Rebel rebel, your face is a mess.

Last night on TV, I caught Sarah Palin, with her eyes rolling around in her head even more than usual, bellowing, "Annoy a liberal and vote for Newt!" Funny how you don't see much of that on the other side, e.g. "I support Elizabeth Warren because she'll REALLY piss off the conservatives!"

Uncomfortable conversations

Having spent 30 years making music that's largely ABOUT uncomfortable conversations, this article really struck me. If "indie rock" isn't challenging in any way, why bother? Also, the writer conveys why the faceless smugness of Pitchfork has always bugged me:

"In Sufjan Stevens, indie adopted precious, pastoral nationalism at the Bush Administration’s exact midpoint. In M.I.A., indie rock celebrated a musician whose greatest accomplishment has been to turn the world’s various catastrophes into remixed pop songs. This is a kind of music, in other words, that’s very good at avoiding uncomfortable conversations. Pitchfork has imitated, inspired, and encouraged indie rock in this respect. It has incorporated a perfect awareness of cultural capital into its basic architecture. A Pitchfork review may ignore history, aesthetics, or the basic technical aspects of tonal music, but it will almost never fail to include a detailed taxonomy of the current hype cycle and media environment. This is a small, petty way of thinking about a large art, and as indie bands have both absorbed and refined the culture’s obsession with who is over- and underhyped, their musical ambitions have been winnowed down to almost nothing at all."

Andy Kaufman is not dead.

He faked his death, changed his identity and has been perpetuating a decades-long political prank under the name "Rick Santorum".