• That there is Bird Turds #19, which S. Higginbotham describes as a "breakthrough." Thanks, Higginblatt!
• Asks B-rett: "Is it the most awesome shit ever?" To which I must respond: "Fuck yeah it is." (Go get your own. (Or something like it.))
• "Out of gas," to me, is second in Camdonispeak only to "critical."
• I smoke. You shouldn't smoke. Because smoking is bad for you. But I do it anyway, because smoking, all things considered, kicks the shit out of not smoking.
I have smoked a lot of cigarettes, and a lot of different kinds of cigarettes. And the long-discontinued Gitane Non-Blonde has achieved, for me, this sort of legendary Long Lost Best Cigarette Ever status. So much so that the Gitane Non-Blonde couldn't have possibly been as delightful a smoke as it is in my memory.
Recently I have come across a brand of cigarettes that reminded me of the Gitane Non-Blonde: the 555. I don't know what to call them, really. "Triple-Fives?" "Five Five Fives?" "Five Cubed is One Hundred and Twenty-Fives?" I don't care. They're great.
• Here's why I love the internet: because you can go from Drawn! to Comicrazys to a Flip the Frog cartoon on YouTube and it's, like, one of the more logical browsing progressions.
• The other day I mistakenly received the above postcard in my mailbox.
• I haven't heard it yet - and, to be honest, I may never - but looking at the setlist from Jason Schwartzman's guest DJ spot at KCRW, I'm thinking: he couldn't, from an aesthetic perspective, have picked any other songs. Unless he wanted to play a Kinks track. Or, like. The Rushmore soundtrack.
• I just want to say it, so that it is in print: at some point, a rapper will make a boast - in the same way that Shawn Carter once famously said the he had been spending hundreds "since they had small faces" - that sounds a lot like this: "I'm ballin' so hard I could buy a tank of gas or two." And I'm just saying. You heard it here first.
• I want these books.
• Above is Bird Turds number eighteen. I feel weird about this one. Usually I try to run a week behind on Bird Turdses. Like, on purpose. I like to think that I always have one ready, just in case. This time, though, I'm posting a comic while my next two strips are in different stages of development. Number nineteen is having some timing issues. Twenty's in sketch-form. So I don't know.
• I just changed the logo and part of the design of CFY,K. I don't know if you noticed. Long-term readers of this here blawg - all three of you - are no doubt familiar with my usually-ill-advised website overhauls. This time around I figured I'd adopt a slower, more subtle approach to changing the look and feel of this thing. I've just been thinking for a while that that Cooper Black logo was looking a little dated. So now there's a new logo. And most of the links are grey.
You could read into this that Curtains For You, Kid, and by extension, The Devil Himself, is "going grey." And you wouldn't be too far off-base.
My gentle revamp of CFY,K has led me to a cautious consideration of the I Don't Know Em But I Read Em Section. (If you scroll down a little ways, it's on the right.)
• I can't even really comment on this except to say that delivering it took some finagling on my part, it's the funniest damned thing I have ever seen, and that there's a lot of really loud curse words.
• As you may have noticed, the above comic strip is Bird Turds #17, part two of two of the Turd of Prey "storyline." It is also, right now, my personal current favorite of the Bird Turds series.
• Speaking of current personal favorites, this website Colorflip is addictive in the weirdest possible way. I love it.
• So. After a couple of years of mixtape / featured appearance output simply too, um, bountiful to effectively link to in any way, a couple of false starts that resulted in the loss of what should have been a couple of great singles, and a few weeks of press that included a leak of Gaussian proportions and a (!) five part anticipatory YouTube series, Tha Carter III has finally dropped. I'm kind of reserving comment, since (a) I'm obviously biased, (b) most of my readers don't care anyway, and (c) the people who do care have, I think, their expectations set so high that Dwayne could deliver The Blueprint and they wouldn't be satisfied. What I will say is that there are some tracks on Tha Carter III that are as good or better than anything Weezy's ever done before. And also that I'm curious as to how well it sells.
