I just found this on my desktop, it’s from the mostest Taiwanese TV show “Rolling Love (Go Fried Rice)” starring my giant crush, super cute pop star/actor Jiro Wang (pictured, sitting). It resonates a bit after the week of holiday parties I’ve experienced.

I’m not ranking cause the Re(De)pression is the great equalizer. And it’s subjective anyway. Snitches. OFF EL DOME HAT!:
“You’ve Changed” Lauren Flax f. Sia
“Who Dat” Young Jeezy
“My President is Black” Young Jeezy
“Bubble Like Soup ’08” Timberlee
“Ex Lover” Friendly Fires
“Cold Summer” Get Em Mamis
“A Dey Hey” Detropix
the whole Abe Vigoda (band) experience
“American Boy” Estelle f. Kanye
“Money” Assassin
“Brooklyn Girls” Charles Hamilton
“Day n Night (Crookers rmx)” Kid Cudi
That CROOKERS transition sound + everything Crookers ever + that one ACDC sample thing
“Desert Storm” Gang Gang Dance
“Test” Little Dragon
“Run Run” Those Dancing Days
“Tic Toc” Busy Signal
“Family Tree” TV on the Radio
“Lollipop” Lil Wayne f. Static Major
“Freaky Freaky” Electrik Red
That one song by R Leslie that was not “Addicted” oh yeah “Diamond Girl” that was OK yo did anyone freestyle over the beat?
The whole Michna album
“Black Hollywood” Chubbie Baby
OK IM OVER IT THERE’S A GAZILLION MORE GO DL THE FADER’S “AWESOME SONGS ’08” MP3

Sometimes, in my capacity as a journalist, I receive copies of albums in advance of their official release to the general public, though now that the “internet” “happened” this privilege is a lot less like sitting in the VIP booth at the club (though you should know that, as I type this, I am drinking champagne [oh oohhhh], and that the last time I drank champers it was poured for me in a glass by Damon Dash, before the bankruptcy rumors [it is entirely possible Damon Dash lost his fortune on champagne for private Jim Jones listening sessions]). Yes, I know what you’re thinking: Julianne you are soooo cool. However, there are a very few certain times when I receive an album in the mail in advance and am terribly anguished because I love it so much and want to share it with everyone I know and talk about it and live with it and make up dances to it and film said dances with the VHS camcorder (I regress). And yet I cannot because A. no one else has it B. I am not a leaker on GP C. if I were a leaker it would definitely end with me in front of a Def Jam firing squad because also my name is watermarked on the album they sent me. So I’m just gonna talk about it because everyone around me is fucking sick of hearing me play these songs already anyway. It’s by Electrik Red, an ensemble of four-lady badassery, and it’s only an EP, and though I’ve heard the entire album (in Gabe’s office), it’s entirely more satisfying and, corporeal i guess, when you actually have something to listen to constantly and annoy the shit out of your coworkers with.
As extensively documented here ca. 2004, I grew up listening to pop R&B, freestyle, electro, and lady hip-hop, mostly because of my dance teachers who would choreograph to Salt n Pepa (“Tramp”), Nia Peeples (“Trouble”), Pebbles (“Mercedes Boy”), Nu Shooz (“Can’t Wait”), Expose (“Come Go with Me”) et cetera. Electrik Red’s shit is generally rooted in this shit, as they clearly have a healthy Vanity 6 salivation-trigger, but occasionally their songs are also like a trancedance electro party in the stars. Stars as in This Galaxy. It was also written by The-Dream. Who is my favorite. As far as I’m concerned, Beyonce was shortchanged as hell on “Single Ladies” (which Dream wrote). She shoulda requested “Freaky Freaky,” the best song ever which Dream gave to Electrik Red, the one that sounds like classic Prince if he was kicking it a lot at Magic City (boom boom), and the one I cannot stop bumping as though tomorrow is armageddon and today’s my first kiss. It goes:
Now let’s get freaky freaky
Whoa whoa whoa whoa
Love when that DJ play my shit, my shit
Like this, like this
I rock, I rock
My hips, My hips
(You know that I love you ba-beh)
Now let it go, now now
(You hold me down like shackles bay-beh)
I know! On the page it doesn’t look like literary brilliance or um, even metaphor (never that), but like, how visceral can you get? It’s also all about the cadence and the falsetto and the crunk anthemitude and the choppy synths, sex/love/sex/love jam five thousand.
I just think they’re such terrific songs. You can also watch the video for their first single which is not the best song on the album by far, but every skraight dude I know gets a gigantor Madoff-debt-sized boner every time they watch this thing. It’s interesting cause like, they clearly wanna kick yalls teeth in… or not?! Whatever, to bring it semi-full-circle, the choreography is banging.

