Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Piano

is the title of a painting by Salvador Dali. The confluence of Dali, Pink Floyd, and the various other accoutrements of the stereotypical pothead was enough to sour me on Dali for the first 20 or so years of my life, at which time I came across some of his drawings at an exhibition in London. Whatever is to be said about Dali the man and the bacon fat on his mustache, the art I like, sort of. Call me conflicted – there’s a cutesiness that I find off putting, and then there’s the pothead factor to take into account, but the drawings I saw were like little energetic/schizoid dynamos. So, then, with the paintings there’s wariness; the drawings fascination. Here is a for/against, or against/for list, from our man Salvador.

Against For
simplicity complexity
egalitarianism hierarchization
politics metaphysics
nature aesthetics
mechanism dreams
youth maturity
spinach snails
Buddha the Marquis de Sade
the sun the moon
Rembrandt Vermeer
savage objects ultra-civilized 1900 objects
medicine magic
philosophy religion
mountains coast line
phantoms specters
women Gala
men myself
scepticism faith

Keeping with my tradition of encountering the hot shit months or years after it was declared hot, I just began my introduction to Aesop Rock’s Bazooka Tooth. My response, in list form,

1) This album has a song called “Babies with Guns.”

2) Aesop Rock has always provoked a bodily response in me: head nodding, head swaying, knee bouncing, whatever. I used to prowl around Hyde Park with swagger, which I should never really have, b/c of this Rock. Sometimes the voice of said Rock aggravates, but that’s no reason to write it off.

3) Syncopation, alliteration, and big ball-ed beats, hell YEE-AH!

4) Song with a sample that sounds suspiciously like that Onyx song I used to like to rock while practicing ollies in my garage in fifth grade, hell YEE-AH!

5) “We’re Famous” is of the fuck-you-anonymous-rapper-I’m-better-than-you-more-underground-than-you-more-inventive-than-you-etc school. Songs about or arising from beef usually involve authenticity claims, and sometimes give the artist the opportunity to completely defy your expectations e.g. if you haven’t heard LL Cool J’s utter annihilation of Cannabis, you should, but be warned – it’ll be hard to think of LL in the same terms again; shit, maybe it wasn’t even about Cannabis. I forget – regardless, LL is HARD in this song.