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sexism, racism, irony
Just got done teaching Jessica Hopper's "Emo : Where the Girls Aren't" article. I pretty regularly covet Jessica's style, force, and insight as a writer, and this article exemplifies her strengths in all of those departments. It's about not only the representations of women in emo music but more broadly about the uncomfortable dissonance that can exist between being a feminist (on the one hand) and being a lover of rock (on the other).
Speaking of uncomfortable dissonance, check out this Washington Post article about "Kill Whitey" parties, booty bass parties staged in Brooklyn "for large groups of white hipsters." I'm all about the cultural cross-contamination, but this kind of party (at least as it's portrayed in the Post article) seems to want to slide into easy racist ironizing. (Note: one of the Williamsburg hipsters quoted in the article is Bianca Casady, one half of weird indie act CocoRosie, which led to this spirited rant over at Brainwashed.)
Also over at Brainwashed today, more happily, is a nice review of Number None's Urmerica. |
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
12:09 PM
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2000-2005
The first Imaginary Year entry appeared exactly five years ago today. Today I've just posted what will probably be the final entry.
Inbetween are 389 other entries which more-or-less serve as an encrypted diary of my life over the last five years. It feels so odd to be done. Last night I had a dream that I was attempting to defeat / kill a doppleganger of myself that had grown to enormous size. |
Thursday, September 22, 2005
11:28 AM
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their mountains so lofty, their treetops so tall
Over the last year, some of the music I've enjoyed hearing the most is weird, delicate folk from Finland (visit the Fonal website for a taste, they've got loads of MP3s if you sniff around a bit). So when I learned that Clay Ruby (of Madison psych-folk outfit Davenport) had organized a US tour for some of the new crop of the Finnish psychedelic scene, I was pretty excited.
The show was Monday night, and it featured Lau Nau (who have put out a release on Chicago's own Locust label), Kuupuu, and Jan Anderzén (ringleader of Kemialliset Ystävät), who was playing with Spencer and James of the Skaters.
I ended up putting most of these people up at the Blood Dorm that night, and the Skaters stayed with me until this morning. It was nice to spend some downtime with them, just lying around with them watching obscuro 80s horror (Xtro, New York Ripper), but the real highlight of the visit was the Skaters / Number None jam that happened yesterday. We got some recordings of the session; maybe some of it will come to light one day. Labels: number_none, personal |
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
12:39 PM
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notice
Not sure exactly what the deal is here, but I'm not currently getting any e-mail sent to my jeremy at invisible-city.com e-mail address, and I haven't gotten any sent to that address since Friday.
Normal service on the old e-mail address has resumed. Thanks for your patience... |
Monday, September 19, 2005
12:00 PM
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everyone loves mail
Looking through my old mail yesterday made me nostalgic for my old days of sending and receiving mail art, and so this morning I trotted over to Geoff Huth's mail art journal / blog qbdp, which only made everything worse.
And so that's led me to ask whether there's anyone out there who wants to swap Project 29 envelopes with me?
Project 29 is from Jeffrey Yamaguchi's 52 Projects, and its instructions read as follows:
"Get a regular sized envelope. [I'll be using a a 6x9 padded envelope. -J.] Address it to someone special. Then, stuff it with as many things as you can: a letter, photographs, ripped out magazine articles, photocopies of poems, a short story, or passages from a novel, recipes, clipped newspaper articles, art work, poems or stories you've written... anything that can be folded up and put in the envelope. Make sure to stuff it so full that you need to use tape to keep it sealed. This envelope should have serious heft. Once it's sealed, get the proper postage put on it (definitely use stamps) and mail it off."
I'd say I can accomodate the first three non-Chicagoans to respond to this post. Labels: projects |
Thursday, September 15, 2005
10:00 AM
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the postal archives
I spent a lot of time this evening looking through and organizing mail. And I'm talking mail that dates back to probably around 1988 or so, when I first started writing letters regularly. I almost never throw a letter away: I still have mail saved from people I haven't been in touch with for a decade or more.
