“Could you work to build something besides a wall?”

“Just Keep Singing” – Winter 2014/2015

1. David Bowie – Fantastic Voyage
2. Panda Bear – Mr. Noah
3. Mr. Twin Sister – In the House of Yes
4. D’Angelo and the Vanguard – The Charade
5. Bill Withers – Use Me
6. I Love Makonnen – Tuesday
7. Justin Timberlake feat. T.I. – My Love
8. XTC – Making Plans for Nigel
9. Wham! – Everything She Wants
10. Fitz and the Tantrums – Out of My League
11. The Decemberists – The Wrong Year
12. TV on the Radio – Could You
13. Caribou – Silver
14. Kendrick Lamar – The Blacker the Berry
15. The Field – Looping State of Mind
16. Spoon – Rainy Taxi
17. Father John Misty – I Went to the Store One Day

Annotations:

“Prudence never pays”

“Drilling Down” – Spring 2014

1. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Get Ready for Love
2. Little Dragon – Klapp Klapp
3. Mr. Little Jeans – Good Mistake
4. Pharrell – Hunter
5. Hot Chip – Atomic Bomb (William Onyeabor cover)
6. Phoenix – One Time Too Many
7. Future Islands – Seasons (Waiting On You)
8. Elbow – Great Expectations
9. Friendly Fires & the Asphodells – Before Your Eyes
10. Wild Beasts – Wanderlust
11. The Smiths – Girl Afraid
12. TV on the Radio – Mercy
13. Arcade Fire – We Exist
14. Todd Terje – Delorean Dynamite
15. Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra – Any Fucking Thing You Love

Here’s a Spotify link to the playlist, let’s see if it works…

Annotations after the cut…

“Don’t be such a nerd, we’ll leave it all to chance”

“One Choice” – Fall 2013

1. The Smiths – Asleep
2. Washed Out – It All Feels Right
3. Holy Ghost! – Dumb Disco Ideas
4. Kendrick Lamar – Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe
5. Of Montreal – Belle Glade Missionaries
6. Four Tet – Parallel Jalebi
7. The Dismemberment Plan – Mexico City Christmas
8. Oneohtrix Point Never – Problem Areas
9. White Denim – At Night, In Dreams
10. Okkervil River – Down Down the Deep River
11. Franz Ferdinand – Stand on the Horizon
12. Cults – Keep Your Head Up
13. CHVRCHES – Night Sky
14. Los Campesinos! – Avocado, Baby
15. Drake – Too Much
16. Arcade Fire – Afterlife

Annotations after the cut:

A Helpful Visit

The comic is actually way bigger, so please click here to read it in the hi-res glory that this ramshackle black-and-white comic was meant for!

 

She may not want this, but I’m giving credit to my friend Meredith for the germ of this idea a few months back. I think I had been acting like a smart ass at the time (imagine that).

Deferred Jams

(Being the latest in my series of quarterly mixes…this one easily a month late.)

“Too Much Time” – Summer 2011

1. Phoenix – Consolation Prizes
2. Holy Ghost! – Wait and See
3. Little Dragon – Nightlight
4. Jay-Z & Kanye West – Ni**as in Paris
5. Aeroplane – Caramellas
6. The Rapture – How Deep is Your Love?
7. Friendly Fires – Chimes
8. Ra Ra Riot – Ghost Under Rocks
9. Ducktails – Killin the Vibe
10. Okkervil River – The Valley
11. Cults – Go Outside
12. Yacht – I Walked Alone
13. The Mountain Goats – High Hawk Season
14. Times New Viking – Fuck Her Tears
15. TV on the Radio – New Cannonball Blues
16. Washed Out – Before
17. White Denim – Is and Is and Is
18. M83 – Midnight City
19. The Flaming Lips – Feeling Yourself Disintegrate

