Young Urban Amateur

My American Apparel Pants

2011-07-18T21:13:00.002-04:00

I bought a pair of American Apparel pants.

They cost $70.00. I had to buy them with my credit card. The card is called a "Freedom" card. When I bought them, I felt like the card was actually giving me more freedom. I know that living on credit is bad and all, but the last "affordable" pair of pants I bought cost $25, ripped within a week, and weren't that awesome in the first place.

In 2008, I moved to NYC, and by 2009, I felt like I didn't belong. It was a vague feeling, but it gradually gained focus. When I felt that outsider feeling, I began to focus on all the guys who had skinnier, more rock star-like legs than me, all the trustafarians, all the non-trustafarians whose self-destructive hard work intimidated me, all the girls who refused to smile or blush when I talked to them...

All the nice things cities like NYC had- nice things that were so close to my dreams that I became painfully aware that I was a demographic, not a unique snowflake...

All the things that I rebelled against by refusing to listen to music that wasn't folk music for nearly a year...

They all could be encapsulated in one brand:

American Apparel.

When I thought of American Apparel, I wanted to take the A train all the way to JFK airport and pick a destination.

But, in July 2011, I was still in NYC, and I really wanted to have a nice pair of pants. I also really didn't want to sift through a thousand thrift stores to find one. I wanted to possibly get to talk to a hot sales clerk in the process, rather than chitchat while avoiding eye contact with homeless white dudes.

I also really wanted to support a business that continues to pay its employees American wages and keeps its factories in America, and refrains from changing those practices even though it could very well go under in 2012.

So I went to American Apparel. I'd describe the shopping experience, but many blogs have already done that better than I would, and, in any case, it was pretty much exactly the way I imagined it two paragraphs ago.

Hiatus, or something

2011-04-08T15:25:00.000-04:00

Hello reader(s),

I am about to go on my first intentional hiatus from this blog. It's funny. I've had weeks at a time where I've been in bad shape and just not posted without acknowledging it. But right now, I'm in good shape, but for a reason I don't quite get yet, I don't even feel that old "I'll post eventually" feeling. A large part of it, no doubt, is my new job. It's turned out that it's not as stressful as I thought it would be, but ever since I started it, I've had more ambivalent feelings about blogging. I either want to make this one more narrative and personal, and meant more for friends... or scrap it entirely and begin a totally new, less personal, more SEO-friendly blog. Until I decide on that, I will turn in my title of "blogger" and exchange it for my new title of "commenter."

If you could listen to only one album...

2011-04-01T01:01:00.000-04:00

This is the first post in this blog since September 2009 that I did not work on all day at work.

That's because I got a new job where I don't get to mess around on the internet 90% of the day.

I thought this time crunch would spark me to new intensity and efficiency when it came to blogging and keeping in touch with other bloggers. But I haven't had as much free time (that I don't choose to spend doing online shopping and getting my Facebook fix). As before, when I get home, I usually would rather do something different than what I do all day (what I do all day = using a computer for a function other than watching TV).

I also realized that my chair in my apartment is uncomfortable for blogging. I'm going to have to hunt for a new one if I wish to comfortably blog.

I've thought a lot lately about how situational our talents and pursuits are. Many of us grow into one awesome thing as children and more-or-less follow that path to its logical extent.

But many of us end up giving up on that awesome thing due to circumstances. Some of us get that same awesome thing back or find another awesome thing to replace it. But it's so much easier to just quit doing awesome things forever.

I'd like to say that I'm sure that won't happen to me. But I'm not sure. Confident, yes. Confident like I'm confident I won't get hit by a car in Manhattan. Confident that if I dodge them, and if I hang out with people who look out for me, they won't hit me.

This morning, as I listened to it for the umpteenth time, I had the shocking epiphany that Bert Jansch's LA Turnaround could be the only album I'd ever listen to for the rest of my life and I'd probably survive.

It's got the British folk sounds I love and it's got the Americana sounds I love. I'd like to hear more than just those sounds in life, but I could probably get by on those sounds alone if I had to.

Don't get me wrong- if you told me that I'd have to eliminate all but one album from my life, I'd be pretty sad. But if it were LA Turnaround, I'd survive. In fact, I can pretty vividly imagine my schedule in this dystopia:

Saturday, 6pm: Music hour. Time for my weekly listen to LA Turnaround.

7pm: Watch Doctor Who for a while on Netflix.

9pm: Go out to bars where there's no music playing, because the only record that exists is LA Turnaround. Talk about the decor where I'd otherwise talk about music. Talk to dudes about how overplayed round, three-foot wooden stools are. Have a conversation with a girl about how underrated green lamps are and how cool it is to meet someone else who loves green lamps in the same way.

3am: Go home with her. Say, "Hey, let's listen to a record." Open up the cabinet that holds my record collection. It's only one record: LA Turnaround. Place it on the turntable, which feels a bit like a sacrament, because it repetitively plays the same thing. Giggle at the steel guitars- or maybe not, since maybe, in this world, steel guitars have ended up sounding ultra-sexy to us. Start making out around "Travelling Man." Remember some decor-related joke the two of you had back at the bar and laugh pretty hard about it.

11am: She's out the door and our separate days have started. Take a shower. Think about going back to sleep again, but decide not to ruin the day. Wonder if she wants to see me again... or if I want to see her again. Put on LA Turnaround once again as I contemplate. Hungover-dial one of my friends. Laugh about how we're both gonna be in our underwear all day. Talk about the separate egg sandwiches we're cooking and how awesome they are. Talk about the awesome music each of us had been listening to lately, which, for both of us, is LA Turnaround.

