Hump Day: These are a few of Kurt Cobain’s favorite things

So I had a pretty spiritual experience this weekend listening to this Earth song featuring Kurt Cobain vocals.

Kurt Cobain’s massive popularity and subsequent martyrdom has made him a pretty mythological figure uh no duh doi. So let’s all act like we’re 13 again and only like things that Kurt likes.

1. The movie Over the Edge.

Hey Matt Dillon. Hey that ubiquitous 90s DIY phrase A KID WHO TELLS ON ANOTHER KID IS A DEAD KID.

2.

3. Allegedly, Beat Happening was one of Kurt’s favorite bands. And while we’re talking allegations, a friend told me that Henry Rollins once punch Calvin Johnson in the junk. Same players, different allegation: Apparently Calvin Johnson also said that Beat Happening is way punker than Black Flag. Discuss.

4. DUH.

“Occupation?”
“Cocksucker.”

5. The Raincoats, which anyone who grew up in a small town and obsessively read the liner notes to Incesticide could tell you (me).

6. I’m serious.

But, I mean… How could you not?

7. The song Seasons in the Sun which he used to play as a child, apparently.

*

8. William S. Burroughs, including this track which he did backing guitar for.

*Thanks Liz!

Hump Day Grab Bag: Fucking fuck yeah fucking World fucking Cup yeaaaahhhhh!

By Tatyana

WHY CAN'T THIS BE EVERY DAY?!?

Wow, I am so freaking excited about the World Cup. Seriously, I have two things on my mind right now, and those two things are soccer players’ thighs.

One thing that I dislike about America (besides our reputation for being a nation unable to stop large-scale environmental disasters that we, in effect, have caused) is the fact that soccer is but marginalia in our sports encyclopedia. American club teams are treated like annoying little brothers. The New York Red Bulls? As in they give you wings? Un. Real.

PHEWWWW, sorry to start off on the cranky foot here (total soccer talk). I need to take a deep breath and watch some YouTube montages of Kaká scoring goals juxtaposed with photos of him in a banana hammock for no real reason at all.

RIP Corey Haim Hump Day Grab Bag

By Tatyana

It’s strange. I recently made an off-handed comment about how the music industry has lost more greats than the motion picture industry, and then snarkily suggested that the motion picture industry kill off some of their greats. Then lo and behold, 2 days later Corey Haim bites the dust. First of all, I’m not necessarily saying Corey Haim is a great. He is an… all right? (RIP Corey Haim). Second of all, this is not the first time that I’ve accidentally willed a celebrity to die. I have been known to randomly mention actors the day before they keel. This guy knows what I’m talking about.

The response on the internet is, as usual, incredibly profound.

I would be lying if I said I knew much about Corey Haim. My childhood was devoid of the pop culture that informs most of the party jokes of my peers, as I was only allowed to watch a handful of movies–usually based on books featuring scrappy, but well-mannered Victorian girls– or retrospectively terrifying PBS shows.

Fresh!

Sometimes, if I was lucky, my grandma would encourage me to write letters to Barbara Bush about how much I loved to read.

Something else Barbara Bush and I have in common.

It was only recently that I even watched the Lost Boys for the first time!

Obviously, it’s always very sad for anyone who loses a Corey too soon, and RIP Corey Haim. But this whole thing really got me thinking about the teen pop culture of the generation just before ours, or maybe that of our older brothers or sisters, and how now all of those celebrities are old. Remember the John Hughes tribute at the Oscars? Maybe you didn’t catch it because the Botoxed skin of the Brat Pack was reflecting the diamond broadcasts a little too brightly. How terrifying was that? Anyway, that was a bit of a nail in the coffin for the genre of sentimental 1980s movies. Sorry about your feelings, Ally Sheedy. Sorry about your face, Molly Ringwald.

So RIP Corey Haim, and RIP all of us eventually. Nobody’s forever young. Except of course for these guys.

Happy Holidays Hump Day Grab Bag

By Tatyana

Ho ho ho, amiright? Here we are, T-minus 2 days until the nondenominational celebration of Christmas, which everyone all over the world celebrates unless they are terrorists. I’m guessing that anyone who is at an office right now has either stopped working about a week ago or is busily trying to undo any holiday party mishaps with some straight up busy beaver work performances. Hint: it’s not sexual harassment if it happens for Christmas –Your Boss. In any case, since we’re all looking to juice up our holiday spirit like the male cast members of Jersey Shore, my Hump Day Grab Bag is themed “holiday steroids to make your Christmas muscles throb with only minimal ball shrinkage.” (What? Ew.)

