Content Nausea No. 117: Fugitive Summer
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Welcome to the 117th edition of Content Nausea. You can read No. 116 right here. Please let me know what you think. Thank you for being here. Here is the welcome blog.
It’s May 1 and I’m sitting on the couch in my living room listening to the new Lucy Dacus record thinking about how on Jan. 1 I was sitting in the Phoenix airport in the aftermath of a bout of norovirus writing about how I was going to make this newsletter more consistent in 2025. And a quick check to the Content Nausea home page shows that it’s been more than two months since I did one of these. Whoops.
Time passes quickly, and it’s May. We’re not fully into spring in central Pennsylvania yet, but we’re getting close. The branches are slowly turning light green, and there are fewer spaces between the trees at the top of the hills. There was a day a couple weeks ago where suddenly the grass was green. I’m leaving for a couple days this evening, and I assume that when I come back, we’ll be fully into spring. That’s how things tend to work this time of year. Every year I challenge myself not to miss it. I think I do an OK job at it.
And yet again, we’re here for a bit of a recap. Since the last Content Nausea, I’ve spent time in Phoenix, Baltimore and Philadelphia, got sick yet again after going out in Bel Air, seen a couple baseball games, gone to a high school reunion and survived another NFL draft. And now it’s May, one of the better months of the year. What’s this month going to have in store? I’ll try to document it.
Some content I wrote this week
There isn’t much to share, I don’t think. It’s been a busy few weeks.
Some content I listened to this week
I’ve been trying to get out of the house and find different places to work in the area, which means frequenting breweries in the late afternoon when there aren’t many people there and I’m not taking up too much space with my computer. Yesterday, I struggled to get settled in. The parking lot at Voodoo was full, but then I had just been at Boal City on Monday. So then I drove over to Axemann, worked for a little bit and decided that I had anywhere from $25 to $75 to spend on records at Fez (the $95 copy of Marquee Moon that I look at every time I’m there remains out of the price range).
I bought Forever Is A Feeling by Lucy Dacus. I really like this record. It hits a couple good beats for me. There are lulls and some songs where the reaction is just, like, sure, but it’s got enough hits — “Ankles,” “Modigliani,” the title track, “Best Guess” — that it propels itself forward well. It passed the “melancholy drive around your hometown” test a couple weeks ago. Dacus has been a known commodity for a while (s/o The Le Sigh [RIP]) and a few songs broke through me on the other records. But this is the first time that a full record has gotten through to me. It’s great.
It’s been a solid couple of weeks for new releases overall: The Beloved Returns by Night Shop, Planet Popstar by Wishy, Welcome to My Blue Sky by Momma, Always Been by Craig Finn. The Night Shop record is a favorite. Also enjoyed the new single from Coma Cinema (we’re so back) and the new single from The Beths, along with the extra song Cloud Nothings added to Final Summer. The new Beach Bunny and Samia records probably deserve a little more time from me. But there’s a summer ahead. My monthly playlist hit rate has bottomed out over the past couple of years, but here was my best attempt to track things in April:
Gloorp went to Clemson, btw.
Some content I read this week
Books I finished reading since the last newsletter: You Didn’t Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip by Kelsey McKinney; The Lights: Poems by Ben Lerner; Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner; See Friendship by Jeremy Gordon; and No Judgment: Essays by Lauren Oyler.
The Oyler collection was a slog. Long Island Compromise was a fun fiction book to motor through in a couple days. I loved See Friendship. There’s some good themes in it about grief, what we tell ourselves, what we think we know and so much else. Also kind of a funny book to read right before going to a high school reunion. My currently reading is The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Such a beautiful writer.
Some links:
Twitter Person by Lindsey Adler
The Faustian Bargain of the “Sacramento” Athletics by Dan Moore, The Ringer
The complicated life of a modern ace: How Paul Skenes has navigated it all by looking inward by Jeff Passan, ESPN
Dwyane Wade’s Greatest Challenge by D. Watkins, The Atlantic
Donald Trump has transformed the American story by Osita Nwanevu, The Guardian
Carmelo Anthony is a Trail Blazer and a Hall of Famer by Sean Highkin, Rose Garden Report
A beloved skier, an audacious jump and the complex grief left behind by Roman Stubbs, The Washington Post
'Such a fairy tale ending': Inside Brandon Graham's final, turbulent, triumphant season as an Eagle by Tim McManus, ESPN
One Last Trip To Philadelphia’s Department Store Of Dreams by Dan McQuade, Defector
Some other content I saw or thought about this week
It sort of happened by accident, but I’m attempting to do monthly “dumps” on Instagram. That’s another platform where I don’t really know what the end goal is anymore. Is it too redundant to post something on the story early in the month and then recycle it at the end of the month for the grid? These are the things I think about while I’m up late at night.
Wow, how did I get this far without mentioning that I finished watching GIRLS? What a complete oversight by me. Loved it. I’ve expressed the sentiment to a couple different people, but I feel like it made perfect sense and was perfectly fine to hate on it in the moment, and it’s also OK now to be like, wow, great show. It’s a good litmus test for seeing who thinks characters in TV shows are real people. I hope Ray found happiness.
Thank you for reading the 117th edition of Content Nausea. It will get better. Thank you, and see you soon.
Baby, tune in tomorrow, tune out tonight
Baby, for a few hours, it’ll be alright
—D.G.