branduponthebrain: George Washington (2000) Directed by David Gordon Green “I just wish I had my own tropical island, I wish… I wish I was… I could go to China, I wish I could go out of The States… I wish I had my own planet, I wish I… I wish there were 200 of me, man… I wish I could just sit around with computers and just brainstorm all day man. I wish I was born again… I wish I could get saved and get my life through Christ… then maybe he can forgive me for what I did… I wish there was just one belief… my belief.”

branduponthebrain:

George Washington (2000)

Directed by David Gordon Green

“I just wish I had my own tropical island, I wish… I wish I was… I could go to China, I wish I could go out of The States… I wish I had my own planet, I wish I… I wish there were 200 of me, man… I wish I could just sit around with computers and just brainstorm all day man. I wish I was born again… I wish I could get saved and get my life through Christ… then maybe he can forgive me for what I did… I wish there was just one belief… my belief.”

"This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."
— Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing: The Fat City Blues
WOW! Pitchfork Festival 2010

I “grew up” on this shit, 2006 the first festival I ever attended and the most bands I’d ever seen in one place—Mission of Burma, Devendra Banhart, Ted Leo, Art Brut, JEEZ! For thirty dollars, to a ex-high school senior? A-ma-zing.

2008, 2008, 2009—the crowds grew, the pants sizes shrunk, the number of overheard conversations about Built to Spill B-sides increased (and no scoffin’—I took part in a bunch of them!) and you couldn’t even adjust your KEFFIYAH without bumping into someone with a SONIC YOUTH t-shirt, usually complimented with a VINTAGE CHICAGO BULLS CHAMPIONSHIP HAT and a PROFOUND SENSE OF DESPAIR. In fact, my college buddy and I played a game called SPOT THE FLANNEL last year only to realize that we were both offenders… part of the snobby hipster milieu ourselves!

Or not. Pitchfork Festival gets a lot of flak for being hipster central, and maybe that’s true when compared to the Taste of Chicago or the Bud Billiken Parade but why does every gathering of young people in bright clothing get the dreaded “hipster” tag? I don’t even know if it’s dreaded any more, just another signifier of a group people love to look down on but secretly sort of envy, at least a little bit—we wanted the money of the yuppies, the fuck-you existence of the punks, the sheer lack of self-consciousness of the ravers, that killer hippie weed… I mean, I read a classroom definition of one of these mythical creatures as “Someone who embraces a lifestyle that is recycling ideas of past ideas of hipster culture, resulting in something that is a hollow trend moreso than the ideology it used to be.” What!

But Pitchfork 2010 is going to be the pinnacle of that, if you’re really into shneerin’ and shcoffin’. They’ve brought cool bands before, Sonic Youth in 2007, Animal Collective in 2008, Wavves (eckhem koff koff koff) in 2009, but Pavement is the hipster-tome of that of that wanton malaise, that readily definable subgroup. Modest Mouse? LCD Soundsystem? These are bands that are so readily hip, readily critically-acclaimed and readily popular that the year will bring every affected youth for counties and counties around, ready to make a Craigslist missed connection.

These three bands are the perfect cross-section of obscurity and popularity, bands that everyone knows about if they want to be cool but still listen to—you’ll never meet someone who just knows “about” Modest Mouse but isn’t really into their music, shit, even I used to bump “Float On” and “Dark Side of the Universe” when I was pumping out calculus homework in Lincoln Park and I can’t even stand Isaac Brock’s voice! I’m excited, real excited, to see the mass exodus of people just looking to have fun, and more importantly, the indignation of the self-identified cool kids who think their exclusive tastes are more legit, feeling a sense of disgust and shame when they’re too embarrassed to dance along to “Disco Infiltrator” while all the smiling, stoned kids are shaking their legs and soaking up the sun…

It’s going to be the Windy City bash of the summer. If you’ve ever written or read a boring thinkpiece about the “Death of the Hipster,” you will want to be here to see the pretentious excesses of our generation zoom towards a singularity, record store heads backed into a corner to get even more obscure and more distanced in order to maintain their thin hold on a hobby—indie rock—that no one really cares about maintaining besides new dads bemoaning how the new Jesus Lizard isn’t as good as the old Jesus Lizard. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Get Ready for "Watchmen 2"

Interesting/horrible news, depending on your POV. Every down-ass comics fan knows that doing a sequel to Watchmen is at best a pretty bad idea, as it’s not just about the story and no comics writer could match Moore’s prose, but money talks, right? Moore and Gibbons have right of first refusal which means they have to be offered the new job, but if they say no (which Moore obviously will, Gibbons maybe not) then it can be farmed to whoever the hell.

