Content Nausea No. 33: Slide Machine
I'm trying, I'm trying, trying to get back to you / And I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying to get back to you
Welcome to the 33rd edition of Content Nausea. You can read No. 32 right here. Please let me know what you think. Thank you for being here. Here is the welcome blog.
This is going to be a maintenance edition of Content Nausea. There was a great plan in late June and early July to be hitting on all cylinders again, but it’s summer and it’s hot and it’s hard to do anything. I spent the week at home cleaning out things from my parents’ basement, and Anna and I resurfaced some exquisite games of hangman.
In the next couple weeks, you’ll get a newsletter about seeing Cloud Nothings for the first time more than 10 years ago (that one is almost done and should have come out like three weeks ago) and maybe some thoughts on Toy Story 3 and “The Decision” a decade after the fact (that one was supposed to drop last week). But we’re all trying our best here, right?
A rather insane range of outcomes on these games. I can only imagine what “_i_e” was going to turn out to be.
We’re past the halfway mark of the year. You can listen to some of my favorite songs from the year in the above playlist.
My favorite albums of the year so far:
Charli XCX -- how i’m feeling now
Kevin Krauter -- Full Hand
Real Estate -- The Main Thing
Lil Uzi Vert -- Eternal Atake
Waxahatchee -- Saint Cloud
No Age -- Goons Be Gone
Dogleg -- Melee
Bullion -- We Had A Good Time
HAIM -- Women In Music Pt. III
Tycho -- Simulcast
Mac Miller -- Circles
Porches -- Ricky Music
The 1975 -- Notes On A Conditional Form
Selena Gomez -- Rare
Ratboys -- Printer’s Devil
Carly Rae Jepsen -- Dedicated Side B
Soccer Mommy -- Color Theory
I’m Glad It’s You -- Every Sun, Every Moon
Woods -- Strange To Explain
Frass Green -- Death of Pop
under consideration: Caribou -- Suddenly; Elvis Depressedly -- Depressedelica; Future -- High Off Life; Hazel English -- Wake UP!; Magdalena Bay -- A Little Rhythm and a Wicked Feeling; Nap Eyes -- Snapshot of a Beginner; Snarls -- Burst; Trace Mountains -- Lost in the Country; Yves Tumor -- Heaven to a Tortured Mind.
What am I missing? What should I be listen to? I’m trying.
Some content I wrote this week
Vacation!
Some content I listened to this week
This may shock you, but the new Cloud Nothings album, The Black Hole Understands, is really good, and of course, I signed up as a ‘super subscriber’ on Bandcamp to support. Not sure I’ll write about this album in the Cloud Nothings mega-newsletter coming in the next few weeks, but this quarantine album marries the bedroom sensibilities of the early releases with the natural growth and development that’s occurred over the past decade(!), and the end result is a really and easy listen.
Jump Rope Gazers from The Beths was a good summer Friday album. “Acrid” has been getting lots of burn on the Instagram Stories, but I’m partial to “Out of Sight,” which was a grower as a single.
Some other things I gave some run: The Life of Pi’erre 4 (Deluxe) by Pi’erre Bourne; Women In Music Pt. III by HAIM; I Love You Say It Back by Key!; Widowspeak by Widowspeak; June 2009 by Toro y Moi; and Mista Thug Isolation by Lil Ugly Mane.
The 062k20 playlist ended up good, too:
Also, the Playlist King reworked the infamous hot knox and it remains unassailable:
Some content I read this week
This is doubling as a Pocket queue cleanout so there’s going to be some very old stories here.
In pursuit of its goal of perfect, frictionless streaming, Spotify encourages you to outsource the work of deciding what you like and dislike, and of figuring out why. In other words, it discourages listening to music as such. Not all listening requires immersive attentiveness—that’s what the radio is for—but in its attempts to swallow up radio and home listening alike, Spotify turns all music into something that fills up the background while you work or exercise or scroll through Twitter. And at least radio stations have DJs. Listening to Spotify is like listening to a radio station run by the stupidest version of myself.
Alex Kirshner on college football player protests in The Ringer.
From ESPN The Magazine in 2015: The allure of Ole Miss football.
The oral history of The Onion’s 9/11 edition via MEL.
Diana Moskovitz on Miami Herald crime reporter Edna Buchanan and reporting on police for Popula.
The great Hanif Abdurraqib on “The Vanishing Monuments of Columbus, Ohio” for The New Yorker:
The work of the people is what endures. It’s unromantic work, done in small increments, sometimes just as a blueprint for whatever future movements might arise, and it’s more precious than any bronzed monument or seal or city name. The work of the students who will not rest until the cops leave their schools. Of the medics who guide people under the shade of a tree and flush the tear gas out of their eyes. Of the people who sew masks, or make bags of supplies and bike them across the city through police barricades. Of the people who carry bags of ice so that the water stays cold. Of the black people who sacrifice their own safety to keep their people safe. Of the people who show up to courthouses, and in front of police stations, and in the suburbs. Of the mothers who grieve for their dead children and who, despite their grief, continue to fight for the living. The new monuments the people are building toward cannot yet be seen. And still, here we are, leaping forward.
A #longread on a social media cult.
Stephanie Apstein in Sports Illustrated on how baseball’s return plan doesn’t really matter (I think this is where the “functioning society” line that was going around recently via Sean Doolittle came from?):
Sports are a treat you get when you live in a functioning society. We do not live in a functioning society. We live in a society in which more than 118,000 people have died of COVID-19, the curves are pointed upward … and states are responding by reopening.
I wish that I had been more curious about who Jiddo and Teta were beyond my grandparents, one part of an intense familial bond based on inherent, silent affection. I wish I asked them more about their lives at those late-afternoon meals instead of worrying about what I’d watch on Kids’ WB while I ate. Merely being in their presence was so comforting, but it took years to realize how much more I could have shared with them. The grief spreads out in cascading moments triggered by memories, waves that will continue to lap against the shore for the rest of my life, each one making its own temporary imprint.
David Roth on “The Twilight of the Cop Consensus” in The New Republic. Alex Pareene also wrote about that night in Fishtown for The New Republic. The Philadelphia Inquirer report on that night is good, too.
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s tick-tock on what went wrong late in May is good, along with the news story on the decision to use tear gas on protesters blocking I-676.
I’m tired of the The Brands:
Pepsi pulled the ad, and apologized. But since 2017, most food brands issuing statements seem to follow the same set of unspoken rules: Never commit to any action; and never, under any circumstances, examine your own internal systems and policies or how they might affect your workers.
Kelsey McKinney on writing in her Written Out newsletter (I subscribed last month!):
On the phone with my friend we weren’t talking about writing. But this kind of discovery of passion and choosing of it is true for anything really: getting a dog, choosing a new city to live, finding a partner, picking a career. Everything requires us to sacrifice something. We were talking a bit about how you can’t control your dreams. How sometimes you want something so much that you accidentally bend your life into a shape you don’t want to get it. It’s hard to realize how much you might give up to get something you want. We can’t have it all, we know, but which parts of it all are we willing to give up to have the other parts, which parts are worth most?
Jim Fixx’s running legacy during the coronavirus in Sports Illustrated.
Gabriella Paiella on Steve Buscemi in GQ.
Some other content I saw or thought about this week
We watched Airplane! for Anna’s birthday Wednesday night, and it is hilarious. I want to watch it over and over again. I’m also trying to watch TV again and have finished the first two seasons of Entourage over the past two or three weeks. I want more frictionless content.
Some books I finished since the last newsletter:
1984 by George Orwell
Tanking to the Top: The Philadelphia 76ers and the Most Audacious Process in the History of Professional Sports by Yaron Weitzman
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
I brought a bunch books back from home, so I need to figure out where I will put them and then which ones I should read. I also brought by Yellowcard concert DVD back, so we’ll all have to figure out when to get together and watch it.
I drove around the suburbs at night listening to Only By The Night by Kings of Leon. Holds up as both a 2008 activity and a 2020 activity.
OK, I’m vamping now.
Thank you for reading the 33rd edition of Content Nausea. It will get better. Thank you, and see you soon.
I've been down south where they use the slide machine
Where the gods are overheard but seldom seen
And here I been just stuck up in between
Yeah, trying, trying, trying to get back to you
Yeah I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying to get back to you
—D.G.