COM TRUISE EATS YR SOUL

Com Truise - "Brokendate" from stereogum on Vimeo.

teh illest shit.

jeans creamin time

That perfect spot in the middle of the Jules/Bruce Venn diagram:




this could barely be better even if it was ELO.

just chillin with my monk bros

i'm on the other side of the world

so I'm in Thailand. have been here for about a week although the first five days don't really count because i spent them with 14 other Americans in one of the nicest hotels I've ever stayed at, in Bangkok. Of course right outside the hotel were slums and the like, which I spose is the standard experience of Americans/Europeans abroad. Also there's a 7-11 on just about every corner here where me and the chill bros I met would go every night to get four packs of Chang ("thailand's finest") for about 2 bucks-- sort of tastes like natty light.
Also learned that we're not allowed to be loud, drunk or messy which may mean I'm in for a very long five months. Now that I'm in my host community I likely won't see another Chang before I hit the Bangkok airport on my way out. Also, my host mom literally handed me a hairbrush. Was kind of planning on a chill time in Thailand and then I found myself shopping for business casual clothes in the mall because I have to dress up for school. what the fuck, sort of.

Anyway, it's 98 and humid. I started school today which was pretty fun and hilarious. I was facing about 40 thai tweens and repeating "my name is Emily. how are you?" about 20 times and definitely wondered how the hell I got here. Planning on inundating these kids with some scandalous music at least, just to keep myself entertained. Hoping to meet up with other american bros ASAP but apparently it's rude to travel from your host family or something. I knew the host family would be a tad difficult since in America we demand independence from age 15, but here you pretty much life with your parents forever here if you're not married, and even if you are. Thai culture is ingrained with all sorts of non-verbal signs that I obviously have no idea how to read. Did I mention no one speaks English? Hoping to become proficient in Thai, just for a fun party trick.

It's still new and exciting at the very least-- the market is pretty cool and has all sorts of crazy stuff-- definitely noticed a 14-inch wooden penis carving with stuff written all over it-- made me wish I had a digital camera and that I wasn't with my host mom and her sister. Everyone here rides motorbikes which seem totally badass and I totally want to get one when I'm back in the states.

You should send me your number because I got a hella cheep phone deal going on and i'll give you a call. Wanna meet in LA in late Oct and travel up the coast for a while?

RE: lost generationz

defeated? resigned? no fuckin way, broad.

"Mothers, don’t let your children grow up to be hipsters. We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new."


I used to believe this, that our world was over and we were nothing but vultures picking at its rotting corpse... but I really don't anymore. The things that have formed our culture might be dead and dying-- sincerity, huge record labels, hypercapitalism, etc, but there are new, better things popping up in their stead. Self-awareness, self-distribution and small, community oriented projects are growing out of the ashes of those bloated tenets of our modern era.

I don't really know what hipster means in 2010, but in 1959 it meant someone who listened to jazz, liked drugs and wrote/read things that used the word "fuck." I have a feeling that when we say hipster we mean people who listen to noise/folk/punk/jazz, like drugs and read/write things that use the word "fuck." In much of the discourse that labels itself "concerned with American ideals", you'll come across phrases like "standing for something", "hard work" and talk of "freedom" "bravery" and "prosperity." Simultaneously, you'll notice that our armed forces kill civilians around the world with a frequency that suggests they enjoy it, while our elected officials have left a fifth of the children in their own country to live in poverty. And this is largely thanks to that "peace and love" generation who later built corporate America over former farms and forests and parked their SUVs in the driveway.

So if we are defeated, it's because we recognize the gross mismanagement of funds and passion by the people who call themselves leaders of the free world, and if we are destroyed it's because we don't know how to change that. Instead, we throw pebbles into the void, listen to noise/folk/punk/jazz, like drugs and read/write things that use the word "fuck." The more people who opt out of our modern corporate nightmare, the fewer bombs dropped in its name. "Hipsters" might not "stand for anything," but they've got my vote.

s00000 ghey for these bros

[when i was younger, i wanted to have 5 kids and name them for each member of the strokes. nick and nicolai could get confusing.]

some advice from Das Racist (the hip hop duo)

So what’s the message you guys are trying to send out to the youth of today?