If I could choose between being in a world where I could only own one album, and I had to go to other people's houses to hear other awesome music, and a world where there was only one awesome album to represent all music, I think I'd choose the latter.

[If you leave a comment, I'd like to hear which you would choose.]

My Attempt to Be a Professional Video Editor, or, How NOT to Pursue a Career, Part III: Editing Internships in NYC

2011-03-18T13:46:00.003-04:00

When I first made the decision to focus all of my energy on video editing (at the end of Part I), I thought I was about to get on a direct path from internship to job.

In the middle of January, I began pounding the internet-pavement and found a video editing internship posted at Red Car, a well-known NYC commercial editing agency with a flashy website and a flashier office. I got an interview, but didn't get the internship. But that gave me some serious confidence that I could do it. If I got an interview at a major place within a week of my decision, something awesome was bound to turn up, right? It felt like someone up there wanted me to be a video editor.

After a random encounter with a friend from Albany, I began interning with her uncle, who owned a stock footage library. It was a very small business- just him and one other dude, and they had a considerable amount of downtime. I didn't get to do any video editing, there wasn't anything else that really interested me there, and it was very far from my aunt and uncle's house, so I stopped doing that when I found something that looked better.

This was the beginning of a pattern.

I found another unpaid internship in which I was promised that I'd eventually get to do some video editing if I'd transcribe video clips from home for a while. The clips were from an interesting documentary about an American Indian high school and the director of the project had been an assistant editor on some other well-known projects. But I never got to speak to her; I just got to speak to a friend of hers who was volunteering his time to the project, and his volunteer-role in the project, as far as I could tell, was to amass volunteers for the project.

Perhaps things would've turned out well for me if I'd stuck with that, but I was bored and felt like, even if I'd had the most awesome networking skills and the fastest transcribing fingers in the universe, I couldn't have overcome the fact that they wanted to get free labor and to not be bothered. Maybe if I'd transcribed even faster and emailed him more frequently, it all would've turned out better? Who knows. In any case, when I found a new opportunity that looked better, I quit.

This new opportunity, which I also found on the internet-pavement, did involve some actual video editing. A director had shot a documentary in Cuba and it looked very cool. It had something to do with the power of the cigar to unite people. It looked super interesting and it would give me the opportunity to actually practice editing somebody else's work.

She desperately needed a rough cut in a week so that she could submit it to a workshop. I asked her what she wanted from me, and she drew me a diagram that represented the souls of the people she met while shooting the doc and all the boundaries they transcended. But she needed to work on that diagram, she said. She needed to speak with her story consultant a few more times before she could figure out what her movie was "really" about. I asked her how long she'd been working on it. She said, "Two years."

Then she spent about an hour trying to find one clip, and told me to chop it up in a way that would make it look more like a "journey." I gave it my best shot and chopped it up in the style of a low-budget sixties music doc, with long shots followed by abrupt cuts that were slightly off the rhythm of the background music (a la Woodstock). She loved it. She I thought that maybe working with her would be a good idea after all.

While I was working on this project, my aunt told me about a guy who she had taught in Hebrew school in the early '80s. He had worked on an oscar-nominated documentary and wanted some help on his new project. He had told her that, if I wanted to help out, there was no money, and I'd be doing menial things at first, but it'd be interesting. I said, "Maybe." I felt like I'd switched internships too many times and it was becoming too much of a habit, and I thought that maybe I'd have a good time with the Cuban doc.

After about a week of working on the Cuban doc, the director found out that the deadline for the workshop had been extended, so now she didn't need to "rush" so much. If she was drawing diagrams and hiring story consultants when she had time constraints, I couldn't imagine how little direction she'd give when she didn't have a time constraint. I got a bad feeling about the project. She said, "I think the only person who can really edit this project is me, and now that I have all the time in the world, I don't need anybody's help."

I then asked my aunt to put me in touch with that guy she had taught in Hebrew school.

***

I recently looked up the movie I did the transcription for. It premiered on the National Geographic Channel in October 2010. I looked at the Cuba documentary director's website recently. It's the same as it was in 2009.

(Names have all been hidden to protect the innocent and also to protect myself from attentions of those who obsessively google themselves.)

What Happened to the album format?" Is "The Album" dead?

2011-03-15T16:39:00.033-04:00

I recently played keyboards and sang on some songs with some old college-era bandmates.

We had a conversation about which songs should be on the album and which wouldn't. An email thread started on the subject.

Eventually, I e-interjected with a "Guys, seriously, nobody listens to albums by unknown bands anymore."

Then we discussed releasing songs on the internet, and then releasing an album later.

I've begun to feel like albums are kind of pointless when you're a minor musician. I don't think I'd ever release an album unless I was Kanye or Radiohead.

I came up with a timeline of the history of the album. It made me realize what a short history the recorded album has had. It made me wonder if it has a future at all. I really don't know if it does, but, in any case, I thought it'd be fun to look back on the lifetime of the medium.

1950: Hey, we can get a bunch of songs at once!

1965: I liked that single... I hope the album will be as good.

1968: I love this band, you should totally check out their album.

1975: Now, even soul and funk artists concentrate on producing full albums instead of singles. Thanks, disco DJ's (who are about to dis-employ tons of musicians).

