when it's at its best, nothing in the world can top Regular Show for absolute, ecstatic hilarity. its casually surreal tone and outsize beats (and every single moment with Eileen, who may very well be one of the Top 10 Supporting Characters In Any TV Show From The Last Decade) and handful of simple, addictive motifs (ohhhhhhhhhh!!!) just add up to something that makes me so implacably happy. bob's burgers can also provide this feeling a large percent of the time (primarily with tina), and adventure time is a more pathos-driven yang to this mf'ers yin, but right now regular show is on such a hot streak that i'm getting jitters just reading recaps.
so yeah, just had to put that out to the very small universe.
Sunday, February 9, 2014
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Swamplandia!, or How I Learned To Start Worrying And Fear Unreliable Narrators
so it's time for the next entry in an erratic series of reactions that I have to compelling media, and the troubling questions that they compel outta me when I am done consuming them. This past week, I marathonned through the last third of Karen Russell's Swamplandia!, a book as creepy as it is beautiful as it is funny as it is traumatic. A lot could be said about its sense of spirituality, and how its main character is actually the lady who dies within the first ten pages and almost literally haunts the rest of the proceedings, but the little bit that has got me troubled so much is a little issue that lies tangential to Hilola Bigtree's ghost, albeit one entombed within the actual literature of the novel: the incredibly realistic magical realism of Ava Bigtree's narration.
(hey yo so watch out for spoilers, and also a trigger warning about rape, in case anyone ever decides to hit the "random" button on google and finds themselves reading this while also simultaneously being in the middle of Swamplandia!, oh boy what are the odds of that, anyway just sayin')
to start off, I gotta say that Karen Russell is a genius of plot structure, narration, and tone. she uses those three elements in perfect tandem like a milky way bar uses caramel, nougat, and milk chocolate. for the better part of the first half of the novel, we are only experiencing the world of Swamplandia! through Ava's eyes, rich and mystical, exotic and strewn with peculiar metaphors. we are shown a swamp that is fertile with beauty and imagination, somehow so intensely swamplike in its description that it could not be less of a swamp at all. dismalness and dampness, in the eyes of Ava, is its own kind of fantastic beauty. naturally, what follows in these eyes, is a similar perspective shift on the plot and character work that goes around within this setting. when the park bankrupts, it comes across less pathetic than ominous; if we are not convinced that osceola is dating ghosts, we are at least amused and compelled by the elaborate fantasies and pantomimes. By the time Kiwi branches off into his own story on the mainland (and begins the third-person narration grounded much more deeply in barebones reality - the Noahs' Ark style artifice of the World of Darkness is universes away from Swamplandia!'s surreal digs), Russell sets us up to believe that, to some extent, the Ten Thousand Islands are a place possessed by a magicality somewhere to the left of typical offbeatness. the tale of Louis Thanksgiving convinces Osceola, it informs Ava's narration, and it convinces us of otherworldly endeavors.
which leaves us hapless fools when Ava, with her magic eyes, is left alone with this narrative heft. when the Bird Man shows up.
i haven't been crushed by any book I've read in the same way that I was by Swamplandia!'s final act. when everything comes crashing down. when I realized that the magical realism I thought about the world was, in fact, only the most realistic portrayal of a young outsider's perspective ever put to paper. and god fucking DAMN it for being that good.
nobody can write the mind of a smart child like Karen Russell. Ava's narrative gymnastics (and they are always vivid and impressive) avoid the pitfalls of typical "smart kid" precociousness by adhering strictly to the character's nature at all times. she is vulnerable and headstrong, observant and never precious. she absorbs the magicalness of her world through a lens that always seems somewhat skeptical. she is someone who WANTS to believe in the fantastic changes to reality, whose expectations fall far short, whose vision is cursed by reality, return-to-sender letters addressed to gator wrestling competitions, and ragged jackets covered with buzzard feathers. carrying the Red Seth around with her (a wonderful symbol for menstruation and innocence), interpreting the swamp as her own surreal heaven of sorts, she is the perfect voice of a curious preteen on the cusp on adolescence.
which, going back to the main point, just makes everything hurt so, so, so much more when we realize how so, so, SO wrong she had been about everything. how the only true magic and ghosts in the novel are those that can be cured with pills, or felt as shots of adrenaline and muscle memory in the gator pits. she slogs through the swamp and survives, but her magical hope throughout the novel keeps us from even seeing the swamp for what it really is.
when the Bird Man first shows up, we have no Chief or Kiwi to serve as a voice of reason. OF COURSE don't trust this drifting man who shows up out of nowhere with paper-thin stories and correct, mystical answers to every question Ava asks. OF COURSE don't go with him, alone, onto a boat in the middle of nowhere. OF COURSE he is just covering his own predatory ass when he insists that you don't involve the police, how he is a supernatural man who is solving a supernatural problem, how the authorities are not in his jurisdiction. OF COURSE the Bird Man is fucking bad news. But Karen Russell cannot let us know this until it is too late. She isolates the narrative within Ava's lens and, in doing so, strands us within the magical realm that we ought to know is false. By the time The Bird Man arrives, the Dredgeman's Revelation taught us practically to expect him. This is a magical book, of course.
Except it isn't.
Karen Russell executed the world's greatest rug-pulling, get us to believe the Devil doesn't exist while he breathes down our neck the entire time. I had in my mind the inkling that the Bird Man was a Bad Dude, but she keeps us from reaching that conclusion for sure until it is already too late. Ava sees in him a fatherly attachment that she needed in those lonely times, a face to relate to in trauma. When events happen that cause double-takes, like him staring at her while she sleeps in Stiltsville, she even manages to somehow disarm us by returning to vulnerable character beats and the two's increasingly unsteady rapport. Hell, she even manages to fucking squeeze a tremendously misguided, oh so tragically believable "I love you" out of Ava. By that point there's enough menace laid on for us to scream at Ava "NO STOP IT NO NO NO SCREAM AND GET OUT OF THERE," but we just can't. like ava, we've become trapped. emotionally and physically trapped. not by the Bird Man, but by Karen Russell. the swamp of exaggerated theatrics and otherworldly fancy is the grim hood of horror stories, a bloody bayou.
and, stuck behind Ava's too-hopeful-for-hope eyes, we can't escape.
Russell ends the novel on as happy a note as can be. but, she reminds us, the Bird Man is still out there, and though Ava is safe now, she is still a survivor of a great tragedy, and there are no easy answers or happy endings to that. Ossie gets her happy-ish ending on the same scale, too. but, as the ever-vivid narration reminds us, the ambivalent endgame ultimately points towards hope. the mainland can be just as magical a place as the Islands if you carry that magic with you, and there's always hope that the Red Seth survived as well.
now I've gone to just disjointed rambles (about three paragraphs ago, maybe) but those last 100 pages are still lurking in the back of my head. Russell proves horror and beauty as two sides of the same coin via the expert way she imperceptibly shifts the tone between the two at the end. I did not expect Swamplandia! to become so harrowing because it had already tricked me into its surreal security one hundred pages prior. the danger always exists, and we need friends and family to help us recognize and confront it before it can swallow us whole. even if Ava's only family at the time is the ghost of her dead mother.
(hey yo so watch out for spoilers, and also a trigger warning about rape, in case anyone ever decides to hit the "random" button on google and finds themselves reading this while also simultaneously being in the middle of Swamplandia!, oh boy what are the odds of that, anyway just sayin')
to start off, I gotta say that Karen Russell is a genius of plot structure, narration, and tone. she uses those three elements in perfect tandem like a milky way bar uses caramel, nougat, and milk chocolate. for the better part of the first half of the novel, we are only experiencing the world of Swamplandia! through Ava's eyes, rich and mystical, exotic and strewn with peculiar metaphors. we are shown a swamp that is fertile with beauty and imagination, somehow so intensely swamplike in its description that it could not be less of a swamp at all. dismalness and dampness, in the eyes of Ava, is its own kind of fantastic beauty. naturally, what follows in these eyes, is a similar perspective shift on the plot and character work that goes around within this setting. when the park bankrupts, it comes across less pathetic than ominous; if we are not convinced that osceola is dating ghosts, we are at least amused and compelled by the elaborate fantasies and pantomimes. By the time Kiwi branches off into his own story on the mainland (and begins the third-person narration grounded much more deeply in barebones reality - the Noahs' Ark style artifice of the World of Darkness is universes away from Swamplandia!'s surreal digs), Russell sets us up to believe that, to some extent, the Ten Thousand Islands are a place possessed by a magicality somewhere to the left of typical offbeatness. the tale of Louis Thanksgiving convinces Osceola, it informs Ava's narration, and it convinces us of otherworldly endeavors.
which leaves us hapless fools when Ava, with her magic eyes, is left alone with this narrative heft. when the Bird Man shows up.
i haven't been crushed by any book I've read in the same way that I was by Swamplandia!'s final act. when everything comes crashing down. when I realized that the magical realism I thought about the world was, in fact, only the most realistic portrayal of a young outsider's perspective ever put to paper. and god fucking DAMN it for being that good.
nobody can write the mind of a smart child like Karen Russell. Ava's narrative gymnastics (and they are always vivid and impressive) avoid the pitfalls of typical "smart kid" precociousness by adhering strictly to the character's nature at all times. she is vulnerable and headstrong, observant and never precious. she absorbs the magicalness of her world through a lens that always seems somewhat skeptical. she is someone who WANTS to believe in the fantastic changes to reality, whose expectations fall far short, whose vision is cursed by reality, return-to-sender letters addressed to gator wrestling competitions, and ragged jackets covered with buzzard feathers. carrying the Red Seth around with her (a wonderful symbol for menstruation and innocence), interpreting the swamp as her own surreal heaven of sorts, she is the perfect voice of a curious preteen on the cusp on adolescence.
which, going back to the main point, just makes everything hurt so, so, so much more when we realize how so, so, SO wrong she had been about everything. how the only true magic and ghosts in the novel are those that can be cured with pills, or felt as shots of adrenaline and muscle memory in the gator pits. she slogs through the swamp and survives, but her magical hope throughout the novel keeps us from even seeing the swamp for what it really is.
when the Bird Man first shows up, we have no Chief or Kiwi to serve as a voice of reason. OF COURSE don't trust this drifting man who shows up out of nowhere with paper-thin stories and correct, mystical answers to every question Ava asks. OF COURSE don't go with him, alone, onto a boat in the middle of nowhere. OF COURSE he is just covering his own predatory ass when he insists that you don't involve the police, how he is a supernatural man who is solving a supernatural problem, how the authorities are not in his jurisdiction. OF COURSE the Bird Man is fucking bad news. But Karen Russell cannot let us know this until it is too late. She isolates the narrative within Ava's lens and, in doing so, strands us within the magical realm that we ought to know is false. By the time The Bird Man arrives, the Dredgeman's Revelation taught us practically to expect him. This is a magical book, of course.
Except it isn't.
Karen Russell executed the world's greatest rug-pulling, get us to believe the Devil doesn't exist while he breathes down our neck the entire time. I had in my mind the inkling that the Bird Man was a Bad Dude, but she keeps us from reaching that conclusion for sure until it is already too late. Ava sees in him a fatherly attachment that she needed in those lonely times, a face to relate to in trauma. When events happen that cause double-takes, like him staring at her while she sleeps in Stiltsville, she even manages to somehow disarm us by returning to vulnerable character beats and the two's increasingly unsteady rapport. Hell, she even manages to fucking squeeze a tremendously misguided, oh so tragically believable "I love you" out of Ava. By that point there's enough menace laid on for us to scream at Ava "NO STOP IT NO NO NO SCREAM AND GET OUT OF THERE," but we just can't. like ava, we've become trapped. emotionally and physically trapped. not by the Bird Man, but by Karen Russell. the swamp of exaggerated theatrics and otherworldly fancy is the grim hood of horror stories, a bloody bayou.
and, stuck behind Ava's too-hopeful-for-hope eyes, we can't escape.
Russell ends the novel on as happy a note as can be. but, she reminds us, the Bird Man is still out there, and though Ava is safe now, she is still a survivor of a great tragedy, and there are no easy answers or happy endings to that. Ossie gets her happy-ish ending on the same scale, too. but, as the ever-vivid narration reminds us, the ambivalent endgame ultimately points towards hope. the mainland can be just as magical a place as the Islands if you carry that magic with you, and there's always hope that the Red Seth survived as well.
now I've gone to just disjointed rambles (about three paragraphs ago, maybe) but those last 100 pages are still lurking in the back of my head. Russell proves horror and beauty as two sides of the same coin via the expert way she imperceptibly shifts the tone between the two at the end. I did not expect Swamplandia! to become so harrowing because it had already tricked me into its surreal security one hundred pages prior. the danger always exists, and we need friends and family to help us recognize and confront it before it can swallow us whole. even if Ava's only family at the time is the ghost of her dead mother.
Saturday, August 3, 2013
some mangled still-kinda-catatonic-from-its-compellingness thoughts about The Act of Killing re:a conversation i overheard on the T by some jerk in a pink shirt with an incredibly wrong opinion
you decided to base your criticism entirely on "the film COULD have done this" and "if the josh oppenheimer did THIS instead then the film would be like THAT" instead of actually having an opinion on the movie that joshua oppenheimer did make! until you did come up with a sliver of that opinion, which was "i guess maybe what he was trying to do was explain why these guys are evil?" despite your equivocation, you are definitely on the right track, on one level. but you are missing the entire point otherwise.
one thing you said was that you "thought he was trying to do some Wong Kar-Wai shit with the waterfall." first of all: you are terrible. I could maybe give you a pass because it looked like you were on a date and you were trying to impress her by looking like a smart white boy who knows an asian director look how worldly you are. on the other hand, you just took someone on a date to see fucking THE ACT OF KILLING WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU.
first of all, there was not even a single thing related to wong kar-wai at all in this, outside of the most general definitions of dreamlike directing. there aren't even fucking happy dreamy waterfalls in any wong kar wai movie i've seen. stop saying things that don't make sense to impress people who you assume don't know any better. more importantly, though, you seemed to miss the entire very-large-part-and-also-point of the movie where there is a film within the film that the murderers are effectively creating and directing. the murderers picked that waterfall. they picked those outfits, those colors. we are supposed to be amazed, appalled, and gaggingly amused by their atonal choices because, for christs fucking sake, it looks like they're trying to make one-part giallo acid thriller, one-part budget remake of miller's crossing in their buddy's closet, and one-part zyrtec commercial. congo talks about finding the symbolism of the waterfall beautiful. you talk about finding the waterfall to remind you of a completely unrelated Chinese director. you both miss the point entirely.
the film is about evil, but it's about understanding it from different angles. it's about a very specific, terrifying type of evil: sanctioned evil. it's about evil that wins, and attempting to subvert it with some quicksand of perspective. congo's endless retching during the last five minutes of the film is so affecting because it's a murderer seeing, for the very first time, what it's like to be a loser. and he can only understand it in a ridiculously complex multi-meta process. first, he sees how the recreations affect the extras negatively. but this isn't enough. then, he places himself in the victim seat and feels a certain exhaustion and fear, but this isn't enough. he still calls in his grandkids to watch the scene as if he won a hot dog eating contest and was appearing on the evening news. when he finally watches himself as the victim, he starts to crack. but it's joshua's words, on top of his own revelatory confession, that finally get him -- if not to empathize or fully understand the actions he committed -- realize the effects they had. he realizes his fucked up perspective on the act of killing, and finally questions himself. "have i sinned?" it's a question that the entire indonesian society failed to ask itself. he, alone, begins to break from the denial.
it's a tremendously pitiable and affecting moment, made possible through layers of literal self-reflection, and it's a process that mirrors watching the act of killing itself. as the audience, we are the next layer on top of this perspective onion. and, watching it, we are constantly reminded of this institutional, unrelenting evil as it gets reinforced as reality one surreal juxtaposition after another. the point (at least, in my reading) of the movie isn't trying to qualify or understand how or why the indonesian paramilitary people are evil. it's about taking it one step further. the root of their evil lies in the overall denial that their actions were evil inandofthemselves, as evidenced most strongly in the minister's speech after the staged "KILL ALL COMMUNISTS!!!" shot. "We don't want to appear brutal, but we also must exterminate the communists." By presenting evil through seeming self-parody, we are forced to understand their delusions as reality. They boast in front of the camera. They are more honest with others, in their schlock and overacting and artifice, than they will ever be with themselves, their souls. And only by turning an eye on themselves, as we turn onto them, will they truly realize the breadth of the destruction they have caused.
one thing you said was that you "thought he was trying to do some Wong Kar-Wai shit with the waterfall." first of all: you are terrible. I could maybe give you a pass because it looked like you were on a date and you were trying to impress her by looking like a smart white boy who knows an asian director look how worldly you are. on the other hand, you just took someone on a date to see fucking THE ACT OF KILLING WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU.
