Content Nausea No. 29: Paraphrased
Can't be quoted it's hard to say
Welcome to the 29th edition of Content Nausea. You can read No. 28 right here. Please let me know what you think. Thank you for being here. Here is the welcome blog.
An afternoon interlude in South Philly earlier this week, courtesy of Steve Powers. It brings me endless joy to think about how one of my favorite murals is on the side of a Marshalls.
Some content I wrote this week
Eagles defensive end Brandon Graham had three people close to him diagnosed with the coronavirus. Two of them died. He was candid this week when talking about the pandemic’s impact in his hometown of Detroit and its impact on him. He has two young kids — who interrupted our Zoom call with him in hilarious fashion — and he gave us real insight into how his life has changed the past few months.
Graham and his family started practicing social distancing guidelines, which recommend remaining six feet from people outside of the home, avoiding crowded places or mass gatherings and not congregating in groups.
Recently, Graham began working out with new Eagles cornerback Darius Slay, who spent the first seven seasons of his career with the Detroit Lions before an offseason trade brought him to Philadelphia. Slay was still in the area, and the two discussed working out when the opportunity presented itself.
Before Graham and Slay got together outside of Detroit at Bloomfield Hills High School, though, the new teammates checked to see if the other had been following coronavirus guidelines.
“It just felt good to be able to come in contact,” Graham said. “I don't want to live in fear, but I am going to be smart about it coming out, so that was one thing that we talked about with each other. I know he'd been quarantining and doing the right things, so it's all about trusting and making sure that you do what you can because we both got kids.”
Doug Pederson talked this week and laid out his thoughts on how and when football might return.
Pederson on trust as his offseason message.
Still not exactly sure why Miles Sanders was apologizing, but it led to a post about tweets about posts about a tweet.
Carson Wentz and Jason Kelce discussed new coaching staff addition Rich Scangarello. Pederson doesn’t think his offense will change that much. He reminded us he’s not that far removed from a Super Bowl.
Some content I listened to this week
Carly Rae Jepsen’s Dedicated Side B was the obvious headliner from a good week of music, but I think I’m going to save my extended thoughts on that for later. I think that’s called a tease.
I touched on it last week, but Charli XCX’s how i’m feeling now is a good slice of life right now. After I scheduled Content Nausea No. 28, I drove around Philadelphia for two hours and ran through how i’m feeling now. The car seems to be the best way to get the full effect of an album (I was more lukewarm on Dedicated Side B until I got in the car and made a cider run yesterday), and Charli XCX holds up for cruising around the city or rolling down the Interstate.
Woods (pictured above at Woodsist Fest in September) released another great album in Strange to Explain. There are few bands as consistently good as Woods, and Strange to Explain feels like another logical evolution of their sound. Plus, Woods might be the perfect late spring/early summer band: At Echo Lake came out in May 2010 and Sun and Shade came out in June 2011, and those are two perfect albums for this time of year. Strange to Explain should join that group. I really need to seed Woods again.
The New York Times had a nice write up on Woods that focuses on Jeremy Earl and Jarvis Taveniere being recruited by David Berman in his return to music and the tragic turn everything took.
The surprise release of Jeff Rosenstock’s NO DREAM was a fun add in the middle of the week. “Ohio Tpke” is my early favorite from it:
Craft Spells’ 2012 Gallery EP popped back into rotation this week. “Still Left With Me” was one of my favorite songs of that year (and a staple on my summer mix that year), but I was drawn back to “Burst” more often than not this week:
This night’s our song
I really like you, would you like to get away?
Let's get away
I bought this EP at Co-Op 87 in Brooklyn during Memorial Day weekend 2012, a weekend that also featured: Mike Sniper hand-delivering me A Folding Sieve by Should from the Captured Tracks office; two The Babies shows at Death By Audio and Brooklyn Bowl; interviewing Cassie Ramone and Kevin Morby with Anna; Woodchuck’s awful spring cider that had maple syrup and brown sugar in it that was not meant to be consumed during an 85-degree weekend; Maryland losing to Loyola (Md.) in the lacrosse title game; and a host of other random things that popped into my mind while I was listening to this EP.
Editor’s note: I’m glad I got away from using filters on Instagram.
Some content I read this week
Some fun words on Mr. Boh from Hmm Weekly:
The word "liberate" here is not a euphemism, but the truth. It is not possible for anyone to steal Mr. Boh, because it is not possible to own Mr. Boh. He is a folk hero, the cultural commons, who belongs to everyone who believes in him. He survived the end of his own brewery plant and of the entire National Brewing Company, living on in the hearts of the people of his city, even when it seemed there might be no more beer for him to adorn the cans of. The narrow and backwards logic of intellectual property would tell you that another brewing concern acquired him, but in fact, as everyone knows, what happened was that Mr. Boh acquired another beer for himself.
Samantha Grasso on journalism in Discourse Blog (which is great!): What Will It Take For Me To Leave?
On nostalgia in The Walrus:
The idea that things will go on forever is simple delusion on our part—all things pass, etc.—but, as delusions go, it is surely among the most understandable if not the most fundamentally necessary. The knowledge that life is fleeting is barely digestible in retrospect; in real time, it’s debilitating. We yearn to go back because life is loss, loss, loss, all the way down.
Bomani Jones in conversation with The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner on Michael Jordan and The Last Dance. Comparing LeBron James to Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez from The Sandlot made for an interesting contrast. Speaking of The Last Dance, Scott Tobias in Vulture was good, too.
And I’ll give David Roth’s final The Last Dance recap for Vulture the final word for now (that’s another tease!):
Jordan gave himself entirely to his pursuit, and everything he had went into the furnace to fuel it. That’s the story of his life, and while there are many moments in The Last Dance when this seems plainly tragic — moments in which Jordan’s life seems empty and cold and joyless — it’s not at all clear that Jordan sees it that way. He wanted to win, and he won. Now he gets to tell all those stories again, as he wants them told, so that they prove the points and deliver the lessons that he wants them to prove and deliver. Jordan has lived his life as a battle of wills against the whole world, conscripting everyone and everything he encountered in his long war against the word “no” and anyone he thought might take from him what he’d won. It would be foolish to expect him to surrender creative control now.
The idea of sitting through another one of these about Tom Brady is nauseating.
Drew Magary on the return of sports and how it’s kind of unsettling.
Remember Civil? I kind of forgot about it, too, even though Popula produced some of my favorite essays in 2017-18, and I went to read Tom Scocca at Hmm Daily. There’s a good investigation/recap into what happened via Allegra Hobbs at Study Hall.
Some other content I saw or thought about this week
I read Kiley Reid’s Such A Fun Age in two days last weekend, and it was a great novel. It moved quickly, it was incisive, the characters were awful and embarrassing and it led to a satisfying resolution.
Thank you for reading the 29th edition of Content Nausea. It will get better. Thank you, and see you soon.
Sometimes my
Thoughts are infrequent explosions
Sometimes I
Drop definition from my words
Sometimes my
Speech recalls moments of violence
Sometimes I
Can't be repeated, I can't be
Paraphrased
No
—D.G.