Mark Richardson

April 26th 2012

I’m a Fiona Apple novice and, outside of singles, I really only became aware of her music this year. “Every Single Night”, a song from her upcoming album that Jenn Pelly wrote about for Pitchfork, is one I’ve been returning to. Maybe b/c I’m starting fresh, I especially like “the new stuff,” who knows, but I think this track is very powerful, my favorite thing I have heard from her so far. Esp. love the contrast between her voice, so clear and rich and full, and the production, which is skeletal. It also touches on a few things related to memory and the physical self that resonate w/ me.

A little over 10 years ago I was in a relatively serious car accident. In my mind I think “I was almost killed” but that’s certainly not true in terms of the injuries I sustained. I do think, however, that if the car that hit me had been a Chevy Suburban instead of a mid-size, it might have killed me, if only because the bumper would have been at about the level of my head instead of at the level of my shoulder.

This is a photograph of the car I was riding in, a Honda Civic DX. Small, a two-seater with a hatchback. And I was in the driver’s seat. It was night and I had taken a freeway offramp and I was taking a left to go over the bridge across the freeway. And with the hill there, I started to cross without looking again to my left and a car was coming right at me. I remember the split second before the car hit, seeing the headlights and knowing it would happen, and then I remember a minute or two later, sitting in the seat and having trouble breathing.

Julie was next to me, and she was fine. She exited the car and fairly quickly and soon there was an ambulance and a fire truck there. They were trying to get me out of the car and then I heard someone say that the gas tank was leaking and I was like, “I’d better get the fuck out of here right now.” So I slid over the stick shift and exited via the passenger door and they put me on a stretcher. (The guy in the other car was OK, and for some reason he never sued me.)

I look at this photo and think that the only thing between me and this other car was this little door. All in all, pretty good design. I made it out without too much damage and I think this car t-boned me at like 40 mph. The paramedics didn’t seem to think that my injuries were too big a deal, which was good. When I got to the hospital, turned out that I had four broken ribs, a cracked scapula, and a collapsed lung (which explained why breathing was hard).

I was in the hospital for four days. At the time, I didn’t have health insurance, and since the accident was my fault, I walked out of there owing a lot of money. The following weeks and months were a dark time. (I wrote a little bit about the music I was listening to in an old column which I’m honestly afraid to look at.)

Early last year, I got a massage from this place in Chicago called Chicago Touch. If you live in Chicagoland, there is a massage therapist there named Marco who is some kind of genius. He’s tall and strong as an ox; sometimes he was honestly a little too much for me—his approach definitely leans toward “therapy” and away from “relaxation.” He’s, like, moving around your organs, almost.

So I was on the table and Marco was working me over. And I had told him about my left shoulder, which still hurts more than a decade after the accident, and how I can’t move it certain ways or the pain becomes unbearable. So he was doing his thing on the shoulder, trying to rehabilitate it, I suppose, and suddenly I was overcome with a flood of memories and emotions, like I could see pictures and remember feelings and it was all from that time years before when I was recuperating from this accident. Everything was right there in front of me and I had to concentrate in order to keep from sobbing. It was intense—not from the pain of what he was doing, but from what it brought out.

I think of this moment when I hear songs like Fiona’s “Every Single Night”, which in part details how bodies can hold memories. It was a key theme for EMA’s Past Life Martyred Saints last year, too and it’s not something you hear discussed often enough.

Posted at 1:13am and tagged with: Fiona Apple, writing,.

