My breakdown of Murakami themes.
I liked this better when it was called Most Popular Tumblr Posts.
oh that’s great! come and get your balls waxed and leave with someone else’s pubic hair!
give me ya keys, i’m taking over
Jessica Hopper (as per usual) hits it out of the park in this essay on DJing for Rookie. You’d better believe I’ve bookmarked this for future reference.
My favorite tip?
“Depeche Mode songs are always much slower than you remember them being, and dancehall only works on wasted people, after 1 AM, and only if they have been dancing to party rap for most of the night. Both can kill a floor dead.”
Pardon me if I’m at least a week behind on new music but: this song/video (for Class Actress’ “Bienvenue”) is so romantic in that cheesy way that makes you feel like you accidentally stumbled upon a breathlessly gorgeous jewelry commercial. And that’s more than OK.
Grimes recommended this (OMFG) on Twitter yesterday - it’s the video for Phèdre’s In Decay, which is NSFW but not in way you expect it to be. Phèdre are “three lovers from Monaco, raised in a cave of gold” and release their debut LP digitally on February 14. (via)
There’s something strangely appealing about this.
(Source: matychavez)
Happy Bday Angela!
Activist, Scholar, Writer, Professor and FBI’s most wanted
When Angela Davis strode on the political stage with her fist raised high and her iconic Afro standing higher, people noticed. She is a rebel and a revolutionary, a bookish philosopher who has lived out her theories with action and purpose.
Smart, stylish, eloquent and fearless, Davis never lets her style get in the way of the substance. Her life’s work has been built around issues of race, community and the criminal justice system. In the 70s, she was involved with The Black Panthers, but much of her energy was focused on what she termed the Prison-Industrial Complex, the systematic privatization of prisons as profit-making machines. This means the more people in prison, the more lucrative the business. Hence, the absurd increase in men (mostly poor, young, black) sent to U.S prisons in the last two decades.
Davis herself was on the run from the law in the 70s, following the murder of a California judge. Innocent, she went into hiding, which sparked a nationwide search and worldwide media attention, propelling her to the FBI’s most wanted list. Two months later, she was arrested in a motel in midtown Manhattan. Despite pressure from famous rightwing fear-mongers – Richard Nixon (who branded Davis a “terrorist”), the then California governor Ronald Reagan and rat-bag FBI director J Edgar Hoover – Davis became an international cause celebre. A global campaign called for her release and Aretha Franklin offered to post quarter of a million dollars in bail. She was acquitted in the end.
Angela Davis inspired people all over the world, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who recorded their song “Angela” on their 1972 album, Some Time in New York City. The Rolling Stones also wrote about Davis, recording the song “Sweet Black Angel” on their 1972 album, Exile on Main Street.
Davis is now a retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is the former director of the university’s Feminist Studies Department. She is also the founder of Critical Resistance, an organization working against the Prison-Industrial Complex.
