The inaugural podcast includes me reading my short story “Life on Mars”, a short piece involving a resigned man grappling with guilt on the surface of Mars while living among a sociopathic shipmate. It runs about 8 minutes and is probably not appropriate for work/children. Future podcasts will include more stories, fiction, and essays, and possibly interviews and discussions.
This may not be a linkblog, but if you’re looking for an ongoing digest of the (IMHO) best of the web, join me over at 12 Pt. Plan. It covers any number of topics, including politics, media, culture, the universe and idiocy, and will be updated many times daily. The best Internet of the day, with short, often rude, commentary. Think of it as a really well-curated Digg, except you can’t post to it, and its target demographic is not misanthropic 16-30 year old Best Buy employees and IT guys who fall to sleep reading the Fountainhead on their Kindle. So, really, absolutely nothing like Digg.
Since the arrest of the human memegrinder ‘the hipster grifter’, hipster bashing has finally gone mainstream. The transformation of the hipster from straw man to bogeyman has been a gradual process: here’s a first, incomplete draft of this supremely important cultural history. Click here to read more »
Not much to report for now, just a quick news update. This new site is almost completely finished and out of its pre-pubescent ‘beta’ status. I’m working on a number of writing pieces for a few outlets, which I’ll have links to soon, and I hope to put the finishing touches on this new site design within the week. For the time being, take a look at the music page, which includes posts including full-album downloads of a number of the musical projects I was involved in (and all of the compilations I put together,) as well as my new personal blog, which is full of needlessly inflammatory items. There’s also an exhaustive metafeed of items I’m reading and posting to various social media tools, and a cherry-picked archive of articles I’ve written over the past couple of years. Thanks for reading, there’s a ton coming up so check back soon!
This is funny.
It appeared in McSweeney’s Gazette for Knowledge Workers with Ironic Sensibilites, though it could also have appeared in any number of boomer-oriented publications at any point during the past four decades, with only minor alterations. ‘Those damned kids don’t read’ is the most evergreen of all think-piece/satirical feature topics. To illustrate this point, wherever Twitter/blogging/etc are referenced in Lanham’s piece, replace said reference with any of the following: Click here to read more »
I’ve been going through an internal debate lately about whether to keep Is Greater Than going–as any publisher (web or print), could have told me, the challenges of running a consistently-updated publication are many, and even moreso if you have any pretensions to offering a quality product. Said product’s quality is debatable, though the intensions certainly are for it to be so.
It’s hard to consider ending it, for any number of reasons: supportive readership, a great community of contributors, and my personal attachment to the project. I’d like to think that the concept behind it is inherently sound, even if the energy it demands is even more than I initially anticipated.
All the same, it’s exhausting, and the personal burnout has taken its toll. The site, which was running as many as six pieces weekly last fall and in the spring, has sputtered into an unsteady rhythm of one piece a week (if even that.) Burnout is certainly a factor, but there are other considerations going through my head: Click here to read more »
From the Metro Santa Cruz
Rock music is obsessed with picking over its own bones, constantly recapitulating what has come before in increasingly derivative permutations. It’s rare to come across a band with a sound that’s undeniably new, but Portland’s Menomena is just such a band, skillfully merging meat-and-potatoes indie rock with digital loops, a dub-inspired low-end rumble and a contemporary cut ‘n’ paste approach to composition. If there’s another band Menomena most resembles–philosophically if not sonically–it’s Radiohead, in their recontextualization of what a rock band can be in a digital age. Click here to read more »
26 April 1:12pm
I often lay in bed, imagining putting my head in a vice. The vice coming down, cracking my jaw, giving at least some relief. If nothing else, it might move the pain elsewhere. I think about these scenarios all the time, obsessively; I can’t help myself, the throbbing is insistent. At least inventing these scenarios gives me some sort of escape. I think about taking a hammer to my jaw, about running a screwdriver through the abscess, about slamming my head against the wall until I can’t feel a thing. Click here to read more »
From Is Greater Than
Two weeks ago, the New York Times announced that American military action in Iraq and Afghanistan had come to an end. If you missed this piece of breaking news while watching Fox and Friends, or didn’t catch it in your RSS news feed, there’s good reason: this wasn’t the old Gray Lady announcing the end of the war, that venerable one-time home of fabulist Jayson Blair, the allegedly leftist mouthpiece that gave safe harbor to WMD cheerleader Judith Miller. Instead the news was broken by the New York Times Special Edition, a mock recreation by a grassroots army comprised of activist groups and individuals. Click here to read more »
From Proximity Magazine
“Hey man, can I see your ink?”
I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Los Alamos, NM, working from the road and trying not to explode at the soccer Mom behind me. She’s bragged for the past forty-five minutes to a friend about her children’s college plans. “Well, she can’t decide between Harvard and Stanford,” a statement expressed in a hundred different ways over the past 6500 seconds. In front of me is a timid teenage boy bearing the store-bought tokens of the feigned high school badass–dandruffed hair and a washer-worn My Chemical Romance t-shirt. He wants to see my tattoos, and feeling a solidarity with my teenage self, I oblige, even though I’m way past deadline.
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