A PARODY SONG FOR MY MOTHER AND BROTHER

To the tune of "Horses in the Stable":

New Yorkers on the table
That IIIIIIIII can read.....

I GOT MY QUIZ RESULTS BACK, AND THEY DON'T LOOK GOOD

I took the "What Passion Of The Christ Character Are You?" quiz and got "Booing Villager."

I took the "What Cuss Word Are You?" quiz and got "Bitch-ass."

I took the "What Type Of Friend Are You?" quiz and got "Fat." 

I took the "What's Your Type?" quiz and got italic.

I took the "What Kind Of Owl Are You?" quiz and got "Spotted."
I took the "What Comic Strip Character Are You?" quiz and got fuckin' CATHY!!!! Shit!!!!!!!!!!

Book Review: THE PURE AND THE IMPURE by Colette

THE PURE AND THE IMPURE is a book written in French in the 1930s that teaches you about how love and sex works. I read the whole thing (translated into english) and I still feel like a love and sex novice, but it did two of the things I'm looking for when I read a book: it articulated some things that I've observed and felt, but never told anyone, and it broadened my horizons by showing me the world through a different brain.
Two things that it didn't do is make me laugh or have any lesbian sex in it. Which is OK. Neither of those things are "deal breakers" for me. A book called "The Pure and The Impure" is just not going to be funny. (Plus, French people aren't that funny. Except Marcel Marceau and Le Pétomane.) The lesbian sex thing was a bit more of a letdown, since this looked like the type of book that was going to have a lot of lesbian sex in it, but that's fine too. I don't read to get aroused. I just thought I should warn you.
The format of the book is basically a big rant. Each chapter is about a person or couple who Colette has known, who was queer or promiscuous or both. Like a lot of rants, it can get tedious, and sometimes you want to shake the ranter and say "what the fuck are you talking about?" but as a ranter myself I found it all kind of endearing. Sometimes Colette seems to be overthinking things, and sometimes she seems to be painting with a broad brush, and that's how I am too.
The most relatable part to me was when she said, of herself and one of her male friends, "He and I and others like us come from the distant past and are inclined to cherish the arbitrary, to prefer passion to goodness, to prefer combat to discussion." AMEN, sister!
Unfortunately, since she's French, Colette also comes across as a know it all. She'll say things like "I am alluding to a certain hermaphroditism which burdens certain highly complex human beings" and you just want to smack the cigarette out of her hand. Really, Colette? Are you and your friends really so highly complex? Passages like this, for me, evoke Leonardo DiCaprio's slave owner character in DJANGO UNCHAINED, who talks in a refined, intellectual voice all the time to mask the fact that he's dumb as shit. But, like I said, I'm a ranter too, so I can forgive these things, as long as you're not measuring people's skulls.
The most horizon-broadening thing for me was the "sensuality" of the writing. I don't mean this in the erotic sense (remember, there are NO LESBIAN SEX scenes in this book) but in the sense of talking about the senses. Colette, since she is French, is very in touch with the smells and tastes of things, and reads into what people are wearing. I never describe smell, taste, or fashion in my own writing, and this book made me feel a little "basic" for that, in a helpful way.
Overall, I'm going to have to give this book a 0/1, because it got a pretty tedious at times, and probably should've just been an essay, but I'm glad that I was forced to read it. (It was this month's selection in my book club.) I like Colette, and in fact I think I have a crush on her. The description of the acoustic qualities of the word "pure" at the end was fantastic, and tied the whole thing together. (The word "pure" in French is "pur," so it translated well.) Also, this book looks good on my shelf. It makes me look like a "highly complex human being." Maybe--hopefully--the kind of human being another human being would want to have sex with.

FINAL SCORE: 0/1

COVER: 0/1

SMELL: 1/1

NEWS

-Boring Hat of the Month is back! Please follow me so I can amass more followers than my mother, who is currently beating me by one follower. (I could unfollow her to catch up, but she posts such good photos!) What gives, Ma? Don't you know you're not allowed to BEAT YOUR CHILDREN anymore??

