If longevity's your aim, then pick some kind of single-celled organism and multiplyyyyy

Slammed in the Butt by the Story of my own Life

Yeah, feelings rarely listen to reason. I can tell you that I know all of two people who are now doing what he more or less set out to do when he was your age and that literally everybody else has taken a different career track from how they started (some deviations being minor, like becoming a lab biologist instead…

Regarding your career concerns, I know where you're coming from (and seriously, that sounds like the dumbest possible idea for a local news source). This may not seem comforting, but here it is: in my experience, professional development doesn't follow cozy narrative arcs. Opportunities are more frequent than they…

I'd turn heel. It'd be the first time that CNN or whoever has hosted a debate with a shot from behind with a steel folding chair.

Even marriages end when death parts ye. Dating afterwards is no one else's business but the bereaved.

I like orgasm faces and voices. They're human and sexy (and often hilarious).

Do they still have that review of Andrew WK's first album up? The one where the reviewer (the founder of the site, I think) calls it "retarded" several times with essentially no other arguments? I remember it because it ended my very brief period of looking at that site and I wonder if they're still proud of…

It's weird to me that a site has that much power. I just don't get it. Do people really let Pitchfork influence their opinions that heavily?

Hope you like oranges.

I figure that it's based on one of music's signature tricks. See, one thing that music is very well-equipped to do is to inspire basic emotions. When music hits, it hits hard. Because of this, and partially because we're used to listening to lyrics as well as instruments at the same time, music is very good at…

It's the drums. They're really smart about arrangement on that song. It starts with no drums, which is a standard gambit, but they really take their time on them. The full kit doesn't come in until after the first instrumental bridge, and it comes in with such furious energy that the song feels like it's somehow…

Everybody exists at a locus of a few different spectra this way, I think. I've had a looooot of conversations about music with people and it's become obvious that there is no one way that everybody experiences. I've played with singers who had almost no interest in songs without vocals, instrumentalists who could…

My favourite discovery moment was in a shop in Stratford. I heard a song that caught my ear, then another that was clearly by the same band. By the third, I was frantically trying to catch the lyrics so I could search for them when they got home. The name of that band is Austra, the album was Feel It Break (their…

Fans are simultaneously the best and the worst. Pretty much the best thing an artist can do for their fans is to learn when to listen to them and when to ignore them.

As a Canadian, I've been impressed with it whenever I've gone down in recent years. I'd say that it's pretty comparable to ours. (I suspect that the Brits and Irish haven't needed it as much as us, as they already started with good beer.)

Yeah, klezmer is generally pretty lively. Slow songs are a better choice for the recorder consort.

Will he toss in that "Ignition (Remix)" tag at the end?

I figure that it'll probably end up being sung by someone with a breathy voice who gives the impression that she downed a fistful of Quaaludes before getting started, so you'll at least have two very different styles for comparison.

I think we're around the same age (I'm 32), and I've begun thinking of our generation as being the repository of all fears. People older and younger than me routinely do things that make me wonder if they were lacking the solid diet of grim predictions and school visits from constables necessary to raise a healthy…