Still Can't Let it Die...

Mmmm...

I guess I can't let it die.

For some reason I just can't let this thing die.

Hello? HELLLLLOOOO?

All I see is darkness...I'm scared. Is this (gulp) d-d-d-death?

(Open with Slow Montage of My Feet Walking into the Room)

It's odd how I seem to get the most responses on my blog while I am not actually typing anything. I've been out of this blogging thing for a while, so give me a few rounds to warm up.

Well, Well, Well...

I haven't posted on this for over a month. How 'bout that?

Can't Help It! Robin Meade, People!

So I'm watching CNN right now(gotta' watch the Meade). With each day passing I am becoming more and more convinced that flying is far from safe. I remember the last time I was on a plane. I was wishing that the plane was larger, thinking that size might help prevent turbulence. Eventually I realized that I was being stupid because what chance does a puny little plane have against THE MIGHTY HAND OF GOD?

Good Lord Bloggers!

I am speaking to the entire blogging community here. Some of your blogs out there are all fancified. Don't get me wrong they're still mostly fucking garbage and bad poetry anyways. Still though, what can one say but oofty boofty.

Anyone?

Aurthur enjoyed reading the ridiculously verbose essay in the booklet that came with the new edition of Endtroducing...

So now he still waits for more essays. I'm looking at you A la, 1959, Andy, Anorexic, and Trendware.

Come on fellas! Flex nuts!

Keep Your Eyes Peeled

Has anyone seen Nathan lately? He has me worried sick. Nathan, if you're still reading Raoul, Aurthur, and I send our regards and may the lord cast a level five safety spell upon you.

Endtroducing...Aurthur Taylor

(note: Between reading issues of “October” magazine and constructing wildly imaginative expressionist paintings and collages Aurthur Taylor spoke of the significance of DJ Shadow’s "Endtroducing..." and, once again, ruined another album for all those who listened.)

On "Endtroducing..."

Rebellion of music culture has been known in the past as a way of rejection to standard auditorial assumptions of previous generations. Late 70’s hip-hop culture was not so much as a rebellion in as much as a reflection on the nostalgia of every young wide-eyed youth thumbing through their parent’s dusty record collection while sucking on a soon to be empty Hi-C juice box. Gunter Grass once wrote, “There was a good deal of talk in those days about secret weapons and final victory. We, the Dusters, discussed neither one, but we had the secret weapon.” Postmodernism does not permit one to rise victoriously over the hammered ideals of the past but to convolute those same principles into a new form which permits the radiance of our own ability to appreciate. Today original creation rings mythology and if there ever was a sinuous road out of the brandized, and later bastardized, label of “neo-expression” (or the Lombarde St. of the “id” if you will) one would have to except the fact that they are born of a generation and can only contribute to its won labeled significance as a whole. In the end we find there is no end and in the beginning we find the end of the lost previous. At that time, all that mattered was matter itself.

It can come as no surprise then that a major revolution in hip-hop music just happened to come nearly twenty years after the forms own birth. "Endtroducing..."’s plunge into the void of appreciation of the appreciated didn’t discover new colors of an old medium but a new medium out of old colors (no racial pun intended). We hear what previous listeners have heard and we kick the same rocks down the same dusty trail as those before us realizing now that it has always been the same trail and we only rearranged its contents.

Marshal McLuhan was able to define media, Arthur C. Danto found himself finding art “after the end of art”, so can we ourselves overcome the challenge of appreciating a gift that has already been given to our own parents? Similar to an heir loom being passed from generation to generation, minus the obligation of course, or something as originally meaningless as boondoggle being reformed as a bracelet to signify the everlasting bond of youthful friendship "Endtroducing…" proves somehow even more powerful than the sum of its parts all while aging like a fine merlot. Perhaps Robert Venturi’s ideas concerning the simulacrum analogized to modern architecture in his essay “Learning from Las Vegas” stand as bleak foreshadowing of our own attention deficit detachment toward the ever increasing chasm of advertisement and product (big label/small building) we can find ourselves reassured that Josh Davis’ (Shadow) medium can never be bound by the confines of mass consumerism and the inescapable (and invisible) thread of gravity.

I remember listening to the album while (ironically) driving to Southern California. It had not been the first time I had heard it but weaving through the suburban sprawl of glowing neon culinary delights in dilapidated shop windows and endless commanding advertisements using only sentence fragments, sans prepositions, it had become the first time I had really listened to it. Perhaps up to that point I had ignorantly written the album off as another hip-hop DJ mix, an equivalent mistake as saying that Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle is just a bunch of genital references and petroleum jelly. Looking back now it seems rather odd that I would need a change of scenery to make me heedful of listening to something that now seems so inescapable. Soon after starting "Endtroducing…" I found myself in an aesthetic daze, absorbing the pungent, pleasurable, and fragrant aroma of Southern California’s deciduous life. The nighttime emphasized strong feelings of isolation while the reflective road lines swiftly passing under the vehicle reassured the trip of its own progress. I couldn’t disregard what I was hearing and after repeating it several times I wouldn’t want to.

Almost a decade after its release and still retaining its own positive anachronistic amalgamation of ethereal soundscapes it has become clear that it would stand as crass to wonder of the album’s own permanence. Paying his respect to music for before his time Josh Davis has created something that can only be described as timeless and whether one agrees or disagrees (or, pardon the cliché “agrees to disagree”) with the content and direction of his work he/she has to remember that they themselves have grown to learn the importance of the simple act of remembering.

Aurthur Taylor, August 2005

Who's in the Fucking Club?

Who here knows the difference between big boobs and fat boobs? If you do you can join the club. We're going to try to let fat women around the world know that their "big boobs" are not in fact a redeeming quality. Which would leave them with, roughly, zero redeeming qualities.