one to get in, one for VIP, and i have no idea what the stamp is for

Officials are trying to rescue a 6-year-old boy who climbed into a balloon-like experimental aircraft built by his parents and floated into the sky over eastern Colorado. Boy may have fallen out because door on balloon was unlocked.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/10/15/colorado.boy.balloon/index.html

live video at cnn.com

about to land…

[happy birthday nietzsche, foucault…]

update:

Runaway balloon lands; boy’s fate unclear

Deputy: Object seen falling from balloon

Authorities launched ground and air searches for boy after balloon landed

Boy found alive hiding in attic after balloon drama

World watches odyssey of ‘Balloon Boy’ in real time

Family known for extreme science experiments

Balloon boy family on Larry King live, balloon boy says “we did this for the show”

update oct 16

Balloon boy barfed twice on live TV during interviews over ‘we did this for a show’ comment

Sheriff said authorities do not believe it was a hoax.

update oct 18

The parents concocted the stunt to market themselves for a television show, a sheriff said Sunday. Sheriff admitted that authorities misled the media on Friday when they said they still believed it was not a hoax. Authorities plan to file felony charges against parents; jail unlikely.

Balloon boy’s dad was arrested in 1997 for vandalism, spent 4 days in jail

bond and lafayette

from the ny times:

Henry James short story “The Figure in the Carpet,” in which a celebrated author dies without having conveyed to the world at large the secret idea that links all his books

(follow up to)

the openings tonight at david zwirmer

and lehmann maupin

mario testino was there too and aloha said “sorry, i totally forgot your name,” so embarrassing.

goodnight.

evolution store window / stella mccartney ad

Some of Barry Ritholtz’s blog readers recently visited stereo hell following:

The bloggers I referenced had produced original material, rather than comments on other people’s original material. These included Calculated Risk, WallStats, Stereo Hell and The Chart Store. Their original art/charts did a great job communicating a particular point I was trying to make…

I felt embarrassed that the first thing they read was another episode of kim’s debauchery. Then, they had to read about Malibu’s SRS… while Barry Ritholtz was making reference to the Strip’s Classic Design drawings featured in his book, Bailout Nation.

admittedly, i do think everybody’s bored of my nietzsche quotes, so here’s some james joyce (trumpet solo):

First she let her hair fal and down it flussed to her feet its teviots winding coils. Then, mothernaked, she sampood herself with galawater and fraguant pistania mud, wupper and lauar, from crown to sole. Next she greesed the groove of her keel, warthes and wears and mole and itcher, with antifouling butterscatch and turfentide and serpenthyme and with leafmould she ushered round prunella isles and eslats dun, quincecunct, allover her little mary. Peeld gold of waxwork her jellybelly and her grains of incense anguille bronze. And after that she wove a garland for her hair. She pleated it. She plaited it. Of meadowgrass and riverflags, the bulrush and waterweed, and of fallen griefs of weeping willow. Then she made her bracelets and her anklets and her armlets and a jetty amulet for necklace of clicking cobbles and pattering pebbles and rumbledown rubble, richmond and rehr, of Irish rhunerhinerstones and shellmarble bangles.

chance implies that there’s an infinite number of possible worlds. Yet there’s only one possible world, the one we’re living in. One and only one scenario is happening. The rest is overthinking.

cloneawilly.com

Last december Malibu finally got her sex reassignment surgery—they shave your crimped pubes, amputate your dick and nuts, and replace them by a vagina and a clit, a three-hour operation.

The operation went well, she left the clinic after 5 days with a douche kit and a dilator (you have to dilate so the scar tightening doesn’t shorten the new vagina). But something went awry afterward…… they call it a “phantom erectile penis.” It’s a sort of clitoris hypersensitivity. The surgeon told Malibu to not worry, that it was common after SRS. He explained that amputees sometimes have this feeling that an amputated limb is still there when it’s not, because the brain has neurons dedicated to each part of our body, and when a body part is amputated, the neurons stay, unless you cut off the head, and it takes the neurons a little while to realize that the organ isn’t there anymore.

Malibu’s neurons didn’t get it at all, they kept acting as if the new clitoris was the cut penis (which it was actually, because they make the clit out of the glans). She had phantom morning boners, viagra erections every time she was standing up, and her swollen neoclit was itching on and off. They say sometimes the phantom organ itches because the neurons send random itch messages, but you can’t do anything about it because you have nowhere to scratch! Usually the sensation disappears after a few weeks, the time it takes for the neurons to understand you replaced your dick by a clitoris, but by now it had been 4 months and the surgeon admitted it wasn’t normal. To what Malibu replied: “I’m rubbing both my dick and pussy against your explanation!”

