Phil Collins is coming out of retirement. (Re)act accordingly.
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I moved to NYC three years and two months ago. Brooklyn, actually. My twin brother let me have his spare room. It's true what they say: after 2 or 3 years, NYC starts being what it always was--loud and smelly and full of rats that aren't all adorably hauling pizza down the steps. But my first month here, I filmed 5 seconds out of each day, one hour apart. And at the end, I had clips from each hour of a day, over the span of a month. A lot has changed. I live in Manhattan now. I ride my bike a lot more than I ride the train. Every pair of shoes featured in these clips has worn out. But some things have remained the same. This place is still huge, even though it's tiny. I still run as much as possible. I'm still impressed at what beautiful, crazy, weird shit I see everyday.
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I'm not gaga over Lena Dunham: I think she's very smart; I think she's a good writer; but I'm not a worshiper. That said, I read Jennifer Lawrence's post on Dunham's recent newsletter project, Lenny. I like the idea of hearing from people we might not expect to, in ways we haven't before. These aren't long reads, but they're dealing with things we're not used to talking about. That's what Dunham does well: she brings things up that people don't have much experience hearing about in the open. Slate's subsequent recap of the post makes the audience even wider. The point is this: women still get paid less than men, even celebrities, even at the top of their game. This is both alarming and not at all surprising. But Lawrence's honesty is surprising: only because, in America, we don't talk about money. Maybe we should. Maybe if we did, things would change. The New York Times also wrote about the gender pay gap recently. All of these sources say the same thing: women don't ask as much. This reminds me of the genius Amy Schumer sketch "I'm Sorry." In this sketch, all of the women (like most women) are successful, but still feel this need so apologize for it--or, just for themselves. The most significant thing here isn't that women need to get paid more--we do--it's that we need to feel like we can ask for it.
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It's coming. Why do we love The Walking Dead so much? A lot of reasons. It's gruesome, it's violent, it's scary, it's full of passion. "This is what life looks like now." We're drawn to this show because it's utter survival; and, while survival does come into play in our daily lives, it's not in this non-stop sense. To a degree, we crave that sort of adrenaline. (If you don't believe me, just look into how many weird Spartan Race and Tough Mudder events are now in an area near you). We watch it almost as a fantasy: not that we want zombies to take over, necessarily, but having to worry only about survival--that actually sounds pretty amazing. Suddenly, no laws, no money, no jobs. Only, can I find food today? Can I find shelter today? Can I find someone to trust today? We feel like we could concentrate on those things better than the petty shit that fills our days. This show proves that we are animals, and that we're never very far from proving that. There are more and more of these all-rules-off type shows, but The Walking Dead is doing it right. Rick Grimes is the perfect hero/protagonist, because he's entirely flawed--just like us. Rick doesn't always do the "right thing" for the moment, but he does the "right thing" for the bigger picture--the kind of "right thing" that most of us wouldn't have the guts to do. Watching this show is a workout; and it looks like season 6 promises more sweat than ever. (Also, if anyone knows of a mashup of every time Rick says "Carl," please let me know). UPDATE: I FOUND IT!
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This Hungarian film directed by Kornel Mudruczo is not a feel-good about a gang of cute puppies: it is like nothing you've ever seen before. The New York Times described it as a "revenge fantasy." The film follows Lili, a 13-year-old girl, who has been left to stay with her estranged father while her mother goes away for work. Lili and her dog Hagen are soon split up when Lili's father decides that he cannot house a "mutt." A lot is made in this film about the distinction between pure-bred dogs and mixed-breed dogs. A metaphor? By the end, Hagen rallies a group of hundreds of mongrels to revolt against all of the human oppressors. Cujo comes to mind. And The Birds. But you can't help rooting for the dogs: they have been wronged. They have been beaten and tortured and abandoned. They have been injected with hormones and have had their teeth filed sharp. None of this is easy to watch, but it helps what follows to be absolutely just. We're reminded too often that humans aren't far from being the cruelest of the beasts.
Huntington State Park, Connecticut
I've been teaching college students for more than 3 years in NYC; if they remember one thing about my class, it'll likely be how much I love to hate the New York Post. Rupert Murdoch is generally gross. But everyone enjoys tabloid journalism from time to time. Or, daily. It's like a candy apple; or even, like those rumored candy apples with razorblades hidden in them that your parents warned you about on Halloween: there's some goodness in there somewhere, but it's wrapped in some pretty toxic shit. I've noticed that The Post, and maybe all of "the news," tends to go through waves of extremely depressing stints. Lately, The Post, and maybe just the reality of New York City, has depressed me. People are horrible to each other--they're sad, sad monsters. But this weekend, I was up in Huntington State Park, Connecticut: just an hour from the city. We booked an AirBnB and hopped on the motorcycle. The moon was bright, the crickets were out, and little lakes dotted the land, reflecting the trees--just beginning to change colors. We didn't read The Post, and for once, I didn't miss it at all.
