mad bear, death stare
fat mare, won’t dare
dumb fare, not fair
dark lair, pied-a-terre
macklemore: au pair
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This is a picture of me and Andrea in San Francisco like a million years ago before Instagram was invented and you had to make your own Instagrams by taking real Poloroid pictures with real Poloroid cameras and then your boyfriend at the time had to scan them at his work so you could all remember what charming idiots you used to be and how you had that Canada sweatshirt and those Abercrombie jeans that were tearing at the knees and those highlights and that mane of hair that refused to be tamed and went everywhere while mocking a sign on a street off of Divisadero.
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long hair, don’t care (and other rhymes)
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The Great Gatsby (2013)
AMONG THE WHISPERINGS AND THE CHAMPAGNE AND THE STARS.
by Chad Perman
I can’t handle how quickly modern culture moves. Mostly, I’m simply ill-equipped—needing time to think and reflect and sort out one’s thoughts feels dangerously close to being a handicap in the digital age. But at the same time, I’m in no way immune to the seductive pull of an ever-happening right now, with all the excitement and escapism that provides. I feel the tug of it, but also the need to pull back, Which in the end only leaves me with a kind of free-floating anxiety, an indecisiveness that effectively manages to keep a thing like contentment forever off my menu.
When I saw The Great Gatsby with my mother on Saturday, as part of our early Mother’s Day date, I had an experience with the film that was interesting to me, and I wanted to write about that: how the film I saw was in no way the film I had expected to see, and about how that happens; how I had ended up at a place in my thinking where I had basically already decided I would hate the film before I’d ever seen it; how I had ended up getting the whole thing so completely wrong and how nice that felt, but then, also, how quickly I started to distrust my own judgement on the thing I’d just seen— seemingly because of how I’d felt about it before I’d seen it—and how I started being defensive in my liking almost immediately, despite the fact that there is absolutely nothing wrong with going to a movie on a Saturday afternoon, being swept up in it and marvelously entertained, and that just being that.
But first, before I wrote, I wanted a little time to think more deeply about all of this, to reflect and explore various threads of my experience before trying to pull together an entire essay on The Great Gatsby.
Yet, less than an hour later, I was at the computer trying to write it. And not because I was ready to write about it—I absolutely wasn’t, and have the internet equivalent of a trashcan full of crumpled up paper to prove just that—but rather because I felt I was up against some kind of cultural deadline, and had to get my oh-so-important ideas out into the world, immediately, or risk missing out on the Gatsby conversation altogether. Because the conversation was already going on, all around me. Within 24 hours of the film’s release, it had already been through both critical attacks and then a backlash to those attacks; within 48 hours several insightful thought pieces about the film were already out, and soon after, the weekend box office reports were released, which kicked off another round of debate and conversation about what the film was and if it had succeeded or not. And then the film opened the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday. For about five days, the internet was obsessed with The Great Gatsby. But soon, signs of Gatsby-fatigue began to set in; people were getting tired of hearing about it. Clearly, the time to have a relevant opinion about the film has just about passed (I mean, James Franco has even written a review of it at this point). As always, there are new things to talk about—Is the new Star Trek movie any good?—and the internet is ready to move on. But the internet is always ready to move on, and that’s not necessarily a good thing.
The best review on this movie I have seen and I am not just saying that.
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Our new logo, for BW/DR Magazine, designed by Brianna Ashby.
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I made this collage of Time Magazine reminding us how they try and sell magazines - ironically all of these were aimed at baby boomers.
Can’t wait until we’re doing this to the next generation.
My story begins in nineteen-dickety-two. We had to say dickety because the Kaiser had stolen our word ‘twenty.’ I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickety-six miles. What are you cackling at, fatty? Too much pie, that’s your problem! Now, I’d like to digress from my prepared remarks to discuss how I invented the terlet…
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Once upon a time, there was a gif that was too adorable that I kept looking at it over and over and over and over again because I couldn’t find the video that it came from and it haunted me forever and then I went home and took a nap and then it STILL HAUNTED ME FOREVER (because: forever) so then I was forced to break my rule of never reblogging gifs and here it is.omg kitty with floppy little feeeeeet!!!!!!!
