July 2012
39 posts
Hi, I recently came across your post a year ago on 'Red Machine' by Fugazi. I'm wondering if it was your first listen to a Fugazi album. You also mention being unfamiliar with or having little taste for hardcore and 1990s music, and I'm wondering if you mean to say you don't like punk music, or just '90s punk. Thanks!
I like classic punk music including the Ramones and the Clash as well as neo-punk outfits like Green Day. 90s music in general is not my favorite, and hardcore in particular will probably never be a favorite of mine…as I wrote in the Fugazi post, I guess I’m just not a hardcore guy. That said, I’m starting to give Led Zeppelin a chance, so I’m taking baby steps into out-and-out headbanging.
“I did (very) occasionally imbibe in the good old days of ‘Sno Shoe Grog’ by the Phillips Distilling Company of Minneapolis while grouse hunting. I was introduced to it by my friends Bob Drew, Marv Tero, and Phil Hagedorn as one of the necessities of hunting. The positive aspects were that it acted like a mouth wash if you hadn’t brushed your teeth that morning, and got you prepared for the kill. However, I knew enough to only drink the stuff in the ‘deep woods’ where I could do no one harm. I must also admit to trying blackberry brandy at Bob’s suggestion as well. But I have lived to age 67 because I gave both of those libations up around age 40.”
—Is there any uncle more uncle-like than my Uncle Bill?
“All, There are some exciting development in the corporate channel. We would like to take this opportunity to introduce the new model, the leaders spearheading the different verticals and answer any questions that you may have.”
—College life, 2012.
- Mom: I'm going to Target. Should I pick up a small air conditioner for your apartment?
- Me: Oh, no, you don't have to do that. I'll be fine.
- Mom: The thing is, if you don't get air conditioners early in the summer, the stores run out.
- Me: I have fans. I'll be fine.
- Mom: Okay.
- Temperature: [hits 94]
- Target employee: "Oh, yeah, our air conditioners are all gone! They've been flying off the shelves, ha ha!"
June 2012
74 posts
Hello, Houston!
I visited Houston this spring and, while there, wrote this for The Tangential. I never came up with a title for it, but it’s pretty self-explanatory. I decided not to publish it on The Tangential because in the end I wasn’t sure if it had much value as a piece of writing independent of my experience, but I didn’t just want to throw it out either. Here you go, Tumblr!
Hello, and welcome to the Houston Airport Express, bus line #102! You waited quite a while for this bus, standing on a narrow curb surrounding a pillar in the middle of a road outside the airport terminal while hotel shuttles whizzed past left and right, unsure of exactly where the bus was going or when it was going to come or how much it was going to cost because no one at the airport knew anything about the public bus service except that it exists and the bus schedules on the public transit site are PDFs you couldn’t access with your phone—nor with your laptop, since the airport wireless has been down all day—but! We are about to drive a surprisingly long distance for that one dollar your bus driver accepted for the $1.25 fare instead of taking two of your bills. And aren’t these seats surprisingly spacious for seats on a public bus that you paid only one dollar for? Well, as you’re learn, if there’s one thing we have in Houston, it is space.
As we roll out of the airport, you’ll notice how green everything looks. Another thing we have here in Houston: moisture. Look at all this sort of foresty-swampy land we have for sale in two-acre parcels! Just imagine the possibilities, and don’t get wet feet! Waka waka. Tips accepted, folks. But seriously, on our way from the airport into downtown we’re first going to pass through a dense but diverse zone of housing developments with names like “Open Pines.” There’s some public housing, there’s some lower-rent private housing, there’s the occasional trailer park, but it’s all going to have a sort of exotic grandeur to those of you from north of the Mason-Dixon Line, due to the semi-tropical vegetation, the many open porches and walkways, and the touches of luxury like winding open-air staircases and outrageously oversized porticos. Just take it all in.
Next, we’re talking strip malls. Lotta strip malls here, containing just about every kind of business you could conceivably fit into a strip mall and even some you really can’t, but that doesn’t stop us from trying. Please stay seated as we climb this onramp to a freeway into downtown. Along the way, we’ll pass a lot of very literally-named businesses with huge signs. There’s DOORS, there’s POOL TABLES, and there’s HOUSTON 420. Lots of freeways snaking all over the place here, and lots of power lines. If you’re into power-line porn and sexy underpasses, this is where you want to come take all your hot pics. Go ahead and snap away.
Now we pass into the downtown zone, which is—I’m not gonna lie—fairly nondescript, with a skyline that’s not unlike Minneapolis’s, minus the collapsible dome. But as we approach our final destination at the downtown transit center, I’ll point you towards the nifty litle light rail there that’s ready and waiting to take you through the Hipster Zone and its pancake shops, all the way out to the hospital and the zoo and your cheap hotel. Welcome to Houston! It only gets better from here.
