The Star Spangled YouTube
(If you play them all at once, it sounds like the N’Sync version.)
Jimi’s
Whitney’s
Cuties’
The Neighbor Chick’s
Rottie’s
Axl’s Former Guitarist’s
Win a copy BONEYARD by Michele Gagnon
Contest
Check out the new contests below!
Contest A: The first twenty people who email me a receipt with proof of purchase of BONEYARD will receive a free copy of my first book, THE TUNNELS. No strings attached. And I promise I won’t steal your identity (unless you’re Bill Gates, in which case consider it payback for Windows ME).
Contest B: Take a photo of BONEYARD on display in a store (or, preferably, a whole stack of them. A girl can dream, can’t she?), and email it to me with the store’s location. I’ll draw from these submissions for…(drum roll)…a brand new car! Not really. But you will have a shot at a brand spanking new digital picture frame (appropriate, right?).
Contest C: Sign up for Michelle’s newsletter to be entered in a monthly drawing to win an Amazon Kindle, an ipod shuffle, Amazon.com and Starbucks gift cards, or a signed first edition of BONEYARD or THE TUNNELS.
[ click to visit Michele Gagnon’s beautiful website ]
The Latest Gonzo Doc
from The Village Voice
Gonzo Salutes Hunter S. Thompson’s Substance
A new doc goes beyond the sensational
by Jim Ridley
“In a nation of frightened dullards, there is always a sorry shortage of outlaws, and those few who make the grade are always welcome.” So wrote Hunter S. Thompson of the Hells Angels after riding with California’s motor-psycho Mongol hordes in the mid-1960s, a feat of embedded journalism that left him mauled, marked, and famous. But the sentence’s true subject—as with so much of what Thompson wrote in the years after his nervy, electric Angels book—is its author.
Alex Gibney’s Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompsonmakes the familiar case that Thompson’s notoriety eventually capsized his career, well before his long-foretold suicide in 2005. Over a quick scan of Thompson’s 
bottles; a note that cautions: “Never call 911!”)personal effects (whiskey , unseen jurors hand down the verdict: “He’d lost that gonzo edge…” But while the evidence of his spotty post-1970s work is hard to refute, Gonzo proves what a vapid, overvalued commodity edginess is, championing Thompson’s best work for brass-tacks insight more than brass-balled outrage.
“The edge . . . there is no honest way to explain it, because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” Like the rest of the movie’s narration, the words are Thompson’s, read by Johnny Depp in the voice he mastered for Terry Gilliam’s movie version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: a clenched murmur through grinding teeth. Thompson’s authorial voice had a hardboiled Beat-poet sprawl—Howlby way of Hemingway—which became more pronounced over the years, especially once (like the drugs outside of Barstow) the concept of “gonzo” began to take hold.
G*ddamn It’s Devil Hot
Yikes! Manhattan Men Bare Hairy Knees, Plump Calves
By Joe Pompeo
On a sweltering afternoon early last month, Adam Newman, a 25-year-old Park Slope comedian who works for CollegeHumor.com, made a life-changing decision: He took scissors to a pair of brown corduroy pants and fashioned them into shorts.
“It’s getting hot and I’ve made up my mind. This summer, I’m wearing shorts!” Mr. Newman blogged recently. “I’ve always been an exclusively-pants guy, but I’m ready for change. No more sweating under the jeans at the park, I’m letting it breathe this year!”
Mr. Newman is not alone. A growing number of style-conscious men are becoming more comfortable with the idea of showing some leg during the hot summer months. No longer does it seem remarkable to see men—straight men—dressed in slim-fitting shorts that hang well above the knee, from conservatively dressed 9-to-5 Manhattan types, to Williamsburg hipsters who wear their cutoffs so high, it evokes the lyrics to the 1993 R&B hit “Dazzey Duks” (or The Dukes of Hazzard, depending on one’s age).
Famous fellas are flashing their thighs. Gossip Girl star Ed Westwick was photographed recently in a dark blue nautical pair of short-shorts; indie rock sensation Devendra Banhart has been spotted in bright, retro-’70s athletic shorts; and professional hockey player turned Vogue intern Sean Avery has donned a plaid gray shorts-suit by Astor & Black for the office.
