“No M.O.’s goal in life was to be a criminal mastermind. He thought if he could remove his fingerprints, he’d be the bane of the FBI, a mystery thief slipping in and out of the Federal Reserve, leaving nothing behind but greasy smudges. The drawback to No M.O.’s plan was that all the sandpapering and scraping had turned his hands into a blistery mass of flesh so tender he got paper cuts from counting money. Unable to hold silverware, No M.O. ate nothing but marshmallows, cotton candy, and white bread. When feeling brave, he bought large bags of french fries and waited for the hot morsels to cool so he could eat them without scalding himself. A favorite GTH parlor trick was to get No M.O. so excited about this grandiose dreams he’d want to slap hands with someone in celebration of his genius. The sound of a No M.O. high five was a sickening splat not unlike the scrunch of a family of snails being stepped on. No M.O. came away from these handclasps alternately screaming in pain and blowing on his hand to take away the sting.”

—
The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty

Question: looking for answers

Tumblrs. You are a superhero. You have powers. Do you outfit yourself in an American Apparel-y costume of tights, lame, lycra, and underwear on the outside, or do you just wear your nicest clothes?

My mood this week: Nellie McKay on The View, singing “I Wanna Get Married.” Watch The View ladies carefully to see who’s getting a kick out of her and who just doesn’t get it. It’s hilarious, ironical, and interesting!

“Banks cited Algren’s 5 or 6 books that are “deathless,” wondering why he’s not in the canon these days. In his time he was mentioned alongside Hemingway and Dostoevsky. He used to grouse to Banks about, besides Preminger, Simone DeBeauvoir, who he had been entangled in an affair with. She objectified him “in a way only French intellectuals could do to Americans, as a figure of authenticity and existential courage.””

—

Considering that Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis are going to star as Nelson Algren + Simone de Beauvoir in a film called My American Friend, I thought now would be as good a time as any to report on what Russell Banks said about Algren at a special reading that I attended. (It was Banks, a jolly sort, and the excellently dark Don Delillo; Algren was a mentor to both of them. I’m currently reading End Zone by Delillo. It goes nicely with Girls’ cover of “End of the World.” My S.O. says Phillip Glass goes well with Delillo, too.)

“It’s shocking, really, that there hasn’t been a biopic of the legendary Paul Robeson as of yet. (According to IMDB, Oren Moverman, the Oscar-nominated writer/director of The Messenger, has worked on a script about the relationship between Robeson and Albert Einstein for Danny Glover.) Much, much more than “the guy who sings "Ol’ Man River” in Showboat,“ Robeson was a towering American figure and one of the few people who can accurately be called a Renaissance man. To sum it up: before he gained international fame as an opera singer and actor, he had excelled in school and sports, both college valdevictorian and All American football player. (He also excelled at baseball, basketball, and track and field.) He got his law degree from Columbia and played professional football. Staggering accomplishments for anybody, and simply mindblowing when you realize that he did this all while facing the difficulties and racism of life in America as a Black man in the early 1900s. As an entertainer, he broke down barriers, playing Othello on Broadway and playing an active role in a film career that was notable for dignified roles that never slipped into stereotypes. He was an activist who spoke out against racism in the world and the film industry. It’s a tragedy that his vocal support of socialism led to the U.S. government taking away his passport, putting him under survailance from the FBI and CIA (he has one of the largest FBI files for an entertainer), and targeting his livelihood during the McCarthy era.”

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This got buried on the site and it’s not my favorite writing I’ve written (a little clunky I say), but, here’s a fact: Paul Robeson is the man + here’s what I wrote about him for Tribeca. Click on it if you’re feeling nice!

Someone should start a fuckyeahPaulRobeson tumblr. When I was at a small Messenger screening, I did ask Oren Moverman about the Paul Robeson/Albert Einstein script because that sounded fascinating and he said it was hard to research. (This article may have some information?)

Anyways, Paul Robeson was a great man; that said, you can see the contradictions of America, the shame and hate and idiocy, played out in his fascinating, imperfect life. This man was the biggest entertainer in the world at one point and America erased him from the records, practically. Words like “awesome” tend to get over used but he really was awesome, in the true, split-it-up “awe” “some” meaning of the word, .

“

You will live to regret this review. Your name and reputation are forever etched in history now, and generations will read this review in incredulous wonder at the man who rated this enduring work of art a 40/100. It is because of reviews and reviewers like you that I started my own blog 2 weeks ago. But no anger here - just pity.

Comment by Bryan Bond from spencer, NY

”

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Comment on my cousin’s review of Joanna Newsom’s Have One on Me on Popmatters. LOL.

“It’s not ambition when you’re not making any choices, and it’s not daring when there’s not much at stake. In the digital world, a triple album is just a few more ones and zeroes to fit on the hard drive. It’s too bad really, that Have One on Me is so overdone because there’s a decent album hidden somewhere in there.”

—

From the Popmatters’ 4/10 review of Joanna Newsom’s new behemoth, in reference to the album’s length.  Not having heard the album, it’s hard for me to comment on this.  I’m of three minds on long album length.

Practical Me totally agrees with this statement above.  Throwing everything you’ve got at an album has nothing to do with ambition, especially if you had three years to record it.  It’s not ambition; it’s convincing your record label to do it, which usually ain’t hard because it’s a good press angle.  As a PR guy, I got so sick of receiving (and often having to pitch) 14 song, 65 minute debut albums.  They were always the work of an artist or band in need of an editor.  It was clear that the “album” consideration wasn’t really taken into account, that they’d put everything they’d ever done at that point onto their CD, which graciously accommodated them.  Ask yourself this: who wants another Mellon Collie?

Wait, maybe I DO want another Mellon Collie.  Listener Me is more ambivalent about this statement.  I adore many of the supposed bloated failures out there.  Tusk is my favorite Fleetwood Mac album.  Odessa is near the top of the BeeGees canon for me (though maybe Horizontal or Idea is my favorite?).  I’m a big Sandanista defender.  The first two Tindersticks albums really hit me hard because they were so deep and so heavy and so long (an 80 minute CD?!).  I like it when artists let it all hang out, when they throw a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what sticks, when they barf all over an electronic musical medium and say “HERE.  Take it.”  It’s exhilarating to pick through the wreckage, looking for misunderstood gems and good bad ideas.

Musician Me takes umbrage at the statement above.  Do you know how hard it is to record lots of (good-sounding) material?  Even in the computer age it’s not THAT easy.  Some bands take years polishing ten songs.  Lord knows, I speak from experience.  Eighteen songs probably took a lot of time to write, record, mix, and master.  Give her a break.  That IS ambitious.  And Newsom’s music (including the few songs I’ve heard of the new one) is not slapdash four chord strummy material.  It’s carefully considered and arranged, built on a lot of details.  Regardless of what you think about the end product, it’s not like Joanna Newsom went into the studio for a week and just pooped this stuff.  And shouldn’t being prolific—if even in spurts—be celebrated?  One of the reasons that the Beatles, James Brown, Dylan, etc. were all so prolific is that they treated musicianship as a job.  Being a musician was what they did and society accepted this role of theirs.  In this era of day jobs and bad economies and nobody buying music, this kind of artist is fairly rare.  We should be encouraging the reemergence of the musical artist as a professional, not expecting them to edit!

But then I think about having to listen to 3 CDs’ worth of material, with my Ph.D. collapsing in on me, and there is just no way I have the time.  Practical Me wins out again.

—Lucas

(via chainofknives)

(Whispery: my cousin wrote this review. I think it’s a solid argument. Gotta admit I’m not super into J. News, tho’ I respect her steez.)