The Bucket List: People I’d like in my Facebook Profile Picture

               Bucket lists offer a peek into your soul. All that wishes, hopes, dreams are revealed in what appears to be an innocuous list of things. Usually people create it as a way of exploring their most suppressed sexual fantasies, but that’s not all there is.

                Facebook offers one the opportunity to look cool in front of their peers. Some seem to have misconstrued this to mean “Let me hook this up to my twitter and annoy my friends.” Others discovered that by posting and commenting on every political story that comes into their RSS feed. Yes, we get it. Aren’t you ever so opinionated? You get music nerds who post up youtube clips that make you shudder out of embarrassment. No one else shares your love of disco, sorry. Last but not least, there are the dreaded tech fans who get aroused at every new techie product they probably can’t afford or shouldn’t buy.

                The main way of looking cool on facebook: profile pictures. Without even having to read any of the lame quotes (oh, you quoted Nietzsche on your profile, poor tortured soul. Maybe you should read more than two sentences of the guy’s stuff, hmm?) You know how cool that person will be. I never have profile pictures with other people; they are always me, alone. Honestly, I’m not bothered by this, but I wonder how people would react if I had someone else, someone vaguely internet or nerd-famous standing with me. Below are some of the people who might give my humble profile a slight boost. They are categorized by my likelihood of actually meeting them. Let’s begin.

Fairly likely to meet them:

1.       The Hipster Grifter – She’s great. I’ve covered her before, and she goes all over New York City. A few of my friends have met her, greatly improving their respectability.

2.       IMBOYCRAZY.COM (Alexi Wasser) – She’s great. However, she lives in California, so my chances of seeing her in Brooklyn are slim. Plus, she does guerrilla-style interviewing with boys asking them about girls. I’m not sure how comfortable I’d be getting filmed and explaining my thoughts on love, since I have complicated thoughts on that.

3.       Tao Lin – I don’t live terribly far from him. As cool as it would be to meet him, most of my friends in real life have no idea who he is, despite my slight nudges that perhaps they ought to read his books. 

Unlikely to meet them:

4.       David Duchovny – Apparently he hangs out in Brooklyn a lot. Most of my friends would know who he is. When I’m fifty, if I look this good and am this well-read, my life will have been a success. 

5.       Thomas Pynchon – He lives in New York. Despite popular belief, he’s not a recluse, he just dislikes journalists. People can and do meet him, it isn’t particularly tricky. But you need the timing right and the correct vibe. Failure to have either one of these things results in a failure to meet him. What having him in my profile picture would be to simultaneously have a secret and a real scoop, though if he were there, he’d probably just look like some old intellectual dude?

6.       Kim Jong-Il – Yeah, I know this is a weird one. Hear me out. I’d try to get a visa to see the film festival there. Since he personally approves each visitor (they don’t have too many) I might have a fairly decent shot of going. I could claim to be an unpopular blogger who writes for a super-elite group of hipsters.  Oddly, my light poking of his stature could help me. When he saw “Team America” he wasn’t bothered by the obvious mocking of him throughout the movie. Instead, he was annoyed that his puppet didn’t get its own sex scene. So we’re dealing with an extremely strange individual here. Plus, as most of my friends are political junkies, they’d know who he was. Bonus would be to my weird cred, which is calculated by random trips and experiences. I’m ahead in this field. 

7.       Mayo Thompson – I adore him. This is the guy who was cool decades before you knew what he was doing was cool. Every music project of his is excellent, tastefully appointed and artsy as fuck. You can’t come close to this guy’s meticulous timing. A few of my friends would know who he was, since I have a lot of music nerd friends who are confused by him. Even the hippies were afraid of him and he did acid with the secretary of transportation. Oddly, our transportation infrastructure was much better back then, so I have an idea of how to improve it which wouldn’t cost much money at all. 

8.       James Murphy – Many of these people are older than me, at least the unlikely to meet people. I need to meet people older than myself, to convince myself that it is possible to be cool at a certain age, rather than falling into some mid-life crisis buying a red convertible problem. He’s a cool guy and knows way too much about music. Somehow, that seemingly useless information served him well. 

9.       You, dear reader – Sadly, I will never meet any of my readers. This worries me, as great deals of you are cool, hip, relevant people. You spread intelligence, humorous musings, and joy throughout the land. Most of you I imagine are around my age, which would help me get out of being the ‘baby’ of my workplace.

Any of these people could be perfect for that perfect profile picture. I hope someday they’ll grace me with their presence and make me a better, happier person. Who out of these people would you want a picture with? Did I leave out anyone who you think deserves greater attention?

Nurse With Wound List: The Project

I’m a tremendous music snob. Some see this as a never-ending problem of mine, my need to endlessly criticize popular music. But that’s not all I do. Another one of my goals is to help others understand that simply because something is obscure or abstract does not necessarily mean it is good or a high-quality product.

                Thus I come to the holy grail of music snobbery/avid drooling record collectors: The Nurse With Wound List. Packaged with Nurse with Wound’s first album “Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and Umbrella” and expanded on their second album, it served as a tribute to the artists who helped influence the Nurse with Wound project. Some of these artists are certainly worth hearing; I doubt you’ll hear much that sounds like AMM or Cromagnon. On the other hand, there’s also some serious filler or showing off at hand. Some of these artists’ inclusion seems like a precursor to James Murphy’s ode to the pissing contest “I’m losing my edge” with pointless name-dropping.

                Both opinions are equally valid. Steve Stapleton suffers from ideas in both camps. On one hand, he does produce an excellent product on occasion. However, as is the case with so many industrial/avant-garde artists, he suffers from being a poor editor of his work. Instead of being obsessed with creating a great product, a great deal of his releases take advantage of the rabid fan base that he’s accumulated over the years with his releases. In other words, he shouldn’t release limited edition runs of pure garbage for the sake of raising money to live in Ireland.

                What I hope to do as I go through this list is to point out the good, the bad, the indulgent, the repetitive, the unnecessary, and the sublime. Already I’ve done about two artists off this list (Red Krayola and Cromagnon). Hopefully this project of mine will produce some great fruits. I have no promise that this will be finished in a year or two. Rather, think of this as something going on in the background, as I try to sort through what’s worth searching out. Besides, I do try to give each recording I review multiple listens, to see if there’s something I might have missed the first time around. Any recording or artist from the list will be specifically tagged as “Nurse with Wound list” to allow you to better sort through the countless artists (well, 294 artists isn’t countless, but it is a lot). 

                People ought to enjoy music for its quality, not some perceived indie or street cred. One should be able to appreciate it on something besides its exclusivity or rarity. And some of the artists on this list are near impossible to find in print or even on the internet. Most are from an era of pure weird, when hippies roamed the Earth as actual hippies rather than whatever it is you’d call them now (sorry, the world isn’t as kind to idealism as it once was). So that means a great deal of creativity was unleashed, along with excessive amounts of indulgence.

                Hopefully you’ll be able to better sort through this so-called “shopping list” with a better idea of what to purchase/get rather than simply standing with jaw agape.