December 2010
26 posts
How we spent this time for the last time
Three years ago today I was on an island in the Banana River (“a lagoon between Cape Canaveral and Merritt Island”) with people I love very much. We were going to start our New Year in the water, around a fire, drunk, having a wonderful time.
Bart, Joe, Pat, and Mikey are all still around. Scott is not.
While writing about Scott for the Awl’s end of the world series, I came...
“I once wrestled a kiss out of a woman while we were goofing around on the floor...”
– Tom Chiarella
My End of the World story for The Awl →
screen-name:
I am really looking forward to this coming year!
This is good.
Watchannaholmes:
“She sure did tell me to get fucked a whole lot.”
40 years ago today, on December 7, 1970, a young Bay Area woman wrote her boyfriend a breakup letter. A few weeks later, the recipient of the letter, an American serviceman stationed in the Da Nang area of Vietnam and nicknamed “Johnny Smack-O”, got on his military-issued PRC-25 radio to read it aloud.
The resulting audio recording,...
“Arabs understand Marty. He has that Middle Eastern quality: me against my...”
– New York Mag unwraps Marty Peretz like an onion
1 tag
Things/people I am going to stop complaining about...
- Adjectives that are made up to describe the Arcade Fire and are never used again
- Not smoking cigarettes anymore
- People who went to prep school and act like that’s normal
- People who use the word “natch” when they mean “naturally,” which they shouldn’t use either BECAUSE MAYBE WE DON’T ALL AGREE ON WHATEVER YOU JUST SAID
“Look at your comment. Back to mine. Back to yours NOW BACK TO MINE. Sadly, it...”
– Youtube commenters are not all shit bags
“All these problems are more difficult to solve compared to a time when a much...”
– The Moscow chief of police
“I think it’s going to become increasingly difficult to seat a jury in...”
– Let’s hope so!
Haley Barbour reminds me of my grandmother
Ben Smith highlights a damaging anecdote from deep in Barbour’s past (1982, to be exact):
The racial sensitivity at Barbour headquarters was suggested by an exchange between the candidate and an aide who complained that there would be ”coons” at a campaign stop at the state fair. Embarrassed that a reporter heard this, Mr. Barbour warned that if the aide persisted in racist...
This paragraph is going to give some people hives
From Carr’s NYT column this morning:
“Waiting for ‘Superman’ ” is one thing that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg agree on, Rupert Murdochtalks about to anyone who will listen, David Koch of Koch Industries promotes, and Paul Tudor Jones and many of his hedge fund brethren work to support.
We all parted with a cool old ’60s handshake
I want to marvel at the circumstances of meeting a person you’re pretending to be/idolizing, but there’s no room for that here. This guy is too serious for freudian antics:
Sherry debuted his Diamond tribute band in 2005. The backstage meeting between Sherry and Diamond was arranged by mutual friend Randy Cierley-Sterling, Diamond’s bass player from 1969 until 1972.
“Randy was...
“LIKE CORMAC MCCARTHY, BUT FUNNY”
– This is the essential difference I suppose. Via Mark Hemingway.
“Portis’s characters have a self-conscious manner, a homespun formality of...”
– Carlo Rotella pretty much nails what makes True Grit different from No Country. Via Jesse Walker.
1 tag
This came out months ago but the maggot part...
So I’m posting a snippet of it here. I saw an excerpt of this Vice interview with plane-crash survivor Juliane Koepcke in Harper’s, which I bought because the cover story is about A.A. When I got to this part I immediately felt nauseated and alive:
You only broke one bone after falling from the sky? Well, other things were found later when I saw a doctor. I had strained the vertebrae...
“Even breathe the word ‘peace’ and your liable to charges of total...”
– A Catholic writer reaches this atheist with a deep truth. Go and read the whole thing.
None of us will be paid music journalists ever
A study released by Berklee College of Music has music journo salaries topping out at $70k per year. My old editor Andrew Beaujon (of SPIN, Washington City Paper, and now TBD) called his old editor for a quote:
“I know for a fact,” says Doug Brod, Spin’s editor, that music journalist salaries “go higher than that,” referring to the study’s maximum. He’s...
“Police sources have contended that various national and international gangs have...”
– La Familia fails to set up shop in the District.
Tim Heidecker and shark-jumping
Comic Tim Heidecker plans to release an intentionally bad album of songs. From Pitch Perfect PR:
Heidecker & Wood is the songwriting and recording duo Tim Heidecker (co-creator of “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!”) and Davin Wood (composer on “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!”) Their first release, Starting From Nowhere, consists of twelve songs written and recorded at Heidecker...
“A spokeswoman for the Mexican attorney general’s office said authorities...”
– Happening to the south of us 