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You Can't Catch Me, Music and Lyrics by Chuck Berry. The Stones covered it. John Lennon was sued (twice!) for covering it and appropriating the lyrics. If Iggy Pop and the Stooges were never sued for doing the same thing as "Come Together" in 1970, perhaps it's because nobody could understand what exactly he was saying, not even the bands that took their names from the adapted lyrics. Perhaps JJ Cale was thinking of the chorus when he wrote Call Me The Breeze in 1971. Finally, though Jonothan Richman's "Roadrunner" clearly took inspiration from the Velvet Underground's Sister Ray and Bo Diddley's "Road Runner"(among other things), but, as a Berry fan, you can hear Richman echoing the lyrics in the Spirit of 1956 going Faster Miles an Hour, with the radio on, tuned to Rock And Roll.
comment posted at 7:28 PM on Jun-19-10
comment posted at 7:33 PM on Jun-19-10

JJ Cromer is a self-taught painter, whose dense, liney work reminds me of Howard Finster and Basil Wolverton.
comment posted at 4:26 AM on Jun-19-10

Although people have been worried about correct speech for thousands of years, it's apparently the status anxieties of modern societies that create the market for usage advice in which artificial "rules" can spring up and spread, independent of the genuine norms of speaking and writing. [via]
comment posted at 3:36 PM on Jun-18-10

If you listen close enough you'll hear police sirens in the distance, water pipes humming, Chinese sweatshop workers listening to Chinese language radio programs and singing traditional Chinese sweatshop songs. And yes, even a barking dog somewhere in the distance. This is the sound that surrounds the sound of Man Man, a cast of characters who rotate around one Ryan Kattner (a.k.a. Honus Honus), a grown fellow who was once a military brat who missed the 1980s pop music of the United States. Based in Philadelphia, but not part of the scene, the band mixes a lot of influences. Though (too) often likened to Tom Waits, Frank Zappa, and Captain Beefheart, Honus said "It's beyond flattering... but I just don't possess the same kinds of things those guys do." Their sound has also been likened to circus music, Viking vaudeville and manic Gypsy jazz, but the band has always insisted that what it plays is pop music. "Pop music has something catchy about it, whether it's a vocal or a rhythm or a keyboard line, whatever it is," said Pow Pow (real name Christopher Powell). Whatever their sound, they gained enough notoriety to tour with Modest Mouse (who they called "a gateway drug to better music"), and they're still at it. But enough with the words, time for some music videos! 10lb Moustache and Rabbit Habits are the two official videos, though Engrish Bwudd has inspired a number of fan-made vids, and even a belly dancing number. (More words and music inside)
comment posted at 2:00 PM on Jun-18-10

Stuff no one told me (but I learned anyways)
comment posted at 3:51 PM on Jun-17-10

This is Why I'll Never be an Adult.
comment posted at 1:37 PM on Jun-17-10

Rosecrans Baldwin considers the literary place of the distant barking dog.
comment posted at 1:45 PM on Jun-17-10
comment posted at 3:48 PM on Jun-17-10

"So you want to keep your lover or your employee close. Bound to you, even. You have a few options. You could be the best lover they've ever had, kind, charming, thoughtful, competent, witty, and a tiger in bed. You could be the best workplace they've ever had, with challenging work, rewards for talent, initiative, and professional development, an excellent work/life balance, and good pay. But both of those options demand a lot from you. Besides, your lover (or employee) will stay only as long as she wants to under those systems, and you want to keep her even when she doesn't want to stay. How do you pin her to your side, irrevocably, permanently, and perfectly legally?

"You create a sick system."
comment posted at 3:37 AM on Jun-16-10

Vic Rawl has filed a protest against the man who beat him in the South Carolina Democratic primary for the US Senate. The official reason is election irregularities, however at the core of the protest is the fact that the winner Alvin Greene is a complete unknown with no prior experience. He won the primary despite the fact that he has no campaign headquarters or material and in fact did not seem to campaign at all. Also curious is the pending criminal case in which he is accused of showing a pornographic website to a college student. Mr. Greene does not come across particularly well in interviews and CNN interviewer Don Lemon even went so far as to question his mental health and called it one of the most bizarre interviews he's ever had. So is this Republican tampering as many observers are accusing? (FiveThirtyEight weighs in) Did South Carolina voters give him the (59%-41%) victory because they thought he was Al Green, soul music's most insinuating singer? Or perhaps these are the wrong questions and we should be focusing on Alvin Greene's platform: jobs, better education for children and justice.
comment posted at 3:57 PM on Jun-15-10

Finding Nighthawks: Nearly seventy years after Edward Hopper finished what would become one of the icons of American art, Jeremiah Moss went in search of the diner that inspired it.
comment posted at 3:58 AM on Jun-15-10

