CHOIRE: A new Hidden Cameras video!

BALK: I was just looking at that. I need to listen all the way through to see if pee-drinking is mentioned

CHOIRE: So far I give it two wtfs out of three.

CHOIRE: Okay, it’s Bronski Beat for the Arcade Fire generation, I can get down with that.

BALK: Ugh I no like when it switches at a minute and a half in.

CHOIRE: Well, at least they kind of made a song.

BALK: I guess I should give up on hoping for another “Music Is My Boyfriend.”

CHOIRE: sigh yeah

BALK: Also someone needs to tell people that this kind of semi-slo-mo camera work feels DELIBERATELY MANIPULATIVE. Like, manipulate me, I’m down, that’s part of what videos are for, but don’t point out that you’re doing it.

CHOIRE: Um, boo. This video doesn’t end with the stupid goth shooting everyone.

BALK: Jeremy does not speak in class?

CHOIRE: asdfasdf

CHOIRE: Feels so-so about Mondays.

BALK: Those pumped-up kicks actually aren’t that bad.

CHOIRE: Music really isn’t getting better

BALK: You say that because you’re old. If you were 17 you’d be like “Oh my god these stupid bloop-bloop-screech sounds are AMAZING.”

CHOIRE: Haha

CHOIRE: Probably ugh

Why do doctors abuse prescription drugs? If you thought the answer was “Because life is an unrelenting series of brutalizing emotions and memories and regrets and even in those rare moments when you forget just exactly how awful things are and you are almost relaxed enough to enjoy a short spell of, if not exactly happiness, at least not feeling like each and every wall is closing in and the end is near and the pain will never stop, there is still a small voice in the back of your brain that pops up to say, ‘Hey, don’t forget about trouble, because it will surely find you, and it is out looking as we speak,’ and that constant cycle of worry and hurt running through your head can only be stilled by the sweet relief of drugs that take that little voice and shove a gag so far down its throat it shits cotton balls for weeks, and if you were a doctor and could write prescriptions OF COURSE you’d be writing them for yourself like crazy, you’d be clinically insane NOT TO,” then you are correct, but this article here on the topic goes with the more polite answer of “self-medication.”

Photo by Zurijeta, via Shutterstock

Let’s not spoil this with words, unless those words are “buy Desire Lines.”

“Feeling weighed down by guilt is more than just a metaphor, according to scientists who have discovered the emotion can produce a bodily sensation. Researchers from Canada and the U.S. discovered that people feel heavier in weight after doing something that made them feel guilty as well as a recalling a memory of when they felt guilty. The scientists believe that while the research is in its infancy, simulating the experience of the weight of guilt, seems to be tied to regulating moral behaviour.”

Cultural observer Richard Rushfield has some thoughts on how the bountiful level of expression in The Current Conversation has failed to result in a multiplicity of critical perspective, and he blames it on the kids:

[T]oday’s abundance of information and voices doesn’t just end up cutting off the breadth of that conversation, but its depth as well. That is to say, not only are fewer opinions heard, but the ones that are are dumber than ever before. The problem goes back to another of my running complaints about Generation Yay: their a-historicism and the roots thereof… It has previously been proven that no member of today’s up and coming horde has any knowledge of — or any interest in — anything that happened culturally prior to “Boy Meets World” and politically prior to 9–11. (Source material provided upon request). Without any sense of history, we are of course just a collection of likes and turn-offs. The generation just prior to Generation Yay was at least glib about it, producing a bunch of very bright well spoken bloggers who even if their souls were made of tin foil, they were able to articulate their moods terrifyingly well. Today’s new crop of bloggers don’t even do that (with a few exceptions- you know who you are) and are just content to post pictures of stuff they liked when they were 7 with some baby talk scribbled above it.

The angry ranting of an aging critic furiously lashing out upon confronting the realization that his opinion is increasingly less relevant to the pop culture discussion of the age, or a searing indictment of a vapid and empty everyone-gets-a-trophy cohort whose innate celebratory instincts and lack of interest in depth and dissent are but another example of how frivolity and superficiality are now considered assets rather than something to be rightly derided? I mean, probably both, but you be the judge. [Related]

Could it really be possible that you are so appallingly ignorant that you require instructions on how to make pasta? Have you really made it this far in your life where a step-by-step explanation which includes advice on the boiling of water is something you would find both helpful and necessary? Is there really a chance that you are so shit-all stupid? Apparently, there is.

What a fascinating time. When you start staring at our government and its economy, you can start to feel an urge to put together a Carrie Mathison-style wall chart. Because on some level, it all starts to seem like it fits together, doesn’t it?

• Here is an “explainer” about What The Federal Reserve Does. Spoiler: what the Fed has done for the last several years is literally give money for free to banks every day. Banks use that borrowed money to make money, including, even, sometimes, by loaning that money to customers. Exciting policy, am I right? “The campaign that gets all the publicity is called quantitative easing. The Fed has purchased more than $4 trillion in Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities since 2008,” thereby pushing prices up, it helpfully explains. Then, quite a bit further down: “The Fed pays for its purchases by creating money from nothing.” There we go. They print money then give it to banks for free. It’s cool! I mean it’s probably actually not capitalism in any sense of the word though?

