February 2012
16 posts
An Open Letter to Whoever Stole My Bicycle
You know what man? Or woman? I kind of envy you. Sometimes I will see things that belong to other people and think, “I would like to own that.” And then I just, like, start thinking of something else, or maybe even sometimes legally procure a version of ‘that’ from a store, or the internet. But you. You, my friend, understand that the very notion of “ownership”...
“Sunshine in Chicago”—Sun Kil...
“All My Friends”—LCD...
The thing about Monster energy drinks is I’m in love with this idea of absolutely manic productivity, mind spinning in twenty different directions as my pen at 120mph synthesizes each and every one of them into something I didn’t even know I had in me, people surrounding me in the library muttering things like “oh man that is clearly a genius working at peak powers” as...
Washed Out Accepts the Grammy Lifetime Achievement...
Oh, wow. I can’t believe—[struggling to be heard over rapturous applause]—everybody, everybody—chill. [laughter; camera cuts to Bon Iver, stone-faced, or at least not smiling; the rest of his face is obscured by beard, what a cool sensitive guy] You know, I was really gonna prepare something for this—but then I got high! Shit, you guys know that song? Me and my...
Right now a boy is examining a pink wool sweater in the basement of an Urban Outfitters. The Urban Outfitters used to be a factory well-known for employing small and in many cases infirm children; one of the children’s accidental incineration was the catalyst for a state-wise protest that led to at least one child labor opponent’s assassination, and perhaps if you’re a student of...
Posters
As of last Saturday afternoon my room has more Morrissey posters than windows, which is to say one Morrissey poster, hung above a couch just large enough to uncomfortably accommodate someone too drunk to walk home and okay waking up with no natural indication of what time it may or, given a pitch black’s room tendency to eradicate all notion of space and shape, not be, like maybe this is...
Dreams
Let me just say real quick that I think Doug Martsch is right but everyone else is wrong—no one wants to hear what you dreamt about unless you dreamt about them, but they should, because aren’t surreal insights into your friends’ psyches way more interesting than, like, stories about whoever it is they love or like or fuck, or whatever? So basicaly in the dream nobody’d...
Drugs
The man closely examining a mango in your local supermarket is on sixty milligrams of slow release Adderol, taken twice daily. When he was ten he’d act out in class and so a psychiatrist who’d read lots of books about dealing with troubled children prescribed him five milligrams of Ritalin within five minutes of meeting him. He stopped acting out but after school he’d curl up on...
Moments of Unexpected Sweetness, Volume One
After a long phone conversation which was in no way modulated volume- or content-wise for the comfort of her fellow passengers, and in which she detailed her throwing a tennis racket at the (presumably Jamaican, based on her impression of him) man whose dick just moments earlier she’d suggested the self-sucking of (‘and suck the fucking cum that comes out too’), the woman on the...
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“Dragging the Streets (first heart...
McDonalds
There’s this McDonalds near Kirkwood Highway that I’ll eat in alone sometimes, because it’s easier than texting people “McDonalds at 6?” and dealing with responses like “no” and “how about we dine somewhere that’s not contributing to the clogging of American’s arteries one processed cheeseburger at a time, look at me, I am a college...
The great irony of being a teenage Hold Steady fan was that these songs that glamorized being young and prone to fucking up/getting fucked up were being sung in retrospect, by a dude already well into his 30s. We were hearing our lives reflected back to us, down there in the pit; he was telling stories. “We’re gonna build something this summer,” he said. I was eighteen, just out...
Our Idols Ditched Us For the Popular Kids Before...
Trying to impose a narrative on a decade’s music might be like trying to blanket a sprawling metropolis with a handkerchief—it’s all just too vast—but in retrospect it does seem significant, that over a six month stretch in 2010 nearly every major indie act of the ’00s released an album that signaled a sort of bowing out. Broken Social Scene and the Hold Steady...
January 2012
3 posts
That Awkward Moment When
That awkward moment when you have to explain to your sister that her suspiciously-accented husband (“In Texas, born and breeded, as if in a barn of footballs!” he always said, defensively) only married her to steal your famous rhubarb pie recipe for the Russians.
That awkward moment when two people are having sex in their bedroom and you’re just waiting there in the closet,...
Notes on the 'Official Girls Afterparty' I Went to...
I wanted to feel cool about rubbing thrifted cardigans with Best New Music royalty in the basement of a swanky Tribeca hotel, but I got the sense that a gaggle of pre-teen orphans could’ve limped in there if it meant that they, too, could have their wide, trusting eyes opened to the wonders of Stoli vodka. (Stoli was one of the event’s sponsors, although all I learned about Stoli was...
Think I’ve saved myself whole low-rent storage centers’ worth of neurons by never once internally asking the question “What is a Hipster,” and by answering all external questions to that effect by saying like “beats me yo, I just love striped shirts!”
December 2011
15 posts
Pitches for New Museums
1) The Interactive Museum of Social Media: Replica suburban bathrooms for mirror pics and accidentally leaked nudes; stables of cats for use with a hi-tech gif/meme station; guides trained to act as old friends and ex-boyfriends/girlfriends, trying to “reconnect” with museum patrons who have long since moved on; replica living rooms where people can “do” things (listen to...
With one of my biggest fears re: texting girls being their reading those pathetic texts aloud to roomfuls of laughing strangers, and oh man someone is doing that right now to some poor dude, and I am just one of many laughing strangers, all sadness is confirmed.
Two attractive young people are sitting on the beach, smoking thin cigarettes. The boy is wearing hip sunglasses and has beautiful blue eyes. The girl has long, straight blonde hair and might be your favorite band’s drummer. The girl says to the boy: What do you think it’s like? And the boy says: What? And the girl points. Further down the beach a fat man in a torn shirt is helping his...
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2012 Hype Predictions
A new artist named $teve’s club anthem about drinking and also having fun and believing in yourself will be inescapable for two months, until an enterprising journalist uncovers his dark past: It will be revealed that before $teve was $teve he was ‘Steve,’ second-string member of the Mexican Summer roster who in ‘09 released an album of hazy, introspective indie-folk...
The Writing on the Stalls in the Library's...
“I jerk off in this stall…seriously.”
There is, next to this brave confession, a small arrow pointing to the words “me too!” These words, it should be noted, are in the same handwriting as the initial confession, meaning I guess that whoever outed themselves as the kind of person who not only masturbates in public but also makes sure to do it under the grossest...
Listen I’ll delete this in a minute but I just want to say that I’m among a sizable bunch of undergrads watching some syndicated Seinfeld (you can lift up your dropped jaw now, I’m done with the fireworks) and in the episode we’re watching a girl George has somehow convinced to date him asked “so do you wanna come up for some coffee?” and he was like “oh,...
James Franco Wrote Something For the Paris Review...
Hiring James Franco to write for your publication is essentially like posting a list of the twenty-five silliest cat pictures of all time—a gleeful, fuck-you admission that quality’s not really important, because think of the pageviews! And what a dehumanizing term, pageviews: You’re not attracting readers, you’re attracting numbers, and in James Franco’s case...
Some Thoughts on Headphones
1.
Last night, talking to a friend who just completed an MA in literature and now works in a Barnes and Noble, I articulated what might be my biggest fear: that I am unable to think properly, because my brain is broken. I imagine my friend and his professors and the critics they read and the friends those critics hold forth with in panels and professors’ lounges starting with one clean pure...
The Three Women on the Phone Outside of the...
#1: She is telling her friend that this is the last straw, and that she needs to calm down, and that she will not stand for this anymore.
#2: She’s pirouetting, punctuating long streams of Spanish with solo chest bumps, little kicks, odd English slang (“dude!” “duh!”). Spanish was my father’s first language, and when his Jewish Mexican family comes in from...
Backleftlitz Winter Mix '11
Artwork:
(That above says ‘CD Freckles’ by the way. Realized it was dumb before I was even finished writing it, but I only had one blank CD. Also if you can’t read my handwriting I’ve typed this all up under the ‘Read More.’)
This Mix CD Might Be Useful As:
Other Notes:
Track List:
1) “Carolyn’s Fingers”—Cocteau Twins
2)...
I am writing this in the library at three in the afternoon with the intention of scheduling it to post a one am, which means that as you read these words I might be dead or making eye contact with an exotic stranger (and not even like saying anything, just letting that small charged moment be enough) or graffiting “backleftlitz” on the sides of tall buildings or setting off fireworks...
You know, as someone who reads a lot of music criticism (and occasionally writes it but don’t worry I’d never burden you guys with links to that stuff) and who also is an alive person dealing with alive-person problems, it feels like it’s getting harder and harder to listen to music without trying to analyze its lyrics or place it in some context or use it to illustrate some...
Remastering
Your grandfather has died after suffering six strokes in three years, and you’ve returned to Queens to help your parents sort through his earthly possessions and figure out what to donate to the Salvation Army and what to throw away and what you can maybe bring back to decorate your alarmingly spare Boston apartment with. In the attic you open a copy of Coping with the Death of Your Spouse...
My younger brother said "listen to this song,...
and I saw men with chin-straps rhythmically rubbing their genitals against the backsides of girls rolling on powdered ecstasy purchased from roommates’ younger brothers (they only deal now, and occasionally pop an Oxy when the going gets tough); saw the men swivel these girls around and assault them with tongues made geographic from nights spent with friends, smoking (allegedly) medicinal...
