Kathy Sierra left Twitter again today, because of other peoples’ abhorrent behavior. She wrote all about it here. If you care at all about the Internet as the modern Commons, it’s worth a read. One warning, though: if you’re not already familiar with the specifics, you’ll probably come away feeling depressed and not a little confused. Because none of it makes any sense to normal people who interact with other normal people via a normal range of means, rather than posting their SSNs online, photoshopping pictures of their kids into porn, and raining down an endless barrage of death & dismemberment threats upon them. Due, essentially, to a difference of opinion.

As a cis-het white male, I’m automatically insulated from a lot of the risks inherent in being [on the internet | alive in America]. Even so, while I speak up frequently about shitty behavior, particularly towards women in the tech community, I’m still afraid to speak too loudly or to poke too deep into certain areas. This despite the fact that I’m essentially nobody of any importance. They don’t care.

Unrelated: For some reason I decided to change my Twitter bio today, which led to me Googling myself, which in turn reminded me that selected freelance pieces I wrote in 1994 are available on the Houston Press website.

If this were Europe I suppose I could use their bizarre Right to be Forgotten legislation to force Google to remove links to that stuff, but where would be the fun in that? Besides, I could list literally hundreds of things that I’m more embarrassed about than that writing, being the type of person who is visited, unbidden, at odd hours by vivid recollections of embarrassing moments from nearly the entire 44 years of my existence on this earth.

But dang, I sure was wrong about stuff.

I had actually been thinking the other day about revisiting some reviews from 1994 – making a list of the records without re-reading the whole things, then listening & re-evaluating them before reading the reviews. But the review I wanted to start with wasn’t in my binder of clips, and anyway, who really cares?

It was a review of the Motocaster album, Stay Loaded, one of many that I screwed up the first time around. Who the hell lets a 24-year-old review records? These goddamn Houston Press clips reminded me that I dismissed Polvo’s Celebrate the New Dark Age, which has for a long time been one of my favorite records. Here, listen to it, how stupid was I? 

I dismissed this fine, fine EP without ever, as far as I can recall, having heard Marquee Moon, even. 

WHO LETS A 24-YEAR-OLD REVIEW MUSIC?

At the very least, 24-year-olds should be restricted to show previews, glowing features, and the occasional laudatory review. Let them think they’re doing real work for, say, 10 years or so before you really give them the keys to something substantial.

It’s for their own good.

Kathy Sierra left Twitter again today, because of other peoples’ abhorrent behavior. She wrote all about it here. If you care at all about the Internet as the modern Commons,...

Big news of the morning was poor pathetic Mark Kozelek trying to convert his recent history of ill-tempered outbursts into some kind of musical/cultural moment. His brand new topical song includes lyrics referring to a writer friend of mine as “some spoiled bitch rich kid blogger brat,” which is pretty impressive considering that she’s only been writing about music professionally for a few years now.

Back in the day I was referred to obliquely in a song or two:

The only response as a critic to stuff like that is … well, I’m still not sure. Is it better or worse to believe that it’s all part of some theatrical performance (which it clearly is – whatever fit of pique inspires a song like that can’t persist as pure emotion through the writing, arranging, recording, etc, etc) which the critic is necessarily complicit in? Are we all winking at each other?

At the time I either took everything totally seriously, or I was just stringing words together in sequences that I found pleasing. I’m not sure I know which it was anymore. And I’m not sure it mattered – I had plenty of people tell me that they read my stuff & never listened to the records or saw the movies I wrote about.

But at a certain point I started to feel like I was occasionally going out of my way to find something provocative to say (and then shortly thereafter I felt like my editors were pushing me in that direction), and not long after that I just stopped writing. Focused my efforts on radio & on generally mostly neutral or intermittently effusive show listings on trianglerock.com. 

I still get people pissed at me but it has been ages since someone wrote a song in my direction.

Anyway. One of my interns last summer was a big Ben Folds fan so for the first & probably only time I actually was able to use that song to my advantage.

The new Deaf Wish single came out today. It’s worth a listen or four. 

