1. 14 Mar



    Rory Gilmore's Early-20s Crisis

    I feel sick to my stomach to hear about the Boston Phoenix closing immediately - it’s terrible news. Like countless others, it’s one of the first places to publish and take a chance on me, and thanks to them I had adventures like Bowling with Franz Ferdinand and getting to peek behind the scenes during an MTV reality show. It was a great place to get started as a writer and so many talented people have come out of it - on tumblr, in the newspapers, everywhere you read words. Here’s a link to one slim piece that I wrote on Gilmore Girls’ season 6 premiere; basically how it was a proto-Girls-like “quarter life crisis.” Remember those, pre-Recession?

    Oh, and I’m pretty sure if it wasn’t for a very early-on mention of Grizzly Bear upstairs at the Middle East where the writer (by Simon Vosick-Levinson, I think? I have a weird memory for this stuff) mentioned their “four-part harmony,” and if I didn’t go to their next show at TT the Bear’s with a notebook in my hand, I would’ve never met the guy in a band who invited me to the party where I met the guy who changed my life. So thanks again, Boston Phoenix!

    ETA: An hour later, still gobsmacked. How sad! It hits a variety of different emotional points involving journalism and the ways that Boston’s changing as a city (everything alt and fun from high school/college is GONE now in a way that suggests total obliteration). And reading that someone like Susan Orlean got her start there, and that people could go from The Boston Phoenix onto bigger and better publications, was a big part of the reason I always wanted to write for them. Ugh.

     

  2. 12 Mar


    It’s funny that the car is sort of the center of this fantasy of “the road,” “adventure,” and “American freedom,” and the idea that you can get anywhere if you only have a car. Because if you think about it, really think about it: cars make no sense. Maybe, even, they’re just a big capitalist lie of freedom and success. They are a super expensive investment that only declines in value. Whole cities and states have developed where you need a car to get anywhere, because you can’t walk down the street or bike safely to get some place else. It’s always disheartening to sit in the autoshop, waiting for some stupid thing that went wrong to get fixed, freaking out because that’s at least 300 dollars out the window, 300 dollars that you didn’t budget for and 300 dollars that will make things slim and difficult this month. The autoshop feels like purgatory because you’re united in your tough luck, the idea that you will have to pay money to leave this dreary place of weak coffee and rotating hot dogs on a stick.Naturally, Lana Del Rey’s selling cars these days. Did you know that? It all dovetails quite nicely on a thematic level, I find.

    It’s funny that the car is sort of the center of this fantasy of “the road,” “adventure,” and “American freedom,” and the idea that you can get anywhere if you only have a car. Because if you think about it, really think about it: cars make no sense. Maybe, even, they’re just a big capitalist lie of freedom and success. They are a super expensive investment that only declines in value. Whole cities and states have developed where you need a car to get anywhere, because you can’t walk down the street or bike safely to get some place else. It’s always disheartening to sit in the autoshop, waiting for some stupid thing that went wrong to get fixed, freaking out because that’s at least 300 dollars out the window, 300 dollars that you didn’t budget for and 300 dollars that will make things slim and difficult this month. The autoshop feels like purgatory because you’re united in your tough luck, the idea that you will have to pay money to leave this dreary place of weak coffee and rotating hot dogs on a stick.

    Naturally, Lana Del Rey’s selling cars these days. Did you know that? It all dovetails quite nicely on a thematic level, I find.

     

  3. 4 Mar



    For my final night’s drive it is snowing heavily. I decide to cover every single geographical point on the Roadrunner map in one long drive, setting out shortly after nine o’clock for Gloucester. It is a beautiful night, the roads empty, the snow falling onto my windscreen in great beautiful plumes, I put my hand outside the window and the flakes float gently, coldly on to my fingers. I drive past the Stop & Shop, I drive out towards Amherst, to south Greenfield. I take in Route 128, the Mass Pike, Route 3, from R9 I loop down to R495, down towards Quincy, I head out to Cohasset, to the rocks. And as I spiral about the snowy landscape I feel like a skater, pirouetting across the ice.
    — The Guardian sent a writer on a rock’n’roll pilgrimage to Massachusetts for the sake of Jonathan Richman’s “Roadrunner.” It’s pretty great! (It is also the inspiration for the current petitioning of Roadrunner as Massachusetts’ state rock’n’roll song … but as a wrinkle, some other delegates have nominated Aerosmith’s “Dream On,” because they don’t get it. It’s super sad. Steven Tyler payola, obviously!)
     

