Thievery Corporation - "la femme parallel"

Drive-by Truckers - Angels and Fuselage

Ufomammut

Sludgy neo-psych from Italy

Etta James - RIP

Etta James (and maybe Nina Simone, as well) is why I fell in love with soul music way back in my early teens.  

Shit Girls Say to Gay Guys

So, the meme "Shit Girls Say" has spun off into black girls, white girls, Asian girls, dudes, drunk dudes, Asian guys, gay guys, black gay guys, Southern gay guys (according to my friend Gawker). Here's Shit Girls Say to Gays.

P.J. Harvey - Let England Shake

Laura Marling - The Beast

Laura Marling - Night after Night

From new album, "A Creature I Don't Know."

The Ecstasy of Influence

I cannot express enough joy about Lethem's "ecstatic" inversion of Harold Bloom's tired reassertion of genius through the psychodrama of the "anxiety" of influence. To create is to remix.

For teachers of writing, threading the needle between learning to be influenced and plagiarism is the key. For teachers of literature, knocking down the notion of originality is absolutely essential to freeing students' interpretive creativity.

"Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves, might we not forgive it of our artworks? 

"Artists and writers—and our advocates, our guilds and agents—too often subscribe to implicit claims of originality that do injury to these truths. And we too often, as hucksters and bean counters in the tiny enterprises of our selves, act to spite the gift portion of our privileged roles. People live differently who treat a portion of their wealth as a gift. If we devalue and obscure the gift-economy function of our art practices, we turn our works into nothing more than advertisements for themselves. We may console ourselves that our lust for subsidiary rights in virtual perpetuity is some heroic counter to rapacious corporate interests. But the truth is that with artists pulling on one side and corporations pulling on the other, the loser is the collective public imagination from which we were nourished in the first place, and whose existence as the ultimate repository of our offerings makes the work worth doing in the first place."

From Lethem's original essay for Harper's, "The Ecstacy of Influence: A Plagiarism" (Feb. 2007)

Anthony Joseph & The Spasm Band

A spirited vibe for the holiday.