The Skeeter Davis Center for Regressive Misogyny

mark newgarden’s we all die alone is the single greatest book i read this year. nihilism, like lots of isms, is a cheap way to court sex for people who love the abstract truth but lack the courage and tenderness to find humor in death. there, i said it. in we all die alone, people dive right into the nasty, hilarious slit of the matter and don’t have to metamorphize into celestial beings to do it. because farting and big honkers are as mortal as fear. so conversations aren’t all abstract, but they are brutally honest; in one episode, an older woman tries to tell her husband about the beautiful dream she had of them the previous night–beachwalking, serenity–while he replies, “fuck me” in endless recurrence. i cried like crazy.

panda bear, “carrots” b/w excepter, “kkkkk”

i can’t even tell if the hippies are getting better or not, but i have come to reckon with the fact that i’d swim around in their piss if they sold it by the bucket. i can never wait to hear what they do next. part of it is that they’re constantly seeding more than they can sew (“carrots” is a half-triumph at best), that the open-ended “here’s what we were thinking for 20 minutes” works with a blog-type methodology: sure, you might not find a willing public for all your spew, but spewing whenever the spirit moves you only refines your approach. for fans, this is an enthralling thing to watch.

pbw poll: do you have a fixation on listening to all recorded output by a single band that doesn’t require some psychic loin-girding for mediocrity or disappointment? whose piss would you swim in?

also, in 1989, epmd recorded a song called “you had too much to drink,” which is the best public service announcement for rap-rock and responsible drinking i have ever heard. truly agonizing.

The Straight Story, pt. 3 of the Year in Review

nate’s year-end corral was so eloquent in its simplicity that it made me feel bad for being almost self-hatingly obfuscatory in my last few posts. but that’s nate’s style, on and off the field. thanks for keeping me in check, nate.

my favorite artist/album title combination from this year

vivid, transparent, and brutally honest, perhaps to a fault.

the titter-titter award for best historic naughty jam i heard this year

the five royales, “laundromat blues.”

paraphrased: my girlfriend’s genetalia is the best genetalia. it is like a washing machine. my analogies prefigure academic rhetoric about the mechanization of sex and try to counteract a long history of catholicism’s cultural legacy of portraying sex as dirty. if you don’t believe me, ask my backup singers, whose moans are self-evident.

runners-up

the treniers, “poon tang”

screamin’ jay hawkins, “bite it”

the latter also ties with tom ze’s “o amor é um rock” for the jane birkin was really no big deal award for sex noise that made me libidinally itchy in a very real way

the best economist cover

close runner-up

of all the words rotting the maw of babel, few bother me more than the overuse of “dada.” i’m serious. bothersome. but i’ll use it for some of these recent economist covers, which run closer to the heart of dada than almost anything i can think of. the deadpan absurdity of the images, rather than dulling or avoiding, actually sharpens their messages. putin and kim jong-il aren’t cast as inert monoliths of boring ol’ dictatorial gubernments, but as what they really are: scary-as-shit cartoons; supervillains in the continuing nightmares of global politics.

three older, “classic” hip-hop albums i heard (and really liked) for the first time this year, in part because i never really listened to hip-hop growing up

stetsasonic, in full gear
black sheep, a wolf in sheep’s clothing
del tha funkee homosapien, i wish my brother george was here

the best album i had forgotten about for a little while

the raincoats, the raincoats.

i recently told a friend that this was one of my all-time favorite records and then realized i hadn’t listened to it in almost two years. it turns out that i kind of needed to, just to remind me that the first step to taking over the world is deliniating just where your world is; between this album and gertrude stein’s tender buttons, i learned the value of thinking small. plus, palmolive’s drumming awakens me to rare heights of idiot joy.

an album that came out this year that has a whiff of the spirit i love so dearly on the raincoats

ooioo, taiga. ooioo like the cars that go boom. they also like west african guitar patterns and screaming.

one hastily selected song from this year

momus, “nervous heartbeat”

twelve hastily selected songs from years other than this year

miles davis, “he loved him madly”
comus, “figure in your dreams”
animal collective, “good lovin’ outside”
del tha funkee homosapien, “dr. bombay”
the coasters, “little egypt”
the pochonbo electronic ensemble, “arirang”
sparkletones, “little turtle”
lord kitchener, “kitchener in the jungle”
gilberto gil, “volks, volkwagen blue”
ned rifle aka hal hartley, closing theme from trust
disco tex and his sex-o-lettes, “i wanna dance wit’ choo”
the boredoms, “jungle taitei”

HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM PBW!

self-surgery yields a cancer!

forgive me, father, for i have confessed, and it’s only been like a few days since my last confession.

lazy links!

soul-gospel digging at the ever-excellent sir shambling site.

irresponsible, uninformed, and yet totally enthusiastic!

big ups to emily qiu of ebay, china province, for sending along my dvd of the north korean mass games. my family will likely enjoy it more than a christmas story or a miracle on 34th street.

