Best of 2006

I do this every year. The point is not what was necessarily the artistic best of the year, but actually what I read or listened to or saw (and usually what actually ends up on this list in a combination of all three) that actually meant the most to me. As a result this, list has almost no criteria even though I like to think I have good taste. But everything on it is something that matters a lot to me.

Cormac Mccarthy
There’s something happening here, and it is clearly and completely terrifying. We will sacrifice a lot for each other, but all of that is not enough. Somewhere there are trees of dead babies and bones with the flesh boiled off of them. Somewhere people are in love, but it cannot be here. Parts of the world are burning, and we want to see them, we want to touch the ashes. The ashes are stark, but hell if they aren’t beautiful.
At some point in January, I went on a serious reading binge when there were many, many other things I should have been doing. At the end of this was a borrowed copy of Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, which is often considered to be Mccarthy’s best novel. It is certainly the most intense, and most harrowing. I had a bizarre experience reading Blood Meridian that I rarely have with books—when I finished it about forty-eight hours after I started it, I had virtually no idea what the specifics of the book were. This feeling was weird, and intriguing. I had read his Border Trilogy before, but this novel was different. Over the year, I read this book three times, and I read four other Mccarthy novels. I read them in different places, in different mental conditions. Mccarthy books don’t teach me anything—their common thread is their violence, and that they exist in a world where you are always surprised to see a radio or a truck on a dusty road. In other words, Mccarthy doesn’t write about us and our angst or trauma. But he writes beautifully, and his books get at some kind of greater, desperate experience which has more in common with our world than we’d otherwise think. These books are essentially modern, they are psychedelic, and they are impossible to read just once.

Camera Obscura, “Let’s Get Out of This Country”
With no offense to Camera Obscura, I mean the song and not the album. I mean the song because it was on repeat this summer, the Scottish lilt and string hook splitting their way through all the heat and angst and horror of months back at home. If I had to analyze what parts of my life are based on some vague form of escapism, it would probably horrify me. But this song is so simple in its wishes: I want to be in a different place, and I want to be there with you. Though the second part of the sentiment is not something I strive to practice in my daily life, “Let’s Get Out of This Country” explains that, on all counts.

Readyville

C’mon, baby do me a favor. C’mon baby, tell me it’s too late. An El Camino is a car, to ge me where I’m going, even if it’s not where I’m supposed to be. The heart’s all cold, but the tongue’s all gin and this paperback is giving me a heart attack. Though we’ve been here for ages, we still act like little kids.

Ah, alt.country, love of my life! Twee will never supplant you, my darlingest darling, my flannel-clad, slide guitar-welding, whiskey-drinking paramour. It’s not just about half-broken windshield wipers and singing songs loudly in Chicago. It’s about spending all your money on cheap flowers and drinking until you’re honest, even when that turns out to be boring.


The Squid and The Whale, Kicking and Screaming
Technically, I saw both of these movies in 2005. But I watched them much more in 2006. Squid is saved on my computer desktop, and I watch it with alarming frequency. In contrast, Kicking was impossible to find for quite a while—it was only released on DVD at the end of the summer, and my video store lost their VHS version. Both are by Noah Baumbach, who, for some reason or another has a real ability to write things that captivate me. Kicking is the only movie I’ve found that replicates what I loved about high school movies for the liberal arts set. When Freedy Johnston’s “Bad Reputation” comes on at the end, we are left depressed, nostalgic, and meaningfully hopeful. I appreciate that. Conversely, I like movies that make me cringe, but Squid and the Whale has a real heart. Brooklyn in all its decrepit gentrification, Knopf, hate where there was love, longtime emotional scarring written really beautifully, and skin peeled off the lower lip. Trying, but not hard enough, and everyone is sad for all the right reasons. These are human failure at its loveliest. The awkwardness of adolescence, and the more upsetting awkwardness of adulthood—all unavoidable.

Voxtrot, s/t EP
Personally, I think this is a stupid band name. And Voxtrot sometimes writes about stupid things. However, their songs are filled with such vibrancy and such understanding that I forgive them for saying that we’re young and stupid and raised by wolves. We are, at points. We can shake our bodies and wreck our minds, and you are the wrecking force in me whether I like it or not, so I might as well tell you. Voxtrot came out with other records this year, but the first hit with such a charming immediacy, and I listened to it so much, and I danced to it so much, that I can’t even fathom last spring without these songs.

The Mountain Goats, “No Children”
When your heart breaks slowly, you find something to steel yourself against. Driving in Philadelphia and screaming the words, in a field in Chicago, in cars all over the country. Every place means something different, because we kept changing. The irony is this is a song about things staying the same forever. Maybe we aren’t so hopeless after all. I still hope that our few remaining friends give up on trying to save us, but for entirely different reasons.

Charles D’Ambrosio, The Dead Fish Museum, Tom Waits, “Hold On”
The Dead Fish Museum was a book I pined for all spring, desperate for its newly printed pages, too poor to afford it in hardcover. “Hold On” could be about D’Ambrosio characters—the utter stillness in a scene, all the things that make sense about chance, and so beautifully articulated that it really does matter. Everything ends up hollow in both instances, but we are trying. We discover that trying is what matters.

Marat/Sade
France gave me horrible dreams the whole way through. There is something surreal about suddenly being half incommunicado with the world while in a place where you feel like you’ve already seen everything, but in your head. There is a sense of weirdness and foreboding, there is a specific flood of beauty and there is an anticipation for moving away from such weirdness. I read a lot, and I read in English because I thought it would chase away whatever was confusing me. I don’t like dreaming in other languages.
Marat/Sade was written in German, so maybe I was undermining myself a little bit. My copy broke in half on the plane home. Stiff binding, but excessive over-reading. The play is railing against nature and the nature of the self. The play is complicated and brutal, and I appreciate that. The characters are all someone else inside of someone else, and the audience is confused and horrified. A distance from beauty is good.


The Blow
Chicago streets and parks in the sunshine are an odd thing to associate with music about personal strength and personal weakness and complication and relationships, but that expanse is the best thing about the Blow. Chicago goes on forever, and everything is visible, the only barriers are what we’ve constructed. We are neurotic, but justified in being so. The city glittering at night some point later, cheap plastic sunglasses and something lovely trapped in those sounds. I think I get it now, or I think I’m getting at it. The Blow is adorable and accurate, and they make some of the most articulate pop songs I’ve heard. These songs make me believe in some commonality of experience that is not immediately apparent. I don’t know about being on the same level as anything, but this is music that is about the desire for both intimacy and inevitable betrayal. The Blow maintains a safe and logical distance from the songs while being so intensely involved in them enough to make a heart stop.

Josh Ritter, “Girl in the War”, Okkervil River, “O, Dana” & Rhett Miller, "My Valentine"
Trapped in a thunder storm, talking on a cell phone, completely drenched and horrified as much as I was eager. Shivering cold and nervous. Everything happened and I was either too far away from it or too close to do anything. Josh Ritter says, “Peter said to Paul, ‘You’ve got to rock yourself a little harder. Pretend the dove from above is a dragon and your feet are on fire’. And us talking to God is Laurel begging Hardy for a gun.” So falling asleep with this song on repeat isn’t a bad thing, but it’s an admittance that something is horribly wrong. “O, Dana” is a Big Star cover, but it’s the same thing, in different terms. And "My Valentine" is about overcoming ambivalence towards real appreciate and real action. It starts with a Dylan Thomas reference ("Love in the asylum is a beautiful thing") and goes on to something that isn't complex or well-thought so much at genuine. Admit that you’re hurt and uncertain, admit that you’re angry, and admit that you're happy with what you've got. Telling the truth is something to strive towards, and is consistently unavoidable.

Kentucky, approximated.

A year ago (and isn’t it funny that we don’t think of anything else this time of year but what happened a year ago?) I never would have assumed that I would go to Kentucky several times in 2006. But down through Indiana we drove, and I saw horses and drank bourbon and moonshine. This is mostly on account of the Damnwells song, which I like a lot, but I have noticed a strange amount of Kentucky in music I like by people who are not from Kentucky. That was a bad sentence, but I think you get the gist.

Neko Case, “Bowling Green”
Neko Case’ fantastic in this, an indiscreet song about pretty girls and lucky men in Bowling Green. It’s a rollicking direct hit, but charming and wry (as all good Case belters are). The times when I love Neko Case the most is when she writes these kinds of songs that are only vague characterizations but are inflamed (in the best possible sense) by Case’s voice, which (again) is utterly enrapturing.

Ryan Adams, “Oh My Sweet Carolina”
“I miss Kentucky/ and I miss my family,” sings Ryan Adams on this, which is arguably one of the best songs on Heartbreaker, a record composed entirely of great songs. Emmylou Harris sings back-up vocals, which are entrancing and sharp all at once. This song makes me catch my breath every time I hear it, and it makes me appreciate all the things that I love about Ryan Adams—his good voice, his good lyrics, his accurate sparseness and deft character development, and his beautiful evocation of something that is just far enough away to be interesting and just close enough to be intimate. “I was trying to find me something, but I wasn’t sure just what/ and I ended up with pockets full of dust.”

The Damnwells, “Louisville”
Louisville means little to me but pictures of nice-ish office buildings and a congested bridge. I saw the Damnwells open for Rhett Miller a few years ago, and they didn’t have any songs like this in their set—everything was exuberant and a little dumb, if I recall. This song is the opposite—it’s thoughtful and careful. It’s a love song, but of the wrong sort—“I don’t want love to conquer Rome, just your voice and a sleeping pill. I’m gonna trade in Friday nights for a piece of your heart”. This is a sentiment that I might not empathize with, but there’s lilting recognition here, that there’s a nonsense to what we desire but also a logic that’s quite beautiful. Cities and girls are interchangeable in pop songs (cities and boys too, though not in this instance), but I’m appreciative of any song that acknowledges why exactly that is. And even though I speed through cities and stall on bridges, other people might cry crossing that river.

Tom Waits, “Jockey Full of Bourbon”
Oh goodness is this self-explanatory. Tom Waits at his ultimate strength—articulate but bizarre story, whiskey voice, and a whole lot of hole where there might be heart or vice versa (and you can never tell).

Ways to waste a holiday.

