The Negotiation Limerick File
RSSBethlehem Says: Belated Thoughts on Adam Yauch
When their place in the genre’s history gets discussed, the Beasties are frequently referred to as a “gateway” act; my relationship with them, in a sense, a generational trope. The screwball collages of Paul’s Boutique and Check Your Head’s skate-punk soul jazz are considerably more original and highly-regarded; The Beastie Boys made the greatest impact with their first album, a novelty record whose cultural pastiche was more memorable than its musical accomplishments, then spent almost two decades proving they were more than obnoxious rip-off artists.
Except Licensed to Ill wouldn’t have worked if it had simply lead so many of us to rap music. Licensed to Ill didn’t just put the idea of hip-hop in our heads, it taught us the basics of how to listen to it.
I’ve been taking issue with people saying the Beastie Boys were “gateway” artists. Sure, they might have turned kids on to hip-hop, but that also implies they were A) not the real thing, and B) those kids would move on once they discovered the real thing. The Beasties mattered because they reinforced the “real” hip-hop, but at the same time perfected their own style that was always worth listening to in and of itself, not simply handing you off to something better.
There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready.
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Maurice Sendak: On Life, Death And Children’s Lit : NPR
I feel kind of ashamed admitting this, but I don’t remember reading Where the Wild Things Are as a kid. I knew about it, but I’m not sure we had a copy. But I have grown to love it reading it to my own kids, including a German translation we have for some reason that I’m able to stumble through with my high school Deutsch.
Sendak lived a full life, and as he sails off on a private boat through day and night, and in and out of weeks, and almost over a year to where the wild things are, the world he left is better for his stories.
Why Publishers Don't Like Apps
I don’t think this should be treated as a great revelation. Publishers don’t (or have come to dislike) apps because readers don’t like them. I never understood the appeal of a single-serving app on my iPhone or iPad that only does one thing: serve up content from one publication. It really is the modern day CD-ROM. The currency of online content is the individual post/article/photo/video with a discrete link. If I can’t get it through social media, RSS, or at least save it to Instapaper, I don’t want any part of it.
The ideal memorial is written from distance, a generous calculation of merit that proceeds honorably without abandoning accuracy. I have to apologize right now for being unable to give you that—Adam Yauch was a part of my childhood, an ambassador to America from our New York, which is now gone, as is he. (via Postscript: Adam Yauch : The New Yorker)
It dawned on me that since I named my Tumblr after a Beastie Boys song, this ought to be the place I say something about Adam Yauch. The Beastie Boys are as responsible for my musical tastes as anyone, right up there with Public Enemy (don’t tell anyone, but Wu-Tang is kind of a distant third—I only carry on about them because of the nickname).
Like Sasha Frere-Jones wrote there, they were a part of my childhood too. I watched the video for “Fight For Your Right” in grade school with my older sister and her friends like it was some samizdat forbidden object. “You mean those guys really go around throwing pies in everyone’s faces?” I grew up with them as they evolved into one of the most creative hip-hop groups ever (I got chills listening to “Pass the Mic” again this morning), but the sheer breadth of their music—hip-hop, punk, funk, all played with equal skill—turned me on to everything else I love today.
Ill Communication was the soundtrack of college. I wish I could be paid an hourly wage for how many times I listened to “Get it Together,” and Hello Nasty is the only album I ever waited in line to buy at midnight.
I was lucky enough to see them in concert once here at the United Center in Chicago, but the time I missed them may be my greatest Beastie Boys memory. I had tickets for a tour with Rage Against the Machine in 2000 that was cancelled when Mike D wrecked a bike and broke his collarbone. It’s funny what memory can do; I’ve seen Rage in concert a couple of times too, and the combined show I see in my head almost feels real.
You can’t call his death shocking or unexpected. Dude had cancer, and now that I work at a hospital I know how depressingly common that is. But the sad fact is that the Beasties were still at the top of their game. I suppose I’m mourning the end of the group as a whole as much as MCA himself. He was the conscience of the group, the one who initiated their maturation and disavowal of their knucklehead early days, but it’s hard to separate the three of them. I really hope Adrock and Mike D choose to end it now. Their last album, Hot Sauce Committee, was as good as anything they recorded, and the thought that it was their last record is comforting. At least they went out on top.
I’ve been listening to Beastie Boys music for the past day now, all their proper records plus the dozens of weird and bizarre remixes I collected over the years. But I don’t really need to hear it again. That music is part of me. I can turn it on in my head whenever I need it.