Shane gets HBO Latino which is offensively titled “HBO OLÈ ” and has been going on about this Mexican show “Capadocia” as long as I’ve known him. He describes it as the Mexican version of “Oz,” another culty HBO show that set the stage for The Wire (and cast a lot of the same actors, plus that guy who plays Michael from “Lost”). So one night last week, he plied me with Mexican food from the best teeny tacqueria in Fort Greene (not bougie, but actual), got made fun of by his macho bodega dude for buying me Corona Lite, and forced me to come over and watch the first episode of this show, warning me that it is subtitled but I could probably understand most of the Spanish anyway. But that I NEEDED TO SEE IT.
Essentially it’s about the institutionalized women’s prison system in Mexico, which is hella gangster and run by this gigante butch lesbian with a big hairdo. There’s a sideplot about these corrupt officials who want to turn the prison into a camp for free labor, and turn prisoners into workforce, thereby helping private capitalism, but increasing the prison population out of necessity (SOUND FAMILIAR?!). In the first episode there’s a riot, a couple of murders, a crack addict, underground drug trade, lots of sex both hetero and homo, and a boob shot like every four minutes: total telenovela style, despite the serious theme and drama-focus. But judging by the first episode it’s one of the most feminist TV shows I have ever seen (on a very short list of feminist TV shows that includes.. “Murphy Brown”? “Veronica Mars”? Umm… “Alibi”? What else?). I’ll let you know more after Shane lets me come over and watch the following nineteen episodes in one day over winter break. Hint.

RIP MC Breed.

My last entry was election day… that is absurd. I didn’t even report about how the streets of Brooklyn burst like a pinata that night, so much joy spilling onto the streets like cellophane candy and rattling bigger, better, prettier than the New Year. Suffice to say… I been busy running a magazine. And now, now that I have a spare ten minutes to throw down on el personal bloggo, I have yet ANOTHER dislocated limb! My index finger. On my typing hand. T, R, G, B,F and V are affected. I hurt it while trying to stop a fistfight. I know this is how River Phoenix’s character was eventually stabbed to death in Stand By Me but I, like him, am a humanitarian. And, in the process of trying to stop the fight, I, wearing four-inch banana yellow Marc Jacobs pumps, was knocked to the ground and caught my finger on the end of the curb on Canal, just before the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge. I kept thinking, Home: it was just across it. Being fairly gangster and also having had an NYC ER experience that I do not rightly wish to relive, I simply popped my finger back into place. It now resembles a half-eaten sausage. Conveniently, I have a lot of typing to do this weekend. Looking forward to it!
After I hurt myself, the almost-fight ceased. No dudes like to see a girl in pain. Even dudes who want to pulverize each others’ faces.
Ladies and gentlemen, my bratwurst:

Home sick and feel like I wanna take a Dyson vacuum cleaner to my lungs, but got up early and walked the four blocks to the polling spot, at the public school down the way, “We HEART Michelle” button on the lapel. I’ve voted there about five times now, and it’s always a quickie in-and-out kinda experience… mostly because I feel like that school only covers about a four-block radius of greater BK. This time, though, first time ever, there were lines, and the whole deal took about 30 minutes. I saw my downstairs people, I saw my neighbor from down the block who used to be a dealer off the stoop but gave it up and started college last year, I saw the smiling faces of Boerum Hill and, while waiting in line to pull ye olde red lever for Precinct 63, I started crying, holding my coffee and looking all crappy and swole in the face from various illnesses and/or emotional outbursts. It was awesome not just for the experience of voting for someone I actually believe in, of voting for hopefully the nation’s first African-American president, the promise of a strong leader in the face of the quagmire, the potential relief from the last eight years of hell, the potential cessation of the US military’s illegal occupation of Iraq and redirection of troops to Afghanistan where our dying soldiers truly need help. It was awesome because I felt like I was part of a community of people that make up a neighborhood that make up a borough that make up a metropolitan area that make up a state that make up this country. In short: I FELT PATRIOTIC AS HELL. Maybe for the first time in my life, but definitely for the first time since I went to a Clinton rally in 1992 at an airport hangar in Cheyenne, Wyoming, at age 16, and felt like this dude would do us good, generationally, culturally, everything. I felt included, one in a whole, because that’s what we are.
Now, if McCain wins I’ll know I was wrong–that America doesn’t want me or anyone I know–but I’m gonna savor that and ride on it at least till midnight EST tonight. Please sweet baby Jesus and mysterious Prince Allah, G-d and whatever deity Stephen Hawking worships, Please math god and Zeus and the Israelites’ Golden Calf and the Merrill Lynch bull down on Wall, please let Barack Hussein Obama become the next President of the potentially awesome United States of America.

LET’S GET IT! STYLE ON EM B-ROCK!

Reports from my BKLYN poll later. SO NERVOUS.

Cole, Erin, Connie and I attended the Cat Show at MSG today, and I’m considering buying an exotic / hybrid domestic-wild cat. Servals are cute and freaky looking with their painterly ears, but I’m obsessed with how baby Caracals sound like birds when they are kittens (as heard below). A caracal is a wild cat native to Africa and the Middle East and is not illegal to keep as a domestic pet in some states. I am afraid of the baby bird caracals growing up and subsequently viewing our other cats as walking hot-dogs-on-a-stick, though, so I should probably let my pet wish go unfulfilled.

