Lemon Ice Forever!

wbkeats: I want you to be weary with meof all that is already...

Tue, 07 May 2013 14:44:54 -0400

I want you to be weary with me
of all that is already well done,
of all that ages us.

Of all that lies in wait
to wear out other people.

Let us be weary of what kills
and of what doesn’t want to die.

Pablo Neruda, “A certain weariness”

audroma: YOU GUYS ARE IN FOR A TREAT! Prose: Joe Bernardi Annie...

Thu, 02 May 2013 16:35:00 -0400

audroma:

YOU GUYS ARE IN FOR A TREAT!

Prose:

Joe Bernardi

Annie Rebekah Gardner

Poetry:

A. Minetta Gould

Jonathan Papas

A 2 x 2 reading about states, countries, apartments, psychic spaces, cities, towns, mental states, neighborhoods, places of the HEART or whatever the hell the readers damn well please.

Joe’s coming from NYC. Come. Hear some stuff. Buy some books. Drink some booze with us.

* Facebook event

* Lorem Ipsum Books

* Art by Emily Garfield

I’m doing a thing! (That’s me, the one who’s “coming from NYC”). I think I’m going to write one short essay about each of the cities I have lived in. I meant to start them today, but the Celtics won last night and then the bar had a Pengo machine, and you know how that goes.

Walking back from my friend Andy’s house while listening...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 21:22:49 -0400

Walking back from my friend Andy’s house while listening to this album on headphones, it occurred to me that it’s about time I publicly revise my middling review from a few months ago. It is, in fact, a grower among growers, having done its thing to the point of settling in as one of my favorite albums of the past few years.

It’s heavy on the labored “drunk in 1950’s rural America” vibes, yeah, but behind that the songwriting owes a strong debt to synth-driven pop songs so sparse and self-assured that, under the right circumstances (walking down Manhattan Avenue while the sun is going down, for example), they sound huge. Songs like “Never Tear Us Apart” by INXS, “Distortions” by Clinic, and “Skool’s Out” by Ladytron, which don’t have that much in common now that I see that list written out, except they all favor holding synth notes for a long time and I love all three of them so much I’m almost willing to fill out some type of binding document so all three of them are played simultaneously while my casket is lowered into the ground.

(Does Tumblr count as legally binding? Why not, with all that venture capital and no Storyboard money pits weighing down their legal department? A post for another day, I guess.)

Ramones Haiku Generator

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:09:24 -0400

Ramones Haiku Generator:

I’m no expert on the relation between correlation and causation, but I do know that I drank one of those Bud Light Lime Straw-Ber-Ritas yesterday afternoon (C-plus, wish it tasted either better or worse but 8% alcohol so hey) and I couldn’t manage to fall asleep last night. As a result, I re-coded my Ramones haiku generator from the ground up. Now it looks nicer and can optionally count syllables for the perfect 5-7-5 haiku.

Bonus for the nerds in the audience: It is no longer a horrifying result of me having just learned javascript and also trying to cram PHP in there for some reason. I bet if you looked directly at the old RHG code for more than five seconds you’d turn into a pillar of salt.

"I hate it because it irresponsibly induces discontent in people for one myopic goal, and then it..."

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:00:09 -0400

“I hate it because it irresponsibly induces discontent in people for one myopic goal, and then it leaves the debris of that process out there in the culture. An advertiser will happily make you feel bad about yourself if that will make you buy, say, a Bic pen.”

- Best-ever Simpsons writer and all-time hero George Meyer, on why he doesn’t like advertising. (This whole profile is pretty great, actually. At the very least, whoever transcribed it wrote ‘funny’ as ‘fanny’ a couple of times. Can’t go wrong with that.)

millsinabout: Here is a professional “tip” for you, suffering...

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 18:42:31 -0400

millsinabout:

Here is a professional “tip” for you, suffering solitary creature: put a small can of pineapple juice on your bedside table when you go to sleep.

