Pink, "Funhouse"

This is Pink's video for her 2008 song "Funhouse," from her studio album of the same name. Apparently, this album's original title was "Heartbreak is a Motherfucker," which would have made me so happy if it had stuck.

This is such an awesome video that it makes me want to light things on fire. I can't help but point out my two favorite moments, both facial expressions, at  :43 and 2:40.

Enjoy.

best. live performance. ever.

I just got back from a show starring the Indigo Girls, with a special appearance by a band I'd never heard of. The group is called Girlyman, and they are drop-dead fantastic. They knocked us all absolutely dead, and it was obvious that the Indigo Girls, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, had a great deal of respect for these guys.

Here's a vid of one of their recent songs, "Young James Dean." In the live performance, they also had a drummer, JJ Jones, who added a nice kick to their sound. You might want to consider checking them out if they come to a town near you.



The Indigo Girls have a strong following in the gay community, and it was interesting to sit for all those hours inside of a room loaded with people who not only accept difference but embrace it, people around whom you know you're safe, you know you're valued, you know you're part of a group whose interests align with yours. Well, okay, that wasn't really the interesting part. The interesting part was what happened after the performance, when the Indigo Girls' fans spilled out into downtown Bloomington. My friends and I hung around, hoping to catch sight of the band when they left, and as the rest of the audience dispersed they were replaced with drunk or drinking Little500 celebrants passing by the Buskirk-Chumley Theater on their way to one bar or another. Drunk, obnoxious, loud.

If you're someone like my friends and me, you retreat a step when the scene changes like this. You tense up a little bit and start looking around at your surroundings a little more. You get in your car and lock the doors. You remember that things that lots of people take for granted--personal safety and respect for boundaries--are not givens, and that even expecting to be treated with basic human respect can be a risk that's not worth taking.

It takes the surprising experience of suddenly feeling safe to realize how rare those moments of safety and security are for people who live outside the mainstream. This fact is well worth our sadness, our outrage, and our disgust.

in case you were looking for a reason to like Yoko Ono

This is "L'Eclipse," from Sean Lennon's 2006 album Friendly Fire.

nerdcore is dead? long live nerdcore

Chaos has ensued after post-punk laptop rapper MC Lars proclaimed the death of nerdcore this week. The post, RIP Nerdcore (1998-2009), begins with this video:


Lars prefaces his pronouncement with the following "important truth":

I have love for ANYONE trying to make a career for him or herself as a professional musician. The odds are stacked against you incredibly. No one buys CDs, so you're going to have to make your living off of touring and selling t-shirts out of a suitcase. GarageBand is in the hands of any and everyone, so unless you have more than a remedial understanding of home recording, the competition is ridiculous when it comes to the need for your product to be presented professionally. Plus, on top of all of that, nowadays everyone knows how to market themselves with Myspace and Facebook and Twitter and blah blah blah, so unless you get extremely lucky with the best song ever written played for the exactly right people at the exactly right time with the most dope YouTube video ever filmed, you're dead in the water.

Then, however, he goes on to explain that "unless you are MC Frontalot, it's time to stop trying to make 'nerdcore hip-hop'." Too many people, he explains, want only to jump on the nerdcore bandwagon (it's a very small bandwagon, ha ha) and do it by trying to sound exactly like Frontalot, the originator of the nerdcore movement. He writes:

I get demos all the time by kids who self-identify as "nerdcore hip-hop artists". And I tell them all that before you try to artificially incorporate yourself into a subgenre, that they need to UNDERSTAND its genesis and BE PREPARED TO PUSH IT FORWARD. Sounding exactly like the dopest people in the scene is not enough.

Well, as you can probably imagine, members of the nerdcore scene got their Star Trek Underoos all in a bunch over this post. Over at Hipster, Please!, the author points out that not only does Lars misunderstand the value of labels like "nerdcore" ("geek rock," "chiptunes" etc.) for describing a musician's proximity to one musical approach or another. He adds that

Lars similarly glosses over a significant chunk of applicable MCs that I fear he perhaps doesn't in his treatise on nerdcore. Whore Moans, The Ranger, Grandmaster Pink, MadHatter, Navi and Super Dragon X are not new to hip-hop. These are cats who were making beats and recording rhymes (with varying levels of nerdy slant) without the insulation of a nerdcore "scene," but who used the loose affiliation that sprang up in the wake of Rhyme Torrents and Nerdcore For Life to find similar, like-minded artists. At times many of them have expressed their own dissatisfaction with the direction of the scene, but their collective antidote has been to make their own shit that much more dope.

