Tropic of Food Community Development Award

Ladies and Manfolk: my brother has learned of the internet. Please welcome him with open arms.

Musical History of Todd

1989: After seeing the video for "Rag Doll" by Aerosmith, buys Permenant Vacation. His life is changed.

1990: Probably buys Pump, Rocks and Toys in the Attic.

1991: I sure this is when he buys Night in the Ruts and Done with Mirrors. His life again changes.

1992: I don't quite remember how it worked but I think it went like this--I sell my Martin Stinger to Will Garriott and buy a Gibson SG, then sell the SG to Todd so I could buy the Jazz bass that is now in my closet. Then Todd decides he wants to play bass, so he trades the SG to Play it Again for a "Rickenbacker" bass, scooping Johnny Wyatt on the transaction by just minutes. Then Todd decides he doesn't want to play bass and trades the "Rickenbacker" to John for either a 12 string or a classical--I don't remember. At any rate, at this point, Todd has his first guitar. Also, buys Joe Perry Project's Let the Music Do the Talking.

Oh, like 1986, the piano lessons start. I should have started with that since it is Todd's primary instrument. Shit. Anyway:

1993: I give Todd all of my Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Pink Floyd CDs thinking, "Now that I listen to Husker Du I have no need of these relics of music." I am wrong. Todd scores. Life changes again.

1994: Goes to college for a while. Probably writes some dirty songs.

2006: Gets Myspace account and ENGAGED!

CONGRATULATIONS TODD! HOORAY!

In loving memory...

Sharin' the Jowl

There ain't a damn ting wrong with Sharin' the Jowl on a lost weekend.

Memoriez....part too

Memoriez.....

HOTEL MOTEL IS A DOVE

Tomorrow night, one of the finest bands to ever break-up will finally live up to their promise to break up. What can one say about this band and the people in this band? They play music. They know what they are doing.

Who are they?

HOTEL MOTEL. Come see them Friday Night at the Big House. If you are reading this you probably live there or at least have passed out there a time or two--but if you are a bot or are from the Yemen, leave a comment and we may see fit to put directions.

HOTEL MOTEL will be releasing thier newest and most last EP Your Ass is Grass So Please Pass the Peas. It lives up to their promise to "sound like Thinking Fellers Union Local 282." I have heard it and it is their best. You should come and get some (diddles).

Some bands are popular with the ladies. Some bands are Band's bands. And some, just some, are band's band's bands. I think you know who I mean, but maybe you don't know what I mean.

A band of beards of subtle knowledge. A band of systematic skirts. That isn't a saxophone but the call of all of the doves of peace as they lay down and learn to respect heavy gauge strings and toypiano solos.

Really: words aside. HOTEL MOTEL present a significant improvement in the state of music. another like them will not be along soon--

This doesn't LOOK like Finn...

TROPIC OF DDOODD!

MySpace Burn

Oh Burn. . .

"I got fucking awesome taste in music"

I assume everyone already reads the AV Club section of the Onion anyway, but just wanted to make sure y'all checked this out:

"This week, The A.V. Club introduces a new occasional feature, Random Rules, in which we ask our favorite rockers, writers, comedians, or whatevers to set their MP3 players to "shuffle" and comment on the first few tracks that come up."

First up, is David Berman of Silver Jews.
David Cross is also worth checking out.

The Saddest Story of All Time For Real!

Once, there were two people--and older man wrapped in a towel and a young woman who was addled in the head to such a degree that her tongue always hung out her mouth. He was kind and loving and she was jolly and full of good cheer. They were friends.

The older man took care of the young woman--bought her groceries, kept her yard--and the young woman kept the older man company--reading to him simple children's stories at night. Neither had any other family, so they made a family just for themselves. Nights were warm, days were beautiful.

Then one day, the older man died. The young woman, being addled, perhaps from a head injury, didn't know he was dead. She just thought he was sleeping. She continued to read to him, or to his lifeless body, each night in the fading light. Soon, she ran out of food, and being simple, couldn't go get food for herself. She was very hungry, but didn't know what to do. She kept asking the older man to get her food, but remeber, he's dead and couldn't respond. She cried. Then she died.

(pictures from Pugs In Hats)

Chris Toenes Fripps it up.

Keeping it Real?

So Pitchfork has a piece on authenticity and such, which uses the Frey thing as a starting point and even mentions Speak, Memory which David will appreciate. I'm not sure it really says much that isn't pretty obvious, and it's longer than it probably needs to be, but I thought it might be the sort of thing that would prompt some discussion here. Maybe I'm naive, but I tend to put myself in "the song not the singer" camp as much as I can. I used boy bands as a metaphor in our earlier discussion, but perhaps Ashlee Simpson is a better example. The anger and surprise at her 'faking it' hardly seems justified. Anyway, have at it.

Champions

A google image search for "Finn's Way" got me a link to this. Apparently, it's not a facial hair competition, but some sort of truck driving contest.

What you think in lights.

MySpace, Finn's Way

Overexperienced in Durham--volume Whatever

Wednesday, February 15
12:30pm
room Whatever in the Terry Sanford Institute of Despicable Public Policy Hotties
"journalizm klass"

Former NEWSWEEK editor JERRY FOOTLICK speaks to the minions on today's hottest issues in journalism:
"You will get a job with a Liberal Arts Degree. My daughter, Duke graduate, totally hot, makes an absurd amount of money, produces Hollywood movies that are touching lesbian brother and sister schlock and will forever live in the shadow of BROEKBAK MOUNTIN', she has a job. Making lots of money. ANd you'll get a job. You'll also be hired somewhere. Freelance writing is for chumps, or the independently wealthy. Oh, sure, it's a grait way to mayk a living, but don't bother with that." (here he pauses to twitch his face violently, which happens about 6 times a minute for the 75 minutes that he talks non-stop, in class that is only supposed to run for 55 minutes but is forced to sit uncomfortably reverently in the presence of someone famous who has ties to DUKE UNIVERSITY, with no questions from the brightest minds at a semi-brightest school [a painful subject with the Devils, who have always lived in the shadow of schools that not only had more people from NEW JERSEY but was actually in NEW JERSEY, or some state like that, CORENELL, or PRINZTUN] other than these:
1. "Like, it seems liek there's so many people who are like, working for NEWSWEEK all over the place, you know? And, so, this is a totally random question, but, like, how does that work? (makes gesture with both hands indicating some motion towards the center of the roundtable--it's a SEMENAR, you know?)

2. "What do you think about trying to do freelance writing for, like, a small local INDEPENDENT publication (narrator did not ask this question, but questioner spends way too much time staring at narrator in general)? "

Jobs. THat's the important thing about, like, journalism, and writing and stuff, too. Getting a job. In JOURNALISM, of course.

Lyrics Updated

Due to popular demand, the lyrics page has been updated to include all three EPs, our two compilation tracks and the lyrics to the forthcoming LP, "Teenage Horses." If you want the lyrics to that to be a suprise, don't look.

TROPIC OF DDOODD!

Marginalia

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about the digital recovery of Melville's Marginalia. Mr. HM is a hero to those of us here at the Tropic of Food, so this is very exciting. (via Backwards City Review).

In Melville: His World and Work (Knopf, 2005), Andrew Delbanco, humanities professor and director of American studies at Columbia University, observes that "detailed reconstruction of Melville's revisions of Moby-Dick is impossible since no manuscript or notes survive." But that assessment turns out to be an overly bleak one. No, Mr. Olsen-Smith doesn't have a long-lost draft of Moby-Dick up his sleeve. But he has recovered the next best thing — the notes Melville made in his copy of a critical source for Moby-Dick: Thomas Beale's 1839 book, The Natural History of the Sperm Whale.

Check it out!

Rock Static

Well, I've mentioned the Greensboro music blog Rock Static before (their link is over on the side, down a couple below Word Nerdy). Last week or so, they asked me to help them write stuff. They saw that I was an endless pool of unfounded opinions and could use a computer. Really, what else do you need to be a blogger?

In any case, please feel free to stop by and look. So far, I've written about Destroyer (big suprise), Recess, Ariel Pink, PIL, Husker Du and Crash. But, hell, you get enough me here. Go and read the other stuff. It is all interesting.

