Spoon: Girls Can Tell
This is a great, understated album that merits repeated plays. Spoon have made a literate, rocking, breakthrough record that occupies a funny place--the songs are not unconventional, per se, yet they're somehow really special. Girls Can Tell displays the emotional resonance and big rock power of, say, Thin Lizzy and Mott the Hoople; the sonically referential, indie-rock smarts of a band like Versus; and amazing hooks that recall Colin Blunstone of the Zombies. Like Jennyanykind, Moviola, and the Lilys, this Austin, Texas, trio has chosen to work on perfecting their craft without paying much heed to mainstream or trends. In spite of (but mostly because of) wrenching breakup-centered lyrical material delivered in a very real, matter-of-fact way, Girls Can Tell is one of those life-affirming pop albums you know you'll return to in years to come. --Mike McGonigal (*****)
Michael Hardt: Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
Empire (2000)—the surprise hit that made its term for U.S global hegemony stick and presciently set the agenda for post–9/11 political theory on the left—was written by this same somewhat unlikely duo: Hardt, an American political scientist at Duke University, and Negri, a former Italian parliament member and political exile, trained political scientist and sometime inmate of Rome's Rebibbia prison. This book follows up on Empire's promise of imagining a full-blown global democracy. Though the authors admit that they can't provide the final means for bringing that entity about (or the forms for maintaining it), the book is rich in ideas and agitational ends. The "multitude" is Hardt and Negri's term for the earth's six billion increasingly networked citizens, an enormous potential force for "the destruction of sovereignty in favor of democracy." The middle section on the nature of that multitude is bookended by two others. The first describes the situation in which the multitude finds itself: "permanent war." The last grounds demands for and historical precursors of global democracy. Written for activists to provide a solid goal (with digressions into history and theory) toward which protest actions might move, this timely book brings together myriad loose strands of far left thinking with clarity, measured reasoning and humor, major accomplishments in and of themselves. (****)
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Golden slide show below, and you know all these consumer goods fill we of Wit with senseless greed. Like that guy that turned into the Golem, we wants it....
Citizen:Citizen
Goldpills by Ju$t Another Rich Kid and Tobias Wong
Price: $275 for three
Available at www.citizen-citizen.com.
Link: Must-Have Items on Style.com.
You say love is this, love is that:
Poplar tassels, willow tendrils
the wind and the rain comb,
tinkle and drip, tinkle and drip—
branches drifting apart. Hagh!
Love has not even visited this country.
--William Carlos Williams
Anybody who doesn't recognize the trend described in the NY Times article below toward stipping powerful women of their jobs and their social rank as a deliberate cultural strategy on the part of the Neocons is, like, high.
Working women equals Democrats equals liberal Hollywood equals massively Democratic California's electoral college votes.
Says here that "colitas" is Mexican slang for marijuana buds.
"Surely, though, Hotel California is actually a scalpel-sharp allegory set amid LA's desert highways, flash cars and mirrored ceilings, summing up the relationship hedonists have with excess better than any other song.
It draws you in, right from the start: 'On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair/ Warm smell of colitas rising up through the air/ Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light/ My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim/ I had to stop for the night'."
Link: The song that won't check out | Rock Roots And Jazz | Music | Arts | Telegraph.
The pre-renovated and decidedly sordid Chateua Marmont of the 1970s, above.
As regular readers will remember, Wit was born in (and of) the wild, and therefore maintains undomesticated swaths of self as wide as newly discovered North Americas. There are the witch haunted woods so eldritchly illustrated by Arthur Rackham, Nathaniel Hawthorne stories of the supernatural spaces inside the awful American unconscious and Melville sea sagas where the miser-merman, Wisdom, reveals his hoarded heaps.
Terrible terras are these, where Mom and Pop and the rules they laid down back home in the suburbs are suspended, then subpoenaed by other authorities and reported lost. The map just trailed off the edge of the page didn't it? So now invisible essences must be your guide. "Follow the flowers, friend," a small auburn fox utters. She's up on hind legs, leaning against a tree, rolling a Drum, wearing soft suede boots from an expensive boutique downtown that are supposed to look natural in this context. None too friendly either, and why would she be?
All this, asshole, and yet wilder yet is yon violet. Amid last year's dead leaves, up from the slime of the brackish winter rot still here, you bet, on the late April forest floor is purple, so violent like the spot from some equivocal overly enthusiastic grasp. Just one, all alone, and so small. And then its name so close to the word for mayhem, with just that extra 'n' in that other world.
Smelling so sweet, a candy pretty from the Bois de Bologne bottled on a twisted Paris street near the grey dangerous river by Annick Goutal. Named simply La Violette, it's just one of those things that causes beauty that makes you want to crush and smash, folds the world suddenly into shapes that make us reading about you in some big book wonder how you'll ever find your way home after it all.