I’m a Fiona Apple novice and, outside of singles, I really only became aware of her music this year. “Every Single Night”, a song from her upcoming album that Jenn Pelly wrote about for Pitchfork, is one I’ve been returning to. Maybe b/c I’m starting fresh, I especially like “the new stuff,” who knows, but I think this track is very powerful, my favorite thing I have heard from her so far. Esp. love the contrast between her voice, so clear and rich and full, and the production, which is skeletal. It also touches on a few things related to memory and the physical self that resonate w/ me.
A little over 10 years ago I was in a relatively serious car accident. In my mind I think “I was almost killed” but that’s certainly not true in terms of the injuries I sustained. I do think, however, that if the car that hit me had been a Chevy Suburban instead of a mid-size, it might have killed me, if only because the bumper would have been at about the level of my head instead of at the level of my shoulder.
This is a photograph of the car I was riding in, a Honda Civic DX. Small, a two-seater with a hatchback. And I was in the driver’s seat. It was night and I had taken a freeway offramp and I was taking a left to go over the bridge across the freeway. And with the hill there, I started to cross without looking again to my left and a car was coming right at me. I remember the split second before the car hit, seeing the headlights and knowing it would happen, and then I remember a minute or two later, sitting in the seat and having trouble breathing.
Julie was next to me, and she was fine. She exited the car and fairly quickly and soon there was an ambulance and a fire truck there. They were trying to get me out of the car and then I heard someone say that the gas tank was leaking and I was like, “I’d better get the fuck out of here right now.” So I slid over the stick shift and exited via the passenger door and they put me on a stretcher. (The guy in the other car was OK, and for some reason he never sued me.)
I look at this photo and think that the only thing between me and this other car was this little door. All in all, pretty good design. I made it out without too much damage and I think this car t-boned me at like 40 mph. The paramedics didn’t seem to think that my injuries were too big a deal, which was good. When I got to the hospital, turned out that I had four broken ribs, a cracked scapula, and a collapsed lung (which explained why breathing was hard).
I was in the hospital for four days. At the time, I didn’t have health insurance, and since the accident was my fault, I walked out of there owing a lot of money. The following weeks and months were a dark time. (I wrote a little bit about the music I was listening to in an old column which I’m honestly afraid to look at.)
Early last year, I got a massage from this place in Chicago called Chicago Touch. If you live in Chicagoland, there is a massage therapist there named Marco who is some kind of genius. He’s tall and strong as an ox; sometimes he was honestly a little too much for me—his approach definitely leans toward “therapy” and away from “relaxation.” He’s, like, moving around your organs, almost.
So I was on the table and Marco was working me over. And I had told him about my left shoulder, which still hurts more than a decade after the accident, and how I can’t move it certain ways or the pain becomes unbearable. So he was doing his thing on the shoulder, trying to rehabilitate it, I suppose, and suddenly I was overcome with a flood of memories and emotions, like I could see pictures and remember feelings and it was all from that time years before when I was recuperating from this accident. Everything was right there in front of me and I had to concentrate in order to keep from sobbing. It was intense—not from the pain of what he was doing, but from what it brought out.
I think of this moment when I hear songs like Fiona’s “Every Single Night”, which in part details how bodies can hold memories. It was a key theme for EMA’s Past Life Martyred Saints last year, too and it’s not something you hear discussed often enough.

April 20th 2012

7 notes

Maggoty Lamb interviews visionary music critic David Toop | Music | guardian.co.uk

Posted at 12:30pm and tagged with: writing, criticism,.

“

Criticism is haunted by an element of collusion, an unspoken pact with the commercial or structural forces that drive a particular sector of cultural “industry”. Now I’m pretty much out of the world of journalism I like to minimise that tendency as much as I can but I’m conscious that a lot of people wanted to be guided rather than unsettled. They want to arrive at an informed decision about whatever troubles them about a new phenomenon before clicking “buy”, rather than being poked in the eye with a question mark. That happens to be unfortunate because the smooth flow of commerce is rarely a key issue for writers who have any regard for the state of their souls. I once wrote a story for the Face about a rapper in Chicago who was involved with the Nation of Islam yet released by a subsidiary of Disney. There were many contradictions in that story, about rhetoric and expediency, money and ideology, blackness and Jewishness, and at the end of it I speculated about what Walt Disney might have thought about having a label devoted to African-American lifers and militants. I don’t think anybody bought the record because of my piece but the A&R guy at the record company lost his job. I would have felt bad about that except it was inevitable anyway, all of it.

”

April 20th 2012

52 notes

When I was packing to move in December Julie and I threw away probably 1,000 photographs, maybe more. It felt both good and bad. At this point, I’m tired of carrying around boxes with doubles of blurry pictures of me doing nothing in particular 20 years ago. But I was also afraid that I would forget things without being able to look at photos every couple of years. But I think it’ll work out. We saved the most important ones and I scanned a few a couple months ago, including this one.

