Monday, November 20th, 2006

Back Like A High-Top Fade


Hey! Retro Kids love the eighties.

This past weekend a friend about to have her first child started making plans with her girlfriends to have one last wild dance night at a ridiculously popular club that specializes in playing 80s music–big hair, big t-shirts with big slogans, big snare drums, big color, big drinks. Woke up the next day to see the picture above. But like those great philosophers once said, I still can’t stand fluorescent socks.

Now you can take me back to this and this and this and this and this and OK now I’m getting carried away, this and yes even, this!

But for the most part, man, the 80s were one long decade.

To be fair, they ended perfectly well. The last three years were especially HOT. Even better, they became the 90s. But I’ll probably have to wait a few years for my own sons to start asking me if they can have those old flannels and canvas Carharts in the closet.

posted by @ 9:50 am | 2 Comments

Thursday, November 16th, 2006

Time Magazine’s Top 100 Albums

Have at it, all you music geeks.

posted by @ 7:39 pm | 2 Comments

Thursday, November 16th, 2006

Upski On Dems and The Youth Vote

A brilliant, must-read essay from William Upski Wimsatt on the importance of the youth vote:

The secret weapon in last Tuesday’s historic election was a constituency Democrats barely bothered to recognize: young people.

Continuing a trend begun in 2004, this year’s election may have produced the highest youth mid-term turnout ever. Early estimates suggest that 10 million voters under the age of 30 made up 13% of the electorate. They helped Democrats in close elections sweep into office in 25 states.

We know because our organization, the League of Young Voters, turned out 150,000 young voters who made the difference in races in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, and Florida. We were just one of dozens of independent, under-the-radar, youth-led efforts to inspire and turn out young voters.

Young people are progressive on issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and immigration. Most think the country is on the wrong track, and oppose the war. They vote Democratic by a 2 to 1 margin. So why are young people overlooked by political campaigners and pundits? The answer is what we call the myth of youth apathy.

posted by @ 8:09 am | 2 Comments

Thursday, November 16th, 2006

Clear Channel Downsizes, Goes Private

From Paul Porter at Industry Ears comes the news that Clear Channel is going private for a $27 billion buyout from investors Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners.

Even more interesting is the announcement that they are selling off more than 400 radio stations.

Is this the beginning of a reversal in terrestrial monopoly radio? Has the logjam been broken?

UPDATE: Apparently Mass governor and potential Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is a principal in Bain Capital. Political speculation is running rampant.

posted by @ 8:04 am | 3 Comments

Monday, November 13th, 2006

Monday Eye Burn


E is for Egads! Reka wrecks.

Apologies for disappearing on you. Returned from Oz to find vapors in the bank account. So I’ve been back on the grind.

Here are things I’ve been meaning to show for a long time. Melbourne’s brilliant Koan and Kano arranged for the amazing art at the Red Bull Music Academy. I missed their Letterheads exhibition, but now you don’t have to. Check the rest of the Nice Produce site for Ozzy’s illest streetwear.


Wake up in the morning, what do I see? (Photo by Peter Dean Rickards)

Jamrock’s illest eyes belong to Afflicted, and he’s preparing a photobook to drop early next year. Here’s a preview of some of his soulful shots from Harlem. I don’t need to tell you about the Afflicted Yard, do I?

posted by @ 10:10 am | 5 Comments

Monday, November 13th, 2006

Me And Josh Davis Down By The 45 Bin

Here’s an excerpt of some hang-out type talk with me and the DJ known as Shadow in the latest ish of The Believer.

A fine issue, worthy of trooping down to the mag stand to get for your very own, if only to possess a hilarious caricature of me that looks vaguely Chicano that you can shove in my face any time I get full of myself.

Here’s Shaddy Shad with some wisdom:

I would say, “Right off the bat, I’m not the Hyphy spokesperson. I don’t go to shows—I hardly even go to clubs—I’m a good ten years older than most of the people in the scene, if not more.” But what I do tell them is, “Look, in the same way that you can be over here and listen to and understand bounce music but it really helps to go to New Orleans, and you can have all your Chopped and Screwed CDs but it really helps to go to Houston to understand, it’s the same with Hyphy.” From Sly Stone to Digital Underground to now, Hyphy is a witty, quirky take on things. And you have to be in the Bay and know the diversity of the Bay and its weird geographic shape, with its pockets of extreme poverty right next to pockets of extreme wealth, and all that weird interplay that creates the Bay as a whole. Even the weather—the weird way all the clouds butt up against the coast—it’s like everything’s cruising along and then all of a sudden you get to the coast and everything’s turbulent. And it’s always there, that energy in the air—it’s always turbulent, never still. And all that factors into Hyphy.

posted by @ 8:14 am | 0 Comments

Saturday, November 11th, 2006

Nobody Beats This Dude

Courtesy Ernie P! The Diabolical BIZ MARKIE Beat-Boxin Japanese Doll Video.

posted by @ 8:28 am | 0 Comments

Friday, November 10th, 2006

R.I.P. Ellen Willis

One of the pioneering feminist rock and cultural critics, Ellen Willis has passed. Another heroine I won’t meet in this lifetime.

