My Favorite Albums of 2009

1. Grizzly Bear Veckatimest

Grizzly Bear "Ready, Able" (from Letterman)

2. Animal Collective Merriweather Post Pavilion

Animal Collective "My Girls"

3. Phoenix Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Phoenix "1901"

4. The XX xx

The XX "VCR"

5. Dirty Projectors Bitte Orca

Dirty Projectors "Stillness is the Move"

6. Neon Indian Psychic Chasms

Neon Indian "6669 (I Don't Know If You Know)" (unofficial video)

7. Washed Out Life of Leisure

Washed Out "Feel it All Around" (unofficial video)

8. Yeah Yeah Yeahs It's Blitz!

Yeah Yeah Yeahs "Zero" (from Letterman)

9. jj No. 2

jj "From Africa to Malaga" (no video available)

10. Neko Case Middle Cyclone

Neko Case "People Got a Lotta Nerve"

And, because I always have one I feel guilty for leaving off, my 2009 alternate:

Yo La Tengo Popular Songs

Yo La Tengo "Sugarcube" and "Periodically Double or Triple" (from La Blogotheque)

I Help the Half-Crab/Half-Woman

On my way home from a concert the other night, I decided to walk up K Street instead of I street. K Street has fewer street lamps and fewer cars. I wanted to enjoy the crickets and the soft churr of sprinklers as I wandered home in the midnight heat.

As I strolled past a smallish apartment building, harshly lit with halogen bulbs, I came upon a strange, contorted form on the grassy parkstrip. It was a woman, more or less. She was calling softy, in a plaintive croak, for her cat, which I could see across the street, rubbing itself on the trunk of a cherry tree. The woman shot a pop-eyed glance at me and I offered to help.

I went across the street expecting to have to chase the cat, but it was perfectly happy to be scooped up into my arms and I returned, triumphantly, to the other side of the street and the strange little woman. She scuttled toward me using only her arms, holding them akimbo and pushing from one side and then the other while her legs, bent at odd angles, merely twitched out of time with her stuttering locomotion. She moved side to side and chattered for her cat. I offered to place it directly into her apartment, the door of which was open behind her.

The apartment was filthy and smelled like a parakeet's cage. The TV was on, tuned to only static. There were bottles and fast food wrappers strewn everywhere. I set the cat down and I swear it let out a sigh.

The lady asked me, as I was leaving, in a voice like someone was choking on a kazoo, to tell those people to leave and I said which people and she said that couple by the car and I looked around and saw that there was no couple anywhere nearby and I wanted to leave very much very soon.

I put the cat in her apartment and pulled the door to. I made sure she didn't want any help and I left, walking up the street as I had been before. I had walked maybe two blocks before I heard again the wailing, plaintive spasms calling for a missing cat. I stopped and waited for a long moment before turning around and going back to help again.

The Chiara Heresies II

On Easter, Chiara and I eschewed the traditional family brunch and went for a walk around the Avenues - the neighborhood where we live.

The weather was fine for walking as long as you stayed in the sun, but turned bitter cold as soon as you went beneath the branches of a tree or the shadow of a house. We had intended to make a picnic outing of it: stop at the neighborhood market, buy some provisions, sit in the park and get our mind off of things, but it was just too cold in the wind and the ground was still too damp from the previous day's rain.

We walked back to our house through the cemetery. It is, or so I'm told, the largest city-operated cemetery in the United States, so it is gigantic. It is filled with tombstones worn down to illegibility by the years, pitched at odd angles as they slowly sink into the earth. Here and there something really tragic, like the stone from 1870 that listed a woman and three unnamed children - a death in childbirth we guessed. Mostly we tried to spot the masonic symbols and the most old-timey names:

(Jedidiah, Zebedee, Tharquad).

At the edge of the cemetery sits a church. Parishioners were filing out of the doors in their cheap suits and floral dresses, heading home from Easter Sunday services. We tried to guess their denomination based on their hairstyles and clothing. A group of teenagers were sitting in a circle on the grass, be-suited and be-floraldressed, reading from the bible and talking.

I had to stop Chiara from shouting at them "Aren't you tired of believing in imaginary people?!" by admonishing her that it was Easter.

She reminded me that I was the one who was always on about the pagan origins of Easter - its Anglo-Saxon roots as a holiday for Eostre, Goddess of the Dawn and of Spring, celebrated as a fertility festival with colored eggs, rabbits, and baby birds.

All true enough, but still . . .

As it was, she pointed at them and barked out, in Nelson the Bully's telltale singsong, "Haa-Haa!" as we passed.

I don't know if they looked over at us or not. I looked firmly at the wet ground and the misshapen headstones and quickened my pace. Chiara chuckled evilly.

"Aren't you glad we can sleep as late as we like on Sundays and then go for a walk or do whatever we want?" she asked me with a smirk.

I said that I was glad of those things. And that we didn't have to sing unmelodic and droning songs in the company of our neighbors every week. And that there were at least two days of the week we didn't have to leap out of bed at some (un)godly hour. Still, I didn't want to taunt those poor dopes - look at their haircuts!

Then we went home and made waffles.  We picnicked at the kitchen table and watched the Daily Show on TiVo.

"Happy Easter," said Chiara to me.

"Happy Easter," said me to Chiara.

If I Had Read This During the Election

I would have been insufferable.

So I just finished Barack Obama's 1994 memoir Dreams from my Father. There is plenty to say about it, but I think I'll start with this:

It is, literally, the only book ever published by a President before that President entered politics (or even, seemingly, thought of entering politics).

This grants Dreams from My Father a particular resonance. Indeed, with all the fatuous cries during the campaign of "who is Barack Obama?" those shouting such vaguely hysteric attacks failed to recognize that Barack Obama, moreso than any Presidential candidate before him, provided the answers to that very question long before he was a national figure and long before he had anything to gain from concealing or spinning his own past.

To be sure, it is an autobiography, and few literary genres are so untrustworthy as autobiographies. Obama himself tells the reader in the book's introduction that characters have been combined from real people in his life and that events have been compressed or extended for narrative, and I feel certain that, here and there, self aggrandizement has crept into the story.

But, at the same time, it is a remarkably humane book. Obama pulls no punches with himself, often casting himself as the flawed character in his own story. There is real wisdom in his telling and it doesn't for a moment feel forced or false. Even without his later achievements, this book would have stood a good chance of leaving Barack Obama remembered as an extraordinary man.

So, first things first: Obama was asked to write the book just after he was named the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. It was supposed to be a personal story of race in America, but it became something more than that over the couple of years it took for him to write it. It became a paean to an outsider's world, a lonely guy story. It is a revealing and lyrical exploration of living between two worlds, of and other than both.

By now everyone knows the outlines of the tale. Obama is born in Hawaii to a White mother from Kansas and a Black father from Kenya. Before Barack is even a couple of years old, his father leaves and returns to Kenya. He will only see him once more during his life - when he is ten years old, and only for a week or so. Obama spends most of his life trying to carve an identity for himself, both as a man and as an African-American, and he is forced, eventually to come to some new synthesis when his father's life and his father's failures are finally revealed to him when he travels to Kenya to, for the first time, meet his relatives after his father's death in a car accident.

