Doppelgängland

I basically should have started this blog a year ago. My first bunch of posts are probably going to be kinda dated. I have a bunch of blog ideas backlogged in my brain. This is going to be the innaugural Doppelgängland post, showcasing people who look a lot a like but are very different. The name comes from the Buffy episode where regular Willow meets vamp Willow.

Spider Webb from The Horrors (left) and Chad Rogers from that house selling show (right):

I've never watched the house selling show, I just watch a lot of Bravo and he's pretty inescapable in the promos. He was also mentioned on The Soup a few days ago, which reminded me how similar they look. I doubt though that, haircut aside, they're anything alike. I also doubt chad can do this.

Also Chad was initial evidence for my very wrong prediction that the bowl haircut was going to be big in America this year.

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Jarvis Cocker - Told You Twice Leftovers

Love this:

I was there and it was even more amazing live. I had this song stuck in my head from the first time I heard the chorus, before it showed up on Youtube, before the lyrics showed up on pulp wiki.

I don't really have any concerts planned for the near or distant future so I figured I'd go back to the not so distant past and talk about this song because I really love it. It's kind of beautiful in the sad is happy for deep people kind of way.

Jarvis' first solo album grew on me so I was happily surprised that I liked the new songs immediately. Typically I'm bored out of my mind when new songs are played live. This set was pretty much the only exception.

This song stuck out the most for me because it was slower than the other new ones, which is ironic because the reason I didn't like the first album instantaneously was because most of the songs were slow and I was still in the process of getting used to slower music with polished production. I'd always thought the opposite was ideal but obviously there's room for both, and both can be amazing.

The line that really stuck out for me also stuck out for the New York Times reviewer. "I wanna love you whilst we still have flesh upon our bones. Before we both become extinct." It's sad, yearning, beautiful, grotestque, evocative and disarmingly simple. Every time I listen to it, it gives me chills. I can't wait to hear how it sounds on the album.

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Seaport Shots

These are probably the most postcard-y pictures that I've taken. I took them for a photo-journalism class and the assignment was to show off composition so they're supposed to be a bit style over substance.
I started with the most postcard-y of all. I like this one because it manages to be vertical and horizontal at the same time.
This one kind of expresses how I feel about the seaport. It is touristy but, at the same time, between the bridge and the water and the old docked ships, it's kind of serene and nice.

Then this one's a bit gray and stormy and doesn't really give away the fact that these were all shot on the same day:

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Beginning Blogging

I decided that I'd start a blog the day after the election. My first idea for a blog name was 'Post-Grad Limbo', which is maybe a little more pretentious than what I ultimately went with. But there was already a blog with that name so I thesaurus-ed Limbo, which led me to uncertain, which led me to ambivalent.

I think ambivalent is a kind of perfect description of my current state. Also, post-grad was the wrong word because I'm not in any kind of post-graduate school. I've simply graduated. My ambivalence is what's keeping me from grad school.

Since weeks passed between when I intended to start writing and now, an even more fitting blog title might have included procrastination. Right now I should be doing something else, but I'm not, I'm writing this.

In future blog posts I want to write about pop culture type stuff, analyze TV and movies (my academic true love), reactions to books I'm reading, and Music* I'm listening to (my non-academic true love) and maybe post a bit about politics and analyze media coverage of politics. I'll probably also post any random thoughts I feel are blog worthy. Oh and I want to post some of my favorite pictures that I've taken too.

I could post some get-to-know-me-type facts but I think I'll hold off. I was just thinking about how I hate small talk; talking about what people do, how they know each other, etc. I'll try to avoid that and let the boring details come out in a more organic, and hopefully more interesting way.

Joe Strummer once said, "I think it's a sin to be boring." Keeping that in mind, I probably sinned a bit with this first entry. In the future I'll try to be as virtuous in that regard as possible.

*when editing, I noticed that I capitalized music by mistake but I decided that it was kind of Freudian so I'm keeping it

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