marathonpacks: shouting out to my fellow prisoners

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:51:01 -0500

"Pitchfork: What kind of shows were you going to?

MS: Well, Brownies was really popular, and I was going to all the underground...Todd P shows, Lightning Bolt shows, all of those kind of shows, and I'd go by myself and I'd stand around. Erase Errata, I remember seeing at some weird place, and I'd stand around, like once a week, stand around, just very awkward. It's very awkward.

Pitchfork: I know how you feel. It's weird to go to those kind of shows alone because there are all these social things going on around you...

MS: And you're bored!

Pitchfork: Yeah, just kinda waiting for the things to start. Everyone is either enveloped in what they are doing, with the people they are talking to, or way too shy to deal with anyone else.

MS: Exactly. And I felt, it was really the in-between, just standing there and I'd be so bored, and this was before, like, I had a cell phone. Or most people had a cell phone. And I was just standing there, so I'd try to talk to people, and people would just be like, "Oh." Or they'd be like, "So what do you do?" And I'd be like, "I play music." "Oh, really, what label are you on?" "None." "Oh." It sucked! It sucked, it sucked, it sucked. And I used to call my best friend and be like "Ooooooooooh!" She calls it a "facial disgracial." Like, "Ohhhhhhh, I want to show those people someday, damn it!" She was watching Network, and there's a scene, the guy is like, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" And so we called our little thing Mad as Hell, like, "Fuck this shit, we're mad as hell! What the fuck!" So we went into this crazy little world. No socializing, just reading constantly, we were nerds, nerds, nerds. And that was when the biggest creative surge of my life happened, and nothing like that has ever happened since. My mind was open. Open to anything and everything, and that was the best two years of my whole life. You want to get back to it, but it's just not there anymore."

Interview: Marnie Stern | Pitchfork

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:18:44 -0500

"We're not waiting around for the perfect record. Records are just a summation of ideas or just the tracks or the music that we're working on. I don't know what they're gonna sound like in the end when we start. There's no, kinda, big plan, you know. Just try this, try this, and, you know."

Also: the BARELY HIDDEN TENSION BETWEEN THESE TWO. There are a few times when I expect one or the other to slam their hands down on the table and yell "Fuck it! Whatever!" and storm out of the room.

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 11:40:12 -0500

"'Make Love All Night Long' by TV on the Radio is one of the least sexy songs I have ever heard. It is a pretty equal combination of “Sweat” by Inner Circle and “Baby Beluga” by Raffi. If a dude who was seducing me put 'Make Love All Night Long' on as background music, he would be as punched as if he said to me, 'Yeah, this sex is on fire' (i.e., very punched)."

(also):

"I made a scramble of eggs, feta, tomatoes, and ham this morning. The last chunk was big and white and I was like, 'Ohh man, is this going to be egg white or feta' and it was feta and I was like 'FUCK YEAH.'"

"Fight with Knives" tumblr (via Maura)

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 11:24:47 -0500

I got to meet Richard Peterson, now an emeritus professor at Vanderbilt, earlier this year at a conference (he actually asked for a copy of my paper [omg]), and am just now sitting down with his essential "Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity" (U. Chicago Press, 1997). I came across a publicity site for the book (excerpted below), which perfectly reflects Peterson's intelligent yet very approachable writing style and the depth and breadth of his historical/sociological research, all present in the book. (Proof: in his epilogue at the bottom of the list: "If you knew some, but not all, of the foregoing ten facts about the creation of country music, you're the perfect reader for Creating Country Music. If you knew all ten already, you're the perfect co-author for the second edition!")

1. Atlanta, rather than Nashville, should have become "Music City, U.S.A." Not only was there was more local talent in Atlanta, but more importantly, in the mid-1920s the five elements that together made commercial country music possible: radio, record making, live touring, song writing, and song publishing, all came together in Atlanta. At the center of this enterprise was Polk Brockman and his first find, Fiddlin' John Carson. For the whole story see Chapter 2 of Creating Country Music.

