![(In response to Grizzly Bear’s Blackberry Jam song)
It Should Come on a Scone by Nicki Minaj
Bitches ain’t serious, man these bitches delirious All these bitches inferiors, I just pimp my interiors I just pick up and go, might pick up a scone Might give conversation, if you kick up the dough Never mind my money; never mind my snacks Every bitch wanna be me, you can find ‘em in Stacks “Pink Strawberry” two milli, “Super Fig” triple plat When you see me on ‘Gella, just admit that I’m winning Do a show for Tartine, they request me by name And if they don’t get Nicki, it just won’t be the same When I’m sitting with Martha, I’m really sitting with Martha Ain’t a metaphor punchline, I’m really sitting with Martha!! Front row at Cupcake Wars posture Ain’t a bitch that could do it, not even my impostor Put these bitches on lockout, where the fuck is your sugar? I pull up in that new new, peaches and gooseberries
[Chorus:] Shake my head yo I’m mad, ain’t a bitch in my zone In the middle of Target, I just feel so at home Got the certification, cause it come with the stove But this jam is so warm, It should come on a scone It should come on a scone, It should come on a scone And my jam is so warm, It should come on a scone It should come on a scone, It should come on a scone Cause my jam is so warm, It should come on a scone IHOP went and gave my commercial to Gwyneth But don’t tell them I said it, let’s keep it on the d-low If you need you a spread, just put me on your toast But you know it’ll cost, about six figures long But you bitches ain’t got it, where the fuck is your preserves? Flinging honey for hers; me I’m fucking above it And I just got the toast, and I’m calling it Thomas But this shit is so warm, it belong in Tahiti Why the fuck am I baking? I competes with myself When you win against Nicki, you depleted your wealth And I’m not marmaladin’, but I’m feeling myself Jelly is waiting, cause them pictures’ll sell Now don’t you feel a-stupid, yeah that’s curd on your face If you wasn’t so ugly, I’d put my jam in yo’ face![Singing] Jam in your face; put my jam in your face, yeah![Chorus][Outro] Ooohh-ooh, jam in your face [3x] Put my jam in your face Put my jam in your face, yeah yeah Yeah yeah](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4g9pn7cwx1qzgbluo1_500.png)
I Will Show You Arcade Fire in a Handful of Dust -
Eliot would not have loved pop music but pop music loves Eliot. Ninety years after the publication of The Waste Land, he remains the lodestar poet for ambitious songwriters. They rummage through his masterpiece’s treasure chest of arresting phrases: the “violet hour” and “bodies naked on the low damp ground” quoted in the Sisters of Mercy’s Floorshow, “April is the cruellest month” kicking off Hot Chip’s Playboy or the “red sails” picked up by David Bowie on Lodger (Bowie told William Burroughs in 1974 that he’d “never read” Eliot but I suspect he got around to it).
Likewise 1915’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. “Like a patient etherized on a table” is paraphrased by avowed Eliot fan Win Butler in Arcade Fire’s We Used to Wait, “Do I dare disturb the universe?” became a song title for Chuck D, and “the Eternal Footman” crops up in Tori Amos’s Pretty Good Year. “Alfred J Prufrock would be proud of me,” declare Manic Street Preachers on My Guernica. And 1925’s The Hollow Men lends its name to songs by Faust, Gravenhurst and Cocteau Twins. And on it goes: Genesis, Gentle Giant, King Crimson, Van Morrison, Rush, EMF, Crash Test Dummies, Okkervil River, the Clientele … “This music crept by me upon the waters.”
But why Eliot, above all other poets? One simple reason is that he is widely taught in British and American schools and he impacts on the adolescent imagination with peculiar force. The Waste Land may be unfathomably complex but it is easy to love regardless of whether you understand it. The language is juicy and pungent, full of fire and rain, rivers and dust, birth and death – lots of death. I remember deriving a thrill of pleasurable dread from its sense of crisis and doom when I first read it as a teenager. Lines such as “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” or “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper” (from The Hollow Men) would be at home on the back of a goth’s leather jacket. Eliot offers a vivid grown-up take on a teenager’s sense that all is not right with the world. At a difficult age you get the impression he’s on to something terribly important, even if you’re not sure what it is.
by Dorian Lynskey for The Guardian
(Source: msodradek)
(In response to Grizzly Bear’s Blackberry Jam song)
It Should Come on a Scone by Nicki Minaj
Bitches ain’t serious, man these bitches delirious
All these bitches inferiors, I just pimp my interiors
I just pick up and go, might pick up a scone
Might give conversation, if you kick up the dough
Never mind my money; never mind my snacks
Every bitch wanna be me, you can find ‘em in Stacks
“Pink Strawberry” two milli, “Super Fig” triple plat
When you see me on ‘Gella, just admit that I’m winning
Do a show for Tartine, they request me by name
And if they don’t get Nicki, it just won’t be the same
When I’m sitting with Martha, I’m really sitting with Martha
Ain’t a metaphor punchline, I’m really sitting with Martha!!