1) Philadelphia radio has gotten really awful. WXPN, my chosen station, has somehow regressed to a mixture of un-listenable and very, very white contemporary adult alternative, and seventies proggish crap. It’s unnerving how little I want to listen to them. Even my favorite DJs have been playing too much Jethro Tull and My Morning Jacket for their own good.
This failure means I’ve been tuning in to a lot of the pop hit stations in Philadelphia. These stations seem to play two things, which share in common their ability to totally baffle and amaze me in their Dadaist poppiness. The first is the song “Fergalicious”, which is the second single from Fergie’s Album The Dutchess [sic]. AHHHHHHHHHHH. In this song, Fegie extols the virtue of her own body in roughly the following order: she’s not sleazy because boys can only look at her (no touching), but she’s accessible (“Fergalicious/ but I ain’t promiscuous/ I blow kisses/ that gets them boys on rock-rock/ And they’re lining down the block/ just to watch what I got”). She also is “up in the gym just working on my fitness” quite frequently. Fergie is also apparently “tastey” [sic, and it IS spelled out) and “delicious”. Aside from teaching spelling errors and a bizarre love of the gym, and also encouraging girls to not be “treated like clientele”, “Fergalicious” doesn’t seem to have a point. However, the song does include a quick Spanish lesson (“4, tres, 2, uno”) and an assurance that Fergie is not trying to take your man. Just in case you were worried. However, “Fergalicious” has a catchy (infectious) beat and is highly entertaining in its strangeness.
Unlike the Fray, which is just baffling.
The other bizarre pop single frequently played in Philly is the Fray’s “How to Save a Life”. The Fray have been boggling my mind since this summer, when they had a hit on Maine radio with a chorus that displayed a completely arbitrary attention to detail and a weird grasp of both the English language and narrative structure: “Everybody knows I’m in over my head/ with eight seconds left in overtime/ She’s on your mind”. Huh. I don’t even know where to start analyzing that. “How to Save a Life” is similarly strange, though according to the comments on songmeanings.net it is about a father and a crack-addicted teenager. This makes some sense, as the Fray do evoke many clichés about knowing best and “talking”. However, this song also switches person extensively, and could be about almost anything. So even if the crack epidemic in America is a problem, its bland evocations of God and “where did I go wrong?” could fit just about any problem (say a stampeding elephant or the apocalypse or a sex addict?). It's amazing how nondescript music can get.

2) Do you want to know exactly what James Bond drinks in each and every installation of his book series? I never did, but in the throes of a family holiday, it can get very interesting. For instance, in Casino Royale he tries to order a 1945 Taittinger and is told by the sommelier to drink a 1943 Brut Blanc de Blanc instead—and he complies. Shocker. Visit: www.atomicmartini.com/007

3) Pitchfork came out with their list of top 50 albums and top 100 songs of 2006 a few days ago. It is completely awful. I can’t start with how much I dislike Pitchfork’s esoterically and triumphantly hip yet horribly cliché coverage of most indie rock. They often ignore actual quality in favor of weird hip factors which don’t quite add up. However, I should note that I often (unconsciously) do the same thing, so I acknowledge how difficult it is not to do. Though with Pitchfork’s Pazz and Jop style of ranking (everyone on staff does a list and point values are assigned to make a final compilation, sort of like a mix tape by committee), one would think this would be avoided. I forgot to post it here, but I had a top five albums list published a few weeks ago in the University of Chicago Maroon. Find it here. Despite the thought I put into it (a significant amount), it is actually not quite representative of what meant a lot to me in the past year. I’ve done a detailed write up of that for the past few years. See them directly below.

2004, 2005.

These are my top lists from the past two years. Verbatim.

2005:
1) Joan Didion. We, my friends, are all the dreamers of the golden dream. We are the victims and the murderers and the people trying to get by on love or money or hope or sex or failure. We lose ourselves, and years later we realize that we are not ourselves without the people who we love, and when we lose them we have to continue to be ourselves anyway, even without them. Sometimes we have to sit and wait for a wave to hit us. Sometimes we have to witness the awful, sometimes we have to watch Jim Morrison fuck up on the precipice of a new, shitty era, sometimes we have to watch ourselves fuck up and then we stand tall and move and wear flowers in our hair and put on our sunglasses and keep thinking and keep writing and we stare at the sky and feel that weird sense about everything being okay, in the end. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, and we tell ourselves stories so that when we die, we will have threads to hold onto, things pulling us. I read six Joan Didion books this year. And I learn lessons from every sentence.

2) Bright Eyes. Because driving around downtown and screaming the most emo lyrics ever can be beautiful. Because sometimes it's good to admit that you're in trouble, as long as you do it eloquently. Because Conor is an intense little kid, and a ghost and because he recorded an alt.country record. Because this time last year I sure as hell did NOT want to marry him. In the end, I think Bright Eyes might be a phase. That kind of staggering intensity shouldn't apply to me for long. But this is my phase, and this is my shitty winter and my days of drinking whiskey and wine and feeling that everything is sometimes too difficult and sometimes too fucking easy.

3) M.I.A. The night before I graduated high school, I went to see M.I.A. I remember dancing and jumping and feeling so lovely and sweaty and I didn't care. I want to be M.I.A., or possibly sleep with her (actually, that's just a paraphrase of something I'v heard said a lot this year). Neither of those two are a very viable option, so I'll setlle for just listening to her music and trying (and failing) to sing along. It's drama, but it makes me smile.

4) Adrian C. Louis, "Colossal American Copulation". For a brief period this spring, I was good friends with really truly messed up kids who were trying to get better. The way this poem works is lovely. It's a personal history of a personal vendetta against the self. And in the end, it's not about being angry at yourself (it never is), so much as everything that you really truly can't control. And that's what fuck is about, really. It's about the control you never really had and will never get. Fuck that.

5) Twee. Ha. I'm liking my juxtaposition. I'm still pretty unable to listen to a lot of twee pop in a row. But: Stephin Merritt is sort of me, if I were a gay man. He's sarcastic and unstable and prolific and suspicious of love. And Belle & Sebastian can be lovely (and sarcastic, yay!), especially ignoring all those horn solo bits. And our days in Kansas really shouldn't have lasted, though I wake up every morning to something different, I think. But in the end, this item is really a concession. We argue about Tullycraft's punctuation all the time. I think in the end, it's a personal decision. For me: Fuck me. I'm twee?!?

6) Charles D'ambrosio. This was a year of reading things forever, even things that I loved. Orphans, his book of essays, was tiny but took me about two months to read just because I had to keep going back and reading sentence after sentence again. It was that beautiful. Essays about walls and home factories and biosquats and families. In the end, it'll all make sense. In the end. Possibly. We go to bed and say our prayers or we won't say them, and we'll sleep together or we'll sleep alone. And we'll miss "The Point", and then we'll find it in a bookstore in Chicago and feel a little better about it all, a little closer to home.

7) Dar Williams "What do you love more than love?"/ Sufjan Stevens "Chicago", "Casimir Pulaski Day". At the end of the summer, after everything was fucked up but before I realized that it would effectively stay that way forever, I would listen to these songs. They're spiritual, so it's a little weird for me. A Buddhist pop song about building new relationships with yourself, and two very Christian songs about running away from those relationships and effectively dying. These are songs about questioning your own desires and realizing that sometimes you have to give in to whatever is pulling you towards it, or pushing you away.

8) Veronica Mars. I also want to be Veronica Mars. She is so much better than I'll ever be. This show is wonderful, even when it isn't.

9) The Mountain Goats, "The Sunset Tree"/ Okkervil River (entire works. Not as entire as if Miranda was writing this though). Lit bands who write about victims and fucked up girls. They're overdramatic, but they know how to twist the knife. "So this is what the volume knob's for" and "We have seen this stuff, and we have seen enough" are the two most sincere, awfully harrowing statements I've heard this year. And yeah, I often need a little reminding (especially when it's cold out and I'm walking around Chicago, alone, feeling, well, shitty) that people are worse off emotionally than I am, and that it takes years for wounds to heal. That's a strange statement. These bands get in touch with things I'm afraid to feel, I think. They do it well.

10) Ryan Adams. Nothing makes me more comfortable than listening to Mr. Adams. For that, and much, I am entirely grateful. I could go into a bizarre psychoanalysis here (I mean, really not the healthiest guy to make you "comfortable"), but I won't.


2004:
1) The Shins "Chutes too Narrow". I remember hearing the live version of "
Gone for Food" at least forty Iimes one night in december. I didn't like this record until later that winter, when i was driving back from silk city and the windows were down and we were blasting 'Kissing the Lipless'. Since then.

2) Susan Neville "The House of Blue Lights". I read the story, 'The Increasing Distance' at Governor's School. It was just so good-- the way I want to write if I really write. Susan Neville's prose is really beautiful and poetic, but I feel it is also really subtly character focused and intense.

3) Ryan Adams "Love is Hell pts 1 and 2". This was my driving music last winter, when things were really shitty at school. Such a winter album! Lt makes me think of salt-stained gray roads and the sun hitting the steeple of Lasalle and sort of laying there, bleeding.

4) T.S. Eliot "the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". I've never loved a poem as much as I loved this poem last spring, when everything felt intoxicating yet really, painfully still.

5)"Freaks and Geeks". Any show that makes me cry this much and obsessed with Deadheads is a wonderful piece of art. Sometimes too brutal to watch because it so accurately captures high school.

6) J.D. Salinger "Franny and Zooey". So many of the things that meant the most to me this year were about paralysis, and none more than this. I love the glass family, but more importantly I love the slightly off world that they inhabit-- the dressing gowns and baths and cigarettes and winter coats.

7) Deborah Eisenberg "What it was like, seeing Chris"- I wrote my best college essay about reading this story again and realizing how profoundly it has affected me the first time I read it. More importantly, I actually believed every word that I was writing.

8) Wilco "a ghost is born". I know you all think this is a shitty record. But it's a mood piece, it's a definition, and it's beautiful to listen to. Jeff Tweedy is my aesthetic. enough said.

9)the Decemberists "Red Right Ankle" and "July! July!". two songs. I know that two songs is not everything this band really means to me. but one song is everything tender and scary that I've been forcing myself away from. and the other is summer and its wonderful grossness and fervor.

10)Neutral Milk Hotel "In the aeroplane over the sea". This album has so many far flung emotional implications for me, and I get the feeling it's going to gather more in the coming year. because I listened to "King of Carrot Flowers" everyday for a month. and because I drew a picture of it in my notebook and that kept me occupied forever. Because sometimes I need something that makes me feel better, and this does.

With days that were numbered and samples for six cents.

