My wife—in all her awesomeness—sent me this link of Christina Hendricks in her underwear.

I’ve spent the past several minutes trying to come up with a reason for posting this image, but alas, all I can think of is ‘Boner Shorts.’ So there you go. Boner Shorts.

When I first introduced myself to this blog in late-eight, one of the things I was most struck by was the tag category ‘Boner Shorts.’ I remember thinking it was the awesomest, most-hilarious, and most-obvious blog category in the history of blog categories.

I’m probably totally incorrect, but I feel like we used to have more of these little gems popping up on the blog. So here’s my attempt at remedying the issue.

Oh, too: it also helps if you like Mad Men. And I guess you might want to read about Ms. Hendricks’ agent asking her,

“Darling, did your boobs grow?”

But, if you don’t care about either of those things, there’s probably no real reason for you to click through to this NY Mag article…the best, most awe-inspiring part is pictured above.

That’s all. Boner Shorts.

Time Out NY recent issue’s cover story was “Most Stylish New Yorkers”, where they profiled a variety of well… stylish new yorkers. While the article in print only showed so much, the recently published online feature has not only twice the amount of stylish new yorkers, but interviews with each and every one about their personal style.

You’ll find Kid Cudi, Jeff Staple, Heems and Victor of Das Racist, Chris Lee of CtotheJL, ilirjana of Apache Beat and The Pop Manifesto all in the mix as fashionable NYers. There are musicians, bloggers, stylists, designers, writers, brokers, actors and even plain old students represented on the list. All of whom have very varied styles that really run the gamut. We were  honored by the amount of Мишка love through out.

Today, TONY added another couple to their running list of stylish NYers…none other than our very own Dennis Chow and his wife Claire. Besides being our dear friends, both work for Мишка in various capacities. TONY couldn’t have actually chosen a more appropriate couple to feature. The two are not always dressed impeccably, but they also really play off each other’s style really well and totally naturally.

Besides plugging the shit out of us, I also love that a good portion of the photos taken for the shoot are something we’ll never, ever let Dennis & Claire (mostly Dennis though) live down again. Especially the two above! Hahahahaha… Oh Yung Chow, what a dandy!

I’ll be upfront in saying I have not read Axolotl Roadkill by Helene Hegemann, and the mere thought of reading a 17 year old author’s debut  on clubbing and drugs, makes me cringe… I don’t care how highly praised it is.

But that isn’t the point of this post. The New York Times had a great article today about the controversy young Helene’s book has stirred. You see, while initially released to glowing praise, certain passages and chunks of Axotol Roadkill have since been accused of being lifted from a variety of sources. Helene Hegemann’s reponse to these allegations has simply been this:

I myself don’t feel it is stealing, because I put all the material into a completely different and unique context and from the outset consistently promoted the fact that none of that is actually by me

The problem is that Helene never at any point cited in her book the original source material nor stated from the outset that she would be “sampling” existing prose. Her excuse was that she didn’t understand she needed to (oh how 17 of her!). She says her “sampling” of text was just a byproduct of her generation and the youth culture, comparing it to DJing.

I honestly think it’s a pretty intriguing concept that, if done correctly, could be giving new perspective and purpose to old ideas. Our modern Pop Culture says sampling is OK, and so sampling back from itself to create something “new” should in theory be acceptable, or shouldn’t it? How is it really all that different from countless generations looking to and appropriating religious ideas, archetypes, and text in creating their own works? Of course those never actually lifted whole passages and pages, but that was then and this is now. Sure some may poo-poo the idea and impact of Pop Culture as inspiration, but like it or not, it’s quickly becoming the dogma of choice for each incoming generation.

Now in regards to Helene Hegemann, I feel she should have always been upfront about her intentions and use of material not her own while constructing this story… but my question is how do you all feel about the concept of sampling for works of literature?

So to pick up where we left off: I collect stuff. My collection of collections is wide and far-reaching. Not surprisingly, one of the things I collect—very randomly, I might add—is magazines.

Long story short, I was sifting through a pile of old(er) Arkitips and Giant Robots and I found this little gem. The tenth issue of the long(ish)-gone Mass Appeal magazine, c. 2001.

I have never been as hip-hop as this magazine. To say it again: I have never been as hip as this magazine. I have never been as hop as this magazine. But I held onto this particular issue because of the fantastic photo essay towards the back by one Massimo Gammacuerta titled ‘BEEF: The Photo Essay’.