Of course, this would lead to Watchmen 2: Die Harder, The Movie or something. My precious childhood! My teenage years? All gone in a hazy swirl of broken promises and fever dreams.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

ittookseconds:

Five minutes and thirty-eight seconds: The eighties revival has come and gone and there are still too few records which sound like “New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84)” by Simple Minds. I thought it was seven or eight minutes long, to be honest - it feels wide enough.

What would your 5’38” pick have been?

It feels like a song Kate Bush could have sung. Never heard of this song or this band before, but I love it.

  • Managing editor of Daily Northwestern: How are you guys doing?
  • Me: Good--I'm writing up Confirmed & Denied (our gossip section) and Emmy is finishing her article.
  • Emmy: (turning computer to show Tumblr) Yeah, that's exactly what I'm doing (smugface).

Ray Cole’s wake on The Wire. Good death scenes always get to me, especially the Pogues’ singalong.

re: cliches

agrammar:

nerdshares:

katiecoyle:

Aw, come on.  Conan telling his audience to be kind and Conan’s audience thinking that it’s sound advice is probably the most innocuous thing ever to happen in the world.  I see your point, and you know I love you, but can’t we all just have a kumbaya moment here?

I think it’s a nice (sadly not always true) message and I think he was sincere in his address. I have no problem with his message at all. But — and I literally just said this to someone — if I, as non-famous person, wrote those words, I’d have thirty ironic reblogs within an hour. I endorse the message of working hard and being kind; the response to it is what I don’t understand. Sure, appreciate the speech or the moment and that he used his final moments on the Tonight Show to say something inspiring, but making and circulating image-post artwork to remind everyone we all need to work hard and be kind? It, not Conan, just seems silly.

Okay: I’m always fascinated by “cliche” sentiments of this sort, because a great many of them are incredibly meaningful and important ideas that just plain resist our efforts to force them into language. We package them in well-worn quotes and aphorisms that are, for most of their lives, meaningless background chatter — yes yes, work hard, be kind, don’t be cynical, sure. Or: holding your child for the first time changes everything, right. Got it. Then along come moments where we find ourselves in precisely the right space for the cliche to really pierce us and reveal all these vast dimensions of meaning and significance that were lurking behind it all along. E.g.: you hold your child for the first time, and everything has changed. And you run and tell people: amazingly enough, this thing everyone says, it contains real no-bullshit meaning! And some will be awed or proud or understanding, while others will say: yes, yes, got it, I’ve heard that.

It seems like a defining characteristic of a lot of modern people to be suspicious of that moment where we’re pierced by the cliche — to immediately sink down from whatever emotional elevation we’re feeling into self-conscious awareness of the cliche involved, and the fear that the feeling may be unearned or manipulated. This is sometimes bad and sometimes necessary. It is what helps me not to run to McDonald’s every time they run that commercial with the guy dropping his daughter off at college and thinking back to when she was a little girl.

But so I think the point here is that Meaningful Cliches don’t actually function well as language. They function well as part of a narrative. They are things we only feel when our experience has really led us to them. This is why people write novels and screenplays and stories, rather than just making signs that say “love is important” or “violence changes people.” Some people will tell you that the job of good writing is to attack and dismantle cliches, but I suspect an equal part of it is communicating some of them — the important ones — the way they feel in real experience. The piercing way. Cliches are not the enemies of beauty or meaning. They are just old, rusty, hard-to-read signs pointing in the direction of what lots and lots of people have found beautiful or meaningful, and sometimes the only way you can get to the good stuff is by actually walking in that direction.

A perfect articulation of something I always suspected to be true, but never properly expressed.

"If you continue to be boring, I will hire an actor in New York to pretend that he's Errol Morris. If you have any casting suggestions, I'd appreciate that. "
The War On Terror: 2000-09
  • Jeremy: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/us-military-weapons-inscribed-secret-jesus-bible-codes/story?id=9575794
  • Matthew: man
  • whatever
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Themed by: Hunson