hi okay, so today might be your first time reading this blog so you should know that every morning i do a roundup of pitchfork reviews and then in the afternoons i write something longer, sometimes directly about pitchfork and sometimes peripherally involving pitchfork. some posts on PRR are better than others, and i think you might like this blog better if you started with some of my favorite posts. here is a list of posts i am proud of:

1. about being obese

2. about telling barack obama about pitchfork

3. about DJing an internet party

4. about the new arcade fire record

5. i’m not gonna tell you what band this one is about because then you won’t wanna read it but i promise it’s good

6. about going to the pitchfork office party

7. about record labels

8. missing the pitchfork festival

9. about DJing

10. about interviewing tame impala

11. video for Tanlines

12. attending corporate events

13. lil wayne’s rock album

14. experiences with unhip music

right now i am walking home from a party celebrating my friend Joe’s Village Voice cover story about New York gossip writers which is honestly a sensational news story, Best New Journalism 9.5, and i’m not just saying it is great because i know him and if you read it you will see what i mean. but actually related to Joe, as maybe you already know, the way that this blog works is that i write the entries on my Blackberry and then i e-mail them to Joe who posts them on Tumblr because the Blackberry Tumblr app has a word count limit that cuts my entries short and also sometimes doesn’t put line breaks in, and i don’t have internet in my apartment because the people who i was stealing internet from changed the password maybe because i was streaming too much seinfeld on megavideo, and also,

joe changes the facts that i get wrong sometimes and puts pictures or links in too, so if you read this tumblr at any time before 8:00 p.m. ET it is because of joe because 8:00 is the first time i get to use the computer on most days unless i walk up to the apple store in Soho after work to post the entry myself when joe is busy, but i don’t like doing that because they always kick me off the computers after like 30 seconds because they see me a lot and know i’m not going to buy anything and there are people who might actually buy stuff waiting to test out computers

i think it is a recent thing that apple store employees started kicking people off the computers before they were done because mike was telling me that there is a homeless woman who wrote her whole novel on computers at the apple store

anyway right now i am listening to Player’s Anthem by Junior M.A.F.I.A. (which i learned stands for Masters At Finding Intelligent Attitudes) and The Notorious B.I.G. and on the chorus, The Notorious B.I.G. says “niggas grab your dick if you love hip-hop / bitches rub your titties if you love big poppa” and then later Lil’ Kim commands, “bitches squeeze your tits” and i remember the time i played this when i was DJing, even though it is a good song it made everyone uncomfortable when he says titties, especially because of how carefully he enunciates it, and almost all the people who were dancing went to the bar or the bathroom or a different club. say that word out loud to yourself, or even in your head, it makes me like wince

anyway okay so i meant to mention this the other day: one of the other secrets that they don’t put in travel guidebooks about new york, besides that you can swim in the hudson river on the pier just south of Houston street and no one will bother you if you are discreet about sneaking past the Parks Patrol, is that anybody can walk into most of the New York University dining halls and eat there without presenting identification of any kind and you don’t need to be a student. you just need to walk past the security guard in the front but he won’t ask you for ID if you go straight to the dining hall

when you are eating there, people don’t look at you weird if you’re old because they just assume you’re a professor or staff member. i think the university would prefer you not know all this but whatever, i don’t work for them. it’s all-you-can-eat and it costs $13.01 (cash or credit) but you can get a To-Go container and eat a full meal and then also fill up the To-Go container so you can take another full meal home, so you’re only paying $6.505 for a full meal, and also you could bring in tupperware and put food in that and and then take it home in your backpack and that lowers your per-meal costs even more. they have cereal, salad bar including guacamole (new this year), meat and vegetarian entrees, ice cream and frozen yogurt, fresh fruit, cookies and cakes. it’s like a cornucopia! none of the food is that good but it is better than hospital cafeteria food but not as good as wedding catering food

i always thought a New York University dining hall would be a funny place to take someone on a date, obviously it would work best on people who are not fancy and have senses of humor. you should not take your date to the dorm dining hall at the dorm on 5th Ave. and 10th St. because it smells really strong inside, like old food, and the smell attaches to your clothes, and you will get nexted (like that old dating show on MTV where the people on the show said “next” to the contestants they didn’t wanna be on dates with anymore, also if the contestants were ugly they got nexted as soon as they came on the screen)

and i know you might be thinking “i am a 29-year-old copyeditor at an advertising agency with an adult job and a promising relationship, why would i ever want to engage in mischief like swimming in the river or eating at a college dining hall” and i have to tell you that doing mischief and things are in that zone between totally not allowed and frowned-upon has only gotten more fun as i have gotten older. like when you are younger and doing mischief and you get in trouble, everyone just rolls their eyes at you and people tell you they are disappointed in you and you sadly move on. but when you are older it makes you feel like you’re still a wild young punk like in that movie that just came out with Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin where they are divorced but in the process of reconnecting they smoke marijuana together and try to hide it from their kids and it is the most fun they have the entire movie

anyway so, about the dining hall and dates, one time jacob told me about this great way to ask someone to go on a date with you which is to make a private Facebook event and then make the event like “Dinner at [Random Restaurant]” and then only add the person you want to go on a date with and then send out the invite and it will take a few seconds for them to figure out what is going on but that’s part of the charm to this whole approach to date proposition

so anyway last night me and mike ate at the dining hall on Washington Square West just north of W. 4th St and i was thinking about how this is the first september since i was like 4 years old that i am not going Back To School and how it feels like graduating from college was like getting shot out of a cannon into adulthood, which is something i think about a lot

on the new No Age record there’s a line about waking up and trying to find your cleanest shirt to wear to work which i think also captures this feeling. like do adults wash their shirts every single time they wear the shirt? how much time and money would you devote to doing laundry? that seems crazy. also i was thinking about how in the 33 1/3 book about Joy Division by Chris Ott, Ott notes that Ian Curtis was married when he was 18 or 19 and killed himself when he was 23, and also some of my friends’ parents got married when they were like 19 or 20 and i don’t even understand how that happens, not that it shouldn’t happen but like how you and your wife could drive to the liquor store and she would wait in the car while you went inside the liquor store and then you would come out and get back into the car and look at your wife and say “they didn’t take my fake”

now i am almost home and i reread this entry and realized that there is no thematic thread or idea or position or point to prove running through it, which my entries are usually guided by i guess, but some days the things you learn and realize and think about don’t really add up to a new cohesive idea and they are just some random things and experiences that you can later tie up into a neater conclusion or grander truth, and this entry is the blog entry version of those kinds of days. okay that’s it have a good day bye!

so when i was in college i had a girlfriend for three years on-and-off but mostly on. we met like a month after we came to school and my girlfriend had a best friend who was also dating a good friend of mine and the four of us spent a lot of time together and sometimes drifted apart and sometimes drifted back together, and we broke up and got back together with our respective girlfriends/boyfriends a few times in college and spent years talking to each other about it. maybe you have also been in a relationship where you have friends who are in a parallel relationship so you know what that’s like, or if you don’t, you can imagine it

so then one morning after i started seeing my girlfriend again we were walking to this breakfast place in the east village and she gets a text that said (for reasons that are not worth exploring in this blog post) that she either had to tell me and her best friend that she had been secretly sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend who was the kid who was parallel to me in our relationships or the person who sent the text message would tell me and her best friend about it. she admitted that it was true

so my girlfriend’s best friend found out that her best friend was sleeping with her on-and-off boyfriend who she happened to still be in love with and so she moved to california when school ended and is happy there now, as far away from new york as she could literally be to still make domestic calls home. half an hour from her new apartment she can dip her toes into the pacific ocean, half an hour from her old apartment she could dip her toes into the atlantic ocean

i found out and went home and put on Casimir Pulaski Day by Sufjan Stevens and laid down on my bed, which was next to the window, and hung my legs out the window and put pillows on my face and tried to not be conscious anymore or feel anything but obviously that doesn’t work, and then two weeks later i missed taking the law school entrance exam that i’d signed up for because i couldn’t function normally, and i was really sad for a long time and didn’t know what to do because when someone sleeps with someone they knew when you were dating them it feels like it invalidates your whole relationship. eventually i could feel better as time heals all wounds

so anyway today i got out of work and walked up to the apple store in soho to go on the internet and while i was there Jacob texted me and asked if i wanted to go up to the Museum of the City of New York on 104th St. and 5th Ave. and i said okay so we took the subway uptown and we walked around the museum and then took the bus back downtown

on the bus ride downtown, jacob told me about how he thought that mattress companies were propagating the idea that everyone has bedbugs so nobody will buy used mattresses in new york so they can sell more new mattresses, and also that if you have eight letters in your name you can sing The-Dream’s song Love King but with your name instead of the phrase “love king”, like “J to the O, N to the A, T to the H, A to the N” if your name is Jonathan for example, and then we didn’t talk for a while and looked out the window and then out of nowhere he goes,

“danny moved home”

and Danny was my friend who was secretly sleeping with my girlfriend and i have been wishing nothing but the worst on him since the day i found out and i have reserved all of my worst vibes to release into the universe on him, like whenever something bad was happening to me i tried to redirect it to him cosmically

and then when i found out he moved back into his parents’ house after school which is just par for the course given the economy, and is an understandable thing to happen to even the brightest and most driven college graduates in 2010 but was probably hard for him because he is a very proud kid, i felt like an incomparable surge of schadenfreude, like finally the universe had responded to the vibes i’d been sending out and granted my wish and my lips curled up into a smile and i laughed like an evil movie character

but then later it didn’t feel as good anymore because of the schadenfreude hangover, which i guess stems from the idea that saying something nasty about someone and wishing bad things would happen to them never feels unconflictedly good, you know, and you reveal something just as ugly about yourself as the thing you see in someone else when you do it. and i wished i hadn’t sent so many bad vibes out and said so much nasty stuff about danny. even if it didn’t directly affect what happened to him, who knows, you can’t underestimate the power of bad vibes or saying mean things

and then i had dinner with mike and told him about danny moving home and not feeling as good about it as i thought i would, and then i walked back to my apartment in bushwick over the bridge and someone sent me an email that had a link to a thread on a music message board about my Lil Wayne tattoo and at first i couldn’t bear to read it because why would people be anything other than mean about stuff on the internet. but then i couldn’t stop myself and i clicked it and read some of the entries and as i walked into Brooklyn off the bridge i got a 50 cent bag of pretzels from a deli and put on Casimir Pulaski Day by Sufjan Stevens on my iPod and sat on the curb outside the deli crying and picking the pieces of salt off the pretzels because i don’t want to eat that much salt because it is bad for your heart and makes you feel bloated

