r.i.p. supergrass

I think I'm still in shock from Supergrass breaking up last month. A big part of me feels silly for loving a band so much and I'm trying to figure out what's under that feeling, so I think it's this: that a lot of people would think it's mental or at the very least dumb to mourn a band. But whoever would say that really doesn't get it. When I first heard Supergrass in 1995 I super liked them and then started to love them in 1998, but when I saw them play in 2003 I was gone. It was very much like meeting someone and hitting it off and thinking that you're cut from the same cloth. When I first heard Supergrass I just felt like I'd found old friends who were cut from the same cloth as me and who inspired me somehow and I couldn't listen to them enough. I first heard them in the movie "Clueless," you know, 1995, and I was watching it at my then-boyfriend's parents' house over Christmas break and we thought we were too cool for that movie but his parents wanted to see it. At the end he said "You have to see this video [for "Alright"] at the end of the tape, this band is really good but really ugly." I thought they were very non-ugly and so I had to break up with him. (Kidding, he broke up with me, but I don't think it was over that.) Then a couple years later I read an interview with Dave Grohl saying that Supergrass were the best live band he'd ever seen which affirmed me as I was in my Dave Grohl phase. That was around the time "In It For The Money" came out, 1998, and it's still my favorite album of all albums to this day. When I met David I put Supergrass on my first mix tape to him and he already loved them which I took as an excellent sign. In 2003 we saw them at the Showbox in Seattle and I was undone. My Supergrass fever peaked then and when they came through again in 2006 on their Road to Rouen tour I waited for them outside KEXP when they did their in-studio. I gave them all these presents (pressies, they called them) and beer (a bit of brew, they called it) and they asked us into the studio and I got this picture of Mick playing for our then-13-month old daughter.

Lolly & Mick at KEXP

Fast forward to 2008, Simone and I saw them in Seattle, Portland and LA and then in New York and NJ with our friend Kate. We are excellent stalkers, either that or Supergrass is really, really nice. We'd emailed with them and built a little rapport and they put us on the list at each show and took us backstage and to the afterparties and they're just such lovely lovely English gentlemen. Kate was saying the other day, as she and Simone and I are trying to process this, that we aren't crazy for mourning this band because they've put us in touch with the sublime. Here is how Kate very eloquently put it:

"My own opinion is that this thing we have each done has connected us to the transcendent; the sublime. This (music/experience/love) is -- for atheists, agnostics, and believers alike -- something that has transported ourselves outside of (for me at least) EVERYTHING. Remember all the times your heart just took off when a song started up? Your brain expanded? Everything alive? I think it's spiritual. To lose it is a gut-wrenching."

We fell in love with everything about their band, their music and style and writing and generosity of spirit and it's all affirmed in the way they've treated us, their rabid fans; they've been so so gracious. My abridged photo history with Supergrass is here and here are some of my favorite videos of theirs. I know they'll be back someday so I can't be too sad.

my feet with Danny & Gaz's backstage at Key Arena

"Richard III" (1997)

"Sun Hits The Sky" (1997)


"Mary" (1999)


"Kiss of Life" (2003)


"Grace" (2003)


"Seen The Light" (2003)



"St. Petersburg" (2005)


"Low C" (2005)

*See also "Pumping On Your Stereo" (1999), "Bad Blood" (2008), "Diamond Hoo Ha Man" (2008) and "Mansize Rooster" (1995) which had no embed codes but are each freakishly delightful.

maybe it's not a bad idea

I just love the website name.

st. peter's bascilia casting shadows

st. peter

the grapes of rad read aloud from mark driscoll's book "porn-again christian"

on this episode, at about minute 1:28:30.

magic bus

Riding the bus takes up a lot of my time and it's fixin to take up a lot more because they just cancelled my community transit route due to budget cuts. How rude! Why does everything have to revolve around the budget? That's my philosophy. Anyway I get to take a different bus now and it adds a full hour onto my commute each way but I actually don't mind and I kind of like it, I get to listen to music and read and on this bus I always get a window seat. I LOVE the window seat. I've had two bus adventures in the two days I've ridden my new route, on Monday I was waiting for my first bus and this girl was at the bus stop with me saying she was freezing and she'd been up all night at a party and she had to call her parole officer and get downtown to meet him or else she'd be in big trouble. I let her call him on my phone and she told me she's 17 and just got out of meth rehab and her mom hates her boyfriend so her mom doesn't talk to her anymore, but she lives with him in Olympia and he's 25. I blurted out "Don't get pregnant. Take your birth control every day, okay? Your life is hard enough" and she said "Oh I have one kid but he's in Mexico. He's three." AHHH! That poor girl, and that poor boy. We got on the bus and she told me she had her GED and she wanted to go to college. I told her she could totally do it and she can have a good life. She said her boyfriend tells her she can't go to school and I was all "don't listen to him, he is lying to you. You can absolutely do it. You can do whatever you want. You can make your life really great." I was starting to feel cheesy but she was seeming to perk up. I wanted to tell her to read Judge Judy's book "Beauty Fades But Dumb is Forever" but managed not to, I just love that book though. So we got off the bus and I gave her a hug and told her she can do it and all that. Then today she wasn't on the bus but another guy was and he said to me "can I ask what you do?" and he said he was wondering because he heard my conversation with that girl the other day and he said he's a teacher and was glad I talked to her and he said "I could tell you and she didn't run in the same social circles" and I was glad for that. We talked the whole bus ride and he eventually asked "are you a Christian?" and I said yes and he said "that's the missing piece. It all makes sense now." That was interesting. He said he teaches at a Christian school and that he's especially sensitive to troubled kids because they all look so good on the outside but he can tell when they're doing poorly in school that something is going on at home. We talked about all that, the tendency of Christian families to want to look perfect and not be transparent. Then I had to get off the bus. My new route is turning out to be rather chatty.