1983: Albums can be even longer and are also the same size as 45's. Long live the long-player.

1999: If I only like one song, I can download it for free!

2000: Shit, I'll download the whole album for free.

2001: I can pay for it if I want. Thanks, iTunes. Good to know you're looking out for us [muffled laughter].

2005: Now I can only download full albums as torrents, and single songs are nearly impossible to find in that form. Paying for single songs that download really quickly doesn't seem so bad anymore. Thanks, iTunes.

2006: ...or I can stream that one song on Myspace or Youtube.

2009: I love this band. Have you checked out their Myspace page?

2010: So that Myspace band just released an album. That's crazy. That's like, what Kanye and Radiohead do.

I know, The Album, that you're only 60 years old, (ie 18 years younger than Peter O'Toole), but I hope you're not offended if I give you a Lifetime Achievement Award.

My Attempt to Be a Professional Video Editor, or, How NOT to Pursue a Career, Part II: The value of film school

2011-03-11T00:01:00.000-05:00

I had a complicated, unconsummated relationship with film school and we'll probably never reconcile.

My first year of college actually was film school. For the 2003-2004 college year, I went to Ithaca College. I applied for a scholarship that was only available if you applied to the Television department (even though I wanted to do film). I didn't get the scholarship. I thought to myself, "When I get there, I can just change majors, right?" But when I arrived at the Park School of Communications, that didn't seem to be the case. My advisor said that it was school policy that students within Park can not change majors. I think she said it was something to do with them already having too many students. Later on, I heard of many people with different advisors actually getting their majors changed.

It's funny how silly I often feel when I tell people about things that happened in college nearly ten years ago. It's kid stuff. It just feels silly to talk about. But the fact is, if, 8 years ago, I'd had a different advisor, I probably never would have transferred out of Ithaca College, and, if I had never left Ithaca College, I wouldn't be who I am today. It's not that who I am today is something I really, really understand... but in any case, I'm pretty sure that if I'd stayed at Ithaca, I wouldn't be that dude.

I left Ithaca because I felt simultaneously intimidated and superior to all the students that surrounded me in the Television department, who seemed to be competing for scraps in a rat race that, at the end, lead to another rat race. I left because I hated the South Hill campus, which looks even more like an abandoned Soviet government center than Albany, NY.

Ithaca College

Albany, where the author spent 22 years of life

But, most of all, I left Ithaca College because I was hemorrhaging a whole lot of money and, after a whole year, nothing clicked to make me feel like it was all worth it.

But, nonetheless, a nagging question floats to the top of my mind sometimes: If you had gotten into Ithaca as a film major, or had even taken some of the more creative classes in the TV department, would I have stayed?

The answer is almost definitely a Yes.

And I say that because I've realized that, once you pass a certain age (21? 25? Hell, 19 for some people?), you realize that your life is just a collection of things that stick and things that don't. And film is one of the things that stuck.

I graduated from SUNY Albany with a degree in literary theory, and it didn't stick. I can recall it very well when it comes up in conversation and there are still bits and pieces of it that help to inform a lot of my opinions... but overall, it didn't stick. I made a few videos between the ages of 5 and 18, and one since, but film still managed to stick. I feel normal spending hours talking about it. I feel normal spending hours working on it. I didn't touch Final Cut Pro for a year, and, when I picked it up again, I was actually better than I was before.

If I'd started off in the classes I wanted, I probably would have just rolled with it. I probably wouldn't have questioned it.

The film program I did attend (after SUNY Albany), at the Digital Film Academy (whose website really should be quieter... come on, guys, some of us are at work!), did a good job of introducing me to a lot of aspects of filmmaking. In many ways, it's superior to a longer-term program. The instructors say, "Here's the equipment you're going to use, and here's how you can try to make art with it, and we're going to hold you accountable for following through with your project." And that's it.

School can shape your identity, and identities are nothing to scoff at. If you go to film school, you're going to reinforce the part of you that sees yourself as a filmmaker. If you don't study it, you'll have to reinforce that some other way. But know that the people who studied it will always have that advantage- they invested a lot of time in it, and, no matter how much they complain about what a waste film school is, film school was responsible for reinforcing that identity of theirs.

My film school was awesome and relatively inexpensive, but it lasted under half a year and has virtually no connections (and no clout) within the industry. The capital "F" Film Schools (a category which certainly includes Ithaca) are connected to the industry and they last four years. They do more damage to your bank account, but they do more to reinforce the idea that you are a filmmaker, and they also situate you better overall for being a lifer.

When I began this post, I thought that my bit about film school would just be an intro to the next chronological part of the story... but that didn't happen. Next time, I'll pick up where I left off.

Until then, if (doubtful), you feel like this post was too short, or (more likely), you want to read more on this subject from someone with more experience, "Is Artsy Fartsy School a Necessity" by Hipstercrite is a good place to start.

My Attempt to Be a Professional Video Editor, or, How NOT to Pursue a Career, Part I

2011-03-07T17:14:00.011-05:00

Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) died 12 years ago today. I remember it really well because, at the time, it felt like I was alone in thinking it was a big deal. A guy who was a big deal had died, and it felt like it was just me and THE MEDIA. It didn't even occur to me that there were other ordinary-seeming people who also cared about Stanley Kubrick. In my mind, knowing who Stanley Kubrick was put me in an elite class, and, in my mind, there were only two zones in which I could camp: lonely middle-school existence, and THE MEDIA. In my mind, I was destined to be part of the professional media, because it looked like there was absolutely nowhere else to go.

