What I've Been Listening To These Days

The other night, a good friend asked me what I've been listening to recently because, shockingly, he respects that I try to have my finger at least near to the pulse of the indie music scene.  Admittedly, this is a hard thing to do -- and harder for me over the past year and a half as I now have a job that is stimulating enough that I don't waste hours reading music blogs, listening to new bands and watching videos while at work and prefer not to be on the computer when I don't have to be at home -- but it's rewarding and, like in the bookselling biz, word of mouth always sells more.  So, if you, too, think my opinion on music has even an ounce of merit then I submit to you the following songs for your review.  You could even think of it as an early end-of-year mixed tape.

Stars by The XX

Soothing.  Lovely.  They're not gonna give it up on the first date and, well, they're better people than I am.

Stars - The xx

Teenager in Love by The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

My roommate thinks this song sounds like Culture Club.  I think my ridiculous high school relationship -- varsity cheerleader and varsity wide receiver canoodle innocently in front of the lockers between classes and have their pictures taken by their parents after football games -- would be the perfect video for this.  Not that we shot heroin or loved Jesus.  That's just the feeling I get listening to this song.

A Teenager In Love - The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart

Surprise Hotel by Fool's Gold 

Hello, new re-imagining of Paul Simon's Graceland!  While I do like Vampire Weekend, this song is about 100 times better than anything I've heard from them to date.  Even better than that charming cover of Ca Plane Pour Moi.

Surprise Hotel - Fools Gold

Sing Sang Sung by Air

I could listen to this song until I died.  I listen to it and am immediately in a better mood, swaying my head and shoulders along to it on the subway and not even caring that I look like one of those crazy people who yells into her bluetooth while walking down the street.  Well, okay, maybe I don't look that crazy, but I'm sure I look completely unselfconscious, something that is hard to come by in this city.

Sing Sang Sung - Air

The Strums by The Dodos

I know, I know.  Time to Die isn't even close to being as explosive an album as Visitor, but I really, really like this song.  One day, I listened to it on repeat, like, 5 times in a row.

The Strums - The Dodos

The New Moon Soundtrack

Kidding.  It makes me want to jump of a bridge it's so depressing.

Laura by Girls

A good time video always wins me over.  Plus, what is not to like about this song/band?  This shit makes me want to move to California, frolic on the sunny SoCal beaches all day in a perpetual state of not-too-fucked-up-ness and sort of pretend that there are no responsibilities in life ever.  I guess I'd settle for just hitting up Six Flags Great Adventure, though.  They do make those water rides look like it's the time of your life.

The Glam Goddess by The Smith Westerns

The way they sing the word you and all the words that rhyme with you is so much fun to do in the privacy of your own apartment while you're cooking or cleaning or doing other things that necessitate listening to an awesome song to make them more enjoyable. In fact, I'm just going to say that this whole album fucking rules and you should buy it.  Like, now.

The Glam Goddess - Smith Westerns

Saga by Basement Jaxx (feat. Santigold)

It's weird, it's fun, it's a great song to listen to on the way to a party on a Friday or Saturday night, or any night, really, I'm just trying to not party on school nights anymore and be a GROWN UP.

Saga (feat. Santigold) - Basement Jaxx

Bad Romance by Lady Gaga

Duh.

Thank God for People Weirder Than Me

Yesterday, while sitting through an insufferable work lunch -- there was a baby in a conference room, need I say more? -- one of my coworkers said:

When I was little, I wanted to have a twin so badly I would pretend my reflection in the mirror was my twin and high-five her.

It was the best thing that could have been said at that moment and even though we all did weird shit like that when we were little -- I "ran away" to the bathroom and made a bed in my bathtub and refused to come out for 24 hours -- we have at least all reached a point in our adulthood where we realize that the appropriate time to indulge these sorts of embarrassing truths is on a blog -- the Internet basically means anonymity, after all -- or with our close friends after, say, one of those giant bottles of Yellowtail wine.  Still, that comment totally endeared her to me and one day, when I finally get around to writing some sort of actually publishable writing, I think I'm going to steal that idea from her because it's pretty pitch-perfect writing material.