Then MC Frontalot himself hosted a forum for discussing this very issue: Is nerdcore dead? It's a lengthy and lively forum, and I think it's safe to say that any proclamation that engenders this amount of backlash may have been made in error. Nerdcore is dead--long live nerdcore.


Lars, to his great credit, is weathering the storm he brewed up with grace and aplomb. Not only has he not vituperated back at the people spitting venom at him, but he's been linking to other people's thoughts on the issue via his Twitter feed.

seven things I know about Michael Jackson

He changed the way we think about movement:





He refused to engage with what we wanted from a showbiz family:




He just went ahead and ignored our need to sort out his sexuality:




He knew we were racist. He used it to his advantage:






He offered us spectacle. We loved it. He knew it. He embraced it, sometimes:






Sometimes, he embraced it in more complicated ways:





He was a singer, composer, dancer, musician. A really effing good one.

Michael Jackson, pop icon, dead at 50

Can you even BELIEVE it?

Michael Jackson was THE pop star of my generation, maybe even the last real unifying star before social media screwed everything up and made it impossible for one star to rule them all.

Jackson was confounding in almost every sense. He forced us to rethink and approach anew cultural attitudes toward race, gender, masculinity, sexuality, and public performance of identity. In many ways it was easier to think of him as an anomaly, a phenomenon so far outside of the world we understood that we didn't need to bother figuring out what he meant to us, and why.

With his death, analysts will probably find fuel to continue down this path--approaching Michael Jackson as a simple freak instead of the product of a complex interaction between the technologies and (human and inanimate) objects of our culture and one person's difficulty in being offered up as a cultural object. If we're lucky, someone will offer up a smart analysis of the cultural tensions that created the two Michael Jacksons: The (damaged, brilliant, trouble, dangerous) person, and the (brilliant, confusing, performative, captivating) public persona. The personal and the public increasingly intersected, especially as Jackson aged into a new media era and suddenly it was more than cameras that surrounded him.

I almost joined the Mile High Club for bloggers.

Man, I love to blog. I love it so much that after nearly a week away recently, I started fantasizing about what I would blog about the first time I was able to get back online again. Last night, I even had a dream about it. I do not find this in any way dysfunctional.

I have to confess to having mixed feelings, however, upon learning that AirTran, my airline of choice because of its high-quality travel accommodations, was set to become the first airline to offer WiFi during its flights (in a predictable move, Virgin America, Delta, and other airlines are following AirTran's lead). Soon, I thought with anxiety, there will be no respite from the onslaught of technology. Soon there will be no place in the country where internet access is not readily available.

That was what I was thinking on the flight out. By the time I boarded the plan to return to Boston, I needed a blogging fix. It was only the Cheapo McCheaperson in me that impeded my intentions. (Why pay $9.95 for something that, as Jon Stewart reminds us, is free?) Instead, I listened to what I believe is the best Bonnie "Prince" Billy album, "Master and Everyone", on my iPod.



We sure do worry, don't we, about the invasion of technology into the spaces of our everyday lives? We're nostalgic for the days of coffee and the morning paper in a breakfast nook. We miss books you could touch, music that scratched--or, if you're a little younger, warbled or skipped--we miss Must-See TV that everybody saw. Those were the things, we are wont to say, that made us a culture: that made us cohere.

And this isn't all. We still tend to think of engagement with media as a passive experience, akin to watching too much TV or spending all night trying for the high score in Pac-Man. (Interesting, by the way, how staying up all night reading a book, which is in many ways far more passive than playing a video game, doesn't get the same dismissive eye-roll--or maybe the time of scorn for engagement with the printed word has passed out of collective memory.)

But a large portion--maybe even the entire portion--of engagement with new media is generative, civic, creative in nature. For all our anxiety over drowning in an ocean of stuff, it does appear that for people in possession with a certain set of dispositions, "getting online" is not drowning but waving.

Clay Shirky talks about the phenomenon of "cognitive surplus," moments of cultural shift so drastic that they rearranged our relationship to time, such that we had more cognitive energy than we had places to put it. Shirky says the sitcom was invented to handle this surplus and that during the industrial revolution, gin served this same purpose.