This photograph was taken in 1994, in a cabin on a 225-foot factory trawler called The Royal King. This ship was one of three in the fleet for what was then called Royal Sea Fisheries. This was a company based in Seattle that operated in Alaska and caught pollack, cod, and sole for the American and Japanese fishing markets. I worked on this ship for six months over the course of two seasons. I did this because I had some debt after college and it seemed like a good way to clean it up quickly. My understanding was that I could work for a few months, spend no money other than for cigarettes (which were something like $15 a carton, pre-tobacco settlement + international waters), and get a large chunk of cash at the end.

There’s a lot going on in this photo. Out the porthole, you can see the Bering Sea. This was far along in in the winter season, so probably late March. We often fished above the Arctic Circle, so there was almost no sunlight. At one point during cod season, I didn’t see the sun or land for over a month. Below the porthole, there I am, lighting a Marlboro Red. I was smoking a lot of them in those days. On the wall over my left shoulder, there is a piece of art showing an abstract image of a fish. This was a little reminder to us that, yep, we were out there fishing. I don’t remember the name of the guy to my left. For some reason, I do remember that he was from Bellingham, Washington. The first season, the was clean shaven, the second, he grew a beard. Nice guy, pretty quiet and reserved. And yes, there was indeed a lot of pornography on the boat: Penthouse, Hustler, some magazines called Swank and Club International that I’m not sure I’ve seen since. It was generally the more explicit stuff. Don’t remember seeing any Playboy.

To the left of the guy with the Penthouse is a map of Alaska. We would sit around this corner table sometimes and look at that map and try and plot our position. Way out there at the end of the Aleutian chain is a large island called Unalaska. On it is a town called Dutch Harbor. That’s where we offloaded the fish we caught. And that is where we would go drinking after we finished our shift during the offloading.

Wedged into the bookshelf above the map is a knife with a white handle. I think it was just there if we needed it. One guy in my cabin the first season, who was kind of scary, used to open candy bar wrappers with a knife. Talk about overkill. He made a big show of it. I tried to steer clear of him. His name was Jack and I believe he got kicked off the boat because he couldn’t stop drinking. He called porn magazines “fuck books.”

We worked 16-hour shifts, seven days a week. So that’s 112 hours a week of work. Shifts were staggered, so that 2/3 of the boat was working at any given time, and the other 1/3 was sleeping. There were about 65 people onboard. My shift for both seasons was from 12 midnight to 4 pm. I never quite got used to getting up at 11:40 pm. After your shift, you had 8 hours to eat dinner, shower, get ready for bed, and sleep. Made for some very strange days.

The ship was a fascinating place. There were probably 10 or so other post-college kids like me. And then there were lifetime fisherman, guys who had been working two seasons and collecting unemployment for years. There were five or six guys from Mexico, a couple of whom were deported when the INS came on the boat to check everyone’s papers. There were two guys from Slovakia. There were five guys from Viet Nam who all lived together in a corner room that we called “Little Saigon.” A few other countries were represented.

One thing about spending days in Dutch Harbor is that you would get mail. When we did our final offload there before steaming home at the end of the season, one of my cabin-mates received a package from his girlfriend that contained two things: 1) a cassette of the Neil Young album Harvest Moon; 2) a half-ounce of good weed. So during the week-long steam back to Seattle, we spent a fair amount of time in the evenings smoking that weed, drinking whiskey, and listening to that Neil Young tape on a Walkman with portable speakers attached to it. We sat around the table in this photograph. The winter season was very difficult, andI was so glad to be almost finished. And getting high and drinking around this table while listening to Harvest Moon turned out to be a very special experience. And I still can’t listen to it without thinking of that week. The album was beautiful, but also sounded weary and wise and resigned and I felt like all of those things right about then.

I’d say there were 10 women on the boat. I worked down on the factory level where we processed the fish, and the boss of the factory was a woman in her late 20s named Denise. She was probably 4’ 11”, had very long hair, and was incredibly strong for her size. She could do most jobs better than anyone and was an intimidating presence.