Leave it to myself (and my friends) to take a road trip based, at least in some part, off of twee pop songs. Drove down from Chicago through Lexington and onto Dollywood, past the hundred yard stretch of Tennessee which contains a fireworks warehouse, an Adult Superstore, and a gigantic cross, past Pigeon Forge and its myriad lit-up Christmas display (animatronic flying pigeons, anyone?). But the roads in Tennessee through the Smoky Mountains are breathtaking, and we got to Dollywood before sunset. To be fair, I think we had all wanted to go to Dollywood before we were aware of the Tullycraft song by the same name. And The Tullycraft song has very little to do with Dollywood itself. Dollywood was all Christmas lights and charmed excess, cross-eyed reindeer and badly designed amusement park rides. Everything there was pretty fantastic. Or just pretty, along those lines.
We stayed the night in Gatlinburg (no songs written about it, thankfully), and pressed on to Nashville. It was raining and gray, we were tired and groggy on a diet of southern-fried everything. So we went to the Nashville Parthenon, a full-scale replica of the Athens’ original—but in concrete. It brought new meaning to the sort of lame and desperate (yet endearing) Casiotone for the Painfully Alone song “Nashville Parthenon”, or at least I think we’d like to believe it did. I’m not quite sure.
For the most part, our little jaunt was a success. Never have I seen so many Best Westerns in one town, that’s for certain.

Without the weight of being whole: On Remixes.

I was always really hesitant to like Mirah, possibly because she has a completely different sense of what to emphasize than what I’ve found appealing about her. At first, she is stark and somewhat angst-ridden, with choruses like “If we sleep together, will it make it any better?/ If we sleep together, would you be my friend forever?”, which though charming, are kind of off-putting to my particular psychic make-up. However, on a closer listen, Mirah is absolutely spot-on. The same song with those adolescent lyrics has beautiful, well-composed gems of couplets: “Hey friends, don’t you think we’d better cool it down/ You’re always getting curious and leaving town… It’s not like we forget about who we are/ So choose a path and follow it, take a pill and swallow it/ It’s not forever we can fool around in the dark”. These are reflective—these, I appreciate.

So, K records just put out a double (!) album of Mirah remixes. Though I am short on cash (sort of—mostly I’m just saving up to buy Dolly Parton memorabilia when I go to Dollywood next week), I have managed to download/track down several of the tracks from Joyride: Remixes. At first, I was hesitant. But part of the problem with Mirah was always her starkness and her honesty. Most of the remixes manage to highlight Mirah’s voice and lyrics (inevitably, when thought out, the best parts of her songs) without obfuscating them. I find the remix of “La Familia” (which I quoted above) particularly good. It’s by a guy named Guy Sigsworth, who I am sure I am indie-illiterate for not knowing [ed. He was in Frou Frou, which makes total sense. This song has their slickness, but with Mirah’s soul]. It makes the song wonderfully intricate, not so plain and sad. To me, at least, Mirah was unappealing in her mournfulness. These remixes tend to move past that, to a blossoming version of the original vision. Though they might not be better than the originals, they are interesting enough to get one through, say, a finals week.

And there is love beyond compare: Radio Playlist 12.4.06

Karen Dalton/ In the Evening, Who Can Tell (Who’s Going to Love You the Best): Sinking is easy at this age. Karen Dalton, with her beautiful voice and sad reworkings of lovely songs, died alone and strung out.
Vetiver/ I Know No Pardon: We have a huge capacity for regret (elucidated by strings).
Okkervil River/ O, Dana: Come on, we have someplace better to be. Let’s try to go.
Sing-Sing/ Going Out: And getting there can be half the fun, melancholy as it seems.
Eux Autres/ The Sundance Kid: If we mythologize ourselves less, we might be better off.
Canasta/ Imposters: Or worse off.
Destroyer/ Breakin’ the Law: The more we learn, the more we’ll grow. This song will get better in a few years.
Dolly Mixture: How Come You’re Such a Hit with the Boys, Jane?: But we’re jealous and petty and silly, sometimes in a very justified way. Being snide is okay, as long as it isn’t all we are.
The Blow/ Parentheses: The little things end up mattering more than we’d think. It’s okay to cry in supermarkets, if you are so inclined. I’ll give you a hand.
Joanna Newsom/ Emily: And we are insignificant in terms of the cosmos, but that doesn’t mean we are insignificant to one another.
Swan Lake/ The Partisan But He’s Got to Know: Seriously.
Hidden Cameras/ Death of a Tune: We know how to sing, and yodel, and dance.
Josef K/ Pictures (of Cindy): Or maybe we don’t.
Julie Doiron/ No More: And we’re pretty fucking sick of it all, so we deserve a vacation.
Tom Waits/ Bottom of the World: Which we don’t yet get. Tom Waits writes strangely compelling songs.
Wednesday Week/ I Don’t Know: We are charmed by the things that intend to charm us, often to our detriment.
Juana Molina/ Micael: But we sometimes forget to acknowledge that we ourselves are charming.
Lesser Birds of Paradise/ Take the Leaves: We work to get better, but often end up getting nowhere.
The How/ When I Was a Boy: And nostalgia has value in its own right.
Voxtrot/ Sway: Yet being too nostalgic is a problem.
Elf Power/ Feel a Whole Lot Better: Most definitely. Not that a good cover of a Byrds song isn’t charming in its own right.
Memphis/ Incredibly Drunk on Whiskey: I’ve been thinking some of suicide/ but there’s bars out here for miles.
Manhattan Love Suicides/ Suzy Jones: I want you to want me.
Camera Obscura/ Dory Previn: Or, at least I did. Now I just want to be alone.
Tullycraft/ Dollywood: And I want to go someplace fantastic just to be ridiculous, and it is important that this is my choice and my kitsch and my triumph.

To think, I'd ever give a shit.

I have a bone to pick with Jane Austen. I like her books, and I think she does excellent and charming satire. However, there’s something the matter with Mr. Darcy—specifically, that the canonization of Pride and Prejudice means that precocious girls in middle school read about him, and advance into adolescence with the weirdly optimistic notion that assholes might suddenly stop being assholes because they fall in love. These kinds of girls usually as cynical and self-righteous as any Austen heroine (of course, many have a pleasantly acidic center consisting of a lack of confidence and self-esteem), but they (and maybe I’m including myself in this), are oddly moved by any narrative featuring such a charmed transformation. I’m talking about Tristan and Jess on Gilmore Girls, and lots of John Hughes movies, and Buffy, and Ten Things I Hate About You (which, I and many of my friends can still quote from at the drop of a hat).

But what can we do about this? Not very much. We can fall in love with bad guys and wonder if they’ll change because we love them (unlikely), or we can recognize the pattern and keep ourselves from liking anyone at all (which is just as harmful and certainly not a step towards becoming truly independent and unencumbered adults). Or maybe, we can listen to more pop music (in my mind, always helpful).

The Manhattan Love Suicides have a pleasant tongue-in-cheek name, and a debut that was just released on Magic Marker. They are low-fi and vaguely twee, and their single “Things You’ve Never Done” is the perfect antithesis to any Austen-related angst. It has a poppy guitar riff, heavy drums and syncopated handclaps (yes). They lyrics tell the story of deciding to leave “this dirty town”, and at the same time, leaving a guy who is apt to walk away. The characterization is exactly that of a Mr. Darcy or Petruchio—“I’ve told you once, I’ve told you thousand times/ This ain’t no play and you don’t need to learn the lines/ The things you’ve said to me have overstepped their mark/ I guess it’s true your bite is much worse than your bark/ They could write a feature on the things you’ve never done/ Ten inch headlines on the front page of the Sun.” The singer goes on, a grounding description of the kind of relationship we tend to romanticize—the one based on witty but horrible rhythmic banter verging on verbal abuse. As the song ends, with more handclaps and a distorted guitar, she sings, “You really blew it/ and I say screw it”, and, ostensibly, packs up for someplace better. This is the antithesis of Heavenly’s desperate “kiss him ‘til he’s obsessed”, and I think we could all use a little more of the getting up and walking away from the things that upset us.

No, it's an Omega.

On the day after Thanksgiving, my family does what I believe is the traditional activity of most American families. We shop, and/or we go to the movies. This year, after my father and grandmother defected to see Babel, which I felt would make me want to die (never good before finals week), I went to see the newest James Bond film, Casino Royale at Buffalo’s biggest cinema. I am consistently shallow.

Other than my immediate family, not many people are aware that I’ve seen almost every James Bond movie. In sixth or seventh grade I watched most of them with my little brother, who, predictably, likes James Bond more than I do. I like the slickness of Bond films, their predictable violence, their clothes and cars and horrible sex scenes. One year my friends and I watched James Bond on Valentine’s Day and made fondue. I forget what film it was, but I remember laughing hysterically at some overt racism, or at a flock of pigeons, or something. But when I was younger, I really loved the movies and their simple villains, and Cold War fears. However, I never got into the Pierce Brosnan Bond, who I felt was too slick, too charming, and fairly lame. Though watching huge explosions and elaborate chase scenes was all well and good, late nineties Bond dealt with the same issues as his predecessors even though times and wars and espionage were increasingly different. The new Bond, Daniel Craig (who was fantastic in Layer Cake) brings a completely new aesthetic with his assumption of the 007 moniker. Instead of spending money on designing pointless yet glitzy gadgets, the producers decided to spend their money on a scriptwriter, which helps to make Casino Royale a good film (though whether this makes it a good or bad Bond film is certainly debatable). The script conscientiously eschewed our perceptions of Bond (“Shaken or stirred?” “Do I look like I give a damn?”), and this Craig has piercing blue eyes and a sculpted, brutish physique, but his charm is much less sleazy than Brosnan’s. He is not obviously handsome, but I found his Bond much more attractive.

And unlike previous Bond movies, Casino Royale deals with our contemporary anxieties in a more meaningful way. Scenes take place in airports and crowded museums, not just exotic beach locations or perfect snowy mountains. Our own problems are also problems for Bond. Every time a cell phone rings or beeps, something bad is about to happen. He wrecks his brand new car, has crippling emotional issues, and is kind of an ass in the face of failure. He is needlessly reckless and hopelessly unpleasant. And the Bond girl, played by Eva Green, is marginally more equal to him than any Bond girl of the past—she is legitimately witty and can be horribly prickly, just like Bond himself (though she continues to look amazing in evening wear. My little brother said at one point, “See? She even looks good without make-up on!” I assured him that she was in fact wearing make-up, though the fact that Green at least briefly appeared vaguely natural is to the film’s credit). Though her character is brutalized and made tender by the violence of the film, so is Bond. Casino Royale has real characters, witty moments, and actual development. It was too long and I’m sure a lot of fans of the series will be disappointed, but this grittier Bond is better for our time and our (or maybe just my) insecurities, and for that I’m pretty thankful.

