Yesterday I saw a dude riding a skateboard—downhill, mind you—while playing a banjo and smoking a cigarette. And he wasn’t half-bad on the banjo, either.

But the truly astonishing thing was that this guy was riding said skateboard on the sidewalk. In Spokane.

For those of you not from around here, there’s really only one word that adequately describes the state of our sidewalks: embarrassing. There’s deteriorating concrete to deal with, upheavals of entire sections, and cracks that could easily swallow a family of four. The sidewalk under the Browne Street railroad viaduct is actually squishy on accounta all the accumulated dirt and grime and human waste. It’s like you’re walking on a sponge, only…grosser.

But, like yesterday, I digress.

A few years ago I saw a guy in Portland riding around on a bicycle and playing the bagpipes—while wearing a Darth Vader helmet. He was trying way too hard to be weird, it seemed to me; a performative act meant to burnish Portland’s reputation for offbeat characters and hipper-than-thou millennials rather than an honest expression of his personality.

But Spokane’s skateboard guy? He’s totally legit. The real deal. Probably never occurred to him to not take advantage of his commute by practicing some bluegrass licks.

Sometimes I really dig this city.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Il glorioso:

Project C-90, the ultimate audiotape guide.

Il sublime:

Promises, the new album by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra.

Il bello:

If you’re wondering why the subheads are in Italian, it’s because of this, the greatest title sequence of one of the five greatest films* of all time:

*The other four are, in no particular order, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, and Planet of the Apes (the 1968 original, obviously).

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

“The semi-colon is a funny fellow,” writes Tom Hogkinson in his review of Claire Cock-Starkey’s forthcoming Hyphens and Hashtags: The Stories Behind the Symbols on our Keyboards. “It was invented by a Venetian printer called Aldus Manutius in 1494 for editions of Dante and Erasmus. He adapted it from a bit of musical notation called the punctus versus, and it was Ben Jonson who really made sure it stuck by including it in his 1640 style guide, The English Grammar. In the 18th and 19th centuries writers went mad for it and in 1837 two rival French legal experts fought a duel over its use: one favoured the semi-colon to end a certain passage, the other a colon. The semicolon supporter was wounded in the arm by the apologist for the colon. Today I still find it an impressive piece of punctuation and young people would be well advised to use it in emails in order to impress their bosses.”

I’m not sure what I could possibly add to that, other than that I’m totally behind settling grammar arguments with pistols, and yes, you should definitely use the semicolon more often.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment

Journalists call it a lede; normal, less pretentious folk simply call it an opening paragraph. Either way, Caitlin Flanagan is one of the best in the business at shooting “straight as a rifle bullet into the reader’s attention”:

One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.

The rest of the article, if you want to continue reading—and why on Earth wouldn’t you after that?—is here.

Reminds me of the time I was interviewing Bill Mize, former national finger style guitar champion. “People ask me all the time what they can do to be better players,” he told me. “Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden, Beyond the Missouri Sky. That’s what I tell them. You wanna know how to play guitar? Listen to that record.”

So. You wanna know how to write? Read Caitlin Flanagan.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment

On the one hand, 61 percent of Americans reported undesired weight gain during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Check out the average poundage for millennials!)

On the other hand, Krispy Kreme is giving away free doughnuts: “The chain says it will offer a free original glazed doughnut to anyone who shows their vaccination card for the rest of 2021, starting today. And the offer is not a one-time deal.”

I need to get me some of that vaccine, stat.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Somebody check the temperature in Hell. Rolling Stone has actually published something worth reading:

For a brief moment in the early Seventies, Judee Sill was one of L.A.’s most promising artists. She was one of the first musicians signed to Asylum Records, a label David Geffen started with Elliot Roberts that became famous for its roster of the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, and others. Sill was produced by Graham Nash, and her songs were covered by the Turtles, the Hollies, and Cass Elliot. But unlike her labelmates, she never found fame and success. When the decade of the singer-songwriter ended, she ended with it, dying on November 23rd, 1979, of a drug overdose.

I only just discovered Sill last year, courtesy of The Album Years—the podcast from Steven Wilson and Tim Bowness, now in its second season.

But man, when I first heard “The Kiss,” from Sill’s second and final album Heart Food, I was gobsmacked. XTC’s Andy Partridge says it best: “Unfortunately, I can’t listen to ‘The Kiss’ anymore because it just presses the ‘sob your heart out’ button. I’m just destroyed for the next hour. I actually think it’s the most beautiful song ever written by anybody.”

Amen, Brother Andy. Here it is, in one of the few known videos of Sill performing live:

Kudos to Angie Martoccio for a sympathetic, well-written portrayal of an artist who deserves to be known. “More than 40 years after her death,” asks the article’s subhead, “could the world finally be ready to appreciate her?”

I dunno. But it damn sure ought to be.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

In the 1930s, the USSR began building hundreds of lighthouses along its 3,500-mile arctic coastline. Eventually, neither keepers nor electricity were needed to run them—thanks to radioisotopic thermoelectric generators: nuclear batteries.

How secure is your password? Here’s a handy chart that will should terrify you. (And here‘s my recommended solution.)

Random question: At what point did we decide that the addition of end to result and user was necessary? Isn’t end result redundant? Isn’t an end user just a, you know…user? So annoying. Not to mention completely unnecessary.

Real-life LEGO (sort of) houses you can build yourself.

What’s the point of fiction? According to Erik Hoel, the novel is “the only medium where there is no wall between the intrinsic and the extrinsic…a possible world where thoughts and feelings are just as obvious to an observer as chairs and tables.”

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

“I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.”

Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955–1967

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment