Curtains For You, Kid

New Mix (part one)

2009-04-07T15:42:00.007-04:00

• Download here.

• Flickr page for cover art here.

• Tracklist here.

Bird Turds #26

2008-12-29T18:49:00.009-05:00

• Finally, right? Also, the second color treatment for "The Constant Gardener" strip after the jump.

A Storyboard Became a Comic Strip

2008-11-24T19:26:00.002-05:00

Bird Turds #25

2008-11-06T17:54:00.007-05:00

• This is Bird Turds #25. This is its original Flickr jam.

"I Want To Read, And I've Never Said That Before"

2008-11-02T17:16:00.016-05:00

•Today's subject line is a quote from my man Jush, who, along with my two other readers, has wanted a "Curtains For You, Kid" update for quite some time now.

About the picture: it's taken from the Ivan Brunetti chapter of that book In the Studio that I can't shut up about. As you may have gathered, it's a miniature biography of movie producer Val Lewton. See, I just finished watching thirty-one straight days of horror movies, and about the only ones I can stand are the ones made by Val Lewton. I Walked With a Zombie is probably my favorite. But whatever. Here's the Flickr page.

• Paraphrased from a strangely irate B-Rett:

'How is it that we're in an economic crisis when the economy can support at least five magazines that come out every month solely devoted to RC helicopters? And there's a bunch more that just deal with the Civil War! How can you fill a shitload of different magazines with news about something that happened 150 years ago?'

I'm not sure what set him off about this, or what it has to do with the economy, but I'm certain that you'll be able to find many more observations like this one when Biscuit finally starts his own blog, tentatively titled "Videogames and Stuff I See on E-Bay."

• It's way cooler that Terry Tate's back than it is that CFYK's back, by the way.

• I am right now, and at long last, finishing up Bird Turds #25. In the meantime, though, there's this other thing I made after the jump.

(Flickr page here.)

• So I guess I'm a Pistons fan now. Which is way the hell easier than it was being a Nuggets fan. (And, yeah, way the hell easier than being a fan of the Kansas City Chiefs.)

Sort of Homeless Once Again

2008-10-02T17:00:00.003-04:00

• Above: A little flowchart I made for Vulcan Video. It's rough 'cause it's a rough draft. (Original Flickr jam here.)

• Paraphrased telephone conversation between Jush and The Devil Himself, October 2, 2008

TDH: The thing about it is, like, I have some time to kill. But it's just enough time to not have time to really do anything. But too much time to do nothing.

J: I bet you have enough time to update your damn blog. It's been like a month.

TDH: For real? A month?

J: Maybe not a month. But like three solid weeks.

• So, yeah. Sorry about that. I am a little bit transient at the moment, having just moved out of my apartment, and waiting to move into the new place. I do, however, have a good feeling in the form of a suspicion that increased productivity is on the way. Right now, though, I am blogging at a coffee shop, which is about the lamest thing you can do with an afternoon.

• CFY,K hero Paul Pope's clothing line for DKNY finally came out. And I don't know. I could see rocking the hoodie, but I'm holding out for the Heavy Liquid hardcover and in the meantime holding it down for regular old black tee shirts.

• Anyway, like I said: There'll be more - I'm hoping a lot more - soon. In the meantime I'm waiting for B-Rett's official commentary on tonight's Vice Presidential debates.

Reading A Lot Lately

2008-09-13T15:51:00.016-04:00

• A while back, a co-worker of mine was talking about how much better of a movie The Constant Gardener would have been if it had actually been about a guy who constantly gardens. So. I drew a little comic about it. (Original Flickr page here.)

• More (read: "Legit") comic news: I finally got my hot little hands on "Love and Rockets: New Stories #1," and it, to say the least, did not disappoint. I don't know what to say about it other than that.

I mean. There's more to say. Like. About the tightening of Jaime's drawing style versus the loosening of his writing. And how the opposite appears to be happening with his brother Beto. But, you know. If you're a fan of Love and Rockets, then you're going to read New Stories #1 regardless of anything I'm going to tell you. And if you're not a fan, then you're going to have to pick through like 25 years of back issues before that kind of observation makes any difference to you whatsoever.

• Yesterday I received the new Neal Stephenson book, Anathem, in the mail. Because OD rules.

I'm not one of those guys who has read everything that Neal Stephenson has ever written. I have, though, read The Baroque Cycle and it's precursor Cryptonomicon. All these books are long as hell. So. Even though I haven't read everything that he ever wrote, Neal Stephenson is probably the writer that I've read the most pages of in my life. Which is weird.

Following The Baroque Cycle, which dealt primarily with Stephenson's large scale re-imagining of the history of technology and commerce on Earth, Anathem is kind of a curveball, as it, so far, deals with monastic civilizations on a planet separate from our own. By which I mean to say: Neal's on some sci-fi shit.

That's fine with me. I'm not the biggest sci-fi guy in the world, but I respect mastery as much as I do not respect genre fiction / literary fiction distinctions, and Neal Stephenson is that dude. So. I'm willing to not resist, as a reader, some science fiction.

That said, early and often in Anathem, a reader is inundated with all kinds of new vocabulary concocted and cataloged in a glossary by Stephenson in order to describe, among other things, historical events and architectural elements on the planet Arbe. As willing as I am to follow Stephenson's stories, the verbiage of the early pages of the book coupled with a series of complicated descriptions of structures - using heavily, of course, many of those words created by Stephenson in order to describe them - interspersed with nonchalant allusions to the history of his fictional planet, had me worried.

Shit, I was thinking, I hope Mr. Stephenson hasn't gone and written his Silmarillion.

Because, see, I view The Silmarillion as kind of an unintentional warning for science fiction and fantasy writers to not take the imagining of alternate worlds to the limit. (I am not a fan of Tolkien, but I have certainly known plenty of Tolkien fans in my life and not a single one of them has ever been able to plow through the totality of that thing.)

Now, having gotten a little futher along in Anathem, it occurs to me that I shouldn't have been so apprehensive. My favorite thing that Stephenson does with his writing is the showcasing of his uncanny insight into complex systems. He has the ability to describe them in terms that make them simple to understand without reducing them. In Cryptonomicon - my pick for the best book with the nerdiest title maybe ever - he does this both with the way codebreakers do their work as well as with the military chain of command. (And, you know, a dozen more times.)

There is a paragraph in Anathem, on page 41, in which Stephenson discusses an in-book historical figure, Proc, who is a kind of metaphysician:

"... Proc was the leading figure in a like-minded group called the Circle, which claimed that symbols have no meaning at all, and that all discourse that pretends to mean anything is nothing more than a game played with syntax, or the rules for putting symbols together. ..."

With this sentence, Stephenson has sold me my ticket. He has not only distilled, pretty much, the essence of what all those weirdoes are talking about when they discuss postmodern literary theory into a relatively simple statement, but he has also demonstrated, to me, that he may well be using the world that he has created within Anathem not as a self-contained thing, but as a commentary on the world in which he, the author, lives.

That, Plus Word Jumbles, Comics, and Coupons

2008-09-06T20:47:00.005-04:00

• Above, the Mystery Lady enjoys a digital sunset. (The Flickr page for this image? Right here, buddy.)

• Notes from the couple of art exhibits I've attended recently:
- Kehinde Wiley is a badass.
- Fahamou Pecou's deal where he paints these gigantic images of himself on the covers of various magazine is an ingenious ploy. I remember I heard about him when the Fader gave him some press after he, you know, made a painting of himself on the cover of the Fader.
- At the "Reset/Play" show at Arthouse, I saw an installation piece that made me think that if there's a market for this sort of thing, then B-Rett has all the materials necessary to become like the next Jeff Koons.

• From the "It's Fun to Pretend that You Care" file: I am, despite evidence to the contrary, hard at work on making new comic-type work for your enjoyment and perusal. In fact, I had a creative meeting with one S. Higginbotham today, so there should be a bunch of stuff pretty soon.

• I'm not big on blogs as written by celebrities, but I have decided to make an exception for Bai Ling's blog for the following reasons: 1. I don't know who Bai Ling is. 2. Her blog is either as unintentionally hilarious as Battlefield Earth or she's a secret genius. My favorite post so far is "I llook. Like a little sexy fox...... [sic]"

• Football season has started. So. Get used to "stories" like this "printed" here on CFY,K:

"Don't Fret, B-Rett"

While, yes, you just lost your number one stunner fantasy QB for the season, I wouldn't worry too much about it, especially if you can get Matt Cassel. Anybody with that much time in the pocket and Randy Moss to throw to is going to put up serious points every week. Also, if I was a betting man, I'd say that the Patriots may well sign recently-retired Daunte Culpepper. (Especially since mere moments after concocting this theory, I found out that it has legs on Wikipedia.)

Stay Low and Keep Firin'

2008-09-01T16:17:00.007-04:00

• I don't know what it is, but I haven't been able to think of a new Bird Turds in a couple of weeks now. So, for the moment, you'll have to make do with dumb little pictures like the one above. (Original Flickr page here.) Also: today's post, as per usual, is pretty disjointed.

• So like I was saying, the Mystery Lady got me that book Maps and Legends. I had wanted the book since I first saw it, based on its incredible dust jacket, designed by Jordan Crane. I have, yes, literally judged this book by its cover, because I've never seen anything like it.

{Editorial Note: The following critique isn't an attempt by me to - if you don't mind another cliché - look a gift horse in the mouth. My favorite presents are like these, the ones that provoke examination and critical thought.}

The thing about Maps and Legends is that the essays in it are good. That dude Michael Chabon is no joke. What's more: I agree with him most of the time.

It's just, like. Let's imagine that Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines had been a good movie. It wasn't, really, but whatever. If Terminator 3 had followed The Terminator, it might've worked out, but it didn't. It followed Terminator 2: Judgement Day, an action movie that, in its day, changed the game. So. What I'm saying is is that even if Terminator 3 had been good, it would have had to have been as revolutionary as its immediate predecessor to be a success.

While Terminator 3 was, at least in my opinion, not a good movie, Chabon's writing in Maps and Legends is quite good. But it does sort of suffer from not being as mind-blowingly great as its cover, which, to me, not so much as a reader but as a consumer, immediately precedes the text.

On the other hand: Having read most of the essays in Maps and Legends, I am now aware of their quality. By which I mean, knowing what I know now, I would read the book whether or not Jordan Crane's cover was part of the deal. Initially, though, I would probably have never read any part of Maps and Legends had it not been for the cover. So. Either Jordan Crane has created a promise with his cover that, really, no writer could hope to fulfill for a reader, or he has simply created, like, the most effectively seductive dust jacket ever. Both, probably.

• On the strength of the following paraphrased statement, I think long-time reader B-Rett ought to be the official CFY,K political correspondent:

'I might have to vote for John McCain now so that the stripping teacher from Varsity Blues will be the VP.'

• I remember a while back I was all whiny about - maybe my favorite "sequential artist" - Paul Pope's lack of content. I would like to now take this opportunity to once again tell Past Self to keep it because Pope's photostream is killing shit right now.

• I have always generally sucked at videogames, particularly Goldeneye-style death match joints. So I guess when I went to my dude Will's birthday Blazertag extravaganza, I should have known that my Oddjob-emulating Chuck Berry duckwalk strategy would only leave me miserably defeated. Alas.

Breathed On Wrong

2008-08-25T16:50:00.015-04:00

• This is the view from outside my work. The cigarette view. I don't know if you can tell from this photo, but I love it because it looks like a real-life version of a streetscape that either Dan Clowes or Chris Ware might have drawn, in that everything is all soothingly geometrical and muted.

• You may have noticed the link down there for the Bird Turds site. It's, um. "In beta." I am now accepting ideas as to what to do with it and how to make it good. Either here or there.

• Speaking of Chris Ware, though, the other day The Mystery Lady bought for me a Quimby the Mouse figure and - and - that book Maps and Legends! She's the best ever.

• So, a while back, in issue #46, The Fader had this great Vinyl Archeology feature called "The End," in which Jimmy Tamborello - of Dntel and Postal Service fame - discussed, like, great songs to die to. (Looking at his website, it seems like he has remained pretty involved with that theme.) It's one of my favorite articles they've ever published, and not only because he's super spot-on with his selections. (Brian Eno's "An Ending (Ascent)?" Jack Nitszche's "Starman Leaves?" Come on. Those are perfect dying songs.) As a concept, it's a great conversation to have.

The other day me and the Rai Chile were talking about it, and he was like:

'Off the top of my head, that song that's playing in the background when Cameron does that 'When Cameron was in Egypt's land, let my Cameron go' thing would be a great song to die to.'

And thus began a search for what the hell that song is called that has lasted, so far, like 48 total hours.

I'm not talking about the lyrics. They come from "Go Down Moses." What I'm looking for is a full-length version of the lovely synth instrumental that plays behind the vocals. At this point I kind of doubt that such a thing exists, a suspicion shared by synth-guru Holotone, who cites the addition of harmonizing vocals as evidence that it's probably an incidental selection made by either Arthur Baker, Ira Newborn, or John Robie, the guys credited with providing original music for the movie.

Two final things about this:

1. You'd think that a guy like myself, who seriously based his whole life on Ferris Bueller's Day Off for many, many years would own a copy of the shit on DVD. Or, failing that, that if that same guy now worked at a video store, you'd think he'd at least have access to it. But I don't own it, and it's always checked out, so I can't do the simple thing and just check the damn credits.

2. The good thing about any worthwhile-yet-unsuccessful internet search is all the shit that you unintentionally find along the way. Like this original script I came across, which has a ton of dialog that didn't make the final cut. My favorite part:

Ferris

My uncle went to Canada to protest the war, right? On the Fourth of July he was down with my aunt and got drunk and told my Dad he felt guilty he didn't fight in Viet Nam. So I said, "What's the deal, Uncle Jeff? In wartime you want to be a pacifist and in peacetime you want to be a soldier. It took you twenty years to find out you don't believe in anything?"

(snaps his fingers)

Grounded. Just like that. Two weeks.

(pause)

Be careful when you deal with old hippies. They can be real touchy.

It's like the search for the fuckin' Philosopher's Stone, only on like a way insignificant level.

Bird Turds #24

2008-08-19T17:16:00.006-04:00

• Bird Turds #24 was made after watching the Spielberg / Cruise War of the Worlds, and wishing that something like this would happen in it. I remember sitting around with Thee Famous Person and a friend of hers years ago watching King of New York, and the friend being like, 'Wouldn't it be great if Christopher Walken just stopped right here and walked over and introduced the cameraman?' And it totally would've! That's how they ought to make movies.

• It's been slow-going here at CFY,K. I could blame this on any number of things, but, truthfully, my whole life has been put on hold since my man Holotone put me on to the N game.

• Aside from N, though, I don't usually play video games that much. (That said, this is probably already the most video game-heavy post I've ever made, and we've got a ways to go.) I do not own a gaming console. (I mean. I probably would. But I can't, at this juncture, even imagine what it would be like to be able to afford one.) The thing I've always thought about them is that an overwhelming number of them are set up like a fun house is at a carnival. You go here. Then this thing happens. Then you deal with that thing. Repeat.

It seems like, for the billion dollar industry that gaming has become, precious few designers are willing to, like, actively try and elevate the video game to anything that resembles, like, a work of art with an interactive narrative structure. One of those precious few is this dude Suda51. He's the guy who made Killer7, which was the weirdest, scariest, most enigmatic and engrossing video game I think I've ever seen.

Suda51 has a new game out now called No More Heroes, for the Wii. I just read a review for it on this website Noise to Signal, a website which also indulges in a great deal of Venture Bros wankery, which is how I found it. Now. I may never play No More Heroes. Because, again, I don't own a Wii. And the Noise to Signal guy kind of totally pans it. But I think it has the potential to be one of those moments where a weirdo-outsider does that thing where they kind of bring a genre to new heights through parody and pastiche. But, then again, it might be one of those moments where a weirdo-outsider has a really good idea and then isn't given the resources to properly execute it due to his weirdo-outsider status. (See also: Lost in La Mancha.)