Mr. Avery’s building mate, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter (who famously hates the word “donned”), was on the forefront of the shorts revolution. “I used to wear them on hot days atSpy, where our air conditioning was primitive,” he wrote in an e-mail, though he noted that he rarely wears shorts to his current job. “Condé Nast is quite generous with its air conditioning,” he said.
Cannoli
Strawberry & Almond Cannoli
Anna’s very own recipe. Makes 16.
Ingredients:
450g ricotta
100g mascarpone
250g strawberries, halved
½ cup icing sugar
½ teaspoon orange rind
1 tablespoon orange juice
¼ cup flaked almonds, toasted and chopped
50g white chocolate, grated
16 cannoli shells
Method:
1. Separate one fourth of the strawberries and cut them into small pieces. Reserve.
2. Heat the remaining strawberries, sugar and orange rind with orange juice until the sugar melts and strawberries soften. Cook until syrup thickens a little.
3. Put the cooked strawberries into a blender and puree.
4. Strain strawberries with a fine sieve to remove excess liquid.
4. In a bowl, beat together the ricotta and mascarpone.
5. Fold in strawberry purée. Taste mixture. If needed add some sifted icing sugar or strawberry juice to sweeten. Be careful not to make the mixture too runny.
6. When you have reached the desired flavour, carefully fold through the strawberry pieces, grated chocolate and flaked almonds.
7. Put mixture in a bowl, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for one hour.
8. Spoon ricotta filling into a fluted piping bag and pipe into cannoli shells. Dust with icing sugar and serve immediately.
Note: You can turn the leftover strawberry juice into syrup by cooking it a little longer. Pour over ice cream or use as a cordial.
Now Everyone Can Own A Talking Trans Am
A Voice From the ’80s to Deliver Driving Directions
It was bound to happen sooner or later: Generation X nostalgia and modern technology have come together in the “Knight Rider” Global Positioning System from Mio Technology.
The Knight Rider GPS (www.knightridergps.com) takes both its sound and style from the 1980s television show about a computerized talking 1982 Pontiac Firebird named KITT. William Daniels, the actor who was the voice of the sleek black car, narrates the unit’s driving directions. The device, which sports a black exterior and flashing red lights, can be personalized to use one of 300 common names in the greetings and random phrases it utters.
Although it does not offer real-time traffic updates, the Knight Rider GPS comes loaded with maps of the United States and is ready to go out of the box. It weighs about six ounces, and has a 4.3-inch color screen. It will cost an estimated $270 and is expected to arrive in stores in August — the month before a retooled version of the “Knight Rider” TV show crashes back onto the airwaves with Val Kilmer cast as the new voice of KITT. J. D. BIERSDORFER
Iced by T
The Big Chill
The hip hop music of the mid-1990’s, reconfigured as a golden era for white adolescence
Sony Pictures Classi
A couple weeks back, Ice-T, whom you may know from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and who is also, it turns out, a famous rapper, fired a shot across the bow of the unlikeliest of enemies: gimmicky teen dance-rapper Soulja Boy.
Averring that Soulja Boy had “single-handedly killed hip-hop.” Ice T continued, “We came all the way from Rakim…we came all the way from motherfuckers flowing like Big Daddy Kane and Ice Cube, and you come with that Superman shit? That shit is garbage.”
T later refined his message, a sort of backpedal, praising some new-schoolers who “really write something,” like Ludacris, T.I., and Lil Wayne, while continuing to call Soulja Boy wack.
It was weird.
More embarrassing than Soulja Boy’s subsequent YouTube responses was the fact that Ice T had bothered to say any of this in the first place. Yet his sentiments are indicative of a special breed of generational paranoia with regard to hip hop, an adoration of hip hop’s glory days.
The Wackness, a new movie that hits theaters this weekend, exemplifies this trend. It’s all about those glory days.
“NYC. Summer 1994. The girls were fly. The music was dope. And Luke was just trying to deal.” It’s a Bildungsroman set to the hip hop of the mid-1990’s, and the music and the movie are there to glorify each other.
The music is an essential element for Luke in his journey of self-discovery: white, nerdy, privileged, and desperate for love. His headphones are there when his parents fight, when he’s friendless at a graduation party, when he gets laid, when he muses on the meaning of life.