Annotations:
-I made an honest-to-god mixtape for someone this summer, and after making it felt I had to tell her not to read too much into the song titles and lyrics I chose. Same thing applies here. I’m drawn to melodies much more quickly than lyrics most of the time, and trying to literally transcribe four months of my life via song titles wouldn’t be much fun for anyone as it is. So basically, don’t look at titles like “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” and “Fuck Her Tears” and assume I had a shitty summer or anything.
-Actually, “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” is on there because I saw the Flaming Lips play the entirety of The Soft Bulletin at Hollywood Forever cemetery a few months back. It was nuts, and a fantastic way to revisit one of my favorite albums from college. Maybe they’ll do Yoshimi shows in two years?
-“Go Outside” was pretty overplayed and isn’t even a favorite song of mine, but it’s here as motivation, I guess – to go outside, do stuff, stay active. Or else!
-So, so tough to choose a Yacht song – I’ve been jocking Shangri-La constantly for months now, and I very nearly chose “Dystopia” or “Paradise Engineering” instead. The whole album’s great, and the band is a ton of fun live. I’m sure you’ll be seeing much more from this album on future mixes.

Welcome back, me!

I have been away from blogging for a loooong time. But now I’m back. Lucky you!

I thought this would be an appropriate time for a change; hence the shiny new name, layout and WordPress address. If you’ve faithfully followed me over here from my old Blogspot page, then god bless you for being a decent human.

I’m hoping that migrating over to WP will excite me enough to post more regularly. I also want to focus on smaller, more frequent posts; my Feeding The Sumo entries often got pretty out of control to the point where they were pretty daunting both to write and to read.

Comics will be back at some point, too. I have some vague ideas, but I only start work on one when a subject really grabs me. Last thing I want to do is force out some unfunny shit every day just to keep the plates spinning. That’s the same philosophy I have with my writing, too.

Which brings me to the new title. “The Daily Friction” is more for my benefit than yours (sorry). I’m not saying I will be posting daily or that my posts will cause friction at your work or in your love life. (I mean, it’s always a possibility, but.) The Daily Friction describes all of the little shit that rises up each day to keep you from getting where you want to go. It’s the email offering 21% off that new Balkan restaurant you will never visit, and the 30 other daily emails just like it. It’s the minivan barely scratching 45MPH in front of you on the freeway. It’s the dead irregular lightbulb you have to remember to replace on the way home from the office. It might be the office in general. And it could very easily be this here blog of mine, too.

The point is that The Daily Friction is always there whether you like it or not. It can be reduced, but it cannot be eliminated. We can get angry at it, but to what end? There is nowhere rational to focus your hate (unless you believe in some deity akin to Final Destination‘s boring, underachieving cousin). The only healthy response is to learn to live with it. It’s something I’m still trying to do, myself, and I’m hoping that the more I use and discuss this blog, the more the concept will ingrain itself into my subconscious.

Look, 9 out of 10 blogs are hussied-up attempts at self-therapy, anyway. I’m just being real about it.

I hope you’ll stick around to see where this thing goes. I am pretty curious about it myself!

Missed it by that much.

November was the first month since starting my blog earlier this year that went without a single update.

Shit.

I consider this a wake-up call. I do have things to say (I promise), I just feel a lot of my posts ended up much longer than I’d planned, to the point that I became wary of having to match new post sizes to the monoliths that came before.

That, and people tell me my posts are too damn long anyway. Ha.

Well, it’s probably true. All our attention spans are shrinking, especially when it comes to internet content. When I fire up Google Reader over breakfast, I usually skip anything I can’t get the gist of in a few seconds. No reason to expect my readers to be any different (but here’s hoping!).

So, anyway, short story shorter: more content coming soon. In smaller, bite-size chunks. For Democracy!

The Name of this Band is The Name of this Band

One of the hardest parts of the creative process for me, still, is naming. Assigning a proper name to a character – or even a non-living object or process – is generally the last part of the journey for me. Maybe I’m a perfectionist, but I feel that an individual’s name has to do a good job of encapsulating what makes them unique. Not that I’m about to name a hard-boiled soldier anything as crass as “Ace Shooter”, but I think we can find more interesting possibilities than your typical “Jim Smith” or “Lisa Johnson” or “Chris Meyer”. Names are literary shorthand for first impressions, and we all know how important those are.