No Shame: 12,000 words on MySpace

[I tried to post the following as a comment on Audubon Park's new MySpace page, but it exceeded the limit by 10,557 characters.] [Burn.]
In the grand tradition of displaying a spectacular series of emails written by us and about us and how myspace stirs all sorts of dudeplex feelings, here they are in individual anonymity, and I quote:
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Well I saw so impressed by this, http://www.myspace.com/hotelmotel, hotel motel's myspace site that I got one for us. Yes, yes, I know, I loved the obscurity, and of course haven't told anyone, but go see adn if you think this is good we can go with it and if not , we will destroy it.
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we have 0 friends. awesome!
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We must keep it that way. I have to say, I have mixed feeling about myspace, but there's no reason we can't have a page. If rpbjr has one, it can't be bad. As long as the background is sensible.
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I think myspace is an okay thing mostly because it's a decent one-stop-shopping type of good place to investigate bands. i mean, it can be useful just because it's there and it's popular and so there's a lot of people checking it out. but we will have to (or, we get to) put up some self-taken soft-porn photos....
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Yeah, it's definitely one of those things that in and of itself is good or neutral, but gets tarnished by the way it's used by many (most?). The fact that it allows one to instantly sample the band's music is definitely a good thing. We just can't let it overtake the blog. And now I have to learn how to draw roses and nekkid women using dashes and semicolons and letters and shit.
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We have two friends: Jon and Charlie. I couldn't resist and have gone a friend spree. Yeah, it will be used to direct people to the blog because the blog, I have to say, is just aobut hte best.
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What the FUCK? We already have 2 friends?????? This is like middle school, but with friends.
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Well we are up to 6 friends:
Jon
Charlie
Schooner
The Whole World Laughing
Criteria
Rossi
That's about all you need in life.
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I'm very upset about this. I really wanted us to keep the 0 friends factor. It could have been us against the net. And now we're just like everyone else--we have digital friends.
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all you have to do is sign in and delete friends. that'd be pretty hard of us.
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Do the {friends} get notice that they’ve been deleted?
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Well, I felt ambivilant about it and now I feel ashamed. I am serious. I shouldn't have done it.
Oh well. long day
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I guess I see it as a way not to promote the band but as a way to get more people to see the blog. That is where hte real money is. The blog. Sorry I betrayed us.
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Well, I think I just made the myspace look a way that will make up for the fact that we have a few friends. Introducing: the big cookie w/friends. This is what is great about being in a band, but is very bad for being in school. Oh, man I haven't done shit today.
*
I was also out for the whole myspace discussion. Hotel Motel accepted the lets-be-friends request and now I see perhaps we (I) should not have? The first friend request that came in [to hotel motel's myspace account], I responded to the person to say I didn't get a message, just her request. She was baffled because I was expecting a little show of interest just on the level of I dig your music, we play shows in your area, I think you'd like my music, but even that is way more reflective than what people do. Myspace is for networking or collecting pictures of girls with low self-esteem and little clothes. I can safely bet that most of the bands who added us don't like our music, or else they need to get out of the bands they are in. I never liked the idea of soliciting requests (except for actual friends, but I was never aware any of them had pages until they came to me) so our modest number of friends, by myspace standards, is all from incoming request. I imagine AP's incoming requests are/will get off the hook, and from local folk no less who actually do care. People just want to bask in the glory. I would personally let them. Having zero friends is cool but nobody will get to the myspace page if we aren't linked from pages people already know. Why not create a fake myspace page at a plausible URL? For example, myspaceonline.us. Then put up a Friends section with 0 friends, and a Friends With Benefits section with the pictures Robert wants up there. And do all sorts of other things that move our recent discussion topics into a Frey-prompted hoax-conscious is truth left Richard Rorty called practice. Let's start a damn hoax and get a cease and desist from myspace. Speaking of pictures, I'll scan in the ones I was supposed to scan right after Wilmington. Sorry! I forgot I had them until Robert mentioned putting soft-core porn on there, and I thought of the morning after photo Finn took.
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Well, this has become something. yes, I asked all our friends, who are actually our friends. Oh, and sebadoh, destroyer and ariel pink. Dash left us a message: " I think we should set up a show called The School of Unobtrusive, yet firm Knocks." I agree with him. that's a smart boy. Yes, the myspace pretty much unequicoably says, "go to the blog" This is email so I can't tell--I hope this hasn't actually become an issue for anyone. I was resistant, but I was resistant to having a band email address and webpage. I don't really want to fuck around with it much, the blog is enough, but it seemed like a good band idea. we should have a few normal ones I guess. i don't think we are going to be mistaken for professional soon.
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all y'all need to chill. i was kidding about the friends factor--i just thought it was hilarious that it said "Audubon Park has 0 friends". i don't care if we have a myspace page. i choose not to have my own for my own personal reasons, but i'm not going to raise a stink about this. i was KIDDING.
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What! Kiddidng! When does AP kid? Have we been kidding this whole time about everything including our tone!?!!?! serious for youth.
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i thought everything but our tone was the serious part. quick--look, over those hills, its.......another flurry of AP emails!!!! lookOUT!
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When Finn says he's kidding, HE'S FUCKING KDDING! He's serious. He's really upset. . .
. . . I'm joost keeedinggg! Punk'd!
