The recent piece on the new wave of American shoegaze in Stereogum was nothing if not exhaustive. Spanning obscure sub-genres and scenes, it shone a light on some of the mostly heavier U.S. based bands carrying on the tradition of outfits like Catherine Wheel and Ringo Deathstarr. The piece demanded a desire to dig deep and attention span to match that ambition. I spent some time this week going through the bands. It was not time wasted. Though I didn’t come out of the exercise with a lot of new favorite music, I did benefit from hearing how the upcoming crop of bands was bending old sounds.

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Simon Kennedy writes for Mere Orthodoxy about how Christians need to be circumspect about how they engage publicly. He sees very few individuals as cut out to properly express public faith.

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A comment on a Stereogum piece about the new wave of American shoegaze: I know I keep riding this schtick, but we really are out of band names, folks. “Ganx Crap take inspiration from the post-slo-blorpgaze of Body Wash and LilMissPiggy.geccs, without completely cresting the wave set in motion by fellow Milwaukee veterans Total Garf Nuggets and T(w)asty Past(e).” Although hilarious, it almost sounds too exaggerated to be a decent parody.

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Matt Birchler on the absurdity of media not being available for ownership. I think it’s extremely frustrating that streaming services generally don’t let people buy permanent copies of the shows they offer. Coda won Best Picture at the Oscars last year and there is no way for someone to buy that movie and know they’ll be able to see it whenever they want in the future. That’s nuts. Considering the rate of bit rot, it can be an unfortunate prospect to imagine your favorite book, movie or album disappearing.

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In a world that’s full of surprises, it turns out that accepting “full responsibility” for massive layoffs might not have the weight it appears to. Art Shaikh, serial entrepreneur and CEO of the tech firm Digital Will more cynically echoes that in the first instance, “claiming responsibility for layoffs might seem like a noble move”, but in reality, “it is advice given by PR professionals”. The language used in these circumstances is so homogeneous and transparent, Mike Lacher from McSweeney’s was able to do a pitch perfect parody.

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I’ve been working on my blog design lately. Occasionally, a situation will arise in which I do something that totally messes things up, and I wish for the option to roll back to a “last known good” configuration. I used to love this option on Windows. If you (or a process or driver) did something that put the operating system in a bad state, you could always roll back to the last known good state and get things up and running. It was like being able to go back in a time machine to before a failure (a power most of us would like to have IRL). It was a chance to correct something and make it right, and then avoid the negative consequences.

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I generally don’t do year-end lists, but I like to share a couple of my favorites things from the past year. In this interstitial time between Christmas and New Year’s, I get a chance to reflect back on what I’ve enjoyed, while having very few demands on my time.

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The skate video that first brought jazz into my consciousness in a very real way was Stereo Skateboards A Visual Sound. After seeing the movie, I started wearing brown dickies and buying John Coltrane CDs. Not everyone in the skateboarding community was into the film, with it’s mixture of black and white stills and footage recorded on Super 8. I was smitten with the aesthetic, though. It was an acknowledgement of something that I had always thought — skateboarding was just as much art as sport. To this day I can’t listen to fast, post-bop jazz without wanting to skate.

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I used to have a well-worn VHS cassette of Sonic Youth’s tour video, 1991: The Year Punk Broke. It featured a just-experiencing-stardom phase of Nirvana, but that wasn’t the reason I watched it over and over. I was more interested in the Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. performances that were recorded at these giant European music festivals. Until Lollapalooza sprang forth from the mind of Perry Farrell, we didn’t have bands like Sonic Youth playing huge outdoor venues in North America.¹

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I’m always on the hunt for new music. I’m honestly proud of the fact that my musical tastes didn’t freeze in my teenage years. Nayantara Dutta explores how people form and retain their musical tastes for a piece in The Washington Post.

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When the pandemic hit, I wasn’t excited about turning over my computer to my high school student son. I had made a rule that my boys would never have a TV or computer in their room. This is advice I’d heard many times directed at the conscientious parent. However, with virtual schooling being the only option in the spring of 2020, I gave up on the rule and gave in to pragmatism. My son got my iMac, and, for a while, I went without a computer apart from my work laptop and my iPad.

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Recently on Micro.blog, folks have been talking about “slow technology.” This usually means single-use or limited-use devices. The phrase “wise phones” has apparently been coined to refer to flip phones and other simple telephony. Anna Havron, an analogue and simplification enthusiast, recently wrote a post on downgrading her own phone.

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Pure Holiday by Ice Choir Though I deeply value the religious rituals and recognitions of the Christmas season, one of my favorite Christmas songs is totally secular. “It’s Different Now” by Ice Choir is all Hallmark, unoffensive generic “toys and candy canes” sentiment. The song is guaranteed to warm even the hearts of the newest of new atheists. It’s almost as if Clark Griswold’s speech — on the meaning of an agnostic Christmas — at the end of the Vacation movie set during the holiday season was made into a song.

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