Rand Dumb Lean Kiss

Eternal Rocks Beneath, by Paul Brainard

Nursing a hangover the majority of the day allowed for plenty of time on Twitter and reading random stuff. Here's some of the more interesting rabbit holes I went down:

Hypnotizing New Animated GIFS from RRRRRRRRROLL (via Colossal)

Literature vs. Traffic in Melbourne (via Lost at E Minor)

Drawings and Paintings from Brooklyn artist Paul Brainard (The Birth of Tim Tebow is a NSFW personal favorite)

This is the one that did me in. Know Your Meme page on Barack Obama. Be careful of all the links on the bottom. So much time wasted.

Of Montreal, one of my favorites, has a kickstarter to help out their feature length documentary. Anyone have $2500 they can give to me to give to them?

I bookmarked these videos on creativity. Haven't watched yet, will later tonight.

You Think It's Like This But Really It's Like This: The Kinks

Naturally, most people know the Brit-rock band for "Lola" and "You Really Got Me", but Something Else By the Kinks is a great fucking album that even non-fans should know about. That's not to say their hits aren't solid, but Something Else was totally unexpected when I first heard it. A great find.

Fun Fact: I heard the Weird Al parody "Yoda" before I had heard "Lola." Relistening to "Lola" makes me further realize how wildly clever Ray Davies was.

You Think It's Like This:





But Really It's Like This:

Kickstarter

Yo! I'm flat broke, but these are some local Kickstarter's that deserve some $$$. Check 'em out:

The Kickstarter Letters by David David Katzman

What is The Kickstarter Letters?
I funded the entire print run of my second novel, A Greater Monster, through a Kickstarter project.* As a reward, I wrote each of my 128 contributors a stream-of-consciousness email or handwritten letter. This book is a signed & numbered handmade, hardback collection of 52 of those letters.

Lost in Concert: Volume One

About Lost in Concert:

Music has been an integral part of each of our lives since long before we could differentiate between harmony and melody, put together a quality playlist or sneak into an all-ages show. Music makes a great day extraordinary and a bad day bearable. It turns moments into memories and gives large groups of people a reason to dance like no one’s watching. Music is a universal language that everyone is fluent in; concerts are the live manifestation of that music. When artists get on stage, the hours, days, weeks and even years of blood, sweat and tears put into their work gets to be experienced by the audience in its purest form without the benefit of a post-production safety net or a second take. It’s their chance to create a community and connect on a personal level that other mediums just don’t possess. It can be a great show or a poor performance, but it’s an experience you won’t soon forget. Eventually, though, like everything else in life, the memories will fade and the details will get fuzzy. Musicians use music as a vehicle for expression to paint their picture; we use music as the canvas by layering and combining pictures and words to create our own visceral experience. Rather than just seeing it and reading about it, you get ripped out of your seat and you get to feel it.

World Book Night

You don't know what World Book Night is? That's ok, I didn't either until after it happened this year. making sure not to make the same mistake twice, I signed up for their mailing list, and woke up to an email this morning about the 2013 edition. As per their website:

World Book Night U.S. is a celebration of books and reading held on April 23, when 25,000 passionate volunteers across America give a total of half a million books within their communities to those who don’t regularly read. In 2012, World Book Night was celebrated in the U.S., the UK, Ireland, and Germany and saw over 80,000 people gift more than 2.5 million books.

This year's books include titles by Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, Sandra Cisneros, Paul Cohelo, David Sedaris, Tina Fey, and many more.  For more about the organization, check out their about page, and find you how you can get involved.

The Lit Log: Eric Rivera

This is the second in a series called the Lit Log, where I ask people to document what and how they read. If you would like to contribute to the Lit Log, hit me up at andhertz [at] gmail. 

Eric Rivera (b. 1984) is from a cornfield in Indiana, a small, impoverished country in the U.S. Middle West sector. He spends his time drawing and printing comic books, riding his bike & running around, and making music in Energy Gown, a Chicago experimental music group. He can't go home again.

How many books (approximately) do you read a year:  Hmmm...I probably read anywhere from 2-6 books a month, but I don't usually finish most of them.
How many book do you read at a time: 2 or 3
The last great book you read: Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos by Samuel M. Steward, PhD.
Your desert island book: Survivalist Handbook of some kind...
Autumn book: The Secret Life of Salvador Dali by Salvador Dali; CF's Power Mastrs 1-3 (re-reading at the mo')
Best bathroom reading: National Geographic back issues from 1961-1970, 1990-1992; Ivan Brunetti's Anthology of Graphic Fiction Vols. 1 & 2
Are you satisfied with your literary intake: No.
Thoughts on contemporary state of literature: I really dislike this Believer school of contemporary writers, it just feels like this upper class of over educated, under experienced, East Coast, white, liberal to the point of actual conservatism, most importantly, basically bad writers. That being said, David Foster Wallace is one of my favorites. My other favorites are all dead. Wait, he's dead too. I genuinely forgot that for a second. My other favorites are LONG dead, then. To further defend my sweeping dismissal of all contemporary authors, though, I should say that in any art form, most of the people in each field are making basically bad work. And the nature of the world today is such that most of those..."hacks," let's call them, are really over-educated. Whether music, painting, acting, whatever...And it is our burden to work through the tangle of modern junk and figure out what is worth our collective memory and consumption. Then you start wondering how that truth affects the execution of the work itself. How can one author's book stand out in a sea of true junk? I dunno. I have to leave for work and can't finish this thought right now.