so to people who wrote nasty things about my tattoo or blog on the internet, i want to give you the same opportunity for schadenfreude that danny moving home gave me and i hope you got what you wanted out of writing what you wrote. i am not saying this so you will feel bad for me, i am beyond aware that there are greater tragedies to feel bad about than some kid getting upset about stuff some random people wrote about him on the internet and i will get over it hopefully by the end of the week

but you should also know that if you think the mean things you write about people on the internet would not bother them or have any impact on them because a certain amount of people read their blog or listen to their band or read their book or watch the films they direct, i want you to think about how vividly you remember the mean things people have said about you versus how vividly you remember the nice things, and how much those have affected you and lingered in your consciousness relative to one another

and it is also worth considering the next time you are tempted to write “____ is the worst band on earth, they have the worst lyrics and the music makes me want to vomit and their ideas are retarded and i hate them” or something in that vein. and i know i write criticism criticism and sometimes it has to be negative but i am doing my best to be civil about it and i recognize that some pitchfork writer’s bad idea or set of bad ideas does not make them a bad writer or an idiot. i also have written mean stuff about people on the internet in my day, but i am not doing that anymore because i want to be proud of how i live and the things i do and say, and the times i wrote mean stuff about people on the internet have not been moments i can look back on and be proud of

and i know this blog has had whatever exposure and everyone tells me to grow a thicker skin because some people are bound to hate it and some of it is corny, but in the way that i couldn’t just not feel bad about my friend sleeping with my girlfriend, i can’t just be like “i will decide to not let this message board bother me and then it won’t bother me” and if you can do that you are probably a monk with crazy mind control, and if you act like the people you are writing about can do that you are living in an emotional internet fantasy world. i also know that admitting a message board made me cry is embarrassing but i can’t imagine i was anyone’s model of stoic masculinity before this post anyway so there’s no great loss in that i think

so anyway i don’t want PRR to be a sad blog but some days you just feel sad and you can’t just command yourself to be happy, so hopefully tomorrow will be better than today and this blog will reflect that too, i hope you understand

last night i was at a party and there was this girl there who is visiting from switzerland and she asked me “what do you do” and i told her what my day job is and then i told her i write a blog about a popular music website and other stuff and we started talking about music and i said “what kind of music are you listening to on your vacation?” and she said “mostly opera but also some electronic and dance music” and then she goes, “what kind of music do you listen to” and i said “honestly it’s hard to say because i have to listen to stuff that [pitchfork] writes about and also i want to listen to my own stuff and write about that stuff too…”

and she said “okay fine, what is your own music”

and i said “wayne” which is what i should have just said in the first place

and she said “what is that?”

and i looked at her like probably like she had three heads, like how could someone not have heard of Lil Wayne in 2010 and i don’t mean that in a condescending way like she is culturally deficient, because she is from switzerland and speaks like 3 languages and i was told that she was quite a jetsetter, she was telling people at the party about visiting different cities in europe and asia. and also her dad retired when he was 40 and rides a motorcycle back and forth across Europe because he has so much money and that is what he has decided to do with his life and money

and i said “he is a rapper from new orleans, he’s in jail right now”

and she said “oh i don’t like rap, or i only listen to it when i am angry. why do you only say him, you don’t listen to rock?”

and i said “well he makes rock too actually but i can’t really explain him” because it would take like six hours to explain Wayne to someone who isn’t from America, i think, because people from other countries have different senses of humor and understandings of irony and meaning and visions of american gangsterism. like remember when Kanye West and 50 Cent both put their records out on September 11th a few years ago and 50 Cent said he would retire if Kanye outsold him and then Kanye outsold him by a lot in America but then 50 Cent sold more records worldwide so he didn’t retire?

50 Cent is a gangster cartoon and Kanye is a self-conscious weirdo who details his mixed feelings about fame and success, which wayne is and does too, and i think if you’re not familiar with the American version of Self, 50 Cent might make a lot more sense to you than Kanye. and i guess that Wayne, at his alien best and his kurt cobain worst and most places in between those, lands closer to Kanye than 50 Cent

like if you are a teenage mercenary in mogadishu or a stickup kid in the City of God or a college student getting yourself pumped up for a recreational basketball game in italy, or borat, or a swiss girl at a party in new york, and your reference points in American rap are Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac and maybe jay-z or 50 Cent, kanye and wayne might strike you as really skilled homosexual gangsta rap parodists

and then leon, who overhears our conversation, puts the Swizzy remix off Da Drought 3 on on his iPhone from an iphone app internet radio station and we sit there listening to it and he says “maybe this isn’t the right introduction” and i whisper (because i want her to be able to hear all the words) that it is the right introduction, or at least as right as any single song introduction to wayne could be because there are so many sides of him, and i want to pause it and look at her and explain that he is saying:

“George Gervin, I’mma get my chill on / I’m cold, yeah, I get my Buffalo Bill on / Beating up your block, yeah, I get my Emmett Till on / In the new edition, yeah, I get my Johnny Gill on / Keep a shot gun, yeah, I get my Jayson Will on / Fuck it Swizz, I’m still going / Black entertainment, yeah, I get my Stephen Hill on / only talk to models, yeah, I get my Seal on”

and say to her that hearing him flow like this gives me the same feeling that i think people get from hearing Jimmy Page solo on Stairway to Heaven, like this is superhuman, and also “george gervin is a basketball player from the 70s known as the iceman which lines up nicely in front of the next bit because Buffalo is a city in new york state known for frigid winters, emmett till was a black kid beaten and murdered in 1955 i think. when he says “in the new edition” it is a double entendre that means a late-model car but new edition is also an early 90s r&b group of which johnny gill was a member, jayson williams was a basketball player who murdered his chauffeur with a shotgun, stephen hill is the president of BET which is black entertainment television, and seal is married to the model Heidi Klum”

and how he rhymes them all in a row and keeps going and how there are a trillion other Wayne lines that are clever and sad and startling and funny, how wayne is virtuostic with his voice like a violin virtuoso or a saxophone virtuoso is with their instrument but people don’t think about it that way because rap is treated like an illegitimate child (how many people do you know who would say “rap music is just talking, it’s not even music”) but jazz and rock n roll were also treated like that once too

and also how a Wayne song is sometimes like a puzzle where the first time you listen to it you unlock the first layer of puns and then the next few times you listen to it you understand some of the next layer of puns and then some day in the future there is a line that you never understood but you have heard a thousand times and you’re like “ahhh i get it now!!”

like yesterday i was walking past Ground Zero and i have been watching the building there rise as it is being built because i work near it, and Wayne says on that same song i just quoted, “switchin up my flows like a nigga do construction” and i never understood it after 3 years of listening and like 400 itunes plays but then as i was walking past Ground Zero i realized he is saying flows and also floors with a southern accent, like a construction worker builds the floors of a building!!

and all the other ideas there are about wayne that would probably take up like half a book and i don’t wanna make you bored reading, and i kept them to myself to not be a really annoying party guest

so anyway then i told her i want to get a tattoo of his face on my arm because he means a lot to me and i said i write a lot in my blog because wayne makes so many songs and that model of output is so admirable about him, and i can’t even process how he could release so many songs and how they could be so funny and interesting and he is my idol

and she laughed when i said i wanted to get a tattoo of him and then she said, half-jokingly, “when are you gonna get it” and i said i needed to wait until my parents died to get the tattoo because my dad said if i ever got a tattoo i shouldn’t come home anymore, and she said that the tattoo was ridiculous and asked leon if i was serious and leon said “i think he’s serious” and she said “don’t do that” and i said “i’m gonna do it tomorrow” and she said “is he serious????” and i said “yes i am serious, this is not that ridiculous, tons of people have tons of tattoos of butterflies and chinese characters and spider webs and hearts with wings, and to me getting a Lil Wayne tattoo is maybe even counterintuitively more rational than those tattoos”

and then today i woke up and realized that i love my parents very much but i also love wayne a lot and i don’t want to offend my parents or make them upset with me but their reasons for not wanting me to get a tattoo are archaic and puritanical and based on a value system that i do not share, and not in a rebellious teenage way (or maybe in a rebellious teenage way?). also i am going to be a lawyer and people might be hesitant to hire a lawyer who has a tattoo that is portrait of a drug-addled rapper

but i have been thinking about getting this tattoo for probably like six months and so i have slept on it for about 180 nights and i don’t want to wait for him to die to get the tattoo because then it will feel like i am memorializing him but i wanna get it to celebrate him while he is still living and working, and for all the other ineffable self-definitional reasons that people get tattoos

i do not have any other tattoos and i was really scared that it would hurt and that i would pass out from the pain and it would smudge or look really fucked up, but whatever, so this morning i asked jacob if he wanted to come with me to get a tattoo, and he said “sure but i hope you’re not expecting me to get one,” and then i took the L to union square to meet Jacob and then go to St Marks Place to get a tattoo of Wayne

but as an id/superego compromise i decided to get the word WEEZY on the inside of my lip, instead of his face on my arm, so i can share it with people or decide to not share it with people based on who the people are, like my parents for instance

so anyway then we walked to St Marks and went into the first tattoo parlor we saw which is the one labeled like FANTASY TATTOO or ECSTASY TATTOO with the red awning, apparently you’re supposed to go to a “good” tattoo parlor but i was just getting letters so what’s the difference, and i walked into the back of the storefront where they sell pretty much only bongs and flasks and marijuana belt buckles and that drug that is anachronistically legal that only lasts for 5 minutes that you smoke whose name i can’t remember, one time freshman year meredith smoked it and says she ran through the dorm hallways in a panic because she thought she had turned into a strawberry but it was only for 3 minutes, and there were two girls in the store who were maybe 16, and one of them said to the other, “they won’t even SEE it until you decide to show them” and i think she was going through the same parental tattoo issue that i am going through

and then i went into the back and talked to a chubby guy in a New Era cap with gold stitching named Kenny and i said “hi i want to get a tattoo inside my lip” and he said “what do you want” and i said “i just need it to say W E E Z Y” in black letters and he said “okay i could do that” and i said “how much” and he goes “60”, i say “okay is it gonna hurt a lot? am i gonna cry?” and he says “lip tattoos hurt like a bitch but if you cried i would seriously doubt your sexuality” and i said “okay fair enough, okay i gotta take a walk around the block and think about this, thank you”

and then me and jacob left and walked around the block and i thought about my identity and whether getting a tattoo would change it somehow, and i decided it might but i only live one time, you know, and this is something that is important to me, and then charlie texted me and said “what are you up to?” and i said “getting tatted let’s hang out later” as if getting a tattoo was just a casual thing, and he called me four times and sent some disuasive blackberry messages but i ignored them because i already made my decision

