JUICE EP

It's been a while, but the new Shouts & Murmurs EP, Juice, is now available for purchase on Bandcamp, iTunes, Amazon, and CD Baby. It can also be streamed on Spotify.

Give it a listen, and please follow us on Facebook and Souncloud.

🍹🍹🍹🍹🍹🍹🍹🍹🍹🍹🍹🍹

#justanotherday

One of the podcasts I work on as part of the Writing & Communication Program's podcast committee, 4.33@Tech, has been gifted a new episode! Executive producer Lauren Neefe writes,

On September 30, 2015, Radiolab host and creator Jad Abumrad called into the WREK Atlanta studios to talk with Lauren and Prachi about sound, storytelling, Radiolab’s podcasting destiny, and the sound a tuba makes when it hits the pavement. It might have been “one of those days” for Abumrad. It was anything but routine for the 4.33 crew.

You can hear me chime in about halfway through, fact-checking Jad Abumrad...

2015 in Film

I'm a little late to the game, but here are all of the new releases I saw in 2015, ranked.

1. Mistress America, dir. Noah Baumbach
2. Nasty Baby, dir. Sebastián Silva
3. The Wolfpack, dir. Crystal Moselle
4. Tangerine, dir. Sean S. Baker
5. Spotlight, dir. Tom McCarthy
6. Amy, dir. Asif Kapadia
7. Best of Enemies, dir. Morgan Neville & Robert Gordon
8. 7 Chinese Brothers, dir. Bob Byington
9. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, dir. Brett Morgen
10. Straight Outta Compton, dir. F. Gary Gray
11. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, dir. Alex Gibney
12. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, dir. Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
13. Mad Max: Fury Road, dir. George Miller
14. Dope, dir. Rick Famuyiwa
15. Results, dir. Andrew Bujalski
16. Digging for Fire, dir. Joe Swanberg
17. The Big Short, dir. Adam McKay
18. Star Wars: The Force Awakens, dir. J.J. Abrams
19. Bridge of Spies, dir. Steven Spielberg
20. The End of the Tour, dir. James Ponsoldt
21. Entourage, dir. Doug Ellin
22. What Happened, Miss Simone?, dir. Liz Garbus
23. Get Hard, dir. Etan Cohen
24. The Stanford Prison Experiment, dir. Kyle Patrick Alvarez
25. Trainwreck, dir. Judd Apatow
26. Steve Jobs, dir. Danny Boyle
27. Hot Girls Wanted, dir. Ronna Gradus & Jill Bauer
28. Queen of Earth, dir. Alex Ross Perry
29. Sisters, dir. Jason Moore
30. Fifty Shades of Gray, dir. Sam Taylor-Johnson
31. Entertainment, dir. Rick Alverson

I still have yet to see a number of films that would likely have a place near the top of this list (Chi-Raq, The Hateful Eight, Phoenix, The Lobster, Anomalisa, In Jackson Heights, Carol, etc.), but I'll get around to those soon enough.

Books I've Read: October 2014-July 2015

• Tao Lin, Richard Yates (2010)
• Tao Lin, Bed (2007)
• Tao Lin, Eeeee Eee Eeee (2007)
• Tao Lin, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (2008)
• Jason Holt, ed., Leonard Cohen and Philosophy: Various Positions (2014)
• LeRoi Jones, Tales (1967)
• William T. Vollmann, The Rainbow Stories (1989)
• Donald Fagen, Eminent Hipsters (2013)
• David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010)
• Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)
• Sheila Heti, How Should A Person Be? (2012)
• Chris Kraus, Torpor (2006)
• Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own (trans. Steven T. Byington, 1844/1910)
• Elmore Leonard, 52 Pickup (1974)
• Aaron Apps, Intersex: A Memoir (2015)
• Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son (1992)
• Patti Smith, Just Kids (2010)
• Jonathan Lethem, Lucky Alan and Other Stories (2015)
• Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing (2011)
• Roberto Bolaño, Woes of the True Policeman (trans. Natasha Wimmer, 2011/2012)
• Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives (trans. Natasha Wimmer, 1998/2007)
• François Laruelle and Philippe Petit, Intellectuals and Power: The Insurrection of the Victim (trans. Anthony Paul Smith, 2003/2015)
• Michel Houellebecq, Platform (trans. Frank Wynne, 2001/2002)
• Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

Essential Reading/Our Canon

Adriane and I had a few glasses of wine the other night and made a pretty extensive list of all of our favorite books––that is, books that made a lasting impact on us, which we could distinctly remember reading for the first time. Many of them were deemed terrible among subsequent readings, and we didn't agree about all of them. Yet, they all meant something to us once, and because of that, deserve to be mentioned. Doubtless, many more were overlooked. With that said, here they are, in no particular order.

• Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried (1990)
• Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955)
• Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters (1983)
• Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913)
• Tobias Wolff, Old School (2003)
• Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle (1963)
• Tao Lin, Taipei (2013)
• Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011)
• Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869)
• Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1856)
• David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997)
• Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (2003)
• Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated (2002)
• Gay Talese, The Kingdom and the Power (1969)
• LeRoi Jones, Dutchman (1964)
• Audre Lorde, Zami (1982)
• Tony Kushner, Angels in America (1993)
• David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross (1984)
• Donna Tartt, The Secret History (1992)
• J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories (1953)
• J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter (1997-2007)
• Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels (1966)
• Joan Didion, The White Album (1979)
• Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945)
• Norman Mailer, An American Dream (1965)
• Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962)
• Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (1967)
• Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942)
• Ann Beattie, Walks With Men (2010)
• Zadie Smith, NW (2012)
• Alex Garland, The Beach (1996)
• Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
• Mary McCarthy, The Group (1963)
• Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895)
• Roald Dahl, Boy (1984)
• Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude (2003) and Chronic City (2009)
• Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939) and The Long Goodbye (1953)
• Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon (1941) and Tender Is the Night (1934)
• Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)
• Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907)
• Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1912)
• Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957), Lolita (1955), and Ada or Ardor (1969)
• Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
• Philip Roth, American Pastoral (1997) and Goodbye, Columbus (1959)
• James M. Cain, Mildred Pierce (1941)
• Evan S. Connell, Mrs. Bridge (1958)
• Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table (2011)
• E.M. Forster, A Room with a View (1908)
• Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son (1992)
• Daniel Clowes, Ghost World (1997)
• Art Spiegelman, Maus (1980)
• Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (2004) and The Savage Detectives (1998)
• Charles Bukowski, Women (1978)
• Richard Brautigan, An Unfortunate Woman (1994)
• A.S. Byatt, Possession (1990)
• Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs (2009)
• James Baldwin, Another Country (1962)
• Patti Smith, Just Kids (2010)
• Bob Dylan, Chronicles (2004)
• Colm Toíbín, Brooklyn (2009)
• Frank O'Hara, Meditations in an Emergency (1957) and Lunch Poems (1964)
• Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (1956) and The Fall of America (1973)
• John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)
• Mark Strand, Man and Camel (2006), Almost Invisible (2012), and The Story of Our Lives (2002)
• Alice Notley, Selected Poems (1993)
• John McPhee, A Roomful of Hovings (1969)
• Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (1989)
• Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees (1988)
• Paul Auster, Invisible (2009), Leviathan (1992), and Moon Palace (1989)
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (1864)
• Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (1938)
• Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
• Jules Feiffer, The Man in the Ceiling (1995)
• Mario Puzo, The Godfather (1969)
• Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air (1997) and Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)
• Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)
• Chris Kraus, I Love Dick (1997)

Film

I made a movie to accompany our album, "New East Berlin & Other Stories." It is actually just a collage of movies made by people who are better and smarter than me, but it was a fun thing to do, and I think I'm going to do it again.

If you have around forty-five minutes of your life to spare, you can watch it here.

Medani Tropage

Adriane Quinlan and I have begun collecting our poems here.

A hefty backlog will be appearing all week, with new poems coming soon.

New East Berlin & Other Stories

Since fall of 2014, Bryan Gottshall and I––with the help of Haley Comet, Adriane Quinlan, and Missy Wilkinson--have been hard at work on our debut LP as Shouts & Murmurs. The LP, "New East Berlin & Other Stories," showcases a number of songs I have written on my own over the years (in New York, Minneapolis, San Diego), and newer compositions, native to New Orleans, where the record was recorded, in Bryan's studio on Alvar Street.

The record is available to stream at Soundcloud here, and can be downloaded for a small fee at Bandcamp. We're hoping to make it available on Spotify and iTunes soon, as well as to play some live shows in New Orleans before too long.