Try it, you'll like it. You trust me, don't you?
Too many rock stars here today perhaps.
"Michael C Luckman - author of Alien Rock: The Rock 'n' Roll Extraterrestrial Connection - says The Rolling Stones rocker developed an interest in extraterrestrial phenomena after a close encounter of the third kind in the 60s.
Luckman said: 'Mick Jagger has been very involved with the subject of UFOs for many years.
In 1968 he went camping in Glastonbury with his then girlfriend, singer Marianne Faithful, and encountered a rare, luminous cigar-shaped mothership.
'Around the same time Mick had a UFO detector installed at his British estate. The alarm kept on going off whenever he left home, indicating the presence of strong electromagnetic activity in the immediate area.'
The 63-year-old singer also sighted a UFO over the crowd during The Rolling Stones' infamous 1969 Altamont Concert in California."
Via: Professor Hex.
Richard Ashcroft looks really good naked.
Whenever we of Wit see Herrema we must pause, agog, and marvel at the fashion greatness.
1) What was the last electrical appliance you bought?
ANOTHER AIR PURIFIER
2) How many shoes do you own?
10 PAIRS OF HIGH TOPS
7 PAIRS OF PUMPS
32 PAIRS OF BOOTS
3) Thinking about only what you are wearing now and including your watch, jewelry and glasses if you wear them, how much would it cost me to get dressed up just like you? And where would I have to go to get the look
POWELL PERALTA – CABALLERO / BONES BRIGADE T-SHIRT….. $4.99 SAN DIEGO SALVATION ARMY
VOLCOM STRIPED BAJA HOODIE….... $65.00 FROG HOUSE NEWPORT BEACH
VINTAGE BLACK LEVIS CORDS….....DON’T KNOW, DON’T KNOW
BLACK NORTH FACE DOWN VEST…..... $180 NORTH FACE BERKLEY
CHARLIE ONE HORSE SNAKE SKIN BOOTS…....$250 TIJUANA MEXICO
IT’S KINDA COLD TODAY SO THE SHIT IS HEAVIER AN COST MORE CASH TODAY SOOO….TODAY IT COST U MAYBE $500
4) What are you going to be eating for dinner tonight?
FISH TACOOOOS!
5) What is the most you have ever spent on a bottle of wine or other alcoholic beverage and when and where was it?
RUSSIAN STOLICHNAYA ELIT $60 ON THE FERRY TO NORWAY
6) What and where is your favorite shop?
I DON’T KNOW
7) How do you get around town?
WALK,BIKE,SKATE,DRIVE
8) Where is your favorite place to holiday?
BAJA
The Wit Of The Staircase would like to encourage its readers to spend the summer of 2007 engaged in learning the truth about 9/11. To that end we'll be publishing many articles like this one below on the subject. We will also be particpating in what we hope will be a very large rally for 9/11 Truth at the site of the attack on the sixth anniversary of 9/11 in New York City this fall.
"Fear attempts to silence dissenters. As the Truth Movement gains momentum and amasses credibility, the fear profiteers have begun heralding yet another 'threat' to National Security - inquiring minds. This is both good news and bad news. We are no longer ignorable. Fearing exposure, the Czars of Propaganda know that 'Truthers' must be branded and discredited if government corruption and corporate fraud is to flourish unabated. This said, prepare for an intensified Smear-and-Fear Campaign. Any group or individual who vocally questions the official story of 9/11 or who exercises the right to demand Government accountability will be labeled 'Anti-American and Anti-Patriotic'.
A well-documented strategy of propagandists throughout modern history, dissolving credibility through character assassination is a calculated tactic utilized to persuade the uninformed public to turn a deaf ear, to, in effect, remain uninformed. It remains to be seen if this line of attack will succeed, and success is dependent upon each individual proponent of freedom. As with the human longing for security, the natural desire for affiliation and acceptance works in favor of the war-mongering, power-hungry elite, for they know only the bravest of the brave will dare risk ostracism for a noble cause."
Link: War and the Police State: Complicity of the American People.
"When the phrase 'great American novelist' is tossed around, the 20th-century names most often cited are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. But a trio of female writers — Miss Wharton, Willa Cather and Dawn Powell — has done just as much to chronicle the American psyche.
These three aren't simply undervalued women who in the name of 'diversity' deserve a more secure place in the canon — they should be at its peak.
That they're not says much about how literary reputation is born and sustained. Experimentalism counts for a lot; so does cutting a romantic figure...."
Link: The politics of prose--Entertainment--The Washington Times, America's Newspaper.
