Wednesday, January 26, 2005

LOOKS LIKE ART TO ME

Some assholes in L.A. want to tear down a giant tower of pallets that some crazy old fuck built, and got the city to label a historical monument back in 1978.

Come on, look at the pictures - it's not just some stack of pallets like you'd see up against the wall of some warehouse or supermarket. It's impressive as hell. I'd like to go out there and climb to the top of it.

Even the neighbors are on the dead guy's side. Leave the thing where it is.

Got Branford Marsalis's The Dark Keys and Sonny Rollins's Way Out West from the library today.

I used to own the Marsalis disc, but I found it tough to get into. Now, almost a decade later, I'm giving it another chance. So far, it sounds pretty good.

I've never heard the Rollins at all. I already know if I copy it, I'm going to change the sequencing, and put all the alternate tracks (some of which are twice as long as their originally-released counterparts) at the end. I hate it when a CD has multiple versions of a song, one after the other.

Got three books, too: John Leland's Hip: The History, James Merriner's Grafters And Goo Goos: Corruption And Reform In Chicago, 1833-2003 and Virginia Nicholson's Among The Bohemians: Experiments In Living 1900-1939. The Merriner ought to go well with the various volumes of the Library Of Larceny I've got piled up to read.

And while we're on the subject of reading, I guess I'll be one more goon taking that 50 Books In 2005 challenge. Book #1: Nation Of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. It's a nice mix of Thomas Frank and Thorstein Veblen, tearing apart the traditional lefty critique of mass culture as some oppressive force laid down from above on the cowed, conformist consumer. They smack Naomi (No Logo) Wolf and Kalle (Adbusters) Lasn particularly hard, which is nice. Check it out.

No comments: