Chinese bands back to SXSW

South by Southwest just announced an initial list of a couple hundred showcase bands for 2010 (it’ll climb up well over 1,000 eventually), and two of the Beijing bands that recently toured the U.S., P.K. 14 and Carsick Cars, are on it. I interviewed two members of those bands, and from what I saw in Brooklyn they were pretty well received by the crowds.

It’s not unprecedented: Lonely China Day and Re-TROS came in 2007 and got thumbs-ups from Jon Pareles. The big question is always whether they will return again. P.K. 14 and Carsick Cars might have a slight advantage here, since they’re already somewhat known, and have gotten their share of critical props: Alex Ross singled out Shou Wang of Carsick Cars in his mega New Yorker piece on Chinese music, and also chose a performance by him as one of his top 10 of 2008.

(HT to China Music Radar.)

Happy Art Week

Tuli Kupferberg’s ‘Daily Perverbs’

His YouTube channel is tulifuli, and at age 86, despite ill health, he still posts quite frequently — looks like two or three times a week, usually. Here are a few examples over the last month:

I profiled the Fugs in 2003, on their last reunion, and I still have the two gifts Tuli gave me before their show at the Village Underground: a copy of his book Teach Yourself Fucking and a button that says “Impeach the President (Generic).”

And here’s his Christmas show for Revolting News in 1992, which, according to its description, features “performances of ‘Christmas in the Workhouse’ and Tuli’s own song, ‘The 8 Days of Hanukah.’ Also stories, poems and a partial reading of ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ by Dylan Thomas.”

Ed Sanders tells me a benefit concert for Tuli is being readied for January with the help of Hal Willner.

The Young Prince of Bel-Air

VHS youth: ‘Angel’ (1984)

Now and then I like to think about the videos whose empty boxes I remember seeing again and again back in the day, but which I never saw. Previously: Basket Case; The Last American Virgin.

Today, more sexploitation.

What?

Museum of propaganda: ‘We Must Have More Men’

Via Vintagraph (same folks behind Shorpy), from whom you can also order prints.

Beautiful old photos

I’m hooked on a number of historic-photo blogs, like If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats, which is responsible for a lot of lost productivity daily. My favorite new one is Shorpy — named after this Dickensian “greaser” — which not only runs a lot of cool, random old photographs, but also links to them in mouth-watering full-size. Click on these to see:

For the record, since I’m highly, cynically suspicious of blog endorsements, I have nothing to do with either of these or the people behind them; I just like the pictures. This disclaimer brought to you by Pizza Hut.

Mariah’s leak strategy

A somewhat ballsy story in The Times of London about Mariah Carey's business schemes — it calls her "one of the few people successfully to screw a major record label" — includes this nugget explaining how Mrs. Nick Cannon manipulates paparazzi at her public appearances via leaks to selected, and presumably controllable, fan-bloggers:

Carey’s itinerary, which is supposed to be top secret but which an aide has helpfully left lying on a table, reveals that she uses the Internet to leak details of each appearance to favoured bloggers and Facebook groups shortly beforehand. This way, only the most devoted fans turn up, and freaks and weirdos are weeded out. The selective leaks also help to make sure there are enough paparazzi but not so many that there’s a scrum. Just before she is due to arrive at the Asahi studios to appear on Music Station, Carey’s aides “leaked the time she will appear at entrance through social online sites, blogs, etc. We are expecting to have 100 fans and some paparazzi”, the schedule reveals. The cybertrickery works to script. Just after 6pm, Carey pulls up in her stretch limousine and steps out into a small but perfectly formed crowd.

According to the article, we can also expect to see Carey in a lot of tourism ads:

She has a house in the Bahamas on the island of Eleuthera. She won’t say if she is paid by the Bahamas tourist board to talk about how great the place is but you’d be forgiven for thinking she is, given the amount of time she spends doing so. ... Carey also plans to team up with the New York tourist board to attract visitors to her adopted home town. When she had her 18th No. 1, the city authorities lit up the Empire State Building in her favourite colours: pink and lavender. It was good publicity for Carey and for New York. Expect to see “Mariah in New York” advertisements soon.

(HT TDS.)

‘Hammer time’ at WSJ

This isn’t the kind of thing I would normally pay attention to, but while waiting for a fax this morning I glanced at a pile of Wall Street Journals and saw this front-page story from last Friday about harem pants. From a non-fashion perspective it is just a hilarious read, starting with the classic WSJ hed and dek:

Ridicule Keeps Fans of Harem Pants From Getting Too Big for Their Britches
* * *Slaves to Anti-Fashion Suffer Taunts of ‘Hammer Time,’ Bike Accidents

And these two wonderful grafs:

A radical departure from the skinny-pants trend of the past few years, the baggy trousers can take some getting used to. Jean Hall, 24, says the low-slung crotch of her American Apparel African-print harem pants got caught on her bike pedal while she was riding through Brooklyn, causing her to fall off. Her friend, who was riding with her, wrote about the incident on Twitter.

“Everyone has something to say about them,” Ms. Hall says. Recently she was chased down the street by a bunch of young boys in her neighborhood who were fascinated with the pants.

But what really clinches it is the hedcut, which you don’t see in the online version of the story (sorry for poor iPhone photo quality):

Now, if you google “harem pants” you get 363,000 hits, including stories at Vogue and MSNBC, so this is nothing new. But this must be like what non-music nerds feel when they stumble upon a piece about Grizzly Bear and/or Dirty Projectors and just think, “What the...?”

Update to 2010 release dates

Updating my earlier calendar post, Tony Allen has been bumped to “spring/early summer,” per his U.S. publicist. Too bad, dude might miss out on Fela! hype, unless of course that show makes it to the Tonys, which is very plausible.

Silver lining: A new Magnetic Fields album has been announced for January. Pitchfork reports:

The bathroom-door-sleeved follow-up to the Magnetic Fields’ 2008 album Distortion is called Realism and it is out January 26 on Nonesuch. It features a song called “The Dada Polka” which may or may not be an actual polka song.

On the band’s website, Stephin Merritt calls this one the “folk” counterpart to Distortion, which also had a bathroom sign on the cover:

So they’re doing Shakira tricks now? Meh.

‘Deus ex Mexican’: Funniest movie review ever

Wow. As I tweeted, I’m pretty blown away by this review of “2012” on The Awl, by Mary HK Choi. This woman is a genius:

You know who I love? I love anyone who hated this movie because I would like to fight them to the death for being wrong as balls. Fuckouttahere. I wanna be on the 2012 thrill park ride, playing 2012 on my Nintendo DS, eating the 2012-branded chocotaco and watching this movie at the same time because I am greedy for this brand of INCREDIBLEBANANASINCREDIBLE. Everyone who says otherwise may as well have written their reviews on their faces in marker because they are obviously batshit crazy and should be ignored. Seriously, will somebody tell me what people expected other than 158 minutes of apocalypse BUKKAKE? Roland Emmerich knows how to destroy himself some world and sure it isn't so much a story but a sprayfest of rapid-fire money shots but what else would it be? And what else would make it THIS AWESOME? It's like the movie has ultra-oxygenated blood and sleeps upside down in a hyperbaric chamber and eats tiger penis like it's its job because it has psycho endurance that feels GREAT in your brain.

It goes on.

Also, I really want to see “2012,” but I knew that once I saw the preview, in which John Cusack does Millennium Falcon daredevil flight moves as the earth vomits out Los Angeles and then swallows it back up again.