Do these people who stay out at parties until three if they feel like it, who sleep late, and can spend an entire day lost in a book, or suddenly take off for a few weeks in Amsterdam, seem like they are living on a richer plane? Even for those of us who wouldn’t give up our maddening burdens in their striped pajamas, that freedom can be something of a reproach, if we are honest. If we weren’t taking this freedom personally, as a sort of criticism of dullness or drabness or routine, a kind of red pencil in the margins of our more mundane stories, we would be a little better, as a culture, at letting the childless (or as Badinter calls them, “the childfree”) go in peace.
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Childlessness remains a taboo. - Slate Magazine
Katie Roiphe says what most parents aren’t willing to admit, that we’re secretly jealous of people without kids. Sure, none of us would trade our kids for the “childfree” life once we have them, but it’s probably not healthy bury those feelings either.
Personally, I feel it most intensely when I read about some young, creative person’s career. “Sure, that sounds great and all, but try doing that with a full-time job and two kids,” I think. It makes me feel like a colossal asshole and it’s totally unfair, because I made this choice to have a family willingly. But it also does me no good to hide from that reaction. The trick is making peace with it.
Great trick shot video or greatest trick shot video? Presenting Trickwinkle, featuring Don Mattingly beaning a bear mascot and his son Preston and his buddies chucking balls into baskets at various Evansville, Indiana high school gyms and football fields. As a southern Indiana native myself, I thought I’d offer a viewer’s guide:
- The baseball field where Donnie Baseball is harassing the unfortunate bear in the Giants hat is Bosse Field, Evansville’s ancient civic stadium. Once upon a time it was the home of the Triplets, a Triple-A team for the Tigers, but now it hosts the Otters, a team in the independent Frontier League, and various high school and college teams. Legend has it that as a high schooler, Don Mattingly once belted a home run completely out of the stadium that hit the Crawford Doors warehouse across the street. My friends and I debunked that myth one night when we cased the surrounding streets and realized it would have been nearly a 700 foot shot to dead center. The Hitman was good, but not that good. I also played many games there, but sadly never hit a home run of any distance. Bonus points: the world series scenes in “A League of Their Own” were also filmed at Bosse Field.
- Preston Mattingly is an outfielder now in the Yankees system. Apparently he isn’t quite the hitter his dad was but he looks exactly like him, right down to the mullet.
- The dude in the candy-striped pants is Kipp Schutz, an outfielder in the Orioles farm system who briefly walked on the Indiana University basketball team in the dark days of Tom Crean’s early tenure when they took any warm body with athletic skill to fill the bench. This video would be extra special if those are the actual varsity issue Hoosier warm ups and not just the knockoffs you can buy at the university bookstore.
- I spotted the following football fields and gyms: Evansville Central’s football field and gym; the Evansville North gym; the Evansville Reitz gym and the legendary Reitz Bowl football stadium. Strangely Evansville Memorial, where Don Mattingly played, doesn’t show up at all.
- I’m assuming the bear comes from the mascot for Central, where Preston Mattingly went to school.
(Source: deadspin.com)
Can Pinterest and Svpply Help You *Reduce* Your Consumption?
Chris Tackett, theatlantic.comProduct-bookmarking sites can give us the pleasure of shopping without the environmental impact of consuming.
At first glance, it would seem that the new generation of product-bookmarking sites such as Pinterest and Svpply are nothing mor…
I think they’re onto something with the idea that bookmarking sites like Pinterest can replace consumption. Instead of buying something on impulse, you save it on Pinterest and maybe think twice later. I’ve noticed the same thing when I save books to an Amazon wish list instead of buying them instantly in the Kindle app. I’ll often go back and look at the list and delete it because it doesn’t sound great anymore. Call it the “What was I thinking?” process.
People who disdain the 140-character convention of Twitter fail to see that a person’s Twitter persona is not determined by one tweet any more than a writer’s style is determined by one sentence. In Twitter, it’s the stream that matters, even a single person’s stream: the stereotypical what-I-had-for-lunch tweet can actually be interesting and even revelatory when it comes in the midst of a series of thoughtful reflections on politics, culture, art. It’s really kind of wonderful to learn that that person whose incisive thinking you so admire has some of those incisive thoughts while eating tacos.
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The Sentences of Twitter - Alan Jacobs - Technology - The Atlantic
Alan makes a good point about what I’ve always thought was an underappreciated element of Twitter, the stream or series of tweets. I feel like there’s too much emphasis on single tweets that can be retweeted and passed around as a bite-sized aphorism. I understand the benefits of brevity and concision, but sometimes the best thoughts—or even more so, the best punchlines—really shouldn’t be delivered in a single unit of text. It’s the delivery that matters, and the rhythm and timing of a series of 3-4 tweets can often express something in a more powerful (or hilarious) way.
