Ego Trip's Race-o-Rama

Got off the phone with DMSB earlier this evening. Among other things, we talked about some possible topics to put up here, such as the passing of James Weinstein. I learned of him through the NYT obit. What caught my eye at first was that he had founded In These Times. But I was surprised to read that he'd also founded one of our neighborhood institutions, Modern Times. Google turned up this more extensive obit.

After DB had to sign off (Terra alert), I cracked open the laptop with the plan to do some work. But I also turned on the TV for some background noise, and found an episode of Ego Trip's Race-o-Rama playing on VH-1...and felt compelled to do a post on it. (Which brings to mind a phrase I caught in another Daniel Drezner post: "Maybe the Internet is not the nirvana of Habermasian discourse, but the academic version of crack." That's chimes in on two recent posts--in addition to linking to Drezner last week, I slipped in a reference to the idea of the web as a Habermasian public sphere here.)

But back to the topic at hand. Have you guys seen this Ego Trip show? I read something about it when it premiered--it may have been this Ta-Nehisi Coates piece from the Voice--but hadn't caught one until now. Seems to be worth seeking out--where else are you going to find folks talking about race in this manner on TV, now that Chappelle appears to be on extended hiatus. (In fact, I thought of characterizing the Ego Trip show as an extended and expanded version of Paul Mooney's Ask a Black Dude/Negrodamus segments on Chappelle.)

That VH-1 put something like this on shows they're not completely culturally bankrupt, as Johnee seemed to imply in his last post. Though it's an odd coincidence that the Ego Trip crew was previously best known (to me, at least) for their book of lists (thanks to DB for hooking me up with that one a few years ago). But they showed there that the list format needn't be intellectually bankrupt.

Spin Top 100 or Why You are the Son of Incestuous Union

Two words: fuck Spin. I've been meaning to say that for about the last 10 years, but never got around to it. Let me also say that the brief existence of the magazine Raygun should remind us all that music journalism, atleast the way I see it, has fallen way off. Raygun was the ultimate medium-as-message for an entire subculture. Spin sucks alot of corporate dick, has abysmal circulation and is perpetually trying to jerry-rig their editorial focus around a shapeshifting demographic that they lost touch with years ago (to understand this, see the part about sucking alot of corporate dick...). Not to mention that Spin has been reduced to a collection of "Top 100" lists, much like VH1--when you have nothing new to say, why not retread the pages with nostalgia and pictures of pretty boy bands (Killers, The Bravery blah blah et. al)? Ok, now that that small editorial conceit is finished, here's what I really think about the partial list released today...

Brilliant so far. OK Computer is the closest thing to a perfect album ever produced--while I detest some of the self-indulgence of subsequent Radiohead, this album is completely worth it. I think a case can be made for Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as a very close #2 here, or even #1 (just saw Wilco live at the Greek, and it was lifted).

Everyone loves these lists, though, because it's like hoping your team will win, and at the end of it all we're all snobs who saw the Pixies when they were just doing college shows or the Germs or whoever--we all want to claim that sliver of authenticity that a rabid fandom can afford. There's always that moment when you hear something on KROQ or see the cover of Spin and you know that it's over, that now, your love affair with this group or artist has become without exception a "guilty pleasure". The subculture slips in to the mainstream as repackaged market-speak. But just like sports radio, this is all about "legacy" of an album, a musical marker of a moment in time.

So I will start the nominations here for other albums that should be added to some list, somewhere, even if it's just the one in my ipod...

My Bloody Valentine "Loveless"
Ice-T: "Power"
Neil Young "After the Goldrush"
Sonic Youth "Goo"
Smashing Pumpkins "Gish"
N.E.R.D. "In Search of..."
Oasis "What's The Story..."
TV on the Radio "Bloodthirsty youths..."
Helmet "Meantime"
NAS "Illmatic"
Black Moon "Enta Da' Stage"
RUN DMC "King Of Rock"
Notorious BIG "Ready to Die"
Superchunk "No Pocky for Kitty"
Bob Mould "Workbook"
U2 "The Unforgettable Fire"
Wilco "A Ghost is Born"
Dinosaur Jr. "Green Mind"
Hole "Pretty on the Inside"
Ministry "Land of Rape and Honey"
etc................

Drezner on White Sox & Moneyball

Since the fatmango seems to have become quite the White Sox fan, thought I'd post this link to a Daniel Drezner post. The post is mostly an excerpt from a front page WSJ article about how the ChiSox are having trouble filling the seats in Comiskey (er, the Cell??) even though they have the best record in baseball. (Though check the first comment, where a South Sider rips into Drezner.)

I made the Garfield+DanyRyanEl trip from Hyde Park to Comiskey only twice, I think. One of those was in Sept '91, before my first year had even actually started--I met a couple high school friends there since the Twins were in town (and come to think of it, it was only a few weeks before they would go on to win the World Series--I vaguely recall watching that famous Game 7 sitting in Woodward on a Sunday night, dreading a physics problem set that was due the next morning). That was new Comiskey's first year in existence--I also recall that I was a prospie on campus in April of that year, just as the first games were being played there.

For more on Drezner, who's a poli sci prof at the UofC, check this post I put up last month.