first of all, there was not even a single thing related to wong kar-wai at all in this, outside of the most general definitions of dreamlike directing. there aren't even fucking happy dreamy waterfalls in any wong kar wai movie i've seen. stop saying things that don't make sense to impress people who you assume don't know any better. more importantly, though, you seemed to miss the entire very-large-part-and-also-point of the movie where there is a film within the film that the murderers are effectively creating and directing. the murderers picked that waterfall. they picked those outfits, those colors. we are supposed to be amazed, appalled, and gaggingly amused by their atonal choices because, for christs fucking sake, it looks like they're trying to make one-part giallo acid thriller, one-part budget remake of miller's crossing in their buddy's closet, and one-part zyrtec commercial. congo talks about finding the symbolism of the waterfall beautiful. you talk about finding the waterfall to remind you of a completely unrelated Chinese director. you both miss the point entirely.
the film is about evil, but it's about understanding it from different angles. it's about a very specific, terrifying type of evil: sanctioned evil. it's about evil that wins, and attempting to subvert it with some quicksand of perspective. congo's endless retching during the last five minutes of the film is so affecting because it's a murderer seeing, for the very first time, what it's like to be a loser. and he can only understand it in a ridiculously complex multi-meta process. first, he sees how the recreations affect the extras negatively. but this isn't enough. then, he places himself in the victim seat and feels a certain exhaustion and fear, but this isn't enough. he still calls in his grandkids to watch the scene as if he won a hot dog eating contest and was appearing on the evening news. when he finally watches himself as the victim, he starts to crack. but it's joshua's words, on top of his own revelatory confession, that finally get him -- if not to empathize or fully understand the actions he committed -- realize the effects they had. he realizes his fucked up perspective on the act of killing, and finally questions himself. "have i sinned?" it's a question that the entire indonesian society failed to ask itself. he, alone, begins to break from the denial.
it's a tremendously pitiable and affecting moment, made possible through layers of literal self-reflection, and it's a process that mirrors watching the act of killing itself. as the audience, we are the next layer on top of this perspective onion. and, watching it, we are constantly reminded of this institutional, unrelenting evil as it gets reinforced as reality one surreal juxtaposition after another. the point (at least, in my reading) of the movie isn't trying to qualify or understand how or why the indonesian paramilitary people are evil. it's about taking it one step further. the root of their evil lies in the overall denial that their actions were evil inandofthemselves, as evidenced most strongly in the minister's speech after the staged "KILL ALL COMMUNISTS!!!" shot. "We don't want to appear brutal, but we also must exterminate the communists." By presenting evil through seeming self-parody, we are forced to understand their delusions as reality. They boast in front of the camera. They are more honest with others, in their schlock and overacting and artifice, than they will ever be with themselves, their souls. And only by turning an eye on themselves, as we turn onto them, will they truly realize the breadth of the destruction they have caused.
Monday, June 17, 2013
midway mark: some unofficial reflections
after reading a very thorough personal statement by Patton Oswalt and watching another interview with Norton, I've discovered my views on the latter straying a little back into "eh, not really getting it entirely" territory. still, the dude's set pretty much embodied (largely) Oswalt's ideal of "tackling a heavy subject in a safe way" about 80% of the time, and of that last 20%, only about 5% was straight-up objectionable. still, speaking as a white man, i've got less credence judging such things for what they're really worth. so meh i guess. I STILL REALLY REALLY LIKED THE ROUTINE ABOUT THE OLD DUDE IN THE LOCKER ROOM.
just discovered a wordpress blog that I had intended to revitalize my faith in creative writing from 2 years ago. needless to say, it failed at its job.
i also started a physical diary! so balls to this semi-public monstrosity from now on! except for the year-end things, those are kind of fun traditions i guess?
about that, though, I can already feel a dearth of memory coming on about January through April. maybe i might start to put it all together better once i step away from the manic heydey of May 2013 (CAN I GET A "HOO HAH TWO TIMES TUESDAY???" and somewhere, in a dominoes across the nation, a packers fan with tight black curls mumbles "hoo-hah") but here's the I Can't Remember Shit Already reflection for the first few months of the year
January: What did I do where was I even
February: I guess I was back at school
March: did I write a paper? or something
April: showers bring may flowers
TO BE CONTINUED???
just discovered a wordpress blog that I had intended to revitalize my faith in creative writing from 2 years ago. needless to say, it failed at its job.
i also started a physical diary! so balls to this semi-public monstrosity from now on! except for the year-end things, those are kind of fun traditions i guess?
about that, though, I can already feel a dearth of memory coming on about January through April. maybe i might start to put it all together better once i step away from the manic heydey of May 2013 (CAN I GET A "HOO HAH TWO TIMES TUESDAY???" and somewhere, in a dominoes across the nation, a packers fan with tight black curls mumbles "hoo-hah") but here's the I Can't Remember Shit Already reflection for the first few months of the year
January: What did I do where was I even
February: I guess I was back at school
March: did I write a paper? or something
April: showers bring may flowers
TO BE CONTINUED???
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Some thoughts about other people who i don't know well enough to directly tell them these thoughts
"Remember when you used to always wear that one hat but now you wear a new hat? You've wore your new hat so much that I already forgot what your old hat looked like."
"You're a pretty terrible person but your hair looks really soft."
"You're a pretty terrible person but your hair looks really soft."
Saturday, March 30, 2013
a lot of words about being really pleasantly surprised by jim norton and why as a person who goes to college i now feel the need to explain it
on the first day of the greatest class that i ever took in college we read this short story by Grace Paley, a real short one only four pages, where the narrator mentions that a comment from her ex-husband made her feel like a set of pipes choking on a plumbing snake. it was a beautiful metaphor. it still is a beautiful metaphor. but my professor mentioned that its beauty was clever, that the abundance of poetics is purposefully used to distract from one emotion and center on another. play with the reader's sympathies, basically.
this is why jim norton may be one of the smartest comedians working today.
now, his set at the somerville theater that i decided to see on a literal coin flip whim had some material in his act that would make ann coulter on a pink triangle, but as he himself said in his act, but that isn't why i'm, as he would say, "BLOGBLOGLBOLGOBLOBLOG"ging right now. maybe i'm givin this a terrible english major overintellectualization treatment (and i already am i mean come on i'm comparing him to GRACE FUCKING PALEY) but 90% of that man's set wasn't just absolutely hilarious, it was so funny that I did not even notice the kind of jokes I was laughing at, and then after I did realize, I kept laughing because I realized how incredibly clever he constructed his set to basically nullify any bad faith that would come from them.
i am gonna spoil the act and its jokes a little bit for a mo' (this set will eventually become a TV special, I think) so if you're real sensitive about having jokes ruined for you then stop reading.
okay now i just did something that jim norton would never do. throughout the act, that man basically set no limits. he spoke everything and whatever he himself perceived within the world to be truth. a lot of this was political (about 5 minutes consisted of an almost jokeless rant against the mainstream media) and a lot was provocative (some needlessly, others... well this is what i'm writing about so bear with me) and if i were at home half-listening to similar routines on youtube then i as a person i-would-like-to-think-pretty-aware of the nuance of identity politics and trauma and shit would have been like “eh…. Not my cup of tea.”
And for the first few minutes i wasn’t really all too that entranced, also because the opener didn’t really do a good job and had me thinking about maria bamford’s “loud girl comic” routine the entire time. But after a little while some stuff began happening so subtly that i didn’t notice. Jim norton was weaving a web that trapped me in it. And that web was made of extremely elaborate, hilarious, beautiful language.
Norton is the absolute master image-heavy comedy, which coincidentally makes him the master of both the dick joke and self-deprecation. He would open with a more provocative statement to get the audience’s attention (“oh a drunk girl… BONER!!!” e.g.) before going into these extremely detailed pictures of some sort of sexual observance, fantasy, or gripe, usually self-deprecating (“but always with girls i turn into a creep…”) . And without fail he would ascribe unto these utterly crass topics jaw-droppingly good analogies (“…crouched in the corner, blinking like a fucking screensaver”). He would run with the image for maybe a solid minute, elaborating every nook and cranny, every possible outcome. He would milk the fucking joke for all the laughs it’s worth. Very ***asterixlyimportantly**** he would go as extreme as possible, not just with his subject matter and his provocation, but in the trope and the delivery as well. Like paley, his heightened language was used to alter the sympathies of the audience, though norton’s goal is singular in doing this: to scorch all the sympathies. Scorch them all. As a provocateur he wants to offend, and yes people would be offended, and most provocateurs (tosh, clay) don’t really get complex or clever enough like say louis ck to accept the joke despite its gross roots (and i am completely excepting people who truly don’t mind the offensiveness at all of which the base level of enjoyment for the show is already much higher and not something that sort of needs to be overcome). Well add norton to the list, then, of comics who get shit done comedically because, like paley, his stories and jokes are so well-phrased and constructed that, on a second level, it completely detaches from its provocative origins 99% of the time.
Suddenly, another layer of it all, on top of these plain, hilarious, beautiful joke constructions, becomes evident. It’s all a big exaggeration, an inescapable atmosphere of what’s basically anti-bragging, the extreme comedian’s holy grail. Dank, shitty observances snowball into a glorious dick-shaped monolith of cobwebs, like a canadian trailer park louis ck (oh shit is he the alice munro of comedians now too???), or a modern diogenes of sinope. This is a short, out of shape man saying terrible things not just to provoke you, but because at the same time we are constantly reminded that A) his subliminal is compensating and B) his liminal is telling the supertruth. He manages the incredibly difficult balance of crafting a stage persona equal parts ridiculous (that you can’t take him seriously) and earnest (that you sympathize with him).
He says both of these qualities about his character pretty explicitly in different routines, calling attention to the atmosphere he’s created without dispelling it for anyone in the audience. He provokes us into thinking about ourselves, the topic being joked about, and, most importantly, himself. Even when he sacrifices “politically correct” contexts for the sake of joke delivery, he recreates a whole new context wherein judgment has shifted from the joker to the jokee. He tells a routine about feeling gay because he loved the way the man next to him on a flight smelled, but he delivers it with incredible earnest, all disbelief and no vitriol. It calls attention to how he, already established to have no luck with women, not has bisexual shame under his belt, but it isn’t a panic. It’s basically a celebration. He gets so deep into describing how great this man smelled that i started to fall in love with that odor, tucked away in a cabin too impossible to reach. He finds himself unwittingly feeling homosexually towards another man, and we laugh because we know that his established perverted lust for women would never traditionally make room for men (the extremeness of the womanly lust retroactively casting the exaggeration tonality on it all), but we also laugh because he embraces it so sincerely, and is merely embarrassed because he broached the topic poorly with the man in question. In common parlance, he asked his crush out very awkwardly and was hilariously rejected. All throughout, the clever constructions of the joke and rapid-fire delivery keep the trance unbroken. We are distracted by his sewer snake joke into sympathizing with norton and decrying the homophobia (once the seed of the joke, now just an incidental) that quashed these two mens’s blooming, smelly friendship.
In that one routine, norton has me eating shit out of the palm of his hand. And it tastes absolutely delicious.
One more example, and maybe the most well-constructed routine of the set, was about subtly coercing a handjob from a masseuse. There, at the base, you’ve got sexual coercion, misogyny, and general perversion set up. And the the rug gets fuckin pulled. He details each step to his method of getting happy endings with scientific precision, filling the exaggeration quotient by acting as if he literally wrote the book on convincing people to give him handjobs. But the pulls out earnest consideration by taking a sudden fucking left turn into john travolta territory. In the greatest formalist move of the show, he casts a mirror on himself and the audience by revealing that every move he used to get a handjob was used by travolta when a bunch of male masseuses sued him too. The wrongness of the scenario, what was first gross exaggeration becomes gross realness, gets generalized, superevident, and the judgment is thrown back to us while the norton train keeps a-rollin with earnest exaggeration about all the gay things he would totally do to john travolta. we are free to enjoy the joke for its jokeyness, of which a lot of jokeyness there was indeed.
When the spell broke for a couple minutes, once for the aforementioned political speech (which also included a defense of daniel tosh point oh that was actually about as saliently made as you can get from the camp of tosh defenders) and again near the end when he briefly broke into doing opie and anthony characters, i was able to collect myself for a bit and realize how incredible the whole performance was. This dude sequenced a set like a fucking comedy titan and could make basically any joke land, no matter how outlandish or crude. I could have listened to him talk for hours about a 70 year old man futzing around a men’s locker room slapping powder on his balls. For HOURS. Even when he slags for a little bit every once in two whiles, he is able to dip back in with some of the most graceful and quickest-acting segues ever. A long-running take on the media’s handling of the aurora shooting started to lose steam and become too hokey when suddenly it became about how pornography is better than michael douglas. Like what how did he even? Not every transition was so smooth but it didn’t need to be when the storytelling was so great; when one quality started to falter, the other picked up lightning quick and the set was back on track for a great, hilarious ending that came out of nowhere. I left wanting more, and also his autograph (but all i had on me was a Toni Morrison novel so I went home THE END).
Norton brings highest-common-denominator nuance to lowest-common-denominator material like dicks and butts and vaginas and handicapped jokes and gay jokes and misogyny and basically anything is the seed for these routines, but norton grows a big dick shaped tree out of them, taking them to ridiculous heights all while degrading himself and maintaining that heightened gross-out atmosphere. He accomplishes “now trust me i have TONS of gay friends BUUUUUT” without the painfulness, and in reaction to that seed we hold the attitude in contempt without blaming him because, well, the dirtiness of homophobia and misogyny is still a truth in this world that norton’s exaggerated character reveals to us through his routines, leaving us to cast our own judgments if we feel the need to. I keep comparing him to some sort of plant but goddamn if he doesn’t plant the seeds for shitbushes and come up with goldandwatermelontrees every time.
Most of this don’t make a lick of goddamn sense probably, and that’s because A) describing why someone was funny is a pain in the dick to do in the first place and trying to decode a multilayered context that’s built upon something as unfunny as a rape or handicap joke is harder than an elephants tusk, and B) as i said, a lot of the sustainment of this effect was in momentum and atmosphere. If he were not masterful enough to maintain the layer of exaggerated self-aware self-deprecation, it would have been easier to find his offensive jokes offensive. If he did not betray an earnestness in the handling of his exceptionally provocative numbers, his jokes would have seemed mean-spirited and cruel. If his language did not juxtapose so brilliantly the rawness of his subject matter, then that would be the end of jim norton would have all fallen hard.
Well luckily his set at the somerville theater was the exact opposite of everything i just said. To paraphrase him, if every comedian was clean as a daisy shit would be boring as fuck. Being dirty and fucking around in the muck is hard to do without seeming like you’re hitting easy targets or provoking just for the sake of provoking. Norton, you are the 1% than knocks it out of the park. And aside from a couple lulls and not-far-enoughs that amounted to probably five minutes out of an hour-and-a-half set, i’d say you’re doing pretty good for yourself.
this is why jim norton may be one of the smartest comedians working today.
now, his set at the somerville theater that i decided to see on a literal coin flip whim had some material in his act that would make ann coulter on a pink triangle, but as he himself said in his act, but that isn't why i'm, as he would say, "BLOGBLOGLBOLGOBLOBLOG"ging right now. maybe i'm givin this a terrible english major overintellectualization treatment (and i already am i mean come on i'm comparing him to GRACE FUCKING PALEY) but 90% of that man's set wasn't just absolutely hilarious, it was so funny that I did not even notice the kind of jokes I was laughing at, and then after I did realize, I kept laughing because I realized how incredibly clever he constructed his set to basically nullify any bad faith that would come from them.
i am gonna spoil the act and its jokes a little bit for a mo' (this set will eventually become a TV special, I think) so if you're real sensitive about having jokes ruined for you then stop reading.
okay now i just did something that jim norton would never do. throughout the act, that man basically set no limits. he spoke everything and whatever he himself perceived within the world to be truth. a lot of this was political (about 5 minutes consisted of an almost jokeless rant against the mainstream media) and a lot was provocative (some needlessly, others... well this is what i'm writing about so bear with me) and if i were at home half-listening to similar routines on youtube then i as a person i-would-like-to-think-pretty-aware of the nuance of identity politics and trauma and shit would have been like “eh…. Not my cup of tea.”
And for the first few minutes i wasn’t really all too that entranced, also because the opener didn’t really do a good job and had me thinking about maria bamford’s “loud girl comic” routine the entire time. But after a little while some stuff began happening so subtly that i didn’t notice. Jim norton was weaving a web that trapped me in it. And that web was made of extremely elaborate, hilarious, beautiful language.
