Santi White, who records under the name Santogold, may or may not be the grooviest thing to happen to urban pop – a label I hate to use, but which seems wholly appropriate under the circumstances – since Gnarls Barkley. Like Gnarls, her self-titled debut record is wildly uncategorizable and just as wildly uneven, ranging from catchy new wave inspired pop songs to cosmic hip-hop hallucinations; and while she hasn’t quite acheived market saturation a […]
Here’s a midsummer night’s tearjerker for you: it’s about a long term, long distance romance between boy and song that would be virtually impossible, or at the very least, far less poetic and tragic and ultimately wonderful in this day and age when anyone can hear a song on the radio, or see it on TV, and then instantly download it from the ether and have it at his beck and call, to be […]
If you haven’t been watching Bravo’s Flipping Out this summer, you should really start. It’s the kind of show that makes you really reassess just how crazy your boss might be, or just how degrading your job might be, or just how anal-retentive your partner or spouse might be. This reality show follows obsessive-compulsive (to the hundredth power) house-flipper Jeff Lewis and his crew of long-suffering assistants. In one of last season’s best episodes, Jeff had one of his assistants drive his cat to an appointment with an acupuncturist, and insisted that the assistant have a discussion with the cat on the way over to explain where they were going and what would happen there.   Jeff Lewis’s mindboggling demands and his perfectly timed, deadpan one-liners are the true star of this show; but the absurdist antics of his assistant Chris Elwood (a sometimes actor) sometimes threaten to steal the occasional scene.
This week, Chris Elwood drew his boss’s ire by wearing his iPod headphones all the time, which had everyone he ran into asking what he was listening to. It was one of those scary moments when I actually understood and (gulp) agreed with Lewis’s righteous indignation – it’s so… unprofessional! – but then, I wanted to know what Elwood was listening to too, and felt cheated when I didn’t find out. Then again, one could hardly fault Elwood for turning up the Tunes and tuning out his boss’s self-absorbed rants. If I were Elwood, I’d probably do the same.  And here, apparently, is what I’d be listening to:
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