Bebes Have Soft Skulls, pt. 2 of the Year in Review

blogger nick sylvester is bored and content and remembers some stuff. legendary beard and neurologist oliver sacks is writing a book exploring the linkages between music and memory. “hauntology” is a nebulous term used to talk about records with a certain psycho-memorial effect that becomes shortened to “h-tology” because bloggers get slightly ahead of themselves. soon bloggers will have no idea what it means and then they will start having to remember what they thought it meant in the first place or why they needed a word for that sensation. they will not be able to do it quite right, i.e. they will start traipsing through the jungle of revelations, perhaps. unfuckwithable experimental music label ghost box puts out some really boring records that make blogger mike powell remember things he has never experienced. he found an explanation entitled “why i will never return to graduate school” on a harvest foods receipt under a large container of cayenne pepper on his counter:

remember all of those ideas that drove you pretty much insane during the spring of 2004. like the one about form i.e. pop song structure being an essentially distracting thing, made distracting through perpetual conditioning. so it’s not that we’re bored with it. actually, we’re constantly occupied by it. if we were to actually get bored, the world would go into reverse-origami mode and we’d be flooded with rootless memories and the unique, confusing bliss of present experience. don’t forget to stop taking so many mushrooms and reading poetry. go back and listen to robert ashley’s private parts whenever you are worried that you are not bored enough. try to report on full boredom like it was a junior-high soccer game.

(and the reason why we *don’t* spend the time is that a) there’s more shit than ever and i don’t mean “shit” as in “stuff” but “shit” as in bad stuff and b) fear of death is spiking amongst supersaturated youth. blogger nick sylvester calls it “back on the run.” and so pier one of redemption is acknowledging the unpinnable cornucopia of life in general and pier two is settling in with stuff like harmonia or robert ashley, records that basically say “here now” over and over again. sleeping is okay. blogger mike powell spent some 2005 inside the float tank, which was expensive but worth it. the barefoot guide said it was “okay to fall asleep.” blogger mike powell finally remembered all the years his mother fed him white plastic tapes with names like celestial highways to try to calm him down from his fear or death. om. but seriously, relax, toke and pass, remember that “nothing happens” is, grammatically speaking, a positive statement.)

what might be a memory, albeit an ineffable and indeterminate one, is blossoming in the alzheimer’s-ridden mind of someone’s grandmother to the music of dorothy coates. bagpipes continue to be ineffective in the rescue of geriatrics from a perpetual present.

The Snowglobe, pt. 1 of the Year in Review

AS THE IRREPRESSIBLE VORTEX OF HISTORY swallows 2006 like a stoned youth some goobers, i feel the surge of necessity to take stock.

rapper saigon wants to put his thumb in your ass, demonstrates a wonderful knowledge of dog breeds and their attendant personalities, and criticizes the clinton administration’s handling of welfare in the united states. expensive norwegian pop chanteuse bertine zetlitz releases an album called my italian greyhound, likely to the complete ignorance of saigon’s fascination. blogger mike powell sees a pitbull eat some wood in a backyard and the new yorker’s david remnick pens a substantial, interesting profile of bill clinton that does not use the word “saigon” (or “ho chi minh city” for that matter), but does use the word “vietnam” three times. meanwhile, men in vietnam continue to eat dog meat because they think it will give them longer-lasting erections. the study of linkages between priapism and sickle cell disease rages on.

pop singer britney spears accidentally exposes her genitalia. ben jones, an accountant in little rock, arkansas, describes it as looking “like a horse’s mouth.” seperately, ben’s roommate, lindsey millar, expresses visible anxiety over the concept of vagina dentata and also likes that album by rappers the clipse. vagina dentata continues to capture the imagination of academia at large.

more rappers make albums about drug slinging and young white men continue to wring their hands over them. blogger mike powell takes a bunch of drugs and listens to steely dan a lot and then kicks drugs and wrings his hands for nine months before meeting a girl who corrects him when he says “verb” but means “gerund.” actually, in the intervening nine months he gets righteously high, like, once, and surrenders to the album conference of the birds by dope-rockers om. both om and the inspiration, an album by drug-slinging rapper young jeezy, have really slow songs on them. rapper david banner, nee lavell crump, continues to be more compelling than dope-induced fantasies mike powell has had of egyptians building pyramids and motivational speaker and drug-slinging rapper young jeezy.

motivational speaker and blogger sasha frere-jones gets into an internet-based tiff with white songwriter stephin merritt over allegedly racist remarks. unsurprisingly, racism continues to thrive; depressingly, it becomes evermore cemented as a party killer in music discourse by the music-listening community.

the insistence of rappers on wearing jewelry, popularly known as ice, continues, perhaps in spite of the fact that the arctic sea is experiencing rapid thawing. the high for little rock, arkansas on december 12th is a shocking 68 degrees fahrenheit, still 140 degrees lower than the temperature at which cocaine base vaporizes.