the arkadelphian.

While I was cleaning my desk, I realized that this poem —...

Thu, 09 May 2013 17:32:00 -0500

While I was cleaning my desk, I realized that this poem — ”Ithaka” by C.P. Cavafy — really is the only decoration I’ve had in nine months at Weld. I chose wisely.

Pay close attention to what I am about to tell you, banana:...

Sat, 04 May 2013 13:11:52 -0500

Pay close attention to what I am about to tell you, banana: you’re a goddamned banana. The only sticker you need would say, ”Your eyes do not deceive you, friend; I am indeed a banana. Please eat me at your leisure, as is the custom of humans. Thanks for reading and God bless!” Don’t gild the lily with ’90s X-TREME marketing bullshit, banana. You’re better than that.

"There may be some truths that are, after all, our friends in the universe."

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 17:47:00 -0500

““There may be some truths that are, after all, our friends in the universe.””

- Saul Bellow (via theparisreview)

The two most indispensable pieces of art in my house (also by...

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 12:26:12 -0500

The two most indispensable pieces of art in my house (also by Paul Wilm).

strandbooks: Underlined passage, Letters to a Young Poet by...

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 07:33:00 -0500

strandbooks:

Underlined passage, Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, p. 19

tragedyseries: For small creatures such as we the vastness is...

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 18:27:52 -0600

tragedyseries:

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

One need not expend all their resources to get a fine item from my shop; whether you intend to woo in pursuit of, maintain or eschew The Bard of Avon’s muse there is something for any and every one. Take a look if you are so inclined.

I made this playlist full of songs about love (or something like...

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 17:51:00 -0600

I made this playlist full of songs about love (or something like that) for all you loveless nerds out there. Coincidentally, it features no songs from Loveless.

trixiedelight: Jules et Jim (1962) Jeanne Moreau

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 17:56:08 -0600

trixiedelight:

Jules et Jim (1962) Jeanne Moreau

"Gracious, soft-voiced girls, who were brought up on memories instead of money."

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 12:55:47 -0600

“Gracious, soft-voiced girls, who were brought up on memories instead of money.”

- F Scott Fitzgerald, The Ice Palace (via thatkindofwoman)

terriwindling: Once upon a time there was a girl, there was a...

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 11:12:42 -0600

terriwindling:

Once upon a time there was a girl, there was a boy, there was a poor woman who wanted, there was a queen who couldn’t have, there was a witch who lived under, there was a green frog at the bottom of, there was a troll, a tree, a bear, a bright-eyed bird who knew the secret of, there was a fairy who had lost, there was a child who had found, there was a wizard who had made, there was a princess who had broken, there was a story trying to be told. Listen. The wind is speaking.

"It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head..."

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 23:45:21 -0600

“It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.”

- Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (via liquidnight)

Fugazi — “Waiting Room.” But I don’t...

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 18:06:25 -0600

Fugazi — “Waiting Room.”

But I don’t sit by idly
I’m planning a big surprise
I’m gonna fight for what I want to be
I won’t make the same mistakes
Because I know how much time that wastes
Function is the key

my top 10 albums of fiscal year 2012.

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 11:00:00 -0600

As some of you know, I almost didn’t do a list for the first time in seven (!) years. What were the top albums of those years, you ask?

2011: Nebraska, by Bruce Springsteen

2010: Alligator, by The National

2009: Remain in Light, by Talking Heads

2008: OK Computer, by Radiohead

2007: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, by Neutral Milk Hotel

2006: Foxtrot, by Genesis (whoopsie-doodle)

Top 5 reasons I almost didn’t make a Top Ten list:

I got a got-danged job
I haven’t had a stereo since May
My laptop’s speakers are garbage
I’m more content than I’ve been in ages, so I don’t quite need music as much
I spent half the year listening to just one record (spoilers)

We can thank the efforts of a kindly, filth-covered urchin boy named AJ for showing me the magic of Top Ten lists again. A Festivus miracle!