Norton is the absolute master image-heavy comedy, which coincidentally makes him the master of both the dick joke and self-deprecation. He would open with a more provocative statement to get the audience’s attention (“oh a drunk girl… BONER!!!” e.g.) before going into these extremely detailed pictures of some sort of sexual observance, fantasy, or gripe, usually self-deprecating (“but always with girls i turn into a creep…”) . And without fail he would ascribe unto these utterly crass topics jaw-droppingly good analogies (“…crouched in the corner, blinking like a fucking screensaver”). He would run with the image for maybe a solid minute, elaborating every nook and cranny, every possible outcome. He would milk the fucking joke for all the laughs it’s worth. Very ***asterixlyimportantly**** he would go as extreme as possible, not just with his subject matter and his provocation, but in the trope and the delivery as well. Like paley, his heightened language was used to alter the sympathies of the audience, though norton’s goal is singular in doing this: to scorch all the sympathies. Scorch them all. As a provocateur he wants to offend, and yes people would be offended, and most provocateurs (tosh, clay) don’t really get complex or clever enough like say louis ck to accept the joke despite its gross roots (and i am completely excepting people who truly don’t mind the offensiveness at all of which the base level of enjoyment for the show is already much higher and not something that sort of needs to be overcome). Well add norton to the list, then, of comics who get shit done comedically because, like paley, his stories and jokes are so well-phrased and constructed that, on a second level, it completely detaches from its provocative origins 99% of the time.
Suddenly, another layer of it all, on top of these plain, hilarious, beautiful joke constructions, becomes evident. It’s all a big exaggeration, an inescapable atmosphere of what’s basically anti-bragging, the extreme comedian’s holy grail. Dank, shitty observances snowball into a glorious dick-shaped monolith of cobwebs, like a canadian trailer park louis ck (oh shit is he the alice munro of comedians now too???), or a modern diogenes of sinope. This is a short, out of shape man saying terrible things not just to provoke you, but because at the same time we are constantly reminded that A) his subliminal is compensating and B) his liminal is telling the supertruth. He manages the incredibly difficult balance of crafting a stage persona equal parts ridiculous (that you can’t take him seriously) and earnest (that you sympathize with him).
He says both of these qualities about his character pretty explicitly in different routines, calling attention to the atmosphere he’s created without dispelling it for anyone in the audience. He provokes us into thinking about ourselves, the topic being joked about, and, most importantly, himself. Even when he sacrifices “politically correct” contexts for the sake of joke delivery, he recreates a whole new context wherein judgment has shifted from the joker to the jokee. He tells a routine about feeling gay because he loved the way the man next to him on a flight smelled, but he delivers it with incredible earnest, all disbelief and no vitriol. It calls attention to how he, already established to have no luck with women, not has bisexual shame under his belt, but it isn’t a panic. It’s basically a celebration. He gets so deep into describing how great this man smelled that i started to fall in love with that odor, tucked away in a cabin too impossible to reach. He finds himself unwittingly feeling homosexually towards another man, and we laugh because we know that his established perverted lust for women would never traditionally make room for men (the extremeness of the womanly lust retroactively casting the exaggeration tonality on it all), but we also laugh because he embraces it so sincerely, and is merely embarrassed because he broached the topic poorly with the man in question. In common parlance, he asked his crush out very awkwardly and was hilariously rejected. All throughout, the clever constructions of the joke and rapid-fire delivery keep the trance unbroken. We are distracted by his sewer snake joke into sympathizing with norton and decrying the homophobia (once the seed of the joke, now just an incidental) that quashed these two mens’s blooming, smelly friendship.
In that one routine, norton has me eating shit out of the palm of his hand. And it tastes absolutely delicious.
One more example, and maybe the most well-constructed routine of the set, was about subtly coercing a handjob from a masseuse. There, at the base, you’ve got sexual coercion, misogyny, and general perversion set up. And the the rug gets fuckin pulled. He details each step to his method of getting happy endings with scientific precision, filling the exaggeration quotient by acting as if he literally wrote the book on convincing people to give him handjobs. But the pulls out earnest consideration by taking a sudden fucking left turn into john travolta territory. In the greatest formalist move of the show, he casts a mirror on himself and the audience by revealing that every move he used to get a handjob was used by travolta when a bunch of male masseuses sued him too. The wrongness of the scenario, what was first gross exaggeration becomes gross realness, gets generalized, superevident, and the judgment is thrown back to us while the norton train keeps a-rollin with earnest exaggeration about all the gay things he would totally do to john travolta. we are free to enjoy the joke for its jokeyness, of which a lot of jokeyness there was indeed.
When the spell broke for a couple minutes, once for the aforementioned political speech (which also included a defense of daniel tosh point oh that was actually about as saliently made as you can get from the camp of tosh defenders) and again near the end when he briefly broke into doing opie and anthony characters, i was able to collect myself for a bit and realize how incredible the whole performance was. This dude sequenced a set like a fucking comedy titan and could make basically any joke land, no matter how outlandish or crude. I could have listened to him talk for hours about a 70 year old man futzing around a men’s locker room slapping powder on his balls. For HOURS. Even when he slags for a little bit every once in two whiles, he is able to dip back in with some of the most graceful and quickest-acting segues ever. A long-running take on the media’s handling of the aurora shooting started to lose steam and become too hokey when suddenly it became about how pornography is better than michael douglas. Like what how did he even? Not every transition was so smooth but it didn’t need to be when the storytelling was so great; when one quality started to falter, the other picked up lightning quick and the set was back on track for a great, hilarious ending that came out of nowhere. I left wanting more, and also his autograph (but all i had on me was a Toni Morrison novel so I went home THE END).
Norton brings highest-common-denominator nuance to lowest-common-denominator material like dicks and butts and vaginas and handicapped jokes and gay jokes and misogyny and basically anything is the seed for these routines, but norton grows a big dick shaped tree out of them, taking them to ridiculous heights all while degrading himself and maintaining that heightened gross-out atmosphere. He accomplishes “now trust me i have TONS of gay friends BUUUUUT” without the painfulness, and in reaction to that seed we hold the attitude in contempt without blaming him because, well, the dirtiness of homophobia and misogyny is still a truth in this world that norton’s exaggerated character reveals to us through his routines, leaving us to cast our own judgments if we feel the need to. I keep comparing him to some sort of plant but goddamn if he doesn’t plant the seeds for shitbushes and come up with goldandwatermelontrees every time.
Most of this don’t make a lick of goddamn sense probably, and that’s because A) describing why someone was funny is a pain in the dick to do in the first place and trying to decode a multilayered context that’s built upon something as unfunny as a rape or handicap joke is harder than an elephants tusk, and B) as i said, a lot of the sustainment of this effect was in momentum and atmosphere. If he were not masterful enough to maintain the layer of exaggerated self-aware self-deprecation, it would have been easier to find his offensive jokes offensive. If he did not betray an earnestness in the handling of his exceptionally provocative numbers, his jokes would have seemed mean-spirited and cruel. If his language did not juxtapose so brilliantly the rawness of his subject matter, then that would be the end of jim norton would have all fallen hard.
Well luckily his set at the somerville theater was the exact opposite of everything i just said. To paraphrase him, if every comedian was clean as a daisy shit would be boring as fuck. Being dirty and fucking around in the muck is hard to do without seeming like you’re hitting easy targets or provoking just for the sake of provoking. Norton, you are the 1% than knocks it out of the park. And aside from a couple lulls and not-far-enoughs that amounted to probably five minutes out of an hour-and-a-half set, i’d say you’re doing pretty good for yourself.
hahaha
so recently i was like "am i making one continuuous mistake again" and well turns out i was so i was like "lol forget that shit" so i diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid *sunglasses fall on face*
Sunday, February 24, 2013
lol oops
rule of 2013 is appearing to be: don't masturbate because you never know when one of your friends will come into your room crying about israel.
happened twice so far. let's go for the hat trick.
Monday, December 31, 2012
2102: rear in ya view
2012 was mostly about vaginas, but it was also about butts. It was also mostly, even more mostly yet, about "buts." As in: this was the best year of my life BUT was it also the worst? That's a big but, as Pee Wee would say. I'mma try to answer it.
First off, this is the freshest I've been while writing this. That said, I'm coming off a 3 hour nap on an ostentatiously embroidered couch. But that's still an upwards spike, not a downwards spiral. So I've got the energy. Let's do it.
I forgot the format I usually do this in.
Oh yeah.
The Year in Me!
The highest highs and lowest lows yet. Last year was stagnation, and I accurately predicted that 2012 would be crazy as fuck. I didn't even know how much, though. Like, crazy high highs and crazy low lows. Unparalleled elation and devestation. On too many occasions, I just lay down on my floor and didn't move for two hours. Most of the time, it was because my futon bed was on the floor and I was sleeping after being in Osaka doing the craziest stuff I've probably ever done. But a couple times, it was because of DEPRESSSIIOOOOONNNNNNNNN! It's pretty emblematic though, I guess, that seemingly identical actions could carry such polarly oppsitized meanings. Pretty easy to mistake the good for the bad. I still haven't quite figured it out. One thing to know though: there was basically nothing that happened in the middle of the road, except maybe later in the year.
Friendship was pretty stable, and any big losses were in my control, thankfuckinggodforthat. One friend that I was worried about losing last year... I lost about 99% of her. But, knowing her pretty well, it was her decision and I think it'll be the best for her. I still worry, but yeah. Her decision. Cut off contact with some haters who were insistent on hating. I hated a bit. Still am. Met the three worst people in the world, hopefully will never see them again. On the other hand, met at least ten of the very best, so I ain't nearly complaining none. Got way closer to people I felt drifty from last year, and some people I've never really talked with before I would easily claim to be "besties" now.
Romance was possibly the rollercoasterest it's been since middle school. Fell in love. Nothing happened of it. That happened again. Nothing happened. That happened AGAIN. Baaaaaaaad stuff happened. I'll get to that later. Hold up. Some time in between all that, I fell in like with two girls who were, and still are, fucking awesome. Nothing but anti-regrets there. Had my first one night stand. A very... interesting night. Basically, a lot of sex in the first half and a lot of unrequited lust in the second. The funniest thing, perhaps that will ever happen to me in my life, happened. I will never tell another soul. Strange, strange year!
Family was also really up and really down. I've grown to appreciate everybody a lot more, and even tell this shit to their motherfucking FACES yo. Aw look at me hiding behind profane humor when I'm expressing sentimentality. Final grandpa died, prompting what will go down in my diary (this) as the Worst Week Ever. I feel like my extended family has been getting exponentially drunker. They have become my creative muse. One day, I will tell them.
The Year in Lit!
Ulysses was my good luck token. Got a job through it. Love that job. Got an A through it. That grade's okay. Hopefully, I will also get a mentor through it. Most importantly, though, I merely GOT THROUGH IT. Helluva fucking book, but I'll save most of my words for my official, publishable criticism of it. Thought I would pick up a lot of Japanese literature, because of yknow Japan and stuff, but all that whiffed on by (except for some choice mangas and folk stories for class, which ended up being pretty cool. Uzimaki!). Short stories won my fucking heart over like woah. I can't barely read anything else now. They're just that much better than novels. Paley, Kafka, Munro, Chekov, Marias, list goes motherfucking on. I haven't read too much outside of class because all of my class reading was so damn pleasureful anyway. Biggest out-of-class book was FINALLY finishing The Big Payback, which was a hella damn interesting book, definitely the most astute hip hop history thingy I've ever read. Still trying to read more contemporary fiction. I finally understand postmodernism! So I've got the theory down a little, at least, now I just have to do the reading.
And now, because I write again, a year in personal lit! Got published! Three different journals, three different stories (one of them twice). Internet writing club was probably the best decision of the latter half-year, in a half-year laden with bad decisions. My best works still go unpublished, and with Duotrope totally dicking out they might stay this way for a while, but whatever. More time to make 'em impeccable.
The Year in Movies!
I mostly came through on my resolution to get back into this shit, though mostly after the fact. One of the only movies I saw in theaters was Magic Mike, which I saw twice, once alone and once on a date with a lesbian. Best. Date. And. Introspective. Evening. Ever. Also I really enjoyed it, but no one has yet taken that opinion seriously for obvious reasons. Slept through Lincoln. If I saw anything else in theaters, it was probably underwhelming because I can't remember it for shit. Oh yeah. Ted. Yep.
Most of my movie watching was catching up, though. I got through some of last year's list: Tinker Tailor was awesome, Drive was awesome, and Poetry was beautiful and awesome. Outrage was hella badass. The Loneliest Planet had me screaming "OHHHHHHHHHH SHIIIIIIIIIIIT" in my bed at three in the morning, completely alone in my house and rewinding my netflix over and over again. Black Dynamite defined the entire first half of my year. In the Mood for Love was beautiful and moving, but lacked a certain something else. Mostly, I think I saw it too close in time to my favorite movie of the year, Taiwanese masterpiece Yi Yi. Holy. God damn. BALLS. THAT MOVIE WAS SO DAMN GOOD. Seriously cannot speak highly enough of it. It's like five awesome movies all rolled into one terrific tour de force. If Edward Yang were still alive, I would definitely blow him, like a lot. STILL have to catch up on a lot, though: Martha Marcy May Marlene and Take Shelter loom over me from last year, while Zero Dark Thirty, Holy Motors, Moonrise Kingdom, I Wish, Amour, The Master, and Cabin in the Woods will likely be marathonned some time next year.
The Year in Kanye!
The most underwhelming Kanye year yet, unfortunately. He saves it a bit at the very end with a baby Kardashian with his fatherly features on the way, but his outsized ego just wasn't so visible all year. GOOD Summer also wasn't, on the whole, very good. I got addicted to Clique and Mercy for a little bit of time, like any good American, but that was about it. Might consider changing this column to be TWO CHAIIIINNZZZ-centric for next year.
The Year in Music!
This could not be more all over the place. I've kept very careful track of my musical obsessions this year, so I can say pretty concretely what new stuff I've been most impressed with: Frank and Kendrick of course, Laurel Halo, Daughn Gibson, Japandroids, Dirty Projectors, Burial, The Shins, Andy Stott, Daniel Rossen in and out of Grizzly Bear, Jens, the Mountain Goats, Passion Pit, Nas, and Action Bronson headline a big fucking banner year for music. Song of the year has shifted and changed all over the place, from "House that Heaven Built" to "Sweet Life" or "Pyramids" or even "Fertilizer" damn I can't pick a single song off this album so how about just "Constant Conversations" or "Ashtray Wasp" maybe? All told, the song I enjoyed the most might have been "Borrowed Time" by Parquet Courts, or "Adorn" by Miguel. Last-second love is definitely "I Belong in Your Arms" by Chairlift and the glorious return of Mystikal with "Hit Me" (thanks, Pitchfork. those motherfuckers got a lot of shit right this year). Laurel Halo wins best new artist. Not much more to say here than go and listen to Quarantine. I'm gonna do it too.
Best new trend is easily hip hop culture shedding its homophobia and queerness going mainstream. Big Freedia, Le1f, plus of course Frank Ocean. I'm sheddin' tears of joy here.
Personal music: My 500 Mountain Goats scrobbles in two months speak pretty clearly about 2012 pt 2. My 0 anything scrobbles speak pretty clearly about pt 1. I adore K-Pop and despise most of J-Pop, except that one song that I heard while bowling which was jazzy and terrific but I never learned it's damn name because of Japanese. Didn't hit my yearly goal by a looooooong shot, but I'm not sweating it. I've given it another year. My tastes are pretty firmly the same, outside of the relapse into NothingButMountainGoats for a while I've been listening largely to R&B and electronic stuff. Kept pretty on top of new music, but since I didn't have a lot of time to listen around, mostly avoided going back into the catalog. A Quiet Storm was probably my biggest discovery in that regard.
The Year in Television!
Wow I love pop culture. FINALLY watched Parks and Rec. It's absolutely hilarious just about all the time. Andy and Ron are my new role models (sorry Marlo). Louie had another banner season, ever so slightly weaker than the last two perhaps, but "Daddy's Girlfriend Pt 2," "Miami," and the "Late Show" trilogy once again beat just about anything else aired on television in terms of quality. Homeland hustled and bustled for its first half, but lost my interest by the second. Game of Thrones homerunned that shit. I also watch Breaking Bad now, and like any sane person love it and cannot wait for the finale. ADVENTURE TIME! Got hooked, really quick, then proceeded to hook 40 more people even quickerly. Bowties are still cool.
Still have to watch Mad Men. And Regular Show. Fuck?
Oh man it's time for the dreaded Month-by-Month
Time to rack my memory. I'll try to avoid doing it quarterly again, because the wildness in general made for some pretty specific spikes and dips.
January: Had the best New Year's in recent memory. Did my rounds across the neighborhood before departing across the sea. Hong Kong was the right Kong, but the wrong food choice. Hong Kong hospitals are nice and quick and inexpensive, though. Entered Japan. I did not know what I was in for.
February: Adjusted. Quickly. Karaoke. Black Dynamite. Made friends of all sorts of nationalities. Discovered the magic of Kyoto with some people I did not see nearly enough of afterwards; crushed hard, then got crushed, but at least that only took a single day. Learned how to ride a bike. Fell into a deep love affair with said bike, who I named Tom Hanks. I miss you, Tom :( :( :(
March: There is a document saved on my computer entitled "March 2012," the contents of which are a 128-size Times New Roman bold "LOL" and nothing else. Basically, an easy contender for the most nervous and scattershot and upsetting month of my life. Fell prey to two simultaneous heavy, heavy infatuations. Blame it on Hiroshima's oysters. I acted on one of them in the ballsiest thing I've ever done, got rejected, and ended up dodging a big bullet there. The other one... nothing much I can say other than To Be Continued?? (lol not likely at all but W SLASH E) Bad news on the family front complicates everything but sits on the backburner. Recovery starts towards the end of the month with adventures in Korea. Got kidnapped by a child predator in da club. Glanced at three of the most beautiful women in my life, resolved to live in Busan forever. Pizza school.
