Reasons why the Internet Rules

Can I tell you something?

New Kanye West track is retarded.

I just get the most painful nostalgia

[The Alt Report]

On Writing, Pt. 1

"I saw him only for a moment, and that was years ago. Boston had been beaten by the White Sox. It was a night game, and when it was over, as the crowd, including myself and my friends, pushed with that suppressed Occidental panic up the aisles toward the exit ramps, he, like the heavy pebble of gold that is not washed from the pan, was revealed, sitting alone, immobile and smiling, among the green seats. He was an old Chinese man, solidly fat, like a Chevrolet dealer, and he wore faded black trousers and a white shirt whose sleeves were rolled up. He sat with one arm up on the back on the seat beside him and smiled out toward the field, where the ground crew was unfurling the tarp across the foreshortened clay diamond and the outfield under the arc lights looked as brilliant and flat as a pool-table felt. And it flashed upon me, as I glimpsed this man sitting alone and unperturbed among the drained seats, that here was the happy man, the man of unceasing and effortless blessing. I thought then to write a novel, an immense book, about him, recounting his every move, his every meal, every play, pitch, and hesitation of every ball game he attended, the number of every house he passed as he walked Boston's three-decker slums, the exact position and shape of every cracked and flaking spot on the doorways, the precise sheen and rust of every floriate and convoluted fancy of ironwork that drifted by his legs, the chalk marks, the bricks (purple-tinted, ochre-smeared red), the constellations of lint and stain in his tiny bachelor's room (green walls, painted pipes coughing with steam, telephone wiring stapled along the baseboard), the never precisely duplicated curl of the smoke off his rice, the strokes of sound composing the hatchings of noise at his back, every stifled cry, every sizzle of a defective neon-sign connection, every distant plane and train, every roller-skate scratch, everything: all set sequentially down with the bald simplicity of a litany, thousands upon thousands of pages, ecstatically uneventful, divinely and defiantly dull.

"But we would-be novelists have a reach as shallow as our skins. We walk through volumes of the unexpressed and like snails leave behind a faint thread excreted out of ourselves. From the dew of the few flakes that melt on our faces we cannot reconstruct the snowstorm." John Updike, "The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble, and Fanning Island" from The Early Stories: 1953-1975

First of all, show me a more beautiful writer than John Updike, besides maybe G. G. Marquez and Pynchon at his most sentimental. I'm serious. Second, John Updike writes in first person, so can you. Third, how accurate. This story is extremely good, I think; it's a triptych of stories he never wrote, the first regarding this man, the second his grandmother, which I found very moving, and the third a group of men washed ashore an uninhabited Polynesian island, only to perish. I heard a quote a few months ago, I don't remember exactly where, but it was something along the lines of, "We're all writing Ulysses inside us all day, but what comes out is so much less." I feel like it may have been from a collection of Saul Bellow's correspondence. Anyway, it's true. The gap between what we harbor within our own minds and what we communicate is so frighteningly obtuse. I think it's easy for a writer to become enraptured by the task of pinning this gap down and raping it for information, details, (bountiful, pristine, details). But then what would be the point? Well, when you are actually writing Ulysses, or if your prose is as lyrical as Updike's, I guess you can just get away with it, and that's the point. But for the rest of us, tailoring becomes a tedious skill. Figuring out what you want to say. Weeding through the best possible ways to say it. And the ultimate dissatisfaction, nine times out of ten.

What a divine description of this moment, though. This moment that every writer experiences, all too often: the way the sun shines on that one day when that woman stands in the doorway to her building with her two obedient dalmatians; the image of that man in the wheelchair and that man sitting beside him on the grass on the hill, just the two of them silently watching the sun set; that house-cat running solitary through the immense, pastoral landscape in the middle of the night; that one bus in the city whose insides glow blue and cast azure shadows over its strange, nighttime inhabitants; the way the earth looks on that day when that blizzard hits and the roads bears no markings and there is no visible difference between the land and the sky, a muted horizon, and it is so silent too. Dozens of these fragments, stashed away in some dusty cavern of the brain's filing system, decidedly unexplored. You can't write about everything.

I think every writer starting out should be handed a copy of Updike's early stories; he's the master of detail, for real. Going through my copy, I find lines annotated that I can't even recall reading. There are smears from tear drops, ash stains, big blotchy pen marks from the days when I respected my books less. But when I think about reading them, I just remember them having this profound impact on the way I thought about writing. They are really solid. He knows what he's doing.