Oh! I meant to loop back to the question of people talking during quiet shows, which is [sort of] how the whole Kozelek thing started. Since he’s too hateful to really get behind at this point, how about you go read this blog post by Circuit Des Yeux instead?

After work we went to see Tig Notaro at the Carolina Theatre. It feels so good to laugh. It feels better to laugh when none of the jokes are mean-spirited or at some smaller/weaker person’s expense. Really. Tig’s shows are like a master class in how not to be an asshole comedian.

Big news of the morning was poor pathetic Mark Kozelek trying to convert his recent history of ill-tempered outbursts into some kind of musical/cultural moment. His brand new topical song...

It always takes a little while, at the start of every recruiting season, to calibrate one’s level of empathy such that you don’t wind up passing folks on to the next interview when you know they’re just going to fail it miserably. I feel like that calibration process is actually happening more quickly this year, at least.

What happened today? I listened to the latest YOB and liked it better than the other ones I’ve listened to previously. So that’s at least one metal album that I’m into this year.

The Supreme Court refused to hear a bunch of different appeals of lower court rulings striking down anti-same-sex marriage laws, which means that in those jurisdictions, those laws remain null & void. But what that means for the rest of the country remains unclear. Meanwhile, it’s all but certain that the Roberts Court is going to screw us all over in myriad other ways, including more attempted gutting of the Affordable Care Act.

Dinner was an excellent gumbo at Geer St. Garden. The evening has involved watching computer science lectures on YouTube and struggling with which microphone to use for an online videoconference. All investment in the future; precious little payoff in the present. Oh well. We’ll always have YOB.

It always takes a little while, at the start of every recruiting season, to calibrate one’s level of empathy such that you don’t wind up passing folks on to the...

Sunday Times & comic books. This has been linked 1000x (and the pix themselves have been shown before) but still, Nicholas Nixon’s 40-year photo series of his wife & her sisters is mindblowing & should be linked again.

Other good stuff in the Times this weekend:

• Nice portrait of Andre Braugher (if you want to borrow the complete Homicide: Life on the Streets DVD set, lemme know …)
• This crazy profile of Alan Cumming

Maggie asked me if I would buy actual paper comix if there were a comic book store on the ground floor of our building & I think it’s safe to say that if there were, we’d have a problem. Not a bad problem, though.

But I’m really pretty much a comix n00b, and I have fairly restrictive tastes, so who knows. One thing I know is that it’s long past time for me to branch out from just reading Image titles.

Sunday pre-show listening/reviewing:

• New Alpha Cop
• Old Daniel Bachman
• New Bitter Resolve
• Jenks Miller & Rose Cross NC at Hopscotch 2014

I have a new DJ training with me at WXDU & today I found out he’s a freshman from New Delhi. When I was 18 I thought I was kind of brave to have moved 1200 miles from home to go to college. Heh.

Dinner at Dos Perros; I can’t stop ordering the mezcal-based margaritas on the menu. Given that it’s currently impossible to buy decent mezcal in NC ABC stores, I guess it’s reasonably logical to order these things, instead of things I could easily make at home.

Watched The Central Park Five. As if I needed another data point to verify that cops, and the criminal justice system in general (um, and America in general, I guess), are actively working to destroy the lives of young black men. 

Their coerced “confessions” were videotaped, but the 24+ hours of interrogations leading up to them were not. Thankfully that, at least, seems to be slowly changing, at least in some jurisdictions. 

Sunday Times & comic books. This has been linked 1000x (and the pix themselves have been shown before) but still, Nicholas Nixon’s 40-year photo series of his wife & her...

This is SO AMAZING:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_7ErkQFduQ

original post

This is SO AMAZING: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_7ErkQFduQ original post

Just found this in drafts. Can’t remember why I wouldn’t have posted it when I wrote it. Was I not finished? Oh well. Here it is:

—————————————————————

Well, that was interesting.

I’ll come right out & say that I’m not alone in believing that this may be the last artistically viable Hopscotch Music Festival, at least for those of us who like freaky shit. Even from outside the entirely opaque tent that is Hopscotch HQ, it’s hard to miss the sense that this year’s freakiest entrants are holdovers from previous years’ wishlists.

