May 2012
6 posts
Fifteen hours ago two hundred friends and acquaintances and three thousand eight hundred strangers sat in sweltering (which is a cliched adjective to place before the word) heat in a stadium generally reserved for football games I never watched, and listened to an MSNBC correspondent dispense Graduation-type aphorisms I will never hear, because I was sleeping off all sorts of unfortunate mental...
So there’s this weird generational window that you never really hear anyone talking about, kids birthed between say ‘88 and ‘92 whose first shits and steps and birthdays exist not on some cloud or hard-drive but rather in the attics and closets of their childhood homes or maybe some early retirement community, preserved on the decidedly analog mediums of videotape and film that...
2 tags
Japandroids
I am not a genius, and probably neither are you. You might work hard to obtain a medical degree and then spend your professional years administering life-saving vaccines to small (and large!) children, but you wont invent the life-saving vaccine; your vegetarian burger chain might come to dominate the vegetarian burger market of a large city and its outlying suburbs, but you probably just...
Realizing, ten seconds into hearing “Age of Consent” for the first time since ‘09, that I’ve spent the last three years chasing inferior/sometimes comparable imitations of a sound that was invented and perfected six years before I was born, and being totally okay with that, because joy and innovation/credibility are different things.
Angry Blog Post
I am so angry. You can’t see me right now, but if you could, you’d notice the warm washcloth I wear on my forehead whenever I am furious. You’ve all, to a greater or lesser extent, expressed your opinions on this outrage that I’d need another warm washcloth just to work up the courage to name, and unfortunately I only own one. I myself was going to remain silent on the...
You know how sometimes, during lulls in one-on-one conversation, people will hum little made-up tunes or fragments of pre-existing songs to ward off the silence that, left to fester, might consume the two people responsible for creating it? Well! A graduate student in ethnomusicography has set out to preserve these awkward interstitial melodies which, he argues, are unique to a culture deeply...
April 2012
7 posts
The Criterion Collection Edition of Your Existence
The Criterion Collection edition of your existence lists for $39.99 and, unlike the pathetic single-disc standard edition popular among misers and minimalists, contains nearly ninety-five hours of special features newly compiled by your friends, family, psychologist and personal trainer. The audio commentary was recorded in an amphitheater filled with everyone you’ve ever met, all of them...
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Let me just quickly say something that would’ve been uninteresting six months ago and that at this late date is almost offensively irrelevant. That thing is this: On the first three Los Campesinos! records Gareth’s metastasizing miserableness was tempered by his band’s arrangements, like they were trying to cheer or shut him up w/ all the glockenspiels mid-level indie success...
More Productive Things You Could Do In The Time It...
If you’re single and don’t want to be single anymore, you could make an online dating profile and on it try to summarize what exactly makes you a person worthy of being loved, and you could upload that one really nice picture your friend took of you for a community center photography class he ended up being unable to pay for. Your mother said “it barely even looks like...
I went to a website that generates names at random, and chose the last name Modica. I went to a website that lists zip codes and chose 93727, Fresno, California. I went to the White Pages website and typed in Modica, 93727. One person with that name lives in Fresno, and her name is Rhonda. She lives on 4871 E Lane Ave in apartment 228 and is between the ages of 35 and 39 and her middle name...
Spotify
For the last few weeks, Spotify has been e-mailing me two or three times a day with the urgent news that yet another Facebook friend I barely know has happily sacrificed another small privacy to a Swedish start-up which, valued at one billion, could probably kill me and get away with it. I’ve tried to unsubscribe from these e-mails, but Spotify apparently thought that was a rash move on my...
“This was last summer. He came over to sell Holly Vicodin but she wasn’t there, so I sat with him. She messaged me today by the way, Holly.”
“Mm.”
“Apparently half the kids are in there for ketamine. Her roommate refuses to admit that she’s not a cat, which has apparently been a problem, bathroom-wise.”
“She deleted me on Facebook.”
...