I would like to reiterate my B-rett request: record yourself playing this shit and send me the tapes. (I can't afford a Wii, but I for sure own a VCR.)

• More video game crap:

This is one of the videos that comes up when you do a search for "asshole Mario" on YouTube. I think what I like so much about it is is not only the idea that whoever made this thing is also, in their own way, elevating a genre through parody and pastiche using an existing and well-known vocabulary, but also that, like. Even though you never see who's playing the thing, you can get a real sense of his or her frustration just by watching Mario. "Asshole Mario" is probably old news, but whatever. It's brilliant.

• And finally, from the Fucking Finally department: the internet delivers, at long last, the deleted scene from Iron Man featuring Ghostface.

Bird Turds #23

2008-08-08T19:00:00.004-04:00

• As originally posted here. (Also, did you guys notice that little Flickr "badge" I got going on now as part of the CFY,K layout? Well. Scroll down a ways. It's there.)

• It's been a long-ass hot-ass day. So now I'm sitting under a ceiling fan, chain smoking, drinking real-sugar Coca-Cola, and basically living the dream for a minute.

• Paraphrased Conversation With B-rett, 8/8/08:

Me: Hey, buddy.

B-rett: {in robot voice} Hello. I am at work, but will gladly take some time off from Frets on Fire to speak to you.

Me: So, um ...

B-rett 9000: I am now in possession of a cooler shirt than you will ever have. Ha ha ha. I will e-mail you a photo of it with my camera eye and computer brain.

Me: Dude, I have that shirt. It's on my coffee table right now. We ordered them at the same time.

B-rett: {Makes some computer noises} Oh. Ha ha ha. You are correct.

Me: Did you see the new episode yet?

B-rett: No. I suck.

{Fin}

• In other news, our own President Isenhour has some impressive new work in a show right now.

• I would like to say, also, that, yes, I did receive an e-mail the other day from the best writer I know. I haven't gotten back to him yet because I am lazy and cannot seem to formulate the kind of communiqué that would be worthy of including in the future-release of Our Collected Electronic Correspondence.

As If It Can't Happen

2008-08-05T13:29:00.004-04:00

• Production on Bird Turds took a little hiatus in the last week as I have been bird-sitting for an actual bird. His name is Turf, and he is hilarious. My responsibilities included making sure he had plenty of food and water, and protecting him from webcomic cats who wanted to eat him.

• Yesterday I woke up and made myself some fuckin' Franch toast.

• Glenn O'Brien, who, as you may know, is kind of a hero of mine, has his "10 Essentials" up over at Men.Style.com. I would've put this up sooner, but the website itself, with all of its popups and ads and crazy layout and color scheme is like the least stylish website I know of. I mean. I read it a lot. But it's so busy and distracting that I feel a little weird linking to it and in doing so foisting it upon my seven readers.

• My man Jush - who no longer reads this blog since he found this other blog - maintains that hip-hop died along with Biggie Smalls. For the record, I don't agree, but I begrudgingly respect his position. So the other day this dude DJ Semi put out Ready to Die: The O.G. Edition, which has demos, original beats, uncleared samples, and unheard lyrics from Frank White's debut LP, which serves to breathe new life into a certified classic and, for listeners like Jush, an entire genre.

Bird Turds #22

2008-07-27T14:52:00.002-04:00

• Here's a new, thoroughly modern Bird Turds for your viewing pleasure.

• When I grow up, I want to be Saul Bass. He's another one of those guys, at least to me - and much like Charley Harper - where you're like "so that's the guy that did all that stuff."

• The Believer, which I rarely read because I want all information to be delivered to me by way of either comic strip or moving picture, has the best Jack White interview I think I've ever read. It's entirely on the subject of upholstery.

Another Extended Hiatus

2008-07-26T19:22:00.003-04:00

• I was going to call this post "Don't Give Up On Me" because I haven't put anything here in a while, and also because it's a little reference to that Solomon Burke record of the same name, but then I thought that "Don't Give Up On Me" was a little too dramatic for, you know, a blog.

• I would like to quote the comment left by one "Daltonnw," who said, upon seeing these McCay-inspired DC Comics origin pages, "HOLY SHIT MY BRAIN JUST EXPLODED."

• I'm sure there's a lot to talk about. I just got back from a trip to my hometown. Jush was there. Rainuts, B-rett. My fam. It was rad. And right from jump I was eating extremely well.

• The Albarn/Hewlett team - of, of course, Gorillaz fame - has made a commercial for the upcoming summer Olympics. If you're not at least somewhat conflicted by the upcoming summer Olympics then you either haven't thought hard enough about it, or don't care - which is the same thing, I guess. But. You don't have to be conflicted about the commercial. Because it rules.

• Yesterday I took a hundo from Jush and, according to him, "shoved it up a wild goose's ass." We ended up with three Carls.

• I'll be right back after I make some Bird Turdses.

Bird Turds #21

2008-07-12T16:59:00.004-04:00

• The above comic strip was inspired, in some ways, by Bill Watterson and this little one-panel joint. Also, The Bird is supposed to be holding two publications that have been seen around my place lately: In the Studio, by Todd Hignite, which is full of in-depth interviews with guys like Jaime Hernandez, R. Crumb, Chris Ware, and others. It's super good. And also, The Bird is supposed to be holding "Comic Art," which is published by - surprise! - Todd Hignite.

• What do you get when you cross Japanese Spider-Man with Serge Gainsbourg's "Comic Strip?" My guess: this.

• More soon.

Now With More About Books and Rap

2008-07-09T02:32:00.005-04:00

• I don't know much, but I do know this: when Future Self wakes up tomorrow - at which point he will be Present Self - and sees that Present Self - who, by the same token, will have become Past Self - put a Doubleshot™ in the fridge he's gon' be full-on stoked.

• So I walked into this place Domy Books the other day. They got a good selection of art books and comic collections and a pretty decent fine art / street art high / low aesthetic. I guess. They were listening to Egg Radio, which was playing okay blog rock. It was at the same time pretty cool as well as further evidence that "hip" remains at a weird little stagnant standstill. (Full disclosure: they weren't hiring.)

• The Roc Boys trailer > the Roc Boys video.

• Somewhat related: A DVD collection of Busta Rhymes videos does not exist. I mean. As near as I can tell. Which is bullshit. Nobody ever worked a fisheye lens like Bus-a-Bus.

• Here's a piece that Lynda Barry wrote about the paintbush. To be honest, I'm not that into this article. I only put it on here because Lynda Barry wrote Cruddy, and Cruddy is a Higginbotham classic.

• You can now pay like 150 bucks for a watch I've been wearing for four years and paid thirteen dollars for. Only yours'll maybe be black. And will have cost you like 150 bucks.

Bird Turds #20

2008-07-06T17:43:00.005-04:00

• This little comic strip experiment, Bird Turds, now has twenty installments. It's weird because I really only thought I had a good enough idea for, you know, the first one. But now there's twenty of them, and I consider a few of them to be even funnier than the initial effort. So whatever. I'm sort of proud. Someone tell me how to go pro.

• What's more is that doing Bird Turds has revitalized my interest in comics in general. I spent, for instance, a sizable portion of last night belly laughing while reading Sam Henderson's ingenious Magic Whistle. Then this morning I started reading The Goon, and that shit is just unbelievably well done.

• The new episode of the Venture Bros is my new all-time favorite. I love that that happens damn near every time they make one.

• Nadal wins at Wimbledon. I win a Crabass bet. Everyone's happy. Except for Jush, who had to witness the devastation in hologram mode in the future history with color commentary provided by myself.

Bird Turds #19

2008-06-24T17:34:00.003-04:00

• 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.))

Get My Prince Hal On

2008-06-22T13:40:00.010-04:00

• "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.

Bird Turds #18

2008-06-20T03:26:00.006-04:00

• 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.)

The Devil Himself On the Subject of the "I Don't Know Em But I Read Em" Section In Descending Order:

Pulp Hope, any more, rarely gets updated. When it does, sometimes it rules. Other times it doesn't. And, again, I'm not into the vinyl toy scene, like, at all. But I wouldn't turn down one of Mr. Pope's new Masked Karimbah joints. I guess I'm saying: I am a tremendous fan of Paul Pope's sequential artwork. I'm just not that into his blog. Or, closer to the point, with all that he has going on, I'm not sure why he even has one.

I read Drawn all the time. Especially since CFY,K became much more heavily concentrated on comics and illustration than on rap music. (There is no reason to have a rap music blog these days. More on this later.) My only concern about Drawn is that two of its main contributors are going pro as fuck lately, and I'm a little curious as to how it will effect the website.

Bol, or Byron Crawford, has a website that I peruse from time to time. Not as much as I used to, though, since, you know, Mr. Crawford does not draw cartoons. But Bol drops truth bombs like no one else on the internets.

Until I just clicked on it, I can't even remember the last time I checked out Discobelle. Nothing personal. I'm just not that into it these days. It seems like it used to be a place where you could check for a remix or a mixtape jam back in the glory days of the Dipset. Now I don't know.

For me, and this is just me talkin', the dude over at Status Ain't Hood hasn't knocked one out the park for a minute. But I don't know. He probably has. A lot of these blogs and columns fall into disregard, on my part, based on my own ever-shifting sensibilities.

Music Thing has and always will be a great site for documenting some things that I have a passing interest in, but no real passion for, like synth stuff that I would have no idea how to use, 8-bit music, and homemade instruments. Every couple of months I spend like an hour on Music Thing, which, in Internet Time, is like a year.

In my opinion, the Fader - a magazine I have subscribed to in the past, and currently keep a collection of - is on the fall-off for a couple reasons. 1. Hipsters everywhere seem to be in a weird transitional period where they've - thankfully - stopped wearing day-glo everything, but haven't yet figured out what to do next. 2. The only means by which the editorial staff has figured out in terms of staying ahead of the indie rock internet dudes is promoting unlistenable garbage. I think the last "new sensation" they were only a little late on was Wale, but that was probably before 3. Nick Catchdubs quit.

Speaking of, Catchdubs had, at one point, a blog that was so goddamned good that he parlayed it into becoming an accomplished DJ/producer, journalist, and, now, boutique label exec. Because of these developments, he rarely updates his blog. I'm not hating. I just miss the old style where that kid Catch would write an entry on the enormous omelet sandwich and all sorts of other wild shit. Have a kick-ass blog → get busy doing other, actually-lucrative shit → let the blog suffer. This seems to be the way it works. Unless you're me.

That said, I hope that the fine folks behind Jesus Piece and Copy, Right? have moved on to other cool shit. Because they're defunct now.

I don't really read Palms Out Sounds much anymore, since they seem to have stopped doing Sample Wednesdays, which was like the whole reason I was into it in the first place. (And then the last one they did was on Armand Van Helden, and who gives a shit?) Palmsout suffers, I think, from having to concentrate on way more electronic music than hip hop, which owes directly to this: Nah, Right, right now, is, like it or not, fucking clearly the definitive hip hop blog on the internets. So everyone else is sort of outmoded. I will say that the Remix Sundays that Palmsout still does usually have one banger in there somewhere.

In sum: I need some new shits in the links department.

Best Video Ever

2008-06-16T02:02:00.004-04:00

• 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.

Turd of Prey [part two of two]

2008-06-10T15:18:00.008-04:00

• 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.

So Submits This Devil

2008-06-07T18:38:00.008-04:00

• 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.

Bird Turds #16

2008-06-02T18:11:00.010-04:00

• 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.

Bird Turds #15

2008-05-29T03:19:00.005-04:00

• Here is Bird Turds number fifteen, in which the main character bird continues to have kind of a weird relationship with all other birds with whom he or she comes into contact, be they sentient or inanimate within the context of the comic strip itself.

Also, I kind of love the Drinking Bird, in that I bet that that Miles V. Sullivan cat never had to do anything else after he made it. What a badass.

• It turns out there were way more people aware of the CFY,K technical-difficulty downtime than I would have thought. So, um. Again. Sorry about that. But it's good to have you back, dudes.

• I hear tell that Shaved and Shamanzo had a little old NYC Sarchichan mini-summit. Somebody send pictures. And anyway I live at a midpoint music hub these days and I ain't got friends really so come visit. Also: Isn't it Nebraska's birthday today? Happy birthday, Nebraska.

• In making this post, I will have gotten everything done that I wanted to have gotten done on my day off. I did my laundry, and, in so doing, conducted further market research for my dream to one day own and operate a coin laundry. And I put away the laundry, which, as I'm sure you know, is like a whole additional, more-horrible chore in and of itself .

Also I finally got it together and went to see Iron Man, which completely fucking ruled. I will say that I was as disappointed as the next guy that Dennis Coles didn't make the final cut of the movie. I guess it's kind of cool that it looked like a Ghostface video was playing in Tony Stark's private jet towards the beginning. More than anything, though, I'm at a loss as to why the cameo that Ghostface shot for Iron Man hasn't leaked online as near as I can tell. Because, really, what the hell is the internet good for if I can't watch a leaked Ghostface cameo?

• Today I was on the phone with the Rai Chile and he told me that instead of investing his money into a Nintendo Wii, he's going to buy those running jump-stilt joints and then run his ass to work. Now, if you know the Rai Chile, just for a second imagine that you're stopped at a traffic light or something, and then he fucking comes leap running past you all wearing one of those aerodynamic bike helmets and goggles and a full-blown lycra bodysuit. And like a super-determined look on his face like he's doing the damn thing. Or even, better, with all that going on and like a long-stemmed rose clenched in his teeth. Just thinking of these scenarios made me laugh so hard I almost threw up.

I'm swimming across the county.

2008-05-27T15:44:00.003-04:00

• I was just looking over the last few posts, and it became apparent to me that I have been too consistently subjecting my readers to my bad illustration attempts. So for today I'm putting up this bad photograph instead. Heh.

• You might not have noticed, because it happened over Memorial Day weekend, but CFY,K was down for a little while there. After using the coding equivalent of a crowbar, I managed to get in there and eff with the HTML enough to alleviate the bizarro script malfunction that had caused the whole thing. Maybe it was my fault. Perhaps I was doing it wrong. But either way, I'm not using those little embedded flash mp3 players anymore, and am going back to the old-fashioned, direct-to-mp3 link, like this one, which will take you to an audio file of valuable advice from Ghostface Killah.

• Here is some video evidence, just in case you forgot that Prince is, indeed, the most underrated guitar shredder in the world.

• Also, if Vice Magazine is ever going to, you know, come back around in such a way that they start being cool again - which will require that they stop being an American Apparel catalog and avoid turning into Paste Magazine - it's going to start with articles like this one about John Cheever. (Who, yes, wrote that short story that became that movie that I love.)

Bird Turds #14

2008-05-21T02:54:00.005-04:00

• Here it is: Bird Turds number fourteen, in honor, of course, of The Red Fantastic's generous donation.

• I don't know if you can tell, but I have been watching shit tons of the greatest show that has ever been on television. If you want, you can watch my favorite scene from the series.

Fewer Hold-Me-Backs Every Day

2008-05-17T17:16:00.011-04:00

• Last weekend I broke down and bought the entire sixteen-issue run of Kid Eternity from Vertigo.

The deal with Kid Eternity is that, like, he was fishing or something when a U-Boat blew up his boat, but when he got to Heaven it was determined by, you know, The Powers That Be that the kid had died before he was supposed to so they sent him back to Earth with the power to resurrect any historical figure he felt like by shouting the word "eternity." There's also this monk/angel guy that hangs out with him called the Keeper.

Then, in the early 90's, The Kid got brought back for a delightfully unreadable three-part miniseries by Grant Morrison. A year or two later, Vertigo gave Kid Eternity his own monthly title, which seemed to have been designed to be a more-accessible comic book, but loosely within the parameters that Morrison established. Kid Eternity was canceled after sixteen issues because no one liked it but me, and it ain't hard to tell why. In the comic, the Kid is constantly surrounded by a rotating cast of flat characters whose only purpose appears to be to relentlessly spew the kind of pseudo-intellectual claptrap that I can only imagine I found to be entertaining fifteen years ago.

Now, though, I find Kid Eternity entertaining on an entirely different level. I like that the Kid is surrounded by these idiots and caricatures and their monologues because I have a powerful resistance to these things, and so, probably in spite of the intentions of the comic's writer, does the Kid. He just wants to be Plastic Man, but the people around him won't let him. That, and Sean Phillips occasionally wrecked shit. (Not to mention the kind of hilarious WWII propaganda aspect of Kid Eternity's origin story.)

• I figure that since it's Saturday you're probably not at work, so maybe today you can hear some audio, watch a video, and maybe look at a picture of a woman in a bathing suit.

Audio: a lesser-known Digital Underground joint I was listening to around the same time I was initially reading Kid Eternity.

Video: the single greatest interview with a rapper probably ever.

Women in bathing suits: Audrina in a bikini, posted here because Jush just got the internet.

Bird Turds 13

2008-05-15T15:42:00.003-04:00

• Here is Bird Turds #13. Stay tuned to CFY,K for for next week's pro-themed Bird Turds #14. Unless you're The Red Fantastic, in which case you should stay tuned to your mailbox for next week's pro-themed Bird Turds #14.

Fantastic Red Fantastic

2008-05-09T13:26:00.004-04:00

• I woke up the other day knowing that I had to change my front driver's side tire, which kind of sucked, but was way better than, like, finding out in the morning that you have a flat tire and then you have to get all sweaty before you go into work. So I put on my spare tire, which was also flat, and rode to the end of the block to buy a used tire, which, you know, cost money. It was a less-than-spectacular morning. (Read: early afternoon.)

But then I got back to my apartment and found that less than twenty-four hours after I had made a half-serious quasi-request, the lovely Red Fantastic had supplied me with a Flickr pro account! Day saved!

I'm thinking:

1. The Red Fantastic is the coolest.

2. I gotta grindstone on some new Bird Turdses and set up a damn Amazon Wish List or some shit.

Bird Turds 12

2008-05-06T00:42:00.005-04:00

• I seem to have gone a week without posting a new Bird Turds. Sorry about that, dudes. So here's one. (It's not that I didn't have one ready, of course. I think that the readers of Curtains For You, Kid have grown accustomed to a greater degree of professionalism than that, right?)

• I'm not sure what having a Flickr pro account does for a person, exactly. And if I had one, I would almost certainly never take full advantage of it. What's weird is that if you have a Flickr account, you can buy a pro upgrade for any other Flickr user. So, it's not that I want one, really, but I will say that whoever buys me a Flickr pro upgrade will get an original Bird Turds comic strip, which I can nearly guarantee will never be worth as much as you'd spend on said upgrade.

• I went, the other day, to this live satellite presentation of This American Life.

Until I actually arrived on the scene, I thought it was going to be, like, a live performance of This American Life. Like they do with Whad'ya Know?, but it wasn't. So I did not, in fact, get to see the condensation on Ira Glass's glasses.

{Never let what you consider to be a good line go to waste, eh? - Ed.}

The place, a movie theater south of town, was packed. It was so crowded, in fact, that this woman had to scoot two seats over closer to me to accommodate this guy and his kid.

And then the show started.

And then the theater lost the video portion of the satellite feed. This made the experience, you know, exactly like sitting in the dark listening to the radio with like 300 groaning, muttering strangers. The audio, which was to accompany a preview segment from the second season of the This American Life TV show, soldiered on.

"I think," said the lady next to me, "that if I keep staring at the screen, and, you know, focusing, then the video will come back on."

"That'll either work or it won't," I said, "but it will be impossible to tell."

"You know," said the guy on the other side of the lady, "it's bad enough that I can't see what's going on. Now I can't even hear it."

So whatever. We shut up. Because, you know, at least on my end, I get it. You paid a lot of money to be here. So far be it from me to fuck it up for you.

But then, a minute later, the video came back, like everyone knew it eventually would. And then the good folks in the projectionists' room "rewound" the feed, so everyone could see the show in its entirety. Which, I mean, shit. All of this was bound to happen. Every theater manager I've ever met - and I have known a few - would much rather yell at some high school kid for ten minutes than deal with several hundred angry NPR enthusiasts.

"Hey, look," said the lady next to me to the guy next to her, "Now you can see all that stuff you missed."

But he wasn't feeling it. So when, a few minutes later, the vertical hold fucked up for a little while, he seized the opportunity the storm off and demand a refund, which was fine with everyone.

That Post-Geographical Feeling

2008-05-03T12:57:00.012-04:00

• It's funny to me that if you have a blog, then really you just end up "blogging" (ecch) about other blogs. I mean. As long as you're not trying to promote anything, and you have figured out that no one really cares about what you did with your Saturday if there's no free mp3 in the offing. Anyway. I read this post that The Style Guy put up about the Basquiat and the Warhol that he knew versus the Warhol and the Basquiat that he has seen portrayed in various films.

• The collecting of vinyl toys is one of those nerdy things, like role playing games and musical theater, that I just sort of missed the boat on, because I was too busy doing other nerdy things like obsessively reading comic books and dorking out at record stores. Recently, however, I have come across a couple of sets of vinyl toys that I completely co-sign. Those new Adult Swim toys look like something I'd like to own, or at least the Venture Bros ones do. (And, you know, the Carl.) The question is: does Biscuit already own these things? And if not, then why not? The other thing that piqued my interest is the Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem playset, which looks like it would be a lot of fun to just look at.

• As you may know, I consider myself to be a more-than-casual fan of rap music. And, as such, I find myself occasionally preoccupied with the sort of lesser-known figures within the classification. But, given the nature of most of my friends and acquaintances, not to mention the kind of embarrassingly juvenile nature of rap music itself, I am often without anyone with whom to discuss lesser-known rappers. Or anywhere to, like, put these thoughts.

But wait. I have a "blog." (Which, yes, is embarrassingly juvenile in and of itself.) So I'm putting this stuff here today, conveniently buried away "after the jump."

I

Like Young Chris. You might be familiar with that one song. Maybe.

Lately I've been thinking that it is a good thing that Young Chris has finally taken - heeded? - what I imagine must have been the advice of every A&R he ever came into contact with, as he has been steadily releasing material sans Neef. (Who, by the way, is the other guy in Young Chris' group The Young Gunz.) It just sucks that he waited until the record industry straight up died before he started doing that. (Now that I think about it, though, the second Young Gunz album may have been the clearest early indicator that rappers would need to dramatically lower their expectations in terms of record sales. I don't think anyone even stole that piece of shit.)

At press time, it seems like Young Chris' best-case scenario would be for Jay-Z to put him under the banner of whatever he's got going on with LiveNation, where any new Young Chris album would almost certainly be indefinitely shelved, because, again, nobody buys records anymore, and Young Chris isn't one of the three or four rap acts - not counting Jay-Z - that can draw a crowd¹. That, and being indefinitely shelved is just sort of what happens to albums by members of S. Carter's supporting cast.

¹This probably has more to do with the fact that every rap show that I have ever been to, on any level, suffers from a lethal combination of impossibly shitty soundboard management and overzealous hypemen than anything else.

II

In recent months, I have been hearing more and more about this Jay Electronica fellow. Like, apparently he had some beef with some other guy or something. And Just Blaze seems to like him, which, as we'll see later, may or may not be a happy circumstance. Some Jay Electronica songs are, to be honest, ill as fuck. There appear to be, however, at least two glaring flaws in Electronica's overall gameplan:

1. "Jay Electronica" is the worst goddamned rap name I have ever heard. He might as well call himself Johnny Opera or Mr. Country-Western, since he obviously doesn't listen to the musical genre he's named himself after. (Because, you know, if he did, he'd know that ain't nobody called that shit "electronica" since The Fat of the Land.)

2. Jay Electronica has the same problem as Young Chris, in that he has decided to become a professional rap artist at a time when it doesn't seem like there's any money in it for anyone who isn't already famous. Electronica's only famous on the internet, and he's only barely famous there. And even if he became really famous on the internet blog scene, it's not like there's any money in that. Until I see Tay Zonday pushing a Bentley, I'm just going to go ahead and think that rap music is fast turning into indie rock, a genre in which most of the principal artists have, like, jobs in addition to their musical careers.

III

I remember a fleeting moment where I thought that Saigon might really do it and come out with an album that I wanted to hear. This was before my expectations lowered to just "maybe Saigon will come out with an album." And before his weird public pseudo-feud with Just Blaze. (And before Just Blaze's stamp of approval stopped meaning anything at all.) And before he quit. And before he un-quit. Back when people actually watched Entourage. They don't anymore. Just like they don't buy records. While the proposed title of this record, The Greatest Story Never Told, sounds almost too perfect, I think he ought to change it to The Chinese Democracy That Nobody Gives a Shit About.

IV

The guy that I think has done something right in the past few days is Busta Rhymes. I mean. Despite that thing where he got together with Linkin Park to make a track. But I figure you've got to put that into the "Happens to the Best of 'Em" file.

I've said this before, probably on this website, but I think it bears repeating. I have never heard an entire Busta Rhymes record, and I probably never will. That said, I have never heard a completely bad Busta Rhymes track. I've always considered him, in this respect, to be like the John Cougar Mellencamp of rap.

Busta just came out with this video, "Don't Touch Me," featured below. It's like a postcard from Flipmodia, sent just to let you know that everything is running smoothly. Spliff Star is still playing the background and being hilarious. (If Busta is Mellencamp, then Spliff is the guy who could've been just a mediocre weed carrier but wound up being rap's own Harpo Marx.) The fisheye is in full effect. The hat matches the jacket. "Don't Touch Me" relies on one implicit truth throughout: shit has never been as good as it was in the late nineties, so fuck it, the best move is to make an awesome-ass late nineties rap video.

• Have you made it this far? Really? Well. I'm honored. If you didn't, though, you missed out on me getting back to some shit you probably do care about. (Spolier Alert Level: guarded.)

• More soon, and with new a new Bird Turds.

Korben My Man

2008-04-25T17:22:00.007-04:00

• Hey hey hey that's Bird Turds number eleven, buddy!

• Dear Camdonians, please send pics of the Crawfish Festival. I miss that shit.

• This is the new video from The Roots, which, yes, makes "Rising Up" the lead single from Rising Down, since I guess ?uestlove saw that one episode of Tyra and decided that "Birthday Girl" doesn't officially exist or whatever.

I wonder what it's like to be Black Thought. Like, aside from being the most slept-on MC with the highest profile, you know, ever. But also, like. When ?uestlove and them are like "Okay, Player, we're going to go be Jay-Z's band - which is essentially like if Jay was the MC in The Roots instead of you - or do The Star Spangled Banner on The Colbert Report or some shit. So. Latrons," what does Black Thought do?

If it was me, I'd've quit a long time ago. Because, I mean. On some level, how is the drummer going to treat the frontman like a fuckin' backup dancer?

• Last night I was at work and "Five Years" came on. David Bowie is completely on one in this performance. I think it's that he says "my brain hurts a lot" that this song kills me.

You're a Science Baby Now!

2008-04-20T21:31:00.006-04:00

• That right there is Bird Turds number ten, ladies and gentlemen.

• So far, it's not looking good for my Crabass ambitions, what with the Lakers leading Denver 1-0. Pau Gasol has been the thorn in my betting side for years now. I have learned that I should never bet against him under any circumstances, and yet I, in what seems like the spirit of masochism, refuse to not bet against him.

• I read this thing the other day in I-D magazine - or I.D. magazine, one - where the guy who designed this website said that he designed it in the way that he did because it's, like, a truer representation of what the internet 'really' looks like. Not only do I not buy it, I'm getting sick to death of people dressing up their recent-nostalgia trips with silly art verbiage. Especially when that kind of thing looks more like this anyway, and all the dude really did was ruthlessly jock U Mean Competitor's steelo.

{Editorial Note: We're not sure why, exactly, the author decided to include that last bit. It sort of went against an old CFY,K editorial adage that maintains that a reader's attention ought never be drawn to anything that he or she wouldn't have otherwise heard about unless it's really good. There's no shortage of websites that do that already, anyway. So. Sorry. - Ed.}

• Man. Last week I was watching this insane shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark that these like, teenagers made in the eighties. And it was good, you know, sort of. In that, like, wow-I-can't-believe-they-actually-did-this kind of a way. Then, following that, I watched this collection of outrageous clips of Japanese television. And it was cool, too. But afterwards all's I wanted to do was watch something that was either bad because it was actually bad, or good because it was actually good. Or not watch anything and just have a good cry. I felt like a copy editor at McSweeneys.

Can't Forget Your Kite

2008-04-15T18:30:00.009-04:00

• I bought this book the other day, you know, in an effort to try and step my Bird Turds game up. And, you know how sometimes you read something that seem like it was written directly to you? Or to me, in this case? Heh.

• Oh man. I had a bizarre-ass Venture Bros.-style B-rett-ready experience the other day. Because another thing about Bird Turds is that it has powerfully revitalized my interest in drawing pictures and reading comics. So. I'm standing in the graphic novel section of Half Price Books the other day, right? Because also I heard they were hiring but it turns out they're not hiring anymore or whatever but whatever and there on the shelf was this recruitment brochure for what appears to be a local costumed supervillain. (I have got to research this shit further.)

• Another day, another drawing of a zombie. I don't actually ever draw zombies. But every time I draw a human face, it always looks to me like if I made it green it would be a zombie face. So there you go.

• Also at Half Price Books - doesn't it seem like it should be called Half Priced Books? - I found this book that was a collection of Robert McGinnis' mystery novel cover illustrations. But it was like forty dollars, which, at the moment, is prohibitively expensive. Luckily, the kind community over at Flickr isn't charging anything to peruse their collection of Robert McGinnis covers, and spaghetti is delicious.

• I finally got my hands on a copy of Ascenseur Pour L' Échafaud, which I've been looking for for years now because of its awesome as hell Miles Davis soundtrack. I haven't watched it yet, though. Watching a reader is kind of a big commitment, you know?

• What isn't a big commitment is watching the series finale of Rob and Big. What it is is a big disappointment that Mtv would cancel it. (I don't know if it's actually getting canceled, per se, but whatever. It sucks that it's over.) It's like. It wasn't enough that they already got rid of all the music and every good show they ever had on there. (I have to stop this before it mushrooms from an innocent rant into a full-blown Janeane Garofalo bit.)

Bird Turds X 2

2008-04-12T15:17:00.011-04:00

• This edition of Bird Turds is based on a youtube video of a turkey fight that S. Higginbotham told me about. And also it is based on the internet.

• Happy birthday to Happy Thawts, my erstwhile Canadian co-host. She just told me that she never had red velvet cake, which leads me to believe that they don't have red velvet cake in Canadia, which makes sense, since red velvet cake is totally awesome.

• From the "Millions of People in Addition to Me Care, But Still It Feels Like Nobody Cares But Me" file: I've been sort of mildly bummed out since Artie attacked his assistant and quit/was fired from the Howard Stern Show. I'm betting it's a hoax, though. So whatever. You guys don't care.

• So so far I've made ten Bird Turdses. (I have released nine of them, but I'm holding back on one. Because, I mean. What if I can't think of one for a while, you know? But if you ask me - and reading this at all constitutes an implicit asking-of-my-opinion on your part - today's two-fer makes up for my keeping one in the clip.)

Being at ten lends itself to all sorts of questions about which I've just begun to entertain the idea of thinking about answering, but that I won't get into here quite yet. Ten is a nice number, anyway, I think. It's nowhere near a number that would be at all comparable to the output of cartoonists both contemporary and throughout history, though.

What are there? Like a thousand Laugh-Out-Loud Cats strips? And then Los Bros have been telling stories about Palomar and Maggie and Hopey for something like twenty-five years now. And in terms of Charles Schulz, forget about it. So. What I'm saying is that I don't want anyone to fuck around and think that me making ten crude Bird Turds comics is even anything like what these dudes have done.