I listened to plenty of great music this year, to be sure, especially toward the top of my list. But unlike years past, I neither made a consolidated effort to expose myself to the classics of each genre, nor did I luxuriate in all of these albums and consider them at their own speed. All of these records are wonderful in their own way, but we’ll just say that these are the least hard-and-fast rankings since my 2009 list, a similarly top-heavy group.

Yes, I’ve got some doubts, and I’d like to (and will) spend more time with all these records. But when I think about what my life was like in 2012, this is what I’ll hear:

10. The B-52’s – Cosmic Thing (1989)

“Shake your honeybuns! Shake it ‘til the butter melts!”

This piece of coked-up insanity is so ridiculous as to be nearly un-recommendable. That said, it is an absolute delight when you listen to it in the right frame of mind. It’s like the flipside of This Year’s Model; incredibly propulsive with a voracious sexual appetite, but fulfilled and happy instead of dejected and bitter. If you put “Love Shack” on at a party and nobody dances, you’re at the wrong party. And whether they’re singing about the ecstasy of travel or slacking off, Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson’s vocals are as close to heaven as we’re likely to get.

9. Dum Dum Girls – He Gets Me High EP (2011)

“Oh, to be your destiny is all I’d ever want to be”

In a word: gigantic. Produced by Richard Gottehrer, who accomplished the same wall-of-sound trick with Blondie, He Gets Me High mixes yearning lyrics with a nearly impenetrable punk-pop-goddess coolness. If the EP were any more ironic or clever, it wouldn’t quite work, but Dee Dee Penny and co. go for the hard sell with their hormonal angst. Look no further than their stellar cover of “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”; it’s completely devoid of any of the ironic commentary in the original song, but that doesn’t matter. You can see just how little the Dum Dum Girls care about your expectations when it would mean betraying their feelings. (Almost as good: 2012’s End of Daze EP.)

8. The Beach Boys – Pet Sounds (1966)

“Sometimes I feel very sad”

I’m not going to argue that this record isn’t as good or important as the ones I’ve ranked ahead of it. That said, I’ve listened to it well over a dozen times, and I don’t feel any stronger connection to it than when I first started. The music is the product of a precocious, unique concinnity of one mind, like a Bach fugue or a Mozart symphony. But as piercing as the record can be, and as elating as it can be, it feels like the emotion still fundamentally belongs to Brian Wilson, too. We’re just borrowing it.

7. Japandroids – Celebration Rock (2012)

“It’s a blitzkrieg love and a roman candle kiss”

Yeah, the concert was a dud. But there was a good reason to be excited for it in the first place: this was the best, purest summer record released in years. It’s one thing to understand that you’re doomed to grow old one day, and it’s another to rail against that inevitability in the catchiest possible way.

6. Wye Oak – Civilian (2011)

“Panic is a slow dissolve – a terror – quiet – calm”

When I mentioned wanting to stick with these albums longer, this is Exhibit A. Civilian is full of enigmatic, beautiful lyrics waiting to unpacked by someone with a little more time on their hands. As it is, it captures the aching wistfulnes and regret of the better Death Cab records with a lot more maturity and perspective, coupled with a very tactical deployment of shoegaze fuzz and some sneaky hooks. It also boasts maybe my favorite single off any of these records. If I look back at this list next year, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Civilian rise to the top 3.

5. Roxy Music – Siren (1975)

“Oh boy is it getting rough when my Old World charm isn’t quite enough”

Since I was first introduced to Bryan Ferry, the frontman and mastermind behind Roxy Music, I’ve always thought of him as a Rent-a-Bowie; not quite the artistic impresario or the vamping weirdo Bowie was, but still awash in layers of irony concealing a deeply sentimental core. Even with lowered expectations, Siren stuck with me from beginning to end this summer. It’s cleverer than it’s got any right to be, almost daring you to sympathize with it. The hugely energetic music is a critical part, but let’s give credit where it’s due: Ferry’s distinctive, macilent quiver in the vocals packs enough charisma and emotional heft for a career, let alone one album.