If you ask a fan about the golden age of hip hop, he or she will likely point to some time between 1986 and 1996. To many, the rap of the early 1980’s is admirable but infantile; since 1996 it’s all downhill. But one can remember!
The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America
‘Painter In a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America’ by Miles Harvey
July 2, 2008
Glimpsed in history’s rearview mirror, events seem to follow one upon the other with fluid inevitability. Thus, the 516-year arc from Columbus’ first wondering footfall on the shore of the New World to this morning’s traffic jam on the 405 appears seamless and foreordained.
Those who find the view from that vantage point unconvincing also will find much to admire in Miles Harvey’s engaging new book, “Painter in a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America” — not least its illuminating portrait of just how halting, helter-skelter and contingent a process the early exploration of the New World really was. Eight years ago, Harvey published a well-received exploration of the intersection of graphic representation and history, “The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime.” In this new work, his subject is the artist Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, a mysterious figure whose astonishingly adventurous life included service with a disastrous attempt to plant a colony of French Huguenots on the Florida coast, near what’s now Jacksonville.
Through the mists of time
Harvey has set himself quite a challenge, because while Le Moyne’s significance is clear, much that’s important about him is unknown and unknowable. He left no self-portrait, for example, so it’s impossible to conjure a mental image of the approximately 30-year-old artist who set out with 300 
other, mainly Protestant French soldiers and sailors from the Norman port of Le Havre on April 22, 1564. One of the strengths of this account is that, while the author does not hesitate to speculate about key elements in Le Moyne’s life, he’s modest about what he asserts based on that conjecture and he’s clear regarding the evidence on which he relies.
It’s apparent, for example, that the artist was formally trained, and he appears to have had royal connections, possibly gained through a relative who was chief embroiderer to Mary Queen of Scots while she reigned alongside the short-lived Charles IX of France. The younger Le Moyne may have supplied his relative — and, therefore, the queen — with accurate floral patterns for embroidery. While Le Moyne’s relations were Catholic, he was a Calvinist, and his family may have wanted him out of the country following the first of the religious wars that would culminate in the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
Nick Flynn From The Ether
Nick Flynn, well-traveled poet
Nick Flynn’s poetry led to a memoir, a play and a possible movie. But it has taken many years and many, many drafts to get this far.
July 2, 2008
 Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night In Suck City |
NEW YORK — On his passport, Nick Flynn lists his profession as “poet,” but there is nothing anemic or brooding about his appearance. On a recent afternoon in New York’s West Village, he dismounted the bike he rides every day from Brooklyn to Manhattan looking like a man ready to ride another 50 miles. In person, as in his prose and poetry, Flynn is exuberant and present, a friendly force to be reckoned with.
He pushed his long hair out of his face and rearranged his backpack before settling into his favorite Greenwich Village cafe. He talked about everything but his work — most especially about the birthing classes he had been taking with his partner, actress Lili Taylor, who was about to give birth to their daughter. Nick Flynn, the award-winning poet and the bestselling author of a 2004 memoir “Another . . . Night . . .,” whose clever, angry title cannot be printed in full, is happy and healthy. After some prodding, he talked about his career, which he agreed had “not been very calculated or thought out.” He paused a moment, staring around the cafe in wonder. “At least not for financial compensation,” he laughed.
Flynn is 47 and many of the details of his life can be found in the two books of poetry he has published, “Some Ether” in 2000 and “Blind Huber” in 2002, along with the memoir. This month he returns with his first full-length play, “Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins,” to be published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
I Love Partying With My Best Friend And His Dates
Literature Bit by Bit
Doors Opening? Bit o’ Lit for Reading Riders
By Laura Yao
Washington Post Staff Writer, Tuesday, July 1, 2008; Page C01
Bored and cranky, Shannon MacDonald was riding the Metro one morning four years ago, headed to her job as a paralegal at Akin Gump.
She was tired of crosswords and Sudokus. She’d never been much of a newspaper person. She was a “book nut” — but due to recent poor choices at the library, she didn’t have anything good to read.
Cue the light bulb: Wouldn’t it be great if you could pick up free commuter-length book excerpts at Metro stations? Wouldn’t publishers be eager to cooperate, to promote new books and authors? Couldn’t somebody, say Shannon MacDonald, turn this into a profit-making enterprise?