A Brief History of Amazing Letdowns (Radio Playlist): 11.13.06

Jolie Holland/ Springtime Can Kill You: Beauty can be a little bit much.
Ryan Adams/ Cannonball Days: But that doesn’t mean we don’t love to miss it.
Blood Oranges/ Hell’s Half Acre: Sitting around doesn’t do very much for us, but we continue to do it anyway. We’ll adore guitars until the world burns.
World of Pooh/ Mr. Coffee-Nerves: Everything adorable is stressful.
Benoit Pioulard/ Palmiend: And fragile.
Tullycraft/ Secretly Minnesotan: We can take over the suburbs with a song.
Aberfeldy/ Love is an Arrow: And make bad metaphors so consciously.
Pipas/ A short film about sleeping: Cassavetes permeates our lives via pop songs.
Okkervil River/ The President’s Dead: And political fantasy puts us all in a good mood, even if we’re sorry about it.
Make Believe/ Political Mysticism: We make mistakes.
Wrens/ Ex-girl Collection: Then we write beautiful songs about these mistakes which don’t manage to be apologies.
Death of Samantha/ Rose’s Rejoice: Life is pretty fucking epic.
Memphis/ I’ll do whatever you want: But magnificence can leave us quivering, alone with our catchy melodies.
All Girl Summer Fun Band/ Brooklyn Phone Call : We like to think that our hearts don’t have to break easily, but they might anyway.
Rosebuds/ Back to Boston: And when we return to the scene of the disaster, it’ll probably be painful but lovely regardless.
Joanna Newsom/ The Book of Right-on: And we believe in ourselves.
Lilys/ Dandy: Mostly just to believe.
PJ Harvey/ Highway 61 Revisited: Everything starts out quiet and distorted but becomes clearer with time. We find ourselves longing for the past anyway.
Morningsides/ Summer Song: And we can be happy for no reason at all.
Blow/ Fists up!: We do not have to explain ourselves.
Lesser Birds of Paradise/ I envy the photons: We do not have to be content with ourselves.
Magnetic Fields/ Born on a train: Everyone fantasizes about being an asshole (though maybe mostly Stephin Meritt).
Grizzly Bear/ On a neck, on a spit: We can be expansive and still be right.
Voxtrot/ Your Biggest Fan: Sometimes things don’t work out.
Diane Cluck/ Half a million Miles from Home: But momentary ecstasy can be pretty great.
Tom Waits/ Lie to Me: Or maybe we just think it’s great.
Old 97’s/ Lonely Holiday: We get sad because you’re not around. Slide guitars may or may not help with this problem.
Handsome Family/ Lake Geneva: In fact, they probably just make it worse.
Slumber Party/ 10-9-8-7-6-5-4: Twee pop just might make it better.
Ramona Cordova/ Take Flight: In the end, all that is certain is that we are delicate creatures, but also exceedingly tough.

Yes, pastels are pretty. The band, too.

Not like it’s actually a surprise to anyone, but I really love The Virgin Suicides. At least, I really love the book. I also liked the movie, which captured the strange, eerie nostalgia and adolescent awkwardness that Eugenides writes so well. I thought Sofia Coppola did a fantastic job of transferring the book from page to screen. However, in seeing Marie Antoinette last night, I was fairly disappointed. In Virgin Suicides, part of the problem that the collective narrators are looking to solve is the actual character and personality of the Lisbon sisters. They are purposefully blank, charming, romantic, strange. They are enigmas. But when the same techniques are used for Marie Antoinette’s character in the film, we are left without any substance. There are gorgeous gowns and lovely moments, fantastically shot scenes dripping with sugar and sunlight. But the character herself is a terrified and coy, virginal but in a horrible Hollywood way. She is two dimensional, uninteresting but beautiful. The best moments of the movie are the awkward and angsty ones between Louis and Marie Antoinette, as they exchange badly scripted, double-entendre ridden dialogue in the midst of the pomp of Versailles (seriously, how could they be expected to consummate when the entire palace watches them enter their marriage bed?). As they sit in their beautiful clothes in their gorgeous palace, as they eat food that matches the decorations in both hue and overindulgence, the characters fail to overcome the fussiness of their circumstances in anyway. I found myself happy that all of the nobles would lose their prissy, petty heads. I completely understand why French people hated them movie. All the French in the film are either prudes or sluts, gossips or clueless, incredibly staunch or frustratingly fickle. There is no definition in the movie. It is terribly, terribly beautiful, but collapses itself in its self-consciousness and lack of actual character. Where Virgin Suicides acknowledged its romanticizing and failure to grasp the characters (that was sort of the point), here Coppola indulges everything. She spent so much money on fabric and food that she couldn’t buy a script?

Also, there were a pair of pastel Converses for a split second in one of the montages of Marie Antoinette’s excesses (set to “I want candy”). I think I’m not alone in really really hating that moment.

Hold up the neon sign that says we're over here.

Saturday night was Almost Famous: Bootleg Edition. I don't know how to describe my love for this movie- Cameron Crowe poured something intense and meaningful into it. The commentary (which involves various crew member as well as his own mother) is touching and insightful. But the weirdest part is my familiarity with it. There are only a few movies where I know virtually every line (also some episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but that comes naturally). The extended version of Almost Famous seems like being on tour with the band, languid and pleasant. Of course, the beautiful moments are still there, but they last longer, and are more careful. Crowe spent a lot of his own money and a lot of his time on making this movie perfect, and it might not be perfect, but it's quite lovely.

Sunday was Voxtrot, and dancing awkwardly and smiling and an absurd lack of eye contact. Voxtrot is wonderful, and they will get better as they become more comfortable. The Empty Bottle is an absurd venue, almost completely unmarked and with a weird air of aging hipster that I found weird but welcoming. I'm sure I will be there again soon.

Elections are turning out well. Pennsylvania will no longer be represented by excessive evil, for which I'm always thankful.

A question.

How come, whenever I decide to read something that is classified as a landmark of both literary and cultural experience-- Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, Nick McDonnell's Twelve (debateable in both regards, actually), any Marquis de Sade, and currently Erica Jong's Fear of Flying-- I am struck by how sloppily it is written, from a literary perspective?

I mean, there are reasons for this. McDonnell was eighteen and related to an editor at Sports Illustrated (or something), and this was pretty much the reason his book was published in the first place. It wasn't entirely stupid, but it certainly was hyped. My experience of Marquis de Sade was that of a bad translation coupled with that fact that I didn't really understand how I was supposed to be reading it. McInerney is legitimately awful-- the book is written in second person, which is always, always a mistake. The exception to this rule is Bret Easton Ellis, whose books I always enjoy, despite his tedious Victorian morality (similar to Wes Craven movies).

But I think I expected more from Erica Jong. I'm not sure why. Probably because she is a woman, and I've read some of her poetry. I guess the inane catchphrase 'zipless fuck' should have tipped me off-- the voice in Fear of Flying is vaguely endearing, but the writing itself lacks most substance. There are points where it really improves. But in general, the text does not engage on a deeper literary level, which is completely frustrating and sort of baffling, considering Jong as a parallel figure to Isadora Wing.

Oh well.

Lessons Learned from Sports Night, in Haiku.

I just watched the entire series of Sports Night in about two weeks. This was quite an accomplishment. Or something.

Sports can be so fun!
And metaphorical for
our complexities!

Drugs are bad. But wait!
This remains a foggy moral
realm, so tread with care.

Be nice to your kids.
Or they might turn out badly.
You’ll feel bad. Or not.

Season two lesson:
Don’t let your characters
kiss, it kills tension.

Good guys often win--
but probably because of
ABC, not Sorkin.

Dan’s problems are so
damn contrived. His nervousness is
never apparent.

Casey is a quite
bad father, and also a
jackass, so often.

Dana and Casey
kiss—I vomit in my mouth,
throw pillow at TV.

Horns!

My headphones gave out yesterday. One half of them still works, the other drifts in and out with a crackly static, which works well for some sorts music but clearly not for other kinds. Weirdly, to coincide with this I’ve been deterministically listening to a lot of songs with peppy horn parts. I don’t know why, but they really appeal to me in this dismal weather, in these dismal midterms. These songs also happen to sound very different when the non-working half crackles—a kind of fiery, nervous exuberance that sort of freaks me out.

Okkervil River, “O, Dana”—This is a cover of a Big Star song that appears on Okkervil River’s new Australia only EP, Overboard and DownYou should be able to download it off Said The Gramophone still, and I highly recommend doing so. The lyrics are sort of nonsense, but the song still manages to mean something very visceral. “ I’d rather shoot a woman than a man/ I worry whether this is my last life/ Girl, if you’re listening/ I’m sorry, I can’t help it,” Will Sheff almost yells at the beginning, straight off. This song is intensely desperate, trying much too hard for its own good. The horn comes in at the chorus, compelling some girl named Dana to “come on”, again and again and again.

The Replacements, “Can’t Hardly Wait”—Ashtray floors, dirty clothes and filthy jokes, we will hear about this again, and probably soon. The horn section comes in after “try and try and try” and two wonderful beats when there is no sound, nothing. “I’ll be home when I’m sleeping/ I can’t hardly wait,” wails Westerberg. This song closes out Pleased to Meet Me with empty, disgusting hope, fraught by a loop of brass chords. It’s a completely weird thing, after a record about alcoholism, idolatry, and being bored in the Midwest. But hell if my record about being bored in the Midwest wouldn’t end with joyous trumpets.

Groovy Little Numbers, “Shoot Me Down”-- The Groovy Little Numbers were a Scottish twee band on 53rd & 3rd Records who released something like a total of five songs. But at least two of these songs are really fucking fantastic. They are mean, sad, depressing songs, lyrically but have the most exuberant, joyous sound—lots of horns, lots of guitar hooks. “I can only take so much, but want much more” crescendos into a poppy chorus punctuated by trumpets. “Heart of stone/ but your walls are tumbling down,” we learn, and maybe we do want a little less—but they keep giving us more and we can appreciate the effort, we can appreciate the loneliness inherent in such overblown production. Because after the band packs up and goes home, when I’m left with my crackling headphones and these songs, I can only wonder where exactly my personal horn section has vanished.

What's left, What's West.

I promise that sometime soon I will stop writing about songs and start writing about movies, poetry, fiction, culture. But there’s a problem with this theory, the least of which is that the only movie I have seen since coming back to school is Art School Confidential, which sucked. I’ve been compulsively watching Sports Night: The Complete Series, and that is reminding me what I liked and also what I hated about Aaron Sorkin shows. But I haven’t thought of anything articulate to say about that. Expect some haiku soon. Sadly, I don’t have time for much distraction that will take more than five minutes of my time. But escapism, I love the escapism.

I’ve been so tired lately, but unable to sleep. I’ve also been having a little bit of a fiction drought-- trouble writing stories. I’ve decided that this has something to do with not properly and seriously sorting through a lot of what I went through in the past year. So I’m doing that—writing, articulately and with a lot of detail, events in the order which I remember them, in a form that would be really uninteresting for anyone but me to read. I’m hoping that once they’re concretely no longer in my head, I’ll be able to use that space for something a little more original. Songs that evoke the same feeling of trudging on (oddly, they're all about the West):

Liz Phair, “Go West”— “I’m not looking forward to following through/ but it’s better than always running into you,” chants Liz Phair, with the strange echoed loop of her own voice that percolates through the album Whip-smart. The production on the whole album is bizarre, but in this song the vocal doubling works in an indecisive snap. The details in the song are blurry, only Soul Asylum on the radio and the big signs that demarcate lines between states are shared with us. “I’ve got to tear my life apart/ and go west, young man… In some ways it feels like I’ve got something to prove/ but in some ways it’s just something to do,” she sings, and I know exactly what she means. There’s a certain solipsism in such determined coasting. But there are things we have to do for ourselves, because we must.

Everclear, “Santa Monica”—I know that Everclear is not the most hip of bands (neither, for that matter, is Liz Phair. Whatever). This song starts with a great, articulate couplet: “I am still living with your ghost/ Lonely, and dreaming of the west coast”. The guitar riff is rhythmic and steady, a heavy electric lick competing with the screaming lyrics. “I don’t want to be your bad guy, I don’t want to do your sleepwalk dance… I just want to find a place to be alone,” the lyrics rant. Again, with the loneliness—but in the chorus, there is another, a “we”. And in these moments, there’s a concrete balance—we want your ghost to get the hell away from whatever sense of self we're finding, but when it all really does come crashing down, probably somewhere in California, we’d like you (or your memory) to be there too.

Magnetic Fields, “Sunset City”—Another song about moving through the West, as Stephin Merritt plays his country songs with a band that sounds like robots on speed. Or something to that effect. This is an apology from someone who is always, always moving on. The last line of this song is “I won’t miss you , you won’t cry,” though it’s hard to really believe such a thing. Later, there will be tears. On the highway as the roads curve into another state and the speaker understands what’s been left behind—“life is too short to hang around”—that, I can agree with. But the moments of ephemeral selfishness fade out into the road, and getting there is getting over any concept we may have had that we could ever be alone. So we can drive and we can feel whole for once, while understanding that there will always be another place or another person (even if that person is ourselves) to get the fuck over.

If I don't grow old, I won't become an antique.

Comet Gain is pretty boring, in certain terms. They’re British, have both male and female members, and in the public consciousness seem to basically belong to David Christiansen, who reformed the band in 2001. They are sort of cliche, with an angsty new wave groove that’s very derivative of Television Personalities, but a little softer and more complex. Their newest record, City Fallen Leaves is entirely too spotty to enjoy as a whole. However, Christiansen’s apathetically moving drawl is interesting to hear, especially when the words turn lovely, which they often do with a poetic pungency. Two songs in particular stand out. The mellow and nostalgic “Days I Forgot to Write Down” is evocative of having compromised on life, and lost what you were trying at anyway. The sentiment of loss is charming but turns out to be ultimately wordless and inarticulate. “These are the days I forgot to write down/ these are the words buried deep in the ground/ They don’t make a sound/ They sing oooo”, goes the refrain, which is pleasant and haunting, beautifully creepy. We keep looking for love, “as if that was enough”, and we keep trying to pry at moments that have slipped away in all but the most visceral of ways. They won’t be written; they won’t be expressed. However, “if you’re fucked, it’s alright/ it’s Saturday night and you are alive/ And you are alright,” he sings, with some emotion, and that seems to be enough, at a certain point. We can be satisfied with our graceful aging if we take stock of what we have, instead of what we don’t have anymore. In the catchier “Seven Sisters to Silverlake”, a lost friend writes letters, which inspire us “to understand/ to feel complete and write down the mirage/ and sing hello morning goodbyes”. And maybe in that process, both the writing and the living and singing, maybe somewhere in there is the unity of what we forgot and that strength allows us to go on, perhaps even compels us to go on.

Such a stupid sentiment, but write it once again.

This week, there was an intense cold snap in Chicago. I woke up on Thursday morning to a layer of snow on the trees outside my window, the sun all blushing and translucent. It was highly unpleasant. The snow did melt by midday, but the fact that it had come so early and with such panache did frighten me. Classes have really started, which means my life consists of reading PDF files on computer screens and carrying around expensive paper with a horrifically enlarged version of my face on it. There are two songs which have stuck in this week. Predictably, both of them are old songs, and both of them are dramatic in a way my life currently (and thankfully) fails to be.

Arab Strap, “The Shy Retirer”.
I’ve never much been into Arab Strap. Though this choice is probably left over from my militantly-anti-Belle-and-Sebastian days (oh, how I hated them!), I think it still holds some legitimacy. Arab Strap are a little overly solipsistic, a little too intense for me. But the Scottish drawl in this song sucked me into it, and the charming couplet that pops in about halfway through: “You know I’m always moaning, but you jumpstart my serotonin”. This song is a short film, the Who/What/Where/Why all un-artfully obscured, but the moment captured beautifully, the narrator pushy and under the influence of something nasty but lovely. He’s angry, and hurt, and purposeful (“We promised ourselves before we came here/ we’d do something we regret/ these people are your friends/ this cunted circus never ends/ I won’t remember anything you say”). He’s so nasty and charming, so accurate. The song has a tense string section, and horns slipping in as well. This song is worthlessness to the fullest extent of its use. The world is all anger, standing around, pointless drugs. The world is in shambles, but it is very well-articulated and we can’t ask for much else these days, can we? At the end we’re left with a tight drum loop, standing there on its own. Am I supposed to be dancing? Was I supposed to be dancing all along?

Tom Waits- “Hold On”.
This song is 5 minutes and 33 seconds long. It (and I know this is a travesty, please forgive me) reminds me of Bruce Springsteen. A lot. And I know Tom Waits is better in some ways than Bruce, and I know he’s more original and completely different. But this is a ballad about a relationship and leaving town and physical desolation but emotional salvation. The line, “Go ahead and call the cops/ You don’t meet nice girls in coffee shops” is somehow completely moving and honest. And that honesty swings into the next line, “She said, ‘baby I still love you/ sometimes there’s nothing left to do’”. The sentiment of loving something that’s perfectly flawed is a cliché. But in all reconstruction, there’s the ghost of destruction, and it doesn’t have to be a menace. This song quickly becomes about accepting the problems in the past, the lame substitutes which become our essentials. As he growls, “You build it up, you wreck it down/ You tear your mansion to the ground,” we’re confronted with the fact of those ruins, and here we are, carrying them in our pockets and feeling the sharp edges as well as the smooth ones. For five minutes, there is a unison between the broken and that continual, awful process of repairing, between clutching something tightly and remembering how it once supported us. I’ve never been comforted (so much as amazed and terrified) by Tom Waits’ voice, but at the end of this song I want it to be record, so I can physically move the needle back to the beginning of the loop and start it again.

Endings.

I’ll be the first to admit my obsession with breaking up. I don’t think of all relationships as doomed, but in my mind there is something creepily eerie about committing yourself to another person for a long period of time. Additionally, I have a plethora of unpleasant songs to back this sentiment up. Observe the breakup songs I have on repeat at this particular moment.

1) The Mountain Goats, “No Children”.
Clearly, with its catchy piano hook and scathing (scathing!) lyrics, this song belongs at the top of any list. John Darnielle writes with such eager gusto about the dead end marriage of his narrator that you can’t help but wince, shrug and sing along. “I hope you die! I hope we both die!” This song makes even the worst marriage look like grotesque, catchy fun. Maybe this will be my wedding song. Probably not.

2) Why?, “Gemini (Birthday Song)”.
This strange gem of a song is hard to access at first because of its weird lyrical choices. But sometimes the haze of physical specifics lifts into beautiful and specific couplets of horror: “When I ask you to kiss my pulse, you offer to start the shower/ I want a verb, and you give me a noun/ What do you dream up while I tongue you down?” The increasing distance in the relationship expands in a fuzzy loop of sound, until we are left chanting with the weird, cold voice chanting, “You know my build, you know my size, the degree to which my eyes are astigmatic.” This relationship, though intense, clearly has passed its expiration date.

3) Richard and Linda Thompson, “Shoot Out the Lights”.
YES. People just can’t manage to break up this cruelly anymore. Even the Mates of State breakup record won’t be close to this perfection.

4) Tullycraft, “I Kept the Beach Boys”.
This is one of Tullycraft’s most sparse songs. They are not masters of the break-up (twee pop is generally better for the sickly sweet intensity of the getting together. Or in the case of Tullycraft, re-getting-together. Maybe that’s why I continue to secretly hate it, or why whenever I have a mental breakdown, there is inevitably twee playing in my head). This song has a military drumbeat, and lyrics start halfway through. They consist of about five sentences that manage to convey the whole story of the relationship ending with, “I went to Memphis and you moved to Detroit/ You took the That Dog and I kept the Beach Boys with me.” And there, we have the essential reasons for breaking up in a nutshell. You are in different places with incompatible music. Duh.

Triptych.

Architecture in Helsinki, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: Monday
The Vic Theatre before a large thunderstorm is a strangely happy place. Weirdly, the most affecting thing about this show was the lighting design, which was gorgeous and highly pigmented. The bands both put on competent sets. Architecture had an early Halloween: various members of the band were dressed as a sports star, an indie-rock loving Trotskyite, a stuffed animal, a member of Panic! At the Disco, and an Abercrombie model. This was weird, but even more bizarre was the flood on Belmont when the concert ended. Completely soaked and cold, the concert was almost totally flooded out of my mind by the rain and thunder, hours upon hours of it. In retrospect, the cutely cartoonish clouds that Clap Your Hands had as their background were facile and poorly used. Very little indie rock can actually stand up to the elements, and I suppose this was no exception.