In the middle of the night, when you wake from a nightmare or from your mind’s persistent, cogent analysis of your ruinous position in the world, a position from which no escape is possible but which is itself untenable, unstable, indefensible, such that you must escape, and you think to yourself: I cannot torture myself with these thoughts, I must go to sleep; nothing can come from this monologue, nothing ever has; yet my problems are real, and I am simply fleeing them, ignoring them, living in a state of irrational, deliberate flight from reality, even as I judge others for not confronting and understanding reality, etc. etc.—

—in this moment, whereas you normally turn to another sleeping posture, perhaps your most trusted, with the cool sides of the pillows and the blanket tucked under your feet, or however you prefer it, and what determines how we prefer to sleep, anyway? Genes? Childhood? Society?—

—instead of flopping onto your belly or pulling your knees up or sighing or sobbing, you can sit upright, turn to your left or right, and reach out into the darkness;

—instead of desperately scanning the darkness to see if it’s light yet, if you’ve already squandered your night, if the world is already moving along, indifferent to how much time you need to spend defending yourself against your own accusations in the middle of the night, you can grasp the small, warm can;

—instead of increasing panic and the debate about whether you need to go to the bathroom, whether the movement and light involved will wake you further, irrevocably, you have instead a plan:

1. Sitting upright in bed, you crack the can and guzzle down the sticky, sugary, idiotic Dole Pineapple Juice that has been waiting to take you on a very artificial vacation since you closed your eyes.

2. What am I doing here in the middle of the night? I’m having some pineapple juice; it tastes like summer camp or elementary school; it tastes like being on a bus with teachers headed on a field trip; it tastes like something Americans used to like a lot; it tastes childish.

The walls of the can are thick; the can is smaller than that of a Red Bull. Imagine old tin cans of beer, World War II beers, World War II troubles. Imagine Dole in Cuba. Imagine Bob Dole. Imagine a crippled hand holding a pen, and how that war injury became a joke: how much of a joke are your injuries? How much of a joke are you?

3. The can is empty: drained as though you are a monster, or a bear, or just an adult in a child’s world, all the objects too small, all the flavors too sweet, all the colors too bright. You’re done.

4. Lie down and go to sleep. Who cares about anything except acid reflux anyway?

For the last six weeks or so, some type of business has been...

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 18:15:06 -0400

For the last six weeks or so, some type of business has been under construction around the corner from my apartment. Nobody seems to know exactly what’s going to end up there, but today I noticed some new signage that, uh, raises more questions than it answers.

"An aging actress whose star has fallen, a thuggish bodyguard, a Holy Rolling studio head, an actor..."

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 11:00:13 -0400

“An aging actress whose star has fallen, a thuggish bodyguard, a Holy Rolling studio head, an actor whose sexuality is in flux—these people inhabit the world of beleaguered publicist Joe Bernardi. Like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Joe operates in a 1940s Los Angeles full of femmes fatales, hucksters, and shady movers and shakers. But he’s no hard-drinking tough guy, just a man desperate to clear his name—the cops think he killed a dead actress—while trying to find satisfaction in his job at second-rate Continental Studios. He also wouldn’t mind reuniting with his ex-wife, Lydia, whose house he watches in the wee hours.”

- Here is what you find when googling your name and a phrase at 3 o’clock in the morning in an effort to see if you’ve ever used that phrase in a published piece of writing: You share a full name with the protagonist of a series of mystery novels.

To the extent that it is possible to have a video stuck in...

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 18:09:00 -0400

To the extent that it is possible to have a video stuck in one’s head, I have had this video stuck in my head for two days. There’s something about the theatrical hamminess of late-seventies and early-eighties new wave that’s really off-putting and appealing at the same time.

I love this song, but Squeeze would later repeat this with the terrible song “Black Coffee in Bed,” which gets hate-stuck in my head on a semi-regular basis.

Dream Journal, 03/06/2013

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 00:22:56 -0500

The narrative of the dream is unclear. However, it takes place in a world where, with each new pressing of Electric Warrior, Marc Bolan demanded dramatic additions and subtractions from the ‘thank you’ section of the album’s liner notes based on who he was hanging out with at the time. This ends up creating a large collector’s market for various editions of the LP.

The pressing I was looking at in the dream was notable for including Lou Reed but not the rest of the Velvet Underground.

I wrote a thing for Motherboard about Twine, a computer program...

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 13:18:16 -0500

I wrote a thing for Motherboard about Twine, a computer program that makes it really easy for non-technical people to create choose-your-own-adventure-style games, and the scene of cool weirdos that has developed around it.
You should get banned from the NBA for life if you lay it up during the All-Star game.

A great thing about the internet is that, instead of doing...

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 15:42:10 -0500

A great thing about the internet is that, instead of doing meaningful work or talking to friends, you can think of the most bankrupt phrases imaginable and use the greatest collection of knowledge in human history to see what the world has to say about them.

"For most of us, settling is an inevitability, not because of insufficient exposure to these bland..."

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 14:37:57 -0500

“For most of us, settling is an inevitability, not because of insufficient exposure to these bland admonishments but because, unlike Jobs, we do not know what great work really is —meaning, we lack confidence in any system of values or ideals, we cannot give ourselves wholly over to anything without doubt— or we cannot decide how much of ourselves or others we are willing to sacrifice. We want love and labor, freedom and meaning, flexibility and commitment.”

