This also functions quite well as a New Year’s resolution:
Continue playing with Run At The Dog.
“Chex Mix”
“Noon Moon”
“Superior Headwear Anthem (Lampshade)”
Posted: January 2nd, 2009 under General.
Comments: none
Now that I’ve been implementing Part 1 of my Winter Survival Strategy thoroughly and consistently every day for the last three weeks—getting back into shape, developing a robust cardiovascular system and toned musculature, neither Taking My Eyes Off the Prize nor Giving Up the Dream, and most certainly never interrupting my fitness regimen for five days so I could go home for the holidays and sleep till noon and lie on the couch watching The Simpsons—I am feeling better about the season and less vulnerable to the various perils of another Minnesota winter.
Of course, another key component of my Winter Survival Strategy, and General Life Survival Strategy in General, is music. So Part 2 of my Winter Survival Strategy is called:
Music, Duh.
Something curious happens to my music-listening habits toward the beginning of a season, as my playlists shift subtly, then dramatically, toward the music that has traditionally provided the soundtrack to a given season. This means that, as October turns to November, I go from Peter Gabriel’s Us (which dominated fall 1992) to Yes’ Fragile (which dominated November of … 1992).
I realize this kind of regression is not entirely healthy. But I find myself taking refuge in this “comfort music” when other aspects of life aren’t quite as stable, or while experiencing a dearth of daylight and temperatures that don’t kill elderly people.
In fact, I have a playlist on my computer right now named “Regression” that is almost entirely composed of the old prog rock I listened to throughout high school; more specifically, the albums I listened to a lot in the winter: Genesis’ Wind & Wuthering, The Yes Album, Dark Side of the Moon, King Crimson’s Discipline.
On those rare occasions when I seem incapable of doing anything but lying on my couch during The Gloaming, I cue up this playlist and turn on the Christmas lights I’ve hung around the windows and I can almost—almost—believe that I’m fifteen again.
What makes this behavior just a shade less than totally pathetic is that I supplement my Regression playlist with music that isn’t older than I am. I still acquire and listen to and become completely enraptured with new music, even the Best New Music, on a regular basis. Now watch how stealthily I transition into that most dreaded yet inevitable year-end blogtrend, the Best-Of List. Sneaky, right?
Perhaps I can mitigate the B-o-L’s music-wonk pomposity by stating that I’ve probably put less thought into this list than ever before, and I’m not going to supplement it with barely relevant personal narratives or high-concept ostentation. It’s just there, and it’ll only take up a second of your time. Nor am I going to rank them, instead listing them chronologically, because these are the albums that accompanied my life in 2008, and in return, my life gave them a narrative.
Atlas Sound, Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel
Goldfrapp, Seventh Tree
DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist, The Hard Sell
School of Language, Sea From Shore
Elbow, The Seldom Seen Kid
Kaki King, Dreaming of Revenge
Sun Kil Moon, April
M83, Saturdays=Youth
Subtle, ExitingArm
The Whigs, Mission Control
The Annuals/Sunfold, Wet Zoo EP
Portishead, Third
Dosh, Wolves & Wishes
Sunfold, Toy Tugboats
The Hold Steady, Stay Positive
Girl Talk, Feed the Animals
My Morning Jacket, Evil Urges
David Byrne & Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
The Bird & The Bee, Please Clap Your Hands EP
TV on the Radio, Dear Science
The Dears, Missiles
School of Seven Bells, Alpinisms
Alias, Resurgam
Flying Lotus, Los Angeles
Hatchback, Colors of the Sun
Posted: December 29th, 2008 under Music.
Comments: 4
Update my blog more often.
For reals.
In the meantime, happy holidays, y’all.
Posted: December 24th, 2008 under General.
Comments: 2
I’ve made no secret of my secret abiding irrational fear of The Gloaming, that horrible gunmetal-gray time of day when the sky turns the color of Kaopectate and my circadian rhythms go into a tailspin and I begin to feel as if I’m living in Norway, with access to none of that country’s wonderful things [1] and all of its bad ones [2].
