Nick Jaina

My recent column is about hipsters in Portland, and how the racial composition of a city matters in terms of the type of conversation the residents have about race. It’s a lot less dry than that description makes it sound, honest.

It’s also about the rapture that didn’t happen on May 21st. If it HAD happened, it would’ve looked something like this.

Wouldn’t THAT have been awesome!?

I spent a week in Los Angeles and got two parking tickets. The first was when I was taking a ten-minute nap in my car. The second was when I felt like I had earned a free fifteen minutes of parking and didn’t pay the meter. I walked up to my van to see a meter maid guy putting a ticket on my window. I was so angry that I crumpled it up and threw it on the ground. Los Angeles.

My new column this week is about my week there and some thoughts I’ve had about jealousy in music.

The title of the essay comes from the Liz Phair song “Jealousy”. Somehow even though she’s from Chicago she seems like exactly the best kind of music to listen to while in L.A.

Here is last week’s column. I was staying in Los Angeles for the week and went to see some stand up comedy. I’ve been interested in learning more about comedy this year as it relates to music, because a solo musician is kind of like a stand-up comedian in their available resources.

If you like my columns, please RT them, as they say, on Twitter. I just realized that you can actually request that people do that and sometimes they actually will. I thought that you just had to patiently sit by and humbly expect people to do that if they felt so inclined.

My recent column for Local Cut is about my childhood heroes. Some people might be offended by the way that I praise Tiger Woods and slam Kurt Cobain. Well, sometimes that’s just how these columns turn out.

My newest column is about the possibility that we have a finite amount of songs that is ever-dwindling. Don’t panic just yet. Okay, panic.

I have a new column up that capitalizes on the life and death of Lennon the Dog, a great companion and friend who also manages in this case to serve the narrative well.

You can find it, as always, over at Local Cut.

(Just kidding about taking advantage of the death of an animal. He was a sweet dog and I miss him.)

Here is my column for the week. It’s about a cross I found in a well at the mission in San Juan Bautista. And the advice that Dorothy got on the road to see the Wizard.

It involves this piece of advice from artist Ryan Pierce:
“Your priority in life shouldn’t be to work hard and save money, because at some point all money will lose its value.”

Here is my latest column for Localcut.

It is about SXSW and American Idol and how they are maybe kind of similar and maybe not. And I refrain from reviewing all the tacos I ate while in Austin. (But man, I ate some great tacos.)

I traveled to SXSW with Menomena last week and wrote about it in my weekly column.

You can read it here.

Sample pull-quote: “Dad moved to Florida and is dating a really nice real estate broker, while Mom stays home and raises the kids while seeing Steve, who treats her well and is pretty cool and has a motorcycle.”