Favorite Things Friday: Saturday Edition

I got to enjoy snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes last night on the walk home from a delicious vegan dinner with friends.  Here's hoping there's more silver-white winter coming before it melts into spring, because I'm really excited about my new raccoon hat . . .

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I already posted about it last week but, just to reiterate, Ellen Willis is a badass.  (An excellent review from the awesome Rachael Maddux can be found here.)









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My new favorite blog, which is teaching me lots of new words, is Social Justice League.  It engages with the sociological problems of pop culture while generally remaining a fan of pop culture, which is SUPER HARD.  I really enjoyed the discussion of the unreliable narrator in 500 Days of Summer, and also the problem with Pepper Potts.

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Upon discovery, I immediately scrolled through all 100-something pages of the Old Love tumblr (via Miss Moss).


















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Oh hey I joined  over the holidays . . . mostly to spite Google Reader for dropping the "Note in Reader" feature.  Watch me turn the whole thing into a perverse competition!  Or forget about it completely, immediately.  In other news, some of the people I kind of know have excellent taste.

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Champagne-cage chair craft - easy to do, cute, fun and a sweet memory of drinking bubbly.  Also a god thing to do with your hands at a dinner party.  via Nag on the Lake














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Finally, a long one:

A while ago, I posted this video of Kermit from Sam & Friends lip syncing to “A Horse Named Bill."  I had tried to add that song to my December 2011 playlist but couldn’t find exactly that version, which I prefer for its weird lyrics about a whale named Lena breaking the ten commandments. The closest version I could find on iTunes was one by some guy named Brian Dewan - not exactly the same, but he included the verse I wanted (that jerk Jerry Garcia left it out, probably because he is racist against whales).

Later, I was poking around on the Neutral Milk Hotel website because I remembered that Jeff Mangum just released a box set, and, why don’t I have that yet? There, I noticed that the set comes with a poster version of the flying gramophone from the CD liner to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea . . . by artist Brian Dewan.

In college, I taped this exact CD liner next to my bed in my dorm room, right next to, if memory serves, some art made for me by children I babysat, and a ketchup packet.














Anyway, probably not the same guy, right? That would be a weird coincidence.  But it IS!  He also did album art for David Byrne and They Might Be Giants, plays lots of weird experimental instruments and is clearly a big fat hipster-nerd. So I guess it’s not shocking that he was floating around two different musical things that I lurve, because I am nothing if not predictable in my lurve for hipster-nerds. Still, neat, right?

Well, THEN I scrolled down and saw that Dewan also contributed to the Where in the World is Carmen San Diego soundtrack, which was basically the soundtrack to my life for the whole of my tenth year on earth. For anyone else out there who also had a cassette player, a minor children’s game show fetish and a major Rockapella crush (god help me I loved the white guy with the cornrows), Dewan cowrote and presumably performed this weird and depressing song (whose choice for the soundtrack, I now realize, makes no sense):

 
This song was at the end of the tape and so includes an inside-joke secret track at the very end.  Remember secret tracks?

MAN I need to dig up that cassette tape.

According to his website, Dewan currently records experimental electronic music with his cousin under the name “Dewanatron,” and designs and builds “synthesizers in custom cabinetry, often reminiscent of either New England churches or 1940's school house architecture” (!!!) He also makes (or made) modern art film strips/installations that sound kind of amazing.  And he may have written music for Sesame Street?

I guess that’s all. Just wanted to let you know that I am super glad this person exists in the world.