April: CEE-LO, Istanbul, great times in awesome parks with fantastic people, general goodness all around. Sextuple dates, some time spent looking in mirrors thinking about how much of my life is a hilarious joke. A good way to rebound from a terribly bittersweet month is with an unadulteratedly great one...
May: ...only to be topped by what will reign for many years, likely, as the Best Month. Great girlfriend, greater friends, greatest food, the quickest blossoming best friendship I've ever wanted to painfully hold onto, long bike rides at night, white beaches and green forests, margarita pizzas and the rules of cricket, neverending nights, neverending sushi dinners, the faint thud of penis-slamming through the walls at night, and a general aura of happiness made for the biggest bang that I could have possibly gone out on. I do hope that I get to return someday soon. Kyoto, Osaka, je t'aime, aishite :D
June: A whole week writing a huge, embarrassing, permanent reflection post on a completely separate, much more visible blog. Welp! Detox from the restless, fantastic hours of May. Stay in Boston on a whim and a prayer. Get job like it's the easiest thing in the world to do during a recession. 21st birthday.
July: Working, playing, steadily infatuating. Loving 2/3rds of it. I finish my first and second short stories, have that "hmmmmmm I should probably stick with this" moment. Rekindle old internet friendships.
August: Detox still goin'. The rest of the house gradually moves back in. Shit about senior year starts to get real. Start a hilarious, really fun summer fling. Lots of catch-up with the other ex-abroad folks.
September: A strange, strange semester starts unassumingly. Working, studying, writing, switching up classes a bunch. End the summer fling because obvi the summer's over, ya fool.
October: Strangeness happens quite suddenly and sharply with the Worst Week. at least, in retrospect, the compounded shittiness of this week was shitty enough to win me free concert tickets in a How Shitty Was Your Year contest in December. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Redemption starts late in the month with a transformative Mountain Goats concert.
November: Dealing with the fallout from last month. Fall behind in schoolwork that I just was so good at staying on top of before that week. Despair, dilly-dallying, and vaginas. But it wasn't all bad. The proudest moment of my entire life, but not for myself. Every second spent alone was spent listening the the Mountain Goats and doing nothing else at all.
December: Scramble and recoup enough to pull damn good grades, presumably from out of my ass. Wrote a love letter to my professor, still waiting to send it. Plans for a Japan semi-reunion fall the fuck apart, still hella bittersweet about it.
The sweetness comes in from the aforementioned hilarious contest about a shitty year. I guess that's an accurate summation and microcosm for the year in general: I had some terrible times and great times, some earned times and some missed opportunities, fulfilled some dreams and built some foundations, but even with the terrible moments, a wealth of goodness has almost always come out of it in the end. (I'm still working on that one last wealth...) So I say FUCK YALL to the haters who may hate because no matter the odds and sods that landmined my path, 2012 was a beacon of remarkableness in what was sure to be one of the Top 10 Most Memorable Years of My Life, if I ever live long enough to make such an absurd list. Cheers!
PS: Damn I forgot about celebrity deaths. I kinda stopped following them. There's plenty of articles out there about such a frivolous thing, anyway. So I'll just shout out the biggest one, to me, at least. Dear MCA, you were a tremendous rapper, philanthropist, and patron of the goddamn arts. You also looked like my dad. I will miss your talents. I know you're up there in Nirvana right now with all the other Bodhishattvas. You earned it, buddy.
First off, this is the freshest I've been while writing this. That said, I'm coming off a 3 hour nap on an ostentatiously embroidered couch. But that's still an upwards spike, not a downwards spiral. So I've got the energy. Let's do it.
I forgot the format I usually do this in.
Oh yeah.
The Year in Me!
The highest highs and lowest lows yet. Last year was stagnation, and I accurately predicted that 2012 would be crazy as fuck. I didn't even know how much, though. Like, crazy high highs and crazy low lows. Unparalleled elation and devestation. On too many occasions, I just lay down on my floor and didn't move for two hours. Most of the time, it was because my futon bed was on the floor and I was sleeping after being in Osaka doing the craziest stuff I've probably ever done. But a couple times, it was because of DEPRESSSIIOOOOONNNNNNNNN! It's pretty emblematic though, I guess, that seemingly identical actions could carry such polarly oppsitized meanings. Pretty easy to mistake the good for the bad. I still haven't quite figured it out. One thing to know though: there was basically nothing that happened in the middle of the road, except maybe later in the year.
Friendship was pretty stable, and any big losses were in my control, thankfuckinggodforthat. One friend that I was worried about losing last year... I lost about 99% of her. But, knowing her pretty well, it was her decision and I think it'll be the best for her. I still worry, but yeah. Her decision. Cut off contact with some haters who were insistent on hating. I hated a bit. Still am. Met the three worst people in the world, hopefully will never see them again. On the other hand, met at least ten of the very best, so I ain't nearly complaining none. Got way closer to people I felt drifty from last year, and some people I've never really talked with before I would easily claim to be "besties" now.
Romance was possibly the rollercoasterest it's been since middle school. Fell in love. Nothing happened of it. That happened again. Nothing happened. That happened AGAIN. Baaaaaaaad stuff happened. I'll get to that later. Hold up. Some time in between all that, I fell in like with two girls who were, and still are, fucking awesome. Nothing but anti-regrets there. Had my first one night stand. A very... interesting night. Basically, a lot of sex in the first half and a lot of unrequited lust in the second. The funniest thing, perhaps that will ever happen to me in my life, happened. I will never tell another soul. Strange, strange year!
Family was also really up and really down. I've grown to appreciate everybody a lot more, and even tell this shit to their motherfucking FACES yo. Aw look at me hiding behind profane humor when I'm expressing sentimentality. Final grandpa died, prompting what will go down in my diary (this) as the Worst Week Ever. I feel like my extended family has been getting exponentially drunker. They have become my creative muse. One day, I will tell them.
The Year in Lit!
Ulysses was my good luck token. Got a job through it. Love that job. Got an A through it. That grade's okay. Hopefully, I will also get a mentor through it. Most importantly, though, I merely GOT THROUGH IT. Helluva fucking book, but I'll save most of my words for my official, publishable criticism of it. Thought I would pick up a lot of Japanese literature, because of yknow Japan and stuff, but all that whiffed on by (except for some choice mangas and folk stories for class, which ended up being pretty cool. Uzimaki!). Short stories won my fucking heart over like woah. I can't barely read anything else now. They're just that much better than novels. Paley, Kafka, Munro, Chekov, Marias, list goes motherfucking on. I haven't read too much outside of class because all of my class reading was so damn pleasureful anyway. Biggest out-of-class book was FINALLY finishing The Big Payback, which was a hella damn interesting book, definitely the most astute hip hop history thingy I've ever read. Still trying to read more contemporary fiction. I finally understand postmodernism! So I've got the theory down a little, at least, now I just have to do the reading.
And now, because I write again, a year in personal lit! Got published! Three different journals, three different stories (one of them twice). Internet writing club was probably the best decision of the latter half-year, in a half-year laden with bad decisions. My best works still go unpublished, and with Duotrope totally dicking out they might stay this way for a while, but whatever. More time to make 'em impeccable.
The Year in Movies!
I mostly came through on my resolution to get back into this shit, though mostly after the fact. One of the only movies I saw in theaters was Magic Mike, which I saw twice, once alone and once on a date with a lesbian. Best. Date. And. Introspective. Evening. Ever. Also I really enjoyed it, but no one has yet taken that opinion seriously for obvious reasons. Slept through Lincoln. If I saw anything else in theaters, it was probably underwhelming because I can't remember it for shit. Oh yeah. Ted. Yep.
Most of my movie watching was catching up, though. I got through some of last year's list: Tinker Tailor was awesome, Drive was awesome, and Poetry was beautiful and awesome. Outrage was hella badass. The Loneliest Planet had me screaming "OHHHHHHHHHH SHIIIIIIIIIIIT" in my bed at three in the morning, completely alone in my house and rewinding my netflix over and over again. Black Dynamite defined the entire first half of my year. In the Mood for Love was beautiful and moving, but lacked a certain something else. Mostly, I think I saw it too close in time to my favorite movie of the year, Taiwanese masterpiece Yi Yi. Holy. God damn. BALLS. THAT MOVIE WAS SO DAMN GOOD. Seriously cannot speak highly enough of it. It's like five awesome movies all rolled into one terrific tour de force. If Edward Yang were still alive, I would definitely blow him, like a lot. STILL have to catch up on a lot, though: Martha Marcy May Marlene and Take Shelter loom over me from last year, while Zero Dark Thirty, Holy Motors, Moonrise Kingdom, I Wish, Amour, The Master, and Cabin in the Woods will likely be marathonned some time next year.
The Year in Kanye!
The most underwhelming Kanye year yet, unfortunately. He saves it a bit at the very end with a baby Kardashian with his fatherly features on the way, but his outsized ego just wasn't so visible all year. GOOD Summer also wasn't, on the whole, very good. I got addicted to Clique and Mercy for a little bit of time, like any good American, but that was about it. Might consider changing this column to be TWO CHAIIIINNZZZ-centric for next year.
The Year in Music!
This could not be more all over the place. I've kept very careful track of my musical obsessions this year, so I can say pretty concretely what new stuff I've been most impressed with: Frank and Kendrick of course, Laurel Halo, Daughn Gibson, Japandroids, Dirty Projectors, Burial, The Shins, Andy Stott, Daniel Rossen in and out of Grizzly Bear, Jens, the Mountain Goats, Passion Pit, Nas, and Action Bronson headline a big fucking banner year for music. Song of the year has shifted and changed all over the place, from "House that Heaven Built" to "Sweet Life" or "Pyramids" or even "Fertilizer" damn I can't pick a single song off this album so how about just "Constant Conversations" or "Ashtray Wasp" maybe? All told, the song I enjoyed the most might have been "Borrowed Time" by Parquet Courts, or "Adorn" by Miguel. Last-second love is definitely "I Belong in Your Arms" by Chairlift and the glorious return of Mystikal with "Hit Me" (thanks, Pitchfork. those motherfuckers got a lot of shit right this year). Laurel Halo wins best new artist. Not much more to say here than go and listen to Quarantine. I'm gonna do it too.
Best new trend is easily hip hop culture shedding its homophobia and queerness going mainstream. Big Freedia, Le1f, plus of course Frank Ocean. I'm sheddin' tears of joy here.
Personal music: My 500 Mountain Goats scrobbles in two months speak pretty clearly about 2012 pt 2. My 0 anything scrobbles speak pretty clearly about pt 1. I adore K-Pop and despise most of J-Pop, except that one song that I heard while bowling which was jazzy and terrific but I never learned it's damn name because of Japanese. Didn't hit my yearly goal by a looooooong shot, but I'm not sweating it. I've given it another year. My tastes are pretty firmly the same, outside of the relapse into NothingButMountainGoats for a while I've been listening largely to R&B and electronic stuff. Kept pretty on top of new music, but since I didn't have a lot of time to listen around, mostly avoided going back into the catalog. A Quiet Storm was probably my biggest discovery in that regard.
The Year in Television!
Wow I love pop culture. FINALLY watched Parks and Rec. It's absolutely hilarious just about all the time. Andy and Ron are my new role models (sorry Marlo). Louie had another banner season, ever so slightly weaker than the last two perhaps, but "Daddy's Girlfriend Pt 2," "Miami," and the "Late Show" trilogy once again beat just about anything else aired on television in terms of quality. Homeland hustled and bustled for its first half, but lost my interest by the second. Game of Thrones homerunned that shit. I also watch Breaking Bad now, and like any sane person love it and cannot wait for the finale. ADVENTURE TIME! Got hooked, really quick, then proceeded to hook 40 more people even quickerly. Bowties are still cool.
Still have to watch Mad Men. And Regular Show. Fuck?
Oh man it's time for the dreaded Month-by-Month
Time to rack my memory. I'll try to avoid doing it quarterly again, because the wildness in general made for some pretty specific spikes and dips.
January: Had the best New Year's in recent memory. Did my rounds across the neighborhood before departing across the sea. Hong Kong was the right Kong, but the wrong food choice. Hong Kong hospitals are nice and quick and inexpensive, though. Entered Japan. I did not know what I was in for.
February: Adjusted. Quickly. Karaoke. Black Dynamite. Made friends of all sorts of nationalities. Discovered the magic of Kyoto with some people I did not see nearly enough of afterwards; crushed hard, then got crushed, but at least that only took a single day. Learned how to ride a bike. Fell into a deep love affair with said bike, who I named Tom Hanks. I miss you, Tom :( :( :(
March: There is a document saved on my computer entitled "March 2012," the contents of which are a 128-size Times New Roman bold "LOL" and nothing else. Basically, an easy contender for the most nervous and scattershot and upsetting month of my life. Fell prey to two simultaneous heavy, heavy infatuations. Blame it on Hiroshima's oysters. I acted on one of them in the ballsiest thing I've ever done, got rejected, and ended up dodging a big bullet there. The other one... nothing much I can say other than To Be Continued?? (lol not likely at all but W SLASH E) Bad news on the family front complicates everything but sits on the backburner. Recovery starts towards the end of the month with adventures in Korea. Got kidnapped by a child predator in da club. Glanced at three of the most beautiful women in my life, resolved to live in Busan forever. Pizza school.
April: CEE-LO, Istanbul, great times in awesome parks with fantastic people, general goodness all around. Sextuple dates, some time spent looking in mirrors thinking about how much of my life is a hilarious joke. A good way to rebound from a terribly bittersweet month is with an unadulteratedly great one...
May: ...only to be topped by what will reign for many years, likely, as the Best Month. Great girlfriend, greater friends, greatest food, the quickest blossoming best friendship I've ever wanted to painfully hold onto, long bike rides at night, white beaches and green forests, margarita pizzas and the rules of cricket, neverending nights, neverending sushi dinners, the faint thud of penis-slamming through the walls at night, and a general aura of happiness made for the biggest bang that I could have possibly gone out on. I do hope that I get to return someday soon. Kyoto, Osaka, je t'aime, aishite :D
June: A whole week writing a huge, embarrassing, permanent reflection post on a completely separate, much more visible blog. Welp! Detox from the restless, fantastic hours of May. Stay in Boston on a whim and a prayer. Get job like it's the easiest thing in the world to do during a recession. 21st birthday.
July: Working, playing, steadily infatuating. Loving 2/3rds of it. I finish my first and second short stories, have that "hmmmmmm I should probably stick with this" moment. Rekindle old internet friendships.
August: Detox still goin'. The rest of the house gradually moves back in. Shit about senior year starts to get real. Start a hilarious, really fun summer fling. Lots of catch-up with the other ex-abroad folks.
September: A strange, strange semester starts unassumingly. Working, studying, writing, switching up classes a bunch. End the summer fling because obvi the summer's over, ya fool.
October: Strangeness happens quite suddenly and sharply with the Worst Week. at least, in retrospect, the compounded shittiness of this week was shitty enough to win me free concert tickets in a How Shitty Was Your Year contest in December. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Redemption starts late in the month with a transformative Mountain Goats concert.
November: Dealing with the fallout from last month. Fall behind in schoolwork that I just was so good at staying on top of before that week. Despair, dilly-dallying, and vaginas. But it wasn't all bad. The proudest moment of my entire life, but not for myself. Every second spent alone was spent listening the the Mountain Goats and doing nothing else at all.
December: Scramble and recoup enough to pull damn good grades, presumably from out of my ass. Wrote a love letter to my professor, still waiting to send it. Plans for a Japan semi-reunion fall the fuck apart, still hella bittersweet about it.
The sweetness comes in from the aforementioned hilarious contest about a shitty year. I guess that's an accurate summation and microcosm for the year in general: I had some terrible times and great times, some earned times and some missed opportunities, fulfilled some dreams and built some foundations, but even with the terrible moments, a wealth of goodness has almost always come out of it in the end. (I'm still working on that one last wealth...) So I say FUCK YALL to the haters who may hate because no matter the odds and sods that landmined my path, 2012 was a beacon of remarkableness in what was sure to be one of the Top 10 Most Memorable Years of My Life, if I ever live long enough to make such an absurd list. Cheers!
PS: Damn I forgot about celebrity deaths. I kinda stopped following them. There's plenty of articles out there about such a frivolous thing, anyway. So I'll just shout out the biggest one, to me, at least. Dear MCA, you were a tremendous rapper, philanthropist, and patron of the goddamn arts. You also looked like my dad. I will miss your talents. I know you're up there in Nirvana right now with all the other Bodhishattvas. You earned it, buddy.
