twin b. or, the tumbling presence of j.p.

Over

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 02:58:01 -0400

This will be my last post at the “Twin-B” tumblr page. I want to preserve it as a document of my college years. All future tumblr posts will be at http://jennpelly.tumblr.com/ which will be, dare I say, a bit more ‘professional.’ My therapy sessions are going back to LiveJournal.

"I’m not really interested in religion or history or science or mathematics or psychology or..."

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 20:02:15 -0400

“I’m not really interested in religion or history or science or mathematics or psychology or politics or geography. I feel I am above them all, except geography. Geography is above me for now.”

- Bill Callahan, Letters to Emma Bowlcut

"Now, I’m not just your average ‘I know all the punk bands’ kid. After fifteen months at the good..."

Wed, 25 May 2011 03:43:48 -0400

“Now, I’m not just your average ‘I know all the punk bands’ kid. After fifteen months at the good radio station (KAOS-FM in Olympia, Washington) playing great teenage music, I feel that I know rock ‘n’ roll. I mean, I know it. And I know the secret: rock ‘n’ roll is a teenage sport, meant to be played by teenagers of all ages — they could be 15, 25, or 35. It all boils down to whether they’ve got the love in their hearts, that beautiful teenage spirit…”

- Calvin Johnson, “The Teenage Radio Star,” New York Rocker (CA. 1979)

Snapshots from my dorm room, #5.

Tue, 17 May 2011 21:43:10 -0400

Snapshots from my dorm room, #5.

Snapshots from my dorm room, #4.

Tue, 17 May 2011 21:42:36 -0400

Snapshots from my dorm room, #4.

Snapshots from my dorm room, #3.

Tue, 17 May 2011 21:41:39 -0400

Snapshots from my dorm room, #3.

Snapshots from my dorm room, #2.

Sun, 15 May 2011 16:40:00 -0400

Snapshots from my dorm room, #2.

Snapshots from my dorm room, #1.

Sun, 15 May 2011 16:30:13 -0400

Snapshots from my dorm room, #1.

"I thought to myself, Well, I have wasted my whole life up to this moment. Any other car I’ve..."

Fri, 13 May 2011 01:26:00 -0400

“

I thought to myself, Well, I have wasted my whole life up to this moment. Any other car I’ve ever been in was just to get me here, any road I’ve ever been on was just to get me here, any other passenger seat I’ve ever sat on, I was just riding here. I barely recognized this girl sitting next to me, screaming along to the piano solo.

I thought, There is nowhere else in the universe I would rather be at this moment. I could count the places I would not rather be. I’ve always wanted to see New Zealand, but I’d rather be here. The majestic ruins of Machu Picchu? I’d rather be here. A hillside in Cuenca, Spain, sipping coffee and watching leaves fall? Not even close. There is nowhere else I could imagine wanting to be besides here in this car, with this girl, on this road, listening to this song. If she breaks my heart, no matter what the hell she puts me through, I can say it was worth it, just because of right now. Out the window is a blur and all I can really hear is this girl’s hair flapping in the wind, and maybe if we drive fast enough the universe will lose track of us and forget to stick us somewhere else.

”

- (Note to self: please always remember that the first book you reread after you graduated from college was Love is a Mixtape. This is one of my favorite passages because it emphasizes the importance of human relationships and music, which are the two most important things in the world, which I realized freshman year.)

"You don’t necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and..."

Mon, 09 May 2011 01:32:14 -0400

“You don’t necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they’re poets. I don’t call myself a poet because I don’t like the word. Me? I’m a trapeze artist.”

- Bobby [duh.]

I wish Arthur Russell was still alive

Thu, 05 May 2011 10:51:11 -0400

I wish Arthur Russell was still alive

"I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record..."

Thu, 05 May 2011 10:31:50 -0400

“I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.”

- Frank O’Hara, Meditations in an Emergency

"Our friend Joe in New York sent us a tape, a third-generation dub of the Pavement album Slanted and..."

Wed, 04 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

“Our friend Joe in New York sent us a tape, a third-generation dub of the Pavement album Slanted and Enchanted. Renne and I decided this was our favorite tape of all time. The guitars were all boyish ache and shiver. The vocals were funny bad poetry sung through a Burger World drive-through mike. The melodies were full of surfer-boy serenity, dreaming through a haze of tape hiss and mysterious amp noise. This was the greatest band ever, obviously. And they didn’t live twenty years ago, or ten years ago, or five years ago. They were right now. They were ours. I think about those days, and I think about a motto etched onto the sleeve of one of those Pavement singles: “I am made of blue sky and hard rock and I will live this way forever.””

- Rob Sheffield, Love Is A Mixtape

"If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save."

Tue, 03 May 2011 09:58:06 -0400

“If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”

- Foer, Eating Animals

Where were you?

Mon, 02 May 2011 00:08:00 -0400

I was at my dorm at Broome Street sitting at my desk, the tenth floor view looked uptown, I saw the tip of the Empire State building glowing. I sat on Gchat interviewing my friends about their new band for my blog. Another box popped up. Was I going to watch the President? Apparently Osama was killed. Liz texts me: “I m nervous.” I am nervous. I check the Times site. Confirmed. I am listening to dark Factory Records-type weird-punk from a Soundcloud stream. I am still nervous and I call my dad and ask should I come home to Long Island but he says no/laughs, he’s going to bed, he got the news from Twitter and doesn’t need to watch it on tv. I pop a can of Brooklyn and nurse it for one hour, sitting in front of my computer, waiting. I listen to the President’s voice boom through my stereo speakers. Ten years. My roommate is sitting on the floor. Then I listen to Sleater-Kinney’s One Beat. It’s not over.

"My deepest impulses are optimistic, an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper..."

Sun, 01 May 2011 14:45:15 -0400

“My deepest impulses are optimistic, an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.”

- Ellen Willis

Sex, Hope, and Rock and Roll (An Ellen Willis Conference.)

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 10:36:00 -0400

10:30: “She couldn’t say a dishonest thing.”

10:30: Love the Joni Mitchell review that was just read. Love how she put herself into her music writing and criticism.

10:30: Ellen Willis “rougher, fiesty,” would talk about women’s lib at the New Yorker office, etc. “Ellen pulled me into the movement.” Idea of rock and roll sewing “a little seed of liberation” early on. Discussions - problematic intersection of feminism and rock and roll.

10:35: Early women’s rock band - Fanny

10:37: <3 Loved the Stones <3.

10:37: “Can a feminist love the world’s greatest rock and roll band?” Need to read this piece!

10:40: Waiting for Hynde and Smith - had Tina. (A ‘writer at The Voice’ denounced her as a feminist for that.)

10:40: “Ellen had endless jerks on her back. She scared them.”

10:42: “Rock and roll, we could knock its head off, but…our lives were saved by that sweet, sweet music.”

10:42: First panel beginning. “What would Ellen think?”

10:43: “Wrote about so many different things without ever being a dilettante - rock music, feminism, psychoanalysis, terrorism, contemporary politics - while always having a clear intellectual spine. Difficult. Our panelists are going to address very different aspects of Ellen’s work.”

10:45: “Every now and then she would write short articles that had to do with psychoanalysis at least implicitly. 2002-2003, began to entertain the possibility of writing a book on psychoanalysis and politics. It would not be from the point of view of someone who would write out of her ass - but on the basis of some very scholarly work. Started the Cultural Criticism and Reporting program at NYU - involved in admin. side.” She had a study littered with Reichien literature. Would spend all day reading and writing.

10:49: She had a different project, described as: a treatise, on psychoanalysis and politics. “She was terrified, not of content.” Terrified she had “never written a book-book.” Project was unfinished at time of her death, but she worked on it tirelessly.

10:53: To understand economics, politics, labor, feminism — requires a psychoanalytic dimension. Ellen said, do I join a conversation on this terms, or fight to get the conversation on my terms. Not because she was egotistical, but because felt her terms were the right terms.

10:53: What to do with her unfinished book? “She had a coherent view on politics and the relationship between politics and psychoanalysis.”

10:56: She was onto issues in 2003 that could have been written yesterday. (Re: ‘cultural unconscious’ in politics.)

10:57: “The denial of pleasure by the cultural unconscious - reason we can’t get ‘beyond A.’” No possible radical movement in country that does not deal with issues of sexuality and pleasure. (“It’s Not The Economy, Stupid”)

10:58: She rehearses key questions - like question of fascism.

11:05: She believed ‘spirit was inherent to nature.’

11:05: She argued … what amounts to a left has systematically refused ideas of family, church, etc. Hmm.

11:07: Need to understand her cultural politics rooted in psychoanalysis to understand her broadly.

11:07: “She was anti-family but loved her own.”

11:09: Ellen didn’t like the anti-political Ramones.

11:09: I hope there are some musicians here, too.

11:10: “One of the most acute bullshit detectors known to modern science.”

» on pause! «

12:30: Ellen didn’t want to be on a desert island; city girl, just wanted to be in the basement of CBGB’s. (“Eat the Rich” t-shirt lol!)

12:53: Ellen Willis and the Cultural Conversation panel beginning now.

