tinyluckygenius aka the Unicorn's tear

FINAL TIME

Gowns final endowment to their too short, but yet epic history: 17 min shedded epic. Erika Anderson is a monster. Reason # zillion to be stoked about 6 years from now: Erika teaches guitarring at Bay Area Girls Rock Camp. Imagine being 13 and the woman teaching you to play guitar is this fucking epic, making songs that are like Nels/"Pissing in the River"/"Scooter & Jinx" mashes.

POSI RIPPING IN OH-TEN!
LEGACY! LEGACIES! SHRED TRAIL!
ROILING FONT OF EXPERIENCE! BESTOWED!
FEELIN IT ALL CAPS STYLE!

THERE IS STILL TIME LEFT

Real life friends at the All-Ages Movement Project are in the running to get 50,000$ grant from ye olde Pepsi Co to do a bunch good work and mentorship and initatives all over the country to support DIY community show spaces etc. The hitch is you have to vote everyday, not just once, for the next week or so. You do it here.

EYES THAT RECOGNIZE

Miranda July on her early days:
"I remember searching the crowd for the eyes of one woman who looked like she might know what I was talking about. I would do it for her; that would get me through it."

!!!

The new Bagel place on Damen has Stumptown Coffee. You know how some preggos talk about oh, once this baby is out, I am so having a giant wine, or whatever? I hope this place stays open past the end of July, because once this baby is out, I am so going go the bagel store to have a medium or small Stumptown coffee, get shitfaced on caffeine.

In the 70's midwifery book I read where most all of the births in this big hippie nature commune were happening in the back of residential schoolbusses or in a tent, with 4 of your neighborly lady friends tending your birth, if the women started to have some labor and the midwives were elsewhere or if it was too soon to get started, the women would just have a couple wine coolers and pass out. For some reason I think that is the funniest thing ever. Newborns and parents tipsy on wine cooler, having a birth with their neighbors on the wooden platform in the woods where their parents live. In the dads testimonial about it, they talk a lot about working on getting their lady high with their vibes during birth, per the midwives. Sometimes they would be cast out of the tent or bus to go fix their vibe, so as not to inhibit the birth. The book is really great, all the kids get biblical names in the end.

Another great story in the book is a woman who previously had lived on another commune that was not as rad and was a single mom and she built a birthing tee pee all by her preggo self and all these stoned hippies came to her birth, like 20 people crowding in the tent to watch, and she looked up and there was a guy she didn't know playing the flute and she was really not into it was but was too busy laboring to cast the wannbe Ian Anderson out of her birth tee pee. This was given as an example of the importance of not having strangers or strange vibes at your birth.

Yesterday we got to hear it's (the fetal baby's) heart beat at the doctor on the baby doppler, it sounded like a little dog in snowpants running very fast. 160 bpm. That's almost techno. My heart sounded like a big dog, far away, barking. Me and our baby, our hearts are dogs together.

SALTED WORMS WRIGGLIN ROUND ROUND

U.S. Girls video. New album is a thing of greatness.

WASP DYSTOPIA

A Sasha Frere Jones classic from the Chicago Reader archives from 1997, on class, privilege, Hamptons references and Pavement's Brighten The Corners.:

"Malkmus claims the words on Brighten the Corners were inspired by John Ashbery's Hotel Lautreamont; thus we're to infer that they aren't about him. But had he in fact stolen every line of the record from Ashbery, it would still tell us something about Malkmus--he didn't borrow from Anne Rice or quote Pulp Fiction, for instance. I don't need to believe that Malkmus his actual self is the protagonist of any of these songs to hear that the words rolling off his tongue are comfortable in his mouth. But my aim isn't to praise or call Malkmus to task for using certain words. In the context of Pavement (as opposed to the world we all live in), the words work as well as any previous lyrics, albeit leaning toward a new grace and swing and away from the old freaky and foxy. The thread I'm pulling on is class: how did it get in here? "

FOR CLARITY'S SAKE

Since people are writing plenty of blog posts about it, and both my editor and I have noted in the comments section of my Vampire Weekend pc., I am putting it here, so people can at least have accurate information by which to judge me/the piece/my editor etc.:

In the original version of the essay I turned in, I never called the band white, nor would I, because that isn't correct. In my 10 days of listening to nothing but that album and reading dozens of interviews and reviews of the band, I was well aware of Rostam's heritage. I might be brazen, but I am not an idiot.