3. Henry Ford, the auto maker, put more money into promoting country music in the 1920s than anyone else. Ford was frightened by what he saw as the urban decadence of couples jazz dancing. In response he organized fiddling contests and promoted square dances across the country to encourage what he saw as the older, more wholesome forms of entertainment. For more on this story and on Ford's links to fascism, see Chapter 4.

4. How did "western" get linked to "country"? Credit (or blame) Hollywood. Luckily, Hollywood didn't call the tune, just the dress code. Gene Autry and other Western-cowboy-outfitted artists were much more popular in B films of the 1930s and 1940s than were their Southern-hillbilly-styled counterparts like Roy Acuff. So, emerging honky-tonk artists like Patsy Montana, Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow, Rex Griffin, and Webb Pierce donned cowboy-styled outfits to sing their hillbilly songs of life's travails. Increasingly backed by hot, electrified instruments, they shaped the sound, lyric, and look that has been at the core of country music ever since. It takes three chapters—5, 6, and 10—to tell the story of this evolution. Along the way, you'll learn about John Wayne's short career as a singing cowboy.

8. What's behind the legend of Hank Williams? His fans didn't know that Hank was a womanizing alcoholic, at least not during his lifetime. Nor was he the first of the Rockabillies cut off in his prime, as his son Hank Jr. and others now like to say. Hank's few big-beat recordings were made early in his career, and though he did do the things that are talked of and more, the facts were carefully kept from the public. Near the end of his brief career he was dropped from the Grand Ole Opry cast for being too far gone to keep up the clean-cut facade required by even the biggest star of the Opry. Also, Hank did not write most of the songs with which he is credited. He outlined the basic stories and provided the catchy phrases, but almost all of the songs were finished by his brilliant song writing publisher, Fred Rose. To learn why Williams, nonetheless, deserves his iconic status in country music, read Chapter 11.

9. Why is country music called "country?" Joe McCarthy, the anti-Communist witch-hunting Senator from Wisconsin, had a lot to do with it. From the late 1940s country had been a musical genre in search of a label—something less degrading than "hillbilly." Everything from "old-time" to "oat tunes" was tried out, but "folk" gained currency with the unexpected success of the Weavers, whose hits included "Goodnight Irene" and "On Top of Old Smoky." Even Hank Williams called himself a folk singer. Then came the 1952 Senate hearings, where McCarthy demanded that the Weavers' lead singer, Pete Seeger, testify about his "Communist leanings." The industry dropped "folk" like a hot rock and "country and western" or simply "country" came into wide use. For the further story of the consolidation of the country music industry around Nashville, see Chapter 12.

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:44:02 -0500

In lieu of this hopeful bit of augury, an appropriately reappropriated quote and image (via/via):

Nice tie-in to the "scoreboard!" view of things, but the 30-something white-dude vote for Obama was sewn up a year ago.

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 11:52:13 -0500

"Atlantic rapper T.I. has passed two million MySpace friends, his MySpace page has over 82.6 million views and his hit single "Whatever You Like" has over 27 million streams at MySpace. Right now all of the songs at his MySpace page are collectively getting well over one million streams per day and to date have streamed over 138 million times.

How does all that translate into cash?

First-week sales of the album Paper Trail were 568,000. The album will have a big second-week drop but should top one million units within a few weeks. First week sales of the song "Whatever You Like" totaled almost 335,000 units. That's 0.13 song purchases per MySpace stream, or $0.09 of download revenue per song stream. (I'm comparing U.S. sales to global MySpace statistics. Comparing numbers across territories like that isn't the best way to compare artist statistics, but it's the only way I can do it.)

Having a #1 song will influence traffic at an artist's MySpace page. At a penny per stream, T.I.'s MySpace page can bring in $15,000 per day if visitors listen to 1.5 million streams (which T.I. will easily exceed today). Those streams would generate even more revenue if the songs had an Amazon.com buy button (which they do not yet have). That's $105,000 in ad revenue for one week. Album sales, assuming a 15/85 digital/physical split, brought in (roughly) $5.42 million. First-week sales of "Whatever You Like" brought in $235,000 (I don't know a la carte sales from other tracks on the album, so I am ignoring them as well as ringtones). The total of the three is $5.76 million. That's $3.75 per MySpace friend (again, not including ringtones)."

