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A look back at sad rap: hip-hop has never been too cool for despair
In January 2018, The New Yorker ran the article Lil Xan and the Year in Sad Rap, in which Carrie Battan provides a snapshot of a recent trend where "a cohort of young musicians embraced a depressive sound and became stars." Except the article misses the (slightly) longer history of this sub-genre, focusing on the recent past where Lil Uzi Vert's XO Tour Llif3 is a pinnacle of modern melancholy machismo, but missing 16 year old Yung Lean and his tongue-in-cheek cable broadcast "sadboy" aesthetic earlier in the current sad rap trend, back in 2013. And that's not the beginning, just another starting point.
DIY or Die in 1994
So it's 1994 and you're punk as fuck and nobody's gonna do it for you, so you wanna put together a show and need to know what bands and venues are around. Or you're a band and you want to set up a tour, or find a label, or maybe you just want zines and tapes from places outside your town. The internet's barely there, so it's a good thing you've got your grimy hands on the 1994 edition of Book Your Own Fuckin' Life, a full copy of which is being kindly hosted by the Internet Archive.
Rock Star Philosopher
In the TLS this week, Samuel Earle reviews two books on literary theorist Roland Barthes. Neil Badmington's book is discussed further in Rhys Tranter's interview with the author, who is editor of the open access Barthes Studies. Philippe Sollers's book includes material available online in French. At architecture / theory blog The Charnel-House, "The Marxism of Roland Barthes" covers an element of Barthes's background and links to primary sources suitable as introductions, e.g. Mythologies, Camera Lucida, "The Death of the Author," and S/Z— a dissection of Balzac's Sarrasine (included as an appendix).
10 quadrillion vulgar tongues
Vulgar is a constructed language (conlang) generator for fantasy fiction writing that creates unique and usable constructed languages in the click of a button. Vulgar’s output models the regularities, irregularities and quirks of real world languages; phonology, grammar, and a 2000 unique word vocabulary.
Something to do with drawing close
Laurie Scheck's "Dostoevsky’s Empathy" and Maria R. Bloshteyn's "Rage and Revolt: Dostoevsky and Three African-American Writers": two engaging articles made available online this week to commemorate Dostoevsky's birthday.
Holidays, gratitude, and Metafilter
At the close of the shittiest week out of a shitty year, I just got sent a picture of my adorable nephew on Santa’s lap, which means inconceivably, American Thanksgiving and the remaining end of year holidays are nigh upon us. And while my mood in the face of recent events isn’t particularly thankful, I am so incredibly grateful to the Metafilter mods for all the work they’ve done this year.
The Irrational Downfall of Park Geun-hye
Even assuming the unlikely possibility Park Geun-hye might not have had the discernment to know firsthand (unlikely because she grew up in the lap of luxury,) the obvious cheapness of Park's clothes and bags even made the news. Yet nothing came of it. Choi Soon-sil dressed Park Geun-hye liked an unwanted doll, and Park, the president of the country, did not care.Ask a Korean attempts to explain the current South Korean presidential corruption scandal and why it shocked the country more than previous such scandals.
Book: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Rick Deckard was an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job was to find rogue androids, and to retire them. But cornered, androids tended to fight back, with deadly results.
The Best Rap Songs of 2015
Passion of the Weiss: The Best Rap Songs of 2015. It's the best year-end list I've come across -- thoughtful, articulate stuff from people who get it, and the majority of it is criminally overlooked/obscure and well worth your time. No matter how in-the-know you are, there's lots of new, crucial stuff here for you. (And no Drake in sight.)
MeFi Horror Club: A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)
The next pick for the MeFi Horror Club will be posted to Fanfare on Friday, December 5th. A Tale of Two Sisters (Hangul: 장화, 홍련; Janghwa, Hongryeon) is a 2003 South Korean psychological horror film written and directed by Kim Jee-woon. The film is inspired by a Joseon Dynasty folktale entitled "Janghwa Hongryeon jeon", which has been adapted to film several times. The plot focuses on two sisters who, after returning home from a psychiatric hospital, experience increasingly disturbing events involving both them and their stepmother.
OBSIDIOTS: Live From District 11
The sheer brilliance that was Medieval Land Fun-Time World (previously) is hard to top, but the guys at Bad Lip Reading have soldiered on. They recently released a treatment of “Catching Fire”, and if you skip past to near the end, you’ll hear Katniss and Peeta contemplate forming a pop group and then… well, the inevitable.
MeFi Horror Film Club, #2: Noroi/The Curse
The Horror Club's first selection, The Cabin in the Woods has gone over well, after only 24 hours becoming the most-commented upon movie thread in FanFare's short history. So, to keep this party rolling, here's next week's selection:
Noroi (The Curse) Bonus: this week's pick is available in its entirety on YouTube.
