[lonely women make good lovers]
things that traveller thinks about when she thinks about me:
1. indie americana (fandom population: 3)
i like boys with guitars, boys with harmonica racks, boys with banjos, boys who can shred on the mandolin like they were slash. i like boys with beards and many, many indie americana-playing boys have beards. i once saw a boy with a guitar and a sweet tennessee accent put a kazoo in his harmonica rack, which killed me.
my love for the sound of americana, especially the indie stuff that gets (or got, in the case of the avetts, because they are Big Time now) played in bars and tiny grimy venues where sometimes peeing is a adventure and your best bet at drinking beer really is sadly PBR, is because i love the south.
i love the culture of the slow lazy back porch. i love music that sounds like drinking cold sweet tea on hot days. i love the way well played roots music can make you want to dance, or make you want to cry, or make you want to fuck, or sometimes all three at once. i think the pedal steel is one of the most amazing instruments ever recorded. i like seeing kids younger than me who can pick the hell out of a banjo, because it's such an old sounding instrument, and it thrills me that young people still want to play it.
bands that i love who play sounds like this: the avett brothers; aa bondy; langhorne slim; gill landry; american aquarium; chatham county line; old crow medicine show; megafaun; the felice brothers; paleface; the everybodyfields. anybody recording on ramseur records.
and if somebody could write me some rps about scotty avett or ketch secor or any of the felices or aa bondy/any of the felices, that would be a++++. otherwise i will have to do it myself, and the writings are not so easy these days.
the dancing is always easy, though, and that's what i think of most, when i think of the indie americana scene: it makes me want to dance. (i'd say that they were all great dancers, and lord knows i love to dance)
2. the NC
when i was a teenager, i ripped this four or five page spread about bands from chapel hill out of some magazine. maybe sassy? the typography and layout look like something that sassy would have produced, but it's also a little too slick, so maybe not. regardless: i ripped these pages out of this magazine, and it was sort of a talisman for me, for many years, this mythical place in central north carolina that made all these amazing bands that i loved as a teenager.
and the thing is, some of them are still playing. i saw superchunk twice last year, and they're putting out a new ep this year. i saw greg humphries, who fronted dillon fence, play a solo set in support of obama last november. people who played in these bands that have since broken up still play in other bands here. and that's -- i keep it tucked at the back of my current journal, and it still represents for me, the things i'm looking for here. a family. music that moves me.
which is not the only thing i love about the nc, but it's one of the strongest ones that keeps me here. this is the first place that has felt entirely like home to me, the green green green springs and the people who mope around after carolina basketball losses like i do, the venues where the owners and the bartenders know my name and the way that seeing people you've respected for years as musicians rub elbows with you watching local bands starts to not even be worth noting, because it's just how it is. the way i know the streets in downtown chapel hill like the back of my hand and yet i keep finding new ways to take pictures of them. the baseball stadium at carolina, beautiful and brand new and shining, and the crush of people who walk across campus together after dark between november and april, heading south to the dean dome in search of a common religion.
and i love the south, unironically and completely with all its flaws; i loved being here during last election season far more than i would have loved being in chicago or mpls or baltimore because what we did here, in the nc, what we did here for obama was no different than what anybody else anywhere did but it felt bigger. nobody doubted that he would take illinois. everybody doubted that he would take virginia, much less the nc, and he won here. barack obama won the electoral college votes in a state that used to send jesse helms to the senate. i mean, that's huge.
the south is a strange, sad, beautiful place. as patterson hood once said, such is the duality of the southern thing -- and i have never entirely parsed out what that line means to me, but i know what it means to the south, to north carolina. it's the admission that there are problems here, big ones, ones that have lasted years and will last years more, but we are trying. we show you our problems and we admit them and we try to fix them. north carolina went blue this year, on a national level. the south and the nc are trying to change without losing the things that make them beautiful and strange to the rest of the country.
and ultimately, the thing is, if i want to change the world, and some days i do, i can't think of a better place to do it that north carolina, a state that has so so much going for it and that still gets trapped in the stereotypes and double standards of the south by the rest of the country. (not that we are the only ones; but we do.) if i want to change the world, i want to change it here, first, with a clear mind to all the things i love, the thing i need to stay the same, but also the things that should change.
also, i love barbeque.
3. photography
i stopped writing almost a year ago. more accurately, i really stopped writing more than a year and a half ago, and though i've produced a couple of stories since then (some posted, some archived forever on my hard drive), the last real story i wrote was an epic rps tale of college baseball players (in love) that no one but me and shep. had ever heard of, 35,000 words of heartbreak and pain and the fact that sometimes no matter how much you love someone it just isn't always enough.
i wrote that story, and it broke my heart and it was all my pain and grief and fear and anger and sadness and frustration on the page, and i couldn't do it anymore. i found myself leaving too much easily read on the page, i was too open, and i couldn't do it.
and so that's about when i got serious about taking pictures.
i take photos because it scratches the same itch in me that writing does, did, does, the itch to make something, but unless you really, really, really know me, unless you are looking so hard, you can't always see me -- my guts, my heartbreaks, my loves, my losses, my fears -- in my photographs. a picture's worth a thousand words, and sometimes mine are, but they're not always a thousand words about me, which sometimes my stories were even when they were about something else entirely.
i like the process of it. i like the heft of a camera, somehow more tactile for me than writing ever was, even with a pen. i like the colors and the light and the satisfaction of framing something and seeing it on the computer or negative exactly the way i saw it.
and i like that i can hide behind my camera in ways that i could never hide behind my writing. sometimes i learn more about myself that way.
