"can i talk my shit again?" -kanye

this grad school stuff is for real man. not to toot my own horn, but ut is a mighty fine school as far as all things media studies are concerned. now that i'm into my second year of m.a., it's starting to get competitive. the conversation starts to revolve around who you're working with, who you want to work with at what ph.d. programs and what your c.v. looks like. to that end, you're expected to "present papers" or get them "published" in journals and at conferences and the like. thank goodness i live in an age of absurdly-proliferated media. anyone, and i mean anyone, can find a niche in media studies. it's not the 1970s anymore, and we no longer have to uncover the attractions of silent cinema or argue the merits of auteurism. those topics are fun, but not necessarily topical anymore.

so i'm having a go at it. over the next week or two, i'm sending off a handful of abstracts to 2 conferences and one journal. the call for papers for the journal was "we want articles about 'south park.'" how cool is that? welcome to the wonderful world of academia, where kids who never want to grow up never have to (see: the fashion sensibilities, or lack thereof, of academics). in media studies, we don't look down from an ivory tower so much as look up from the foot of a jungle gym.

anyway, congratulations, finally to the city of chicago. only fitting that the second city gets first prize bestowed upon its second team. i'm not even going to try to make a snide remark about cubs fans. oh wait, yes i am. suck it up whiners. have some compassion for the south siders. admit that you sucked this year. go ahead, admit it. doesn't that feel good? now, exhale, and confront the fact that the brewers will finish ahead of you in the standings for the next decade. ahhhhhh.

a great bit of insight on the curse of texas at slate, likening the state to an expansion franchise.  not a curse in the baseball-purist sense (there is nothing pure about this state, people, it's the bastard child of greedy rednecks and nomadic border-straddlers), but a socio-cultural one in which bush's bad decisions make the rangers and the country suck.

finally, why am i always the last douchebag to latch on to good little rawk bands only after they've blown up on like the O.C.?  seriously, someone handed me lonesome crowded west and it's blowing me away.  i get so sick of the pretension and elitism at pitchfork.com that i can't go to them for new music anymore.  suggestions welcome.

yes, i'm still alive.  usually this thing is a better indicator of my otiosity than my livelihood.  it's hot in texas.  makes me vaguely miss mild midwestern summers where you appreciate the hell out of everything because you know the deathly arctic wind is right around the corner.  but i love it here.  i love listening to all the texans drawl on about "how hot eeit eeeis."  i rather prefer sweating to shivering, no?  trust me, you've never been swimming until you've laid out in the 3pm late august heat for a couple of hours.  a delight.

anyway.  some thoughts before diving into my main treatise:

--my job has made an internet junkie out of me.  i read espn.com alot, unfortunately, and i've come to realize that "sports journalism" is only slightly less an oxymoron than "entertainment journalism."  it's pure chaff (written stuff, mind you; broadcast sports coverage is an absolutely necessary part of my daily entertainment diet).  sure there's a certain art to the game report, and even a rick reilly-esque insight can be worth a read.  but on the whole, guys into sports have no business butchering the written word, especially ex-athletes.  let them be pundits, color commentators and "PTI" guests, but never scribes.

--picture time!

me and the lady at my coworker's swank engagement party.  big time stuff.

--this is the funniest thing i've read in the onion in a long time.  i hate to echo every other half-hearted stoner jackass who's said this before, but this paper and i have some sort of magical, mind-reading connection, like my mind is some sort of glorious newswire from which they get feeds for story ideas.

--i had an entire 3 minute conversation with a complete stranger at a movie theatre the other night speaking only in trey parker-terrorist parlance from "team america."  i:  "derka, derka, muhammad jihad."  he:  "oh, derka derka derka."  you see, this is why, when a big-brother style omni-government takes over and throws me in jail because they can read finally read the horrible things that go on inside my head, i'll be able to survive solitary confinement.

ok.  onto the meat and potatoes, the little brother show from two nights ago.  first, some backstory.  a raleigh, NC hip-hop trio.  two emcees (big pooh and phonte) and one dj (9th wonder).  yes, that phonte from the foreign exchange record all you hipsters picked up 8 months ago because the crazy-cool poet black guy in your extended circle of friends turned you onto it.  yes, that 9th wonder who's produced hits for Jay-Z, Beyonce and Nas.  yes, that little brother whose debut album has garnered them now-insufferable comparisons to the native tongues movement (Tribe, De La, et.al) and whose forthcoming sophomore effort got the EIC of The Source fired because he wouldn't back down from his perfect rating.

now aside from the great, universally appealing music they make, i want to mention several things that blew me away about this show.  first, it was a hip-hop show in austin texas, which means there were, hmm, maybe 80 people there.  which was fine.  most performers on leg 20 of a 25-leg tour would get discouraged, but not these guys.  phonte and big pooh (lamentably, sans 9th wonder who was probably off plotting with rich williams, pharrell and timbaland on how they will take over the world) stepped on stage and simply said "they ain't a lot of mothafuckas in here, but the mothafuckas that's here count.  let's rock."

and that's what they did for the next two hours, non-stop.  always a smile on their faces, always having fun.  and not in a disingenuous, jurassic 5 style, interscope-told-us-to-play-up-the-socially-conscious-message-hip-hop-vibe, but in a real way.  all they cared about was having fun with their friends onstage, and it was infectious.  when did hip-hop lose its sense of fun?  when did it have to start taking itself so seriously?  it appeared as if they could've been alone in a dorm room somewhere and they would have been just as entertained/entertaining.

they rocked it, man.  a lot of their music isn't what you'd normally think of as concert-rockable, it's more wake-up-at-noon with your girl, a glass of lemonade and a joint type stuff.  but they recognized this.  they took their more mellow songs, kept the lyrics (which can be decidedly aggressive) and played them over more upbeat instrumentals (appropriately, lots of tribe and jaylib).  did i mention they never stopped playing and always were having fun, including a completely coreographed dance routine a la old-school motown quintets?  these are chubby, sweaty black men from north carolina, mind you, not smokey robinson.  another thing, they have a much-hyped album coming out in 2 weeks, and they didn't play one song from it.  take a minute to let that sink in.  (i'm reminded of the david spade joke about how he hates it when bands jump into new stuff, insisting instead that they play their hits "just like on the album.")  little brother played nothing but jams, nothing but stuff they'd released because, according to phonte, "who wants to sing along to some shit you don't even know the words to?"  i'm still bowled over by how stupidly brilliant that statment is.

ok i'm almost done.  one last endorsement.  midway through the show, garry shandling comes in.  yes GARRY SHANDLING of "the larry sanders show" and so on.  (aside:  my favorite shandling joke has him complaining about how everytime there's a thunderstorm his dog gets nervous and digs up the carpet..."so i got some dog tranquilizers, and he still digs up the carpet whenever it storms, but it doesn't bother me nearly as much anymore.")  he stayed in the back corner for only a couple of songs with some amazing looking woman who probably dragged him there, but i swear i saw his head nodding a couple of times.

then phonte finished, the encore mind you, with an a cappella of prince's "kiss" in unabashed falsetto. come on.  that's brilliant.  following this was a plea from everyone on stage to obtain their music, legally or otherwise.  i urge you to do much the same.  the foreign exchange's "connected" is a great place to start (great baby-making music btw), or else their debut "the listening" rocks it.  the oft-ahead-of-his-time colin finan actually wrote about them before they broke.  "the minstrel show" drops in 2 weeks.  kanye, the louis-vuitton-don, drops next week.  in a bundle, my undies are.

kisses from austin.