Frank Ocean x Andre 3000, what more can I say, two weird tastes that taste great together. Listen below and catch Frank O. on Jimmy Fallon right about now. Ocean’s new LP Channel Orange has dropped unexpectedly like birdsh+t! Purchase it now on iTunes.
In rappity-rap news, the new mixtape (free LP) Royalty from the gangsterish bambino himself, Childish Gambino. Downloaded, but haven’t listened myself yet…I will let y’all be the judge. This Tina Fey sh*t is wild funny, though (after the jump).
Vic.trofimovthis is the kind of gay music everybody can get behind (no pun intended)!
Now that everybody’s paying attention, your boy Frank Ocean just posted a new song on his tumblr, titled “Sweet Life” and although it’s clearly one-to-grow-on type song, its pretty easy on the ears on first listen (stream below). I was doing my patriotic duty by grilling meat on a rooftop on the 4th so I missed the dramatic exodus from the closet that comprises his previous tumblr post (I’m not sure if that’s a late pass or a straight pass?) but anyway I’ve posted his statement after the jump just for the sake of starting arguments (and you can read dream hampton’s take on things here).
Vic.trofimovjoey is that dude
Superficially, Joey Bada$$ is pretty much your average 17-year old Brooklynite – getting up reluctantly in the morning, steady watching the clock at school, skating along the borough’s JMZ tracks with his homies, this, that and the third. The only twist: this kid can rap with the most accomplished of veterans. His newest video for “Waves,” produced by Freddie Joachim and with the visuals being directed by Va$htie, is evidence for all that noise. “Born boss, no days off #childlabor.” Watch out for those 90s babies and make sure you grab Joey’s 1999 tape!
Vic.trofimov!!!
James McNew formed Dump, a one-man four-track side project, in January of 1991. After a half-dozen releases, Dump was put aside to focus on his job as bass player for Yo La Tengo. McNew resurrected Dump in 1998 when he released a seven song cassette homage to Prince entitled That Skinny Motherfucker with the High Voice? Prince fans will recognize the title as a self-referential line from the bizarre song "Bob George" off the infamous Black Album. That Skinny Motherfucker with the High Voice? was released on CD in 2001 with five bonus tracks added to the end.
Fallout 3 is an addictive RPG situated in an unrelentingly bleak post-apocalyptic future. Created by the folks at Bethesda Game Studios, the gameplay mechanics are similar to their earlier hit, the fantasy-themed The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Like 2007's BioShock, the soundtrack utilizes popular music from the early to middle twentieth century that effectively evokes a nostalgic sense of loss. Bethesda also contracted Inon Zur to create a more traditional score to extend the epic experience further.
It’s an election year, and while everyone’s talking about dressage horses and eating dogs, what they really should be talking about are the real issues. Like where’s Joffrey’s birth certificate? And what about Robb Stark’s family values? The political mischief makers over at Mother Jones put together the Game of Thrones videos below, which use kernels of truth to spin out attack-ad parodies, Westeros-style. But beware: Thar be spoilers.
Read moreBuckle up kids, because this gets long and personal.
So, a long time (~7 months) ago, in a galaxy far, far away (rural New Hampshire,) there lived a sad little girl (or KICKASS ADULT,) named Julia who just so happened to have a friend named C. C and Julia had spent the past several months talking too much altogether about Glee, and C had begun to push for Julia to add a second show to her plate. Some brightly-colored sitcom about derelicts going to a community college.
And Julia was skeptical, but C was persistent, for she knew that if Julia liked the first two minutes, Julia would have a new favorite show. See, C knew something that Julia did not.
C knew that Abed Nadir existed.
Now, there are a couple of things you, gentle reader, must know about Julia in order to appreciate what happens next. First, you must understand that, ever since she had been born and maybe even before, Julia had been autistic. And second, you must understand that, because of this, Julia had spent her whole life watching and learning stories where she had no part, no point of entry, and no value. Julia was trained to imagine herself in stories as someone she was not and could never be, and to define the story of her own life in terms of how it failed to be reflected back to her. And sometimes, most of the times, Julia forgot that she was a person. Stories are important, and she didn’t have one. You are a mistake isn’t a story. It’s barely even a sentence.
I must warn you now that this is not a story of how C or Dan Harmon or Abed Nadir or even Julia herself saved or healed Julia. It’s in the script, but Julia wouldn’t have a voice in any of those stories, either. No, gentle readers and vicious tumblr-ers, this is a story of what it means to start a new story and see on your screen, for the first time, someone who moves like you.
Do you understand what that means?
It’s probably not something you’ve ever really had to think about. But how someone moves is the first thing telling you whether or not they might be able to be you, and you them. And for the first time in Julia’s life, she looked at a character on television and saw a yes.
Abed Nadir walked onto Julia’s laptop screen, and nothing and everything changed.
For the next seventh months, there was a lot of CAPSLOCKING IN GOOGLE CHAT at C about Community and Abed Nadir, but very few words elsewhere. Which was odd, because when Julia liked things, she tended to talk about them too much. This was one of many things she and Abed had in common.
Except, here’s the funny thing. Abed said “I just like liking things,” and it wasn’t just not-punished, it wasn’t just okay—either of which would have been remarkable and unbelievable—no. It was good.
And Julia, who had endless words for a great many small and unimportant things, couldn’t say anything more about Abed beyond he moves like me.
Abed Nadir, you see, is an autistic character.
There’s a difference between TV Autistics and autistic characters on television. TV Autistics—Bones, House, Sheldon, Sherlock—are caricatures, and, not coincidentally, all fan-diagnosed. They are socially awkward/anti-social/socially maladapted, eccentric geniuses free of any serious adaptive functioning limitations, motor issues, sensory sensitivities, or language differences, able to manage independently in all major areas of daily living, with a bonus side of savant skills and the empathic range of a rock. They’re awesome, but they’re a stock character, and they manage to simultaneously hint at the autistic experience without actually meaning it. It’s like that poster about gay subtext in popular that was going around a while ago
the irony being, of course, that for a show that is “so gay,” it’s actually not gay at all. The people in charge have found the perfect ratio of homoerotic subtext (all of it) to actual gay characters (none of them) to keep the fangirls creaming their pants and the money rolling in. No one involved has any intention of meaningful inclusion or exploration. You avoid any potentially unpleasant consequences, because the choice to have a gay character was never actually made.
It should be noted that autism isn’t the only reason Julia grew up without People Like Her on television, and it’s not even close to the only reason she has a Thing about stories. And that’s the curious thing about these TV Autistics—someone who’s watched one of them in action is much more predisposed to assume that since Julia is autistic, and since she’s got this extended metaphor (bonus points if you say perseveration) about stories going on, stories must be her Special Interest, the framework through which she filters the world, the poor half-human thing.
And they are, but that’s because Julia is, shockingly, a person at her core. And people need stories.
Which brings us back to Abed.
It’s entirely possible Julia over-identified with Abed, just a tad. Which struck her as first a bit odd—they’re nothing alike, Abed thinks The Breakfast Club had a plot and likes falafel and his mom had the decency to leave— and then as more than a bit precarious. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
(Somewhere, fiddling with her contacts, C arched an eyebrow and said “it wasn’t?” and Julia cyber-kicked her.)
Abed Nadir walked around like a bird or a giraffe, and he couldn’t do thumbs-up and he talked too fast and knew too many things and he was sharp and suspicious and easy and trusting. He did things that were simultaneously uncanny/creepy and sweet/thoughtful, and he couldn’t do bills or read clocks but he could tell psychiatrists to fuck off and he could fight with his best friend when his best friend tried to take charge, and he was jealous and sharp with his crushes. He had friends and private worlds, and all the scars that come from growing up a mistake, and things were imperfect and messy and painful and visceral but he always emerged okay.
Abed Nadir said “please don’t do a special episode about me” and Jeff Winger promised he “wouldn’t dream of it.”
And then he told Abed to pick one reference, and Abed picked 16 Candles, so they sat on the counter and ate chicken.
(And Abed didn’t mind who he was kissing so long as he got to be Han Solo, and also he delivered several babies and got to be the good cop and the bad cop and used his diagnosis to get rid of an unfortunate lab partner and took advantage of a stranger in a bar’s patience so he could talk about Farscape.)
And stories are a scary and messy business, full of magic and demons, taunting possibilities and rules-that-aren’t, things we can’t have and altogether far too many opportunities for a sad little girl’s heart to be ripped out of her chest, and Julia kept watching, every week. And you must understand that asking Julia to pick one Abed moment is liking asking Abed to pick one reference.
You must understand that one story is infinitely bigger than zero, and it may still be very small and nowhere near enough, but it’s something.
And yes, her heart was eventually forcibly extracted when Dan Harmon broke his promise and Virtual Systems Analysis was the dreaded Special Episode. And Julia remembered how to breathe, and stitched herself back up, because she hadn’t really needed that heart, anyway. And when it turned out that someone else would be in charge of Abed next year, she remembered what she had always known to be true about happy endings and said goodbye, mourned more than she had for any corporeal person (which was still not very much,) and folded away that part of herself and went back to not existing.
But for seven months.
For seven months, she had.
Our plea for a late pass would point out the fact that British pop-starlet Ellie Goulding is not really our typical okaypleezy-steezy. But then again, The Weeknd most certainly is so all that’s really left for us to do is begging Your Honor for leniency. Taking some (but not all) of the grunge out of the House of Balloons joint, Chiddy Bang‘s Xaphoon Jones provides the beat and Ellie provides the sweet. Don’t tell us you wouldn’t wanna get high with this woman.
spotted at 2DB
This is a very good question. There are several important things you need to do.
First, you need a round hole in your chest that goes all the way through you. I can never stress enough to the kids, it has to be a perfect circle, about the diameter of a drinking glass rim, it has to be in the absolute center of your chest - like where a heart would go on a plumber or a woman - and it has to go clean through you. If you’re standing in front of me and I can’t see the wall behind you, you’re never really going to write much more than a dream journal, recipe book, or maybe one of those manuals that tells people what writing is.
A lot of people say “what about my heart, what’s going to pump my blood around,” which brings us to step two: you have to be made of something other than flesh and blood. I prefer to be made of mud, because it keeps women and children away from me. Other writers are made of dirt, or excrement, the choice is yours, it just can’t be anything that anyone would want in their bed and it has to be a substance that adheres to itself but nothing around it, so that you can keep a generally human shape for as long as possible. Appearing human-like is important to the next step.
Sit or stand in front of paper or a computing device and turn your back to everything, which will incite it to attack you. Everything preys on humanity and goes for the heart, so hold still, arch your back and it should shoot through your hole and onto your keyboard. As it passes, it will be tainted and scattered by the inside rim of whatever you’re made of, which some would call your “voice” but which I call “filth.” The more there is, the more people notice you’re “a writer” and the more you’re doing it wrong. Your job is to be a heartless piece of dirt, a puppet, a necessary but largely unremarkable conduit of something better than you, something lovable, something with purpose, and your one redeeming act before it finishes with you is to find the angle at which you barely affect its path.
If none of this is possible, you could always become an assistant of some kind on Glee and I’m sure eventually you’d just get to write one. Good luck!
