A Suitcase Full of Mixtapes

I saw Future Bible Heroes play this song last night and now I’m...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 18:51:00 -0400

I saw Future Bible Heroes play this song last night and now I’m imagining every vampire in movies/literature singing this, accompanied by big Broadway-style orchestration and a dance routine.

stochasticplanet: 48.273763°N, 41.338135°E Tatsinsky District,...

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 15:06:51 -0400

stochasticplanet:

48.273763°N, 41.338135°E
Tatsinsky District, Rostov Oblast, Russia

photo by miheev

#Literature at the #NYCPopfest13 kickoff show. And so begins the...

Fri, 31 May 2013 01:00:29 -0400

#Literature at the #NYCPopfest13 kickoff show. And so begins the best weekend of the year! #popfest #nyc #cakeshop (at Cake Shop)

I'm all of this and more.

Fri, 24 May 2013 22:07:01 -0400

loofk: Killer song alert! Josie by Brisbane quartet Go Violets...

Wed, 22 May 2013 20:33:18 -0400

loofk:

Killer song alert! Josie by Brisbane quartet Go Violets comes from the band’s upcoming debut EP. The band describe their sound as “bunny rock pool pop.” That pretty much nails it.

Well this is great.

modraucous: this is my favorite sign for a bar. it’s closed...

Thu, 02 May 2013 16:03:14 -0400

modraucous:

this is my favorite sign for a bar. it’s closed down

Oakland!!

eye-contact: Le petit soldat

Wed, 01 May 2013 17:54:03 -0400

eye-contact:

Le petit soldat

Kinda feeling this song today.

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 14:21:02 -0400

Kinda feeling this song today.

Art by Tom Frost http://theboyfrost.blogspot.com/

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 15:33:30 -0400

Art by Tom Frost

http://theboyfrost.blogspot.com/

Some of my haul from the Brooklyn Zine Fest today. I spent way...

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 15:52:46 -0400

Some of my haul from the Brooklyn Zine Fest today. I spent way more money than I should have but I am looking forward to reading them all.

Oh man between NYC Popfest and Chickfactor 21 June is going to be an incredible month for shows!

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 11:51:27 -0400

Oh man between NYC Popfest and Chickfactor 21 June is going to be an incredible month for shows!

There are many things I enjoy about Glasslands in Williamsburg, but possibly my favorite is the...

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 22:08:46 -0400

There are many things I enjoy about Glasslands in Williamsburg, but possibly my favorite is the “NOT A BARTENDER” sign pointing to the sound guy.

A pretty great day in NY

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:02:56 -0400

1. Go to Grand Central to see Nick Cave’s (not that Nick Cave) Heard NY. It’s like seeing a herd of Snuffleupagii suddenly burst into a frenzied, colorful dance explosion.

2. Sandwich at Num Pang.

3. Take the train uptown to the Museum of the City of New York and see the exhibit on designing, and design in the World’s Fairs of the 1930s (the Futurama! A cigarette-smoking robot!). Also the disco fashion of Stephen Burrows, models of tiny apartments, and ice skates from the 1880s.

4. Have a reviving beer and grilled cheese sandwich (with pork belly, kimchi, and fried egg) at Earl’s Beer and Cheese a few blocks away.

Heard NY and the World’s Fair exhibit are only up through the 31st, so get on it! Those sandwiches are delicious all the time, though.

Eight Wheels Tonight

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 15:49:49 -0400

Tonight I am going to go see Lois Lowry speak at the 92nd Street Y and then I am going to a friend’s birthday party at a rollerskating rink so basically I am living the ideal adult life of my 13-year-old self.

barthel: Lush - “Ladykillers” There was a three-year stretch...

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 18:55:04 -0400

barthel:

Lush - “Ladykillers”

There was a three-year stretch where I put this on every nice-to-meet-you mixtape I made, which in retrospect is probably why I fell so hard for the Long Blondes. This being the CD binder era, though, I didn’t actually know the names of any of the other songs on the album, except maybe “Single Girl,” so following along on my iPod now that I’ve finally downloaded Lovelife has been…instructive. At the time, I think I took it as very of-a-piece, in that I just didn’t know how to put it in the proper context. It just sounded like a great pop-rock album with way more style than, say, Weezer, but still basically Weezer. As a full-fledged music nerd, though, I can get the allusions to their past shoegaze sound in “500” and the nods to some of their contemporaries on “Olympia.” Which doesn’t mean I appreciate it better, or more, just differently. People talk about albums meaning different things depending on your stage of life, and that’s true, but it’s also true that as your knowledge grows, you get the chance to re-hear whole albums, and I’m doing that now with Lovelife. (It is still great.)

