Carrie Brownstein
People barely have anything to say in 140 characters. The last thing we need is a bunch of discursive rambling on Twitter.
I willed myself into being.
I wish I'd lived in New York in my early twenties. Or learned to speak more languages at a young age. I didn't do either.
Nutty fans are fine with me, as I have no known nut allergy. In general, though, it's best to carry an EpiPen to deal with outbreaks of fan nuttiness.
I think one of the scariest things about depression is that it exists along with the happiness and the joy, and it kind of plays with it and sucks the color from it.
I think I was so grateful, in the years after Sleater-Kinney broke up or went on hiatus or whatever you want to call it, to find 'Portlandia' and co-create 'Portlandia' with Fred Armisen, which allows for levity, allows for the same kind of kinetic energy, but channeled through absurdity and surrealism.
I think people would describe a lot of Sleater-Kinney as unsettling. And I don't think our best moments have sonic assonance to them. I think that we are best with a little bit of... a caustic attitude and tone.
I think a lot of people want stories or lives to have very distinct beginnings, middles, and endings. Generally, I think things are a little more fluid than that.
What I appreciate about Sleater-Kinney is that we did six records, and they all felt different. It was a band that was able to encapsulate different sensibilities because we were focusing on it as music and art and not as a statement.
I try, in the present, to not exalt the past because I think that's such a way of diminishing the present. And it's hard to live like that.
I don't think I realized right away that I was switching from being a fan into being a performer. I've always tried to maintain that duality, because I think fandom is a way of being porous and curious, but it did feel like a step forward.
With sociolinguistics, after covering the basics of the field, I focused on discourse analysis.
Of course, 'Portlandia' is all about ways that people curate their physical space and their life.
There's something about mean-spiritedness that has a way of distancing an audience.
Sometimes when you look at somebody else's career or choices or family, there's almost a comfort in knowing there's another option.
I think music took hold of me and captured my imagination at such a formative age that I ascribe a mysteriousness to it, and I exalt it and take it seriously in a way that I think has just permeated my life ever since. And I'm less interested in music that is novelty or jokey or ironic.
I think there's a lot of wonderful comics that leave you hanging in a state of apprehension or anxiety before alleviating that tension with a joke.
There is a certain comfort that comes from feeling intellectually apart from phenomena. That you have the luxury of time to reflect or apply scholarly thinking to art and culture.
I think that art, and making music or comedy, is a way of positing yourself on the map and then trying to find other people out there with you.
Writing isn't necessarily about what one knows but what one wants to know.
I think that there is something about the ritual of making things more difficult that people find meaning in.
Shoes are a great invention. They keep us from stepping on nails. Your feet stay clean and warm and dry.
I grew up outside of Seattle and have lived here my whole life, and I think that there is a culture of questioning and guilt. Almost an 'anti-ambition.'
The Northwest, to make a generalization, is a fairly sensitive populace. Slightly self-conscious and very self-reflexive.
I definitely love performing live because there are moments of spontaneity. And as much as you're performing on stage, I feel like the audience is performing, too.
For film and television, it's interesting how fans feel that their particular ways of manifesting their affections are the correct ones. It's not just about being a fan, it's about how you perform your fandom. That's always been interesting to me.
Curiosity is what keeps me open to a sense of hope. It staves off negativity.
In Olympia, Washington, many of us were writing songs that were the equivalent of bloodletting: This is the sound a wound makes; this is the screech of a scar. But Mary Timony was always more kaleidoscope than microscope, creating magical worlds replete with weaponry or sorcery.
I really feel like social media - it's like all these tiny stages that you put yourself on. And you come to rely on these likes and favorites, and it's this applause and this validation that you start to need. Then it's like you don't know how to soothe yourself, and I think it's very pernicious.
'Beasts of the Southern Wild' was one of those films that I felt like I could dismiss because it received so many accolades, but then I watched it and was won over.
When I was 16, 17 years old, I became aware of music coming out of Olympia, Wash., which is the state capitol and about an hour south of Seattle. And there were bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile and Heavens To Betsy, and for the first time, I heard my story being explained to me, being sung to me.
I'll admit that I'm not quite certain how to sum up an entire year in music anymore; not when music has become so temporal, so specific and personal, as if we each have our own weather system and what we listen to is our individual forecast.
I always find that nostalgia is sort of like memory without the pain. And that's why it feels so good to kind of bask in that, and I think it can be deceptively comforting.
I associate Taylor Swift with some pretty kinky stuff.
Over the years, music put a weapon in my hand and words in my mouth, it backed me up and shielded me, it shook me and scared me and showed me the way; music opened me up to living and being and feeling.
I get mad at myself when I get news from Twitter before I get it from a regular news source. Then I'm off to a bad start: getting the second-hand, filtered experience all day long.
I think that half of us feel fraudulent in our lives anyway. There's that strange disconnect of not really knowing what we're doing sometimes, or why it matters. It's our existential crisis.
I think that there's so many versions of femininity, and in terms of gender as a binary construct, that seems to be being dismantled.
I really don't know what to do when my life is not chaotic.
The game Rock Band has been haunting me like a bad ring tone. It gets stuck in my head and momentarily effaces all that I love about music.
Rock Band is more like Stairmaster than it is like rock 'n' roll - it's the same steps with different degrees of difficulty.
It's hard to beat the visceral high of playing live and creating something spontaneous.
With Rock Band, you can play along to Black Sabbath or Nirvana and possibly find new ways of appreciating their artistry by being allowed to perform parallel to it. Rock Band puts you inside the guts of a song.
I will say, as a woman, when you put a mustache on, you find out a lot of things about yourself.
For a while I had somebody that came to clean my house that turned out to be in a band that I really loved.
Well, in some ways I had sort of the opposite experience of other people that are sort of dreaming of being in a rock band. I was dreaming of like corporate lunches and just like, and I'm not really joking. Like the whole idea to me was really appealing.
It turns out I'm not very good at working with a traditional boss.
After Sleater-Kinney broke up in 2006 I had very little desire to play music. It took well over three years before picking up a guitar meant anything to me other than an exercise.
It was writing about music for NPR - connecting with music fans and experiencing a sense of community - that made me want to write songs again. I began to feel I was in my head too much about music, too analytical.