Despite having grown up just a few latitudes south of Minneapolis, with all the various horrors and joys of Midwestern winters inculcated in me from birth, I am beginning to fear that I have some latent form of Seasonal Affective Disorder which is slowly but surely getting worse every winter. The Gloaming never used to bother me; in fact, I embraced it as a child because it meant coming in from playing in the snow and drinking hot chocolate and watching TV. [3] It meant dinner. Even in college I didn’t mind it so much because I didn’t really appreciate sunlight anyway, holed up as I was in some corner of the library or convalescing with friends in the soulless artificial light of the dining hall.
Indeed, it seems like getting through the winter used to be much easier. For most of my twenties my winter survival strategies used to lean pretty heavily on music and drinking and a general embrace of the sedentary lifestyle, especially during the long January-February stretch. But these last couple winters I’ve been horrified to realize that none of that will cut it anymore. [4]
Maybe it has something to do with getting older. Maybe it’s because I’ve turned into one of those assholes who goes running every day, so now I appreciate the time I’m able to spend outdoors during the spring, summer, and fall. Maybe it’s because I’ve also turned into one of those assholes who rides his bike everywhere, so I resent the extra steps and layers that winter cycling requires. I can still do both of those things—run and ride my bike—but it’s not as effortless, or as warm.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m not thrilled about the daily jogging and biking thing. I’m one of those assholes, but I’m by no means proud of it. It kind of pisses me off, in fact: all that effort and energy and moisture-wicking fabric expended in the service of maintaining even a baseline level of happiness (BLH), and it’s certainly not as immediately gratifying or decadent or socially stimulating as, say, drinking and sleeping.
But it appears to be my only recourse, for now. Which is why it is the first and most crucial component of my Winter Survival Strategy, a many-pronged regimen of BLH-maintenance I’ve developed with the help of others who suffer similarly. I’ve named this component:
Exercise, Unfortunately.
This means I have to go running outside, in temperatures as low as 20°F, wearing three or four layers up top and two down below and those sissified wool gloves that sissies wear. And, sometimes, something called a neck gator.
It means that when I ride my bike I will be wearing the aforementioned layers and gator, along with wool socks [5], fancy futuristic gloves over my aforementioned sissy gloves, a headband, a hat, a helmet, an extra jacket [6], and goggles. That’s right, goggles. Like, the kind that normal people wear to go skiing but that assholes wear to ride bikes. It means I will buy different-sized bike tubes so I can switch out my road tires and put my snow tires on.
So that does it for biking. But I still want to run [7], and when the temperature drops below 20°F [8], I will take my regimen indoors, because I am resolutely not a badass (just an asshole). Now, just where does one go running in Minneapolis in the winter?
In the Metrodome, apparently. That’s right: the place where the Twins and the Vikings, two professional teams of sports players, sometimes play. What I discovered just recently is that the upper deck of the stadium is opened twice a week to assholes who want to run in circles on it, for just $1 a visit. 2.5 laps around the stadium = one mile, which means I can run my minimum distance of 3 miles in just 7.5 laps. Emily and Maryhope and I tried this recently. I turned on my fancy iPhone-based GPS for Assholes so I could keep track of our distance, and our afternoon looked like this:
The novelty of running in the Metrodome sustained us for about three laps, and then we just got kind of bored. [9] In the end, we decided it was the sort of thing we’d be content to do maybe once a month.
But once a month isn’t going to cut it [10] if I’m going to maintain a daily BLH. This is how I found myself standing in the lobby of the Downtown Minneapolis YMCA, gatored and goggled, applying for a membership. The YMCA offers income-based memberships on a sliding scale, and since my income is four dollars a month, they were willing to slide pretty far for me. The good news is that soon everybody will be able to get great bargains on income-based memberships because everyone will be laid off.