November 2011
20 posts
This has probably been said before (is how I’ve prefaced half my blog posts and how I’ve mentally prefaced half the things I’ve ever said) but I feel like the main problem w/ the still sort of new Facebook live newsfeed thing is that nobody cares what like 90% of their Facebook friends are doing or reading or listening to or feeling sad about or supporting, b/c whereas on Tumblr...
On the terrace of the same suburban bar I blogged about a couple of days ago a girl who I once loved unrequitedly and who also follows me on Tumblr hey what’s up if you’re reading this later said that at her prestigious liberal arts college there is graffiti that says “the revolution will not be Tweeted, it will be Tumblr’d,” and while she talked about the...
So you’re standing in the hot center of the dancefloor at a bar you used to walk by when you were sixteen and mostly just got high in underground parking lots and basements vacated by parents vacationing in sunny old colonial Williamsburg, and this girl who when hanging out with friends you used to refer to by this terrible nickname because she was dating your friend and you weren’t...
A couple of feet away from me on this bus there is a girl. She is asleep, and has no eyebrows, and where eyebrows should be there are large crude black rectangles that look like they were drawn on in Sharpie, and where sideburns shouldn’t be there are Sharpie-style sideburns, and I wonder if this girl is just way more punk rock than I could ever hope to be or if she has been the victim of a...
Hello! You’re probably in the middle of deciding whether to spend Thanksgiving with your ailing father or super-hot new boyfriend/girlfriend, so let me just say quick that this is my 150th post on Tumblr, that that number is sort of skewed b/c at least 20% of the time I gnash teeth/pull hair for a while post-posting and then delete the post, and also that—because in a sense most of you...
Somewhere right now a boy is buying a vinyl copy of an album that came out last Tuesday, figuring that it’s only $5 more than the CD and physically you’re getting a lot more bang for your buck and plus it comes with a link to the mp3s anyway, and one day a boy he’s trying to impress will come over and see the vinyl and say “wow, you have this on vinyl? Can we listen to...
Animal Collective to Announce New Album...
(11/21/11, 2:03pm) In a SPIN interview quoted in a Pitchfork news post paraphrased in a Stereogum editorial and then re-constructed based on context and user comments in a Quietus year-end list, Animal Collective’s Avey Tare said that “we have no plans to release a new album at the moment, but if we did, we’d almost certainly announce its impending release two or three months...
M83's Parent-Teacher Conference
Principal Feldman: “To some extent then yes, I suppose you could say that for a brief period in the mid-’80s I was something of a celebrity in the insular world of architectural journalism, at first for my Dexedrine-addled musings for Wood Design and Building (which, and I know this is just unfathomable now, but back then Wood Design and Building was quite a bit more tolerant of the...
What Listening to the Song "Hazel" by Weekend...
You are packed in a canon pointed out the passenger seat window of a car going 120 miles per hour down a highway when suddenly you are launched into the stratosphere, twisting and twirling alongside stars and planes as you glimpse scenes of staggering joy on the ground, sons reunited with military fathers, homeless men winning lottery jackpots and donating all their winnings to charity (minus just...
I’ve locked myself in my friend’s bathroom, there are people hanging out and playing Beirut’s “Elephant Gun” on ukuleles which, like, if a stranger said “what are the things in life you depend on” I’d be like “whoa deep question stranger, wish I was as thoughtful as u” but also “oh in response: the dudes from my freshman year floor...
Very late on this discussion, if there ever was one, and if there ever was one somebody has probably already made this point using fancier words and maybe a well-chosen .gif or two, but so while yes, Zooey (and I guess Drake? Didn’t read the whole quote), we are not our musical tastes, we are (in addition to blood and organs and, occasionally, interesting hats) how that music makes us feel,...
“Okay yeah so hi, this is going to sound weird—and I know, not a super-promising way to start a conversation but—well first I want to make it clear that this isn’t me asking you out at all. I find you incredibly attractive, and think we’d get along great, based on your Facebook interests and the small snippets of conversation I’ve ‘overheard’ [cue...
There is someone with a deep respect for the language he inherited from the father he never met. At 23 he has an MFA, a subscription to the New York Review of Books, an encouraging coterie of friends he can rely on to puncture his ego and tell him when he’s just plain fucking up, a thorough—but never blind—appreciation of the Western canon and, after a post-grad trip to China,...
I got an iPhone last week and now
I will never be lost again. Sitting in the passenger seat of a friend’s car en route to Charlotesville, Virginia, we will not decide to pull over at a gas station for directions, will not watch a woman in a pink wig steal a Snickers from the candy aisle, will not be asked, by the boy behind the counter with a mustache somewhere between Franco-and pedophilic, if we know where the...