and then me and Jacob walked to the liquor store on 2nd and 10th and i bought 3 tiny bottles of whiskey, the size that alaina used to call “shorty forties”, and drank them and went back to the tattoo place. joe was waiting there for us because i texted him, and me and jacob and joe go inside and into the back room and i see the tattoo guy and go “hey i hope it’s okay that i got a little drunk for this, i know it’s gonna hurt and i didn’t want to pass out” and he goes “yeah it’s fine, what do you want again?” and i say “W E E Z Y on the inside of my lip, let me draw it out for you” and he lets me draw it on a piece of paper and looks it over for a second and makes me sit on a chair and my heart is racing because i’ve never gotten a tattoo or surgery or any other piercing, pretty much nothing that ever hurt really badly, but i am sort of drunk so i feel okay

and then he takes a disposable needle out of its plastic seal and shows it to me and says “new york state law requires me to show you that your needle is brand new and sealed” and then he puts a piece of paper towel on my lip to dry it and then moves in close to me so he’s sitting like one foot from me and he makes me tilt my head up and turns the needle on and i am shaking, and i am thinking about my parents

and then he puts it to my lip and it burns and i can feel him doing each stroke of each letter and my eyes are closed, i think i’m going to pass out at first but then that subsides when he is on the first E, and then before i know it it’s done and it burns a little

and i look in the mirror and it says WEEZY and it is clear but it is also off-center!!!! like discernably off-center

and i think for a second and think “shit this looks stupid” and tell joe and jacob “okay this looks stupid because it’s off-center, should i get the F? i was thinking about the F before, remember i told you jacob?” and jacob looks at joe and says “yeah he was thinking about the F” and joe says “yeah go for the F” and i go back inside and say “hey it’s off-center, can you put an F on it?” and the guy goes “yeah sure” so i sit back down and he makes it say WEEZY F

and then i thank him and tip him with $20 and say “hey i hope twenty is okay, i don’t know what’s customary and i don’t want to be cheap” and he says “yeah twenty is good, can i take a picture?” and i say “okay” and he takes a picture with his phone and then says “what does it mean?” and i say “it’s Lil Wayne’s nickname, like Weezy F. Baby” and he goes “hahahahah that’s what i thought it meant!! you crazy man” and i say “no, people get tattoos of butterflies and rainbows and dragons and naked women and hearts with wings on them, getting WEEZY F isn’t that crazy!!!” and he goes “whatever you say dude”

and then we left and walked around for a while and now my lip hurts. hopefully one day i can show wayne and he will laugh and say “you crazy” in modesty i think, because he would maybe think that me getting a tattoo of his name was going overboard, but he doesn’t understand, and i will tell him about that steve jobs quote where he says:

“When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”

and then i will tell him that, in his own mind, his work seems good but maybe obvious because he is the one that comes up with it and he “just saw something” when he connects 18 obscure pop culture references together through rhyme or does other magic, but to me it is miraculous because when i was younger and growing up i held all these bands and rappers and visual artists and writers in high esteem because i couldn’t even conceive of how they did what they did, like their work was really mysterious to me and their thought processes and work ethics were beyond my grasp and that is what made them so magical. but then i got older and gradually have sort of come to understand, at least a little, how many artists work and think and that has been disillusioning and disheartening

someone else said something like this, but you can kind of understand what is going through Kanye West’s mind, you can kind of understand what’s going through Win Butler’s mind, or Avey Tare’s mind or Kevin Drew’s mind or Craig Finn’s mind or almost everyone else’s mind. but Wayne is incomprehensible. and in the spirit of it not being fun to have all your illusions shattered, wayne has become even more important to me because he is the last inconceivable mind standing, so here it is:

also i know i said i was gonna not blog for the rest of the week but i decided against that obviously. also aunt amy or uncle mel if you are reading this, please don’t tell my dad

it is the end of summer. the internet is getting updated so slow that it is encouraging me to go outside and play, and pitchfork is not reviewing records until next tuesday which makes it difficult to write pitchfork reviews reviews. i was thinking about writing about some old reviews or reviewing the 200 blurbs on the top songs list but then i was thinking about how little time on earth we have, like in terms of the universe we are alive for like one eye blink or less (if the universe is alive for the equivalent of a human life) and how writing reviews of old reviews or 200 track blurbs would be a frivolous use of my eye blink and yours

so whenever pitchfork puts out a big list i wonder how you are supposed to use it. like do you read it all at once? or are you supposed to read like the fifty entries each day? i don’t know if the 200-entry list with blurbs is a functional format for information transmission, even with only fifty entries a day. this morning i tried reading #200-#151 and i got from 200 to 185 before i had to stop because i couldn’t keep track or make sense out of what the blurbs were saying any more. plus the list makes everything sound seminal but after a while it just bleeds together, it’s like that adage about how the american primary education system tries to make every kid feel like they are special by putting them in “advanced” classes and telling them they are special but if everyone is special than no one is actually special, you know?

anyway so because pitchfork is not reviewing records until next tuesday and the writers have time off, i was thinking about what they are doing with their time off like maybe showering or having a snack or taking a nap, or working on their secret poetry that they publish under pseudonyms, some are talking to each other on Gchat about the No Age record, some are posting on the secret pitchfork writers-only message board about the No Age record, some are watching netflix streaming with their girlfriends and boyfriends and wives. some may be directly exposing themselves to the sunlight and becoming uncomfortable and retreating back into the internet like internet vampires. others are at their non-pitchfork day jobs, like i am about to be, but right now i am on the subway listening to Tha Carter II by Lil Wayne and writing this obviously

there are a few reasons i am listening to Tha Carter II, the first one is that i am not ready to start listening to the No Age record because i want to give it my full attention and i can’t do that right now

the second is that none of the other stuff i was listening to sounds good right now. i mentioned this a long time ago but some days i wake up and shower and get ready to leave my apartment and put my headphones on and i put something on and it doesn’t sound good and then i try another artist and then that doesn’t sound good and then i try something else in a different genre and that doesn’t sound good either and then i put on Lil Wayne because it would feel uncomfortable to not be listening to headphones when i am by myself in public and Wayne is the most comfortable thing i guess

i can’t imagine that i am the only person who does this, like maybe you have a friend and every time they come over, they walk into your living room and put their headphones away. or like one time i was walking around the lower east side at night and i walked past the Bowery Ballroom right as a Pains of Being Pure At Heart concert was letting out and people were coming out of the venue and onto the sidewalk and i saw this girl coming out of the concert and she reaches into her bag and pulls out her skullcandy headphones and puts them on and plugs them into her ipod and turns it on and walks away and i was like “damn, someone with a more severe public headphone compulsion than mine, that’s kind of a relief actually” — i can’t imagine she actually wanted to hear music right at that second, after spending like at least an hour and a half at a concert. it felt like if Usain Bolt, the runner, did his warmup and then some practice laps and then ran his races, and then when he was all done with his races, he decided to run all the way back to his hotel from the stadium

i read somewhere that researchers found that listening to headphones for six or more hours in a single day (or six hours consecutively, i can’t remember which) makes you start to feel really isolated and irritable and psychologically distressed because your brain doesn’t understand why there is music being pumped into it so intensely for so long, it maybe acts like it is being attacked or getting American-style tortured where it isn’t like breaking-your-legs torture but this prolonged state of discomfort that isn’t immediately obviously torture according to the conventional definition of torture but feels like torture. maybe listening to headphones constantly even when there’s not anything you want to hear and nothing sounds good but you do it because it’s just what you do is like Chinese Water Torture where they keep releasing a drop of water onto your forehead every few seconds, which doesn’t hurt, but you feel increasingly ill-at-ease

so when i am uncomfortable when i am listening to headphones i always feel like i will become more uncomfortable if i take them off unless i have something else to do, like read a book or something else to distract/stimulate me. the first night i went back to my parents’ house after coming to college and living in a dorm on a big avenue where it was loud 24 hours a day and there was always sound coming in through the windows, i went to sleep in my old room in my parents’ house where it is totally silent and i laid down to go to sleep and the silence was instantly uncomfortable and oppressive so i had to put on headphones to feel comfortable and fall asleep

in high school, alaina used to listen to headphones whenever she went anywhere and then one day her iPod broke and she panicked because she had nothing to listen to for a few days and but then she said it was really liberating and she said she began to think more clearly and soon her compulsion to listen to music whenever she was going anywhere went away and she said she felt more at peace and i should try it

also sometimes i feel like that about writing in this blog, like i don’t want to write so then i decide that i am not going to write and then i start writing a short thing about how i am not going to write today because there are other projects i need to be working on and then i start thinking about something else and writing about that as a tangent and then when i’m done i just go back to the beginning and delete the part about how i’m not gonna write in the blog today

but this week i need to put my foot down to myself, and writing this out might help break my habit, because Pitchfork is taking a week off and the writers get to work on their pseudonymous poetry and netflix streaming and i actually really need to work on other projects and also try to soak up the sun because the summer is ending. i hope you have a good week and i will be back next week!! okay bye

tonight i am DJing a party to celebrate the opening of this new communal workspace for internet startups in Williamsburg, and also to celebrate a new internet social media recommendation and interaction mechanism that is somehow connected with twitter, i am not sure i fully understand it. i wonder how many hours it would take to explain it to my grandma. maybe that could be like the new metric for measuring how conceptual/meta/post-modern whatever you’re doing is, for example like “yeah i’m writing this cloud-based internet application that is actually both a monetarily incentivized game and a social media tool and it also has a wiki-style user-updated database. as it stands i’m at 3 grandma-hours but if i integrate it with foursquare that’s gonna be another grandma-hour”

right now the party is about to start but the organizers are playing a mashup of Justice and some female rapper on the stereo off one of their iPods and i am wondering if they want me to play this type of aggressive music, this is not my vibe

now i am DJing, playing Sky’s The Limit by The Notorious B.I.G., including the minute-long introduction by his mother, which i can include because there is no one here except the organizers of the party who are still setting up and these three random guys who came on time (AKA way too early). i always try to show up late to parties so i am not those guys. i guess someone always has to be those guys though, so they’re taking one for the team. they’re standing in the middle of the room drinking Pilsner Urquells, talking to each other, probably waiting for some chicks to show up

