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...