Enjoy, and if you haven't happened to like our Facebook page yet, that's something to do.

The Year in Music

On the day after Christmas, I took the 7 train out to Sunnyside, Queens, where an old friend of mine was celebrating his thirtieth birthday. All of us got to talking about how by the time you get to your late twenties, youth culture doesn't care about you anymore, so when it comes to new music, who cares, listen to what you like. With that said, a lot of good records came out in 2014. Here are my favorites.

1. The War On Drugs, Lost In The Dream
2. Karen O, Crush Songs
3. D'Angelo and the Vanguard, Black Messiah
4. Mac DeMarco, Salad Days
5. Mr Twin Sister, Mr Twin Sister
6. Merchandise, After the End
7. Les Sins, Michael
8. Real Estate, Atlas
9. Angel Olsen, Burn Your Fire
10. Jessie Ware, Tough Love
11. Ariel Pink, pom pom
12. Owen Pallett, In Conflict
13. Kevin Drew, Darlings
14. Thom Yorke, Tomorrow's Modern Boxes
15. Leonard Cohen, Popular Problems
16. Swans, To Be Kind
17. Warpaint, Warpaint
18. Perfume Genius, Too Bright
19. TV on the Radio, Seeds
20. Parquet Courts, Sunbathing Animal

2014 in Film

A number of my favorite living directors released films in 2014 (a symptom of a broader shift in contemporary cinema which Richard Brody summarizes nicely for The New Yorker). So it's no surprise that I saw a total of forty-one new releases this year––a personal record. On this, the final day of the year, I've taken the time to reflect.

The Best

1. Birdman, dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu
2. Inherent Vice, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
3. Listen Up Philip, dir. Alex Ross Perry
4. The Grand Budapest Hotel, dir. Wes Anderson
5. Nymphomania (Vol. 1 & 2), dir. Lars von Trier
6. Boyhood, dir. Richard Linklater
7. The One I Love, dir. Charlie McDowell
8. Citizenfour, dir. Laura Poitras
9. Ida, dir. Pawel Pawlikowski
10. Gone Girl, dir. David Fincher

Honorable Mentions

• The Unknown Known, dir. Errol Morris
• Mood Indigo, dir. Michel Gondry
• Mistaken for Strangers, dir. Tom Berninger
• The Trip to Italy, dir. Michael Winterbottom
• The Interview, dir. Evan Goldberg & Seth Rogen

The Worst

1. Tammy, dir. Ben Falcone
2. The Other Woman, dir. Nick Cassavetes
3. Walk of Shame, dir. Steven Brill
4. Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa, dir. Declan Lowney
5. Get on Up, dir. Tate Taylor
6. Rich Hill, dir. Andrew Droz Palermo & Tracy Droz Tragos
7. Joe, dir. David Gordon Green
8. Only Lovers Left Alive, dir. Jim Jarmusch
9. A Most Wanted Man, dir. Anton Corbijn
10. Chef, dir. Jon Favreau

The Middle Ground

• Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, dir. Adam McKay
• Finding Vivian Maier, dir. John Maloof & Charlie Siskel
• The Galapagos Affair: Satan Comes to Eden, dir. Daniel Geller & Dayna Goldfine
• Neighbors, dir. Nicholas Stoller
• Obvious Child, dir. Gillian Robespierre
• Nightcrawler, dir. Dan Gilroy
• Horrible Bosses 2, dir. Sean Anders
• The Immigrant, dir. James Gray
• 22 Jump Street, dir. Phil Lord & Christopher Miller
• They Came Together, dir. David Wain
• The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, dir. Francis Lawrence
• Altman, dir. Ron Mann
• Men, Women & Children, dir. Jason Reitman
• Foxcatcher, dir. Bennett Miller
• Happy Christmas, dir. Joe Swanberg
• Night Moves, dir. Kelly Reichardt

Oh, It Must Be Christmastime!