It's a compelling story, but it is an even more compelling book. Obama has what so few politicians have - he has the gift of actual literary talent. He is an extraordinarily good writer, both in terms of his ability to describe and set a scene or a character and in terms of his keen understanding of narrative structure. In fact, though a memoir, the book is consciously novelesque and reads quickly and engrossingly like the best bildungsroman.

I say that had I read this book during his campaign I would have been insufferable. That is perhaps because, as an English major, I am stunned and honored to have a President capable of a book of this quality. Perhaps no President since Lincoln has had so firm a grasp on the written word, and America cannot suffer for its leaders knowing how to wield their language well. As hard as I fought and cared and hoped that he would become the 44th President of the United States, I find myself anxious for the end of his tenure as President so that he can get back to writing. I would love to read a novel by the author of Dreams from My Father.

Unclean! Unclean!

Those are Mina Harker's words when she comes out of her stupor at the hands of Count Dracula who has just been found in her bedchamber forcing her to suck on his tit where he has cut himself and is bleeding.

It is pretty much the best scene in the whole book and is positively messy with sex. The scene is described in such a way as to bring to mind - to our 21st century minds anyway - a forced fellatio. There is this description of the act where one of the men who bursts in upon the scene says it looks like nothing so much as a man forcing the nose of a kitten into a saucer of milk.

Fantastic.

One wonders, of course, how much Bram Stoker could have had such a thing in mind (or, indeed, even been aware of such a thing) in those pre-Freudian days, but throughout the novel the vampires are blatantly associated with sexual activity. The Brides of Dracula, who come to seduce Jonathan Harker during his stay in Castle Dracula, are practically soft core porn characters, both in their behavior and description. The thrusting of a stake into a female vampire and her subsequent baring of teeth and thrashing of extremities taking on a decidedly carnal - if gruesome - cast, with the hero plunging his stake into the creature again and again while she moans and screams. It seems impossible Stoker was not aware of himself.

Even before Dracula, of course, vampires had begun to take on the lascivious characteristics that were always under the thin veneer of Victoriana. Camilla, the most popular vampire novel prior to Dracula, was, after all, about a lesbian vampire seducing a young girl. But this very excitement which is evident in Stoker's book (the reader can sense his scribbling hand rapidly increasing the pace with which words are laid onto paper whenever the undead get a scene) is, in a way, part of the problem with Dracula.

Thing is - the book is really terribly conventional for its day. There must be twelve chapters in which the protagonists hold hands and pray together and resolve to love one another always. The men are, to a one, flat as the paper they are written out upon and Mina, clearly the most dynamic and interesting character, is constantly passing up action to moon over the men. One senses that Stoker either didn't know what he had in Mina Harker or was conflicted about a "new woman" protagonist and couldn't bear to let her loose upon the plot where she could have torn through literature for real.

Still worse, Dracula is hardly in the damned book. He gets several short chapters in the very beginning and then disappears almost entirely until the aforementioned "rape" of Mina Harker. Hell, he doesn't even get a final scene. The protagonists spend the last third of the book rushing all over eastern Europe to catch Dracula before he can return to his castle and regain his strength while Dracula outwits them in a hundred different (and boring) ways, but when they finally reach Castle Dracula, just before the sunset, the are successful in killing the fiend in his coffin before he can rise for the fight.

Its the most stunning anticlimax I have come across in ages.

Save for Sherlock Holmes, no character in fiction has been adapted for the screen as many times as Count Dracula. If one was to add all of the other media - books, comics, art, music, video games, toys and games - I would lay money that no character PERIOD has even been treated with so much as Count Dracula. And though, naturally, Stoker could not have known this would come to pass, to give such a creation no final speech, no fight to the death, no death scene, even? Criminal.

Look, I had always heard/read/been told that Dracula was boring and not worth the time it would take to read. I can say definitively that this was not the case. It isn't by any means a perfect novel and it is nearly buried on occasion underneath tedium and Victorian bloviating, but it reads faster than I would have expected it to and it is so impossibly classic that it feels perhaps more rewarding than it really is.

Other People's Dreams of Teeth

Everyone loathes to hear another person's dreams related to them.

So I'll make it brief.

Dreamt last night that two of my teeth fell out. they had two small metal prongs by which they were meant to attach to my gums via insertion of these prongs into very small holes. I spent the whole dream frantically trying to simultaneously direct the prongs into their apertures and still hold on to the tooth. No matter how hard I tried I could not replace the teeth in my head. It seemed terribly important and caused me horrible stress that i could not put everything aright.

I've read somewhere that to dream of one's teeth falling out is common, but I've never before experienced it. Supposedly, if you're the sort who believes in the unconscious mind and the interpretation of dreams, such a dream reflects a feeling of not having control in one's life.

It certainly seems plausible in my case. When I awoke, I didn't feel any relief to discover that all of my teeth were in place. Instead I just replaced one nightmarish fear-stress continuum with another.

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

Turns out, I do.

Here're my thoughts:

Watchmen is a really and truly wonderful graphic novel. I really believe that it may be the only comic book to have fully transcended the medium to arrive at that higher, ivory tower guarded realm called Literature. It's layered and profound and filled with three dimensional characters. It speaks to and about comic books, hero worship, the cold war, fascism, the purpose of art in the world, and the philosophy of consequentialism.

It has a lot on its plate. I think it mostly is able to handle what it sets out to do.

But the film Watchmen is another thing.

I wanted to like it, but it is a deeply flawed creation. First, it is interminably long. Second, some of the casting (acting) is dreadful. Third, the plot that slinks along so well in the book just feels slow and bloated in the darkened theatre.

That said, it has parts that are really something to see; moments that actually do manage to stay with you when you leave your seat and walk the stickum off of your shoes on the way back to your car. The Dr. Manhattan stuff, which I would have laid money on failing, actually works pretty well. Billy Cruddup does an admirable job emoting through a character whose defining characteristic is his failure to emote. Ironically, it is the scenes where normal everyday humans are supposed to be talking seriously that rang the most hollow and community theatre-esque.

Anyway - capsule review: if you liked the comic book, give it a shot. It won't ruin the book or anything and some of it is fun to see on film. If you haven't any idea what Watchmen is or any inclination to read the book - I'd pass. It is, after all, a bloated, gassy movie filled with unnecessary slo-motion fight sequences and gigantic blue penises.

Mesocyclonica

So, every Neko Case album review begins with some remark about The Voice and this one is no different.

For those who have been following Ms. Case since she was banned from the Grand Ole Opry for taking off her shirt during a performance at the Ryman Theater in Nashville, this latest album will have little to surprise. Rather, she seems on a trajectory, moving further and further away from the alt-country siren she once was and toward the asymmetrical, overtly poetic singer songwriter she now clearly is.

The Voice, though, that always remains. She describes it as a firehose of sound, liquid and loud as all hell, but unwieldy for delicate singing. She sells herself considerably short. Middle Cyclone finds her reverb drenched vocals swooping and diving and pouring themselves over fifteen songs about - in the sense that they are about anything at all - natural disasters, animals, death, and her own insecurities. There are songs about tornadoes in love and murderous whales, songs about maneating and disappointment.

All are dark and melodic and perfect for three a.m. listening, but what continues to impress me is how she's managed to carve out a coherent world for herself and her music unlike anything else going. Songs sometimes barely flirt with two minutes in length that could easily have been expected to be four and half minute numbers in anyone else's catalog. Songs go for four minutes and then give you the chorus precisely once before ending at the four and a half minute mark. All the lyrics are slantwise and the tempo often not at all representative of the subject matter. In short, she's made herself over six or seven albums into an honest to goodness rock poet. And that would be enough to admire even without The Voice, but to be perfectly frank it is The Voice that keeps people coming back for more. It is The Voice that alchemizes it all into something potent and addictive - there simply isn't anything like it in popular music today. It is like Patsy Cline was trapped in the machine that created Dr. Manhattan.

Middle Cyclone isn't immediately as satisfying to me as was Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, and it doesn't do for me what Blacklisted still does for me, but it is a good deal more upbeat (at least musically) than either of those two albums. Check it out.

Oh, and this is still 2009's greatest album cover. They may as well hand out the award already.

The Chiara Heresies

Chiara and I are in bed.

She is telling me a story from work:

They have a public address system at Nordstrom, where Chiara works, and occasionally employees are tasked to make certain announcements. The other day a particularly effeminate gay man who works with Chiara was making some announcements and Chiara was beside herself with delight.

Chiara adores everything about homosexual men.

Apparently this guy speaks with a pronounced lisp and in a kind of valley-girl patois and apparently it is quite funny and quite charming. Anyway, Chiara says to another girl she works with how much she enjoys when this particular guy makes announcements.

"Why?" says the girl.

"Because," says Chiara with an eyeroll "He's soooo gay!"

"Do you think so?" asks the girl, her face scrunched in confusion.

"Of. Course." levels Chiara.

And there is a kind of pause. Let us imagine it is longish and pregnant.

"Look," begins the other girl "not that I have any problem with it myself, but don't you think that gay people are doing something against the will of god?"

And, wait for it. Chiara's response:

"God? Which God? Are you stoopid? There ees no god. Don't be reediculous."

This is where I burst into shocked laughter.

"I theenk I might be a sociopath," says Chiara pensively.

In the Slipstream, Between the Viaducts

Once, when I worked retail, in those heady, Arabian Nights-like days when employees could play their own music in the store, I was listening to the Van Morrison live album from 1974, Too Late to Stop Now, and a woman, a customer there with her portly and Limbaughed husband, complained.

"What IS this horrible noise?" she asked in a pinched manner.

"The Music?" said I.

"If you can call it that. What is it?"

"Van Morrison. You don't like it?"

"Ugh, does anyone?"

"Most people consider him to be one of the preeminent singer-songwriters of the latter half of the twentieth century."

I really said that. Exactly that. For some reason I remember that part vividly. Maybe because I, like you no doubt, are revolted that I actually speak this way.

"Well, is he anything like Beethoven?" asked the woman with a pronounced arch to her narrow and crispy eyebrow.

"No. No, he isn't. But, in fairness, no one is." I replied resignedly.

And just for the record: on another occasion I was listening to Beethoven and some gigantic golf moron complained bitterly about that, too.

Anyway, this is all a digression from my point. And my point begins at Too Late to Stop Now.

If you don't have it, you don't have a record collection. It manages to distill everything about Van Morrison and his preternatural connection to Soul. Because it came at a time in his career when, arguably, his best music was behind and right underneath him, and because he is capable of something fierce and authentic and shamanic in his live performances (if you catch him on a good night), it ends up as a sort of accidental greatest hits record. Really, unless I feel like listening to Astral Weeks, I probably listen to Too Late to Stop Now more than any of his other albums. I think it is one of the five albums I'd go into space with if I never planned to return to Earth.

But for all of its soulful, avatar of rhythm and blues, operatic splendor, Too Late to Stop Now does not capture an aspect of Morrison's music that he himself has only rarely tried to connect with. It doesn't reach for or grasp the aether in quite the way Astral Weeks did and does any time you want to take it for a spin and you're in the bath on a Sunday morning in June. And even though he isn't what he once was, the chance of maybe melding the two into a third thing, perhaps transcendental soul or rhythm and mysticism, makes me feel slightly faint.

In other words: I have high expectations.

Enter Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl.

I want it to be a revelation - an archeology of the album I love so dearly, unearthing something new and unexpected from the songs that I know too well after too many listens. It isn't quite that.

The album is really good. Van Morrison is clearly engaged in the material and the off-the-cuff feeling of the original is preserved here (the band only had one run through before performing together) intact. There is the usual Van Morrison schtick of extending, through vocal riffing and interposing of other songs for brief sections of music, each song by four minutes or so. Sometimes that can be a drag, but there is life in it for Morrison and you never get tired of listening to him pour himself and the listeners down into a trance.

I don't know that I want to go into detail about every song, but suffice it to say that fans of Astral Weeks will find plenty here to reignite their passion for the original album as well as plenty to enjoy for the first time. There are real differences in tone between the two albums - the newer, live album is bluesier and Morrison's voice gruffer, his phrasing more expressionistic, but ultimately Live at the Hollywood Bowl is a sort of reflection of the original album thrown off by a smoked glass. There are moments I like better than the source record and moments that don't come close to matching its purity and surprise.

But really, isn't this all one can ask from a live album - that it reengage, refigure, and reveal?

Like so many reviews I give (what does this say about my confidence in my opinions?) I'll just say that, if you're a fan, you'll really like it.

The Best Snowstorm of the Year

I'm decidedly of two minds about the weather today.

On the one hand, I'm personally offended to have snow in March. It had been warmish and increasingly vernal for several weeks. Flowers were starting to push their way out of the ground, birds could be heard scrabbling on the roof in the morning. Winter seemed in full retreat.

On the other hand, it was the most curious snowfall. Early this morning, when I dragged myself out of bed like a marionette with tangled strings and looked out our bedroom window, the whole world was coated with a marshmallowy dollop of white.

Between an inch and two inches of snow on every roof, on every lawn, on every branch - right down to the tiniest of new buds - but not a speck of snow on the streets and not a hint of it on the sidewalk.

No shoveling to be done. No extra care to be taken behind the wheel.

What's more, by some odd trick of the storm, every street sign and every billboard, every stop sign and every shop sign, every school crossing and every mile marker, was covered in snow as though each had been frosted with a cake spreader. No vertical space could be seen without its message obscured by a perfect coating of snow.

Tabula rasa. Everything ineffable (or, at least, uneffed).

Still. Goddamned March, isn't it? Enough already.

Surge Overkill

I loved (in the sense that you could love something so bleak and utterly devoid of hope) Thomas Ricks' Pulitzer Prize winning book, Fiasco, about the planning, selling, and "execution" of the Iraq war between 2002 and 2005. It was thorough and humane and technical and scathing. It richly deserved its plaudits, especially in those dark and chaotic days of the Iraq war in 2005, 2006, and 2007.

So now Ricks has a new book out about the Iraq war following immediately from Fiasco. It is called The Gamble, and it is largely about the 'surge.'

But what is/was the surge?

It turns out the surge was really three distinct things orchestrated to happen at once. The first, and most familiar, was the increase in troop levels inside Iraq by roughly 30,000 men and women. the second was a complete reset of the American strategy in Iraq, led by Generals Odierno and Petraeus over the objections of almost everyone who had any say in the affairs of the United States Military. The third was the so called 'Sunni Awakening' which was, in point of fact, a billions of dollars effort to pay the Sunni insurgency to stop killing Americans and start killing Al Qaeda.

The most striking, perhaps, was the strategic shift.

