teamsweeting

Evidently Papageorge and Winogrand were out photographing...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 12:10:00 -0400

‘Central Park, New York’ (1969) by Garry Winogrand

‘Central Park, New York’ (1969) by Tod Papageorge.

Evidently Papageorge and Winogrand were out photographing together, so the curious doubling of women was matched by the doubling up of male photographers snapping them. The duplication of images gnaws away somewhat at our tendency to identify a photographer with a particular style – the thing that makes Winogrand Winogrand – even though the style is almost inseparable from content. The temptation is especially strong in the case of Winogrand since his style is so palpably … Winograndian! Except this particular Winogrand, it turns out, could just as easily be a Papageorge. Effectively, it’s a Winogeorge, a Papagrand. Or is it?

Geoff Dyer · In Transit: Garry Winogrand · LRB 20 June 2013

A Very Short History Of Fully Clothed People Jumping Into Swimming Pools In Drake Music Videos

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 16:06:23 -0400

Pop That (July 2012)

Started From The Bottom (February 2013)*

No New Friends (June 2013)*

Note: in videos marked with as asterisk it is Drake himself jumping into the pool.

Empty Spaces

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 15:24:00 -0400

The Op-Ed from Scott James in Thursday’s NY Times about the supposedly outsized tenant protections in the city San Francisco is really just another example of irresponsible editorial coverage from the Times.

The first major rhetorical failure is the idea that a single anecdotal example of irresponsible tenant behavior should affect housing policy in any way. Tenant protections, rent control and housing rights are victories in long running battles with high stakes for working class and poor urban residents. Their importance should ring especially loudly in a city as fissured by inequality as San Francisco.

The second and probably more egregious rhetorical failure is James’ suggestion that it is San Francisco’s “extraordinarily difficult” eviction process that leads landlords to keep so many apartments empty. James tips his hand when he explains that:

…a tenant-free property is much more valuable. A check of comparable recent sales in our neighborhood, in fact, shows that empty buildings are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars more than those with tenants, and with the current housing-price boom, that profit margin (on paper, anyway) increases each month.

For a landlord, an extra room is always a commodity, and that commodity is always going to be more valuable when it doesn’t have any pesky limitations attached to it (you know, like, a standing agreement that it remain someone’s shelter). Because an empty property is exempt from year-to-year rent increase protections, and because it’s value can more easily grow in step with the booming housing market, banks will always assess empty (maintained) properties at a higher value than their inhabited equivalents.

It is the market-created value a landlord earns from a space’s ease of transfer and its potential to one day be luxury real estate that got us here. We’ve let investment value grow too far out of step with a space’s utility as living quarters so let’s not bullshit about loutish, power-mad tenants keeping apartments empty.

Drake’s new Instagram-y video for No New Friends...

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 12:51:00 -0400

Drake’s new Instagram-y video for No New Friends is retroactively set 11 months and 25 days before Fiona Apple’s Criminal. Do you remember the 90s?

There is something about an elevated train. Something about having the screeching and the clack...

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 15:45:00 -0400

There is something about an elevated train. Something about having the screeching and the clack and the spray of sparks around corners up in the air where everyone can see it that makes me happy. Being underground has its own stealthy romance but the work and the grime and noise of the J train reminded me of a New York we’re not supposed to see anymore and I liked that.

I moved off the JMZ into quiet Crown Heights about five weeks ago and I never thought I would miss it, the work horse train tearing past people’s bedroom windows, like I do.

Here are some music videos filmed along the J train’s shadowed Broadway Corridor.

We can blah blah blah about all the dialed-in...

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 18:01:00 -0400

We can blah blah blah about all the dialed-in Arrested Development cameos forever but I think Anne Hathaway’s 5 seconds as an extra redeems them all.

IMG_0413.jpeg

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:21:57 -0400

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robertas: Pre Order The Roberta’s Cookbook Now!! CLICK HERE TO...

Wed, 29 May 2013 15:25:19 -0400

robertas:

Pre Order The Roberta’s Cookbook Now!! CLICK HERE TO PREORDER!!

Cavern // Liquid Liquid // Optimo -Cavern - Scraper - Out...

Sat, 25 May 2013 13:25:00 -0400

Cavern // Liquid Liquid // Optimo -Cavern - Scraper - Out 12” (1983)

If you wanted to be dramatic you could say that the bass line in this song bankrupted two record labels.

In 1983, when Melle Mel and Sugarhill Records took the bass line from Liquid Liquid’s Cavern and used it in White Lines (Don’t Do It), attribution and payment rules for sampling hadn’t really been established yet, not that Sugarhill would have cared much. Sugarhill gets a lot of love for ‘starting hip hop’ but their story and their role in hip hop’s beginnings is bit more complicated—the verses from Rapper’s Delight are word for word stolen from the Cold Crush Brothers, for example. ‘Sampling’ is also maybe a generous word for what Melle Mel did with Cavern.

Ed Bahlman, the producer on Cavern and the owner of 99 Records, refused a straight sample so Melle Mel had the Sugarhill Records house band (an early iteration of Tackhead) replay the bass line. Mel also stole the cadence of the song and changed (appropriated ??) Sal Principato’s lyrics from ‘slip in and out of phenomena’ to ‘something like a phenomena.’ When Bahlman heard White Lines on the radio, he took Sugarhill to court and eventually won but Sugarhill—which was never a particularly well run label—declared bankruptcy and dissolved before they could pay. Aside from setting an early legal precedent for sampling and fair use, nothing ever came of Bahlman’s legal victory. There are also vague rumors—not entirely surprising considering Sugarhill’s proto-Death Row reputation—of mafia intimidation and Sugarhill people vandalizing the 99 Records store on MacDougal St. .

Disillusioned by the fizzled court victory and now pretty much bankrupt himself Bahlman abandoned the music industry, dismantled 99 Records and disappeared.

In 1995, when Duran Duran covered White Lines, Liquid Liquid lawyered up and was finally able to get some attribution and some money, Bahlman was still MIA.

And now? 99 Records is having a moment, White Lines and the bass line from Cavern is sampled to death, and the ‘something like a phenomena’ line pops up in songs by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LL Cool J and De La Soul.

Ed Bahlman lives in Brooklyn and protects swans. So, anyway, yeah.

Some small, helpful tips:

Sat, 25 May 2013 11:40:00 -0400

Kimchee grilled cheese sandwiches

Grapefruit juice in your gin and tonics

putting basil in your chocolate milkshake

This karaoke place

This song

Photo

Sat, 25 May 2013 02:05:32 -0400

"Could its destruction possibly be justified by a net gain of a mere 3,000 square feet, roughly the..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:39:00 -0400

“Could its destruction possibly be justified by a net gain of a mere 3,000 square feet, roughly the size of a roomy Manhattan apartment?”

- Martin Fuller’s NYRB article on MoMA’s decision to demolish the American Folk Art Museum is full of those lip-tightening allusions to wealth that will be familiar to (and maybe sought after by?) anyone who reads the New York Review’s art and architecture articles but, if you don’t toss your head back and cackle at the sentence above—well, I don’t know man.

The National Meets Зву́ки Му

Wed, 08 May 2013 22:08:00 -0400

first this then this

I saw Quadron play a late late show at le poisson rouge last...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 13:25:00 -0400

I saw Quadron play a late late show at le poisson rouge last night. They didn’t play Herfra Hvor Vi Står but I can’t blame them—it would have slowed us all down.

I wrote this more than a year ago and was thinking about it all day yesterday.

Over his five decade career, George Jones came to be recognized...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:36:00 -0400

Over his five decade career, George Jones came to be recognized as the archetypical country music singer. He never bothered with a cowboy hat but any survey of his career will come back strewn with the genre defining, honky-tonk jukebox tropes. George Jones was Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles and divorce and drug use and solitary, months-long whiskey binges and somber steel guitar and barrooms and cheating and getting cheated on and cocaine and going broke and brandishing handguns and dropped attempted murder charges and music and dancing and drunk driving and child support and getting sober and storytelling and constantly touring and more than 100 albums released across half a dozen labels.

Jones’ story is well known and well documented on his albums, but one thing I didn’t know until I read his NYTimes obituary was that Jones has a long history of opening small amusement and theme parks across the south.

In 1966 Jones opened the George Jones Rhythm Ranch in Vidor, Texas and in 1969, after marrying Tammy Wynette, Jones settled in Lakeland, Fla. and built another country-themed park, the Old Plantation Music Park, on his bayou property. Jones lost most of the 70s to drugs and alcohol but in 1983 he married Nancy Sepulveda and mostly sobered up. The couple moved back out to East Texas and opened the Jones’ Country Music Park, which remained in business for six years, by far Jones’ most successful venture.

There isn’t much to read about any of Jones’ parks online—just a little paragraph here about the end of the Old Plantation Music Park—but the connection between country music superstars and small, privately owned amusement parks is fascinating to consider. Places like Dollywood and Opryland seem like such eccentric business ventures in an age of perfume endorsements and conglomerate tour sponsorship

If anyone knows anything else about Jones’ parks, I would love to hear more about them.

Photo – Jones and Sepulveda in front of the stage at Jones’ Country Music Park in 1983.

Photo

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:28:28 -0400

Hashtag Mobile Store

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 20:02:42 -0400

Hashtag Mobile Store

It could be nice, I think, to see Vivian Gornick and Nick Paumgarten, on stage somewhere, fighting...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 20:42:00 -0400

It could be nice, I think, to see Vivian Gornick and Nick Paumgarten, on stage somewhere, fighting about James Salter.

One of the more embarrassing things that happened to me this weekend is that I was taught the...

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 12:14:00 -0400

One of the more embarrassing things that happened to me this weekend is that I was taught the etymology of ‘murk’—one of my favorite words—by a New Yorker comment piece.

Someone at the all-you-can-eat/all-you-can-drink sushi spot...

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 04:14:53 -0400

Someone at the all-you-can-eat/all-you-can-drink sushi spot slammed a 5 Hour Energy alone in the bathroom and didn’t even have time to toss it into the trash. I guess?

I feel like they’re probably The Worst but also could possibly be The Best? I’m sorting some things out right now.