Joe Stracci's blog. Topics covered include, but are not limited to: writing, art, technology, Apple, food, fatherhood, parenting, and music. And photography. And design. And sports. Oh, and probably some politics too.
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Rings is the just-released first single of Aesop Rock's new solo record, The Impossible Kid. I still remember meeting him at SUNY Purchase in 2005. I'd lie and say I've dug much of his stuff since Bazooka Tooth, but this one seems to have some of that old fire. I hope the new record is just as good.
/via Rhymesayers
Jayson Greene, writing for Pitchfork:
Kanye's second child Saint was born in early December, and there's something distinctly preoccupied about this whole project—it feels wry, hurried, mostly good-natured, and somewhat sloppy. Like a lot of new parents, Kanye feels laser-focused on big stuff—love, serenity, forgiveness, karma—and a little frazzled on the details. "Ultralight Beam" opens with the sound of a 4-year-old preaching gospel, some organ, and a church choir: "This is a God dream," goes the refrain. But everything about the album's presentation—the churning tracklist, the broken promises to premiere it here or there, the scribbled guest list—feels like Kanye ran across town to deliver a half-wrapped gift to a group birthday party to which he was 10 minutes late.
This is probably the best review I've read of TLOP. This is the only assertion that I disagree with:
The Life of Pablo is, accordingly, the first Kanye West album that's just an album: No major statements, no reinventions, no zeitgeist wheelie-popping.
The way TLOP was and/or is in the process of being released is the big deal here. In five years or so, I think we'll look back at this moment and realize that this was when the gate officially came crashing down on the old way of doing these kinds of things.
Erin Lee Carr, writing on Medium:
Six months ago, I had a big meeting. The kind of meeting that wrenches you awake at 6am in a cold sweat, with the feeling that you hadn’t ever really fallen asleep. I arrived an hour early, naturally, so I went to a nearby cafe. I was prepared, I had my hard drives, and they had great stuff on them, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had forgotten something. As I sat there and stress ate a piece of chocolate fudge cake, I realized I felt off because I hadn’t talked to my dad, a tradition I observed before every big meeting. I wasn’t able have the prep phone-call the night before to go over the words that could win me anything. I just had my own thoughts rattling around in my head. I felt like I had lost my ace in the deck and if you knew my dad, I promise you’d agree.
For some reason, it makes me really happy to know that David Carr was such a good Dad.
Nicholas Kristof, writing for The New York Times:
It’s good to see leading Republicans standing up to him today, but the situation recalls the Chinese saying, qi hu nan xia — when you’re riding a tiger, the hard part is getting off.
Yup.
Jennifer Williams, writing for Vox:
According to the FBI, which considers this a domestic terrorist movement, "By declaring themselves 'sovereign citizens,' they [believe that they] are emancipated from the responsibilities of being a U.S. citizen, including paying taxes, possessing a state driver’s license, or obeying the law."
Things like driver's licenses, permits, and even zip codes are seen as "contracts" with the illegitimate US government that cede one's sovereignty. By rejecting these things, you're "tearing up" the contract and freeing yourself.
These beliefs may be nutty, but the groups are quite serious. A 2014 survey asked US law enforcement officials to rank terrorist threats to the United States. They ranked sovereign citizens as the highest threat — with Islamic extremists coming in second.
Will Trump build a wall to keep these nuts out?
Oh, wait—they're already in.
This album—the sound and the subject matter and the timing of it—will always mean more to me than most people who hear it, I know, but I still feel like this is worth sharing.
/via Pitchfork
I read for hours that way, morning after morning, my mind awhirl. For the first few hundred pages of my initial reading, I will confess that I greatly disliked “Infinite Jest.” Why? Jealousy, frustration, impatience. It’s hard to remember exactly why. It wasn’t until I was writing letters to my girlfriend, and describing to her my fellow Peace Corps volunteers and host-family members and long walks home through old Soviet collectivized farmland in what I would categorize as yellow-belt Wallaceian prose, that I realized how completely the book had rewired me. Here is one of the great Wallace innovations: the revelatory power of freakishly thorough noticing, of corralling and controlling detail. Most great prose writers make the real world seem realer — it’s why we read great prose writers. But Wallace does something weirder, something more astounding: Even when you’re not reading him, he trains you to study the real world through the lens of his prose. Several writers’ names have become adjectivized — Kafkaesque, Orwellian, Dickensian — but these are designators of mood, of situation, of civic decay. The Wallaceian is not a description of something external; it describes something that happens ecstatically within, a state of apprehension (in both senses) and understanding. He didn’t name a condition, in other words. He created one.
Reading 'Infinite Jest' changes you. There's no way around it. Writer or not, it changes your brain. It doesn't just exercise your muscles; it activates muscles that you never even knew you had.
Conor Friedersdorf, writing for The Atlantic:
Now, Rush Limbaugh isn’t the chair of the Republican National Committee. One can easily find figures who more fully embody “the Republican establishment” or “the ruling class.” It is nevertheless absurd for him to speak as if he somehow exists outside of this power system. And the clearest illustration of why it is absurd came Wednesday on his radio show, when he was explaining to his listeners why it is difficult for him to cover the dispute among Donald Trump, Megyn Kelly, and the Fox News Channel.
“It’s very hard when you know everybody involved,” he began, “and when you consider them friends.” Then he spoke frankly about a number of his friends on the right.
I've been making this argument for a few years now. If millions of people know your name, you're not an outsider. It just doesn't work that way.
