the clap song

The European Commission has barred top officials from taking holidays on oligarchs' yachts and dictators' jets in a new code of conduct. But MEPs, who want more say on the rules, point to shortfalls and loopholes.

(the actual) Episcopal Jesus

have y'all seen this PRO-ANA tswift cover girl commercial?

and isn't this one creepy??—

I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO...

Verses

Elvis Costello "Shabby Doll"

Giving you more of what for
Always worked for me before
Now I'm a shabby doll
What's going on behind the green elevator door
With just a shabby doll

There's a hit man facing
A compromising situation
With just a shabby doll
And a very neat line in character assassination
She's just a shabby doll

She's just a shabby doll
She's putting him off and putting you on
She's just the shabby doll
You're swearing upon you know in your heart
She's gone you know in your heart
She's just a shabby doll

There's a girl in this dress
There's always a girl in distress
She's just a shabby doll
She's so sure she's self-possessed
Then again she's half undressed
She's just a shabby doll

The boy that I used to be
Showed no sign of sympathy
For just a shabby doll
I have betrayed you and me
And paid for my own bribery
With just a shabby doll

He's the tired toy that everyone enjoyed
He wants to be a fancy man but he's nothing but a nancy boy
He's all pride and no joy

And being what you might call a whore
Always worked for me before
Now I'm a shabby doll
Untie the gag the cat's out of the bag
But won't show his claws
He's just a shabby doll

She said you must be joking
Some things are left unspoken
You're just a shabby doll
He's lying limp and soaking
He was openly broken
By just a shabby doll

http://miraclesnmagic.wordpress.com

Longtime NBA sideline reporter, Craig Sager, was thrown out of the Olympic Village, and China altogether, early Sunday morning after security guard dogs picked up traces of weapons-grade plutonium emanating from his controversial "Electric Suit of Destiny" (seen here during the 2007 NBA All-Star game).

WHHHAAAATTT HAPPEN????!!!!!!!
This is so sad.

While hosting a celebrity boxing match, the crowd turned on Jersey Shore's Jolie "Angelina" Pivarnick. "The crowd just went crazy and started throwing Kotex at her," says her mother. "She went there to have a good time and she got ridiculed and abused."

Cynthia Bourgeault is an Episcopal priest, writer and retreat leader. She is founding director of the Aspen Wisdom School in Colorado and principal visiting teacher for the Contemplative Society in Victoria, BC, Canada.

Verses

"Three Wishes" by The Pierces

We'd be so less fragile
If we're made from metal
And our hearts from iron
And our minds from steel
And if we built an army
Full of tender bodies
Could we love each other
Would we stop to feel

And you want three wishes:
One to fly the heavens
One to swim like fishes
And then one you're saving for a rainy day
If your lover ever takes her love away

You say you want to know her like a lover
And undo her damage, she'll be new again
Soon you'll find that if you try to save her
It renews her anger
You will never win

And you only want three wishes:
You want never bitter
And all delicious
And then one you're saving for a rainy day
If your lover ever takes her love away

You only want three wishes:
One to fly the heavens
One to swim like fishes
You want never bitter
And all delicious
And a clean conscience
And all it's blisses

You want one true lover with a thousand kisses
You want soft and gentle and never vicious
And then one you're saving for a rainy day
If your lover ever takes her love away

"outside in my Impala"

Perhaps it's just a matter of my dotty (dotted?) past in school, a personal-permanent feeling that Autumn (the season that smells like school) is oppressive—but really—isn't this Autumn, September, 2010 in New York City, America, feeling OPPRESSIVE (let my people [I mean me] go). The Tea Party (psychotic misappropriators of our glorious Revolutionary Histories) is gaining traction. One cannot help but project a bleak (HOPEless) 21st century, like:

more pro-war, corporate deregulating, tax-cutting (social program gutting) and anti-civil rights legislature (or non-legislature?)...meanwhile bridges and roads and systems of public transportation are crumbling, collapsing and there's also an increase in freakish weather disasters and oil and chemical spills and terrorism and joblessness is increasing and there's no healthcare and nothing's getting manufactured here anymore and tariffs are rising and police stations and fire houses are closing and schools are closing and no one can afford to go to college, cannot borrow enough money and it's 19th century Russia plus robots and cloning and giant, masturbatory virtual-reality machines that people choose to live in...

There's that. And it's been humid. Pillow and I saw the President's motorcade yesterday, sort of fast and rough (a Tahoe packed with orange-suited gunmen) and limo's look so old-fashioned now. It's unstable. It's tornadoes and hurricanes and gruesome murder trials and The Yankees losing game after game..."Mr. President, I need you to answer this honestly. Is this my new reality?" And I know full well this mess isn't Barack Obama's fault. I just see in him what I see everywhere: uncertainty, faltering, fear, thinness.

Some Pop right now reflects this local color brillianty.