***

I had a realization two days ago that at least 90% stuff I write about in this blog is:

1) not the stuff I think about every day
2) not the stuff I do every day

That's going to change a little, at least for the purposes of this entry, which will be about things I used to do every day, and still do think about every day.

***

When I came to NYC in 2008, I had the somewhat vague idea that I wanted to work in movies, but was also pretty sure that I wanted to be a video/movie editor.

I didn't have a clear vision of how any of those things could happen, but I had a few hints that provided me with enough fuel:

1) Many people work in the film/video industry without going to film school.
2) No matter what you study or how good you are, the way you get started in the industry is through internships.
3) Some regular-ass guys like me make money editing videos.
4) Lawrence of Arabia had good editing.
5) Editors don't have to run around on set.

I moved to NYC in June 2008. I enrolled in a class at the Digital Film Academy in September 2008. I took the class more to give me confidence and to give me a kickstart. I knew that film school doesn't get people jobs, but it does help them develop the focus that leads to jobs. I also had a temp job at a call center that was decent enough and exhausting enough that I really felt like I was a member of the NYC community.

When that job ended in October 2008 and the temp agency had nothing else for me, I lived on couches for a few weeks, nearly worked as a telemarketer for the notorious scam company Madison Who's Who, and then moved to my aunt and uncle's house in the far reaches of Queens while collecting unemployment. In early 2009, I began working a part-time job as a respite care worker before realizing that, due to our country's screwy welfare system, I lost $50 from my unemployment check every day that I worked at that job, while the job only paid about $30 a day. It was a no-brainer- I told the employer to stop paying me, and then I quit.

In retrospect, I wish I had volunteered my services there, just to keep me more connected to the working world and to get a good reference, but at the time, my logic was, "It's a job, so if I don't get paid, why do it?"

So, at that point, I decided to continue to collect unemployment while trying to build a video editing career. I had the security of unemployment and my aunt and uncle's hospitality and I'd heard of people getting video editing jobs after just a few months of full-time interning. It all seemed pretty lined-up and I felt the most focused I'd ever felt since high school.

It was the beginning of the most single-minded period of my life. A period in which I worked really hard, got high on my own imagination and potential, and put way too much faith in an industry that I really, really didn't understand, and, in 2009, probably didn't even understand itself.

How to Deal With a Nice Guy has an update!

2011-03-04T18:03:00.000-05:00

My other page, "How to Deal With a Nice Guy," which hasn't seen any action in nearly half a year, just got updated today. A guy wrote in asking for advice about dating while he lives in his parents' house. I gave it my best and warned him of all the weirdness that awaits him... and then told him that, weirdness aside, it's not so bad. I also managed to tie it all to Seinfeld.

Until next time, know that I've got a few posts in the works... some NYC ones and some music ones, too. Happy Friday!

Here's the link:

How to Deal with a Nice Guy: "I'm ready to attempt to polish off my game and reenter the dating scene, but I have one big problem: I live with my parents."

The great regional dialect video game (not that kind of video game)

2011-02-28T22:18:00.002-05:00

A few weeks ago, the Tsaritsa posted a video where she says a few words and answers a few questions and, in the process, gives the world a great example of her quasi-Philadelphian accent.

The day after I saw it, I made this video. If it weren't for my knowledge of Final Cut Pro, I'd have posted it then. But, due to my knowledge of Final Cut Pro, I decided to fix the terrible lighting in my room by making it black & white and messing with the contrast, and decided to make some title cards to make it easier to follow.

Between then and now, my hair actually grew about two inches. See?

Anyway, here's the video. See the Tsaritsa's original post for the text this is based on, and make your own! (See that? Just used the internet's ability to link information together instead of copying it!)

If a dude in a movie talked like me, where would you think he was from?

What's your Bat Out of Hell?

2011-02-23T15:32:00.016-05:00

I received several offers of help after the last post, on my old man-like wonderment in the face of technology. Apparently I appear to be pretty bad at using computers. I don't think I've ever met anyone else with my outlook on computers. On one hand, I use them all the time. But, on another hand, I'm just as amazed by them as the average 90-year-old in Alabama. And I still don't think that organizing digital information will ever be satisfying in the way that organizing physical space is.

You can't shut off a messy room but you can shut off a messy computer. Sometimes I feel like I'm one of the only people my age who realizes that.

But, to paraphrase Kenny Powers, I did not come here today just to bash on f*ckin technology. I came here today to do something completely different. I came here to talk about a great rock n' roll album that contains multitudes: Bat Out of Hell.

(Bat Out of Hell composer Jim Steinman with Meat Loaf.)

I wish I had a way to tie this to something funny I was doing right now. But I really just started thinking about it because I found out, via AM New York, that Meat Loaf is playing a $75 show at Irving Plaza tonight. I'm not going to go see him live, but seeing the little blurb about how awesome he was going to be live reminded me of how much I love the sound of him on record.

"Paradise By the Dash" and "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" are masterpieces, but it was when I heard "You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth," for the first time that it all began to click for me (and that I decided to finally listen to it as an album).

The album is a (loose) story of a young, horny, unavailable guy and a young, way-too-available girl who, by the time they reach "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" are doomed to be stuck together for the rest (or at least a good part) of their lives. But, while it's about the old "growing up too fast" phenomenon, it's not a grown-up look at those things. It's a beefed-up teenage look at those things.

