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AutonomyBoy

Autonomy Boy, you're so naive.

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Mixtapes for Hookers

Because who wants to listen to all that moaning?

• You Know What I Love? (11/4/09) [View | Hide]

  Swedish television. This is from last week’s episode of Korslaget, the show where famous yet available musicians return to their hometowns to organize choirs. The show’s in its fourth season there, though it (stupidly) only lasted for one in the US. I thought I’d leave you with this. I’m off to New York in the morning, for a mini-vacay with the boyfriend and also for some work-ish things. Tomorrow night we’ll be at Sex Worker Literati, Audacia Ray’s reading series at the Happy Ending Lounge. Then we’re having a big gay night on the town because Friday we plan to hang out with all the ladies from the 2010 New York City Sex Bloggers’ Calendar.  Calendar proceeds benefit Sex Work Awareness, which is a very worthy cause.  Basically I’m just tagging along with my boyfriend, although lots of people I know through the internet will be there, including some of my Carnal Nation cohorts, so I guess it’s sort of a work thing for me, too. Saturday our plan was to hang out in the city, though those plans were thwarted because my family’s decided to have their big holiday get-together this weekend, about three full weeks before anyone sensible would actually call it “the holidays.” My point, mainly, is that I probably won’t be blogging much in the next couple of days.  So you may have to wait until Monday to find out what my two least favorite songs of the noughties are.

• 2003. The Boys All Freak And Song #6 Is Bumpin’ (11/3/09) [View | Hide]

  [I am so not finishing this list before the end of the year...] 6. Jewel, Yes U Can* Picture it: Cranston, Rhode Island, 1996.  I am fifteen years old and nightly my parents and I sit down to painfully awkward and uncomfortably starchy dinners.  To stop me from complaining too much they let me pick out the dinner soundtrack.  I am at the height of my angst-ridden period, but unlike most other angst-ridden teenagers I don’t do drugs or explore Satan worship or wRiTe In ThE kOrN sTyLe.  No, my cathartic muse was Jewel, the Alaskan singer who once lived in a van and who had an eight-minute long song about a very bad canoe accident.  Jewel had messed-up teeth and sang that song about how she was sensitive and wanted to stay that way.  She yodeled, too, and had that other song that went “oh Jew! oh Jew!” Jewel went on to become wildly famous, of course, mainly because she re-recorded several tracks off the album to make them more radio-friendly.  The poppier version of You Were Meant For Me was fine, but the massively altered Foolish Games took a corny yet delicate ballad and blew it up to an unholy mess.  It was, I thought, a huge sellout; Jewel belonged in a bedroom, or a van, writing poetry in a notebook, not singing goopy slow jams for Batman soundtracks. I mention this all because she would be accused of selling out again much later, and I’m not talking about the special Christmas version of her hit song Hands.  I’m talking about 2003, the year of many selling out accusations.  Fountains of Wayne sold out, folks said, exchanging indie cred for a Best New Artist Grammy nomination seven whole years after Radiation Vibe.  Liz Phair sold out, too, aiming for the Sex And The City audience and alienating 99% of her fans.** But Jewel’s transformation was different, because in 2003 she was already a commercial radio star with a bunch of hits.  So the jump from heavily-produced folk to Cole Porter-inspired electro was kind of a big one, and one that many longtime fans  couldn’t handle. To make matters worse, she named her album 0304 and wouldn’t explain why, and then appeared on the cover wearing pink and yellow.  Oh, and she also had long, windswept hair and a hint of Lara Croft’s abs.  She was like a brand-new person. A brilliant brand-new person.  I won’t pretend that Pieces of You has aged very well, or that her other albums have more than two or three good songs each.  But I will defend 0304 to the death.  It is so good.  Intuition, the album’s only hit, is a great single, regardless of the mixed messages that accompanied it.  (NB: A song that makes fun of advertising should maybe not be licensed to a lady’s razor campaign.)  Fragile Heart, her best ballad, is the sweetest Magnetic Fields song that Stephin Merritt never conceived.  And don’t forget that America rhymed “we like spam” with “Polanski’s banned.” Best of all,  the glammy Yes U Can mentions feathered hair and repeatedly uses the word bumpin’.  It also mentions hot pants and men with dolls.  It’s crazy coming from Jewel, and as such is simultaneously more and less convincing than if it were by anyone else.  In that way it’s reminiscent of On and On and On, the lone batty ABBA song where they sing about being famous and hanging out at parties with government ministers. (*This song does not seem to exist anywhere on the internet.  Fucking Atlantic.  But this video is something… Skip ahead to about 1:30, it’s kind of insane.) (**These are not bad things.  You’ll notice that both Stacey’s Mom and Why Can’t I? made my longlist of the year’s best songs.)

