For Emma, Forever Ago was a revelation for me when I finally heard it, a year after everyone else had. Part of it was that I had recently broken up with a girl named Emma and I was feeling wistful. But part of it was also that it was just really fucking good.
That said, I don’t think Bon Iver should release albums in the summertime. His music seems more suited to sunsets at 4:30 in the afternoon.
Anyway, here you go.
My iPod Touch is having problems. It is a second generation iPod Touch, which I was perfectly happy not knowing for as long as it didn’t have problems, but which I was forced to figure out when it came to self-prescribing a solution for said problems. I’ve had this magical device for a year and a few months. A couple days ago, I was bored and then I was like, “I guess I will go for a walk and listen to music.” So I put on my shoes and turn on my music and the left headphone on my second generation iPod Touch starts squigging out on me. All crazy in and out and bzzzt and boing and whizzzbang and whatever. And then silence. Left monitor dead.
No amount of jiggling the headphone jack would bring it back.
One of the difficulties with being relatively ignorant about the inner workings of the technologies that we use on a day-to-day basis is that when they break, we can’t fix them. This is obvious to anyone who’s ever tried to fix anything, but those numbers don’t seem to be trending upward, if I may be so bold as to make broad cultural observations without citing any sources. What I mean is that the pace of change in technology is so rapid that learning how to fix things as they’re released approaches futility: after all, why bother repairing an outdated product when you can replace it with the latest model for the same price?
This is particularly true in the case of Apple, which suggests that I send my iPod to them in exchange for a new one (for $100 and without any of my music on it, which — PROBLEM! — because the last time I updated my iTunes software, you fuckers erased like 20 albums from my library). But it’s also a simple fact of life in an age of Moore’s Law. There’s no point falling in love with a particular technology when the technology is slated for obsolescence in a couple of years.
This is all in stark contrast to the way human beings lived throughout history and up until not very long ago, when life-changing technological innovations were not multiple-times-per-decade types of events. When the VCR broke, you brought it to the VCR repair guy. When the record player needed a new needle, you went to the record player repair guy to get one. You had shoes re-soled, pants hemmed, shirts tailored and patched. Et cetera, et cetera, and get off my lawn while we’re at it, and so on… but the larger point is simple and it is this: your typical consumer product is no longer the same kind of investment it used to be. People willingly spend hundreds and thousands of dollars to get the flattest\shiniest\lightest\fastest gadget there is, and when it inevitably breaks they aren’t like, “WTF, that cost me a lot of money,” they relish the opportunity to buy an even jazzier one!
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I have to go to work this morning. HERE ARE SOME INTERESTING THINGS TO READ IN THE MEANTIME!
After a while, crocodile.
Hope the deal with the devil was worth it, pal!
Alternatively:
This is old old old, but it’s riveting, and I just spent twenty minutes looking for it (for something unrelated), and although I’d remembered that it was riveting, I hadn’t remembered how riveting, so I’m posting it.
Be curious if any of you know any live performance vids that come close to capturing that level of intensity.
I had work today. At my job, I sometimes sit in the basement of a church surrounded by thousands of books. I go through those books one by one, scanning them onto an Amazon platform and uploading them to my non-profit’s seller account, where they will be sold for a profit. (This is a new experiment in generating revenue for the organization. I hope it works, because it’s my job to make it work!) We don’t sell all the books, of course, because the vast majority of them are shit — broken or ancient and yellow or missing a cover or old periodicals (i.e., not books) or lacking an ISBN number or advance reader copies or large print versions. I throw all those books in big trash barrels. We will recycle them.
I listen to the radio when I’m sitting in the basement of the church, because otherwise there’s only the odd hum of the generators, occasional footsteps from far away. Without the radio I would go insane, really. I whistle along to the corporate and classic rock and scan books — beep! — and throw books — boom! — and take cigarette breaks outside in the sunlight.
