Posts tagged music
Eerie Theodicy: On Townes Van Zandt’s “Lungs”

I first encountered the song “Lungs” by Townes Van Zandt about a decade ago. It’s the musical sting at the end of the seventh episode of the first season of HBO’s True Detective, a show we watch annually in the spring. It seems to have little to do with the content of the scene, but the vibe is immaculate.

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"I Am Back To Save the Universe": A Possible Reading of OK Computer

I don’t need to tell anyone to listen to OK Computer. Everyone who’s going to has and everyone who means to has heard that they should from more authoritative and better paid sources than yours truly. But I generally feel the need to justify why I like things, beyond just a bunch of people saying that it’s great.

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Confluences: The Nostalgia Trap, pt. 5

It was V. that brought me to Thrice, actually, and not the other way around. I distinctly remember having read V. already, and then, not that long after, being in a Wal-Mart in Bedford, PA and seeing Vheissu, their then-most recent album. I was stunned to see such an obvious reference to a novel I had first heard about from my father, who basically only remembered chapter 3, in which a character named Stencil does several “impressions” of not-himself, with each section of the chapter narrated by the person he’s pretending to be at the time. Also there’s like, robot secret agents or something, and everyone’s in Cairo in the late 19th century.

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Doing Art: Some Ways to Unshackle Creativity

These are not the steps to creativity, nor are they merely tools that you use as you proceed in your own acts of creation. They are options that I hope you can make use of as you work on your art. Anyone who purports to offer you a foolproof guide to creativity is just as suspect as someone who is offering you a foolproof guide to critical thinking. Anyone you believe on this topic is going to (unintentionally?) sabotage you.

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