• Search Terms (11/3/09) [View | Hide]

  Today: gay males in rhode island with pictures alex kapranos cigarette brutos eros steve hammond how do i completely cancel a craigslist how could a village turn into a town von asian hookers looking for love Yesterday: god hates anal sex terry richardson moneyshot men often makes passes at boys gay splits “girl with cum on her face” Sunday: show willem defoe’s cock too muscly michael was naked because… grace metalious bobblehead dmx up in here cover indian party pubes Saturday: terry richardson, topless awesome hookers gay sex muscly party pj harvey prostitution comma comma chameleon song Friday: joan jett pube comma, comma, comma, comma, chameleon pictures of prostitutes in rhode island wrestlings boners u2 with or without you Thursday: naked hunk flaccid london phone booth prostitute gay beasts prince albert hookers eringer lawsuit santa albert antichrist stunt cock too big Wednesday: 300 dpi karen elimanningpenis calling cards london century lounge ultimate fighting school bukakke burger [photo: Alex Kapranos, via Flickr]

• You Like Me! Or At Least You Like Male Nudity! (11/3/09) [View | Hide]

  Big week for me over on the ol’ Tumblr.  Yesterday my Tumblarity went into four digits for the first time ever, and today I got my 10,000th Like. For those of you unacquainted with the Tumblr concept, if you have an account you can ‘like’ other people’s posts by clicking a little heart that’s in the corner of the screen.  With 10,002 likes and 1936 posts, that means each post I’ve written was liked by 5.16632231 people.  Tumblarity I’m less sure about, but it’s a number that goes up the more popular you are.  Folks sure do like looking at pictures of naked dudes! [photo: Richard Pierce]

• What Not To Wear? (11/3/09) [View | Hide]

  ObamaWeather hates me.

• 2003. Song #7 Brings All The Boys To The Yard (11/2/09) [View | Hide]

  [The best of 2003 continues with the only great song that year to have been performed by cast members of a daytime soap opera.] 7. Kelis, Milkshake New York singer Kelis first appeared at the tail end of the last millennium.  Caught Out There–the “I hate you so much right now!!” song–hit #4 on the UK singles chart, but the song had minimal impact stateside. Americans also ignored the follow-up singles from the Kaleidoscope album, and Young Fresh n New, the only single released from her follow-up album, didn’t even do particularly well in Britain. After two big misses, most R&B singers wouldn’t get the chance to make a third album, but luck was on Kelis’s side. Luck, and her longtime collaborators The Neptunes, who were suddenly in the middle of a very successful run of chart hits. They wrote and produced the whole of her Tasty album, and abruptly the singer transformed from Macy Gray-ish cuckoo to batshit sexpot. Milkshake is a dirty song, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s hard initially to say exactly how.  The chorus makes no sense, really, unless you take the time to figure out what she means by milkshake, what she means by yard, what it means for the boys to go there, what she might teach you, and what it means for her particular milkshake to be better than yours.  Whoever you are. Like a lot of great Neptunes songs–from Britney Spears’s Boys to NERD’s She Wants To Move–Milkshake doesn’t take itself too seriously.  It’s too goofy to be genuinely sexy, though during the bridge Kelis enters sultry mode and drops hints about what all the boys in the yard might actually be in for.  It’s just a few seconds, but it demonstrates what makes this song great:  it doesn’t overdo anything.  At just over three minutes, the song is the perfect length, long enough to firmly lodge itself in your head after each listen but short enough that it doesn’t grow tiresome.  The chorus, which is doubled, occurs just four times. That’s eight la la la la la’s and sixteen occurrences of the phrase “better than yours.”  You can’t forget it, but you’re also not bored by the ten thousandth listen.  (Lest we forget, the song was so omnipresent that it even figured into Randy Jackson’s guest appearance on General Hospital.*) The song also had a really good video.  In a rare instance of a mainstream hip-hop clip not sucking, the Milkshake video matched the song’s wacky attempts at sexiness.  Kelis thrust her boobs around a diner, but the sight of her writhing around on a counter wasn’t as sexy as one might thing.  Added to that are  some exploding frappes, a slight reworking of the suddenly-halfway-through-it-turns-into-a-club hip-hop video trope, and visual punctuation of most of the song’s many ding noises. Despite its popularity, Kelis didn’t really manage to follow up on the song’s success.  Her next single, Trick Me, tanked despite actually being quite fun, and to date the singer’s only other charting single has been the mildly annoying #19 hit Bossy. (*This was the second-best pop/soap opera crossover of the decade, at least that I’m aware of.  It’s still not as good as when Days Of Our Lives’ Marlena Evans jumped out of a plane and lost consciousness in a snow drift only to be rescued by Smokey Robinson.  Just FYI.)