Sunday, October 28, 2012
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
201o1
i mean it's year in review time again. a couple weeks earlier this time, but this is when all the real publications and outlets and shit do their summaries so why can't I too? I'm in control of these damn rules I can do whatever I want about it damn it.
so... 2011. maybe it's the sparklehorse playing right now, but overall I think it was a pretty sad, beautiful year (or maybe i'm playing sparklehorse because i'm feeling particularly sad and beautiful, or maybe I'm just beautiful). or maybe i'm just feeling strange and angsty (is that why i'm typing without lots of capital letters? oh shit they're on to me). as usual, i forgot to make notes along the way, and my memory is failing me hard when it comes to remembering all sorts of shit from before, say...... october??? but as usual, i'll try my damndest to remember all sorts of important stuff that went down, in the intimate and expansive realms.
Overall year: enjoyable overall, i mean life is enjoyable at its basest so i'm cool with that, but also strange and, at some points, overbearingly dismal. if 2009 was transition, and 2010 was solidification, 2011 is precipitously perched on the verge of another major transition. dunno what, dunno how, but it all added up with the same result: Stagnation. but whenever things stagnate, there's a big window to potential, great or bad, on the horizon. i may be in a bad mood now, but the future is bright. so i'll give it that.
Year in Me: where the strangest, worst things tended to be going on, as well as the most unexpected, wonderful things. as usual, my friends defined my life. on two separate, horrifying occasions, I realized that I may have lost two of my closest and most loved friends to permanent circumstances. the highest high of the year came when one friend very, very thankfully returned to the fold stable and healthy, culminating in the best (and most needed) vacation of my life thus far. the other friend... i hope to Whoever every day that she is doing okay. i'll leave it at that. broke up with girlfriend. so it goes. a lot less sex, especially in Act III. looking forward to reversing those fortunes. biggest bright spots, aside from Montana, with the family, which is doing great, just great. almost drowned. so overall super scattershot, a bit of a roller coaster amidst a paradoxical hanging atmosphere of malaise and stagnation.
Year in Lit: this is a new section! because I remembered how much I love reading this year, and I actually had time this summer to read for pleasure, the first time since godfuckIdon'tknow. read Phillip K. Dick, left me with a bit of an empty pit where satisfaction should have been. read Frank E. Ahl, completely turned around all my political and religious ideals. read waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much Walt Whitman, inspired to almost like and understand poetry. finally read James Joyce: started Ulysses, enjoyed the fuck out of the first 75 pages before the book disappeared; read and related a scary fuckton to Portrait, probably the most I've scarily related to a novel since Goethe. overall, I look forward to reading a lot more than I used to, because if i can be superearnest for a second, reading really is the most important thing in the world. so i'll try to do that more.
Year in Movies: practically nonexistent. Bridesmaids was pretty funny, but didn't transcend like so many are saying it did. The Hangover 2 shouldn't have existed. I finally saw Psycho; it was alright. Hugo was great, beautiful, and got a lot of tough smiles out of me, but still somehow felt lacking. the silver lining, however, is that there's a LOAD of new movies I still want to see: Drive, Certified Copy, Beginners, Drive, Take Shelter, Poetry, Drive, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Drive, Drive, and Drive, just to name a few.
Year in Kanye West: also lacking! "HAHHH??!!!" deservedly became a national catchphrase (and also inspired the best pitchfork year-end blurb i've ever read, great job pitchfork), but his shit was significantly less cray than in years prior. step it up, Mr. West. do it for the childrens.
Year in Music: The Weeknd (whose new mixtape's .zip currently stands before me, though I still don't want to stop listening to Sparklehorse), Atlas Sound, Destroyer, St. Vincent, M83, Azari & III, Washed Out, and the ever-reliable Low release albums of the year. as far as songs go, nothing can compare to the enormous "Midnight City," though I've grooved superhard to "Hours" by Tycho in equal amount, too. The Weeknd claims best new artist easily, though I'm just as excited for the future of Colin Stetson, who is the most talented and unique musician in the Western World right now, and Post-Dubstep, the credibility of which was revived by stellar albums by Kuedo, Rustie, and Sepalcure after James Blake's 2011 approach drifted from the most favorable course.
Music trends are kind of shitty. just when I was starting to like Chillwave, it's declared deader than fucking Jong-Il (but i'm getting ahead of myself here). PBR&B never broke out as much as it should have, and the whole "dark" aspect of hip-hop needs to seriously slide out the back door (drakez a bitch #whatyougonnado #hashtagginonablogspot). like i said, though, the future of Dubstep is brighter than God lighting up a Neutron joint.
My personal year in music was, again, a great success. again, I hit my new year's resolution, and again, it occurred precisely on Thanksgiving Day. no strong focus on my exploration of older tunes, since I spent the summer too tired to keep up with anything, and the fall too busy keeping up with everything to explore older stuff in depth. something wonderful may have happened earlier in the year, but as usual, I can't recall shit. learned a lot about old blues due to class, but nothing I listened to really struck a chord, except for Mississippi John Hurt (oh my god I love Mississippi John Hurt). overall, I feel my tastes strongly shifting into electronic territory, a renewed interest in music over lyrics (the usual exception being The Mountain Goats, whose new record has been sadly underplayed), and Michael Haggins.
Television! Television perseveres again at providing the most consistent entertainment of all media. Did a full second run-through of The Wire after the first wasn't enough, and caught up on 3 seasons of Community shortly thereafter. I preferred Louie when he had a good balance of hilarious episodes with the deep ones, so Season 2's willingness to go full-unretard was somewhat jolting, but still super enjoyable. the high points are the best moments of television all year, though. "Come On, God" ranks right next to "Dogpound" for belly laughs; I've only seen "Eddie" in full once, but it's stuck like a fucking bullet in my brain. seriously, Louie is an adept motherfucking storyteller, comedic, dramatic or whatever the hell "Duckling" was. plus, i became an enormous Whovillian. bowties are cool.
STILL HAVE TO WATCH PARKS AND REC. FUCK.
Time for the month-by-month? Eh. I'll just do it by quarter, and then divide the last few months that I can actually remember into bits and pieces.
Jan: I had to have been home for this month, but I can honestly not remember much at all of what transpired.
Feb - May: WALT WHITMAN. relationship peaked, then decayed and stagnated for a while. drifted apart from a few good buddies because of it. first big friend crisis results in a personal and academic crisis. luckily, all was overcome. did an acting class, met some pretty sweet people. of course, instant dispersal once class ended. damn shame.
June - July: WORKED. a government job, cubicle and everything. the office was, by far, the least depressing part. the most depressing part was not knowing what to say when a lonely 80 year old asked you for more food stamps, please. the jovial cynicism of my officemates were a welcome countervailing force, otherwise the summer would have just been overwhelmingly, almost viscerally depressing (though the passing one one officemate certainly didn't help... RIP Carl). rekindled a bit with one of my oldest friends, even though we basically have nothing in common anymore. ate a big fucking amount of ice cream, to the ire of certain people in Bulgaria at the time. became superactive on Uncyc again, mostly out of boredom and emotional relief after the stressful work day. quickly became a strong contender for Writer of the Year. so it goes.
August: more of June/July, but also MONTANA! couldn't have asked for a better reprieve from the dismal town job, or better company to spend that reprieve with. fuck carly's adulterous scumbag father though. he can chew a taint.
September: I have a house! It's pretty sweet, though I'm out of the loop since everyone else was already there since June. broke up for real. enjoyed a good bit of regrouping and solitude, but being an absentee from the summer really put a hamper on getting back into the college dynamic.
October: finally got back into the Tufts groove very late in the month, around Halloween, which was especially fun this year. fall into some heavy infatuation with a lady, but the situation is more complicated than the plot of It's Complicated, starring Alec Baldwin. never act, regret it forever???????????
November: wouldn't you know it, my first actual successes in the comedy world outside of Uncyc. work piles up and reaches critical mass around thanksgiving, but i put off all that unimportant shit to memorize lines in the big show, which I am actually in for the very first time, thus ending that unfortunate running joke. second friend crisis. still coping, still worrying.
December: starred in the show, everything went smoothly, regretting not being able to participate again until senior year, though i'll certainly be submitting some stuff postAmericaly next semester. rocked half the finals, bombed the other half, but so far the alphabetical return(s) have been more than satisfactory. got real sad about leaving for the semester and decided to do this post super-angsty, ahead-of-time, and Sparklehorse-soundtracked (it's kind of getting old now).
Abrupt segue into celebrity deaths: Steve Jobs, Bin Laden and Jong-Il, Hitchens and Havel, Patrice O'Neale and Bil Keane have nothing in common except they're also missed, ANDY ROONEY ;____________;, Joe Frazier, Mikey Walsh, Betty Ford, Amy Winehouse, Clarence Clemens and Columbo, Jack Kevorkian, GIL SCOTT-HERON!!! ;______; (the sliiiiiiiits), Macho Man Randy Savage, M-Bone (the "M" stands for "Dougie"), Jackie Cooper, Gerard Smith of TVotR, Sarah Jane, SIDNEY LUMET ;________;, Geraldine Ferrarro, Elizabeth Taylor, NATE DOGG ;___________;, "Bear" Stanley, Joe Morello (who kept the best 5/4 time in the world), Mike DeStefano, and lastly, UNCLE LEO ;___________________;
And that's that. I'm turning off this damn Sparklehorse already. I already know I'll treat you good someday. You don't have to shout it, Linkous (also RIP).
so... 2011. maybe it's the sparklehorse playing right now, but overall I think it was a pretty sad, beautiful year (or maybe i'm playing sparklehorse because i'm feeling particularly sad and beautiful, or maybe I'm just beautiful). or maybe i'm just feeling strange and angsty (is that why i'm typing without lots of capital letters? oh shit they're on to me). as usual, i forgot to make notes along the way, and my memory is failing me hard when it comes to remembering all sorts of shit from before, say...... october??? but as usual, i'll try my damndest to remember all sorts of important stuff that went down, in the intimate and expansive realms.
Overall year: enjoyable overall, i mean life is enjoyable at its basest so i'm cool with that, but also strange and, at some points, overbearingly dismal. if 2009 was transition, and 2010 was solidification, 2011 is precipitously perched on the verge of another major transition. dunno what, dunno how, but it all added up with the same result: Stagnation. but whenever things stagnate, there's a big window to potential, great or bad, on the horizon. i may be in a bad mood now, but the future is bright. so i'll give it that.
Year in Me: where the strangest, worst things tended to be going on, as well as the most unexpected, wonderful things. as usual, my friends defined my life. on two separate, horrifying occasions, I realized that I may have lost two of my closest and most loved friends to permanent circumstances. the highest high of the year came when one friend very, very thankfully returned to the fold stable and healthy, culminating in the best (and most needed) vacation of my life thus far. the other friend... i hope to Whoever every day that she is doing okay. i'll leave it at that. broke up with girlfriend. so it goes. a lot less sex, especially in Act III. looking forward to reversing those fortunes. biggest bright spots, aside from Montana, with the family, which is doing great, just great. almost drowned. so overall super scattershot, a bit of a roller coaster amidst a paradoxical hanging atmosphere of malaise and stagnation.
Year in Lit: this is a new section! because I remembered how much I love reading this year, and I actually had time this summer to read for pleasure, the first time since godfuckIdon'tknow. read Phillip K. Dick, left me with a bit of an empty pit where satisfaction should have been. read Frank E. Ahl, completely turned around all my political and religious ideals. read waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much Walt Whitman, inspired to almost like and understand poetry. finally read James Joyce: started Ulysses, enjoyed the fuck out of the first 75 pages before the book disappeared; read and related a scary fuckton to Portrait, probably the most I've scarily related to a novel since Goethe. overall, I look forward to reading a lot more than I used to, because if i can be superearnest for a second, reading really is the most important thing in the world. so i'll try to do that more.
Year in Movies: practically nonexistent. Bridesmaids was pretty funny, but didn't transcend like so many are saying it did. The Hangover 2 shouldn't have existed. I finally saw Psycho; it was alright. Hugo was great, beautiful, and got a lot of tough smiles out of me, but still somehow felt lacking. the silver lining, however, is that there's a LOAD of new movies I still want to see: Drive, Certified Copy, Beginners, Drive, Take Shelter, Poetry, Drive, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Drive, Drive, and Drive, just to name a few.
Year in Kanye West: also lacking! "HAHHH??!!!" deservedly became a national catchphrase (and also inspired the best pitchfork year-end blurb i've ever read, great job pitchfork), but his shit was significantly less cray than in years prior. step it up, Mr. West. do it for the childrens.
Year in Music: The Weeknd (whose new mixtape's .zip currently stands before me, though I still don't want to stop listening to Sparklehorse), Atlas Sound, Destroyer, St. Vincent, M83, Azari & III, Washed Out, and the ever-reliable Low release albums of the year. as far as songs go, nothing can compare to the enormous "Midnight City," though I've grooved superhard to "Hours" by Tycho in equal amount, too. The Weeknd claims best new artist easily, though I'm just as excited for the future of Colin Stetson, who is the most talented and unique musician in the Western World right now, and Post-Dubstep, the credibility of which was revived by stellar albums by Kuedo, Rustie, and Sepalcure after James Blake's 2011 approach drifted from the most favorable course.
Music trends are kind of shitty. just when I was starting to like Chillwave, it's declared deader than fucking Jong-Il (but i'm getting ahead of myself here). PBR&B never broke out as much as it should have, and the whole "dark" aspect of hip-hop needs to seriously slide out the back door (drakez a bitch #whatyougonnado #hashtagginonablogspot). like i said, though, the future of Dubstep is brighter than God lighting up a Neutron joint.
My personal year in music was, again, a great success. again, I hit my new year's resolution, and again, it occurred precisely on Thanksgiving Day. no strong focus on my exploration of older tunes, since I spent the summer too tired to keep up with anything, and the fall too busy keeping up with everything to explore older stuff in depth. something wonderful may have happened earlier in the year, but as usual, I can't recall shit. learned a lot about old blues due to class, but nothing I listened to really struck a chord, except for Mississippi John Hurt (oh my god I love Mississippi John Hurt). overall, I feel my tastes strongly shifting into electronic territory, a renewed interest in music over lyrics (the usual exception being The Mountain Goats, whose new record has been sadly underplayed), and Michael Haggins.
Television! Television perseveres again at providing the most consistent entertainment of all media. Did a full second run-through of The Wire after the first wasn't enough, and caught up on 3 seasons of Community shortly thereafter. I preferred Louie when he had a good balance of hilarious episodes with the deep ones, so Season 2's willingness to go full-unretard was somewhat jolting, but still super enjoyable. the high points are the best moments of television all year, though. "Come On, God" ranks right next to "Dogpound" for belly laughs; I've only seen "Eddie" in full once, but it's stuck like a fucking bullet in my brain. seriously, Louie is an adept motherfucking storyteller, comedic, dramatic or whatever the hell "Duckling" was. plus, i became an enormous Whovillian. bowties are cool.
STILL HAVE TO WATCH PARKS AND REC. FUCK.
Time for the month-by-month? Eh. I'll just do it by quarter, and then divide the last few months that I can actually remember into bits and pieces.
Jan: I had to have been home for this month, but I can honestly not remember much at all of what transpired.
Feb - May: WALT WHITMAN. relationship peaked, then decayed and stagnated for a while. drifted apart from a few good buddies because of it. first big friend crisis results in a personal and academic crisis. luckily, all was overcome. did an acting class, met some pretty sweet people. of course, instant dispersal once class ended. damn shame.
June - July: WORKED. a government job, cubicle and everything. the office was, by far, the least depressing part. the most depressing part was not knowing what to say when a lonely 80 year old asked you for more food stamps, please. the jovial cynicism of my officemates were a welcome countervailing force, otherwise the summer would have just been overwhelmingly, almost viscerally depressing (though the passing one one officemate certainly didn't help... RIP Carl). rekindled a bit with one of my oldest friends, even though we basically have nothing in common anymore. ate a big fucking amount of ice cream, to the ire of certain people in Bulgaria at the time. became superactive on Uncyc again, mostly out of boredom and emotional relief after the stressful work day. quickly became a strong contender for Writer of the Year. so it goes.
August: more of June/July, but also MONTANA! couldn't have asked for a better reprieve from the dismal town job, or better company to spend that reprieve with. fuck carly's adulterous scumbag father though. he can chew a taint.
September: I have a house! It's pretty sweet, though I'm out of the loop since everyone else was already there since June. broke up for real. enjoyed a good bit of regrouping and solitude, but being an absentee from the summer really put a hamper on getting back into the college dynamic.
October: finally got back into the Tufts groove very late in the month, around Halloween, which was especially fun this year. fall into some heavy infatuation with a lady, but the situation is more complicated than the plot of It's Complicated, starring Alec Baldwin. never act, regret it forever???????????
November: wouldn't you know it, my first actual successes in the comedy world outside of Uncyc. work piles up and reaches critical mass around thanksgiving, but i put off all that unimportant shit to memorize lines in the big show, which I am actually in for the very first time, thus ending that unfortunate running joke. second friend crisis. still coping, still worrying.