So that’s where I am right now. Well, not right now: right now I’m sitting in a coffeeshop on the west edge of downtown, watching the snow fall while my sweat- and spit-moistened neck gator dries off. In a little while I will activate tonight’s component of my Winter Survival Strategy, which will involve putting on my gator and goggles and riding a few blocks west to the YMCA and running on the treadmill for 45 minutes, then sitting in the sauna far too long, then seeing if I can get from the Y’s third floor to the downtown Target via the Skyway, just to see if I can. Such is the modest extent of my enterprising spirit right now. It is winter, after all.
Posted: December 8th, 2008 under Minneapolis, General.
Comments: 11
One thing about Netflix I find both frustrating and kind of neat is that movies show up in my mailbox that I don’t even remember putting in my queue, probably because I did so as long as a year ago—such is the glacial pace at which I’ve been working my way through it. So I often receive surprises: movies I forgot I wanted to watch but am now eager to, or movies I can’t even remember why I wanted to see in the first place.
I got a pleasant surprise of the former variety when I opened a little red envelope to find a documentary about Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon—an album I hadn’t listened to, much less thought about, for at least a few years.
Which is a shame, because: Dude. It’s fucking Dark Side of the Moon. But very few progressive rock legacies have weathered very well, least of all the Floyd—despoiled as it was by Roger Waters’ and David Gilmour’s very public, twenty-year feud; the inevitable slew of uneven solo albums on everyone’s part; and of course David Gilmour’s grandiose perseveration with the Floyd name throughout the eighties and nineties. Also, chops-wise, Pink Floyd wasn’t as superficially impressive: they didn’t have the blistering pyrotechnics of a King Crimson or Led Zeppelin, preferring sustained blues notes on the guitar, whole notes on the organ, and deceptively simple drum parts.
All of which is a shame, because again: Dude. It’s fucking Dark Side of the Moon. Just because an album stays on the Billboard Top 200 for fourteen straight years and garners hyperbolic amounts of critical acclaim and creates the blueprint for the next thirty years of concept-driven, blues-inflected progressive rock and is embraced by stoners and frat boys alike, doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve all those accolades.
Posted: December 1st, 2008 under Music.
Comments: 8
Check this out:
In Subsidized Time the Statue of Liberty is outfitted with a large-scale version of the subsidizing corporation’s signature product. To wit: in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, she’s wearing a giant diaper.
“NNYC’s harbor’s Liberty Island’s gigantic Lady has the sun for a crown and holds what looks like a huge photo album under one iron arm, and the other arm holds aloft a product. The product is changed each 1 Jan. by brave men with pitons and cranes” (367).
The following year, largely elided by the novel’s main action but referenced ominously throughout, is the ironically named the Year of Glad, when the gigantic lady will be adorned with a giant black plastic garbage bag—or, a “large dark billowing shape,” q.v. Geoffrey Day and Kate Gompert’s conversation on 649.
Another indication that the Year of Glad is going to be very unpleasant indeed for a great number of people.
On a pretty much entirely unrelated note, here’s my debut on Minnesota Reads.
Posted: November 25th, 2008 under IJOASa-oBC, Literature.
Comments: none
Thanks to everyone who came out for Run At The Dog’s show at Lee’s the other night. It was a good crowd and a good vibe, despite (or perhaps because of) the snowfall and the midnight set time. For those of you who missed it … well, you’re lame. But there will be more shows in the future.
Med School:
My Baby, She Really Plays My Song On The Radio:
Specks:
River Bottom Nightmare Band:
Posted: November 14th, 2008 under Video, Minneapolis, Concerts, Music.
Comments: 2
Being the narcissist I am, I inevitably frame national and global politics in terms of the events of my own life, making connections—often tenuous—between the macro and micro in an effort to better contextualize historical developments so huge they defy contextualization.