- When I read this part of Mills’ excellent essay on Steve Jobs’s monomania, a giant foam finger appeared on my hand and I started chanting his name. Then I started hurling embarrassing insults at Mills’ literary opponents from my eighteen-dollar seat in the internet’s bleachers.

Rajon Rondo, His Celtics, and the Second Worst Job I've Ever Had

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 10:00:00 -0500

In June 2008, when the Celtics won their most recent championship, I was working nights at a phone-survey call center along with a significant portion of Boston’s DIY music scene and a bunch of friendly, hard-drinking middle-aged ladies. Our office was roughly 100 yards from the TD Bank North Garden, and we had to walk by it in order to get to the 7-11 that served as the only affordable, fast place in the neighborhood to get some food during our short breaks. Almost every night, we were tempted to solicit the scalpers for Van Halen tickets or Bruins tickets or Celtics tickets instead of going back to work and calling Midwestern families to ask them what they thought of their homeowners insurance. It should go without saying that, despite it spawning nearly all of my funniest workplace memories, the job sucked really bad.

I can’t remember if I asked for the night of game 6 of the NBA finals off, or if I’d been cut, or if I didn’t have to work to begin with, but I remember watching the game at my apartment by myself, seeing Boston Beat LA, and feeling psyched to the point of staying up to watch the local news’ coverage of the drunken destruction that erupts in the wake of every major Boston sports victory. The fallout of the Celtics winning the finals paled in comparison to that of the recent Patriots or Red Sox victories, but it still felt like a matter of course to watch some folks have a go. (In spite of winning a championship and, at least for that year, coming out on top of one of the greatest rivalries in sports history, the Celtics never got quite good enough to cross over. The drunken, violent non-sports-fans who have ruined the Patriots and Sox for everyone else were, and continue to be, largely absent on the Celtics scene.)

The last thing I saw, before I turned the television off to go to sleep, was a shirtless man putting a brick through the ground floor window of my call center’s office building and immediately getting tackled by a group of police officers. There could have been no sweeter icing on the cake. It was a great moment.

Following a youth of casual basketball fandom driven mostly by the 1990’s NBA’s remarkable amount of outsized personalities, I readily admit that the Antoine Walker era, combined with my general early-20’s insanity, sucked out a lot of my enthusiasm for the Celtics and the NBA in general. It takes a special kind of basketball fan to never waver during the multi-season NBA process of bottoming out on purpose and rallying again, and 2006-era me, while upset when Paul Pierce got injured, was more concerned with Flipside Records on Beacon Street closing (I purchased the X “Wild Thing” 12” single, which I consider to be the worst record I own, at their going out of business sale) and talking people into buying him beer. The Celtics getting good again brought me back into the fold.

(“Good,” in this case, is defined by the classic NBA trope of not only having stars, but by having the kind of role players that ensure chemistry and keep team fandom from being the type of slog I imagine Spurs fans and, more recently, Brooklyn Nets fans, have to endure. The Nate Robinson/Glen Davis “Shrek and Donkey” postgame is an all-timer.)

Three Junes ago, I had been up for almost 40 hours playing Super Mario Galaxy 2, going to a job interview that ended up being for a non-paying lie, and playing poker with my friend Jon when I saw Artest Come Alive in game seven of the NBA Finals and crush the Celtics’ hopes of another title.

Last June, I sat in a crummy Williamsburg bar with Matt and his buddy, a guy (a Heat fan!) named Magic Jake, while Lebron Came Alive in game seven of the Eastern Conference Finals and crushed the cinderella Celtics’ hopes of another title. (Two Junes ago I successfully started an “MVP” chant for J.J. Barea in an extremely crowded sports bar.)

This past Saturday, I went to go see Blues Control and Home Blitz with my friends Erin (big Celtics fan) and Kate. Afterwards, we went to a house party and failed to solve the rebuses on my Ballantine bottlecaps. I woke up on Sunday with a mild hangover, and before I even left my bedroom I learned that Rajon Rondo had torn his ACL and wouldn’t be playing competitive basketball for the foreseeable future.

“Blow it up,” says the internet, mentioning Rudy Gay and pretending the Raptors front office wants to trade Kyle Lowery and not José Calderón. As tough as it is to admit it, the internet has a point for once, especially given Danny Ainge’s recent knack for well-meaning but ice-cold trades that don’t work out in real life (see you on the other side, Kendrick Perkins).

