We’re celebrating #StandUpMonth all April long by highlighting your favorite comedians every day. Today’s featured stand-up is: John @Mulaney.
And one of my favorite comedians talks about my birthday
“Think about these things, reader. Don’t sigh and turn the page. Think that I have written them and you have read them, and the odds against either of us ever having existed are greater by far than one to all of the atoms in creation.”
—
Three Colors: Red, December 1994 (via ebertquotes)
Although Ebert and I did not always agree in regards to movies that he reviewed (See: Back to the Future). I’ve always had a great respect for his views and his ability to critique movies in a fair way that brought them to a wider audience.
There is a reason that in a world where most critics are lauded and hated by creative personalities, Ebert remains loved among most.
(via theatlantic)
Inside the Cupola, just at orbital sunset, Earth already dark. From here we photograph the world.
Of all of Chris’ photographs I find this one to be my favorite so far.
Unearthing America’s Treasure Trove of Rare, Private Press Vinyl
In the current era of digital music and laptop bedroom musician-dipshits, anyone can make music and distribute it to the masses for little or no money. You basically fart and you have “released” an “album” online. Entire music genres have grown up around this concept and the ease that comes with it. But years ago, before computers and the internet, recording and disseminating your music was much less democratic. Buying physical instruments, recording music, creating sleeve artwork, and creating vinyl albums was a serious undertaking and not for the casual hobbiest. Yet, many unknown and obscure musicians did just that, without major record label help, going DIY and privately pressing their work themselves. Today, a new book from Sinecure Press, titled Enjoy the Experience, hits shelves. It stands as the most extensive look into this culture. Plumbing the depths of many obsessed collectors’ archives (including their own), editors Michael P. Daley and Johan Kugelberg pulled the best of the very best records. The book includes albums by lesbian folk singers, pizza parlor organists, religious cult leaders, and singing Werewolves, to name a few examples. You can check out some our favorites in the gallery above. We spoke to Michael and Joahn about this massive project and the joys of getting weird with wax.
VICE: This book seems like it must have been a massive undertaking. How long did it take you guys?
Michael P. Daley: It took over three years to make the actual book. However, the collectors who’s archives we dug into have been amassing the contents for several decades.What gave you the inspiration to take on such a labor of love? How did this all start?
Johan Kugelberg: I started receiving Paul Major’s record catalogues in 1986 or 1987. He’d describe records that made me want to move to the USA. Whenever some of them arrived in my mailbox in the old country, they were instant game changers. Records described in the mainstream as “psychedelic” just weren’t compared to the strange private press vinyl Paul conjured up.When I moved to NYC from Sweden in 1988, my first exposure to buying these kinds of records in actual shops was that summer, in a junk shop with Tim Warren of Crypt Records. He’d show me some of the wildest homemade covers and crazy lounge records. It was off to the races. We’d stop in thrift stores driving around New England, bringing back piles of crazy records. In the early 90s, I hung out with Brandan Kearney and Gregg Turkington (of Drag City), who were the best mentors a young lad could have as far as next-level vanity pressing sounds go. There was a bit of a network of private press fan-boys motivated ultimately by those holy moments of pure human expression that are much more common on privately released records than on mainstream releases.
How did you go about finding all these records? Once you found them, how did you find the information and back story about the artists?
Michael: These records came from a whole host of private collections, however the foundation of the whole book was from Johan’s coffers.The backstories came about differently for each author. For myself, I went through files of old newspapers finding advertisements for gigs, ebay-ed old periodicals, googled like a madman, in an attempt to construct a chronology from existing sources. In some cases we located the performers and they were very kind, like the great Sherry Emata. In other cases, the performer was located, but they weren’t so vocal.
Johan: Michael and myself have been working together for over three years and share a lot of enthusiasms. A number of collectors that I was already pals with provided all access to their collections and to the artists that they’d tracked down. Paul Major is an unbelievable source of insight, information, and enthusiasm. We are now working on a book reprinting all of his record catalogues from the 80s and 90s, which I think is some of the best music writing ever by anybody. I love Bangs and Meltzer, but I love Paul’s writing more.
Did you have physical copies of all the records? Did you listen to a lot of them? Did you find any hidden gems we should know about?
Michael: All the record reproductions are from physical copies. We’ve been trying to listen to every single one. The problem is that while there are about 1100 LP covers in the book, there’s actually double that in the office, so we have our work cut out for us. However, I’d say most have at least been needle-dropped at this point.As for hidden gems, all of them are stupendous in one way or another. Even the ones that might be considered “technically bad,” are still really interesting, and not just in that superficial “so bad it’s good” kind of way. All of these records are artifacts that represent a living person’s dreams and aspirations at a point in time. For me, I relate the beauty of these objects to the famous last shot of The Shining, when you stare into the old photograph and the echoey big band music starts playing, except in this case, you are hearing echoey music and an old movie comes into your mind instead.