H: “Calm down. Calm the fuck down.”

V: “Shut up, dude.”

H: “Shut up and calm down.”

V: “Chill the fuck out, bro.”

H: “Sit still for a minute and just shut up and calm down. A lot of people got it worse than you, bitch.”

Of Jeff and Jules

One of the best parts of being a human is experiencing sensation to the extent that you transcend, however fleeting, the experience of the other 23.92 hours of your day. Lots of other living creatures can experience pleasure, so perhaps what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom is our ability to blog about these sensations.

Anyway, every so often, if you're lucky, you experience a medium, whether human-created or a natural phenomenon, that enables a heightened sense of union with the moment in the world around you, and leaves you wishing you had more ears, or eyes, or hands. That's why we do things like listen to music, isn't it? Under these pretenses, I submit to you the act of experiencing the art of Jeff Lynne, and the not-yet-released solo debut of Julian Casablancas, of Strokes and Lower East Side fame.

Jeff Lynne could be deemed the godfather of modern synth-pop (as opposed to ancient synth-pop). I remember reading one critic's claim that Lynne had all the pop sensibilities of Lennon but "took it to outer space" or something. To the extent that it is true, as he's often associated with Xanadu, which he did the soundtrack for, and other Xanada-esque things of the early 1980s, it's only half-true. I like to think Lynne had "all the pop sensibilities of Lennon" (meaning he could write a decently structured song with a catchy enough hook) and brought it to the basement. As in basement party, with lots of earnest men in yellow plaid wool suits with mischievous glints in their beards, and the sweet-talking women who didn't take any shit, unselfconsciously wearing powder blue dresses they'd sewn themselves. Everyone's drinking the punch and there are drugs rolled, smoked and snorted behind that door over there, and that guy might sled down their stairs in his briefs, but everyone is just wading in that sweet sweet technicolored sea of ELO's combination of strings, Minimoog and beats heavy enough to move a train.

Given that Julian Casablancas is associated more with post-millennial urban ennui than "chill times" per se, he and Jeff "Synth Opera" Lynne may seem like strange conceptual bedfellows. Not so, I assure you. Jules (as he will be referred to henceforth) has a similar knack for carving an immaculate melody from plastic, while bringing it to life with a level of depth of insight and compassion perhaps surprising to those who dismiss Jules and his Strokey cohorts merely as being too preoccupied with "cool" and its leather jacketed conventions. Along those lines, J.C. seems pretty damn self/world aware for a kid who grew up in the midst of the moneyed elite of the Upper West Side.

Jules begins "11th Dimension", the lead single from "Phrazes For The Young":

I just nod, I've never been so good at shaking hands I live on the frozen surface of a fireball Where cities come together, to hate each other in the name of sport [ahem]

before further extrapolating on the nature of the human experience at this point on the post-apocalptic (?) time-space continuum:

No one really cares or wonders why anymore
Oh I got music, coming outta my hands and feet and kisses/
That is how it once was done
All the dreamers on the run



Perhaps what really places Jeff and Jules hand in hand in my mind is not just their love of heavy machinery, but the epiphanies of late youth they place carefully inside the beats and synths. Around age thirty, both come to zen-like, pacifist conclusions about the act of living:

"Your faith has got to be greater than your fear" and "Forgive them even if they are not sorry" from Jules' "11th Dimension" and


"I have fought in the holiest wars,
I have smashed, some of the holiest jaws.
Ive been jailed, been impaled, and been dragged through the world.
One thing, I have learned through these years,
Is that no man, should be stricken with fear.
It should be that he walks with no care in the world.
So my friends, who are gathered today,
Hear this clear, for Ill not further say.
That no man, shall cause me to take up arms again"

from ELO's "Boy Blue", 1976.


If that's not transcendence, I'll still be wishing I had more ears.

Harsh realizations.

So I've been in a really weird mental and physical state today. I spent all my hours at work meticulously cutting out these cardboard folders to promote the design group. I think I went into a zen trance, and took a step towards enlightenment. My mind is normally going a million directions, but I've been very lucid and focused all day. And super relaxed... So I'm stoked on my forward lunge towards eternal consciousness....

Or maybe I'm just hungover from all the $1 Miller high lifes I drank last night.