New Lykke Li album Wounded Rhymes is really nice, streams at http://stereogum.com/644192/stream-lykke-li-wounded-rhymes/mp3s/ at least for now.
this post is for people who are sick of pandora or last.fm or just like music
ok, maybe i am behind the curve on this. but. listen.grooveshark.com
this site is entirely superior to any other streaming music site i have found. think subscription services like rhapsody or zunepass, but without the subscription. search for what you want to hear, add it to the queue at the bottom, and hit play. skip whatever songs you want. play whole albums. create an account, or don’t. sure there’s a two inch sidebar showing constant ads, but at least it doesn’t interrupt my music and tell me i’ve won free business cards every fifteen minutes. cough.
also great for finding remixes you didn’t know existed. i give it five meaningless stars. if i find a catch, i’ll let know you. and as my friend megan says, enjoy it while it lasts.
to save myself an extra post, you can also use the website mentioned above to check out harry and the potters (again, am i behind the curve?). really cute, garage-y music about harry potter. how can you resist? they are playing at mac’s backs books in coventry next tuesday if you’re in cleveland.
harry and the potters
alright. burst of motivation over.
The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing: A (Somewhat Harsh) Review
I picked up this book at a Salvation Army store and paid three dollars for it. Before that, though, I feel like I’d definitely heard about it and intended to read it. I think my dad even asked me if I’d read it once. So I had somewhat high expectations from Melissa Bank, who happens to be the author of this NY Times bestseller.
I have my own little issues with the NY times (pronounced, in my head, “nigh times”) but I understand that they have relatively little control over what makes it onto their bestseller list. That seems to be pretty fully determined by the public. So, that said, let’s get to the book.
I’m going to refer to Bank’s work as a novel, even though it seems to be a cross between a novel and a collection of short stories. A better way to say it might be “a collection of short stories, all written about the same person, and not necessarily chronological”. The opening story, in which Jane (protagonist) is fourteen, made me think maybe I had accidentally stumbled onto a YA novel. But pretty soon Jane is grown up and dealing with her relationship with a man with ED. So, probably not YA material.
And the book held my interest. There are a lot of beautiful stories, and it seems like it’s really about family more than it is about romance. So I was captivated, I would read a story pretty much every night, I blew through the book. It was beautiful. It made sense.
And then I got to the end. If I had to recommend this book to you, I would recommend that you read up until the last story, the one the book is named after, and stop. You may feel unresolved, you may want to find out what happy ending Janie gets, but resist. Because these last fifty or so pages are a total disappointment.
In retrospect, maybe I should have known that “hunting and fishing” was going to be a metaphor for “getting a man”. The last story in this collection is a drawn out elaboration of the aphorism “just be yourself”. In a predictable fashion, Jane decides that since all her other relationships have gone bad she will approach new relationships following the strict rules in a self help book, as quasi-schizophrenically enforced by “bonnie and faith”, who yell advice at her constantly. And of course these rules which force her to be coy and distant with a guy she really likes turn out to make her unattractive, and the man almost leaves her, but at the last minute she says “wait no this is who I really am!” and they make out in front of her standard poodle.
It is clear to me that one of two things happened here. 1) Ms. Bank faced a looming deadline to finish her book, and wrote the first thing about men and women she could think of. I doubt this, since it is her first published novel. 2) She wrote a short story entitled The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, published it in a women’s magazine, was critically acclaimed (or something) and got a book deal to write the rest of Jane’s life. And instead of throwing out the crappy original that is brass to the gold of the rest of the book, they tacked it on to the end.
The about the author does mention that she’s been published in Cosmo.
Sorry, Ms. Bank. I overestimated you.
the status addiction
I’m not going to pretend to be anything less than addicted to Facebook. It is pretty basically awesome to be able to see pictures of all the crazy things people from my high school are doing at college, and although I’m not overjoyed that membership was extended down to high school and generally to the various creepers of the world, what can you really do. Anyway I have friends who are still in high school. But the point of all this is to say that photo sharing, chat, and “notes” (essentially blog posts) are all old hat – we had those through AIM/ichat and myspace. What really makes Facebook so addicting, I am convinced, is The Status Update.
The Status Update, also known as the ability to tell ALL of your friends exactly what you are doing at any given point in time, gives Facebook some kind of egocentric magic that is utterly irresistable. The ironic thing is that you are almost certainly the only one who actually cares about your status. Or maybe you and your significant other. Beyond that, I’m pretty sure most statuses go unnoticed. Of course they pop up in people’s feeds, but only if they get online within a few minutes of your posting them. Even when I do read status updates, about 90 percent of them (mine too, don’t get me wrong) refer either to the person’s schedule or a song I haven’t heard.
I am especially guilty of changing my status to a line from whatever song I am currently into, usually in the hopes that someone will recognize it and realize that I am cool. No, I do not give credit to the artist when I do this. Yes, I realize that is a little shameful. If only I could think of clever things on my own.
So now here we all are, a culture hooked on checking and reporting our place in the world on a basis ranging from weekly (if you’re really strong-willed and independent) to hourly (if you’re a true addict). If you’re not careful, you start thinking in statuses (stati?). I’ve done it. If PowerPoint has changed the way we think about information and learning, Facebook has changed the way we think about ourselves and our friends – the biggest change being that we think about ourselves a lot more.