December: starred in the show, everything went smoothly, regretting not being able to participate again until senior year, though i'll certainly be submitting some stuff postAmericaly next semester. rocked half the finals, bombed the other half, but so far the alphabetical return(s) have been more than satisfactory. got real sad about leaving for the semester and decided to do this post super-angsty, ahead-of-time, and Sparklehorse-soundtracked (it's kind of getting old now).
Abrupt segue into celebrity deaths: Steve Jobs, Bin Laden and Jong-Il, Hitchens and Havel, Patrice O'Neale and Bil Keane have nothing in common except they're also missed, ANDY ROONEY ;____________;, Joe Frazier, Mikey Walsh, Betty Ford, Amy Winehouse, Clarence Clemens and Columbo, Jack Kevorkian, GIL SCOTT-HERON!!! ;______; (the sliiiiiiiits), Macho Man Randy Savage, M-Bone (the "M" stands for "Dougie"), Jackie Cooper, Gerard Smith of TVotR, Sarah Jane, SIDNEY LUMET ;________;, Geraldine Ferrarro, Elizabeth Taylor, NATE DOGG ;___________;, "Bear" Stanley, Joe Morello (who kept the best 5/4 time in the world), Mike DeStefano, and lastly, UNCLE LEO ;___________________;
And that's that. I'm turning off this damn Sparklehorse already. I already know I'll treat you good someday. You don't have to shout it, Linkous (also RIP).
Friday, December 31, 2010
I suppose it's time for another bleary-eyed year in review
Back by popular demand!
So yeah, 2010 topped it. Whatever "it" was.
The Year in Review: Very good. Lots of shit happened. Unlike the transition year of 2009, 2010 was more or less an exercise in solidification, bowdlerization, pontification, and transubstantiation. Damn it was good.
Me from this year: No earth-shattering personal tragedies so that's a definite step up. I lost a pretty close friend but that was mostly his/her fault and not mine. Plus, (s)he was really more of a chore than a friend. Other than that everything is great. Good girlfriend. Lots of sex and all that good stuff, I think. So things going great here.
Movies were also great this year, but not as good as 2009. Black Swan was crazy as shit though it got nearly ruined by the 12 year olds sitting behind us who got grossed out by the masturbation scenes. Inception was also cool; the Social Network was cool too. Cool. Cool year for movies. I haven't seen any of the cold movies though: Winter's Bone, ..., I guess that's it. I just want to see Winter's Bone pretty bad. Right now no movie measures up to the Hurt Locker though. On the whole, I actually saw very few of the movies I wanted to see. Still have to see Cyrus and the Fighter. Oh, 2010 killed in Documentaries though. Exit through the Gift Shop is probably the best of the decade, and the decade's barely even started yet. The year's been pretty lacking in comedy, though. The Kids Are Alright was... alright.
The year in Kanye West holds its own very well against 2009. A powerful feat indeed, to be discussed in further detail very briefly in the next paragraph.
Music from this year: The-Dream, How to Dress Well, LCD Soundsystem, Janelle Monae, Caribou, Sleigh Bells, Titus Andronicus, James Blake, and Ted Leo make albums of the year (I'll count all his EPs as one thing for James Blake). Kanye's album is also great but far from perfect. I've yet to hear the new Ghostface, Walkmen, or Roots albums to a significant extent though, but those are probably great too. Good year for music. Lil B is more interesting than Drake, whose LP was disappointing, but the jury's out on whether he's actually technically better. Regardless, no new artist from last year is as good as How To Dress Well so that case is closed in favor of 2010.
Music trends from 2008 are still the best. 2009 is even better than 2010, I'd say. Hipster blog-rap going mainstream should probably never happen, but what should never EVER happen is horrible awful absolutely worthless shit like Die Antwood ever breaking out of the landfill. Hopefully that shit's a novelty that'll completely disappear by the end of January and no one will try to copy/emulate them in any way.
My personal year in music kicked rocks. Actually hit my New Year's resolution of 50,000 songs on Thanksgiving Day. Wooooooo. The amount of fantastic bands I discovered this year cannot be quantified, though. The biggest personal musical breakthrough is definitely the "discovery" of jazz. Though I've listened to Miles Davis and Jaco Pastorius here and there in the past, in August the floodgates just goddamn burst. Jazz kicks rocks. Hard bop, bebop, cool, modal, New Orleans and all that old shit, shiiiiiit just about every jazz is good jazz. Even Kenny G. Especially Kenny G.
The biggest star of entertainment this year, however, is probably television.
New shows? One word: Louie.
Discovery of old shows? Two words: The Wire.
So great shit there. Is it time for the month-by-month thing? Eh, okay.
January: This month was pretty shabby. Winter break from college, but instead of seeing my friends I got to see the inside of a hospital, from a hospital bed, since I was in the hospital. Hardcore sinus infection. Shit incapacitated me for two weeks. Heavy stuff. Once I feel better, though, Tufts friends come up and we do a small Northeastern Area road trip. Woooo that was pretty fun.
February: Back to school, did lots of schoolwork. Don't remember much. Took that class "Black Comedy." Shit that class was awesome. Japanese? Ehhh not so much.
March: More generally good times, schoolwork. Was this spring break?
April: If it wasn't, this was spring break. Even more good times. Los Angeles, genuine Mexican food tasted like fake Mexican food except for the stuff that was raw fish or some shit. That stuff tasted GOOD. In'n'Out Burger isn't all it's cracked up to be. Enough talk about Rocket Power to last a lifetime.
May: Finals? The first year draws to a quick close as I rocket my way up from a D- to a C- in Japanese. Kanpai!!!! Also don't remember much about this except general happiness. I should do half-year reviews because I don't remember jack from the first six months.
June: See above. My birthday... IN FRANCE! Yeah, that's where I was from the second week of may until now! In France! Great times had there, except from my awful host family. They sucked enormous amounts of testicles, except for their hot adopted Vietnamese daughter. *growling cat noise* Huge guys, pencil legs, alone in Geneva airport. For more information see here: http://alpaholicsanonymous.blogspot.com/
July: Rebound from France. Boy am I tired! I do nothing all month, basically.
August: I remember that I'm home so I can download music in absurd quantities, so I do that. Jazz is discovered, 3500 songs are obtained. Prepping myself to return to school by visiting Mical a lot instead of doing the thing that makes sense and seeing my home friends a lot. Whoops.
September: School is gone back to, Mical is seen every day since. Everyone lives so far apart though! Damn having to walk to other dorms! Insert link of Ben telling me that I am white and whining. Hey, Ben! Go back to Africa!
October: More work, more play. Halloween! Pretty boring Halloween actually.
November: More play, more work. Go home for Thanksgiving and hit 50,000 songs after an enormous blog splurge on funk gems, dusty grooves, and '70s soundtracks. Don't blame me, blame my professor for introducing me to Philly Soul.
December: I realize far too late I only like one of my four classes. I do a wicked pull-up in Japanese again only to get the mediocre grade I was expecting before the wicked pull-up. A faulty reading of a paper assignment in Psychology completely sabotages both my roommates and my grades, though Black Music is once again my saving grace (let's hope Gay Music keeps up the streak next semester). Word's not in yet on English, yet, though my expectations are upper-to-middle average. So yeah, a meh end to a generally great year.
And even if it did seem somewhat unremarkable for a lot of it, the important thing is that it was good. Seriously, it was good. I haven't felt that generally good for that long since before I even know when. Middle school or some shit, probably, not counting the latter half of 2009.
But do you know who the year wasn't good for? That's right, these dead celebrities! In order of ;__________________;, starting from the weepiest:
Captain Beefheart, Leslie Nielsen, Peter Graves (peter graves AND leslie nielsen?? come on, god!!!), Gary Coleman, Malcom McLaren, Teddy Pendergrass, George Steinbrenner, Dennis Hopper, Tony Curtis, J.D. Salinger, Rue Mclanelanchelanan, Marvin Isley, Solomon Burke, Lena Horne, Harvey Fuqua, Mark Linkous, Barbara Billingsly, Art Linkletter, Greg Giraldo, Ronnie James Dio, Corey Haim, Miep Gies (pffft, like hiding Anne Frank ever made you better than Corey Haim)
...and everyone I made a status about but forgot to include here.
Anyway I had the song "Hold it, Now Hit it" stuck in my head all day so I'm gonna listen to that and go to bed. See y'all at the end of 2011.
So yeah, 2010 topped it. Whatever "it" was.
The Year in Review: Very good. Lots of shit happened. Unlike the transition year of 2009, 2010 was more or less an exercise in solidification, bowdlerization, pontification, and transubstantiation. Damn it was good.
Me from this year: No earth-shattering personal tragedies so that's a definite step up. I lost a pretty close friend but that was mostly his/her fault and not mine. Plus, (s)he was really more of a chore than a friend. Other than that everything is great. Good girlfriend. Lots of sex and all that good stuff, I think. So things going great here.
Movies were also great this year, but not as good as 2009. Black Swan was crazy as shit though it got nearly ruined by the 12 year olds sitting behind us who got grossed out by the masturbation scenes. Inception was also cool; the Social Network was cool too. Cool. Cool year for movies. I haven't seen any of the cold movies though: Winter's Bone, ..., I guess that's it. I just want to see Winter's Bone pretty bad. Right now no movie measures up to the Hurt Locker though. On the whole, I actually saw very few of the movies I wanted to see. Still have to see Cyrus and the Fighter. Oh, 2010 killed in Documentaries though. Exit through the Gift Shop is probably the best of the decade, and the decade's barely even started yet. The year's been pretty lacking in comedy, though. The Kids Are Alright was... alright.
The year in Kanye West holds its own very well against 2009. A powerful feat indeed, to be discussed in further detail very briefly in the next paragraph.
Music from this year: The-Dream, How to Dress Well, LCD Soundsystem, Janelle Monae, Caribou, Sleigh Bells, Titus Andronicus, James Blake, and Ted Leo make albums of the year (I'll count all his EPs as one thing for James Blake). Kanye's album is also great but far from perfect. I've yet to hear the new Ghostface, Walkmen, or Roots albums to a significant extent though, but those are probably great too. Good year for music. Lil B is more interesting than Drake, whose LP was disappointing, but the jury's out on whether he's actually technically better. Regardless, no new artist from last year is as good as How To Dress Well so that case is closed in favor of 2010.
Music trends from 2008 are still the best. 2009 is even better than 2010, I'd say. Hipster blog-rap going mainstream should probably never happen, but what should never EVER happen is horrible awful absolutely worthless shit like Die Antwood ever breaking out of the landfill. Hopefully that shit's a novelty that'll completely disappear by the end of January and no one will try to copy/emulate them in any way.
My personal year in music kicked rocks. Actually hit my New Year's resolution of 50,000 songs on Thanksgiving Day. Wooooooo. The amount of fantastic bands I discovered this year cannot be quantified, though. The biggest personal musical breakthrough is definitely the "discovery" of jazz. Though I've listened to Miles Davis and Jaco Pastorius here and there in the past, in August the floodgates just goddamn burst. Jazz kicks rocks. Hard bop, bebop, cool, modal, New Orleans and all that old shit, shiiiiiit just about every jazz is good jazz. Even Kenny G. Especially Kenny G.
The biggest star of entertainment this year, however, is probably television.
New shows? One word: Louie.
Discovery of old shows? Two words: The Wire.
So great shit there. Is it time for the month-by-month thing? Eh, okay.
January: This month was pretty shabby. Winter break from college, but instead of seeing my friends I got to see the inside of a hospital, from a hospital bed, since I was in the hospital. Hardcore sinus infection. Shit incapacitated me for two weeks. Heavy stuff. Once I feel better, though, Tufts friends come up and we do a small Northeastern Area road trip. Woooo that was pretty fun.
February: Back to school, did lots of schoolwork. Don't remember much. Took that class "Black Comedy." Shit that class was awesome. Japanese? Ehhh not so much.
March: More generally good times, schoolwork. Was this spring break?
April: If it wasn't, this was spring break. Even more good times. Los Angeles, genuine Mexican food tasted like fake Mexican food except for the stuff that was raw fish or some shit. That stuff tasted GOOD. In'n'Out Burger isn't all it's cracked up to be. Enough talk about Rocket Power to last a lifetime.
May: Finals? The first year draws to a quick close as I rocket my way up from a D- to a C- in Japanese. Kanpai!!!! Also don't remember much about this except general happiness. I should do half-year reviews because I don't remember jack from the first six months.
June: See above. My birthday... IN FRANCE! Yeah, that's where I was from the second week of may until now! In France! Great times had there, except from my awful host family. They sucked enormous amounts of testicles, except for their hot adopted Vietnamese daughter. *growling cat noise* Huge guys, pencil legs, alone in Geneva airport. For more information see here: http://alpaholicsanonymous.blogspot.com/
July: Rebound from France. Boy am I tired! I do nothing all month, basically.
August: I remember that I'm home so I can download music in absurd quantities, so I do that. Jazz is discovered, 3500 songs are obtained. Prepping myself to return to school by visiting Mical a lot instead of doing the thing that makes sense and seeing my home friends a lot. Whoops.
September: School is gone back to, Mical is seen every day since. Everyone lives so far apart though! Damn having to walk to other dorms! Insert link of Ben telling me that I am white and whining. Hey, Ben! Go back to Africa!
October: More work, more play. Halloween! Pretty boring Halloween actually.
November: More play, more work. Go home for Thanksgiving and hit 50,000 songs after an enormous blog splurge on funk gems, dusty grooves, and '70s soundtracks. Don't blame me, blame my professor for introducing me to Philly Soul.
December: I realize far too late I only like one of my four classes. I do a wicked pull-up in Japanese again only to get the mediocre grade I was expecting before the wicked pull-up. A faulty reading of a paper assignment in Psychology completely sabotages both my roommates and my grades, though Black Music is once again my saving grace (let's hope Gay Music keeps up the streak next semester). Word's not in yet on English, yet, though my expectations are upper-to-middle average. So yeah, a meh end to a generally great year.
And even if it did seem somewhat unremarkable for a lot of it, the important thing is that it was good. Seriously, it was good. I haven't felt that generally good for that long since before I even know when. Middle school or some shit, probably, not counting the latter half of 2009.
But do you know who the year wasn't good for? That's right, these dead celebrities! In order of ;__________________;, starting from the weepiest:
Captain Beefheart, Leslie Nielsen, Peter Graves (peter graves AND leslie nielsen?? come on, god!!!), Gary Coleman, Malcom McLaren, Teddy Pendergrass, George Steinbrenner, Dennis Hopper, Tony Curtis, J.D. Salinger, Rue Mclanelanchelanan, Marvin Isley, Solomon Burke, Lena Horne, Harvey Fuqua, Mark Linkous, Barbara Billingsly, Art Linkletter, Greg Giraldo, Ronnie James Dio, Corey Haim, Miep Gies (pffft, like hiding Anne Frank ever made you better than Corey Haim)
...and everyone I made a status about but forgot to include here.
Anyway I had the song "Hold it, Now Hit it" stuck in my head all day so I'm gonna listen to that and go to bed. See y'all at the end of 2011.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Wooooooo
So I've been complaining lately about stuff like comets (see: two posts before entitled "Poetry" it's a pretty good read) but I'd just like to say for the record that I was kidding about all of that. Comets are cool and should not be judged.
Monday, November 8, 2010
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
The Case for Similes
Since I don't want to clog the newly co-blogged Thinkin', I'll post the rebuttal examples to my initial anti-simile post right hurr:
1. "I can make that pussy whistle like the Andy Griffith theme song." - Drake, Best I Ever Had
Straight-up one of the best lines of braggadocio in rap history. Nothing says sexual talent like pleasuring a woman so exquisitely that her vagina begins to mimic a classic television theme song. And he does all of this despite not wearing a shirt with stripes, too!
2. "She rockin' that shit like." - The-Dream, Rockin' that Shit
The-Dream's concept of love and beauty is so grand and mysterious that the entire concept of comparing it to anything else at all eludes him. Oh The-Dream, you sentimental slut, you.
3. "If you like it then you should have put a ring on it." - Beyonce, All the Single Ladies
Beyonce brazenly displays her fetish in her hit single with glorious feminine bravado: if you bear resemblance to her hand, then perhaps you ought to marry her.
1. "I can make that pussy whistle like the Andy Griffith theme song." - Drake, Best I Ever Had
Straight-up one of the best lines of braggadocio in rap history. Nothing says sexual talent like pleasuring a woman so exquisitely that her vagina begins to mimic a classic television theme song. And he does all of this despite not wearing a shirt with stripes, too!
2. "She rockin' that shit like." - The-Dream, Rockin' that Shit
The-Dream's concept of love and beauty is so grand and mysterious that the entire concept of comparing it to anything else at all eludes him. Oh The-Dream, you sentimental slut, you.
3. "If you like it then you should have put a ring on it." - Beyonce, All the Single Ladies
Beyonce brazenly displays her fetish in her hit single with glorious feminine bravado: if you bear resemblance to her hand, then perhaps you ought to marry her.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
2009 in review: A sexy, sexier year than 2008?