Having said that, I still had a pretty damn great time, and I hope to be able to do so again next year. And given that I actually wound up missing a lot of the weirdest bookings of the festival, maybe that part of my concern is illegitimate from the get-go.

Here’s the list of everyone I saw:

Thursday:

See Gulls
Le Weekend
Schooner
Judy Barnes
Museum Mouth
Last Year’s Men
The Tills
Author & Punisher

Friday:

Bachman, Graves & Bowles
Jenks Miller & Rose Cross NC
Little Black Egg Big Band
Sunburned Hand of the Man
MV+EE
Mary Lattimore & Thurston Moore
Obnox
Bedowyn
Artificial Brain
6 String Drag
Power Trip

Saturday:

Lud
Midnight Plus One
Some Army
Silent Lunch
Wing Dam
SubRosa
Screature
White Lung

The first rule of Hopscotch for me nowadays is Always Avoid City Plaza. It will crush your dreams and make even bands you admire dearly seem like puny automated museum dioramas. 

This also gives you time to nap and eat dinner, which are ultimately the true foundation to a successful Hopscotch experience.

I only saw 27 bands (over 3 days, an average of 9 bands a day, not too shabby by any normal metric). I have weirdo acquaintances whose tallies are more than likely in the 40s at this point. 

Just found this in drafts. Can’t remember why I wouldn’t have posted it when I wrote it. Was I not finished? Oh well. Here it is: ————————————————————— Well, that was...

johndarnielle:

I’m not sure if this q is about how to not make me nervous or about being nervous oneself. Because people sometimes feel nervous when saying hi in the signing line, I’m assuming the latter. If it’s the former, then this answer will totally be ridiculous and too long, but at any rate thanks for thinking of me, I’m all right, I don’t like to shake hands or take pictures, people shake my hand and take my picture anyway and if that’s the worst thing that happens to me today then I’m blessed. (NB the book signing lines have been too intense and crowded for pictures so non-issue there.) 

Otherwise, here is a thing I want to say: I know and I get that meeting somebody who’s made a thing that is useful or moving is a little weird, because the time we spend with music or literature or dance or film is private, intimate: if I listen to a song, and I have a very strong emotional response to it, it’s like the song knowsme, sort of — the song was there was I was most vulnerable. In some cases, it saved my life, and that’s no exaggeration. What intimacy could be more profound?

But of course that’s illusory. The song has no feelings of its own, and the songwriter — say, Joni Mitchell — was not there with me while I was sitting in a dark room sobbing to “A Case of You,” feeling like it spoke directly to me, so desperately in love, needing words to understand what I felt. The songwriter is really exactly like the person who made a coat: without the coat, some days I’d be so cold I wouldn’t be able to even think about anything else! My debt to the coat is considerable! But I would not be nervous meeting the person who made the coat, no matter how long I’ve been using it or how vital it’s been to me. 

So, nobody should be nervous to say hi to me in a signing line. I am really not anybody special at all.* I know songs are different from coats, but the above analogy really holds. I hope I’m an ok person, but I also know that sometimes we talk about people we admire in these superlatives that start out funny (“Joni Mitchell is a PERFECT HUMAN BEING. She is GOD ALMIGHTY WALKING THIS EARTH.” I talk this way about JM all the time, btw) and then have the result of 1) repeatedly expressing an obvious untruth, which is the exact method for inculcating a belief and 2) making us nervous to meet people who’ve made things we like. But there’s nothing to be nervous about. I’m just the guy who made the thing. The thing itself can’t be met, or has already been met. 

*really honestly really. It would make me super happy, super happy like a Yoshi at the Super Happy Tree, if people would join me in this accurate perception of me being a person who makes things he hopes are useful to others. 

Currently trying to think about whether I’ve ever owned a coat that I loved so much that I’d geek out if I met the maker. Hmm.

johndarnielle: I’m not sure if this q is about how to not make me nervous or about being nervous oneself. Because people sometimes feel nervous when saying hi in the...