That awkward moment when someone in your corporation sends a corporate e-mail to everyone in the corporation unironically thanking the corporation for generously presenting the corporate training event they just made him coordinate as part of his job.
“It is now clear that the brevity of an indecent broadcast—be it word or image—cannot immunize it from FCC censure. Any future ‘wardrobe malfunctions’ will not be protected.”
—
Chief Justice John Roberts. So health care reform will stand, and also we’ll never have to see a breast on TV even for half a second ever again.
It’s hard to know how I feel about being an American in 2012.
MP3: Tilly & The Wall – "Love Riot"
Hell yeah! And hopefully will announce a tour as well. Tilly and the Wall are currently #5 on my obsessively monitored most-listened-never-seen-live list—behind only Lana Del Rey, Talking Heads (sigh), Tom Waits, and Peter Gabriel.
MP3: Tilly & The Wall – “Love Riot”
Tilly & The Wall will release their new LP, Heavy Mood, in October via Team Love.
“Welcome to iTunes Store Customer Support. My name is Rahul and I am glad to help you today. I understand that the song ‘Stairway to Heaven’ doesn’t play completely and you would like to re-download the same. I am sure you are anxious at this time and I will do whatever I can to help you right away.”
—BRB, going to see if I can find somewhere where I don’t have to be in the same room as myself for a while.
Why Are American Kids So Spoiled? →
newyorker.com
With the exception of the imperial offspring of the Ming dynasty and the dauphins of pre-Revolutionary France, contemporary American kids may represent the most indulged young people in the history of the world. It’s not just that they’ve been given unprecedented amounts of stuff—clothes, toys, cameras, skis, computers, televisions, cell phones, PlayStations, iPods. (The market for Burberry Baby and other forms of kiddie “couture” has reportedly been growing by ten per cent a year.) They’ve also been granted unprecedented authority. “Parents want their kids’ approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parents’ approval,” Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, both professors of psychology, have written. In many middle-class families, children have one, two, sometimes three adults at their beck and call. This is a social experiment on a grand scale, and a growing number of adults fear that it isn’t working out so well: according to one poll, commissioned by Time and CNN, two-thirds of American parents think that their children are spoiled.
Elizabeth Kolbert considers new research on American family life the phase of adultesence: http://nyr.kr/L9sCOG
This is why people in academia warned me I’d hate journalism. I don’t, but…come on, New Yorker. I’ll bet two-thirds of parents in any society, anywhere, ever, think their kids are spoiled. Some of the first known writing about children in human history, from the ancient Fertile Crescent, says that kids are getting too spoiled. Seriously, I’m not even making that up.
“Are kids spoiled?” is the least interesting question you can ask about childhood, and yet it’s the one that gets asked again and again and again, and the answer is always, “Obviously, yes,” but nothing ever changes BECAUSE IT’S PART OF A FUCKING DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION OBSERVED IN EVERY SINGLE DEVELOPING SOCIETY EVER IN HUMAN HISTORY.
As society develops, both mortality and fertility drop. There are fewer kids, and each kid inevitably gets more attention. THAT’S JUST HOW IT WORKS. We’re not going back to the Victorian Era or the Industrial Revolution—let alone the dawn of agriculture—so just let the kids have their goddamn cell phones and STFU.
(I said this in a slightly more nuanced fashion here.)
“By using social networks we voluntary put on public record ‘who we are’, ‘what we do’ and ‘what we think’, disclosing in this way our identity and the most intimate aspects of our lives—making them available at a click. In this sense, social websites can be understood not as tools for the advance of democracy and human rights—but rather as instruments that allow a cheap, quick, thorough and easier surveillance. This is made even more effective by the voluntary cooperation of its intended targets, who happily (and deliberately) fill in pages with private information and personal data to build their profiles and express their views.”
—
“Technology will not advance democracy and human rights for (and instead of) you”. Zygmunt Bauman on the use and mis-use of new media. (via sociolab)
Yes, Zygmunt Bauman, I am indeed cooperating with people who want to cheaply, quickly, thoroughly, and easily stalk me.
Come at me!
Anybody want to see some Transformers pictures I drew when I was 12?
Anybody?
Hello?
“A rock thrown through the passenger’s side window of a car was the entry point for a burglar who stole items from the vehicle’s glove box.”
—I like the way this one-sentence crime report from the Southwest Journal is written to lead with the most exciting part.
In this post, Minneapolis musician Jeremy Messersmith volunteers the fact that he makes about 0.49 cents—that is, about $0.0049—for every stream of a song.
I just figured that I play about 30 songs a day on my laptop. That’s about 900 songs a month. I pay $5.00 per month for Spotify Unlimited, which works out to 0.56 cents—that is, about $0.0056—per song.
This doesn’t really prove anything except that Spotify isn’t getting rich off my back, but it’s certainly interesting given that iTunes keeps about $0.30 per $0.99 download.
