Tripartite.

...and brief, since all I'm focused on is unwinding.

One. A brief ode to Twitter, presented in precisely 140 characters as is the rule:

twitter is trending topics. brief bursts of convo, rather meditated-upon, succinct. minimalistic in a maximalistic screen-immersion culture.

Two. Dr. Oliver Sacks, whose book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain I picked up last week, was a guest on the June 29th episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Talks about how music stimulates the pleasure center of the brain. It's neat how things seem to rush at once into your life. Trending topics, again.

Three. I may have forgotten my third thought. Will just say that I've been continuing with my David Foster Wallace binge... devouring Brief Interviews with Hideous Men nowadays on the bus ride to and from work. It's a collection of his short stories, wild yet controlled. DFW's got a way of reigning in these bizarrely constructed tales, in an auto-crash, can't-look-away fascination. They're urgent, causing the reader to feel that not only is it rude to stop reading, it may in fact be unsafe to do so. Fictional characters will hang in your conscience well after you've scrubbed your hands of the grit and oil. It's not simply that it's dark. It's also sad and here and real.
I can safely say that he does short fiction as well as he does essays as well as he does hyper-lengthy fiction. What a guy.

"Tales of music and the brain"

Schopenhauer is quoted in the introduction to Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, "The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain... Music expresses only the quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves."

Dean & Britta, June 5th at the Black Cat

I've grown so accustomed to a fast internet connection that it seems tough to get by when you're just sitting around waiting for a page to load. Trying to pay bills online, but even the Bank of America website is taking its sweet time loading... and watching music videos doesn't seem worth it right now. Either way, it's a nice relaxing day - my day off!

Friday night I went with two of my best concert buddies to see Dean & Britta at the Black Cat. You might also know Dean Wareham from Galaxie 500 or Luna, the influential indie rock bands he formed in the 80s and 90s. Or you might not. Anyway, my friends Chris and Pete got me into Galaxie 500 pretty recently, so I'm a recent fan. But Chris has been following Dean Wareham for something close to 20 years and on Friday, he finally got to meet him! We also met Britta, who is gorgeous. Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips are married and play together as Dean & Britta. Seems a bit poppier than the older stuff, but they're a great live act. The Black Cat was pretty packed that night with a mix of longtime devotees and new listeners.


Watch a video of Galaxie 500's "Tugboat." Also check out the music video for Dean & Britta's "You Turn My Head Around" and others.