• Then there’s a group of politicians who say the Treasury is lying when it says that it will run out of money on October 17 — that’s a week from tomorrow — to pay debts. (Already the interest rate on that debt is increasing.) Such as Senator Richard Burr. How is Treasury wrong? Easy! We laid off all the government employees, so we have money on hand!

“We always have enough money to pay our debt service,” said Mr. Burr, who pointed to a stream of tax revenue flowing into the Treasury as he shrugged off fears of a cascading financial crisis. “You’ve had the federal government out of work for close to two weeks; that’s about $24 billion a month. Every month, you have enough saved in salaries alone that you’re covering three-fifths, four-fifths of the total debt service, about $35 billion a month. That’s manageable for some time.”

Perfect. Also, tax revenues are still coming in! Just don’t try to call the IRS to ask any questions, because they’re not answering. That is definitely capitalism: putting people out of work and enjoying the savings.

• What’s most annoying is that when you conceive of siding with Republicans, who ostensibly want to decrease spending and create a “smaller” government, and when you think “yes, I too would like to limit the amount of debt that the government can agree to carry!” they start screaming about “Obamacare” — like Representative Paul Broun of Georgia: “The greatest threat right now is Obamacare. It’s already destroyed jobs, it’s already destroyed our economy, and if it stays in place as it is now, it’s going to destroy America.” And you realize they’re just liars and crazies. (Oh right, and also the party that tried to bankrupt the country with a decade (I mean, at least) of war profiteering, but apparently we don’t talk about that.)

• How will business react to this instability? The same way they always have:

From New York to Silicon Valley, more and more large American corporations are reducing their tax bill by buying a foreign company and effectively renouncing their United States citizenship.

Yay, let’s end the U.S. government and move back to the old worlds from which the majority of us came.

by Eric Spiegelman

A few months ago, Awl Music switched over to a new kind of curation. (Yes, sorry, “curation.” You know: choosing videos.) Instead of picking videos one at a time, by hand (by mouse?) we started picking shows from YouTube and Vimeo, and set the site up to automatically post new episodes from the shows that we like. Right now there are 8 shows that get fed into the stream: La Blogotheque, a live music series produced by the French music website of the same name; Beat Making Lab, a PBS Digital Studios program in which some guys introduce a compact electronic music studio to various cultures around the world; We Have Signal, a wonderful live music series produced by Alabama Public Television; Wreckroom, a live music series filmed in Adrian Grenier’s basement; Enjoykin, a super weird but usually enjoyable Russian YouTuber, who will be the first hire when BuzzFeeᴅ expands to Minsk; All of the shows from VFiles, including What The F*shion, the best show on YouTube; All of the videos posted to the Oddfuture YouTube channel; and, starting I think, like, now, Chronic Gamer Girl. This works great on-site, but is also really delightful to follow on Tumblr.

So it’s basically like when they replaced Kennedy on MTV with an eight-disc CD changer machine — but better, because it’s like the CD changer is a bunch of different smart people that we like making their own choices. Anyway. This new system has just been bubbling along on its own for a while, and this morning this video showed up.

It’s a live performance from a band called Houndmouth. I’d never heard of them before. They’re delightful. How have we missed them? They’re on Rough Trade, and they did Letterman this year — and they are, apparently, currently on tour. The first song they play starts at 1:17, if you want to skip the intro, which you probably do, because playing four hundred hours of Candy Crush this summer obliterated whatever shreds of attention span you had left.

Eric Spiegelman is a web producer in Los Angeles and the proprietor of Awl Music.

“He just wants to tax everyone to smithereens.” (Also: “I would love to support a fourth term for Mike Bloomberg. So if we can float that, you can say Muffie Potter Aston wants a fourth term for Michael Bloomberg.”)

★★★ The dead air — the deadest air — was in the cross streets, in the dim, sweltering morning. The wind was blowing on the uptown-downtown ones, and a drizzle was being wrung out of the sky. A needly genuine rain followed, then sun and a hot, damp wind. That little cycle dispensed with, the real phenomenon arrived: darkness again, heavy racing clouds, cold gusts. Low in the east, the sky was still white, and above it on the boundary the clouds were rumpled and choppy. The rain hit the western windows in a furious blur, while the eastern view, in the lee, stayed in focus. By rush hour it had all blown out. A woman tap-tapped her way out of the train with a furled full-length umbrella. The line-sitters for the Apple store were still sheltering under the scaffold across the street. A bit of pink appeared in the west, and the sky was suddenly all billowing purples, stunning waves of deep color. Balcony rails lit up with sharp lines of orange; orange shimmered on the darkening Hudson. Days’ worth of unused beauty, delivered at last.