Category: Music

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What It Is: 11/29/10

What I’m reading: The Odyssey, some goofy Johnny Ryan comics, and a ton of magazines I needed to catch up on, like Monocle, New York, Fantastic Man, GQ, Esquire, and Interview.

What I’m listening to: Barking, The Lady Killer, High Violet, This is Happening, and Ain’t Nobody Worryin’.

What I’m watching: The Promise, Alice in Wonderland, Moon, About a Boy, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and some more of season 1 of In Treatment.

What I’m drinking: G&T with Ethereal gin, from a little distillery up in the Berkshires.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Being cute for our Thanksgiving guests, going on a colder hike at Wawayanda. I’d share the specs with you, but I updated the GPS app on my iPhone and now it doesn’t work correctly. Yay. Thanks, Motion-X!

Where I’m going: I’ll be in Puerto Rico next Sunday-Tuesday for a mini-biz trip. It’ll be my first JetBlue trip, and my first flight from Newburgh Airport, up near Herriman. Continental’s rates were absolutely exorbitant, esp. since I was booking late, so I’m going to break with my rule of not flying direct on this trip. I have a 6 a.m. flight back home on Tuesday (via Orlando), but I don’t think I’m capable of staying up all night and rolling straight into the airport, as I once did.

What I’m happy about: Getting some errands done during my week off, managing to get $500 in trade-in value for my 1st-generation MacBook Air from Tekserve in NYC, and spending a little while comic-shopping with my pal Mark. Also, I was happy to have a long conversation about men’s fashion with a clerk at the Club Monaco store in SoHo. It sounds superficial, I know, but it was nice to chat with someone who took one look at me and recognized that I didn’t dress by accident.

What I’m sad about: Some punk-ass kids smashed my mailbox over the weekend, prompting me to buy and install a new “vandal-proof” one.

What I’m worried about: That my inability to get into LCD Soundsystem is a sign that I’m an old fart.

What I’m pondering: A good quote about my heart for the website of my wife’s pal Nicole’s blog. I’m thinking of coming up with something from here.

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What It Is: 11/15/10

What I’m reading: The Odyssey.

What I’m listening to: The Lady Killer, The Point of It All, and some gorgeous jazz music, courtesy of my old pal Paul Longstreth, who was playing the club at the Royal Sonesta on Bourbon St. last night (btw: I’m in New Orleans this week)

What I’m watching: Week 2 of season 1 of In Treatment, the finale of Eastbound and Down, and a catch-up of Bored to Death episodes. On Sunday, I caught The Social Network at The Theatres at Canal Place, and enjoyed that. I haven’t liked Jesse Eisenberg in any previous film, but he did a great job with the role. The movie’s last act was kinda weak and, well, it just sorta stopped, but it was a fun ride.

What I’m drinking: Beefeater & Q-Tonic (on Sunday evening; there’ve been various other gins over the course of the week, including Fifty Pounds, Citadelle, and an alleged Hendrick’s)

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Lamenting the lack of a farmer’s market and missing their Sunday hike, since Amy wasn’t going to jam them both in the back of her Mini while I’m away.

Where I’m going: I’m in New Orleans, after a delayed Saturday night flight.

What I’m happy about: Just being in New Orleans. I know New York is the Greatest City Ever, but New Orleans is still my favorite. Oh, and getting to see Paul play on Sunday. That was just rapturous for me.

What I’m sad about: Being here without my wife. I’ve traveled to a lot of cities on my own, but it doesn’t feel right to be here without her. When I got in late-ish Saturday night, I went out from my French Quarter hotel to get some dinner. I ended up getting a fried catfish po-boy and Abita at Primo’s on Decatur St. I had a table on the balcony, and looked out to the river, and realized that I was across the street from the place where we got married. I felt a few moments of elation, recollecting that weekend five years ago. Then a guy down on the sidewalk began bellowing in a rage at someone on his cellphone, and the moment snapped.

What I’m worried about: Getting instant-onset diabetes from those beignets at Cafe Du Monde.

What I’m pondering: Whether the idea I had at the jazz club Sunday night for a movie script is totally awesome or just the hack result of too many G&Ts and an excessive emphasis on the romance of New Orleans.

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What It Is: 10/18/10

What I’m reading: I started The Odyssey, but decided to take a short break with Never Let Me Go.

What I’m listening to: Fox Confessor Brings The Flood and Sir Lucious Left Foot

What I’m watching: Bear Nation (some of my best friends are bears) and Withnail & I

What I’m drinking: Dry Fly & Q-Tonic

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Not a lot. I was sick, so no Sunday grey-hike.

Where I’m going: Nowhere in particular, but I’m hoping to get a Herriman hike in on Saturday with a pal, provided my headcold’s all gone.

What I’m happy about: Getting into NYC on Saturday to meet up with Mark F., a good pal of mine. We had a nice brunch at the Double Crown, during which the ex-girlfriend I mentioned last week dropped off the accordion I’d bought from her. After eating, Mark accompanied me to the Billy Reid store on Bond St., and then we walked up to Astoria Wine & Spirits, St. Mark’s Comics and Porto Rico Importing Co. (for a bottle of Bols Genever, Marvel’s Strange Tales II, and a pound of Kona, respectively) before the farmers’ market at Union Square and Mark’s departure back to the Bronx. We had a good, meandering conversation. Between that and the previous weekend’s catch-up with my old high school pal Jen, I’m reminded of how much I need to stay in touch with old friends.

What I’m sad about: This lousy headcold. Grr.

What I’m worried about: Well, Mark’s response to our conversation about wearing nicer clothes (a prelude to visiting the Billy Reid store, which was a blast, btw) was, “Are you belatedly becoming a metrosexual?” I told him that if I started wearing man-scara, he could disown me, but once I began lugging the old-time suitcase containing the accordion down the street, he withdrew the question. As it turns out, carrying that accessory into the store seemed to grant me some weird street cred with the staff at the BR store. It seems that “Can you check my accordion for me, please?” isn’t said often enough nowadays.