Being the narcissist I am, when I think about what happened tonight, I think how I spent the bulk of the last decade. I am old enough to have plenty of unhappy adult memories of the years 2000-2008, especially the last time we tried to find a new leader. But I am still young enough that eight years feels like a really long time; a quarter of my life, in fact. And no eight-year span has ever felt as long as the most recent one.
Being the narcissist I am, I feel as if tonight, my country vindicated me by vindicating the whole.
Riding my bike home tonight I made a mental list of the ways things were different the last time I was proud of our country’s leadership:
- I was twenty-four years old
- I was living in Grinnell, IA
- I had a predominantly different set of friends than I do now
- My favorite band was the Dismemberment Plan, and they were still together
- Gas cost $1 a gallon
- My father was still alive
- I was a member of Speed of Sauce
- I was still in college
Things are different now, in a billion different ways. It might take me a while to get reacquainted with my own patriotism, but I’m looking forward to that process. If a person is bombarded by enough bad news, that person might begin to forget what good news sounds like.
Finally, some good news.
Posted: November 5th, 2008 under Politics.
Comments: 2
In an effort to take my mind, and yours, off Tuesday’s momentous importance and the incipient nationwide dread tying our collective electoral stomach into knots, I want to share the good news that over the weekend I traveled to Chicago with my new band to play a show there.
I think the statute of limitations on referring to Run At The Dog as “my new band” has almost expired, which is nice. Especially now that we’ve successfully survived a road trip together. Even though I’ve suspected as much for several months, I’m now completely convinced that we are a good fit for each other as musicians and friends. And I think I proved to them that I am the sort of person willing to drop everything and make a 14-hour road trip, spend money on gas, sleep on the floor, etc just to play a rock show in another city. It’s important for them, and me, to know that I am still that kind of person.
The best part of the whole experience, other than the show itself, was singing along with the Scissor Sisters and Tears For Fears in the middle of the night during the return drive. If a single album can give birth to the collective musical consciousness of five people, it would seem that Songs From The Big Chair is the musical father of Run At The Dog, and we are all siblings living under Roland Orzabal’s roof. This is, happily, true of most of the bands I’ve been in.
Finally, here’s a video of our first song on Saturday night. It’s a personal favorite.
Posted: November 3rd, 2008 under Chicago, Video, Music.
Comments: 2
I’m not much for Halloween costumes, though I’ve had a couple smartass showings over the past few years, ranging from the esoteric to the extremely esoteric.
Far be it from me to discontinue a trend. And yet, my costume this year is esoteric while at the same time obnoxiously inevitable.
And it exists only in photographic form. Click here to see this year’s costume and groan accordingly.
Posted: October 29th, 2008 under IJOASa-oBC, Images, Literature.
Comments: 8
The relative lag time between posts on this blog has been bothering me for some time and is damn near close to becoming unacceptable. Strong language, I realize, but updating this blog has slipped a few notches on my list of priorities, and despite recent milestones of which I’m plenty proud, some of my passion for it has waned. I think it also has a lot to do with the now all-but-defunct albatross that is the IJOASa-oBC, hamstrung as it is by events beyond my control and demanding a great deal of time and energy so that even thinking about it, much less working on it, leaves me feeling sad and tired.
Notwithstanding all that, however, I’ve found recent inspiration in a new piece of writing by Andrew Sullivan in the current issue of the Atlantic, entitled “Why I Blog.” Sullivan gives a lot of reasons for blogging that I share but had never previously considered. The piece is worth reading in full, but for now I’ll just share some passages that grabbed me, and renewed my drive to blog on a more regular basis.
As blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal. And make no mistake: it heralds a golden era for journalism. …
As you read a log, you have the curious sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages—the opposite of a book. As you piece together a narrative that was never intended as one, it seems—and is—more truthful. Logs, in this sense, were a form of human self-correction. They amended for hindsight, for the ways in which human beings order and tidy and construct the story of their lives as they look back on them. Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending. So they have plot as well as dramatic irony—the reader will know the ending before the writer did. …
For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.
