Diagrammanomicon.
Momus is one of my favorite pop stars, which should surprise no one: a lycanthropic formalist, a jet-setting dilettante, a gadfly in the best possible sense of the word, he writes fiendishly stylish pop songs about pirates and Beowulf and Wendy Carlos and Tokyo neighborhoods. I mean, how can you not love a song like “MC Escher”?
The conventions of rap dictate that every MC who takes the mic
Claims to be the best, fills his set with hype
It’s OTT.
But if we imagine a world where every MC really is badder and fresher
Than every other, it just gets madder and madder
One of those rooftop salmon ladders
Drawn by …
MC Escher
The impossible rapper
Ain’t nobody does it better
Under pressure
MC Escher
He’s so clever
Gives you pleasure
Forever…
His website’s always been a go-to for those coffee breaks when you want to spend fifteen minutes playing with ideas that might end up going nowhere, but so what. And, well, now he’s got a LiveJournal; more coffee, please! —Today’s entry starts out with one of the reasons why (un-neo-)conservatives today might well distrust the CIA beyond all expectation: the CIA, it seems, heavily subsidized abstract expressionism in the 1950s, as a cultural front in the cold war: macho, cerebral, muscular art, the art of capitalism and liberty, going toe-to-toe with socialist realism. (Following up on yesterday’s playful entry, which was in part about how pop art came along and yanked the tablecloth out from under abstract expressionism.)—The CIA pulling NEA duty? Horrors. But! From there, we skate into the fascinating work of Mark Lombardi, whose beautiful diagrams of money and power look like old skool uggabugga.
Anyway. Commended to your attention, and all that.
And if that's not enough Momus, he's a regular on the fascinating (and infuriating) I Love Music/Everything boards. If you didn't know that already, that is.