If I may be serious for just a moment, seriously. I think it's good we have a myspace page because the music starts playing right away. That's what makes it a good thing. Next stop, FACEBOOK!
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Oh yeah! I thought I mentioned this option in my other email but it looks like I forgot. When I proposed the hoax, I knew Finn wasn't serious when I sent my email--or rather, he kind of meant that it would be cool to have no friends on myspace, but wasn't upset. I just want to do the hoax. On the other hand, it would be indescribably badass to just remove the friends from the real page. We could send everybody a message that says "Happy Valentine's Day MF's! You ain't my MySpace friend after all." Then there would be a link to an mp3 of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' "Don't Come 'Round Here No More."
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"Jenny Lewis is HOT. But Rilo Kiley is NOT. Also, I have a cousin named Jenny Lewis, so this whole conversation is dirty. David, stay off my cousin's myspace page."
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a) what's wrong with a cousin?
b) I am in class, or I wouldn't have all this time to email and I just read a whole history of the green lantern. I don't even care.
Yeah, she's hottish. That dude in Rilo Kiley with the moustache is hurt for real. I watche dhte morning becomes eclectic of his other band the elected. I don't take children seriously. Why are so many of hte younger artists, in their early to mid twenties so short? Did their parent's smoke? They look rediculous. Pavement didn't like like children when they were that age. I didn't know there were girls on my space. except for th big cookie girls.
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"Everyone dies, that does not change and we do not give gifts to the dead."
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don't feel like looking it up (i mean, shit, i looked up fucking "religion" on wikipedia yesterday), so just tell me: was jenny lewis the small wonder? pretty sure i'd dismiss r kiley and the solo lewis within a couple bars, but i also know that on her new album she does a version of the t. wilburys' "handle with care" with m. ward and c. oberst. what're these kids gonna sing about when they actually do get old and decrepid and limp and irrelevant? what it used to be like to pretend to be wise? can i get a "burn"? happy vageen to you
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That Wilburys song is the shit. I gotta hear that cover. Can I getta “mp3”?
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>can i get a "burn"?
Request acknowledged; burn.
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Well, I did look it up and it appears that Ms. Lewis didn't appear in small wonder at all but was in troop beverly hills and on an episode of golden girls and some other shit. IMDB> maybe she was and I didn't see it. Yeah, I would delete thre freinds but I aske dhtem to be our friends so I say we forget we even have the page, but if you haven't seen the cookie girls or stingy, then you don't know waht is missing. I made a banner ad for the blog and put it on there. Also merge and destroyer are our friends.
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32 friends now!
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i'm so totally into m. kalb's Happy Burnintine Day idear -- i was actually going to use the term "bad-ass" in my email informing on the potential for friend-deletion, but opted for the less slangy, more targetted, "hard." either way, this would be a great way to maybe make damn sure that we don't get professional anytime soon. more on myspace that is not kidding: i don't think myspace is a good thing which is defiled most of the time by the horny and low self-esteemed. it's not that we should use it even though most people abuse it. instead, it's a disgusting and disconcerting modern appliance that we can actually get some efficient use out of -- right, the music plays immediately when you go to the page, and it's free. also, take it or leave it, myspace probably is the kids of today. i mean, it's fun to pretend to not be professional (or really not be professional, i guess), but is it fun to hate everybody? right, most people are doing things in a way that'd we'd all like to think does not happen (the whole 2000's being the "i'm an asshole and have not heard of shame" decade), but you can have a myspace account and be noble. boycotting it would be like boycotting email, i-tunes, amazon, ebay: good for you, but no where near a drop in the outside world's bucket of changing or stopping something. myspace isn't mind control or fascism or lay-offs or hydrogenated preservatives or over-medicating or intelligent design or even mtv/vh1/e. it's a bar, a meat-market, full of despicables, and we can 'be there' too. 2 psychic issues re myspace: (1) "oh shit, i might want to see photos of this girl, and, oh shit, this is wrong....", and (2) "oh shit, look how many people and bands there are. i am so small. and inconsequential." Ta Da!
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I totally agree with all that. It is indeed not fun to hate everybody, although it IS fun to hate ON people, though not everybody. True true. A bar of despicables is also totally true. The kids of today, that is definitely true. Can we get some use out of it? certainly. Will we? Who knows? Let’s try. We might get a group of despicables who wander over and post comments and shit and draw us a rose and ask when we’re playing a show.
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We could havve posted all of this as comments on the myspace page. that would have been coola.
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I see "Audubon Park" (David) has posted comments for "Hotel Motel" (me). What's great is the AP picture is mainly me so it just looks like I'm posting comments. What will the myspaceosphere think?!?
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This is another email.
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Kalb and Biggers are neck in neck! Kalb with the most emails, but Biggers with the most pontificating. who will round the corner first. Nahm and Cohen are tied for the least emails, while Spiker has stopped to smell the roses.
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Neck in Neck!
Whuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut?
Guhhhhhhh-roooooosss. Gay, gay, gay! Gay, gay! Yur gay! gay band members!
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okay, i'm posting a comment on myspace right now that displays all discussion relevant and non- to myspace. and i've done my best to remove anything that might actually be embarassing or real (non-virtual) world damaging. please contact david about removing/deleting the comment if you have problem(s) with it. and please don't talk about this anymore so that i can stop cutting and pasting to the comment box, hoping that it won't fart out on me and lose my last 1/2 hour's worth of (really worthwhile) work. META IS HARD WORK.
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Happy Valentines Day Part II

