some other apricot

thefeeling: I’m pink. One of the few things I’m looking...

Thu, 16 May 2013 03:17:31 -0400

I’m pink.

One of the few things I’m looking forward to about the future is some kind of hyper-personalized individual recognition system that will keep track of my preferences and weaknesses and ensure that I never have to hear The National in public (which inevitably ends in crying, either quietly or loudly) ever again.

Obviously, people have differing opinions. Every time you try to...

Wed, 08 May 2013 16:00:10 -0400

Obviously, people have differing opinions. Every time you try to write about something larger than yourself and your experience, something as large as a city, which is mostly made-up anyway, you’re going to get things wrong. Or not wrong, exactly, because it isn’t objective, which is sort of the point.

I am doing a yoga teacher training. A couple of weeks ago we were sitting in the big room of the studio on a Friday night when there was an earthquake. The room stuttered, just slightly, the walls and the ceiling noisy when they moved. “Was that?” MK asked, and didn’t bother finishing the question, because yes, it was. We shrugged. We kept on talking about the sutras.

Spring here vacillates not just between sunny and rainy but between two different kinds of climates, the dry air of desert winter getting hot and huge so that it was ninety in the shade last week. Then it rained, and now everything is beachy again, covered over by a marine layer in the mornings. I had forgotten how gorgeous dry heat is, the way the air billows and swells, the way you can forget it against your skin until the breeze blows warm and it feels like clean sheets, maybe, scratchy and pleasantly foreign all around you.

I don’t know, everything is easy to make a joke about. Teacher training, the green juices everyone drinks for lunch, disaster weather and the relevant Didion quotes. I drive my car into the intersections when I’m waiting to make a left turn, because I’m impatient; the only person who has ever commented on this was a visiting New Yorker, who thought I was reckless and insane. Stories and stories and stories.

I’ve given up on convincing anyone else I’m right, and maybe that’s what bothers people so much about this place: it encourages a kind of living that isn’t interested in much outside of its own skin. If I were going to make generalizations, I might say that New York’s insistence is on the moral rectitude of ignoring physical discomfort and having a loud voice, that both modes work better when tempered by one another.

Later today I’ll go to a yoga class with a teacher I know, and she will encourage me to identify my thoughts as thoughts, to think them without being attached to them, to find a way to observe myself as a thinking thing. We’ll do some poses. If there’s something she wants me to explore more deeply she’ll use her hands to show me how.

"Now I'm a free agent, literally and figuratively. I've reached that enviable state in life in which I can do pretty much what I want. And what I want is to continue to play basketball. I still love the game, and I still have something to offer. My coaches and teammates recognize that. At the same time, I want to be genuine and authentic and truthful."

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 21:48:55 -0400

"Now I'm a free agent, literally and figuratively. I've reached that enviable state in life in which I can do pretty much what I want. And what I want is to continue to play basketball. I still love the game, and I still have something to offer. My coaches and teammates recognize that. At the same time, I want to be genuine and authentic and truthful.":

jennydeluxe:

“Why NBA center Jason Collins is coming out now,” Sports Illustrated.

Not that this is, um, a truly crucial part of the story, but Collins is a Harvard-Westlake alum; I remember reading about him and his brother playing college ball when I was in middle school. (Also, fun fact: apparently Jason Segel played alongside him, in high school.)

needsmoresalt: Although we knew Z would go back to LA from the...

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 12:14:51 -0400

needsmoresalt:

Although we knew Z would go back to LA from the day she arrived on this coast again, it was still awful to see her go. For her going away party, I made as many Z-specific foods as I could think of — chocolate chip cookies, deviled eggs, etc — and we toasted her over and over with our martinis and wine and champagne.

December 11, 2012, 10:57pm

I know everyone feels this way but I’m fairly certain that I’m right when I say: my friends are the best friends.

"To wear a smell in public (and this is 100% Harad’s feminist perfume observation, not mine) is to do..."

