If You Bring Your Acoustic Guitar to My Party I Will Scream
Posted: 25 March 2021
Imported from substack so the formatting is messed up, it looks better on substack.
This is cool, I didn’t know how good this song sounded on the piano:
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Index
A * means I can see myself listening to the album again at some point in the future (for fun). Everything else can be anywhere between great and not so great.
Art
Portraits I Like
Math
On Big Numbers
Music
* Yucky Duster - Yucky Duster (2016)
Indie Pop
* Yucky Duster - Duster’s Lament (2017)
Indie Pop
Xiu Xiu - A Promise (2003)
Experimental
* Metric - Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? (2003)
Rock
LVL UP - Hoodwink’d (2014)
Indie Rock
Nirvana - In Utero (1993)
Grunge
Art
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Portraits I Like
A couple of years ago, I quit my job and spent a year painting. I found myself veering towards figurative art, particularly portraiture, and would like to share some paintings that I find inspiring. This is by no means an exhaustive list (not even going to start with Klimt and Schiele).
Frantisek Kupka’s portraits paralyze me with their colors and expressiveness:
Lucian Freud’s portraits aren’t flattering and distort their subjects, which I like, and their expressiveness and brushstrokes are incredible. He is also, in my mind, responsible for making it acceptable to have half of your painting be hardwood floors. I won’t be showing any examples of this, but hardwood floors make up, like, half of his ouvre.
I could go on and on with Freud. The up-close portraits like these blow me away.
There are also a lot of contemporary artists whose work I think is excellent, such as Inès Longevial, whose work has a beautiful illustrative feel with simple geometry but sneaks in an astounding depth with its incredible shapes and colors. The balance and tension between the flat and dynamic areas of the paintings rule. I’m also really inspired by her productivity! These three paintings are all from 2020! Incredible output. I’m enthralled just pulling these up to add to the newsletter. I can’t look away.
Heads and hands. That’s what it’s all about, if you ask me.
Math
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On Big Numbers
Here’s a crazy Wikipedia article: [link]
If you are not familiar with what a “big” number is (if you’re not sure, you’re not familiar. A billion? Get real), you are in for a treat. This article lists a bunch of numbers as examples. We start pretty small:
Okay, those are numbers, for sure. Not very big, but going up. From here we progress to numbers that are unimaginably large. The human brain cannot comprehend numbers this big. But we can kind of try to understand what these numbers represent:
Number of atoms in the universe? That’s huge. I can’t picture one million of anything, forget a googol or whatever, but those words mean something to me. Then we get this, which, buckle in:
Ok, so let’s level set here: the number 10^80 from the last section, the approximate number of atoms in the universe. Pretty big number, right? 10^80, written out as 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, is 81 digits long. You only need 81 digits to write down a number that represents the number of atoms in the universe.
If you were to take atoms and line them up single file across your fingernail (a fingerinail is about 1cm across), you would have a line of approximately 100 million (10^8) atoms. If you wrote one digit per atom, the 10^80 number I wrote out above would fit on this line of atoms over a million times. A grain of sand has around 10^21 atoms. You would be able to write that same number from above (with all the zeroes) out ~ten million trillion (10^19) times on the atoms of a grain of sand. A human is made up of approximately 10^28 atoms. The earth is around 10^50 atoms. The universe has 10^80 atoms.
The number of digits in the number 2↑↑6 is roughly, uh, 10^19,727. This is so big that if you took every atom in the universe, expanded it to the size of the universe, then took every atom of every one of those universes and expanded that to the size of the universe, and you wrote one digit of 2↑↑6 on every one of those atoms, there would not be enough atoms in all of these universes to even come close to writing this number. Again, this is just to write the number. The value it represents is so much bigger than that that all we can do is laugh.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. But there’s something really intriguing about trying to think about these insanely big numbers. This is incomprehensibly big. It’s beyond incomprehensibly big. And then the article hits you with this:
Very cool. And this is just near the start of the “bigger numbers” list, they only get larger going down. The real joke buried under all of this is that these numbers, representing values so large that they shatter the cosmos, are still somehow useful in combinatorics.