Glenn Peoples "What Do You Get for Two Million Myspace Friends and 26 Million Streams?

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 11:11:45 -0500

Based on the tantalizing bits pushed to the press in advance of his book's publication, Cambridge historian David Fowler wants to revise the received wisdom about the Beatles' legend and their impact on youth culture in the 1960s as a small part of his new book, Youth Culture in Modern Britain (Palmgrave Macmillan). And sure: There are no doubt plenty of new vantages through which to approach such a multi-faceted and widespread phenomenon as the Beatles, especially after nearly 40 years of having their cultural and musical importance inflated beyond recognition (to a teeny degree, uh, by stuff like this and this).

I've not read Fowler's book, and the Beatles section looks to be relegated to a single chapter (the last one) but this quote, decontextualized as it is, stuck in my craw, for obvious reasons if you know me even in the slightest: "(The Beatles) were young capitalists who, far from developing a youth culture, were exploiting youth culture by promoting fan worship, mindless screaming and nothing more than a passive teenage consumer."

Does it shock anyone at all anymore to think of rock and pop music as a commodity? Doesn't debunking the specious claim of the Beatles' inability to "develop a youth culture" reek of a strawman built to burn in service of an incredibly simplistic Marxian argument about exploitation? Don't we understand at this point that youth cultures based around pop music have always developed from the interplay between listeners, creators, promoters, distributors and other intermediaries (Ed Sullivan), which is much more nuanced and complex than simple "exploitation"?

The "fan worship, mindless screaming and nothing more than a passive teenage consumer" line is really what gets me, though. The notion that die-hard music fans are nothing more than submissive fanatics lapping up what's put in front of them would be sort of boneheaded coming from anyone who's ever, well, liked anything, but especially so from a historian ostensibly devoted to reconstructing a half-century of such affective behavior. I'll concede that when studying mass audiences, especially in the past, the necessity arises to lump people together, lest analysis devolves into pointless relativism. But falling back on the tropes of passive consumerism and mindless screaming just seems plain lazy, if not a bit shameful.

Yet it seems to serve a function for Fowler, whose main project seems to be pulling from the fringes an unheralded folk hero representing the authentic in the face of fabricated mainstream nonsense (Ladies and gentlemen: Rolf Gardiner). I look forward to reading Fowler's full book, if only to absorb what I imagine will be another convenient interpretation of infantilized mass/pop culture and fan reception by a scholar who should probably know better.

I've been having this nightmare. A real swinger of a nightmare, too.

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 09:49:15 -0500

A great piece of investigative journalism from Julian Sanchez at Arstechnica (see below) about the dubious provenance of the numbers the U.S. government trumpets re: jobs and revenue lost to crimes against intellectual property (750,000 and $200 to $250 billion). First, I was reminded of John Iselin (as Joe McCarthy) in The Manchurian Candidate, pulling the latest number of DoJ Communists (57) from a bottle of Heinz ketchup. Then, obviously, this sprung to mind. But of course, duh, when I stopped to think for just a hot second, this sadly recent and all-too-real example reminded me that even In Real Life, Big Numbers don't have to Mean Anything when you need to Convince People to Do Something.

Some choice moments from Sanchez's digging, with added boldness on the best bits:

"These statistics are brandished like a talisman each time Congress is asked to step up enforcement to protect the ever-beleaguered U.S. content industry. And both, as far as an extended investigation by Ars Technica has been able to determine, are utterly bogus.
...
we dove into press archives, hoping to find the earliest public mention of the elusive 750,000 jobs number. And we found it in—this is not a typo—1986...The Christian Science Monitor quoted then-Commerce Secretary Malcom Baldridge, trumpeting Ronald Reagan's own precursor to the recently passed PRO-IP bill. Baldridge estimated the number of jobs lost to the counterfeiting of U.S. goods at 'anywhere from 130,000 to 750,000.'
...
All the projections we've discussed, the rigorous and the suspect alike, calculate losses in sales or royalties to U.S. firms. This is often conflated with the net "cost to the U.S. economy." But those numbers—whatever they might be—are almost certainly not the same. When someone torrents a $12 album that they would have otherwise purchased, the record industry loses $12, to be sure. But that doesn't mean that $12 has magically vanished from the economy. On the contrary: someone has gotten the value of the album and still has $12 to spend somewhere else.
...
both numbers are seemingly decades old, gaining a patina of currency and credibility by virtue of having been laundered through a relay race of respectable sources, even as their origin recedes into the mists. That's especially significant, because these numbers are always invoked as proof that the piracy problem is still dire—that everything we've done to step up international enforcement of intellectual property laws has been in vain.
...
Neither figure is terribly plausible on its face. As Wired noted earlier this week, 750,000 jobs is fully 8 percent of the current number of unemployed in the United States. And $250 billion is more than the combined 2005 gross domestic revenues of the movie, music, software, and video game industries."

