Brick House

Latest print purchase. Bushwick… flasks of brown liquor...

Sat, 26 May 2012 14:23:45 -0400

Latest print purchase. Bushwick… flasks of brown liquor and thwarted ambitions.

“Things I Think About When I Think About Bushwick” 15” x 19”, Graphite, colored pencil, and watercolor on paper. 2012

Meet Jens. He’s the latest acquisition to the Holland...

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:35:00 -0500

Meet Jens. He’s the latest acquisition to the Holland & Lin household. Recognizing the practicalities of buying a station wagon (ahem sorry “sportswagen”) and a long puffy black jacket (it’s like wearing a sleeping bag!) are the humble beginnings of my recent transformation to ninja soccer mom. All I really need now is an asian kid who plays soccer.

Hello, pretty. Soon you will be mine.

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 17:12:57 -0500

Hello, pretty. Soon you will be mine.

Mid-century home for sale in Massachusetts! Am strongly...

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:46:00 -0400

Mid-century home for sale in Massachusetts! Am strongly considering trading my Cambridge condo. I want. I heart. I need.

It's Serious

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:11:23 -0400

After 6 years of hemming and hawing, Christian and I finally took the next step in our relationship: we merged our CD collections.

And the duplicates are:

Arcade Fire: Funeral
Beastie Boys: Ill Communication
Beastie Boys: Pauls Boutique *
DJ Krush: Milight
DJ Shadow: Endtroducing *
DJ Shadow: Preemptive Strike
Fugazi: 13 Songs
Modest Mouse: This is a long drive for someone with nothing to think about
Modest Mouse: The Moon & Antarctica
Modest Mouse: Lonesome Crowded West
Moby: Everything is wrong
Mogwai: kickingadeadpig
Orbital: In Sides
Pavement: Crooked Rain
To Rococo Rot: Music is a hungry ghost
Tortoise: Remixed *
TransAm: Self-Titled
TransAm: Red Line
TransAm: You Can Always Get What You Want
Unkle: Psyence Fiction *
The Best of Herbie Hancock
Underworld: dubnobasswithmyheadman

Unless indicated (* = claimed), we’d like to give our babies a new home. Must be responsible and having an already alphabetized CD and vinyl collection is a plus.

"Build in an ice-filled collins glass: 1 1/4 oz Vodka, 3/4 oz Creme de Cassis, 2 dashes Peychaud..."

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:39:01 -0500

“Build in an ice-filled collins glass: 1 1/4 oz Vodka, 3/4 oz Creme de Cassis, 2 dashes Peychaud bitters, Juice of 1/2 Lime, Ginger ale. Top with ginger ale. Garnish with a wedge of lime.”

- Cielo Cocktail (Created by Tony Abou-Ganim of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas)

I found it very difficult to go through a bottle of Creme de Cassis that has been sitting on my kitchen bar for over a year until this drink recipe.

Janet Avatar

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 14:18:04 -0500

Now that I have an inordinate amount of time to sit around and do nothing (hold up, I’ve been reading People and eating Christmas cookies, my bad), I’ve been signing up for every cool social networking and online profile site that I’ve been meaning to check out. This has resulted to (in addition to facebook and twitter), tumblr, flickr, auteurs, and now a flavors.me account. (Next target is goodsie for my mom’s handmade jewelry site.) Flavors.me came in just in time because maintaining all of these online profiles was starting to stress me out (in a holiday vacation kind of way). And now the world wide web is made better by a nifty little site that organizes all things Janet all the time.

Cartman sings ‘Oh Holy Night’ from Mr....

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 13:26:00 -0500

Cartman sings ‘Oh Holy Night’ from Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics Soundtrack. I’ve been rehearsing my Cartman voice for the family Christmas Eve talent show.

Now that the semester is over, I can finally catch up on Season...

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 17:00:56 -0500

Now that the semester is over, I can finally catch up on Season 13 of South Park! Holy crap, Cartman singing Lady Gaga is hilarious. I have another Cartman impersonation to put into my considerable roster.

The Economics of a CD Boxset

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 14:24:05 -0500

My industrial econ exam is long over but here I am thinking about price discrimination. Even though I already have every single album of Kraftwerk, The Stone Roses, Jesus & Mary Chain (including B-Sides and rarities, please), I still want the freaking box sets. I am that nutty consumer way up there on that demand curve who’s willingness-to-pay for awesome music and glossy cd jackets for bands that she is obsessed with is quite high. I will then give away my cds so that I’ll feel better about myself when I purchase the box sets (although logic there is unclear).

At some point, I’ll attempt a list of top ten cd boxsets of all time…

"One old fashioned glass is packed with ice. In a second old fashioned glass, a sugar cube and 3..."

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 01:37:06 -0500

“One old fashioned glass is packed with ice. In a second old fashioned glass, a sugar cube and 3 dashes of Peychaud’s Bitters are muddled. The Rye Whiskey is then added to the sugar/Bitters mixture. The ice is emptied from the first old fashioned glass and the Absinthe is poured into the glass and swirled to coat the sides of the glass. Any excess Absinthe is discarded. The Rye-Sugar-Bitters mixture is then poured into the Absinthe coated glass and the glass is garnished with a lemon peel.”

- Sazerac Cocktail

My partner makes the best sazerac cocktails. Aren’t I lucky.

Hot Chip's Take It In

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:21:11 -0500

Hot Chip's Take It In:

I can’t get enough of the UK dance crew Hot Chip. I would consider dropping out of my MBA program to be one of their 24 hour party people (not accurate, but do wish that circa 1976 to 1992 I was cool and British).

Anyway, with so much digital music at my disposal, I admittedly get impatient listening through an entire song. I’d play something for like 5 seconds and think “next”. But I plugged through this one because it’s Hot Chip and I am loyal like that.

The contrast between the chorus and refrain is amazing. I picture a West Side Story dance club sequence featuring the goth kids and the earnest student council geeks. (Although read the Pitchfork review for way more detail and interpretation than my bizarro-awesome visual here.)

Brick House The Resurrection

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:04:01 -0500

In college, my friend bought me the coolest present, a domain name and webspace, and I built Brick House with the bricks and mortar of HTML (yup, I just dated myself here). I wish I had screenshots of janetlin.com because the site was sick: animated gifs, a picture of a construction site with the message “this page is under construction”, background wallpaper of Ewan MacGregor, and oh oh a splash page that blared Outkast’s “So Fresh, So Clean”.

I had no reason to make a website about myself, certainly not like janetlin.com or janetlin.net, who have taken over my poor forsaken domain names for a career move to promote their online brand equity (although I’m sure both Janet Lin’s are very nice and sweet people) whereas I was procrastinating on my homework and posting pictures of my cat.

Back in the day, making your own website was fun, technical and creative. I would look up fansites to view their source code to learn how to do web programming. And if I got really frisky, I made my own banners and labels on photoshop. But then came blogs, facebook, flickr, twitter, DIY sites and for some reason I never really got into them as much. They never felt like works of my own creation, just these sites that really want my data, clicks and status updates.

After my days of public service, I decided to blog again under wordpress but after a whooping 4 posts, I couldn’t handle the commitment. And then there’s twitter which totally stresses me out sometimes. So Brick House has yet to find a home but is renting at Tumblr waiting for the janetlin.com or janetlin.net foreclosure.