My dear friends in The LeBarons recorded a Christmas EP, and asked me to write the liner notes. I think I've found my true calling. Quoted in full:

Twenty years ago, when Mariah Carey sang “All I Want For Christmas Is You”, we couldn’t help but believe her. With Bill Clinton’s presidency mired in allegations of sexual misconduct, a health care reform bill dead on the Congress floor, Kurt Cobain dead on another floor in Seattle, genocide in Rwanda, and the TV airwaves promising us it’d be awhile before we stopped hearing O.J. Simpson’s name, Mariah’s invitation to join her under the mistletoe was about all that could keep us from drowning ourselves in a North Pole-sized bucket of long-expired eggnog. A lot has changed in the past two decades -- some of it good, some of it not so good. But no matter how hard times might be, how many loves lost, how empty our proverbial stockings, The LeBarons are here to wake us up from our collective hangover and remind us that there’s still an ounce of cheer in that glass. Drink up, amigos. It’s Christmastime.

It should come as no surprise that The LeBarons have decided -- two millennia and some change after a certain baby was born to a certain virgin in a certain barn -- to serve us up a special Yuletide elixir: the story of The LeBarons, like the story of Christmas, begins in the desert. Not in Nazareth, but in Bakersfield, CA -- this time, though, there’s only two wise men. Raised on The Beatles and Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace, D Frank and Nate Berg know that rock and roll ain’t really American if it ain’t a little British too. It’s this sort of dialectic that made their debut LP, Sounds From The Parallel Present, such an insightful commentary on the city of Los Angeles (and a seminal entry in its pop music canon): gritty and glitzy, sunny and noir. With clever songwriting, Liverpudlian guitars, and vocal harmonies as likely as anything to get Brian Wilson on the phone with his lawyer, The LeBarons resurfaced the centrality of Southern California in American musical history. And here, they do it again -- with sleigh bells.

The title track is full of the ambivalent resignation we all feel during the holiday season -- the saxophone is just melancholy enough to make us feel human, and want to keep being human. In “What Child Is This?” Berg/Frank update an old classic, presenting us with a baby Jesus in dark Ray-Bans who knows what’s hip (and what’s not). I once knew “Hang the Lights” as “Mouse in the Meadow” when I played Fender Rhodes for Berg’s short-lived mid-2000s group, The Lawrences of Arabia. It was an autumn song then; winter suits it much better. “Hey, Mr. Santa!” Frank growls in the album’s closer, “I only want a girl to hold me tight”. Twenty years ago, that girl could have been Mariah. Now, it could be you. So gather the family, crank up the Victrola, and let Oh, It Must Be Christmastime! pull those frosty heartstrings. It might be the only peace on earth you get this year.

You can listen to the album here.

The Opposite of Hallelujah

I wrote a review of Leonard Cohen and Philosophy: Various Positions (ed. Jason Holt) for Review 31. Read it here.

"No Name in the Street" (1972)

James Baldwin, FORTY-TWO years ago:

"Well, if one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected — those, precisely, who need the law's protection most! — and listens to their testimony. Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person — ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."

Books I've Read: January–September 2014

• Roberto Bolaño, 2066 (trans. Natasha Wimmer, 2004/2008)
• Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1985-1986 (1988/1993)
• Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read Them (2010)
• John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar (1968/2011)
• Chris Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia (2000/2013)
• George Kouvaros, Where Does It Happen?: John Cassavetes and Cinema at the Breaking Point (2004)
• Daniel Kane, We Saw the Light: Conversations between the New American Cinema and Poetry (2009)
• Richard Klein, Cigarettes Are Sublime (1993/1995)
• Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces (1989/2009)
• Emily Hahn, No Hurry to Get Home: The Memoir of the New Yorker Writer Whose Unconventional Life and Adventures Spanned the Twentieth Century (1937-1970/2000)
• Donald Allen, ed., The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 (1960/1999)
• Sean Wilsey, More Curious (2014)
• Wim Wenders and Mary Zournazi, Inventing Peace: A Dialogue on Perception (2013)
• John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead: Essays (2011)
• Jáchym Topol, Nightwork (trans. Marek Tomin, 2001/2014)
• Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (trans. Lydia Davis, 1856/2010)
• Joshua Cohen, Four New Messages (2012)
• Gaito Gazdanov, The Spectre of Alexander Wolf (trans. Bryan Karetnyk, 1947-1948/2013)
• Graham Greene, Complete Short Stories (1923-1990/2005)
• John McPhee, A Roomful of Hovels and Other Profiles (1966/1968)
• Curzio Malaparte, The Skin (trans. David Moore, 1949/2013)
• Tao Lin, Taipei (2013)
• Tao Lin, Shoplifting from American Apparel (2009)
• Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011)
• Chris Kraus, I Love Dick (1997/2007)
• Amanda Petrusich, Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records (2014)
• Ben Lerner, 10:04 (2014)
• Ray Carney, Cassavetes on Cassavetes (2001)
• Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995 (ed. Bill Morgan, 2000)
• Allen Ginsberg, Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958-1996 (Ed. David Carter, 2001)
• Choire Sicha, Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City (2013)