Well, she’s about to find out. It took a few years for MacDonald to focus her ideas, meet publishers, line up designers and printers and quit her day job. But she’s now the sole publisher of the latest and most literary addition to the local freebie reading lineup — Bit o’ Lit.
A bite-size (8 1/2 -by-5 1/2 -inch) magazine containing four or five excerpts in each issue, Bit o’ Lit made its debut May 5 and has come out on alternate Mondays since then. In a world where more and more reading is being done on a screen, the 25-year-old MacDonald is headed in the other direction: using one dead-tree medium to promote another.
“It’s kind of a retro idea, in this read-excerpts-online world, but it’s a neat idea — giving books to people who have time to kill on the subway,” said Carl Lennertz, vice president of Independent Retailing at HarperCollins.
Rings Stolen From Lord
Tolkien’s children fight for ‘Lord of the Rings’ gold
Pierre Vinet / New Line Cinema
The trust of the “Lord of the Rings” creator says New Line cheated it out of millions.
The ‘Lord of the Rings’ film trilogy has raked in billions for others, but for the heirs of beloved author and creator J.R.R. Tolkien, nothing.
SO “THE LORD OF THE RINGS” made no money.
Let me amend that. The film trilogy, which grossed $2.96 billion worldwide at the box office and $3 billion or so more in DVD and ancillary markets, has not made any money for the heirs of J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the famous books.
Tolkien obviously isn’t Peter Jackson, who directed the franchise, or Liv Tyler or Viggo Mortensen, who starred in it, or New Line Cinema, the studio that financed it, or Miramax, which owned the film rights for a second but couldn’t get the movie made, or producer Saul Zaentz, who bought the rights in 1976. He’s just the guy who dreamed up the cosmology, the whole shebang of hobbits and dwarfs, orcs, ents, wargs, trolls, whatnot. “Three rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-Lords in their halls of stone, Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne.” Those were old John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s words.
But he’s dead, so why should Hollywood share any of the dough?
I wondered if that’s what the Time Warner empire must be thinking when I waded through the lawsuit filed against New Line in February by Tolkien’s children on behalf of two Tolkien trusts. There are only two Tolkien children still living — Christopher, age 83, and Priscilla, age 79 — and the case is not scheduled to be heard until October 2009. Days after the filing, New Line folded and became a division of Warner Bros. — some might call that karma.
Maybe I’m naive, but I find it hard to believe that not a sliver of gold could be found in all of Middle-earth for not only the aged Tolkiens but also the charitable trust that gets 50% of their fortune and distributes money to such causes as Save the Children, the Darfur Appeal, the National Campaign for Homeless People and UNICEF.
Coolhunter Launches Fashionation
Welcome to Fashionation, an alternative fashion universe where fashionistas, photographers and creatives can get their weekly fix of the best fashion editorial from around world. Never before has the world’s best fashion editorials/photography converged in one great central hub. Each day we scan the globe’s top fashion magazines – from every international edition of influential glossy bibles Vogue and Harpers Bazaar, right through to obscure and cutting edge fashion and pop culture tomes such as Pop, Marmalade, ID and Dutch to unearth the most creative and inspiring work happening in the world right now. From Moscow to the Netherlands, Bejing to Melbourne, New York to London and Milan, Fashionation is searching the globe to deliver inspiration direct to your desktop.
In addition to bringing you the hottest fashion editorial, Fashionation will also cover the coolest offerings from fashion week events around the world. We’ve also brought the best of the web’s street style blogs together into one place, providing a truly global view of street style, city by city.
Subscribe now to the weekly newsletter. Fashionation – the only fashion destination online. Fashionation has been designed by UK based creative studio, Something Somewhere.
Cocker’s Got A Leather For His Fred
Cody’s Books Lives On In Spirited Defiance of Bourgeois Berkeley
Image of the Day: The Show Goes On
Cody’s Books may have closed suddenly 10 days ago, but Bob Calhoun aka Dante, author of the recent punk-wrestling memoir, Beer, Blood and Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling (ECW Press, distributed by Independent Publishers Group), plans to hold an event scheduled there for tonight anyway. Calhoun will read on the sidewalk on Shattuck Avenue in front of the shuttered Berkeley, Calif., store at 7 p.m. A Bay Area resident and regular for years with the Bay Area’s Incredibly Strange Wrestling tour, Calhoun may draw many fans as he did at BEA, where he gave free headlocks.