-The Buies Creek Astros, a minor league baseball team from North Carolina, has rebranded themselves as the Fayettville Woodpeckers, in honor of a beloved local bird known as the red-cockaded woodpecker. The new name was elected by local residents, who said that they admired the woodpecker for its looks, tenacity, and baseball-esque affection for BORING. 

-Welcome back, Nyquil510! The gang from the Nyquil510.tumblr.com comment section missed you.

-What do you guys think about the movies and stuff that've been coming out? Here's what I think: SUSPIRIA (2018) is dope, Bud Smith's weekly column in The Nervous Breakdown is dope, and this "Letter of Recommendation" about Old English is dope. THE FAVOURITE (don't you just love leaning into that extra British syllable, when you say it out loud? I know I do!) is pretty dope, but the dopest Yorgos Lanthimos movie is THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER. BIRD BOX, surprisingly, had something to do with birds, but was BAD. THE PANTY SYMPHONIC is dope.

-No One Dies Forever HQ was attacked by a bear the other night! This is true. It knocked down the company trash can, ate some of our trash, and then ran off into the woods to take a shit. He never tried to attack us or anything, but my roommate was so freaked out by the experience he ran right upstairs to the gun vault and put all of our honey in it.

-Birders from all over the country have driving down--"flocking," you might even say--to Los Angeles to catch a glimpse of the red-flanked bluetail, an extremely rare siberian bird that has mysteriously taken up residence in a hedge near the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library of UCLA. Apparently, this is only the 3rd such bird ever spotted in California. When asked to comment, birders and library-goers told reporters to "keep it down." 

RIBALD LIMERICKS FOR THE HOLIDAYS

for Ethan Coen and Thomas

there once was a man from nantucket

whose dick was so long he could suck it

it was easy and fun 

but he longed for a son

as he spat his cum into a bucket

there was an old man from old hickory

who once showed his wrinkly old dick to me

inside those folds

was an army of molds

that could have led dixie to victory

a lady named katie just stated

the number of men she's fellated

it's so strikingly high 

it makes me want to cry   

i wish we weren't so closely related!

i destroyed the receipts and the playbill 

and my voice, as i lied, sounded stable

but again, i got caught   

cause i somehow forgot  

to wipe all of your shit off the table 

DIAL B FOR BIRDER, EPISODE 5

Available on iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud and Audiomack.

BOOK REVIEW: BEHIND THE PAINT by Violent J and Hobey Echlin

Do YOU know how magnets work, shithead? That's how I feel about people who make fun of Insane Clown Posse. Like bros, vegans and DJ's, ICP has become a go-to target for people for unfunny people who think they're funny.  Even Troma movies make fun of them, and Troma fans (pointing at myself) are some of the most contrarian, unfuckable people on the planet.

I don't listen to ICP (except Chicken Huntin', I Want My Shit, Thy Unveiling, and The Neden Game. And Bitches) but I often find myself drunkenly defending them to people at bonfires. Their music might be grating, and they might make too many sex puns, but at the end of the day ICP is funnier and more interesting than 95% of the people making fun of them--and they have better taste in music, too is the gist of my arguement. It's rare for me to take the "anti-hater" position like that, but for some reason I always felt strongly about it. This book, given to me by Nyquil after he lost my copy of SWEET JONES: PIMP C'S TRILL LIFE STORY, proves that these feelings are valid. 

Raised on the sultry nocturnal sounds of Esham, Sir Mix-A-Lot, Geto Boys and Awesome Dre, The Insane Clowns are wiggers of the most endearing sort. They're wiggers from a time before the internet, when kids were beat up and socially alienated for being wiggers. It was a lot harder to copy black culture then. You couldn't just buy a Cam'ron shower curtain and start saying lit. As an unpopular person and obscure regional rap afficionado myself, I found this "early years" section of this book--usually the most tedious part of an autobiography--to be fascinating.