I cannot stop watching the Beyonce “Single Ladies” video. I think it is brilliant they used Bob Fosse choreography and put her in a weird A Chorus Line leotard with a robocop hand. I wore that exact outfit in soho yesterday but then I had to buy a coat. because it was cold, jerks.

I clearly don’t have to tell you how thrilled we should all be that Colin Powell endorsed The Senator. Saw Oliver Stone’s W. this weekend and it wasn’t funny. Brolin is obviously getting the Oscar. Thandie Newton as Condi should get Best Supporting–she had like four lines but it was all in her eyes. Still cannot get over the fact that we have an oedipal bio / historical faction/farce about a sitting president. Even if it is Georgie. Still shocking. I find it very telling, wholly indicative of how much dignity was stripped from the office in the last eight years. Even Bill Clinton’s errant weiner couldn’t have dreamed this far down the rabbit hole. (Also, our country during Bill’s cigar-a-thon could have taken a cue from lusty-ass President Sarkozy and his polyamourous wife Carla Bruni–i.e. PEOPLE HAVE SEX AND SOME PEOPLE ARE FREAKS, EVEN THE PRESIDENT, BIG FUCKING DEAL. Or to use an example closer to home, look at New York’s awesome New York governor D. Patterson who, after Elliott Spitzer stupidly decided to have an affair with A PROSTITUTE, immediately admitted every single thing he’d ever done before he signed himself into office after Spitzer got sent away to a batcave in Westchester–affairs, weed, then cocaine when he thought weed was too boring, insanely gymnastic dances to overcompensate for his blindness at discos, etc. Whatever, it was the 1970s in New York! Get over it! Then again, we have Edwards, who was pretty stupid but mostly tacky considering his wife’s whole FIGHTING CANCER. Like, people, if you are going to step out, at least wait until your spouse is in sighting distance of remission. It’s a whole other level of common decency. I DIGRESS!)

I have not updated for awhile. Normally I would like to have one specific topic to yammer on about but there’s too much going on. First off, we are completing our December issue, five weeks in the making. Terribly busy. It’s always a process to put out a magazine and every once in awhile you ram your little forehead up against the fence like a goat looking for a clover patch, but every issue, it drops, and you feel pumped. No matter what crapitude you go through to get there, somehow it always feels better once it’s in layout: like your ideas have come to fruition and yo, it’s kind of VERY awesome that you get to do this. Kind of like a dream job? Yes. My first fanzine was when I was ten. I made it on my commodore 64 from PrintShop (old heads know). It was called the Daily Bugle and I distinctly recall one of the pages had a giant tooth graphic and the admonition, in Lucinda font: “DONT FORGET TO BRUSH YOUR TEETH.” (NEW FADER COLUMN!) I meant to sell it to our neighbors for ten cents but I only made one copy. I probably threw it away, embarrassed, once I got older, but let’s just say I’ve been making magazines for a long time. Magazines of sorts. Or wanted to anyway. Moving on.
We put out a new magazine, which I am terribly proud of. The America issue/photo special: It is seeable / downloadable for free on the internet in PDF form here, though I recommend at least flipping through the book in a bookstore… the photos are too phenomenal not to touch on glossy paper. We are having a tiny tiny tiny celebratory party with super secret special guest DJs on Wednesday in Manhattan from 7-10 pm, if you want to come email julianne@thefader.com with the subject header “MY PRESIDENT IS BLACK” in all caps and write me three sentences about why you are voting Obama.
I have been twittering my face off. If you are not familiar, get familiar.
I have become obsessed with /enamored of Mad Men, the only zeitgeistical television show I did not watch until Pete, trying to reference it, said, “That is the only zeitgeistical television show I watch but you don’t.” Hence: I watch it now. The writing is excellent and every episode, I thank god I was not alive and a woman before the woman’s movement. Betty Draper, with her wistful, suicidal appeasing, reminds me so much of a character from a book: April Wheeler, the tragutante from the apocalyptic marriage in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road. It’s a book that will send you to the floor in agony. It’s also being made into a movie so read it fast so the characters can be fully formed in your mind before the snipes hit the streets with the real actors who shall not be named here.
I have finished reading graphic novels: American Widow, the heartbreaking memoir of a woman whose husband died in 9/11, when she was eight months pregnant.
And the new Love and Rockets by, as ever, Los Bros Hernandez, the most important graphic novelists of all time at least to me. The new stories have grandmas who are superheroes, which speaks to me culturally and feministically, if that is a word. Los Bros are male feminists from the olden days for real.
Bout to go in on David Heatley’s My Brain is Hanging Upside Down. Kinda feeling like that as I write this–shipping the magazine! long day!–so if the prose is not massaging your brain-face like you’d like it, that is why.
I have been watching this video that Shane sent me about a prehistoric shark discovered off the coast of Japan in 2007, and thinking about how its weird tiered teeth basically wants to rip off all our faces.

And just when the pundits think she did okay, the New York Times has to go and transcribe what she actually said. You thought it wasn’t possible but yes, it is true: it looks far emptier on paper.