Click here to buy Beer, Blood and Commeal at Amazon.com
300 x 2
Counting Down to 300 Sequel
Warner Bros. Entertainment
For Greece! For glory! For ripped guys in skimpy armor!
Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. are looking for a plot to hang a follow-up to 300on, as they try to repeat the surprise blockbuster success of the 2006 flick adapted from Frank Miller‘s graphic novel.
Fanboys will be heartened to know that, according to Variety, original director Zack Snyder is being wooed for the next installment, which will be based on a new graphic novel from the acclaimed comic-book writer.
The problem is exactly who will be going to war this time around, considering nearly all of300‘s main characters were killed off at the end of the first film, including Gerard Butlerand his heroic pecs. Butler’s testosterone-fueled King Leonidas led Sparta’s small yet fierce army in a doomed but inspiring standoff against the Persians in the Battle of Thermopylae.
Miller must work out whether the new saga will be a prequel, a sequel or a possible spinoff headlining those who survived the brutal fighting, and whether there will be a number referenced in the title (150? 600? 3,000?).
Dali’s Words Performed @ MOMA
WRITING DALÍ: THE ARTIST’S LETTERS, POETRY, AND MANIFESTO
MOMA, Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters
11 W 53rd St.
New York, NY 10020, West 40s
“I don’t do drugs. I am drugs,” the self-proclaimed genius Salvador Dalí once said. Indeed, no one should expect to go home feeling sober after tonight’s mind-altering program Writing Dalí: The Artist’s Letters, Poetry, and Manifesto. Performance artist Laurie Anderson, poet Jorie Graham, former U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic, and Wooster Group founding member Kate Valk will channel the madness as they perform a range of his works, including excerpts from his film scripts, his musings on New York, and his provocative 1928 Manifest Groc (Yellow Manifesto). The evening is part of MOMA’s summer-long exhibit and performance series, “Dalí: Painting and Film.”
Ticket price: $10, students $5
Running dates: 06/30/08 6:30 pm
Fine Art At 30 Feet Per Second
Tate exhibit keeps on running
In Pictures: See a gallery of the work here
Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent, Monday June 30, 2008
guardian.co.uk
A volunteer runs through Tate Britain as part of Richard Creen’s Work No 850. Photo: Reuters
Martin Creed cheered up the Turner prize no end seven years ago, when he won the award for a piece that consisted of a gallery’s lights being switched on and off.
Now the artist is back with a new work that is likely to prove just as irritating to traditionalists.
Creed’s Work No 850 is a single athlete running at top speed through the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain – every 30 seconds, all day, every day.
Visitors to Tate Britain will see a runner streak past them, dashing “as if their life depended on it” according to the artist’s instructions. After a runner has made the 86 metre sprint (which will take around 12 seconds) there will be a 15 second pause, like a rest in a piece of music. Then the next runner will dash forth.
The runners have been recruited from various athletics magazines. Each will work a four-hour shift, with sprints interspersed with rests.
They are to be paid £10 per hour; and the Tate will be recruiting more runners through its website in due course. “We’re desperate to find enough people to keep it going for eight hours a day until November,” said Creed.
The piece has a certain mystery to it: why is the runner running? To what? From what? “They are running urgently,” said Creed, “to complete the work.”
Is it pretentious, asked someone. “No, it is not pretentious. No one is pretending. They are just running,” said Creed.
And is it art? ventured another. “It’s not for me to say what art is. I hope people enjoy it and I hope they find something in it. I make my work because I want to make my life better, to make things exciting and fun and enticing.”
The appeal of the running figure, according to the artist, is simple: “Running is a beautiful thing. You do it without a pool, or a bike; it is the body doing as much as it can on its own.”
The pauses between the sprints, he said, provide a “frame” for looking at the runner.
It was crucial, he said, that there should be no separation between runners and visitors; that the runners should have to weave past visitors and the visitors should be able to experience the runners directly, without a roped-off area. Nevertheless, those who take it upon themselves to join in the fun will be peremptorily stopped by museum security. “Running is not allowed in the galleries,” said Creed.
The Best Right Jab In The Music Business
I wonder what Mandela thinks of this.
Government Intrusion Into Personal Lives Continues
Busty lady’s breasts could ‘burst’
Monday, June 30th 2008, 11:32 AM
A woman has been denied her ninth boob job because she’s reached the legal limit for silicone in the body.
Sheyla Hershey, 28, can’t use the excuse of having had children to account for her enormous boobs. With only one kid, eight past surgeries in the last five years is definitely the culprit for her size 34FFF bras.
Determined to get move up to size 34GG even though the U.S. forbids it, she’s planning on going to her home country of Brazil to get the job done.
“I think big boobies look beautiful,” she told The Sun. “I am just following my dream and I won’t let anyone stop me.”
Even though her wish for cleavage to literally spill would fulfill the fantasies of many men, another surgery could actually endanger her health, according to Dr. Robert Rey, plastic surgeon to the stars.
He told her, “Your breasts could literally burst.”
Is Sheyla’s husband Derek Hershey, an American, the luckiest man ever, or is he just cursed with too much of a good thing?
[ click to read article at NY Daily News – my back hurts just looking ]
Walter Iooss Jr.’s book ‘Athlete’
Here are images from ‘Athlete,’ Sports Illustrated photographer Walter Iooss Jr.’s new book, with caption information written by Iooss. Here are his comments on this 1961 boxing photo: “Ali and Terrell…I never saw this photo until 20 years after I took it. It’s from one of two fights I was at when he fought.”
Credits: ‘Sports Illustrated Athlete’ by Walter Iooss Jr.
Scrabble Rules
Spell bound
When the Great Depression left architect Alfred Butts out of work, he scrabbled around for something to do – and came up with a game whose ingenious mix of anagrams, crosswords, chance and skill is still a winner, 60 years on. And yet it nearly didn’t see the light of day… Oliver Burkeman reports
Saturday June 28, 2008
The Guardian 
At the 36th National Scrabble Championship, Paul Allen plays the word ‘bum’
The highest score that it is theoretically possible to achieve in a single turn in Scrabble is for the word “oxyphenbutazone”. Even at the top levels of tournament Scrabble, this has never actually happened: it would require the game to have unfolded in exactly the right way up to that point, leaving exactly the right open spaces, and the right combination of letters in the bag. But if it did, it would span three triple-word scores, creating seven other new words on the board, for a total of at least 1,778, depending on which official word list you used. The closest anyone has come in real life was a now deceased Kurdish player, Dr Karl Khoshnaw, who got 392 points for “caziques” at a contest in Manchester in 1982. (Oxyphenbutazone, in case you’re wondering, is a chemical compound used to treat arthritis; caziques were ancient Peruvian and Mexican princes. But if you had a Scrabble champion’s mind-set, you wouldn’t waste brain-space on what words mean: that’s not the point.)
Scrabble’s perfect equilibrium between chance and skill wasn’t an accident; Alfred Butts meticulously studied the matter. He had plenty of time to do so: born in Poughkeepsie in 1899, he trained as an architect and took a job in Manhattan, but by 1931, aged 32, he fell victim to the economic chaos engulfing the country. Years later, asked what he did after losing his job, he was self-deprecating. “Well, I wasn’t doing anything,” he said. “That was the trouble.”
He tried his hand at art, drawing New York scenes, but they didn’t bring in serious cash. “So I thought I’d invent a game.” He had a role model: by 1931, Charles Darrow, a Philadelphia heating salesman who’d lost his job in the Wall Street Crash, was on his way to becoming a millionaire thanks to Monopoly, which he claimed to have created. (It later emerged he was probably bending the truth.) “I think Alfred was hoping he could do something similar,” Robert Butts says. “Invent a game and make some money.”
The Best New Pipes of the 21st Century
Mo’ Flo’ and The Machine. Lungs.
FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE have two songs on iTunes – you can get them both for a buck98 – let’s send Florence to the top.