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Some favorites of mine from the other day:

President-Elect Willard "Mitt" Romney (via Young Chicago Republicans)

Man Who Eats Breakfast At Dunkin' Donuts Every Morning And Enjoys The 'Saw' Films Allowed To Vote (via the Onion)

Really hope this doesn't end: Mitt and Rob

The command center. HuffPo, MSNBC, NYT, CNN, Google, Fox News. NBC on the tv too. twitter.com/and_hertz/stat…
— Hjortzy (@and_hertz) November 7, 2012

RT @bobbyfinger: NATE SILVER IS PROBABLY SITTING ON A TOILET RIGHT NOW PLAYING ANGRY BIRDS WITH A RESTING HEART RATE OF 60 BPM.
— Philip Montoro (@pmontoro) November 7, 2012

"Um...rape.Rape?RAPE!(raperaperape)..." Todd Akin's concession speech, probably.
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) November 7, 2012

Time to call the Missouri senate race a legitimate wrap. #FuckYouToddAkin
— Matt LeMay (@mattlemay) November 7, 2012

Bartender refuses to serve Herman Cain any more drinks.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) November 7, 2012

LOL someone just posted on FB: "Hey West Coast? Obama REALLLLY likes the Kendrick album. Vote accordingly"
— Ernest Wilkins (@ErnestWilkins) November 7, 2012

jpg of the night. #Obama2012 twitter.com/kellyoxford/st…
— kelly oxford (@kellyoxford) November 7, 2012

Happy Freedom Day, Y'all

Tonight:

At the Observatory. Ono. Energy Gown. Wishgift. No Safari. Be there:

Kill a Cyclist, Get a Ticket

On Wednesday morning, a cyclist along Augusta Boulevard was fatally hit by a truck making a right turn. The truck driver was only ticketed. The full story and links can be found on Grid Chicago.

I'd like to think of Chicago as fairly bike-friendly, but I feel always feel a tinge of hesitancy to suggest it as such. Amenities for bikes aside (Emanuel is big into expanding bike lanes), the fact that there is so much tension between bikes and cars is the main reason it's hard to call this a bike-friendly city. Especially after cycling in Beijing, where most Chicago (and American) drivers and cyclists would probably get too frustrated at the lax traffic laws, it's difficult to place exactly where Chicago lies on the bike-friendly scale. I rarely feel in danger on a bike, but I feel like I'm more conscious on my bike than many of people passing me by on Milwaukee Ave. Really, there's no reason to be going so fast on a bike on a road that doesn't have a segregated lane. Many bikers have the same mentality as the drivers they claim to hate. Why speed up to get to a red light? Why try to overtake a car when you know they can accelerate faster? And calm down: that cab honked at you as a warning that he's there. Take out your headphones and use all of your senses and be aware of your surroundings.

Generally, I think no driver wants to murder a cyclist; likewise, no cyclist actually has a death-wish. And I'll even admit there are as many bad cyclists as there are bad drivers. Everyone's got some place to be apparently, and the slightest thing that gets in one's way elicits a weird sense of entitlement from both sides of the road. That said, I'll run a stop sign or red light if I deem it safe. I'm not talking about Six Corners, but there are plenty of low-traffic areas I ride through often enough that there's no reason to come to a complete stop and then go uphill on a bike. I don't believe bikes and cars should have the same laws, but I do think that more cyclists should adhere to traffic law basics.

Since we don't have all the details of the story at hand, it's hard to say who's at fault. As the victim was in his 50s, I'm making the assumption that he was a seasoned rider, and probably over the phase where he feels the city is his own personal playground. As we don't know what kind of truck it is, it's hard to say what visibility he had. But just a $500 ticket doesn't seem to suffice. Accidents will happen, but negligence is preventable.

For further tips on bike safety check out this link. Wear your helmet, peeps.

Sounds

Kids These Days released Traphouse Rock as a free download.

Ono released their first recorded tunes for the first time since 1986. Albino is streaming on bandcamp.


Here's a(n absurd) new music video from Moon Furies...



...and an equally absurd on from Archie Powell and the Exports: