Welcome to the 26th edition of Content Nausea. You can read No. 25 right here. Please let me know what you think. Thank you for being here. Here is the welcome blog.
Man, I really don’t have a good top for this newsletter. I was going to write about paying Cloud Nothings around $54 on Bandcamp for 27 live recordings a couple weeks ago, but I already wrote about how the band’s demoes from earlier this spring were giving me some major 2011 vibes. Whoops. Anyway, I set the over/under on live sets I would have been in attendance for at either 2.5 or 3.5, depending on the text thread, and it came in at two: March 31, 2012 at Red Palace in D.C., and Feb. 1, 2017 at Webster Hall in New York. The 2012 show was #formative (hi, Anastassia! even though we didn’t know each other!) and it was also the last time I heard them play “Forget You All The Time” live (unless they played it the next night at the Baltimore show, which I was also at).
The 2017 show was in a stretch where I saw them three times in five nights in three cities after Life Without Sound came out, and it was also during a bizarre day where I drove from Philly to Upper Marlboro, Maryland, and back, and then managed to get the Amtrak to New York while writing a couple stories about a teen deciding he was going to play college football at Penn State. Good times.
But anyway, that’s what the top of this newsletter was going to be about, and it ended up being that anyway. Carry on!
Emily is offering natal chart readings for $15 with all of the money going to charities for coronavirus relief. She did my chart a couple weeks ago, and it was an illuminating experience, even if I don’t completely understand it yet! Email Emily here, and your chart could be next.
I took a couple of Ls on the internet this week. The algorithm tracked that I had clicked on some American Apparel emails over the past few weeks (lol) and started serving me promoted Facebook posts for Los Angeles Apparel facemasks. I had lost track of Dov Charney over the past few years, and I thought, wait… right? So I clicked on one of the ads like a fool to find out, and now, Los Angeles Apparel men baby rib briefs (retail: $12) are following me across the internet.
The other L came from an email my mom sent me about my birthday and general apartment things, and whether I was any closer to buying a mattress. I inherited a queen mattress that rests on a dilapidated, wooden futon frame, and while it isn’t meant to be part of the longterm plan, it was an initial cost-savings that I intend to take advantage of for as long as I can. But I hadn’t thought about mattresses for a while, so I did some googling and perused Casper, Leesa and a bunch of others direct-to-consumer brands I had never heard of before landing on a Strategist post about mattresses that was broken down into too many categories. It did not provide much clarity.
But now I am being followed around by mattress ads on every social media platform. They all look comfortable, but I would prefer not to think about it right now.
Some content I wrote recently
wrote my baby brain and airplanes in Friday evening’s Content Nausea. I think this was one of my most-read newsletters, so I appreciate that!
Carson Wentz talked about being a dad.
Caught up with Maryland coach Mike Locksley to talk about new Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts.
Don’t compare a Hall of Famer to a rookie.
Wrote about how a 28-year-old Australian is playing for the Philadelphia Eagles because of the depictions of football in pop culture (or something).
Some content I read this week
Turntable was part of an older, more tribal internet that mostly went the way of blogs as social media rose to dominance. Even before quarantine, though, there were signs that people were craving a return to a more intimate kind of social-networking—as evidenced by the rise of Discord and similar apps, and indie-rock-themed Facebook shitposting groups. "Communities can only really form now in private," Stephen said. "It's harder to coalesce as a group in public. "[Privacy] just makes it feel less performative. You’re not out here farmin’ for likes and RTs."
I was gonna save my big Turntable.fm retrospective for the next summer, but it appears the pandemic has other ideas in mind. I’m writing this right now while participating in a JQBX room (s/o Maya) late on a Saturday night, and it’s bringing me some major 2011 vibes. I basically wrote about it here earlier this year. Wow, I’m already running out of ideas. But it’s fun. lol someone is playing “Sweet Disposition” by The Temper Trap in the room and I can’t remember why I hated on this song so much in 2010! I’m sure I had a “good” reason.
Anyway, good vibes. maybe I’ll let you guys know if I’m doing a JQBX room for my birthday later this week.
Writer Helen Fitzgerald on poetry in Kelsey McKinney’s Written Out newsletter last week was really good! It made me want to write more again. Also, Lindsay Bird’s “Pyramid Scheme” is devastating! In a good way!
Columnist Peter Schmuck is leaving The Baltimore Sun. I worked with Schmuck in 2013 and then again in 2015-16, and it was always fun. My favorite story with him was sitting at a table in the Oriole Park cafeteria before a Sunday game late in July or even in August and listening to him and another older scout discussing 1980s baseball, including the Donnie Moore tragedy. Everyone else at the table was quiet and just listened.