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New York City is tough. Anyone who lives here can tell you that. To the point that, most things don't gain sympathy from New Yorkers. Most New Yorkers hear your sob story and trump it with ease. I don't know if a little over 3 years earns me the title, "New Yorker" yet, but I'm definitely growing a thicker skin. Over the past year, I've learned how to bike in the city. It's risky. It's scary. It takes skill. I prefer to only bike early in the morning: anytime between 5:30 and 7:30am, the streets are generally clear (or, clear for NYC). When I'm not crossing the George Washington Bridge to do 25-30 miles of hills in the Palisades on my "nice bike," I'm commuting to work on my single-speed. The same single-speed I've had to literally stop people from attempting to steal, despite my $90 lock in broad daylight (sigh, New York). But yesterday I was pulled over by the cops: lights, sirens, 2pm. They accused me of turning right on red, and failing to yield to pedestrians: 2 traffic tickets and a court date. I shook my head for the remaining 8 miles of my commute to work. I Googled what to do about this, and came across dozens of similar stories. This is my favorite. The thing is, it shouldn't be this difficult to exist in a place and safely get to and from work. Other cities are doing this better than we are. There are a lot of problems with this scenario, but at the end of the day--even a bad day--with two bikes in tact, and all of my bones in tact, I've still survived, and that counts for something, I hope.
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Flashes of Life is illustrated by the great Jimmie James. Jimmie is a man to meet: he lives the way we all wish we had the guts to. There's no way to properly define this man: an artist, a musician, an actor, a writer, a guy to waste an afternoon with. He sells paintings in SoHo during the summer, smokes cigars with his buddies on rooftops and in parks. He mingles with the elite, all while remaining the absolute coolest of them all. In the winter, he goes to Thailand. "It's the way people should live," he says. Everyone is nice and happy. Everyone does what they want: no one worries about money. He didn't mean to go to Thailand the first time, he was just escaping the winter. He road-tripped to Florida and Louisiana, and California. Then, he was in the airport thinking, "What next?" He looked for the cheapest flight leaving within a few hours: Bangkok. It changed his life. We've all met people who bring out the worst in things--the worst in others, the worst in life--Jimmie does the opposite. He brings out the best in everything. You ask him if he'll paint you a cover, and instead he makes the whole damn book better, and then turns it into music. Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska.
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From the Album Explanations, one subject explains Sonic Youth's "Daydream Nation"
"Daydream Nation" - Sonic Youth
When I was 14, I got really into Nirvana. Like, really into it. Like "lumberjack flannel everyday and bad attitude about everything" into it. But in my ceaseless quest to find more stuff that sounded like Nirvana, I came across a book that told me Cobain idolized this band called Sonic Youth. So naturally, I swung by the nearby record store and picked up Daydream Nation at the counter-guy's suggestion. It's safe to say this record changed my life. "Teenage Riot," for one thing, was the first song that ever truly spoke to me in a meaningful way. I heard a lot of myself in that album: the restlessness, dissonance, angst, wonder, and drive was all me in a way that made Nirvana look goofy in comparison. Guitars were pushed to their limits (and often beyond), and each song was more artful than the last. I still listen to this record on a regular basis: it's literally timeless.
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From the "Album Explanations," a musician explains his influences:
Donny Hathaway - Donny Hathaway
I got into Stevie Wonder back in high school, and pretty much listened to him straight through college (and beyond) on constant rotation. I've probably listened to and sang Stevie Wonder more than anyone on my list. He was also the major reason I started singing. But then I got into Donny Hathaway after I had been listening to Stevie for years, and was completely blown away when I first heard him. The fact that he so heavily influenced Stevie is obvious, and gave me a great appreciation for him. I really connected with his songwriting in particular: you can hear his struggles with depression so often.
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From the "Album Explanations" comes the story of why "Business as Usual" makes the list:
Men at Work, Business as Usual, 1981
After the sugar in my father’s gas tank, after a broken window, after the late night phone calls and the death threats, my family packed off from Connersville to a Holiday Inn in Indianapolis. It had an indoor pool. A vacation from school, though school wasn’t actually happening. The strike had closed it down. My father was to blame—according to the striking teachers.