Forever my jam.

katherinestasaph: isabelthespy: tori amos — little...

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 20:55:17 -0400

katherinestasaph:

isabelthespy:

tori amos — little earthquakes

“why do girls have to tear each other down?” - sharon cherski, my so-called life episode 5: “the zit”

“i need a big loan from the girl zone.” — tori amos, caught a lite sneeze (off boys for pele)

at dinner last night someone used the phrase “twelve-year-old girls” disparagingly and i almost lost my mind. i have developed a fierce sisterly protection towards those prickly, lovely, angry, lonely, loving, sacred, scared, unclassifiable creatures, at twelve and in the half-decade or so that follows; placing them as objects of scorn to score a laugh or make a point fills me with immediate white-hot rage. i will nurse a smoldering grudge at anyone i hear doing this; i will hate the entirety of an article or essay that does it, regardless of its other merits. you fuck with t(w)een girls, you fuck with me.

i’ve been trying to interrogate, then, why it is that when i think about the fact that i can’t listen to most of this album, i mentally file it as “too teenage girl.” do i mean too earnest — as though teenage girls lack the capacity for sarcasm and wit and posturing — or too obvious — as though teenage girls are never complex — or too this or that or the other, as though there’s anything at all you could say about teenage girls that would always be true. poisonous cultural narratives run deep — especially when we, as i have done, repeat them to ourselves in order to untangle a messy time.

*

what people miss in the eternal discussion about how brian is so smart or jordan is so dreamy is that there is a love triangle at the center of my so-called life, but it’s not about the opposing pairings of Team Krakow vs. Team Catalano. it’s about rayanne and angela and sharon, and the swells and ebbs of the fluctuating, complicated currents of girl-love flowing between the three of them. brian and jordan are entertaining and infuriating and distracting and consuming, but together they don’t give the show half the emotional weight angela’s relationships with sharon and with rayanne do.

i don’t cry when jordan stands angela up or brushes her off at the buffalo tom show, or when brian spreads the rumor about the two of them having COMPLETE SEX!, or even when jordan breaks up with her. but i cry when sharon tells angela that after her father’s heart attack, you were the only person i wanted to deal with. i cry when rayanne mumbles into angela’s shoulder i’m too messed up to be your friend anymore. i cry through the entire end of the episode where rayanne sleeps with jordan, beginning when rayanne says, i lost everything. i lost a really good friend.

study angela’s face at the end of that episode, when she’s onstage with rayanne: she’s not crying for jordan, either.

*

it’s strange to me that this is the song that’s stayed with me the longest, considering it was never a favorite in high school (those were crucify and silent all these years) and, more pertinently, it is perhaps the song which most exemplifies the album’s excesses — fitting, given that it’s the title track. tori tells of dancing in graveyards with vampires till dawn, goth preciousness at its finest, and hating elevator music, which could fit easily on a list of complaints about The Man alongside “all that corporate pop shit” and “dress codes.” and that’s all before the final bridge, before she sings — wails, really — give me life, give me pain, give me myself again, lines straight out of the margins of unused math notes halfheartedly jotted down in the last row, desk pushed as close to the back of the classroom as possible.

still there’s something about the plaintiveness of the refrain that hooks me somewhere deep and still a little tender. while i assume (maybe unfairly) that like most of the songs on the album it’s about and addressed to a man, that the fights that have soured this relationship took place between a heterosexual couple, i always hear it as being about girls. i always hear:

oh, these little earthquakes
doesn’t take much to rip us into pieces

and i think back to girls i loved and revered and shrank from growing up. to the shakiness that persisted no matter how great my affection for them. to the delicate beauty of those relationships. and to their explosive fragility.

