Three Things
Love & Mercy: The genius and madness of Brian Wilson. You get to watch Pet Sounds come alive in his mind and in the studio. You get to comprehend, finally, why all those songs are so pretty and yet so sad.
Homemade pizza dough: I'm not gonna go into great depth about pizza. We all know it. We all like it. But let's talk pizza dough! When you or someone you know makes it from scratch—makes it light and toasty and soft and flakey and crunchy all at once—well, it's pretty much a game changer.
Sorry Jamal Williams for running into you at vans and sorry for liberating the background noise: A Beatrice Domond video. "A largely self-filmed montage of non-spot tricks," as it's called in the interview with her I first saw it on. This chick does WTF she wants, in life and on her skateboard. Should we all be more like her and like that?
Jeff & The Brotherhood
Jeff And The Brotherhood laced up a set at the Doug Fir on Friday night. Do you y'all know them? Two lads from Nashville who happen to be brothers who also happen to play these grand stoney riffs for your listening pleasure. Of course, they used to sound a little more punk-y, like Weezer meets The Ramones. Now they're more sludgey, more unlaced. Anyway, they're just dudes. In jeans and tee shirts. One playing the drums, the other a guitar. It's almost too simple to work, and yet it does. More than works. It's fucking rock and roll!
Not Doing
I'm not good at doing nothing, but I want to be. I'm a fidgeter, a toe tapper, a person with checklists written down in little books. Busy is good. I like it when I work—even if "work" is doing laundry, clipping rose bushes, calling my mom—but I don't know if a human being's only purpose is to get stuff done.
Lately I've been trying to do absolutely nothing now and then. Not reading. Not texting. Not tidying. Not watching anything or listening to anything. It's really hard—the hardest! Which must mean it's good for me. Nourishing somehow. To be quiet and look at things. Consider things. Sit and breathe. I want to be confident in the face of simplicity. I want to lay in a tube in the middle of a lake and do nothing more than look at the place where the trees meet the sky.
What I Want To Watch
The End Of The Tour: RIP David Foster Wallace. He was a soldier on the battlefields of existential loneliness. He put into words what we're all feeling. The gift of articulation—it's no small thing.
Straight Outta Compton: An NWA biopic. No, wait—THE NWA biopic. "Speak a little truth and people lose their minds ... "
The Wolfpack: My world. Your world. Their world. They're all just constructions of a little thing called the human mind ... aren't they?????
Blue Moon
As you may know, there was a so-called "blue moon" this weekend. Despite its astrological implications—its deep cosmic portend of high and wild emotion—this rare second full moon of July looked much like other full moons.
I think it was the heat, though, the moon combined with the heat on Friday night, that really stirred together like a stiff cocktail and made everyone summer drunk. No one wanted to stay inside. No one wanted to be alone. Everyone was out doing something, wearing shorts and shirtsleeves—sometimes less, everyone was sweating, talking, laughing, and acting disorderly.
I stayed up late. I drank cold drinks with limes perched on the rim. I rode my bike all the way to Lombard Street and back, winding down the quiet boulevards under the grand ole pine trees as their limbs reached out like elephant trunks and pumped oxygen up into the stars.