brendawgiswhat

Yes, I just spent an hour on youtube watching charlotte hatherley videos

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 02:48:00 GMT

and this one really sums up today well:

CRUSHING: Micachu

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 05:16:15 GMT

"Lips"

"Golden Phone"

"Calculator"

Discovering PJ Harvey & how awesome she is

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 01:08:14 GMT

"Grow Grow Grow"

"Black Hearted Love"

Man-Size

Down By The Water

Beeeeeen Soooo Loooong

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 03:31:47 GMT

Aaaaand the wooooorld seee-eeeee-eeeems sooooo cooold and Iyyyyy think that Iyyyy'llll...spend much more time on the Tumblr. It's just so nice and pretty for the little things that make up most days, but not so good for long form stuff, which is why I should probably sit down here more often.

For the life of me I cannot remember which Stevie Wonder song that is!

More than usual

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:15:43 GMT

I usually hate being at work anyway, but I feel like I'm going crazy today, and being here is only making it worse.

Over there

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 03:22:08 GMT

Photo dump, in addition to a busy day at the Tumblr.

Suddenly re-roused by Beatles' songs

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 14:21:29 GMT

and playing video games and watching sports ALL DAY LONG. What is it about coming home to Milford that turns me back into a 17 year old?

Huge chunks of X

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 02:45:12 GMT

Susan Sontag, I don't know who you are (Wikipedia will assist me momentarily) but I love you eternally for writing this in your journal/notebook (via this month's Harper's):

February 1960
X, the scourge.

"X" is when you feel yourself an object, not a subject. When you want to please and impress people, either by saying what they want to hear, or by shocking them, or by boasting + name-dropping, or by being very cool.

America is a very X-y country. Can limit "X" by rules of class + sex behavior, which America has less clearly defined.

The tendency to be indiscreet -- either about oneself or about others (the two often go together, as in me) -- is a classic symptom of X. Alfred pointed this out at the White Horse the other night. (This was the first time I. and I had talked about X with anyone). Alfred is like me in this way.  Alfred has huge chunks of X!

People who have pride don't awaken the X in us.  They don't beg. We can't worry about hurting them.  They rule themselves out of our little game from the beginning.

Pride, the secret weapon against X. Pride, the X-cide.

Apart from analysis, mockery, etc., how do I really cure myself of X?

I. says analysis is good.  Since it was my mind that got me into this whole, I have to dig myself out by way of the mind. But the real result is a change of feeling.  more precisely, a new relation between feelings and the mind.

The source of X is: I don't know my own feelings.

I don't know what my real feelings are, so I look to other people (the other person) to tell me.  Then the other person tells me what he or she would like my feelings to be.  This is ok with me, since I don't know what my feelings are anyway, I like being agreeable, etc.

I don't know what my real feelings are. That's why I'm so interested in moral philosophy, which tells me (or at least turns me toward) what my feelings ought to be.  Why worry about analyzing the crude ore, I reason, if you know how to produce the refined metal directly?

Why don't I know what I feel?  Am I not listening?  Or am I turned off?  Doesn't everyone naturally have reactions to everything?  (P. used to enrage me because there were so many things he didn't react to -- sit in this chair or that, go to this movie or that, order this or that on the menu.)

Why don't we mind when others react X-ily to us? Don't I in fact despise the prematurely balding young man in the faculty dining room X-ing all over the place?

2/29/60
More thoughts on X:

X is why I am a habitual liar. My lies are what I think the other person wants to hear.

I have an X-feeling for Sarah Lawrence, as I had last year for Commentary. Why? because I feel I haven't fulfilled my obligations there.  I've been unpunctual, unprepared, etc.

But note: it's true.  I am delinquent.  I missed last Thursday's class.  I never prepare for the Tuesday lectures.  I always come after lunch on Thursday when my contract says I must be there at 10:00.  It's true I get away with it, but my feeling for the place becomes sick, infected.

Maybe people who are X-prone are habitually irresponsible?

Isn't the problem that I don't know any of the degress between a total enslavement to a responsibility and ostrich-like irresponsibility?  All or nothing, what I've been so proud of in all my love life!

All the things that I despise in myself are X: being a moral coward, being a liar, being indiscreet about myself + others, being a phony, being passive.

X is Sartre's "bad faith."

3/12/61
The way to overcome X is to feel (be) active, not passive. I feel anxious when the phone rings -- therefore I don't answer or I get someone else to. The way to beat that is not to force myself to answer the phone.  It is to make the calls myself.

Lesson Learned

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 20:26:20 GMT

But life is long! What will I do to occupy myself for every day for the next twenty years? Obvy, planning that is preposterous, but it's still fun to think about. You can do a lot in twenty years! This sounds so plain and simple, but it's making me very happy right now.