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 14:30:51 -0400

“To wear a smell in public (and this is 100% Harad’s feminist perfume observation, not mine) is to do exactly what women are not supposed to do, ever: Announce your presence as a desiring subject, with definite opinions and specific desires. I chose this. I wanted this. I have this. I did it because I liked how it made me feel. Now you can feel it too. You’re welcome. Perfume is the least feminine thing ever, in that sense.
And yet, at the same time, it’s also not masculine enough for many gender-wary men — you have to choose it because it’s beautiful, it’s adornment, it’s a step you consciously take to make your person more beautiful and it doesn’t even have the practical value of clothing or shaving or cutting your hair. If you wear it, you can’t even call it “perfume,” you have to call it a Man Name like cologne or aftershave, because if you call it by the correct name you’re suddenly wearing makeup. Perfume fucks with gender like whoa. It makes people viscerally uncomfortable in ways that are almost entirely about gender. This is one of the many ways I think it’s awesome.”

- Doyle Smells: Opium, Taking Up Space, and Perfume Gender Panic

Italics Mine: My Mom: Hipper Than Yours

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 02:02:00 -0400

Italics Mine: My Mom: Hipper Than Yours:

citizendino:

italicsmine:

My mom has been to Coachella every year since its inception. I have gone with her twice, but I hated it, so now I just wait for her to give me a post-mortem over the phone. (You know: “The Postal Service was so good!” etc. etc.) It’s too hot and crowded, for…

Jane’s Addiction lived down the block from us when my mother was pregnant with me; they practiced loud and late, and she called the cops on them regularly.

Accordingly, I am skipping Coachella this weekend because a) why and b) yoga teacher training.

Untitled: Some Brief and Frightening Tips from George Saunders via Konundrum...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 21:35:16 -0400

Untitled: Some Brief and Frightening Tips from George Saunders via Konundrum...:

is-or-ought:

Some Brief and Frightening Tips from George Saunders via Konundrum Engine & Edan L.

“I don’t believe at all in the Deep Dark Secret theory of literature: this idea that there is a right or a wrong about a given story or a given approach. My own pathetic output is proof that, at least in…

mom discovers procrasti-blogging

Dispatches from NHV

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 13:55:00 -0400

Dispatches from NHV:

On Sunday I was at this barbecue at a house in the hills in Echo Park and it was drizzling so everyone was making faces about it, including B, who had just flown in from New York. “You should be tougher than this,” someone said.

“It snowed last week,” he said. “I’m done being tough.” He’s moving back in just over a year; we walked around the property together, the yard and the porch and the deck overlooking a ravine, the steep sharp fall carpeted in what looked like nasturtiums, watching the sun set through the slits in the hills to the west. “People just live like this here,” he said, sweeping out a hand at it: space, sun, a pinata from somewhere south of here rigged up in one of the trees. “They just… do.”

They do; we do. I miss eastern spring a little bit, though, too. The day last year that I wore that stupid romper and drank rose on the train, brought N the season’s first asparagus, the curling tips of the scapes.

"“Is it always the same story, then? Somebody loves and somebody doesn’t, or loves less, or loves..."

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 13:39:36 -0400

“

“Is it always the same story, then? Somebody loves and somebody doesn’t, or loves less, or loves someone else.”

“Part of the thing the character’s doing,” Ms. Adler said, “is trying not to live the stereotyped version of that story. There are many stereotyped versions of that story.”

”

- Miranda Popkey interviewed Renata Adler about the rerelease of Speedboat and Pitch Dark. (via emilybooks)

Untitled: About the novel … the one in progress … : E had a dream in which a man...

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 17:30:06 -0400

Untitled: About the novel … the one in progress … : E had a dream in which a man...:

is-or-ought:

About the novel … the one in progress … :

E had a dream in which a man came up to her on the street and demanded to know if her work was influenced by William Gass. When she woke up, she tried to reconstruct her response but couldn’t. Instead she made a new list (not Gass but yes, CPK and…

I promised I would out her if & when she started using it, and, faithful daughter that I am, I’m following through. My mom has a blog! She is going to post things on it, and write about writing her novel! You should read it, mostly so that you can see that everything I think about process & place pretty much comes from her.

Things I Ate That I Love: Walk into the mirror

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 16:05:00 -0400

Things I Ate That I Love: Walk into the mirror:

emilygould:

If you find the words “my yoga practice” offputting, bye!

In late December I decided to take a break from teaching yoga in favor of finding work that paid well enough for me to pay my bills and start putting a dent in the debt I’d accumulated while writing my book. I was lucky to find one, but…

I did Bikram for four years, and hot yoga for two; this says some things about me as a person and more things about the seven years I spent in New Haven, where my yoga options were limited. Suffice it to say that at this point I am basically immune to hot, cramped, dark rooms and terrible smells and sweating in a way that makes you excruciatingly aware that like, every single inch of your body has pores on it. Every inch, you guys. I mean, there’s sweat and then there’s sweat.