i got a Pilsner Urquell too but i don’t have a bottle opener so it’s sitting next to my computer. i used to go to a bike shop in the east village called Busy Bee, the one that got busted for selling stolen bikes a couple months ago, and it used to be owned by this guy who would sit out on the sidewalk drinking Pilsner Urquells and if i was getting a repair done and i had to wait, he would give me a pilsner uquell and we would drink them on the sidewalk (even though that is illegal, i guess he was just old so he wasn’t a threat and maybe he was down with the cops) while he told me about the patents he was working on for this new nautical technology he was developing. that is my only association with pilsner urquell

anyway so now there are a few more people here but for some reason the sound is totally muffled, this sucks and is embarrassing because people will blame the DJ for crappy sound even though i didn’t set the system up and have no idea how to fix it. it sounds like i am listening to this music with cotton balls in my ears. also my external hard drive came unplugged and the music turned off because it was playing off the hard drive, then i scrambled and played Brooklyn Zoo by ODB off the iPod because it was the first thing i saw

and Brooklyn Zoo turned out to be a bad choice, nobody is dancing and people have even sort of stopped talking because it is so intrusive, this song is literally a crazy person yelling at you. Elizabeth says it sounds like a crazy person is trapped inside the speakers and trying to get out. there are still not that many people here. why did i agree to do this, i’m also literally getting paid in tequila (jose cuervo silver)

also i wish i could sit down but that would be so lame, no DJs sit down unless they’re like physically disabled. now i’m playing In Too Deep by Sum-41 and no one likes this either. i wish i had taken an antianxiety pill, i can’t even look up, these people will not have happy faces listening to muffled music that is too loud that they hate. i think based on the title of this blog people will expect me to play like Pitchfork house taste music/Best New Music but they will be disappointed

the guy who set up the sound system laid the speakers on their sides and now it sounds much better, not muffled anymore. my friend mallory just came up to me and introduced me to a girl who looks so much like a porn star. she is wearing crazy makeup and has platinum-blonde hair and sort of looks like she’s made of plastic. when she walked away i asked Mallory if she was a porn star and Mallory said that she plays the evil popular girl on My Life Is Liz, a show on MTV. Mallory said the girl wants to be the intern at her PR firm in her spare time, even though she is almost the main character on a TV show that just got signed for another four seasons. Mallory suspects that the girl got gussied up because she is not from New York and was excited to go to a “big New York party” and that’s why she looked like that

now there are a lot of people here and it is clear they do not like what i am playing because people keep coming up to me and asking me to play “more current stuff”, i can tell that the organizer of the event who asked me to do this did not expect me to be playing so much Shaggy and Aaliyah and The Supremes and Ja Rule. she suggests that i play “LCD Soundsystem, Chromeo, Phoenix… maybe even Panda Bear?” and i say “i don’t think that is really my vibe but i’ll try” because she is being really nice to me and she looks a little frantic because people are complaining about the music. i want to disappear. i am going to try to explain why i play so much Shaggy in a second. i play Fancy Footwork by Chromeo and Lisztomania by Phoenix, i wish i could disappear right now, if one-year-ago-me looked into the future and saw future me DJing and playing Chromeo he would kill himself preemptively, i am issuing an internal apology to all the past and future incarnations of me for being weak-willed and giving in and playing this song. i mean i even kind of like the song but this is just embarrassing

some girl comes up to me and asks me to play I Can Change by LCD Soundsystem at which point i’ve had enough of these requests and i go, “okay look i love that song but seriously it is so fucking sad” and i want to tell her “i know that’s what you want to hear but if i was playing music on the “what i want to hear” system we would all be listening to Chicago by Sufjan Stevens 25 times in a row and then going home” and she looks at me and rolls her eyes as bass kicks in and Frankie Valli goes “WHAT A VERY SPECIAL TIME FOR ME” and she says “ugh i feel like i’m in college” and walks away, and then dan comes over to me and says there’s a fine line between me and a bar mitzvah DJ which is unwittingly the ultimate compliment, finally someone who gets me, i will explain this in a second

now i am playing Beware of the Boys by Jay-Z and Panjabi MC, someone comes up to me and says there’s an amazing Bmore club mix of this that i should check out. leon says i should play Fat Lip by Sum-41 and i tell him that these people will stone me if i play Fat Lip but he has the right idea. Elizabeth gives me a kiss and tells me i am doing fine and to stop worrying

okay listen, to all the people who are here right now and are under the impression that they are witnessing a historically, catastropically bad DJ set i need to explain like three things to you. first, there is this Paul Sevigny quote where he indicates that a DJ, in the ideal, is an artist like any other artist, and in that vein, making a request that doesn’t sound like any of the other shit the DJ is playing is sort of insulting, and consider it analagous to making a request of another artist, like you go up to a painter who is painting a landscape of like some mountains or something and you say like “hey i’m not that into mountains, why don’t you go inside and paint some nudes bro” — you wouldn’t do that right? i have witnessed about a thousand DJ sets i wasn’t into and the way i dealt with them was by drinking my drink, spitting my game, and hoping that the DJ is making a statement that i might not understand or agree with (instead of just sucking), and moving on. i am not an amazing DJ but i might be a pretty good DJ if you can get your vibe to match up to my vibe which i am trying to make really easy, i have rocked some clubs in my time, and also no DJ can please everyone but he is doing his best

and also, not to lay all my cards out on the table here but the reason i play so much Shaggy and Fat Joe and TLC and The Supremes, and a ton of random one-hit-wonder songs like Tarzan Boy by Baltimora is that in my experience the best public listening moments i’ve ever had have been hearing the first notes of a song that i would never put on on my iPod but i know every word to it, or at least the melody, like songs that were or are so deeply embedded in the popular culture consciousness that they are, like, above subjective judgments of quality, you know what i mean? they are just joy and you can dance to them and like listen to Nobody But Me by The Human Beinz, which is my ideal song, and you’ll know what i’m talking about

to me the bar mitzvah DJ is the luckiest DJ on earth because he gets to play songs that make peoples’ faces light up with that flash of recognition, like “man what the hell is the name of this song, i love it!” every song is a classic fucking stone jam. you might disagree with my philosophy on this but i hope we can still be friends and also the first thing i learned about DJing was that people are just trying to get drunk and dance, not be educated on your exquisite taste and the extensive reach of your knowledge, you know? i think there are clubs where DJs can achieve both of those goals and people are more receptive to obscure shit, but this is an office launch party, not Berlin

some more people are dancing now, it is later and they are probably sort of drunk

when i moved to Bushwick i noticed that there’s tension as i walk past families on the street because they give me death stares because they think i am the one who is gentrifying their neighborhood and making their rents go up so they can’t afford to live in the houses they lived in long before i got there. it reminds me of something i miss about living in Manhattan: the gentrification is already settled. there is nobody who is saying “damn look at all these rich white people moving into soho, the neighborhood’s really changing” because that happened like however many years ago and is now settled, you know what i mean? i want to play the song equivalent of those settled neighborhoods, just joy without the tension, and playing contemporary hip music to a room full of New York twentysomethings is a minefield compared to playing Got To Give It Up, Pt. 1 by Marvin Gaye which you know most of the words to if not all of them

it’s a minefield because people form biases against current bands, like X many people are guaranteed to not dance to Chromeo because they think Chromeo is cheesy, X many people won’t dance to Vampire Weekend because they think VW are rich white race music reappropriators, you know? i just want to play music that doesn’t have ideological battle lines drawn across it, that you also happen to know the words to and can dance to, like Candy by Mandy Moore which i will play in a second

okay now it is much later and i am drunk off the tequila i got paid with and the lights are off and i am playing Gimme Some Lovin’ by the Spencer Davis Group, 85% of people are dancing and for the first time, after doing this for four hours, i feel like i am succeeding here. i am happy. tao and caroline are dancing and he’s a pretty reserved guy so that’s a success in itself. the organizer of the party is dancing so i am sending good vibes out to her for letting me do my thing and not booting me when everyone was complaining. i will tell her i am glad i did this later and mean it. i am drunk. i am also sending out good vibes to Wayne, he is probably sleeping right now, i wonder if he would like my DJ set

and so yeah, to the people who have left already or are standing on the walls talking presumably about how i couldn’t possibly be sucking worse as a DJ right now, i hope this was clarificatory and also i should say YOU MAY BE RIGHT, I MAY BE CRAZY, BUT IT JUST MAY BE A LUNATIC YOU’RE LOOKIN FOR

1. joshua love does not want to talk about Chief. if you were at a party with Joshua Love last night you could have gone up to him and tapped him on the shoulder and been like “yo what’d you think of that Chief record” and he would have been like “i don’t wanna talk about that band, leave me alone, also i don’t know you bro” and his review is like what would happen if you kept bugging him and he was finally like “okay fine i’ll tell you”

so he releases three disappointed and begrudging paragraphs, one of the shortest pitchfork reviews in recent memory, so frustrated by the record’s mediocrity, writing “Chief fail to be more than an amalgam of other, better bands” and finishing with “Chief are rarely better than competent at anything they try to do here.” he slips in a little faint praise somewhere in the middle of this thing but you get the sense that it’s sort of political. recommended for readers with short attention spans, 7.125

2. it’s obvious to say but i feel like the records reviewers are writing about seep into their tones or approaches to structuring their reviews, like maybe even subconsciously. well i guess they’re conscious of it but you know what i mean. sometimes a frantic or urgent-sounding record yields a frantic or urgent-sounding review, or a rap review might slip in bits of quasi-rap slang like “Dude lost it for a minute but he’s really back with this one” or something like that. and today’s Mark Pytlik review of the Phil Selway record is as simple and straightforward and plain as the record he’s describing. i think Pytlik does the best he can with limp source material but this review is ummmm not required reading. 6.65

3. on his Tumblr blog last night David Drake wrote, like, “my gucci mane review is up at Pitchfork [that part was a link to the review]. Haters gonna hate” and that was the whole entry i think

it’s weird to preface your own work with that defensive note, also the implicit “if you don’t agree with me that makes you a hater”, and it’s weirder because he doesn’t really have anything to be defensive about. personally do not agree with the score but who cares, the review is excellent: Drake doesn’t waste a word as he convincingly thinks through this mixtape in terms of its moment in Gucci’s career, his current place in the rap landscape, his production choices and his drug intake among some other stuff. it has a different soul than the Gucci reviews i’m used to (Tom Breihan’s Gucci reviews) but it’s just as satisfying in its way. 8.0 recommended review.

the first time i came to brooklyn on my own was when i was in high school and Beirut was playing their first-ever headlining show at Northsix (which later was gussied up and reissued as Music Hall of Williamsburg) and i told my mom i was gonna pick my friend Max up and drive to the train station and take the train to the city and then the NRQW to the L and then walk to the venue and come back the same way but then i picked up Max and we decided to drive the car all the way to the venue because we didn’t wanna have to leave during the middle of the show to make the last train back to our town, sorry mom

when Angelica was in high school in LA she listened to Television and The Strokes all the time and that’s what made her want to come to New York, and my image of living in downtown Manhattan and being old enough to go to bars was pretty much from them too. one time i gave my high school english teacher a copy of Is This It? and he brought me back a copy of Marquee Moon, i wonder if Angelica was ever listening to the same song at the same time as me. sometimes i think about what people who i don’t know yet are doing right now, like what my future wife is doing right now, probably listening to the new Sufjan Stevens EP

anyway so that Beirut concert was probably the last time i went to Brooklyn for like two years after that because i came to college in Manhattan and tried to make it my home and pretend i’d never lived anywhere else, and i was so happy to live in Manhattan finally and not have to run to the subway to take the last train home. all my friends lived in Manhattan and the parties i went to were in Manhattan and all this mythology was in Manhattan, like last night Elizabeth did a reading and she said that nothing can even happen in Manhattan for the first time any more because everything has already happened here at least once before. Manhattan was everything i always thought it was gonna be like, and more stuff i didn’t know about, and i tried to explore everything here and understand it and own it in my mind

and everyone who lives anywhere eventually learns little secrets about living there and the most topical end-of-summer one i learned about living in Manhattan is that if you go to Pier 40 on the Hudson River just below Houston Street at night, you can walk out onto the pier that is just south of the building and hop over a plastic fence and walk down a ramp onto a floating dock, and there are no security guards for a few hundreds feet (except the Parks Dept but they ride in golf carts so you can see them coming) so you can swim in the hudson river and no one will bother you. one time my dad was assigned to the psych ward in the hospital he was working at and he went around giving the people in the psych ward their food, and one of the mentally ill people there who my dad had never said a word to looked him in the eye and said to my dad, “Gaddafi’s brother is in town. Take advantage of it.” and he was suggesting my Dad assassinate Gaddafi’s brother (Gaddafi is the dictator of Libya). and i am telling you the same thing about swimming in the hudson river: It is the end of summer and security is light. Take advantage of it.

it is not as dirty as it used to be but it still makes your hair soft, if you don’t have anyone to go with i will go with you

also another good one is the movie theater on 34th and 8th is the best place to moviehop in Manhattan because the ticket ripper is on the bottom floor and once he rips your ticket you are free to do what you please. almost every other theater in manhattan has a system set up to prevent movie hopping like at the 25-screen theater at 42nd St, once you get on a down escalator it takes you out of the building and you can’t reenter on any of the other floors, i have fallen for that a bunch of times and it is Game Over

anyway so then my second year in college everyone still lived in Manhattan and then the next year some of the more adventurous kids moved to Brooklyn and i was aware that there was cool shit going on there but it was huge and hard to get around and had no grid system, like getting from 48th and 3rd to 21st and 7th is pretty much self-explanatory but getting from one random corner in Brooklyn to another one is not self-explanatory, and i stayed in Manhattan and never wanted to leave and thought moving to Brooklyn was pretentious and the reason i came to New York was to be in Manhattan so why would i not stay here if i could

and then some of my own friends moved to Brooklyn and i resisted it even more and wanted to never go there and thought everyone who lived in brooklyn would just live in manhattan if they could afford it and Brooklyn was just like living in the suburbs again and i would rather drown myself in the toilet than have to do that again. there are people who live in Brooklyn who brag about how long its been since they’ve set foot in Manhattan because Manhattan is lame and those people were the opposite of me

but then living in Manhattan started getting harder, like when i couldn’t sleep because of cars honking and like the energy that i used to thrive on and made me think i was living in something amazing, like of all these people on the street 24 hours a day, some drunk and screaming, some running to make the train, eating a folded up slice of pizza, a celeb dining al fresco, breastfeeding a baby, making out, crying on the cell phone, fighting each other, hot girls, tourist families holding up maps, the fashion show, old people walking slow taking up the whole sidewalk — all that stuff got to be too much and it made me nervous all the time and i started to hate walking around in it and it was like a bad acid trip where everything is too intense, and i could never see that much of the sky. i don’t know if you could tell but i am a nervous guy and Manhattan exacerbates that and it was like being in a cage. not like literally being in a cage but i think it felt like what being in a cage would have felt like

and then luckily that coincided with not being able to afford living there anymore

and so now i live in Bushwick where it is calmer and the buildings are lower and sidewalks are wider and the people are generally not as attractive and nobody is rich and people don’t look at me cockeyed if i am wearing slippers and have a stain on my shirt. there are almost no parks or trees in bushwick, all of the architecture could be described as utilitarian, it is maybe the ugliest neighborhood i have seen in new york and seems physically designed to keep people depressed, but i’m still calmer there than i was in manhattan and that’s important to me. two nights ago i told marisa i wanted to make t-shirts that said KEEP BUSHWICK BEAUTIFUL and giggled at my own t-shirt joke and then she didn’t respond and i said “come on that’s funny?” and she said “i would only maybe laugh at that joke if i was your girlfriend and we had been dating for under two weeks and i was trying to humor you”

okay have a good day bye

p.s. i walked home from work through Bushwick and was thinking about the depressing architecture and i thought, like, let’s say one out of every thousand architects is a sadist (and also assume all architects design equal numbers of structures) who derives pleasure from inflicting pain on other people, that means one out of every thousand structures was designed by a sadistic architect and more than one out of every thousand people lives in a domicile designed by a sadist (because there are more structures than people) and i bet the number is even higher in low-income areas like Bushwick because sadistic architects must gravitate to designing government housing as the best architectural way to express their sadism, right?

so last night i had a lot of liquor and then this morning i woke up and my head hurt and it felt like i was paralyzed in bed and i walked into the bathroom to shower with like my eyes closed or like half open like a newborn dog. and i was so thirsty that i drank like probably like a quart of water out of the shower spigot, you know what that’s like, and then i got on the subway and my head was still hurting and i was like “i do not feel like writing the morning roundup this morning, it’s the end of august and everything is slow on the internet anyway and i will just take a day off and it will be whatever” and then i read the first two reviews which are okay but pretty much recommended only if you like the bands already, and then i was about to just post like “hung over taking the day off”

and then i read the third and fourth review and was even more sure about posting that

and then i read Mark Richardson’s fifth slot review of Kemialliset Ystävät’s Ullakkopalo and i was intrigued by the review because he lays some cards on the table immediately when he says he didn’t know what to expect “Since I didn’t have a good idea of what Finnish folk would sound like and knew nothing about the Fonal label” and part of me was like “why are you reviewing this shit you have no idea about, you are wasting my time” but also part of me was like admiring his honesty because he’s like the second or third in command at the most important music publication on earth and you’re not supposed to be like “i do not know fuck about what i’m reviewing”, like you are operating within illusion that you know everything by virtue of your position and only writing about stuff you know about

but then i finished the review and read it again and it is tremendous and honest and astute and all the best things a pitchfork review can be without any of the bad ones like condescension or referentialism or awkward phrasing, and it is just buried at the bottom there today under the heading some artist you’ve never heard of whose name seems unpronounceable, and i don’t think i should say anything else about it except it is a thrill to watch mark richardson think right now

also i am not writing this because he is an editor and i would prefer to not insult the editors because honestly i guess i look for stuff in the editors’ reviews to rip harder than the infantry guys like Aaron Leitko or Andrew Gaerig, and also Mark Richardson’s columns are mostly too much for me, if you read them you know what i mean. but it took cojones to admit he didn’t know what he was getting into and you see his thought process unfolding which maybe makes this even better because you might not have known anything about Kemialliset Ystävät’s Ullakkopalo before you read this either, and he looked organic up in the dictionary and then wrote about that,

“Ultimately this music seems deeply organic, using a specific dictionary definition of the word: “having an organization similar in its complexity to that of living things.” And because it sounds so connected to nature, it can be initially hard to absorb in its specifics. You could be standing in a field somewhere looking around and everything looks the same— it’s a field, like any other field. Or you could get down on your hands and knees and dig into the grass and notice the tiny things living there and how this blade is dead and that blade is half-eaten by something and so on. That’s how Kemialliset Ystävät feels— like something ready to be explored on whatever level feels right.”

9.7 Best New Review

so a few months ago i was telling Leon about how much i love Lil Wayne and he said “why don’t you write about him more” and i said that i didn’t have anything new to say about his work because there is already so much powerful writing about it but then Leon said you should write about how you feel about him personally and then i wrote these like 50 haikus about him but they weren’t very good so i will just say that i think about Lil Wayne every day, especially when i am listening to him but also sometimes when i am staring at my computer i think about him or when i’m on the subway reading a book or in the elevator at work. i think about what he might be doing right now and or if he’s in some kind of trouble or something, i am worried about him. me and Angelica watch prison reality shows on MSNBC and sometimes it doesn’t seem that bad but sometimes it just seems gruesome and he’s a little guy and i don’t know how the prison credibility economy works beyond “pedophiles get spit on” and bernie madoff is the man in jail, but i’m sure there is someone there who would wanna harm Wayne

anyway i suspect that i have heard Lil Wayne’s voice for more cumulative seconds than anyone else’s voice during my life which is a weird thing to think about, sometimes when i listen to him i pretend that he’s a friend talking to me instead of a larger-than-life pop star, and i feel like i know him maybe more than any other person who i don’t know personally, you know? i’m sure you have one of those people and maybe it’s wayne too. like i can imagine what it would be like to have a conversation with him, and also i can imagine having different conversations with him based on his different moods and the different situations we would talk in, like if i won a contest to meet him and he was in a really good mood we would have a different conversation than if i was his favorite prison guard in jail or i was a late night host and he came on my show after he got out of jail. i think he might be awkward because he was awkward during some of the Lil Wayne Fuse Takeover segments and it looked like he was ready for more drugs again to feel normal

sometimes i think about writing fan fiction about him, like a story where me and him go into space as mechanical technicians on a maintenance mission for the international space station and we fix the space station but then on our way back to earth our own space shuttle breaks down and we have to wait until the rescue shuttle comes and gets us and we just hang out in space smoking blunts, i wonder if nasa would let him bring weed to space because it’s not even illegal up there, i also wonder if you could smoke given that there’s no air in space but whatever it’s fiction

