So, I think I’m going to put this blog into semi-retirement. I just don’t update it enough anymore to feel right calling it “my blog.”
Most of my posting these days is on Tumblr. So that’s where I’ll turn my attention, while reserving this space for the sort of longer-form writing for which it’s best suited.
Until I figure out the difference between this blog and my Tumblr—and decide whether to continue maintaining one, both, or none of them—you might as well head over there. If you return to this blog it’ll be because I linked to it from there.
My yoga DVD has an excellent workout.* But I hate the music. Like much yoga music, it ranges from bland to treacly to offensively annoying. So I recently took the routine’s instructions from the DVD and combined that audio with my own mix of downtempo instrumental electronic music, leaning heavily on the artists you’d expect, like DJ Shadow and Boards of Canada. (This is where music geekery and yoga assholery converge.)
But at the end of the program, during the “constructive rest” segment, comes “Bad Days,” by Timo Mass, the gorgeous closer to his all-killer-no-filler 2002 dance freakout, Loud. And while it’s ideal music for “letting my body undulate on the waves of my breath while my brain sinks into my heart” (the DVD’s words, not mine), I may have to swap it out with a less potent, emotionally loaded piece.
Because “Bad Days” actually connotes very good days: the sunny spring of 2002 when I didn’t have much of an agenda beyond drinking beer with Neil and playing drums in a party band. There were some bad days back then, too: I wasn’t so much on a career track so much as wildly derailed from it, and I was letting a number of personal relationships deteriorate for various reasons.
But euphoric recall allows me to only remember the sunny afternoons and the bacchanalian nights in Iowa City bars, and seeping in through the cracks between the dance anthems and the sweaty rock songs was this one—bright, patient, searching.
* That is an actual sentence I typed, on a blog with my real, full name on it; a blog that anyone in the world can read.
For several years I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Minneapolis supermusician Shawn Neary, whom I first met when his old band, Boy With Stick, played with my old band, Nolan. He’s from Iowa too, and when I moved up to Minneapolis he’d already been here a few years, playing with Boy With Stick but also with a little band called Tapes ‘n Tapes (whatever happened to those guys?), the delightful pop trio Seymore Saves The World, and finally taking on bass duties for beloved local juggernaut Cloud Cult. Shawn is the best evidence I’ve seen that a person can have a successful career in music while remaining a genuinely nice guy.
He’s also been quietly carving out a (side? solo?) project called The Wapsipinicon, named for a river in Iowa. The other day, Shawn walked straight into my workplace and handed me the band’s first album, San Geronimo, hot off the presses, and I was abundantly grateful. The Wapsipinicon is playing a CD release show at the Kitty Kat Club on March 6. Here is my favorite track from San Geronimo (so far), called “Get Out of My Town.”
I want my reading regimen for 2010 to be at least more robust than last year’s, which isn’t saying much—I’d have to read more than five books to beat last year’s total (hey—these YouTube videos aren’t going to watch themselves).
The first one is Mary Karr’s Lit, which I was looking forward to for a while, and which I received for Christmas. Her first two memoirs are among my favorite models of the form, and I was eager to see Karr’s singular voice brought to bear on her adult struggles with alcoholism and spirituality.
So maybe my high expectations were part of the reason I was a little disappointed that Karr’s account of her salvation seems almost too tidy, when in fact motherhood, divorce, addiction, and the writer’s life are extremely messy things. It’s a truism in literature that happy lives don’t make for narratives nearly as compelling as tragic ones, so maybe after watching Karr navigate such a spectacularly fucked-up life across three books, we don’t quite buy it when she actually finds peace. Read more »
Since I made my students do a freewrite today, I figured it was only fair that I do it too. The prompt was “Write about whatever song is stuck in your head right now.” All day, I’ve had “Accidents Waiting to Happen” by 12 Rods swirling in my brain, playing the frantic drum part on my teeth, despite a long bus ride soundtracked by iTunes shuffle and an episode of This American Life.
The thing is, this isn’t even one of my favorite songs from Lost Time, or one of my favorite 12 Rods songs, period. My favorite off Lost Time is probably “Terrible Hands,” the sort of song you can tell would have fit right into a Dismemberment Plan set. Not that “Accidents” wouldn’t. Not at all.
For Christmas I received a device which will allow me to convert hours of old 8 mm tape to grainy, slightly out-of-sync video, archive it on an external hard drive, and then forget it forever.
The new decade, coupled with my occasionally uncomfortable revisiting of this old footage, reminds me that while a monumental leap occurs between a person’s second and third decade of life—teenagers graduate from high school, gain weight, develop various bad habits, get jobs, make mistakes they hope aren’t irreversible—the transition that occurs over the course of one’s twenties and early thirties is more subtle but no less striking: the people in these old videos are committing various ill-advised acts of debauchery and naivete, but have survived, flourished, started families, and cultivated new lives that elaborate on but never entirely supplant their old hedonistic ones.
As a recovering nostalgia addict, I am careful never to dwell or wallow for too long in the past. Especially now that ten years ago doesn’t feel as deep in the past as it used to, I have to be careful about ascribing too strong a negative or positive quality to it. It just was. These videos from that era provide the most objective viewpoint I’ll ever have, and the subjective one is there if you’re looking for it: I was young, cocky, and a little pudgier than I am now. I had potential. I was done with school but still had a lot of growing up to do. I could play the drums and I could write and I had no idea what to do about it. Read more »
Notes on David Foster Wallace’s “All That” (The New Yorker, December 14, 2009):
From what little I know about The Pale King, I am already wondering if and how this story fits into it.
The early mention of the narrator’s “biological parents” recalls similar qualifications made by the narrator of the 2004 story “Good Old Neon” from Oblivion.
On the surface this story is about faith v. skepticism. I wonder whether it is meant to function as DFW’s rejoinder to the New Atheists, knowing as we do from his writing that he attended church and made substantial room in his work for faith, magic, the supernatural, and the afterlife. He was always good at putting the lie to the idea that smart people cannot be believers, or that believers must be simple-minded and irrational.
“The fact that the most powerful and significant connections in our lives are (at the time) invisible to us seems to me a compelling argument for religious reverence rather than skeptical empiricism as a response to life’s meaning.”
Has it taken me this long to get around to reading this story because I was reading other things, because I had much catching up to do in my NYer reading, or because I was avoiding this story with a kind of vague dread I’m worried will accompany all my consumption of whatever future writing by DFW ever emerges?
“I’m not putting any of this well. I am not and never have been an intellectual. I am not articulate, and the subjects that I am trying to describe and discuss are beyond my abilities.”
I rang in the year 2000 indulging pretty much all of my vices at once. I finished college. I didn’t have a cell phone or a broadband internet connection. I lived in a series of rental properties. I discovered the Dismemberment Plan. I taught ninth- and tenth-grade English. I moved to Iowa City. I became a substitute teacher. A friend died. I discovered Music for 18 Musicians. I got a job at a bookstore. I recorded an album in New York. My band broke up. I got a new computer. I woke up late on September 11. I got my first cell phone. I went to London. I joined two newbands. I ran my first 5K. Neil moved away. Wes moved away. I started a blog. My drums were stolen. I got a job scoring standardized tests. I bought new drums. I recorded an album in Iowa City. I was fired from my job scoring standardized tests. I went to California. My dad died. I quit my job at the bookstore. I got a job at a day care. I read Infinite Jest for the second time. I moved in with my mother. Mark moved away. I joined Friendster. I went on tour. Phil moved away. I moved to Chicago. I got a job at a sign-making company. I discovered Talk Talk. I quit my job at the sign-making company and got a job at a corporate law firm. I joined a kickball team and an alt-country band. I joined MySpace. I got a new computer. I discovered Stars of the Lid. I got into grad school. I quit my job at the law firm. I read Infinite Jest a third time. I moved to Minneapolis. I got a new bike. I made new friends. I joined Facebook. I lived in a horrible rental property. My new bike was stolen from my horrible rental property. I got a job working for Garrison Keillor. I shaved my head. Garrison Keillor fired me. I moved into a nicer rental property. I turned thirty. I joined a new band. I went to a lot of weddings. I quit drinking. I discovered Subtle. I got a new bike. I got a job at a café. I shaved my head again. I took up yoga. I got a new computer. I went to London again. The bridge fell. I wrote a book. A lot of my friends moved away. I wrote for some magazines. I joined Twitter. I got a job teaching writing. I met someone special. I joined a new band. I got an iPhone. I read Infinite Jest for the fourth time. I quit my job at the café. Iowa got civil rights. I got a job at a coop. I got a tattoo. I went on tour again. I got another job teaching writing. I went to the beach. I moved into a new rental property. I got a new computer. I recorded my first day album. I got proper winter boots and a proper winter coat. I woke up early and walked to work, in the snow, and the sun hadn’t risen yet.
Notes on David Foster Wallace’s