atthesametime

Spotted in the last twenty four hours in Washington, D.C. See if you are an inside the beltway nerd enough to name all three.

Jay Reatard, one of the shining lights of barebones rocknroll is dead at 29. So fucking tragic. I just watched this video of a show he did many years ago and I seriously almost cried.

Here it is, a list of every book I read in 2009. Total comes to 34, which is about average for me these days. However, if you take the time to read the whole list, you’ll realize a lot of these are popular fiction. What can I say, I am a busy man.

Best Fiction – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Steig Larson
Best Non Fiction - The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian – Robin Lane Fox


1.    The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian – Robin Lane Fox
2.    The Monkey’s Raincoat – Robert Crais
3.    Ancient Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction – Julia Annas
4.    The Sign of the Four – Arthur Conan Doyle
5.    A History of the Jews – Paul Johnson
6.    A Small Town in Germany – John LeCarre
7.    The Early Church: The Story of Emergent Christianity From the Apostolic Age to the Dividing of the Ways Between the Greek East and the Latin West – Henry Chadwick
8.    A Canticle for Liebowtiz – Walter M. Miller
9.    Saint Augustine – Gary Wills
10.    A Coffin for Dimitrios – Eric Ambler
11.    Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor – Anthony Everitt
12.    Cruciverbalism: A Crossword Fanatic’s Guide to Life in the Grid – Stanley Newman
13.    Memoirs of Hadrian – Marguerite Yourcenar
14.    The Incident – David Ignatius
15.    The Peloponnesian War – Donald Kagan
16.    The Books of God and Physics – Enrique Joven
17.    Claudius the God: And His Wife Messalina – Robert graves
18.    The Annals of Imperial Rome – Tacitus
19.    Civilization of the Middle Ages – Norman F. Cantor
20.    The Man on the Balcony – Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo
21.    The Rebbe’s Army: Inside the World of Chabad-Lubavitch – Sue Fishkoff
22.    Zeitoun – Dave Eggers
23.    A Conspiracy of Paper – David Liss
24.    Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels – Hella Winston
25.    Tradition: Orthodox Jewish Life in America – Mal Warshaw
26.    Rainbow Six – Tom Clancy
27.    Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the Word of Competitive Scrabble – Stefan Fatsis
28.    Occult America: The Secret History of how Mysticism Shaped our Nation – Mitch Horowitz
29.    Living Judaism: The Complete Guide to Jewish Belief, Tradition and Practice – Wayne Dosick
30.    The Alienist – Caleb Carr
31.    The Laughing Policeman - Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo
32.    The Hidden – Tobias Hill
33.    The Road – Cormac McCarthy
34.    The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Steig Larson

Dear Geeks,

Is there a way in Itunes to change a large number of artists names at one time? Like if I want the artist on all the tracks in this symphony to be the composer, Shostakovich and not the performer? Help me out people, this must be possible.

Oh look, here is a picture of Dmitri


I love Russians.

I am writing this on an iPhone from the beach on Puerto Rico. That right there should tell you how much my life has changed in the last ten years. I started this decade as the editor of a punk rock music magazine, I am ending it as a tax attorney. What.the.fuck.

Places I have lived
San Francisco
Brooklyn
Cairo
Washington, dc

Jobs I have had
Magazine editor
Used bookstore clerk
Graphic designer
Video editor
Telemarketer
PR flack
(pseudo) attorney

Biggest events
Moving to ny
Going to college
Graduating law school
Getting engaged

Life is exciting and terrifying in it's unpredictability.

Happy new year everyone!

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

1. I have been listening almost exclusively to last.fm radio as of late, and its great. Main station – Beethoven, John Adams, John Coltrane. This gets me the best of post minimalism, romantic period and bebop and the occasional smattering of free jazz and weird Stockhausen stuff. Recent discovery – wonder kid Nico Muhly. Some of its great, some of it is too self consciously experimental. Other great find –  Stravinsky beyond Rights of Spring. I am obsessed, he and my new found re-interest in chess makes me want to be Russian.

