Black Magic Woman

We've mentioned legendary doom metal band Electric Wizard at least once before. With a new album due this fall, The Typing Monkey figured it was time to (re-)acquaint readers with a terrific interview with Electric Wizard's guitarist -- no, the other one. Yeah, her, Liz Buckingham. The one who isn't Jus Osborn.

In 2011, Kim Kelly, of NPR's music blog The Record, interviewed Buckingham. Asking smart questions to get smart answers, Kelly illuminates Buckingham's inspiring motivations. Like the best female musicians stomping around in a field still dominated by men, Buckingham isn't a female guitarist, she's a guitarist. Right on, Liz Buckingham. Right on.

Read it all here and get hip to the massive, too-much-to-smoke power of Electric Wizard.

Q: You know how I know you're gay?

A: You posted a poem on your blog

Well the joke's on you buddy, because we posted a link to a poem.

An excerpt from Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing
by Margaret Atwood:

but I come from the province of the gods
where meanings are lilting and oblique.
I don’t let on to everyone,
but lean close, and I’ll whisper:
My mother was raped by a holy swan.
You believe that? You can take me out to dinner.

***
Read the entire thing here. (It's short, but long enough that we wanted to link away rather than copy and paste.) Atwood wrote the poem in 1939, published in a collection from 1995 called Morning in the Burned House.

So Much to See

Sometimes we see blogs, Tumblrs and other stops on the web and wonder why we even bother. Then we remember, we bother because if we weren't here to pass the links on to you, who would?

At least that's what we tell ourselves at night before drinking enough cough syrup to fall asleep while listening to old radio dramas.

Imagine some sort of brass fanfare here. Now look!

Can you even stand it?! Yeah, exclamation points. Journalism-degree-be-damned. If ever there was a still from a Disney cartoon that merited a freak-out, this certainly makes the grade.

This is just a smoked pepper corn amongst the bounty of spicy offerings at the Graves and Ghouls Tumblr.

It's run by a woman named Cat who has another Tumblr worth your time, Vintage Gal.

There are GIFs on both, which tend to bug our wonky eyes, but that's one broken match in the factory full of joy. And please know there are ladies in various states of undress on both blogs, so don't get fired on our watch, okay?

Diana, Huntress of Bus Drivers

Ciudad Juarez in Mexico City may have a costumed vigilante, and she means business. The story, if it's true -- and this news report give it a squinty eye -- concerns direct and violent retribution against bus drivers in the city.

What did transit workers do to bring down the hammer of old-world justice on themselves? For years, it's believed that some drivers have been raping and killing female passengers, leaving their bodies in the desert.

But someone calling herself Diana, Huntress of Bus Drivers, alleges she's responsible for the recent shooting deaths of two drivers in the area. Each driver got two shots to the head, and police are investigating.

Read the story and cross your fingers that Diana has her targets straight. Her press release is chilling and righteous. And as has been pointed out elsewhere, if the police there put as much effort into stopping the rapes and murders of women as they are in attempting to find Diana, there'd be no need for Diana.

[Hat tip to The Stranger for the lead.]

tl;dr

The Typing Monkey may re-use that headline (and tag) anytime we post links to articles on the web that actually qualify as articles.

What qualifies us to decide what qualifies as an "article"? Any piece we read that reaches a certain tipping point of the tl;dr factor. To save you a trip to Urban Dictionary, that weird abbreviation stands for "too long; didn't read" and is often used jokingly in comments under articles on the Web.

But it's just as often typed in earnest, because attention for reading web articles drops exponentially after certain word counts. The numbers vary depending on which study you read, but the advice is the same: the shorter the better. Which loosely means, anything that can't be read "above the fold" -- read without the user having to scroll further down the page -- is least likely to be read.

Why does this happen? Again, search around the Web and read up on studies, statistics and opinions, but the fact that it happens bugs us. It bugs us even more when we catch ourselves doing it. Never mind that this very blog posts two- and three-page scrollers all the time. We just can't shut up and that's another issue entirely.

So in defense of long-form journalism, criticism and other types of information delivery through the written word, we'll put "tl;dr" right there in the headline to let you know that what we're linking to, when we're recommending it, is more than one "page down" button's worth of reading but worth the time and attention.

To the links!

First up is "Wikipedia's Women Problem" from science writer James Gleick for The New York Review of Books. If you've been following the story at all, Wikipedia has slowly moved all of the women from the category "American novelists" into a sub-category specific to their gender. While this sort of OCD categorizing isn't weird on it's own, it's a problem because they didn't call the other category "male American novelists." Gleick goes deep. Hold on.

Take a break, drink some juice and then dig into Christopher Riley's love letter to Richard Feynman from The Telegraph. Riley's piece is secretly hyping the film version of his love letter to Feynman, but that doesn't reduce the appeal of his writing.

And perhaps most interesting to all of us at TMI, is a Wilson Quarterly article by Tom Vanderbilt called "Star Wars." Vanderbilt examines the value of "user review" critical opinions that dominate and influence our behavior on the Web and in the real world of commerce.

Yelp, Amazon and other giants of this format really do shape opinions, but Vanderbilt asks whether there's any real worth in these arbitrary and generally anonymous voices. Plus he asks what we bring to these opinions in contrast to what we might bring to the critical writing of that dying species: the paid, published critic.

For us, Vanderbilt's article is the most interesting, but all are worth a dive.

You'll be seeing mention of Arts & Letters Daily frequently for the tl;dr items, because that's where we go most often to grow our brains. Thank you A&L.

Fond of Cigarettes

Heh heh. Click and enjoy this Victorian illustration about uppity dames, brought to our attention by Hark! A Vagrant on Tumblr.

Atypical Girl

The news is old already, but The Typing Monkey would be fools to not acknowledge the death of Ari Up, especially given this.

So many lesser musicians owe a major debt to Up's methodical envelope pushing. Is there a better way to dismantle expectations than to just get inside the machine without asking permission? No there isn't. No manifestos or drawing attention to the fact that she was a woman making post-punk weirdo reggae/dub/pop. Up just did it.

The AV Club's obit sums her up well. We shall now retire to the lounge and listen to The Slits magnificent version of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine."


[As longtime Typing Monkey associate Kevan says: This news bums me the fuck out. -- ed.]

This Is What a Feminist Looks Like

Check out "Graduation Day" from MSNBC's photoblog.