June 1, 2012
Three Men, A Plan

I profiled Liars for the current issue of FILTER. Link above the photo. 

Also: nicest dudes. Angus, who’s a mad Clippers fan, didn’t even give me hell about the Chris Paul trade. 

6:02pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZnxlayMZWF4Y
Filed under: writing liars filter music 
May 31, 2012

backatown:

Late 1950s/early 1960s travel posters.

HOT.

May 31, 2012
RIP Ween

I say goodbye to one of the weirdest bands ever to work with a major label. Ween were the first band I ever loved who were truly out of the mainstream. They probably changed my life.

1:09pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZnxlayMUb4dJ
  
Filed under: ween obituary link writing 
May 30, 2012

More of this, please. (Also, this is probably the only bounce video ever with no shaking-it; good to see the form branch out a bit.)

(via Humid Beings’ Twitter)

May 30, 2012
"Americans don’t want excellence, and we certainly don’t want long-term sustained excellence…We want to maintain our high ideals, without needing to walk the walk. Nobody can hate the Spurs, so nobody wants to love them."

— from Matthew Yglesias’ excellent essay on how the American sports fan’s apathy towards the San Antonio Spurs demonstrates our own hypocrisy. As a fair-weather Hornets fan, I hated the Spurs for precisely two weeks during the 2008 NBA Playoffs, and have returned to being vaguely aware of their existence/success.

May 30, 2012

When I read this title on Americana’s tracklist, I foolishly presumed it was a Sex Pistols cover. All told, this might be better.

May 29, 2012
thepenguinpress:

Over at The Millions, A-J Aronstein recaps his trip to Austin for the recent David Foster Wallace symposium:

To his fans, Wallace struggles more mightily in his work with these kinds of questions than any author of his generation, though they’re certainly at the heart of a lot of fiction that Wallace didn’t write. He was, as [editor Michael] Pietsch puts it, “an extraordinary mind struggling with the challenge of ordinariness.” But what we seem to be searching for in an author’s archive (or even in a biography, a memoir, or whatever) is precisely an indication of the ordinariness of their struggle. So although we say we go to fiction for what we think is a unique set of experiences, we still crave the tangible evidence that an author was a person: that Wallace made sometimes-unreasonable demands of his editors, that he hid in hotel rooms while on assignment, that it was harder for him than the effortlessness of his prose would suggest.
When I asked Pietsch about the challenges of working with Wallace in everyday life, he responded with a tennis anecdote, telling me about a time when David had ask him to play a few sets.
“I demurred,” he said, “but David said ‘trust me, it’s great. What I’m really good at is putting the ball just outside your range.’”

Read the rest
(Bound copy of “Corrections of Typos/Errors for Paperback Printing of Infinite Jest“ from David Foster Wallace to Nona Krug and Michael Pietsch. Image courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center.)

thepenguinpress:

Over at The Millions, A-J Aronstein recaps his trip to Austin for the recent David Foster Wallace symposium:

To his fans, Wallace struggles more mightily in his work with these kinds of questions than any author of his generation, though they’re certainly at the heart of a lot of fiction that Wallace didn’t write. He was, as [editor Michael] Pietsch puts it, “an extraordinary mind struggling with the challenge of ordinariness.” But what we seem to be searching for in an author’s archive (or even in a biography, a memoir, or whatever) is precisely an indication of the ordinariness of their struggle. So although we say we go to fiction for what we think is a unique set of experiences, we still crave the tangible evidence that an author was a person: that Wallace made sometimes-unreasonable demands of his editors, that he hid in hotel rooms while on assignment, that it was harder for him than the effortlessness of his prose would suggest.

When I asked Pietsch about the challenges of working with Wallace in everyday life, he responded with a tennis anecdote, telling me about a time when David had ask him to play a few sets.

“I demurred,” he said, “but David said ‘trust me, it’s great. What I’m really good at is putting the ball just outside your range.’”

Read the rest

(Bound copy of “Corrections of Typos/Errors for Paperback Printing of Infinite Jest“ from David Foster Wallace to Nona Krug and Michael Pietsch. Image courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center.)

(via fuckyeahmanuscripts)

May 26, 2012
Nice work, Record Store Troll.  (Taken with Instagram at Reckless Records)

Nice work, Record Store Troll. (Taken with Instagram at Reckless Records)

May 26, 2012
Yankee / Hotel / Foxtrot (Taken with instagram)

Yankee / Hotel / Foxtrot (Taken with instagram)

May 26, 2012
think-progress:

There are exactly three countries on Earth that do not provide guarantees for paid maternity leave. Papua New Guinea and Swaziland are two of them. Care to guess the third?
Read the article here. 

think-progress:

There are exactly three countries on Earth that do not provide guarantees for paid maternity leave. Papua New Guinea and Swaziland are two of them. Care to guess the third?

Read the article here

(via ilovecharts)