Mt. Eerie, Calvin Johnson: Thursday
The seasons managed to align perfectly for this show, which took place in the eerie, gothic Hutchinson courtyard. One of the first chilly nights of the year combined beautifully with the gawky coldness of both performers. Leaves stuck in neat piles on the edge of the courtyard, everyone got stoned and many cigarettes were smoked by various Northside hipsters and radio station staff members. Walking around with a billfold in my pocket, I could barely concentrate on the actual music, just its presence in the scene. The moon was caught in the trees, and everything was breathing and I was giddy because it was autumn. I wish I could say more about the performances, but all I know is that they were crisp and eerie, like the night itself. Afterwards we collapsed into a Voxtrot dance party which was really just jumping, and we jumped poorly on the slate, in front of the dry fountain. That was lovely enough.

Elvis Perkins, Okkervil River: Sunday
Felt ill before I went, but was pleasantly impressed (again) by Will Sheff, Jonathan Meiburg, and really, the whole band. The Okkervil River boys are adorable, but meaningfully so. They all sing along to every song, they banter, they charm. It’s more than the fact that I love these songs, and that I ventured all the way up to Schuba’s with other people who love these songs. Sometimes it’s the small, charming quirks (drunken debauchery, iffy wardrobe choices, and a dobra) that that make bands work for me live. Though I’ve never seen a live show that I dislike entirely, it’s really rare to stand there and sing along with a room full of people you don’t know, some of whom wrote and regularly perform the songs. It’s this kind of synthesis, I might even suggest love, that really makes a concert worthwhile for me. To know that we are there all together, for no particular reason, and to know that you are wearing a Hans Bellmer t-shirt and spinning a story without sense, that we all have hope or something to hang our hope on when we manage to catch up with it. The evening started with these words, trembled by Elvis Perkins, “While we are sleeping, the shadows flow, time files, the phone rings, there is a silence and everybody tries to sing—oh, oh.”

Maine can be evil.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been a counselor at a camp in Maine for low-income girls from all over New England. Even though I was head of the drama department, I had to do a lot of work in arts and crafts. Main difference: Arts and Crafts Building has a radio, always tuned to Q97.9, Portland’s hit music station! I am so damn happy to be away from the Q. I’m fairly certain that they have the shortest playlist of any radio station, ever. Here are songs that I heard at least once a day, if not twice or three times. These are the messages we relay to the youth of America. Constantly.

Promiscuous, by Nelly Furtado feat. Timbaland
This is the most radio-friendly song of the summer (at least in Maine). The intro “How you doin’ young lady, the feeling that you givin’ really drives me crazy,” is guaranteed to make eyes roll. “Promiscuous” is a really catchy song, and I liked it a lot at first. But then it turns annoying. I’m sorry, but didn’t “Promiscuous” mean someone who sleeps around and generally wears slutty clothes and projects a certain image of sleaze? I think of Christina c. 2 years ago, not someone who “seems so innocent”. For that reason alone, this song annoys me. It’s not tongue-in-check at all, just dumb. The Nelly Furtado voice (which Furtado has alleged speaks from a complex female perspective) is vapid and unpleasant and responds to things like “Promiscuous girl, stop teasing me, you know what I like, and I’ve got what you need” by saying, “Promiscuous boy, let’s get the point.”

Ain’t No Other Man, Christina Aguilera
I’m so happy Christina cleaned up her act and looks gorgeous now. This song with its bluesy backbeat and “Do your thing, girl” sample, is the perfect antithesis to “Promiscuous” and its attempt to simplify a complex subject. Aguilera actually simplifies a complex subject, but does so convincingly, with a strong voice and good production. When she belts, “told my others, my lovers both past and present tense that every time I see you every things tarts making sense,” you believe it. This is a fun song, but also a little lame. That Aguilera would be so indebted to her "man" for her lovely reform is upsetting. Regardless, this song is good, even after excessive playing.

Hate Me, Blue October
The second line of this grunge annoying song is “they crawl in like cockroaches leaving babies in my bed”. Aside from the fact that this could be said of the entire pseudo-grunge movment, this song is annoying, whiny (chorus: “Hate me today, hate me tomorrow, hate me for all the things I didn’t do) and generally lame. Lots of kids sang along to this one.

Temperature, Sean Paul
You can’t understand what Sean Paul is saying and it sounds exactly like all his other songs. However, whenever it came on I had to turn up the radio, by demand.

Buttons, Pussycat Dolls
A nine year old sang this at the talent show. The part, “I’m a sexy mama/ who knows just how and when I want it” was particularly hilarious in that context. Supposedly, the Pussycat Dolls are nouveau burlesque. Actually, they are just a lot of girls dressed up in horrendously slutty outfits and overdone make-up singing a song that doesn’t make sense. “Loosen up my buttons, babe”? What? Are we Victorian, or just looking for a new way to take off our clothes?

Single, Natasha Bedingfield
Ugh. I never want to hear another anthem about being single.

Lips of an Angel, Hinder
Ugh. I never want to hear another song about the fact that you’re about to cheat on your girlfriend because of some woman, to whom you feel compelled to sing, “girl you make it hard to be faithful/ with the lips of an angel”. Ha.

Over My Head, The Fray
This is the fratboy jam. It shifts person perspective at least twelve times and the chorus is “with eight seconds left in overtime”, and I can’t really understand why. I bet that the lead singer is cute though.

I Write Sins not Tragedies, Panic! At the Disco
The voice: so annoying. The fact that somebody bothered to write a song that has an actual plotline: okay. The singer is a groom who “can’t help but to hear” an exchange about how his bride is a whore. The chorus is, “Haven’t you people ever heard of closing a *__* door?” Classy. But totally awful.

My problems belong to television.

I have an intensely negative attitude towards therapy. Maybe it was reading Freud's writings on hysteria when I was too young, or hating anything having to do with expressive schlock. But recently I've discovered another answer: Animaniacs.

My little brother brought the first season of Animaniacs home with him last week. When I was younger, it was my absolute favorite show. I credit it with teaching me a lot of things: U.S. Presidents, Gilbert & Sullivan, geography, unhealthy popular culture obsession. But apparently, it also managed to teach me a laughably bad attitude towards psychiatrists. In the first episode we are introduced to Dr. Scratchandsniff, a bald German with an unseemly, large head. He works for the studio, and tries in vain to effectively babysit ("cure") the Warner Brothers, and their sister. He uses stupid puppets, asks questions like "What's on your mind?" (Yakko answers, "My hat?") and is totally incompetent. He also runs around with a net most of the time, and rips out his own hair. This, I do believe, is my first ever impression of what a therapist did. No wonder.

Thanks, Animaniacs, for my bizarre factual knowledge and my lifelong resentment of therapy. I appreciate it.

Movies about fucked-up people.

I am a big fan of movies about people who are more emotionally incompetent than I. This explains my early summer Bergman obsession, and also why I like John Hughes movies. Those people are adolescent though, so they have an excuse that I no longer feel is valid for me.

Last night I rented Match Point. It was directed by Woody Allen, but you wouldn't know it. The characters talked at a normal pace, and other than the self-obsession, and boring amounts of sexual intrigue, it wasn't much of a Woody Allen movie at all. For one thing, I could finish it, which hasn't been true for any movie he's made since Everyone Says I Love You (which was excellent and adorable).

The movie is shot like a current, bland romantic comedy, including beautiful actors, product placement (Ralph Lauren, Cartier), jaunts to all the touristy places in London (the theatre, the Thames, the Tate Modern, Buckingham Palace) as well as elaborate mansions in the English countryside. The people spend most of their time being gorgeous, but since this is a Woody Allen film and he doesn't much care for pretty people, they are therefore painfully boring and clearly destructive. And continue to be that way, for the entirety of the film. It was a brand of torture-- wanting to watch pretty people do awful things that weren't quite awful enough to be turly interesting. And it lasted for two hours. It totally confounded me. I have no pity or connection to any of the characters, who relied only on their good looks and stupidity, yet I didn't particularly want to stop watching. It was absolutely bizarre. I attribute it to my love of these types of movies when they are a little better written and with a slightly less attractive cast, but I'm probably just making excuses.

Oh well. I would probably enjoy soap operas if I managed to start watching them. That is a sort of amazing realization.

A Pitchfork Villanelle.

Well, I got back this morning from the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, completing my three urban music festivals in as many weekends. Of the three, Pitchfork was by far the best. Because I have to write an article for the newspaper on it, I decided to interpret my feelings here in a villanelle instead.

Ah, The Cool is Good? (In the Heat)
a lame villanelle

The sun was hot, but sweaty hair and lanky limbs beat faster still.
Hipsters filed into the dusty diamond Union Park to see
Again! The same orange dress from H&M, similar bands on the bill.

And despite the heat, they all still found a lovely, peppy thrill
while buying ethnic food quite cheaply, and sitting under trees.
The sun was hot, but sweaty hair and lanky limbs beat faster still.

Large sunglasses and shitty dye-jobs, beer all spilled
On boys with concave chests and American Apparel tees,
The same orange dress from H&M, same bands on the bill.

And water was cheap, and toilets gross: a good time with no frills
And nobody making awful talk, lots of posters to see.
The sun was hot, but sweaty hair and lanky limbs beat faster still.

Danielson was cute, Mountain Goats sang about awkward kills,
Spoon was true, CSS were paper dolls, Jens orchestral twee—
The same orange dress from H&M, similar bands on the bill.

When Diplo rocked the tent so steam swum upwards, though no hills
Decorate the city, there still was a loud longing reaching, light and free.
The sun was hot, but sweaty hair and lanky limbs beat faster still.
Despite, because of the same orange dress, the similar bands on the bill.

To top it off, I just got back from seeing Sleater-Kinney. I'll write on that tomorrow.

Don't go chasing waterfalls.