48 Minutes of Classic Carlin for 89cents
No Better Way To Wile A Saturday!
it’s ripped from vinyl (but it merits 4.5 stars nonetheless),
| By | Jeffrey Thames “King of Grief/KPFT 90.1 FM” (Houston, TX) |
Carlin on Campus (recorded at UCLA’s Wadsworth Theater in 1984) is the only album from the master that has yet to see a CD release. (Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s also his only solo album barring his RCA debut not distributed by Atlantic.) What you get with this mp3 is the complete program, both sides, unindexed, and ripped from a very-good-condition LP. You’ll hear the occasional light surface noise that shouldn’t detract from your enjoyment of the album. The question you have to ask yourself is if you want to pay for a vinyl rip.
Look at it this way: Carlin was apparently a vinyl guy. He had Atlantic press up promo copies of Parental Advisory on wax for his personal library, and the albums chronicled in the Little David Years box are housed in LP jacket replicas (complete with ringwear). Vinyl was apparently good enough for Uncle George, why should we quibble? (It’s also an economic alternative to seeking out the actual LP on Internet auction sites.)
Technicalities aside, this was Carlin’s most consistent release of the 80s and contains some favorite routines cited often in the past two days’ obituaries. If this is the only means of mass availability for On Campus, so be it.
When Birds Attack
The Arctic tern is fiercely defensive of its nest and young. It will attack humans and large predators, usually striking the top or back of the head. Although it is too small to cause serious injury, it is still capable of drawing blood Photograph: Andrew Parkinson/Corbis
Oates Ditches Hall in Bald-faced Rejection of Men Missing Facial Hair
Oates, Mustache Make Cartoon Crime-Fighting Team
John Oates may be coming to a cartoon near you. |
 |
June 27, 2008 , 11:15 AM ET
John Oates wants people to know that he is nothing like what he was when he had a mustache. The Hall & Oates principal is firm about the distinction, because if things go as planned, his mustachioed image could appear on TV in cartoon form kicking ass, rocking out and wearing tight pink pants.
Independent publisher Primary Wave Music Publishing, which owns a majority stake in most of the biggest hits in the Hall & Oates catalog, is shopping a cartoon titled “J-Stache” that further illustrates the dichotomy. As laid out in a two-minute trailer, Oates is portrayed as a modern-day family man and finds himself enticed back to the rock star life by his mustache, which is voiced by comedian Dave Attell.
“In a cartoon setting, the mustache has its own personality,” Oates says from Aspen, Colo., where he’s finishing his latest solo album. 
“Just as I’m represented as the John Oates of today, the mustache is the John Oates of yesterday. The focus of the music will be on the back catalog, but it’s an open-ended situation. There’s even talk of the mustache trying to bring new bands into the picture.”
The pilot, which Primary Wave estimates will be between six and 10 minutes long, is being storyboarded, and the aim is to have it completed in the next two months. It will portray Oates opening a new wing of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that focuses on mustachioed musicians.
Suddenly, a dying David Crosby appears and with his last breath warns Oates of a mysterious secret group of mustache wearers bent on killing other mustache wearers. As actor Tom Selleck attempts to escape from the latest murder scene, Oates summons his own mustache with a fist pump that simultaneously changes his clothes from conservative attire to pink pants and white boots.
Mexican High
A friend of mine just wrote an awesome novel called Mexican High.
Check it out if you can:
Museum Of Bad Art
Madonna “Give Hard Candy 2 Me” (The Chris Ciccone Sticky Mix)
Gene Simmons Gives Music Biz It’s Last Lick
Gene Simmons’ Kiss of Fate
Kevin Mazur/WireImage.com
KISS mainman Gene Simmons has been blaming the death of the record industry on bands like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails and others who have experimented with alternative methods of releasing music.
Oh, and the fans, too.
“The record industry is dead. It’s six feet underground and unfortunately the fans have done this. They’ve decided to download and file share,” said Simmons, according to an AOL Australia report.
“There is no record industry around so we’re going to wait until everybody settles down and becomes civilised. As soon as the record industry pops its head up we’ll record new material.”
Are you happy now, ungrateful fans of music?
Anyway, the death of the music industry has at least gotta be good for the Kiss Kasket, the $4,700 coffin the band used to sell on its website. It could be used as a beer cooler until the lucky fan died and was placed inside.