*

“You know kids. They find one person and they just can’t get enough of them. It’s like being in love, only they’re not allowed to have sex. […] Don’t you remember? There’d be, like, this one person, who had, like, perfect hair, or perfect breasts, or they were just so funny, and you wanted to eat them up — just live in their bed, and just be them. It’s like everybody else was in black and white, and that person was in color.” — amber, my so-called life episode 3: guns and gossip

the first person to break my heart was a girl. we were in middle school, she a year younger than i. she had this gorgeous glossy jet-black hair down to her waist, and a beautiful pixie face, and an apartment that always smelled of cigarettes and cat litter and a mother whose fashion i would have thought of as bohemian if i had known the word. we talked about greek myths (her favorite was artemis, mine athena; funny in this context to think now of us two girls reaching towards the virgin goddesses) and sailor moon, school and elaborate story-games we would spend hours dreaming up. if we talked about boys — which i know i did with other girl friends — it hasn’t stuck in my memory. we would sit in each other’s bedrooms drawing and talking about the evolution of our technique, or bring out books we thought the other would like. at sleepovers i would lie next to her skinny body and wonder, not having yet developed anything in the way of a sexuality, if maybe i was a lesbian. i turned out not to be, as i figured out when my body started communicating its desires, but still i look back on that time and i think, i was in love.

i loved her and i wanted to be her. i delighted in her company and thrilled to her approval. for a time we were inseparable, sisters without the fights; then she stopped speaking to me. i didn’t know why; i never found out. i wrote her a letter, apologizing for whatever i had done wrong, begging for another chance; she read it and ignored it. i cried in our school’s library. she was friends with boys now, these perpetually angry boys in her own grade i’d hated even before she (as i saw it) left me for them. i tried not to show i cared. i missed her, desperately.

when sharon tearfully asks angela what she did that made angela not want to be her friend anymore and angela starts crying, saying she doesn’t know, it wasn’t anything sharon did, it just is, i think back to my silent tears among the bookshelves. i understand better now the inscrutable frictions that flare up to the point where they seem unbearable, the way perhaps not exclusively but especially when you are young your conception of self can change so rapidly that everything about your life feels wrong and needs to be discarded like a cocoon. i would go on to feel them too, bewildered and frustrated at myself but unable to shake my sudden distaste for girls close to me, although in the most important cases i was lucky enough to have the chance to come back.

*

yellow bird flying, the song opens, gets shot in the wing: textual analysis of a tori amos song is a dangerous if not useless endeavor, but i hear this and i think of how frequently the vibrancy of girlhood gets injured in the fear and confusion of adolescence. i look at little girls in bikinis poolside or on the beach and wonder how long it will be until they hate their bodies, until the very notion of having a body becomes overwhelming and scary, and for how many of them it already is. i look at tall girls and wonder how old they’ll be the first time an adult man hits on them, if none has yet. i wonder what girls will latch on to for power as they come to realize how powerless they’re considered, how they will distance themselves from each other to avoid the deadly label teen girl. what they will do to survive a world that doesn’t want them to be people.

and i hate
and i hate
and i hate
and i hate
disintegration
watching us wither

on some days, in certain moods, i think of my adolescence as a prolonged falling apart: i was a girl and then i fractured into several things less than that. i was a daughter, a body, a girlfriend, an intellect, a friend, a student, with no core binding those pieces together. when i looked for a self i found only need. everything around me — friends, tests, boys — became a referendum on whether i was enough. even the different manifestations of that hunger — smart enough, pretty enough, popular enough, good enough — were ways of dancing around that central gaping hole.

it is hard to muster the generosity of spirit necessary for true healthy friendship when your spirit is expending its energy trying to bolster its own existence. i am ashamed and saddened that i have only learned this through loving men, but: while they can coexist, love is fundamentally incompatible with that sort of desperation. when your vision is blinkered with mirrors showing you your worst self, it is next to impossible to see someone simply as they are, as a person to love and not an object of validation or rejection.

so many of the slings and arrows of my adolescence, given and received, came from minute actions that seem meaningless in retrospect but meant everything at the time. the word insecure feels inadequate, as though it were a matter of jagged edges and not profound emptiness. my foundation had dwindled to something paper-thin: how else to explain my susceptibility to little earthquakes?

i look at girls and i wonder how little it will take to rip them into pieces, and i hate that i wonder that.