What I’m pondering: How long it’s going to take me to learn to play that accordion, considering I have no musical training. Also, what else Never Let Me Go is a mix of. So far, I’ve got Such, Such Were the Joys and Camp Concentration (which you really should read). And whether I’ll ever buy anything from Billy Reid (I was sorely tempted).

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What It Is: 10/4/10

What I’m reading: That Iliad. Patroklos just went down, so things are about to get out of hand.

What I’m listening to: Sir Lucious Left Foot, A Friend of a Friend, In Our Nature, and some Steve Earle.

What I’m watching: Boardwalk Empire, Bored to Death, and Eastbound & Down. That’s a pretty sweet Sunday night lineup by HBO (not that we stay up to watch ’em). Oh, and the stupidest finish of a college football game I’ve ever seen (not that I watch much college football): LSU beating Tennessee when too many Volunteers volunteered to make the goal-line stand on the last play of the game. I mean, I’ve seen teams called for 12 players on the field, but FOURTEEN PLAYERS, all lined up? We “joke” that LSU coach Les Miles may be a slow adult, but to see his idiocy get trumped by another coach? I should make a “Special Olympics Bowl” joke here, but I’m not that mean. Oh, wait . . .

What I’m drinking: Dry Fly & Q-Tonic, although I spent most of the week dry, in hopes of getting off the stress-induced cycle of drinking and/or taking a Xanax in order to get to sleep. Why I chose to do this during a heavy-duty production week, I don’t know. I should’ve waited till this week, when there’s less work stress to pervade my brain.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Going on another long-ass hike on Sunday. On Saturday, Ru pulled his R. Kelly trick and peed on Otis’ head when they were out for their morning walk. Oh, and they played grab-ass.

Where I’m going: Kansas City for the wedding of one of Amy’s pals

What I’m happy about: Finishing my October issue (pretty much) on time.

What I’m sad about: The Ultimate Trailer Show on HDNet got cancelled. This is a serious problem, because Robert Wilonsky’s show was just about the only way I found out about good upcoming movies. If it weren’t for that show, we’d never have heard about Louis, and I’d have missed out on one of the best musical experiences of my life. So, grr. Basically, we’d just open Netflix when Wilonsky’s show was on, and plug in movie after movie. In fact, our next Netflix delivery comes from a UTS episode: The Good, The Bad and the Weird. (UPDATE: and, my wife reminds me, without UTS & Wilonsky, we’d never have discovered In the Loop, which is among my favorite comedies.)

What I’m worried about: That I’m forgetting something. I’ve been pretty stressed lately, and my memory’s been addled as a result. Friday, walking the dogs, I had some song lyrics in my head, but couldn’t recall the song they were from. It took a day or two before it came back to me: Babylon Sisters. But that made me sad because that’s also the title of a book for which my pal Sang, who died in January, designed the cover.

What I’m pondering: Achilles and fate (again). I hope to write at length about a couple of thoughts on the subject, but I need to finish the poem again first. I love how each re-read finds me focusing on a different key; last time (2007), I made a muddled attempt at figuring out the role of the gods in the action & the characters’ lives. Now that doesn’t seem like too much of an issue to me.

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What I Love and What I Don’t Like

I had a sort of crappy end-of-day at work. I tend to internalize my frustration and play out phantom conversations endlessly. This tendency gets exacerbated by the fact that I don’t talk to friends very much. I drive home from work, IM with my wife for a few minutes to find out how she’s doing and see when she expects to get home from work, then take the dogs for a walk usually about half an hour or so.

Rufus & Otis are great, but their conversation skills are lacking, so I tend to keep talking silently to myself and letting these frustrations fester. The weather’s so lovely this evening that I it would sooth my soul, but I kept slipping back into little tirades. I should’ve called one of my old pals, but it’s just not in my nature anymore. Don’t know when that changed.

got in and fed them, checked work e-mail and some other work-related stuff, which only fuels my nonsense. Then I decided to go downstairs to my library sprawl out on the couch, and read the new issue of Love & Rockets. And that’s when I got out of myself. Jaime Hernandez’ stories in the new book flat-out transported me. The moment young Perla saw the girl-mechanic on the parade float, I had a grin from ear to ear. My heart was broken after the story of her brother. I lost myself in his amazing storytelling, and I’m thankful for that.

Love and Rockets: New Stories #3 by The Hernandez Brothers - Jaime detail
(I also may be the last reader of theirs to realize that Beto Hernandez is this generation’s Russ Meyer.)

In other news, Barking, a new Underworld record, came out yesterday. I love a lot of their music, but I’m just befuddled by this new stuff. I gather they used outside producers for the first time, and the result is really . . . pedestrian. Which is a funny term to apply to dance music, but there it is. It’s almost like reading a serial comic book with a new creative team that fails to Get It.

To me, Underworld’s best music is like having drug-crazed nanobots devouring the language and motion sections of your brain, so that words don’t really make sense and you’re possessed with an urge to dance/thrash. This new record, on the other hand, has a lot of shimmery keys, banal disco beats and sensical lyrics.

Worst of all, the decision was made to have Karl Hyde sing, despite the fact that he doesn’t have much of a singing voice. Oh, and there’s a ballad. Except it’s not absurd/surreal, like Good Morning Cockerel, a song from their previous album, Oblivion With Bells, about which I’m rather ambivalent. I’ll give this one another try or two, but it’s a very disappointing record.

So that’s a little of what’s going on. I also spend a lot of time thinking about Achilles and Odysseus in The Iliad.