David Byrne & Brian Eno "Life Is Long"

Everybody says that the living is easy
I can barely see 'cause my head's in the way.
Tigers walk behind me - they are to remind me
that I'm lost, but I'm not afraid.

Soul to soul - a kiss and a sigh
sawed in half by the passage of time.
Halfway home, from a window you see
chains and bars, but I am still free.

Welcome!

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:25:50 GMT

Hey - Brez (uh, Heather Bresnahan) got a new LJ! amen_enema - which will probably be about more than affirming rectal cleaning. Friend her!

Full Disclosure: I think Brez is great, and sometimes I sit down and write things like this to myself:

"I think Heather is probably the most wonderful and interesting person I've ever met. She's got a lot of qualities that are rare these days – namely, she's very sincere at all times and, quite often, she's got absolutely no fear of being curious, asking questions, being wrong, etc – and that's probably due to her amazing powers of earnestness. Also, she farts, burps, talks about her poop, period, scratches her crotch when it itches, doesn't shave at all, and yet remains the cutest, cuddliest person on the planet. Again, I think this is due to her unyielding sincerity, but I don't know how to express exactly how much this means to me. Brez is not always a comfortable person to be with, and she's not always comfortable with herself, but she's very comfortable being herself, whatever that is, and it's probably the most refreshing thing ever."

I'm rather proud of that paragraph.

Somebody touch me

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 16:05:56 GMT

Please!

Back online!

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 01:37:11 GMT

Back on the internet. Going to get less reading done. Started one of those wonderful tumblr things for myself.

If my Facebook status could be a paragraph

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:32:00 GMT

Andrew is going to work, getting his paycheck, totally going shopping for underwear and shirts, eating something for dinner, moving into his new apartment, which is exciting, except that he will have no internet in that place until Sept. 10th unless he can steal wireless from one of his neighbors, and he won't have cable either, which means he won't be able to watch the RNC next week, which he is surprisingly upset about, which got him wondering, "is there a bar that will show the RNC? If so, do I really want to go in there and drink? Yes."

I couldn't have one of these things and not post music

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 02:04:29 GMT

So, Erich called a week ago (two weeks ago?) asking for me to give him some of that kind of music he likes, you know the kind, Brendawg. And I do, but I didn't know how to tell Erich that for the past year or so I've been predominantly listening to music with a heavy groove-factor -- 90s hip hop, funk, disco-tinged dance, afrobeat, reggae, and some post-punk and modern rock/pop artists who incorporate those genres of music into theirs. Not the stuff twee is made of. But, of course, Erich likes more than twee, and I know this. He loves that song about fucking a hamburger by Gravy Train!!!!!!! and he likes The Knife and all sorts of great things. The problem is mostly that I've been relatively out of touch with a good amount of contemporary music, especially this summer. For a month I didn't listen to music at all, and the month after that I only listened to The Coup. Just this month I've really started to listen to music again.

So I started out trying to find some songs for Erich, and I ended up spending way too much time just listening to songs, getting interested and sidetracked for hours and then remembering that I was on a mission. The result is this -- a 25 song mix that is all over the place, and likely to contain a few songs that will not interest Erich at all. Honestly, after ten more listens, there are a couple of songs in there that I'll probably forget myself But for now, they've rapt my attention. I really wish I had gotten this done before Erich's long drive across the country -- I apologize in advance for the reggae.

Anyway, here it is - Erich Mix (.zip)

1. Cut Copy "Saturdays"
2. Fox "SSSingle Bed"
3. Rox "My Baby Left Me"
4. Field Music "Sit Tight"
5. Hank "You Are The Child of Betrayal"
6. Dandy Livingstone "Jungle Walk"
7. Young Marble Giants "Eating Noddemix"
8. Von Sudenfed "Dearest Friends"
9. Deerhunter "Never Stops"
10. Au Revoir Simone "Stars"
11, Munk & James Murphy "Kick Out The Chairs (Who Made Who Replay)"
12. In Flagranti "Reputation Or Notoriety"
13. The B-52s "Private Idaho"
14. The BPA "Toe Jam (Featuring David Byrne and Dizzee Rascal)"
15. The Coup "Piss On Your Grave"
16. Alton Ellis "You Make Me Happy"
17. Kid Creole & The Coconuts "I'm A Wonderful Thing, Baby"
18. Of Montreal "An Eluardian Instance"
19. Blood On The Wall "When You Go Out Walking"
20. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks "Gardenia"
21. Wild Beasts "Brave Bulging Bouyant Clairvoyants"
22. Klanguage "Never Over"
23. Sissy Wish "Float"
24. Annie "I Know UR Girlfriend Hates Me"
25. Vitalic "Wooo"

SLUMBERLAND

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:53:24 GMT

Came in the mail today! I've never been this excited about a book before, and I love those things!

