the dream-maker always has time for your story

Old iPhone photo of a stray cloud over China 1 that bespeaks the right level of dreaminess.

Various Artists, Authentic R&B Stateside SL10068 (collected by Clarke Gernon)
Bobby Rush, Raw
Aloe Blac, Good Things
Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
Bill Withers, 'Justments
Gil Scott-Heron, Home is Where the Hatred Is
Marilyn Crispell & Joseph Jarman, Connecting Spirits
Max Roach and Anthony Braxton, Birth and Rebirth

• I watched a half-marathon of How To Make It in America, a totally asinine HBO series about, I think, the guy that came up with skinny jeans. It's gorgeous like terrible TV shows about NYC Whenever are, part Saturday Night Live intro, part Saturday Night Fever strut. All people do in New York is drink coffee in those little cups and bump into Destiny on the street. Yo, isn't that famous jeans designer Gino Jeansaloni at that picturesque bodega? Go talk to him, yo, while I go talk to this fine lady! Catch up with you at Club Clubbo! and the dream-maker always has time for your story and goes son, you remind me of me and I'm gonna cut you a break, Here's the card of the guy that will make everything happen for you. Dreadful. Beautifully shot. I'd live these guys' empty lives.
     
• The pitch perfect theme song by Aloe Blacc has been wedged in my head for days, and now, in yours.
  
  
  Aloe Blacc, "I Need a Dollar"
  
  But really, I feel like I lost valuable hit points just by mentioning this stupid show. Should you find yourself couch-bound on a lot of cold medicine going y'know, I like Entourage, but I wish it was breezier, HTMIIA is the show for you.
    
• Speaking of valuable hit points, I love Ready Player One. It is nerds-ahoy fun, a jumble of 80's pop culture, D&D, and video game ephemera gathered up into a Magic Mountain ride with a prize at the end. It folds nostalgia into an origami Space Invader. I love how upends the usual misfit frame of role-playing games and Atari and presents them as ways to expand one's world, mostly because that's what they were to me. Ii won't give away too much to say there is a part where the protagonist must re-enact War Games within a game inside a simulation inside the book and it all works. And, it contains some of the best social media takeover u/dys-topia talk of any novel I've read.  More to come on that.
     
• Speaking of social media dystopia, I had some thoughts on Photosynth panoramas but they got all article-y and were thus relegated to their own post.
     
• Speaking of my second point, the Aloe Blacc album is excellent. Sure, he is jumping Bill Withers' train but if it came rolling through, wouldn't you? This is what "Femme Fatale" sounds like in Lou Reed's head when he sings it.
  
  
  Aloe Blacc, "Femme Fatale"