4. NC ballers
my number one all-time favorite carolina baller, in any sport, is george lynch. he was the only senior starter on the 1993 championship team, he was the heart and soul of that team, and to this day even my love as a whole for this year's carolina team, which surpasses my love for that 1993 team by a hair, cannot surpass my individual love for george lynch.
i love that james worthy and michael jordan and sam perkins played here. i love that tyler hansbrough will be this current team's legacy. i love that carolina has players on major league baseball rosters; i love that we will have three first round draft picks from this year's baseball team, though i don't love that they'll leave us. i love the way that a carolina player, of any sport, can grow on me -- i'd have gladly tossed ty lawson under a bus the last two years, but he hasn't given me cause to cheerfully loathe him in weeks this year; alex white, saturday starting pitcher for the baseball team, grew up hugely between his freshman year and his sophomore year, and i no longer want to punch him in the face every time he takes the mound, and he's going to be a first rounder in may.
and i love this year's basketball team's senior class, collectively, more than just about anything: tyler hansbrough; bobby frasor; marcus ginyard; danny green; mike copeland. they moved to chapel hill at the same time i did, and they've broken my heart a couple of times over the years, but more often than not they've just been joys to watch, and they stayed four years, all five of them (and a fifth year for marcus and maybe bobby), which doesn't happen anymore.
5. Keira
i love her. i think she's beautiful, i mean truly gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous though sometimes i would like to feed her a sandwich, and i love that even if i don't always think she is amazing in movies, i love that she always picks interesting roles. i love that she's going to play zelda fitzgerald, and my favorite of all her roles ever is elizabeth swann.
i can't promise to give you topics but if you'd like me to talk about anything else that you associate with me, say the five things and i will try.
now i have to buckle down and get some work done, because i am hoping to skip out of the office early and watch the first couple of innings of the carolina baseball game before i go home.
1. indie americana (fandom population: 3)
i like boys with guitars, boys with harmonica racks, boys with banjos, boys who can shred on the mandolin like they were slash. i like boys with beards and many, many indie americana-playing boys have beards. i once saw a boy with a guitar and a sweet tennessee accent put a kazoo in his harmonica rack, which killed me.
my love for the sound of americana, especially the indie stuff that gets (or got, in the case of the avetts, because they are Big Time now) played in bars and tiny grimy venues where sometimes peeing is a adventure and your best bet at drinking beer really is sadly PBR, is because i love the south.
i love the culture of the slow lazy back porch. i love music that sounds like drinking cold sweet tea on hot days. i love the way well played roots music can make you want to dance, or make you want to cry, or make you want to fuck, or sometimes all three at once. i think the pedal steel is one of the most amazing instruments ever recorded. i like seeing kids younger than me who can pick the hell out of a banjo, because it's such an old sounding instrument, and it thrills me that young people still want to play it.
bands that i love who play sounds like this: the avett brothers; aa bondy; langhorne slim; gill landry; american aquarium; chatham county line; old crow medicine show; megafaun; the felice brothers; paleface; the everybodyfields. anybody recording on ramseur records.
and if somebody could write me some rps about scotty avett or ketch secor or any of the felices or aa bondy/any of the felices, that would be a++++. otherwise i will have to do it myself, and the writings are not so easy these days.
the dancing is always easy, though, and that's what i think of most, when i think of the indie americana scene: it makes me want to dance. (i'd say that they were all great dancers, and lord knows i love to dance)
2. the NC
when i was a teenager, i ripped this four or five page spread about bands from chapel hill out of some magazine. maybe sassy? the typography and layout look like something that sassy would have produced, but it's also a little too slick, so maybe not. regardless: i ripped these pages out of this magazine, and it was sort of a talisman for me, for many years, this mythical place in central north carolina that made all these amazing bands that i loved as a teenager.
and the thing is, some of them are still playing. i saw superchunk twice last year, and they're putting out a new ep this year. i saw greg humphries, who fronted dillon fence, play a solo set in support of obama last november. people who played in these bands that have since broken up still play in other bands here. and that's -- i keep it tucked at the back of my current journal, and it still represents for me, the things i'm looking for here. a family. music that moves me.
