Bird Turds #22

• 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.

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Another Extended Hiatus

• 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.

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Bird Turds #21

• 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.

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Now With More About Books and Rap

• 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.

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Bird Turds #20

• 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.

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Bird Turds #19

• 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.))

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Get My Prince Hal On

• "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.

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Bird Turds #18

• 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.

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Best Video Ever

• 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.

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Turd of Prey [part two of two]

• 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.

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