There's a thousand yous, there's only one of me

A COUPLE DAYS AGO I posted a handmade video for the Daft Punk song "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger." Today I heard Kanye West's new track, "Stronger," and guess what it samples? The same Daft Punk song. Oh shit, Kanye! You and I are totally fingers between eyes.

The song is the first single off Kanye's upcoming album, Graduation, that I'm legitimately excited about. I love the dark synth feel. And the video is beyond dope. As Pitchfork put it: "Expensive!"

Things that are awesome about the video:

1) Kanye's unreasonable venetian blind shades.

2) The mammoth, red Japanese subtitles.

3) Space Trooper robot costumes.

4) Colors.

Me likey. Here it is.

Kanye West - "Stronger"

"You can be my black Kate Moss tonight."

I love it when you get handsy with me

TYPICAL BEDROOM TALK FALLS into one of three categories.

1) The Moan, The Groan: Your standard fall back options. Includes your "ooo"s and "oooh"s with an occasional "oh yeah" for good measure.

2) The Declarative Demand: A bit more advanced than The Moan, The Groan, these are suggestions to your partner to keep doing whatever they're doing, but in a slightly modified manner. Includes your "faster"s and "harder"s.

3) The Informative Outburst: More advanced still, these are ways of informing your partner either of what you are doing, or what you'd like to be doing. At its most basic, includes your "I'm going to [blank] your [blank] right now" and your "Oh man, I'm [blank]ing your [blank]."

With each step up the ladder, you are taking a bigger risk, with the potential for greater rewards. The flip side, however, is that your greater risk means a greater chance of utter failure. Take, for instance, this story my friend R told me recently.

"So, my friend and this guy are going at it. I mean, really going at it. They're getting sweaty and all hot," she says.

"Nice," I say.

"Yeah, nice," she says. "The thing is, he's talks in bed, which she's not that into."

I shake my head. "It's a shame."

"It's just that he has a tendency to say the wrong thing. Like, they're both getting pretty close when he looks her in the eye and says, straight faced, 'I'm gonna buy you a red dress! I'm gonna buy you a nice steak!'"

"What'd she say? 'Ooo baby, I like it raw?"

Daft Hands - "Faster, Harder, Better, Stronger"

Work it harder make it better.

If I said it stinks, would it be a putdown?

MY HOMETOWN IN CONNECTICUT is one of those cities where local artists are commissioned by local businesses and the local government to create sculptures for the street (local streets), which then are auctioned off for charity after some number of months. This is a great idea. Everyone benefits: the artist, the charities, the politician, the business, the people. Sure, sometimes the art winds up being kind of terrible, like the year that the downtown was overrun by smaller-than-life, garish giraffes, but still, great concept.

The current exhibition is called Tossed and Found and is a bunch of sculptures made from trash and found objects. One piece, a huge rhino made from wood panels, is, I hear, already going for $20K. The whole exhibition is a big step up from the painted ceramic animal thing. Go CT!

I couldn't find any pictures of the Tossed and Found stuff (I didn't look that hard - hey, I'm on vacation), but check this stuff out instead! Artists created piles of trash that, once you project light onto them, become something else entirely.

Shigeo Fukuda, Lunch with a Helmet On, 1987


Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Dirty White Trash [With Gulls], 1998


Tim Noble and Sue Webster, HE/SHE, 2003


Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Real Life is Rubbish, 2002


[via The New Shelton Wet/Dry]

Come on cartoon Lily, light my fire

MARK RONSON, THE PRODUCER behind Amy Winehouse and the 40s revival currently taking place in pop music, recently released an album of his own in Britain. It's coming to the States in early July, and it should make a splash, even if it's not an enormous commercial hit (which it may wind up being). For the album, he's teamed up with some of the artists he's worked with recently, including Winehouse and Lily Allen.

This video is for the track he cut with Lily Allen called "Oh My God." It's representative of the general feel of the songs I've heard so far: they roll forward with a strong rhythm section, and the man's never met a horn he didn't like. The video is fun, a play on the Jessica Rabbit performance in Who Framed Roger Rabbit - a great fit for his modernized 40s sound - with an animated Allen in the Jessica Rabbit role.

Mark Ronson with Lily Allen - "Oh My God"

But do you think we could add a French horn someplace?

More Ronson! The first single off the album is a cover of "Stop Me," a Smith's song, and the vocal here is by Daniel Merriweather. It's a great choice for a first single. It reels you in, makes you want to listen again, and makes you wonder what the rest of the album is going to sound like.

