It’s all in the transitions. That’s where you feel it. The fast tempo is even faster after a slow one. The triumphant anthem is more powerful when paired with a lamentation--and it’s also more fleeting. “Watch Me Jumpstart” by Guided by Voices is a good song, but it’s a great one when you play the song before it on Alien Lanes. It’s “Evil Speakers,” one of Robert Pollard’s toss-offs, lots of nonsense lyrics with a cliche tossed in. (“Without wings, I’ve begun to fly.”) It’s not terrible. It's OK, I guess. But as a jangly set-up for the driving, guttural guitar that kicks in the moment it ends and “Watch Me Jumpstart” begins? Man, it’s essential. It’s the pedestal for the bust of Beethoven glaring at you. You don’t notice it but you need it. Without the pedestal, poor old pissed-off Beethoven is sideways on the floor, glaring at lint.

The kids, man, The goddam kids. Listening to singles. Wouldn’t know a good transition if it split their Dres in half. Probably just listening to Vines, anyway, all six seconds if that, the visual more important than the aural. Fuckin’ kids. Only know Beck as the guy who got dissed by Kanye, not as the guy who faded from “Loser” to “Pay No Mind.” That latter track starts with the statement that this was song two on the album and the order, sped-up or heliumed-up in high-pitch, to: “Burn the album!.” Not as in “copy,” but as in “set on fire.” Or better yet, they don’t know Beck as the guy who faded from the manic, eclectic, raw creativity of the Mellow Gold album to the actually-mellow One Foot in the Grave acoustic album, a mini-masterpiece that showed whoever cared to listen that hell yeah, this guy knows his roots. But it’s not just the kids. No one knows that album.

The good people at The Morning News are running an essay of mine titled, "My Top One Lists." It's about my inability to keep up with pop-culture. I recommend reading it aloud at work, to your family, and on the train or bus.

In honor of today's blizzard, here is some audio from the archives. Remember, Chicagoans: don't be a hero. Stay home and youtube a netflix, 'cause it's just crazy out there.

Today Patton Osawlt tweeted, "Where do people find the social wattage to build & maintain an entourage? I thought success meant you earned quiet & solitude." It made me think of this portrait of Sinatra's entourage and his role in it, from Gay Talese's masterpiece "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." If anything can answer that, it's this:

My friend and I disagree about disco in two ways: one a basic matter of taste; and one controversial. I dislike it; he likes it. That’s trouble enough for a pleasant conversation. But the second part of the argument is where it gets interesting. Or, if not interesting, tedious and divisive. He thinks that the bulk of the backlash goes beyond taste and is directly attributable to homophobia. I counter that no, it sucks.

This little entry is in response to Renee Graham’s Boston Globe article, which my bullshit “friend” emailed to me yesterday, titled “Why does rock and roll hate disco?” You may remember that I titled this entry (see above) “Because it sucks.” Get it?

Heh heh heh. I am sticking with the sophomoric title not because I think I am so funny or even because that’s what I think about disco. I am keeping it because I think it is an apt response to the way Graham frames the article: why have so many disco musicians been excluded from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?  

Answer: Because it, the hall, sucks.

The following two quotes appear within a few paragraphs of each other in Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49," which is about... well, it doesn't matter. Modern urban and suburban life, pop music, restoration plays, paranoia/chaos, secret societies, etc. I kinda forget since it's a difficult book, as all his books are, and I read it over a decade ago. Difficult books, generally, are rarely about anything specific, which is part of what makes them difficult. Aside from feeling dumb while reading a difficult novel--clocking ten pages an hour and resisting the urge to move your lips as you go--you wind up feeling dumb again a decade later when you have trouble saying what it was about.

[The other day I promised a second article that addresses Men's Health issues (oops, I keep capitalizing that phrase for some reason). Here it is. The first one is here.]

Professional blasters, be they powerlifters, weightlifters, or strongmen, have a common saying: “Don’t talk about it: BLAST about it.” That’s good as far as the gym door, but when we find ourselves among weaklings who wouldn’t know a chest fly from a pistol squat, it helps to have a vocab as jacked as your delts.

And so, I have compiled a list of three bad-ass power words to impress in the boardroom… and the bedroom. Or wherever you choose to have intramarital sex.

On October 12, 2004 at 8:43 p.m. Central Time a man disembarked from a plane at O'Hare International Airport carrying the most deadly virus that humanity had ever seen. He was carrying it in his bloodstream. Not, like, in a bag.

The good part was that it was very hard to transmit. Someone had to say, "Yah mo b there!" to the carrier after he said something about a grapefruit festival in Woodstock, Illinois. The virus did not care what, exactly the carrier said to prompt that reply from the other person. It could be an invitation to the festival, obviously, but it could also be a general comment about there being a grapefruit fest in Woodstock (there is not) and then the person hearing about it would have to express interest in going to it using precisely that statement. Once "the phrase that slays" was uttered, (as the evil bioscientist who concocted the virus called it), the carrier would turn an ashen gray and his eyes would fill with pus. The person who said "Yah mo b there!" would not become ill from this encounter, since it takes another two weeks for the virus to become transmittable. But once the carrier wound up at the hospital all covered in pus? Oh man, look out.

About fifteen years ago a woman I know had a boyfriend who moved to Chicago without a job. She helped him network by calling another woman I know, a consultant at Arthur Andersen, to flat-out ask her to find him a job.

“Well, what does he want to do?” the second woman asked.

“He wants,” she said, “To be a businessman.”

That’s fantastic. That two people could be so naive --the boyfriend with the vague yet driving ambition, the girlfriend with the blunt execution of it-- strikes me as hilarious, sad, moving and hilarious again all at once. Not finance, accounting, marketing, or banking. He simply wanted to be... a businessman. 

I’ve hydromated my current homebrew (pictured) at 7.88 % ABV. The recipe came with no target OG, so when fermentation slowed and I racked to the secondary, I was pleasantly surprised to see the calculation come out as: “Do not drink three of these in a night.”

Don’t worry about the jargon. ABV is obvious. “Fermentation slowing” means an abeyance of yeast activity. “Racking to the secondary” means “filter beer from big bottle to slightly smaller big bottle so it declouds and whatnot.” OG = original gravity. “Abeyance” means "slowing, receding" and “hydromated” is very probably not a word. It just sounds cool. I measured the beer with a hydrometer, which is a thermometer-esque buoy one floats in beer to figure out how much booze is in it. Original Gravity minus Final Gravity times Something Else (mysterious, I use a special lazyman website) equals how strong your beer is.

I’ve only recently gotten into high alcohol beers. The insider term for normal 4 to 5% ABV that I (heh heh) grew up on is “session beer.” For the vast majority of us, that distinction is redundant. Since the noble experiment of Prohibition ended in 1932 until about 2008, beer meant session beer. For seventy years, it was all roughly the same, all roughly as strong.

I wrote a story called "The Reception," and it is in the new volume of Pendulous Breasts Quarterly, a literary journal for the discriminating breast enthusiast.

If you are an elderly relative of mine reading this: take heart. It is not actually a pornographic magazine. It's just a hilarious title thought up by one John Howell Harris, formerly of the Onion and a comedy guy in New York (City). The first volume was great and I expect this new one to be the same. My copy has not arrived yet so I am not going to straight up lie and say it is awesome, but with writers from the Onion, the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, 30 Rock, and what not, Volume II is very likely to be killer. BUY IT HERE.