Tuesday, April 20, 2004

A few of my gentle readers have written me, taking me to task for writing so much here, lately, about hip-hop.  They want to know what else I'm listening to, stuff that's "good."  Well, I think hip-hop is good.  At least the bits I choose to write about in this space.  I'm not slumming in popular culture here!  I mean, I could give you a 1000-word discourse on the latest Yeah Yeah Yeahs CD, or talk about my ambivalence towards the TV On The Radio LP, or rhapsodize (with reservations) about Martina Topley-Bird's Quixotic.  I could tell you that I probably listen to disc 3-A of The Anthology of American Folk Music more than anything else in my 1500-plus collection of audio artifacts (CDs & LPs).  I could tell you that I spend no small amount of time wishing that I lived in city whose symphony chose to play things written post-1920.  I could write about the last few free-improv jazz shows I've attended (actually, I should write about this - the Peter Brotzmann tentet blew my mind a few weeks ago at the Parish). Umm...anyway.  It's the next evening now.  Sorry about that - my girlfriend came home while I was writing (or perhaps just typing) this entry, so I stopped to talk to her about her stressful day.  Now I can't remember what I was trying to get at with this entry.  I've lost interest, too.  "I like all kinds of music,"  seems a ridiculously simplistic thing to base an entry on, no?   I'll add here that I really think Bjork is the best writer-and-performer-of-pop-music working today.  Hip-hop is new to me, and therefore fun.  Like any other musical form, however, separating the wheat from the chaff is critical.  I was listening to my local hip-hop station this morning, and I was frankly appalled by the blatant appeals to prurience telegraphed in every song I heard.  Not that I'm prudish about this sort of thing - on the contrary, I think "sexy" is something a pop song might want to aspire to - but this stuff was just stupid.  I really like Beyonce - I think she's beautiful, classy, and talented - but L'il Kim's rap on the remix of "Naughty Girl" is really gilding the lily from a sexual content standpoint, I think.  I'm not really interested in the fact that Kim can "pop her cootchie like a rubberband" or whatever.  What the hell does that mean, anyway?  Beyonce sing-sighing that she's feeling sexy enough to be one's naughty girl is quite sufficient.  That slightly old-fashioned verbiage - naughty - taken in context, is what makes the track so hot.    Whatever.  I'm sure my readers don't need me to tell them what's sexy!   But, while I'm on the topic, and since I never write about stuff like this, I will add that Helen Mirren is sooooo sexy.  I stayed up late on Sunday to watch the first half of Prime Suspect 6 (my favorite television show ever).  Wow.  I think she's 58 or something, now.  Good acting really turns my crank - I think Edie Falco is sexy too, just by dint of her work on The Sopranos.  It's all about these fleeting glimpses of vulnerability good actors are able to convey, I think.  I'm aware that I'm not achieving global subject-verb agreement in this entry, but so be it. This weblog has really turned into a pop culture-centric site lately.  This year, I've become a lot more honest with myself regarding my need to relax, and kind of absolutely decathect from the stress I experience as part of my daily life .   Accordingly, I no longer feel compelled to draft imposing treatises on this or that weighty topic of enormous import.  I just want to have fun, and apply a tiny bit of analysis to things I do while relaxing.  I like thinking about things, and analyzing their content.  To that end, I suppose, I picked up two new books at Borders today.  Parenthetically, I feel no small amount of guilt for preferring Borders over my locally-owned bookstore (BookPeople), but I do.  I just do.  I won't relate here my years-long attempt to reconcile myself to BookPeople - suffice to say I just cannot, so I skulk around in Borders instead.  Anyway, I picked up a collection of short stories by Edgar A. Poe, and The Gastronomical Me by M.F.K. Fisher, with an eye toward the date in the not-too-distant future on which I can engage in some serious leisure reading.  The trick with Poe was sorting through the myriad omnibus editions to find just what I wanted, from both a content and typographical perspective.  Do I really want a two-pound hardcover tome containing everything he ever wrote, displayed in 10-pt. font?  No.  I wanted the best stories (no poems, no criticism), in paperback, 12-pt. (at minimum) font.  It took 15 minutes of perusing the various volumes before I got just that.  This made me think about the ubiquity of certain authors' work, relative to others.  I wandered over to the fiction W's, and confirmed that there was not one volume of Patrick White's work on the shelves.  His stuff continues to go out of print at an alarming rate, and I just don't get it.  A Nobel prize winner, readers!  I mean, I know the Nobel for literature often goes to undeserving authors (Pearl S. Buck, anyone?), but Patrick White is a GREAT novelist.  Sad.  M.F.K. Fisher, on the other hand, was easy.  I like food - I like eating food, preparing food, thinking about food, and reading about what discerning people have to say about the role food has played in their lives.  M.F.K. Fisher is just the best, ever, at this.  She's one of those writers whose work I carefully apportion out to myself - there's nothing worse than the realization that one has come to the end of a beloved, deceased, writer's body of work.  I can't describe to you the desolation I felt when turning the last page of my final book by Dorothy Sayers, Iris Murdoch, Patrick White, Kafka, Borges, etc.  I still have quite a bit of M.F.K. Fisher to go, and must add that I really don't think her books belong in the cookbook section of the bookstore!   6:55:40 PM