by Carl Wilson

Reading this very enjoyable Guardian interview today with KLF/Justified Ancients of Mu Mu/Timelords/million-quid-burning/etc pop conceptualist Bill Drummond – answering four of the last 100 questions he is ever going to answer publicly in his life, according to the rules of his latest “sculpture” – got me wondering if he’d ever made music under his own name. Yes, and it doesn’t sound like any other music we associate with him. Instead, happy Scottish yelping.

(from “The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Broxton” in Mighty Thor #14, script by Matt Fraction and art by Pepe Larraz, 2012)

Frill Series 2

Frill Series 5

Frill Series 9

Margaux: I went to an event recently, an informal award ceremony at The Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. The K.M. Hunter Artist Awards were recognizing my friend Jean Marshall’s work along with 7 other recipients. The people who received the grants were awarded out of the blue – nothing fancy, no applications, no parades, no advertisements. The night was structured around pretty great and simple short videos of each of the recipients talking about their work and somehow, as my mother would say, there was no B.S. – everyone seemed to know what they were doing. The video of my friend featured her first Skype conversation since she’s from way up north. All in all, a real classy way of going about an art award.

I love this art book by Richard William Hill, The World Upside Down, lent to me by the curator Michelle Jacques. As Hill explains inside: “The term ‘world upside down’ has its origins in Europe’s Middle Ages, and I have taken the liberty, as an enthusiastic amateur, of attempting an account of inversion in the visual arts of the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods.” There are many confident and recklessly perfect things inside, one of which is a discussion on tricksters that involves Chery L’Hirondelle. As L’Hirondell says there, “that spirit (the trickster) is there to remind us that many social parameters are just man-made, are not of the natural order.”

Ketchup is changing

This is a pretty interesting audio interview about hearing voices in the evangelical community – “‘When God Talks Back’ To The Evangelical Community”

Good art shows ended and in process in Toronto: I loved some of the new work from Derek Mainella at Neubacher Shor Contemporary. Jenn Murphy has an art show on now at Clint Roenisch gallery, Monkey’s Recovery, that I have no doubt will be pretty great to be in the middle of.

Chris: Here’s the pointillist form letter that rejected would-be contributors to Raw magazine received. “Impossible to reproduce / should not be allowed to reproduce.”

As someone who hates the word “foodie” even more than the bovine fetishism it denotes, I appreciate the fake menus a mystery comedian handed out at Brooklyn’s “Great GoogaMooga” festival (this orthography!) last weekend.

Carl: I have been distressed about our country this week. For just one example of why, listen to what a former government scientist has to say. On the other hand, I have been inspired by what our young, red-squared, francophone compatriots in Quebec have achieved, bringing hundreds of thousands of people into the streets to protest their province’s drift away from its social-democratic traditions and, subsequently, its attempt to curtail their rights to protest. If you’ve gotten a less positive impression, here are 10 points you should know.

On a lighter (but raspier) note, I had an animated conversation at a dinner party last night about the apparent speech trend called “vocal fry,” aka “creaky voice,” especially among young women, about which there was much pop-science chatter early this year. Today I stumbled on a terrific blog about speech that has a more in-depth examination of the phenomenon’s precedents, prevalence and implications, from Britney to Gene Pitney. I did like the theory that we came up with last night, though – that, among people with parents and elder siblings likely afflicted with at least traces of Uptalk, it’s probably a typical generational reaction-for-distinction.

This is a live 1969 recording from the Montreaux Jazz Festival of this cover of Eugene McDaniels’ song (also recorded on Roberta Flack’s first album the same year):

Dedicated this week to the student protestors of Quebec.

Love the lie and lie the love,
A-hangin’ on, with push and shove.
Possession is the motivation
That is hangin’ up the goddamn nation.
Looks like we always end up in a rut (everybody now!):
Tryin’ to make it real — compared to what?

Brad Tinmouth

Henri Rousseau

Ben Reeves

Carl: Here is an experimental-music performance that turns into a Donna Summer tribute, by Alan Licht. The combination feels exactly emotionally right for mourning the queen of eternal disco.

Another form of mourning: A grad student posts to YouTube the interview she did with the late Carlos Fuentes on a tape recorder during a car ride in 2006.

And a third: D.C. mourns “its president,” Go-Go Godfather Chuck Brown.

Funnier, but grim in its own way: Toronto writer Sean Dixon encounters the 2012 version of “dog ate my homework”: “Author wdn’t dO my homewrk 4 me.”

Chris: Via Tom Ewing, Patrick Cowley’s 16-minute-long megamix of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.” For all that disco’s popular image became associated solely with hedonism (and for all that hedonism has to recommend it), the heights here sound downright empyrean.

Not sure that this will bring Carl around on song-of-the-spontaneous-summer “Call Me Maybe,” but it did mesmerize me for at least 10 minutes at 2 am last night.

First-grade poetry.

“I’ve got a 14-year-old daughter who’s like me reincarnated— it’s the most frustrating thing in my goddamn life right now. She’s brilliant. I remember telling her on Halloween, ‘Why would you want to be Marilyn Monroe? Why would you want to be that white woman? Why don’t you want to be Sojourner Truth or Harriet Tubman?’ And she says, ‘My brother’s going as Freddy Krueger, and you’re not telling him to be Martin Luther King or Malcom X. We’re kids, daddy.’ So she essentially exposed my sexism.” Read this interview with Killer Mike, buy his new album, draft him for Congress.

by Carl Wilson

From the fantastically titled upcoming album, I Predict A Graceful Expulsion. I appreciate that a song with this title has such a springtimey video. Also that like a lot of current hits this song is so sparse on chord progression, but unlike them also restrained in vocal expansion and other gestures. Perhaps another day it would strike me as stingy. Today it feels like it wants to help me think more clearly. It counsels patience, but it’s not making any promises.

(from Horrible #1, by Zach Worton, 2012)