I've worked about 60 hours this week and slept 20. Am I going crazy because I'm listening to this song on repeat or am I listening to this song on repeat because I'm going crazy? Either way, I am obsessed.
I had wicked insomnia last night, and in the time before I decided to get up I tried to "count sheep" by thinking of rappers with comic-book names. I came up with: Dr. Octagon, Jean Grae, Juggaknots, Ghostface (Tony Stark), Method Man (Johnny Blaze), Green Lantern (d.j. but still counts), MF Doom, David Banner (it's Bruce in the comic but still counts)....there must be tons more but my brain was addled. I guess I'd be Jessica Jones.
So far our power is limited to group-thinking 90s/early 00s top 40, but give it time.a feeling of longing for something that one is fond of, which is gone, but might return in a distant future. It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might really never return....Saudade is different than nostalgia (the English word, that is). In nostalgia, one has a mixed happy and sad feeling, a memory of happiness but a sadness for its impossible return and sole existence in the past. Saudade is like nostalgia but with the hope that what is being longed for might return, even if that return is unlikely or so distant in the future to be almost of no consequence to the present. One might make a strong analogy with nostalgia as a feeling one has for a loved one who has died and saudade as a feeling one has for a loved one who has disappeared or is simply currently absent. Nostalgia is located in the past and is somewhat conformist while saudade is very present, anguishing, anxious and extends into the future.One of the things I find so beautiful about saudade is that not only does it perfectly encapsulate this certain kind of wistfulness, by giving it a name it celebrates it as something of value. It doesn't dismiss it as useless wallowing, it acknowledges that some people leave a bigger fingerprint on you than others, and that's just part of our lived experience: That happened, I knew you, we were there.
This past July, on my way to a party at St. Mark's Church thrown by delightful spazz Brendan Fowler, I ran into a fellow tablemate from the freaks-and-geeks side of our high school cafeteria, Erik (second from right). I hadn't seen him in four years, and he told me his band had been signed and they were headlining the St. Mark's benefit. I left before they came on, because I am a jerk, and I never checked the Virgins out until I heard them last Wednesday...on "Gossip Girl"! They also did a tour opening for that band Jet. They're officially kind of a big deal. Yaaay Erik!
My alma mater was a bastion of all things P.C., womyn-centric, anti-hegemonic, vegan and gluten-free, the sort of place where leaving the cafeteria you'd have to step over the protesters dressed like Native Americans lying prostrate covered in fake blood and then wind your way through thirty girls and gay dudes doing free-movement improvisation on the lawn. Maybe we were burnt out on Naomi Wolf, or maybe college girls are college girls are college girls, but at night we'd all put our politics aside and drunkenly sing along to the most misogynistic lyrics hip hop has to offer. When I was 16, "Ain't No Fun" enraged me; today I absentmindedly mouth the words while I'm doing work. I'm essentially inured to the sexist aspect and all of its ramifications, which is why it's so weird that while listening to good ol' Brand Nubian the other day I found myself bristling at what Grand Puba was saying. He sits on a high horse in general, sure (see: "All for One" etc.), but how many songs do you really need taking women to task for sluttin it up?
Rap represented in mathematical charts and graphs
Delta 5 - Mind Your Own Business
This weekend was all about purple jumpsuits, band-aid pasties, no borders no boundaries, valet parking, and straight class no-hobo thrift store glamour. Well done, ladies.
A few years ago, Chuck Klosterman wrote a piece for Esquire describing the difference between an archenemy and a nemesis, and why it's kind of great to have either one. While virtually everything else I've ever read by him makes me annoyed ("Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs" is like being cornered at a party by some windbag who won't let you get a word in edgewise and still tries to divine some sort of deep significance from the pop-culture bath that Baumbauch/Smith/Tarantino/Linklater sucked dry for movie scripts in the 90s), this article really spoke to me. While I have more than my fair share of soured friendships, I would love to know that someone is sweating me to the point of fist-shaking vengeance. At the very least, I'd settle for a nemesis that could be the target of my finely honed yet sadly underused across-the-room withering stares. Any takers?