On December 30th, 2008, I came to the realization that things couldn't get much worse and made it my resolution to make sure that 2009 would make up for it by being the best year ever.
Wouldn't you know it, out of the shitstorm emerged a brilliant rainbow!
Well, not too brilliant. At many points in the year, the silver lining was thin around the edges of intimidatingly dark clouds. Yeah, the tragedy was bad, but out of loss emerged catharsis. This might be a personal belief, but I find loss, in some morbid ways, preferable to lingering waiting and uncertainty.
Anyway, that aside, 2009 was really about growth and change. We got a black president, he does some changes, people think it's okay but not really Jesus. Disappointment? Not for me! I stopped caring about politics long ago, and stopped thinking that Obama would be Jesus not too soon after that. In the beginning, shit really sucked, but things are actually getting better with the economy and all that. Can't really judge the status of the world all too much, as it fell of my radar since I've gone to college, but I'd say it made a definite huge step up from 2008.
This year in movies was also great, and a huge improvement on 2008. It wasn't quite as good as 2006 or 2007, but it has its share of greats: Adventureland makes all other teen comedies of the decade look like shit; In The Loop and The Hangover are two of the best comedies of the decade; Up nearly equals last year's Wall-E; David Bowie's son made the fantastic sci-fi thriller Moon; lastly but the opposite of leastly, The Hurt Locker is released and quickly becomes one of the most awesome movies ever made and is hopefully going to win every Oscar available (fuck Avatar). Also, I heard Star Trek and Precious and Zombieland and some other things were good too.
My personal year in music sorta sucked because I lost my iPod. On the other hand, while I was predominantly an ironic hipster in 2008, I grew to separate my ironies from my taste in 2009, resulting in a great expansion of taste and appreciation. I finally began to unironically appreciate Sean Paul, Paramore, and other pop artists. Plus, my work as a hip-hop DJ at Tufts' WMFO Medford resulted in much more exploration into hip-hop as a genre and culture.
But enough about me, music in 2009 stacks up to roughly equal footing as music in 2008. For debuts, 2009 is a narrow winner in my eyes: 2009 had the xx and Japandroids, while 2008 had Vampire Weekend and Titus Andronicus. For trends, however, 2008 wins: Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver's beard-and-plaid forest hipster clearly tops 2009's meager doped-up "chillwave" hipster. Additionally, hard rockers Baroness and Them Crooked Vultures fail to be quite as heavy as Harvey Milk or Torche. 2009 emerges superior in most other categories: Raekwon and Anti-Pop Consortium clearly top Lil' Wayne in hip-hop; The Bug created the perfect mix of dancehall and dubstep, though the genre only got big in 2009; Cold Cave and Passion Pit create a new standard for electropop with their stunning debut LPs.
As for 2009 in art, I have no idea.
Same goes for sports and NASCAR. I didn't watch much this year except for baseball, and the good news is that the Mets didn't fall apart nearly as badly as they did last time, but that was mostly because they did so poorly that a falling apart wasn't really necessary. Oh well, that still isn't so humiliating, at least.
The year in Kanye West in comparison to last year is quite intriguing. While 808s and Heartbreaks was the biggest sonic embarrassment of his career, West personally topped it in 2009 with a drunken rant at the... well, y'all know the story. That said, 808s is still horrible.
This year in myself, however, is fantastic. 2008 saw my destruction and 2009 begat my rebirth. The last few months of high school were the best I ever had (also, I forgot to mention Drake! Drake rules! hard!) and the few after graduation were the most fun and enlightening of, well, my life. Still, it all sucks compared to college. Well, not really, but college rules. But that summer ruled too. But college is the best probably. In short, a 2009 timeline:
January: New Years, resolve to improve self and year. Hooked up with ugly girl in fantastic bonding exercise with Ben. Possibly not the best, but certainly most memorable new year!
February: After getting deferred from Penn, anxious about college. Don't remember much else. More or less a filler month.
March: Model congress, mostly, I think. Visiting colleges, too, maybe. Starting to get pretty happy, but still quite anxious.
April: Got into college! Goin' around and visiting them. Had the best time at Wesleyan, but got the most out of my visit to Tufts, so I choose to go there. Gave the middle finger to Northwestern (which would later turn out to be an awesome decision, because Matt Renick also goes there!)
May: The timeless Championship Blacket sublimely caps off my high school career. Lots of tomfoolery, bonding, and playful hatred of my teachers. Started writing for the 405 and this blog.
June: I realize that, for the first time since 2006, I am actually completely happy for an extended period of time. Many, many personal revelations made. Also, Michael Jackson dies.
July: I am shocked to realize that I am still happy, but something is still missing. Slightly anxious about college, missing friends. Downloaded a LOT of music to prep for college.
August: I make the absolute most out of my home friendships, but spent some time maybe regretting not choosing Wesleyan instead. All of that was negligible compared to the amount of happiness I had, which culminated into the grand Trapped in the Closet farewell party.
September: Turns out I love Tufts. I make best friends and realize that they are the best. Early doubts quickly and completely evaporate. I am happy and reinvented, but there is still something missing.
October: A blackout. I realize how happy I've been when I am suddenly not happy for the week following the blackout. Sweet relief and return to happiness the week after.
November: Any notion of "something missing" evaporates as I get involved in my first and best official relationship since turning Kimberly Heater into a lesbian in the second grade.
December: Romance, satisfaction, and a 13 page paper that holds my potential B+/A- average in limbo. Happiness slightly marred by a brief trip to the hospital and the lengthy sickness that came out of it.
Lastly, we examine the most important criteria for the success of a year, and by far the category that 2009 has excelled the most in, with spades, flying colors, and all that jazz: Notable deaths. Ricardo Montalban, Walter Cronkite, Dom DeLouise, DJ AM, Bea Arthur, Billy Mays, Brittany Murphy, David Carradine, Ed McMahon, John Hughes, Les Paul, Mary Travers, Captain Lou Albano, Robert Novak, Patrick Swayze, Soupy Sales, Steve McNair, and Ted Kennedy. All that's left is the final masterstroke of Rush Limbaugh, who had 21 hours left to kick the bucket. Go for it, Rushie!
All in all, a good year. Good for the arts, good for me, and good for celebrity morticians. Better than 2008? Yep! That much better? Yeah! THAT much better? OF COURSE! 2009 WAS THE BEST YEAR THAT I CAN REMEMBER!
Here's to hoping that 2010 can only top it!
Wouldn't you know it, out of the shitstorm emerged a brilliant rainbow!
Well, not too brilliant. At many points in the year, the silver lining was thin around the edges of intimidatingly dark clouds. Yeah, the tragedy was bad, but out of loss emerged catharsis. This might be a personal belief, but I find loss, in some morbid ways, preferable to lingering waiting and uncertainty.
Anyway, that aside, 2009 was really about growth and change. We got a black president, he does some changes, people think it's okay but not really Jesus. Disappointment? Not for me! I stopped caring about politics long ago, and stopped thinking that Obama would be Jesus not too soon after that. In the beginning, shit really sucked, but things are actually getting better with the economy and all that. Can't really judge the status of the world all too much, as it fell of my radar since I've gone to college, but I'd say it made a definite huge step up from 2008.
This year in movies was also great, and a huge improvement on 2008. It wasn't quite as good as 2006 or 2007, but it has its share of greats: Adventureland makes all other teen comedies of the decade look like shit; In The Loop and The Hangover are two of the best comedies of the decade; Up nearly equals last year's Wall-E; David Bowie's son made the fantastic sci-fi thriller Moon; lastly but the opposite of leastly, The Hurt Locker is released and quickly becomes one of the most awesome movies ever made and is hopefully going to win every Oscar available (fuck Avatar). Also, I heard Star Trek and Precious and Zombieland and some other things were good too.
My personal year in music sorta sucked because I lost my iPod. On the other hand, while I was predominantly an ironic hipster in 2008, I grew to separate my ironies from my taste in 2009, resulting in a great expansion of taste and appreciation. I finally began to unironically appreciate Sean Paul, Paramore, and other pop artists. Plus, my work as a hip-hop DJ at Tufts' WMFO Medford resulted in much more exploration into hip-hop as a genre and culture.
But enough about me, music in 2009 stacks up to roughly equal footing as music in 2008. For debuts, 2009 is a narrow winner in my eyes: 2009 had the xx and Japandroids, while 2008 had Vampire Weekend and Titus Andronicus. For trends, however, 2008 wins: Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver's beard-and-plaid forest hipster clearly tops 2009's meager doped-up "chillwave" hipster. Additionally, hard rockers Baroness and Them Crooked Vultures fail to be quite as heavy as Harvey Milk or Torche. 2009 emerges superior in most other categories: Raekwon and Anti-Pop Consortium clearly top Lil' Wayne in hip-hop; The Bug created the perfect mix of dancehall and dubstep, though the genre only got big in 2009; Cold Cave and Passion Pit create a new standard for electropop with their stunning debut LPs.
As for 2009 in art, I have no idea.
Same goes for sports and NASCAR. I didn't watch much this year except for baseball, and the good news is that the Mets didn't fall apart nearly as badly as they did last time, but that was mostly because they did so poorly that a falling apart wasn't really necessary. Oh well, that still isn't so humiliating, at least.
The year in Kanye West in comparison to last year is quite intriguing. While 808s and Heartbreaks was the biggest sonic embarrassment of his career, West personally topped it in 2009 with a drunken rant at the... well, y'all know the story. That said, 808s is still horrible.
This year in myself, however, is fantastic. 2008 saw my destruction and 2009 begat my rebirth. The last few months of high school were the best I ever had (also, I forgot to mention Drake! Drake rules! hard!) and the few after graduation were the most fun and enlightening of, well, my life. Still, it all sucks compared to college. Well, not really, but college rules. But that summer ruled too. But college is the best probably. In short, a 2009 timeline:
January: New Years, resolve to improve self and year. Hooked up with ugly girl in fantastic bonding exercise with Ben. Possibly not the best, but certainly most memorable new year!
February: After getting deferred from Penn, anxious about college. Don't remember much else. More or less a filler month.
March: Model congress, mostly, I think. Visiting colleges, too, maybe. Starting to get pretty happy, but still quite anxious.
April: Got into college! Goin' around and visiting them. Had the best time at Wesleyan, but got the most out of my visit to Tufts, so I choose to go there. Gave the middle finger to Northwestern (which would later turn out to be an awesome decision, because Matt Renick also goes there!)
May: The timeless Championship Blacket sublimely caps off my high school career. Lots of tomfoolery, bonding, and playful hatred of my teachers. Started writing for the 405 and this blog.
June: I realize that, for the first time since 2006, I am actually completely happy for an extended period of time. Many, many personal revelations made. Also, Michael Jackson dies.
July: I am shocked to realize that I am still happy, but something is still missing. Slightly anxious about college, missing friends. Downloaded a LOT of music to prep for college.
August: I make the absolute most out of my home friendships, but spent some time maybe regretting not choosing Wesleyan instead. All of that was negligible compared to the amount of happiness I had, which culminated into the grand Trapped in the Closet farewell party.
September: Turns out I love Tufts. I make best friends and realize that they are the best. Early doubts quickly and completely evaporate. I am happy and reinvented, but there is still something missing.
October: A blackout. I realize how happy I've been when I am suddenly not happy for the week following the blackout. Sweet relief and return to happiness the week after.
November: Any notion of "something missing" evaporates as I get involved in my first and best official relationship since turning Kimberly Heater into a lesbian in the second grade.
December: Romance, satisfaction, and a 13 page paper that holds my potential B+/A- average in limbo. Happiness slightly marred by a brief trip to the hospital and the lengthy sickness that came out of it.
Lastly, we examine the most important criteria for the success of a year, and by far the category that 2009 has excelled the most in, with spades, flying colors, and all that jazz: Notable deaths. Ricardo Montalban, Walter Cronkite, Dom DeLouise, DJ AM, Bea Arthur, Billy Mays, Brittany Murphy, David Carradine, Ed McMahon, John Hughes, Les Paul, Mary Travers, Captain Lou Albano, Robert Novak, Patrick Swayze, Soupy Sales, Steve McNair, and Ted Kennedy. All that's left is the final masterstroke of Rush Limbaugh, who had 21 hours left to kick the bucket. Go for it, Rushie!
All in all, a good year. Good for the arts, good for me, and good for celebrity morticians. Better than 2008? Yep! That much better? Yeah! THAT much better? OF COURSE! 2009 WAS THE BEST YEAR THAT I CAN REMEMBER!
Here's to hoping that 2010 can only top it!
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Another pitchfork obsession post
Gonna keep it brief this time. Sorta. I need my sleep. Hardly been getting any lately, anyway.
This time Pitchfork's down to the last 20 albums, like they were before with songs. My predictions/analysis:
My Predictions for Their List, in mostly no order:
1. Radiohead - Kid A. They love this album so much, you'd think they made it themselves. Which they probably wish they did. Why do they love it? Because it's the future! If they don't put it at number one, I will not only be surprised, but also pleased. It's a great album and all, but it's as overrated as, well, Radiohead.
2. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion. See above, more or less. 'Cept they'll probably put this 'round two or three, and instead of imagining that the album captures the dark, nebulous spirit of the post-9/11 Bushocalypse (like Kid A), it embodies the fleeting optimism that guides the noble caucasian american soul through the economic Barackalypse (like they said in the "My Girls" blurb).
3. The Arcade Fire - Funeral. To Pitchfork's credit, they practically did create this album. It would make sense to put it up here, seeing as they gave it a future and all.
4. Outkast - Stankonia. 'Cause there's gotta one album by black people up here, y'know.
5. Kanye West - Late Registration. Scratch that. Two albums by black people.
6. Modest Mouse - The Moon and Antarctica. The defining album of the most defining band of the most poorly defined genre. Also the second album of real music that I ever listened to. Should be number one, but eh, whaddyagunnado?
7. Sigur Ros - Agaetis Byrjun. The album that created the meta-hipster term "post-rock." That nagging albatross ought to push it down a few rungs, but it's still a beautiful, beautiful album. Deserves the top 10 spot it's probably going to get.
8. Jay-Z - The Blueprint. When you see this many black people getting together on a list, you know something's up. Better call the police just to make sure.
9. The Avalanches - Since I Left You. Oh my god this is the best album. I love it! They love it! What could go wrong!
10. Interpol - Turn on the Bright Lights. Call me crazy, but I like Antics better. They don't. And this is going to be their list. So there.
11. Daft Punk - Discovery. Okay fuck what I said about the Moon and Antarctica this is number one okay thanks bye now.
12. Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. 'Cause Pitchfork likes to pretend that this album matters.
13. Sound of Silver - LCD Soundsystem. Good album. Gonna be up there. Not much more to say about that.
14. Strawberry Jam - Animal Collective. Try to convince me that Pitchfork is going to get away with not putting two Animal Collective albums in the top 20. Just try. Ten dollars say that they're gonna throw in an EP up there too. Also, Danse Manatee.
15. Panda Bear - Person Pitch. ...or maybe they'll just put this solo project all up in the list instead.
16. The Knife - Silent Shout. 16 seems like a fitting place for this album, too.
17. Sufjan Stevens - Illinois. The guy and his album that redefined college rock for good, and also for better. Kudos, Sufjan!
18. The Books - The Lemon of Pink. It's okay. They like it. It'll probably be here at some low number. Like 18.
19. Boris - Pink. This is a stretch, but they oughta put another Boris album on the list. They liked this better than Akuma No Uta, anyway. Also, it'll put the predicted number of "Pink" albums up to 2, and that is never a bad thing either.
20. Brian Wilson - Smile. Might as well, amirite?
And now, my completely unrealistic hopes:
1. Daft Punk - Discovery
2. Modest Mouse - Moon + Antarctica
3. The Avalanches - Since I Left You
4. Louis Logic - Sin-A-Matic (it is the best rap album ever shut up already)
5. Interpol - Antics
6. Jay-Z - The Blueprint
7. Japandroids - Post-Nothing
8. Harvey Milk - Life... the Best Game in Town
9. Boris - Heavy Rocks
10. TV on the Radio - Young Liars EP
11. The Unicorns - Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?
12. The Arcade Fire - Funeral
13. Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam
14. Sound of Silver - LCD Soundsystem
15. Louis Logic -Misery Loves Comedy
16. Sigur Ros - Agaetis Byrjun
17. Thao - We Brave Bee Stings and All
18. Tobacco - Fucked Up Friends
19. Gorillaz - Demon Days (shut up)
20. Tim & Eric - Awesome Record, Great Songs! (shut up shut up shut up it is the catchiest album I have ever heard and ever will hear shut up go away)
Fuck all that was too long and took too long. Sorry I wasn't witty. I don't need to be witty. Fuck that sounded pretentious. I am sorry. I love you, internet reader. Please forgive me. You know how I am about stuff like this. Peace.
ps: i love you. also im gay.