MeFi Horror Film Club
As a spinoff of this discussion about new labels in FanFare, I floated the idea of pseudo-formal FanFare movie clubs, in which threads could be posted for older movies and folks would convene to discuss them, book club-style. Several folks seemed interested, with the idea of a horror movie club on the table.
Who's on board for a MeFi Horror Movie Club? I figure we can get together and choose a movie here and reconvene next Monday in a FanFare thread to discuss the film. Ideas?
Emily Dickinson's handwritten manuscripts
The Emily Dickinson Archive
is a collection of high resolution digital images of Emily Dickinson's handwritten manuscripts. Here are, for instance, Because I Could Not Stop for Death, Tell the Truth but Tell It Slant, I Dwell in Possibility, They Shut Me Up in Prose and I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died. The whole collection is fully searchable and the images include the text of the poems as they were written down by Dickinson. The archive is a project of Harvard's Houghton Library but many other institutions provided manuscripts. Perhaps the best place to start is to simply browse the poems by title.
We Beat the Drum Slowly
Chad VanGaalen animates a surreal drive through Hollywood in the video for Timber Timbre's Beat the Drum Slowly. VanGaalen also produces animations for his own music: Molten Light, Flower Gardens, Clinically Dead, Peace on the Rise and Red Hot Drops. Some imagery slightly NWS.
"Next thing you know, you're packin' extra socks!"
"In this excerpt from Keith Cameron's new biography Mudhoney: The Sound and the Fury from Seattle, spanning the end of grunge's golden era (Fall 1993 to Fall 1994), we have Mudhoney opening area tours first for Nirvana and then Pearl Jam - the latter of which is shattered by Kurt Cobain's suicide - and joining Vedder & co. for a tour of the White House, during which President Bill Clinton meets with Eddie Vedder to discuss whether or not he should address the nation about Cobain's suicide."
Weird & Wonderful Excellent Esoteric Nightmare Narratives
Please recommend as much artsy, intelligent, literary horror fiction (in any medium: books, stories, films, whatever) as you can!
Translations of Stefan Grabinski, Poland's Poe, Lovecraft, of sorts
Stefan Grabiński is often called "the Polish Poe" or "the Polish Lovecraft," which are both useful for short-hand, but don't quite capture Grabiński's style. As suggested by China Miéville in the Guardian, "where Poe's horror is agonised, a kind of extended shriek, Grabinski's is cerebral, investigative. His protagonists are tortured and aghast, but not because they suffer at the caprice of Lovecraftian blind idiot gods: Grabinski's universe is strange and its principles are perhaps not those we expect, but they are principles - rules - and it is in their exploration that the mystery lies." If you haven't heard of Grabiński, it is probably because only a few of his works have recently been translated to English. The primary translator is Miroslaw Lipinski, who runs a site dedicated to Grabiński. You can read Lipinksi's translation of Strabismus (PDF linked inside), and The Wandering Train online.
Architects, Ethics, and Prison Design
The American Institute of Architects’ Code of Ethics [pdf] states that “Members should uphold human rights in all their professional endeavors." Raphael Sperry, president of Architects, Designers and Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), wants to amend the code further so it reads "Members shall not design spaces intended for execution or for torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, including prolonged solitary confinement." From Architect Magazine: “Should Architects Design Prisons?”
Ramsey + Moore = God
David Chalmers and Alan Hájek give a one-page argument that the Ramsey test and Moorean reasoning entail that rational subjects should accept that they have the epistemic powers of a god [pdf].
A song for the formerly hearing impaired
I Liked You Better Deaf. (slyt, now with captions)
NSA says: squeeeeeee!
The attack can extract full 4096-bit RSA decryption keys from laptop computers ... within an hour ... using either a plain mobile phone placed next to the computer, or a more sensitive microphone placed 4 meters away. RSA Key Extraction via Low-Bandwidth Acoustic Cryptanalysis
"Stop at nothing... Betray, violate, cause enormous harm."
"I listen to Ira’s show on and off, because I think they do the best work there is in that form. But This American Life has inspired this proliferation of programs where people tell their stories, and I think it’s gotten—there’s too much of it. I find it annoying, because it’s very uneven. Now it just seems like everybody’s telling a story, and it’s beginning to sound narcissistic, and I’m thinking, Who gives a shit about your story? You’re just another person telling your story. How many do we need?" Joe Frank interviewed by Jonathan Goldstein for The Believer
I'm a hero hunter. I hunt heroes. Still haven't found any.
"In this way, Mills achieves a genuine transgression: he admits defeat. Which is to say, he reveals himself as only creating new masculine fantasies in the same mode as his prior works – superseding Virago’s feminine motives in favor of manly rage at spoiled ambitions – while at the same time savaging superheroes in a way that is not truly destructive, but merely substituting an arguably worse status quo for the genre’s prior lies. As you say, Marshal Law is grim ‘n gritty in the fashion of its day, but I would add that Mills’s admission of inefficacy at promoting substantive change marks it as the only post-Watchmen work — and, by its murder mystery, its wartime background, its American critique, and its spoofing of extant superhero archetypes, it is very specifically post-Watchmen — that betrays some cognizance as to the ways in which Watchmen’s legacy would be processed: more violence, more darkness, more ugliness atop a hardly-cracked genre foundation." -- Janean Patience and Joe McCulloch discuss Marshall Law; part 2, part 3, part 4.
