2018

words:

music i thought about in 2018

Here’s my futile act of resistance against posting screenshots of algorithmically generated “Your Top Songs 2018” playlists.

eli keszler - stadium

This album broke my brain during a late night subway ride. It sounds like the city more than any: the predictable randomness of machinery; the steel scrapes of the train bouncing through the tunnel; the steady, ethereal drone of electricity; a beeping that you can’t place. Two men board a nearly empty subway car, sit on opposite sides and start chirping each other like only old friends can.

read more ->

words:

pacific concrete

Museum of Anthropology at UBC

The Pacific Northwest has a very specific architectural feeling to it.

Dark wet concrete, sometimes pitted and rusty from the sea air, seems at home against the rippled grey sky. The damp greens and browns of parks and public spaces are a natural contrast against the monochrome palette of giant cement staircases poured over the hilly landscape. Extremely comfortable ergonomic shoes on a really hard surface.

read more ->

words:

the truck exhaust gender reveal party

I can’t stop watching these videos. They illustrate the present era of participatory media better than anything else I’ve seen; how social media encourages us to make an event out of everything. They are America’s last grasps at two absolutes it has relied on: gender rigidity and the internal combustion engine.

read more ->

words:

ideas for human evolution

  • bigger ass to handle sitting at computer all day
  • smaller ears to block out dissent and diversity of ideas
  • foam layer in skull to cushion inevitable blunt force trauma and prevent the ensuing brain damage
  • larger middle finger on dominant hand for emphasis

This will be a continually updated list.

words:

the ambient show

So I’m at the ambient show—total ripper—and there’s this drone metal act killing it. Great sense of dynamics and atmosphere but going all way in on the theatrics (QT forest nymph on ethereal vocals, complete with True Detective S1 leaf crown) but something was missing: fog machine. You can’t have drone metal without some smoke emerging from whatever bog you crawled out of. Do us all a favor and head on over to Long and McQuade and properly set the scene.

Then, right as the dronetown headliner starts their singular note of the evening this guy in front of me presents, I shit you not, a full bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos and starts eating them one by one. I’m trying not to just totally lose it laughing my ass off.

I look around and suddenly the magic is gone. The whole room smells like too many masters degrees. Everyone has found a way to stand in an even more awkward way than the person next to them. I start to hear that note again and it’s suddenly a dialtone.

words:

chemtrails

I think about conspiracy theorists a lot, reading about them when I can. Obviously there’s some degree of grifting going on, but it’s near impossible to tell where the grifting ends and the belief begins. People in sales talk about believing in what you’re selling, but does someone selling tickets to a seminar on chemtrails? I’m sure at some point they saw it as a way to make money, or to gain notoriety, or even just some friends. They begin as impostors but get in too deep. They eventually fully embody their views and they’re swallowed whole; the person indistinguishable from their gospel.

I work in tech, and ‘impostor’ is instead used from the inside looking out. An impostor in this sense is somebody who feels like they lack the skills or knowledge to succeed in their company. This is obviously a threat to anyone’s ability to be successful but this is not about that. There are plenty of better words about that elsewhere.

The bigger problem are the people who are impostors in the other way: they believe it so hard that they cease to be real people.

You see it most clearly during a fire drill. The filing cabinet for small startups spills all its disruption into the street. I’m told that’s a shirt referencing a Bitcoin inside joke. That man is wearing a set of shoulder holsters—like for pistols—but they have an iPhone and a Moleskine in each.

Later, a message in the conversation pit1 tells us that the alarm was triggered by an adjoining building full of art students.

  1. rhymes with ‘black’ ↩

words:

summer by the balls

Oh yeah every year I say I’m really gonna squeeze all the juice out of the summer but this year I’m really gonna do it. There will be a smoking hole in the earth where this summer once was.

Usually by the end of September I feel some malaise and regret that I was inside a little too much, left a Corona undrank and a lake unswam. Not this year.

People will be filled with reverence and envy as they remember Summer 2018 as that one When He Really Did It. That year when he was pure expression of relaxation and warm weather exuberance in the face of all adversity.

words:

human resource

What if we hired a small child by the hour to kick everyone in the shins? They’d do it at a totally unpredictable interval so you could never know when it’s coming. We should probably hire one to hide under every desk.

“What am I doing wrong?” You shout down to your ankles, beyond the mug that reads DO WHAT YOU LOVE. The kid says something about Fortnite and ignores the question.

words:

how i organize my digital music

Music for sale on USB thumb drives in Mexico

Streaming music is dominating our consumption of digital music and I can’t stand it. Leaving my library in the hands of a startup that surely will not be around forever is unwise. I want the files, I want metadata, I want to know what I’m listening to. Is this album the Remastered version, Deluxe version, the Anniversary Edition or a remixed bootleg? With most services it’s hard to tell if it’s Explicit or Clean.

The best ways to get mp3s these days are Bandcamp, download codes included with physical media or a thing that rhymes with “dole squeak”, but what you do with these files once you have them is another story. Keeping a large collection of music on your computer isn’t easy and my process has evolved over the years.

read more ->