Emchap’s Shit from the Internet 8/29/18 🍠
This year has been full of an unexpected amount of nostalgia, which has served to throw up the ways in which I wasn't aware that I had changed in the last few years. (Moving does that, it seems like, and moving again has done it more than the last time.) It is odd to contrast my current life (living alone, working remotely, mostly quite happy) with a few years ago (living in a studio within a house, working remotely, so profoundly unhappy that I used to compare myself to a wolf trying to gnaw its leg out of a trap).
The look back tour continued last week with a Wednesday night concert featuring Kimya Dawson and AJJ (formerly Andrew Jackson Jihad) as double headliners. A friend had to cancel last minute, and so I wound up attending alone, perched on the upstairs level of the venue.
I first saw Kimya Dawson when I was 15 or 16 years old, with my high school best friend, in Athens. We got horribly lost on the way there, and neither of us had smart phones, and we had to stop to ask for directions at a gas station. She played at the 40 Watt, and we got fancy grilled cheese sandwiches before, and during the show she made all the tall people stand in the back so the rest of us could see. It was the first concert I remember attending without any parents, and the first time I set foot in Athens, which remains a city around which I have a whole host of uncomplicatedly fond memories.
I saw AJJ three years ago (with Jeffrey Lewis opening, in the only time an opening band has ever been good), at a sprawling venue in Atlanta which no longer exists in that location. I was still reeling from an awful breakup, and had decided I was going to leave town (though I think at that point I still assumed I'd be headed for Chicago), and wound up meeting up with a girl I knew from elementary school and reconnected with 900 miles away and a decade later when attended at the same 750 person college. It was a vaguely religious experience.
The show on Wednesday made me feel approximately 800 years old. Kimya Dawson seemed older, and tired (it was too big a venue for the kind of music she sings), and I spent much of the first part of the show glaring at a couple net to me who were apparently made wildly aroused by sad songs about political injustice, based on the amount of groping. The AJJ fans (mostly younger, mostly louder, mostly men) chatted during the set, which sucked. But still, she played songs I still know the words to even though I haven't listened to her regularly in five years, and she's still trucking along playing earnest music, and it was good to see.
The AJJ set made more sense for the space—they're on the louder, punker end of the antifolk spectrum—and their fans turned most of the bottom floor into a mosh pit in a way that made me glad I wasn't down there. They're getting older too (they've been together for nearly 15 years) but they still screamed sad songs about impotent unhappiness and anger which the young people made of elbows enjoyed. So did I, sedately, from upstairs, away from the elbows.
I was glad I went. I'm curious how much longer either act will be touring. I am too old and sleepy to go to concerts on Wednesday nights if I have to be at work at 7 the next morning.
Shit to read
A look at whether Nixon hit his wife.
I finally finished this oral history of Creative Loafing, Atlanta's alt-weekly.
This interview with @dril is great and deeply strange.
I want to go to there (a wardrobe of linen tunics).
TIL vaginas have crypts.
This story involves grift and art and it is BANANAS.
A phenomenal and horrifying piece of long-form journalism about an orphanage run by the Catholic church where children were abused.
Daniel Ortberg wrote bananas metafiction about To All The Boys I Loved Before.
What your menstrual products say about you is the only personality quiz I respect.
I make terrible biscuits, so I related to this a lot.
I want to give this letter writer a pat on the head.
Ask Polly actually answered the letter question!
Shit to eat
Turn on the broiler.
Wash off some frozen shrimp so they stop sticking to each other.
Put them on a baking sheet.
Under the broiler they go for 5 minutes.
Mix up 1 part each of rice vinegar, soy sauce, wasabi paste, and sugar. (I used half a tablespoon of each for a single serving.)
Heat a cast iron pan over high heat, with a tablespoon of oil.
Chop up a cucumber, and toss the chopped up parts into the pan.
Cook it for 4 minutes or so until it browns.
Toss in the shrimp.
Add the sauce.
Cook for another minute or two until the liquid is mostly reduced.
Serve over something (I went with lettuce; rice is by far the more normal option).
Eat.
Adapted from the Cucumber volume of Short Stack (where it appears with crab meat)
Shit to listen to
This recording of "Kokopelli Face Tattoo", the AJJ song I made sure to stay until I heard, and which I find profoundly affecting even though I'm too old for that to be unembarrassing (but "hey dude/I hate everything you do/but I'm trying really hard to not hate you/hating you won't make you suck any less" is a great set of lines)
Shit to buy
I'm really into this jumpsuit
These bathsheets, which I'm hoping go further on sale this weekend because my towels are finally old and sad enough that I'm going to buy new ones