The Bus.
Paul Kirchner's The Bus is a surreal gag strip that ran in Heavy Metal magazine in the early 80s. It can be bought as a book, but the book is out of print. Here it is on Imgur. Downright scrumptious, old-fashioned flavor with that 70s east-coast anomie vibe.
This ain't chemistry. This is Art.
With the momentous series finale of Breaking Bad just hours away, fans of the show are hungry for something, anything to wile away the time before the epic conclusion tonight. So why not kick back and chew the fat with your fellow MeFites with the help of a little tool I like to call "The Periodic Table of Breaking Bad."
A roiling sea of leather-jacketed anger and raised middle fingers
The chant began less than two minutes into the first song. An undercurrent at first, just a few hecklers. But it got louder with repetition, each wave building on the last. Soon the chant threatened to drown out the band itself.
“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
1986: Punk band Discharge goes hair metal
“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
1986: Punk band Discharge goes hair metal
BART's tax shelters
How transit agencies pay for corporate tax shelters so they can pay their own bills.
Here's to you my little loves, with blessings from above
San Francisco band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club recently released a worthy cover of The Call's Let the Day Begin.
Knock, knock. Who's there? Banana. Banana who?
"While playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) we discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet. "
After completing the scan of roughly one hundred thousand IP addresses, we realized the number of insecure devices must be at least one hundred thousand. Starting with one device and assuming a scan speed of ten IP addresses per second, it should find the next open device within one hour. The scan rate would be doubled if we deployed a scanner to the newly found device. After doubling the scan rate in this way about 16.5 times, all unprotected devices would be found; this would take only 16.5 hours. Additionally, with one hundred thousand devices scanning at ten probes per second we would have a distributed port scanner to port scan the entire IPv4 Internet within one hour.
How does wasting away together in Metafilterville sound?
Pursuant to this comment I made on the blue, (and ignoring what happened to the cruise passengers in that thread,) what does everyone think of our arranging a Metafilter cruise, resort or mountain cottages week-long getaway sometime?
Oh, what a tiny compressed history of love and struggle.
Sister Arts: On Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Others
Starting off examining the friendship between Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, Lisa L. Moore examines how poetry acted as the lingua franca of second-wave feminism.
Sick Papes
Sick Papes
on Allometric Scaling of Metabolism, Growth, and Activity in Whole Colonies of the Seed‐Harvester Ant Pogonomyrmex californicus: “Dudes have been flubberbusting long and hard about whether we should think about the bees in a hive (or people in a city, or dicks in a game of dick jenga) as a wonderful communion of separate beings or as all just the dangly bits of one MegaMan. As the disturbing old saying goes, there’s many ways to skin a cat, but what perverted shitbag wants to skin a cat a bunch of different ways? So the world was on the verge of turning its back forever on this age old question and exploding in a supernova of its own ignorance. That is until some brave souls (Dr. James Waters and colleagues) figured out the illest of ways to blow the lid off a part of this problem. But let me slow my roll a bit and fill in the rubbly background that makes it crystalline just why this pape is so sick…”
Shinier, happier people.
Major scaled is a Vimeo user who digitally transposes sad songs into a major key. Here's their cheerful rendition of REM's Losing My Religion.
Love in the Time of Recession
Vini Reilly, of English post-punks The Durutti Column, had been through a rough couple of years. His friend and mentor (and Factory Records boss) Tony Wilson died, and then the already fragile guitarist suffered a series of strokes. Unable to play, and frustrated in his attempts to secure government assistance, he found himself having to sell his studio gear in order to make rent and pay off debts. Then his nephew decided to rally the fans.
. .. and now, it's time to scare you half to death.
Nightfall was a popular and controversial horror and sci-fi series that aired on CBC Radio between 1980 and 1983.
Damn, I wish I thought of that.
The Jealous Curator
is 'a collection of art that inspires & depresses' its proprietor, who has been updating the site almost daily since February 2009 with series of paintings, sculpture and mixed media, furniture, and always with light-hearted commentary about what's posted.
Mark Pauline: terrorism as art
Terrorism as art:
Mark Pauline's dangerous machines. Robots, rebellion, and the post-apocalyptic performance art of Survival Research Labs.
The other film adaptation of J.G. Ballard's "Crash"
Long before the David Cronenberg film (NSFW: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10), before even the publication of the novel, Harley Cokeliss directed Crash! (1, 2) - a short film adapted from the story in J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, starring Ballard himself and Gabrielle Drake (sister of Nick Drake). (previously)