Mark Ronson with Daniel Merriweather - "Stop Me"

I was a part of the fabulous girl group The Supremes.

And for good measure, here's the Jessica Rabbit clip. I remember being, like, thirteen or so, and being really turned on by Jessica Rabbit. And then I turned out gay. Go figure. I'm not sure what it means, but a psychologist would probably have a field day with it.

Jessica Rabbit - "Why Don't You Do Right"

I like boys and misproportioned, over-sexed animated women.

Your girlfriend loves my lipgloss

LIL' MAMA'S FULL COURT PRESS continues with a remix of Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend." The original's bratty, shiny snark comes through, and Avril re-delivers the chorus and the bridge, but this is more hostile takeover than remix - Lil' Mama makes the track her own. At first you think she'll just be gracing the intro, but as she herself says as the first chorus winds down, "Please, 8 bars and stop?" She rides this forwards and backwards, and then throws it to the floor and winds around all over it.

Watch out for Lil' Mama, kids.

Avril Lavigne and Lil' Mama - "Girlfriend (Remix)"

"I'm tellin' you like Jennifer Hudson"

But are you calling my mom a pikey?

I'M STARTING BUSINESS SCHOOL in New York next year. I was thrilled with the school early on in the application process (hence my decision to apply early), and was, for obvious reasons, quite happy with the school when they decided to accept me.

Since then, it's been downhill. A meager financial aid package. A confusing website. Different ID names and passwords for everything. Systems and departments that don't speak to each other. Surprise charges. Through all of this, though, the saving grace has been all of the unhelpful and unpleasant people, people who treat me as if my confusion, my very existence, was a chafe on their soul.

Today was the latest in a growing list of indignities. I called the Off Campus Housing Office (because I have no chance of getting university housing), and asked a simple question: What paperwork should I bring with me on my apartment search?

From the beginning, the woman was a terror. She all but made fun of me for thinking I could find an apartment in New York with an August 1 move in date in early July. When I asked her the best time to start looking, she suggested three or four weeks from now. When I pointed out that four weeks from now was, in fact, August 1st, she told me tersely that the rental market was tight (really? in New York?), and suggested that I give myself two or three weeks to find a place. Ignoring the fact that two or three weeks from three or four weeks from now would be the middle of August, I told her that I had a full time job in another city, and that I would need to find something with a tad more alacrity.

I could almost hear her disinterested shrug.

"You may not find a place then."

I was flabbergasted. This woman's job was to help students find off campus housing, and here she was telling me that I would begin classes without a place to live. In effect, she was saying that she couldn't give two shits about the underlying purpose of her job, her sole reason for coming to work every day, the very reason her position, her entire department, existed. She was suggesting that I begin at her school (the honor for which I am paying upwards of $140K) living on the streets.

She must have taken my silence as some sort of grudging acquiesce to her flawless job performance.

"I need to go," she said. "The office closes at five o'clock."

It was 5:02.

It was then that I began to imagine having a Lauren Cooper conversation.

"I ain't bovvered," I would say.

"Excuse me?"

"Do I look bovvered?"

"Sir, the office is closed."

"But I ain't even bovvered though."

"What do you..."

"Are you calling me fat?"

Instead I said, in my fake happiest voice, "Well, gosh, thanks so much! You've been such a big help. I'll be in touch from my lean-to shantytown!"

Catherine Tate - Lauren Cooper Gets Murried

"I ain't even bovvered tho."

I'm not an asshole, I just play one on TV

DESPITE THE FACT THAT it happened months ago, my friend M has recently developed a fascination with the Rosie O'Donell-Donald Trump multiple-round verbal smackdown. M's always found acid tongued humor funny, so it comes as no surprise that he would die laughing to hear two adults say truly hateful things about one another on national television.

If you ask me, Trump and O'Donell deserve each other. Back when Rosie was the "Queen of Nice" on Morning TV, I took my younger sister to see her show being taped live. My father and Rosie have the same agent (or did, anyway), and he had scored us really good seats, saying that Rosie would come over and say hello, or at the very least fling a Koosh Ball or two our way.

Not only did Rosie not come over and say hello, it was startling to see the transformation that took place once the cameras shut off. When the red light was on, she was smiling and warm, but when they flickered out, it was like her soul flickered out as well. The light in her eyes literally went out. She tromped around the stage with a sneer, like she couldn't be bothered to be there. I think she flung those Koosh Balls at the audience not as a way of engaging us, but out of revolted distain for the people that had come to see her.