Stuff White People Like: Thinking they know more about hip hop than other white people

Apparently, in his recent review of Big Boi's new album, Sasha Frere-Jones didn't find it important to talk about any of the rapper's work pre-2003, and, furthermore, to properly discuss the album he was reviewing. This isn't the first time Frere-Jones has fallen short in the face of a hip hop review. While that piece on MF Doom last fall was solid, really solid, I always find his reviews to exhibit such a narrow, well, aging white person perspective; they lack a general understanding of hip hop as a genre, and base their critiques on trivial elements usually involving an artist's career, blankly bypassing the heart of the album, the point. In this review, Frere-Jones spends a lot of time discussing the style on Big Boi's most recent Speakerboxxx album and his decision to release Sir Luscious under Def Jam, but doesn't bother mentioning any of Big Boi's, or Outkast's earlier work. I understand that Frere-Jones is attempting to paint a portrait of the artist by spending 3/4 of the article dissecting his previous work, but when you limit the scale of that portrait to that of a single, fairly commercial album released ten years after the beginning of an artist's career, it just seems silly. I appreciate that the New Yorker branches out into the genre when it does, but I just wish it tackled the subject with the same level of no-fucking-around-legitimacy that it does everything else. Like, if they want help, they can just ask, you know? In any case, the last paragraph was pretty good, so here it is:

"The musical DNA of 'Sir Luscious' lies in a simple strategy that Big Boi has used for years: he often raps in double time, no matter what the tempo of the song is. This means that even the slower songs, like 'Fo Yo Sorrows' and 'General Patton' (the latter has one of the better opera samples in recent hip-hop), which hover at around eighty beats per minute, don't drag--Big Boi uses the space in the beat to provide another rhythm with his words. More than once, I thought of the clatter of a lawnmower, where secondary rhythms whisper underneath the main beat. Though there are rappers with more puns and wider purviews than Big Boi--he raps too often about the club, for instance--there are not many who can be simultaneously forceful and careful. Despite any clichés about Southern dispositions, Big Boi is never laid back when he raps: he defines wide-awake."

[The New Yorker, 8/2/2010]

In a nutshell

This is the wedding you wish you were at.

RADIOLAB IS THE COOLEST THING ON THE PLANET. IF YOU DO NOT LISTEN TO RADIOLAB, YOU ARE NOT COOL. LISTEN TO THEIR LATEST EPISODE ON LANGUAGE AND BLOW YOUR NERD LOAD ALL OVER YOUR STACK OF SCIENTIFIC AMERICANS.

I've been all around this great big world, and I've seen all kinds of girls

Spent yesterday hopping from winery to winery, throwing back Pinots and Zinfandels by the dozen. There was this one pristine moment, when we were barrelling down the winding road with all the window's open and a joint going, and everywhere you looked there was just sky and hills rolling in all directions covered with neatly-lined lush vineyards, and behind that small purple mountains, and the sun was so yellow, the air was so soft, everyone was very funny and vulgar and high and pleased with the surroundings, and everything was just fucking great--everything about it screamed run-on sentence with lots of descriptive visuals. I know it's cliche, but hanging around this part of Northern California really gives one the illusion of being amidst a Steinbeck novel, or at least what may once have been one. The way the grapes dangle, bountiful and dark, below the masses of green.

I just discovered this roll of photos from my step-grandmother's funeral almost two years ago, in the Highlands. Really please with these two images.

[flickr.com/yellowcoat]

Leftovers

Just got a few random rolls from the summer back. Here's a few of my favorites from the bunch. The US images were all Portra 400 NC on a shutter speed higher, and the Barcelona images were, I believe Velvia 50. So you can decide if it makes a difference on a Canon A1, I guess.

"Almost midway into Pilot Talk, there's a line that gets right to the heart of Curren$y's appeal: "Xbox web browser/ Download a updated NBA roster/ Play a 82-game season/ Condo full of snacks, Spitta not leaving." Not too many rappers could get away with bragging about sitting in their apartments all day playing NBA Liveand eating Doritos, and even fewer would try. But Curren$y has hit a certain level of mixtape-level cult stardom in part because he's perfected his amiable everydude stoner persona, and that comes across vividly in that line even though he never mentions weed. He doesn't have to; it's implied. The other thing about that line is its specificity. Curren$y's not just a guy who plays NBA Live all day; he's also one who makes sure he does it right, getting the updated roster. It might harsh his buzz if new Bull Carlos Boozer suddenly turned up in his old Utah Jazz uniform. He appreciates the smaller things."

The opening paragraph of this Pitchfork review of the new Curren$y album is pretty spot on, mostly because I've definitely had that thought at one point while listening to that track, and a couple others on that album, while sitting in my apartment eating Doritos and feeling elite. I've been bumping that album a lot since it came out earlier this summer, been burning it for my friends, recommending it to strangers. For fear of sounding too Pitchfork-happy, I'll just say that yeah, it is a perfect mid-summer album, especially if you have to spend three days cleaning your new house because the previous tenant was a hoarder.

[Tom Breihan, Pitchfork, 7/30/2010]

These are selfish times, I got shellfish dimes and sanddollars

I've been listening to Why?'s Elephant Eyelash all week. It's very nice, which you probably already know. This album is like if cLOUDDEAD fucked Built to Spill, and Interpol filmed it, then laid down some guitar riffs in the background.

The hottest shit I've seen in awhile, and I even spotted UKNOWHOO on the street TWICE the other day.

I'm literally going to masturbate over the utter perfection of this jeans/sandals combo as soon as I'm done writing this. Also for the record, that is what color I think every pair of skinny jeans should be. Just saying.

[JAK & JIL BLOG]

You ever see someone puke up 5,000 Doritos?

Major Food Groups:




A shitload of Doritos (although I find their 'Tangy cheese' packaging redundant)

Oreos

Fucking asparagus

This picture of Bob Dylan and Jack from the early '90s