But I think that even having only done ten, even at the beginnings of things, you start to get an inkling as to the way things might end up going. It is already happening that I am beginning to shape the experiences that I'm having into panels and dialog in my mind while they're happening. I think that this is an encouraging phenomenon on two fronts. First, I think that it might be symptomatic of what might one day evolve into a technique of some kind. And secondly, it might be a common thing to have happen, and if it is, then it might be a difficult thing to just "turn off." And if, for the sake of argument, we assume that all that is true, then it gives rise to the notion that maybe there's a secret hidden cache of never-released Calvin and Hobbes comics somewhere in the world.

• Ok. So anyway. It had been a while since I checked out the Top 5's over at Crailtap but today I checked out Tim O'Connor's Top 5. The shit is hilarious. Especially when he gets to the part about that horrible garbage that precedes the best show ever.

Just Make 'Em All

2008-04-10T00:34:00.007-04:00

• The above is Bird Turds number seven. I think I did this one before, but it got lost in the move. I've always liked the way that ApeLad over at Hobotopia - author of the always remarkably well executed Laugh Out Loud Cats - draws little birds. So I tried to draw some like that.

• In other news: say it ain't so, Mr. Mora.

One Stop Shop for Blog Rock Slop (Edited)

2008-04-06T19:34:00.008-04:00

{original photo: Hi, How Are You? - Ed.}

• What follows is a bunch of notes that I wrote in the past couple of weeks that I was thinking of compiling into a larger article that was to be called "South by South of No North." I'm putting the best of it up here instead, though.

• My sister, Thee Famousperson, occasionally comes up with what we in our family - or, really, probably just the two of us - refer to as "Handy Tips."

"I can never remember my license plate number," I said to her over the phone one day. I was somewhere on the outskirts of San Antonio, looking for an inexpensive place to stay the night because all the hotels in Austin were booked solid through the week. The motel I was trying to get a room in needed my license plate number so they would know to not have my car towed away in the morning.

"You should program it into the 'notes' section of your cell phone," she said.
"Thanks," I said. "That's a 'handy tip!'"
I think she should start her own YouTube show, where each week she would dispense a new invaluable nugget of advice. I imagine it would look something like this:

~~Protip~~ Handy Tip: Do not attempt to move to Austin during SXSW. It won't be any fun. You will not see Black Mountain play a 1 A.M. at the Mohawk even though they are your favorite band. You will be spending that time instead covered in sweat in a motel room in San Marcos with no working A/C because, like I said, the rooms in town are all full, and you don't know anybody in Austin.

• I wrote these notes in the worst notebook ever. I don't know how anybody else does it, but I everything I write generally starts out written in longhand. Anyway. The cover of this fucking thing ripped completely off seconds after I opened it up for the first time. The pages themselves are as thick and yellow as yellow toenails, and the perforated edge is totally for shit. After this I'm retiring it, by which I mean, of course, that I'm throwing it away.

• {This next little part was written after a day during which a real estate agent got all mad at the author for having the audacity to find an apartment without her, thus "taking money out of her pocket." The author, having lived in Austin now, even for a little while, isn't exactly convinced that much of the following is accurate to any degree whatsoever. - Ed.}

The sheer number of apartment locators in business in Austin - and they are in business, buddy - speaks to the impossible volume of people constantly meandering its way here. They all figure, incorrectly, as they have always figured, as I now figure I might have figured, too, that they have found themselves a little city with a cosmopolitan atmosphere and a laid-back attitude. Where no one ever steals, and you can probably just work some job for two or three days a week, which would leave you with ample time to get on with the important business of constructing dreamcatchers and repainting coffee tables in bright primary colors. They - we - are all wrong, and are all suckers who bought it. I have a suspicion that I've been lured here by the Austin hype machine, been given the old bait-and-switch, and introduced instead to the cutthroat world of hair-trigger rental property real estate in what might be a secret government plot to turn a bunch of leftover counterculture idealists into strict capitalist Little Lebowski Urban Achievers in short order. Perhaps the GOP has recognized a shortage in young devotees with a working knowledge of the Adobe Creative Suite.

• Lyndon Baines Johnson, the thirty-sixth president of the United States of America, was a hell of a raconteur¹. As evinced, of course, by a talking animatronic version of him that I encountered when it was cold and wet and grey outside.

Some time ago I visited Austin, on a bit of a recon mission. I won't say that I immediately fell in love with the city, but I was immediately greatly intrigued by it. More than anything, it seemed like a place where a young dude like myself could start to, as they say, get his grown man on. When I visited, it was cold and wet and grey for the whole trip.

When I returned to Austin some time later - weeks? months? I have never been good with precise chronology - to find a place to live, it was, again, cold and wet and grey for like the first five days. So I thought that cold and wet and grey was just sort of how Austin was. It's not.

But it was when I stumbled into the Lyndon Baines Johnson presidential library. (Full disclosure: I wasn't really altogether aware that it was a presidential library. I thought it was an ordinary public library, and I needed badly to use the restroom. So I went there with the notion that, you know, homeless people damn near bathe in public library restrooms, and I was, in some sense, homeless at that point myself, so what the hell. 'This is how it starts,' I thought, in the parking lot.)

Leaning on fencepost, doffing cowboy hat, wearing chambray workshirt, the robot president looks over his robot shoulder to make sure Lady Bird's not around before delivering the punchline.

"'Well, hell,' he said, 'I liked what was drinkin' more'n what I was hearin'.'"

¹The other day I was in a record store, and I'm pretty sure I came across both a greatest hits collection from the Presidents of the United States of America, and the new Raconteurs record. So.

• I've decided that if I'm going to be in Austin, I might as well get hip again, right?

{It should be noted that the author has not been "hip" since sometime around 2003. - Ed.}

So I guess I'm going to brush up. Reread that one book. Try and get through that controversial essay that Mailer wrote. Investigate the story behind Stagger Lee. Go to shows. Renew my Fader subscription. Try and get an MFA. Scarf. Vintage sunglasses. French cigarettes. You know.

Bird Turds Number Six

2008-04-01T18:38:00.006-04:00

• It's been a little while since I made a new installment of the Bird Turds comic strip. I feel, like, a little bit worthless if I spend any time at all lately not actively seeking employment. So. Things are touch-and-go here at CFY,K.

• I don't know if this fan-produced Mega Man movie has actually been made yet, but I would like to use this picture as Thee Famousperson's audition.

• In other FP news: I was going to tell her about this picture of the new Love & Rockets comics coming out soon, but she was already all over it.

• "The Drought is Over part 5" came out last week. I doubt if you guys care. I've been on some 90's rap shit lately, word to the Rai Chile a.k.a "Brimsta Mack."

• The Dolorean, it turns out, was the poor man's Dolorean. The lesser-known Bulldog is the purest form. Weird.

Working With Windows

2008-03-25T17:49:00.004-04:00

• And once again, it's been too long. But what do you want for nothin', right? Long story short: moving takes for fucking ever. And it costs a shit-ton.

• It seems like blogging etiquette dictates that I make, on returning, like a gigantic post, to make up for lost time. And perhaps I will soon. But the pressure of that has been keeping me from getting back to CFY,K earlier, so I've decided to just, like, not do that. This way, anyway, I can kind of get back into whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing with this thing. You know.

• Yesterday - the other day? I'm losing track because of the anxiety that comes with being unemployed - I went to this exhibition, and the original scroll from On the Road was there. This, as you might imagine, had a powerful effect on me. The thing about it is, aside from that whole trip being like a sort of weird pilgrimage for me, that it works. You read the thing, and if you can get past the presence of Kerouac's own handwritten corrections, then like. If you skip down a ways, he's somewhere else. Doing something else. Like a road. Never mind.

• I remain a fan of Paul Pope, but I am unimpressed by his new line of DKNY clothing. So. Sorry, buddy.

• I am hereby throwing my hat into the ring of rock and roll poster design, starting with this little one that I have unsolicitedly made for Anvil Rabitt's project. It's got open space so in case if you want to add like a handwritten date/time/venue situation, right?

• Soon there will be many photographs and plants. And more Curtains.

2008-02-27T15:57:00.009-05:00

• I gotta tell you. It's hard for me, as the owner of legit pairs of Tiffanys and De La highs from back in the day, to be over it, but I'm over it. It's fucking hard for me to get stoked about athletic footwear at all anymore, but then my dudes over at Jesus Piece - who by the way put up a link to the Run For It! mix which for some reason I never saw till the other day - put me on to the Ferris Bueller SB's. It's awesome that the movie that I have based my whole life on is getting some play, but I think they should just put out white bucks like the kid rocks in the movie, and release an accompanying Ferris-style jacket.

• Man. Yesterday me and the Rai Chile were driving through town. And we stopped at a stoplight, you know, like you do. Looking across the intersection we saw, at a gas station, a pregnant teen smoking a cigarette like a foot away from the gas pump. The way I figure it, the whole scene was fucked up on at least six levels. More if you figure in the way in which the girl in question was intermittently and, say, "gropily" making out with this dude that was standing there.

{UPDATE: One regular reader of Curtains For You, Kid has sent in another, perhaps more sophisticated diagram to illustrate the event I witnessed. To this reader I say, "Thanks, buddy."}

• Which is not to say that I'm against smoking in any way. Quite unlike a vocal portion of GQ's readers. When will the War Against Fun be finally over? Because those dudes needs to know that the Marlboro Man is a perfect image of American Cool, and smoking is awesome because it looks so cool when you do it.

• I wonder how long it's going to take Bobby Knight to say something offensive or strangle someone or some shit in order to be kicked off of ESPN. I'd put the over-under at three weeks.

• Leave it to the circuit benders to make the Easy Button difficult.

• Any time I'm at my sister's house, I, for some reason, always end up drawing little pictures on 3X5 note cards. She has like a billion note cards. Today when I was over there I drew a woman's handbag, and made a list of fantasy jobs.

2008-02-24T15:47:00.008-05:00

• Above: Bird Turds #5. (There has been some confusion about these things. So. If you click on the above picture it should open up the flickr photo page - I'm not that good at this stuff - in a new tab or window at which point you can click "all sizes" so that you might actually read it. If you feel like it.)

• How awesome would it be to be a foreign correspondent for CNN from your outpost in Secondlife? You could file stories like "Sploders: An Exposé," or "Make Your Lindens Work for You" or an interview with the fifteenth baroness of Bauerhoff de Caledon. You wouldn't have to worry about fact-checking or anything because nobody gives a shit.

• I have recently come across two music videos that have reached, in my opinion, the upper echelons of radness. One of them, "Knights of Cydonia," by Muse, I saw with Jush last night. (Its inclusion here is evidence of how impossible it is, I think, to overestimate the cultural impact of Guitar Hero.) The shit is a send-up/tribute to everything that has ever ruled in movies or television. The other one, "Yahhh," by Souljah Boy (?!) I was going to put up on the last post, but I didn't want anyone thinking that I had ripped it off for Bird Turds #4. Whatever. I dare you to not laugh along with the little dude who's like a cross between Lil Penny and the Great Gazoo.

(Just click on it, dude. There's YouTube action within the answers.)

• I just realized I missed the new episode of The Wire to make this entry. And now I'm all "errgh."

Speak the King's English

2008-02-22T14:19:00.007-05:00

• That right there is Bird Turds number four. (Number five is currently in production.) I hope you guys are liking these things. I want to make enough of them for, like, Bird Turds to have its own little website. But that's a ways off, I think.

• This week brought the return of Sir Dizzle Dafoe. You must love that. Nonstop face feeding and nonsense.

• From the "Caught Sleeping Once Again" File: Yesterday I was listening to Wale's 100 Miles and Running mixtape (put together by that kid Catchdubs), thinking that, as much as Wale shouts out Malice and Pusha T and has a whole skit about how rappers with "Lil" in their names are horrible, he should really get on a track with Weezy. But then he already did.

• Stunt Kitty (via Drawn) isn't making me guffaw, exactly, but it is good for a "heh."

• Ladies love Gustav.

Now With Something Like User-Generated Content!

2008-02-19T19:59:00.007-05:00

• I have made yet another Bird Turds comic. I like this little bird. (You can click "all sizes," by the way, to see it in all of its bigness.)

• That photo up there was taken by one S. Higginbotham, of a rug that she actually owns.

• I guess when a band already has a video on Mtv - of all places - it's a pretty solid indicator that I've been sleeping on them for, like, entirely too long. (It's weird that having a video on Mtv these days means almost exactly the opposite of what it used to mean. Like, now you're probably less likely to check out a band if you see that they have a video on Mtv. They've become like Oprah's Book Club for music videos. Either way, times are hard since I became broke as hell and fascists took away the Good Shit Catalog.) Whatever. Vampire Weekend is good, and I like any band that makes a song about an esoteric grammar issue. (Should that be "grammatical" issue?)

• Pardon me, but I think that that Lindsay Lohan spread in New York Magazine (possibly NSFW) might be - and not necessarily for what some might consider to be the "obvious reasons" - the best thing she's ever done. Or at least since Mean Girls.

• From the Obligatory Lil Wayne Reference file: this old post from a random blog might contain the best comment I have ever read.

• Raver sent me a link to this website called Stuff White People Like. The shit's funny. (Fuck! Dutch city bikes! Guilty as charged!)

• More from Mrs. Higginblatt: Fitness Celebrity John Basedow has met his match, and he's got a gun.

• I would like to, here, reiterate my formal request to one Anvil Rabbitt (get iTunes, already) for pictures of Schnabel's new building, the Palazzo Chupi. Can it really be as obnoxious as I suspect that it is? Is it possible that it came right back around into awesome territory? I feel that further investigation is necessary.

2008-02-15T19:19:00.005-05:00

• I made a new Bird Turds last night, based on an all-time favorite Ghostface lyric. (The internet says that the words are a little different than how I have them, but I think Shamanzo and others would agree that my interpretation is correct.)

• My new favorite radio show is Coast to Coast AM. How did no one tell me about this before? Late-night UFO conspiracy theory broadcasts? That is my shit! Me and Rainuts were going to make, like, one of those terrifying songs that uses weird disembodied voices and atmospheric sounds out of this thing, but then we found out that Tool used it first.

• This guy Ben Pearce's Flickr photostream is amazing. (It's also where Holotone gets his profile pics! (Read: "via Holotone."))

• Because I abruptly switched sides and decided to bet the smart "money," and therefore suffered a devastating crabass loss, it has taken me a while to be able to appreciate Carl Brutanananadilewski's enthusiasm for the New York Football Giants' Superbowl victory. But I think enough time has passed.

• I want to live inside of a shipping container.

I Wrote It On the Paper

2008-02-07T18:02:00.000-05:00

• I mean. I certainly don't want to straight jock these dudes' style, especially since I've been reading that shit forever. But, I'm sayin'. I don't think anybody gets to wreck the spot on a GFK reference except for Tony Starks himself. And also, have you ever had a banana nutrament? The shit is delicious.

• According to a popular poll, and at press time, this is the best thing that was on the internets in 2007. And even though I haven't made a prank phone call since we found this dude in the phone book listed as "Horney, Major" when I was like 12, I find it hard to disagree. Which means that, emotionally, I think I've aged about three years since then.

• Speaking of which, the Real World / Road Rules Gauntlet III Fantasy League - also known the most ridiculous thing that me and the Camdonians do - soldiers on. By my calculations, I am up by at least 700 points.

• So I drew this picture the other day. And, yes. Fine. It's not that good. I hear you. So, then, the question becomes: if I'm going to make images and they're not going to be that good, then why would I choose the female nude as a subject? I guess my rationale is that if I'm ever going to become a super hard-ass drawer in the mold of Los Bros and Paul Pope, then I have to start somewhere.

• Perhaps I'm too heavy on the italics on old CFY,K. But, then, no "blog" can be too Salingerian, right? Heh.