Petraeus was an advocate of the polar opposite of the sort of war Donald Rumsfeld wanted to have. Rather than going small and fast and hard, Petraeus wanted to go big and long and slow. Petraeus wanted to fight the war in the way that counter insurgencies have been fought a dozen times before in and by other nations. Basically, he wanted the Americans to protect the people of Iraq, earn their trust, live among them, and damn everything else until the Iraqis settled down, trusted the United States and got on with the business of a relatively stable nation.

Much of Ricks' book is about the month to month metrics of the surge and the constant fight within the policy arms of the government to keep it going. For most of the book we are meant to feel that the surge is a qualified (though stunning even in its qualifications) success. American deaths in Iraq, after spiking sharply initially, begin to drop. Iraq civilian deaths begin to do the same. Neighborhoods begin to function after a fashion, and American troops begin to recover some of their morale and esprit du corps. But Ricks leaves for the last section of his book the reservations.

Basically, the Americans interposed themselves between the Sunni and Shia factions of a low boiling civil war. Eventually this bore fruit. But what happens when we leave? Moreover, since much of our strategy was arming and funding the very people who were killing us in the war's early years, what would happen to them and their weapons once we were out of the picture? Have we simply created the setting for a more balanced civil war? The object of the surge was meant to be to reduce violence enough for the Iraqi government to come to some kind of reconciliation with its people and begin to take on the responsibilities of securing and providing for its own people, but everyone seems in agreement that this, perhaps the most important aspect of the surge as originally conceived, has been an abject failure.

President Obama has made clear his intentions to draw down American forces to between 35,000 and 50,000 by next August and to remove all troops by 2011, but what we, none of us, know is how Iraq will respond. It may well be that the surge will come to be regarded as an almost mythical success within the armed forces, but it may well equally be that, in hindsight, it looks as though we delayed the inevitable at massive cost to both lives and treasure in order to masturbate with a fundamentally unstable pseudo-nation.

The book itself isn't as engaging a read as its immediate predecessor. It often feels rushed and more like a first draft than a coherent narrative of events. It bounces between so many interviews that say the same things that one is left with the impression that, though Ricks' access seems to have been deep and broad, that there was less of a story than the book set out to tell when it came time to actually write the thing. At times it can be fawning over Petraeus and Odierno (perhaps deservedly) and at other times it can be oddly silent about the world outside the top brass of the Army and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Ultimately, what best explains the book and its rambling quality is the final line of the thing itself (I'm paraphrasing):

The events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet occurred.

That is the most sobering and resonant moment in the whole book, actually.

Andrew Bird @ the Venue - February 25, 2009

Got to the show a bit late and had to cantilever Chiara and I into a riser on the balcony. Had to balance on one foot, supported with a hand levered against some kind of smudgy ceiling strut to see anything. Finally eked out enough space to both breathe and stand just in time for the opener to go on.

Loney, Dear was that opener. They are a sort of Jens Lekman cum Belle and Sebastian outfit (as, indeed, one might expect a Swedish band to be) but perhaps not so precious as the sum of those two parts. I was utterly charmed. I liked them well enough to come home and buy their most recent album.

As is usually the case when rushing into a purchase of an opening band's record, I was somewhat disappointed by the studio versions of the songs that had seemed so lively to me in person. Oh well. Was still a very nice opening set and set the stage quite well for Andrew Bird.

So Andrew Bird is is like the terminator designed by Wes Anderson. He whistles, he skinny ties, he goes shoeless on stage, he plays violin and is enamored of electronic beats and samples. It's a hipster wet dream if one is the sort of hipster who wears sport coats and listens to NPR.

Guilty.

The set was a good mix of material from his new album, Noble Beast, and most of his other records from the past six years or so. They are all of a kind, all as quirky, melodic, and enjoyable as the next. The audience was engaged and I felt happy being there. There was nothing to surprise me, having seen him live before, but for those of you who have not, his routine deserves to be explained.

So Andrew Bird is a sort of indie-folk version of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins - you know, in the scene where he has the one man band apparatus on. Bird plays, as I've already mentioned, the violin, but he also plays the guitar, the vibraphone, and, in the sense that it can be played, his clarion whistle. On top of all that, his drummer runs the sample board while drumming, his bassist plays the saxophone and the clarinet and his second guitarist--well, he just played the guitar, really.

But, because he can't possibly play all of these at once (why not try strapping the drumkit to your inner thighs and the vibes to your lower back says I) he employs an array of stomp boxes the likes of which I've never seen. He'll play a brief bit of music on the violin and hit the stomp box to loop it. Then, he'll play another refrain and loop that. Then, he'll pluck a melody line on the violin and loop that. He might whistle a few seconds of something and loop that. Eventually, he'll play some chords on his beautiful Gibson Les Paul and loop those before finally settling in to the lead guitar bit and the singing of the song, all the while backed by a piece of music seven or eight players deep - all of which are he and his three bandmates.

So every song is a stereophonic palimpsest and half the fun for the audience is watching (and hearing) the thing being built and then controlled throughout by Andrew incessantly jabbing at the row of buttons arranged at in front of him with his socked feet, bringing back or silencing little snippets of music he put down live at the beginning of the number. Its a great show and one can't help but appreciate the effort when so many would have just prerecorded whatever samples they might need and played them the same every night. Add to all of this the fact that his voice is soaringly better live than on record - a kind of arch version of Jeff Buckley's morose but exquisitely controlled wail - and I think anyone would say they had been to a great show.

Cairo to Capetown via Curmudgeon

I once rented from Netflix a documentary series starring Michael Palin in which he traveled from Cairo to Capetown overland. It was warm and funny and humane and fascinating. The roads were shit (and worse), the boats and trains were dilapidated and slow, the food looked awful, and the nations through which one must travel in such a journey were (and still are) in terrible condition socially, politically, economically, environmentally, and medically. Still, Michael Palin's charms and Africa's splendors are such that I was envious of him and of his adventure. So it was with that interest intact, along with my own limited experience with the continent, that I dived with gusto into Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari.

There are really only so many ways one can go from Cairo to Capetown overland (it is, afterall, a journey in only one direction), so Theroux and Palin visited many of the same locales. The two men's journeys could not, however, have been more different or more differently portrayed.

Palin is an affable traveler most of the time. He is, of course, a famous funnyman, British, and possessed of a calm, sunny disposition. Theroux is none of those things; he is the most famous misanthrope in the bookstore. He seems, at times, to hate everyone - especially fellow travelers, westerners, and intellectuals. At literally every opportunity he reminds the reader how much he loathes his life in the west, with its telephones and computers and familial obligations and how much he prefers the worst hovels and mudholes of a backwater village in the middle of nowhere. He hates beuraucrats with a passion, and loves the authenticity of decay, disorder, and defeat. Almost the only thing he and Palin have in common is their abiding love for their subject. Theroux, at the end of all of it, loves Africa deeply and personally and because of (not in spite of) its faults.

Theroux, for all his bile and condescension, is a fabulous writer. He can capture a place and a moment and a populace in a thousand ways, and none ever repeated or overused to the point of stereotype or cliche. He goes places most people don't want or feel safe to go and he goes there traveling routes noone would take - almost gleefully traveling wherever he is warned not to travel.

Reading the book, you get chaotic Arabic Africa, truly weird Ethiopian Africa, defeated and dangerous east Africa, failing central Africa, and prosperous (if emotionally dead) South Africa. You get the flavor of each of these places whole clove, and you get the sort of vignettes that you don't soon forget, though you're glad they aren't yours.