Bottom line, dude took a bunch of hood- and/or prison-weapons and used them on inanimate foodstuffs. It’s one of those so-simple-it’s-genius ideas that, at the time, really stuck with me. And? And so naturally I made sure (apparently) that the magazine itself stuck with me as well. Enjoy the (hastily produced, but with love) photos of the photos here, for your viewing pleasure. (Feel free to click-through on any of the images for a larger size).

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Books. What a joke. Little rectangles of information.  As usual, it’s been days since I’ve left the house and Diksmell Fartdik is once more demanding that I write something for the Mushkunt Blog. I’ve forgotten what daylight and women look like. I haven’t spoken in days and I forget how to make my throat and mouth work together to form words. I’m like that movie starring Meg Ryan where she speaks wolf talk. I am an urban feral child-adult. Here are some of my books that are going to interest others.

—–

10) Disney Adventures featuring Macaulay Culkin

When I was little I owned all the issues of Nintendo Power and Disney Adventures. I would keep them organized and read them over and over. I loved magazines so much.  It seemed like I was going to work for them when I was little. I made zines and then I started Trashed Magazine and by that time the magazine industry was already dead.

So what’s left? Wasting my love of topical writing on this fucking website. Playboy was once a home for chaste titties but they also sent Shel Silverstein to Spain so he could do comics about it and paid Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder a lot of money to produce the beautifully painted Little Annie Fanny comics. Who’s going to finance beautiful things now? Everything’s gotta be made cheaper and faster now.  I was supposed to be in magazines. Now what do I have? I have nothing. Rudyard Kipling believed that if Hell exists, that we are living in it.

Long story short, Macaulay happily discusses all the good times he was having with Michael Jackson at the time.

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9) Rat Catching by Crispin Hellion Glover

I interviewed Crispin Glover when What Is It? came out and he gave me copies of his books. That interview was scheduled to be in a magazine that got canceled but at least I got to meet him and he gave me these books.

I feel guilty about every interview I ever did that didn’t get used for one thing or another.

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8) Sex in the Outdoors by Robert Ros, M.D. and Buck Titon, M.S.

Boy, that rabbit’s really getting an eyeful. Did there have to be a guide for having sex in the outdoors?  Isn’t that what all living things have been doing since the dawn of time? The advice is all like “Don’t rub your dick on poison ivy.” And if you see a big bunny watching you sex then just close your eyes and hope he goes away because you are probably about to die.

—–

7) Understanding Human Behavior

If you ever get close to a human and huuuuuuuummaaaaaaaaannnn behavvvvvvioorrrrrrr. I’ll never understand the appeal of Bjork. I found this book in the trash.

That’s some crazy ownership tag in the front of the book. Don’t think about death too much, Wilcox.

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6) Masters of Metal by Lee Martyn

This book is ridiculous. I like that they have chubby Ozzy on the cover. He was moving in a Chris Farley direction at this point.

—

I bet you didn’t know that Steve Martin was heavy metal. Now you do.

I bet you didn’t know that ZZ Top were metal either. Neither did they. Only Lee Martyn did.

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I have a serious love for good sci-fi. On the other hand, I really can’t stand bad sci-fi. So when my buddy handed me Infoquake by David Louis Edelman in a stack of Palahniuk books, I was a bit cautious. I didn’t exactly pick it up and tear it open right away.

Granted, I was also too busy zoning out in front of the TV for the past 2 months, so there was that. Something happened to me in the last fiscal quarter of 2009: I became much more interested in buying books—stockpiling them, like some mad survivalist, out in the country, slowly going crazy—than actually reading them.

But guilt is a funny thing. After all, I HAD foisted my Klosterman library onto him, the least I could do is take his goddamn recommendation and read the thing. So I did. And I am glad.

The first thing I noticed about Infoquake is that it wasn’t necessarily ‘hard’ sci-fi. I’m trying to think of a book or books that would qualify as hard sci-fi—you know, so I can paint you a picture—but I just can’t right now. I guess that means that I don’t really read hard sci-fi.

To be totally honest, this might actually be a cyberpunk book, come to think of it. Either way, it’s got that ‘just-right’ mix of future-tech exposition, socio-economical presupposition, and snarky anti-anti-heroism that is the hallmark of a good Gibson or Stephenson tome. Come to think of it, it’s very much in the same class of ’scientific-adventure-with-a-touch-of-technological-hypothesis’ that Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America is. I’ll go out on a limb with a block-quote, from me to you:

This book is equal parts Liberation: and Snow Crash. With maybe a slight dash of Neuromancer. Maybe.