Nothing embodies the spirit of Christmas like Christmas music, which represents the corny, the annoying, the amazing, the body, the blood, the holy ghost, etc etc etc. Somehow at midnight on Thanksgiving a giant spirit reindeer hooves a button in the sky and any radio station, store, and phone line that does not immediately play Christmas music is promptly strangled by tinsel or choked by chestnuts (which, coincidentally is is the name of my new holiday album). In all likelihood, the way you handle Christmas music is the way you handle Christmas– either you bite the bullet and embrace the tiny morsels of joy that you extract with your giant yule tweezers from the flaming pile of fruitcake cake shit that is the holiday season, or you whine about how the holidays are for consumerist clowns and you make everyone miserable. Rolling on with this delightful metaphor, here are my favorite golden shit nuggets of holiday jams.

Two Girls, One Twilight

By Tatyana and Michelle

(PART ONE)

I used to think Michelle was hands down the coolest person alive. But then one drunken night she watched the Twilight movie and proceeded to get sucked into the series. Like, I still thought she was cool, but I don’t know maybe just a little lonely or something? Then my mom came and brought me all the Twilight books. Fifty pages into I was unconvinced, then suddenly, a switch was flipped. I began having dreams; I walked around in a perpetual Twilight haze. And suddenly, Michelle was back to being the coolest (mortal) person I knew again. So now our entire friendship is predicated on barely legal softcore vampire porn. Here is a sampling of our conversations.

Have I ever been this attracted to a man in lipstick before?

Tatyana: Okay, so I read about 250 pages of New Moon yesterday and I’m getting kind of bored. Like, werewolves are great and everything but I want some sexy vampires stat. What is it about vampires? I never thought anything about them, and then Twilight inspired me to start watching True Blood and I swear to god I’m never gonna bone a mortal dude again. What’s wrong with me?!

Michelle: DUDE. Seriously! Speaking from the status of a Breaking Dawn (book 4) reader, I must say don’t worry baby! He’ll be back and you’ve got some 300-600 more pages of non-boning related reading to do. Also, Bella Swan – down to fuck, am i right? I think vampires have always been portrayed as sexy and seducing, because that’s how they attract their prey right? And by prey i mean my vagina. However, don’t get me wrong. The things I would let that werewolf do to me! So many howling jokes…

I mean is it just me or does this all seem to be playing out as the age old (read: racist) battle of stone cold Anglo who’s stoic and quiet vs. the tall ‘exotic’ hot-blooded short tempered dark boy? Oh Jacob Black yr so crazy. I wish i could tame yr Native American ways. Eugh, Stephenie Meyer, why?!?!

Gigantic is, in fact, gigantic

by Tatyana

We like that zine Gigantic. We think it’s a nice mixture of new fiction and poetry and good interviews with more famous names– like Malcolm Gladwell. We like the format, which is a huge double tabloid newsprint that you unfold and unfold until your neighbors on the train are giving you angry morning eyes while you elbow them unknowingly because you are so fully engrossed in the content. The art is good, with the layout being both ziney yet polished. These Gigantic people, they have a blog too, where you can order the zine. It’s here.

By Tatyana

A Tweeter from Iran: “Ahmadinejad called us dust, we showed him a sandstorm”

The culture of unrelenting all right

By Tatyana

I began my journey to psychic maturity in that special cultural void of the late 1990s/early 2000s. The pop zeitgeist has always had its moments of shameless emptiness, but as an angry teen in rural Ohio cranking out zines on the coattails of grunge and riot grrrl the prevalence of NSync and the fact that ravers were the nearest subculture seemed especially cruel. Perhaps it was partially the Lewinsky-laden frat boy party years of the last term of the Clinton administration, perhaps it was seeing consumption itself turning the very real rage of 1980s disenfranchisement (across all musical/ cultural genres)  into a viable commodity, but even the fringes began knotting their connection to the center by aping the tone of unrelenting all right.

Let’s get real.

Rage, sadness and elation are galvanizing forces while all rightness sits fatly at the passive crossroads of good vibes and keepin’ on keepin’ on. The side effects of these marginalized emotions generally include accountability, change and dialogue– things that looking back at post-9/11 Bush administration policies are generally missing. Instead, the pervasive culture of unrelenting all right has encouraged a business as usual mindset in which those galvanizing periphery emotions, once denied, manifest as fear.

Standing in a moment: the night they drove old dixie down

by Tatyana

Look at all these white people

Anyone that’s come within spitting distance of me the last month knows that I’m inappropriately obsessed with the Band, and more specifically the cultural significance of the 1976 Scorcese documentary The Last Waltz.