4. Paul Simon – Graceland (1986)

“These are the roots of rhythm, and the roots of rhythm remain”

The album that launched a million “Dad’s Cool Mix” playlists. Everybody knows what distinguishes Graceland sonically, as it adroitly combines Simon’s keen eye for detail and ear for melody with a brave old world of West African rhythms, chants, and instrumentation. More than its bevy of hits, though, what distinguishes Graceland for me is how it both acknowledges the shortcomings of the modern world while embracing music as an escape. As sweet and as funny as Graceland can be, it’s the passing moments of hope and saintly serenity that will resonate with me when I’ve grown old. I’ve never heard—or been reassured by—anything quite like them.

3. Mekons – Mekons Rock ‘n’ Roll (1989)

“We never have to stretch our imagination—it is our own lives we can’t believe”

Part of the audacity of the punk movement—hell, you could lump in Exile on Main Street, too—is British bands wanting to save American music from itself by going back to the roots. The Mekons made a career out of doing the same with American folk, binding it to a punk ethos and biting cynicism in a way that, along with Billy Bragg, more or less invented alt-country as we know it.

Despite some unwieldy sloganeering, Mekons Rock ‘n’ Roll is a bewildering, conceptual tour not only through rock and roll history, but also through some of the seediest, darkest corners of a decade full of them. The Mekons’ colossal “fuck you” to the ‘80s is also a deeply complicated love triangle between the band’s ideals, American crassness, and the siren song of rock and roll. As uneven as it can be, it’s never less than captivating.

2. David Bowie – Station to Station (1976)

“It’s not the side-effects of the cocaine…I’m thinking that it must be love”

It’s well known that Bowie barely made it out the first half of the ‘70s; his emaciated form from the Ziggy days, combined with the gruesome twosome of an astronomically expensive coke habit and a terrible contract, nearly drove him insane. His long drying-out in Europe was the basis for the cathartic, if misleading, Berlin trilogy. Before that, though, he was the Thin White Duke.

Combining the irresistible art-funk of Young Americans with the most interesting of his many characters, Bowie made an album—one that he claims not to remember recording—about the many varieties of consumption. The drugs, conspiracy theories, and quasi-fascist mysticism that fascinated him at the time? Check. Television? Check. Nostalgia? Check. Religion? Check. It’s hard to tell just how genuine Bowie is being at any stage of the record, considering how nasty and manipulative his Thin White Duke persona was supposed to be. But even in his Messianic heyday as Ziggy, Bowie was never a more desperately persuasive salesman than he was on Station to Station.

1. Patti Smith – Horses (1975)

“I tore off my clothes, I danced on my shoes, I ripped my skin open and then I broke through”

If the Mayans had been right—or rather, if we had given a shit about what the Mayans had actually written in the Long Count Calendar, and it presaged doom in 2012, and it actually happened—then Horses would have been a good goddamned soundtrack to the end times. It’s the direst, most intoxicating, most ambitious, and most satisfying record on this list, and it had won the top spot by the third time I’d heard it all the way through.

After listening to Horses nonstop from March through July, I wondered if it would lose its shine, the same one that inspired me to write the best piece of criticism I’ve ever produced. It hasn’t. Horses may well be the best album I’ve ever listened to, and it’s served as a personal muse to me in a way that other towering achievements, like OK Computer, never have. That’s why Horses is my favorite album that I found in 2012.

“Heroes” — David Bowie by Masayoshi Sukita.

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 17:59:37 -0600

“Heroes” — David Bowie by Masayoshi Sukita.

likelyhealthy: Don Draper’s “Why I’m Quitting Tobacco”. I am...

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 00:46:44 -0600

likelyhealthy:

Don Draper’s “Why I’m Quitting Tobacco”.