Temporary Switch to Ultra-Lights

2008-01-27T21:16:00.000-05:00

• I've been trying to make this post for a while now, but I got all sick, so it's taking forever. The problem with like never getting sick is that when you do get sick you get sick as shit. But I'm coming around.

• The other day I drew a little comic strip I'm calling "Bird Turds." Would you maybe like to see it? (I also drew this other thing for it, but I don't know what for, really.)

• Fantagraphics finally got on their grind and revamped their website. It wins now, and you can finally order directly from them. FancyNerds of the world, be stoked.

• I'm pondering this potential move, you know, to Austin. I think if were to base my decision solely on the music that's coming out of that place, I would already live there.

Spoon - "Black Like Me"

White Denim - "Shake Shake Shake"

The Octopus Project - "All the Friends You Can Eat"

• The Rai Child is reading over my shoulder at the moment, eating his gross food. Breathin' all hard and smackin'. The shit's disgusting. I would remind/implore him to bring it the fuck back already, but I'm tired of saying it.

The CFY,K Travelogue: Austin, TX

2008-01-23T14:01:00.000-05:00

• So, I was sitting on a plane bound for Jacksonville, Florida last night, crammed into a window seat next to a woman who looked, smelled, and sounded like a Jaguars game, when it occurred to me that I ought to update my blog.

• I'm kind of through with apologizing for the sporadic nature that CFY,K has taken on in the last while. Because, you know. I don't have one of those - admittedly way better and more entertaining - blogs like, say, Nah Right or Drawn, or whatever where each entry is just, like, one piece of news in a specialized cultural niche. I am not a specialized cultural niche, and have no interest in becoming one, and not that much shit happens to me.

• But then the other day I went to Austin, Texas on a reconnaissance mission because maybe I want to move there based solely on the notion that I have got to get out of where I'm at. A "kick in the ass," or a leap "into some cold water." Or that's what my old man says anyway. I am now in the process of pondering this.

{Editorial note: right here is where I would put one of those "Click to continue reading" links on this post. But I haven't yet figured out a really good way to do that. So. Until I do, the reader must take comfort in the idea that the author is in b4 tl;dr. - Ed.}

• And now, some highlights, in no particular order.

• On Sunday afternoon, a Good Old Timey Type Friend, with whom I had attended high school and who is now a lawyer, showed up and showed myself and a certain Mystery Lady around Austin. (He pulled up to the motel, by the way, in this awesome sports car that he had reportedly paid for with poker winnings, which completely rules.)

We all went to Matt's El Rancho and had the best shit ever. (By which I mean of course the best dip ever but whatever.)

Afterwards we ventured to the capitol building on Congress Avenue. There's an awful lot going on in that place. Like an age-old myth/debate finally dispelled/settled. And a kind of horrifying - because it catches you totally off-guard - portrait of a former Texas governor.

• It was my initial intention to visit the campus of The University of Texas at Austin in an effort to see what their MFA program was all about, but because I am - due to years of training - a Master Trip Planner, I arrived there on Martin Luther King Day. So it was closed. It was also like the only cold and rainy day in the history of Texas. Everybody I met on campus was super-nice, though, so that was cool. And I saw that tower where that one lunatic shot a bunch of people in '66. It's kind of weird to see, but I think there's a lot to be said for their unflinchingly maintaining that building as the symbol of the school, regardless of its tragic history.

• After hours of searching in the dark rain, we finally found the Stevie Ray Vaughn statue on Town Lake. It was seriously like a half mile from the motel. There was this workout drill instructor guy in the middle of the field making all these fitness freaks run laps with the aide of his loudass air raid siren. I felt compelled to extravagantly smoke cigarettes on my loping approach to the monument. So I did.

Sittin' In the County for Summers

2008-01-08T14:28:00.001-05:00

• Yesterday, I should say, was a good day. If there is a better way to spend a Monday - food preparation (which, admittedly, resulted in a burnt thumb), a BCS championship (which, admittedly, is, from jump, total bullshit, but still), and a late-night bathtub telephone chat (the best part) - I'd like to hear about it.

• The other day, though, was one of the most unlikely on record. Me and the Rai Chile took a trip to Cumberland Island to, I don't know. Conduct some kind of bizarre research for this thing I may or may not be working on. And seriously. Can you honestly imagine either of us, like, walking on nature trails? (Rustle in the bushes? Flee!)

So we went to Dungeness, which was, really, the overarching point of the trip. Have you been there? No? It's like this old Carnegie mansion that has burned down, I think, twice. Now it's the ruins of a bygone era, with wild horses roaming around like it's Twelve Monkeys. There's these old cars that are just burnt rust. Everything about it is weird and lovely and tragic.

It's like the House of Usher, you know, after it fell. Which is why, when we arrived, the blackbird lighting on the long-unused fountain and unleashing a primal squawk was a little too Poe, and a little too perfect to describe anywhere except for, say, a blog.

• I wonder how Shamanzo is doing wherever he is at the moment.

• In other news, I found the Best Skate Video of All Time on YouTube. (The audio's a little effed, but what do you want?)

• I've been rereading this William Gibson book, Pattern Recognition, for the past couple days. Entertainment-wise, I think it's secretly kind of incredible. The main character has, like, an allergy to mass-marketed logos and branding. So. In that spirit, I wonder how long it takes Google to sue Alli weight loss pills for banking on a loose subliminal visual association with the Google logo.

Ahem.

Dear Google,

If you hadn't thought of suing Alli weight loss pills before I said anything about it, I will gladly accept some millions of dollars. Or, like, some cush position doing nothing but making pots of money for no reason. Because, you know,

I gotta take a shot,

TDH.

2007-12-29T18:06:00.000-05:00

• {EDITORIAL NOTE: This one's going to be a little longer than usual.

"Blog," as a word, is some kind of abbreviated portmanteau that, I think, comes as close to describing the thing itself as any other term in this dumbed-down and ridiculous "parlance of our times." Or at least the term "blog" suggests how I use my blog. (Yikes. "My blog." Try to say that out loud in earnest and you'll marvel at how easy it is to repulse yourself.)

My blog, typically, is a space for me to be glib, and to keep in some kind of loose contact with an irregular and far-flung group of friends, and - from time to time - to direct The Reader's attention to some extraordinary or entertaining aspect of our popular culture. The guiding principle behind Curtains For You, Kid seems to always be: "Keep it light." Or, just as often: "Keep it."

But, occasionally, I think, this blog could serve as a space for me to showcase material for The Reader that reflects my actual feelings about a personal event.

The other day I was asked to speak at the funeral ceremony for my beloved and recently departed grandmother. What follows is the text, slightly altered, from the speech that I gave. - TDH}

• I think that Eleanor, "Freckles," my grandmother, was given a gift - life - by God.

I think that Gramma Freckles herself would be much more qualified to make that statement than I am, but I don’t think that that makes it any less true.

Eleanor was given the gift of life by God, and in return she gave Him the gift of a life gracefully and remarkably lived.

At this time I feel that this metaphor bears extension. It is easy for me to imagine Freckles' life as the vessel for the present that she gave to her Lord, in the same way that a little felt box might contain a lovely necklace.

Into her life, into this parcel that she dedicated herself to preparing for God, Gramma Freckles packed the unceasing care and support of those around her. In addition, she packed into her life her loving relationship with her husband Gilbert, to whom she was married for some sixty years, and with whom she raised three exceptional children.

Perhaps most importantly, the present Freckles gave to God was packed to overflowing with her own energy and vitality that seemed, I think to all of us here, to be limitless.

When Eleanor passed away, she did so as peacefully and as gracefully and as elegantly as she had lived her life. And although I was initially overcome with the emotions that accompany the loss of a loved one, it didn't take long for me to consider the idea that the way she passed was, in some way, the wrapping and the ribbon she put on her own personal gift to God.

Gramma lived her life as fully and considerately as anyone ever had. If she could talk to us today, I think that she would remind us all that there is nothing to be sorry about. We ought to take this time to celebrate the life of Eleanor, and to continue to be inspired by her life to make our own lives into the kind of beautiful and exquisite experience that she had.

Two Little Drawings

2007-12-29T00:17:00.001-05:00

• I've been, um. Yeah. Kind of like. You know how when you just want to not think about anything for a while and you end up making dumb little sketch joints for a couple hours? And then even though they're not that good or nothin' you Photoshop 'em anyway because whatever. I probably would have liked for them to be saying things. I'm looking for a resource of a bunch of speech balloons somewhere. So. Holler at me. More later. Probably, technically, today.

• (I don't know how many of you have a flickr page or whatever. But after you upload some pictures and describe them, you click this button that says "Save This Batch." I would like to be able to customize it to say "Save This Biatch." Ns;js.)

2007-12-24T01:26:00.001-05:00

• I'd like to start out with two, like, editorial notes. First of all, even though it is Christmas Eve and I seem to be posting to this blog with increasing irregularity, I'm not necessarily implying that this will in fact be the last post of 2007. (Like you care.) Secondly, I kind of can't stand year-end lists. But fucking everybody seems to make one, or at least every magazine. And I think I'd like to work for one of them one day. So. I figure I might as well just start producing year-ending list-type text.

• While I consider The Darjeeling Limited to be, on the strength of its visuals alone, the Best Movie of the Year, and while I thought at the time that watching that last Pirates movie on super-packed opening night with my former neighbor while she drank sneaked-in beers and seriously talked through the whole thing was unusually awkward, it was, in retrospect, the best experience I had watching a movie in 2007. (That last sentence, though, might qualify for Longest Sentence I Wrote This Year.)

• Best Blog Based Entirely On Another Blog of 2007: Wear Palettes, which takes the photos from The Sartorialist and reduces them to color palettes. In order to, I don't know, better track, like, color trends. Or something.

• As far as the Best Album of the Year is concerned, I think it's only fair to call it what it is: the Best Record I Heard All Year. Because there were a lot of records I just didn't listen to this year - even ones that it seems like I would have listened to. I think that this is the case because (a) there's no place to buy new CD's anymore, (b) the Good Shit Catalog died, and (c) the last time I was hip was in October of 2002.
So. All that said, for me it comes down to Da Drought 3 and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. I'm not just trying to exercise some, like, one-rap-record-one-rock-record white guy blogger diplomacy here. Or maybe, on some level, I am. But I think I'm just really into extremely hardworking musicians who manage to sound completely effortless and cool all the time.
UPDATE: You know, the more I think about it, the more I think that Rock Band might be the Album of the Year.

• Fuck this. End-of-year lists are exhausting. And they only ever talk about general crap. Like the Best Book. I don't even remember reading any books this year. But I'm sure I must have. I'm just saying: I've never read a magazine where some guy lists, like, his Proudest Personal Achievement.

• Proudest Personal Acehievement of 2007: (fucking finally) graduating from college.

• Hardest-Won Photograph I Took This Year:

this one.

• I feel that the Year's Biggest Disappointment For Me, Personally was and continues to be the Raichile's unceasing negligence of what really ought to be the greatest blog ever.

• I just looked at the clock. It is now 4:31 in the a.m. I guess I could keep typing until January, but at some point enough's enough.

The Reign of Blank-Blank has Begun

2007-12-20T17:43:00.000-05:00

• Let's begin at the beginning, then, hey? Okay. So. American Gangster came out, and I was and remain embonered about the whole thing. The only thing that I thought was disappointing about it, really, was Lil Wayne's verse on "Hello Brooklyn 2.0." You know. Because it's not all east coast -sounding and super lyrical. But then I listened to it a bunch of times, and I decided that it's one of the best parts of the album. Wayne's part on it sounds like a Delta Blues singer performing with the New Power Generation. Or, you know, like Prince with a drawl. Also, the track so reinvigorated my love for "B-Boy Bouillabaisse" that I made this little thing. (What do you call these things? "Mashups?" What a dumb term.)

• Can't find anything to buy for Thee Famous Person - who doesn't "believe in" Christmas but still wants presents? If I was you, I'd try here.

• I converted pounds to dollars and, at press time, it'll cost me $39.62 apiece. But still. Don't think I'm not going to make the next Devil Himself mixtape (tentatively titled "Protected Everywhere") available on these bitches.

• Tadanori Yokoo? More like Radanori Yokoo.

• So. I've had this one post going for a couple of days now, because I saved it, and decided I would finish it at some point down the road. I decided today that today was the day, though, just so I could finish it with the new shit. (What? Yes.)

Two-Fer Tuesday

2007-12-12T18:48:00.000-05:00

• I figured it'd be a good idea if I broke this up into two posts, for the sake of. I don't know. Continuity? Something? I just personally never like reading long-ass text-heavy blogs. I tend to tune out. I suspect that you might as well.

• The other day I put a Mogwai song up here. Mogwai's one of those bands, man. Where, like, I've never really considered myself a capital-f Fan, but, like. I really like them. (I'm the same way about Busta Rhymes.) I guess somebody synced up one of their songs with an Iggy Pop interview and put the shit on YouTube. I say to that person: Thanks, buddy!

• The new Vanity Fair - I know - has an article concerning the suicides of East Village/LA artists Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan. I certainly don't mean any disrespect, but the first thing that occurred to me was the late Mr. Blake's series of really great haircuts. Here's an embed of Blake's "Sodium Fox." (Because, you know, apparently at least seven of you watch these things. (There's also a video of Duncan's "The History of Glamour" on the Vanity Fair site, but it's like forty minutes long so, of course, I haven't watched it yet.))

• Ike Turner died. But you knew that already, probably. (Just trying to stick with the dead celebrity theme for this installment of CFY,K. I guess.)

For Personal Use

2007-12-12T18:07:00.001-05:00

• As for the delay , I am easily distracted. So.

• I spent the better part of last week in New York City, staying and working with Old Raver, trying to get my country-boy-makes-good on. I think that if I had tried to post before now, you all would have had to wade through a bunch of environmentalist rhetoric and links to helpful tips for green living.

• I will say that Raven Simone, for her part, has exceeded all reasonable expectations in terms of "Good Looking Out." I think that I might formally discontinue my own personal usage of the term "Ravenize" in honor of this. Maybe.

• Also: I managed to get to the big city just in time to give the kid Shamanzo a proper Sarchichan send-off. I think he's in China now. Or somewhere. (A hallmark of Sarchichans, I think, is their innate ability to to arrange their lives in such a way as to be able to just drop everything and go at a moment's notice.) Safe travels, Monsieur Rabbitt.

Sleep Till Four Or Whatever

2007-12-01T17:41:00.000-05:00

• First things first:

Dear Viva Voce,
I don't want to sound like a dick. Because I'm flattered. Really. But, um. The next time you make a song about me, you could go a little easier on the jangle-pop and go for more of a "brooding menace" kind of vibe.
Cheers,
TDH

• Okay. And that said, I think that the wintertime is the time to chill the fuck out 'cause it's boring.

That's "I Do Have Weapons" by Mogwai, by the way.

• So. Um. About that. I got this poll here. There's a whole, long-winded thought process behind its inclusion, but I'll spare you the particulars.

• It's a little funny when a band with the kind of cultural cachet that The White Stripes commands makes a video for a cover song. What's weird to me is how often they, in particular, do that. But whatever. Their new video, for "Conquest," originally written by Corky Robbins and performed by Patti Page, is hilarious and awesome.

• Now. Again. YouTube embeds. I'm not sure if they're worth it. The kid needs feedback.

• You know what's funny? Married to the Sea.

Jush Is Radocasting As I Write This

2007-11-24T19:59:00.000-05:00

• When you're stuck, kind of, at your parents house, you end up watching the most bizarre movies ever because they have a gigantic TV and you can't just take Jacuzzi baths all day.

• Speaking of television, If I had my own channel, it would look a great deal like this Grupthink poll. I know I mentioned it there, too, but in the interest of being thorough, I can't figure out how to embed that old-ass Flipmode Squad video for "Cha Cha Cha." It would totally also be in heavy rotation on my fantasy TV station.