The surgeon said another operation was needed (”for the sake of science,” which in surgeon’s parlance means “without additional cost”). So she got another surgery. It consisted in taking all the urinary and ejaculatory systems out that they had left in the first place, and all the nerves linking the former penis to the neurons. A real butcher show.

But it worked, and today the phantom penis is gone. She’s a woman!

The doctor said she had to rest for a month to heal properly, but she’s feeling better already and said she wanted to start doing some rotations at the dungeon next week. Her operation was quite a big buzz among the clients, some are eager to pay a substantial premium to be allowed to dribble while waxed, or beaten, with a view of her neoclit and smelly ass. You don’t have many post-ops doing this in NY. She said she wants to save for a third op to widen her hips.

“If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

Engaged In Mutilating

Distorted Impalement

Parasitic Extirpation

Cemetery Rapist (First album: Your Daughter’s Twat Filled With My Cock.)

Fecalized Rectal Sperm Spewage

Sublime Cadaveric Decomposition

Methadone Abortion Clinic

Funk Shui

Weapons Of Mass DeFunktion

Magically Delicious Smoking Skunk Monkey

The Kind Of Jazz Music That Kills

Three Stoned Men (Song titles: “Stoned,” “Too Stoned,” “Too Lazy To Pee,” “Fog Bank.”)

Post Mortem Bong Hit

Wicked Pussy From The Wild West

Gestapo Pussy Ranch

Menstrual Tramps

Shit Howdy

Diarrhea Till You Die

Farticus

Rot Shit

3 Piston Ass Hammer

Meth Teeth

Fag Cop

Lasers And Fast And Shit

Phallus In Chains

Menage A Twang

Oh Shit! A Geyser

more

The news seems like live History but History is simply the part slow-motioned enough to be ratified and minted. The rest accumulates in continuous saturation and evanescence, in words and repeated words like in Basquiat’s paintings, a stream of the world’s consciousness rather than its memory. Saturation and evanescence are two different ideas, somehow conflictual. But as with music, “news exceeds reality” (Thomas Bernhard) and, simultaneously, fades in the next spumous moment. Non-Stop.

I am in the third or fourth stage of working through my feelings about cunnilingus. In the beginning, I was grossed out and troubled, then i became curious, and now i like it. Anyway, thanks, Imp, for watching me get humiliated.

Last night i went to one of kim’s friend’s cocktail party, it was in a tribeca apartment, 20-30 people. There was a graphic designer who used to work with me at the agency and now works at the arnell group, the branding agency that redesigned the pepsi logo. He didn’t work on it but we talked about the brief that’s been circulating around agencies for the past week, where you learn how Arnell pitched the new logo to Pepsi, invoking the golden ratio and the earth’s magnetic fields. Basically, they tilted the logo and distorted it until it looks like a smiling emoticon, then asked Joaquin Phoenix to write the brief, but he was so stoned they took the decision to chew mescaline themselves and started to see circles, spheres and oscillations everywhere, then the boss said, “let’s put the fucking visions down on paper,” and they came up with a Theory of Everything that links together the pepsi logo, the origin and evolution of intellectual property, and all known physical phenomena, and explains why they tilted the logo (”By investing in our history and brand ethos we can create a new trajectory forward”) and distorted the shit out of it (”emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity”). The presentation is modestly called “Breathtaking.” It’s harder to understand than Hegel’s philosophy, but the Pepsi executives are geniuses and bought the idea.

Pepsi executive/genius: “How much for the logo and the brief?”
Arnell: “$300 million.”
Pepsi executive/genius: “Holy cow! I guess that’s what an eternal logo costs.”
Arnell: “Actually, eternal logos are much more expensive. Your logo is just immortal, which seems long enough for the next 5 millennia. For your information, something eternal has no ending AND no beginning. While something immortal has no ending but has a beginning. Spinozistically speaking.”
Pepsi executive/genius: “Holy fucking cow, you rock!”

Kim and the host of the party (a banker as well) joined the convo to confirm that advertising agencies still have a lot to learn from the ibanking world, whose selling air/who will bullshit the most techniques are still far ahead.