There’s a whole plethora of backstories behind each one of these, too. Some of these records are attempts at being famous, some are actually money laundering devices, some are just for friends, and some are souvenirs for live shows at a lounge. So even when they are bad, or silly, or downright baffling, their greatness is realized when it strikes you that this is all very real, that the LP is the crystallization of a time and place in the past.
Johan: The more of these records I hear, and the more album jackets I look at, brings about a notion of an American cultural vernacular. It makes me think that things like rock and roll, hip-hop, jazz, and hamburgers, could not happen anywhere else. And that there is a singular and sublime artistic narrative in here. As a first generation immigrant, I have no problem with readily admitting that it reminds me of how much I love the USA and its people.
Enjoy the Experience comes out today on Sincure Press. If you purchase it through their website, you can get the deluxe version with a slipcase, fold-out poster, and clear vinyl Century Records on how to make your own record (for the same price as in stores!). That’s really cool.
I’m pretty much drooling over this book.
I am pretty much “Getting directly down” with this book
I’ve never heard a single convincing argument for why either congress or the boardroom should consist of 50% women. Never.
In fact the whole thing seems to be predicated on the Feminist belief that vaginas are magical.
It’s predicated on the fact of life that 50.8% of the US population consists of females, you fucking human shaped turd.
Because your mother, sister, or friend should be treated as equally as you. If you haven’t heard a “convincing argument” yet, maybe it is because you are not listening, and are instead using straw men to further convince yourself of your correctness.
Over the weekend, The New York Times Magazine ran a piece about altruism, and they enlisted Key & Peele to make a sketch to compliment the article. It’s great!
I will reblog Key and Peele all the time because they have such nice smiles.
R.I.P.
Yesterday I was doing non-Easter themed stuff with my family while Rob was doing real Easter things with his, which we have been boycotting for the last 4 years because that’s something you get to do when you’re an athiest from a Jewish family.
I got an email from him with a photo of this llama (not totally shocking, his aunt brought a diapered pygmy goat to Christmas once). I replied, “hm, maybe they always have Easter llamas but we didn’t know because we never go.”
An hour later I got another email saying, “scratch that, the llama is dead.” She tried to walk up the stairs onto the boat dock & something awful happened (think Kevin Ware in the Duke game yesterday), resulting in the llama being euthanized while the kids were off on an Easter egg hunt.
Point taken. No more Easter for us.
Wait 2 more days. He’ll come back.
Dreams of my Father
Last night while laying in bed, I finished Barack Obama’s book “Dreams of my Father”.
The book, written before President Obama was President Obama, is a sort of autobiographical exploration of the life of a mixed raced child. He explores issues of culture and race through the eyes of someone with a very unique perspective.
I really enjoyed it. The narrative and often colorful story telling made you forget that the book was placed in a non-fictional universe. While reading I felt like I was with Obama as he struggled with his identity in Indonesia and Hawaii. When his grandparents were being over protective of his race, you could feel the uncomfortable teenage Obama drip off the page. I felt the pain of realizing that our parents aren’t always who we think they are. The joy of meeting his forgotten brothers and sisters and aunts in Africa. Of course a bit of hope was thrown in every once in a while for good measure.
Below are some more personal views I got from the book.
‘Lost’ Rod Serling video interview, 1970.
These “lost” interviews with Serling are a fascinating glimpse into the mind of one of television’s few visionaries. From the Youtube description:
“In 1970 University of Kansas professor James Gunn interviewed a series of science fiction authors for his Centron film series “Science Fiction in Literature”. This footage from an unreleased film in that series featuring an interview with Rod Serling, which wasn’t finished due to problems with obtaining rights to show footage from Serling’s work in television. This reconstruction is based on the original workprint footage that was saved on two separate analog sources since the audio track was separate. Re-syncing the footage was a long involved process as the audio track didn’t match the film and there was substantial sync drift. While not perfect, there’s a lot of interesting information on writing for television in the dialogue with Serling as well as a prophetic statement about his health at the beginning.”
You’re traveling through another dimension—a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s a signpost up ahead: your next stop: the Twilight Zone!
(via hodgman)
JAY SHELL’S “THE RAP QUOTES” via Juxtapoz
Multidisciplinary artist, Jay Shells, has recently been creating legitimate looking signs containing rap quotes that reference specific locations in New York. After compiling over 30 signs, Shells set out installing these signs in the locations mentioned in the quotes. The artist has quoted many well-known rappers such as Jay Z, Mos Def, Kanye West, Gza, Nas, Jeru the Damaja, DJ Premier, and many more. Check out others via The Rap Quotes.
(via pitchfork)