12:53: “Politics of style and style of politics…”

12:55: Conversation about music was a conversation about ideas.

12:55: Holy shit all of my favorite writers and people are in this room.

1:00: Astounding how hidden her ridden was before this book.

1:00: Joe Levy talking about the ways he found Ellen’s writing before the NYer digital archives, etc. “Astounding,” her work.

1:01: A lot were record reviews, show reviews, idea of “singer of the Modern Lovers with ‘I Love My Life’ penciled onto a t-shirt.”

1:02: “What is unusual is its embrace of ambiguity and ambivalence.”

1:04: Book, feels like someone who is willing to embrace “I guess, but I just don’t know.” Rock critics became an argument over “is this good or this this bad.” Whereas, with Ellen, it was different, it didn’t have to be so clear.

1:05: Oh my god.

1:05: Intellectual tradition passed on in cubicles, bars, apartments that look like The Strand. Ellen’s writing looks like someone writing with you, says Anne Powers, and that is what the intellectual life is about. Making minds bigger.

1:06: Kathleen Hanna discovered Ellen at the end of the 90s when she moved to NY at the Strand, a hard time, at the end of the 90s, hyper-identity crises.

1:07: She was trying to find her voice while being told she created something. She was really confused about what it meant to “have a voice” as a female musician.

1:08: Sick of living up to crazy expectations in a tense political scene that had gotten very insular. Got No More Nice Girls and was like “this women has an amazing fucking voice.” Gave her hope that she could embody that in her music.

1:09: Started question how sexism fed into her ideas of needing to find a voice.

1:09: She had power…

1:11: Identity politics in the 80s and 90s.

1:12: Ellen Willis is embodied in her work. You are with her physically in every way. Reality of being embodied. (Says Anne Powers.)

1:13: “FUCK THAT” -Anne Powers re: being afraid of the “feminist” tag.

1:14: In the 90s there was this contradictory thing of not wanting to universalize but taking unneeded amount of space because you were claiming authority because you were saying “I am a woman,” etc. Hanna says it became like a beauty pageant in reverse. Laundry list rather than a real conversation, eating each other. She finds Ellen’s voice like a flashlight out of that maze.

1:15: “This isn’t the first time I’ve thought something Kathleen Hanna said is awesome but…” -Joe Levy

1:15: Pluralistic value she sees in the music itself — wouldn’t say it was the hallmark of ID politics, but this work is deeply political w/o limiting itself to identity. The insistence that there is no separation between the art and the politics is often clear and just as often inspiring. (-Joe Levy)

1:16: Acknowledge realities of desire and honor ideology — essence of contradiction AND dialectic that produces new thought. (-Anne) Liberating to think of herself as a new ID in the “master narrative.” Biggest growth: looking outward at other narratives and IDs not her own, across lines of class and race.

1:17: “All rock critics did not go to Berkeley.” #NYUpride…

1:24: Recast the narrative of New Journalism with Ellen Willis at the center rather than Hunter S. Thompson. (-Anne Powers)

1:28: What the hell is desire? Can we break that down? (-Anne Powers)

1:29: Idea of collective movement in NY as a magnetic force.

1:32: “Ellen could get me to rethink the Stones who I hate beyond all reason.”

1:32: Computer battery dying :-(. I am inspired beyond comprehension, promise.

I did a presentation on Veganism today for my Ecocriticism class...

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 21:30:34 -0400

I did a presentation on Veganism today for my Ecocriticism class addressing the questions: How is our understanding of “food animals” shaped by the language framing our conversation? How much suffering will we tolerate for our food? If you cannot answer these questions, look at this fucking cute pig.

I’ve studied Do The Right Thing in three different...

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 19:00:00 -0400

I’ve studied Do The Right Thing in three different academic situations at this point, and I learn new things every time. I am repeatedly awed by the intro.

"Beyond this literal forgetting of animals by eating them, animal bodies were, for Kafka, burdened..."

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 15:22:55 -0400

“Beyond this literal forgetting of animals by eating them, animal bodies were, for Kafka, burdened with the forgetting of all those parts of ourselves we want to forget. If we wish to disavow a part of our nature, we call it our “animal nature.” We then repress or conceal that nature, and yet, as Kafka knew better than most, we sometimes wake up and find ourselves, still, only animals. And this seems right. We do not, so to speak, blush with shame before fish. We can recognize parts of ourselves in fish — spines, nociceptors (pain receptors), endorphins (that relieve pain), all of the familiar pain responses — but then deny that these animal similarities matter, and thus equally deny important parts of our humanity. What we forget about animals we begin to forget about ourselves.”

- Jonathan Saffron Foer, Eating Animals