The second season, a woman lived in my cabin, which was very, very small. It was five dudes and her, not sure why it worked out that way but I don’t remember it being a big deal. She was from Brazil and had come to fish because at that time the Brazilian economy was a mess and there were no jobs. She was also educated, had a masters degree in anthropology. The first time I met her, she was on the deck of the boat. She had an army jacket and a beret and was smoking a small corn-cob pipe. And she was reading The Portable Nietzsche in English with a Portuguese-English dictionary next to her. I was intrigued.

At one point, I lent her 5 or 6 CDs to listen to on her break, and the next day she told me that she really loved one and couldn’t stop playing it and it was The Velvet Underground & Nico. She had never heard of it, or Lou Reed, but she loved it immediately. I admit that I found this unbelievably cool. To me, VU were something I experienced through reading first. I knew they were “important” and that informed how I heard them. But to her, it was just a CD someone lent her, and she heard the greatness in it.

Over time, especially the second season, when she stayed in my room, I became infatuated with this woman from Brazil. And I talked to her about that and she told me that she was lesbian. I was crushed. But we remained friends. There was another lesbian on the boat and sometimes they hung out and at least once they hooked up and that was difficult for me. I was very jealous. The woman from Brazil wanted to move to Seattle and had green card trouble, so at one point I told her that I would marry her to keep her in the country. That’s where my head was. She agreed but, thankfully, it never worked out. Last year, we became friends on Facebook.

Posted at 12:25am and tagged with: writing, neil young,.