1973: Marlena Shaw.
1997:Blue Boy.
2009: Tame Impala.
comment posted at 2:51 PM on Jun-13-10

Behind the Surface: Underwater Ballet Photography by Nadia Moro.
comment posted at 7:59 AM on Jun-13-10

... on June 12, 1982, approximately a million people demonstrated in New York City's Central Park against nuclear arms and for an end to the arms race of the cold war. Nothing like it had ever happened before. It was not only the largest antinuclear demonstration but the largest political demonstration of any description in American history. Nothing like it has happened again, either. The tide of protest was at its high-water mark, and thereafter receded steadily. - Jonathan Schell, 2007.
comment posted at 1:48 PM on Jun-12-10

Restoring Journalism Maureen Tkacik talks about her life as a journalist, the nothing-based economy, and the future of journalism. She suggests abandoning authority and productively channeling narcissism. (via 2p & dd)
comment posted at 7:49 AM on Jun-12-10
comment posted at 2:18 PM on Jun-12-10

Chester Arthur Burnett , better known as Howlin' Wolf, was born 100 years ago today.
comment posted at 4:34 AM on Jun-11-10

Sad breaking news on a previously discussed topic as 16 year old Abby Sunderland is feared lost at sea.
comment posted at 1:54 PM on Jun-10-10

Fake the Beatles : WFMU DJ Gaylord Fields delivers an entertaining presentation on the mid-1960s cottage industry in Beatles soundalike records. Other Beatlesque imitators to follow below the fold.
comment posted at 4:32 AM on Jun-10-10

Tomas Saraceno's architectural geometric installations. Some are eerily spider-like. Others are Buckminster-Fulleresque. My favorite is his Flying Garden, in which his geometrical inflatables are covered in grass and other living matter. Anyway, his Lighter Than Air exhibit was organized by the Walker Art Center and is in Houston at the Blaffer Gallery this month. Thanks, Minneapolis!.
comment posted at 12:49 PM on Jun-9-10

News, photos and video of the devastation has begun to appear online, as power is restored to the area: the storm that hit Leamington Ontario early Sunday morning was part of a system that killed 7 people in Ohio, but which incredibly caused no fatalities when it hit in the Canadian town of 20,000.
comment posted at 1:08 PM on Jun-9-10

São Paulo Fashion Week, the nation’s most important fashion event, has been forced by local prosecutors to ensure that at least 10 percent of its models are of African or indigenous descent. The model scouts see it differently - it's all about what sells. "The goal" Brazilian model scouts say, "is to find the right genetic cocktail of German and Italian ancestry, perhaps with some Russian or other Slavic blood thrown in. Such a mix, they say, helps produce the tall, thin girls with straight hair, fair skin and light eyes that Brazil exports to the runways of New York, Milan and Paris with stunning success." Yet, "on the pages of its magazines, Brazil’s beauty spectrum is clearer. Nonwhite women, including celebrities of varying body types, are interspersed with white models. But on the runways, the proving ground for models hoping to go abroad, the diversity drops off precipitously."
comment posted at 4:09 PM on Jun-8-10

Fantomatick is a slightly surrealistic often disturbing French photographic blogspot often NSFW.
Just...keep...on... clicking ... away
comment posted at 4:03 AM on Jun-8-10

Subnormality: A Saturday Evening in the Future, or Stairs. (Previously.)
comment posted at 4:21 AM on Jun-7-10

Y’all know Jesco White, right? Maybe you’ve seen one of the two documentaries about the Dancing Outlaw, following in the footsteps of his tap-dancin’ dad and trying to keep away from the influences of his no good, rabble-rousin' family. Well, now they’ve got a documentary too.
comment posted at 6:15 PM on Jun-6-10

Brian Duffy, one of the 'Terrible Trio' photographers of the 1960s, has died aged 76. Duffy, along with fellow working-class London boys David Bailey and Terence Donovan, revolutionised fashion photography with a brash, sexual, personal style and helped to define the Swinging Sixties.
comment posted at 6:30 AM on Jun-5-10

". . . all of us bright young hotshot UPA stars absolutely hated the Howdy Doody show, and felt that the puppet itself was gross—a ten on a kitsch scale of one to ten. We determined to “improve” the Howdy Doody character to the level of our hallowed UPA design standard. After all, we were already the toast of New York animation, raking in the prizes and publicity. We simply couldn’t lower ourselves to something so crude, even if the client was paying us to do just that. So we just blithely went ahead with transforming Howdy Doody in our own image."
comment posted at 12:27 PM on Jun-4-10

As summer arrives, a scientist writes (mostly negatively) about air conditioning
comment posted at 1:40 PM on Jun-2-10

Instead of kicking the shit out of a team that had just been formed out of kids who'd never played the game, didn't have a full set of equipment, and only loosely understood the rules, Roncalli High School's JV women's softball team forfeited the game in order to use the time to teach the new team how to play, then took up a collection to help them buy equipment and hooked them up with a former coach to help advise the program.
comment posted at 4:13 AM on May-29-10

In 2008, The Nation Institute published a lengthy expose (single page) by Sydney H. Schanberg about the role of John McCain in supressing evidence of American prisoners of war who never left Vietnam.

