I Disagree

But before I respectfully disagree with Danny I'll agree with him. Kanye is a huge leap forward in the hip-hop/R&B world. His recent singles have the artistic vision and musicality that the genre has been begging for since the late 90's.

But it is not the leap that hip-hop/R&B needs, and it is not the blending of hip-hop/R&B and rap that will save both genres from being more than an interesting footnote in history. Kayne's artistic vision provides a nice candy shell around a hollow tasteless center that is his lyrics. When you cut through all the smoke and mirrors, you find Kayne is not doing anything different than anyone else in the hip-hop/R&B world. He's just doing it artistically. Don't be fooled by flashy music videos.

Kayne is also a horrible live performer who uses intricate stage set-ups and flamboyant effects to detract from his horribleness. I don't believe artists whose live performances fall so flat, will ever be able to significantly change a genre. How will listeners ever be able to trust the musician?

There is absolutely no need to sacrifice the complexities of rap lyrics so that they my be fit into a musically styled song, and there is no excuse for a musician to be so horrible live. To illustrate this I provide two examples.

The first Gnarls Barkley. Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo blend masterfully the musicality of Danger Mouse with the gritty rapping and gospel singing of Cee-lo. With this blending there is absolutely no sacrifice of lyrics, which remain complex, extremely dark, and not centered around the ego of the performers. The song "Crazy" was a huge leap forward which brought to the mainstream good rap, good beats, good singing, and generally good music. Not to mention a unified artistic vision that is astounding on the album, in the music video, and live. In the future Gnarls Barkley will continue to evolve and significantly contribute to not only rap and hip-hop/R&B but to evolution of music as a whole. Behold!



The second example is Lupe Fiasco. I'm not going to belabor the above mentioned points, so I'll be brief. Genius lyric, musicality, artistic vision, good live, and a mainstream recognition. He knows he can't sing so he doesn't try. Behold...again!



Kanye is not evolving anything but interesting videos and bad music. We are about as lucky to have Kayne as we are to have T-Pain. I am equality concerned about Kayne's lack of a fulfilling life as I am about T-Pain's love of a stripper. And now for something completly different.

Kanye West Welcome To Heartbreak Video

Alright, so we got some posting on this shit. To cap off video week on C-boys and U-os (in contrast to college basketball's "judgement week", every weeks a something week!) I post up the latest Kanye West video. Mind you I seem to be having some disagreements on the musical merits of 808's and Heartbreak, especially with my sister, but as usually happens as I am older and wiser, she is wrong haha. Now the new Kanye is not a masterpiece, but it is finally a step forward in a new direction for hip-hop/r&b, which, especially hip-hop, hasn't seen much progress since The Cold Vein (Cannibal OX. I would argue that Kanye's last album before this also was big, esp. with its samples of Can and Daft Punk, but Kanye's early stuff, while being excellently done, was still working well within the rap matrix) Hip Hop has the assorted verbal geniuses still going (Ghostface, MF Doom,Sage Francis), and the genius producers (Timbaland, uh..there's others) but no real unified artistic vision that requires a merging of the two to take it in the new directions it desperately needs to remain relevant. This is what Kanye has done, and why he has biggest musician on the planet even though he is not that great a rapper. The best stuff out there has this element of musicality, whether it be M.I.A. to The Bug to Lil Wayne (in his voice) blah blah watever. A smooth flow is not enough, you need to fit into the backdrop, even if the rapping loses some of its complexity.

Ok this extended theorizing may be flawed. But...808's and Heartbreak is good. And we are lucky as FUCK to have him and he can be cocky as fuck as long as he keeps producing illness. Exhibit A: The song Bad News. Exhibit B:


Now if you have a slow computer you may not be able to watch this. And if you can don't worry your computer is not broken. Watch it. Carefully. Your mind will be blown. Props to the director, who threw in the whole history of film into this music video. It is a true masterpiece, with one incredible moment after another: Kanye swirl green windows visualizer like, to him talking to himself, the freeze, and then then he pops in between hidden on the wall, to the right foot tapping and his body sliding across the tv test colors when the synth strings come in. Has there ever been a better music video in its 30 year history? Anything so ambitious so flawlessly executed? the effects and procedures of the past, the pixelated fragments, the internet, the future. And I kept but think it says something about the modern human condition. What that is I won't go so far as to speculate. I'm just going to watch it again.

i'll add a welcome!



dont let the blindness stop you from doing what you want to do!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cx_i2EmBP4&feature=related

I'm Here To Get You Wet

Holla holla holla holla holla.

Meditate on this:



!!!

"We will dominate this information revolution."

Listen. To. That. Bassline.

In honor of Peter Woods' imminent enjoining with the blog, I post this video. So fucking cool. Bootsy Collins kills it, the horn solo in the middle is nasty, and James Brown is soooooooo young. Before color tv???

Herro

hello cowboys! finally, one of our ideas have breathed life! Ill try my best to put in the little sister perspective. danny told me the first thing i should write should tread along funny/absurd/insightful. Well, i wrote this poem that isnt any of those things, but it was inspired by some blog below. seems appropriate since we're feasting off our collective ideas.. virtual collective, right? and robots are always pretty cool.

pick up phone
good morning machine,
you sound fresh!
have you taken a morning jog?
oh is that so?
but I must confess
I didnt call for Mrs. Mclousky.
no I must confess
I called for you

Something surely Tom will disagree with

As we have run out of steam and arefreaked out by our own words appearing outside of our bodies and becoming immortal ("Who wrote that? I remember it but it surely wasn't me..") I have taken to finding what others have said so it speaks for me, as I am them and they are me (if at the moment I feel that way).

HOW TO BUILD YOUR OWN HOMEMADE TEXTUAL WAR MACHINEWRITING IS AN ACT OF TERROR OR IT’S NOTHING AT ALL.
…for we are no longer interested in writing for the State-run institutions, for the supermarkets, academies, and bestseller racks. We’ve no desire to write for the commercial profit-run enterprises that feed an unending appetite for the humanist fairy-tale. We are striking against all notions of verbal communication as a medium of entertainment or enlightenment or education.

ok? It gets worse though:

It is not merely a matter of destroying all sympathy and empathy in the literary arts but of the concentration of a hatred for human communication that burns so intensely it streaks towards earth like a death-comet from the most alien section of space…it’s a matter of punishing, brutalizing, disgusting your readers, of keeping them out of the test-grounds where your apocalyptic war-machine is being assembled.

how scary to articulate this belief seriously. That is why quoting it is much easier, I distance myself from this crazy.

http://www.cold-me.net/parts/forum/messages/179.html

Check the link for the full characteristics of the "textual war-machine" in contrast to the characteristics of the "State-novel".

Key point being number 10:

10. An assemblage with absolutely no commercial value (aggressively non-commercial)—a text that can only be given away free if anyone is expected to read it: AND THEY ARE NOT EXPECTED TO READ IT.

YES THE BLOG LIVES AGAIN!

I got Money in the Bank, Shorty wat you drank

Straight ballin. I found this job to be an entry level trader on craigslist and for some reason it has the stink of destiny for me. I think I could sell myself in the cover letter.....

Cut Up in Betweens

Phone calls to make, all day again. So I will write this blog over the course of the day, one word to one sentence at a time in between picking up the telephone.

I don't know about a bill, I'm just a messenger.
Just let it ring out...Its 9:45 you really going to pick up a call from a random number?

The Cydonian face, merely pareidolia? Just let me leave a message please.

I get it! Apophenia! That still doesn't explain the convincing connections between Nostradamus and 2012. (Bleh->Skeptic's Dictionary) Answer me Answering Machine!.

New Age! I will be on the edge of paradigm shifts, sifting through the I Ching. Theosophy, your relevence is relevant and I guess you may be, blasphemous but now seems such old news to me.

Everybody already has a mobile, you sir on the street are preaching to the converted! The cellphone industry will be the first in a line of Malthusian-esque catastrophes.

God put his name on the no-solicitations list the day man discovered the telegram. (Who needs me when you have Magickz?)

http://www.myanimalhome.net/ (my animal home??) ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME. Tooooo Sick....thats reminiscent of To Sit. 2 Sick

http://www.ontological.com/ Got to go to this place. The ontological-hysteric theater?? Astronome with John Zorn? Yeah.

Cool message + singular name, and I'm going to google you.

Organic

I’m writing this offline, in Microsoft word, because my internet isn’t working, which seems sad (though I’m smiling) and remote (though I’m sitting next to Ryan) in a way that I’m sure is relevant to everything we’ve been writing about. Next I’ll be sitting on my bed, in my absurd (ryan?) green room (painted that color on a whim), writing blog entries in my journal with pencil and paper to be transcribed later and posted on the internet. I’m not connected to the world via the internet or any other means, and the space I’m building right now is being opened up in isolation. That’s fucked up, if you ask me.
------------------------ S
------------------------ T
------------------------ R
--- B E C O M E S --- A ---
--- L ------------------ N
--- O ------------------ G
--- G ------------------ E
--- G
- D I S E A S E
--- N
--- G


Am I being social in my antisocialism or antisocial in my aggressive socialism?

Note: I’m not a socialist, but based on what I know about their ideology, I doubt they’d mind sharing the label.

But to the point!

AN ODE TO DANNY BROWN!!!!