Yawn Boost

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 14:02:27 GMT

For the past week I've either been too busy to write in this thing or, when I've had free time, found that I had nothing to say. When I get home from work and make and eat dinner, it's already seven o'clock, and the four or five hours I usually spend reading/thinking/bike riding have been occupied by Northwestern job applications and trying to get my apartment situation figured out. (The apartment situation is this: Jeff, Jason's younger brother, agreed to pay a big chunk of our rent so that we could live in this nice ass apartment and then bailed on us after three months. Jason and I cannot afford $1500/month between the two of us and we don't know anyone who is willing to join us and pay $500/month with no utilities. So while searching for a party to take over our lease, we're also searching for a new, cheaper place to live, and we'd like to have all of this settled before the end of the month.) This is why I've been reading Foucault's "History of Sexuality" for, like, a month. That, and my magazine subscriptions have started to roll in, which takes up a lot of my train reading.

I just feel tired all the time lately. Some nights I'll get 4 hours of sweaty sleep and some nights I'll get nine hours of dead sleep, but either way I never feel rested, and I feel like I spent my entire day doing what's necessary (work, eat, job applications, apartment stuff) instead of what I want to do (read, write, think, watch The Wire, go on a bike ride, cut shit out of the paper). With the exception of a couple of apartment showings this weekend, signing for a new apartment tomorrow night, and my morning/afternoon of job applying, THIS WEEKEND IS MINE. Eight uninterrupted hours should be enough to liberate me.

This past weekend Drew, Mauriah and Jonah came to visit. It was awesome. We did a lot of stuff in two days -- Shedd Aquarium, Chicago Institute of Art, and the Lincoln Park Zoo -- and met up with Sam Newman and Dylan Simons at the CIA. It was nice to see so many familiar faces. It was nice to see Drew, Mauriah and Jonah. Since moving, I've come to understand exactly how special Drew Rhodes is. We both love basketball a lot, we both love hip hop a lot (I think our musical tastes diverge a little after that), we both have a very cynical, pessimistic sense of humor, and we share a decent amount of skeptical political angst. I often miss him. And it was nice to see Mauriah too. There's a decent chance she's reading this, so I'm going to stop talking about her like she's not here. Mauriah, your visit was wonderful. I feel bad about not taking the time to get to know you while you were so close, and I enjoyed getting to know you a little better while you were here. Remember on Saturday night when Jason and I came back and you and Drew were drinking? That may have been my favorite moment of the weekend. Even though Drew bought those Bailey's things, I guess I just didn't expect it. But when I came back, you were both really giddy-happy, and, you especially, it seemed like your eyes were lit up, or maybe just open more or something. In short, I wanna sit down and chat and giggle at The Soup with you.

And it was great to see Jonah. Half of his life had passed by since the last time I saw him. He's got more hair, he's bigger, he's making a lot more noise, and he's still the happiest, most easygoing baby in the history of babies.

Just remembered! A thing I have been thinking about a lot in the last week -- I need to be more critically positive! I realized that I spend way too much time thinking about the flaws of things, why they suck, and, in my quest for purity, why just a little bit of suckiness ruins the whole thing. This is stupid and I know it, but this is going to be a difficult habit to break because I've been doing this my whole fucking life. My mom taught me to argue, and she taught me that instead of forming substantive arguments as to why something is good or why it should be done, it's much easier to form critical arguments on why the other thing sucks or shouldn't be done. I definitely took this with me into my academics (fuck psychology, I want to rip shit apart in English course essays!). That's not to say that I don't find negative or deconstructive criticism helpful or necessary at times, but I think I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking in that mode compared to the amount of time I spend trying to build something up. Ask me to tell you why something is bullshit and I'll give your a grocery list for a family of six. Ask me why something is good, or why I like something, and chances are I will be much less articulate, have many less reasons/support, and that I'll end up either telling it's better because it's not that other sucky thing (which is where I will shift to indignant criticism of the other sucky thing) or that I just like it -- just because. For example, Graham and I were talking about this Monday night. We could both give you a long list of reasons why you should not vote for McCain, but (and maybe I'm speaking more for myself here) a lot of my support for Obama, especially since he's began to shift to the middle, is essentially based on the argument that he's better than McCain. And while I think that's true and important, I also think it's steeped in a good bit of compromise and looking the other way, although, with the middle-shifting (drilling, FISA, Faith-based initiatives, etc.) I can't help but cringe and wonder where all of my enthusiasm (and hope -- hope, Barack) has gone.