Living for the City

As of Halloween, I officially live in a new apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side, four blocks from the Express 4/5 and three blocks from Central Park.  It's magnificent; probably one of the best places in terms of location and proximity to awesome things I've ever lived and so, because I've had to go through hell and back to get into this apartment, I'm going to brag for just a few minutes about some of the reasons it is better than where you live.

There is a Gristedes, a dry cleaners, a drug store, a liquor store and an NYSC branch within one block of my apartment.  Seriously, how is that for convenience?  Need to whip up a breakfast for an unexpected overnight guest on a Saturday or Sunday morning?  No problem, just run down to the grocery store for some eggs and OJ, then pop over to the liquor store for some mimosa-worthy champagne. Then, once they've departed, it's time to drop off the week's laundry and head over to a yoga class or something to further enhance your flexibility.  Fucking perfection.

IT IS THREE BLOCKS FROM CENTRAL PARK.  For the past year or so, I've tried to start becoming a real runner, something that from the time I had to take Presidential Fitness Challenges in elementary school I was convinced I'd never have the desire to be.  But something about being a twenty-something in this city, about wanting to do something to somehow counteract how unhealthy my alcohol intake is has made me really step it up over the past month or so and I've been running my little heart out.  When I was living in Astoria, I loved how beautiful the city looked across the East River when I was running at night, but, shit man, that view is nothing compared to running along the north side of the Reservoir and seeing midtown all lit up -- Empire State Building included.  Also, some pretty hardcore runners use that path, which is great for really encouraging me to push my best mile time.  

Museum Mile.  I haven't taken advantage of my proximity to this, but the fact that I am so close to two of my favorite places in the city -- The Frick Collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- makes me so very happy.   And, maybe now that I live eight blocks away, I'll finally get to the Neue Gallery -- something I've been meaning to do for literally five years.

It takes me twenty minutes door to door -- including buying coffee -- to get to work.  TWENTY minutes.  Can you even believe that?

No longer do I have to really deal with commuting into the city on weekends when there is all sorts of bullshit work being done on the subways.  Remember that weekend only TWO lines were running normally?!  Yeah, screw that.  Do your track work, MTA.  I'll be hanging out in one of the many bars along 2nd Avenue, thinking about how all the inanity of the past few months has turned out to be worth it.  Fuck you, Astoria.  Fuck you, shitty former landlord.  I have a management company now and a video intercom.

Also, isn't the Stevie Wonder song that inspired the title of this post just great?

Living For The City - Stevie Wonder

The Greatest Five Words in the English Language

As spoken by the King of Trashy Daytime Television, Maury Povich, and compiled in a Top 7 video list:

You Are...NOT THE FATHER.

I'm not sure the Internet has ever produced anything more perfect than these videos and this commentary.  Person who wrote this, will you marry me?

(Special thanks to @johnthedomingos for tooting this right at quittin' time!)  

The Ride Kind of Side Show

You know, any side project done by any of the members of Grizzly Bear is fine by me.  I loved Department of Eagles' 2008 release In Ear Park -- this video for "No One Does It" pretty much sums up why -- and with yesterday's release of Chris Taylor's album, under the moniker CANT the trend continues.  Take a listen here.  I promise you won't regret it.

Oh! And I should also mention that teenage girls everywhere are now going to be rushing to buy Grizzly Bear albums thanks to their contribution to the New Moon soundtrack with Beach House's Victoria Legrand.  

This Is Where I Leave You

It's been an extremely long time since I've read a full book in a twenty-four hour period, but this weekend, as part of my resolve to slow down just a little bit and on the recommendation of a friend, I sat down with Jonathan Tropper's new novel, This Is Where I Leave You and did just that; and boy howdy am I glad I did. Also, I realized after writing briefly about Lorrie Moore on this blog last week that I don't write enough about books, which, at the risk of sounding slightly hyperbolic, are arguably the great loves of my life, and so I decided that maybe I should attempt to rectify that situation.

