Extremely Fucking Cool (in Retrospect)

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Whenever we see an old pictures like this, we wish we could have been there, in that magic era when b-boys ruled the streets, New York City had real grit, and tube socks were the bomb.

Never mind that if we actually had ventured into the South Bronx in the early ‘80s, we would have been bat-shit terrified by all the urban blight we now find so charming. The point is: it’s in the past, so we can fully embrace it’s awesome cool-osity. (I mean, c’mon: when was the last time you saw a kid from the ghetto rocking a pith helmet for Christ’s sake?)

Click on this link to see more amazing images:

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/raw-and-real-inside-the-south-bronx/

Photo by Ricky Flores (http://rickyflores.com)

Fake a Hug

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Of all the wonderful apps and hardware made possible by the Internet, perhaps the least convincing are those that seek to replicate actual human contact. Take, for example, the Like-A-Hug—a jacket which allows any one of your Facebook friends to “hug” you from a distance.

This idea would be annoying even if the people behind Like-A-Hug had figured out an elegant way to execute it. But they didn’t. The Like-A-Hug simulates an embrace by filling an incredibly fashion-backward jacket with air. Imagine walking through the park and every five minutes the shapeless blue vest you’re wearing spontaneously puffs up like an emergency lifejacket. It will not make you feel loved.

This idea is emblematic of the one aspect of social media that we—true believers all—don’t agree with: the neurotic drive to inject social media into every area of human experience. Whatever value it has to your self-esteem, a Facebook “like” is not the same thing as a real-life like, and most of your “friends” on FB are not your friends at all. We prefer real hugs, from real people we care about, the people we actually enjoy being clasped by.

(Read more about it: http://bit.ly/TGq8JE)

The Fresh Prints of Belair

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We’re not heavy partisans of analog-over-digital here at DML. We think that you can take awesome photos with a smartphone (if you know what you’re doing) and that Instagram filters can make photos look even better (if you know what you’re doing). None of this “you have to get your hands dirty in the darkroom to be a real photographer” nonsense for us.

That said, we lurv, lurv, lurv the Belair X 6-12 Globetrotter, which looks like something Audrey Hepburn would have used back in the day. We’re even thinking of getting one for the office. Not to take pictures with—goodness, no—but to be seen holding, as if we were about to take a picture. You can’t buy that kind of authenticity.

lomographicsociety:

Embrace the possibilities of medium-format film and watch your creativity take off. With the Belair X 6-12 Globetrotter, you can create high-quality panoramas, regular and square photos, mix-and-match high quality lenses and much, much more. The camera is crafted from metal and wears a brown snake-style patterned leather coat. Pre-order your camera today and save 30% - Only 300 of this camera will be made available worldwide! http://bit.ly/T1DT58

BABIES SHOULD SLEEP THIS WELL

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We don’t believe in coincidences. If we say “we’ve been working like a dog,” and then a dog barks, it is not just chance, but an event of extreme significance.

So when we saw this article about the Ostrich Pillow, we started to tremble with an almost religious fear.

Because earlier that day, we had read this article in the New York Times about sleep, and the growing practice of letting employees take mid-day naps to increase their productivity. Thus, we have the prospect of a post-lunch snore, and the perfect accessory to make that snore possible.

Do we care that the Ostrich Pillow resembles an enormous bug head? Or that it looks like it might suffocate you if you actually tried to use it?

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No, we don’t care. Because the Ostrich Pillow allows us to sleep on the job. And that trumps everything.

A Sexy Beast

 

We love Iggy Pop. Aside from his amazing his body of work—particularly his seminal records with the Stooges, which only sound better as the years go by—we love his amazing body; the sinews, the wrinkles, the blood vessels the size of fat earth worms. He’s wildly attractive and wildly repulsive all at once—no small feat at any age, but a miracle at 65. He’s icktastic, grossexy and fuckusting: everything an old punk should be.

But a bobblehead? No no no. We’re sure Iggy’s head is big enough as it is. Besides, this one looks like George Bush, Senior in a wig.

(If you think you can design a better Iggy Pop bobblehead, send us a drawing and we’ll post it on our Facebook page. The winner will get a year’s worth of heroin.)*

* - Contest void in states where heroin is illegal.

Original post: http://tmblr.co/Zj5HrwSmXmSf

M.I.A.'s Guerilla Tactics

The following originally appeared in the August 2005 Central Park SummerStage program, written for people to read as they sat sweltering in the sun and waiting for the show to begin. M.I.A. was already pretty well known--though obviously not as famous as she would become after her single “Paper Planes” became a surprise hit three years later.

In terms of the highly unoriginal question at the center of this piece—would M.I.A. have to abandon her revolutionary ways to become a success?—I haven’t quite decided. Plenty of people would say she sold out years ago, but I don’t know too many sellouts who would dance around the Grammy stage literally hours before having a baby, or who would give the finger to several million people during a Superbowl half-time show.

  Underground dance star M.I.A. is a godsend for music journalists. Her back-story is so interesting it practically writes itself, and every article about her since she emerged last year has featured the salient points. The twenty-nine year old Sri Lankan—born Maya Arulpragasam in London—is the daughter of a major figure in Sri Lanka’s Tamil separatist movement. She spent her first eleven years in that increasingly violent country, before fleeing with most of her family and eventually resettling in one of Outer London’s most run down housing projects. Maya learned English listening to Public Enemy and N.W.A. An art school grad and filmmaker, she discovered the charms of the Roland MC-505 Groovebox (the drum-machine/synthesizer on which she writes most of her songs) while filming a tour documentary for Britpop band Elastica. With the encouragement of Elastica’s leader Justine Frischman and underground dance/punk star Peaches, Arulpragasam ditched the camera and started making music. M.I.A.’s fame spread over the Internet, where her single “Galang” was distributed via mp3 blogs and file-sharing sites. With its blend of nonsense rhymes and thick immigrant slang, “Galang” became a sleeper hit.

