January 2011
24 posts
Current bafflement: Jeremih →
Attempting to evaluate Jeremih’s “Down On Me” ft. 50 Cent for possible inclusion in my e.o.y. Top 100; for seconds at a time it will seem impossibly pale but then - without changing - it will be…
Berkeley economist Brad DeLong posted this video,... →
Teena Marie “Lovergirl”
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/12/ta-nehisi-coatess-appreciation-of-teena-marie.html
And Brad on an issue that I think it’s imperative that voters make other voters pay attention to:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/12/a-time-to-spend.html
December 2010
34 posts
Online Notebook: 'He called the essay “a naughty,... →
tomewing:
If I was an editor - with, like, money to spend on writers and such - I think I’d probably treat putting a section or magazine together like a sports team. You need people who can do venomous dismissals, you need controversialists, you need stylists, you need insightful listeners, you need people who can discover new stuff, you need people who make your readers feel comfortable and...
Teena Marie →
I used her as a challenge, a battle flag, and a question mark, and what I wrote about her really pissed her off.* The challenge was that she created music way better than anyone like me seemed able to…
How to fly safely →
tomewing:
My compulsive book-buying tended to cluster around payday and a session on Amazon, which I’ve now weaned myself off. But a lot of the stodgier stuff on my unread list comes from a habit I’ve got into of buying something from an airport bookshop whenever I travel - “to check my credit card is working”, I tell myself, but it’s at the level of a superstition now almost.
So by buying...
Yet Another Year In America December 23, 2010 →
With all the presents packed last week, few new songs debut. Lil Wayne ft. Cory Gunz “6 Foot 7 Foot”: Same producer as on “A Milli,” and the same deep rubber-ball bass, but – maybe it’s just the…
It's going to be a chile day after Christmas →
I’ve got 30 oz. of frozen roasted-peeled-chopped green chile, and a pound of boneless pork. Now what?
Well, obviously I’ll thaw the chile…
Merry Madness To You →
So, turns out that Daddy Yankee’s “Vida En La Noche” wasn’t actually a single, though that’s no concern for my singles list, seeing as how there were another twenty-six songs ahead of it that were also…
Turmoil In Crazyland →
Turmoil here in Crazyland as it turns out that Princesa’s “Más Fuego,” number three on my singles list, is definitively mid (like spring) 2009; and she was talking up the album back in 2009 too, it seems, though I suppose…
December Madness 2010 →
I’ll be out of the house early tomorrow afternoon, and though the P&J letter just says the ballot is due “by December 24,” not “by the end of our work day on December 24,” I am two hours behind New York, so not to take…
Trains and whips excite me →
Most disappointing event of 2010:
Nobody on Rolling Country responded to my Rihanna/Flynnville Train joke. (Repeated it on poptimists, and no one…
Club Music Contorted Into Pretzels →
New G-Dragon & T.O.P. single “High High,” vocals and beats twisted as electronically tight as they can be, club music contorted into pretzels, and GD & TOP finally breaking into song* at 2:20. I…
Irresolute Singing →
Listened to this year’s Arcade Fire album for the first time, thought the tunes were almost always good, the playing and arrangements were usually good but with a self-defeating tendency towards recessiveness and obscurity, and the singing…
Now A Major Blog Post!
jonathanbogart:
So has a book ever been made into a minor motion picture?
Yeah, all the time, ‘cause back in the churn-‘em-out ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s producers were often taking usable plots from little-known books, or books that were only known to the audience for a specialty genre (crime or westerns, usually), and the book wouldn’t be part of the advertising...
Yet Another Year In America December 16, 2010 →
Still not much shaking up the charts, but at least we score a hat trick this week, three songs coincidentally of a piece, and three reviews to match. T.I. ft. Eminem “All She Wrote”: “Goodnight,…
The Days Of Future Posts →
I’ve also started posting at a blog called Jazz Advance (“From Free Jazz to the new vanguards”), where I’ll show up occasionally, if you’re interested. I mention the Contortions, Joni Mitchell, Ashlee Simpson, Taylor Swift, and Nazareth. Right on the jazz vanguard I am!
…
One girl →
Hardly know anything about Omsk musician Milky Toad - I’d call his one MySpace track minimalist electronica, which probably isn’t a very helpful designation; some of his other streams seem more dancey, though along the same lines - but his statement of intent (as rendered by Google translate) is the best ever…
[For some reason Tumblr didn’t link several of my livejournal...
marathonpacks: Matthew on Sleigh Bells’ Treats: To... →
girlboymusic:
tomewing:
marathonpacks:
Matthew on Sleigh Bells’ Treats:
To some extent, it’s a meta conceit not unlike the way lo-fi and chillwave artists present their songs with a deliberate patina of age and grit intended evoke the aesthetics of recording and playback devices of the past. The obvious difference is that …
I like Matthew’s take on Sleigh Bells a lot. It sort of reminds...
I'll never be the hot actor, I'm too cold →
My P&J ballot is due in less than a week, and while I’m struggling to keep my singles shortlist under 100, I’m also struggling to come up with a really good albums list (though it’s already way…
More good musicwrite, 2010 →
Like me,* Tom Ewing asked people to list the best thing they wrote all year, and his list has only a couple of overlaps with mine. …
Yet Another Year In America December 9, 2010 →
With Glee and little else hopping into the holiday charts, my bit remains adamantly unchomped, as you may have gathered by the recent lateness of these roundups. Glee Cast “The Dog Days Are…
After School on Amnesty Week →
The Singles Jukebox, which is by far the best review site I see regularly,* has just started its second annual Amnesty Week: each of the regular writers nominates a favorite single that hasn’t yet…
The end of today all over the sky →
Trying to start a conversation over on poptimists about the new IU video (“Good Day”): http://community.livejournal.com/poptimists/793519.html By the way, what would you say are…
Overheard At Tony's Market →
“May I help you with anything?” “No thank you. I’m just enjoying myself looking at the sausages.” [Pause] “That’s totally acceptable.”
Yet Another Year In America December 2, 2010 →
The retail season continues uneventful as far as the singles chart is concerned, with only two new non–Glee-ers . Enrique Iglesias ft.Ludacris & DJ Frank E. “Tonight (I’m Lovin You)”: Strange that…
Dear Universe →
Dear Universe, Could you please make Tumblr crash every other day? And on the days when Tumblr doesn’t crash, could you take out LiveJournal? Also, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and ilX could use some…
K-pop people: What's happening in this DJ DOC... →
K-pop people: What’s happening in this DJ DOC video? They’re obviously parodying a whole bunch of popular Korean groups, but I’m hardly one to understand the nuances, or even the broad sweeps; ‘cept…
Contact info →
Frank Kogan PO Box 9761 Denver CO 80209-0761 edcasual at earthlink dot net (Making this a post so I can put it in my lj sidebar.)
My town had created its very own East Village... →
I want you to post here how Facebook ruined your life. You see, my friend Tina (as in “Roger Williams In America” and “The Wind From My Head” in Real Punks Don’t Wear Black) started a Facebook…
Yet Another Year In America November 25, 2010 →
Slowly catching up after the holiday. Glee Cast “Forget You” comes within two spots of pulling off a first, of getting into the top ten before the original does. Other than that, little else is new,…
a grammar: we r drunk party perry california ke$ha... →
agrammar:
If you are maybe sitting at work waiting to go out and get trashed tonight, and thinking about that, and maybe looking for something medium-lengthish to read about Katy Perry and Ke$ha and drunkenness and parties and the past and future of our nation and stuff along those lines, then here is…
Nitsuh, this isn’t really to do with the piece, which I like fine, but the...
Why Park Bom but Sandara Park? →
Is it that Dara first came to fame in the Philippines? Or is Wikipedia just fucking with me? (But everyone on YouTube agrees with Wikip.)
Note that only one of these is a single →
Top five Ke$ha tracks*: 1. Blah Blah Blah 2. Backstabber 3. Party At A Rich Dude’s House 4. Cannibal 5. Boots & Boys The one of these that Lex might like if he didn’t know whom it was by would be…
Good musicwrite, 2010 →
In the comments (or if in Tumblr, reblog), please name the single best or your single favorite thing you wrote about music (etc.) this year. Also, please name the single best or your single favorite…
Moments of the year
tomewing:
There should be a category for this in year-end polls, as well as albums and tracks and artists or whatever. It’s a diminished attention span culture now, man! And also Ian McKellen’s “sexual gladiators” monologue on the Scissor Sisters album has to be rewarded somehow.
Surely you can utilize Freaky Trigger or Poptimists for this - and for other fun categories as well. (This is how...