• I don't know if you can tell, but since last Sunday my Venture Bros mania is back in full swing. Go watch the new episode 'cause you can't wait either.
• I am at the moment coming down from the first genuine shoe high I've been on since the heyday of Nike SB. (Wale, on that track "The Hype" on that mixtape I've been telling you about, puts it around 2005.) I just copped some gently-used loafers from a secondhand store for well under fifty American dollars. Given that I've been seeking out precisely such a pair of shoes for almost a year now, and that I'd get less utility out of and spend more on a tank of gas, I'd say it was a sound purchase. To celebrate, I prepared for myself a light, healthy repast.
• I just watched Mailer on Mailer. I've been thinking about making a (non Bird Turds) comic strip featuring him, so I figured a movie wherein Mailer discusses his life and work at length would be worth watching. Like, if I'm going to fictionalize him in my own stupid crap, I was thinking, I probably ought to expose myself to a broader swath of his intellect than just The Fight, which is the Mailer work I find most enjoyable probably just because it deals with subject matter that I'm already all nuts about. This movie I just saw, though, basically just reinforced what I already kind of thought about Mailer: his true value as an author is that his occasionally impossibly grandiose statements are perfect for taking and presenting in a new context. Take the title of this post, for instance. I did.
• Wait wait wait. Hold the fuck on. Did Jay-Z just hijack a Lil Wayne beat in order to compare himself to a former poet laureate in the first line? Because that's what it sounds like to me.
(Also, and I'm not saying I know the future or nothin', I'm just saying. Who got you onto Charles Simic before his ass became the American poet laureate? I even put him on your mixtape. Shit.)
• Lately I've been reading this book Spook Country which is kind of the sequel - although I'm never sure that the word "sequel" should be applied to books - to this book that I love. Today I came across the following passage:"'It implements finite difference methods for the solution of partial differential equations, on block-structured, adaptively refined rectangular grids.'"
Even typing it out just now has in no way helped me to understand what in the fuck that means. I called the Rai Chile, who is a math nerd, to see if he could help me out, but his stupid phone died before I could even tell him about it.
• The above is Bird Turds number sixteen, "Turd of Prey part one of two." But you knew that, because it says that. Not to overanalyze it or anything (that's more of a me and S. Higginbotham telephone activity, anyway), but I, like, learned some valuable lessons while making this one. Chiefly, that the grey Pentel brush pen will not magically turn you into Will Eisner. But then I also learned / decided that it would be better to present it as is than it would be after photoshopping the shit out of it.
• And now, "A Conversation Between The Devil Himself and an Imagined Reader, Part One of Two."
IR: What's going on with everything being presented in two parts today?
{Here The Devil Himself mumbles unintelligibly and takes a drag from a Camel light. Camel lights are not his brand, it should be noted, but he got the pack for free so whatever.}
IR: Um. Okay. I was really wondering whether or not you were going to embed the season three premier of the Venture Bros on CFY,K.
TDH: I am abosolutely not going to do that, based soley on the idea that I don't want the new Bird Turds to be completely outclassed on its own shit. But you should totally watch it. It's awesome as hell.
IR: Anything else?
TDH: Um. Yes. Those shirts you want totally exist. Mine's on the way.
• I was wondering how long it was going to take Glenn O'Brien to do a full-on Warhol issue of Interview. (Caution! Clicking the "Interview" link will cause browser-resizing and annoying audio.) And now I know. (I'm not hating. If you're going to do a full-on Warhol issue of anything, it ought to be Interview, and you ought to be Glenn O'Brien.)
• And now, "A Conversation Between The Devil Himself and an Imagined Reader, Part Two of Two."
IR: I heard that Tha Carter III leaked.
TDH: So?
IR: So are you going to post a link to it?
TDH: No way. Buy that shit. Wale's new mixtape is for free and it's awesome. Go get that.
