last year there were only really two albums that came out that i previously looked forward to - wale and the hood internet the mixtape volume 4. this year i think there will be quite a few more, because already out of the gate i am looking forward to…

1. rhymefest - el che
2. the heligoats - goodness gracious
3. kanye west - album #5
4. steve burns and the struggle - deep sea recovery efforts
5. miles kurosky - the desert of shallow effects
6. weird al - album #13
7. the avalanches - album #2
8. vampire weekend - contra
9. ted leo & the pharmacists - the brutalist bricks
10. lcd soundsystem - album #3
11. los campesinos - romance is boring
12. the thermals - album #5
13. she and him - volume 2
14. gorillaz - plastic beach
15. lupe fiasco - lasers
16. whatever annie hardy is recording
    
    that should probably make a pretty good year. yes this blog entry is mostly for myself

i saw this billboard the other day for verizon, where it just said america’s largest and most reliable 3g network and had the can-you-hear-me-now guy just crossing his arms smugly.

the assumption verizon makes is that we’ve all seen the can-you-hear-me-now ads. and probably all of us have. but it strikes me as a little bit evil - verizon is acknowledging that yes, we all know these ads so well that just seeing the dude evokes the message of the ads. but they’re buying billboards solely to prime us, to make sure that we’re thinking about that dude all the time. i don’t know, when a billboard is providing information we might not have had before, great, it’s informative. when it’s just hammering in what we already know, i start to get suspicious.

not that it’s a bad strategy or anything. i’m just worried at how good corporations are at manipulating what we think. we are all so dumb, i think.

here’s what i don’t like

i don’t like when people reject a song on its premise. it’s entirely possible to be disingenuous when writing a song, sure, but if the song is good enough you can overlook a faulty premise. for instance, the cam’ron song “i hate my job” is a really good song, but the premise is that cam’ron is an underemployed woman/man (the gender changes based on the verse) who hates her/his job. it’s pretty universal, but cam’ron is such an asshole that it’s easy to challenge the premise. but you know what, in this economy when if you bitch about your job someone will always go AT LEAST YOU HAVE A JOB, sometimes you have to be such an asshole, and the song makes me laugh and is something i blast on particularly intolerable weekdays.

another example is the taylor swift song you belong with me. sure, it is hard to envision her in as frumpy a light as she casts herself (though being over 6 feet tall she probably does wear the sneakers. perhaps she was once lanky and awkward) but she does this affable diary style of songwriting that i think makes up for it. at least thats what i tell myself.

my girlfriend has a rather tenuous relationship with art. she is a graphic designer, and she doesn’t like her art to “mean” something, but rather to just look nice.

but doesn’t that by itself mean something?

if a piece of art is supposed to express an idea, or make you think, or make you feel a certain way, then a good piece of design that has no function other than to look good thus qualifies as art. the design was something that the designer thought was interesting enough to compose. more than that, something that looks good is enough to evoke a feeling in you, even if the feeling is just that everything has been put in its place. when you look at something and say “that looks nice,” it’s not just the item that looks nice - it makes you feel nice. if art ought to make you feel something, who’s to say that something that makes you feel nice is any less art?

Attention Dominick’s shoppers: Do you like crappy apples? Then you’ll love our crap apples! Grown in the lush gardens of Kankakee, Illinois, these can be described with one and only one adjective: runny! Before you even take a bite, Kankakee crap apples will ooze with an unidentifiable miasma that will turn your outie into an innie. You’ll find them in the dairy aisle, next to the cottage cheese. Pick up a Kankakee crap apple today!

i wonder why everyone always gets so worried about china. even on npr today they talked about our financial relationship as one of mutually assured destruction - if our assets ever tank, the value of their holdings go down, as well. add that to their contradictory relationship with technology - high censorship does not play nice with an information economy - and the severe one-child free-rider fuckery that will lead to an disproportional amount of cranky, sexless chinese men (and, if the invisible hand of adam smith tells us anything, a lucrative market for prostitution) and i think china’s threat is vastly overblown. but why do we pretend that they’re just micrometers away from cashing in our debts and putting the us in the poorhouse? probably because the generation that runs the world is so used to one superpower having another as an enemy, the dot com bubble extinguished our irrational exuberance that we were living in a post-soviet utopia, and we realized that terrorism, either as an organization or as a dogma, isnt a worthy adversary. so some of us need an enemy so that we feel worthwhile. q.e.d., china is evil.