Poptimism in the truest, most graspingly desperate sense of the (made-up, hilarious) word.

Wow, Pitchfork; so, in the new world, do we really have to dig under Nickelodeon spinoff sitcom rocks to find the debuts of future pop starlet also-rans so that we can give them a 6 out of 10 next to music made by (and ostensibly for) grown-ups?

Apparently, we do.

Well, all right! Hell, let’s crack open the Night Train and get it over with! My friends; my good, good friends: Here’s to comparing Carly Rae Jepsen to—well, to anything in the world, out of haplessly ambitious ass-coverage and sheer desperation.

It’s okay, Pitchfork. The last ten years haven’t been a colossal waste of time—they’ve just been an exercise in discovering just how far down this thing can go.

…And here we are. See you on the other side!

P.S.: Just kidding; see you at “South By.” We’ll be the ones in the party tent rocking glow-in-the-dark label promo gear and doing shots!

Advertisement

Sorry, can’t talk right now.

Busy hitting “refresh” over and over at the Italians Do It Better site.

This is in or around being an obsessive record-collecting dope (with exceptional taste in music and design).

Seriously; you should look into this label. $5 for a CD? $10 for a record (on color vinyl, with free download, of course)? Free downloads of like half their catalog (or more) over at Soundcloud? Sweet DIY/glam analog/photocopy-style graphic design and really fun, sharply-crafted and overall awesome music?

How is the mainstream music industry collapsing when this model exists?

(Oh, wait; I forgot—greed, aggressive short-sightedness, suing the people they should have been figuring out how to appeal to, and giving today’s limos and lunches priority over staying in business tomorrow. Easy to overlook.)

Toyotas of Massachusetts: Family Values vs. Keeping it Green.

It’s hard to wrap my head around this car and what it’s saying to the world—a Prius with a smugly superfluous vanity plate and a Christian fish thing. It’s a red state/blue state paradox; like a Dr. Laura show on NPR. It’s freaking me out, but I like it.

I appreciate the way it comes off as a more genuine, real-life, walking-the-walk embodiment of what this car (which I used to see on the way to work) is telling everyone:

The Prius comes off sort of like the clean-lines, grown up version of the Camry’s jaded, apathetic splatter, doesn’t it?

Either way, both cars are clearly tools for telling people something about their owners; at the minimum, the message seems to be: I care.

How much they care, and about what, are less clear, but one thing we can take away from these two pictures is that the owners of these cars would probably find one another irritating.

Office rocker.

I was a temp for eight years. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire, off the shoulder of Orion. Paranoid bosses muttering “Hezbollah” when someone brown comes into reception. And kittens. Posters and posters of kittens.

This next song is called “You Can’t Recycle the Paper That the Paper Comes In.”

It goes like this:

Oh, you can’t recycle the paper that the paper comes in

I know you think you should be able to

But it says right on the paper that you can’t

And the trash can is right next to the recycling bin

So why is this so hard for you to manage

…Time to die.

Office surprise.

I love the charming, even adorable optimism that quaintly radiates from the little sections in grocery stores where they have Sharpies and Post-It Notes and little boxes of paper clips for sale—like, literally, with actual price tags on them.

They must know that everyone’s office has that stuff for free. Right? I mean—they have to be aware that we all get these things at work.