Front row at Cupcake Wars posture
Ain’t a bitch that could do it, not even my impostor
Put these bitches on lockout, where the fuck is your sugar?
I pull up in that new new, peaches and gooseberries
[Chorus:]
Shake my head yo I’m mad, ain’t a bitch in my zone
In the middle of Target, I just feel so at home
Got the certification, cause it come with the stove
But this jam is so warm, It should come on a scone
It should come on a scone, It should come on a scone
And my jam is so warm, It should come on a scone
It should come on a scone, It should come on a scone
Cause my jam is so warm, It should come on a scone
IHOP went and gave my commercial to Gwyneth
But don’t tell them I said it, let’s keep it on the d-low
If you need you a spread, just put me on your toast
But you know it’ll cost, about six figures long
But you bitches ain’t got it, where the fuck is your preserves?
Flinging honey for hers; me I’m fucking above it
And I just got the toast, and I’m calling it Thomas
But this shit is so warm, it belong in Tahiti
Why the fuck am I baking? I competes with myself
When you win against Nicki, you depleted your wealth
And I’m not marmaladin’, but I’m feeling myself
Jelly is waiting, cause them pictures’ll sell
Now don’t you feel a-stupid, yeah that’s curd on your face
If you wasn’t so ugly, I’d put my jam in yo’ face!
[Singing] Jam in your face; put my jam in your face, yeah!
[Chorus]
[Outro]
Ooohh-ooh, jam in your face [3x]
Put my jam in your face
Put my jam in your face, yeah yeah
Yeah yeah
Coachella. Tupac. Hologram. Taken apart, none of these things are new, or even revolutionary. But something fascinating happened after the debut of the Tupac hologram (henceforth: Holopac) at Coachella: people were, for however briefly, awestruck.
My lil blog post is all growed up.
[video]
My roommate’s bunny does this crazy Gene Kelly heel-clicking leap. We thought he was having a stroke. It turns out it is just a common expression of an ecstatic rabbit called “binking.”
What is the Difference Between Clouds and Fog?
The subject of a heated debate in Dolores Park that ended in a man giving Abby the double-bird and yelling “Come back here! Come back here!”
Does Nicki Minaj Have Ass Implants?
A natural question after watching her entire music video canon with Abby and Elizabeth.
Do Streetlights Go Out Around Other People, Too?
Or is it just Elizabeth and me?
Picture of Danzig Buying Kitty Litter
Misfits, they’re Just Like Us.
[video]
[video]
Teach the Books, Touch the Heart -
We’d just finished John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” When we read the end together out loud in class, my toughest boy, a star basketball player, wept a little, and so did I. “Are you crying?” one girl asked, as she crept out of her chair to get a closer look. “I am,” I told her, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.”
But they understood. When George shoots Lennie, the tragedy is that we realize it was always going to happen. In my 14 years of teaching in a New York City public middle school, I’ve taught kids with incarcerated parents, abusive parents, neglectful parents; kids who are parents themselves; kids who are homeless or who live in crowded apartments in violent neighborhoods; kids who grew up in developing countries. They understand, more than I ever will, the novel’s terrible logic — the giving way of dreams to fate.
Along with “Of Mice and Men,” my groups read: “Sounder,” “The Red Pony,” “A Raisin in the Sun,” “Lord of the Flies,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Macbeth.” The students didn’t always read from the expected perspective. Holden Caulfield was a punk, unfairly dismissive of parents who had given him every advantage. About “The Red Pony,” one student said, “it’s about being a dude, it’s about dudeness.” I had never before seen the parallels between Scarface and Macbeth, nor had I heard Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies read as raps, but both made sense; the interpretations were playful, but serious. Once introduced to Steinbeck’s writing, one boy went on to read “The Grapes of Wrath” and told me repeatedly how amazing it was that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.” His historical perspective was broadening, his sense of his own country deepening. Year after year, ex-students visited and told me how prepared they had felt in their freshman year as a result of the classes.
And yet I do not know how to measure those results. As student test scores have become the dominant means of evaluating schools, I have been asked to calculate my reading enrichment program’s impact on those scores. I found that some students made gains of over 100 points on the statewide English Language Arts test, while other students in the same group had flat or negative results. In other words, my students’ test scores did not reliably indicate that reading classic literature added value.
Until recently, given the students’ enthusiasm for the reading groups, I was able to play down that data. But last year, for the first time since I can remember, our test scores declined in relation to comparable schools in the city. I felt increased pressure to bring this year’s scores up. All the teachers are increasing their number of test-preparation sessions and practice tests, so I have done the same, cutting two of my three classic book groups and replacing them with a test-preparation tutorial program. Only the highest-performing eighth graders were able to keep taking the reading classes.