Investment bankers aren’t paid to spot the right, profitable acquisition/merger for their clients, but to sell the idea, whether or not it makes sense for the company. It’s all about making a fantastic pitch book and hypnotizing the client into opening his wallet. Actually, acquisitions usually destroy value (AOL/Time Warner), or at best have zero effect.

Kim: “What the client pays for, relative to the pertinency of what he gets, is a massacre. But you know why they keep buying shitty merger ideas? because they have shit loads of money, and they don’t have any imagination about how to spend it. Do you think Microsoft needed Yahoo?
Host: “Nobody’s in the business to sell tic tacs. When you deal with a dumb wealthy client, it’s fair game to suck its teats until it says ouch. So the pepsi pitch book, i say yeah man, suck that fucking pepsi teat until it says ouch.”

so after tribeca, we went to another party for tar magazine at milk studios in the meatpacking district, where we met aloha and sybil. The party was “trendy” but not fun, so we didn’t stay and went to a bar in wburg, which was ok but totally filled w/ 22 year olds, and all i can say about 22 year old girls is that they seem really horny, they were so loose and flirty w/ all the guys, really sexual, maybe they didn’t want to spend valentine’s day alone? “Come on, don’t be such a catholic,” kim said to me. One girl was grooving at the bar drinking a vodka tonic. She was showing off a camel toe, too. Later we were in line for the bathroom and she talked to us, mumbled, “i don’t understand… why… my boyfriend doesn’t want to have sex with me…. we haven’t had sex for… 3 months… are you guys asian?… I’m from North Carolina.” She also said her name was stephanie.
“i’d totally do her if she wasn’t shit-faced,” whispered Kim.
“Get drunk.”
“Oh, good point.”
“Yeah. Seize the moment.”
They ended up vodka-tanked kissing on a sofa, one boob popping out of stephanie’s shirt. Years of contained lesbian steam blowing away. A McKinsey consultant Kim knew from high school came up to me and said, “feeling left out?”

The Knife is a sis-bro duo from Sweden. The sister, Karin Dreijer Andersson, is the lead vocalist. They’ve put out four albums: The Knife, Deep Cuts, Hannah med H soundtrack, Silent Shout. They won six Grammy awards in 2007. They then announced that the Knife will stay mute for 3 years. Andersson launched her solo album last year, under the name Fever Ray, and Brother Olof Dreijer (DJ Coolof after midnight) is writing his own songs.

It’s a weird pair and they seem to be neo-communist with anti-corporate rage. But when a cover of one of their songs was picked for a commercial, they got real and reluctantly accepted money from sony. I don’t judge them. I am not a neo-communist, but imagine ideology has to bend sometimes. They aptly used the money to launch their own label. From what i’ve read, they rarely perform live, and when they do they show up masked (they need a publicist). In 2003 they won a grammy as best pop group of the year but did you ever see masked neo-communists attending such glittering sacrament? You didn’t because The Knife “boycotted the ceremony by sending two representatives from another artist group dressed as gorillas with the number 50 written on their costumes as a protest against male dominance in the music industry.” Since then, a positive gender discrimination has been applied at every major label office, sexists and superfluous men have been fired, and gorilla killings in congo stopped. Good job, Karin!

I make fun of The Knife but, as a compatriot and a groupie, i really like them.

I’m going to try to write a review of Deep Cuts. I’m not Sasha Frere-Jones so please indulge me. I have been obsessed with Deep Cuts for 6 months, i love this album. I was sad to read it’s their least favorite, most commercial album.

Deep Cuts was more like a sidestep. … when we did Deep Cuts we said we’d make pop music, because we wanted to reach more [people]. That’s why we used hip-hop beats and Euro-techno disco stuff, but I think we got quite tired of that. (In an interview with Pitchfork, June 2008)

[It reminds me: Journalist: Aren’t you annoyed by the success of Lolita? Nabokov: No, its doesn’t annoy me. I am not Conan Doyle, who, because of snobbery or simple stupidity, prefered to be known as the author of an History of Africa that he thought superior to his Sherlock Holmes books.]

I personally find some of Deep Cuts tracks historically paradigmatic of the 00s. Dissonance, dereliction, knit brows, a vague will to love trapped in an extreme skepticism. It has a “decadent party in new york” touch too. On a technical level, it makes me think about Michel Legrand, not the fun and the melodies, but the achievement of something via simplicity.

