• 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 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."
"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.
• 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 threeorfour 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.)
• 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 TheStar 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.
• 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.
• 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 everygoodshowtheyeverhad on there. (I have to stop this before it mushrooms from an innocent rant into a full-blown Janeane Garofalo bit.)
• 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 thousandLaugh-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.
• 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.
• 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'.'"
• 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.}
• 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.
• 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.