Inspirational words:

“My education was dominated by modernist thinkers and artists who taught me that the supreme imperative was courage to face the awful truth, to scorn the soft-minded optimism of religious and secular romantics as well as the corrupt optimism of governments, advertisers, and mechanistic or manipulative revolutionaries,” Ms. Willis wrote in an essay collected in Beginning to See the Light (Knopf, 1981).

She continued:” Yet the modernists’ once-subversive refusal to be gulled or lulled has long since degenerated into a ritual despair at least as corrupt, soft-minded, and cowardly–not to say smug–as the false cheer it replaced. The terms of the dialectic have reversed: now the subversive task is to affirm an authentic post-modernist optimism that gives full weight to existent horror and possible (or probable) apocalyptic disaster, yet insists–credibly–that we can, well, overcome. The catch is that you have to be an optimist (an American?) in the first place not to dismiss such a project as insane.”

posted by @ 9:54 am | 1 Comment

Friday, November 10th, 2006

R.I.P. Ellen Willis

One of the pioneering feminist rock and cultural critics, Ellen Willis has passed. Another heroine I won’t meet in this lifetime.

Inspirational words:

“My education was dominated by modernist thinkers and artists who taught me that the supreme imperative was courage to face the awful truth, to scorn the soft-minded optimism of religious and secular romantics as well as the corrupt optimism of governments, advertisers, and mechanistic or manipulative revolutionaries,” Ms. Willis wrote in an essay collected in Beginning to See the Light (Knopf, 1981).

She continued:” Yet the modernists’ once-subversive refusal to be gulled or lulled has long since degenerated into a ritual despair at least as corrupt, soft-minded, and cowardly–not to say smug–as the false cheer it replaced. The terms of the dialectic have reversed: now the subversive task is to affirm an authentic post-modernist optimism that gives full weight to existent horror and possible (or probable) apocalyptic disaster, yet insists–credibly–that we can, well, overcome. The catch is that you have to be an optimist (an American?) in the first place not to dismiss such a project as insane.”

posted by @ 9:53 am | 1 Comment

Thursday, November 9th, 2006

Apathy :: Dead

Youth turned out for the mid-term elections in the largest numbers in 20 years.

Joe Garofoli writes on the front page of today’s Chronicle:

18-to-29-year-olds were compelled to vote because of one of the oldest media tactics: Somebody asked them, often in person.

Of course, many were angry with the direction President Bush has taken the country and wanted change, according to a bipartisan exit poll from a youth voter organization. Put the two factors together — and add the growing influence of new media tools — and some analysts say a generation of young voters is solidifying into a Democratic voting bloc.

“The 2006 elections show that Republican campaigns must mobilize their base of young voters to win,” said GOP pollster Ed Goeas, who conducted the poll of 500 18-to-29-year-olds with Democratic pollster Celinda Lake for Young Voter Strategies in Washington, D.C. The nonpartisan organization is a project of the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University.

Tuesday “proved that young voters can and will be a force in elections,” Goeas said. “Of the 28 seats in the House of Representatives that changed hands so far, 22 were won by less than 2 percent of the vote, 18 by 5,000 or less votes, and 4 by less than 1,000 votes.”

(Here’s a full list of related articles.)

You want to know how it happened? Just check the League of Young Voters site. In Ohio, they knocked on 50,000 doors. In Pennsylvania, they ran a massive registration and GOTV and election protection campaign, and backed up those efforts on the ground in Maryland, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Florida, Maine, Missouri, Connecticut, and California. Not a few of those states turned on very thin margins–all made by young voters.

The Dems did not do this. The Reeps did not do this. Young people did it for themselves.

The result? Evan Derkacz at WireTap Blog says that young people made up 13% of the vote the other day, yet another surge along the lines of what we saw in 2004. (Check the CNN exit polls here.)

I have to admit it’s wonderful to see all the old pundits and their brainwashed young followers (beginning with NPR and extending all the way to the alt-weeklies) who have been bemoaning the waste of “apathetic youth” eating a large serving of crow along with Rumsfeld and Bush.

Unrelated note for t-shirt junkies: you’ll see an ad at Wiretap for the very last Origin limited edition Can’t Stop Won’t Stop tees there too. Mike found a precious few in his garage and he’s selling them now.

posted by @ 8:06 am | 0 Comments



Previous Posts

Feed Me!

Revolutions

Word

Fiyahlinks


twitter_logo

@zentronix

Come follow me now...

Archives

We work with the Creative Commons license and exercise a "Some Rights Reserved" policy. Feel free to link, distribute, and share written material from cantstopwontstop.com for non-commercial uses.

Requests for commercial uses of any content here are welcome: come correct.

Creative Commons License