disco party 9-5

Seth Price's bumpin 8-hour work mix here. Tests at my "day job" are already in process.

Seth Price: I didn’t have a particular use in mind. I was thinking about work days, where different sets of working hours represent different kinds of work and different cultural areas: a union job, an office job, an art gallery, a boutique… But it’s true, I liked the fact that the track could be played perfectly, start to finish, during an 8-hour work day, so yes, a work mix, why not.

-from an interview with Boško Blagojević, here.

Loose Club-Going Women

Last year a group of activists founded the Consortium of Loose, Forward, and Pub-Going Women in India. It was not formed for fun, but in response to the the hyper-conservative Sri Ram Sena and the group's violent campaign to chastise bar-hopping women in Southern India by beating them physically.

In America calling yourself a loose, forward, pub-going woman is simply your alignment with the status quo, the freedoms afforded by third-wave feminism. We can now dress badly, drink until we black out and wake up with whomever caught us falling (1). Nonetheless, going out to a bar (as the consortium organizers in India worked so hard to defend) is a public stage to demonstrate women's liberation.

In America, there have so far, been few pop-culture patron saints of this excessive, debauched proof of freedom.  Though pop singers mention clubs, these spaces always seem abstracted. The 'club' is less an actual venue than an a romance that is really just a backdrop for meeting that one special someone.(2) You are not going to be annoyed by stuff they say to you, and you are not going to get beligerantly drunk.

But in 2009 someone gave us a more realistic reflection of a teenage-bar hopper; one that celebrates the parental dissapproval, binge-drinking, the run-in with the law, and the morning-after eye-crust. These are freedoms we take for granted. Hello Ke$ha, patron saint of the American Chapter of the Consortium of Loose, Forward and Pub-Going Women.

(1) Beyond the circular arguments and the moralizing that "hooking up" (Tom Wolfe's term here) incites in some ways, bar culture is now the 21st century version of "coming out" to your town, society. You may find this charming or you may find this offensive. But there it is, public space.
(2) The club in these videos is not a place where people you know are. It is a mysterious anesthetized zone where you meet good-looking strangers only.

Tiiiightrope.

Well, to start: the saddle shoes!

Night People tape covers

More here.

OIL + REAL ESTATE

June 6th, 2010: Summer is not even here yet in America, but all morning there has been talk on the national radio of beaches closing down for the season.


Little clods of tar are washing up on shores as far as Florida because for forty-seven days now the Macando oil prospect has been emptying into the ocean at a rate of 12,000 to 100,000 gallons a day. The government reports that 29.7 million gallons have been released into the ocean.  The Macdonald estimate has this at 51.5, the Wereley has it at 95.0 . The BP worst case scenario is at 117.7 million gallons. It's a Sunday in Connecticut. This time of year, the green trees that line our streets give us a reason to live in the suburbs, while in the moments we have our doubts, the effects of the subprime mortgage crisis won't allow us to move.


Last year this month, Real Estate released  Real Estate. None of the members of the band are from the beach, though we'll credit Real Estate with contributing to the movement of rock bands that have that sound of sun-stroked nostalgia. Eager-to-please chords quickly resolve themselves and voices are washed with a remarkable microphone echo,  which gives any recording heavy nostalgia with it's self-conscious reminder of time, and in this case, the sensation of getting stoned in a volvo and looking for redemption in the music of the Grateful Dead, or anywhere: "You're walking down that Pensacola Beach, keep on searching. Until you find your Rolex in the sand, you wont be stopping..." is how Real Estate's "Beach Comber" goes.  The record was made between January and June 2009, during a period when the band was out of college and marginally employed, living at their parents' homes in New Jersey. Other song titles are as follows: "Lets Rock The Beach,"Atlantic City", "Suburban Beverage," "Suburban Dogs." It is a nostalgic  (Greek: nostos (return home) and algos (pain)) record of mundane agonies they call Fake Blues, and beaches and lawns and sprinklers and Budweisers, life as vacation.

 The project of the suburbs operates on nostalgia, on what Mikhail Bakhtin called an 'historical inversion': being that the ideal is  not being lived now, it is projected into the past. Out here, in the suburb in which I grew up, in the faux-danger of dark patches of trees, the small thrill of an unexpected turn in the road, the falsely wild hedges, we search for a preternatural return to the myth of eden. But our Valhalla hides invisible irrigation systems, tamed with pesticides, and powered on gas.

Down the street from me, a man I do not know has built a scaled version of Le Petit Trianon at Versailles, the delusional playhouse of Louis XVI, which was itself Jean Jacques Anges' return to the myth of Palladio, which was itself a return to pastoral Greece, who they themselves were nostalgic, since they invented the term.  On the north side of the original Trianon, a double spectator staircase descended into a manicured backyard, hidden from the public. In Greenwich, Connecticut, a town in which I have noticed, since childhood, the boom of speculative building, the quieting of crickets, the nearly complete extinction of reptiles, and the thinning of mammal populations, the new new new manse in the woods has been reversed to face the street, so the back-lawn and all of its imagined pleasures spill out into the public eye.

On the New York Times website, there is an interactive feature that allows you replay the oil spill in time-lapse, and I've been scrolling my cursor obsessively back and forth through it, making the oil condense and then drawing it out again over the ocean. I hear reports that the oil spill has reached Pensacola beach, slowly turning the vacation zone for the family into a nightmare. The promotional on the website for Pensacola has yet to be corrected and still reads: "Pensacola Beach offers family fun on the whitest beaches in Florida. I am trying to grasp what has happened in the most abstracted, rational way, but in the end what I do is listen to Real Estate and feel nostalgia for nostalgia for nostalgia, for the beach and for everything else.