Volume 1: Axioms and Pickup Trucks

1. "On the other hand, life is short, and hard, and it seems like good policy to inflict the absolute minimum pain/humiliation on other people as we schlep through the day."-David Foster Wallace, It All Gets Quite Tricky, Harper's Magazine, November 2008.


2. High schoolers have an inordinate number of important conversations on the backs of cars and pickup trucks. We just watched a Friday Night Lights episode where two kids have one of those conversations that seems like the most important thing in the world at the time, all while sitting on the back of a pickup truck. Pretty sure I had a few of those myself, including the only girl I dated in HS breaking up with me in the school parking lot on the back of my 1983 Volvo 240DL. Makes sense though--at that age you don't usually have anywhere more private or meaningful than your car to stage a discussion.

Photo by Silversldr

The Best Thing I Heard this Week--Bon Iver

The best thing I heard this week was the new Bon Iver album. Bon Iver, or Justin Vernon, succeeds on his second, self-titled record, in a way that is both completely different than the first and exactly the same.

The Best Thing I Heard this Week-Chad VanGaalen

Photo by El Diano

In September of 2006, I went to see Band of Horses at the Cat’s Cradle with my sister (I think) while they were touring on their only album worth a listen, Everything All the Time. I only remember three things about the show, and two of them had to do with the opener, Chad VanGaalen. Also, I’m going to refer to him from here on out as CVG because it’s quicker.

The Best Thing I Heard this Week--The Strokes

As a change of pace one morning before the dredge to work, I put on The Strokes’ Angles. This might be the best album I hear this year. Seriously. Slept on, most likely because of a lackluster effort last time out (First Impressions of Earth) that saw the band seemingly trying too hard to create something different from their first two records (the equally brilliant Is This It? and Room on Fire). Angles is a warning shot--wake up, The Strokes are not done, they are in their fucking prime.

A Mission Statement, of Sorts

"[T]he function of sports, games, and athletics is that of release from the complexities of modern life. In Freud's famous phrase, modern man is forced to live psychologically beyond his means, and sport is a kind of retrenchment in an effort to balance the budget. The demands made on consciousness by mere existence in the world to-day are so great that there must be constantly available ways of lowering consciousness and escaping to simpler levels, to muscular and instinctive levels where the exigent demand for thinking is not felt."--Bernard DeVoto, The Cestus of Hygeia, Harper's Magazine, July, 1937.

Hat tip to Roy Blount Jr.'s preface to Rules of the Game. And to Sarah Miller and Michael Mayo for the gift of the book and years of friendship.

Well

Decided not to renew my url...so posting all of that stuff over here. Super-tedious for everyone involved. Yay!

Update

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.