GROUP THERAPY

all of the yellow flowers of the sour grass closed

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 21:38:16 -0400

all of the yellow flowers of the sour grass closed

"Well, you see how it is done. It is my hope that these few words will get you started. Remember that..."

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 20:06:37 -0400

“Well, you see how it is done. It is my hope that these few words will get you started. Remember that although this business may seem closed and standoffish to you, looking at it from the outside, inside it has some very warm people in it, some of the finest people I have run into in the course of a varied life. The main thing is to persevere and to believe in yourself, no matter what the attitude of others may be or appear to be. I could never have written my songs had I failed to believe in Bill B. White, not as a matter of conceit or false pride but as a human being. I will continue to write my songs, for the nation as a whole and for the world.”

- Donald Barthelme, “How I Write My Songs”

Photo

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 19:04:02 -0400

blackhistoryalbum: Boy shopping with his mother on Ninth Ave,...

Thu, 30 May 2013 18:48:09 -0400

blackhistoryalbum:

Boy shopping with his mother on Ninth Ave, New York, Morris Engel, photographer, 1938

Photo

Wed, 15 May 2013 16:46:08 -0400

andrewtsks: Savages playing their first single, “Husbands,”...

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:31:14 -0400

andrewtsks:

Savages playing their first single, “Husbands,” live on Later With Jools Holland, October 2, 2012.

"In a post-industrial world where consumers are incited to individualize themselves and where the..."

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:30:27 -0400

“In a post-industrial world where consumers are incited to individualize themselves and where the operations of power seem to favour classification and segregation, it is hard to regard difference as necessarily progressive. The flexibility of new modes of commodity production and the expansion of multiple media support micro-communities and fragmented niche cultures. Each cultural difference is a potential distinction, a suggestion of superiority, an assertion of hierarchy, a possible alibi for subordination.”

- Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (via beautravail)

now on twitter @bricksquadbenji fallow me

Sat, 04 May 2013 20:55:27 -0400

now on twitter @bricksquadbenji fallow me

"Sometimes while I ride the subway I try to look at each person and imagine what they look like to..."

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 18:48:40 -0400

“Sometimes while I ride the subway I try to look at each person and imagine what they look like to someone who is totally in love with them. I think everyone has had someone look at them that way, whether it was a lover, or a parent, or a friend, whether they know it or not. It’s a wonderful thing, to look at someone to whom I would never be attracted and think about what looking at them feels like to someone who is devouring every part of their image, who has invisible strings that are connected to this person tied to every part of their body. I think this fun pastime is a way of cultivating compassion. It feels good to think about people that way, and to use that part of my mind that I think is traditionally reserved for a tiny portion of people I’ll meet in my life to appreciate the general public. I wish I thought about people like this more often. I think it’s the opposite of what our culture teaches us to do. We prefer to pick people apart to find their flaws. Cultivating these feelings of love or appreciation for random people, and even for people I don’t like, makes me a more forgiving and appreciative person toward myself and people I love. Also, it’s just a really excellent pastime.”

- Dean Spade - “For Lovers and Fighters” (via gaobaby)

Photo

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 14:36:09 -0400

Photo

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 19:08:44 -0400

Photo

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 21:28:16 -0400

Photo

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 19:51:53 -0500

thenewinquiry: Some or all depression derives from political...

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 20:22:15 -0500

thenewinquiry:

Some or all depression derives from political despair, as Cvetkovich rightly situates it —although I would have liked for the book to have carried through on its original promise, to look more closely and critically at the cultural components of depression, at how it really is a public feeling (as opposed to keeping depression, as Cvetkovich mostly does, inside.) Depression can be political, can be a process of breaking through. What others—family members and bosses, in television commercials—see as depression can be in fact the use of one’s own body as a site of refusal to participate and function fully in capitalism, (hetero)normative social behavior, or gendered labor: an ongoing space to cultivate one’s self as a political and sovereign subject by shutting down. Why is Cvetkovich in such a hurry to get over depression?

-Kate Zambreno, “Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness”

heatherchristle: I can’t stop thinking about these caddis fly...

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 21:06:21 -0500

heatherchristle:

I can’t stop thinking about these caddis fly larvae from an old issue of Cabinet. As the magazine explains:

The images above illustrate the results of an unusual artistic collaboration between the French artist Hubert Duprat and a group of caddis fly larvae. […] [The] aquatic larvae […] protect their developing bodies by manufacturing sheaths, or cases, spun from silk and incorporating substances—grains of sand, particles of mineral or plant material, bits of fish bone or crustacean shell—readily available in their benthic ecosystem. The larvae are remarkably adaptable: if other suitable materials are introduced into their environment, they will often incorporate those as well.

