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Oh, Jessica Paré! You are so pretty, and it’s neat how your career is taking off, but it’s such a shame New York put you on the cover not just looking like you have to pee but looking like you have to pee while floating in a sea of pee. Zou pee-sou pee-sou.
I guess I should start bracing myself for this kind of guilt just on the off-chance I ever have kids because I feel like my offspring will be especially prone to these kinds of accidents, what with their mother, as an infant, having once pulled a whole crock-pot off the counter and onto herself by the electrical cord, and another time having landed in the ER with a dislocated elbow acquired while dancing with her grandmother. GREAT JOB, TINY RACHAEL. GREAT JOB TRYING TO STAY ALIVE. GOOD. REALLY. SUPER. AWESOME. THUMBS UP. YOU’RE GONNA DO GREAT IN LIFE.
Zooey Deschanel Says No Kids | ABC News - Yahoo! News (via perpetua)
This is actually even more hilarious when you realize, as Joe just did, how the writer very likely arrived at this completely bizarre assemblage of facts: Clearly she just read the phrase “Zooey Deschanel divorces Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard” and interpreted that, somehow, as meaning “Zooey Deschanel divorces Death Cab [some dude] for Cutie [some band] frontman Ben Gibbard.” Which, grammatically, completely works! We suspect this is the result of that time-honored tradition of “putting it into your own words” ie “rewriting stuff from someone’s Wikipedia profile to make it somewhat not obvious that is exactly what you are doing.”
Perhaps that is totally obviously what went wrong here, but Joe was very proud to sleuth it out and then we laughed forever and then I coughed a lot and died. (#allergies)
But actually the most bizarre thing of all is how the story turns into an explainer on this strange new idea that women might not want to have kids because they might want to work or something?! I think we’re really burying the lede here, folks.
The Billfold | What to Expect When You’re Expecting to Live in New York City
This gives me hives. I know where and how people live is generally a very personal and idiosyncratic decision often impacted by a number of complicated and uncontrollable factors and desires, and I know that I have literally been to New York City once in my whole life, as a high-school junior, actually just about ten years ago this spring, and I know that as a young writerly type perhaps I should be at least willing to consider the possibility that my “career” would be “better off” if I was willing to make that move, but I very personally cannot comprehend how in the world that would ever be an attractive possibility, mostly because—THAT IS SO MUCH MONEY. SO MUCH MONEY. And so little space. Actually I think that might be roughly around the same amount of space of the house (two-bedroom, backyard) Joe and I just moved into, maybe a little smaller, but we pay roughly one third of that. And that is actually pretty low for Atlanta so I feel conspicuous even telling people who live here about it, but I feel like every so often I need to remind the outside world (ie, people paying so so much as much or less space in New York City—the rest of America is probably more on our scale, or even lower!) that there are other options, and other cities, other places where you will be able to live happy and fulfilled and challenging lives, and also go out to eat more, or buy an elephant, or whatever you want to do with the thousands of extra dollars a month you don’t have to sink into a shitty little box you don’t even own.
That I think the problem with this New York Times piece might be more a matter of tone and presentation and mishandled self-deprication than the writer actually feeling that much of a strong aversion to “sharing” musical tastes with the world. This paragraph, of out context, seems to indicate the opposite—but where and how it’s situated in the piece is more of an, “oh, I used to feel this way, I understand if you feel this way, but this is actually pretty ridiculous, maybe, and not the best way to go about things.” She recognizes those feelings as “deeply stupid,” but she over-relies, I think, on the assumption that the reader will be on the same page re: the preposterousness of pretending like you “own” or have super-secret claim status to any sort of music. Perhaps she/her editors just didn’t consider/realize that there are still enough people who feel “that way” (a total aversion to sharing, an overvaluation of snobbery) that “that way” would probably be seen as the default.