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 23:00:18 -0500

"In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot."

Tim Dickinson, "Make-Believe Maverick"

Chris Rock, futurist.

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:49:12 -0500

Stranger things have happened:

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 01:58:14 -0500

"On this matter of criticism, something that appalls me is the idea going around now that the practice of criticism is opposed to the literary impulse. Is necessarily opposed to it. Sure, it may be a trap, it may destroy the creative impulse, but so may drink or money or respectability. But criticism is a perfectly natural human activity and somehow the dullest, most technical criticism may be associated with full creativity. Elizabethan criticism is all, or nearly all, technical-- meter, how to hang a line together-- kitchen criticism, how to make the cake. People deeply interested in an art are interested in the 'how.' Now I don't mean to say that this is the only kind of valuable criticism. Any kind is good that gives a deeper insight into the nature of the thing-- a Marxist analysis, a Freudian study, the relation to a literary or social tradition, the history of a theme. But we have to remember that there is no one, single, correct kind of criticism, no complete criticism. You only have different kinds of perspectives, giving, when successful, different kinds of insights. And at one historical moment one kind of insight may be more needed than another."

Robert Penn Warren, from The Writer's Chapbook

Couldn't Tell the Difference 'Tween an "-a" and "-er"

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 21:29:15 -0500

1. "Let us begin with a simple construct: a solitary slave sings. The singing is heard as enigmatic noise by an overseer on the ship at sea moving somewhere along the middle passage; or heard by a young and enslaved Frederick Douglass, and remembered (differently in the process of reflection and critical interpretation) as he composes his memoirs; or heard by the white abolitionist whose own sense of pathos guides him or her to anticipate that this experience will be repeated again and again; the slave's song is captured as a fleeting specimen fitting some mid-nineteenth-century protoethnographic schema of 'natural history', or it is heard by the man of scientific training who now knows that it has a proper place within a taxonomy of ethnologically conceived folkways.
...
While the singing emanates from an individual or group, it is never reducible to only the sound of a singing subject. In breaking the air, it punctuates an existing history and ruptures into the present. Certainly it hails a past just as much as it marks its own movement. As a cultural form, the song further extends an already extended cultural passage, just as it also begins passages that will cover new cultural terrain."

Jon Cruz, "Culture on the Margins: the Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation"

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2. Wale, "The Kramer" (mp3) (from 2:19 to the end, especially)
from The Mixtape About Nothing (2008's best rap album) (download)

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 21:09:52 -0500

"SOMERSET, NJ—In what local authorities are calling a 'near tragedy,' Charles Wentworth, a 17-year-old Rutgers Preparatory senior and member of the affluent Wentworth family, came perilously close to suffering a consequence resulting from his own wrongdoing Saturday.
...
'A lot of kids in Charles' situation would have confessed and accepted punishment for their mistake, but my son is strong,' said Wentworth's father, aluminum magnate Herman Wentworth, who after arriving at the crash site told his son that 'everything is taken care of,' and while Charles sat in his father's BMW texting his friends, loudly threatened to call the police commissioner if any charges were pressed. 'Charles would never allow himself to give up and gain valuable insight into the way things work in the real world without a fight.'"

