Aesop Rock posted the flatland compilation video I did during my comprehensive exams. So, if you haven’t seen it, head over there and check it out, along with other fun stuff from Hail Mary Mallon, Jeremy Fish, Kimya Dawson, Rob Sonic, Aesop, and friends.

Mad thanks to Aesop Rock for supporting my silliness.

My dude Aesop Rock‘s new record doesn’t come out until July 10th, but here are a few sneak peeks:

Since Hail Mary Mallon’s Are You Going to Eat That? (RhymeSayers, 2011) was my favorite record of last year, you know I’m ready for what these guys have been up to since. With new records in the works from all involved, this summer is guaranteed to have an ill soundtrack. On to the goodies:
Aesop Rock and Whiskers the Cat star in the album tralier for Skelethon: [runtime: 1:57]:

Here’s “Zero Dark Thirty” from …

SXSW can always be considered an extreme example of the platitude “when it rains, it pours,” but this year, it was a bit too literal. SXSW Interactive weekend was a rainy, sloppy affair like I haven’t seen in my few years in Austin. Someone — nay many ones — downtown likely made a killing on rain boots and umbrellas because they were everywhere, and I know nobody packed those for the trip. Once Interactive was over and the guard changed for Music, the rain had subsided and the sun shone …

Zines, well, mostly skateboard and BMX zines, defined my formative years. They were our network of news, stories, interviews, events, art, and pictures. It’s very difficult to describe how an outmoded phenomena like that worked once such epochal technological change, one that uproots and supplants its cultural practices, has occurred. FREESTYLIN’s reunion book, Generation F (Endo Publishing, 2008), has a chapter called “The Xerox was Our X-Box,” and that title gets at the import of these things. As I said in that very chapter, “Making a zine was always having …

My dad is an air traffic controller, so I’ve grown up with a special relationship with airports. These grounded waystations are like family members, some close siblings, some distant cousins. Is there a more interstitial space than an airport? It is the most terminally liminal area: between cities, between flights, between appointments, between everything. The airport is a place made up of on-the-ways, not-there-yets, missed-connections. The airport is a place made up of no-places.
In the late 1970s, Brian Eno attempted to sonically capture the in-between feeling of being in a airport. He’d …

Grant Morrison describes his growing up through comics books as a Manichean affair: “It was an all-or-nothing choice between the A-Bomb and the Spaceship. I had already picked sides, but the Cold War tension between Apocalypse and Utopia was becoming almost unbearable” (p. xiv). Morrison’s first non-comic book, Supergods (Spiegel & Grau, 2011), is one-half personal statement, one-half art history. It’s an autobiography told through comic books and a history of superheroes disguised as a memoir. His early history of superhero comics is quite good, but it gets really, really …

I used to solve the Rubik’s Cube — competitively. I never thought much of it until I, for some unknown reason, was recently compelled to tell a girl that story. I now know how nerdy it sounds. The girl and I no longer speak.
Some of the things I grew up doing, I knew were nerdy (e.g., Dungeons & Dragons, LEGOs, computers, etc.). Others were just normal. Looking back on them or still being into them, one sees just how nerdy things can be. In a recent column on his SYFFAL site, my …

The turntable is easily the most iconic cultural artifact associated with Hip-hop, but the advent and adoption of the boombox had as much to do with its spread and tenacity. Before raps were on the radio, they were on the tapes. Think of the turntable and the microphone as the senders and the boombox and the cassette as the receivers: without recording and playback, Hip-hop wouldn’t have lasted long. The already choked socioeconomic conditions from which it sprang could’ve buried it like so much tape hiss. Two recent books explore …

In the words of biographer Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage (no relation) was so full of original ideas that he begged to be misunderstood. He did for music what Duchamp and Warhol did for art: His work questioned and critiqued the establishment in which it existed. Infuriating to many, inspirational to others, his place in the history of art, music, and other creative acts is undeniable. As Kostelanetz (1989) wrote, “Even though these ideas usually attract more comment than commentary, more rejection than reflection, he is, to an increasingly common opinion, …

As usual, the Summer Reading List is the time of year when I ask a bunch of my bookish friends what they’re reading. It’s always a good time, and this year we have newcomers and old friends Howard Rheingold, Michelle Rae Anderson, and Zizi Papacharissi, as well as Summer Reading List vets like Alex Burns, Cynthia Connolly, Steven Shaviro, Ashley Crawford, Peter Lunenfeld, Erik Davis, Michael Schandorf, Patrick Barber, and Brian Tunney.
As always, the book links on this page will lead you to Powell’s Books, the best bookstore on …