Adderall
I am on* ten milligrams of the amphetamine that has sustained the uniquely outsized ambitions of a generation, mine, mass e-mailing their resumes into an unusually dark and discouraging void, and while I too discredit most pieces of writing that use phrases like “my generation” as if having an increasingly slim set of shared experiences can create common ground even between two...
March 2012
8 posts
monologue on mixtapes and self-consciousness, some...
“Maybe you don’t think this way, I don’t know, maybe who you are is who you actually are and you do a reasonable job of communicating this unconflicted, confident self to other people without worrying about whether or not these other people think you’re pretentious or silly or unattractive or whatever. But we could stay in this bed for the next sixty hours, could forgo food...
My first piece for Matador Network is live. Endless thanks to Josh Heller for setting all this up. Here is half a sentence from it: “…within hours of arriving in Italy I would be applying the pre-coital ointment to Giancarlo’s many unsightly thigh lesions.”
I’ve never had an About Me page before. I just made one.
Someone sent me a link to this Tumblr. It is dedicated to preserving the stupid posts I send from my cell phone and then delete before going to bed.
What I Did While Tumblr Was Down
Looked first to the left, then to the right of my computer screen. Unhooked my feeding tube, emptied out my swollen catheter bag, tried to remember how to blink. Normal standing-up stuff. Went outside. It was warm; missed winter, I guess. Tried telling a passing stranger an opinion I had but they said “why are you telling me this, who cares, stop making noise.” I learned that one of...
Despite persistent and mounting evidence, I have never fully confessed to my mother that on a bi-hourly basis I suck smoke into my lungs to relieve the feeling I get when I haven’t had smoke in my lungs for a while. There’s no real reason for me to lie, but my mother is happier when she thinks I am not smoking, so why not let my mother be happy, do you want me to make my mother sad?...
1 tag
An Afternoon at the Teenage Tumblr Content Commune
Those low, long, gray industrial buildings you see on the sides of highways. I’d always thought of them as pharmaceutical warehouses—where all the pill bottles lining our medicine cabinets sat in neatly organized rows, awaiting the bloodstreams of those suffering from generalized anxiety or a lack of focus, transparent orange plastic stretching out to the horizon. Marco’s...
Recently and for totally uninteresting reasons I’ve been reading a lot about that moment in the mid-’50s when a bunch of teenagers from nowhere middle American towns cut noisy unpolished singles with sometimes no distributive intention besides wrapping them up and handing them to sweethearts in the drive-in movie theaters of our (or my) unimaginative collective (or individual)...
There is no law against watching hardcore pornography in public libraries, and one time I saw an old man watching a porn where the actors were dressed up to look like little kids. (This was by the copy machine.) There is no law against spending whole hot summer afternoons in your boxers browsing the Facebook photos of people you find attractive. There is no law against mentally composing your...
February 2012
19 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”...
2 tags
“Sunshine in Chicago”—Sun Kil...
“All My Friends”—LCD...
Why Five Unrelated Individuals Purchased Take-Five...
1) As the co-creator and public face of the local health campaign that has led teenagers and their parents to swear off synthesized snacks with a near-religious fervor in public Snickers burnings (chocolate and caramel melted en masse, the smell lingering pleasantly for days, a perpetual peanut-scented reminded of the sacrifice crucial to maintaining a healthy, sexy body), this woman had to drive...
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...
Spam and Evil and Other Things
The cumulative effect of glancing at two hundred pleading spam messages is, I learned last night, horrifying, the digital equivalent of finding yourself suddenly surrounded by a throbbing mob of cut-rate pill pushers, women looking desperately for companionship, con-men disguised as bank managers/Coca-Cola representatives/heirs of the recently diseased, all of them eager to bestow vast fortunes...
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...
1 tag
“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
2 posts
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
16 posts
And, content with what he’d seen, ready to re-enter the world of lips and shouting and all kinds of crazy, buttonless ways of ‘liking’ things, the blogger shut his laptop, paused, and then beat himself to death with it.
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...
1 tag
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,...