Anyone with a pulse notices that the lyrics,

“Mind is a razorblade”

“young girls with dyed black hair”

“You touched my heart, Like a knife that’s very sharp”

“After one day it started itching, And we rubbed until it was bleeding”

“Rumours telling me you are mourning”

are hard to describe without using the words eerie, spöklik (eerie in swedish), goth, emo-goth, framed poster of Maniac, to commit suicide.

Yet, you’re not asphyxiated like in a piss ass drunk Tom Wait’s song. You’re dying but at the same time you know you will survive. It’s plain 00s and abusively optimistic. Here are my comments on 6 tracks taken from the album.

1. “Heartbeats” - 3:52

My first favorite song.

0:00 A fat synth drags itself like a bum plagued with bronchitis.
0:44 Karin doesn’t seem in the best of moods. Another synth ricochets in the background.
1:05 Awesomeness: “To call for hands up above, to lean on / Wouldn’t be good enough, for me no.”
1:16 (mini-bridge) Different synth goes staccato.
1:39 Karin evokes a “night of magic rush” and it gets energetic again, and harrowing, until the end.

Voice is my favorite instrument. My dad once bought me a record of a Billie Holiday interview for christmas, it had musicality and was as velvety and grating as her singing. Heartbeats introduces you to Andersson’s voice the right way. Her voice, gloomy and diaphanous like black alabaster, and how she tears it up, damps it, fluxes it. Her accent is great as well, and so are the surpassing cute pubertal inflections that erupt on certain words (”Ten days of perfect tunes” or “we were in love”). She sounds crazy when she sings, but you know you’re not dealing with a psychopath. Some music critics like to mention Björk when circling around The Knife, but Björk is a total wacko (i don’t mean in real life, but her character) so the two don’t display the same vocal intensity, nor the same grain. In my opinion, a better comparison would be Diamanda Gallas or Anne Clark.

2. “Girls’ Night Out” - 3:38

My second favorite song because you can get high and listen to it without getting depressed. Just depraved. If the coke is bad you might end up crawling on the floor like a skank with one arm raised toward the stars though. The tempo is aimed to make you dance but you can just sit and nodd to the beat. You can also get naked and trip like Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant. It helps to have a little electronic music background and be a fan of gritty and wild new york otherwise the synth will sometimes resemble a military camp siren. Also, at some points, Olof assaults the drums like the energizer bunny, but it’s okay.

We listened to it at least 5 times on new year’s eve. Then we high fived and sniffed more coke. But don’t be a junky or you won’t have the curiosity to listen to Anne Clark’s Sleeper in Metropolis, and then play Girls’ Night Out, and then understand the difference between “not on steroids/on steroids.” And wow, the philosophy of the lyrics is positively talking to me, “We aimed for high speed / And for someone who could catch me.”

3. “Pass This On” - 3:48

Famous title. Famous video.

Maybe you heard about this small book Kant probably wrote in one hour, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, where he overstates the difference between the two. I’ll sum it up: the sun rising over a green and paisible meadow is beautiful, thunder and raging seas smacking rocks are sublime. i’d say the album is globally sublime, but Pass This On could be qualified as beautiful too. Its lugubrious languor is cheered up with a warm-like-wood xylophone synth that takes you to the bahamas (xylophone is derived from Greek “xulon,” which means “wood,” sorry to be pompous) and softens the drama. You’re not somewhere dark, dirty and loud anymore, although there’s some neat psychology to be done to unpack that incest innuendo hovering overhead: When she says, “i’m in love with your brother,” is Karin talking to herself? Sorry but the people in charge of putting together the message and passing it on are not professionals, really.

If you think there’s a choir of underaged creeps singing in the background, you’re wrong, Andersson does all the voices.

4. “One for You” - 3:48

“Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea.” We can moot about the relevancy of that Nietzsche quote but there’s something childish and sweet in One for You. Musically it’s elegant and tenacious like Prokofiev’s Dance of the Antilles Girls (in Romeo and Juliet) and Stewart Copeland’s Rumble Fish soundtrack (Our Mother Is Alive, Hostile Bridge to Benny’s), with an oz. of Fleetwood Mac aspartame. Playing “soft as snow but warm inside” (My Bloody Valentine) seems to be the MO of the song.

5. “The Cop” - 0:44

Crap.

(in the same vein, i prefer aphex twin’ Come to daddy)

13. “Behind the Bushes” - 4:15

Instrumental. Debauchery of sadness. They’re all dead.

amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Bush-Boom-Misunderestimated-President-Economy/dp/1594670870?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1232115413&sr=8-1

http://www.richardprinceart.com/nursepaintings.html