when i was driving the van in the Obama motorcade i had some down time with one of the white house staffers and she told me about music she liked and i told her how much i love wayne and tried to explain him a little bit, but he’s not easy to explain, especially to a middle-aged person who isn’t into rap, and telling her about it felt sort of sisyphean but i still thought it was worth it. i even told her about how Obama told some school children he was talking to that not all of them could grow up to be like wayne (or LeBron James) because that’s how great he is but then i went home and checked the quote and Obama meant that he didn’t want all black kids aspiring to be rappers or basketball players but he did name the best rapper and basketball player he could think of. i also told her that he raps like Coltrane played saxophone and bears maybe a similar but not totally analagous role in his genre based on this book i read about Coltrane in high school, to legitimize wayne to her sort of because rap is now probably similar to what jazz once was, and she seemed intrigued by the comparison

and then i told her about that picasso quote that max told me where picasso says “if i had been a preacher i would have been the pope, but instead i was a painter so i am picasso”, and i think the same thing is true about wayne, like if he had been born into a rich family he might be playing violin at carnegie hall right now, or his paintings would be in the whitney, i am not joking or being hyperbolic

in florida i tried to play Wayne for my mom in the car, i played her A Milli and she asked how i could tell good rapping from bad rapping and i thought about how since i don’t play guitar it’s hard to discern a technically masterful guitar solo from a simple but amazing guitar solo from just a pretty good guitar solo, and i told her that there’s obvious technical stuff to listen for but there a basic “does it sound good or bad?” to consider too, then it reminded me of this New Yorker feature about people who discern authentic pieces of art from forgeries of art and one of the guys they interviewed said that there’s some technical stuff to look for in trying to determine if a work is a forgery but sometimes you just know intuitively, he said that recognizing a real piece of art struck a chord of immediate familiarity and it was like looking at a friend’s face, you just kind of KNOW

also when emily broke up with me i stormed out of her apartment and walked through alphabet city in the snow and i put on M. Ward but that just made me feel worse, and then i put on Da Drought 3 and it made me feel so much better, like life sucks but at least i can still listen to wayne

i just reread all this, and i don’t mean to say something like “look how big a wayne fan i am, your fandom couldn’t compare” because we all have special moments with wayne and everyone’s fandom is different and this is just an account of parts of mine, and some of it sounds creepy but i don’t mean it in a creepy way, like if i met Wayne i wouldn’t like accost him or stalk him but i just believe in him and sometimes it feels like almost everything will disappoint me and fall apart eventually but i don’t think wayne will, it’s like when he says “i’m all i trust” because i feel that way too and i believe in him, and having something to believe in is important, you know?

1. Tom Breihan is “back like cooked crack” today, cutting the bullshit and getting right to it as he opens his Young Jeezy review, “The main takeaway from 1,000 Grams Vol. 1 is that we’re seeing a potential feud brewing between Young Jeezy and Rick Ross.” Tom writes this review like a classic Status Ain’t Hood (his old blog) column, flouting the Pitchfork style guide in favor of jam-packing the review with trademark Breihanisms, which i took the liberty of listing here:

“for connoisseurs of rap beef, that’s an intriguing [beef]… that’s some deeply silly shit… some seriously canny beat selection… some inside baseball shit that I don’t even understand… his absolutely nuts new single… an old-school mixtape technique that not too many people mess with… one of those superhuman beats that he just inhabits like nobody else… Jeezy thrives on a very specific kind of track, one where the grain of his voice can sink in deep…”

and then he finishes with a pun that only a paltry 98% of readers will catch, “…judging by the respective quality of both this tape and Ross’ great new Teflon Don, Jeezy is heading for a big L here.”

Breihan goes for the W, Best New Breihan 8.5.

2. a lot of the time when people make fun of Pitchfork (David Cross, The Onion) the point they hinge on is Pitchfork’s self-seriousness. in today’s Jayson Greene review of The Electronic Anthology Project, Greene acknowledges that he shouldn’t be taking these synth-pop Built To Spill covers of their own songs seriously but can’t resist doing it, and Pitchfork compounds that by making this today’s lead review

it’s like Doug Martsch was at a party and he told this story that was really long and was supposed to be funny but then people started losing interest in the story and a couple people wandered away surreptitiously and at the punchline a few people giggled but then Pitchfork stood there with its arms folded and looked at Doug right in the eye and said “not funny!!” a little too loud and then everyone in the circle was silent and uncomfortable because like, come on it’s Doug, and it was awkward and then even though Doug Martsch was the one who had told the long, not funny story, it’s Pitchfork that comes off looking like the humorless weirdo

what Pitchfork could have done was politely chuckled and then walked away from the circle and found one of its friends and been like “man Doug’s story was lame why are we even still friends with that guy” and the only difference between that more appropriate reaction and “not funny!!” is review placement, and this review would have been more appropriate in the bottom three reviews if not the last review today, not the lead review, but now a million people will see that Doug Martsch told a bad joke when really it was a fans-only joke to begin with, Pitchfork you are a real asshole sometimes

3. Ian Cohen delivers more critical beatdowns than any other Pitchfork writer and he sometimes reminds me of like a superhero in a movie where the hero rounds up all these petty criminals, like generic short bulky guys in beanies who like snatch old ladies’ purses and commit other petty crimes that make it rougher for honest hardworking people to live in their own neighborhoods, and he rounds them all up and looks like right into the camera and says, calmly and menacingly, “IT’S TIME TO TAKE OUT THE TRASH” and then like wraps them all up in a net and hurls them into the city dump and like rub slaps his hands together like he’s just finished doing a dirty job, you know what i mean?

except instead of petty criminals it’s We Are Scientists today, and instead of “time to take out the trash” he says “bass riffs align themselves into right angles, sharp synth lines blare, hi-hats sizzle, hooks dissolve on contact, and 2004 never ends” and tosses this record into the dump!! the review gets a 6.8 because We Are Scientists is an easy target and this could have been a more effective beatdown

i am sitting on a planter outside the Jane Hotel right now waiting for mike to come so we can go into this party and i was sitting on some stairs until a security guard came up to me and looked me over and said there was no loitering and i said “no i’m here for the party tonight, i’m just waiting for my friend” and he said okay and told me i could sit on the edge of this planter which is like 30 feet from the entrance to the hotel

so while i’m waiting for mike i should explain what The Jane is which is a “luxury hostel” as distinct from a luxury hotel and the guy who owns it also owns a bunch of luxury hotels, but what makes The Jane a hostel is that here you have to share a bathroom with other people who stay on your floor which i think encourages guest mingling ;) ;) ;) ;) you know what i mean? The Jane has a ballroom that hosts the same kind of weekly DJ parties and corporate sponsored models-and-free-drinks parties that The Standard Hotel or The Gansevoort or The Bowery Hotel or The Cooper Square Hotel host with quasi-celebrity DJs, and tonight is the first night of a weekly party here called Jane Doe where there are only female DJs and it’s sponsored by an organic vodka and there is an open vodka bar

sometimes Paul Sevigny DJs here and he is Chloe Sevigny’s brother and a famous/outspoken Manhattan nightlife impresario and he used to run this club called The Beatrice Inn which attracted the same models + celebrities + downtown coolguys and coolgirls + hangers on + interspersed business guy who picks up models crowd that all these hotels and clubs attract in varying proportions, but The Beatrice Inn got shut down by the police for smoking violations or something. sometimes i used to walk past people on the street downtown wearing t-shirts that said Free Beatrice or Save Beatrice but then they couldn’t save it and now it’s closed permanently i think but maybe they’ll revive it. yesterday Larry Fitzmaurice, the pitchfork writer, tweeted that Manhattan is so weird

so one time mike brought me to a party at a place in Soho called Red Bull Space (not joking) where Paul Sevigny was DJing right after Beatrice got closed down and its fate was undecided and mike interviewed him and then introduced me and i said “i like what you are playing” and then asked if i could DJ at Beatrice because i was trying to be courageous and he asked how old i was and i said 20 and he said “good” because i was underage and that is currency, and then he asked if i was trained or like a professional DJ and did like mixing and stuff and i said “no i just like play songs off iTunes or Serato” and he said “that’s good too” and i agreed and he told me to e-mail him when Beatrice reopened but then it never did

also one time Paul Sevigny did an interview about DJing and Manhattan nightlife where he expressed disappointment at the quality of the contemporary downtown Manhattan coolguy/coolgirl and said that DJing used to be part of a larger aesthetic statement but there is no statement anymore and DJing is just the coolguy thing to do and he wished he could have the old New York back

so mike comes and we go inside and the DJ is playing Rudeboy by Rihanna, we go up to the bar and the bartender says “how are you doing” and i say “ummm vodka soda” and then i realize what she said and i say “i’m okay how are you?!?” but by the time i say that she’s already getting my drink and she comes back and looks at me like she’s bored and doesn’t answer, she puts it on the bar and i grab it and walk away, i think i have offended her by treating her like a vodka soda machine, and whatever the opposite of stiff is how i could describe this drink

now the DJ is playing Flashing Lights, wonder if Paper Planes is up next, there are taxidermy monkeys behind the bar encased in glass wearing fez hats, the lights are dim and there are candles flickering and the bathroom door is covered in leather like an old leather sofa. this place is really fancy. mike is interviewing someone who is a publicist but is on a reality show about her publicity firm called Kell on Earth on Bravo and he is asking her about paradoxically being the most newsworthy person here given that she’s a publicist. she must be flattered. he comes back and says she wouldn’t do the interview, he says she is not allowed to talk about the show she is on at all but she was fun to talk to anyway

i get a vodka/passion fruit cocktail from a different bartender, not going back to that side of the bar, this cocktail is too sweet

mike comes back and i tell him i started a twitter to keep track of my diet so i can see everything i eat every day and so everyone else can see it so if i eat three slices of pizza i’ll feel weird about it and he says “there was a times story yesterday about that, did you see it? why’d you start yours today?” and i say “fuck fuck fuck i started mine because of my blog post about being obese which i wrote to remind myself that i’m gaining weight again, i didn’t even see that story, it’s gonna look like i just started a diet twitter because of the times story, i’m gonna delete it when i get home” and he said “well the twitter wasn’t all diet for the dude who wrote the story” and i go “okay well mine is all food but whatever, i’ll guess i’ll just keep a journal in blackberry memopad” and mike says “you don’t have to do that, the story didn’t really make waves”

a girl is standing near us who mike says is the gossip columnist for The Daily News which used to be a really huge deal in New York and might still be sort of a big deal, but i guess i am not their typical reader so i wouldn’t know, also whenever i think of The Daily News i imagine an editor smoking a cigar in midtown banging on his desk and yelling “GET ME BETTER PICTURES OF SPIDERMAN! YOU CAN’T EVEN SEE HIS FACE IN THESE!!!! YOU PEOPLE ARE IDIOTS!” and staffers scurry out of his office. the gossip columnist is wearing short white shorts and huge wedges and has bleached blonde hair as i walk past her she says to a girl who must be a fashion designer “you guys are like the like brand of the summerrrrrrrrr!!”