• Are You Highbrow? (11/2/09) [View | Hide]

  [Click image to enlarge.] From Crooked Timber comes this handy chart from a 1949 issue of Life Magazine, letting you know what’s highbrow and what isn’t.  My favorite part is that the useful highbrow objects are a decanter and an ashtray from a chemical supply company. I’m all over the place.  I like the Eames chair, but I also prefer a jukebox to Bach. And don’t even get me started on the joys of bourbon and ginger ale.

• Sunday News (11/1/09) [View | Hide]

  [Because I spent most of the week reading about prostitution in Rhode Island, this news update is abbreviated.] The Village Voice called wrestling organization Ring of Honor the Best Place To See Straight Men Get All Homoerotic.  Wrestling fans responded, obviously, by calling for the death of people from the Village Voice. Grace Metalious, author of scandalous fifties bestseller novel Peyton Place, has been honored with a bobble head by the New Hampshire Historical Society.  That’s pretty cool, although I’m more excited by their Old Man In The Mountain bobblehead. [via Largehearted Boy] The Telegraph has a list of 100 cultural moments that defined the decade.  It’s interesting to read British ideas of what’s culturally important, because we’re so alike and yet so not.  I can’t imagine something like The Beethoven Experience capturing American hearts and breaking sales records, for instance, or any American calling “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor” a significant cultural moment. Finally, Asterix, the plucky French comic hero, turned 50 this week. [image from Glory By Honor VIII: The Final Countdown]

• The Pop Chart (11/1/09) [View | Hide]

  The special All Saints’ Day edition of The Pop Chart kicks off in about seven minutes right here.  And you can always follow along with the Top 40 over at the Pop Chart blog.

• Rhode Island Prostitutes Forced Onto Street, Into Danger (10/29/09) [View | Hide]

  The anti-prostitution bill passed the Senate tonight.  Here’s the Providence Journal story, and my (admittedly highly opinionated and angry) take.  The governor will, I think, sign the bill tomorrow, and then it goes into effect immediately.  That means no time for the women in the spas to find other jobs, or even look for them, mainly in a county pushing 14% unemployment and a real unemployment rate of over 21%.  It also, of course, means a lot more rape and violence and women going to jail for non-violent crimes; the first offense is punishable by up to six months in prison.  During the House committee meeting the other night, one Representative asked how much implementation would cost; nobody had checked.  Later, that same Rep suggested job training, counseling and HIV risk education in lieu of jail time; he was told by the committee chairman that the state probably couldn’t afford that.  But hey, they’re sure fixing that Asian spa problem!  Right?

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ju-ju-julio

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