There are some people who I stopped corresponding with more-or-less by accident, and some of them I don't know how to track down: Amanda Doimas? Mark Davis? Lauryn / Lauren Rose (the one from Bucks County, PA, not any of these other fakers)? If any of you are out there Googling yourself some night, and you should stumble upon this, think about dropping Jeremy Bushnell a line [jeremy, at invisible-city dot com projects, at imaginaryyear dot com].
Other relationships represented in my box(es) of mail ended more consciously, or mutually, or whatever, just ended for one reason or another. But I can't seem to let go of the letters. If we ever cared about one another enough to write back and forth rest assured that I still have the letters and I remember how it felt to care about you that way; if, later on, I came to hurt you, rest assured that I remember the way that that felt too.
Because this is a blog that's often about archiving rather than about weepy quasi-sentimental recriminations, I should say that the organizational process went smoother than I expected; all these old letters are actually stored in a fairly orderly way. That said, I could probably use an organizational scheme that's better than my current one, which involves nestling letters inside of brown lunchbags which are then further nestled inside of boxes. Digital scanning is flat out, and I can't think of a good way to scrapbook them: anybody out there on the Web have any especially clever mail-archiving ideas? Labels: indexing, personal |
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
8:17 PM
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half-decade
It is with some sadness that I have to announce that as of Thursday, September 22nd, the autumal equinox and the five-year anniversary of its first installment, my serialized fiction project Imaginary Year will go on a hiatus which will (most likely) be permanent.
I've enjoyed having Imaginary Year as a project, but I've grown increasingly interested in writing other things, and attempting to write two pieces of short fiction a week, hopefully pieces which are of decent quality, doesn't leave much time for writing anything else. I've written basically the equivalent of a novel a year for the past five years: it seems like now might be a good time to take a breather. I don't know, yet, whether I'll spend my time writing something new, or whether I'll spend it revising Imaginary Year and sending it out for publication, but it'll be nice to be able to think about my next move without a deadline for new material always just four days away.
I don't want to say that I won't return to these characters at some future point—I've worked so much with them that it's hard for me to imagine trying to make sense of the world without making use of them as my front-line tools for interpretation. But if I do return to them it probably won't be in short format pieces like those that make up Imaginary Year—there's only so much they can do in the constrained space of a couple of pages. It'd be nice to have a little more room to let them breathe.
That said, over the last year I've tried to get each character to a point where you can more or less feel like their story has “concluded,” at least inasmuch as the events in people's lives ever conclude. They don't, which is why I wrote this story this way. I hope you've enjoyed it.
If you want to be added to a mailing list to receive news about future writing projects or Imaginary Year news, just send an e-mail to “projects” at “imaginaryyear.com.” If you want to make a donation, feel free to use this button:
But I've never really been in this for the money. It's been great having you guys as readers: I certainly would have given up on this project years ago if it hadn't been for the thoughtful and kind responses I've gotten from people who were enjoying it. That's really all I have to say. Thanks so much,
Jeremy Labels: personal, writing |
Sunday, September 11, 2005
1:05 PM
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the weirdo's guide to the grateful dead
So I'm on this mailing list which is dedicated to weird psychedelia, noise, "forest punk," and other sundry topics of this sort, and talk has recently turned to the Grateful Dead.
I'm not a Deadhead, but I recognize that there are some moments in the mountainous trove of recordings the Dead left behind that are undoubtedly worth hearing. For this reason, I've long been a happy owner of Grayfolded, a seamless collage of the "best moments" of recordings of free-form Dead jam "Dark Star," assembled by notorious cut-up artist John Oswald. I've long thought of this as all the Grateful Dead that any respectable weirdo should ever need.
But I also just recently stumbled upon an hour-long GD mix from laptop manipulator / Vermont hippie Greg Davis, designed to (in his words) "highlight the weirder, more psychedelic side of the grateful dead at the same time supplying you with the catchy classics."
The especially nice thing about that mix is that it's available as a free podcast, here:
http://podcast.soundarc.net/ (Scroll down to #2.)
Soundarc is also offering some other podcasts that may be interesting to readers of this site. |
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
3:19 PM
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