One problem with the book, which I'm remembering as this review gets longer and longer, is that it's too long. If you include the annotated discography, and the "what Psychopathic records means to me" section at the end (by everyone on the Psychopathic records roster), it's 596 pages. I suspect that the book wasn't "written" so much as dictated by Violent J, while he was high, and this technique makes for hilarious reading ("I was like, 'Whoa, this is the shit! Slash likes my song! The chick he fucks likes it, too.'") but 600 pages of reminiscince is a lot from any man. If I was the editor, I'd probably cut some of the wrestling stuff. And give it a better cover.

Ratings-wise, I have no choice but to give this 1/1 stars. BEHIND THE PAINT was funny, inspirational and full of rap gossip, and how much more can you demand from a book? You want it to have a neden?

FINAL SCORE: 1/1
COVER: 0/1

NEWS

-DIAL B FOR BIRDER is on iTunes now, and also SoundCloud and "Stitcher." Tell your friends, if you ever make any.
-In case you're not savvy enough to know yet, the Nyquil510.tumblr.com comment section is home to one of the most vibrant fan communities online.
- Follow Thomas on twitter.
-Sorry To Bother You is dope, the new Byron Crawford book is dope, and the new episode of Tarantula is dope. Music is still mostly bad.
-This crazy crow lady's blog post about crow necrophilia has gotten a lot of attention lately. How can I get a picture of a crow doing something even more fucked up? Sound off in the comments... 
-Speaking of hot news stories, I've been running into a lot of news coverage of these so-called "bird scooters" recently. Are you guys up on this? I'm not. I've heard of the bird Scoter before, but this sounds different.
-According to an article in The New Republic that came out last year, white people living in rural areas of the South make up the highest percentage of birdwatchers in America. Yeah--too bad they're watching em through the scopes of their AK-47s.
-You know, I've been thinking about it, and maybe Ben Franklin was right: Maybe the bald eagle shouldn't be America's National Bird. Maybe America's National Bird should change, based on who the president is. For Lincoln, it it's an owl. For LBJ, it's a rooster. And for Donald Trump? Scrooge McDuck. (UPDATE: Shit, Penn Jillette beat me to this comparison.) Maybe a cuckoo bird.

CELEBRITY GUEST POST: "RAP MUSIC THAT I LIKE A LOT RIGHT NOW THAT JESSE WILL FEEL INDIFFERENT TOWARDS PT. 2" BY THOMAS

Ok hello again! What's new with you?

Ok so you are going to hate this and I think I hate this too, but it's super interesting and worth talking about! The song starts out with a solid verse from our friend Wicca Phase Springs Eternal and then it hits: probably the weirdest delivery I have ever heard. It sounds like this guy is actively crying and also cannot touch his lips together. This got me thinking about how people make music today and its effect on the music that is created. Can you imagine if this guy existed in the 90s? Chances are he would never record music and if he wanted to he'd have to rent studio time and there would be an engineer or producer of some type there that would tell him "No! Stop doing that with your voice! That's bad!" But instead this guy can just do weird stuff with his voice in his room on his laptop and release it to the world. The result is A LOT more music out there and a lot of it is boring or bad, but there is a greater opportunity now for truly unique and different sounds to emerge. The internet is pretty rad IMO.

Drippin So Pretty

Drippin So Pretty is a new to me rapper that writes songs almost exclusively about being in love and shooting heroin (take a min to process that please).

SHORT SONGS ARE DOPE. This beat is really insane, there is so much going on here. When the bass drops at :25 it's so good! When I first heard this song I got super stoked on it and emailed it to Jesse and he replied by saying he "hopped off the rap train at mumble station", which made me think he might secretly be 48 years old. 

I can't quite figure out what he is saying for the hook, either "I don't fuck with lil shorty, she ain't right for me" or "I don't fuck with lil shorty, she don't ride for me." The more I listen to it the more I think it's the latter, but I'm going to go with the former because it makes the song 100X more endearing. 