(via infestissumama)
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Wolf-Meyer refers to the practice of going to bed at around eleven o’clock at night and staying there until about seven in the morning as sleeping “in a consolidated fashion.” Nowadays, adults are expected to sleep in this manner; anything else—sleeping during the day, sleeping in bursts, waking up in the middle of the night—is taken to be unsound, even deviant. This didn’t use to be the case. Until a century and a half or so ago, Wolf-Meyer observes, “Americans, like other people around the world, used to sleep in an unconsolidated fashion, that is, in two or more periods throughout the day.” They went to bed not long after the sun went down. Four or five hours later, they woke from their “first sleep” and rattled around—praying, chatting, smoking, or making love. (Benjamin Franklin reportedly liked to spend this time reading naked in a chair.) Eventually, they went back to bed for their “second sleep.”
Wolf-Meyer blames capitalism in general and American capitalism in particular for transforming once perfectly ordinary behavior into conduct worthy of medication. “The consolidated model of sleep is predicated upon the solidification of other institutional times in American society, foremost among them work time,” he writes. It is “largely the by-product of the industrial workday, which began as a dawn-to-dusk twelve-to-sixteen hour stretch and shrank to an eight-hour period only at the turn of the twentieth century.” So many people have trouble getting enough sleep between eleven at night and seven in the morning because sleeping from eleven to seven isn’t what people were designed to do.
—“Up All Night”, Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker (via cityography)
Relevant to my life/interests/way of being.
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I’m at the eye doctor and my pupils are huge and I’m overhearing some guy with a British accent telling the guy behind the counter that you have to live in New York for six years before you’re a real New Yorker and he has been here for 12 so he qualifies. And anyway my pupils have been dilated and now everything is getting fuzzy. Two days ago I was in Australia and now I am in the Lower East Side. People asked us where we were from and we said, “New York,” and they asked, “Where in New York?” and we said, “Manhattan,” and they asked, “Where is that?” And then we were at loss.
Anyway, Australia was great and all, but it’s no New York, even if I can’t feed kangaroos here.
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SPRING!
- K-X-P - Melody
- Sleigh Bells - Crown On The Ground
- Evan Voytas - You Don’t Even Know Where It’s At
- Frank Black - Headache
- Generationals - When They Fight, They Fight
- The New Pornographers - Jackie, Dressed In Cobras
- Dum Dum Girls - There Is A Light That Never Goes Out
- Neon Indian - Polish Girl
- Tokyo Police Club - Be Good (RAC Remix)
- Billy Ocean - When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going
- Future Islands - Balance
- Phantogram - Don’t Move
- Digitalism - Circles
- The Shins - Australia
- Rilo Kiley - More Adventurous
- The Statler Brothers - Flowers On The Wall
- The Tins - Subtle Rattle
- Royal Teeth - Heartbeats
- Broken Bells - The Ghost Inside
- Discovery - Swing Tree
- Moby - Run On
(Source: Spotify)
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The other day I quit my job. I’ve told you this several times already, in various ways, but it’s still noteworthy, not least due to the fact I had been at that job for almost three years. There are people who I know now, who are my dear friends, who I talk to every day, who did not even know me before I started this job. A week or so after I had given my notice, I was walking to lunch with my coworker and she mentioned some weird story that had happened at the company off-site in San Diego. I had not attended said off-site because I had just quit and it would be a bit weird to have me attending this event that is designed to embrace the growth of a company I would no longer work for. So I stayed in New York and watched a lot of Law & Order: Criminal Intent and ate some ice cream and it was good, and He saw that it was good and He called it Working From Home Week.
So, in any case, I was walking to lunch with my coworker and she mentioned that she had to bring three things that had made a big impact on her life, and one of these things was the book, The Alchemist. “I don’t know, I just had to come up with something, so I said this book,” she said. “I do like it, but it felt kind of random.” And then apparently the CEO of our company also said that The Alchemist was her favorite book. And then somebody else, and then somebody else. Everybody was reading The Alchemist.
So I decided that I would also read The Alchemist because I had also read twenty pages of Fifty Shades of Grey and since that had not killed my soul (yet/as far as I know), I decided to give it a whirl. So I read about five pages last night and then I woke up this morning and discovered that I am the greatest person to ever live and the master of my own fate forever. So anyway, life is pretty good right now! Cool manifesting destiny, bros. Let’s all eat cake.