I hate Paul Theroux. Or anyway, I'd hate to be trapped in an elevator or a dinner party with him, but I dearly love his writing and his nomadic spirit. He's Anthony Bourdain without the self aggrandisement and posturing. He's V.S. Naipaul with a bias against his own culture instead of that he visits. He's mean spirited, cantankerous, ironic, keenly observant, and a really wonderful travel writer. If you have a thing for Africa, or just for travel books in general, this is one of the best.

Romance!

A quick update before I hop into the shower to have a drink. (who's gonna know?)

Chiara and I have apparently reached a point in our relationship where, when she comes home from work on Valentine's Day and finds me wearing pants, she asks me "Deed you go somewhere today?" in a suspicious tone.

I told her I had to get dressed for when the police came.

Homeless for the Holidays (At My House!)

One year, while living alone in a little house I rented, I had a Halloween party.

In the early part of the evening I stayed in and handed out candy to the trick-or-treaters and, because I was forever opening and shutting the door anyway, I didn't bother to lock it in between candy out-handing.

So I could hardly have been surprised when the seven foot tall homeless man, stinking of whiskey and pee (and of clothes washed in whiskey and pee) burst through my door and into my living room to "get away from the dude who stole [his] bike!"

At first I tried to humor him. Pretended to look outside. Told him I didn't see the guy he was running from - that the coast was clear. Somehow he took this elaborate pantomime as an invitation to sit on (and forever mar the smell of) my sofa.

He grabbed my phone off the coffee table and punched a long succession of numbers. While he sat there, fidgeting, holding the receiver against his head as though waiting while it rang on the other end, he told me he was calling the C.I.A.

When he finally got through to the C.I.A. he asked to speak with Mr. Santos.

He became enraged when he was, apparently, told that Mr. Santos had been transferred to another department and that they did not have a contact number. The homeless man held the phone away from his face and shouted into it "I ride with Jesus on a rickshaw!"

This all ended predictably, with me pushing my head into his chest in order to get him out the door, like trying to get an elephant onto an airplane.

So all that was years ago. The reason I mention it is that I am, apparently, the nexus in some cosmic relationship between the wheel of the year and drunken vagrantism.

Today, Valentine's Day, I received a telephone call from my delightful French neighbor, informing me that a drunken man was sleeping on my front porch (a sentence that sounds surprisingly sophistique in a French accent).

I laughed. Imagine if I'd gone to get the mail this afternoon. How long had he been there? As it was I had wandered by the front window half a dozen times today without seeing his sack-like body slumped in my Adirondack chair. But the sun was on him and he was sound asleep, drunk as a fish, blissfully unaware of my presence as I peered at him through the glass.

I wish I'd thought to take a photo before the police came. I called Eric to tell him about the whole thing and he didn't answer. If he had, he told me later, he would have convinced me to decorate the guy with tinsel and string - as a Valentine's Day gift for Chiara.

"Because that's a gift you can't buy in a store," he said.

As it was, I did the safer thing and just called the police.

In three minutes they had nine officers and four paramedics there. It was ridiculous.

Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves, especially after they determined that the guy was basically okay - just hammered. They led him away and I got a picture of that. They would take him to a detox shelter and they said he would be fine. They handcuffed him, though. That seemed a shame.

Still, they told me as they were leaving that he was just out of prison - on parole for only two days. So maybe a good thing I didn't put glitter on his face after all, Eric.

One odd note more - after the cops took the drunk guy away from my house, I went outside to sniff the wet spot on the chair (only water - I think) and I checked the mailbox. The mail carrier had come and gone while the dude was passed out on my porch. I have to ask him about this the next time I see him. It won't be awkward, I have to talk to him anyway. For some reason we've stopped receiving the lingerie catalogs the previous owners received at this address and something has to be done, recession or no.

Somewhere, a Pair of Black Panties are Unidentifiable

Yes, you will tell me that there are scores of reasonable explanations, but fuck you.

I went to get into my car today and I saw this on the asphalt nearby.

Is it a Hello, my name is sticker, do you think?

I would lay money that it's in a woman's hand - so the chances of it being ironic or jocular are somewhat reduced. But could she have so many as to need a label just for these? Who labels articles of clothing this way, anyhow?

The mysteries are legion. Also, it kinda turned me on.

I think it would make a perfectly good album cover someday.

Playing with Dolls

I've gone back and forth on whether or not I wanted to "review" movies on this blog.

For one thing, I see so many of them. For another, I seldom have anything terribly interesting to say about them afterward. I'm plenty good at discussing things I liked about them in conversation, but every time I've tried to write about a film it has come off as either bloviation or bathos.

So here is my compromise with myself: I will try to do a blog about movies I see in the theatre, but not the scads of them arriving every month from Netflix or flickering late at night on the movie channels of my cable subscription. Moreover, I will try to just write a few words about each film.

Starting with the first film I saw in 2009, Coraline.

The first thing to be said is that it was great. The second is to gape slack-jawed at you (as best I can in text) in imitation of my reaction to the 3-D in which I saw the movie.

I don't know when this 3-D thing started to be legitimate, but I had no fucking idea. I was amazed and filled with real wonderment just watching this already beautiful film. You have to see it to believe it.

As for the film itself - creepy and memorable and visually stimulating while simultaneously tripping enough of the switches in our collective consciousness to have some real resonance.

For some reason, what sticks with me most (other than the eerie uncomfortableness it trucks in) is the lighting. There are so many light sources in every scene, some from in world sources (which are often weird and wonderful), and some from just out of frame, and they all bathe the film in a changeable light palette - sometimes cool and sepulchral and sometimes warm and languorous. The way the film uses the lighting to communicate mood is subtle and stirring and deserves to be paid attention to while you're in the theatre being wowed by the movement and the 3-D.

It isn't a perfect film, but the stop-motion animation is the best I've ever seen and the story stays with you after you leave the theatre. What more can you ask of it?

So, I say see it.

Perfect, Inspired by Perfect

I admit, up front, that it is entirely possible that the only reason I liked this well enough to post it here is that I am deep in the thrall of medicine head, buried under fathoms of Nyquil. Still, she does seem to get it, doesn't she?

Video found by someone at Buzzfeed.

Redoubtful, But a Nice Idea

Upon learning of the imminent volcanic eruption in Alaska, Chiara said:

"Good. Maybe we can finally keell Sarah Palin een lava."

Stay safe, rest of Alaska. We love you down here when you aren't Palining up the joint.

Videos Can Be Odd

Peter Bjorn and John "Nothing To Worry About"

Jeff versus Owls

Someone's dream of owls reminded me:

Once, years ago, on leaving a woman's house in the wee hours just before dawn, I walked to where I had parked my (convertible) car. There, perched on the steering wheel, was a small black owl, more or less the size and shape of a coke can.

I paused in the deserted street and watched it for a moment.

I slunk closer and closer, gripping my keys in my fist to prevent their jangling.

When I drew near enough that a lunge could have allowed me to touch it, it fluttered away into an overhanging tree. I watched for a moment and then pulled myself into my car, drowsy and anxious to get home to sleep away the day.

Just as I was shoving the key into the ignition I was smacked in the head by what I was sure was a rudely thrown pinecone.