2. villagecharm  is on vacation, so I can post a truly funny comment about him as a crazyman running a handcrank press and get no response. This sucks. Get back to WV where you belong, shut in!

3. As it gets dark, I can see into the office across the street from me where a number of twenty and thirty something mean are in a conference room, half are looking at laptops, multiple le pain quitidien coffee cups on the table, and behind them is a massive map of the country done in D.C. red and blue as well as a couple of smaller maps I can’t make out. Likely states by district. I wonder what they’re building in there.

I just posted my final secretsmonday update. It was fun while it lasted, but I think it has run its course. If you're up for it, go on over and say goodbye.

1. I have nothing to report. I work, I study, sometimes I run. That’s it, it’s a boring life right now.

2. I am currently reading the Road. That Cormac McCarthy, he is a laugh riot! The scene with the cannibals and the kid crying ‘cause he is starving and the world turned to ash? Had me in stitches on the bus this morning.

3. I am finally this month pulling the trigger on secretsmonday . This coming Monday will be the last one I do, ever. If someone else wants to take the meme up and do it on their page, they can have it, but for me, this one will be the last. So mark your calendars and lets have Secrets Monday end with a bang.

secretsmonday  is up - late again. For the first time ever I think I am soliciting responses to a question. Check it out.

Poll #1476679 Minor Sell Out
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 18

I need more long sleeve running shirts, should I pay a sketchy online dealer for a longsleeve bootlegged minor threat shirt?

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( Nabokov's notecards )

( Writers in their offices )

After having kind of a hectic day and forgetting about secrets monday, I finally got around to posting it. The response has been underwhelming, not surprisingly, underwhelming. Perhaps today will be a more interesting secretsmonday  on a Tuesday?

Poll #1461996 TV on the DVD
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 29

Which TV series should E and I watch next?

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I am going to share with you now a true inside the Beltway secret. You want to know who really runs the country? It is not the Masons, or Van Jones, it’s the local members WAKA, the World Adult Kickball Association.*

WAKA in D.C. is a massive league of kickball teams made up of junior hill staffers, NGO workers, assistant lobbyists and bloggers. If you are under the age of thirty and you live in the D.C. area, there is a pretty good chance you either are a member of WAKA or one of your roommates is. This is where the groundwork for the decisions about our future are made, at kickball games on the National Mall, and in the shitty Irish bars near Union Station.This may sound like I'm kidding, but I'm not. Does your congressman really need to get a rider on that appropriations bill? Talk to the scheduler on the other team. Need to make sure a certain lobbyist shows up at your fundraiser? Buy his assistant a beer at Irish Times.

This country isn’t run by a cabal of socialists, its run by a bunch of kids who manage the outlook calendars of the powerful... and they all play kickball.

 *Formerly Washington Area Kickball Association until they decided to take the conspiracy global.

There are now a million of these videos of people saying stupid shit on the mall, I generally find them to be depressing and not all that funny. This one especially bummed me out. Check out the conversation around eight minutes in where a woman wants to know if the czars appointed by Obama will be getting land. I mean, come on people. How distanced from reality can you get? That is so phenomenally irrational that I can't get my head around it.

The whole thing depresses me, its like ill informed America on parade.<input ... ></input><input ... >

A good friend has just released an album of instrumental electronic work under the name Females. It is awesome, a cross between Kraftwerk and instrumental dirty south crunk done using a mixture of vintage electronics and new tech. Check it out at:

females.bandcamp.com

Party People,

I'm back from two weeks of vacation in the American South and Cape Cod. It was awesome. I have started drafting a very long post about all the food I ate, but right now I don't have time to finish it. I do however have time to say that the best bbq I have ever eaten is Central in Memphis, New Orleans is a city I need to return to and today is a very special holiday edition of  secretsmonday Go on over and check it out.

Dear Internet,

Why is everyone talking about “birthers” all of a sudden? Did something happen? Is there really a growing number of idiots out there who believe that shit?