Check this out: my great grandparents’ wedding in 1904. Those mustaches! My great great grandfather (seated) looking so much like Daniel Day Lewis! The sheer and utter joy spilling out of their faces!
I did a little research on the lack of smiles in Victorian-era photos, and what I assumed originally was a result of having to stand perfectly still for a photo turns out to be incorrect. Instead, smiling in a photo back then was viewed in the same way as today’s duckface: totally unacceptable.
“A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.” - Mark Twain
I have this in my bookmarks, and every once in a while I rewatch it. It’s totally bizarre, but oddly and genuinely motivational. When he plucks the imaginary birdseed out of his hand… I’m ready to start a revolution.
Bookmark this, and don’t let your dreams be dreams.
Sometimes it’s pretty easy to get caught up in the minutia and forget about the amazing night sky. Last weekend I took a little camping trip out to Colorado Bend State Park—off the grid—and got up at 2:30 in the AM after the moon set to do some stargazing. And it was in-fucking-credible. I’m not new to this, and have set late night alarms set to go catch a meteor shower, a space station passing, or a lunar eclipse. But last weekend’s pitch black and perfectly clear night might just take the cake for best star gazing I’ve ever done.
I only took mental photos, but they are fantastic. Now I want more. I might be making a trip out to West Texas in the next couple of weeks to take catch this spectacle before it’s gone.
Maybe I’m so interested in things like this because for my entire life my parents have made fun of the time in 1986 when, alledgedly, I “wouldn’t wake up” to see Halley’s comet while my family was at a friend’s beach house in South Africa, where the viewing conditions were perfect.
5-year-old-me “slept through Halley’s comet”, and now almost 35-year-old me is into going to great lengths to appreciate the stars—like by crawling out of a warm sleeping bag on a 29º night just to stare up at the sky.
Hopefully I’ll make it to July 28th, 2061 when Halley’s comet returns. But until then, the night sky is not lost on me.
Maintain the status quo. Stay in your comfort zone. Avoid challenges, and stay away from new experiences that might change you. Avoid vulnerability at all costs. Dare NOTHING.
Stasis is the magic word.
2015: You were a heartbreaker, and it’s been a fucking experience. But now I’m done with you.
The last couple of months here have been consumed with work, travel, and creativity. And not so much on the website updating, obviously. I finished up some pretty big projects last year that left me feeling burned out, and the feeling hasn’t really subsided. Way more into exploring places and writing music lately, but it all ebbs and flows.
So far 2016 is off to a solid start. I had a pretty fan-fucking-tastic trip to San Francisco and Tahoe over the New Year, best photos below.
There was a pretty cool reddit story the other day about an internet stranger casually solving a huge song mystery for another redditor. After a year of the mystery lingering, one day a stranger sent a link to the song, and it blew the original searcher’s mind.
Oh my god. Oh my fucking god. I’m actually freaking out.
Who are you? How did you know? WHAT IS GOING ON?
Thank you so much. But also, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON
And the kind stranger just responded with:
Shh bby is ok
And, just like that, a meme is born. The internet is amazing, sometimes.
But I can totally relate to the poster’s original excitement. Sometimes a song just gets under your skin, and you’ll do anything to find it. Before the modern internet, finally locating a song felt just as satisfying, and I remember distinctly trying to hunt down the following songs in the following ways, and feeling just as excited once each of them was in my possession.
1989
“Girl I’m Gonna Miss You”, by Milli Vanilli. I’d hear this on the radio, and the melody line in the chorus (1m 24s) rocked my little 8 year old heart so much I just had to find the geniuses who created it.
I called up the local radio station and hummed the melody on the phone in order to figure out what it was. I was gifted the tape by a family friend shortly afterwards.
(And listen, I realized the error in my ways regarding Milli Vanilli not much later. We all did. We all did.)
1997
“Incense and Peppermints” by The Strawberry Alarm Clock. I heard this song in Austin Powers, and it blew my teenaged mind. I wanted more. More Strawberry Alarm Clock.
I searched far and wide for a recording of this song during Christmas break of ‘97, and had to go up to the Sam Goody in The Mall Of America in order to finally find the truth: that there was no available back catalog of Strawberry Alarm Clock, that they were basically a one hit wonder, and I’d have to settle for the Austin Power’s soundtrack. Which I did.
1998
I heard this song every so often on the radio for months and months and months, and it would haunt me. I wanted it. But every time, the DJ would say nothing about it. I delayed plans and waited patiently in my Mom’s 1995 Dodge Neon for a song set to end, hoping to get a clue about the song that had been captivating me.
I tried to savor every second the song was playing, knowing it might be weeks before hearing it again. At night after getting back on the 1998 internet in my parent’s basement, I’d Altavista the shit out of the lyrics that I scribbled down earlier in my pocket-sized memo pad.
I don’t even remember exactly how I ended up finding the song, but I do remember that when I finally did locate the MP3, it was named incorrectly. I went around for years afterwards thinking the song was called something else, but I was also thrilled to have it.
2015
Yesterday, I held up my phone up for a few seconds and it identified a Barbara Lynn song from 1963 that was playing on the radio.
I have had a few of these pretty weird experiences.
The guy being interviewed wrote this article for The Atlantic called If You’re Not Paranoid, You’re Crazy, which might leave you terrified. In it, there was an interesting idea from a teenager’s perspective on surveillance.
Surveillance, he said, was pointless, a total waste. The powers that be should instead invite people to confess their secrets willingly. He envisioned vast centers equipped with mics and headphones where people could speak in detail and at length about their experiences, thoughts, and feelings, delivering in the form of monologues what the eavesdroppers could gather only piecemeal.
What I find ironic about this whole thing is that people are paranoid about the data that’s being collected on them, and some of that data is being collected because of paranoid national security measures. Can’t we all just fucking relax?