When I was packing to move in December Julie and I threw away probably 1,000 photographs, maybe more. It felt both good and bad. At this point, I’m tired of carrying around boxes with doubles of blurry pictures of me doing nothing in particular 20 years ago. But I was also afraid that I would forget things without being able to look at photos every couple of years. But I think it’ll work out. We saved the most important ones and I scanned a few a couple months ago, including this one.
This photograph was taken in 1994, in a cabin on a 225-foot factory trawler called The Royal King. This ship was one of three in the fleet for what was then called Royal Sea Fisheries. This was a company based in Seattle that operated in Alaska and caught pollack, cod, and sole for the American and Japanese fishing markets. I worked on this ship for six months over the course of two seasons. I did this because I had some debt after college and it seemed like a good way to clean it up quickly. My understanding was that I could work for a few months, spend no money other than for cigarettes (which were something like $15 a carton, pre-tobacco settlement + international waters), and get a large chunk of cash at the end.
There’s a lot going on in this photo. Out the porthole, you can see the Bering Sea. This was far along in in the winter season, so probably late March. We often fished above the Arctic Circle, so there was almost no sunlight. At one point during cod season, I didn’t see the sun or land for over a month. Below the porthole, there I am, lighting a Marlboro Red. I was smoking a lot of them in those days. On the wall over my left shoulder, there is a piece of art showing an abstract image of a fish. This was a little reminder to us that, yep, we were out there fishing. I don’t remember the name of the guy to my left. For some reason, I do remember that he was from Bellingham, Washington. The first season, the was clean shaven, the second, he grew a beard. Nice guy, pretty quiet and reserved. And yes, there was indeed a lot of pornography on the boat: Penthouse, Hustler, some magazines called Swank and Club International that I’m not sure I’ve seen since. It was generally the more explicit stuff. Don’t remember seeing any Playboy.
To the left of the guy with the Penthouse is a map of Alaska. We would sit around this corner table sometimes and look at that map and try and plot our position. Way out there at the end of the Aleutian chain is a large island called Unalaska. On it is a town called Dutch Harbor. That’s where we offloaded the fish we caught. And that is where we would go drinking after we finished our shift during the offloading.
Wedged into the bookshelf above the map is a knife with a white handle. I think it was just there if we needed it. One guy in my cabin the first season, who was kind of scary, used to open candy bar wrappers with a knife. Talk about overkill. He made a big show of it. I tried to steer clear of him. His name was Jack and I believe he got kicked off the boat because he couldn’t stop drinking. He called porn magazines “fuck books.”
We worked 16-hour shifts, seven days a week. So that’s 112 hours a week of work. Shifts were staggered, so that 2/3 of the boat was working at any given time, and the other 1/3 was sleeping. There were about 65 people onboard. My shift for both seasons was from 12 midnight to 4 pm. I never quite got used to getting up at 11:40 pm. After your shift, you had 8 hours to eat dinner, shower, get ready for bed, and sleep. Made for some very strange days.
The ship was a fascinating place. There were probably 10 or so other post-college kids like me. And then there were lifetime fisherman, guys who had been working two seasons and collecting unemployment for years. There were five or six guys from Mexico, a couple of whom were deported when the INS came on the boat to check everyone’s papers. There were two guys from Slovakia. There were five guys from Viet Nam who all lived together in a corner room that we called “Little Saigon.” A few other countries were represented.
One thing about spending days in Dutch Harbor is that you would get mail. When we did our final offload there before steaming home at the end of the season, one of my cabin-mates received a package from his girlfriend that contained two things: 1) a cassette of the Neil Young album Harvest Moon; 2) a half-ounce of good weed. So during the week-long steam back to Seattle, we spent a fair amount of time in the evenings smoking that weed, drinking whiskey, and listening to that Neil Young tape on a Walkman with portable speakers attached to it. We sat around the table in this photograph. The winter season was very difficult, andI was so glad to be almost finished. And getting high and drinking around this table while listening to Harvest Moon turned out to be a very special experience. And I still can’t listen to it without thinking of that week. The album was beautiful, but also sounded weary and wise and resigned and I felt like all of those things right about then.
I’d say there were 10 women on the boat. I worked down on the factory level where we processed the fish, and the boss of the factory was a woman in her late 20s named Denise. She was probably 4’ 11”, had very long hair, and was incredibly strong for her size. She could do most jobs better than anyone and was an intimidating presence.
The second season, a woman lived in my cabin, which was very, very small. It was five dudes and her, not sure why it worked out that way but I don’t remember it being a big deal. She was from Brazil and had come to fish because at that time the Brazilian economy was a mess and there were no jobs. She was also educated, had a masters degree in anthropology. The first time I met her, she was on the deck of the boat. She had an army jacket and a beret and was smoking a small corn-cob pipe. And she was reading The Portable Nietzsche in English with a Portuguese-English dictionary next to her. I was intrigued.
At one point, I lent her 5 or 6 CDs to listen to on her break, and the next day she told me that she really loved one and couldn’t stop playing it and it was The Velvet Underground & Nico. She had never heard of it, or Lou Reed, but she loved it immediately. I admit that I found this unbelievably cool. To me, VU were something I experienced through reading first. I knew they were “important” and that informed how I heard them. But to her, it was just a CD someone lent her, and she heard the greatness in it.
Over time, especially the second season, when she stayed in my room, I became infatuated with this woman from Brazil. And I talked to her about that and she told me that she was lesbian. I was crushed. But we remained friends. There was another lesbian on the boat and sometimes they hung out and at least once they hooked up and that was difficult for me. I was very jealous. The woman from Brazil wanted to move to Seattle and had green card trouble, so at one point I told her that I would marry her to keep her in the country. That’s where my head was. She agreed but, thankfully, it never worked out. Last year, we became friends on Facebook.

April 13th 2012

Three Things re Instagram

216 notes

1) Instagram has always kind of bothered me, though it has been used for many images I’ve enjoyed. It’s hard for me to accept that these shared and widely understood ideas of beauty and poignancy as rendered through specific “distressed” visual cues are something that a few computer programmers have written perfect algorithms for. I mean, it’s too good. It works too well. This is a very regressive way of thinking, I realize. My problem entirely. But I can’t help it. (I always used to root for humans to beat computers in chess and it was a legitimately sad moment when it became impossible. This feels related somehow.)

2) When you look at photos made with Instagram, you are not looking at images of people or landscapes, you are looking at Instagram. The subject of the photos is incidental. What you see are the filters and the algorithms and, ultimately, the corporation. At least that’s how it feels to me.

