irl tho last night
“Noise performance breaks down the public scene of live music audiences into their subjective encounters with extremely high volume. The only choices are to stay to feel it or to leave. At the beginning of many Noise performances, the audience splits in two: in an instant, some press closer to the stage and the speakers, and others retreat to the back of the room. Listeners must decide, almost immediately, whether they can tolerate the overwhelming volume. Those who remain must find a way to appreciate this sound—to construct some valuable framework of personal experience through it—or they are forced from its presence. Unlike the nuanced contours of a good live sound mix, which brings a crowd together in a shared public atmosphere, Noise concerts flatten the space with overwhelming loudness. Extreme volume divides the common social environment of music into individual private thresholds of sensation. A really good Noise show confuses you, separates you from your acquired knowledge, and makes you wonder what’s going on. It is easy to know that a Noise performance will be loud, but successful Noise performances still feel shockingly and unexpectedly so.”
From Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation by David Novak (Duke University Press, 2013).
I can’t think of a time in recent memory when I have been so devotedly going over song lyrics, even ‘batshit Ezra Koenig spoken word interlude’. My favorite lyric from Modern Vampires of the City though has to be the opening to “Hannah Hunt”:
A gardener told me some plants move but I could not believe it /
‘Till me and Hannah Hunt saw crawling vines and weeping willows /
As we made our way from Providence to PhoenixI don’t want to belabor the point by pointing out alliteration, or whatever. You all had high school English. Let me just say instead I love the imagery and also the naivety—aw they’re roadtripping, this couple, they’re run off to see the rest of the country, and it’s probably not going to end well. Crawling vines and weeping willows, jesus. But everyone Ezra sings about on the album sounds both in-love and terrified about it.
I relate to MVotC mostly because it is so anxious about the inevitability of death, and from the POV of twentysomethings. (This album could also be called When You’re Young and Pruned, Dying Would Really Suck*). Our age group isn’t supposed to be so fixated on death as we are statistically further away from it, and we’re to leave the griping to those whose bodies aren’t as limber as they used to be, who have accumulated piles of responsibility hard to leave behind. While I’m not sure if I buy the notion that the elderly are more resigned to death (it seems more like a sickness/health thing than an old/young thing?) there’s no fear sharper or sweeter for me, right now. I joke about being struck by a car while crossing the street in Center City probably because it’s the only most realistic option for my untimely death; I get honked at by impatient drivers trying to make a turn while darting behind the flow of pedestrians just before the light changes. And I’m always thinking to myself You’ve hardly done anything yet, hurry up. Or It would suck if I died before Laura Marling finally leaked. “Hudson” is particularly terrifying; it sounds chased-up by a choir of the damned.
*It took me way too long to realize that Diane Young also = Dying Young, even hearing it over and over
East Village, Manhattan. $700.00
(Loft Bed Above Closet in Kitchen)
Looks kind of pleasant
Yeah this looks pretty reasonable
rent too damn high
ceiling 2 damn low
oh COME ON, jstor
don’t tell me i have to write about this anime as postcolonial text about the sinister capitalist exploitation of feminized labor MYSELF
How do we read the agency of the subject when its demand for cultural and psychic and political survival makes itself known as style?
“
| — | Judith Butler, “Agencies of Style for A Liminal Subject” |
“I recall an August afternoon in Chicago in 1973 when I took my daughter, then seven, to see what Georgia O’Keeffe had done with where she had been. One of the vast O’Keeffe ‘Sky Above Clouds’ canvases floated over the back stairs in the Chicago Art Institute that day, dominating what seemed to be several stories of empty light, and my daughter looked at it once, ran to the landing, and kept on looking. “Who drew it,” she whispered after a while. I told her. “I need to talk to her,” she said finally.” Joan Didion
Image caption: Agnes Martin. Morning,1965.
Georgia let the pussy game speak
