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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That Post-Geographical Feeling

• 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.

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One Stop Shop for Blog Rock Slop (Edited)

{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.

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The CFY,K Travelogue: Austin, TX

• 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.

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The American Classic

• 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.

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