Political Cinema After Politics →

Me, on Angelos Koutsourakis, on Lars von Trier:

‘What can I say? I understand Hitler,’ said Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, at a press conference during the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, where his film Melancholia was screened for competition. As he stutters on, describing how he can ‘see Hitler in his bunker’ despite his having done ‘some wrong things,’ identifying himself as a Nazi while insisting that he is ‘not against Jews,’ Melancholia’s star, Kirsten Dunst, shifts uncomfortably in her chair, rolling her eyes, laughing nervously. ‘Oh my god,’ she audibly mutters, ‘this is terrible.’

The 2013 Films I Saw, Ranked from Best to Worst

1. Spring Breakers, dir. Harmony Korine
2. Frances Ha, dir. Noah Baumbach
3. American Hustle, dir. David O. Russell
4. 12 Years a Slave, dir. Steve McQueen
5. Computer Chess, dir. Andrew Bujalski
6. Side Effects, dir. Steven Soderbergh
7. Blue Jasmine, dir. Woody Allen
8. This Is The End, dir. Evan Goldberg & Seth Rogen
9. The Bling Ring, dir. Sofia Coppola
10. Gravity, dir. Alfonso Cuarón
11. The Hangover Part III, dir. Todd Phillips
12. Before Midnight, dir. Richard Linklater
13. The Wolf of Wall Street, dir. Martin Scorsese
14. The Great Gatsby, dir. Baz Luhrmann

My 25 Favorite Records of 2013, Loosely Arranged

1. Darkside, Psychic
2. Arcade Fire, Reflektor
3. Ducktails, The Flower Lane
4. Phoenix, Bankrupt!
5. James Blake, Overgrown
6. My Bloody Valentine, mbv
7. Merchandise, Totale Nite
8. Courtney Barnett, The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas
9. Ducktails, Wish Hotel
10. Radiation City, Animals in the Median
11. Julia Holter, Loud City Song
12. Young Galaxy, Ultramarine
13. Daft Punk, Random Access Memories
14. David Bowie, The Next Day
15. Blood Orange, Cupid Deluxe
16. Vampire Weekend, Modern Vampires of the City
17. Atoms for Peace, Amok
18. Rhye, Woman
19. Haim, Days Are Gone
20. Parquet Courts, Light Up Gold
21. Mayer Hawthorne, Where Does This Door Go
22. The National, Trouble Will Find Me
23. Youth Lagoon, Wondrous Bughouse
24. The Field, Cupid’s Head
25. Cheatahs, Extended Plays

An Open Letter to The Silent Comedy, by Justine Marzoni

theradicalnotionblog:

"To be clear, my issues with this video do not lie in the fact that rape is a theme represented. What I do have a problem with is the way that it is represented––as an accepted practice, presented uncritically, and seemingly without comment".

The following is a response by San Diego local, Justine Marzoni, to an ever disturbing and rape-normalizing video, “Always Two”. If you love rape culture, you’ll LOVE this new video by San Diego’s local (and fairly popular) band, The Silent Comedy. I encourage you to watch and to let your emotions fuel your action towards ensuring the removal of this video’s existence in the public sphere. TRIGGER WARNING for those sensitive to Rape (and lets be honest, I wish we all were). Thank you so much for writing this, Justine. You can watch the video and view the letter directly below.

http://youtu.be/AUBKNZfAwis

Read More

Morrissey and Melancholia (Spoiler Alert: He’s Still Miserable) | The New York Observer →

In which I destroy one of my idols…

The Fourteenth

The hobgoblins strike at my teeth

As the recyclables flail with emotions

And the bicycles fly through the air

After a night with Jameson’s

And the camera excites the little girls

Who sing to the cherry trees even though

No one is actually listening

But no one cares, no one knows

How I can sit here for hours and hours

Waiting for something to happen

But nothing ever does, except a bathroom break

Every now and then.