Anyway. The radio station I listen to at work is a dude rock station. Like, they play a mix of modern dude rock — Papa Roach (who I did not realize was still a band until today!) and Linkin Park and whatever — and then they play older dude rock, before dude rock got so horribly dude-bro-ish — your Hendrix, your Zeppelin, your Appetite for Destruction-era G&R, etc. Maybe it was that, actually: maybe it was the introduction of bro-ish-ness that was the beginning of the end for dude rock. I don’t know. Who cares. Where was I going with this?
Oh, right. So WAAF, Boston. Dude-bro rock radio station. Got it.
The morning-to-afternoon DJ on WAAF is, it goes without saying, a dude-bro. I forget what his name was. You can just call him Dude-Bro. Anyway, Dude-Bro was kind of not-bright, but I was all scanning books and throwing them around and not really digging the idea of finding a new station, so I listened to him. Anyway anyway anyway. Dude-Bro was all “Osama bin Laden is dead,” and he began filling me in on little details I hadn’t caught because I wasn’t reading the news obsessively like I usually do, because I was at work trying to stay sane. So, right, so moving right along. Dude-Bro says, “Osama bin Laden was killed yesterday by U.S. Special Forces and buried at sea today,” which was news to me, the buried at sea part. But then he said something curious. He said:
“Which I still don’t really believe.”
And I was like, “HA!” And then I was like, “WHOA!” And then I was like, hmm.
Dude-Bro went on to the effect that he thinks that bin Laden was “buried at sea” –OBVIOUSLY, DUH, SHEEPLE! — so that nobody would be able to look at the body which, DUH, doesn’t exist because we didn’t even kill bin Laden (!), we just captured him. Or maybe we didn’t even capture him at all, did you ever think about that? And then Dude-Bro put on some Pink Floyd and let the matter drop for a little bit.
So I was kind of confused, you know?
I needn’t have been.
Take it away, J. Michael Waller (at Andrew Breitbart’s place, where else?):
The free world, particularly the United States, has a right to make sure Osama bin Laden is really dead. Every American has a right to walk right up to bin Laden’s corpse and view it. We are entitled to know for a fact that the witch is dead. No shroud for dignity’s sake, please – bin Laden’s naked, bullet-riddled corpse should be put on display in lower Manhattan for all the world to see. The entire body should be digitally scanned, inside and out – and made available for everyone to take his or her own picture.
The right needs a new conspiracy after the whole long-form birth certificate clusterfuck-fiasco. This thing has legs.
Welp, my Idol bracket’s busted.
I shouldn’t be too surprised, I suppose, since Casey had already been voted off once earlier in the season, only to be rescued by the judges save. And his unprecedented uniqueness (as far as American Idol goes, anyway — upright bass much?) pretty much guaranteed from the get-go that, sooner or later, mainstream voters would weary of his quirky style and jazzy sensibilities, but just watch his final performance and tell me that Casey Abrams isn’t the charmin’est Idol contestant you ever done laid eyes on.
le sigh…
Why is it so hard to be a seventy-year-old rock star?
Because there are no precedents, no frames of reference — this generation of sixty-and-seventy-something rockers all did their part to leave their mark on rock n’ roll — they were among the first ones to do so. A whole bunch of them are dead before their time, due to overdoses, indulgences, excesses, or plain bad luck, and they have left the rest to sort out this business of making rock music now that they are old geezers. As I mentioned in the last post, there are four different paths available to aging rock stars: return to your roots; evolve into something you think is relevant and modern but probably isn’t; die and preserve your legacy; and/or stay cool and relevant by doing whatever the hell you want. Maybe this schema will help you judge aging artists less harshly — or maybe more so — but at the very least, I hope that it can shed light on how some of our most legendary artists are dealing with the inevitability of getting old. Hint: it’s no fun — unless you’re Keith Richards.
I know there’s a lot of Gaga hate out there, and I’m not saying it’s not founded, or that her music is particularly interesting, but there’s a lot more interesting content to what she’s doing as a public persona than there has been from any major pop diva in a while.
Here’s an interview she gave @Google to a kindof adorably flustered Google employee a couple weeks ago (starts with a pretty cool video):
Okay Google. We posted something about Lady Gaga. Search hits please!
I will be watching LCD Soundsystem’s last concert.
(via Alex Balk)