The Onion, "Wealthy Teen Nearly Experiences Consequence"

unrequited AIM chat attempts, vol. 1

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:26:36 -0500

(from the archives)

marathonpacks (3:44 pm): i don't put much stock in the idea that too many "obscure" songs on a mix is inherently an "elitist" endeavor, or a sign of trying to "prove" one's taste. sure, exchanging mixtapes/cds/playlists/whateverz are social processes, which means that we care about what the other person thinks about us, as much as the music when we give it to them. that's like a foundational ting (sic). and mixes are made for special occasions with deliberate purposes as well, so like a wedding DJ mix isn't going to have too much Glaxo Babies or shit on there. (unless it's the Glaxo Babies' drummer's wedding, but you get my point). But I do think there's a lot to say for making a mix for someon (sic) that (sic) you know pretty well, and whose tastes you might be attuned to, and making it with a lot of stuff that you're fairly certain they've never heard before. not out of some high fidelity-type desire to blow minds and move product or whatever, but because i think that, from a reception standpoint, listening to a carefully put-together mix of stuff that sounds vaguely familiar from a genre-perspective, but which isn't ringing a bell, can be sorta invigorating, you know? like, requiring an active, thoughty (sic) listening stance, not like "oh here's that fucking Bowie song again that Eric plays and gets all amped to."

ghostofchristmasgassed: ...

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marathonpacks (8:33pm): so get this b/c it will BLOW YR MIND
marathonpacks: so like the first time i ever heard antony and the johnsons it was ambient, in some public place somehwere (sic) and i'm totally convinced that it was aaron neville. i'm all "hey that's aaron neville singing" or some such
marathonpacks: then i found out its this guy antony and am like "huh"
marathonpacks: anyhoozle so the first time i hear hercules and love affair, i instantly think back to the song 'hercules' by aaron neville, which for some reason had just come up on shuffle maybe
marathonpacks: and guess who sings with hercules/l.a. (...) IF NOT ANTONY HIMSELF
marathonpacks (8:36pm): it's what i call a CHRISTMAS MIRACLE and it's not even christmas

dont_take_me_alive_72: ...
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marathonpacks (9:12am): im thinking about starting a blog what do you think of that idea

greg_in_cow_town: ...
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marathonpacks (6:55pm): calling you right now

x_french_pea_shootr: ...

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:56:47 -0500

I don't care about Airborne Toxic Event as a band (I don't care about most bands, so nothing specifically against these guys), but I do think this recent kerfluffle they've puffed up with Pitchfork proves that there are still ways for indie rock bands--especially those not subject to Brooklyn's non-stop, barely-filtered publicity machine--to imaginatively try and separate themselves from the ever-growing, ever-similar stack. Ian Cohen's Pitchfork review slagged the band with a 1.6, which is one thing. The band fired back with a lengthy, passive-aggressive missive on its website, which is the second thing.

Leader and band-former Mikel Jollett understands how the media works, of course: Wikipedia tells us that "Jollett had earned income as a freelance writer, contributing to organizations such as NPR, Los Angeles Times, Filter Magazine and Men’s Health" (He also named his band after a quote from a Don DeLillo novel, which is just as annoying as the myriad of bands from a while back named "Lot 49" or some bullshit. We get it. You took L238.) Perhaps even unconsciously, and definitely more interestingly, Jollett (and, um, the band's publicist) might also have been influenced by the current, soul-assassinating strategies of the RNC re: Sarah Palin. Essentially: take whatever is slung in your direction, no matter how based in factitude it might be, and immediately play the victim of some tyrannical, elitist institution. What comes of this, or what is the third thing? Let's let Google Blog Search tell us the third thing, which is cleverly coded, absolutely free publicity for your debut album (am I in there now too? Dammit).

