the actual articulation of whatever

True, language is an organic, untameable product of human culture, and all the style guides in the world can’t stop the lolcats from hazzing their cheezburgers if thousands of people want them to. But by the same token, subliterate Web chatterers are unlikely to overthrow standard English anytime soon. Curiously, people who cite the “organic” nature of language in decrying standardization never consider that standardization might itself be an organic process—that the relative stability of spelling and grammar conventions in the twentieth century as opposed to the eighteenth, the eighteenth as opposed to the sixteenth, etc., might have evolved communally and naturally and not through a conspiracy of grammar scolds.

abbeville

Neon Indian – Deadbeat Summer from LaundroMatinee on Vimeo.

via my old kentucky blog

I guess I’m floating says that Josh Ritter has a new album due out in a few months.

I saw this blurb in an ad for a novel today:

“Moonie Madison is the literary descendant of the scrappy, sensitive, warm-blooded women of Kate Chopin and Willa Cather, a true Midwestern heroine. You will root for her, and she will not let you down.”
Kate Christensen on The Melting Season

I don’t want to read a book where there is not the slightest chance of being let down. I don’t think I am alone in this.

I expect to see a new entry on Healthing It soon:

The menu was predictably dog-dominated: dog paws, dog tail, dog brain, dog intestine, even dog penis. We went for a dog broth, simmered for four hours, with Sichuan pepper and ginger. It was warming, with a pepper-tingle. The meat was tender, unctuous, blander than pork, but stronger than chicken. Later, the owner, Chen Zemin, explained how the best dogs for eating had yellow coats, weighed 30 pounds, and did miracles for arthritis.

Okay. Will you try anything once?

If you enjoy 80’s cinematography, grainy but flashy colors and gold chains, you will enjoy this music video. If not, you will just have to make do with a good song- Julian Casablancas “11th Dimension”.

(via the modern age)

The band Summer Camp, ostensibly British but otherwise a bit of a mystery, is playing at SXSW this year. Bloggers and journalists alike seem to think this band is on the precipice. I don’t know how the mechanics of popularity work but I do love their songs.

Finally, there’s Summer Camp, who came armed with nothing but a MySpace page and a couple of spectacularly lovely pop songs. Suddenly everyone cottoned on that they were very good, and the one scrap of information they did provide – that they were Swedish – might not have been true. So here’s some proper journalism for you: we found out who they are, and talked about their secret identities. Which, it turns out, were an accident.

“It wasn’t deliberate,” said one member, who nonetheless wished to stay anonymous. “We made the MySpace in two minutes and did it like that in case somebody we knew stumbled on it and laughed at us.”

Summer Camp – Ghost Train by Themblueeyes

Summer Camp – Was It Worth It by MusicSnobbery

In light of the impending Democratic apocalypse of November 2010, I think it is high time that we discuss and put out in the open exactly how you ought to feel about the (D)im prospects of this midterm cycle.

Lesson 1: Learning is experience and 2008 is worth remembering. If you recall, it was the year in which the almost three-decade old conservative movement crashed into a wall made of money and sand. America, which had been moving steadily right since the election of a dashing old man to the White House in 1980, took a jarring leap leftward with the election of a young, sleek covert agent from lands abroad, bred deliberately with the bizarrely inefficient destruction of our nation in mind.

With Obama’s ascendancy, the coup de grâce, came the final fall of the Republican congress and then eventual arrival of a Democratic super-majority. The nation was poised for change – and not just the bumper-sticker sort but the tangible sort, like a hatched Bolshevik plot or something equally consequential.

Yes, we were told that 2008 was a watershed moment in our nation’s history and we reacted in kind. If you think back, you might still be able to hear various news anchors weaving their unimaginative story lines about the GOP being “put out to pasture”, the possible end of the Republican Party and the thousand-year rule of the Democrats. In short, the men and women of America’s televised services (our best and brightest) had an erection as openly exposed as the microphones which stood so tantalizingly close to their mouths. It was an easily exploitable storyline, perfect for simplification, hyperbole, yelling, flashy graphics and weird breaking news music to make the viewer uncomfortable but glued to the set.

A power shift in American politics, an episodic event, became blown up into a pre-rapture party which warranted utterly confusing sixteen person panels on CNN, smug circle jerks on MSNBC and a completely predictable case of masturbation-induced-amnesia on Fox News. In the end, it meant ratings.

Fast foward to 2010:

The GOP, marked for death by pundits just a year ago, is about as angry as a screaming zombie and almost as articulate. The Democrats, assigned near-permanent hegemony over the country around 12 months ago, are docile fools walking around with shaved heads so that the zombies might have a better look at the menu.

So, here’s my advice for the upcoming season: As November 2010 approaches, keep your eyes open for televised orgies in which a group of made up men and women get paid to conceive of and share the most bizarre and half-baked ideas ever to cross a lusty American mind. If you get lucky and come across this sort of stuff, listen up. Act on your wildest urges right then and there. Soon enough, you’ll find yourself fucked and they’ll find themselves paid.