I struggled for a while to come up with a name for this blog. And problems intensified when I found that most of my blogspot title ideas (OK, the best of my ideas) had already been registered long ago. It echoed my struggle years ago to come up with an unused AIM screenname that was still clever and didn’t end in an arbitrary string of numbers. (I eventually relented and slapped “720” on the end of my handle. Oh well.)

But, just as I did back then, I was curious as to who had had these ideas before me. Were they of a similar humor? Kindred spirits? Might I befriend these strangers across the vast anonymity of the internet? Or, would I be horrified to find that they appear smarter than me?

Curiosity got the better of me, and I visited all the already-registered pages that I couldn’t create. And here they are, if you’d like to join me in exploring what might have been:

expletive deleted: beaten to the punch by a Czech guy who seems to have gotten drunk and trashed the place.
procrastination station: seems to have led a short and sad life, despite sounding like the title of a children’s show.
brain cavities: really? not one single entry?
chris is a sexy beast: To be fair, I probably would not have really done anything with this, either.

Those options unavailable, I eventually settled on FEEDING THE SUMO. It’s a reversal of the phrase “Starving the Sumo”, which is a mantra intended to help adolescents avoid masturbating and was first used in the unintentionally hilarious Christian motivational film Every Young Man’s Battle. The idea being that our perverse nature is as hungry as Yokozuna, and if we give him some food he’ll bounce us out of the ring. I think.

Not that I’m going to blog about masturbation (sorry), but there is a thematic resonance underneath it all. I’m fond of using the term “mental masturbation” to describe anyone who goes to such trouble to show off their mental superiority that their efforts end up doing more harm than good. But I also think that anyone freely offering up their opinions as if they are of automatic benefit to readers – as I am clearly doing – is kind of engaged in the same egotistical stroking, if less disastrously. Not saying it’s a negative (or, if you’re Christian, sinful) thing, I just think it’s an interesting parallel.

To put it another way: You’ve got to have some balls to think people are going to care what you have to say. And if your intellectual Sumo does end up informing and entertaining others, why wouldn’t you want to feed the guy?

This blog, and myself, explained

Do I really need another distraction in this world? Does anyone?

Probably not. Though I can boast memberships on nearly a dozen web communities and social networks – and yes, even Twitter – here I am, creating a blog only now, years late to a party that may be past its apex. But I do have a reason to be here, and I hope it’s one that keeps me updating it (and maybe even somebody reading it) long after other online crazes have been forgotten.

The reason is the medium itself: writing. I’m currently an amateur writer, hoping to make it professionally one day. To date, I’ve written a few screenplays, and I have a regular gig co-writing the all-ages comic Rabbit and Bear Paws. I have a bunch of other projects in various states of outlining/scripting/imagining – but these are all giant, complex undertakings of creativity, and sometimes I just want to write a few paragraphs reacting to something. So that means there will be occasional reviews of movies, books, comics, music; maybe random thoughts on the creative process itself. If you’re lucky (and if I’m even luckier), I may even talk about my own experiences in the field.

But I want to make sure this stays a blog focused on creativity and creation; if this devolves into biweekly posts of funny YouTube videos, it becomes just another nameless echo station in the virtual landscape and I might as well stop wasting everyone’s time. And, as a budding professional, I’d like to avoid burning bridges in the industry and so try to keep snark and shit-talking out of my reactions. So if you see any of that negativity starting to creep into my posts, you have my permission to virtually kick my ass!

Anyway, that’s the basics explained. I hope you keep reading. And I also hope I keep posting: the blogosphere is littered with the Best of Short-Lived Intentions, which is actually something I want to discuss in my next entry. That, and the meaning behind the title of this Blog! Dramatic!