This time Pitchfork's down to the last 20 albums, like they were before with songs. My predictions/analysis:
My Predictions for Their List, in mostly no order:
1. Radiohead - Kid A. They love this album so much, you'd think they made it themselves. Which they probably wish they did. Why do they love it? Because it's the future! If they don't put it at number one, I will not only be surprised, but also pleased. It's a great album and all, but it's as overrated as, well, Radiohead.
2. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion. See above, more or less. 'Cept they'll probably put this 'round two or three, and instead of imagining that the album captures the dark, nebulous spirit of the post-9/11 Bushocalypse (like Kid A), it embodies the fleeting optimism that guides the noble caucasian american soul through the economic Barackalypse (like they said in the "My Girls" blurb).
3. The Arcade Fire - Funeral. To Pitchfork's credit, they practically did create this album. It would make sense to put it up here, seeing as they gave it a future and all.
4. Outkast - Stankonia. 'Cause there's gotta one album by black people up here, y'know.
5. Kanye West - Late Registration. Scratch that. Two albums by black people.
6. Modest Mouse - The Moon and Antarctica. The defining album of the most defining band of the most poorly defined genre. Also the second album of real music that I ever listened to. Should be number one, but eh, whaddyagunnado?
7. Sigur Ros - Agaetis Byrjun. The album that created the meta-hipster term "post-rock." That nagging albatross ought to push it down a few rungs, but it's still a beautiful, beautiful album. Deserves the top 10 spot it's probably going to get.
8. Jay-Z - The Blueprint. When you see this many black people getting together on a list, you know something's up. Better call the police just to make sure.
9. The Avalanches - Since I Left You. Oh my god this is the best album. I love it! They love it! What could go wrong!
10. Interpol - Turn on the Bright Lights. Call me crazy, but I like Antics better. They don't. And this is going to be their list. So there.
11. Daft Punk - Discovery. Okay fuck what I said about the Moon and Antarctica this is number one okay thanks bye now.
12. Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. 'Cause Pitchfork likes to pretend that this album matters.
13. Sound of Silver - LCD Soundsystem. Good album. Gonna be up there. Not much more to say about that.
14. Strawberry Jam - Animal Collective. Try to convince me that Pitchfork is going to get away with not putting two Animal Collective albums in the top 20. Just try. Ten dollars say that they're gonna throw in an EP up there too. Also, Danse Manatee.
15. Panda Bear - Person Pitch. ...or maybe they'll just put this solo project all up in the list instead.
16. The Knife - Silent Shout. 16 seems like a fitting place for this album, too.
17. Sufjan Stevens - Illinois. The guy and his album that redefined college rock for good, and also for better. Kudos, Sufjan!
18. The Books - The Lemon of Pink. It's okay. They like it. It'll probably be here at some low number. Like 18.
19. Boris - Pink. This is a stretch, but they oughta put another Boris album on the list. They liked this better than Akuma No Uta, anyway. Also, it'll put the predicted number of "Pink" albums up to 2, and that is never a bad thing either.
20. Brian Wilson - Smile. Might as well, amirite?
And now, my completely unrealistic hopes:
1. Daft Punk - Discovery
2. Modest Mouse - Moon + Antarctica
3. The Avalanches - Since I Left You
4. Louis Logic - Sin-A-Matic (it is the best rap album ever shut up already)
5. Interpol - Antics
6. Jay-Z - The Blueprint
7. Japandroids - Post-Nothing
8. Harvey Milk - Life... the Best Game in Town
9. Boris - Heavy Rocks
10. TV on the Radio - Young Liars EP
11. The Unicorns - Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?
12. The Arcade Fire - Funeral
13. Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam
14. Sound of Silver - LCD Soundsystem
15. Louis Logic -Misery Loves Comedy
16. Sigur Ros - Agaetis Byrjun
17. Thao - We Brave Bee Stings and All
18. Tobacco - Fucked Up Friends
19. Gorillaz - Demon Days (shut up)
20. Tim & Eric - Awesome Record, Great Songs! (shut up shut up shut up it is the catchiest album I have ever heard and ever will hear shut up go away)
Fuck all that was too long and took too long. Sorry I wasn't witty. I don't need to be witty. Fuck that sounded pretentious. I am sorry. I love you, internet reader. Please forgive me. You know how I am about stuff like this. Peace.
ps: i love you. also im gay.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Fuck grammar!
Yeah, I said it. Grammar, one of the key underlying fundamentals of the English language, can go fuck itself. It's completely pointless, seeing as the "rules" of grammar can be easily broken while still maintaining an appropriate level of understanding. For example, take this sentence with "bad grammar":
I ain't learned no writing in English never before.
Now, to the typical grammar prude, this sentence would be laughably self-referential, since it's quite clear that the person who wrote it doesn't know much about the English rules of grammar. The humor is derived from realizing the writer's intentions, however, which not only makes the sentence clearly understandable with bad grammar, it also makes it hilarious. Now, take this sentence with normal grammar:
I never learned how to write in English.
Not only is this sentence correctly constructed and free of triple negatives, it's also a blatant fucking lie! Of course this person knows how to write in English, they just parsed a sentence completely free of grammatical errors. Can't get that shit done in babelfish. Unfunny and just as understandable, correct grammar only detracts from this sentence.
In summation: mistakes in grammar are hilarious and not bad at all. And no, this was NOT just a way to cover my ass for realizing that I said "your" instead of "you're" and "is" instead of "are" in a couple of my posts. This was intended for humor as well as retroactive ass-covering.
I ain't learned no writing in English never before.
Now, to the typical grammar prude, this sentence would be laughably self-referential, since it's quite clear that the person who wrote it doesn't know much about the English rules of grammar. The humor is derived from realizing the writer's intentions, however, which not only makes the sentence clearly understandable with bad grammar, it also makes it hilarious. Now, take this sentence with normal grammar:
I never learned how to write in English.
Not only is this sentence correctly constructed and free of triple negatives, it's also a blatant fucking lie! Of course this person knows how to write in English, they just parsed a sentence completely free of grammatical errors. Can't get that shit done in babelfish. Unfunny and just as understandable, correct grammar only detracts from this sentence.
In summation: mistakes in grammar are hilarious and not bad at all. And no, this was NOT just a way to cover my ass for realizing that I said "your" instead of "you're" and "is" instead of "are" in a couple of my posts. This was intended for humor as well as retroactive ass-covering.
A series of things come together at this exact moment to form this blog post
The things:
1. It's 3:30 AM and I can't sleep
2. I spent the last hour re-reading the Pitchfork 500 tracks of the decade list, sans the unreleased top 20
3. I am a music nerd and I love making lists, hence this list right here and that music nerd behavior above
This post:
1. An introduction list, describing the circumstances
2. This current list, detailing the contents of the post
3. A series of lists containing my predictions for the top 20 songs of the decade, as prematurely decided by pitchfork prior to the actual end of the decade.
So now that the formalities are out of the way, I present my ideas for what the top 20 will be. Of course, I will inevitably be proven horribly wrong in about 21 hours, but until then, I will have my fun. This first list contains the songs that I definitely know Pitchfork will put in because they're Pitchfork (in no particular order):
1. My Girls by Animal Collective. If Jesus Christ had risen from the dead on the release date of Merriweather Post Pavilion, Ryan Schreiber wouldn't have noticed. My Girls is the instantly recognizable single from the band's poppy magnum opus (or magnum "poppus", I should say, heh heh heh :smug: ) and will definitely get mentioned. If it doesn't get a spot on the list, then it'll be Summertime Clothes instead, since it's actually better, anyway.
2. 99 Problems by Jay-Z. This song is not-so-mysteriously absent from the developed list of 500-21, so i fully expect it to take its rightful place in the top 20. If it should happen that Pitchfork has 499 songs and 99 Problems ain't one, then something is terribly wrong with this list.
3 and 4. B.O.B and Hey Ya by Outkast. Like Pitchfork said on the half-year list, they're the best songs ever. Pitchfork was right. Both should be up there somewhere, if not all the way at the top again (I can't think of anything from the latter half of the decade that could overtake it, except maybe...)
5. All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem. If I recall correctly, Pitchfork (and a great deal of other people) are not hesitant to call this song the anthem of the generation, a full-fledged emotionally crippling bildungsromen packed into the span of seven and a half minutes, and a sonic retelling of The Graduate. Maybe not the last one. It'll definitely be there, though, and I'd put money on a top 5 spot too.
6. Get Your Freak On by Missy Elliott. See its position on the half-year list. Also, see introducing women into the rap game (fuck Lauryn Hill! (just kidding, Lauryn Hill rules))
7. Paper Planes by M.I.A. Slumdog Millionaire winning Best Picture solidified this song's imminent spot in the Top 10.
8. One More Time by Daft Punk. This is a maybe-probably-definitely, since Digital Love placed very high in the 20s, and I think that placed higher than One More Time in the half-year list, but it's just a disgrace to finish the list without this song getting its props.
9. Maps by Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It's Maps, it was 10 on the half-year list, it's absent so far, so it's gotta be there somewhere. I'm rather lukewarm on the song, but this list is my prediction of pitchfork's opinions, not mine. I'll save my opinions for another list.
10. Heartbeat by Annie. See above.
11. Ignition (Remix) by R Kelly. This is just the best song. But don't let me tell you why, let John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats tell you why.
12. Blind by Hercules and Love Affair. It finished first on the end-of-2008 list, it's the Pitchfork-proclaimed "rebirth of a genre", and a pretty damn good song to boot. Pitchfork would be remiss if they didn't include this.
13. House of Jealous Lovers by The Rapture. I have my doubts about this one, given the speed with which Pitchfork abandoned the dance-punk ship and kicked The Rapture's stature down a couple dozen notches on the half-year list, but I wouldn't count this entirely out yet, since the list hasn't mentioned "dance-punk" 150 times yet.
Then there's the list of bands that Pitchfork will probably namedrop in the top 20, but I can't think of a specific song to predict:
1. Another song by Animal Collective besides My Girls/Summertime Clothes. Maybe it'll be both. Or, if they want to pick a better song, it'll be Guys Eyes or Brother Sport. Or, if they want to pick something from the past, it'll be Peacebone or Who Could Win a Rabbit?
2. Something else from Kid A. They fucking love that piece of shit. I say it'll be Idiotheque, because that's the only one I can name off the top of my head.
3. Something by Interpol, probably PDA or Specialist.
4. Something else from The Moon and Antarctica, but 3rd Planet placed pretty low, so I wouldn't really count on it. One could hope for Tiny Cities Made of Ashes or Stars are Projectors
5. Something else from LCD Soundsystem will definitely be there, but it'll be really crowded if they included Yeah, Beat Connection, Losing My Edge, AND All My Friends in the top 20.
And, lastly, here are the ones that they should just add because I like them and cannot believe they have not been mentioned yet:
1. Useful Chamber by Dirty Projectors. Stillness is the Move got a nod, but this one did not. That's a little unbalanced, considering that Useful Chamber is just as good and has bigger name/hype recognition.
2. Stan by Eminem. They've included about a half dozen Em songs up to this point, but they failed to mention the song that made him a critical star? How could you, Pitchfork! Fix this at once! D:
3. The Rat by The Walkmen. They mentioned In the New Year at a low spot in the 500 and gave this song a high spot in the end-of-the-year list. That said, it's also by far the greatest song The Walkmen ever made or will ever make. But where the hell is it?
4. Wham City by Dan Deacon. This is so much better than The Crystal Cat, which already got a mention. Also, it's so much better than any other hipster-dance-pop song that has ever been released.
5. Frontier Psychiatrist by The Avalanches. How bitchin' would it be if this was in the top 10? Yeah. Hella bitchin.
Well, that took me a long time to write, and I guess I'm pretty tired now that I've vented a bit and got all dem lists outta my system. Now time to wait and see how much of a fortune teller I actually am.
1. It's 3:30 AM and I can't sleep
2. I spent the last hour re-reading the Pitchfork 500 tracks of the decade list, sans the unreleased top 20
3. I am a music nerd and I love making lists, hence this list right here and that music nerd behavior above
This post:
1. An introduction list, describing the circumstances
2. This current list, detailing the contents of the post
3. A series of lists containing my predictions for the top 20 songs of the decade, as prematurely decided by pitchfork prior to the actual end of the decade.
So now that the formalities are out of the way, I present my ideas for what the top 20 will be. Of course, I will inevitably be proven horribly wrong in about 21 hours, but until then, I will have my fun. This first list contains the songs that I definitely know Pitchfork will put in because they're Pitchfork (in no particular order):
1. My Girls by Animal Collective. If Jesus Christ had risen from the dead on the release date of Merriweather Post Pavilion, Ryan Schreiber wouldn't have noticed. My Girls is the instantly recognizable single from the band's poppy magnum opus (or magnum "poppus", I should say, heh heh heh :smug: ) and will definitely get mentioned. If it doesn't get a spot on the list, then it'll be Summertime Clothes instead, since it's actually better, anyway.
2. 99 Problems by Jay-Z. This song is not-so-mysteriously absent from the developed list of 500-21, so i fully expect it to take its rightful place in the top 20. If it should happen that Pitchfork has 499 songs and 99 Problems ain't one, then something is terribly wrong with this list.
3 and 4. B.O.B and Hey Ya by Outkast. Like Pitchfork said on the half-year list, they're the best songs ever. Pitchfork was right. Both should be up there somewhere, if not all the way at the top again (I can't think of anything from the latter half of the decade that could overtake it, except maybe...)
5. All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem. If I recall correctly, Pitchfork (and a great deal of other people) are not hesitant to call this song the anthem of the generation, a full-fledged emotionally crippling bildungsromen packed into the span of seven and a half minutes, and a sonic retelling of The Graduate. Maybe not the last one. It'll definitely be there, though, and I'd put money on a top 5 spot too.
6. Get Your Freak On by Missy Elliott. See its position on the half-year list. Also, see introducing women into the rap game (fuck Lauryn Hill! (just kidding, Lauryn Hill rules))
7. Paper Planes by M.I.A. Slumdog Millionaire winning Best Picture solidified this song's imminent spot in the Top 10.
8. One More Time by Daft Punk. This is a maybe-probably-definitely, since Digital Love placed very high in the 20s, and I think that placed higher than One More Time in the half-year list, but it's just a disgrace to finish the list without this song getting its props.
9. Maps by Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It's Maps, it was 10 on the half-year list, it's absent so far, so it's gotta be there somewhere. I'm rather lukewarm on the song, but this list is my prediction of pitchfork's opinions, not mine. I'll save my opinions for another list.
10. Heartbeat by Annie. See above.
11. Ignition (Remix) by R Kelly. This is just the best song. But don't let me tell you why, let John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats tell you why.
12. Blind by Hercules and Love Affair. It finished first on the end-of-2008 list, it's the Pitchfork-proclaimed "rebirth of a genre", and a pretty damn good song to boot. Pitchfork would be remiss if they didn't include this.
13. House of Jealous Lovers by The Rapture. I have my doubts about this one, given the speed with which Pitchfork abandoned the dance-punk ship and kicked The Rapture's stature down a couple dozen notches on the half-year list, but I wouldn't count this entirely out yet, since the list hasn't mentioned "dance-punk" 150 times yet.
Then there's the list of bands that Pitchfork will probably namedrop in the top 20, but I can't think of a specific song to predict:
1. Another song by Animal Collective besides My Girls/Summertime Clothes. Maybe it'll be both. Or, if they want to pick a better song, it'll be Guys Eyes or Brother Sport. Or, if they want to pick something from the past, it'll be Peacebone or Who Could Win a Rabbit?
2. Something else from Kid A. They fucking love that piece of shit. I say it'll be Idiotheque, because that's the only one I can name off the top of my head.
3. Something by Interpol, probably PDA or Specialist.
4. Something else from The Moon and Antarctica, but 3rd Planet placed pretty low, so I wouldn't really count on it. One could hope for Tiny Cities Made of Ashes or Stars are Projectors
5. Something else from LCD Soundsystem will definitely be there, but it'll be really crowded if they included Yeah, Beat Connection, Losing My Edge, AND All My Friends in the top 20.
And, lastly, here are the ones that they should just add because I like them and cannot believe they have not been mentioned yet:
1. Useful Chamber by Dirty Projectors. Stillness is the Move got a nod, but this one did not. That's a little unbalanced, considering that Useful Chamber is just as good and has bigger name/hype recognition.
2. Stan by Eminem. They've included about a half dozen Em songs up to this point, but they failed to mention the song that made him a critical star? How could you, Pitchfork! Fix this at once! D:
3. The Rat by The Walkmen. They mentioned In the New Year at a low spot in the 500 and gave this song a high spot in the end-of-the-year list. That said, it's also by far the greatest song The Walkmen ever made or will ever make. But where the hell is it?
4. Wham City by Dan Deacon. This is so much better than The Crystal Cat, which already got a mention. Also, it's so much better than any other hipster-dance-pop song that has ever been released.
5. Frontier Psychiatrist by The Avalanches. How bitchin' would it be if this was in the top 10? Yeah. Hella bitchin.
Well, that took me a long time to write, and I guess I'm pretty tired now that I've vented a bit and got all dem lists outta my system. Now time to wait and see how much of a fortune teller I actually am.
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