January Consumption

Posted: January 31, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , | Leave a comment

I found a few songs I liked in January. I also did some things, culturally, that were enjoyable. Here is a list:

  • Per Kirkeby at the Phillips Collection
  • Echo Lake, Wild Peace
  • Django Unchained
  • Yo La Tengo, Fade
  • Jay McInerney, Story of My Life
  • Transportation Camp (then, this happened)
  • Ai Weiwei at the Hirshhorn
  • Zero Dark Thirty
  • Maria Raha, Cinderella’s Big Score
  • Little Serow
  • Robin Sloane, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
  • The Bike House’s Coldest Day of the Year ride
  • Boozy milkshakes at Satellite Room
  • Frederick Kempe, Berlin 1961

Notes:

I rarely see movies. I told myself I’d see one movie a month in 2012, and completely failed in that endeavor; I’d like to try it again in 2013. Django and Zero Dark Thirty are worth writing dissertations about, probably. I’m not going to do that here.

I left my phone at home the day I saw the Ai Weiwei exhibit. I also didn’t get to the Hirshhorn until 4:30 p.m.—it closes at 5:30 p.m. on Sundays. I’d like to go back. The exhibit’s breadth is incredible, and Weiwei comes off as a master of everything. I felt like I didn’t spend as much time as I could have because the museum was closing. Also, I’d like an Instragram photo of the cube.

Yo La Tengo’s Fade is the first album I’ve bought on its release date in many, many years. I was really thrilled by doing so. It’s a phenomenal album, and I’ve spent a few nights listening to it while laying on my floor. I did listen to it via Pitchfork Advance, which was fun only because I was able to listen to it at work. Advance’s horizontal scrolling annoys me to no end.

0113

Posted: January 30, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: | 1 Comment

I made you a mix of what I listened to this month. Download it here (choose “0113”).

  1. “High Low” – The Band in Heaven
  2. “Sweet Honey” – Carousels
  3. “Cherry” – Chromatics
  4. “Heart Strings” – Dark Arts
  5. “Even the Blind” – Echo Lake
  6. “Youth Conspiration” – future
  7. “Made for You” – Honeyslide
  8. “Ghost Highway” – Mazzy Star
  9. “Absinthe Party at the Fly Honey Warehouse” – Minus the Bear
  10. “Sleepwalker” – Moon Duo
  11. “Cathouse” – Pissed Jeans
  12. “Bent Out of Shape” – Replacements
  13. “Broken Toy” – Veronica Falls

This is a good illustration of my predictable taste in music. I like drone-y shoegaze and token punk songs. If I were better about convincing you to pay for the music you like, I would include links to Bandcamp and Soundcloud pages for the above artists, but you should probably buy the music you like anyway. I know you’re capable of Googling, if you care.

Sharing/Oversharing

Posted: January 23, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

This is cross-posted on my Tumblr, which more people read. I’d like to have it here for posterity.

On Saturday night I was drinking at Trusty’s with friends I’ve made through Twitter (we bike in D.C. and talk about it on the Internet). There is nearly no chance I would have met either of them any other way.

I am totally unbridled on Twitter, and have been for years. I don’t know how else to use it. I chose not to lock or delete my account when I graduated college in December 2010. By then, I had already benefitted considerably from being active on social-networking platforms. I still benefit from being active on social-networking platforms. I also readily acknowledge that I am rarely polite, professional, or appropriately reserved on Twitter. I’m not much more so on Tumblr.

How I use Twitter and what I say on it came up between my friends and I. The conversation was likely prompted by this tweet, though there are dozens of similar ones I could point to. When James told me he was moving to Germany, then broke up with me, I tweeted about it and wrote about it for The Billfold; by writing in a very personal way about someone close to me, I crossed a threshold I had generally avoided (and still, for the most part, avoid—you’ll notice I write almost entirely about myself here). And so, the level of emotion, ambiguity, contextless song lyrics, and unwarranted barbs aimed at unknowing guys on OKCupid in my tweets swung way up. It hasn’t cooled down since, even compared to the style in which I was tweeting prior to my relationship with James.

On Saturday, we talked about how it often feels better to just say shit, not necessarily for cathartic reasons but because it’s just easier than repeatedly explaining why you’re freaking out. Or because putting something into the ether makes it much less monumental. I wrote the tweet linked above last week while having a panic attack in the bathroom at DC9. Being unabashedly public made things easier.

Occasionally, I try to understand what reading my Tumblr and Twitter must be like for someone that’s not me. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I don’t care how I come off—it’s how I’ve written in the way I’ve written for so long. But I am writing this now because there’s a shallow-breath feeling in my chest that I get when I care, and I don’t know how to react to it other than to say that it’s there and making me nervous.