which is not the only thing i love about the nc, but it's one of the strongest ones that keeps me here. this is the first place that has felt entirely like home to me, the green green green springs and the people who mope around after carolina basketball losses like i do, the venues where the owners and the bartenders know my name and the way that seeing people you've respected for years as musicians rub elbows with you watching local bands starts to not even be worth noting, because it's just how it is. the way i know the streets in downtown chapel hill like the back of my hand and yet i keep finding new ways to take pictures of them. the baseball stadium at carolina, beautiful and brand new and shining, and the crush of people who walk across campus together after dark between november and april, heading south to the dean dome in search of a common religion.
and i love the south, unironically and completely with all its flaws; i loved being here during last election season far more than i would have loved being in chicago or mpls or baltimore because what we did here, in the nc, what we did here for obama was no different than what anybody else anywhere did but it felt bigger. nobody doubted that he would take illinois. everybody doubted that he would take virginia, much less the nc, and he won here. barack obama won the electoral college votes in a state that used to send jesse helms to the senate. i mean, that's huge.
the south is a strange, sad, beautiful place. as patterson hood once said, such is the duality of the southern thing -- and i have never entirely parsed out what that line means to me, but i know what it means to the south, to north carolina. it's the admission that there are problems here, big ones, ones that have lasted years and will last years more, but we are trying. we show you our problems and we admit them and we try to fix them. north carolina went blue this year, on a national level. the south and the nc are trying to change without losing the things that make them beautiful and strange to the rest of the country.
and ultimately, the thing is, if i want to change the world, and some days i do, i can't think of a better place to do it that north carolina, a state that has so so much going for it and that still gets trapped in the stereotypes and double standards of the south by the rest of the country. (not that we are the only ones; but we do.) if i want to change the world, i want to change it here, first, with a clear mind to all the things i love, the thing i need to stay the same, but also the things that should change.
also, i love barbeque.
3. photography
i stopped writing almost a year ago. more accurately, i really stopped writing more than a year and a half ago, and though i've produced a couple of stories since then (some posted, some archived forever on my hard drive), the last real story i wrote was an epic rps tale of college baseball players (in love) that no one but me and shep. had ever heard of, 35,000 words of heartbreak and pain and the fact that sometimes no matter how much you love someone it just isn't always enough.
i wrote that story, and it broke my heart and it was all my pain and grief and fear and anger and sadness and frustration on the page, and i couldn't do it anymore. i found myself leaving too much easily read on the page, i was too open, and i couldn't do it.
and so that's about when i got serious about taking pictures.
i take photos because it scratches the same itch in me that writing does, did, does, the itch to make something, but unless you really, really, really know me, unless you are looking so hard, you can't always see me -- my guts, my heartbreaks, my loves, my losses, my fears -- in my photographs. a picture's worth a thousand words, and sometimes mine are, but they're not always a thousand words about me, which sometimes my stories were even when they were about something else entirely.
i like the process of it. i like the heft of a camera, somehow more tactile for me than writing ever was, even with a pen. i like the colors and the light and the satisfaction of framing something and seeing it on the computer or negative exactly the way i saw it.
and i like that i can hide behind my camera in ways that i could never hide behind my writing. sometimes i learn more about myself that way.
4. NC ballers
my number one all-time favorite carolina baller, in any sport, is george lynch. he was the only senior starter on the 1993 championship team, he was the heart and soul of that team, and to this day even my love as a whole for this year's carolina team, which surpasses my love for that 1993 team by a hair, cannot surpass my individual love for george lynch.
i love that james worthy and michael jordan and sam perkins played here. i love that tyler hansbrough will be this current team's legacy. i love that carolina has players on major league baseball rosters; i love that we will have three first round draft picks from this year's baseball team, though i don't love that they'll leave us. i love the way that a carolina player, of any sport, can grow on me -- i'd have gladly tossed ty lawson under a bus the last two years, but he hasn't given me cause to cheerfully loathe him in weeks this year; alex white, saturday starting pitcher for the baseball team, grew up hugely between his freshman year and his sophomore year, and i no longer want to punch him in the face every time he takes the mound, and he's going to be a first rounder in may.
and i love this year's basketball team's senior class, collectively, more than just about anything: tyler hansbrough; bobby frasor; marcus ginyard; danny green; mike copeland. they moved to chapel hill at the same time i did, and they've broken my heart a couple of times over the years, but more often than not they've just been joys to watch, and they stayed four years, all five of them (and a fifth year for marcus and maybe bobby), which doesn't happen anymore.
5. Keira
i love her. i think she's beautiful, i mean truly gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous though sometimes i would like to feed her a sandwich, and i love that even if i don't always think she is amazing in movies, i love that she always picks interesting roles. i love that she's going to play zelda fitzgerald, and my favorite of all her roles ever is elizabeth swann.
i can't promise to give you topics but if you'd like me to talk about anything else that you associate with me, say the five things and i will try.
now i have to buckle down and get some work done, because i am hoping to skip out of the office early and watch the first couple of innings of the carolina baseball game before i go home.