After tinkering for months on her debut Arular, she gave most of the tracks away to the American-born DJ Diplo, who blended in bits of Jay-Z, Missy Elliott, The Bangles, and Jamaican toaster Cutty Ranks to produce an amazingly enjoyable mix tape called Piracy Funds Terrorism. The two posted the tape for free download on the Internet, and threw copies into the audience at shows. Instead of sabotaging her debut, the stunt generated so much buzz that even relatively staid publications like The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and The New York Times took notice. When Arular proper finally came out in March, it was hailed as one of the best albums of 2005—and this only three months into the year.

So is M.I.A. worth all the fuss?  Well, yes, but not because of that bio (or her undeniable outsider glamour). Her music is fiercely creative and catchy, and there’s a homemade quality that sets it apart from polished commercial dance tracks. M.I.A. essentially makes 21st century folk-music, which is to say she sticks sounds together with cheap electronics and a lyrical outlook that appeals as much to young South Asian club goers as to ironic Williamsburg hipsters. The beats come from everywhere: Indian bhangra, Brazilian baile funk, the theme from “Sanford & Son.” In one verse, M.I.A. can drop a line of perfectly credible Jamaican patois, then name check The Pixies and Lou Reed.

Of course, she’s not the only one engaging in this type of beat-driven border crossing. What sets M.I.A. apart from other post-modern, sonic collage constructing dancehall divas is a peculiar balance between pop frivolity and radical politics. While she’s trying to reach a wide audience (“I want people to listen to me while they’re playing bingo in Swansea,” she said last year in The New Yorker), she risks alienating that audience with some of her subject matter. Even when the music is at its sunniest, the lyrics simmer with  violence—violence not fueled by the outlaw fantasies of hard-core rap, but by the bleak realities of Third World poverty and the resentment of the West in engenders. M.I.A. incorporates these elements so artfully, you may find yourself dancing to a song about teenage prostitutes, racial profiling or, perhaps most troubling, terrorists. Arular’s opener, “Pull Up The People,” seems to flirt with suicide bombing with the same verve that N.W.A. once glamorized car-jacking. Though M.I.A. never endorses the violence she portrays, her songs have a nasty kick that can leave a listener off-balance, not sure how much to forgive. Certainly she is unabashed in her appropriation of rebel iconography, from the crude stencils of Molotov cocktails and rock-throwing youths that adorn the Arular packaging to the animated sticks of dynamite that usher one onto her website. Is she merely appropriating an air of danger in the same way that Joe Strummer of the Clash used to wear a Red Brigades t-shirt on stage? Or is she really ready to storm the barricades?

To be fair, only a few of her songs could be interpreted as being from a terrorist’s point of view, and one track, “Amazon,” is explicitly about a terrorist’s victim. M.I.A is estranged from her father and she apparently called her album Arular—her father’s nom de guerre—in order to mock him. In interviews, she has said she wants to provoke discussion, that it’s important to see everyone as humans first and political animals second. But pop music has never been about nuance, and if you’re going to promote yourself with images of bombs and jungle fighters, some people will take it at face value. M.I.A.’s rise so far has been remarkable, especially in America. But whether or not she’ll be able to ultimately break out of the underground may depend on the ability of western pop listeners to get past the guerilla imagery. Will she have to abandon the rebellion to reach those bingo players in Swansea?

The Awesome Insult, part 2

I just loaded the StumbleUpon app to my iPad and the first place it sent me was a list of Shakespeare's best insults. I'm surprised at how few of these I remember. Most are the kind of thing you might expect: "Out of my sight! thou dost infect my eyes," from Richard III or "You whoreson malt-horse drudge" from The Taming Of The Shrew.

But there are also plenty that would feel right at home on "Curb Your Enthusiasm" or "30 Rock:"

"Your abilities are too infant-like for doing much alone." - Coriolanus

"I do desire we may be better strangers." - All's Well That Ends Well

"More of your conversation would infect my brain." - Coriolanus

"There is no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune." - 1 Henry IV

Not on this list, but one that often pops into my head when considering certain people, is Hamlet's aside to Horatio on the first appearance of the sycophantic courtier Osric:

 

Hamlet: Dost know this water-fly?

Horatio: No, my good lord.

Hamlet: Thy state is the more gracious, for 'tis a vice to know him.

 

See the rest of the list here.

Image by Alice and Martin Provensen, taken from the book Shakespeare: Ten Great Plays (1962, Golden Press, New York)

The Awesome Insult

There's something extremely satisfying in reading a well-worded put down, even when you don't know much about the person being destroyed. The late Christopher Hitchens was a master of this particular art form. Among the numerous examples re-quoted in the week following his death: On George Bush:

“[George W. Bush] is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.”

On Michael Moore:

“The laugh here is on the polished, sophisticated Europeans. They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious, and ignorant and so on. And they’ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities,”

In Hitchens' honor, I wanted to highlight this almost zen-like insult from one of his heroes, George Orwell, who in "The Lion and the Unicorn" surveyed Britain's pre-World War II leadership and found it wanting:

"...somehow the ruling class decayed, lost its ability, its daring, finally even its ruthlessness, until a time came when stuffed shirts like Eden or Halifax could stand out as men of exceptional talent. As for Baldwin, one could not even dignify him with the name of stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole in the air."

Pipe-smoking Stanley, you've been zinged!