If Shirky is right in this, then he is also right that we are now finding ways to deploy our mental energies toward collaborative knowledge-building and collective meaning-making. What to some resembles watching hours on end of "Perfect Strangers" and "Full House" is actually something more akin to pitching, casting, and producing the shows themselves--no, even more than that, collaborating on reshaping the sitcom altogether. We don't yet know the outlines or boundaries of what the internet and social media will afford, and every time someone gets online our culture gets a brand new opportunity to edge a toe toward the outer limits.

Which is pretty neat, if you ask me.

PSA: in support of post-punk laptop rap

Here's a new release from MC Lars, who calls himself a "post-punk laptop rap artist."



I found out about MC Lars's work via my day job as educational researcher for Project New Media Literacies. I worked with literary scholar Wyn Kelley and media scholar Henry Jenkins, among others, to develop a teachers' guide for integrating new media literacy practices into the classroom while teaching Moby-Dick. Henry introduced us to an MC Lars song called "ahab," and later, he posted an interview with Lars on his blog.

Here's the "Ahab" video, which makes me so very happy. My favorite part is when Queequeg dances, surrounded by the crew of the Pequod.

"The Man in the Attic," by Steven Millhauser

At exactly midnight by his strapless watch, Haverstraw puts down his No. 2 hexagonal yellow pencil beside his spiral-bound notebook, which he leaves open on the desk, and leans back in his chair. For a moment he feels dizzy, and grips the edge of the desk; it is hot in the attic room, and the air feels stale and close, despite the twenty-year-old rattling window fan that is supposed to draw the hot air out and somehow leave coolness in its wake. The attic room, lined with bookshelves, is above the second floor of the house, where his mother has her bedroom. Haverstraw's bedroom is also on the second floor, but he prefers to sleep in the old guestbed in the attic study. The mattress sags, his feet stick over the end, and the room is poorly heated in winter, but Haverstraw does not seek comfort. Haverstraw is thirty-nine years old and lives with his sixty-six-year-old mother. For the last nine years he has been at work on an immense project, an experiment in memory, which will justify him. Tonight the writing has gone well, or at least not badly, though perhaps his ideas have carried him a little astray; he has the sudden sense that the whole project is astray, his whole life astray, but the thought is so terrifying that he quickly suppresses it. He must get out and walk in the night. His waking hours are divided into three segments: from one in the afternoon to six at night he gets through the day, from seven to midnight he writes, and from midnight to five in the morning he gets through the night. He sleeps from five in the morning to one in the afternoon. Dinner with his mother is from six to seven—always. His work will justify him. People will understand. He will be redeemed. Remember old Haverstraw? Guy who lived in the attic? Well! Seems that he. Turns out he. Haverstraw needs to get outside and walk. He turns off the bent-neck standing lamp, pushes back his chair—an old kitchen chair with a pillow on the seat—and stands up, wondering whether his little attacks of dizziness are something he ought to worry about. After all, he's a man almost forty, a man stuck in a bog. His back hurts. His eyes burn. His life hurts. He will be justified. He picks up his watch without a strap and thrusts it into his pocket. Haverstraw crosses the room, switches off the overhead light, and makes his way through the unfinished part of the attic, filled with the abandoned games of his adolescence, the stuffed animals of his childhood. He never throws anything out. Somewhere in a shoebox are all the little prizes from the cereal boxes of thirty years ago, still in their transparent crinkly plastic wrappers. In a drawer of the old dresser sit piles of old bubblegum cards no one has ever heard of: science-fiction cards, movie-star cards, fire-engine cards. He still has his old patrol-boy badge on its white strap, his old paper targets full of BB holes. He ought to clear out all this junk, but it would be like throwing away his childhood. Haverstraw tiptoes down the wooden steps of the attic and makes his way in the dark along the second-floor hall, past his sleeping mother—he can hear her breathing—and down the carpeted stairs. On the dark landing he passes a black, invisible picture: Hokusai's Great Wave. In his mind he sees vividly the little yellow boats, the little white heads, the towering waves that frightened him as a child, and far away the wave-like top of Mount Fuji. He continues down the carpeted stairs to the front hall. From a hook on the wobbly clothestree he removes his blue nylon windbreaker. He opens the front door quietly, for his mother is a light sleeper. When he steps outside he sees, high up in the dark blue sky, the big white summer moon. His heart lifts. The night will forgive him.

Excerpted from Enchanted Night by Steven Millhauser. Copyright © 1999 by Steven Millhauser. Printed online at http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1199/millhauser/excerpt.html.