Sometimes weather gets in the way of a good time. Sometimes people let it, and I acknowledge that sometimes they have to let it. Some of my best experiences have been with wet people after rainstorms, because we have nothing left to lose. Dancing in wet clothes, running through streets unable to see, slipping and sliding haphazardly across puddles, sidewalks, stages. But WXPN’s All About the Music Festival was actually a washout. I decided to go on Saturday, accompanying my parents to see Slo-mo (pedal steel player from Marah, Philly-based, and totally awesome), Josh Ritter (the same part of me that plays ‘Thunder Road’ endlessly can’t get enough of this), and, importantly Konono No. 1 (Congolese! My father describes them, “as if everyone in the Dead played a thumb piano instead of whatever they play”. But mostly, they’re just fun and loose and cool), as well as a lot of other, mostly unremarkable artists.

Slo-mo was excellent. His band features rapper Mic Wrecka, the women from Stargazer Lily, and a bunch of other veteran Philly scene people of the Marah ilk. He wears a white suite and rectangular black-frame glasses to perform, and writes smart, lively odes to life in Philadelphia, like one to his drug dealer (“Go to the street where the grass is green/ and the smell is sweeter than you’ve ever seen/ Right on Girard, turn left hard/ Get your Shackamaxon”). The band even did a cover of TLC’s “Waterfalls”— which turned out to be weirdly prophetic.

As Konono No. 1 was setting up, it started raining. And not dripping, snotty rain, but full-on thunderstorms with clouds so thick that you couldn’t see the Philadelphia skyline across the river. The thunder was the loud, deafening sort that is scary no matter where you are, and lightening was coming down like straight pins through the sky, but safety wasn’t so much of an issue, because we were between the Delaware and the top of a hill, and there was a huge metal stage and a transmitter tower. But as people ran to their cars and the various concession tents, and the XPN staff lopped frantically about, the rain came vertically and horizontally so virtually everyone and everything got drenched. The storms stopped after about forty-five minutes and they began to set up the stage again. People were mudsliding down the hill where the audience sat with their shirts off, buying cold beer, and idling around the stage. We were all drenched, but sort of happy. There was an air of triumph over dampness. I could see Konono’s megaphones getting dried off.

But the sky darkened again, and XPN decided to cancel the rest of the festival, announcing that they would have a show with various acts from that day’s line-up at World Café Live (their much smaller venue in West Philly) that evening. We decided to go there, still in our sopping clothes. However, as it turned out, the line-up was exceedingly boring and acoustic—aka, no Congolese thumb pianos, but a lot of mediocre singer-songwriters (though Willy Mason and Josh Ritter were good. Steve Wynn, formerly of Dream Syndicate, was okay). So it turned out to be damp, a little boring, and very disappointing. Plus, my cell phone got a lot of water in it, and is now very very broken. Oh well.

Coffee, Grass, Blood and Bugs

Even with my continual attempts at lateness (I fumble for the snooze button, get back into bed after I’ve taken a shower, check my e-mail, collapse into my piles of clothes desperately strewn), my father demands that we arrive in downtown Philadelphia a good 30 to 45 minutes before I want to go anywhere near the building where my internship is located. Instead of going straight there from the car, I’ve taken to wasting my first coffee while sitting in Rittenhouse Square and reading. It’s sort of comforting to be there, watching all the badly dressed, frenzied business people walk past. Rittenhouse Square always smells a little disgusting, but the kind of pleasant putrid that is comforting to me. Rotten grass and bags from Dunkin Donuts left in the rain. I sit on a bench that isn’t too close to obvious trash or sleeping bums, and I don’t smoke, not because I don’t want to, but because I’m giving myself a break from that for now. The random guys in too-thin t-shirts who congregate in the square howl at each other (“Motherfuckin’ bitch! Man, how you doin’?) and they pick through the trash cans and cackle and I sort of hold in my smile in. It’s so very Philadelphia, all of this incongruity: beautiful statues, wealthy commuters, cursing regulars, a girl reading boyish Westerns.

I’ve been into very male books lately. First D’ambrosio, and now I’m on a Cormac McCarthy kick. I never took McCarthy seriously before this year, but in my attempts to embrace things that were dark in a different way than the angsty stuff I usually favor, I found myself really liking him. He’s light on character development, but everything in his books is perfect, pulsing, and starkly glowing. He’s a true modernist writer with almost psychedelic spells of beauty that overcome his vague, somewhat cliché characters. The men he writes about are burns, or tattoos—they don’t change, just harden. There’s always more to see out of what they are, but they don’t become anything else. And the world he writes: the timeless Mexico of All the Pretty Horses shocks you with a truck, a radio. In Blood Meridian, which I’m working on again now, the struggle is almost Biblical, but the characters are from Texas, Kentucky, Tennessee. These are books about power, but not the pure aesthetic emotional power that McCarthy could have used (he has the talent of words, certainly). They about evil and love and a weird brand of subtlety-- descriptions of snake-bit horses that entrance me enough to read them again and again, shriveled hearts, and a world of dust and blood that is so seductively gorgeous it seems scary.

So I close my book, and I walk the seven blocks to work with these images in my head. I may not enjoy my job so much, and I certainly wouldn’t want to live in the epic that is McCarthy’s world. But holding one close to me when I have the other, knowing they can both exist through me, through anyone—that’s the idea, and that’s what I’m floating this summer past. Half an hour of gorgeous veins spraying like geysers against a campfire and dead animals prepares me for a day of researching higher education affordability in Pennsylvania. It’s not forever, but I’m glad I have it now.

We don't need reason and we don't need logic.

A Brief Playlist.

Camera Obscura, “Let’s Get Out of This Country”
Apparently, if you really love someone, or if you really want to, the best thing to do is leave town with them. Lies! This song acknowledges how momentary, but how satisfying that feeling can be. Wanting to get away makes a person pine for any silly ideal. Lyrically, the song reflects this (“We’ll find a cathedral city/ You’ll be handsome/ I’ll be pretty”) and its loose grasp on humdrum reality. But it’s a good reminder that the world is full of he same unfulfilled desires, the same questionable push and pull. In the album’s first track, the same voice sings “I’m ready to be heartbroken/ ‘cause I can’t see further than my own nose at the moment”. That illogical carpe diem sentiment strums sarcastically, but also with real meaning, through the whole record, but most beautifully in this song.

Kathleen Edwards, “In State”
On the other side of the scale of loving someone or something is the moment when you give it up, and store it in your mind-- though apparently, if it's convenient the state prison will work just fine. The speaker in Kathleen Edward’s ballad is about to turn in her criminal boyfriend (“You talk sweet ‘til the going gets tough/ The last job you pulled was never big enough”), but instead of suggesting they escape together, this song is a quick thump into the real world. She still loves him, but the refrain, “maybe twenty years in state’ll change your mind”, suggests that part of her betrayal is a desire to keep him as hers. Seeing people falling away is hard, and sometimes the ideal you keep may be locked away—or if you can, make that the actual person. The instrumentation on this song is perfect for summer and my mini-van (I’m lame, really), driving with the windows down and singing along.

The Pastels, “Speeding Motorcycle”
This is a Daniel Johnston cover, and I know those are kind of cliché, but I like the way Stephen Pastel opens this song, voice sort of shaky and wobbling. When the whining gives into a brilliant pop song (are those violins? Damn!) and the whole thing pulses out this charming mantra about loving motorcycles but also loving life, one can’t help but be charmed. Everyone needs to remember that “We don’t have to break our necks just to get our kicks”, and there’s real emotion coming through the vocals in this song.

Tugboat, “Love Goes Home to Paris in the Spring”
A random Australian somewhat twee band doing a lovely cover of a Magnetic Fields song: well, duh. Instead of Stephin Merrit’s growling twang, this song is charming and poppy. The harmonies melt prettily over the words and the light guitars and synth instrumentation. “I’ve had enough/ You never give me anything/ Don’t you know love goes home to Paris in the spring?” is one of the most staunch and appropriate break-up lines I can think of. This song is simple (I just quoted about a third of its lyrics), but lovely and empowering.

Sonic Youth, “Incinerate”
Man, do I love this newly reinvented catchy, accessible Sonic Youth. This song is not so lyrically smart: it’s mostly about a guy exploding his girlfriend’s heart and getting caught by the fire department. Whoops. It also rhymes “nice” with “ice”. But this is all forgiven when one hears the bass line and guitar solo, Moore’s low vocals. The song builds up to a bright, low-burning finish and I’m left wondering why I didn’t try to see Sonic Youth again. Because they’re middle-aged and creepy, that’s why. But they’re clearly still writing good songs.

You are what you love, regardless of admitting it.

New York, even when I’m lost in its almost infinite depths, usually comforts me more than any city in the world. I think I like most the fact that you can get anywhere, anytime, even when the subway is under construction. I like the heat and the fact that after I wore the same shirt for 36 hours straight it had a sort of grimy, chemical feel just from being in the city. Magic, I tell you. Things drift like that. However, the expanse of New York and the number of people there can make for some shitty concerts.

I came with the intention of seeing at least two concerts—Okkervil River on Thursday evening, and the Siren Music Festival on Saturday. Siren is a huge, sweaty, hipster-brimming extravaganza on Coney Island. The day was hazy, the air was hot, and Coney Island smells iffy. Also, we got lost on our drive there and ended up visiting all five boroughs in one and a half hours. I didn’t mind this so much as the actual disappointment of Siren. Nobody, not a single person, looked like they were having any fun. The thing that is most important to me in my life of music is the propensity of people to actually love it—to dance, to sing along, to grin. But at Siren nobody was happy. In their oversized sunglasses and floppy haircuts, everyone was a little hostile and definitely registering as bored. There was a similar problem at Okkervil. It was probably because both shows were free, outside, and (Siren especially) very crowded. But why go to Coney Island if you aren’t going to attempt to enjoy it? Why wait around for Will Sheff and the Okkervil boys just to yawn and play with your Converses? The city is beautiful. The music can be lovely, it can be awful. But I hate that these people won’t take ownership of what they purport to enjoy.

Conversely, on Wednesday night I went to see the Weakerthans in Philadelphia, where most of the kids came from the suburbs or New Jersey to see the band (I’d wager). Sure they had adolescent dye-jobs and Blink-182 stickers on their backpacks, but the attendees at the Weakerthans show knew every word, and sang along. These are difficult words too—John Samson likes his ‘benediction’, ‘colonize’ ‘dissemble’ etc. Even when the guy behind me was pumping his fist and singing too loudly to the quiet songs, it was nice to know that people really love the band, love them enough to dance, to sway, to spout the words with meaning or without. New York, for all its bustle and comfort, failed to convey any kind of palpable interest or intent. That bothers me.