• From the Not Sayin'; Just Sayin' File: We here at at Curtains For You, Kid are at our parents' house, as you may well know, where there is always an insane glut of celebrity gossip magazines. And maybe we're connecting dots that shouldn't be, but in light of recent events, the Breaking News out of Hiebradond just got a little weird.

• Two books I want: 111 (nsfw), and the new Walton Ford joint.

• Every once in a while you get the impression that maybe Nick Catchdubs is a little too awesome, and gets more intrawebs love than anyone else ever, and you wonder how in hell he ever got to that position, but then he drops a Justice remix with Wale on it and it all makes sense again.

• The thing about this article - apart from its inclusion here officially making this CFY,K entry a little heavy on the celebrity news - is that at first you're like "Man. Sucks for the old Hulkster." And then you think about how it's all you're going to hear the Bobo Howard Sterns talk about for a while. But then you do a double take, read the shit again, and say "New American Gladiators?! YES!"

2007-11-17T13:38:00.000-05:00

• P.S. I don't actually own a gun.

• I think that my life changed for the better since I changed my ringtone to the opening lick from Gimme Shelter. Now every time I get a phone call it's like Martin Scorsese is directing a little moment of my day.

• This is the best still frame from a cartoon show. Ever. For so many reasons. But really just the one.

• I've been thinking that I should, by all accounts, address the passing of Norman Mailer. Since he actually wrote novels, whereas I sometimes write about writing novels. I came across this story that, I think, deals with Mailer's passing - as well with as the "death" of contemporary authors' striving for The Great American Novel - pretty well.

• It's getting cold outside, and that means it's the time of year for introspective gangsta rap songs that prominently feature pianos. This is "Kill My Dog" off of Cam'ron's new mixtape.

• Thank you, Drawn!, for providing me with a couple of other places to screw around on the internet for no reason.

Good Mornian

2007-11-13T16:09:00.000-05:00

• It's not really my place to be specific on this, so I won't. But I will say that there are interesting new developments going on over in Hiebradond. I guess you'd have to know old Anvil Shamanzer, like, personally. His new song, however, is for all to enjoy.

• ~~When's Blogger gon' let me do those embeddable little expanding flash players for em pee threes? Oh wait. (I'ma get on it.)~~ {Update: fixed!}

• I just wrote a résumé, which, I think, looks pretty impressive. I'd hire me. I mean. If I could stand me. (What are you supposed to do with a résumé again?)

• You know how when you go to a comic book store and they have those hundred boxes full of back issues of Rom, Spaceknight that you can buy for ninety-nine cents apiece? No? You don't? Because - what? - you're not completely nerdified? Whatever. These boxes: they got 'em. Marvel Comics, though, is digitizing their archives. So that way, I guess comic shop owners can free up more space for grown-ass people to play Magic and Pokémon. (No links to these things. One must draw the line somewhere.)

• On my personal wishlist: 58 Rodeo. I mean. If me and El Amar are ever going to make rock posters. (Me: "It's just hot chicks and skulls, right?" E: "Yeah. And fonts!")

• My Dad brought home season one of Weeds on the same day that my sister came over with a DVD collection of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which are like the two things on TV that I watch that don't come on the Mojo network. (Especially since Adult Swim straight ganked my snake-for-an-arm idea. (Possibly NSFW)) So. They're talking about alternating pilot episodes. I'm gonna go.

2007-11-08T01:17:00.000-05:00

• I was sitting around the house the other day, you know - 'cause that's most of what I do - and Caddyshack came on. And you know. It had been a while since I heard that one dude on some "Ahoy, polloi," and somehow FP had never seen Caddyshack, which I thought was bizarre. Just because, like, so many old dudes are constantly quoting it. So I guess now she'll know what they're talking about.
I started thinking, though, what the hell happened to Lacey Underall, that singular paragon of 80's hotness? It turns out she's not up to much. But that's okay, because I can relate to that. This website retroCrush interviewed her. I need a job like that, where I get sent out and paid to holler at Mia Sara.

• I remember I put something up about this before, maybe years ago at this point. So I figured I'd follow up on it, even though I know that no one cares. That Ghostface doll is finally coming out. My thing, though, is like, the shit costs $500. How big a market can that possibly reach?

• Jush is gonna be rich.

• But the real story of the week in my own personal life is that the new Jay-Z record came out and that the shit is good. I suspect, however, that you guys aren't all that interested in where I think it rates among Jay's other albums, and how I feel about particular tracks. So I figured I'd just embed the Roc Boys video because it looks like the most awesome party ever that you would never, under any circumstances, be invited to.

• I have long maintained that Shannon Sharpe could only have ever played for the Denver Broncos - never mind that he played two seasons for the Ravens - because he is, in fact, a bronco. He looks more like a bronco than even John Elway, who is at least half bronco. But now there is a new contender for the title of Athlete Who Most Resembles His or Her Respective Team Name: Chris Bosh. If he ever gets traded, I hope it's to some future expansion team called like Les Pterodactyls de Montréal.

An Orchestra of Penguins

2007-11-01T20:06:00.000-04:00

• The winner for this year's CFY,K Halloween Costume Contest goes to Old Raver and her roommate, who went all the fuck out for a sick Statler and Waldorf getup. I, of course, did not dress up, because I am a perennial hater, but I did carve a sick demon-in-a-hellpit pumpkin.

• I must be honest, though. Because I don't really care one way or the other about Halloween. I'm making this post pretty much solely because Saul Williams has released a new album on his own, that you can get for free - free is harder to come by these days - or pay five bucks for. It's a sweet deal either way. Trent Reznor did a bunch of production on it, which is weird. But whatever. I love Saul Williams. Go get it!

• I mean. I guess there's other stuff going on in the world of the intrabutts. Killa's finally got a new song out. Dog the Bounty Hunter is a total racist. Lil Wayne is properly releasing all those leaked Carter III tracks, and may be going to jail still. Wired Magazine having an article about VBS.tv (nsfw) is like Wired having an article about Wired from ten years ago. But seriously. Saul Williams has a new record out.

Straight to My Mind-Hole

2007-10-30T16:24:00.001-04:00

• I'm pretty sure this guy was an actual zombie, but he didn't eat my brain. What he did do was seek out a decent light source for me to take a picture of him with my shitbox cellphone camera. This zombie fellow was so nice that I now believe all zombie movies to be anti-zombie racist propaganda.

• I just got back from spending time in Asheville, North Carolina. In between fending off attacks from vicious pitbulls with heads as big as stop signs and being stranded on the outskirts of town with El Amar and an odd collection of moonshine-drinking locals, there were three concerts at the Orange Peel. Some notes on these shows follow.

• Spoon. The first night me and thee Famous Person got into town we saw Spoon. We showed up late, because we, together, are incapable of leaving town for a trip before four p.m. So we missed The Ponys, which sucked, because FP was really excited about seeing them. Spoon ruled, though. They played their melodic, piano-driven pop songs with a kind of funk-laden slow groove that built, occasionally, into incredible crescendo. There is something blue-collar about their consistency and their "no-frills" (by which I mean, of course, "no eyeliner") look. The bass player plays his instrument exactly like it should, in my opinion, be played. FP says that the lead singer sounds kind of like Billy Joel, which makes sense, since Billy Joel also totally rules in a blue-collar kind of a way.
Spoon used an effect to mimic, I guess, the sound that a ghost might make for "The Ghost of You Lingers." FP thought that they were tying to emulate the sound of the truly big-ass fan attached to the ceiling of the venue.
{Editorial Note: The hyperlink immediately above leads to the Big Ass Fan company, which makes, yes, big ass fans, including the one at the Orange Peel. But I wonder what the percentage is for visitors to their website who are fans of big asses. - R. Ronsonol}
Spoon closed the show with "The Way We Get By," which, despite its inclusion on the O.C. soundtrack, remains a perfect pop masterpiece. The crowd was pleased.

• They Might Be Giants. I didn't actually go to this show. I felt, at that point, that I needed some time away from thee Famous Person in order to preserve my own tenuous grasp on sanity. You know how it is with siblings, man. I will say this: the chicken parmesan sandwich I had while this concert was happening was delicious. That and I have seen TMBG a bunch of times, and they're always really good, and I suspect that they did not disappoint.

• The New Pornographers. I spent the whole time wondering what it must be like to be Carl Newman, who seems to be the de facto leader of The New Pornographers. Everyone, even die-hard fans of this band (among whom I am not), clearly seems to like Neko Case and Dan Bejar - both members of TNP - way more than him. And since both Case and Bejar have pretty successful solo careers, are they, like, doing the less-successful members of this band a favor by showing up at all? I mean. They are. But I wonder how aware everyone is of this.
For a band that I don't particularly like, The New Pornographers put on a pretty amazing, high-energy concert. Neko Case - yawning intermittently throughout the show - adds a nice little twang to the Mamas & Papas-style harmonies at play.
Bejar, by the way, was rarely on stage. He sauntered on to sing lead vocals on about every tenth song on a - roughly - thirty song set. I think he knows that he's the secret weapon of the band. Also: you can add him to the list of celebrities, along with Patterson Hood and Hyde from That 70's Show, who look kind of like Cruton.

Dude With All the Dudes

2007-10-23T19:51:00.000-04:00

• The lady Mz. Higginbotham has a new, completely pro-fee-essional gig these days, with an office, she says, that is big enough for a ping-pong table. I can't imagine when she'd find the time to actually play ping-pong (The Heroic Sport of Heroes), though. Maybe she could spend all day training with a robot. Then she might have a shot at one day beating me. (I wonder if the Robo Pong 2040 is in anyway related to R.O.B.)

• I am under the impression that Stephen Colbert is running for president entirely for the lulz, and entirely in character. Is there like a legitimate term for when the joke-thing begins to have an effect on the actual thing?

• Winsor McCay may well be the best that ever did it.

• The White Stripes Lomo joints are really, really awesome. (Though I can't decide whether the Jack or the Meg one is the most awesome.) But I can't imagine a set of circumstances under which I'd actually buy one.

• Bring it back already. Shit.

• What the hell is "Gocco printing?"

• I love it when the DJ you like so much remixes that band you like so much and it turns into a remix you like so much. Word to Discobelle.

Pour The Coffee In My Eyes

2007-10-19T14:31:00.000-04:00

• Hearing about my exile on Elba, S. Higginbotham came to visit this week. Ping-pong was played. Attendant injuries were suffered. Pork chop sandwiches were consumed, and attendant food comas were endured. It was like a morale-boosting care package that you'd get on a rainy day at summer camp except, like, in human form.

• "You's a seven-time felon. What you doin' with that?"

• I want someone that I know, likesay the aforementioned Higginblatt, to make their own font, and then to tell me how that went, so I can decide if I would like to do so as well.

• So what if I don't have a functioning automobile or any discernible source of income? Fuck it. I'm going to see Spoon. Because I can't think of a good reason as to why I wouldn't do that. I mean. It only costs money and is happening hundreds of miles away. (Happy birthday, FP.)

• I'm having one of those days where I'm not dying; I just can't think of anything good to do.

• From the "More Evidence That This Blog Has Become Less About the Strange Activities of One 'The Devil Himself' And His Far-Flung Associates and More About the Goings-On Within the World of Rap Music That Nobody Who Reads Said Blog Cares About Other Than Its Author, 'The Devil Himself'" file: Lil Wayne is going to be on the new Jay-Z record. We here at CFY,K consider this a win. (Also: Here's hoping that there's some little kid sitting in front of his computer with a notebook full of scribbled sixteens thinking, 'Oh. That's how you do that.')

2007-10-13T14:10:00.000-04:00

• The above artwork comes from a Love & Rockets collection by Jaime Hernandez called The Girl From H.O.P.P.E.R.S. I highly recommend it. (You should really probably buy it from Fantagraphics, just to keep it real, but I could only find a direct Amazon link.)

• So now that new Hova joint "Blue Magic" has its own video, in addition to the aforementioned trailer. Hype Williams directed the new one, and it looks gorgeous. (Hype Williams should offer to do his best work for Jay-Z for free, in an unceasing effort to make up for "Sunshine.") See also: "Roc Boys," which is also classic Jay. (I am getting my hopes up for American Gangster. I can't help it.)

• You know who I like? Graphic designer Charley Harper (RIP). I think old FP has a poster of his somewhere in her house. And Habitiat Skateboards pretty much unabashedly got their whole stee from him.

• If you were thinking of making the best music video of all time, you'd probably want to combine the following ingredients: a freestyle intro from Big Daddy Kane with human beatbox provided by Biz Markie, sing-along shots of authentic eighties-style hip street kids on a basketball court, where Spud Webb (!) is playing some ball. Then you'd think, "fuck it, go nuts" and throw in a John Madden cameo in there for giggles and grins. What if I told you that that video already exists, for Paul Simon's perfect pop song "Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard." You'd have to like that, because you love that song, and it would save you a ton of impossible work.

Corndog Victory in the Final Seconds

2007-10-10T01:14:00.000-04:00

• What I think is funny is the idea that having a degree in English makes a person somehow less able to communicate with the people around them in the world. Like. I wrote this little thing for my friend the other day, just a little write-up to appear in a local publication, about 150 words, and I honestly had no idea how to do it. Perhaps I'm only capable of long-winded and convoluted academic critiques. And half-assed blog posts. (I mean. I did it, and did it happily, as my friend is the hardest-working person I have ever met in terms of charity. She really, actually, thinks globally and acts locally, which is a rare thing, despite the proliferation of bumper stickers intended to convey that same philosophical message. What I'm trying to say is that writing that 150-word thing was way more difficult than a longish paper, but it took a while for me to say that, because I have an English degree and therefore have a hard time saying anything.)

• So, um. Lil Wayne got arrested. But I guess it's cool now. Or something.

• Speaking of Lil Wayne, and other rap-related news, what the hell happened with Still Listen To Gangsta Music? That shit was my favorite. I'm beginning to think that whoever made that blog is secretly, actually Cam'ron, and has, as such, disappeared from the face of the earth. Luckily, my dude over at Jesus Piece still holds it down.

• Rave-on sends me links to good stuff like small-time producers send Kanye soul records to sample. This one's good, about an art collective that moved into the mall. Although I must say that living in the mall sounds like the place I would like to live least. But whatever. Art kids and their damn statements.

• I have not finished Marisha Pessl's book. Nor have I fully explored that book's website. But even a cursory perusal of these things suggests that Pessl is pretty, pretentious, and approximately half as talented as she thinks that she is. I think we ought to get married. (My book, for the record, seems to be selling for upwards of one hundred dollars. Take that, suckas!)

The Kid With the Most Knowledge

2007-10-03T17:29:00.000-04:00

• I think I have gotten more "post titles" from "Ghost Deini" than from any other source. HST had The Book of Revelations. I have Supreme Clientele. This is reflected in our respective prose, I think.

• So, yeah. I drew this picture of Buddha for some reason the other day. Figured I'd, you know, share it with you fine folks.

• I, also, would like to apologize to all the people whose phone calls I have only been sporadically answering as of late. It's like this, see: my car's broken down. In order to do anything, therefore, I have to get a ride, usually with Thee Famous Person, who has been graciously carting my stank ass around town every day. I have this thing, though, where I refuse to talk on the phone for any substantial amount of time when I am in the, like, physical company of people. Especially in the car. I can't stand it when the person you're in the car with is all on the phone for a long time. You can't talk to that person, listen to music, or have your own phone call. You can't do shit but listen to, like, half of a conversation you don't care about anyway. So I don't do it on principle.

• The other thing that's been suffering lately is this blog. Having a blog is something that you do when you have some time by yourself, which is rare these days as well, and for much the same reason. (It's also the same deal for, like, dicking around on the intrabutts finding out about stuff, which also makes the blog suffer. Like. When have I ever gone this long without a link to something?)

• Wait. You know what's awesome? Taking, like, dialog from Frank Miller's Batman and visually remixing it with Adam West-style Batman. It's the shit. (Via Drawn. (Are we still, like, crediting link-sources? I do it intermittently, 'cause fuck it.))

• More soon? Let's hope so.

That's Okay With Me

2007-09-26T15:44:00.000-04:00

• So. You'd have to know, by now, that I'd be all stoked to see the thirteen minute prequel to The Darjeeling Limited. (Trailer here.) It's called Hotel Chevalier, and it's free on iTunes. (Get iTunes, already. Sheesh.)

• And speaking of movies, old Raver sent this next thing my way. (I have to give credit where credit is due, lest I be accused of "ravenizing" anybody's shit.) Right in the middle of Robert Redford trying to re-legitimize his career, Tom Cruise seems intent on letting you know that he is still, in fact, doing his thing.

• You remember when that Shyne joint "Bad Boys" came out with that ill-as-fuck Barrington Levy cameo? Foxy Brown has made that song again, and it's ~~still~~ a pretty good song.

• My favorite Simpsons episode of all time is called "The Mansion Family," and it's on Season 12. I consulted Video ETA, but they don't know when the shit's coming out.

We Now Return

2007-09-23T23:56:00.000-04:00

• "... to your irregularly scheduled programming."

• That picture is supposed to be like an early rough draft of this weird little comic project I'm supposed to be working on with my sister, thee Famous Person. Because when we are around each other, that's what we do: begin little comic projects and then never finish them.

• I finally - on a related note - got that book that Paul Pope released. It, like the rest of his work that I've seen, is kind of uneven, but when that dude hits, he kills it.

• More art crap: Have I talked about Nicholas Roerich on CFY,K before? I might have, in some incarnation of this blog. But then I forgot his name for a long time, until, like, two days ago when it occurred to me again. Roerich is the shit. I'm putting this up here as much for your benefit as my own. You know. In case I forget.

• I think you guys know how I feel about TDB's - that's Traditional Dutch Bicycles, by the way. So. I found this blog, right? And I'm not saying it's, you know, "rule 34" status, but it might as well be.

• I don't even wear glasses, but I would wear these. I do, however, wear sunglasses, so if anybody wants to come up off some Persol 649's on the cheap, holler at the kid.

• Making an album, after, let's face it, a pretty lackluster coming-out-of-retirement joint, based on your reaction to a movie was, when I first read about it, either the best or the worst idea that I had ever heard of. But then Hov dropped what I guess is a trailer for his upcoming single - which, I know, is weird - and the shit is ill. (But, I mean. I'm biased.)

• The Orange Park Kennel Club is neither decadent nor depraved. It is, however, for suckers. You spend all your time trying to figure out the difference between, like, a quiniela key and a box superfecta. The odds listed on the racing program mean nothing. A 13-1 shot, from what I could gather, has exactly as good a chance as winning a race as a 3-2. (Meanwhile, of course, I am naturally allergic to numbers and, therefore, bet entirely on instinct and the humor-quality of a given dog's name. This, I have come to learn, is an ineffective method.)

• Ok. More. Soon.

The CFY,K Travelogue Phase Three: Colorado

2007-09-17T18:34:00.002-04:00

• As has been made, I think, pretty clear by the first two "phases" of the CFY,K Travelogue, I spent a great deal of time on this trip not actually doing much of anything. I found this to be refreshing, coming off, as I was, a hard summer of the final throes of college classes, and all the attendant nonsense therewith. By the time I got to Denver, though, it seemed like it was time to get on with the business of some hard-core tourism. Luckily for me, old Lo-Ha, my lovely hostess, was as bored and as unemployed as I was (and, by the way, am), and therefore ready to seek out whatever action there was to be found in the Centennial State.

• If you laugh "a special kind of" laugh when you're hanging out with Nebraska, then it's sort of a constant thing with Lo-Ha. At least with me. Everything that happens when you're hanging out with her is hilarious, due in no small part to the fact that she's there. It's one of those things like if Lo-Ha was reading out of the dictionary, it would be really, really funny that she was, in the first place, reading out of the dictionary.

• I think our shared inability to take anything seriously came in clutch when we visited - for the purposes of continuing a sort of trip-long theme, as well as research - the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. I had read about this place, but I don't think either of us were prepared for the weird brand of, like, militant freak they have running around that place. Indo-Tibetan Buddhism majors engaged in poetry slams with students of transpersonal psychology. There were strictly enforced rules as to which color of meditation pillow was allowed where. All of it: too much. After a half-hour we commandeered the sole computer in the school's tiny library to purchase baseball tickets online.

• The real highlight of my time in Colorado, I think, was a trip we took from Denver to Aspen by way of Independence Pass. The route is closed during the winter, because the road is high and treacherous. We almost hit a deer to the tune of "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)." Along the way, one fact became clear: everything in Colorado is mind-bogglingly beautiful. Even the mechanics. I kind of couldn't really deal with it. Once you get to Independence Pass, you're over twelve thousand feet above sea level. So. Even in the middle of the summer, it's awfully cold.

• At "Aspen's hippest hotel," old people play Connect Four at a large table in the lobby at all hours. Aspen is weird. It's surrounded by gorgeous mountains and peopled with citizens that seem nice enough. Be warned, though: they can sense that you are not in possession of a Black Card before you enter into any restaurant, and the wait staff treats you accordingly. Although I felt like some kind of impostor when I was there, I don't want to come across like I had a bad time in Aspen. It's incredibly picturesque and relaxing. It makes sense that rich people spend so much time there. But, really, for me, it was getting there that was the most fun.

• The next day I woke up and embarked immediately to conclude the strange "literary portion" of my tour of America. Lo-Ha and I drove around Woody Creek, Colorado for hours until we finally came across the entranceway to a compound that may or may not have been part of Hunter S. Thompson's legendary Owl Farm. I'm satisfied that it is. But you never know. Lo-Ha was, after a fashion, bored. So, with a final stop at Buffalo Bill Cody's final resting place, and a protracted round of the "Famous People Name Game," we returned to Denver.

• I left Colorado and Lo-Ha and what was essentially the final leg of my amazing trip the next morning. I returned to Orlando to visit again with Higginbotham. (Note: never, ever, under any circumstances, expect any peace and quiet on a flight to Orlando. You will be surrounded be screaming children that are out of their goddamned minds with excitement at the prospect of spending any amount of time at all at Disney World, and you will curse plane travel and want, silently, to die.) I regretfully couldn't spend the night there, though, as there seemed to be pressing issues to attend to in my hometown, so I went to see my folks for a few days. Then my car broke down, and I am now stranded in their home as I type this.

The CFY,K Travelogue Phase Two: Venice Beach

2007-09-12T00:49:00.001-04:00

• Mere micromips after Higginbotham dropped me off at the airport I was throwing my bags in the back of Jenkin, Nebraska's own Heroic Warrior Honda. There is something, to me at least, completely fascinating about being on an entirely different coast of the United States than the one you woke up on, all before lunchtime. (Nobody else seems to think that this is all that remarkable, however. "Can you believe it," I'd ask. "Yes," they'd say, "you were on an airplane." They don't understand, though, that airplanes are powered by magic.)

• The first night I was in town, there was a Swillpro Records Revue at the Good Hurt, but it really could have been held either inside of Nebraska's own MySpace page, or during a particularly strange evening at Fluids Bar and Lounge. Face was there! Think of this! Maybe you don't think air travel is all that wondrous, but surely you could grasp the significance of randomly running into Face, right? What are you? A robot? Anyway, the kid Smithers' Jagger elbows could seriously maybe give Shamanzo's time-tested Kiedis joints a run for their money (Ns;js).

• After that night, though, Nebraska and I got down to the business of not doing a whole lot of anything. To paraphrase our own Anvil Rabbitt, 'you laugh a special kind of weird little laugh when you hang out with Shaved.' It's true. You do. We spent a good deal of time wandering around the Venice Beach Boardwalk, which, exactly as I remember it, is better than television. In the span of seriously, you might come across a fistfight between two mimes - they had dropped all pretense and were screaming at each other - and, equally random but thematically linked precisely, Jimmy Hart, the Mouth of the South. I did. I also bought Brown's Requiem at Small World Books and caught up on some reading while Shaved Wieners shrapled the gnar like it was '88. Then it was off to get our Animal Style on.

• Me: In your professional opinion, how long would I have to stand around on the boardwalk before I ran into Nyft?
Nebraska: I'd say about two, three months.
{Not true. I ran into that dude in like an hour. It was awesome.}

• Roughly half of my time in the Los Angeles area was marked by this hilarious tension. Shaved was visited, in addition to myself, by this beautiful young schoolteacher that he had met on - get this - an airplane. (I know. This type of shit doesn't happen to anybody, but Nebraska's a damn superhero now. At some point before I showed up, he saved a house from burning down.) For a while there, as a result, he could not decide whether or not he was going to be Johnny Cool Guy, 'cause this lady was around, or, like Ridiculous Onomatopoeic Party Favor Noisemaker Nebraska, 'cause, you know, that's how the Security Council rolls. So I would send over these little lob shots over his Cool Guy net just to watch him deal with it. More sample dialogue:

Me: Hey, you want to play a Man Cup?
Lovely Lady: What's a 'Man Cup?'
Nebraska: It's nothing. It's the first level of MarioK -
Me: It's when we put on those jock straps, you know, with the cup? And then we run towards each other at full speed, from across the room, and bang cups together. Whoever thinks it sucks first loses.

• All of this eventually boiled over (aided in no small part by this depressing little movie we were all huddled around watching) in a furious fit of recording in The Genius's amazing new apartment in downtown L.A. There is evidence of this madness, and it can be found here and here, if you have the patience. (E Lamar, click these shits!)

• Suddenly - at least as suddenly as I had arrived in California, I was back on an airplane, headed this time for the mountains.

• When you're leaving LAX by airplane, they make you fly out to the ocean and turn around if you're headed eastward. I remember looking down out of the window of the plane at the expanse of water below. Moments later, after we made the turn back east, I was above undeveloped green land, and it looked exactly the same to me as the ocean had. "It's like," I thought, "they're the same thing, it's just that the ocean is moving faster than the land." I surmise from this that it is quite possible that either Los Angeles itself makes you high, or that they're putting strange chemicals in the air inside of airplane cabins.

The CFY,K Travelogue Phase One: Orlando

2007-09-07T16:46:00.000-04:00

• The whole time I was on this trip I was thinking that if I had a laptop, I could update CFY,K from the road. But then I thought that that would result, eventually, in me spending the whole trip "blogging," which would have blown.

• The day I turned into an old man, I drove to Orlando, Florida, to visit one S. Higginbotham. It was 110 degrees outside the whole way, in the Volvo without air conditioning. I drank a gallon of water and never had to pee, you know what I'm saying? Making that drive was like playing soccer. By the time I stopped, I was wearing Okefenokee Pants.

• There, strangely, doesn't seem to be a whole lot going on in Orlando. We spent all day looking for where the cool kids were hanging out. What we came across, though, was people dressing up, like in suits and prom dresses and shit, to go to the mall. (We did go to a mall. This much is true. But, to be fair, old Higginblatt had like this gift certificate or something. So it was justified.)

• The campus of the University of Central Florida is like this gigantic sprawling utopia. Sort of. It's like if they shot The Prisoner in Orlando instead of Portmeirion.

• I don't, however, mean to suggest that everything in Orlando is bad. Because, first, that would be untrue. (Add to that the fact that S Dot had like just moved there when I visited, so it's not like she had shit like all mapped out.) The Higginhours have set up housekeeping in the nicest little house that any of my friends live in. They use a fun-house mirror instead of like a regular mirror. How do you not love that? And every building in Orlando is shaped like a food product! We saw a house that Kerouac lived in! I saw President Isenhour straight snipe a wasps' nest from a hundred yards! It was epic!

• The other thing was that me and Higginbotham were afforded ample time for some regular old shooting of the shit, which is what I came down there for in the first place. We are awesome talkers. In addition, our hanging out resulted in the creation of a new comic strip we made called "Split 7 Inch." I want to do more of these things, so we get really good at it. And then, like, set up Split 7 Inch's own little web presence, and then take over the whole nerdy world, like those other dudes who make that webcomic that you don't read but like a billion other people do. Split 7 Inch is awesome and can be found here and here.

• I had a lovely time in Orlando, but, too soon, I was waking up S. at like 3:30 in the morning or some shit to drive me to the airport. We drank Doubleshots on the way, and I had to take a Doubleshit on the plane the whole time, but refused to.

• Next time: Venice Beach is just as weird even when you know your way around.

He Lives!

2007-09-06T17:42:00.001-04:00

• Hey, how long has it been? A "while," you might say. And too long. During which time things have managed to spin wildly awry, the fact to which the dormancy of this here "blog" primarily owes. Forgive me, won't you?

• Previous to these developments - involving massive automotive trouble and financial wrangling - I had been having the best time of, maybe, my whole life. I'm planning to put up a long-overdue travelogue here on CFY,K. And I might as well. Because I am stranded in my hometown, with, seriously, nothing better to do. (This is a precarious position. If you're not doing anything, you can be made to do anything.)

• There is more to come. Sooner than you know.

2007-08-13T13:26:00.000-04:00

• Just as a little protip, if anybody ever sends you a link with, like, "roflcopterd00d" or "halflife2.zoy" involved, do not click it. You'll hate it, 'cause it sucks. Skritch has gotten me with this delightful little prank like a thousand times by this point.

• Whose Tusken Raider do you prefer? E. Lamar's? Or Paul Pope's?

• Castle Magazine is all about illustration and design and is available for free download at their site. Definitely worth checking out.

• I figured I would update the old CFY,K today, since tomorrow I am going on the Friendship Tour 2007, with stops in Orlando, Los Angeles, and Denver, so I won't be posting for a little while. (I'm not sure if that matters, really, though, since I'm visiting like nine tenths of my readers on this trip.)

Music Is My Hawt Hawt Secks

2007-08-11T19:09:00.001-04:00

• The Border Disaster Episode Two - at long last - is now extant! Enjoy it. (Either here or on Happy's site.)

It's Too Hot To Think Straight

2007-08-10T14:40:00.000-04:00

• I always forget that magazines are sold by the celebrities on their covers. I'm weirdly loyal to several publications, based on various reasons, so I generally don't care who's on the cover at all. But then the other day I bought a Paste Magazine - which I typically hate because it reminds me of an old dude at a rock show with like a meticulously maintained haircut - solely because the White Stripes were on the cover. I've talked about this before, like how White Stripes interviews are so off-putting because of how normal Jack White seems. But also, you spend the whole interview waiting on Meg White to drop some essential truth like she's Silent Bob or some shit. And sometimes she does. But she usually keeps quiet, which makes for great tension.

• Lately all I've been doing is drawing pictures and thinking about drawing pictures. So I think that the rest of this post is going to be about comics and illustration and drawing and crap.

• Are you guys reading the weekly Yikes that Fantagraphics puts up? You ought to be. Weissman rules.

• This is the best three seconds you'll have all day.

• My favorite Hernandez bro, Gilbert - Thee Famous Person's favorite is Jaime, who also rules, but I only mention it because FP's mad that she doesn't get mentioned more often on this blog - has a new comic out on Dark Horse that I'd like to read. But I can't because the comic book store in my town closed. Dark Horse is also involved with this web comic called "Sugarshock," but I'm not linking to it on GP, but it's worth reading, so you should find it and do so.

• Paul Pope has a new book out. (Someone out to be it for me since I'm about to officially be old as all hell, ha ha.) Paul Pope is my hero. You can tell he uses a brush in a lot of his work, and I wonder how he does that. I am scared of the brush.

Phenomenal Get-Up Game

2007-08-06T23:07:00.001-04:00

• So. It's been a minute. This is true. But let's be fair. I have two more days of college left. Shit is real right now.

• Also, me and HappyThawts decided that, since The Border Disaster Episode Two is indeed taking forever due to unforseen cirumstances, we'd drop The Border Disaster Episode 1.5 to keep things moving.

• More (quite) soon.

The American Classic

2007-08-02T14:25:00.000-04:00

• I remember during high school, I think I ate a Twix and drank a Dr. Pepper - I know what you're thinking. Shut up. - every single day, and I thought it was the single greatest soft drink / candy bar combination ever conceived by man. But then the other day I hit upon some new shit, which is actually some old shit, but has, regardless, supplanted the old situation. "The American Classic," the best snack ever (I used to have a roommate that would laugh hysterically every time anybody said "snack" or "snacks"), consists of one eight ounce Coca-Cola in the glass bottle and one regular milk chocolate Hershey Bar. But then, to top it all off, you chase it with one Marlboro cigarette, because otherwise you feel like you're a little kid in the 1950's and you want to dress up like a cowboy and sit only inches in front of a black and white television.

• I figured I should put up something for you to listen to while you wait, with baited breath, for the new Border Disaster episode, which should really be happening any day now. It's this Rolling Stones demo / outtake thing where they play a Rice Krispies jingle or something, and invent punk rock in the process.

• Also, you guys need a new NSFW blog to read?

• So I was talking to S. Higginbotham the other day, while she was en route to her new home. I told her this story about how I saw this thing happen a little while ago that was so, like, obviously and directly symbolic that I could never really use that experience for the basis of, say, a piece of fiction, because it would come across as forced and dumb. Luckily, "forced and dumb" is pretty much the order of the day here in the blogosphere, so. Anyway.
You might haver heard of this tragedy the of involving the deaths of nine firefighters. It was pretty horrible. In the aftermath of this, somebody started putting up these billboards around town that said "Not Forgotten," and I thought they did a really decent job on them. I was, no kidding, touched and impressed when I first saw one.
About a a month after, I was sitting in the driv-thru at Wendy's, and the person in front of me was taking forever, and the whole time I was watching a guy cover up the "Not Forgotten" billboard with a real estate advertisement. I guess it was only ever a matter of time, but watching it happen was kind of a powerful thing. It was like the kind of sentimentality that Norman Rockwell leaves out.

You Can Learn a Lot From a Bot

2007-07-31T13:25:00.000-04:00

• I am a fan of Garfield. Sort of. I mean. He certainly doesn't always knock it out the park, but he's usually good for one of those little, like, snuffling nose laughs if not a full-on lol. Sometimes he's capable of a brand of irreverence that's tough to find anywhere in the (un)funny papers anymore. But this has to be the laziest damn comic strip I have ever seen. Doesn't Jim Davis have a whole staff of dudes working around the clock on this shit? And the best they can do is that one picture twice, broken up by, like, a sound effect that doesn't look drawn by anybody's hand?

• I have decided that if / when I ever finish a novel, I want it to be published by Tank Books. 'Cause look.

• For the past couple of days, me and Happy - who is already hard at work on the next installment of "The Border Disaster," which I know you can't wait for - and Thee Famous Person - who also wrote about this on her emo-ass blog - and Skritch - who doesn't have a convenient link but who used to have a blog of his own - have been playing The Greatest Board Game of All Time in weird 1997-style java applet format while Skypin'. It has come to this. Just playing the game itself wasn't quite nerdy enough. I'm five and one.

• Crailtap did a Top 5's with Evan Hecox. It's always nice to see the art director get some love. Especially since Evan Hecox is probably the best thing about Chocolate since Mike York left.

The Border Disaster (Episode One)

2007-07-27T22:19:00.000-04:00

• So, um. It's next to impossible to get Jush to come up here to record another Rattlesnake Roundup / Friday Night Ride Out. He's much too busy going on vacation every weekend to solo-circle-dance in the company of hippies - they never look like this, always like this - to be bothered with it. But I felt the urge to make another, like, radio show style "podcast" type thing for you guys anyway (even though I'm pretty sure that it's not technically a podcast), so I got Grupthink Queen and SexCaster HappyThawts on the case and we made this thing called "The Border Disaster." There's way more talking on this one.

Tell Me Something

2007-07-26T12:32:00.000-04:00

• A whole gang of cats have been sending me links to the new Kanye video for the past couple of days. What no one that I've seen on the internet is talking about - which is weird, because it seems like this video is everywhere right now - is the Jon Brion/Zach Galifianakis connection. Remember how Jon Brion did a bunch of production work on the -arguably superior - version of Extraordinary Machine that was leaked to the internets? Soon after the official release of that record, the "Not About Love" video came out, which, at the time, was hilarious and original, and had the added bonus of being filmed in 641 territory. Later, Jon Brion did production work on Kanye's last album, as well as his new one, and now there is this "alternate take" of the "Can't Tell Me Nothin'" Video, which is, if nothing else, way better than the original snooze-fest that was the first one. I only ever root for Jon Brion. He puts on the best show ever. And while it seems strange that this group of creative people he's involved with would just straight recycle an idea (are they banking on the idea that no one saw the Fiona video?), what's even weirder to me is that I seem to be the only one talking about it. Is Jon Brion's influence just not interesting to anyone else? Or, like, am I just that astute an observer of contemporary popular culture? I doubt it. Maybe it's boring.

• Can't read Bigger Bonus Bananas 'cause Raichile's too busy playing Keno in some bar in a saltwater shithole somewhere? Well, if it makes you feel better, you can wear these shoes. That way you can blame Rainuts for your bad taste in shoes.

• The trailer for Darjeeling Limited is out. I'm all embonered about it.

• What Is Interesting to Me Is Not Necessarily Interesting to the Public at Large, Exhibit A: I actually read most of this.

• In other news, Lil Wayne got arrested. Great.

Eee eee eee ahh ahh (I am a drumset)

2007-07-23T14:45:00.000-04:00

• "Rorschach Eleven" digital illustration by E. Lamar. (The "E" stands for "Eep.")

• This weekend was crazy. On Friday, I went and saw the much-anticipated Golden Blade III, which ruled and was hilarious and kick ass and awesome. (I think I first heard about GB3 on the same day I met E. Lamar, in like 1911.) Then I woke up ninety minutes later and drove to check out Sorry Sorrow Studios. Super-fun. Sample conversations:

1. "Did you tell that guy that you liked that shoe 'cause the perspective's all fucked up?"
"Yes."

2. "Do you think I should either make tons of money in an impossibly short amount of time, or work in food-and-beverage?"
"Are you serious?"

• Tom Breihan, lately, has been talking about Summer Jams, and how there aren't many of them anymore. I've been trying to make a mix of Summer Jams since fucking like May, and haven't been able to find enough of them to be worthwhile. It sucks. I have artwork ready and everything. You guys heard any summer jams lately? Please direct my attention to some damn shit.

• When did that BLACKstreet song "Fix" come out? '96-'97 range? I mean the remix. Do you think that Teddy Riley, Dirty Version-era ODB, that amazing nutjob from Fishbone, and Slash were all in the studio together at one time? Do you have any idea what I would have done to be in that room? Jesus.

(Also you can right click and save ass. Or something. Maybe. Not sure how DivShare works in this regard.)

• Jush, you know how you're going to buy every guitar under the sun from here on out? Buy this one next. (Did you go to work today? You are out of your mind.)

Lost Ploss in the Ross

2007-07-19T22:11:00.000-04:00

• Look at that picture up there. I'm super proud of it.

• With old Higginbotham looking for a new apartment and job in a new place, and with Jush and them all trying to catch the record-breaking ball in Milwaukee, I'd say that the regular readership of CFY,K has, at the moment, dwindled considerably. Far be it from me, though, to desert my stupid blog altogether. Maybe they'll be all embonered when they get back and there's new crap on here.

• Word from the West Coast suggests that Our Friend Anvil Rabbitt would not persuaded to enter into even one Man Cup, holding tightly to his ill-gotten and self-proclaimed Bobby Fischer status. (He has never faced me, and I would wreck his whole spot.)

• In related news, if you were to buy this, you'd both rule and suck in a Ruling-Sucking simulcast. (Same thing for this thing. But, somehow, Raichile's MarioKart phone is pure kickass.)

• I know I've mentioned it before, but if those cats over at FluoKids don't start inviting me to wherever they find all these women hanging out, then they'll be jerks forever. Reading this blog makes me wonder if "Expatriate House DJ Who Lives in Paris or Something" isn't my one true career calling.

• Golden Blade III is already getting great reviews. I'm trying to make it up there for the premier, but am making, at press time, no promises.

88 Ones

2007-07-17T12:17:00.001-04:00

• Man. It's been a long week already and it's only Tuesday. The weekend was awesome, though. Ate a Monte Cristo with the folks. Hung out with the Raichile in the Boringest Town on Earth, before riding out to Jacksonville to kill zombies and trivia and chicken parms before Jush straight up actually made it rain to the tune of much more than thirty-one dollars at the stripclub (probably NSFW). All of these things were rad, but they also all screwed up my whole getting used to waking up early thing. (Does it get easier? Ever? Because it's always easy to sleep till noon.)

• I don't know what's going on with the Fader these days. I really don't. First, they take seriously two extra weeks to send me the new issue - which is torturous when you're have to see it in like a bookstore and know that it's available for a free PDF download and that it has a Lil Wayne cover story but you're thinking like, "Well I should wait because I subscribe to this shit and it's going to come sooner or later" - and then they let Nick Catchdubs, a DJ and blogstar who somehow managed to turn capslock and onomatopoeia into a viable journalistic style, slip away from them to go run a record label with A-Trak - the link to which I would include here except that it's a social network link, and I refuse, as you all well know (it's called Fools Gold records, for your searching). Are they trying to make me stop reading their magazine?

• Is anybody going to West Jefferson, North Carolina any time soon? 'Cause even though I'm trying to not drink soda, really, I need to know what non-HFCS cane-sugar style Regular Rocks and Doctor Rocks taste like.

• Thee Famousperson has a blog now. Maybe. It's too early to tell if she's going to keep up with it. So far all that's on there is a picture-less Russian novel of a post that falls well within tl;dr range. (This post, actually, is running the same risk right now. Before you leave, though, check out these Kwik-E Marts!)

When I Started Smokin'

2007-07-11T16:44:00.000-04:00

• Dear Hollywood,
Please bring back Mädchen Amick.
Thank you,
The Devil Himself.

• This is going to be one famousperson-centric fancy-nerdy post. So. To get things started, a FancyNerd YouTube ShowDown!

Is the theme song to Zelda more appropriately played on the accordion (that old Fancy Nerd favorite)? Or on the theremin? It's too close to call! (For maximum freak-out, see also: "Theremin Killed the Radio Star.")

• Gogol Bordello is the - kind of - new Dexy's Midnight Runners. But without the hit.

• I just found Twin Peaks Season Two on DVD for something like twenty-three dollars used. Which is, I think, pretty reasonable (read: what it should have cost to begin with). So, in honor of the reigniting - is that a word? - of my whole Twin Peaks thing, I figured I would answer the call of, probably, dozens of nerds scattered across the globe. Presenting "Just You (And I)" by James, featuring Donna and Maddy. (If you need an explanation for this, I don't know what to tell you.)

The Other Side of the A.M.

2007-07-09T07:06:00.000-04:00

• Our Man Lamar was in town this weekend, sleeping days away on the air mattress in the center of my apartment and being rad and farting. It ruled. I just stayed up all night completing a Contemporary American Poetry paper. These things may well be connected.

• Lately Holotone hits me with random links on the IM connect. This one came through with zero explanation, but I think it's safe to say that this Michael K. Brandlow character is easily the most intense lawyer of all timez. He reminds me, somehow, of character actor Marshall Bell. Or maybe I just wanted to include a link to Marshall Bell because I spent so long figuring out what his name was. (Something about the only payoff of my, seriously, hours-long search being that you might click the Marshall Bell link and go "Oh yeah, that guy," is sort of pathetically hilarious to me.)

• So for some reason - well. Not for some reason. For reasons owing to my theory that the hottest women on Earth come from there, I think I need to take a trip to the Ukraine, which I'm calling the Ukraine and not just Ukraine, because it's way more James Bond to put the the in there. Anyway. I was looking around at, like, Ukrainian tourist destinations, and came across this place called Club Yo, which, sadly, has nothing at all to do with Ed Lover and Dr. Dre. On the website I was on - which somehow I can't find, even though I did manage to copy the following text - described this Club Yo as such:

" Musical club yo and bowling of 7 stars, is the uniform entertaining complex, located in the center Odessa and borrows one of in the lead places in entertaining industry in Ukraine club yo includes the dance floor, the stage, the sound . 10 Plasma panels and the light equipment of the european standard. the convenient furniture on two circles of the disco and the capacious bar rack, allows to lead comfortably evening up to 1500 visitors of club. Separately from the basic disco is available " disco bar " with the dancing on 150 person. Bowling of 7 stars has contained in itself two bar racks with greater assortment of drinks, 8 paths of firm " braunswick ", two billiard tables for the pool and one table for russian billiards. The convenient upholstered furniture promotes pleasant pastime. Kitchen also european."

Club Yo. I've never wanted to go anywhere as badly as I want to go to Club Yo.

• According to the Raichile, armed with this recipe, you could stay home and eat your own turds and be totally happy.

2007-07-05T15:54:00.001-04:00

• How weird is it that both Fosto (premier soon!) and the Rai Chile (bring it back!) have the same birthday? It's today. I'm putting up the King of Eweep for his birthday, as he is turning at least 100 years old. I think Rainuts is just going to sit at his house and eat healthy foodstuffs.

• The above picture comes from a Hedi Slimane picture gallery that I found through this blog called Dirty Down. If you click the picture I put up here, good shit happens, I think, but before you back back through every other picture I've ever uploaded, this is the first one that does anything. So far.

• Steampunks are a weird-ass group of people. This much we know to be true. But it never let it be said that they're not industrious as all hell. (How long, do you think, before this guy inadvertently turns himself into C3PO?)

• I would like to call attention to the fact that I have invented a new word: "Embonered." (Embonered, adj. 1. To be stoked on, or to have a hard-on about someone or some thing. "The new Lil Wayne mixtape has me fully embonered, nullus." 2. Actually being in the state of having a boner. "You ready? I'm embonered.")

• Miraculously, The White Stripes have emerged victorious in the time-honored game of "Endure the Obnoxious Shithead Canadian."

• From the Finally File (Cross-referenced with the Nobody Cares Anymore But Me File): Jim Greco gets Epicly Later'd.

• Just Blaze has one long track with like four songs from Jay Electronica, who, despite having a wackass rap name, is actually dope as fuck.

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2007-07-03T20:48:00.001-04:00

• Q: How many times do you have to take a bath wearing your jeans?
A: As many as it takes, man.

• Is Format Magazine awesome? Or is it just like another one of those Hypebeast + Mass Appeal X The Fader = Random Colorful Hipster Nonsense deals? (Aren't we done with all that shit by now? The Devil Himself wears jeans and white tee shirts as a personal form of fashion protest.) I don't know. You tell me. (And while I'm at it, my new issue of The Fader needs to go 'head and get here.)

• The other day the kid Holotone - locally famous for the early epic Raichile battles - sent me a link to the kickass part of a terrible film. I'm into it.

• Rilo Kiley, as a band, has finally found its true purpose: letting the world know that pornstars are just as boring as indie rockers. (NSFW, kind of. I don't know. Maybe it's SFW, but probably not. It depends on where you work, really. Where I work, which is nowhere, it's perfectly safe.)

• This one I saved till the end. Because it's worth it. I usually hate childhood-nostalgia stuff, because what the hell, you know? If I'm already going to do something as weirdly childish as having a blog, then I at least shouldn't blog about childhood crap, right? This one, though. It's too good. Remember when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were the king shit lookout and it was nuts and they had that promotional deal with Pizza Hut but there was no Pizza Hut nearby so you had to beg your mom to drive you ass out to Pizza Hut when they released that tape by that "band" that was supposed to be, on some level, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles themselves? Remember that?

Do you guys listen to the songs I put up here?
	Yeah, man. I love them shits.
	I'm at work, homie. I got no speakers.

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How about the YouTube embeds and links? Do you watch 'em?
	For sure, dude. What else am I doin'?
	Who has time for all that?
	I'm at WORK. So, no.

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