It's somehow not quite fair to rediffuse stuff that appears on BoingBoing (I mean, who doesn't read BoingBoing?), but this one is just too wonderful to miss:
Over at dippermouth.blogspot.com there's a discussion of Louis Armstrong's take on "I've Got A Gal in Kalamazoo" that includes a wonderful video clip with an even more right-on intro:
...(Regarding the vocal by Tex and The Modernaires, I once showed this to an old friend from high school and all he could say was, “White people....ugh.”)[but hang in there --after 4 minutes of whiteface bathos there's a specTACular Nicholas Brothers dancing take on the tune]:
The future is assured:
(via Darryl Landry)
and see a 2007 clip and a recent interview
he SHOULD be. This is real Americana (and starting with number 2 is no crazier than anything else you can imagine):
Piano isn't something I do, but it's fascinating to watch those who can:
(this via Echidne of the Snakes)
I've been saying so for years, and here's a lovely example:
...and on another page in the same NYTimes, see Dumb and Dumber 2.0: iFart application for a not-unrelated bit of Nacirema consumer lore, somehow especially appropriate for SuperBowlSunday
The almost-tragic rootlessness of the (North?) American psyche is mightily exemplified in a New York Times article on The Mall of America. A snippet:
Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the crux of the problem: We are reliably informed that whatever part of the economic crisis can’t be pinned on Wall Street — or on mortgage-related financial insanity — can be pinned on consumers who overspent. But personal consumption amounts to some 70 percent of the American economy. So if we don’t spend, we don’t recover. Fiscal health isn’t possible until money is again sloshing into cash registers, including those at this mall and every other retailer.Malls are Nacirema and Naidanac writ large, revealing all the brassy crumminess and deficiencies of taste that these societies celebrate in architecture and mass consumption (how's that for blanket indictment?). Take a wander through deadmalls.com, and peek into deadmalls.blogspot.com for daily doses of mallery. Note that malls are the quintessential securitized Panopticons, bristling with CCTV and private police forces. And don't let's get started on mall food, probably the greatest concentrations of high-fructose corn syrup dispensing on the planet (and of deep fat frying too). And mall music...In other words, shopping was part of the problem and now it’s part of the cure. And once we’re cured, economists report, we really need to learn how to save, which suggests that we will need to quit shopping again.
So the mall we married has become the toxic spouse we can’t quit, though we really must quit, but just not any time soon. The mall, for its part, is wounded by our ambivalence and feels financially adrift.
...described as “pop contemporary adult hottest hits.” South Avenue collects the upscale, chic stores and pipes in “rock adult album alternative.” East Broadway is supposed to feel contemporary and gets “pop adult contemporary/modern.”Oooooh.