I’d rather…
Burrow into your brain bit by bit,
Than explode our blog with random shit,
My liver is failing,
My mind is flailing,
So pick your point and plunge your prick.

Haha – maybe I need to slow down with the William Gass. Nonetheless, I’m sure cyberspace will make your member tingle.

On another note, but one that is certainly in the same key - (Organic is old, or… ganic is old (I’m enjoying my word games)) - this was how someone once explained conservatism to me:

Imagine that the whole world is a boat (the evangelicals took this too literally and thought it was grounds to assume that Noah was a conservative, and hence, that god hates GAYS! Their logic is flawed, but so are their morals and their haircuts, so it’s a mystery where to start. Did their haircuts affect their logic or did (A implies B → not-B implies shit) manifest itself in the real world as a mullet?) and that it’s cruising peacefully across the Atlantic, occasionally getting shat on by an egret or a seagull (aka the Mohammedans). To try to rebuild the ship, from scratch, while at sea, would be complete lunacy. Instead, according to the conservatives, the ship needs to be constantly maintained and gradually improved, plank by plank, so that it doesn’t sink. The key here is the emphasis on maintenance and gradual reform. In other words, the radical-rebuild approach (aka revolution or progressive reform) is nothing short of madness.

My point: conservatives have a monopoly on the organic food market.

Alright, I’m going nowhere with this post. I have a lot to say, but I guess now is not the time to say it. More to come, eventually, on organic and authentic (I think they go hand in hand, but correct me if I’m wrong) and the lack of urban planning in Bangkok. I’ve even got a road map that I’m going to post, so get excited.

Continuity Continued

------Phew, I was wondering if you were going to respond to me in terms of "blog theory" or if a response meant trying to match my random machine gun fire of text. I'm kind of sad it wasn't the latter, but I think your pretty much mostly right. I would love for an organic growth of this blog where our minds work in sync toward something greater. But where is our goal, and what is our starting point? I thought that maybe if I used different text colors, italics, and laid out embryos of a hundred different ideas we could somehow use one of them, or merge a few of them (in actuality they were born to die on the spot, or maybe more like a clashing with everything else- mini explosion- and thats it). I don't want to butt heads (but I do think there is bound to be a little of it, cause I can sense a chasm in our ideas of philosophy, writing, and creativity, which I'm sure is true between all people but especially painful between you and I [Tom] because we both have thought about these things alot and want to share it with each other, a process still in its early phase yet we think we are old/smart enough that we don't take well to disagreement even though disagreement and difference is string-theory reality), personally I am interested in theory but I find it hard to discuss with you in a sort of analytical/logical framework my intuitions, in this sense I guess I am less articulate (I guess it might be more of a problem with me, as you may be more practiced in having serious conversation and dialogue through your lit. theory-where there is deeper thinking because of its accepted open subjectivity, in contrast to my experience in politics, where subjectivity is told to sit on the bench- thus my tyrannical form of argument), I want just to do. I don't want this to become some sort of contest about who can thread together the most well worded sentences together which are in actuality meaningless. But my doing, and I guess this is what I was trying to describe as I was doing it, had the feel of an inside joke, an introspective outerness, not a diarist but a columnist speaking to those crazy enough to try to understand him (which may be ok?).
------So a dialogue is better. And I guess in some ways this means it need be more personal, which I was trying to avoid but was failing at and only created a impenetrable personability. Still all this returns us to our original matter of discussion- continuity and direction. I have no clear ideas on this. Blogs in general that I've read have no real continuity besides a theme they focus on (which I never like), such as "continental philosophy" or "left-wing politics", or "new music releases". There are also the ones where we talk about what we are doing and how we are feeling and what we are thinking which I guess we are doing now but as a general trend I think is also weak. Creativity right???? Creativity flows in so many different directions, in so many different formats, even within this limiting format of the typed word. But I think there is nothing wrong with us getting into each others heads right? Anyways, we didn't really get that much figured out. But this is good. And its only 10am in the morning here at work. Shit I've even have a whole schedule of my day written out (cuz you said it'd be good for a story!!!) that I did last week which I've spared you guys because only so much should be done. Who said blog posts are supposed to be short?