Duprat, who was born in 1957, began working with caddis fly larvae in the early 1980s. […] After collecting the larvae from their normal environments, he relocates them to his studio where he gently removes their own natural cases and then places them in aquaria that he fills with alternative materials from which they can begin to recreate their protective sheaths. He began with only gold spangles but has since also added the kinds of semi-precious and precious stones (including turquoise, opals, lapis lazuli and coral, as well as pearls, rubies, sapphires, and diamonds) seen here.

ecofrat: just shopping for a new whip

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 00:21:49 -0500

ecofrat:

just shopping for a new whip

tumblinerb: OJ Da Juiceman - “Swag Like Me” (So Icy, 2008)I was...

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 00:18:40 -0500

tumblinerb:

OJ Da Juiceman - “Swag Like Me” (So Icy, 2008)

I was going to answer more questions tonight but some of y’all are bringing real anger and antagonism to my ask box. So I’m going to play this a thousand times instead.

bmichael: This post was more than mad...

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 20:22:31 -0500

bmichael:

This post was more than mad decent.

nedraggett:

Baauer - Harlem Shake (by maddecent)

—

Fifth — over ILX, there’s been a thread running now for some months with the strong but I think perfectly apt title Itunes, Billboard, and the marginalization of black music and black audiences in America. To quote the opening post by my friend Reverend Dollars (again, referring to slightly older news now from October):

So today Billboard changed their policy to allow digital music sales to count on previously airplay-driven genre charts. The problem with this is that there is no way of separating by demographics like there is for radio. The radio listener chooses the station that best fits their tastes, whereas anyone might buy from Itunes. Further compounding the problem is that that isn’t even true — economically privileged listeners, who are more likely to be white, are much more likely to purchase digital music.

The introduction of Itunes data to the Billboard Hot 100 in 2005 has had the effect of slowly but surely pushing music favored by black audiences off the pop charts and top 40 (and even rhythmic) radio, to the point where there are now very few songs that cross over from urban radio to other formats. Over the past year or so, there have been only a few songs popular on the r&b charts that cross over into the top 40 at any given time, usually below the top 10 (even this year’s huge rap hits “The Motto” and “Mercy” got stuck in the teens on the big chart), while most of urban radio’s big songs get stuck in the 30-100 range of the Hot 100. This has also led to the trend of black music stars like Nicki Minaj and Usher creating entirely different singles for different radio formats, with pop songs for white radio and r&b or rap songs for black radio.

Billboard’s new changes potentially strike an even bigger blow to black audiences being able to determine their own hits. On this week’s r&b chart, with the changes enacted, Rihanna’s decidedly pop (and, it should be noted, terrible) “Diamonds” jumps from #61 to #1, pushing Miguel’s decidedly r&b (and brilliant) “Adorn” out of the top spot. Urban radio stations may have lost one of their last impetuses left not to play pop music with white-leaning audiences.

Following initial discussion of this and other points, the thread has continued to note things like the switching over of radio stations from one format to another, the success of Macklemore and so forth. Baauer’s explosive chart success thanks to the Billboard revamp has prompted the latest series of posts, and one from katherinestasaph is of note:

honestly I don’t really have a problem with this in principle — I’m no Luddite, if you just look solely at the medium it really is the same thing as calling in requests or whatever, in a way — but it’s the sort of variable that probably, in practice, adds far more weight to virality/memedom than actual musical popularity. which is of course from a business perspective a feature, not a bug — and not even new with these changes (gotye, carly rae jepsen, etc) — but yeah, it is kind of fucked that Baauer has a No. 1 hit when 75% of the people responsible for doing this for him have no idea who the sam hill Baauer is. not even on a “oh, the girl who did ‘Call Me Maybe’” level —- not at all. which makes for an excellent chart for measuring the best ways of emulating OK Go videos, but as a music chart, or at least something that tries to be one…?

now! when the bigger problems will happen is either if/when this takes on more weight, which, who knows; or when it jumps to the genre charts. which you know it will.

(I recommend her ‘culture jamming the hot 100’ post from earlier today while I’m at it.)

Sixth — and final for now, but just because I have to stop somewhere — this combination of factors is potentially telling. We’re still at the center of this and this may just be a moment, nothing more — and then again, quoting another post in the ILX thread from some dude (literallly, that’s the handle — thanks Al!):

Billboard is counting 30 second videos, and starting it this week, precisely to capitalize on “Harlem Shake” and show off how ‘with it’ they are for being able to measure its popularity.

The reason why the thirty second video rule is important is because that’s been the length of most of the Harlem Shake video memes — there have already been a slew of jokes that if Billboard were totally honest they’d be awarding number one to that first thirty seconds of the actual song and nothing else. But what this suggests to me is that if they are going to keep this rule going, then a lot of bets are potentially off on a number of fronts, harkening back to katherinestasaph’s post I quoted.

Photo

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 19:41:59 -0500

Photo

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 15:44:05 -0500