kind of professionalized cool. You really think LeBron’s going to fight back? Against Danny Granger? I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Pacers fan, but even I thought it was karma that knocked his ankle out last night. It’s like a guy who swings like crazy trying to punch a bigger guy, and dislocates his shoulder while the other guy just laughs.
Wade of course deserves what he gets (one shot only, though) for his cowardly John Lynch-style free-safety tackle on Collison, but then again we knew that he was this sort of guy since the All-Star Game, when he broke Kobe’s nose for some weird, personal reason. (An aside: Wade and James are two of the most entitled players the NBA has ever seen at this level. It’s obviously part of the Player As Brand era of the league, and it’s mostly visualized through their incessant acting and overt grimacing when they don’t get their way, but still, it’s not pretty). Which is why Tyler Hansbrough’s hard foul on Wade last night—I read it as a too-long delayed response to Wade’s Collison tackle, like a pitcher throwing at another team’s guy in October for a thing his teammate did in June—was sort of cool, in a “why the hell not?” sort of way. And Haslem’s return hack on Hansbrough was just as earned (and should get him suspended), but you know it was doubly hard because, well Hansbrough looks like Hansbrough does, right? Not to make assumptions, but c’mon, don’t you want to punch this?
Haslem’s response (and Dexter Pittman’s bizarre overreaction later) are the only evidence that the Pacers’ strategy is working at all. They’re not going to take Wade and James (hell, not even Battier or Chalmers) off their games with this idiocy. If anything, it’s only making them play better, wanting to get this thing over with quicker before one of these dummies hurts someone.
The Pacers can win this series (right now they have an 8-10% chance) if they utilize the size of Hibbert and West (and keep them out of foul trouble). I don’t know why this isn’t something that happens—Hibbert looked tired as hell last night, for one thing, and West’s banged up knee won’t help matters Thursday. But what these guys represent is an actual size advantage, not some puffed out “make Gretzky’s head bleed” junk. How awesome would it have been if the Pacers would’ve just quietly, nerdily, and smartly taken the Heat out in 7, instead of giving in to Bird’s hillbilly goading and the most hackneyed media-driven “motivation” possible?
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There’s a movie that Quentin Tarantino wrote but didn’t direct, True Romance, where Christian Slater’s talking to a fake Elvis. He’s talking to a fake Elvis projected out of his mind. In ‘JoJo’s Chillin,’ JoJo is talking to a fake Ghostface, a Ghostface projected out of his mind.
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(Source: ajwas)
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On the way back from Memphis yesterday, we stumbled upon this warning, somewhere in the vicinity of Union City, Tennessee. Yes, I did a u-turn to make sure I captured it. Yes, I am 12 years old.
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I’m partial to the pre-funk sixties, like Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Lou Reed. I like Television and Richard Hell & the Voidoids, The Pixies. I used to listen to the soundtrack for the movie Tank Girl all the time. It was really good. God, I love that movie. I totally should watch it again.
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There is something endearing about the way Indianapolis has embraced the Pacers, something so determined about how they link the fact that the entire city has sold its soul to the athletic-entertainment complex with their desire to remain small-town Hoosierland in their devotion to the team.
(I’m not kidding about the first part, either. This is a city that tore down a dome to put up Lucas Oil Stadium, which looms over the highway looking for all the world like Noah’s Ark on the side of Mount Ararat, only more expensive. This is a town that wanted the NCAA to come and set up shop.)
So you get a new basketball arena that’s bigger than Albania, and you sell the naming rights to a bank, but you call it a “fieldhouse,” and you have 85-year-old Carl Erskine, the former Brooklyn Dodger great, play the national anthem on a harmonica (…)
The Pacers are of a piece with the whole scene — earnest craftsmen, all of whom know their roles.
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Kami de Chukwu - Who You (Prod. by Coldesack) (2012)
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The final version of ‘Bad Girls’ still refers to bad girls as sad girls, but Summer and Moroder dispensed with the demo’s explicit critique of prostitution. Instead of calling into question the psychic price of sex work, this version accepts sex work on its own terms, with girls picking up strangers ‘if the price is right.’ But if the final version pulled its punches in many respects, it also positioned Summer not as a judgmental outsider but as one of the girls. Summer isn’t celebrating prostitution, even if the track’s lusty arrangement suggests otherwise. Rather, she is confronting what she shares with those streetwalkers, which is why she declares that she and the girls ‘are just the same.’ If Summer sounds unusually exuberant, especially as she yells out to a john, ‘Hey, mista, have you got a dime,’ it may be because Summer knows something about the experience of being made into a commodity, of being reduced to a seductive whisper. Tellingly, in a television interview some years later Summer said that ‘Bad Girls’ marked the moment when she stopped being an object and became a subject.
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There’s not a guitar, bass or drum in sight on ‘I Feel Love.’ Just synthesizers and sequencers keyed to a Summer vocal whose higher register could barely articulate the spare lyrics; it’s the first time in dance history that backing track and singer worked in such perfect tandem. At the time only Kraftwerk and Neu! made music like this, and like Kraftwerk, ‘I Feel Love’ is often praised, incorrectly, for sounding cold and machine-like. Listen again to the point at which the percussion fades and all that’s left is the sequencer. The possibilities of recorded music have rarely sounded this numinous.
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After some cajoling, Summer agreed to record a demo of the song—in a blackened studio, on the floor, without any crew members to embarrass her as she pretended to give herself over to orgasmic ecstasy. Summer saw herself as a theatrical singer, and she later revealed that she had gotten through the experience of recording the song by acting a role: she imagined that she was Marilyn Monroe in the throes of passion…’Love to Love You Baby’ was sensational in the larger culture as well, with Time magazine reporting that it contained twenty-two orgasms. (The BBC counted twenty-three.)
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Donna Summer “Need A Man Blues” (Love to Love You Baby, 1975)
