Published today under the News > Society > Depression section of the Guardian website, this article on the quarter life crisis phenomenon is nourished with an unnecessary seafood metaphor, but highlights a very real and modern affliction. It has broken down the four phases of a crisis that one third of people between the ages of 25 and 35 go through.
Well I’ve been in the grips of such a crisis and I attest you can shave about 3 phases off that by reading some French existentialist philosophy. Skip Camus and go straight to Sartre for maximum effect. You’ll be plunged deep into the Nausea, and probably start thinking of ways you can top yourself without your parents feeling they failed at raising you. My idea was a nice clean hanging, whereby I would not leave a note, but I would leave my pants around my ankles and my genitals exposed. Death by misadventure is a great story for your friends and relatives, and your next of kin will be happier not knowing that you died believing ”every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance”.
After you put the book down, it’ll be choppy waters for a while, but I bet you 200 squid that if you stop coddin’ yourself and wipe that (octo)pus off your face, your ocean blues will be (pelican) brief. You’ll wave goodbye to your worries as jacque cousteau-dian of your own life. So don’t be a chum(p)! You don’t need anyone’s seal of approval to get back in the saddle (seahorse). You’ll be having a whale of a time making a big splash with your new capers. And I can’t be more pacific than that!
Thank you for signing up to our first ever Sheik lit book club. We all know the stereotypical cover art; beards draped seductively over figs, snakes wrapped suggestively in Persian carpets. But over the next 7 weeks we’ll get under the covers with these men.
Here is the reading list:
Week 1
Shopaholic Returns Her Skirt Following A Public Stoning
About the author – Iftar Kinsellabir is a nom de plume used mainly out of shame.
Week 2
Waiting To Explode
About the author – A hailed suspected arsonist.
Week 3
Being Jordan
About the author – Katie Price has large breasts. She lives in England with a blind child and some paparazzi.
Week 4
The Devil Wears Form-Fitting Clothes
About the author – Lauren Weisbasha’ir worked undercover at Vogue. Author of Entertainment Weekly’s “#1 Worst Book of 2008″
Week 5
He’s Just Not That Into Porkers
About the author – No one would sleep with him after he read The Satanic Verses.
Week 6
PS I Love Fasting
About the author – Cecelia Ahlam is the daughter of a sheik. Her sister is dating the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. He is in Westlife. They met at the Muster Station.
Week 7
In Her Hijab
About the author – Jannafaiqir Wasiener believes dumb, attractive sheiks and smart, ugly sheiks can get along. Ha!
Come along each Tuesday evening. There’ll be cupcakes and burning effigies of Salman Rushdie.
This week more than one person (two people) said to me that the internet has ruined social interaction, that the world’s secrets are too easily revealed, and the pleasure of first-hand discovery has been destroyed.
I find it hard to agree with them since the internet is where I get most of my ass. But I do like helping people. So here are some more technological advances that appear swagballs at first but no. No they’re not.
Aeroplanes. They always kill the planet, and sometimes they kill you. Gone are the days when we never had to see our useless emigrants again. Now we get visits from annoying OZ and US-based ex-pats on the daily. Nothing Great about these planes.
Bungee rope. Suicide is hard enough without this tied to your ankle!
Telephones. Killing the art of face to face conversation since 1875.
Penicillin. Sure my syphilis is gone, but is it worth the nausea?
Food. Have you noticed you bite your tongue far more often when you’re eating food then when you are, for example, dying!
Rape whistles. My ears are killing me!
Music. Why, that was better in my day. I’m only going to see K.Flay when she plays KOKO so I can tell her so to her face.
Fan Death is a side project of Dandi Wind’s that I wish I hadn’t waited so long to check out.This time round Dandi is joined by a bint called Marta. I don’t know where she came from, but I like her pixie drink.Not as frightening as Dandi’s other work, this duo like their disco how I like my sex, with strings attached!Theirs is a beautifully downbeat electropop, think Roisin Murphy with a bad cancer diagnosis.
The name Fan Death has nothing to do with the hotline set up when the Carter twins divorced each other, but actually refers to how electric fans chop up oxygen molecules and if left on too long in a confined space lead to asphyxiation. For example, a man crouched in a box about the size of a half of a calf would be killed by a pocket fan in just 24 minutes.
Their first music video was directed by Nathan Drillot, who was also lamp operator on Acts of Imagination.
In Saturday Nov 22’s Irish Times, there was an article by a young man named Alan O’Riordan entitled How Fresh Went Stale. It was about hiphop, and how it hasn’t changed since the mid-90s. It says that even worse than the clothes these rappers have us wearing, MCs are going to have a hand in us shooting each other like they’ve already gotten the English doing, all we need do is look at the bebo sites of Limerick gang members. I don’t know about that. I’m not friends with any gangland killers on bebo, but then as a general rule I wouldn’t add a friend who has selected a 50 cent skin for their profile page, unless it was chosen in crisp delicious irony.
The article worried me because Alan claims to be a one time hiphop fan and I’d expect him to know better. My concern was that my mother, who knows I have listened to rap music since I was 12 years old, could have read it. Being in her late 50s and completely out of the loop she would have taken it at face value. I expected to return home and find the locks changed, with my mother inside petrified that I was going to cap her black ass with nickel-plated hollow-tip slugs from my tech-9, shouting out to me that if I didn’t slowly back down the driveway she’d drop a dime to five-0. She would adopt this parlance believing it to be all I could understand now that hiphop has turned me. You try to bring your kids up right, but then the Drester drops The Chronic in 92. Parents can’t compete with that.
