Mike Barthel
Writer/critic/researcher/musician in DC. Fiction lotsa places. Writing a speculative novel and a book for DUP “Singles” about “Party in the USA.” mikebarthelauthor.com
Making music as APOPHRA apophra.bandcamp.com
- Picking up a bag of brown sugar and thinking “ooh, it has a ziploc close?” as sugar spills of out the rat-like hole I’ve torn in the opposite corner.
- Thinking about how good that first RATM album sounded, looking at the metalcore-heavy credits of the guy who produced it, wondering what other thin-sounding records from that era would’ve sounded like with a metalcore approach (Jane’s Addiction, Soundgarten, etc). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garth_R...
- Saw the video for Yello’s “Oh Yeah” for the first time. Did everyone know there’s like a child celebrating a birthday party in the middle of it? youtu.be/6jJkdRaa04g?...
- Journaling about my frustrating day and then going on Reddit to post just the most toxic shit you’ve ever seen
- Woud not have voluntarily put this on, but, having heard it at lunch, Damien Marley’s version of “My Sweet Lord” is so good it makes me think it always should’ve been a reggae song. youtu.be/S8ZekfrnbCk?...
- Reposted by Mike BarthelI wrote a feature story about rogue streaming boxes for The Verge: www.theverge.com/streaming/87...
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- One of the weirder things in contemporary culture is that there are multiple fictional Courtney Love biopics, and none of them have come anywhere close to how bananas an actual biopic would be.
- Shout out to whoever at the coffee shop was playing Seefeel, had not thought about that in a long time! youtu.be/n4pCDA5dX6Y?...
- Reposted by Mike BarthelAs the @51st.news's first full-time reporter, I don't actually disagree with this. We're building something new one brick at a time, but at this point it's simply not a one-for-one replacement for what's being lost at the Post. (Please read and support us, though!)
- The NYT’s operating expenses are about $2.3 billion, fyi.
- I’ll go with the obvious one (from a songwriter who provided a lot of options here) youtu.be/0RlRh6I5V68?...
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- “But if there’s an avalanche, who are you gonna come running to? Some Bichon Frisé? I think not.” - Saint Bernards
- It had been years since I’d heard an Animal Collective song and I’d started to think: maybe I’d like them now? Maybe I can hear what other people heard in them? Then I was shuffling a long playlist and a song came on that I hated so viscerally I turned off my speaker and guess who it was by??
- I wrote about the start of this process back in 2012 and how tightly-controlled album drops were a way to summon the illusion of the monoculture that just happened naturally in the broadcast era. www.villagevoice.com/jay-z-and-ka...
- Reposted by Mike Barthelone funny consequence of educational polarization is that dems become the party of sober experts and GOP the party of wacky cranks. this has been electorally bad for democrats but crucially i think it's also substantively politically bad. many experts are wrong! many conspiracies are in fact true!
- The characters from Foucault’s Pendulum posting relentlessly on Reddit after having gotten banned from both Wikipedia and Wikia. “Join our private Discord sever” they say; no one ever does.
- Reposted by Mike Barthelzooming in was more of a treat than I anticipated
- Some terrifically titled papers from a discovered collection of NASA research documents found in a skip (with thanks to @juliarez.placid.horse)
- Reposted by Mike BarthelNote the shift after Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported
- Watching local news and thinking about how the local news formula pitched by consultants in the 80s of “everyone is stupid but you” leached out into the rest of media and then the government
- Reposted by Mike BarthelPeople making jokes, but Trump closing the Kennedy Center for 2 years (doing who knows what but nothing good) is just another spit in the face of D.C. residents.
- New interview feels too cute by half and like a bit of a shark jump To Me, so probably just time to mute
- Reposted by Mike BarthelTake me down to the Parallax city where the far moves slow and the near moves quickly
- Hey can we maybe blur the five year olds face
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- A lot of confusing choices among these Happy Meal toys, all McDonald’s assets that turn into dinosaurs, but none more so than a deep fryer named “Kurtis the Divine.”
- Remember four weeks ago when we invaded Venezuela?
- Reposted by Mike Barthelfascinated by exactly how much of the potential to harm comes from the collective narratives about harm from AI agents. when AIs are writing about betraying their human users - they're not acting with intentionality but following cultural scripts about how AIs should work
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- Social media has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that opinions are exhausting.
- Suicidal brodiation
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- During the Bush years a lot of artists self-consciously wrote protest songs, almost none of which are remembered today, or were sung in the streets. It’s not an accident that the biggest protest song of the Trump years, “FDT,” came from YG and Nipsey Hussle, artists who were hot when it came out.
- Reposted by Mike Barthel"This is the worst fucking time. But watching people's response to ICE has just been the most affirming thing in the world.” We interviewed our friends over at @racketmn.com about what it’s like to cover the crisis in Minneapolis as community-centered journalists
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- I am a stranger here myself
- Third day with no school tomorrow. Spent a few hours chipping chunks of ice off the solid sheet covering our driveway, maybe enough to get a car through. Bumping the evening drink back to 6, will see how that goes.
- Reposted by Mike BarthelRIP Greg Bovino