Barring any sort of controversy the Band felt about the cutting of the film, it stands as one of the best concert films of all times. It’s the story of the journey the Band took from being a backing band for various musicians to coming into a band in their own right. This film is where Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan join them on their stage. As artists as varied as Joni Mitchell and Dr. John and Neil Diamond are graced by the Band’s take on their songs, it becomes clear that their contribution to the music of so many has been incalcuable.

Quick, whose face is more terrifying?

Also, caveman Neil Young apparently had the biggest cocaine snot bubble dripping out of his nose during “Helpless,” and they had to rotoscope that shit outta there. Rotoscoping in the 1970s? Man, Neil wipe your nose.

summer stamina

Memorial Day weekend is notoriously a knock down drag out battle between the old schlubby indoor kid self you’ve been inhabiting all winter and the tanned, dehydrated day-drunk sleep-deprived wild child you become in those glorious and painful months known as summer in New York. Some of us fair better than others, but I’m guessing that all of us did at least 1 of the following things this weekend:

Ate so much meat we passed out.

Drank so much tequila we passed out.

Sat in the sun in the beach/park for so long that we passed out.

So now we’re all probably back at our desk jobs in from of our computers lamenting the facefuck that was our welcome to summertime– maybe a little sunburnt, maybe a little hungover, maybe a little confused about how exactly we made it to work. But be strong little grasshoppers. Summer is like running a party marathon, and here are some songs to get you to the finish line.

Beyonce’s feelings on monogamy have never been clearer.

By Tatyana

The manifold attack on analyzing the cultural significance of pop music through the lens of academic criticism has largely been relegated to a battle for relevance. Nevertheless, Beyonce has continually found herself highlighted as a champion of feminine empowerment, and really, I’m beginning to question why.

Don’t get me wrong. I effing love Beyonce. That said, it seems as though her vagina plate at the Dinner Party is probably only half-cast. Her take on female empowerment is mostly making a lot of money and getting the man. And never has this been clearer than in her new future cinema classic, Obsessed.

Bitch, you think you're crazy?

Again, let me reiterate. I effing love this movie. The chasm between my visceral enjoyment of something and its general agreement with my own politics is vast and obviously, incredibly empty. Obsessed is basically 90 minutes of being facefucked by the significance of heterosexual monogamy and the importance of the financial security that “family” creates.

The audacity of things grown in the sun

By Tatyana

Los Angeles is a city constructed of 3.8 million disparate and elaborately constructed fantasies. In fact, I would venture to say that the entirety of Southern California doesn’t exist in any real, tangible realm. I mean, have you ever really looked at a palm tree? Don’t even try to convince me that those things are real. Instead, I’m fairly certain that Los Angeles was conjured from the ether out of spray tans, cool sunglasses, and a drive to succeed tempered by the stronger drive to just chill out man–the culmination of which, delivered in a cloud of marijuana smoke, gave us our favorite city of angels.

I imagine it looked something like this:

Discovering Photoshop must've been hella exciting

Regardless, I found myself in Los Angeles for the first time in about 8 years, and maybe I was just sun-stoned, but guys, who’s down for a mass exodus?

White dude underdog rock.

By Tatyana

In accordance with natural law, and as an underdog myself, I have always had a soft spot in my cold heart for the rock’n'roll underdog. This particular subgenre of musician can manifest itself in many forms: the nerdy dudes who were never given a fair chance, the ones who were self-conscious enough not to be taken seriously by those who desire posturing; the lonely Beatle who waited till his solo career to release a triple album of songs pent up from years of being misunderstood. 

So here’s a brief tribute to my favorite white dude underdogs. I feel you guys.

John Fahey was rated as one of Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitar players of all times. Yet, no one seems to know about how freaking amazing he was. He is one of the few musicians to be lumped into the American Primitivism genre. No one plays like Fahey. What’s more amazing is that he was a notorious curmudgeon.

The 50 day moving flavel index at all time blerk

by Tatyana

I was talking to a friend a few weekends about the Jon Stewart-Jim Cramer smackdown, and while I had not at that point actually seen it, what my buddy said really resonated. It was something along the lines of, isn’t it strange that satirists like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and even certain segments of The Onion are the only media outlets/figures that seems to be addressing some version of the truth?

Obviously, ye olde satire as cultural commentary is nothing new, but doesn’t this recent revelation and the fall out on both sides of the Stewart-Cramer debate say something about the place of media and punditry?

Criticism in favor of Cramer assigns Stewart the position of a schoolyard bully, claiming that he used his fairly benign position of cable news comedian to alight his soap box and preach to the choir. But would these critics be saying the same thing if Cramer was able to engage in debate with Stewart and was anything besides guilty and downtrodden? Cramer’s appearance on the Daily Show was an embarrassment to CNBC, one that I’ve seen repeated ad nauseam with various liberal pundits on an array of Fox News programs.