I was moved to write a response about how there still is so much vibrant hip hip out there, and brilliant politically charged progressive rap music that does not embrace misogyny or homophobia. I was going to talk about a plethora of artists like Saul Williams, Edan, El-P, Busdriver, Buck 65, MF DOOM, Pharoahe Monch, Talib Kweli…. Well, I was going to go on for a while. But that was over a week ago now, and after asking myself what would black jesus do, I think I would just rather list my top 5 rap songs that are disrespectful to women in my new weekly feature where I give mad props to all you ride or die bitchaz out there!
At number 5, we have Eazy-E’s ode to the American automobile. If Three-6 Mafia can get an Oscar for It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp, I don’t see why this beautiful piano-led composition can’t scoop a posthumous Nobel prize for poor old Eazy-AIDS.
Ladies’ Lyrical Lowlight: “Get yo ass up you funky bitch and wash yo ass”
I give this track 4 female Chagrin Chromosomes: XX XX XX XX
At Number 4 it’s “Ain’t No Fun (If the Homies Can’t Have None)”. Pitch perfect G-funk era classic from Snoop Doggy Dogg’s debut and still best album, Doggystyle.
Lyrical Highlight: “Well if Kurupt gave a fuck about a bitch I’d always be broke, I’d never have no muthafuckin indo to smoke”
Snoop scores 3 vexed sets of homogametes for this effort: XX XX XX
Number 3 sees the late Big L weigh in with “No Endz, No Skinz”. While other rappers who were killed when they were 24 purported that mo money meant mo problems, Big L found a mathematical correlation between less money and less sexual activity.
Lyrical Highlight: “I wouldn’t give a chick 10 cent to put cheese on a Whopper”
And at number 1 is “Bridgette”. The D.O.C., crooning along with some of his buddies from NWA, recounts the story of how he and his homies came to surprise a young lady with a gangbang. I think the only reason this hasn’t been made into a Reese Witherspoon romcom is because it ploughs a similar vein to one of Cecelia Ahern’s novels. It’s that despicable.
Lyrical Highlight: “I’m behind Ice Cube ’cause that’s where the line starts”
One of my very favourite Dublin bands Cap Pas Cap are to release the limited 12” We Are Men on 28 November, and they just posted this gnarly vid to accompany the even gnarlier track.
Release an album already, mes freres. Et ma soeur.
In an unrelated article within the banner headline, I wish somebody had told me that the DOD was playing with members of the Young European Strings school in the National Gallery last night!!
It’s my new cartoon. It’s kind of a 2pac does Smallville, cracking crime James Bond Jr style! Every week he tries to solve the murder of a famous rap star. There’s easily enough dead rappers for 3 or 4 seasons of 36 episodes each, starting with Big L and Scott La Rock.
As we all know, just like US presidents, any oul rapper can get shot but only the good ones die. This will be highlighted by having guest MCs each week from the current crop of living rap artists such as Young Jeezy and Soulja Boy. Each episode will feature a freestyle battle between Pac and the uncovered assailant, and of course the end of each ep will feature socially aware messages like (1) Respect Ho’z (2) Don’t throw gang signs (even if you genuinely believe the wes’ side to be the bes’ side) (3) Purple Drank does not GIVE you the flu (4) Dr Dre cannot prescribe purple drank (5) Don’t sleep with Eazy-E (6) Jerhi curls are highly flammable (7) Yo momma jokes hurt people’s feelings too (8) The truth about Drapetomania (9) Kanye West is Satan (10) Don’t tell gang members you feel sorry for their mother (11) Leave the plastic on your new couch in case your one son who was going to make it to college gets shot and Ice Cube carries him into your living room all bleedy and dead (12) DO tell mom the babysitter’s dead.
I ain’t seven thirty, this could be huge! Maybe I shouldn’t have posted this. Are WordPress gonna get all grabby with Teenage Tupac and be like, “He’s mine! I own him and all his subsidiary rights!”? I wish I read small print. Or maybe its Afeni Shakur I should be worried about. Now I need the World Intellectual Property Organization. Get Geneva on the phone!
A band who if were Irish would probably have toyed with the name StiraMatic, Chairlift make their Irish debut in Crawdaddy this Saturday night.
Although some comment has been made of their ugly name, their music sings for itself. The Brooklyn three-piece’s first album is a wonderfully laidback affair with a couple of electro pop gems to be found therein.
I’m especially looking forward to hearing the bouncy Evident Utensil live, and not just because it has the best lyrics. You can bet their happy, clappy Bruises, which they merrily and smartly whored to iPod, will give the Saturday night crowd a happy ending.
I say “crowd”, it will be interesting to see how many turnout for this gig. Given our current winter economic climate these smaller gigs, on weekdays especially, have seen audiences dwindle in recent months. This subject has been covered in super interesting fashion on Jim Carroll’s blog.
It was the same at the recent Headlights / Throw Me The Statue gig. From my own selfish standpoint, I enjoy these hyper-intimate gigs. But I do worry great up and coming artists like these will stop visiting us. So, if you haven’t already done so you should check out Chairlift. I would have called them Hairlip. It’s ugly, but it’s sexy ugly!