Or maybe I’m just overly sympathetic because I once also wrote something that attempted to address the issue of people freaking out about “other people” liking “their music” and no longer feeling “special” that was a total abject failure in terms of tone and structure, parts of which were interpreted as utterly earnest that I intended to be read with dripping sarcasm, and that I generally wish could be obliterated from the internet entirely but, since it can’t, I might as well share. (In short, what I meant: “Miley Cyrus kind of grates on my nerves as a public figure, and this interview she did was also pretty grating, and maybe it seems silly or contrived that she likes this ‘critically acclaimed “indie” artist’ when that is so far from who she is as a performer, but hell, at the end of a day she’s a human being like the rest of us, why should she be shut out of enjoying music that she might find deeply personally affecting for one reason or another?” How it came out: “LOL I am a miserable rockist indie snob and Miley Cyrus has weird teef.” You know that book If You Give A Moose A Muffin? Well, they’re working on one called If You Give An Anxious, Long-Winded, Largely Inexperienced Writer A Weekly Internet Music Column, and it’s about my life from October 2009-August 2010. Cute!)
NYTimes | Why the Old-School Music Snob Is the Least Cool Kid on Twitter
Here is what I think about when I encounter stuff like this:
In middle and high school, my family had one computer—a Compaq Presario desktop with weird purple accents, if you’re wondering—that the four of us all shared. A pretty typical setup for the late 90s/early 00s, I guess. For a while this was fine because mostly I was the only one in the house that cared about the internet, but when my younger sister Sarah got a little bit older (she’s three years younger than me) it got a little tricky. I guess this was before there was the option to have multiple desktops on a Windows machine, or maybe we just didn’t know about it.
Anyway, there was a lot of squabbling and sniping not just about who got to use the computer and when, but what ownership either of us had on the stuff that wound up on the computer. This was during the Napster heyday, or maybe just after it—maybe AudioGalaxy was the thing then, I don’t remember. At any rate that’s how I was getting most of my music at the time, not even whole albums, just totally random tracks I’d download whenever I read about some artist that sounded interesting in Spin or Rolling Stone or on any number of the “online diaries” of total strangers that I followed (this was even pre-LiveJournal, I think; Lindsey, you were most likely one of them!).
All questions of ethics aside, this was super super important to me in terms of developing my own musical tastes, and I discovered so many artists that way—gosh, I can’t even remember exactly what now, but probably lots of Jeff Buckley, Elvis Costello, weird old Ben Folds Five b-sides and bootlegs; I remember downloading a whole scrapped album by Kara’s Flowers, the band that became Maroon 5; some band called Starlet that I think might’ve actually been a fairly legit Swedish indie-pop act, I don’t know. It all felt very special and private.
I was thinking about this earlier, kind of, because I just registered rachaelmaddux.com which is something I’ve been vaguely desiring to do since I was about thirteen or fourteen, back when it seemed definitely like something someone could do, but I had no idea how, and it also felt like definitely something my parents wouldn’t be OK with. I mean, in 7th grade when I bounded into the kitchen and proudly announced that I had signed up for my first email account—mushmellow1214@hotmail.com, if you’re wondering, whatever the hell that meant—they reacted not with the gushing pride and excitement I’d expected but with absolute stricken horror, and then my dad made me print out the terms and conditions agreement and read the whole thing before he let me actually use the address. And I realized today that back then the internet was kind of my Narnia, this strange world where things were mostly familiar but also deeply strange and beautiful and terrifying, and which I could access through my own home and that I felt, most of the time while I was there, no one else would fully understand like I did, like it was impossible to express to anyone on the other side what it was like there. And that was scary but also kind of great, for a thirteen, fourteen, fifteen year old girl. So I definitely felt like what I did online, music-downloading included, was very private and sacred and mine.