everyone here is a model or a fashion designer or an affiliated fashion-industry staffer i think, i know i’ve mentioned this before but it bears repeating, they are probably all around my age but feel older and it reminds me of that new york times Twentysomethings article where that person says something like “i know i’m old but i still feel like a kid” and i wonder if these people still feel like kids because they don’t look like kids to me. it is unnerving to look at someone who i know is younger and feel like they are older, like these scandinavian people with faces that look like they just finished rendering in a 3D design program, and also how old i will have to be before i don’t feel like a kid and even if these people do also feel like kids, at least they eat at fancy restaurants and wear fancy shit which i know are superficial markers but these are real indicators to adults. sometimes i feel like even if i ever get real money somehow i would even feel weird eating at fancy restaurants or drinking expensive beer or ordering a fancy cocktail or something you know? my dad grew up poor and i think literally he could win the lottery and have a hundred million dollars and he would still always live like he was barely scraping by

i think the opposite of that could be true, like people who grew up rich and don’t make much money now still act like they’re rich into their 20s and 30s and maybe wealth is actually just a state of mind and you live by your state of mind more than you live by how much money you literally have and suffer and enjoy the consequences of that

also being here makes me think of that mix that jj did for the BBC called 5 Minutes With jj where they sample an Akon beat and quote Biggie lyrics and sing over the instrumental intro to The xx record, in that order in a medley and the parts of the medley are separated by this echoing voice which i think is Charles Manson’s voice and he says “i don’t, uhhh… i don’t pretend to go uptown and be anything fancy. i can… but i find more real in the world that i am in”, i guess that is how a lot of people feel about living in brooklyn but maybe living here comes with a different pretense, or maybe it doesn’t and the Manson quote applies

also while i’m thinking about jj, i just honestly really wish they hadn’t revealed their identities, especially with that video where they smoke weed and show their faces, although it is so badass when the camera goes up to the dude and he has the bandana over his mouth and he pulls it down and exhales smoke because you didn’t even know there was smoke in there to begin with. i guess when you don’t know what someone’s name the mystery is kind of a really compelling part of their work and if you knew my name and where i was from you might think of this blog differently and have different ideas of who i am even though you can’t really tell anything from a person just from their name even though it feels like you can, and if you KNOW someone’s name it removes a lot the possibilities you create around them, you know what i mean?

like for a thought experiment just imagine if we knew hipster runoff was named Charles Qualley from Austin and we might subconsciously be like “oh i GET this guy more now” because we know his name but we wouldn’t really know more about him than we do now

there is a woman sitting next to me on this couch who i have seen as a model on the Calvin Klein ad that hangs over Broadway and Lafayette, she is wearing heel boots and she looks very clean. the DJ is playing Tambourine by Eve which is her single that was on a record from like 3 years ago that never got released i don’t think

now the DJ is playing Run This Town and then the Jay-Z song where he opens saying “allow me to reintroduce myself, my name is hove” and there is a photographer here and he takes pictures of a lot of people and sometimes we make eye contact but he doesn’t take my picture. fuck that guy. the DJ is playing Hooked On A Feeling, i wanna go give her a hug

so then we leave and i am talking to mike about someone he was talking to and in the middle of talking he says the phrase “a mild fascination” and i say “ahhh that’s a line from a song!!”

and mike says “well it was an original line from my mind, but what song?” and i can’t remember what the song is called and i say “ahhh i can’t remember but it’s off a record called Pigeons and i was gonna make a blog video for the song with almost all shots of pigeons” and mike says “why?” and i say “because the record is called pigeons i think maybe they called it that because pigeons are beautiful but underappreciated and i think it’s sort of how that band sees itself, like it’s beautiful but no one cares because it’s just not that distinct” but i still can’t remember the band name

also i tell mike “they got a 7.8 but that’s just a ‘better luck next time’ score” and mike says “pigeons are gross” and i say “no way they’re so cool” and i think for a second and say “okay i’m not trying to just be counterintuitive but first of all they’re doves and second, they have these gorgeous iridescent blue and green necks, like have you ever looked at a pigeon’s neck? they’re such cool birds but there are so many of them and they’re like rats in New York so everyone takes them for granted and thinks they’re just gross, seriously, but if you look at one of them up close they’re amazing” man i am drunk, i actually had some drinks i neglected to tell you about

that all feels corny and i shouldn’t have phrased it like that but look at a pigeon up close next time you see one, and also remember how shitty their lives are before you call them gross because they’ve been through enough. and also as a sidenote, the pigeons metaphor reminds me of hip kids in a way, like they/we are plentiful enough to take for granted, like this morning i was on the platform for the L-train surrounded by other twentysomethings who were all on their way to their graphic design jobs or whatever and it’s easy to be like fuck them they’re all the same but that’s stupid and unnecessary and i suspect every hip kid is worthwhile in their own way and there are things more worth being categorically cynical about than youth culture, and we talk more as we walk east and i interrupt mike when i remember what the song is called and i go “AHHH IT’S CALLED COLLECTOR and it’s by Here We Go Magic” and mike says “that sounds obscure” and i say “the song is good, you will like it”, okay that’s it have a good day bye

1. Brian Howe continues his convincing campaign for Summer MVP and shines on this morning’s lead review of the new Antony and the Johnsons EP, writing with his usual casual understatedness, and it made me think of how sometimes you read something and then you start like thinking or talking or writing in its voice, you know? and you need to wait a minute to snap out of it, like this morning i was on the subway reading a piece on The Awl and then i started writing something and was thinking and writing in the style of that piece and read what i wrote and deleted it and started over because it sounded weird, or sometimes i read some New York Times stories on the subway and then start writing in that style and it sounds weird too

anyway i think something similar is going on with Brian Howe and this Antony EP where he like absorbs Antony’s like holy benevolent understanding vibe and then writes with that vibe but it doesn’t sound forced or uncomfortable, and also the points he makes about this EP are spot on (“There are no grand, collective statements or demands, no extravagant gestures; only personal wishes for the well-being of others and a few quiet prayers from a singer who, for the rare moment, seems to have everything he needs for himself.”), to my ears anyway. Best New Review, 8.5.

2. Tom Breihan is back in form with today’s Kingdom review, opening with some details about listening to his clock radio and how the kind of jam-packed, busting-at-the-seams dance music that used to keep him hooked on the genre has has fallen out of fashion and Kingdom is the last producer to give him the same feeling that he used to get from 90s dance music

a lot of electronic music, especially music that Tom characterizes as “fun music, and it doesn’t have any big aim beyond that” is harder to write about than music with pointed lyrics and a clear mission, i guess, because it’s harder to extract concrete ideas to agree or disagree, beyond the idea that there are no bigger ideas, you know what i mean? like there’s just not that much to say about “fun music” with “no big aims” and someone else could have turned this review into six paragraphs of textural descriptions of the sounds and it might have reminded me of the phrase (that Tom Ewing writes about in the new pitchfork Poptimist column) “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”, and i guess the way to get around that is obviously to write about the sensations music evokes and your memories and associations about it, and only a few people at Pitchfork understand that as well as Tom. 7.4.

3. Matthew Perpetua engineers the caboose today, writing the last two reviews, and proves capable at a reviewerly conceit that’s sometimes frustrating and pointless for readers: working through records track by track. neither of these are essential reads but both succeed on their terms, and if you only have time for one, the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack review is the stronger among the two: 7.2/6.5

okay so when i was 14 i was 5’2” tall and i weighed 220 lbs, and every day i woke up and had to go to school i wanted to walk in front of a bus and every day when i came home i wanted to walk in front of a bus and i didn’t want to look myself in the mirror and i didn’t let people take pictures of me. every year i went to the doctor for a checkup i gained at least 20 lbs and some years about 25 or 27 lbs except one year when i only gained only 17 lbs, and the pediatrician showed me the height/weight graph and for the first time my height/weight combo was actually on the graph instead off the graph and on the way home my mom was really happy and proud of me that i’d managed to gain so little weight that year and i went home celebrated with like a huge bowl of chicken parmesan and spaghetti with meat sauce and cheese and bread and diet coke, a piece of cake and some cookies and starburst before bed that my mom didn’t know about, sorry mom if you are reading this right now

anyway so i went to summer camp every year and got really into tennis because it was the sport i could play that didn’t have shirts and skins teams, and i swam in the lake at camp with my shirt on and told counselors that i didn’t wanna get sunburned even though i am an olive-skinned guy and had been sunburned like twice in my life.

on days in school when the school conducted physicals in the gym we were given a card and had to walk around the gym to all the different stations to get weighed and have our heights measured and our blood pressure taken and other stuff, and the staff would fill out our cards, and on those days i would either pretend to be too sick to go to school or go into the bathroom with my card and fill it out myself and wait half an hour in the library so people wouldn’t suspect anything was up and then just hand the card in so i wouldn’t have to walk around with my weight publicly displayed, even if it was just on a little card, not like written across my forehead, i don’t know what i would have told someone if they had asked to see my card and i would have had to show them and then they would have seen that i was 13 and weighed 200 lbs

one year in middle school i saw my friend Doug’s card and it said 90 lbs and my card said 180 lbs and i wanted to tell him i weighed as much as two hims and laugh but obviously i didn’t because it was too sad to laugh about and i didn’t say anything

so every day on the walk to school i’d get a $1.59 bag of dipsy doodles (which is a huge bag) and a starbucks bottled frappucino to supplement my lunch which was like a chicken parmesan sandwich or cheeseburger and french fries and a soda, and my parents didn’t keep any good-tasting food in the house so sometimes i’d get candy from the vending machine and hide it in my bag and eat it secretly before or after dinner or before bed. one time i heard my mom crying and telling my dad that she didn’t know what to do to help me, and i used to look in the mirror and think of what i would do or give away to be able to lose weight, like i would think to myself that i would literally amputate one of my legs to make the rest of my body thinner and other stuff like that, or i wished i was like poor in a third world country so i couldn’t eat that much, honestly. i played a lot of tennis and walked a lot and every time i exercised i’d reward myself with food so it was negated