I am not sure if this means I am back on tumblr. It definitely means that I was scrolling through my dashboard for the first time in three weeks or so and found something awesome.

explore-blog: The Night Life of Trees – gorgeous illustration...

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 10:51:01 -0600

explore-blog:

The Night Life of Trees – gorgeous illustration based on Indian folk mythology

AUSTIN KLEON: The artist vs. the scientist

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 17:38:39 -0600

AUSTIN KLEON: The artist vs. the scientist:

austinkleon:

I am a scientist
I seek to understand me
All of my impurities
and evils yet unknown
—Guided By Voices

thenearsightedmonkey:

Because artists and scientists don’t hang around each other quite enough, they accumulate odd imaginations about each other. Here a great scientist talks about an artist who imagines that scientists have a inferior imaginative take on things.

It was fun to find out while reading Lawrence Weschler’s books on Robert Irwin and David Hockney that both artists spent a good amount of time hanging out with scientists and felt a special kinship with them.

Robert Irwin in Seeing Is Forgetting The Name Of The Thing One Sees:

Everyone involved on a particular level of asking questions, whether he’s a physicist or a philosopher or an artist, is essentially involved in the same questions. They are universal in that sense… although we may use different methods to come at them…

The scientist in the video above is the great Richard Feynman. Here’s an excerpt of what he says:

The way I think of what we are doing is, we are exploring, we are trying to find out as much as we can about the world. People say to me, “Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?” No I am not. I am just looking to find out more about the world.

Hockney, in True To Life:

Finding out that [art and science are] not that different has been very exciting for me. The more I’ve read of mathematicians and physicists, the more engrossed I’ve become. They really seem like artists to me. One’s struck how it’s almost a notion of beauty which seems to be guiding them, how at the frontiers of inquiry, contemporary physics even seems to be approaching and acknowledging eternal mysteries.

Feynman explains why the unknown doesn’t bother him:

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong… I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe…

This is very much the attitude that the writer Donald Barthelme said was essential to the creation of art:

The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do… The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention… Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing…

Irwin says the process of inquiry that an artist goes through is a lot like a chemist’s, in that “What you do when you start to do a painting is that you begin with a basic idea, a hypothesis of what you’re setting out to do,” and then the rest is a lot of experimenting and trial-and-error.

But there are some essential differences, mainly that it’s hard to retrace an artist’s thought process (although, some artists leave a better paper trail than others…):

“Once the scientist is finished, you can look back over his notes to consider the precise sequence of yes-no weighings which brought him to his solution. It’s all quite logical and structured… The artist, on the other hand, keeps no such record (although historians would love it if he did). Rather, he literally paints over his errors. Six months later, when you ask him, ‘Why did you stop there?’ and he replies, ‘Well, because it felt right,’ his answer may not seem acceptable from a logical point of view… but in fact it’s quite reasonable. Given the basic fundamentals, he’s tried just about every damn combination possible, every way possible, until he’s finally arrived at what makes sense to him. The critical difference is that the artist measures from his intuition, his feeling. In other words, he uses himself as the measure.

beatonna: olosta: group of women having a smoke, gelatin...

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 17:15:02 -0600

beatonna:

olosta:

group of women having a smoke, gelatin silver print, c. 1896.

How to go back in time and be this person is the question

nevver: Still falls the rain

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 16:37:28 -0600

nevver:

Still falls the rain

theparisreview: “Mucous: An adjective, not synonymous with the...

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 14:46:31 -0600

theparisreview:

“Mucous: An adjective, not synonymous with the noun mucus. It’s worth noting this not only because the two words are fun but because so many people don’t know the difference. Mucus means the unmentionable stuff itself. Mucous refers to (1) something that makes or secretes mucus, as in ‘The next morning, his mucous membranes were in rocky shape indeed,’ or (2) something that consists of or resembles mucus, as in ‘The mucous consistency of its eggs kept the diner’s breakfast trade minimal.’”

The unfinished David Foster Wallace dictionary. For more of this morning’s roundup, click here.