1) It’s self-serving because it’s a presumption borne out of the selling of an agenda; this person didn’t crop out my hair because their personal notions of composition led them to blithely disregard my own notion of black identity as related to my hair, it was an intention act of suppression and judgement as part of…

Yeah, but I didn’t say it was a function of space, I said composition, as in framing. And the picture in the Instagram post is itself cropped; if you pull up the full shot of the cover online, I still believe it’s not an unreasonable assertion that it was done to frame their burbs in a particular way. Could it have…

“I am disappointed that @graziauk invited me to be on their cover and then edited out and smoothed my hair to fit their notion of what beautiful hair looks like.”

It sounds like you are being way more circumspect about this than is generally allowed. My two cents: the allegations as put forth in the referenced article aren’t great; if the people involved weren’t happy about it, and think Louis CK is scummy and want to have nothing to do with him, fair enough. If the people who…

To play the tight-ass who undercuts the roguish hero, and to be every bit as charming and endearing and sympathetic as said hero...

As far as I’m concerned, we are two people who had a conversation. I concede that I might have an air of flippancy about me that could come across hostile, but it’s a factor of the referenced exasperation, and I’m not angry now nor an angry person in general. You seem like a fine sort, and as the song goes, “I’m so…

That’s an awful hyperbolic representation of a guy who makes some mildly exasperated but essentially benign comments on a website he frequents.

Point out to me where I’ve done either of those things.

Why wouldn’t there be?

Because I believe this battle always means something. If you look at a history of my comments - going way back into the Disqus days - I am always on this hill, because it always matters to me. Is this the most egregious example? Not really, but it’s significant and part of a larger pattern, and I will be calling it…

“Look, sorry, I get no pleasure from being so negative...”

And you are welcome to that perspective, whereas mine is that this represents just another increasingly common and progressively damaging instance where the language is cooked to service an agenda rather than accurately reflect a specific circumstance. If you hold a writer to the standard of knowing what words really…

Ooh, a fellow parser! I can play this game too:

“confirms”

“Louis CK’s alleged habit of cornering women and forcing them to watch him masturbate”

Ranch is delicious. Hidden Valley Ranch is peppered smegma.

If you would have told me when I first heard Mellow Gold when it came out that Beck would have remained interesting to me as an musical artist for (holy shit) well over 20 years, I would have said you were crazy. For just about any music act I enjoy, there is a window during their career that usually tops out at about…

If Beercan is a joke song, then Mellow Gold is a joke album, since it’s as good as any song on it.

I listened to the new Beck album and couldn’t escape the feeling that he’s reached that phase in his career where he starts to sound more like the artists he’s influenced than they sound like him. Phoenix in particular kept coming to mind.

On my debit card, I would like a picture of the legendary British comedy duo Fish and Cushion.