Uh oh I need to go somewhere else now hope I dont have to make phone calls.

searching for continuity

(d)bro, let loose with the lasso and become what you need to become (what is the internet for if not for that?).

still... I think we need some continuity. It's like we've ripped a gaping hole in space with this blog, or rather, like we've inserted pockets of space into time (i might be wrong, but I think that's what you've been getting at with your posts about us hanging out and writing this blog at the same time and how the two - the hanging out and the writing - are impossibly linked), like some diver dude with the bends, or pepsi blood (something worked in that new add campaign). Anyway, the way I see it, all of a sudden there are pockets of space where there's only meant to be a single point (or where there used to only be a single point, because who am I to make value judgements on this shit) wrapped up neatly in the presence of the present, and I'm waiting for the redshift to kick in (because that's what that's from right? space expading simultaneously outwards from every point), and when it does this blog is going to explode, and it's going to be nothing more than an endurance game: who can wrap their mind around it longer? or it's going to turn into a battle royal: each of us competing to mold it into something manageable, which i actually think would be cool in a weird way, like a chess game, only the point would be to remake everyone else's ideas into something of your own, like that crazy african-american signifying monkey. Now that i think about it, isn't that what i'm doing right now? - taking your ideas and squeezing them in places and cutting them open in others until they bleed and choke and die and are reborn in the image of something new and of my own. Eventually, your voice and your ideas (or mine depending on who wins), will start to sound and look foreign to you (although this is not my intention), becuase there's no way I can read your posts and fully grasp what you're trying to say, and so, when i chew them up and spit them back out, they're bound to seem strang and oblong where they once looked round, like a chinese man in harlem, or a black man at the skiway for that matter. Eventually, you'll get into my head, and i'll get into yours and you'll start using my words to think your thoughts and vice versa, until one of us becomes schitzophrenic or goes completely mad. Instead, i think we should establish some sort of loose direction to this blog so that we're not forced to chose between exploding our blog and lobotomizing each other with words, video clips, colors, and music.

Brain Games

"Here's a pencil pad, I'm gonna spread some information." - This force released onto the internet, a glacial mass spreading down slowly taking over lands unreached and mapping them out with 0s and 1s, I thinks and what fucking idiots. Whats the inspiration? Shuggie Otis released his first album when he was 18, and then his classic when he was 21. And that was it.

"I slept on the Bridge." - People are now jealous of teachers because of their pensions, job security, and benefits?!? So children are the future? (I thought it was the legacies of institutions, conglomerations, and infrastructure) We can't even train them to catch up to the present. Movin' on, from Slum Village to Microcastle.

"Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessel are the written mythologies of memory and desire." - Eh, is that the same as writing as a "mythology of the future"? Blood and nerves constantly remade anew.

"Around 20 million migrant workers have returned to the Chinese countryside after failing to find work in the cities because of the economic downturn, a senior official said today....underestimate and say the real figure could ultimately reach 40 million." - Numbers. Too. Big. Something profound about US-China trade relationship, civil unrest, China owning American debt, etcetcetc.

"The aerolite, or whatever it is, seems to be about fifty or sixty feet long, cylindrical, and about ten or twelve feet in diameter. Great excitement exists in the vicinity and the round-up is suspended while the cowboys wait for the wonderful find to cool off so they can examine it." - The one clear mention (and first hit) when I googled cowboys and UFOs was this 1884 newspaper article where the two [might have] coincided in time. The third link I find is- our blog!! holla

"Channels transmit.
The problem of knowledge is: how do you construct a channel capable of expressing it? Ideas are ideal problems; the reality is complexity. The purity of ideas give way to the fissures and leaks of the real." - The blog (or whatever this is, as there is no one to read it except you) is an interesting medium. I catch all these thoughts that have only a vague relation to what I'm thinking or my relationships with you guys, and then you get to read them (or never do) at a time outside of any such context of our hanging out. We are straddling this nether area where we do not communicate on this blog thoroughly online like most ppl do but at the same time it is not an extension of our casual conversation. It is freeing in its range of possibility but also terrifying in that I find myself all alone in a pseudo-dialogue, a ying-yang of both shouting into a void and slowly putting together the lego blocks of a hurricane. For real though, this shit really keeps me going at work. I really wish you guys would write something, anything, and not leave me stranded on ice while all of it breaks around me and i drift...

Also I'm going to slowly ratchet up the crazy. I think soon I will be writing outside of myself as you know me but as the lost denizen of Cowboys and UFOs, the nomad anyself.

journalism

Yo, the lady i'm meant to be working for didn't show up, so i've had nothing to do either, and I'm thinking about leaving if she doesn't get here in the next thirty minutes, because all i've been doing is reading my book and a few random articles online, both of which I can do at home or at the tea lounge. But anyway, i found an interesting article on the new yorker website. It's about the slow and painful death (like liver failure after overdosing on tylenol) of journalism and what needs to be done to save newspapers like the washington post, and incedentally, it's written by a family friend who used to be the washington post correspondent in India.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/stevecoll/2009/01/nonprofit-newsp.html?yrail

Art, Computer

Thank you. I wish I still had the beautiful art I created while on the campaign trail in Connecticut. No work today so far at the office, they are painting or something here and the fumes are causing the true grunts to peace to the outside world. My stuffy nose ain't smell shit though. Im gonna try to make a collage now.