Kitten Power
How could I not reblog this? Not only is this a) the perfect kitten cover, it’s also b) a great album and c) incredibly cute.
"My quarrel here isn’t with the idea that cool people don’t know as much about stuff as they used to. If you really want to drill deep into your interests, you still have that option. You just have to accept that most of your findings will have no social value. My beef is really with the factors that gave rise to this state of affairs, and I realize this beef is deeply stupid: I bridle at the idea that good stuff could be public in the first place, that I should have to share my tastes with the wider world. My love of knowledge-hoarding was part snobbishness, part proprietary, part nesting: I liked the idea that my favorite movies, books and music are for me and a select few others, because they’re special and they’re part of my life. To think that everyone in the world might love them just as much makes me feel like a salt molecule in a tub of brine. Like friendship, taste should be somewhat exclusive — your friends are the ones you choose above all the other bozos. If everybody is friends, then no one is, really. The same applies to being fans of Arcade Fire."
Why the Old-School Music Snob Is the Least Cool Kid on Twitter - NYTimes.com
I can barely contain my disdain for this sort of thinking, because it has nothing to do with the nature of art and creativity, which is inherently rooted in communication, and everything to do with an individual’s neuroses, selfishness and obsession with petty social capital. The kind of thinking expressed by Alexandra Molotkow in this essay is toxic in its contempt for creativity, in part because it doesn’t really acknowledge that her sentiment is, in fact, anti-art. It’s a consumerist commodity-driven collector mentality that has nothing to do with the work of an artist reaching an audience in a profound way that isn’t entirely dependent on social context.
(via perpetua)
Doesn’t this piece seem like it should be in Thought Catalog or even The Onion, and not the New York Times? Although I can identify with some of the feelings expressed, I think Matthew is right.
(via perpetua)
Bashar Al-Assad, What's On Your Ipod?
Just before Christmas Assad underlined his leftfield tastes when he ordered Don’t Talk Just Kiss by Right Said Fred, a band that shot to fame with the hit I’m Too Sexy. Days earlier he highlighted his interest in UK pop music, this time with a slightly more credible choice, purchasing Bizarre Love Triangle by New Order. In the same month he ordered We Can’t Go Wrong by The Cover Girls, a New-York-based “urban girl group” of the 1980s and early 1990s
Voyeuristic fascination mildly lessened when you ask yrself the question “How surprised am I that someone who was a student in the UK in the early 90s likes Right Said Fred and New Order?”
(Cover Girls though!)
Anyway it’s interesting that the Dictator of Syria uses iTunes in pretty much the exact way I do - filling in half-recalled gaps or (in my case but maybe his!) drunk-buying stuff you already have because you want to hear it right now.
There was a school of still life painting I once read about - or a specific painter, I don’t know - which specialised in portraits of empty rooms, the rooms being those of incredibly powerful men: Princes and grandees of post-Renaissance Europe. The idea was that the rooms were as if the men had just left them. Everything in the pictures was, it was explained, deeply symbolic and carefully arranged, and maybe it was. But maybe it was just some stuff lying around, and the ordinariness or oddness of the stuff as it related to the owner was its own symbolic weight, a gravity of power not of meaning.
We’re all just people.
Resonant Frequency/Bill Callahan
It should be noted that the biggest Callahan fans I know are women, in no small part because of his towering sexual charisma.
I don’t think the simplistic Bob Lefsetz idea that we basically listen to rock artists who we either want to have sex with or be buddies with is entirely wrong. Having those inclinations means you connect with the artist and their (not-abstract, personality-driven) art on some level, maybe many, and probably explains why I don’t really like PJ Harvey but I could listen to Joni Mitchell forever. That said, I don’t know if I’d be more interested in the male equivalent of the (pretty good!) Grimes album.
“She’s meeting them in their world and experiencing what they experience and even enjoying it while remaining completely herself.”— That’s what I really like about the Oblivion video. (It also makes me think Claire Boucher is someone I’d enjoy hanging out with.)
