chill summer

While the actual soundtrack to this summer was "Call me Maybe", "I Don't like", and "Gangam Style", this one indie song and vid could very well have been playing all August.

This song is the boringly exciting numbness of various LA parties that are almost as hip as they want to be.

Watch the vid, the first minute before they get to the party captures the lack of accomplishment a hungover day can bring.  The guys are fucking around on bikes, being active in a way that doesn't build to anything. I find more similarity with the girls driving around in their old car.  LA has a car culture and that manifests itself in multiple ways. Driving around on a day off is a good way to fill time without having to think or work too hard.

Who watches

I had convinced myself to not care about the Watchmen prequel news. But then I was explaining the situation to a non comic book reader and they were outraged. They convinced me that just because it happens all the time doesn't mean we should act cool and cynical and ignore it but instead we should feel outrage.

I can almost understand why many comic book readers side with the company over the creator. I still, in some ways, identify more with being a Marvel reader than a DC reader even though I know that that means nothing. Now, I feel proud when Fantagraphics does well (in the same way, I imagine, that a sports fan feels proud when their team win). Of course, thats stupid.

What I don't get is the hard on that many comic readers have towards the law. Since DC didn't technically break the law, what they did to Alan Moore is okay. Whats funny about this, is that a large part of me realizing the disconnect that sometimes exists between morality and legality came from a steady diet of super hero comics growing up (well that and the number of potheads I have as friends). Super Heroes, especially by the 80s, were breaking the law all the time in their purist of doing the right thing. Corporations were the bad guys who were protected by corrupt governments. But somehow, many readers want to ignore that and call DC the good guys for taking advantage of yet another creator.

Ha

Comments on NPR rap reviews continue to be the funniest stuff on the internet:

TV and long form

While Tim will always be my fave FNL character, watching him in the pilot again reminded me of how much of a jerk he could be. (And racist). The above clip is one of the few positive moments for him.

Next Level

Watch full screen with speakers up.

Ye

Damn, this dude likes Kanye almost as much as I do (but prob not as much as Kanye does).

I think he missed the point on 808s though. What I like about 808s is that it's, for lack of a better word, earnest. MBDTF is probably a 'better' album. It's a lot more self aware. 808s is a sad album about being sad, and I like that.

Still Blame Game is one of the best rap songs about the end of a relationship ever, except maybe that line on Diamonds & Wood by UGK: "Got to the point where I could not decipher day from night/She say she love me but all we do now is fuck 'n' fight."

KE_08

The Kramers Ergot 8 release party was last night. Got my copy signed. The crowd was a slighty nerdier version of the hipster crowd I see in Echo Park so obv I loved it.

As for the book itself, well I've only had it for one day so I haven't fully thought about it.

I do think that it's design is interesting. 4, 5, 6 were super colorful and gave the appearance of being all over the place (though were in many ways pushing a similar aesthetic). 7 was big and expensive and inspired by the reprints of the old newspapers strips. 8 feels like an archival collection in some ways. Seneca in his review referred to it as "building the medium its next academy, a new repository of wisdom for future artists to draw from and bend to." I think that is close to true. I think in some ways it is inspired by the archival collections that are being put out right now.

Maybe it's just because I also recently picked up the new Barks collection. There's something a little goofy about these nice hardcovers of originally disposable material (that is not to say I don't think Barks was a genius). All these new collections feel like we're building a 'serious' library of comics history. This volume of Kramers feels like it will fit right in. It even has the somewhat out of touch intro essay and a list of other books by Picture Box.

In every state theres a station playing drake

When I drove across country, I did it almost entirely to the radio. I listened to a lot of pop country. I like pop country, but by the end of the trip I did start to grow tired of the overwhelming American exceptionalism in the music. I'm sure I'll talk about that later. While pretty much everywhere I went there was a country stations, it was not true that, "In every state, there's a station/Playin' Cash, Hank, Willie, and Waylon."

This is just another example of country music mythologizing their older stars. Rap does the same thing with the constant callbacks to Biggie and Pac. And so do comics.

I was reminded of this recently when I picked up some 80s issues of FF by Byrne. They were a perfectly enjoyable purchase at a dollar each. They also made me think just how much Byrne was into Kirby. And now the entire Marvel universe is based around past work. There is this small insular world of creators who's entire job is to curate the ongoing adventures of a group of characters from the 60s. It's easy for Art comics fans to look down on this. (And for sure, many aspects of how older creators are treated are very problematic). But, I don't know, there's something really interesting about this slavish devotion to the characters but not the energy of the original comics.

YC (Feat. Nelly, B.o.B, Trae The Truth, Yo Gotti, Cyhi Da Prynce, Dose &...

Nelly's verse on repeat all day.

Late to the party on this song, but still good.

Intro

Allow me to introduce myself: I choose Biggie over Pac, part one over part two when it comes to the Godfather and Xaime over Gilbert.

The main point of this blog is a way for me to get my pop cultural ramblings out of my system and written down. Hopefully, this will cut down the number of angry conversations I have with strangers where I insist that a certain screwed hook has more emotion in it than Eminem's entire career.