Politics aside, this mindset has been a problem with my recent struggles since moving to Chicago. In trying to figure myself out, I've often done so by defining myself by what I'm not, or what I don't like, instead of by what I am, or what I do like. I suppose either one is a little tricky, and that framing identity with an "I am this, I am that" (pointing) procedure is also problematic. In turn, I've realized that my initial goal of becoming a genderqueer male-ish person was near-sighted and haste, and not that different from my previous attempts to be a "straight dude." This doesn't mean that I'm not messing with gender any more, and this doesn't mean that I've come to some kind of "just be me" resolution. It means that I'm changing my goal here from transforming myself into some predetermined identity with defined borders and all that, to continuing to find out exactly who I am regardless of gender, or despite gender, and to do so by fucking with gender. I suppose the ultimate goal (maybe setting "ultimate goals" is my problem) is to take gender into consideration to the point that I fully realize how arbitrary it can be.

Whew. When I started this post, I thought I'd be ending it by saying "well, at least I wrote something." But that felt productive!

That tug of war thing

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 03:38:34 GMT

Lately, I don't want to do anything, but more than that I don't want to do nothing. One side says, "Andrew, get up and do something. Go take photos, read something, write something, say something, go somewhere and use your goddamn brain." The other side says, "Who the fuck you think you are? A photographer? A critic? A writer? You're just Bren from Milford. Sit down, smoke this bowl, dick around on your computer or watch infomercials or something, and be thankful you've got an easy life. Whatever you do, don't go and leave the apartment and do something embarrassing. If you're lucky, I'll let you go on a bike ride."

Obviously, this is not good -- and #2 is a total asshole. But still, most of the time he wins and I either sit around and do nothing, or, in order to convince myself that #1 even stood a chance, I act like I'm deliberating -- like this is a tough decision to make -- until I get flustered by the amount of time I'm wasting just thinking about what I'm going to do and cave.

I need a hobby. Not anything little either -- I need a project. I need to do something that I believe is meaningful. Punching numbers and making phone calls on behalf of the boss is not meaningful to me. I could give a fuck. Coming home from work, cooking dinner, dicking around online, watching shitty TV, reading, listening to music -- it's not enough.

For the last year or two, I've had a big itch to do something creative. Last year, I bought a bunch of magazines and made some collages. That's lame. Problem is that every time I get an idea, #2 tells me to get back in my place and convinces me that I couldn't produce anything worthwhile so it's not worth my time. I know #2's argument ("You ain't never did shit so you ain't gonna do shit") really sucks. So in order to convince myself that I can be good at something; that I can be creative and thoughtful in some fashion, I've just got to fucking do something. I can't do nothing anymore. But I still don't know what I want to do (it continues)! Write something? Lately I've been thinking about something musical, but I can't read music at all and I'm not sure if I have the patience for that, though I did say I needed a project. Taking photos? Maybe re-learning Photoshop, or some other software? Painting? I always wished I was a better dancer.

Blurp

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 04:09:38 GMT

After a busy week, I finally got around to some good thinking this weekend. Painful but productive. Most of the time I feel like I'm playing tug-a-war in my own head.

Isaac Hayes "Need To Belong To Someone"

Tussin

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 01:32:34 GMT

Just got back from a very satisfying bike ride. On my way back home from a jaunt up to Rogers Park, I saw a parked ambulance on the side of Ravenswood Ave., and then a very old (and seeming dead) woman in a stretcher on the sidewalk, with two paramedics who didn't seem like they were in too much of a hurry (which really makes me think she was dead). Another block down, I passed three old women, two pushing the third in a wheel chair. And then, as I turned onto Peterson, I saw that a series of senior/assisted living homes were located directly across the street from the largest cemetery in Chicago! A couple more blocks down Peterson, a headstone store! Ahh!

Skipping lunch for a big plate of internet

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:03:49 GMT

Ever since school got out, I've been missing the internet. Ever since I moved to Chicago, I've been a mess. Now I've got a speedy, consistent internet connection in my apartment, and over the past four weeks, my self-hatred and its incompatibility with an irrepressible moral intuition has boiled over with the added heat of depression, loneliness, and confusion. In short, I've been especially sad, hopeless, bewildered, and bored out of my mind -- and this new journal is (one of the places) where I will be trying to figure out exactly how I would like to go about living my life. For me, it's easy to recognize that I've changed quite a bit since graduation, and especially since my move to Chicago. Even still, some days I find my self laughing at who I was the day before. It's unstable, and half the effort is convincing myself that the work towards becoming Bren 2.0 is going to be worth the consequences of existing at Bren 2.0 (but, at the same time, dealing with an idealistic, altruistic morality that turns self-concern into self-loathing).

To date, I'm embracing the mess, chugging through the shitty job and loneliness, and pretty much just fucking with shit in order to figure out where I wanna be as a person. This journal here is going to be where I attempt to have a conversation with myself (and hopefully others) about whatever it is that is interesting/perplexing me, whatever is making me happy or sad, etc. Here goes!