So when my sister found these programs on the computer and started using them to download her own stuff, which was only marginally more embarassing than what I was listening to, it completely wrecked my entire concept of ownership. It was like she was using my wardrobe to access my secret world and while she was there she was listening to my sectret MP3s that I had harvested on my own. And of course I could always tell when she was doing this because I could hear her playing the music. It drove me crazy. I remember exploding at her once—I was watching TV in the other room and she was on the computer and I heard, like, god who knows what, some old weird Modest Mouse song that I probably didn’t even like but some college girl whose “weblog” I had started following had said they were cool so I downloaded it—anyway my little sister was listening to it and it was like I’d found her going through my closet or something, but worse, maybe even like I’d found her going through my diary, but worse than that even, because it was as if she was claiming some kind of ownership over it by playing it for herself. But NO, it was MINE! Mine mine mine! And I think I even ran into computer room yelling at her about that. Like, telling her she was not allowed to listen to it because I had downloaded it, it was mine, not hers, get her own. Yes, I actually do think that I suggested to her that she download her own copy of the same MP3 and that she should only be allowed to listen to that one, not mine.
So then probably our mom came in and told us to chill out and for me to stop acting so ridiculous and just let my sister listen to the dang songs because I sure as hell didn’t own them—I had illegally downloaded them, remember, and that is maybe the ultimate irony, or not quite but still quite funny. And then at some point after that when my rage had subsided (days, weeks, months, not sure how long that took), I realiezd, oh wait. This is actually pretty great. My sister likes the same music I like. She is listening to the music I downloaded because she likes it, and she is downloading other music that I have actually not heard of and that’s pretty good too. And aside from a brief but very intense Evan and Jaron fixation, which I’m sure she would also admit to being pretty inexplicable and embarassing (we both partook in the Hanson-love so I can’t knock that), she has basically held steady as someone whose musical tastes are compatible with my own, who I enjoy enjoying the same music as, who I enjoy sharing music with and seeing shows with and getting excited about music with. I know I would have come around to this eventually, and I know that even if we did wind up liking completely different stuff I would still respect that and probably find value in that, but as it has turned out sharing music (and books and TV shows and movies) has been a real and steady source of sisterly bonding for us, and makes being together just that much more fun, and I can’t believe it was once a source of real anger and frustration that she would “dare” like the same things I liked.
And I think that experience with her made me generally more open to other people liking what I like—and not just being OK with that but being excited about sharing, happy to be open with what I love. And it has also made me increasingly impatient with people who are not OK with that, who get fussy about keeping what they love and know private and secluded, because I now necessarily associate it with being a completely unreasonable fifteen-year-old music snob unwilling to share the things most precious to her even with her own flesh and blood.
So. That is what I think about when I encounter stuff like this.
Also, this hot mess.
(Perpetua has a more succinct take on the NYT piece here.)
Why yes, I did flag this Facebook ad as “offensive,” but only because “DEEPLY AND UNNECESSARILY CREEPY” was not an option.
“You could help Aladdin Sane!”
Pitchfork | Bradford Cox Talks “Shocking” Minneapolis Performance
I would like someone to illustrate the literal meaning of all of Bradford Cox’s pronouncements here in the style of Stefon’s hottest nightclubs, this one in particular, although perhaps an animated approach would a more ideal approach. (Mental images of mouthpeeing notwithstanding, dude makes some damn salient points.)
Bryan Cranston - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Joe and I finished season four of Breaking Bad last night (nb: HOLY SHIT AAAAHHHRRGGGHHHAAAAHHH FAAAACE!!) so now I’m Googling all the things I wanted to Google but was afraid to Google for all the lurking spoilers and whatnot. I was really itching for some resolution re: Anna North’s wildly evolving face/body situation (I figured she was pregnant at some point but she doesn’t appear to have had a kid since 2006 so now I am feeling like an awful bodyshaming asshole but seriously what is going on she looks like a totally different person which is weird for a show that’s supposed to take place in a compressed period of time when no one else looks markedly different except I feel like Walt’s goatee was looking a little glued on a few times in the last season) but oh well. This is really sweet, at least! Also Aaron Paul was in some Korn videos.