The same day that Emily was in Los Angeles staring herself down in the mirror my friend A. and I decided to try SoulCycle for the first time. It is, first of all, ludicrously fucking expensive: $25 for a class, $3 for shoes, and, because it’s LA, $3 to park. We also paid $2 for water bottles, which, at that point, what-fucking-ever. Our class included my least favorite high school classmate, whose most recent project was starring in a too-terrible-to-be-funny webseries, and one of the actresses from Glee. I said hello to neither.

SoulCycle is basically just spinning with a spiritual/motivational twist; our instructor turned off the lights played loud music and screamed at us over her headset, asking us if we were ready to take on the responsibility of being an inspiration. She told us we needed to be ready to let go of our past selves, to shed our fear and our fat and climb the hills on our path to purity. I mean, don’t get me wrong: it was a fantastic workout.

But it was just— there’s something so incredibly, deeply perverse about needing to take 45 minutes and pay $30 to go somewhere dark and loud and crowded and have someone yell at you that things are going to be okay. Yoga gets a lot of flack for its touchy-feely surrender to your breath talk; SoulCycle and hot yoga and Bikram just mask that by making the physical experience miserable, so that you’re too broken and exhausted to shut it out, someone telling you over and over and over again that you’re okay, that things are going to be okay.

There’s also the flipside of it, that you can’t possibly believe that you are okay if you’re shut into a dark room on a pretty LA day, sweating and trying to break yourself down, get so tired that you’ll believe anything someone yells at you over a headset. Baudrillard has my favorite description of American exercise as spiritual bulimia, the belief that having energy to spare is embarrassing and almost disgusting. You have to purge yourself of it to find purity and peace. So much of our homegrown spiritual culture is about loss. It’s so crazy, the idea that we need to suffer in order to be happy, that we need to make ourselves smaller, in order to be better.

In college M & I went through a period where we had so many dumb conversations about...

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:40:00 -0400

In college M & I went through a period where we had so many dumb conversations about relationships that we eventually made a game out of it, trying to turn our half-baked observations about love into SATC voiceover monologue-worthy gems. Our best effort was an extended metaphor about the fiscal crash (2009, what’s up): diversifying your emotional investment portfolio, staying away from subprime properties, knowing when to accept the sunk costs and just cut your fucking losses, already.

Anyway: related.

Under the Sea (Farm)

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:48:37 -0400

luckypeach:

When I went to visit Bren Smith’s Thimble Island Oyster Company to learn about the sad shape of the sea for the Apocalypse issue, I met all kinds of unexpected animals out there on the water.

Read More

Good old days, cont’d.

ysfp: Ever year we face a conundrum: one of the most important...

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 19:38:41 -0400

ysfp:

Ever year we face a conundrum: one of the most important tenets of Harvest is that it’s a break from the plugged-in technological world, and no one wants to bring a fancy digital camera along to dig in the dirt, but we need pictures of the trips! For our 2012 session we experimented by giving leaders and support crew disposable cameras and asking them to document what they did and saw. The results are hilarious and gorgeous and make us miss summer all over again. Above are some highlights— you can check out the rest on our Flickr page.

Good old days.

Like all Los Angeles stories, this one starts with freeways. The route I take to writing class now...

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 11:50:42 -0500

Like all Los Angeles stories, this one starts with freeways.

The route I take to writing class now starts out the same as the one I took to therapy, when I was going in the fall and spring of 2009, 2010. Then as now I get on the 101 south at Melrose, take it to the 110 north where it used to be the Arroyo Seco Parkway. Now I get off just after the split with the 5; I used to take it out ‘til the freeway ended in Pasadena, to the Jesuit university where my therapist worked.

There’s something almost too easily analogous about the experiences: the tension and anxiety beforehand, the fear that today is the day I’ll be exposed as a fool and a liar and a fraud, the release afterwards, the way that both trips make me want nothing more than to speed and listen to loud music and change lanes over and over and over again. How badly I need to feel like I’m moving and moving quickly, on the way to and from.