As for Trump, he is, of course, a Grade A schmuck.

Regardless, today I got the following gchat from M, who has apparently been inspired to a new level of bitter scorn:

"You're a fat disgusting sasquatch, and a loser. I am so glad you are leaving DC, because you'll probably fail in business school and I love to see ugly people fail. You're a loser. I'll probably sue you because it will be fun to take money from your fat ass."

He's good at this game. Too bad I love the sasquatch.

Very Tasteful - Forest Ninja (I Love the Sasquatch)

"Never seen the movie Tron."

In which I love down Maya Rudolph

I HAVE A GROWING OBSESSION with SNL's Maya Rudolph. She did this sketch as Donatella Versace selling a new, high-class version of Hot Pockets called Versace Pockets. It's fall out of your chair funny. Matt Damon is also in the sketch as Axl Rose, and now every time I go to microwave something, I wail, "You know what you are! You're going into the microwave, baby!" which, let me tell you, makes for a fun workplace environment.

Unfortunately, I can't find it on the Tube anyplace. Check it out here.

Maya also does a great Whitney Houston. In the season finale of SNL, they had fun with those new Geico commercials where the celebrity tells the real person's story, and she did her Whitney. Later in the show, "Whitney" popped into the Weekend Update to share some special "summretime" brownies with Amy and Seth. And now I'm sharing them with you. Pay it forward.

SNL - Whitney Houston stops by Weekend Update

"It's gonna be a messALRIGHT!"

Hook me up with some high quality footwear, hokie!

MY LITTLE BROTHER, who's graduating from high school next week, wears these moccasins all the time, including out and about in public. It's one of the things that makes him cool, because if you think about it, it takes some serious balls to wear slippers out in public, much less to an urban public high school.

This winter, he had the following exchange.

"Yo! Where'd you get those kicks?"

"Um... L.L. Bean?"

White people!

Just 2 Guys

"Spinach dip, real hot chicks."

While I'm talking about my brother, he and a couple of his friends formed a fake rap group called The Wang Gang. Spectacular. Unfortunately, they can't post any of the videos to the Tube because one of the members is a potential future Olympian (for real) with potential future real endorsement deals. Wah wah.

But this should give you some idea of what they're all about.

Bing Bong Brothers

"You guys..."

Arcade Fire - Neon Bible

THE ARCADE FIRE's new album, Neon Bible, is marvelous. This will probably shred whatever indie cred I had (not much, considering I posted Paris Hilton's "Nothing In This World" with unironic pleasure), but with the exception of a few songs, I wasn't such a huge fan of their first album. Neon Bible, though, I love straight through.

This video for their song, "My Body is a Cage," is a mash-up or sorts; the YouTuber took the song and set it to clips from Sergio Leone's spaghetti western, Once Upon a Time in the West. Cool how well it works. The song, while not my favorite on the album, is moody and powerful nevertheless.

Arcade Fire - "My Body is a Cage"

My body cage ain't big enough for the both of us, pardner.

Bonus! Here's the group performing "No Cars Go" at Rock en Seine in Paris. I love the way Régine Chassagne's vocals are brought further forward in this version, how, at the end, they're all just belting it out, and the way they yell "Let's go!" with so much gusto. A great song about the desire to escape to someplace safer and more innocent.

Arcade Fire - "No Cars Go (Live at Rock en Seine)"

"Little babies, let's go!"

And what the hell, here's the same song from the ACL festival, this time with more propulsive drumming and tighter instrumentation.

Arcade Fire - "No Cars Go (Live at ACL Festival)"

"Between the click of the light and the start of the dream."

Don't worry, my gay pride is offset by my white guilt

THIS WEEKEND WAS GAY PRIDE in Washington, which meant that Team Peen was out in full force across our nation's fairest district. Personally, I feel like gayness is a strange thing to be proud of. Not that one should be ashamed of being gay, but it seems weird to be proud of something in which one played no part. I mean, be proud as hell when you make out with a great guy, but as Margaret Cho so aptly pointed out, there's no such thing as the Slut Pride Parade.

If we're being honest, Gay Pride Weekends aren't doing much for gay politics. I have straight friends who get more excited about Pride than any gay people I know, in large part because the gays all know that the three days should really be called We're All Trying to Have Sex At Once... Weekend.

Gay Pride also seems to give people license to act in ways they would never act normally. I was out at a bar this weekend and had the following conversation:

"Hey," he said. "Where'd you get those shoes?"

"Thanks! I got them online. Do you like them?"

"Yeah. So, like, are you a top?"

Are you kidding me? Can we at least exchange names first?

Electric Six - Gay Bar

First Cobalt, then the after party in the Lincoln Bedroom?

Back in the hooskow!

DEAR LA COUNTY -

First she's in, then she's out, now she's back in. I have work to do; I can't just spend all day refreshing People.com and The Drudge Report to find out what's happening with Paris Hilton.

For the sake of my continued employment and our national productivity, please make up your collective mind.

Love,
Wizzle

In case you've forgotten in all the excitement, Paris isn't the first celebrity to be thrown in jail after an alcohol-related infraction.

Diana Ross, Live From Jail

"Tina-ni-na!"

Wetness is the enemy

MY DOCTOR SEEMS ALWAYS to have a health obsession to push every time I visit. The first time, she gave me a goodie bag of allergy pills and told me that my mission in life was to keep my "passages clean and dry." Upon my second visit, however, it seemed that wetness in general had become the enemy, and I was being redeployed lower down the body.

I'm lying there catching my breath after the cough test, practically smoking a post-coital cigarette, and she asks, "Are you using an anti-fungal spray every day?"

Anxiously, I sit up. "Is something wrong?"

She uses her pen to point to my feet, looks at them for a moment, and then locks eyes with me. "Athlete's foot never goes away, you know. It's with you forever."

I'm shocked. "I have athlete's foot? Doesn't that itch? Or flake something horrible?"

She shakes her head. "You don't have it. Yet. But your toes are very wet."

"They are?"

"All feet are. They're a breeding ground for fungus, slipped into a warm, dark sock." I'm tasting vomit. "Your mission in life is to keep your toes dry."

French and Saunders - Dawn's Doctor Visit

"Just a big, fat, wobbly tummy I've got!"

I Love Mo Rocca

DEAR MO ROCCA, where have you been? Ah, that's right. You're in a musical now on Broadway. Well, good for you, I suppose. But bad for us, though. VH1 and my poor and bitter soul miss you.

Please note Mr. Rocca's reaction when the hipster compliment's The Sound of Music's Nazi backdrop. Classic.

Mo Rocca Takes on Indie Rock Kids

While visions of nazi's danced in their heads.

23 days will fly by, sweety. Be strong!

THE 80s HAD MADONNA. The 90s had Britney. And in the 00s, we have Paris Hilton. Every decade needs a quintessential blonde, a blonde that reflects back to us what we love and despise about ourselves, deep down at the root of our being. So what does it say that America's Favorite Blonde, the Blonde America Loves to Hate, begins her 23 day sentence in an LA County correctional facility?

Is it possible that she actually wanted to do time? Lend her a little street cred? Stay with me here, just for a second. Word is that Ms Hilton has already lined up a book deal for the Paris Hilton Prison Diaries. If she can make it sound terrible enough, and believable enough, I bet she makes a cool mil off the deal. Even if you think she's reprehensible, but you kind of have to admire her particular form of resiliency.

Jennifer Delfino - "I Wanna Be Famous"

"Paris, put down that notepad! This is joke, not advice!"

And for an extra treat, because you've been so good to me, here's Paris' finest music videographic achievement to date, "Nothing In This World."

Paris Hilton - "Nothing In This World"

"I want Paris to come to MY school!"

Eve - "Tambourine"

THE WEEKEND IS HERE, first one back in DC in a few weeks, and tonight promises to be a dance party for K's birthday, and then a Team Peen party later in the night.

I have but one desire, and that is for Eve's new song, "Tambourine," to make it onto a playlist at some point in the night. Miss Eee-vee-eee has been undercover for a while, but I predict she's back in a big way with this song. It's a great summertime song, and the fact that it samples Puffy's "Can't Hold Us Down" is hilarious. Expect to hear this heavy for the next few months.

The video is a good too. Very colorful, which always gets a plus, and she looks like she's having a blast on the shoot. Particularly in the shiny teal pleather leggings. I mean, hello!

Eve - "Tambourine"

"Shake your tambourine and go get yourself a whistle."

Get on it, State Farm!

THE PAST FEW WEEKS have seen me spending my hard-earned cash like nobody's business. I bought new shirts, new pants, new shoes, got a new haircut, went away for two new weekends, bought new expensive face shit (undoubtedly a ripoff), and bought rounds of new drinks for old friends. It's absurd, and I need to stop.

Or do I?

My friend M sent me this link and now I'm thinking all I need to do is make a low low monthly payment.

Coming Out Insurance

"What the hell is a bedazzler?"