But, as evidenced by the muffled flutter of wings in the branches above me, I had, in fact, been divebombed by an owl.

Another owl. Perhaps the mate of the one who had been sitting on my steering wheel. In any case, I lept out of my car and stood in slack-jawed shock in the middle of the road.

When I felt sure the little owls were going to stay put, I sauntered back to the car. This time I saw it coming and ducked.

One of the little, yellow-eyed terrors just clutched at the hairs on top of my head as it went past. I screamed or laughed (or both at the same time). I ran back to the girl's front door and knocked until she answered, already half asleep and now in only her underwear.

After a minute of convincing her that I was in earnest, she followed me into the street while I tried to find the owls in the tree. We must have stood there for three or four minutes, me gesticulating wildly and shouting in the now pinkish dawn, her in her panties and t-shirt, clutching herself underneath her breasts from the cold. Eventually, she assured me that she believed me, but begged off witnessing anything in favor of bed. Reluctantly, I let her go, sure that she thought I was exaggerating at best and lying at worst.

Just as she turned to go - pinecone to the back of the head.

I shout. Girl turns. Girl sees owl flying back into tree, away from the general area of my cranium. Girl sees self-satisfied Jeff, thrilled to have provided evidence of mad owl instead of owl madness.

She ended up standing there, jumping up and down and waving her arms - distracting the vicious things - long enough for me to jump in my car and speed away.

I often think about those stupid owls. What did they want with my car?

Hypnopop - February 5, 2009

I suppose I must have had this song in my head this morning because of their upcoming sophomore album, but I don't know why it would have been this particular song. I haven't heard it in months and months. Anyway:


Peter, Bjorn, and John

"Amsterdam"

Writer's Block

The Old New Pornographer

They're going to reissue Serge Gainsbourg's album Histoire de Melody Nelson on March 24.

Start saving up your cigarettes, red wine, and warming lotions.

Monsieur Gainsbourg (father of Charlotte, fucker of Brigitte Bardot) remains the epitome of dirty sexy cool. Perhaps only Prince has approached the depravity and simultaneous musicality.

Strike that. Prince far exceeds Gainsbourg, musically - but no matter how many women Prince has been with, you don't quite want to be Prince.

In any case, Melody Nelson is (vaguely) an album about pedophilia (or, more properly, ephebophilia) and whatever other sexual deviance Gainsbourg can dream up a way to mumble through a cigarette about and string drenched, slinky French Pop over for half an hour. This is all accomplished with help from his onetime wife and all-time hottie, Jane Birkin on backing vocals. She also does a turn porning it up in the videos released in support of the album.

It is all just too great to summarize and dance around. I'll post a clip.

And, wouldn't you know it - all the clips on YouTube have their embedding disabled. But here are a couple of links:

Ballade de Melody Nelson

L'hotel Particulier

Steve Miller Can Suck It

The embedding is disabled on this one, but please please please please please follow the link to Johnny Guitar Watson's original version of "Gangster of Love."

You won't (couldn't) be disappointed. He gives it the slink, the groove, the crotch-grabbing grit, and the sex that a song called "Gangster of Love" really ought to have in any sane universe.

Only watch out for those lapels . . . they could put your eye out.

Hypnopop - February 1, 2009

Seems just about right to wake up with the following song in one's head on Candlemas:


Fleet Foxes

"Drops in the River"

Sun Giant

Hypnopop - January 30, 2009

Of all the songs I could have in my head when I wake up and get out of bed, I don't know that this is the one I'm most proud of. Nevertheless, it's catchy and I like it well enough - just not as much as some others by the same artists.

It's a Bee Gees cover, and Leslie Feist doesn't even perform it live in this arrangement (she opts for a slower, quieter, less dancy version) but this is the one I had on my cranium all morning. I'm a sucker for journalistic integrity.

Feist

"Inside and Out"

Let it Die

I Married Homer Simpson, Apparently

As I was working in the office down the hall, I heard Chiara suddenly yell out from the bedroom.

"YES! YES! YES!"

I assumed (hoped) that she was having some kind of orgasm. I asked what that was all about.

Turns out she was watching Oprah discuss donuts and what brought about the When Harry Met Sally moment was the revelation that glazed Crispy Creme donuts have fewer calories than ordinary cake donuts.

This, for Chiara, was something like a smoker discovering that cigarettes gave one the powers of time travel, invulnerability, and flight.

A Mirror with a Memory

Errol Morris did a photographic retrospective of the Bush presidency this week, using the photos and insight of several photographers from the Whitehouse Press Pool. Some of them are iconic and already familiar. Some of them are really stunning and revelatory. Check it out. (And don't just look at the pictures - read the damned article).

It IS Hard to Cut Through the Irony

I didn't spot this. Someone on Buzzfeed did. I just like it. I just like irony. And photos.

Paddle to the Plastic Straining Device

When I was a child, my mother used to read this rather sad little book to me called Paddle to the Sea.

It was about a little wooden carving of a Native American in a canoe that was set into a river somewhere in the upper Midwest or Canada or somewhere. You see, carved on the bottom of the canoe was a message entreating anyone who found the little man to place him back in the water so that he could find his way to the sea.

Through a series of misadventures (getting stuck in beaver dams or picked up by children - that sort of thing) his journey is thwarted and then continued anew as people eventually set him on his way again. Eventually he gets to the Atlantic Ocean, where, one can only imagine, he was eaten by a shark.

Anyway, this is a good deal like the journey of my kidney stone.

I've not heard from the spikey bastard in a couple of weeks. It has been paddling around in my bladder, I suppose. In any case, someone has read the inscription carved on its horrible underbelly and returned it to its purpose.

So now it seems to be on the move again, this time out the only way available to it and through the last, most awkward to describe leg of its journey.
Suffice to tell you that it hurts, but not so much as when it is in the kidney, knocking about and making one long for a nuclear missile to swallow. You feel that you have to pee a lot and then you don't pee. It is like a bumblebee is stuck in your urethra and is trying desperately to find its way out, blindly.
Oh yeah, and the bumblebee is wearing those football pads with the spikes - like in The Road Warrior.

Back on the meds.

When I catch the little fucker maybe I'll post a picture. Wouldn't that be terrible?

John Updike, R.I.P.

No book ever depressed me more than Rabbit, Run. I'm sorry he's dead. I don't know that T.C. Boyle and A.S. Byatt can edit every anthology of fiction, but now we'll have to find out.

Sir! Sir! You've Forgotten Your Debilitating Addiction!

On my way back home with my new TiVo, I saw a funny little tableau while stopped at an intersection.

A woman in a green apron was rushing out of a sandwich shop in the way that you do when you are trying to catch the person who just left their credit card on the counter when they walked out with their sandwich.

She called out repeatedly after a man who then stopped and turned to allow her to close the distance between them.

The man was clearly either a homeless person or a method actor gearing up to play a homeless person.

When the woman finally caught up to him I saw what she was racing to return to the man. It was a nearly full bottle of bottom shelf vodka. The woman held it like a dog turd for which she did not bring a plastic baggie, between two fingers and held away from her body at arm's length.

The man grasped the bottle with two hands, reverently, and thanked the woman profusely, as if it had not been his already and was, instead, some unanticipated gift.

I wish I could have heard them talking or seen the end of the encounter, but the light finally changed and I was off, taking my hopefully dead-behind-the-eye new TiVo home to begin its new life of recording slavery.