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 11:49:17 -0500

matthew: have you seen this one clip with McCain talking about "President Putin of Germany"
eric: what?
eric: is that on the onion
eric: has life turned into the onion
matthew: the Republican party has turned into the Onion
matthew: last night he said something to the effect of confusing the Prime Minister of Spain with a Latin American despot
eric: and then he confused a Latin American despot with Home Despot, the home furnishings store
matthew: ha
matthew: where you can rule your house with an iron fist
eric: haha
eric: there recently was a psychologist on NPR or some such talking about how McCain exhibits all the tell-tale signs of early dementia
eric: but that's of course completely off the record
matthew: mi casa su dictatorship
eric: no one can dare say that the possible leader of the free world might be a crazy old senile bastard, shaking his cane at russia because russia's frisbee is on his roof
eric: president Oldy Olsen
matthew: vice president Pimpbot
eric: Secretary of Agriculture Tokey the Bong
eric: ok maybe not that last one

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 18:07:34 -0500

"Of course we should have seen Sarah Palin coming. All we had to do was look at the music charts. Which song dominated American radio airplay this summer? Not M.I.A.'s 'Paper Planes,' despite the deserved critical excitement when it jumped into the top five on the back of Pineapple Express; not Miley Cyrus; not the Jonas Brothers; and not even Coldplay. It was Katy Perry's 'I Kissed a Girl,' a pseudofeminist exploitation number whose cynicism has been topped this year only by the RNC."

Michaelangelo Matos: Katy Perry - "I Kissed A Girl"

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:13:32 -0500

"...I spent some time digging up what I could of Writing on Professional Wrestling. There was that pro wrestling class at MIT, which had a blog, and I read that all the way through. A few university presses have put out essay compendiums on the subject, and there are a few pieces scattershot on the web. Most of the discourse, as with any academic writing on pop culture, is largely a self-serving defense of the subject as worthy of academic inquiry. Roland Barthes. Hypermasculinity. Revisions of Masculinity in the Post World War II era. Wrestling as Spectacle. Role of the Mask! Authenticity vs. Inauthenticity! Wrestling Is Sort of Like Pornography! Sexism. Wrestling As Modern Epic Storytelling. Heroes and Villains. Everything I've read keeps an arm's length from the subject matter, and my guess is that most of them have never liked pro wrestling anyway. For the sake of being "critical discourse," the critical discourse on professional wrestling fundamentally misunderstands the humor and appeal of professional wrestling.

I didn't fear Papa Shango because he is playing on stereotypes of non-Christian religions and a continental fear of witchcraft as handed down to us through children's stories. Rather, I feared Papa Shango because he is an enormous man who paints his face white and carries around a skull with smoke coming out of it.
...
As a closed and profitable and fantastical and self-perpetuating universe, the WWF in the early/mid-90s remains deeply fascinating to me--not just culturally but aesthetically."

"LADDER MATCH MANIFESTO"

Me: Oh, this is going to be so good. Above, my emphasis; replace "professional wrestling" with "most any popular culture phenomenon".

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:52:38 -0500

A Super-8 camera bearing a supposed snuff film accidentally floated away on some balloons (used as a cheap crane effect), was found and watched by a farmer, who freaked and gave it to the authorities, who tried to solve the case for a year before acting on a tip from an art student and discovering that it was the popular heavy metal rock act Nine Inch Nails. In the Smithsonian of Novel Ways to Promote Music, this Pretty Hate Machine-era stunt, accidental or not, is, when compared to what Reznor would do later, something akin to finding the Wright Brothers' first popsicle-stick airplane model. Here's the whole story, from the flabbergasted folks at c.1990 Hard Copy (via):

One other fun thing: the producers' idea of a stock "art student" (around 5:05) is a fey, bereted jester-type lustily painting what looks like an out-of-work Cinemax softcore actress. I'm more afraid of him than anything that might have been on Reznor's film.

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:35:49 -0500

If you have a Facebook profile, you're already sick of this, but: Finally, a website that remembers the lessons taught us by Richard David James can be used to make things as irresistably creepy as me, below. Back-combing was a bitch.

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:11:22 -0500

"All David Hayes meant to do was cast for his granddaughter. Instead he wound up landing a 21-pound channel catfish — a North Carolina state record — on her Barbie fishing pole."

