Studies

Incomplete thoughts and irreverent tales of art, cinema, design, food, love, media, millennials, music, nostalgia, objects, photos, politics, spaces, travel, and wit. You can also enjoy it as an XML/RSS feed.


Code monkeys like us.

When I was first in Chicago, I was five years old, between a bus from Toronto and a train to Los Angeles—though not my official point of entry into the United States, it has defied its own insignificance—a mere fingerprint on The Bean, if you will—and, with Burger King French toast sticks, become an integral part of this immigrant’s narrative. My memory allows little more than that I was there, but this time, two days in the august company of squared-shoed and trapezoid-spectacled enemies of my enemies, I know to take pictures, to take notes.

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Four random numbers.

“Thanks for remembering,” she started to say after I’d wished her a happy birthday. “I thought I was special but then you have that crazy memory for numbers.”

There is something about numbers — their exactness, perhaps — that once allowed them to embed in my memory as a pincushion, but the etchings of California addresses, reed strengths, sports statistics, and phone numbers from my life before the mobile-phone era, before the days when all of my contacts’ numbers were at hand, upon my grey matter are eroding.

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The road to clarity.

“The Road to Clarity” reminds me of the assignment from The Cheese Monkeys where the students of Introduction to Graphic Design have to hitchhike on a snowy day—it’s a flash marketing, personal branding/image management, and hand-lettering exercise with life-and-death overtones.

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Just get on with work, and sometimes things’ll hurt.

Double bourbon. She looks back, waiting for a call. Make it hurt.

She sets a pint glass before me filled to a third of its height as I down the last of my blacksmith. And another one of these. Kill the bourbon, pen down on the back of the report.

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Green power.

I learned today about Peter Schweizer’s editorial in USA Today about Al Gore not using renewable energy sources to power his own home even though they’re available in the metropolitan markets where he resides, Washington, DC among them. To which my first thought was not oh, the hypocrisy, but, why the hell am I not using renewable energy sources to power my own home?

So in ten days, I will be—though not without some effort.

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Tag clouds.

In my line of work, it would behoove me to have a precise definition of what Web 2.0 is. It’s been suggested that it’s marketing departments jerking off to AJAX. I think it has more to do with tag clouds.
The evening past I ventured to the PostSecret exhibit in Georgetown and bemused myself with the […]

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I’d never shown it to you.

2008 December 25

Though I completed this chapter of my pop music autobiography in late September, a few weeks into my first semester at Georgetown, only now in the more apparent denouement of my existential crisis do I feel compelled to write its intentions, framed in the context of two gifts I received in November.



Echoes

  • Ben Folds feat. Regina Spektor - You Don't Know Me
  • 'Til Tuesday - Voices Carry
  • Jon Brion - Little Person
  • Nancy Wilson & Cannonball Adderley - Save Your Love For Me
  • The Perishers - Rock, Best Friends
  • The Libertines - Death on the Stairs
  • The Libertines - Music When the Lights Go Out
  • The Libertines - Never Never
  • The Five Stairsteps - Ooh Child
  • Katy Perry - Electric Feel (MGMT Cover)

Data compiled by Audioscrobbler.


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