Skynet Junior

Had to replace my TiVo today because it was crawling out of the primordial ooze and struggling toward sentience.

Well, it isn't really a TiVo. It is a Motorola brand DVR provided by my cable service. But it is basically the same thing, only without the adorable sound effects.

So the squirrelly little box had been acting up for a couple of weeks now - recording television programs we had never asked it to record.

To add insult to injury, it had atrocious taste.

We'd come home after work and curl up for Top Chef or The Colbert Report and instead be asked to try out According to Jim or Wedding Wars or Burn Notice (whatever that is).

It was like my father had come over while we were out and reprogrammed the damned thing.

The last straw came last night when the little freak recorded not once, but twice, Good Will Hunting.

I swear it seemed to whisper at us "Ben Affleck has an Oscar for this movie," and "Robin Williams grew a beard for this movie; it must be a real movie. You should definitely watch it. Twice."

So today I had Chiara distract it while I pulled its plug and watched its little red eye slowly fade out. I drove it down to the offices of the cable company, pulled my service ticket and sat down on a hard plastic chair to wait for my number to come up on the overhead display.

I placed the TiVo two chairs to my right. I knew it was powerless without an electrical source, but it was still warm and I found it unnerving to have it in my lap.

When it came to be my turn, I dropped the box in front of the woman and asked her for a replacement TiVo - which she pulled out from a large cabinet and had me sign for in just a minute or two.

I leaned in conspiratorily and said "Make sure this one goes into the 'kill' pile before it becomes fully aware of itself."

The woman smirked at me and laughed. "No, we're training them," she said.

A cold shudder went down my spine as I turned to leave.

If the future history of our war with the machines records that the battlecry of the robot army was the theme song to the Tyra Banks Show, know that I did everything I thought I should at the time to prevent the metal armageddon.

It Still Doesn't Sound Any Good

While watching The Soup tonight, after laughing heartily at Tom Cruise's continuing festival of awkward, Chiara mentioned to me that his movie is number one in Germany.

"You know which movie is number one in Germany?" I asked, incredulously.

"Yes," she said. "It said on CNN that his movie was number one - you know, that one called Val Kilmer."

When I laughed, she demanded to know what the title really was.

I wouldn't tell her. I like hers much better, anyway.

Psychedelectronica

I've always had an arm's length sort of relationship with Animal Collective.

It has never been that I don't like the music they make or that I don't like the idea of them as a band - it was only some sense that I liked it better in theory than in practice - that I would never listen to a whole album of it, even if I could always be happy when someone else had it playing at a party. That sort of thing.

I guess I would say that I've had trouble "getting" Animal Collective.

The songs always seemed about four minutes too long and had more to do with shape than with progression or melody. Sometimes I felt looped out, if you know what I mean.

But I bought the Panda Bear solo record, Person Pitch, and while I almost never listen to it all the way through in one sitting, I love it. It is like a Brian Wilson orgasm. And that is a good kind of orgasm to have.

So after Merriweather Post Pavilion started to get all kinds of rave reviews, and after Tim came by to proselytize to me about Animal Collective for the hundredth time, I resolved to give it a shot.

And it's really good. I haven't quite gathered the enthusiasm for it that some have (I'm not ready, in January, to declare it the greatest album of 2009), but it is certainly the best I've heard from Animal Collective. Anyway, it is the most accessible I've heard them be and, with a band like this, that is really the same thing. I have a feeling it will grow on me the more I play it.

The usual elements are all in place: a dance record buried under multitracked harmonies and psychedelic flourishes, an indie record swimming in electronica touches and anthemic swells of sound. It isn't a record you can slide right into like a warm bath - this one, like all the Animal Collective output, will take some effort - but there are jewels here if you can mine them.

For me anyway, the effort has finally been rewarded.

And yes, the album art does that for me too. It's creepy and a surprisingly good approximation of the music inside (underneath? behind?).

Touche, Tubby

Me: walking down the concourse of the open air shopping center, returning from an eye exam.

Fat Kid: approaching from the opposite direction, wearing a tank top and athletic shorts.

The City: cold. snowbound.

Me: passing the fat kid, "aren't you cold?"

Fat Kid: banging on handheld game with stubby fingers, "I don't get cold. I'm fat."

Me: Sisyphean attempt to laugh in a way that conveyed amusement, but not agreement.

The City: sigh.

Distaff Disappointment

"Why would I spread my legs for that?"

This was the tantalizing snippet of conversation I overheard at dinner last night.

The speaker was one of seven women at a table together, cattycorner from the one where I sat with Chiara and our friends - where I was supposed to be bantering about god knows what. I'm sure my eyes went glassy and my face went slack; I willed all of my blood to my ears and tried to drown out the sounds of a busy restaurant at peak hours. These are the instinctive responses of a machine built by millions of years of evolution to hunt for masturbation material.

Gradually, it became clear that the women in question were talking, in some manner or other, about pregnancy and about visiting the gynecologist.

This is my closing argument in the case I have just decided to accept entitled women have terrible conversations v. no duh.

Or anyway, they don't talk about anything fun when alone together.

Or anyway, they don't when they are near me in a restaurant last night.

The Special This Evening is Waterboarding

Found myself at a dinner with a friend of mine and some of her coworkers.

At one point, apropos of nothing, my friend turns to me and says:

"You're a republican, right?"

I fell off of my chair and was unable to see or taste for several minutes. When I recovered, still in shock, I told her that I "was the most liberal creature she'd ever encountered. I would," I said, "grant trees the right to vote and animals representation in congress. "

she laughed. I continued, feeling on a hot streak.

"I want the government to pay for breast implants and for Obama to swear an oath on a gay baby."

This, it developed, was not the crowd for this sort of thing.

All of my friend's coworkers, I would soon discover, were of the 'double Guantanamo and put the environmentalists there' persuasion. The evening continued in a predictable fashion.

I wish I had been cool about the whole thing - aloof, suave, confident in the resounding victory of my ideology. I wish I'd weathered the "Obama won because the people are so uninformed and it's only a popularity contest," and the "Bush made us safer than we were eight years ago," and "torture is a subjective thing," and, worst of all, the "double standard of the media and the way they reported about Palin" with more aplomb.

As it was, it was all I could do to reassure them all that the coming socialist utopia would have a place for them, too.

Someone at the table eventually was successful in steering the topic to the Superbowl, and I admired them for it. Me, I was itching for a fight and would have liked nothing better than to get to gloat about the potential supreme court appointees. I had already suffered through being told that I only believed what I did because I was clearly a defense attorney (I'm not) and that I didn't understand America as I came from L.A., which was nearly Mexico anyway (that's stupid). I had a hardon to yack about the end of the war in Iraq and Planned Parenthood and the Kyoto treaty and all the other bugaboos of the conservative heart, but I ended up discussing whether or not Kurt Warner would make the hall of fame. (I argued yes, but that he didn't really deserve it. This was only vaguely controversial).

In the end, a man at the end of the table bought drinks for everyone. Everyone, that is, except for me.

I absorb your catcalls. I'll settle for winning the culture wars.

A Man's Life Swallows its Own Tail

So today, my friend says to me:

"My mother wants to be my friend on facebook. I don't know what to do."

And I said:

"Suicide."

Pulpy!

They're racy, they're books, they're art, they're postmodernist, and they're impossible except as photographs, which adds another po-mo dimension to them that I really like.