I originally saw this on Can't Stop the Bleeding.

Law & Order SVU Valentine's Day Cards

Happy Valentines Day...

Overseen in Durham--Volume 1

Normally our professors don't act like this, but this guy, the chair of the Economics department here at Duke, had to win a bet he made with the rest of the Econ professors (seen in the background) that he could make it come out his nose.

R.I.P. James Yancey, aka J Dilla, aka Jay Dee

We here at Tropic of Food (at least those who play bass in Audubon Park), mourn the extremely tragic passing of Jay Dee, hip-hop producer extraordinaire. He died last week at 32 due to complications involving a blood disease. Jay Dee's production credits are stellar:
--D'Angelo's "Voodoo"
--The Pharcyde's "Labcabincalifornia"
--De La Soul's "The Grind Date"
--the Jaylib project with Madlib
--Slum Village

Always representing his hometown of Detroit, Jay Dee kept alive the notion that 60s and 70s soul was the backbone of hip-hop production. I expect that he is rollin' a very large blunt in heaven, surrounded by crates of dusty records that he could never find on earth. .......

This is Truth.

From: Park Place
Date: Feb 12, 2006 10:47 PM
Subject: Your music rocks!

Your music rocks!

Howdy! I have to tell you that I really dig your music because I'm a talent scout and if you call my company they will give me commssion for every show they book you. You sound easy to book.

Park Place Entertainment LLC is a booking and promotional agency. They do lots of events and feature rock and hip-hop artists as well as most other genres. I'm sure you'll be received well. They have tons of live music venues all over the place.

If you want to check 'em out. Their website is www.ParkPlaceE.com.

To speak with an agent call toll free (888) 717-0372.

Tell them Maria Carter (the talent scout) sent you.

Call soon while the roster is still open because they only have room for a few more bands on their roster.