It's got such a strong and evocative atmosphere that, after listening to Bat Out of Hell several times, I started to mourn the fact that I didn't have an out-of-control teenage experience like Jim Steinman's characters. Bat Out of Hell looks at sex, love, and domestic life from the perspective of a teen who feels it all careening towards him like a natural disaster (or like a bat out of hell). But when I was a teenager, I was one of the hypsersensitive ones who based his ideas about girls on The Unbearable Lightness of Being instead of American Pie. (Note to any teenagers who might be reading this: Unbearable Lightness might have a little bit more to offer on the human condition, but when it comes to girls, the two works are probably of equal value.) Bat Out of Hell, fun as it is, used to also make me feel like I'd missed out on a whole lot. It used to make me think of the silly, action-filled teenage past that might have been. I used to listen to it and wonder if, had I gotten all of that out of my system back in the day, maybe I would've been more in touch with reality in college... and so on and so forth.

But I see Bat Out of Hell in a much different light now. A whole lot of things about it clicked for me when I read this in the Wikipedia article on the album:

Citing the narrative of "Paradise," [producer Todd] Rundgren jokes that he can't imagine Steinman being at a lakeside with the most beautiful girl in school, but he can imagine Steinman imagining it.

And it hit me: Bat Out of Hell doesn't exist to evoke nostalgia for wild, careening teenage years. It wasn't created by or for people like the characters in the songs. It's just a museum of American teenage life, created by a space alien named Jim Steinman. And if another space alien - or another human, for that matter - ever wonders what the hell it's like to be a sexed-out (I believe I just coined that term) American teenager, they don't need to waste time speculating, and they don't even need to waste time reading anthropology texts about high schools in the suburbs of Grand Rapids. Bat Out of Hell is the King Tut's Tomb of the subject. It's all you need.

In any case, that's how I feel when I listen to Bat Out of Hell. It doesn't make me think at all of being an actual teenager myself. Music-wise, I'll always have Nelly, Third Eye Blind, and my own personal CD collection to do that. Bat Out of Hell, as much as it has some resemblance to actual adolescence, is a musical Lawrence of Arabia - it's an epic passage to a time, place, and life that I've never experienced and never will. I'm glad that Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf took us there, just like I'm glad that David Lean and Peter O'Toole took us to the desert.

I attempted to end this with a question but I couldn't think of a good one. So I'll put down the super vague one that I came up with:

What's your Bat Out of Hell?

On the futility of deleting unread emails or: A good excuse for having 1300 Facebook friends

2011-02-16T21:12:00.003-05:00

You'd think that deleting unread emails from your inbox would make you feel more relaxed and in control, like the way you feel when you organize your room (or at least move stuff from the floor to boxes under your bed).

Every few months, I think to myself, "Wow, when that inbox counter has the number zero, I'm going to be so satisfied." And then I spend hours opening and/or deleting emails. And then my inbox says zero. And then I realize that, if my inbox were to lie to me and just not have a counter, I'd be none the wiser. I wouldn't feel any more or less organized.

In addition to their superhuman ways of organizing information, computers also offer us countless opportunities to engage in deceptively productive tasks that amount to nothing more than putting weak paper bandages on our cluttered minds.

Reducing the number of unread emails is just the most tragic letdown that computers have to offer. Here are some others:

-Deleting Facebook friends. One of my friends whittled down his 500+ friends to about 50. He said it was part of his big project to disengage from Facebook. I really liked the idea of that, so I tried to delete some of my 1300 friends. After I'd deleted about 20 people, I felt exhausted, and I thought to myself, "Man, you have to really, really engage with Facebook in order to disengage from it. How ironic." Then I realized that I could just log out of Facebook, 1300 friends and all, and then I'd actually be disengaged from it. So I did that instead.

-Cleaning up desktop icons. Unless I have an extra awesome desktop background photo, the value of being able to access just about anything from my desktop is much > the value of having a clean-looking desktop. Having a clean-looking desktop, unlike, say, having a clean room, just feels sad and desolate.

-Deleting songs that you don't listen to anymore. Data has no soul. So deleting that song that symbolizes an era you'd like to forget does not carry the same weight as giving your old Cure CDs to your sister. Giving your cure CDs to your sister is dramatic and meaningful and cinematic. Deleting Cure MP3's just means that next time you feel like listening to them, you'll have to go to Youtube, and, if the song's not on Youtube, you'll be kind of annoyed that you engaged in the unfulfilling task of deleting those files.

Now I'm going to go do a computer task I find rewarding. I'm going to delete all the pages I don't read from my Reader. Because every time I open it, I go "Who's that again?" and then I end up leaving zero comments on anybody's blogs, and that's a bummer.

Five Great Tearjerking Songs that Aren't Love Songs

2011-02-11T22:23:00.007-05:00

It's a "Tunesome Thursday" on Friday. Just like in the good old days of 2010.

Even men cry to music sometimes. And not when a screenwriter wants to show how much of a wuss we are. Sometimes we do it in real life.

This post was inspired by the following incident: The other day, I remembered the time when, shortly after a breakup, I heard "Go to Pieces," and I - like the protagonist of the song - went to pieces and I cried.

I kind of wanted to feel that feeling again. It was kind of like that line that Ron Livingston says in Swingers about how you stop caring, but then you look back, and you actually miss the pain.

So I played the sentimental song. And guess what? It didn't work.