At night, the streetlights dappled the hotel room. The noise of traffic seeped in. As my siblings slept soundly, I lay awake thinking, God damn, god damn, god damn.
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From the "Album Explanations," one subject explains why they chose "Back in Black" by AC/DC as one of the albums that influenced their life.
My brother, god love him, has odd taste in music. He listens to modern country now (sorry Joe, that's just unacceptable), but back in the day, when I was in my late single digits, he was the man when it came to music. At night he would load up his stereo with a stack of five or six LPs to put himself to sleep. There were no doors in our upstairs anywhere, so everybody had to listen to it and down the hall I was rocking out all night. My mother hated the bells (if you know Back in Black you know what I mean) and she'd make him get up and turn it off when that one dropped.
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From the "Album Explanations" comes the story of why one subject picked "Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too" by New Radicals for his list of albums that have most influenced his life.
This was the first album I ever personally owned: it was a birthday gift from my mom when I was 9. Apparently some dude who worked at Strawberries (a now defunct music superstore in Cambridge) convinced her it was "the coolest record out right now," so she took his word for it and picked up the cassette. I must've played that tape from side-to-side and back again for a couple years, because the only other cassette I remember having prior to getting a CD player when I was 12 was "Americana" by The Offspring, the soundtrack to the Matthew Broderick Godzilla, and a Creed tape. (*shudder*)
Aside from being a nostalgia thing, "Brainwashed" is actually a pretty well constructed bastard-pop record. Every song is tinged with surprisingly competent socio-political commentary that had relevance during the late 90's. Of course, as a 9 year old, all that stuff went way over my head, but the catchiness and breadth of style in each song made it the perfect record for a kid just starting to look past the Lou Bega's of the time. In a lot of ways, "Brainwashed" is a culturally defining record, especially when you consider how an alt-pop anthem like "You Get what You Give" went mega-platinum or whatever, AND how frontman Gregg Alexander went on to write the songs that made Britney Spears famous (not like that's something to be proud of or anything, but hey, it's important...). There's also a song on the record that involved doing porno films in Japan and some guy mistaking cocaine for Sweet n' Low (keep in mind, I was 9... so when I heard "coke" I thought it was soda and when I heard "porno" I didn't know what the f*** it meant). Anyways, the album is great: so much so, in fact, that I bought the record again ten years later and still have it on my laptop now.
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Thinking about a pug named Potato...
I've been working on a project for about 4 years now: a book of poems. And lists and time stamps. It includes these guys. This started when I was thinking about that thing that happens when you unexpectedly hear a song that takes you back; like, say, Marvin Gaye's Got to Give it Up. And then I started thinking about all of the albums that take me to a place long ago: albums my parents listened to; the first albums I bought; the one CD that I had in my car in college when I rigged a "Discman" so that I could play CDs out of my cassette-tape-only car stereo. So then I started asking other people what they would put on their lists: albums that influenced their lives--albums that take them back. I asked everyone I could think of to write their list of albums. I got lists from my 18-year-old creative writing students, and from my 70-something jazz musician friend. I asked artists and writers. I asked my parents. The reaction was pretty amazing. Some people were instantly on it: they sent their lists to me within hours of my asking. Others lingered--took days and weeks to perfect their lists. But most wanted to tell stories: most attached a paragraph or two of explanation for why they had chosen each album. The stories are great. Over the next few weeks, I'll be posting some of the explanations of albums that have influenced people. "Album Explanations." Stay tuned...
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People talk a lot about a man in uniform. I've always had a theory that this is more about cleanliness than the actual uniform. And the fact that a uniform stands out when separated from its crowd. Which is close to being irony, I think. A sailor in a sea of sailors (pun intended): no one stands out. A sailor in SoHo, well...there could be a lot of reasons for that, but they stand out. Tom Chiarella wrote an article for Esquire Magazine about what we wear: an investigation into the power of the uniform. In real life, Chiarella is many things: a writer, a professor, a score keeper for college football and basketball games, a poker player, a golfer, a father, a husband, an artist; but none of his roles really require a uniform. For the article, he chose a priest, a security guard, a mechanic, and a doctor. Chiarella leaves a lot unsaid, but that's his style: to gain a connection to the reader by letting them find their own connection. What he doesn't say is, when people think we belong, we do; and so the sub-sub text is, when people think we don't belong, a lot of times we don't. He also says (but doesn't say) a lot about how comfortable we are with ourselves: what do we enjoy wearing? I just bought a new dress, and now all I want is occasions to wear it. You'd have to really love your job to feel that way about work clothes. The point is, we're all looking at each other to figure out what's going on--to figure out who's important and who's not--judgment, yes, but also to know where we fit in to the whole big mess, too.
