Scrawled in Wax

Diana Kimball (who, frustratingly, is twenty-one and smarter and more eloquent than I’ll ever be) has another beautiful, honest piece up on her blog, this time picking up on Merlin Mann’s introspective, reflective ‘letter to the internet’. What struck me about it was, yet again, the need to project a vision of oneself into a public text in order to begin to make that image concrete. There’s a lot to this idea, and I think it has a lot to do with Lacan and weaving the self from the outside in, though I can’t quite put it all together right now. But while it engages a number of ideas – the limits of the internet, email as a (failed) organising principle – perhaps more importantly, it contains lines like this one: “I believe it is possible to move about the world in a thin, spherical film of sunlight. The way to do this is by becoming a radioactively-glowing source of honesty and kindness.” We need more of this optimism and ‘wise naivete’ among geek bloggers (and maybe less cynical Young Manhattanite bitterness).

I’ve mentioned this before but You & Me, the new Walkmen album, may be the best thing I’ve heard in months – possibly years. This New York Magazine review is a good place to start, particularly for the snippet that the Strokes “would press the Walkmen on friends as the new marker of where rock was”. And if the Strokes Is This It? captured much of the ironic resignation of the early part of this decade, then this is the sequel from an older, wiser, grittier band. Lead singer Hamilton Leithauser still sings with the same raucous, fuck-you abandon that made “We’ve Been Had” the best rock single of the 2000s (to make no mention of it being the perfect morning-after companion piece to “All of my Friends“). But the brittle, bitter edge is gone now and as the disc treads over the line that separates acceptance from resignation, one finds an undercurrent of nostalgia that does not miss the past, but instead, moves forward as it looks back. What’s more, the album works as a cohesive whole and the shimmering, reverb-soaked guitar glitters throughout the entire thing like a shiny, silver anchor. This is going to be one of those albums I’ll end up buying twice: first on eMusic, and later on CD because I know it deserves better than MP3.

I know almost nothing about singer Melody Gardot, but CNN tells me that a near-fatal accident left her in constant pain and sensitive both light and sound. Of course, as a singer, she gets up on stage under the lights, in front of loud monitors and fans. So, for Melody Gardot, her love and art is pain. Is “Yes, yes, fucking yes” an appropriate response to this?

Finally, in a totally narcissistic move, I’d just like to say that after a three-year hiatus, I am back living in downtown Toronto. The Annex, to be precise. It feels good to be home.