birthday

Simultaneously lamenting and celebrating the loss of my teenager-hood and my induction into the Twenty-Somethings Club.

(But more celebrating.)

rainer maria rilke

"You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. Live the questions now." -Letters to a Young Poet 

where everything's familiar and sincere

When I'm feeling melancholy, or hermetic, or faithless, or overly complacent, or soul-crushingly passive, or any combination of the above with a store of added afflictions imminently available, I like to watch this video. I mean, I do other stuff too (i.e. inhale jars of peanut butter, sob quietly in a locked stall, etc.), but there's something kind of magical and healing about the earnestness of this band and this performance. Defiance, Ohio are unrefined, scrappy, and honest; and watching them play this song (though unfortunately entitled "Hair Pool") helps me understand that, even when my own energies seem to be dissipating, there is still so much sweetness abounding in this world (or on YouTube, whatever) just waiting to be shared.

In any case, if watching the delightful drummer-turned-maraca-shaker in the upper right doesn't make you smile, your cause is indefinitely lost.

P.S.: This performance is a part of the Pink Couch Sessions series, in which an awesome amount of awesome artists you've never heard of play acoustic versions of their awesome music; and it's all done on this dude's pink couch in his Brooklyn apartment. I HIGHLY recommend you spend several hours (/days) checking it out. Who needs Prozac when you have folk punk? 

vernal

vernal (adj.): appropriate to or suggesting spring.

(ashish gupta)

(rainbow gathering)

(elizabeth peyton, "spencer")

Happy soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings! Love, me, Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, et. al.

sláinte

To know me is to know the zealousness of my Anglo/Celtophilia; and no other band embodies both Englishness and Irishness (paradoxical but apparently possible) as gloriously, and obnoxiously, as the Pogues. As the English-born son of Irish emigrants, Shane MacGowan and his band of joyous rabble-rousers combined the reactionary angst of the London punk scene with the lumpenproletariat defiance lauded in Celtic tradition - thereby creating something heretically novel, incendiary, and somewhat sublime in its own twisted right.

(By the way, if it seems like I'm overanalyzing the Pogues, who essentially created really good drinking music, it's because I am - I wrote a 20-page paper about the band and the Ulster punk scene during the height of the Troubles, ~1976-1985, for my Irish Lit class last semester (seriously). I still kind of can't believe that while my classmates pored over obscure 19th-century emigration records, I got away with using Undertones albums and YouTube videos of Stiff Little Fingers tearing shit up as my primary sources. Suckers.)

AnYwAy, I am aware that yesterday was St. Patrick's Day and that this post may seem a little late to the Irish Catholic game. But, in my defense, I was on a plane all day yesterday and my deeply flawed understanding of the basic laws of time and space tend towards the belief that, once a minimum of three time zones are crossed within the space of one 24-hour period, then time, for the traveller in question, ceases to exist at all. So for all intents and purposes today is March 17th in Caroline's Wonky Universe. Bottoms up!

In honor of Ireland, Shane MacGowan's teeth, and disconcerting 1980s music video nonsense, here's what I think is the Pogues' most beautiful track, "A Pair of Brown Eyes," off their revelatory 1985 album Rum, Sodomy and the Lash.  

   

hasta la vista

Off on a Rioja binge. See you in a jamon-fueled week!

down in albion

It's official: in the fall I'll be off to study in London! (Fecking finally.) In the interim, the city-wide search for a proper full English, fit for one hopeless Anglophiliac, continues.

Here's one of my favo(u)rite quintessential Londonian songs by a quintessentially British band (accompanied here by a slideshow of images from a quintessentially British film. Technically the Scots are British, too! Whether they like it or not.)