Good Luck,
Maria

Tropic of Truth

Nahm beat me to the punch on (re)instituting some intellection at the Tropic of Food. Our Frey coincidence went further than (1) speakin’ out about values of truth regarding the Frey scandal, and (2) an indulgence for wikipedic hypertextual cross-referencing. Also, I promise, I meant to post my thoughts to the blog a couple weeks ago, but instead I wimped-out and slapped the whole thing at the end of a promotional mass-email; not only that, but presented it in such a way that no one but me would get my meaning (as if anyone clicks on all the links, as if anyone then reads them) – for fun.

None of which is to accuse Nahm of ‘biting’ – amazed we were so unwittingly on the same page – plus, our chosen subjects were not identical: his was about the life of the imagination and mine was about concern over the survival of historical veracity (if such a thing ever existed, blah blah blah).

All of which is a self-congratulating preamble to the fiction-v.-truth hoax du jour. Last night the “Colbert Report” mocked the American Association of Petroleum Geologists for awarding Michael Crichton’s recent novel, State of Fear, their national *journalism* award. In his novel, Crichton “…dismisses global warming as a largely imaginary threat embraced by malignant scientists for their own ends.” (NY Times) The Times’ article is good, fun truth, so I’ll paste it at the bottom in case the link doesn’t work for non-NYtimes-members – basically some pot v. kettle re blackness.

Now, what I find lacking in David’s (albeit brief) rant on Frey-hating is specifically addressing the matter of intention w/r/t a good, healthy hoax. Maybe Frey was pushed by the publisher to change his novel into a memoir in order to sell more copies (because apparently, bad memoirs sell better’n bad novels). Anyway, there’s an important and obvious difference between Kent Johnson faking some non-existent Japanese poetry for postmodern effect and James Frey fibbing here and there to make his memoir more saleable.

But anyway, to keep things off-point, back to global warming. Always wondered what the goal(s) of those supposedly malignant scientists' Global Warming Hoax would be, googled it, and found this. This is just one of many items, but let’s run with it. Proponents of Global Warming want to “…control the world economies, dictate development, and redistribute the world's wealth” and the KYOTO treaty was (gasp) “really about redistribution of wealth, from America to the rest of the world.” I wonder if that’s what Crichton’s on too. Point being that this’d qualify as another hoax that could not be judged as at least healthy for our imagination/intellect, even if destructive to a purist's sense of veracity. And another one being Holocaust Revisionism. These are all too easy targets.

[Too bloggy?]

rbrt

--------------------------------------

Truth? Fiction? Journalism? Award Goes to . . .

By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: February 9, 2006

Journalists like to think of themselves as presenting as accurate a picture as they can of the real world.
The American Association of Petroleum Geologists takes a broader view. It is presenting its annual journalism award this year to Michael Crichton, the science fiction writer whose latest book, "State of Fear," dismisses global warming as a largely imaginary threat embraced by malignant scientists for their own ends.
"It is fiction," conceded Larry Nation, communications director for the association. "But it has the absolute ring of truth."
That is not the way leading climate scientists see it. When the book was published in 2004, climate experts condemned it as dangerously divorced from reality. Most of these scientists believe human activity, chiefly the burning of fossil fuels, is changing the atmosphere's chemistry in ways that threaten unpredictable, potentially damaging effects.
The book is "demonstrably garbage," Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford climatologist, said in an interview yesterday. Petroleum geologists may like it, he said, but only because "they are ideologically connected to their product, which fills up the gas tanks of Hummers."
Daniel P. Schrag, a geochemist who directs the Harvard University Center for the Environment, called the award "a total embarrassment" that he said "reflects the politics of the oil industry and a lack of professionalism" on the association's part.
As for the book, he added, "I think it is unfortunate when somebody who has the audience that Crichton has shows such profound ignorance."
The book has high-profile admirers, though. One is Senator James M. Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who is chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, who calls global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."
Mr. Nation said there had been "some pushback" on the award from association members who had written to association publications to protest it. "Whenever you get to the global warming issue you have legitimate scientists on both sides of the issue, as we do in our own membership," he said.
But he praised Mr. Crichton as "a high-profile writer" who had brought attention to the topic "to really create some good." He said readers would "have a very good informational read" about science and sometimes the way science is made."