SHORT SONGS. SHORT SONGS. SHORT SONGS. I legit get upset when I see songs within this genre that are like 3:30 plus. Real rude of the artist to assume a high-powered businessman such as myself has that kind of time to waste.

Controversial opinion: I like the cheesy tire screech sound effect in this song. Anyways, I like the melody and soul in this song. 

Section Where I Talk About Bladee A Lot 

I've already written extensively about Bladee and he is probably my favorite artist active right now. Since the last time I wrote about him in Fall of 2017 he's released a ton of great music. It's actually pretty crazy how prolific he has become in the last couple years. It seems like random new songs of his are constantly dropping on top of random albums and mixtapes that seem to come out of nowhere. Heck, he even dropped a Christmas song last December that contained an A+ catchy hook. 

Ok so new songs:

My Lord this beat is amazing. Bladee just sort of floats over this beat with his melodic voice getting chopped up by the autotune.

This song also produced one of the most endearing YouTube comments I've seen in a while:

Haha I just want to give that guy a hug and scruff up his hair.

Bladee came out with a new album recently and I like it a lot! It is not on the same level as Eversince, which is probably my favorite rap album of the last 5 years, but it is a very engaging listen. Once again, the production drives things, with beats that don't sound like anything else out there. 

The production of this song is so warm and soft, it feels like my ears are getting a big hug. Also this beat is so layered, I keep picking up on different elements, like the subtle guitar strumming that comes in @ :56. There's a lot of song here in around two and a half minutes. I appreciate that Bladee utilizes his autotune to do something interesting for the chorus. For most of his songs the autotune sounds like it is just there to distance him from real life, because I think he legit has a good singing voice. 

This is the "lead single" off the latest album and it took me a while to get into, maybe because I was distracted by the music video? I highly recommend people listen to songs for the first time without the visuals, to get an actual opinion of the music before watching the video. There is nothing worse than sending a video of a song to your friend and they come back at you with "wow, what a silly hat he has on!" Or maybe I should just accept the importance of visual aesthetics in music and how they are forever intertwined. IDK. 

Hella Sketchy

Jesse has accused me of only liking depressing rap and he is only 90% correct. Here is part of the 10%:



IMPORTANT WARNING: don't watch this music video! Forget everything I wrote above and don't let your eyeballs taint this song. Hella Sketchy is a rapper that makes extremely light and catchy rap songs. He also looks like a 15 year old kid that I instinctively want to stuff in a locker. But dang this song is so catchy!!! Also it is that rare breed of song that is super poppy, but does not wear thin immediately. I have been listening to this song for over a year and still think it is tight. 

Don't watch this music video either! It is chopped up clips from the "Spent a Check" music video. This beat is great though. I was talking to Jesse in person about this one, trying to figure out what the production sounds like. I think we settled on a Nintendo tropical paradise.  

More Lil Peep

Do you remember last post where I was talking about how Lil Peep released so much music before his death and I'm amazed how I keep discovering new songs of his? Well just since writing that last post I have discovered two more songs that I absolutely love:



The vibe of this song is so sick. It sounds like I am listening to something real important. I feel bad for the feature, because this beat is huge and Peep always layered the shit out of his vocals, so Wulf's verse sounds oh so meak. Hellboy is such an interesting album and I have come to really enjoy it after being initially turned off by some of its cringey moments. Peep's angst is going to sound bad to some listeners, but there is a lot of interesting moments, and wonderful expressions of his emerging pop sensibility. 

Hey speaking of pop sensibility, this song is super catchy! Very enjoyable 2 minute plus track that always leaves me in a good mood. I have a lot to say about the feature, Yung Bruh/Lil Tracy, but we'll save that for next post. 

Ok that's all for now. Remember, you get what you give in this life, so don't walk around being a selfish shithead.

Life can be a beautiful thing if you let it be.