In the editing process, a particular sentence was changed to being a general statement about how most people don't have a problem with white people playing African music--it was a statement about appropriation, not about Vampire Weekend specifically--though it was open enough that it could be read that way. It's now been fixed, by my editor, along with an editor's note explaining why it was changed. No one was was trying to assign whiteness, no one was qualifying Rostam as white, or Persian as white and the sentence (it in the third graf) has been updated to reflect that--so there is no mistaking it.

FEB 6 MARK YR CALENDAR

Ebony Bones in Chicago with full band, Feb 6, Green Dolphin.

STAFF BENDA BILILI

Been going through Peter Margasak's Top 40 List for 2009--I was busy with book stuff last year and am playing catch up still--and PM's list is heavy with solid albums from more obscure folks, like Congolese ensemble Staff Benda Bilili, who live on the grounds of the Kinshasa zoo.

Trailer for the documentary about them.

Live TV performance from last year.

BABIES

If I wasn't already pregnant, this would make me want to be. It also makes me want a goat. Maybe we will register for one. A little goat babysitter for the little baby.

TALKIN' BOUT MY ENERVATION

My Vampire Weekend essay/class war round-up is out in this weeks Chicago Reader.
I am so glad that is over.

MOONBATS IN THE NEWS

Last weeks Reader, fondly remembering radical feminist theologian Mary Daly: :""People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore," said Daly in 1999 to an interviewer uneasy about her proposed planetary "Mister-ectomy." But Daly exhibited no such qualms, which is why I think she would agree that Fox's obit was kind of a whitewash. Daly, however, would have surely found a way to blame its shortcomings on "the patriarchy," whereas I construe them as the consequence of Fox trying to register Daly's stature as (in the words of former Ms. editor Robin Morgan) "a central figure in 20th-century feminism" without giving the average lay reader the impression that she was a flaming moonbat.

CRAZATION

BLDG BLOG tells the amazing tale and shows the pictures: "One of the inmates who particularly stood out was Dwight York. York is "an author, black supremacist leader, musician, and convicted child molester," Wikipedia tells us, who built a colorful, Ancient Egyptian-themed instant city on several hundred acres of forest land in the U.S. state of Georgia."

He built a crazy compound and preached white people were mutants and inferior to blacks, the good ol boy sheriff came and tore it down. The entry goes on to make some really interesting points, including:

"These are sites built such that their every spatial detail is not justified by some historically rigorous academic architectural code, but because they function, psychologically, as a piece-by-piece tuning of the built environment. Add enough ornamental references together, these spaces say, and some weird new Messiah might yet someday return. It is functional ornament."

GUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Fever Ray accepts award. Just watch. Please let her be nominated for a Grammy or something in America that is on broadcast televisions very soon. Please please. This makes Lady Gaga's Carrie-esque bit seem like a hamster in a wheel in comparison.

IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU'D BE HOME BY NOW

Hey! So Matt and I are moving, and maybe you, reader/person of Chicago area, would like to take our magical and cheap apartment here in the Ukrainian Village starting in March? It's different than any other apartment in Chicago: it has one enormous bedroom and one medium bedroom and both have big closets. For a mere $925/mo, you also get:

1100 sq. feet
Newish kitchen w/ a dishwasher and tons of cabinet space.
Bathroom that is newish and nice.
15 new windows--southern eastern and northern exposure.
Central heat that tops out around $100 in the winter.
Closets!
A HUGE pantry storage closet, to fill with your craft supplies.
I repainted it last summer so it's bright and shiny on the trim.
Basement storage unit and laundry.
Cats and dogs are a-ok.
Both bedrooms fit queen beds, though the big one you could have 2 beds in even.
Neighbors are cool and quiet.
Bedrooms are on opp. ends of the apartment.
The view of the entire downtown skyline is really rad.
You get tons of light in the winter and can see the sunset.
Hardwood except in kitchen and bathroom.
Landlord is a nice lady and will gladly extend your lease past the sublease, which is up in the fall.
iPhone reception is ok/2 bars here.
One block to Grand, 5 blocks to Chicago Ave., 4 to Damen and 3 to western.
Quick walk to Atomix and Tumans and the Bottle and the library.
Perfectly situated for pre-dawn runs to Bacci Pizza.
Pre-loaded with positive, creative vibes.