Another former Sun colleague who no longer works there is Don Markus, and he has joined the Substack lifestyle. On Sunday, Don wrote about moms (it was Mother’s Day, after all) and ESPN’s re-broadcast of a 1984 game between North Carolina and Maryland. UNC’s Michael Jordan was obviously the reason the game was on television, but it was such a time capsule. Len Bias was a sophomore. Lefty Driesell was on the bench. This insanely 1980s Maryland logo was on the court at Cole Field House. And Cole Field House! It was alive! It was rocking! There were “Carolina sucks!” chants. It was great. Kaz pointed out that it was one of the first times he was watching Len Bias in extended action, as opposed to highlights. The same was true for me. Maryland loses the game — obviously, because why would ESPN broadcast a game that young Michael Jordan loses? — but it was a memorable, social-distanced, Sunday afternoon experience.
Drew Magary made me want to eat pancakes. (I did not make pancakes Sunday).
Luke O’Neil on the end of Great Scott in Boston:
Some people spend their lives accumulating real estate and others spend their lives accumulating memories of experiences with friends in shitty bars and then you don’t even get to hold onto them for very long on the back end. Unlike real estate memories depreciate in value over time it’s a huge fucking rip off.
Spencer Hall & Jason Kirk in Hazlitt on sports:
For me, the thing that mattered most about sports is how they, by design, did not matter. We built industrial complexes around them, but at heart, they were about discovering which side had earned the right to shout the cooler obscenities on any given day. And then the following day, we would rediscover.
The soundtrack for “The Last Dance.”
David Roth has been great in his “The Last Dance” recaps, and these two passages on Episode 3 and Episode 5 stand out to me. This VICE piece also highlights some of my reservations with it all. I think I might write more on this when the series is over?
The problem is not just that Jordan isn’t a reliable narrator—he’s a pathologically competitive egomaniac, if you’re just joining us—but that he isn’t an especially insightful or curious one. Instead of making Jordan’s version of the story part of a broader whole, Hehir seems dedicated to reverse-engineering a broader and universally agreed-upon truth onto Jordan’s version of things.
His drive is undeniably what made Jordan, but it doesn’t necessarily make him interesting, and the fact that he only really tells one story—someone says Jordan can’t or shouldn’t do something, and then he does it anyway because fuck you—is only really a problem because Hehir keeps letting him tell it over and over and over again.
Episode VII and Episode VIII were pretty good last night.
Kim Gordon rules! Two good interviews with Brendan O’Connor and Amanda Petrusich:
To some people, I suppose art is expected to be beautiful. But it might be worthwhile to make something not perfect—to actually show failure, or be willing to disappear as the artist. I’m not sure this answers your question about awkwardness. I think, for me, it’s just trying to take whatever I’m doing a step further from what I’ve done, and sometimes that happens by making an awkward, shamanistic move that doesn’t fit into the logical choices of the work as you follow it.
Steve Francis flames out. He’s the first Terp I can remember. I’ll also never forget his appearance at the final Maryland home ACC basketball game.
Anne Helen Petersen had a passage in here that grabbed me, too.
Some content I listened to this week
The 04k20 playlist is ready for you.
Charli XCX is what we would call ‘on one’ right now:
Did not really ‘get’ Caribou in 2010, but I’m coming around now (s/o Matt):
New Hazel English album should get better as the weather gets better:
Listened to a ton of Get Up Kids recently, too:
Some other content I thought about this week
I have not watched much television during the pandemic, which is a little surprising to me, but then again, my day-to-day life has not really changed, and that day-to-day life does not consist of much television. But I watched “Normal People” last week — I got a concerned text from a friend making sure I did not binge it one night — and I enjoyed it.
I read Sally Rooney’s book last summer in one sitting (more or less) on a flight to Oregon, and I liked it a lot. The emotions and the feelings in it felt real and relatable, and it was easy to read. The show felt similar, though there is a distinct difference between reading about horny teens/college students and seeing the horny teens/college students, but I digress.
Paul Mescal’s depiction of Connell was great, and Daisy Edgar-Jones was good as Marianne. There were some things that stood out to me, like Connell’s personal development being easier to communicate on screen, while Marianne seemed to work better in book form. Shoutout to Connell’s mom again, though.
Also, I can’t figure out what tweet or newsletter I read a couple weeks ago that referred to “the show about the incommunicable Irish teens” but I need to figure out what that was because it was the best way to describe this show.
I missed some sort of Sally Rooney discourse because of the NFL draft last month, but the book is good and the show is good, and that’s enough for me.
The private discourse did yield a good screencap in the end:
Thank you for reading the 26th edition of Content Nausea. It will get better. Thank you, and see you soon.
And I never sleep but I go to bed
And I never sleep but I go to bed
And I never sleep
—D.G.