Anyways, I devoured this book. I devoured it for many reasons. First of all the writing is pretty top-notch in terms of prose. It's not really poetic in the way that makes me love a writer like, say, Jeanette Winterson, but the language feels easy, feels familiar, feels smart. Then, there's just the whole arc of the story. If you've ever taken a writing class, then you know there's that whole Chekov conceit, you know, the one where you if you introduce a gun in the first act, it must be used in the second? Anyway, Tropper uses this trope brilliantly, by first bringing the reader into the book by making her believe that it is a book about the loss of a father, and in a lot of ways it is, but that is not what is at the heart of this story, it is merely the gun that is used to get the action going. The action here is attempting to negotiate relationships when there is no clear way to negotiate them, when every character is "emotionally inarticulate" to the degree that it makes their lives full of implausibly hilarious comedic events -- I'm talking testicles catching fire here -- and the struggle is to reconcile this ineptitude in the wake of a father's death. This action, by the way, is heightened by the fact that the characters in the book are forced to sit shiva as the dying wish of their father. This extremely emotionally scarred family hasn't spent seven whole days together in decades and, thus, have not had to face the sources of many of their own character flaws and relationship conflicts.

The means by which Tropper gets his characters into the situation that forces them -- and especially the narrator, Judd -- to really self-reflect is, ultimately, unimportant because, I feel, at the end of the day, what he's really trying to get at is true: most of us are extremely emotionally inarticulate to the point that it makes our relationships much too complicated and full of (perhaps unnecessary) anger, deceit and misguidedness. It is this raw feeling and acknowledgment of uncertainty that made me really fall into this book in a way that I haven't fallen into a book in a very, very long time.

See, the narrator, Judd, is at a point in his life where something has to give. Somehow all his broken relationships need to work themselves out, but he has no idea where, really, to start. It is only when he is able to meditate on tangible representations of emotions that he is moved into action. Three times he discuses the content of a chest of drawers, and it is apparent that the mementos he finds in them -- images of his own marriage and youth, the hint of a man moving into his home, the items his father held on to for decades -- are the most emotionally charged times of the book, the times when his character is productive. Something about this is very poignant to me, as though it is only when we can really take the time out to try to bring ourselves back to the point when a particular feeling or relationship was engendered that we can gain the perspective needed to move forward.

But, even though I did really love and soak up these moments of the story, it is, perhaps (and maybe I should say: spoiler alert!?) the ultimate message of the book that seemed, finally!, fresh and in tune with the way that I feel about life in general, no matter how fucked up anything might be at any given moment. And, that, for all it's over-sentimentality and maybe hokeyness, is the fact that life is full of options, full of hope and it is pointless to let any difficult event render one stagnant. What, after all, is more depressing than a man or woman whose life seems to have stalled completely and no personal growth has occurred in a very, very long time? Sometimes, as Judd makes apparent, the energy it takes to be able to continue to move forward, to remember that one can always choose to do something else, to be something different, is overwhelming, but it is important that one always remember that anything can happen.

And that, my friends, is my serious and not at all funny book report. Please, even if my response to this book seems to be too emotional for you, I encourage you to read it because at the very least it is funny --remember, there are testicles that catch fire at some point! -- but maybe you can also discover for yourself something different to love about this book.

A Christmas Horror

This morning, in the Grand Central subway station, I saw this poster for the remake of A Christmas Carol starring Jim Carrey:

And here's what I want to know.  Who thought it was okay to have Jim Carrey straddling/riding a phallic-looking rocket bell (that's a bell, right?  I can't even really tell) with his mouth suggestively open like that.  Isn't this supposed to be a kid's movie?  Isn't the goal of movie promo materials to make you want to see a movie, not be slightly horrified at 8:45 in the morning?  At least one thing is clear, I know what I won't be doing on November 6.