Saying Goodbye is Not Easy

Never is, really. Especially when it's olde friendz.

"Dude!"

With all the recent discussion re: Brey and his fictionalized memoirs, here's a guy who figured out a way to have his cake and eat it to. " He says each one is true -- only some names and a few details have been changed to keep him out of trouble with the authorities. " What do you call this? 'Dude-lit'? 'Brah-lit'? I'd never heard about this guy and his 'stories' until I read this, and my already low opinion of humanity just dropped a little lower. Sorry for sharing.

Nuggets:

Reading an interview on perfectsoundforever with Andy Hummel, the bass player for Big Star back in the 70's, I came across a couple of tidbits about that era in rock and roll.

But we wound up at the TGI Friday's on Overton square one Monday night which was "Rock and Roll Night." It was a major hell-raising scene in those days. A DJ would play old 45's and just everyone came and stuffed the place. That was the back cover.

I brought a group into Ardent called "Voice of Cheeze." They were a bunch of kids from Centre College in Kentucky. My little brother went to college there. They were sort of country folksy. I recorded several demos on them. They were great. I still have a lot of tapes of them.

Thoughts of a Man as he Finds Himself in Need

Dear Rikk

An Ode Upon Rikk, corrected

And the sound of hounds...

I object to the cult of realism; the cult of memoir, of autobiography, and of fact. I object to the lifting of writing to a higher plane only because it is "true." Why are people so obsessed with non-fiction? "Well, it actually happened and that is more interesting than something someone made up." Yes, but every story, no matter how true, is made up. It is changed by the words that are used, the way things are described. Non-fiction can never be truly non-fiction becuase someone had to write it in some way; had to choose between the endless possibilities for telling the story--and that is what it ends up as--a story. Additionally, consider that none of this happened to you. You are reading a book either way. Fiction or Non: in the end they are just the same. Words on a page. I see little difference between the two, except the non-fiction writer got a jump start on the plot. So perhaps this brings me to my claim: non-fiction writers are lazy (Fred B. excepted, I know he just makes all that stuff up. Like anyone has ever climbed a mountain.) You aren't holding up your end of the bargain. I ask you to think up something I've never thought before and express it in a way that I couldn't have expressed myself. That is all that I want. Consider: we cheer Frank Abagnale because he is getting one over on the MAN and we WITH him. We jeer James Frey because he got one over on us and we are AGAINST him. My message: we need to learn to love being fooled.

This isn't to say that Mr. Frey doesn't have to take his lumps. The fraud, when caught, must pay--otherwise fraud isn't fraud anymore--but he does it for us, to protect us from ourselves. Thank you Mr. Frey.

Haven't you read Light While There is Light? Don't you love Araki Yasusada?

Hooray for lies.

TROPIC OF DDOODD.

With Danish comics causing riots around the world, here's another installment of "Tropic of Ddoodd" which we hope offends dozens.

Addendum Pigeonum

touch the sky, bitchez.

Props to Scott M @ HAB

Audubon Park's not the only one

with a secret 5th* member...

* 5 and 1/2, counting crouching denim

Day 12

Of the life of a pigeon.



Other more goodness here.

NOUMENAN

is this okay?














is it?

AP Fans Take Note

Once there was a girl named J. Lockard. I didn't know her but I saw her go by one time. She has rented Police Academy 2 for some reason. Now it is overdue. Why, J. Lockard? Why? gob?

Full Lost House

Stephie from Full House was a Meth Addict. Can we pool our tears we shed:

"But two years ago, feeling bored and being unemployed, she says she began experimenting with drugs and got hooked on meth.

After a three-day "lost" weekend, reportedly followed by an intervention staged by her former Full House costars Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, John Stamos and Bob Saget, Sweetin checked herself in to the Promises rehab facility for six weeks of intense treatment."

TROPIC OF DDOODD

Greetings readers, today we have the premiere edition of “TROPIC OF DDOODD”, a serial that shares with us the wacky antics of several sure to become beloved characters. You’ve already met some of them, like Mikey Wave with his signature catch phrase “BURN!” One note: in the spirit of collaboration, today’s ‘script’ was written by soliciting Mad Lib suggestions by email from unsuspecting members of our Staff. Thanks. Enjoy