HOBART

Channel Orange is a strange, beautiful thing. Like some combination of Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants, Beck’s Midnite Vultures, and Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear, with ripples of George Benson’s Beyond the Blue Horizon tossed in, it is simultaneously reaching and small. There are big orchestral swings, and little glances at melody. It opens with a short track called “Start” that is essentially the start-up screen from the original PlayStation. There’s a 10-minute song smack in the middle called “Pyramids.” It’s stitched together by intermittent recordings from old television shows and radio calls, the cries of mad, weird people surrounded by earnest, soft-focus songs. Like so many of the best, wounded oddities from American culture, from Raymond Chandler to Paul Thomas Anderson to Steely Dan, Southern California is the setting.

(via Summer Blues: Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange Listening Party - Hollywood Prospectus Blog - Grantland)

c’mon, that description doesn’t make you curious and kinda super excited? (also, the three guest appearances are Earl, Andre 3000, and John Mayer, whahuh?!?)

10 notes
See Post tags #Frank Ocean #grantland

back cover photo for Frank Ocean’s Untitled Novel (Short Flight / Long Drive Books, 2014)?

(Source: nabildo, via witanddelight)

52,746 notes
See Post tags #Frank Ocean

It[Dan Harmon’s Harmontown podcast]’s not stand-up, it’s not theater, and it’s not a lecture, although sometimes it feels like all those things. (Maybe not theater.) It’s filed under “comedy” in iTunes, which isn’t wrong, but its best moments belong in some imaginary genre alongside books like Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, the parts of Marc Maron’s WTF podcast where you’re listening to Marc Maron talk to himself about Marc Maron, the self-deconstructive nonfiction of David Shields’s last few books, maybe the instantly legendary “cancer set” comedian Tig Notaro recorded at Largo last year, maybe Frank Ocean’s Channel ORANGE — autobiographical work that derives its charge from a compulsion to confess, narrated from an in-the-moment POV by people not particularly concerned with their likability. (via Dan Harmon and life after ‘Community’ - Grantland)

9 notes
See Post tags #Dan Harmon #Harmontown #grantland #Ben Lerner #Sheila Heti #Marc Maron #David Shields #Tig Notaro #Frank Ocean