chocolate + horses + eating disorder = judge judy win

I love Judge Judy like an elderly person and I think horses are hilarious so imagine my demented delight over this case. My favorite quotes:

"We go through great lengths to put my horse in the best light possible."
"I have an eating disorder!"
"My horse looked deformed!"
"We ship semen all over the country."
""It's a reflection of the horse. If it looks deformed that's because the horse is deformed."
"Don't irritate me, this case is irritating me enough already."
"QUIET!"

mysterious whispers, part 4

(written by me:)

My throbbing calves carried me back to my apartment where once inside I shut the door and collapsed on my Q-Bert bean bag chair. It was a tender relic from the past I refused to give up no matter how it clashed with my Rachel Ashwell shabby chic decor. I'd lost my innocence on that bean bag chair and no one could take that away from me. Maybe Jovan would be the next man I would lose my innocence to. What would I wear? Glaring at the Wii Fit, I stalked to my closet and threw open the door.

(written by OfficeGnome:)

"Egads! what are you doing here?!?" I squealed at the intruder, like a wild boar approaching his prey. I hurriedly shut the door in a panic. How could this have happened to me, on today of all days? I took a long deep breath, and tried to pull myself together. It was just a spider afterall. The daddy long-legs had made my closet its new lair and I was going to have to face my fear if I was going to put on my perfect sexy tube dress and make it to Jovan's show in time for the royal procession.I flipped through my mail looking for the appropriate weapon. The magazine issue I had been waiting for had arrived, but there was no way I was going to use it to bludgeon the bug. Ahah! My new Vermont Country Store catalog would do the trick. I hated that crap anyway.I flung open the closet door and then like a medieval warrior, I smashed the critter with all my might. The catalog was a lance and the spider was the black knight that I had sworn to assassinate. I was a murderer. And now it was time to get dressed to kill.

(written by Carrie:)

I tossed the be-smeared catalog aside and flipped through the fabulous fashion file of my closet. My evening looks and club wear were nestled in the back corner of the closet, a plush treasure trove of crushed velvet, ruched satin, cubic zirconiae, and draped tencel. Regularly adding new looks to my twilight repertoire was a fulfilling and healthy hobby of mine, no matter what my financial counselor said. Where was my perfect sexy tube dress?? I was starting to panic and sweat heavily as I swatted aside several polyester halter tops. This couldn't be happening. Not tonight. I could feel my stomach plummeting like a barrel over the Lower Falls of the Grand Canyon. It wasn't there! My brain suddenly screamed with the partial memory of that wild night at Coka Cabana's. I had been wearing the tube dress when we took that baking sheet, can of hairspray, and lighter fluid out to the steep hill behind the club. Regrettably, my memory ended there. I was going to have to both improvise and compromise with my fashion choice.

eugene peterson on love

These are from his book, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places...

"But love is one of the slipperiest words in the language. There is no other word in our society more messed up, misunderstood, perverted, and misused as the word "love." Complicating things further, it is a word terribly vulnerable to cliché, more often than not flattened into nonmeaning by chatter and gossip. It is all me-directed. It is all self. The largeness of love is reduced to the mouse hole of ego. It is often used by the same person and in the same conversation in self-contradicting ways - seriously and frivolously, soberly and sentimentally, thoughtfully and teasingly. It is used in the worship of a holy God and as a euphemism for loveless sex. It is used to reveal heart intimacies and commitments and as a cover for telling every sort and variety of lie. An incalculable amount of violence, both emotional and physical, occurs in relationships begun in love. In no other human experience do we fail so frequently, get hurt so badly, suffer so excruciatingly and get deceived so cruelly as in love. Still, we continue to long for love, dream of it, attempt it. Walker Percy titled one of his novels Love in the Ruins, an epitaph far too many in our community can claim for their own. So when the men and women of the Christian community are given the responsibility for telling one another that God loves them, that he commanded every one of us to love one another, and when we assume responsibility for giving guidance and instruction in the life of love, we know we have no easy task. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a more formidable, seemingly impossible, task. Because of the enormous importance this has for the way we live, it is important to get it right. We need to listen attentively to every conversation, read discerningly every book, if we hope ever to discern the truth and implications of the love word." (310 - 311)

dan savage on the weirdest letter he's received

i'm putting this at the top of my netflix queue

And here's the BoingBoing article on it.

if you want to hear my weird voice

pull this thread as I walk away. Here's the Grapes of Rad podcast I was on last week.