I realized why it didn't work: love/breakup songs are often the most tear-provoking songs, but their relevance is usually pretty situational. When they make you cry, it's usually because they're about heartbreak and you, at the time you hear them, happen to be heartbroken. When the heartbreak is gone, you've got to find a different kind of song to cry to.

So, in honor of Valentine's Day, I've decided to compile a list of tearjerkingly emotional songs that aren't love songs. Songs that might still do it for you when you've got it together and aren't feeling like a heartbroken blubbering fool.

5) Streets of London - Ralph McTell

In the all night cafe
At a quarter past eleven,
Same old man is sitting there on his own
Looking at the world
Over the rim of his tea-cup,
Each tea last an hour
Then he wanders home alone
So how can you tell me you're lonely
Or say for you that the sun don't shine?
Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London
I'll show you something to make you change your mind

The song's a real tearjerker because, on one level, it's a protest against poverty, but, more than that, it's a protest against the way we forget to appreciate what we have. It's about how there are sad people all over the world... and not just in distant, sad lands that we've never seen. There are sad people in our neighborhoods, but we're so caught up in our own longing that we don't even notice them.

It's the line, "Each tea lasts an hour, then he wanders home alone," that gets to me the most. It's such a quirky detail that it's almost funny (in fact, in this cover of the song, it almost sounds like a joke). I did laugh the first time I heard it. But then I pictured the old man from the verse and realized how often we spot little characters like him, laugh at them, and then move on and complain about how we can't afford vacations and how there's got to be "something better" than the jobs we have.

How can you tell me you're lonely?

God damnit, McTell gets me every time.

Watch this video. And look at the eyes of the fans as they sing along.

Now, for some comic relief, watch this sketch.

(**Contrary to the beliefs of Simon Pegg's character in the sketch, Ralph did have a ton of other songs, and, as I've written about before, many of them are awesome.)

4) When I'm Gone - Phil Ochs

It's hard to talk about this song without talking about its context in the tragic life of Phil Ochs - a down-to-earth but genuinely mentally disabled man who cared too much about changing the world for his own good - but I'm going to try.

The whole song is a meditation on appreciating the little things in life while somehow doing something good for a troubled world, and how little time any of us have to do either of those things. For me, the most moving verse is this one:

All my days won't be dances of delight when I'm gone
And the sands will be shifting from my sight when I'm gone
Can't add my name into the fight while I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here

3) All By Myself - Eric Carmen

When Celine Dion covers a song, most self-respecting cool kids would wipe it from their memories. But not me. I can still respect the sincerity in Eric Carmen's original.

For years, I only remembered the over-the-top chorus of the song, in which the singer screams "All by myself!" repeatedly. But the verses have some more subtle, sensitive lyrics.

When I was young
I never needed anyone
And makin' love was just for fun
Those days are gone

Livin' alone
I think of all the friends I've known
But when I dial the telephone
Nobody's home

And finally,

Hard to be sure
Some times I feel so insecure
And love so distant and obscure
Remains the cure

Maybe it's just because I was an antisocial kid (as I imagine Eric Carmen was, too) but I think this song has got real weight to it. It's like a Daniel Johnston song that doesn't sound like a Daniel Johnston song. It's an epic pop ballad fit for slow dances at Bar Mitzvahs that conceals a troubled kid who's just trying to reach out to a world he knows very little about.

The thing about "All By Myself" is that it's easy to laugh at it, but, if you don't laugh at it, crying is pretty much the only option. The song got used as a joke in an episode of Friends... and, while the initial music cue was hilarious, the song ended up making it just a tad too serious for comfort.

It really should be a crime to use powerful Russian classical music as the basis for a pop song about regular male loneliness. But Eric Carmen did it. And he got away with it.

2) Puff the Magic Dragon - Peter, Paul & Mary

Even if it is, as they say, about smoking weed, which I doubt, this tale of childhood's end is still moving, because of how vividly it recalls the things we lose when we stop being kids.

His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain,
Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane.
Without his lifelong friend, Puff could not be brave,
So Puff that mighty dragon sadly slipped into his cave.

It's not news that we lose a certain innocent kind of imagination when we stop being kids. But this song doesn't stop at reminding us of that. It goes a little farther- it reminds us that the innocent imagination we used to have actually had some intelligent detail to it. It reminds us that the imaginary places we traveled to had names and had actual geography to them, and it reminds us that our imaginary friends actually had personalities, and would actually miss us whenwe weren't around.

We all know that we can't go back to our own "Land of Honnalee," but "Puff the Magic Dragon" suggests that maybe the world would be a better place if we allowed ourselves to miss it.

1) Imagine - John Lennon

It's not just the Lennon's voice and lyrics that do it. Even the reverb-drenched first piano notes have a quality that lets you know, "Hey listener. It's time to be moved now."

I nearly wrote, "It's easy to write this song off as sentimental and overly idealistic, but, if you listen closely, you'll hear a genuine recognition of how impossible it would be to achieve all these things, combined with a plea for us to believe in them anyway."

But then I got thinking about how it seems so obligatory to do things like that in entertainment articles - to say "You might not think this is good, but - here's a twist - it is." But I'm going to come clean about "Imagine": I really don't think I know anybody who denies its awesomeness. The only crime committed by this song is the crime of being overplayed, but, when a song's that good, it's kind of forgivable.

There's a reason Clear Channel asked its radio stations not to ban it when Bush II was riling us up for war. There's a reason that the most staunch Zionists in my Birthright group got upset when our tour leader had us sing it at the Rabin Memorial.