3) I’m reminded of this profound moment where I experienced the opposite of an Instagram: five or six years ago, my mother’s sister gave her some old slides. These slides contained pictures of my mother taken when she was about 13. It seems like a common thing for girls around that age to get together with their friends and try and take “glamour” shots of each other. I think around then you start to figure out what a camera can do and how you might have some fun with it. I have a photo of my sister about that age, holding a black rose, with heavy eyeliner, looking goth. And this roll of slides had my mother and her friend taking glamour photos of each other around 1957. My mother had these slides turned into 4x6 glossy prints. And when she brought them home from Walgreens, I almost started crying because I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. The photos were shiny and crisp and brand new and the colors were perfectly rendered. They looked like they had been taken in my backyard last week, there was nothing about them that looked “old” in any way. And there was a 13-year-old girl in a sun dress gazing off into the distance, trying to look serious and sophisticated. And that was my mother. It was uncanny, like seeing a ghost, kind of. I have one of these photos framed in my living room now.

Posted at 9:37pm and tagged with: instagram, writing, two column,.

April 13th 2012

43 notes

I reviewed the new Black Dice record. I like it. Very much enjoy listening to this while walking around Brooklyn.

Posted at 10:46am and tagged with: Black Dice, pitchfork, writing,.

April 11th 2012

Neneh Cherry & The Thing — Dream Baby Dream

149 notes

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

57,933 plays

I wrote about Neneh Cherry & the Thing’s cover of the Suicide classic “Dream Baby Dream” for Pitchfork. Calling this my favorite song of 2012 so far.

Posted at 12:22pm and tagged with: pitchfork, writing, neneh cherry,.

April 9th 2012

Things I Remember Writing: Animal Collective MPP

31 notes

If you were reading music blogs in late 2008 you remember that people were getting pretty worked up about the upcoming Animal Collective album. A song or two trickled out; someone hacked Geologist’s email and sent a note to a blog asking that the record be leaked; the one or two print reviews that had already appeared were rapturous. It was a combination of “This record might be really good” and “This record exists, a small handful of people actually have it, but I can’t hear it.” It was a weird in-between time, I think, when records were expected to leak well in advance of release and the PR machinery hadn’t quite figure out how it worked.

I’d been asking for a copy for a while but no dice. It seemed likely that I would be reviewing it for Pitchfork, since I’d reviewed the last few AC-related releases and I good grasp on what they were about. And I was looking forward to it, since I knew it would be heavy on material heard live on the Strawberry Jam tour, which I’d seen a couple of times and which sounded interesting.

And then finally, a day or two before our publishing break, I received my watermark. I shared it with a couple of people in the Pitchfork office. We all listened to it, and agreed that it was very good. We decided that I would review it. And since the release date was the first week in January, that it would run on the first day back.

Julie and I were going to Richmond to spend a week for the holidays. So we packed up the car and started driving from Chicago. We took two days to get there. And for much of the way down, I listened to Merriweather Post Pavilion in the passenger seat on headphones while writing a draft of the review on my laptop. Once in a while, I’d take off the headphones and plug in the cassette jack thing and play a song for Julie to get her reaction. One, a Panda Bear song called “Daily Routine”, completely blew us away and we heard exactly the same thing in it. That coda—just couldn’t believe how beautiful it seemed in that car during that December on the drive south.

Julie wasn’t as sold on the rest of the album but I immersed myself in it. It was fun to be listening to this record and thinking about it while I was not at all connected to the internet (no iPhone then) so I had no idea if it had leaked or if anyone else had heard it or what anyone in the world thought about it aside from the couple of people I’d briefly spoken to in the Pitchfork office. After all that build-up, during that drive, it was just me listening to the music and watching the landscape roll by, alone with my thoughts and this music and trying to put them together. It was obviously just another indie record but it felt significant; I thought I heard something special in it.

By the second day I had something like 3,500 words written, just about the band and their trajectory and what I thought they were doing and how this music worked. Much of it was, I’m sure, terrible. But I had enough that I could carve a proper review out of what was there, which I later did. I gave it a high rating. I thought about giving it a 10 but decided against it (Pitchfork hadn’t given one in a long time).