*I've been meaning to write for weeks about Nicki Minaj's verse on Trey Songz' (and we LOVE Trey Songz) bunkish "Bottoms Up." Coming in at 2(min):40(sec) (do skip ahead), Nicki picks up the "drunk-in-the-clurrb" sticks with some lines about margaritas and pink champagne delivered como...Miss Adelaide, a gangster's moll, a zany/glamorous hood of the 20th century, but also Kristin Cavallari. She whips up (punny!) a narrative with the perfecto line, "I don't say hi/I say keys to the Benz," which then leads to a projected, pretend snarling rage, for which she quickly apologizes with, "Excuse me./I'm sorry./I'm really such a lady./I rep Young Money./You know...slim...baby...?" And then we're talking about tabloids and Anna Nicole Smith as a possible saint. And WOW Nicki, thanks so much for reminding us that Smith's wacked-out Trim-Spa promotional VMA rant of 2004, "DO YOU LIKE MY BOOOODDDDYYYY??!!!" was a f*^&ing seminal text. Anna Nicole Smith was a trailblazer in the world of AVATARS, the art of self-making and disseminating. A genius. And Nicki too for saying so (and her everywhere-at-once, melodic delivery)! It's pretty gothic though, right?

**Like Rihanna's "Only Girl (In the World)"—I love how unafraid Rihanna is to come-off crazy and desperate (I mean, "on the brink of ___?") and self-destructive; it's her newish oeuvre (rebel fleur!). And her alarming/ist siren-voice and accompanying heavy electronics only magnify the dynamic (drugged? futuristic? soldierly?), fast-alternating paranoia and carelessness at the heart of her recent work. In "Only Girl" she expounds on Be and Kanye's "Ego"-as-sex-organ metaphor of 2009 by posing Ego-as-sexual-orientation, as...thick zombie presence, as liquor? Rihanna demands (screams), "I want you to make me feel like I'm the only girl in the world,/Like I'm the only one that you'll ever love,/Like I'm the only one who knows your heart, only girl in the world,/Like I'm the only one that's in command,/Cause I'm the only one that understands how to make you feel like a man." In this relationship, sketched on the dancefloor, neither party is responsible for their own emotions (or gender identity), neither have any power, or "command." They must force each other's feelings, act and react. They must possess one another, and in so doing both lose self-possession. The lovers are mirrors. The partnership is proof of materiality? In this rapid, loose, disordered 21st century, building and keeping and believing an identity for oneself has never been more important (never been so broadly the object-of-careers, actions, outfits, utterances), or more difficult, more maze-like and wonky and elastic. In this track, Rihanna is bluntly insisting that her and her man bind together to stabilize and affirm their identities, as if they are the only information, the only information in the world, Adam and Eve, one body, consumed by one another, blind to everything and everyone else, love babies in the womb, First and/or Last Peoples. Oooooh it's kinda chilly and doomed. And smart. I feel like it's about images too. Like, how impossible to be "the only girl in the world" when holograms and billboards and digital spirits fill the very air, making for a Floating World (visible behind our eyes too!). You know?

***Another one for self-destruction and bad prophecies right naw is Kanye (of '09's cute "Ego" swagger). His single "Power" opens better than most things, "I'm living in the 21st century/doing something mean to it..." (I have been loving invoking the "Twenty-first century" that sounds like a bell toll when you speak it.) What follows is crashing (more sirens!), "Global," genre-surfing bits and samples plus real-talk, a man drifting between tabulating baubles and mentioning/musing political consciousness and booze and powder and suicide and back to suicide doors and himself and the World and himself and the World. It not perfect. But it's so much. (And the video—magazines are history paintings!)

****Of course (I mean, history lessons are always helpful), the song that has taken my temperature best this week is a mini-throwback, an (ghost)Impala hovering outside, Lloyd Banks and Keri Hilson's 2006 collaboration, "Help." From Hilson's introductory cooing, "G-Unit...," to fade-out, it brings the rawest nostalgia, a snuffing/damning certainty that the dreams attendant to the noises (the G-Unit noises) are dust, dunzo, shaken-out. In 2010, the sound of Lloyd Banks in 2006 makes me want to cry, like it serves to conjure lost love, lost ease, lost power.

Look at this album cover!------------

Mel Tormé! Death of Empire!

xoxo

faces of ______

CAVE CANEM

Powhatan's Mantle

White-tailed Deerskin, shells

Virginia

17th century

Gorgeous Italian Wedding Cake

too blessed to ____

Memento Mori

Humanity and Empathy are 2 of the 4 principles at facebook. Those were the 2 principles I was missing on that evening. Why are there so many tweets? Well this isn't a simple subject.....I wish I could meet every hater. I wish I could talk to every hater face to face and change there a opinion of me one conversation at a time. I wish they all knew how much I really cared about music and pop culture and art and peoples feelings.