After writing that paragraph, I looked back and realized that I didn't know what that reason was, and I considered deleting the whole thing and washing my hands of that brief dip into vaguely political rhetoric.

But then I realized that there is indeed a reason: it's because, when you listen to "Imagine," for three minutes, it's incredibly hard to feel like that the domination of another human being is a good idea. When you listen to "Imagine," it's possible to get a three-minute reprieve from the part of your brain that's focused on acquiring food, sex, and property for yourself.

When you listen to "Imagine," you get riled up, but you don't get riled up about the things that usually get us riled up. And I'd like to think that that's at least somewhat true of all the songs on this list.

With that said... Happy Valentine's Day!

Guide to chasing rainbows

2011-02-09T23:45:00.001-05:00

When I began my last post, I had an idea in mind, but another one - the disorienting changes in creative professionalism -took over. Today, I'm going to get back to the idea I had in mind yesterday.

The idea I had in mind yesterday was this: that, in a world where it feels like anyone can create, we should be creating.

It was partially inspired by Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids... Or, rather, by things I've read about Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids. Particularly this post from Hipstercrite. Particularly these words, which I'm paraphrasing:

To me, they appeared to be waiting for something to stick[...] My idea of an artist has always been someone who was either blessed from the womb with an artistic gift or knew very early on what their artistic path in life would be and they spent years cultivating that craft. To me, Patti and Robert seemed like two lost souls, trying the roulette wheel of creative mediums until one finally gave way to them.

I realized that I, too, used to think that artists followed single paths, but that I sincerely don't anymore. I realized that the '70s and '80s Lower Manhattan was a profoundly inspiring place because they were saying "come on, you should try to be an artist" at a time when nobody else was. These days, though, it's sort of a given that we should all try to be artists. It's like the Retro-East Village has taken over the world. It's been diluted in the process, but it's still taken over the world.

Anyway, I've come up with a list of creative endeavors that can be pursued pretty easily these days, and what a dilettante with a ton of energy might want to know about them.

MOVIES

What you used to have to do, and should be grateful you don't anymore:

For most of the history of motion pictures, you really had to depend on other people to even *see* the classic movies. As far as I can tell, in 1980, if you wanted to find out if Citizen Kane was really as great as they say, you had to find a revival theater that was going to show it - which, for many, would mean commuting to a city that was hours away - and then plan your life around that date. Or you had to go to film school, where the professors all owned prints. On one hand, this world must've been kind of cool. But, on another hand, you really couldn't say, "I want to watch that movie," and hunt it down the way you can now.

For most of the history of motion pictures, the equipment necessary to make a motion picture (not just the camera, but the editing bay, the sound recorder, sound mixer, etc.) actually cost more than it cost to go to film school. Now it's the other way around. Film school would have to slash its prices more desperately than a used Oldsmobile salesman to make itself cheaper than the current cost of making a movie.

And, finally, for most of the history of motion pictures, there was no Youtube, no Dropbox, no Vimeo. Basically movies didn't used to be information- they used to be physical things that needed to be moved around, like groceries or drugs.

The bottom line:

Making a movie doesn't require as much expensive technology as it used to, nor does it require as much labor, but it requires a lot of different skills. It's best if you go into it knowing that editing and sound will take a lot of work. If you go into it without knowing much about editing and sound, you will likely 1) spend too much energy on trying to shoot things perfectly and 2) get extremely discouraged once you've finished shooting, because it will seem like it's always going to look and sound so terrible.

It's easy to get annoyed and bored with just about anything you create, but this is probably even more true with movies than with anything else. Movies are a lot more work than other things in the sense that a lot of the time you spend on projects is devoted to solving tedious problems and even more of the time is just plain old waiting.

But seriously, though. You can make movies. That's awesome.

MUSIC

What you used to have to do, and should be grateful you don't anymore:

You used to have to practice, and you still have to do that today. But you also used to need a whole lot of talent, skill, and money to make yourself sound cool. You don't really need that now. You can record yourself in your bedroom, post the mp3's on myspace and say, "Hey other musicians, let's play together," and "Hey bar owners, let me play at your bar, this is what I sound like, isn't it awesome?" Putting yourself out there doesn't get much easier than that, and it's a bit easier for people to forgive a weird musician than it is for them to forgive a weird... well, a weird just-about-any-other-kind-of-artist.

The bottom line:

Playing music requires a whole lot of preparation that nobody will see. If you get really ancy practicing exercises alone, it's probably not for you. But if you can practice exercises that don't sound particularly cool and feel good when you get better at them and think, "Maybe I'll be able to play a song soon," then keep at it.

If you want to be strictly a cover artist, you've got to be either technically really good or your covers have to be really unique and brand-able. Ie, "heavy metal songs played on the thumb piano."

If you want to write your own songs, I've got a good tip for you: VoiceSMS. I used to get ideas in my head, have no place to record them, and then lose them. I'd buy a tape recorder but forget to bring it along. I'd sit down at a computer and then the magic would be gone and I'd record something that sounded less awesome than it sounded in my head. If a song ever came out, it was because of a lucky combination of me getting the idea while having at least ten free minutes to spend alone with an instrument. But I've recently begun sending myself VoiceSMS messages. Most cell phones can do it. I highly recommend it.

WRITING POETRY/PROSE

What you used to have to do, and should be grateful you don't anymore:

Publishing - and, well, being read - used to be harder. There used to be less opportunities to self-publish in print and, well, there didn't used to be the internet.

