PicoBlog

There's a Simone Weil quote I've always been soothed by, which vibes with an idea here, about the infinite amalgamations of the self: "I am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness,” Weil writes. I find this notion consoling: to imagine that my self, or my soul (that bothersome glowing orb that is always following me around) contains not only what I currently am but also everything that I am not.

Hello and welcome to REPLY ALT, the only and therefore greatest email newsletter about music. Ever since I started this newsletter, I’ve been dropping casual mentions about My Book that I’ve been working on but have been kinda dodgy about the details. Well, here it all is... Nobody writes the books I want to read. Every time I find myself at a bookstore staring at the shelves of books about rock music, I am struck by how homogenous everything looks.

It saddens me that young girls are being manipulated into damaging their bodies for what is I believe in most cases a fad. Unhappy girls (teen vogue's market) think these procedures will alleviate their internal emotional suffering by appearing like/becoming their opposite sex or unsexed "true" selves. I believe that a significant number of these teen girls who feel wrong inside indeed undergo these surgeries to look like how they feel inside.

What did you do during lockdown? When it all started in March 2020 I made many a resolution, most almost immediately abandoned, towards self-improvement, but one area I have kept up is study of the Italian Renaissance. Has there ever been any period of artistic history as astonishing as this one? And now a painting from one of the greatest masters of them all, Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, aka Sandro Botticelli, is coming to the market: on January 28th, Sotheby’s is selling Young Man Holding a Roudel.

I’m in Paris. I just landed with the carry-on bag I’ve been living out of, on-and-off for up to six months at a time, for ooooh about 16 years now. Plus, a very large suitcase of extra things I may as well take to Paris with me, such as the Greek herbs and Tasmanian salt I didn’t use up before leaving, some shampoo dregs, spare batteries, an earplugs st… ncG1vNJzZmirkaeuqcPIpaqopl6owqO%2F05qapGaTpLpwvI6ipGaakZi4brXNZqeaqpmoeqK4zKiqrWWYqq%2BmvsyapZ0%3D

Sam Tanenhaus’s review of my book is pretty weird! Weird in that I’m not sure what its thesis is or why any one paragraph follows another, weird in that (as is common with Tanenhaus) it’s written from a schizophrenic ideological position that nevertheless represents itself as the voice of sanity, weird in that its arguments and observations congeal across its length with no internal coherence or purpose whatsoever. Tanenhaus is a guy who forced Politico to issue a correction saying that Tanenhaus is not a conservative, but who could not then actually articulate his politics to Politico in a minimally coherent way.

I recently wrote a contrarian, conceptual piece at Discourse Magazineon Walmart. I’m not the biggest fan of Walmart, but this was my thesis: Walmart didn’t kill the small town, per se; in some important ways, it is the small town. I don’t just mean that it replaced the function of the town, in that you can buy everything there, run into people you know, etc. I mean it in the sense that Walmart is essentially a town under a roof in a land-use sense, down to the aisles (streets) and departments (small stores).

2024, widely predicted to be among the wildest years in American history, seems to be self-actualizing before our very eyes. Many people sent me the new George Carlin special. That’s right — 15 years after Carlin’s death, he’s back. Move over, Hologram Tupac. It’s AI Carlin. And here’s the YouTube description, showing a viewcount of over a quarter million views in three days: 286,527 views Jan 9, 2024 #georgecarlin #standupcomedy #dudesy

I don’t envy the job of a NWSL general manager or sporting director. Right now, they are the ones tasked with managing a salary cap somewhere between $2million and $3million. Within those figures, they have to figure out how to pay around 26 of the best footballers in the world a “fair” wage in 2024. Of course, in sport, salaries or prize money have long been a part of the discourse, the strategy, and the allure.