So if that sounds like something you’d be into, then, well, I’d say dive right in. The good news is that it’s part of an ongoing series, so if you’re left hungry for more, you can go back to the well. I’m cracking the second book—MultiReal—right now, and will be sure to let you know how it goes.

Start Rant:

You know, just to be fair, I’ll say this: much of what you might not super-like about the abovementioned books is here, too. Cyberpunk books are notorious for their attempts to imagine some lofty change in the way we as humans experience computers. The way we communicate. The way we program. This book has that. Some of the stuff really works and is very much core to the plot and feel of the book, but, alas, there are some core things that are just too wonky. The real kicker is that Edelman is a programmer by trade…he should know better. BUT! There’s a reason why, whenever you see a movie about ‘hacking’ or ‘nets’ or matrices of some sort, they have some outlandishly visual and visceral representation of what that is.

That reason is simple: watching a dude type, read email, and/or drink Mountain Dew in his bathrobe is not necessarily something anybody would want to see or read about. It is, however, what hacking or nets or matrices look like, by and large.

Still a very good book, however.

/End Rant

So I know I’m not pictured here. In my underwear. And I know that these are not photos of guns, knives, Guitar Hero controllers, and other things you may expect to see in photos (at least if you’ve been a Bloglin reader for a while).

But, well, this is the kind of thing I take photos of. I am addicted to collecting photos. And I am addicted to thinking about collecting copies of The Catcher in the Rye. So I have started my own little hybrid collection: Photos AND Actual Copies of The Catcher in the Rye.

I have been doing this for 2 or 3 years, and in fact, I had a great time looking for copies of this book in Japan. I found 3. It is officially universal.

More than anything else, this book taught me that it’s ok to type how you talk. I know that’s a bit of a ‘hiding in plain sight’ concept, but if you read your average email out loud, you realize that it sounds pretty square. Catcher showed me that people communicate through grammar and tone, and, well, I am forever grateful.

I have gotten several emails so far (from people who know of my little collection-within-a-collection) and I’ve been happy to tell them that I’m not sad at all for Mr. Salinger. I’ve never taken the time to really try and dive-deep into his mythos; I’ve always been content to let him stay mysterious in my mind. Seems like he wanted his peace more than anything, and I’m bittersweetly happy for him that he (hopefully) has it now.

And yes, I concur with Mars, Oh Mars: If you can hear us—be you on high or down low—please buy a guy a drink. He earned it.

RIP

Today sucks. Two massive institutions have passed on. The elusive, enigmatic author JD Salinger has died of natural causes in his Cornish, NH home. Salinger’s last work was published in 1965 and he hasn’t given an interview since 1980. I mean, he could have really died in the 80s for all we know.

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” Catcher in the Rye – opening line.

News also came in today that leftist academic Howard Zinn has died. When I was in college as a history major, Zinn was a god. His seminal tome “A People’s History of the United States” changed how Americans look at their past and took the spotlight off the founding fathers and put it on the laborers, feminist activists, and the Native Americans; the real backbone of the nation.

“Historically, the most terrible things – war, genocide, and slavery – have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.”

Someone in the afterlife buy these cats a drink.

Hopefully all if not most of you guys are familiar with Taschen, but those who aren’t they’re really the pre-eminent publisher of books on art & design. Almost every single book they put out isn’t only fascinating, but a work of art and design in it’s own right.

They are currently running a sale on thousands of slightly damaged and display copies at bargain basement prices, 50-75% off. Best of all Taschen has shops in major cities from New York to Berlin. Head over here for a complete list of Taschen stores and their hours during this massive warehouse sale. And for those of you who can’t make it to a physical shop, the Taschen webstore is having a pretty generous sale of it’s own!

Photo by Victoria Jacob

We love Das Racist ’round these parts and certainly we’re not alone. Thanks to the widespread blogging last year for their breakout track “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” made the Williamburg duo/sometimes trio widespread sensations.

The Village Voice recently invited Heems to write a lengthy and incredibly interesting essay on what life as an internet phenomenon has been like and meant for the fledgling group. It’s a really thoughtful piece and I’m sure isn’t the sort of thought provoking and sincere piece many of you are probably used to reading or were expecting from one of the guys who brought you “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” and the recent video for (shout out to Ronnie James!) “Rainbow in the Dark”.

Seriously get yourself a cup of coffee or a beer and just take in this wonderful essay.

Das Racist: Thanks, Internet! (Click Here to Read)