Since beginning this new program in September, I have answered over 600 multiple-choice questions. In doing so, I encountered exactly one piece of literature: Frost’s “Road Not Taken.” The rest of the reading-comprehension materials included passages from watered-down news articles or biographies, bastardized novels, memos or brochures — passages chosen not for emotional punch but for textual complexity.
By “using data to inform instruction,” as the Department of Education insists we do, we are sorting lower-achieving students into classes that provide less cultural capital than their already more successful peers receive in their more literary classes and depriving students who viscerally understand the violence and despair in Steinbeck’s novels of the opportunity to read them.
We cannot enrich the minds of our students by testing them on texts that purposely ignore their hearts. By doing so, we are withholding from our neediest students any reason to read at all. We are teaching them that words do not dazzle but confound. We may succeed in raising test scores by relying on these methods, but we will fail to teach them that reading can be transformative and that it belongs to them.
We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it? An accumulation of nameless energies.--Don DeLillo, from White Noise
To be not a man, but the projection of another man’s dreams—what an incomparable humiliation, what vertigo!—Jorge Luis Borges, from The Circular Ruins
Tupac. Coachella. Hologram. Taken apart, none of these things are new, or even revolutionary. But something happened in the wake of the Tupac hologram (henceforth: Holopac) debut at Coachella that I find utterly fascinating: people were awestruck (including yours truly). It provoked a kind of cultural zeitgeist awe that one rarely finds in this era. You don’t hear people of this generation utter the phrase “where were you when…” or a smug “I was there” in regards to most cultural ‘moments.’ “I was there” is not a brag in regards to seeing Gaga’s meat dress, for example, or Madonna making out with Britney at the VMAs. We were all there, on a zillion youtube videos and photographs posted minutes later. These utterances don’t occur nearly as often as I imagine they crossed the lips of prior generations. Woodstock. Altamont. The fall of the Berlin Wall. The Ballet Russe’s Rite of Spring opening night. San Francisco in the late 1960s. It’s increasingly easier to “watch” an “exclusive” moment on youtube, then hit ‘close tab’ and feel satisfied that you, too, experienced it. We’re no longer the protective owners of unique experiences.
Talk of taking Holopac on tour, or creating new holograms of dead legends rings a bit false to me. We are so quick to duplicate and capitalize on “original” moments these days, and the reverence is equally quick to dissipate. I would also posit that a Marvin Gaye hologram, or a Jimmi Hendrix hologram, won’t hold nearly the same “I can’t believe my eyes” as the Tupac hologram. Gaye and Hendrix are pretty firmly—for lack of a better word—dead. The genius in “bringing back” Tupac is the uncertainty that swirls around his legend, the conspiracy theories that he is living it up, smoking weed and drinking Hennessy on a Caribbean island somewhere, laughing at all of us all the way to bank. There is still a slight superstition, if you will, upon first seeing the Tupac holgram, that it justmighthave been the real thing. This inspires, as Freud wrote in Das Unheimliche: “certain things which lie within the field of what is frightening. The uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” Freud also wrote:
Many people experience [the uncanny] in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts. There is scarcely any other matter upon which our thoughts and feelings have changed so little since the very earliest times, and in which discarded forms have been so completely preserved under a thin disguise, as our relation to death. Since almost all of us still think as savages do on this topic, it is no matter for surprise that the primitive fear of the dead is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface on any provocation.
I mean, c’mon: even a recreated Jimmi Hendrix LSD guitar-on-fire schtick seems a little…benign compared to this first incarnation of the ghostly, godly Tupac, rising barechested and glowing over a desert of people, under a sinister fog of marijuana smoke.
The term simulacrum was first recorded in the English dictionary in the late 16th century as “the representation of a god” in something like a statue or painting. Only later did it gain the association of “an image without the substances or qualities of the original.” Plato would be banging his head against the wall re: HoloTupac. Baudrillard would applaud in DeLillo-esque way, I think: we are only projecting meaning and memories onto Holopac, onto this collection of light waves and dust particles. We are recreating the man in image and in memory, and here we have the perfect intersection of Freud’s uncanny and Baudrillard’s simulacrum. And what of those of us who watched a video of the Holopac? What intersection is that? Are we also truly experiencing this representation? Baudrillard writes:
The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning point. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any last judgment to separate truth from false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.
Everything is already dead and risen in advance. Call me old-fashioned, but I say: let Holopac rest in peace. Leave him to wander the deserts as a shirtless specter that only appears during rainbows, or potentially sipping on gin’n’juice while he records more “posthumous” albums.