  4. 27 Feb


     

  5. 21 Feb


    Had Bunheads on in the background of making breakfast the other morning; half-watching it, I could tell it wasn’t one of their better episodes, a kinda bottle episode thing set in the ballet studio. Fell onto the side of bad quippy, with inexplicable Tommy Lee Jones jokes by teenage boys. Then - and it felt like all of a sudden - I heard this song coming on, “I Predict” by Sparks, which sounded a little like Sparks to me (but I know their new wave-ier stuff) if it was filtered through a clompy, stomping, big beat Queen tube, and since it’s Bunheads, it was this Magic Mike-y group dance with tiny teenagers in silhouette where everyone’s playing a miner in a hardhat.

    Little did I know that the video for “I Predict” is equally weird, it’s David Lynch’s very first music video, featuring one of the Sparks stripping to eager customers. MTV banned it because of Ron Spark’s Hitler mustache.

     
     

  6. 20 Feb


    A very unfleshed-out thought, but I was talking about this idea with my guy the other day: is the female New Age-searcher sorta like the current equivalent to the beats? Can you relate Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love to Jack Kerouac and On the Road? Do both works inspire a visceral “aw, fuck this!” from - often - the opposite sex, a sort of revulsion at somebody’s glorifying how they threw off the shackles of society and discovered enlightenment-to-the-minus of everybody else?It’s really half-formed right now but I don’t think I’m wrong. I also found it very funny that, of course Kristen Stewart is all like “MAN I LOVE THE BEATS, ON THE ROAD, YEAH FREEDOM,” because that seemed like the most “Kristen Stewart” answer to “why did you do On the Road, the movie that nobody saw?”

    A very unfleshed-out thought, but I was talking about this idea with my guy the other day: is the female New Age-searcher sorta like the current equivalent to the beats? Can you relate Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love to Jack Kerouac and On the Road? Do both works inspire a visceral “aw, fuck this!” from - often - the opposite sex, a sort of revulsion at somebody’s glorifying how they threw off the shackles of society and discovered enlightenment-to-the-minus of everybody else?

    It’s really half-formed right now but I don’t think I’m wrong. I also found it very funny that, of course Kristen Stewart is all like “MAN I LOVE THE BEATS, ON THE ROAD, YEAH FREEDOM,” because that seemed like the most “Kristen Stewart” answer to “why did you do On the Road, the movie that nobody saw?”

     

  7. 12 Feb



    Massachusetts politicians are trying to make The Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner" the official rock song of Massachusetts.

    This is the most delightful news of the day!

     

  8. 12 Feb


    (Source: kimmiesgifgallery)

     

  9. 5 Feb


    itscomplicatedproject:

    The issue #1 zines are here! That’s the cover — and the zines as they looked when Niina opened the boxes yesterday — above.

    Since the first issue is themed around artists whose work we loved as teenagers, we knew we wanted the issue to look like a school notebook with doodles all over it. Niina did the sketches, and then the amazing Gina of Birds of Lace Press took them and designed this cover.

    The zine is 54 pages, and contains essays by Nona Willis Aronowitz, Elisabeth Donnelly, Tom Ribitzky, Brooklyn Copeland, Nina Mashurova, and Judy Berman.

    We’ll be sending issue #1 to Kickstarter backers ASAP, including those who ordered both issues. Watch this space for more info on how to buy the zine if you don’t already have a copy coming via Kickstarter (or if you did but also want to buy dozens more copies to distribute to everyone you know).

     

  10. 21 Jan