This photo made me feel bad.
Because I thought, “Aww, yay!” But then I thought, “Peter is the prettiest. And John is the most amazing. And Jon … Jon is the best drummer?”
Dear Jon Wurster, why haven’t you forced me to admire you helplessly from afar OR inspired me to make websites and covet striped suits? :(
(via valerie2776)
This is going to be weird, but here goes anyway.
When I saw this photo I flipped out. You could say it set a switch off in my brain. I went to Flickr, downloaded the photo, and put it straight onto my phone as desktop wallpaper.
(How crazy is it that telephones have desktop wallpaper now? And how long is it since “desktop wallpaper” was a completely meaningless concept? Living in the future is amazing.)
Now every time I go to use my phone it reminds me to be awesome and also makes me grin a big stupid grin. And all those split seconds of joy really add up over the course of a day.
There’s not really a conclusion here. I’m just happy.
The Mountain Goats - Going to Bristol with Owen Pallett of Final Fantasy at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis, Minn. Nov. 7, 2009
John Darnielle - guitar + Owen Pallett = :O
“ People do things to people, books don’t. Books are like rocks. You hold one in your hand and look at it in various lights to get a sense of it, and then when you get a good angle, you throw it through a window to see what happens. ”
“Darnielle: For years, I’ve written narrators who aren’t gender-identified. When I do autobiographical stuff, that’s different, obviously. But I’ve always tried to keep my songs as potentially not a man’s thing. I think so many rock songs you assume by default it’s a man’s thing. That’s a weakness of narrative. And when I was younger, my early songs employed this trope that is popular to this day with indie singer-songwriters, where a guy is gonna hurt himself or do something drastic and appalling in order to show the object of his affection how intense his love for her is.
Paste: And we’re supposed to celebrate his self-destruction.
Darnielle: Yeah! And you’re supposed to think that’s amazing when these guys tell these stories: “Oh, he broke something, he hurt somebody, he did something rash; his love must have been so great!” instead of, “Oh no, he’s a psycho.” When I was younger, I did those too. And then I thought, that’s kinda bullshit to tell stories like that. I try not to write songs in which men glamorize their own need for approval from women. That’s kinda a bogus way to go out. But I try to do this quietly, I’m not about to go around telling people how they should or shouldn’t think. My feminism is for me.
”
John Darnielle interview, Paste Magazine (via annierachel) (via fuckyeahthemountaingoats)
That’s what I’m talking about. Especially the “Oh no, he’s a psycho” part.
I like my writing best when I’m not quite sure what I’m saying or whether I agree with it. That’s the point at which your writing gets better, when you go out on that edge.
Darnielle’s success here comes in the way he approaches his subject matter not as a dogmatic Xtian, but as the kind of flawed, spiritually bereft post-industrial human that modernist novels always used to warn us about, picking up the lessons of the scriptures for the first time and finding them more relevant to his own being than he ever suspected.