There are a series of tunnels on the 110, three or four in a row, brief enough that I can hold my breath through them. I always did this on the way to therapy, a childish holdover, so that I could make a wish. I was miserable; I wished that I’d be happy. Some days, the days when I was gripping the wheel and thinking up excuses before I even got there, ways to evade all of the things I didn’t want to talk about, I just wished that I would get through it, whatever it was. The hour and the day and the drive.

These days I hold my breath out of habit; I wish idly, not because there aren’t things to wish for but because the wishes never did me any real good. What mattered was that I made the drive, even and especially when I didn’t want to. I went to therapy even though I was convinced it wasn’t helping. I gritted my teeth and got through it; I asked for and accepted help even when I couldn’t believe that I deserved it at all.

I was sitting on the interchange tonight, stuck in traffic, mid-level on one of those complicated flyovers where the city’s arteries are starkly visible, when I discovered that I’ve managed to teach myself all of the lyrics to Drake’s verse on Fucking Problem, my current favorite dumb rap song. It was possibly the stupidest victory. That’s the best part of staying somewhere, though: getting to write over it, whatever it was, the bad part. Getting to retrace the freeways until they say what you want them to say. Learning the lyrics so well that it’s effortless, singing along.

nzle: The Story of the Jowl

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 13:05:27 -0500

nzle: The Story of the Jowl:

nzle:

So about a month ago, my friend Will bought a half pig from Flying Pigs Farm for his birthday and then sold off the individual cuts. I got a huge rolled and tied skin-on shoulder, some ground pork, a little skirt steak off the ribs, and a cheek. The shoulder is in the freezer awaiting a massive…

I always wondered what it was like to read NSH’s posts from afar, as a person unable to open her pork-scented closets and eat what is almost certainly going to be the best carbonara ever made. Now I know, and I really wish I didn’t.

Me & dad pre-red carpet, approx. 3 years ago today. I have been to the Oscars twice: once when I...

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 18:10:51 -0500

Me & dad pre-red carpet, approx. 3 years ago today.

I have been to the Oscars twice: once when I was sixteen and again when I was twenty two. My father is a voting member of the Academy; the dirty secret is that the carpet is fun and the drinking martinis and staring at famous people part is fun and then the actual awards ceremony is bo-ring, like, you know at home how you get up and get snacks and walk around and talk to people and check your email? Can’t do that in the Kodak. You just sit there and watch and sit and watch some more.

Today I’m sitting on my parents’ couch, watching Ryan Seacrest and Kelly Osbourne on E!, drinking beer, trying to get some writing done during the commercial breaks. Life in LA: more and less glamorous, depending on the day, the year.

emilygould: This is a photo of the first time I met Meghan...

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:50:25 -0500

emilygould:

This is a photo of the first time I met Meghan Daum! The second time will be tonight and no one will be styling us like fierce vampires, un/fortunately.

I feel like I’m in some ways less and in some other ways more of an idiot than I was in the joint interview that accompanied this photo, and in the book that prompted it. I wonder if Meghan feels the same way about the essay collection she published near the end of her 20s? Tonight, I will ask her that, live onstage.

Come!!

I am going to be at this thing tonight. If you’re in LA (what is up with this wind, right?) you should probably come, too.

luckypeach: Here’s the cover of the next issue. It’ll be...

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 12:58:23 -0500

luckypeach:

Here’s the cover of the next issue. It’ll be arriving in mailboxes and bookstores over the next couple weeks. Inside you’ll find a massive interview with a little-known writer named Michael Pollan, a comic collaboration from Tony Bourdain and Tim Lane, stories of werebeavers, and all manner of strangeness and grossness you expect from us taken to apocalyptic extremes.

Issues will be available at all your favorite stores that sell printed things. Or you could cop a copy direct from us here.

Oh, yeah, I guess I should note: we’re gonna try to tumblr here regularly, so feel free to follow. We’re also on instagram and twitter. And facebook, but seriously, I do not have any idea how that thing works.

pfm

I have it on good authority that there will also be a picture of my face in this one (illustrating a piece about my dear friend Bren Smith!)— just in case you needed the extra incentive.

loganmsachon: drinkyourjuice: Used the six things I know about...

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 17:34:00 -0500

loganmsachon:

drinkyourjuice:

Used the six things I know about Los Angeles to decorate the wall of my friend’s “I’m moving away!” party.

hhah perfect

*if we DON’T take the 405, as it is a terrible freeway to nowhere. (Nowhere good, anyway. Looking at you, west LA.)

(Otherwise: accurate.)