*

the show never answers sharon’s question, posed — like their initial break-up — in the sanctuary/war zone of the girls’ bathroom. certainly it is too big a question to be answered in one place, by one person. but i offer this: girls tear each other down because no one builds them up. because they know each other to be easy targets from having been easy targets. because they are scared and angry and they have every right to be.

and because we don’t teach them to love each other. we don’t teach them how valuable such love is. movies valorize heterosexual romance as a contest or a conquest; magazines are filled with articles on how to find, keep, and please a man. pop psychologists are happy to lecture on the secrets of happy marriages, communication skills for couples, the fact that relationships take work. no one tells you friendship does too. there are no top ten tips from preventing jealousy from turning you into a selfish friend, no instructions for how to support your friend with her relationship problems when a part of you hates her for having a boyfriend, no encouragement to reach past the awful twisting resentment that she’s got straight hair or a smaller waist or better grades and hold on to how she’s always been there for you, how she makes you laugh. and there’s no one saying these things are worth doing. no one is sharing what to me is such a sacred truth that it should be proclaimed from the rooftops: girls can save your life. some of them saved mine, even after i walked away.

for all the prettiness of jared leto’s eyes, and the sighing over the way he leans, and the fact that my phone corrects “catalano” to “CATALANO” because of how often i have typed TEAM CATALANO — for all that i’m glad angela gets into his car at the end, for all that i want what they go on to share to be at least sweet enough that she never regrets it — for all that, in the end i’m not Team Catalano, not really.

what i really want for angela is to realize what she really lost. i want her to recognize how little she was able, at that time in her life, to build herself up, and how much less rayanne, for all her bravado, had been given to work with, and i want her to find in that awareness the space for forgiveness. i want her to learn that rayanne is worth fighting for, and to find the strength to do it. i want rayanne to be lucky enough to have the chance to come back, and angela to be wise enough to recognize that if rayanne returns, it’s angela’s luck too.

in the end i’m Team Rayanne. and Team Sharon. and Team Angela. in the end i’m Team Girls.

Hey, so yes: read this.

Ohhhh, this piece is so beautiful.

Shut Up and Play ALL THE HITS PLEASE

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 01:24:31 -0400

Does anyone know the Crying Fan in Shut Up and Play the Hits, the documentary about LCD Soundsystem’s last show at MSG? I hope he’s ok with getting the only laughs in the movie.

Overall, I think it is a very good if not quite legendary concert film. The show and backstage footage is fantastic. I maybe would have taken the title’s advice and used a little less Chuck Klosterman and one more hit. And less footage of James Murphy shaving (it takes a long time!) and more of his adorable French bulldog.

Critical bias: The New York I Love You balloon drop finale at that show remains one of the most transcendent concert experiences I have ever had.

My ‘Pin Pal just sent me this wonderful-crazy postcard...

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 16:34:21 -0400

My ‘Pin Pal just sent me this wonderful-crazy postcard of Cher in Burlesque (wearing some sort of officer’s hat?) and a tasty-looking recipe for taco soup! Hooray for The Hairpin and for getting cool things in the mail! I only regret that I do not have a postcard that measures up to this to send in reply, but I’ll think of something.

GPOY/GPO this tumblr, obviously. It’s on view in the...

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 14:59:06 -0400

GPOY/GPO this tumblr, obviously. It’s on view in the Museum of the City of New York’s Capital of Capital exhibit as an example of bank promotional material from the 1930s-60s. This seems like a bank version of a Chick tract and I am very curious about the sad stories made happy by (or that could have been avoided by) the use of financial products and services from Mystery Bank. But as a consumer I would have been more swayed by the piece displayed next to this, a comic book featuring superhero/bank personification Captain Dime. (Bitten by a radioactive bank teller? Lab-grown by an unholy union of the FDIC and SHIELD? A visitor from an alien planet that has concocted a reasonable, easy-to-understand financial regulatory system? Tell me more, Captain Dime!)

Tonight. #nerrrrrd #law (Taken with instagram)

Wed, 23 May 2012 18:34:02 -0400

Tonight. #nerrrrrd #law (Taken with instagram)