1. Odessa Steps Scene (Battleship Potemkin; Sergei Eisenstein; 1925)

    Reserve reading watching for the long-suffering readers of my dumbass toots. (Start around 5:36.1)

    Especially prepared for the fortunate residents of the center-to-right four-fifths of the social curve—comprised of persons who chose to spend the weekends of their early teen years “having dates” and “going to parties,” and “couple-skating to ‘Open Arms.’”

    Rather than—say, just hypothetically—“chugging 2-liter bottles of Mountain Dew and watching reruns of Masters of the Silent Screen before caving in to 35 frenzied seconds of masturbating to the girdle section of a decade-old Penneys catalog, and eventually falling asleep to the late night album-sides on 98 Rock.”

    Yep. Film scholarship is complicated.

    1. My Christ, eighty-five years later, this is still a jaw-dropping piece of filmmaking. ↩

  2. Digging for Answers

    Digging for Answers

  3. Wizzard - “See My Baby Jive” (Top of the Pops; Xmas, 1973)

    First, I couldn’t stop listening to this on repeat for a half hour.

    And, now I’ve apparently watched this insane and very colorful 1973 TV performance three times in a row.

    Why? Easy.

    1. Songs like this are why rock ‘n roll is better than almost anything;
    2. Few objects in the universe are more empirically fascinating than Roy Wood;
    3. With the notable exceptions of John Entwistle and Mr. Wood, bass-playing veterans of the British Invasion era rarely felt comfortable even being photographed with the notoriously-difficult-to-play French horn;
    4. It was only in the 1970s that Western Civilization briefly saw how to harness and channel the inscrutable mystique of a man wearing an inexpensive gorilla costume.

    Roy Wood is a goddamned treasure.

  4. Freehold, we have a problem.

    Freehold, we have a problem.

  5. The Swell Season covers  Neutral Milk Hotel | Music | A.V. Undercover | The A.V. Club

    Sweet maui onion, that motherfucker can sing.1

    What an ambitious and revered song to cover, but, holy shit, does he ever hit the 3-pointer.

    Sure, I’d probably listen to Glen Hansard sing the ingredients on a shampoo bottle, but this is, you have to admit, pretty great.

    Bonus: The Mighty Mangum playing 2-HB solo/live in 1998.

    [Swell Season via sorry I totally forget who sorry] [struck @ 2010-08-13_12-13-31PDT]

    [Swell Season via The Bacon Review]2

    1. Well. Eventually, he sings. First there’s a goddamned pre-roll beer commercial, then a spoodeley theme song, then an explanation of the “Undercover” project, then a kinda-cute interview, then I blacked out for a while, but I’m pretty sure I heard a song and saw a guy in a hat. It’s all kind of fuzzy now. My Lord, how the web breaks so hard when your chrome outshines your gold. Kind of like the delicious gold you’ll find inside every bottle of Budweiser®. Budweiser® America’s Great Liquid Error.™
      (Budweiser is brewed to be enjoyed responsibly by adults. © 2010 Anheuser-Busch, Inc., Budweiser®, St. Louis, MO. All rights reserved.) ↩

    2. royalbacon says: “I’m reblogging this for two reasons: 1) Jeff Mangum live! and 2) I think Merlin found this because of me, and he just forgot because he’s a busy guy.”
      1. THANK YOU! (Thing is, I scoured my Dashboard and Reader subs and couldn’t turn it up. Apologies that you were overlooked, and thanks again.)
      2. Also? I’m not busy. I’m just disoriented. And that makes me look busy. Because my brow is furrowed, my eyes are crossed, and my cocksucking motherfucking book still isn’t done. Self-loathing is a hell of a drug. ↩

  6. Letters of Note: Remembering Tony Wilson

    Letters of Note: Remembering Tony Wilson

  7. On the Clarifying Power of Market Intelligence

    And, you can’t sell me bullshit—
    We know the prices.

    Jay-Z, dropping an awesome line that seems a little more profound every time I hear it.1

    (mp3)

    1. No, I’m not showing off. Without line breaks, half my toots look like JavaScript written by ducks without a coding standard. Others? Yeah, linebreaks really help. ↩

  8. DTerm: A command line anywhere and everywhere Oh, man. DTerm = instantaneous, low-friction, “get in/get out” CLI access from anyplace on your Mac. Daddy like…even more than Visor. Get, get, get. Gold, I tells ya. Also? DTerm’s not a bad way to start dipping your toe into the murky waters of (dunh-dunh-DUNNHHHHH!!!!) the command line (mmm…bash). It looks a lot scarier than it really is, I swear. Like Photoshop and sexual intercourse, *NIX has way more options than a beginner needs to learn or a casual user needs to master. I mean, seriously—to start banging around with any of the three, you only really need to know maybe 3% of the options. Which leaves you with a comforting level of complexity, depth, and breadth to just ignore until you really need it. Which there’s a good chance you won’t. Viz: Unsharp Mask → Adjust Levels → (byzantine, bajillion-layer mask, knockout, and blend jive) cd → sed → troff changing your fucking sheets → oral sex without weeping and scream-singing songs from Scout camp → University of Phoenix “master class” in Tantric Jism Calligraphy [via the outstanding (and highly-recommended) One Thing Well]

    DTerm: A command line anywhere and everywhere

    Oh, man. DTerm = instantaneous, low-friction, “get in/get out” CLI access from anyplace on your Mac. Daddy like…even more than Visor.

    Get, get, get. Gold, I tells ya.

    Also? DTerm’s not a bad way to start dipping your toe into the murky waters of (dunh-dunh-DUNNHHHHH!!!!) the command line (mmm…bash). It looks a lot scarier than it really is, I swear. Like Photoshop and sexual intercourse, *NIX has way more options than a beginner needs to learn or a casual user needs to master.

    I mean, seriously—to start banging around with any of the three, you only really need to know maybe 3% of the options. Which leaves you with a comforting level of complexity, depth, and breadth to just ignore until you really need it. Which there’s a good chance you won’t.
    Viz:

    1. Unsharp Mask → Adjust Levels → (byzantine, bajillion-layer mask, knockout, and blend jive)
    2. cd → sed → troff
    3. changing your fucking sheets → oral sex without weeping and scream-singing songs from Scout camp → University of Phoenix “master class” in Tantric Jism Calligraphy

    [via the outstanding (and highly-recommended) One Thing Well]