Slaughterhouse 90210

 Slaughterhouse 90210 is one of my favorite blogs these days. Celebrity/pop culture photos captioned with quotes from (high) literature. Awesome!

When Morning Comes.

Craig B and Iain Cook, formerly know as the geniuses behind Aereogramme, released a new, wonderful, quite non-Aereogramme record as The Unwinding Hours. And Solstice played its way right into my Top 10 love songs. Too bad the (animated...) video can't keep up with the song. A 'Hallam Foe'-esque melancholic Glasgow aesthetic might have been too obvious, but still...  

You can just switch to a blank tab to enjoy the song.

Maximize Your Investment.

In the newsletter for the release of I'm New Here, the new record of Gil Scott-Heron ("The Revolution Will Not Be Televised") he described the 'proper procedure' get the maximum out of you CD investment:

Music, for example. Buying a CD is an investment.
To get the maximum you must

LISTEN TO IT FOR THE FIRST TIME UNDER OPTIMUM CONDITIONS.

Not in your car or on a portable player through a headset.
Take it home.
Get rid of all distractions, (even him or her).
Turn off your cell phone.
Turn off everything that rings or beeps or rattles or whistles.
Make yourself comfortable.
Play your CD.
LISTEN all the way through.
Think about what you got.
Think about who would appreciate this investment.
Decide if there is someone to share this with.
Turn it on again.
Enjoy Yourself.

I should go hit the record stores. 

Marching Bands and Camouflage Shrubs Make Your Day.

OK Go - This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

Time to Read.

In a recent Q&A with Prospect, Martin Amis first claimed to agree with Dryden that "literature is instruction and delight" and is ought to be enjoyed. So far so traditional, so good. In his next answer he dismisses young, contemporary authors: 

 I don’t read them. I read my friends: Will Self and Zadie Smith. But it’s a fantastically uneconomical way of reading, to read your youngers. No-one knows if they are any good. Only time knows that.

Ian Leslie more or less agrees. Norman Geras in my opinion correctly calls it a " cramped approach from someone who's talking up the tienjoyment of reading". Sure, time is a scare commodity (if you want to introduce economical terms into a discussion about reading, which I fear you have to). So I can't entirely agree with Norman Geras either: You probably can't read it all. Most people just don't have the time or energy for that. But to dismiss young authors because they haven't  passed the test of time, or, like all the authors he mentiones before, are part of the canon. In times of loads and loads of user-generated reviews etc. I can easily and quickly determine how big the chances are that I will enjoy any given book. There just is no more need for a strict canon anymore, for literature passing the test of time.

When talking about reading as joy and delight, such normative statements are problematic, anyway.

(photo by moriza http://www.flickr.com/photos/moriza/ / CC BY 2.0)