For all this entails, I admire the Celtics’ refusal to be a perennial second-round playoff team, instead being willing to drop future hall-of-famers and put it all on the line for a run in, say, 2015-2016. But even writing “2016” out is a drag, like looking at the expiration date on your credit card and thinking about how it seems so far in the future that, as far as you’re concerned, the card will basically never expire. The singularly bitter shittiness of Paul Pierce potentially not retiring a Celtic is the type of thing New England sports thrived on (see you on the other side, Hartford Whalers) until Tom Brady, Kevin Garnett, and David Ortiz started cramming trophies down everyone’s throats.

But yes, mystical basketball logic dictates that These Celtics, the ones whose greatness made a guy throw a brick through my terrible job’s window, and the ones who made me like basketball again, are probably pretty much toast. They were probably pretty much toast the second Ray Allen (My favorite player from those years, and a UConn alumnus who in 1995 was very nice about my Grandma asking him to pose for a photo with me at the McDonald’s across from the ESPN headquarters) left town for parts unknown, but this year’s admittedly lackluster team still showed flashes of brilliance.

We are all going to get old and die (even Dee Brown) so best to look back fondly on the time when Nate Robinson, Rasheed Wallace, and Tony Allen were all on the same team while we still can. Instead of the Kevin McHale clothesline, we’ll have every moving screen Kevin Garnett never got called for. (And the one he did get called for.) Bird’s reliable game-winners map pretty easily to Ray Allen’s record-breakingly reliable game-winners, and his love for trolling crowds (keep an eye on the Hawks bench towards the end of that) can be seen in the form of a glint in Pierce’s eye every time he literally sets fire to Madison Square Garden.

Around the last time the Celtics were ascendant, I was riding the train back to my neighborhood from the call center. Across the train from me, an older man who I’m pretty sure was homeless was sharing a plastic pint of vodka with his buddy, and they caught me looking up from a book at them. “Want some?” the guy asked, gesturing the bottle towards me.

“Sure,” I replied. (That job, and the mental state it put me in, is a subject for another day.) As I motioned towards the bottle, the guy pulled it away.

“Hey. Hey!” the guy interrupted. “Who’s number 33?”

“Uh, Larry Bird?” I replied.

“Ha ha,” the guy laughed, bringing the bottle back towards me. “Yeah.”

While We're At It

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 20:16:00 -0500

I wrote the one-sheet for Colleen Green’s great new album. Here is that.
I wrote a review of the new Barbaras collection. Here is that.
Chris Bosh was mean mugging at the White House today. Here is that.
Between that and Lebron mobbing that guy who hit the half-court shot and then apparently tweeting about being hung over the morning he had to go meet the president, my opinion of the big three-era Heat is at an all-time high.

"What We ________ Is Secret" or "How Do You Like Them Iceages"

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 17:27:00 -0500

Friend of the program Devon Maloney wrote a thing about the band Iceage today, and I was going to write a different thing about Iceage until things got shuffled around and now I’m not anymore, so instead of jogging this afternoon I organized some thoughts on the former and some thoughts that were originally going to find their way into the latter. Mostly: Iceage are getting really popular, and it’s weird, but not that weird.

It’s a pretty predictable path: A band coming up on the strength of the tides of sub-trends in a musical community (either by accident or by accurately predicting them), then being willing and able to exchange their subcultural cache for regular-cultural cache before the trends they came up on dry out.

It would be tough to overstate, for example, the amount of totally-justified sway Fucked Up had in the Actual Hardcore community (Actual Hardcore meaning house show-attending, Infest shirt-wearing, can-name-more-than-five-Discharge-songs formalist hardcore) around the time Hidden World came out. I know a (legitimately well-adjusted) dude who got a tattoo referencing a HW-era Fucked Up song before the song was released. FU then pulled an extremely crafty bait-and-switch, becoming a (good) heavy indie rock band and exploding their fanbase while continuing to signify “hardcore” and all the tuff authenticity that modern hardcore has more or less eaten itself in order to maintain.

Iceage, for their part, came out with New Brigade, a really good record that both asked to be taken Emotionally Seriously and that obliquely referenced the occult (thereby riding the then-recently-crested wave of Mysterious Guy Hardcore), and which featured enough dark vibes to ensure a spot in the then-rising wave of punks getting into goth. (N.B.: Those Tampa guys are really good at this, having been the arguable peak of MGHC with Cult Ritual and now being the arguable peak of Punks Liking Goth Now with Merchandise.)