You end up writing about yourself, since you are a relatively fixed point in this constant interaction with the ideas and facts of the exterior world. And in this sense, the historic form closest to blogs is the diary. …
But a blog, unlike a diary, is instantly public. It transforms this most personal and retrospective of forms into a painfully public and immediate one. It combines the confessional genre with the log form and exposes the author in a manner no author has ever been exposed before. …
The key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks. But the superficiality mask[s] considerable depth—greater depth, from one perspective, than the traditional media could offer. … A blog, therefore, bobs on the surface of the ocean but has its anchorage in waters deeper than those print media is technologically able to exploit. It disempowers the writer to that extent, of course. The blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of authority. He is—more than any writer of the past—a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.
A writer fully aware of and at ease with the provisionality of his own work is nothing new. For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that suggest the imperfection of human thought, the inconstancy of human affairs, and the humbling, chastening passage of time. …
Perhaps the quintessential blogger avant la lettre was Montaigne. His essays were published in three major editions, each one longer and more complex than the previous. A passionate skeptic, Montaigne amended, added to, and amplified the essays for each edition, making them three-dimensional through time. … Montaigne was living his skepticism, daring to show how a writer evolves, changes his mind, learns new things, shifts perspectives, grows older—and that this, far from being something that needs to be hidden behind a veneer of unchanging authority, can become a virtue, a new way of looking at the pretensions of authorship and text and truth. …
To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth. …
If all this sounds postmodern, that’s because it is. And blogging suffers from the same flaws as postmodernism: a failure to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective. A traditional writer is valued by readers precisely because they trust him to have thought long and hard about a subject, given it time to evolve in his head, and composed a piece of writing that is worth their time to read at length and to ponder. Bloggers don’t do this and cannot do this—and that limits them far more than it does traditional long-form writing. …
There is, after all, something simply irreplaceable about reading a piece of writing at length on paper, in a chair or on a couch or in bed. To use an obvious analogy, jazz entered our civilization much later than composed, formal music. But it hasn’t replaced it; and no jazz musician would ever claim that it could. Jazz merely demands a different way of playing and listening, just as blogging requires a different mode of writing and reading. Jazz and blogging are intimate, improvisational, and individual—but also inherently collective. And the audience talks over both.
The reason they talk while listening, and comment or link while reading, is that they understand that this is a kind of music that needs to be engaged rather than merely absorbed. To listen to jazz as one would listen to an aria is to miss the point. Reading at a monitor, at a desk, or on an iPhone provokes a querulous, impatient, distracted attitude, a demand for instant, usable information, that is simply not conducive to opening a novel or a favorite magazine on the couch. Reading on paper evokes a more relaxed and meditative response. The message dictates the medium. And each medium has its place—as long as one is not mistaken for the other.
In fact, for all the intense gloom surrounding the news-paper and magazine business, this is actually a golden era for journalism. The blogosphere has added a whole new idiom to the act of writing and has introduced an entirely new generation to nonfiction. It has enabled writers to write out loud in ways never seen or understood before. And yet it has exposed a hunger and need for traditional writing that, in the age of television’s dominance, had seemed on the wane.
My blog is not really journalistic, though I have blogged in that capacity before—and I owe at least some of my negligence toward this site to the time I’ve spent blogging for other online organs. But this thing here—this repository of half-formed, embarrassingly personal essayish dribs and drabs that, at their best, spark the sort of conversations Sullivan prizes in the blogosphere—this is still my baby.
To Sullivan’s reasons for blogging I would add that I also blog because, for all my avowals to the contrary, I crave attention for my writing, and this is the most immediate way to get it. Before I blogged I had maybe two pieces of writing I wasn’t ashamed to situate before another pair of human eyes.
Once I began blogging I became prolific, for better or worse. I began writing on a semi-regular basis. I figured out what worked and didn’t work. I generated essays that would eventually become my application portfolio for graduate school. Having considered myself a writer for many years without doing much actual writing, I was finally taking action.
