Day: July 5, 2014

"Elevator Mixtape" by IEJ [Vimeo]
Apparently people posting video footage of escalators on YouTube and elsewhere is a "thing." IEJ made a compilation. Update, from an email from IEJ: "As far as I can tell, the escalator recording community is a subset of the elevator recording community who have their own wikipedia. I linked to the page of dieselducy who took the video you can see in the preview freezeframe (mall in Roanoke VA) [in IEJ's mixtape]. He's big in that scene. ... Maybe they don't have the glamour of bridges and trains but elevators/escalators are ubiquitous anomalies themselves (they aren't everywhere - WY only has two and the riders of the first one in Kurdistan are happy and confused)." Tom here: Documenting escalators is interesting to me in an "all the buildings on the sunset strip" way, only crowdsourced. These are unobserved phenomena that take on an aesthetic dimension through mass recording.

"Wistle While You Twerk" by Ying Yang Twins [YouTube]
America woke up to twerking with Miley Cyrus, but this song, from the album Thug Walkin', released in 2000, shows that it's been around for 14 years, at least! Join Doc, Grumpy, Sneezy, Dopey, and the rest of the gang with this happy anthem.

Addendum: The German group Trio is considered a one-hit wonder of the '80s (for "Da Da Da - I Don't Love You - You Don't Love Me ") but they were a pretty good band, as seen in a collection of German TV performances assembled by Network Awesome. In fact most '80s one hit wonders are that way because of the music industry's insistence on hits.

cosmicsands has transcribed the text of Kevin Bewersdorf's Issue Project Room reading on Rap Genius, a site for crowdsourcing lyrics, poetry, etc. Based on this, the phrase "Taoist poetry about the internet" in the previous post is a bit confining. There is Eastern influence but also a tone of Walt Whitman-esque celebration, in poems such as "Who is using the internet?" (see below). A poem like this walks a line between being savvy enough to characterize an ocean of data, with ever-shifting codes of hipness and obscurity, while "opening its heart" to that data as if it were Whitman's democratic throngs. Missing is the even more delicate balance of some of the earlier work, before Bewersdorf's road-to-Damascus moment of deleting his website and (ostensibly) going offline, between understandable revulsion at phenomena such as dozens of stock photos of people praying and an attempt to write sincere praise in a tone that mimics both religious awe and corporate sales motivation.

"Who is using the Internet?"

Who is using the Internet?
In my eyes, the sun is.
Dragon dorks.
Shark dorks.
Los Angeles Latinas.
Mystical comedians.
Cable guys.
Credit card registrants.
Grown men in developing countries.
Dream weavers.
Translators.
Native peoples.
Inverse porn stars.
Someone typing randomly.
The descendants of Adam and Eve.
Adam Sandler, and his descendants.
Cranky flowershop owners.
Anyone who's seen the sun.
The employed.
The powerfully obsessed.
The politically ejaculating.
Those committing heinous crimes,
As well as the dying,
Their caregivers,
Your parents
And your lover.
Paleface, my heart goes out to you.

corrections to transcription can be added on Rap Genius