BTW, I'm still highly recommending Rojo if you're trying to keep up with any blogs--that's how I came across this.

del.icio.us, furl, Google

There's been little action up in here lately, so thought I'd share a few random links. I do have a couple ideas for more substantive posts--almost started one yesterday on C Hitchens, actually, after reading this in Slate; and got another one in mind on Sartre and existentialism, after reading this Norman Mailer piece in the Nation. And I got a way of bringing Brother West into the Sartre piece, thus following up on Johnee's post from a few weeks ago.

Speaking of which, it's dawning on me that the blog structure--or maybe it's just the Blogger structure?--isn't that well-suited for the kind of chime-in, threaded conversations that I'd like to see us having here. Stuff just gets buried in the comments. Any ideas for a better interface that facilitates that kind of thing?

Which brings to mind another link I was thinking of throwing up--the recently launched TPMCafe. In particular, some folks up there had been name-dropping Habermas and his concept of "the public sphere." Check here and here and here. Interesting stuff. In any case, TMPCafe is something to keep your eye on.

But back to the random--but hopefully useful--links I was going to offer up. Last month I e-mailed a few of you about del.icio.us and Furl--new and seemingly trendy takes on the idea of creating on-line bookmark managers. I recall that there were a couple such attempts to build such sites in the late '90s; I was particularly interested in them then, b/c I was always getting on the web on random machines around campus, and thought it would be useful to get at my bookmarks wherever I happened to be. And more generally I've got an archivist streak in me, which is why I started blogging in the first place--to save all the fantastic links one comes across. But the interesting links keep coming up faster than I can blog them; hence the need for a place to save them in the meantime.

Del.icio.us and Furl are interesting b/c they take advantage of tags--useful both for classifying/searching your own bookmarks, and for connecting with what other links user's have bookmarked and tagged (i.e., the "folksonomic" aspect of tag-based systems).

So I created accounts on both sites, and installed the "Post to del.icio.us" and "Furl it" buttons to my browser. I've been using the del.icio.us more regularly--you can see the links I've saved here--although Furl does have the advantage of saving a copy of any page you link on their servers. (Useful for grabbing NYTimes articles, say, before they go into the paid archives!)

However, I did randomly log in to Furl yesterday, and found that they display a list of popular links, which led me to these two useful Google-related links:

• this OSX-style interface for a variety of Google tools


• this quick reference to Google's advanced operators for searching

Finally, I came across a mention of this recently, which is still in GoogleLabs--a way of personalizing Google's search page. Esp useful if you're using gmail.

Another sign that Google is so much more than search. Actually, I think I read about the personalization experiment in an article that claimed that this is evidence that Google aspires to be a portal. But as I've read in a few places, they aspire to much more than even that. I was impressed by this piece that I came across last year, about how Google may be building an OS for the web. (It occurred to me after reading it that Google would be a good long-term investment--how I wish I'd acted upon that that thought and picked up a few shares of Google then.)

Then there is Google's much-hyped initiative to build a virtual library; see for example this MIT TechnReview piece, titled "The Infinite Library" (to bring it back around full circle, just last week I was wading through one of Hitchens' typically dense and cryptic literary essays in The Atlantic, this one about Borges). Finally, I came across this blog entry about another fascinating idea Google is working on. (Note that that's from the blog of the same writer who wrote the TechReview piece. He's got a piece in the works on "continous computing" for the TechReview, for which he's been conducting an experiment in "participatory journalism" on his blog.)

There is some interesting stuff happening out there...

Motown Remixed

motown-remixed
Originally uploaded by suman_ganguli.

I was thinking of doing a post about this new Motown Remixed comp that just came out anyways, but in a nice coincidence, Soul Sides has a few audio snippets, plus the usual insightful commentary (here specifically).

Go the official site to listen to all the tracks, seemingly in their entirety.

I was skeptical when I heard a few weeks ago that Motown was jumping on the remix compilation bandwagon. (Following Verve, with their Remix series, now up to 3 volumes; and Blue Note, with both their Blue Note Revisited and Madlib's Shades of Blue. A lesser-known precursor to these is the Blue Note Remix Project.) So I'm pleasantly surprised to read Soul Sides opine that this may the most consistent of these compilations.

The tracklisting does look tasty: ?Love redoing "Grapevine", Jazzy Jeff taking on the Tempts (sounds great), Spinna doing an Eddie Kendricks track...

I first heard about this disc via an e-mail that came a couple of weeks ago, promoting a release party that took place in the D last weekend (with the flyer above attached).

The party was just one of hundreds of afterhours in the city last weekend, in what's become a Detroit Memorial Day tradition, what with the 5th installment of an electronic music festival taking place on Hart Plaza (oddly called Fuse-in this year, after originally being DEMF and subsequently Movement.) The Free Press had this article about this year's turnout and this review; check also this link that I've been saving since last June.

Just noticed that the Motown party was at the Johansen in Eastern Market actually--the site of the first of the few Detroit afterhours that Anj and I made it out to. On a frigid night in Feb 2001, we rolled in around 2am, with--unforgetabbly--"Sharevari" booming over the system. We were at the Johansen one other time, the following summer--our first time seeing Theo Parrish spin. That night was also memorable b/c we got to Eastern Market too early (midnight), so we got a bite to eat and listened to some seasoned jazz cats blow next door (what's the name of that joint?).

Update (June 9): Just came across this City Pages review of the Motown disc, plus a couple more remix joints (Curtis Mayfield and Atlantic).