Trendy Suburban Get-Together, The Musical

Had some lovely old friends over for drinks, tasty food, and pleasantries tonight. Oh, and some delightfully cliche indie musics.

Here's the pairing menu:

Fleet Foxes | Tiger Mountain Peasant Song

RATATAT | Everest

The Bird & The Bee | F*cking Boyfriend

Camera Obscura | Razzle Dazzle Rose

Andrew Bird | Fitz & Dizzyspells

Sydney Wayser | La Di Da

Volcano Choir | Island, IS

Monsters of Folk | Dear God (Sincerely M.O.F.)

Asobi Seksu | Thursday

Bon Iver | Brackett, WI

Broken Social Scene | Swimmers

Lykke Li | Let It Fall

MGMT | Time to Pretend

The Smiths | There is a Light that Never Goes Out

Radical Face | Welcome Home

Radiohead | Weird Fishes/Arpeggi

Regina Spektor | Two Birds

Stereolab | Window Weirdo

Regina's "Laughing With"

For my lovely lovely Kate because she's the kind of friend who even from oceans away knew that this would be exactly what I needed to hear this morning. xo

Do You Fancy Yourself a Patriot?

The Fourth of July was the best day of all the summer days, and I'm feeling rather nostalgic. The light was the kind of light that renders skin a beautiful glowing gold and warm. Here are are my favorites.

Necessities

It would be untruthful to say there are only a handful of books that have changed the way I see the world around me. Yet, it is with absolute honesty that I can say there are only a handful of books that have changed the way I think about how I see the world around me. I'm not sure where exactly it lies, but Letters to a Young Poet is without question within reach. 

In the early 1900s a young German poet sent his work to Rainer Maria Rilke, asking him for advice on how to mold himself into a writer. For the next five years, Rilke sealed his wisdom and his heart into envelopes addressed to the young poet. After Rilke's death, the letters were bound and published, leaving us to crave letters of such honesty and beauty addressed to us. 

In one of his letters, Rilke talks about the futility of a life lived without passion. With words alone, he drops us into a world that necessitates throwing every piece of ourselves into something. For the young poet, it is the desperate, unending passion for his work. For Rilke, it is making clear the power and pleasure of love. It is left to us alone to mold of head and heart passions to call our own. The subject and context are not important -- the presence of passion is indispensable:

"Believe that with your emotions and your work that you are taking part in the greatest." 

It is impossible to deny that there is something inherently entrancing about people who have conquered the manifestation of passion within themselves. So many of my brilliant and beautiful friends have found what it is that drives them, or, perhaps just as importantly, lent thought to the cognition of living passionately. I adore them. I'm addicted to every moment of conversation that comes with brightly lit eyes and words spilling faster than our mouths can organize. I want to know every heart that beats wholly with the passion that keeps it from crumbling. Please teach me your mind -- how does it work?

Metacognition is a big word for a simple idea: knowing about knowing. It's a dangerous idea -- thinking about thinking. The risk of getting lost is great, and overwhelmed greater. Still, it seems the risk carries a weight far more enticing than the safety of a mind left unexplored.  

My Little Sister and Her Screen Prints

My beautiful little sister has this unbelievable, instinctual sense for print and textile work. She's been working on some screen printing that I am totally and completely obsessed with: a few parts Andy Worhol with a dash of Rorschach ink blot. I love love love.

In Early Summer

Things fall slower at three a.m., of this I am quite certain. When the air is cool and the sky is stuck between getting darker and getting lighter, an aged kitchen chair leaping from a second story window into the street falls gracefully, quietly, slowly -- fracturing and splintering into a million exquisite pieces, each different from the other.

Tucked neatly underneath the the window from whence the chair flew, five sit on the front porch of the house. Stories and sly eyes and smoke between us, we are a collective prime number in the early hours of the city. The street wanderer plays guitar -- a piece of broken pipe sliding through the blues of his Georgia soul. He's not good and it's not beautiful, but that's okay.  

Our ribs and voices melt into one another, colliding and collapsing into something comfortable. The porch is our whole world. Our everything, ourselves. The quiet of the night protects us from the rising sun and saves us from the close-drawing day.

It's time to sleep and find sweet dreams when we get there.  

Bon Iver, my darling, Bon Iver

This is my heart and my head melted and seeping into parchment and poetry. With a kind of vulnerable, familiar melancholy that's meant to be a close friend - that kind of silent friend where we needn't say anything because everything worth saying has already been said. And loudly, at that.  

(this one's for my near and dear friend Kate and her smoke-and-music perfect porch and the summer evenings we will spend there)

NYC in the Springtime: A Retrospective

I spent my spring break in New York City. And I fell in love. 

I'm desperately enamored of New York. The city consumes every piece of me, and I every bit of it. Like a new crush turned old love, I cannot get the city out of my head. It seeps from my veins and spills from my eyes. I've spent time in New York before, but never like this -- without tourist agenda or sight seeing to-do. My brilliant and beautiful friend Laura and I wandered the city together, feeling entirely at home. Safe, comfortable, more happy that I've ever known.  

My heart lives in New York City already, soon my body will too.  

A Feat of Graphic Design Prowess

Tonight, my PRSSA Agency client, Mike Lombardo, and I decided to make a poster for his upcoming show at TT the Bear's in Cambridge. Earlier today, his bassist Ellen made a funny little semi-serious poster in MS Paint. 

Mike and I don't joke. Our craft is refined, our talent revered. We create wholly serious, exquisitely beautiful art with ideas that are entirely our own. Like this:

I have two conclusions: 1. I should have gone into graphic design, and 2. You should go to Mike's show. 

God This Place Is Amazing

I know it's terribly cheesy, but I'm so in awe of my amazing friends. Boston University is so unbelievably saturated with fantastically talented people, and I'm so lucky to have them to learn with and learn from.

I adore you all.  

Strings and Sealing Wax and Other Fancy Stuff

Last weekend when I was home for winter break, some friends and I found ourselves curled up in my living room with freshly emptied wine glasses and months and months of life to listen to. We tangled through the messes of friendships, relationships, all those ships, and stumbled upon parts of ourselves that had been lying dormant. I could write for days and days about my beautiful, brilliant friends, but their stories are not mine to tell. 

Somewhere between old jokes and new adventures, we found ourselves stuck on a single armchair anomaly: The Internet. The realization of the absolutely indefinite wealth of information weighed heavy on our shoulders. Where were we to find ourselves amidst pages and pages and pages of words and words and words? How could we possibly hope to leave a mark in this world within our own? 

Although it's scary, we must. Because there is something enticing about the unexpected pairing of anonymity and exposure in this online world of ours. 

So here it is, my mark.