Despite the fact that John McCain based a significant part of his campaign on his military service, the story never attracted any significant media attention.
comment posted at 12:23 PM on May-28-10

"Immediately after an attack by Israel, and even with no Iranian response, the United States is likely to begin significant defensive deployments to the region. Its attempts over a period of a year to negotiate with the Iranians make the Obama Administration more vulnerable to domestic pressures to be strong in its reaction to an Israeli strike.

At an early stage after an Israeli attack, the United States would be faced with deciding whether to passively await casualties or to attack Iranian military capabilities on its own. The United States would probably decide to finish the job on Iranian nuclear facilities and destroy as much as possible of Iran’s capability to project combat power."

The Israeli Threat: An Analysis of the Consequences of an Israeli Strike on Iranian Nuclear Facilities [PDF].
comment posted at 3:58 AM on May-25-10

Get Drunk Not Fat. Get Drunk Not Broke.
comment posted at 4:28 AM on May-24-10
comment posted at 11:35 AM on May-24-10

Read These on Your Death Bed: Helen Vendler on last poems by James Merrill and Wallace Stevens.
comment posted at 1:02 PM on May-23-10

Yes as a matter of fact, 50,000 new films a year is a very good thing
comment posted at 1:15 PM on May-23-10

Singer/songwriter Shirley Ellis is best known for her hits "The Nitty Gritty", "The Name Game" and "The Clapping Song," but there's...
comment posted at 1:05 PM on May-22-10

Friday Night Fosse: Rich Man's Frug, The Heavyweight, and The Big Finish from Sweet Charity. Happy weekend!
comment posted at 5:38 AM on May-22-10

Bean Pie, my Brother? The Muslim Bean Pie is a sweet, custard pie made from eggs, sugar, and beans (usually navy or pinto beans).
comment posted at 4:30 AM on May-22-10

I can has game?
comment posted at 5:41 AM on May-22-10

"To ignore this trespass is to agree that NOTHING any musician has attempted to do with their life in music has any intrinsic value - and I refuse to do that." Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, whose new album Orchestrion came out in January (see him discuss it here), ranted about smooth jazz legend Kenny G, claiming that his overdubbed performance of What A Wonderful World defiled the memory of Louis Armstrong. (Via Aaron Cohen at Kottke.org)
comment posted at 12:31 PM on May-20-10

What Did Jesus Do? - Adam Gopnik takes a look at the man, and the myth that was Jesus Christ. A Q&A follows.
comment posted at 12:16 PM on May-20-10

Roma/Gypsy Interiors and African Interiors by photographer Carlo Gianferro + a collection of imaginary interiors from artist Anne Hardy.
comment posted at 4:01 PM on May-19-10

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, Oh yeah
[another great find at Postroad's blog (NSFW)]
comment posted at 4:17 PM on May-19-10

This Book is Overdue (link to a PDF of the first chapter from the author’s site: here) is a non-fiction work published in February of 2010. It’s a study of the modern library, and by extension, the modern librarian. Primarily the place that each of these things has in a world that is increasingly moving to a world of digital information. The book is divided into a few different sections...
comment posted at 5:32 PM on May-18-10

With a surprisingly low voice and the composure of an R&B singer many years older, Helen Shapiro toured with The Beatles in 1963; inspired Lennon and McCartney to compose for her the song “Misery” (which they intended for her vocal style); wrote her own B-sides; starred in ("A Hard Day's Night" director Richard Lester's) 1962 movie; and recorded an album of songs in Nashville with (Patsy Cline producer) Owen Bradley. All before her 17th birthday.
comment posted at 2:10 PM on May-17-10

Clio Visualizing History seeks to illustrate the unique role of visual images in American history. That history is rich with images taken by women, and of women. Frances Benjamin Johnston photographed a diverse sample of Americana from politicians to mine workers, socialites to factory women, and public institutions. She was a peer of many, including Gertrude Käsebier and the Allen sisters.
comment posted at 1:53 PM on May-16-10

Probing the link between slaughterhouses and violent crime. A study shows that as the number of slaughterhouse workers in a community increases, the crime rate also increases.
comment posted at 11:26 AM on May-15-10

Animated Album Covers featuring iconic images from The Beat les, David Bowie, The Clash, Pink Floyd (semi-related: The Dark Side of the Moon in real life) and more...
comment posted at 9:57 AM on May-13-10

Fifty Extraordinary Churches
comment posted at 4:26 PM on May-11-10