Music
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Yucky Duster - Yucky Duster
My friend Max introduced this band to me and we saw them open for LVL UP, a show I don’t have many strong memories of (I think I was already in the “not drinking” phase of my life and drank a lot of diet cokes). Yucky Duster broke up not too long after that show. So did LVL UP, actually, maybe it was a cursed event. I don’t remember feeling super inspired by their set but I do really like Yucky Duster’s music. The songs are about real, meaningful events in their lives but are silly and light-hearted. They make good sounds and have an energetic, carefree feel. Love it.
Yucky Duster - Duster’s Lament
This album features more male vocals and has a very Beach Boys vibe going on. “Duster’s Lament” would fit right in on Pet Sounds, so would “Different People.” It was an interesting evolution of their music, building on top of their self-titled release and really succesfully developing their sound. It would’ve been nice to see where they went from there, but they broke up. Alas.
Xiu Xiu - A Promise
Distressing!!!! This is hard to listen to and causes a lot of mental chaos. It’s not, uh, bad? I guess? “Sad Pony Guerilla Girl” is a cool song. It’s just difficult to listen to this album without feeling like someone is coming at you with hedge clippers.
Metric - Old World Underground[…]
I didn’t know that Metric frontwoman Emily Haines was part of Broken Social Scene and sang the hit song “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year Old Girl” which has featured in my past two newsletters. I’m legitimately kind of shocked.
Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? is an album I’ve really enjoyed for a while now. Every song on it is solid and Metric really enjoy and excel at doing this thing where they bounce between unusually-instrumented verses and rocking out with power chords. The songs are fun and poppy, Haines’ singing is great, it’s a fun album.
LVL UP - Hoodwink’d
Listened to this again because I had the lyric “I keep trying, I keep, keep, trying” stuck in my head, and learned that half of the song is about listening to Silver Jews (I don’t pay attention to lyrics often, sorry).
I’m kind of conflicted about this band in general, and I don’t really know why. I sometimes get in the mood to listen to them, which doesn’t really happen with that many bands, but I don’t think I would ever say that I really like their music. I don’t know!!! It’s a good album with some really really catchy songs on it (“Annie’s a Witch,” the afore-mentioned “I Feel Extra-Natural”) and some really cool riffs (“Ski Vacation,” “Medication,” “Soft Power,” honestly most of the songs on the album are a lot of fun). It’s good music with good guitars. I just have some sort of problem I’m incapable of verbalizing. Maybe it’s the disenchanted, bored-sounding vocals.
Nirvana - In Utero (also B Sides)
I like Nirvana a lot but this album never really clicked for me. Cobain was an incredibly talented songwriter and a vocal powerhouse, but I don’t really think that comes through on this album. On individual tracks, sure. But listening to In Utero through, something doesn’t work. It’s kind of a boring album.
Maybe I just have really philistine tastes, and the noise-ier (like the genre, not like… the word noise) direction of the album doesn’t work for me. Maybe I’m being unfair to In Utero because I really like Bleach and Nevermind. The album seems stuck somewhere between 80’s and 90’s noise such as The Jesus Lizard (a genre I think sounds more nihilistic than any other), and Kobain’s sincerity and poppier tendencies. It flip flops between filth and melody. Some songs feel confident and sound incredible (“Rape Me,” “Milk It,” “tourettes’s”), some sound like older Nirvana songs (“Heart-Shaped Box,” “Pennyroyal Tea,” “Dumb”), and some I just don’t like at all (“Scentless Apprentice,” “Frances Farmer[…]”).
Kobain, hyper-tuned into the music industry and ever-conscious of what he was composing and the image it sold, seems torn between writing what he knows will sound good and sell, and pursuing a vague and half-formed notion of authenticity. The resulting album seems reserved and unsure of itself, as conflicted as Cobain likely felt.
Don’t get me wrong: a lot of the album is incredible. But I’ve never in my life thought “You know what I really want to listen to right now: In Utero.”
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That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading, feel free to leave feedback, have a great day.