Lessons Learned from The Devil Wears Prada, in Haiku

Straighten your hair and
lose a dress size, but you won’t
find real joy. Shock!

Ex-editor of
Northwestern’s paper this girl
can’t get a job.

This nice boyfriend will
be dumped by Act III. So please
forgive their make-out scene.

Meryl Streep acts like
a huge bitch! One never could
have guessed, the challenge!

Guys like pretty clothes
on a pretty girl: also,
fancy lingerie.

Inappropriate
outfits are quite in style!
Oversized necklaces too.

Sleazy writers are
sleazy, especially
in Paris, when drunk.

Grainy film stock means
our heroine is sad, but--
sad enough to change?

Sisterhood equals
understanding that in all
bitchiness is power.

Success means giving
up personal happiness,
but not stilettos.

Happiness is love,
freelance journalism and--
well, no, just those two.

Radio Radio

So today, WXPN, Philadelphia's notorious Adult Alternative station (this means they play some synthesis between really cool and sort of lame music on a regular basis) and Y100Rocks, a webstreaming descendent of Y100, Philly's only alternative rock station that was shut down a little more than a year ago, announced a merger of sorts.

It sort of seems like a good idea, almost. Jim McGuinn, who will be hosting the new evening show on XPN (called Y-Rock on XPN, which is not as lame as the XPoNential Music moniker that applies to the webcast), always had the best music taste at Y100, and I would sometimes actually try to listen to his Sunday show which featured good new music. However, McGuinn will be replacing Matt Reilly's usual slot. Reilly plays the best music on XPN, by a long shot. I'm glad to see the demise of the "Indie-Rock Hit Parade" (another exceedingly lame title), which I could never listen to because it was worse than WHPK, my radio station, on a bad day. But this new format seems to support everything that was silly about both XPN and Y100-- specifically XPN's frantic desire to reach out to young listeners (their current base is 35 and up, but hey, those people will at least give them money), and both stations' decision to not actual play so much that could be described as alternative. Y100Rocks has improved on this over the old Y100, considering the presensce of actual female artists (Sleater-Kinney, Rilo Kiley, Tegan and Sara) and good local acts on their top 150 songs of 2005. But Reilly is virtually the only XPN dj who would fit into both formats. Also the only dj who my friends and I wrote a fan letter to last year, after he first started. Reilly is also the only XPN dj that I regularly chose to listen to instead of my own music. I'm well under 35, but I have no money to give. Oh, well. Maybe y100 and XPN can recognize some of what they don't like about each other in themselve when they work more closely. This experiment will be interesting, at least.

I accept neither of these films wholeheartedly, but I do like them both.

This evening, I stopped my father from re-watching Ingmar Bergman’s 1972 film Cries and Whispers so I could commit myself to another viewing of How to Deal, the straight-up teen melodrama from 2002, starring Mandy Moore and Trent Ford (who I continue to crush on a bit, owing less to his grungy handsomeness and more to his degree in English Lit from Cambridge). I had watched Cries late on Saturday night, and the movie is overwhelmingly brutal. It’s beautifully shot and performed (the whole cast keeps these stoned looks of inner turmoil and family trauma like the seasoned Bergman pros they are, shooting insults at one another with well-lit damp eyes) and painfully written. But it’s a little intense for an off-night. How to Deal has articulate lines like, “Enjoy him and fool around with him, don’t fall in love with him. Why do you think they call it ‘falling’ anyway?”. But hey, Mandy Moore is really good at rolling her eyes. And I might have been lying about caring less about how cute Trent Ford is.

Something funny: Bergman’s film is famous for using a very specific glossy red, which he described as evocative the human soul (“a damp membrane in varying shades of red”). The crimson pulses through scenes: sharper than blood, more stalwart than the characters, intense and passionate. But! That same red is a motif in the less serious (and okay, I’ll admit, less good) How to Deal. Sure, in the latter it serves as a brilliant common accessory color during the ‘falling in love’ montage that looks like a video for American Eagle Outfitters (set to Liz Phair’s popstar reinvention single, “Why Can’t I?), the boyfriend’s car, a single wall in Mandy Moore’s well-decorated room, lots of Coke cans, the clothing of the pregnant teenage best friend. When the young (not!-)lovers encounter romantic barriers, the red shrinks away into browns and oranges, LIKE THE HUMAN HEART. This movie is not subtle. Of course, neither is Cries. They are very different. Somehow they work incredibly well together—where Cries is painful, How to Deal is glossy and fun, and where How to Deal is overwhelmingly lame, Cries is painfully articulate. Neither could be described as anywhere approaching accurate. But there is something real, and actually really good, about both.

P.S. My father says, “Remind me what’s good about this movie other than that some of the actors are cute?” I can’t justify why I like it other than its tremendous attention to lame details like color, and the grandmother who smokes weed. Also, Mandy Moore’s eye rolling, and lines like “If love beats us up let’s beat it up right back!” C’mon. Inaccurate, but charming. I know that life isn’t like this, but film can be. Isn’t that why people like Bergman too? It’s why I like Bergman.

I thought I was there for a reason, but I guess it turned out that I wasn't.

Jonathan Meiburg, the lead singer and songwriter for the band Shearwater, is a trained ornithologist, which, when you see him live, seems exactly fitting for his long-gazing glazed eyes and arched neck—he certainly could have spent long hours peering at fragile birds and their soft wings, thin legs, black eyes. After he has performed and is standing behind you in the audience, Meiburg wears thin glasses and could be mistaken for any other beer-clutching overly-educated attendee at the Six Organs of Admittance show, but onstage in a Minus Story t-shirt, exploding feedback on his guitar, Meiburg is the kind of mysterious that is almost normative. There is nothing particularly entrancing about him except for the fact that there might be.

Except then he opens his mouth, to sing or to speak. Meiburg told three stories last night in his opening set. One was about taking an old-fashioned train on a demonstration run back from Philadelphia to the dilapidated Camden station, him aged seven and coming down with an intense fever that made everything pulse and expand. When the train stopped in the New Jersey forest for a photo-op, Meiburg detailed the greenery around him, and the train backing slowly down the tracks, moment lasting forever. His second story was about a trip for hawk research in the Galapagos, mysterious and bizarre—a leader who stank of rum, birds so docile they could easily be roped, hiking across lava and jungle. His last story, about a vain fisherman and a dead, pregnant shark and her unborn babies, was particularly eerie especially in its documented truth.

Meiburg’s stories, and to a lesser extent his songs, remind me overwhelmingly of the book that I’m in the middle of reading right now, The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D’ambrosio. This is a book I’ve been waiting for for years, ever since I read the story ‘Screenwriter’ in the spring of 2002. Sated by his book of essays, Orphans, and his first short story collection The Point, I am still immensely enjoying this new collection. The stories have the same sense as the ones Meiburg told during his show—they are about people who are not good, who teeter on cliché but retain an intensely fragile and intriguing quality and reward the audience in the end. They are about youth and sickness and being lost forever in a mind. D’ambrosio writes about bones and sharks and divorces with an equally nuanced level of detail—one that is intentionally hazy but also beautiful and pointed. He is trying to tell us something: these are not empty stories, but they are also vague and muddled in very specific ways. When Meiburg wraps up his story about the Galapagos abruptly, by saying, “Well, I guess the point of this is, I started seeing ghosts everywhere,” and launches into the desperate melody of another eloquent Shearwater song, we catch our breath and we twitter. It is this reaction, this progression, that D’ambrosio feeds me. The dark part of living—not in a dramatic way, but in a rather quiet and expected one. The story shouldn’t make us see ghosts—not logically—but, oh, how it does.

Life's a whole lot like my whiskers: Life is dark, life is short and life is rough.

Readyville is from San Francisco, but named their band after a small town in Tennessee. They use slide guitar and dissonant harmonies and open their songs with lines like “There wasn’t enough whiskey in this city to get you to tell me the truth”.

Yes, Readyville is a genuine alt.country band. And that’s pretty awesome.
Readyville is Nick Palatucci, who plays guitar and sings main vocals which both sneer and ply, and Eoin Galvin, who sings harmony and plays a lot of other instruments including a crazy sad sounding Organaire. Palatucci’s phrasing is powerful and slightly whiny, but only in the best and catchiest of ways. The songs aren’t as pretty as early Whiskeytown, or quite as witty and self-deprecating as the Old 97’s used to be, but they have a whole lot of heart, or maybe just a whole lot of empty place where the heart keeps trying to be. One of the best things about alt.country music is the absurd amount of consciousness it has about being feeling effectively empty. When you listen to alt.country you suddenly realize that everything you do is a little indulgent. That’s the difference between a sort of roots-twinged, mellow sad and the overblown sadness of most intense emo odes. After a break-up you want to complain, but you can see that “I’m making a big deal out of all of this/ I guess you can tell/ I noticed it as well.” Things are pretty shitty and you like to appeal to lost lovers and your own sense of regret, but you become pretty aware of the mess you’ve made. You talk (or sing) things through, and sometimes you just have to admit that “The timing is lousy and the moral's all wrong/ Well, this ain’t the kind of story that ends in a song.”

Readyville is a charming concept, and they come off as smart and kind of messy, with voices breaking over high notes and guitars picking along haphazardly between smart lyrics. They tell stories about reading while drunk, driving all night, and falling off of the ferry. Their album sounds visceral and tipsy, but they are certainly competent. Though the second half of the record is not quite as charming as the first, the cycle of songs about (ex-)girlfriends (“Monica”, which is excellent, “Anne” and “Lorena”) is well-executed. “An El Camino is a Car” is one of the best tracks on the album, even if they seem to only use the line “El Cerrito is a town by the bay” because El Cerrito scans really well with El Camino. It implores the listener, “I hope you’re sitting down dear/ I hope there wasn’t anyone around here/ You’ve been trying to impress.”

Apparently, Readyville wrote and frequently performs a song about the death of one of the Nick’s former roommates, who is still alive and none-too-pleased about his premature memorial. Readyville doesn’t see why he wouldn’t be. After all, one of the best things about alt.country is that you never seem to really have anything when you have it, possibly including life. You’re always hungover or broken up, drunk or driving (though hopefully not both at the same time). Memorials that haven’t happened yet, bewitched by a slide guitar and a sad voice and often-snide lyrics— that is the soul of alt.country music. We know that we aren’t in the center of the world, that we are peripheral and dumb, but we allow ourselves to indulge in a little wallowing. And then we switch off the record and go on living, because we might as well try while we can.