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I was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio, but I like to think that I grew up in Indiana. College and graduate school and the years after: that's when you do your real growing. I never long for Ohio: never think of it as home; but every once in a while, I think Bloomington could pull me back. I spent a lot of active time on the streets of Bloomington. I rode a lot of miles on my bike, and ran a lot of miles on my feet, and walked my dog all over that town. I remember the first time I saw "Elephant Micah" advertised on the marquee at The Bishop--a small music venue on South Walnut Street. I thought it was a funny name: my name. But I never managed to get to a show. I saw the name several more times, and even planned to go when Elephant Micah was on tour with Magnolia Electric Company, but our worlds never did collide, exactly. Nevertheless, I feel like I've been a fan from afar for several years. And just now, I was blown away with the single, Pearl Bryan. Songs like this sound like southern Indiana: narrative songs. Long, slow songs that ache. Murder ballads. Joseph O'Connell is Elephant Micah, and he has a beautifully simple voice. The story he tells is true: about a woman from Indiana who was killed--decapitated--and the men who hanged for the crime. They were the last men hanged in Newport, Kentucky. The sadness here is real: it echoes and echoes until there's a small sense of calm.
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Netflix describes Joseph Gordon-Levitt's new project a "crowdsourced variety show." I remember reading about this when he launched the project. I remember thinking, "Damn, I wish I was famous enough to pull something like that off." But I'm not, and he his, and that's the whole point. He organized it, and now he's leaving the talent part up to everyone else. It started in 2005, with just Joseph Gordon-Levitt and his brother, Dan. He calls the ongoing project, hitRECord. As in, do something and record it. Even now, there are only 8 people who work for the company, the rest is people remixing and creating via the internet. Gordon-Levitt is also pulling out themes from the projects that have been recorded, and putting them into a "TV show." It's a good idea. Basically, he throws out assignments or ideas, and people create. The show itself comes off as a bit corny, (the live audience, Gordon-Levitt being a ham), but if you stick with it, the actual projects created are super impressive: especially when you see the breakdown of how many are involved in each. So, someone writes a script and posts it, someone acts it out and posts it, someone writes music and posts it, on and on, and the result is pretty amazing. The short film and the song in the first episode are memorable. If Gordon-Levitt maintains this brand, it seems like it's only going to grow.
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Beirut has a new album, No No No, with a September 11th release date; until then, there's a single, "Gibraltar," with a video. Pitchfork sees this as an island of trash, and it is, partly, but there's more going on than that. The song is catchy, with more of a beat than some of Beirut's more melancholy tunes. But this video seems to point at what we so easily abandon. We walk away all the time: we move on, but we leave things behind. That loss accumulates, maybe on an island, maybe in our minds, and it turns into something gained. Certain things remain true, no matter our accumulation. The moon is beautiful--the way it makes everything blue. The tide comes in and out. Pigeons circle around what we toss. It doesn't take long before we pick up and move on again. I like this song a lot. There's so much gained in loss: there's so much truth in shedding.
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If you live in NYC, you've probably seen Steve Buscemi. He's probably been kind and quiet. You've also probably seen and even talked to his brother, Michael. Also kind and not quite as quiet. The Buscemi brothers are good people. A friend of mine from Indiana used to say that: good people. Meaning, you can trust them: they'll help you out and listen and give good advice. Steve and Michael are both actors: both great actors, but Steve tends to land more roles. They're not competitive, per se, but they're aware. And they're both as creative as they come. Most recently, they've been working together, on a "talk show" put on by AOL (yeah, seriously). Park Bench. It's perfect. They talk to celebrities, musicians, everyday New Yorkers. It's funny and serious and once. It's real life without being reality. If you get the chance to talk to these guys, do: they're normal guys. They sit on benches. They tell great stories. They make NYC a better place to be.
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Oh baby. Oh Prince. The man has given us 3 minutes and 44 seconds in "Stare," only released on Spotify. With all great Prince anthems, there's a lot of repetition to this song, but Prince has never needed complex lyrics. There's a nod to "Kiss" in there, even though this is a "brand new beat:" when Prince says the word, the instruments react. And there are all of the instruments here: sax, brass, bass, and beats. We all react.