The Status Update has even spread beyond its origins – AIM has added a status update option (probably to compete with Facebook as a chat service; also, was the away message the ancestor of the status update? maybe.) and I’ve noticed that the white boards on people’s doors at my college now often contain “Brittany is” and “Amanda is” spaces. They usually take up the whole board (making leaving notes a little more difficult, unless you want to say Amanda is cute or something, but try saying Amanda is Hey sorry i missed you i’ll be at the commons from 3 to 5 if you want to pick your book up then). Although I’ve often wondered whether these people honestly think their floormates care about their status, even more disturbing is the posting of people’s entire class schedules daily on their doors. This bothers me for three main reasons.
1. As I’ve sort of been saying, I don’t especially care about your class schedule, and I have to wonder who does.
2. Who has the time to write out their entire schedule every day? I barely have time to eat and throw my room into something resembling order before I leave for the day.
3. It seems a little dangerous, actually. College campuses aren’t the safest places in the world, especially urban ones like mine, and it just seems a little less than wise to advertise your whereabouts every minute of the day. Can you say sexual predator? I can.
So, now that I sound like Andy Rooney, I’ll let you go update your status. Maybe I’ll update mine too. The author is: tired of being so self-aware.
you turn the dial, i’ll try and smile
I have found the most cheerful and cool song in the world. It is “A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger” by Of Montreal. CHECK IT OUT it will make your life better I promise.
Fashion Police
I realize that I write about tv shows a lot on here, and I will try to vary it up a little bit, but I cannot keep myself from saying that TLC’s “What Not to Wear” is the single meanest show on television. I am sure that this is why people watch it, but I think it is absolutely sick that anyone would watch a show where they spend a good part of the time talking about what is wrong with the way someone dresses themselves. It came on after Jon and Kate yesterday and the girl they were targeting refused to talk to them and then ran off crying. Maybe all the people do that, I don’t know, I never watch that show. But I felt really bad for her. It made me wonder how many people just flat out refuse to be embarrased on TV, how many possible episodes end up failing. I was a little disgusted when she eventually came out of the bathroom and hugged Stacy and Clinton. Neither of whom makes a good tv personality.
post-holiday
A really cool short story would be Light is Like Water by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. We had to read it for my spanish class, that is the language it is written in, but I could not understand it and so I read the english translation which is really wonderful. It is easily available online. After you read it you should watch a cool video of it here. I love it anyway.
ok get serious.
I would very much like to talk about tvs and the like. I am being inspired specifically by my own home theater system, which was pretty much my parents’ way of filling the hole I left when I went to college, but I think that what I have to say applies to home entertainment in general.
So tvs have gotten a lot bigger over say the last ten years, which isn’t all that big of a deal. Rich people will have big tvs and normal people will have normal sized tvs. Just like cars and diamonds. That is life.
The more important development in the watching of all things prerecorded is (drumroll)…HI DEF. It started, I think, with DVDs having better picture than VHS tapes, and then came high definition television, which was just a few channels. Now we have Blu Ray and a whole slew of hi def channels (if you have the right kind of cable or satellite), and they make the tvs specifically so that they make things EVEN MORE hi def.
Here is my issue: there is such a thing as too much definition. Hard to believe, I know, but it’s true. On a lot of shows and dvds or blu ray or whatever that are shot in a certain way, you get this thing called the “soap opera effect.” It is extremely aptly named because you really do feel like whatever big budget film or show you’re watching has suddenly been switched for a daytime drama. It’s wonderfully ironic, since soap operas are notoriously low budget productions, and most scenes in them are only shot once. Apparently they had some kind of edge all along.
Even discounting the soap opera effect, one could argue that we would do well to back up from making things quite so realistic. These scientists studied the way art affects the brain, and they discovered that one of the things most pleasing to human aesthetic experience is “isolation of a single cue,” which basically means simplicity. It’s the reason we like drawings better than photographs sometimes. The idea is that too much detail, too many things to look at, puts stress on your information processing system. I find it extremely true. Ever notice how your mirror image looks a lot better to you if the lights are dim? You can’t make out all your little flaws. The same goes for seeing people on tv. Or in movies. Whatever.
I came home the other night and Mary Poppins was on. In high definition. Never have she and the Banks children looked so unmagical. I turned it off – I want to be able to remember Mary Poppins as she was when I was a little kid, on my old school VHS tape and wonderfully crappy tv.
rant of the day
The other day I was watching television, which is kind of rare when I’m at school (although now that I am on break it’s a much different story). I tend to check the music channels first, and I stumbled onto MTV’s True Life: I Am Celibate. the concept alone was enough to make me watch most of the episode. True life is pretty much never a good show, and this one was no exception. While it’s possible that whoever came up with this idea thought they would be doing the youth of America a favor, the truth is pretty much the opposite. Come on people, what does it really say when we put our few “celibate” teens up next to has-been celebrities and twin bisexuals? True Life may be reality tv, but it’s not my reality. I know a lot of people who choose not to have sex. So far it has not been a big enough deal to get them on tv.
Never mind the fact that the highlighted individuals had all been sexually active in the past and none of them gave a good reason for celibacy other than “I have beliefs,” (what are they?). MTV seems to have looked for those least likely to succeed in their celibacy, perhaps to keep us all on the edges of our seats.
Not cool, MTV, not cool. You have misrepresented the lovely people who make up my generation.
