lily k. on aux camera/my holiday on the tiled dragon, nashville

mark newgarden’s we all die alone is the single greatest book i read this year. nihilism, like lots of isms, is a cheap way to court sex for people who love the abstract truth but lack the courage and tenderness to find humor in death. there, i said it. in we all die alone, people dive right into the nasty, hilarious slit of the matter and don’t have to metamorphize into celestial beings to do it. because farting and big honkers are as mortal as fear. so conversations aren’t all abstract, but they are brutally honest; in one episode, an older woman tries to tell her husband about the beautiful dream she had of them the previous night–beachwalking, serenity–while he replies, “fuck me” in endless recurrence. i cried like crazy.

panda bear, “carrots” b/w excepter, “kkkkk”

i can’t even tell if the hippies are getting better or not, but i have come to reckon with the fact that i’d swim around in their piss if they sold it by the bucket. i can never wait to hear what they do next. part of it is that they’re constantly seeding more than they can sew (“carrots” is a half-triumph at best), that the open-ended “here’s what we were thinking for 20 minutes” works with a blog-type methodology: sure, you might not find a willing public for all your spew, but spewing whenever the spirit moves you only refines your approach. for fans, this is an enthralling thing to watch.

pbw poll: do you have a fixation on listening to all recorded output by a single band that doesn’t require some psychic loin-girding for mediocrity or disappointment? whose piss would you swim in?

also, in 1989, epmd recorded a song called “you had too much to drink,” which is the best public service announcement for rap-rock and responsible drinking i have ever heard. truly agonizing.