when you are fat and you eat a lot you don’t start off eating huge portions of individual foods right away, or at least i didn’t — like i started eating a little of one food, like one cookie with lunch, and i’d eat one cookie with lunch for a long time and then one day i’d be like “what the heck, two cookies please” and then the next day i’d go back to one cookie because two cookies seemed like an indulgence and then the day after that two cookies again because really what’s the practical difference between one and two cookies right? or between medium and large? and then one cookie again, and then two cookies and then two cookies and two cookies for a long time, i’d promise myself “two cookies is the most i’m gonna have with lunch EVER” and then one day i’d just say three cookies, because hey what is the difference between two cookies and three right? and it’s just one day right? and then the next day i’d get two cookies and be proud of myself for eating just two and then the next day i’d get three to reward myself for having only two the day before, and then it would be three for a long time after that. portions grow gradually because you are trying to not gain weight. and that’s how it was with everything and eventually i just tried to stop eating more and more

and another thing about being fat for me is that on one hand it felt like it was totally my fault and i was the one eating two or three burgers as dinner or three slices of pizza because that was what i was choosing and i hated myself for it, and on the other hand i felt like i had almost no control over what i ate and i NEEDED three cookies and if i restricted how much i ate at one meal i would feel like i owed myself an overindulgence at another meal, and there is a more complex psychology to overeating than that but you get what i’m saying right? but there is no one else to blame except yourself and i’m sure a lot of fat people would find it condescending if you said they didn’t have that total agency in their overeating but i know that’s what it was for me. being a conscious and ongoing victim of yourself is maybe worse than being someone else’s victim because at least you can blame THEM and there’s something wrong with THEM but you just know there’s something wrong with YOU

and then one day i was on the bus up to summer camp after freshman year of high school and i was reading Stupid White Men by Michael Moore because i was 14 and that was what my politics were and there’s a chapter about being a vegetarian in it and i obviously needed to make a drastic change in my life so i decided to become a vegetarian and threw out my salami sandwich at a rest stop and told the other kids i had been a vegetarian for six months so they wouldn’t be cynical or doubt my resolve when i said i didn’t eat meat, and then i used being a vegetarian as a way to not eat almost anything, i’d say “oh chicken patties for dinner tonight, can’t eat that but it’s okay cuz i’m not hungry anyway” and my motto was “an apple a day keeps the doctor away ;)” and i don’t know how i summoned the willpower to not eat but i was not eating as voraciously as i was eating before that, losing weight became effortless and i felt like this sort of ecstatic peace that maybe like monks feel, and apparently people also feel it right before they starve to death but i didn’t care if i fainted or starved to death because at least girls would talk to me if i was thinner and i could play basketball or ultimate frisbee like a regular kid. my first girlfriend, like junior year in high school, called me Rocawear because that was the only brand of clothing i’d been able to fit into, i was like a XXXL and had to get my sweatpants hemmed

i am not telling you all this so you will feel bad for me because i lost a bunch of weight and am now of normal weight and there is nothing here left to feel bad for, and i am sorry if you are thinking i said this all so you will feel bad for me but there is no other way to tell this story and it’s gonna be music-blog relevant in 30 seconds

so when i was in high school my girlfriend’s mom said she was an alcoholic and i asked my girlfriend if she drank like every day and my girlfriend said she hadn’t had a drink since 1985 and being fat is sort of like the same thing, like when you are fat during formative years you will always think of yourself as fat, or maybe it was just me, but like eventually no matter how skinny i could ever be i will probably still feel really fat and i have never had an unconflicted relationship with food and have made peace with the fact that i will pretty much think about my weight consciously every day for the rest of my life but i wanted to say that as easy as it is to blame fat people for being fat, it’s not really right, or it’s superficially “correct” because no one is putting a gun to anyone’s head and saying “eat” except like Precious (but even she ate that fried chicken to feel better)

but there is so much more going on in the mind of the man who’s sitting in front of you on the train who weighs 415 lbs and is eating a whopper with extra cheese and a large fries and a large coke and even if you want to slap that shit out of his hands and shake their shoulders and say “stop killing yourself!!!” you might be missing the point. and not even in a “society makes poor people fat by providing only cheap unhealthy food options” way (although that’s true too) because there’s more going on on a personal level, like literally i could not stop eating and all i wanted to do was stop eating since literally before i can remember and blaming fat people for “choosing” to be fat sort of misses the point and it’s a condition that deserves compassion, and i don’t mean that condescendingly because nobody wants to be pitied but there’s a difference between pity and understanding. like you know a heroin addict would probably stop using heroin if they could flip a switch to turn the heroin need off and it’s easy to vilify the heroin addict or fat person but food is as addictive as drugs. if you ask the 415 lb man on the train if he thinks his lunch is a ludicrous lunch he might tell you it would have felt like a ludicrous lunch ten years ago but today it feels like a rational lunch, just like the guy with the $50/day percocet addiction or coke addiction would feel like something was missing with only $35 of percocet or coke even though that would be enough to lay me or you out

so anyway the reason i was fat was not because i was poor and could only afford cheap food, like my mom kept all snackfood out of my house and stocked the fridge with fresh vegetables and fruit and made me healthy meals that i could circumvent at school, and my parents chided me into not eating so fast so i would feel full sooner and always tried to get me to eat healthy and paid for me to exercise almost every day through tennis lessons and made sure i walked a lot, but i think that me and a lot of other overweight people feel an unusually strong CONSUMPTIVE INSTINCT, like i can just say i felt uncomfortable when i wasn’t consuming a lot, and i still feel that way and when i do stuff i like to do it A LOT like yesterday me and zara went to the movies and saw Piranha 3D and then Step Up 3D and then Lottery Ticket because i feel like when i do something i should go hard whether it’s with food or blogging or whatever, i just wanted to eat as much as i could

and so in the vein of alcoholics often replacing their consumption of alcohol with consumption of something else like cigarettes or the bible, i came home from camp and was afraid that i would be plunged into circumstances where i used to eat a lot and it would trigger me eating a lot again but instead of food i came home from camp and started downloading music more and reading about it, especially pitchfork obviously, obsessively and every day like i used to eat, and i could download records and add them to my iTunes all day every day after school instead of eating, and i started going to concerts every weekend and buying CDs and instead of rushing to the kitchen after dinner for dessert i’d rush back to my computer to see if anything new had leaked, and i would download and download and add and add and that became what satisfied my need to consume and consume. i’d just download whole discographies of bands i knew i’d probably never listen to, anything anyone mentioned i would find and if i couldn’t find it after a while i’d just buy the CD, and honestly all this may be unique to my psychology but i bet there are a lot of people who used to be really overweight who replaced the consumption of food with the consumption of something else and this wouldn’t sound that crazy to them

downloading music became like buying or ordering it and hearing it is like tasting and chewing and swallowing and thinking about it is like DIGESTING — have you ever heard someone say something like “oh yeah i heard that record but i still need a few more listens to digest it, you know?” that’s how i feel every day

and if it wasn’t for the ability to download as much music as i needed to be satisfied, because i didn’t have enough money to buy as much music as that, and i know this might all sound crazy to you but it is literally what i went through and how i still feel, i probably would just have gone back to food or done drugs and i would have either weighed (and this is a conservative estimate based on gaining only 20 lbs/year which was much lower than average) 380 lbs right now and died from that or killed myself or died of an overdose because i have a hard-time with consumptive self-control, you know what i mean? downloading mp3s literally has saved my life

1. Stuart Berman bangs out an acceptable review of the new Mogwai live CD/DVD thing, opening with a little cynicism and then moving into some straightforward critical admiration. in the first paragraph he writes, “as far as mythic locations go, the Music Hall of Williamsburg ain’t exactly Pompeii” and i wanted to reach through the screen and elbow jab him and be like “ya got that right pal!!”

he continues, finishing the opening paragraph, “Judging by the wide array of physical/digital purchasing options available on the band’s website, the real purpose of this release is to test out new e-commerce possibilities for the band.”

okay first that’s unusually cynical for pitchfork because i think their m.o. is to pretty much take the artist at their word and let the bitter internet apply cynicism to that, and second, there’s nothing in Berman’s tone to indicate a joking overstatement, but this is a weird thing to say and wrong, especially since Berman later gets at what seems like the likely rationale behind the release

so saying a band would put out a release to test the waters for the commercial viability of putting out a release doesn’t make sense on it’s face, as much as saying anyone would do something literally to see how well they could do it theoretically, that’s backwards, and also there are plenty of ways to research whether or not your band can sell records like nextbigsound.com or seeing how well your last release did or the size of the venues you play or a million other metrics. he says they are testing out the e-commerce possibilities but like i don’t even know how to respond to that particular nuance of this point because the whole thing doesn’t make sense, you know what i mean?

Berman finishes his review with the actual best possible explanation for this release, “Mogwai also seem eager to challenge the notion that their best work is 10 years behind them: They close out Special Moves with a rampaging version of Mr. Beast’s “Glasgow Mega-Snake” that makes the preceding, suitably apocalyptic reading of “Like Herod” seem like a mere warm-up exercise.”

if you’re an old band and people think your new material isn’t up to snuff, there’s no better way to say you still got it than to juxtapose the new material complimentarily with the old stuff and be like “see? we’re better than ever”, and Berman should have resisted his instinct for cynicism since he ultimately gets it right, 7.0

2. Stephen M. Deusner doesn’t waste a word in his taut Jon Spencer Blues Explosion review, neatly detailing their ferocity and progress and ending on an intriguing but ultimately misguided note when he writes, “The great misunderstanding in the early 90s— one that survives today— is that somehow the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion were making fun of their influences, but really they were trying to rescue them from being whitewashed by too many reverent critics and too many museum-worthy box sets.”

when i first saw JSBX playing with Heavy Trash and Stars i think, a few years ago, i had a similar instinct that Deusner refers to as a “misunderstanding” about what JSBX was trying to do — throwing into relief how over-the-top their influences were by doing over-the-top ALL the time, sort of like how Fang Island is a bit of a parody of like Journey and Boston because they are all-solo, all the time. Deusner says that’s wrong, but i think the truth, for acts like JSBX or Fang Island or Lez Zeppelin or any other act that seems self-awarely in love with its ridiculous influences, is somewhere in the middle:

they ARE joking around about Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis and Journey and Boston and they DO think they’re ridiculous, but they also love and respect them and using the term “mocking” is wrong here because it implies something derisive. you can love something genuinely and still get that it’s over-the-top, and the mistake Deusner makes here is finding that those are mutually-exclusive ideas, you know?

3. the rest of the reviews today are maybe only worth reading if you are literally in the bands written about, or if you produced their records, except maybe the CIAfrica review is pretty good if you are into DJ/rupture, that one gets a 6.9