So I’ve since refined my primary reason for blogging into the belief—more a fear, really—that if I didn’t blog, I might stop writing altogether.
And, considering that in the spring I’ll be getting paid to teach other people why blogging is worthwhile, I’d better not lose hold of my conviction that it is anytime soon. And “Why I Blog” will probably be the first piece of reading on the syllabus.
Posted: October 22nd, 2008 under Literature, General.
Comments: 2
I almost forgot that my blog turns six years old this month.
That’s a long time on the Internet, and an eternity in blogyears, yall.
Celebrate with me after the jump!
Posted: October 14th, 2008 under General.
Comments: 5
Over the weekend I ticked another first off my list: I went camping.
By myself.
I’ve been camping before, of course, but this time around it was important that I go by myself and that I do it before the end of the camping season. I didn’t really get much of a vacation over the summer, so this was my one sort of retreat, and for reasons I can’t quite articulate it was important I go alone.
Maybe it was a pride thing. I wanted to prove to myself, if no one else, that I could do it. Set up a tent. Start a fire. Not freeze to death. Being outdoorsy and self-reliant is, in many ways, against my nature and outside my traditions, and as I get older I find it increasingly valuable to go against my nature by stepping outside my comfort zone and Trying New Things, even if only in small, incremental ways that eventually accumulate until I’m standing at some point in the future, looking back at today and thinking, Huh, I didn’t think I’d be able to do that, but I did.
So it was important to me, if no one else, that I successfully start and maintain a fire, something I’d never done in thirty-two years, despite having camped before and even working at a camp. I’d always let someone else take care of building the fire while I stuck with what I knew: snide wisecracks and beer consumption. My benchmark on Friday night was simple: If I could just start a fire and keep it going, the weekend would be a success.
The weekend was a success.
Not an epic odyssey of self-discovery and triumph over adversity; just a success. I didn’t have any grand revelations. I just sat and ate and slept and read and wrote and tried not to freeze to death. And went on some walks and sat by the St Croix and read most of The Road, which is simultaneously an awesome and awful (awfulsome) choice of reading material for a solo camping trip. And I was glad to return to the creature comforts of home but want to go back out and do it again ASAP. And maybe move to Helena.
This photo pretty much sums up the weekend. Read more »
Posted: October 6th, 2008 under General.
Comments: 3
In my twelve years of public schooling, snow days were, obviously, thrilling anomalies whose excitement evolved in variety and intensity as I grew older. In elementary school their joys were simple and obvious: a chance to stay home and watch television, then venture outside to play in the freshly formed drifts.
In middle school and especially high school, the implications of snow days became variform and complex. My swim team would often get the news between sets as we bobbed at the end of the lanes during morning practice. Coach Stanley would bark that he’d just gotten the call: school was off; therefore, we had time for another couple thousand yards. We’d whoop and then immediately groan, and my consequent commingling of joy and suffering was never before in such perfect proportion.
Snow days in high school promised a wealth of quasi-adult activities: lunch at Pizza Hut, a nap, a trip to Wal-Mart for no particularly good reason. Or a group of us would convene in someone’s basement to watch movies. Or Phil and Wes and Mark and I would hold an impromtu band practice.
But whatever the age or activity, snow days were so blessedly perfect not just for their unpredictability but for the persistence of one grand, darkly reassuring notion: school had failed. The bureaucratic rigidity and institutional routine of school—the surest, most predictable thing about our lives up to that point—had, for once, broken down, however temporarily; the system was interrupted.
I am reminded of snow days now, at the end of September, not because I anticipate any of them in the near future, but because of the deep-shit mess in which our nation’s economy has gradually and/or suddenly mired itself. It’s a circumlocutory hike to that from snow days, so please bear with.
I should also preface the entirety of the following with a caveat and a guarantee: that I don’t know dick about economics, never have; and that I will not try and act like I do. Read more »
Posted: September 30th, 2008 under Politics, General.
Comments: 13