And then I filed it, and then it ran, and MPP turned out to be a big deal, especially those first few weeks. A guy interviewed me about the review, which is pretty strange. It was an IM interview and I was typing fast and I asked him to correct my misspellings and the way they did so was by adding [sic] every time I messed something up (which was often). And then a week later HRO wrote something, and then another couple of weeks later Nick Sylvester wrote a long post on Riff Raff in response, and that post was partly about me and said some nice things even though I didn’t (and still don’t) know Nick very well and had only met him a couple of times. One of the nice things involved riding in a car listening to music with other Pitchfork writers. And then New York magazine posted a “guide” to the whole thing.

It was an amusing, silly, and deeply weird moment, made even weirder when I tried to explain it all to the people in my life who didn’t care about music blogs (i.e. most of the people in my life). And while it was happening I kept thinking back to writing and listening in the front seat of my Toyota Corola.

Posted at 10:25pm and tagged with: animal collective, things I remember writing, writing, two column,.

April 8th 2012

16 notes

Barry Hannah’s Mixtape :: Oxford American - The Southern Magazine of Good Writing

Posted at 1:54pm and tagged with: writing,.

“

Most writers are not much to look at. But writing makes you beautiful.

”

April 5th 2012

6 notes

jj covering John Sebastian’s theme from “Welcome Back, Kottter” (that opening sequence gave me my first idea of Brooklyn) in 2009. For me, a notable “internet moment” from the last few years. Not too often I see something and immediately wonder “What is this? What does it mean?” The utter strangeness of a couple of kids from Sweden making ethereal dream-pop-ish stuff and then singing the theme from a middling sitcom that I used to watch on prime time when I was young. I suppose this song has been sampled and they traced it back from there, but still.

It was made stranger because when I was a kid I really, really loved this song and used to sing it to myself and hearing this I wanted to sing it again. It’s a song about feeling good, about family, about being accepted and loved, staying true to your roots. And this version is beautiful.

Oh, and this video is set to slow-mo footage of Maria Sharapova, just because. I emailed their publicist in 2009 to ask for an mp3 and he said “They want to keep it as a video thing.” OK.

Wondering about Elin’s favorite Sweathog…guessing Horshack.

Posted at 8:02am and tagged with: jj, writing,.

April 3rd 2012

Reblogged from perpetua|47 notes

Articles: Mind Is Your Might: Fiona Apple’s Oversharing | Features | Pitchfork

Lindsay Zoladz did an amazing job on this article about Fiona Apple’s resurgence, please go read it!

(via perpetua)

Very happy to have run this piece today. Between this and some of the pieces Lindsay linked (by Nitsuh, Matthew, Carrie Battan covering her Austin show), along with conversations I’ve had with people in the office including Jenn Pelly and others, it’s been v. interesting to follow along with these thoughts about Fiona Apple and what her music has meant to people. Especially interesting for me because I knew literally nothing about her music or how it resonated until late last year. She seemedimportant and talented and I’m sure I put Pawn on at one time or another and heard the big singles. But I never had a single thought of note about Fiona or her music until very recently. And wow, it’s a Very Big Deal, and I’m learning something new about it every day. And though her music still doesn’t mean anything to me, I’ve been listening some, so who knows, maybe it’ll happen. But the main thing I enjoy about participating in music discussion with all these smart and thoughtful people that I like is discovering music that really means something to them and learning why. Sometimes that is much more rewarding than finding music I like.

Posted at 9:16pm and tagged with: writing, fiona apple,.

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Particular vitriol is reserved for [Fiona Apple’s] Best New Artist acceptance speech at the 1997 VMAs, which is called “one of the most ridiculous soliloquies ever to be witnessed at an MTV Awards event (which is pretty amazing in light of the competition.)” My experience of that speech couldn’t have been more different. When it originally aired, I was 11 and up past my bedtime. Apple walked up to the podium, looking oddly radiant but decidedly unglamorous and a little shaken up, and proceeded to deliver an impromptu speech that came out of her in an anxious dribble of words. “Everybody watching this world,” she gestured towards the glowing stage, “This world is bullshit. And you shouldn’t model your life on what you think that we think is cool and what we’re wearing and what we’re saying and everything. Go with yourself.” It was disarmingly earnest. The way she said those words lifted me up, shook me around, and then placed me back down again, rearranged. I didn’t have the language to describe it at the time, but it was an unexpected jolt of humanness in the ever-churning, willfully plastic cultural machine.

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