“Expressiveness, in humans, is mutable. We can get better at it. And when we get better at expressiveness, we get better at understanding, better at sympathy, better at bullshit-detection, better at experiencing pleasure, better at true engagement (with others, with the world, with ourselves). And in a time when (I hate this phrase but) “mass-media” seems intent on making us worse at understanding and sympathy, and is rapidly filling us with (cheerful, happy) (or faux-dark, doom-inflected) bullshit, and seems specially designed to make us less adept at experiencing (real, authentic) pleasure, and is bent on actively discouraging real engagement—well, at that time, our guild becomes essential.”
– I feel like the phrase “good interview with George Saunders” is kind of redundant, but good interview with George Saunders.
The new Nintendo system, the Wii U, is presumably named after the deafening foghorns Shigeru Miyamoto heard every day in the sleepy fishing village where he presumably grew up.
Yo La Tengo - Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House
Sometimes you sort of wake up and realize that you’ve entered another one of those periods in your life where you can’t sleep, drink an unusually high amount of tea, and have a hard time listening to any albums besides “…And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out.”
Addendum: I believe this to be the highest-quality piece of Simpsons-referencing music ever recorded. I’m open to being proven wrong, but don’t think for a second that I haven’t thought about this for a long, long time.
What do the Fat Boys and Michael Scott have in common? An abiding love for Sbarro!
New York: Think about how different our lives would be if there was still a $3.99 all-you-can-eat Sbarro on 49th street.
Fu-Schnickens Feat. Shaq - What’s Up Doc? (K-Cut’s Fat Track Remix)
Being the most dominant post-Russell NBA player aside, there’s something about how Shaq’s level of self-awareness was the perfect cultural bridge between the yes-everything 90’s and the post-everything 2000’s.
Also on today’s Shaq playlist:
“I think part of the sexual harassment stuff was location.”
– I haven’t yet bought that book about ESPN that came out today, but apparently former ESPN Chairman Steve Bornstein thinks the place where I spent the first eighteen years of my life is to blame for ESPN’s “frathouse mentality.” You might remember my hometown for such 2011 events as a guy murdering somebody because his friends made fun of his farts.
My old friend Adam is one of those guys who knows more about music than God, but whose taste invariably sticks towards unimpeachable classics and well-knowns. While the rest of our group of friends, circa 2005 or so, would be fawning over some 7” somebody got, Adam would be listening to, and talking everyone’s ear off about, Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen or, his favorite, The Clash. Nothing wrong with that, obviously, but his taste sometimes ran afoul of everybody else’s when he’d start evangelizing the likes of U2, whose body of work he enjoyed and, I assume, continues to enjoy more or less in toto. One particularly heated night, somebody asked him what the fuck he was thinking by sticking by U2, with the concomitant exorbitant ticket prices and not-changing-the-radio-station that go along with it.
“If it weren’t for U2,” he said, “a way shittier band than U2 would be the most popular band in the world. You’ve got to give them that.”
I couldn’t disagree.
Actually, wait, I typed this out because I thought the analogy worked, but it doesn’t, because if it weren’t for Phil Jackson then Red Auerbach would still be the undisputed Greatest NBA Coach Of All Time, and Red Auerbach is way less shitty than Phil Jackson, so nevermind. Anyway, Adam’s got a pretty good thing going these days, writing for the Nashville Scene here.
(Edit: How did I leave an apostrophe in “Thoughts” for so long? Disgraceful.)
My apartment is currently without power (long story, upshot is that my roommates and I are dumb) and thus my 2000’s-addled mind cannot distract itself from any of the stupid shit it comes up with. In turn, much in the same way one might “Tumbl” a bad pop song that gets stuck in one’s head, I will share:
-What the city of Seattle will do when Dubai inevitably builds an exact replica of the Space Needle at double scale.
-A group of middle managers at a large company that has no business being involved in social media (construction conglomerate, car dealership) enthusiastically watching a seminar consisting of a group of youths singing a song called “We Got the Tweet.”
-The effect it would have on society if tomorrow it was concluded that you didn’t need to sleep if you ate twenty squirrels a day.
“Styrene, who was born Marian Joan Elliott-Said, shot to fame in 1976 with X-Ray Spex, and was immortalised in punk history with the song Oh Bondage, Up Yours! ‘Little girls should be seen and not heard,’ Styrene would say to introduce the track.”
– Cheers to The Guardian, who certainly did not miss any part of the point when writing their Poly Styrene obituary.
