Students, professors, parents, campus possums, take cover: another finals week is upon. As tradition pretty much dictates at this point, Wesleying is committed to helping you procrastinate on the daily by procrastinating ourselves—on the daily—with a new Procrastination Destination each day from here on out. So it goes. As always, you can send us your own suggested links at staff(at)wesleying(dot)org; we’ll post what we can.
Anagram Record Reviews, or “Warm Voices Rearranged,” is my first pick, which I think I picked up on Facebook from famed underground record reviewer and occasional YouTube celebrity Mark Prindle. (Mark’s own record review site is, of course, a veritable procrastination warehouse unto itself, but I’m not even gonna go there.) ARR follows through on its promise pretty well: each day of the work, it chooses a new album (the archives run from Alanis Morissette to A Silver Mt. Zion, Laurie Anderson to Liars) and reviews it in the form of an anagram using the record’s title. The Rolling Stones’ Dirty Work becomes “Wrinkly old sots rotting here.” Liars’ They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top becomes “Now, let’s hasten to hurl the atonal music in an unmarked crypt.” I think my favorite anagram record review is either Sun Ra’s Fate in a Pleasant Mood (“He has taped sacred incantations from Saturn. Alien keys, Ma!”) or Steely Dan’s Everything Must Go: “Yet these drug-loving men stay.” You can browse by artist or decade on the sidebar, check out the book (I swear, no one’s paying me), or read the FAQs. The disclaimer to readers is especially worth quoting here:
The anagrams that appear on this site do not represent the personal opinions of their compilers. Rather, they comprise a mystical discourse of Universal Mind. As such, they are woven into the very fabric of Being, and should therefore be viewed objectively as the condition of possibility for the existence of the works and artists in question.
So that’s how they do it. Did I mention you can suggest your own title to be anagrammatinimized™? You can. “Think of it as your chance to bend the arc of the moral universe ever so slightly toward justice,” the Blogspot urges. So I will. Did I mention you can suggest your own Procrastination Destination? Contact us over Electronic-Mail at staff(at)wesleying(dot)org. And enjoy your seven days in hell. (PS: for something vaguely similar to this PCdJ but not really, check out Animated Albums.)