We hate to leave it--it's my favorite place I have ever lived. You should live here instead. Only one month deposit. The end.

msjessicahopper (aaattttttt) gmail dt com if you want some info or to come visit.

THE DOGS OF MY DREAMS HOUND ME

I have been making my way through Algren's Chicago: City On The Make in between naps. Our couch is not good for upright comfort and so you must slink down and slouch and wedge yr feet midst it's crack, and naturally fall asleep prone, book slipping. Between one of the 6 naps the book has ushered, or rather the couch, though maybe not entirely--the prose does get a bit prosaic when he goes long on the Sox pitching line up of his youth et. al. and many strangely nicknamed local hooligans and gansters known to Chicago prior the mid-century--I digress--I came across the quote about loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose, and was a tiny bit stunned. The quote gets misquoted often, and what follows, the pithy full phrase is so much richer of a quote--and it goes "You might well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real."

"Never a lovely so real" should be on the goddamn flag. Makes the truism of "woman with a broken nose" seem cliche and off the mark, doesn't it.

The whole book is great, explaining the reason why it's still a crooked, savage republic in 2010: that's all it's ever been. Long con as founding principal. Algren's tribute is a pessimistic one, though he's always gory when it comes to rundown lives and suffering, and Chicago in the early part of the century certainly fit the bill it'd seem. Those pages still feel contemporary, not sure if thats to Chicago's shame or it's credit.

LOVERS AND DREAMERS AND ME

Last bit of the Cap'n Jazz footage I got. Whole audience sings along off key.

GENUINE ARTIFACT

I'll post the rest tomorrow, but here's Cap'n Jazz doing "Oh Messy Life" earlier this evening with full line up including Davey von Bohlen, who is now an accountant, btw.
It was so totally rad. I uploaded it to vimeo, too, which looks better.

And "Que Suerte"

NEWEST INDUSTRY

Here's all the info I got on the Joan of Arc super show featuring the bands of everyone who has ever been in the band and my speculation about the Cap'n Jazz headline/reunion.

GOD I LOVE THIS BAND

Look Blue Go Purple vid for Cactus Cat. "SHE IS MY BEST FRIEND", no, no, not the rebel girl--the cat.

GENTLE TRUE SPIRIT

I din't win the American Library Association's Excellence in Young Adult Nonfiction Award for which I was nominated. It is okay because I was up against like 79 other books, and my book still gets a sticker for being a nominee, and most people who see that sticker have no idea the competition was anymore than a dozen books. I hope the sticker is metallic, because them people might mistake it for the Newberry or the Caldecott or one of the big shit ones for kiddo books. I am still up for another ALA award for the best feminist book for young readers. That field is only 20 books deep, so I have slightly better odds. A lot of old riot girls are now feminist librarians, so I am banking on that. Supposedly I will find out this week, but I have already been waiting since like, Halloween to know. I don't think I have ever been nominated for anything serious before. At least not to my face.
So I am anxious, but just a little.
(ADDENDUM: My google alert, like a psychic dog, just brought me the link to what the stickers look like. I would like to win the one for Audiobook production, with the shell. THEY ARE ALL SHINY.

Mostly I am tired.

Also, I am tired of listening to Vampire Weekend. I am writing about them and really, the hardest part is having to hear the music they have made. To come famous in your young age of Facebook and Obama, I bet the world seems like nothing but infinite possibilities--which is maybe why he sings about vacations so often.

PSYCHOTIC IN A BALACLAVA

A. McQueen Fall 2010 menswear is heavy on nouveau balaclava/turtleneck onesies, #1 in dapper Aquaman/masculating cretin looks.