While Danish punk is no stranger to blatant genre exercises (Gorilla Angreb ruled and when I put them on the other night my roommate refused to believe we weren’t listening to X), Iceage’s youth make me doubt there was much intentionality behind New Brigade capturing the zeitgeist or whatever it did. Signing to Matador and generally doing the let’s-get-really-popular dance, though, has shown that their ambition matches their dedication to the craft, and it’ll be interesting to see how they move forward songwise and how willing they are to alienate fans (and which fans they’re willing to alienate, cf that thing recently where Merchandise people named their tour that terrible thing and it was probably on purpose).

Bands who get their start in conservative subcultures breaking out of those subcultures is always weird and reminds everybody both how weird conservative subcultures are and how (increasingly!) weird the process of such a band getting popular is. Back when everybody had a million dollars, it wouldn’t be out of bounds to suggest Iceage would eventually turn into Soundgarden. Now it seems fair to assume that if they stick around Iceage will end up like the Black Lips or something; populist synechdoche for a codified scene that a lot of people are curious about but don’t have the time or money or energy or interest to really delve into. This is important: Iceage are getting famous (and, probably, at least kind of rich) by standing on the back of a subculture that’s incredibly, religiously important to a whole lot of people. Iceage punks or Black Lips garage dudes or Skrillex dancers who haven’t paid their dues (be it by familiarizing themselves with record arcana or just by attending a lot of terrible/great small shows) are like Easter Catholics, getting a simulacrum (Devon’s word, not mine) of the ecstatic intensity of the scene’s climaxes without any of the toil that’s supposed to make the climax a climax.

Unrelated, but related: Iceage have a lot in common with Odd Future. Subcultural tourism but the music is pretty good, hatred of the adult as a strong theme, giving everyday youth-type emotional tension an apocalyptic vibe, etc.

This is a really long-winded way of saying I drunkenly purchased a Killdozer shirt the other night, and the more I think about it, the more I should sell all my other possessions. Who wants to give me a stick and poke that says “intellectuals are the shoeshine boys of the ruling elite”?

Two Things That Have Happened Recently

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 14:56:00 -0500

Editor’s Note: This has been sitting in my drafts for months. It is a true story. I can’t remember what the other thing that happened was.

Not long after eating lunch, I felt something amiss in one of my teeth. After picking at it, I managed to shake loose a small, hard piece of metal.

“Oh no,” I thought. “I’ve lost a filling.”

“Wait a minute,” I thought. “I don’t have any fillings.”

“Wait a minute,” I thought. “That’s a piece of foil from my burrito.”

"As an aesthetic document, Hotline is unimpeachable, and please do not just take a video game..."

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 13:13:00 -0400

“As an aesthetic document, Hotline is unimpeachable, and please do not just take a video game writer’s word for it on the subject of aesthetics. That said, let me try to gain your trust. We share our offices with what must be described as a very cool design firm. They work with big boys and influence minds and look good doing it. One guy has a Japanese girlfriend.”

- Well put, Kill Screen. I will continue to not take your writers’ words on the subject of aesthetics, but I will visit your site as a source of late-breaking updates on your officemates’ partners’ ethnicities.

Just in time for election season, I made an MP3 of Homer Simpson...

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 12:15:00 -0400

Just in time for election season, I made an MP3 of Homer Simpson angrily asking “When are people going to learn? Democracy. Doesn’t. Work.”

Feel free to listen to it on repeat instead of watching the news, or do what I did and set it as your ringtone. (Download)

Elsewhere: A Thing

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 16:02:09 -0400

Elsewhere: A Thing: I got an idea for a new thing awhile ago, and then didn’t act on it for awhile, and then my life sort of fell apart for a couple of weeks, but now it has begun to take shape. It is explained below:

lcd-reviews:

I still haven’t figured out exactly what format this is going to take.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked a few of my friends (and one person I know pretty tangentially and entirely over the internet) to send me five writing prompts. I’m still not sure exactly what a ‘writing prompt’ is, but they are my friends, and they’re smart, and they did a good job filtering my selfish request through their personal sensibilities.

Then I was totally busy for a couple of weeks.

But now: I am going to try and answer the prompts to the best of my ability. I will answer them in the order they were asked, and I will try and put each answer over 250 words. Once all of the prompts have been answered, I will probably ask for more prompts from different friends and different people I know pretty tangentially and entirely over the internet.

I decided last night that an explanation of who the person is and my relationship to them will act as a sort of sixth prompt from that person. I will do that one first.
So here goes.

The first wave of prompts, provided graciously by the illustrious “Uptown” David Cole, has been answered and can be found by clicking that thing, or clicking here. I’ve got a decent-sized backlog of prompts (especially at the current rate I’ve been answering them), but if you’re interested in participating, you are encouraged to let me know.