I think they're all great. Check 'em out HERE.

Noble, But Also Tame

On Noble Beast Andrew Bird has toned down and pulled it back and I don't quite know what to make of that.

The melodies are all there, the whistling too. The lyrics are still winningly peculiar, playing as much with rhyme as with the way words sound and mean differently. It's a very pleasant listen, but it seldom jumps up out of the speakers at you, as I think several moments on his last full length album, Armchair Apocrypha did.

Every Andrew Bird album can be a bit samey and can have a kind of soporific effect, but Noble Beast is especially low-key throughout with really only one song ("Fitz and the Dizzyspells") to leaven the mood.

I heard a radio interview with Mr. Bird where he talked about the recording of Noble Beast. He said they started in the studio with the vocals and worked their way down (or up, depending) from there - and that's exactly what this album sounds like from time to time: like the rhythm tracks were the afterthoughts. It isn't that this quality makes the album especially one thing or another, but it has moments of bloodlessness that have me feeling it will fade in my memory.

I also felt that way about swaths of Bird's album Weather Systems, and to no surprise, this record was produced by the same guy.

Maybe it is only because of world events, or the season, but I find myself wishing for an album of more jagged, angular indie-folk. It isn't fair, I suppose, to impose some kind of particular expectation on the album; I ought just accept it for what it is and enjoy it.

And I am, mostly - the first half of the album especially. "Oh No" and "Fitz and the Dizzyspells," especially, are instantly memorable and chug along nicely. It went well with a glass (or three) of port and a well-stoked fire last night - but I'd be hard pressed to recall more than two or three of the fourteen tracks.

I will tell you this much: I went to see The Shins, Belle and Sebastian, and Andrew Bird at the Hollywood Bowl and Andrew Bird was the best of the lot by far. If you get the chance, go see him and his ridiculous live multitracking - its a lot of fun watching a man juggle a violin, a guitar, a xylophone, and a microphone all at once and still make really lovely music in the process.

Bon Iver's Sonic Snowangel Serenade

I don't know when a proper follow up to this year's For Emma, Forever Ago is planned for release, but I understand the four tracks on Bon Iver's new EP, Blood Bank, were not recorded in the For Emma sessions.

Mostly they are of a kind with the songs on that album, though they also branch out into new sonic territory, grasping for a fuller and perhaps even more insular sound. the song "Babys" particularly comes to mind, with its tense and intense piano chords, and Justin Vernon's autotune on the track "Woods" is unlike anything yet heard from the Wisconsinite (Wisconsonian?).

If you felt, as I did, at the end of For Emma, Forever Ago, that you needed more of Bon Iver and quick, you'll be happy to hear at least most of Blood Bank.

Obamamerica, Day One

Eight years ago, the Onion ran an article about Bush's inauguration. The headline, a quote from the Onionverse's Bush inauguration speech, read "Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over."

Who knew then how prophetic the little satiric newspaper would be?

After Obama's inauguration, I think the entire globe let out its breath for the first time in years. We barely got out alive.

In any case, Obama's speech seemed, at times, a thinly veiled rebuke of the Bush years and an only lightly coded message to America and the world that that whole nonsense - the anti-science, the fanaticism, the extra-legality, the unilateralism, the arrogance, the warmongering, the anti-environmentalism, and the anti-regulatory attitude - were all in the past and an aberration at that. Add to this the subtle charge that it was time for America to grow up and leave behind its reckless teenage years and the speech seemed to cover the next four years like a blanket. The rhetoric was not high flying most of the time, but the sentiment was intense and grounded in a way that felt reassuring, even in its sobriety.

I, for one, feel, for the first time in years and years, in awe of my country and civilization. Nothing will come off quite as well as I might dream it will, I'm sure, but everything is going to be better (it would have a hard time being worse).

I've never been so close to buying a flagpole.

America on, bitches.

p.s. how cool is Barack Obama? check out the new Whitehouse website, where you can, among other unprecedented transparencies, read the actual text of any and all executive orders, see the name and appointment of every single person nominated for a job by the executive branch, and read the actual text of the agenda the pres. plans to pursue while in office. I know it makes me a nerd and a wonk, but I get all curfluffled over ethics and civics. Oprah can have her grand love stories and tales of overcoming hardship - give me the simpler and deeper pleasures of an open and responsive democracy any day to get me all misty eyed.

The Jennifer Dispatches II: The Things That Make My Father Laugh (Make No Sense)

My sister sent this email to me today. I can only assume she wanted me to post it here, the curious phrase "off the record" notwithstanding.

"Hey.

Tim and I were up at Mom and Dad's last night. We watched several episodes of Dirty Jobs with Dad, which is a show that makes Tim and I laugh - when it is not about animal hides - then it just makes us feel . . .well, dirty.

So, anyway, we are watching it and Dad is laughing and saying things like "oh my god" - (you know in the way he does where his voice goes up at the end) and asking questions like "now why would he do that?" - (you know in the way that he does). He keeps saying how amazing it is that this guy would do all of these horrible things just to get on TV. He complains and complains, but I swear to god he was laughing so, so hard. Why do you think he pretends to not like things that he does like?!

Oh and off the record, while we were watching television there was a commercial for some random sitcom on TBS or ABC or something like that. I didn't see this clip, I just heard it, but basically there was some joke where the woman says two female names and I guess probably pointed to her breasts or something because then the guy says "You named them?!?!?!"

I'm not exaggerating; Dad laughed for five minutes, and in Dad fashion kept on loudly repeating "You named them?!?!" "You named them?!?!"

Tim and I just looked at each other across the room and tried to laugh a little so that we didn't draw attention to the fact that we were actually both paralyzed with awkwardness and laughing at Dad. It may not be as funny on paper, but I wish you had been there to share in the paralymazment.

Anyway I hope things are okay with you. Talk to you soon. Love you."

It's No Billie Holiday Impersonation

I've only just completed David Sedaris' most recent book of short stories entitled When You Are Engulfed in Flames.

I'm a big fan of his. I can remember laughing - really laughing - at most of the brief essays in Naked or Barrel Fever, but this one left me a little cold.

I kept wondering if it was me or him that had lost something. Had I gotten too used to his cadences and rhythms? Had he become a victim (like so many artists) of the comfort brought with success? After all, comfort and happiness are to be desired in life, but in art they bring often meager rewards.

Whatever it was, most of the stories in When You Are Engulfed in Flames, while perfectly entertaining and droll, failed to really grab me and shake any emotions out of me - least of all the one I most wanted to find between its covers: amusement.

Most of the stories are rather contented domestic tales of life in a French villa. Only the novella length diary of Mr. Sedaris' attempts to quit smoking (which closes the book) really reaches the heights I was looking for.  Maybe it is because that longish cycle of journal entries takes place largely in Japan that it comes off so well - nothing feeds the would-be chronicler of awkward moments like a foreign culture, and, it turns out, nothing is so sure to produce awkward moments as time spent trying to be an unobtrusive, effete, gay man in Japan.

In any case, in reading over this quick thumbnail review, I feel I've been too hard on this little book. If you like David Sedaris, you'll like it. It might not have the power to arrest you with freshness, as did some of his earlier collections, but it is like having dinner with an old friend who always tells funny stories - you might know their shape and the sorts of things your friend is likely to say or do, but that is part of the pleasure in the end.