3. Michael Phelps
2. Usain Bolt
1. David Hayes

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:08:42 -0500

"A trilogy as sexy, silly, and inscrutable as it was a quarter-century ago, these videos play out on the same early-'80s barren Texas landscape that No Country for Old Men's Anton Chigurh traversed, though the proceedings here are decidedly more Penthouse Forum than Cormac McCarthy. In each successive video, a car mechanic, valet, and short-order cook suffer abuse heaped on all sides by bosses, bikers, slick-haired queers, and lard-assed oil-rich Houstonians. Under such pressure, these blue-collar boys encounter their fairy godfathers, ZZ Top (who appear like a mirage in the Texas Panhandle landscape), via a set of magical car keys with the ZZ logo and 'The Eliminator' herself, a customized two-door, cherry-red 1933 Ford coupe. Attended by a triumvirate of hotties decked out in halter tops, fishnets, leather minis, studded belts, and red pumps, these modern-day Fates arrive just in time for the makeovers (seriously, in the intervening decades, how did no one at Spike TV conceive of Skank Eye for the Straight Guy?) and triumph."

Andy Beta, "Remembering ZZ Top's Inconceivable 1980s Makeover"

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:44:37 -0500

One little indie rock addendum to this Dial M post about a trove of Blue Note album cover scans (which seems to be offline at the moment?), particularly their note at the bottom about Yesterday's New Quintet's visual homage to Ornette!:

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 11:44:18 -0500

Like you, I couldn't watch enough replays of Usain Bolt winning the 100 on Saturday night, especially because he pretty much did the Soulja Boy dance backwards for the last 20 meters. I don't mind cockiness as long as it's earned and not overly performative, but holy shit is this guy fast. Has there ever been a record that we take seriously broken so incredibly easily? Like, a guy in a pie-eating contest taking the last minute to re-enact with his fist a bit of dialogue from My Dinner with Andre? One of those radio DJs staying up for like 175 hours doing the last 10 with his eyes closed? I don't think so.

But as with virtually all amazing things that athletes do, with Bolt, there's a shoe company in the mix (maybe):

You see, the reason Usain Bolt didn't push through and finish in 9.60 seconds instead of 9.69 is -- as the rumor goes -- because he's smart. He didn't want to kill his gravy train.

Runners often get six figure bonuses for doing things like breaking world records and if you study the previous four times the 100 meter has been broken over the last three years, it's never been by more than .03 seconds. Asafa Powell (9.77) broke Maurice Greene's record (9.79). Justin Gatlin (9.76) broke the record of Powell, who broke it back a little more than a year later (9.74). That stood until Bolt broke the record (9.72) in May.

So, the conspiracy theory goes, that Bolt knew before the race that he had to win the race and take the gold, but not push it too much, otherwise he'd kill his opportunity at future bonuses.

Change is on the cards, but this time it will be hard

marathonpacks@yahoo.com (marathonpacks) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 02:10:37 -0500

"When I am online I am perpetually aware of open-endedness, of potentiality, and psychologically I am fragmented. I make my way forward through whatever text is in front of me factoring in not just the indeterminacy of whatever is next on the page, I am also alert, even if subliminally, to the idea of the whole, the adjacency of all information. However determined I am to focus on the task at hand, I am haunted by this idea of the whole. Which is different than what I might experience sitting in a library chair knowing that I’m in the midst of three floors of stacks. The difference has to do with permeability, with the imminence of linkage, and it is decisive.
...
when Nicholas Carr talks about how it gets harder and harder to stay with a book—and there is an avalanche of this sort of testimony—I see it as evidence that exposure to the intransitive genius of cyberspace does begin to affect our responses, our cognition, when we are not online. That we are being modified.

Sven Bikerts "Reading in the Open-ended Information Zone Called Cyberspace"

I made a brief reference to Carr's Atlantic article in my own minor staring-at-the-object rumination last Friday, but obviously that venue (nor Atlantic Monthly, even) isn't the place for the sort of research-driven understanding of the way in which we not only create, but receive information online (obviously, in Girl Talk's case as in so many others, those two things are very much intertwined). This sort of thing fascinates me, and there will be more said by me as I find ways to say it. For starters, I appreciate Bikerts' anecdotal addendum (I've helpfully highlighted my favorite sentences); his opening paragraph reminds me of that longstanding philosophical question pondered by those who study technology (and I'm paraphrasing): "where exactly are you when you're talking on the phone?"

I also like Dr. Murdoch's take on the subject: