i’m disbanding the affect catalog on the grounds of what the hell was i thinking, the last thing i ever wanted was for this blog to turn into a glorified laundry list. plus, i’ve been inspired lately by messy, robust correspondences with nick and domenico, the latter on radio emo, which has driven me to download the most recent fall out boy and panic! at the disco records. i.e. another mess entirely.

new year’s lull. i’m moving back to new york to work here and put some more time into stylus, meaning, ostensibly, unmitigated fun and more encounters with young, art-school-educated women.

well, it’s about one month until valentine’s day, which means it’s about one month until the westminster kennel club dog show. you all may recall that last year, a wormy bull terrier named rocky’s top sundance kid took best in show, robbing the monolithically gorgeous carter’s noble shaka zulu of his rightful title. granted, the rottweiler hadn’t taken the working group in the show’s history, so it was a minor coup. year by year, carter’s noble shaka zulu. year by year. and he’s back again for 2007, while some wormy bull terrier is not. (this might have something to do with winners not returning on following years though; not sure.) either way, the bull terrier was, in some respects, a good sign for the wkc, like how spin—i know, surrounded by the stink of death, but—put tv on the radio on last month’s cover: edgy within reason.

the dog show is one of the most visibly stratified social events i’ve ever attended, a quality likely heightened by the fact that madison square garden is a stadium, and hence has stadium seating, which, if you’re housed five feet from the back exit, enables you to hang out with fat women in labrador sweatshirts and feel distant enough from the folk in black tie & evening gowns to enjoy a spicy sense of dickensian poverty.

i’ve fallen for beagles as of late, and was probably too numbed from all the plebe hollers for the golden retriever to even notice what a handsome-ass specimen last year’s 15-incher was. for some reason, most house-kept beagles i’ve met are porky. porky beagles are shaped like footballs and far from cute. not the case with the prizewinners, who serve as a constant reminder of mankind’s dazzling ability to manufacture beauty.

one short month.

(if i could only write about music with the same untethered excitement and total lack of self-consciousness with which i write about dogs.)

I like to play it sometimes, too

for friends and the interested: “our project,” richard, your postman, on myspace.

The Skeeter Davis Center for Regressive Misogyny

mark newgarden’s we all die alone is the single greatest book i read this year. nihilism, like lots of isms, is a cheap way to court sex for people who love the abstract truth but lack the courage and tenderness to find humor in death. there, i said it. in we all die alone, people dive right into the nasty, hilarious slit of the matter and don’t have to metamorphize into celestial beings to do it. because farting and big honkers are as mortal as fear. so conversations aren’t all abstract, but they are brutally honest; in one episode, an older woman tries to tell her husband about the beautiful dream she had of them the previous night–beachwalking, serenity–while he replies, “fuck me” in endless recurrence. i cried like crazy.

panda bear, “carrots” b/w excepter, “kkkkk”

i can’t even tell if the hippies are getting better or not, but i have come to reckon with the fact that i’d swim around in their piss if they sold it by the bucket. i can never wait to hear what they do next. part of it is that they’re constantly seeding more than they can sew (“carrots” is a half-triumph at best), that the open-ended “here’s what we were thinking for 20 minutes” works with a blog-type methodology: sure, you might not find a willing public for all your spew, but spewing whenever the spirit moves you only refines your approach. for fans, this is an enthralling thing to watch.

pbw poll: do you have a fixation on listening to all recorded output by a single band that doesn’t require some psychic loin-girding for mediocrity or disappointment? whose piss would you swim in?

also, in 1989, epmd recorded a song called “you had too much to drink,” which is the best public service announcement for rap-rock and responsible drinking i have ever heard. truly agonizing.

The Straight Story, pt. 3 of the Year in Review

nate’s year-end corral was so eloquent in its simplicity that it made me feel bad for being almost self-hatingly obfuscatory in my last few posts. but that’s nate’s style, on and off the field. thanks for keeping me in check, nate.

my favorite artist/album title combination from this year

vivid, transparent, and brutally honest, perhaps to a fault.

the titter-titter award for best historic naughty jam i heard this year

the five royales, “laundromat blues.”

paraphrased: my girlfriend’s genetalia is the best genetalia. it is like a washing machine. my analogies prefigure academic rhetoric about the mechanization of sex and try to counteract a long history of catholicism’s cultural legacy of portraying sex as dirty. if you don’t believe me, ask my backup singers, whose moans are self-evident.

runners-up

the treniers, “poon tang”

screamin’ jay hawkins, “bite it”

the latter also ties with tom ze’s “o amor é um rock” for the jane birkin was really no big deal award for sex noise that made me libidinally itchy in a very real way

the best economist cover

close runner-up

of all the words rotting the maw of babel, few bother me more than the overuse of “dada.” i’m serious. bothersome. but i’ll use it for some of these recent economist covers, which run closer to the heart of dada than almost anything i can think of. the deadpan absurdity of the images, rather than dulling or avoiding, actually sharpens their messages. putin and kim jong-il aren’t cast as inert monoliths of boring ol’ dictatorial gubernments, but as what they really are: scary-as-shit cartoons; supervillains in the continuing nightmares of global politics.

three older, “classic” hip-hop albums i heard (and really liked) for the first time this year, in part because i never really listened to hip-hop growing up

stetsasonic, in full gear
black sheep, a wolf in sheep’s clothing
del tha funkee homosapien, i wish my brother george was here

the best album i had forgotten about for a little while

the raincoats, the raincoats.

i recently told a friend that this was one of my all-time favorite records and then realized i hadn’t listened to it in almost two years. it turns out that i kind of needed to, just to remind me that the first step to taking over the world is deliniating just where your world is; between this album and gertrude stein’s tender buttons, i learned the value of thinking small. plus, palmolive’s drumming awakens me to rare heights of idiot joy.

an album that came out this year that has a whiff of the spirit i love so dearly on the raincoats

ooioo, taiga. ooioo like the cars that go boom. they also like west african guitar patterns and screaming.

one hastily selected song from this year

momus, “nervous heartbeat”

twelve hastily selected songs from years other than this year

miles davis, “he loved him madly”
comus, “figure in your dreams”
animal collective, “good lovin’ outside”
del tha funkee homosapien, “dr. bombay”
the coasters, “little egypt”
the pochonbo electronic ensemble, “arirang”
sparkletones, “little turtle”
lord kitchener, “kitchener in the jungle”
gilberto gil, “volks, volkwagen blue”
ned rifle aka hal hartley, closing theme from trust
disco tex and his sex-o-lettes, “i wanna dance wit’ choo”
the boredoms, “jungle taitei”

HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM PBW!

self-surgery yields a cancer!

forgive me, father, for i have confessed, and it’s only been like a few days since my last confession.

lazy links!

soul-gospel digging at the ever-excellent sir shambling site.

irresponsible, uninformed, and yet totally enthusiastic!

big ups to emily qiu of ebay, china province, for sending along my dvd of the north korean mass games. my family will likely enjoy it more than a christmas story or a miracle on 34th street.

Bebes Have Soft Skulls, pt. 2 of the Year in Review

blogger nick sylvester is bored and content and remembers some stuff. legendary beard and neurologist oliver sacks is writing a book exploring the linkages between music and memory. “hauntology” is a nebulous term used to talk about records with a certain psycho-memorial effect that becomes shortened to “h-tology” because bloggers get slightly ahead of themselves. soon bloggers will have no idea what it means and then they will start having to remember what they thought it meant in the first place or why they needed a word for that sensation. they will not be able to do it quite right, i.e. they will start traipsing through the jungle of revelations, perhaps. unfuckwithable experimental music label ghost box puts out some really boring records that make blogger mike powell remember things he has never experienced. he found an explanation entitled “why i will never return to graduate school” on a harvest foods receipt under a large container of cayenne pepper on his counter:

remember all of those ideas that drove you pretty much insane during the spring of 2004. like the one about form i.e. pop song structure being an essentially distracting thing, made distracting through perpetual conditioning. so it’s not that we’re bored with it. actually, we’re constantly occupied by it. if we were to actually get bored, the world would go into reverse-origami mode and we’d be flooded with rootless memories and the unique, confusing bliss of present experience. don’t forget to stop taking so many mushrooms and reading poetry. go back and listen to robert ashley’s private parts whenever you are worried that you are not bored enough. try to report on full boredom like it was a junior-high soccer game.

(and the reason why we *don’t* spend the time is that a) there’s more shit than ever and i don’t mean “shit” as in “stuff” but “shit” as in bad stuff and b) fear of death is spiking amongst supersaturated youth. blogger nick sylvester calls it “back on the run.” and so pier one of redemption is acknowledging the unpinnable cornucopia of life in general and pier two is settling in with stuff like harmonia or robert ashley, records that basically say “here now” over and over again. sleeping is okay. blogger mike powell spent some 2005 inside the float tank, which was expensive but worth it. the barefoot guide said it was “okay to fall asleep.” blogger mike powell finally remembered all the years his mother fed him white plastic tapes with names like celestial highways to try to calm him down from his fear or death. om. but seriously, relax, toke and pass, remember that “nothing happens” is, grammatically speaking, a positive statement.)

what might be a memory, albeit an ineffable and indeterminate one, is blossoming in the alzheimer’s-ridden mind of someone’s grandmother to the music of dorothy coates. bagpipes continue to be ineffective in the rescue of geriatrics from a perpetual present.

The Snowglobe, pt. 1 of the Year in Review

AS THE IRREPRESSIBLE VORTEX OF HISTORY swallows 2006 like a stoned youth some goobers, i feel the surge of necessity to take stock.

rapper saigon wants to put his thumb in your ass, demonstrates a wonderful knowledge of dog breeds and their attendant personalities, and criticizes the clinton administration’s handling of welfare in the united states. expensive norwegian pop chanteuse bertine zetlitz releases an album called my italian greyhound, likely to the complete ignorance of saigon’s fascination. blogger mike powell sees a pitbull eat some wood in a backyard and the new yorker’s david remnick pens a substantial, interesting profile of bill clinton that does not use the word “saigon” (or “ho chi minh city” for that matter), but does use the word “vietnam” three times. meanwhile, men in vietnam continue to eat dog meat because they think it will give them longer-lasting erections. the study of linkages between priapism and sickle cell disease rages on.

pop singer britney spears accidentally exposes her genitalia. ben jones, an accountant in little rock, arkansas, describes it as looking “like a horse’s mouth.” seperately, ben’s roommate, lindsey millar, expresses visible anxiety over the concept of vagina dentata and also likes that album by rappers the clipse. vagina dentata continues to capture the imagination of academia at large.

more rappers make albums about drug slinging and young white men continue to wring their hands over them. blogger mike powell takes a bunch of drugs and listens to steely dan a lot and then kicks drugs and wrings his hands for nine months before meeting a girl who corrects him when he says “verb” but means “gerund.” actually, in the intervening nine months he gets righteously high, like, once, and surrenders to the album conference of the birds by dope-rockers om. both om and the inspiration, an album by drug-slinging rapper young jeezy, have really slow songs on them. rapper david banner, nee lavell crump, continues to be more compelling than dope-induced fantasies mike powell has had of egyptians building pyramids and motivational speaker and drug-slinging rapper young jeezy.

motivational speaker and blogger sasha frere-jones gets into an internet-based tiff with white songwriter stephin merritt over allegedly racist remarks. unsurprisingly, racism continues to thrive; depressingly, it becomes evermore cemented as a party killer in music discourse by the music-listening community.

the insistence of rappers on wearing jewelry, popularly known as ice, continues, perhaps in spite of the fact that the arctic sea is experiencing rapid thawing. the high for little rock, arkansas on december 12th is a shocking 68 degrees fahrenheit, still 140 degrees lower than the temperature at which cocaine base vaporizes.

Made a blizzard when she blew her nose (i.e. she did voluminous amounts of cocaine)

Here’s my only real bid:

I move bricks like Stevie Nicks moves moms/Weepin’ through “Landslide” on the five o’ clock freeride

(i.e. on the regular and without the expenditure of much effort)

Okay and I’m out the game.

I don’t know why the Clipse album should even be any of my business except that I too am white and enjoy blogging. But I’ve been listening to it a lot lately, so I need to break from the lean comedy of my s.a.d. catalog to throw a few words into the wind. As rappers, I like Clipse fine. I also acknowledge that I’m woefully underqualified to talk about rap, though I have no problem listening to it as it is frequently in English and concerning a variety of topics situated within the oft-blogged-about “human drama.”

What weirds me out about Clipse isn’t who they are or what they do, but how they’re read. Clipse’s loudest champions are still basically huddled under a more glamorized umbrella of that fucking brilliant, pithy, look-at-yall’s-selves, top-10 GQ note (CLIPSE WILL CHANGE THE WAY YOU DIGEST FOOD). This was, I remember, something of an issue when We Got it 4 Cheap came out: kinda brilliant white kids playing the scattered apologist or philosophizing on behalf of the guns. (Make no mistake: I adored Nick for it, because I think when you scratch the lolz, he’s more morally engaged than most.)

A lot of people seem to want to hang isms on Clipse. Philosophical rubrics slide easily into validations. Because otherwise, we’d have to own up to our morbid fascination with RUTHLESSNESS (to wit: “An unforgivable mean streak powers this album” [Pitchfork]; “As they rap about drug deals and money stacks, Malice and Pusha T wield lucidity like a weapon; you get the discomfiting feeling that they know exactly what they’re doing.” [the Times]; “Fury becomes less about retribution than business: the business of sneering, vicious, infectious, professional hip-hop. Global. Capital-first. Emotionless. They never look back.” [Stylus]).

And really, a lot of this press has bullied them into an image that I think they don’t fully project. What I hear on Hell Hath No Fury isn’t the sound of two cold hustlas with the world by its dick, but scraps vying for a seat at the edge of society, knowing that the very thing that brought them there—trap, the game, whatever the hell people that don’t do it like to call it—will always keep them at the door. The hook in “Dirty Money” is whispered out of shame. Apologies are made to their families. “Hello New World” is very “slingers of the world unite,” but loaded down with fear and totally without Marx’s bravado—“Funny how my neighbors think I’m not where I’m s’posed to be/They think I’m cuter in jail,” so shine on or whatever, and don’t worry about starting that IRA because the pound always puts bad dogs down. They don’t even seem half-proud of their shit; it’s all panic-of-acquisition.

It’s not that Clipse aren’t smart enough to debase human compassion, but nihilism (by any name) is an agonizingly far stretch. Really, I only tasted metal once—the lyric about turning girls into liars. But other than that, Clipse’s paranoia commands more of my pathos than the world—the one they’re supposedly ruining, devouring—does.

So, sum is—and there’s no way I’m going to really step out with the word “racist,” but—I feel like everyone’s making them out to be boogiemen because it helps keep the picture, ahem, greyscale. The last thing we need to do is figure out why a bunch of pale college kids are enthralled with the hyperbolic villainy of some black folk, especially when said villainy has clearly come with deep psychological bruises.

(NOTE: I *do* know that K. Sanneh, who wrote that NYT review, is not white. Okay. I’m just assessing trends in rhetoric.)

Jangles the Junkie Returns: A Dictionary for Curing Hella Seasonal Depression, Year Two, Part One of Three