Monday May 16 2022
Thank you for asking. Yes, all the photos here are mine. If you like them, visit the original blog, which began as a home for images. (I’m approaching 19 years in this game.) There’s also a gallery on my name site, a timid bridge between the first website and this newsletter.
Read Meaghan Garvey and Rax King and give them your money. Meaghan tweeted that the new Ethel Cain is “album of the year” and that this is “not a tough call.” Is it? I don’t rank things anymore, even though I go around screaming “album of the year!” all the time. It’s a process! Mind yr business!
My friend Morgan Meis did a wonderful thing last year with his friend Josh Tyree. They made a book you can download for free as a PDF, though I recommend buying a physical copy. From the publisher, Punctum: “Wonder, Horror, Mystery is a dialogue between two friends that takes the form of a series of letters about movies and religion.” This is accurate! What do they ask each other? Again, Punctum: “Why do we so intensely love or hate films that dare to broach the subjects of the divine and the diabolical?” I wish these two talked about Tarkovksy more (he does come up) but the below is thinking I will pay for.
I wasn’t thinking about Buffalo, actually, in this moment. I was fact-checking a Bookforum piece on Gary Indiana that’s coming out soon. While looking up the second Rodney King trial, I found this unsigned 1993 editorial from The Baltimore Sun. Look at the passion for believing that white violence is just a bad dream from some other time, on its way out thanks to the big, bountiful breeze of justice.
Friend of the blog, Andy Beta, sent us another show that deals with the delights of digital dub: Tuff Shed!
Little Alchemy is a few years old but god yes I love it. When things pile up, I want to figure out how to make glass from sand and electricity. A game, literally, made for me.
Do you know what Winamp is and was? It was sort of a game, and also not. Go to the Winamp Skin Museum and lark about. All of the players are functional.
I keep returning to this Vittles piece about “hyper-regional chippy traditions.” Potatoes can be destroyed in so many delicious ways and everyone cares.
I love this mental health recovery compilation.
I also love Barbie Bertisch and Paul Raffaele, and their Herb Sundays playlists. In the process of answering a question about Nu-Disco, Barbie put me on to this Daniele Baldelli playlist. I would be underselling it to call it amazing. It’s kind of like something I keep trying to make but much, much better. This is 777 songs Baldelli apparently played at Cosmic Disco, compiled by a nice person named Adrian Hoenicke. Baldelli does a lot of things in his sets and one of them is Find the Dance Song Released By a Non-Dance Act. The Cure, Tubes, The The—all have hidden bangers.
What does it mean to buy a watch in 2022? My friend, Sarah, needed to buy one for her daughter, by order of the AP English test dragoons. You must have one, and it cannot be a smartphone. We looked at CVS and a few head shops on Sixth Avenue near Eighth Street, and then I peeled off. Later, she sent me a photo of the watch. Can you guess where she found the watch and how much it costs?
$22, at Marshall’s.
The world is still a physical place, from phones to the Suez Canal and beyond. This piece about laying underwater cables and trying to control the internet on the African continent is about that, among other things.
