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I hold hands with the business plan for the guillotine man
I have slept about six hours total in the last two nights. My recently prescribed inhaler may not be doing the job it's supposed to. It is my opinion that nothing about this month needed to be as difficult as it has been.
I don't think I have once in my life in the Boston area rented an apartment that resembled the configuration in which it was originally built, meaning my prosaic first reaction to this post is a solid bet on stairs to a former mother-in-law apartment or Philadelphia-style shared second floor that was walled off during a previous renovation; the ominous scratches around the deadbolt look entirely consistent with socketing it into the door well after the fact with about the level of competence I have personally experienced in property-managed repairs. The only part that strikes me as unusual is the accessibility of the stairs. The ones in our bedroom closet are blocked off.
Earlier this week I was stuck listening to a rather terrible cover of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" (1989), but it made me realize how much the original song impresses me for creating a narrative with nothing more than a list of cultural references and almost no verbs; it's the way it accelerates. The first verse spans events from 1949 to 1952, the second from 1953 to 1956, the third from 1957 to 1960, the fourth from 1961 to 1963, and then suddenly as if the Kennedy assassination broke time—what else do I have to say—the final verse hurtles from 1965 into 1989, leapfrogging pop culture and atrocity into an overwhelming pileup of history that will keep on coming as it always has whether the narrator can take it or not. Among other faults, the cover threw its post-Cold War references together without regard for chronology, which seemed to kill the entire point.
In my intermittent way of colliding with music videos, Spoon Benders' "Dichotomatic" (2023) strikes me as one of the better variations on the vampires of capitalism since Peter Strickland's In Fabric (2018), less fetishistically sexual and more working perhaps literally stiff. I also just like their lo-fi sludge-wall of sound.
I miss my little cat.
I don't think I have once in my life in the Boston area rented an apartment that resembled the configuration in which it was originally built, meaning my prosaic first reaction to this post is a solid bet on stairs to a former mother-in-law apartment or Philadelphia-style shared second floor that was walled off during a previous renovation; the ominous scratches around the deadbolt look entirely consistent with socketing it into the door well after the fact with about the level of competence I have personally experienced in property-managed repairs. The only part that strikes me as unusual is the accessibility of the stairs. The ones in our bedroom closet are blocked off.
Earlier this week I was stuck listening to a rather terrible cover of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" (1989), but it made me realize how much the original song impresses me for creating a narrative with nothing more than a list of cultural references and almost no verbs; it's the way it accelerates. The first verse spans events from 1949 to 1952, the second from 1953 to 1956, the third from 1957 to 1960, the fourth from 1961 to 1963, and then suddenly as if the Kennedy assassination broke time—what else do I have to say—the final verse hurtles from 1965 into 1989, leapfrogging pop culture and atrocity into an overwhelming pileup of history that will keep on coming as it always has whether the narrator can take it or not. Among other faults, the cover threw its post-Cold War references together without regard for chronology, which seemed to kill the entire point.
In my intermittent way of colliding with music videos, Spoon Benders' "Dichotomatic" (2023) strikes me as one of the better variations on the vampires of capitalism since Peter Strickland's In Fabric (2018), less fetishistically sexual and more working perhaps literally stiff. I also just like their lo-fi sludge-wall of sound.
I miss my little cat.
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I wonder if it was the same cover! It was playing while I waiting for my prescriptions on Tuesday and I recognized the riff without paying much attention to the lyrics—I was reading a Victorian ghost novel—and then all of a sudden the phrase Prince and the Queen die crossed my awareness and then the next line was about 9/11 and I immediately gave up and went back to not paying attention.
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Yeah; no! And now that I have gone to research this annoyance, it seems they omitted COVID-19 entirely and their justification is that it didn't really fit into the rhyme scheme.
Everyone seems to have complained about the chronology, lack thereof.
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As soon as I saw the words "rather terrible cover of We Didn't Start The Fire" I was like ah, yes, the Fall Out Boy version.
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I hadn't realized it was infamous!
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(copying and pasting from a rant I made about this last year)
Two new popes go unmentioned, and so many countries with marriage equality, and the Boxing Day tsunami is only touched upon with the single word "earthquakes". Even in American events, they included Balloon Boy and Fyre Fest but not the subprime mortgages or the Occupy movement. And nothing about trans movements at all, but thank goodness they found the time to mention the historical significance of... Stranger Things? Also, nothing about DARPAnet, ARPAnet, the Eternal September... but it's not like the internet's a big deal, I guess.
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I had been mercifully unconscious of it until Tuesday!
(copying and pasting from a rant I made about this last year)
It's not like the lyrics have improved since.
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Look, I'm not inside a lot of buildings these last few years!
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(If anything it's always been Boomers v Gen Exers, a lot of us were their kids!)
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I do run occasionally in and out of the local bookstore where I pick up my preorders.
I was like, what. Why. I think it might be part of the stupid Millennial v Boomer thing?
I don't know! I'm not a fan of the entire formulation. My parents are original-definition baby boomers (1946, 1952) and both of them have better-developed shipping instincts than I do. My mother casually assumes that most people are somewhere on the gender spectrum in the same way that the Kinsey scale exists for a reason. I have no idea if she's demographically right, but I think it's a really neat way to approach the world.
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I can't keep millennial and gen z and The Next Ones straight, it's embarrassing. For years I thought millennials were ppl born in 2000. /o\
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I do, too.
I can't keep millennial and gen z and The Next Ones straight, it's embarrassing. For years I thought millennials were ppl born in 2000.
I was born in 1981 and supposedly belong to the micro-generation of the Xennials, which sounds like something Buck Rogers should be fighting. I am willing to vouch for some sense of generational disconnection from the majority of my age-mates, but the odds are overwhelming that I would have grown up alienated from my cohort on my own merits no matter when my parents actually reproduced.