The bottom line:

The advice to "put yourself out there on the internet" is widespread. That's because it's true. But I've noticed two big things that are easy for us beginning internet-writers to overlook.

One is that, on the internet, people are going to be a whole lot more interested in who you are as opposed to just your writing. Twitter is the most obvious example of this, but it's pretty much true about the whole internet. You can be the funniest, most clever, most insightful tweeter, but, 9 times out of 10 (ie unless you're Kelly Oxford), if people don't know you from something other than Twitter, you're not going to get a lot of followers. So, sometimes you've got to find something interesting about yourself other than your writing. (My version of that is that I'm attempting to live a non-yuppie, non-trustafarian life in New York City, but get the feeling that that's not nearly as interesting as I think it is.) I suppose writing was always this way, but internet literature is just even more this way than analog literature is.

Two is that, if you're not going to capitalize on something distinct about your personality, you've got to have something consistent in the subjects you write about. Ie you write mostly about movies, or mostly about your job, or something else along those lines. You need a spark to get you to keep writing and an "in," or a "brand," if you will, to hook people.

The whole bit about how you have to maintain your personal brand can be summed up by this: McDonald's needs a brand because there are millions of fast food joints (or were, rather, before McDonald's became so dominant), and people who write on the internet because there are millions of fast word joints (That's not just wordplay, I'm kind of serious. We are fast word joints.)

[I also want to add that I'm in a bit of a crisis about this kind of thing. I think that giving advice is what gets me going the most. But I didn't start the blog out that way at all. I started it out telling flowery stories, and it's hard to bring myself to do that anymore, and it's just plain weird.]

I actually feel really strongly about this stuff. I think that, if I had heard what I'm saying now years ago, I would've avoided years of feeling directionless and like I was writing in a claustrophobic bubble. Hell. I still feel like I'm in that bubble sometimes.

ACTING/IMPROV/STANDUP

What you used to have to do, and should be grateful you don't anymore:

The only thing about live acting performances that used to be harder was getting seen. As with movies, the ways to get your image out there are endless. But, sadly, that's just about the only thing that's better these days. It mostly used to be way more lucrative and popular.

The bottom line:

Live theatrical performance is, in some ways, one of the easiest pursuits to get into. It's hard in the sense that you can't really do it by yourself. Standup is technically a solo art, but you really can't do it without an audience, and it's much harder if you don't have friends who want to see you succeed.

In short, because it's such a social art, if you have a group of friends to play around with, you've got at least 55% of what it takes.

If you live in a major city, you'll probably be able to find theaters that also offer classes. Goodness. There's got to be a better name for them. They're an amazing invention. They give you an instant group of people to bond and mess around with, but they also give you a feeling of legitimacy and potential. There's something about being taught by someone who performs regularly and then seeing their shows and saying "hi" to them that makes you take these classes more seriously than you took your high school drama class... or even your college drama class, for that matter.

WRITING TV/FILM SCRIPTS

What you used to have to do, and should be grateful you don't anymore:

The answer here is pretty much the same answer as the last one. Ease of distribution is just about the only way it's improved.

The bottom line:

This is one of the most underrated of hobbies. It's a hard kind of writing because it's very mechanical. You don't really get to look back on it and say, "Man, I wrote a good script," in the same way that you do with prose and poetry. You get to look back on it and say, "Man, I wrote something that probably will be awesome if it gets performed," and, at best, "Man, that page has one line that's as good as a short poem."

But what's awesome about it is that, since it's about describing something that will happen rather than carefully crafting sentences, you can easily do it with friends. You can bounce ideas off of each other. You solve problems together. You figure out how to get from point A to point B and laugh at how good your ideas are.

It's like working at an advertising agency... except you don't have the burden of a multi-million dollar account, and, at the end of the night, you don't have to worry if the super-creative pharmaceutical ad you just came up with will lead hundreds of old people to buy a product whose side effects include not only addiction but chronic urinary tract infections.

The biggest drawback is that, when you go it alone, it can be even more frustrating than writing prose or poetry. If generating ideas is a party, then scriptwriting itself is taking the recyclable beer bottles from the party to your local supermarket... and then handing them over to some actors who are supposed to make them look cool.

And those are all the arts that I know about. I was going to make a section about painting and crafts, but I didn't get anywhere past one word. And that one word was "Etsy."

I also want to make a disclaimer that I do still believe in the value of actual talen. I just think that, especially with the declining quantity of paid gigs out there for the really talented creative folk, we've got to start taking hobbies more seriously and seeing "real art" as less of a distant, elevated thing.

Can anyone think of other easy-to-dabble-in arts that I left out? Has anyone been personally effected by the drastic changes in the creative professional world? Has anyone recently discovered any previously-untapped creative outlets?

Creativity.

2011-02-08T19:54:00.002-05:00

Creativity. Advertising agencies, visual artists, non-visual artists, MBA's, and countless others all make convincing arguments in the debate of "Who are the most interesting and creative people in the world?"

I grew up thinking that, if you wanted to be creative, your ideal destination was the film world.

I know others who grew up thinking that the idea destination was the graphic design world.

The advertising copy world.

The music-recording world.

The theater world.

Hell. They're all not that different. There were a few odd years in the 20th century whenwe had regimented industries that required years of mastering elite skills, but these days, there's no question about it: we're all on the same planet. We've got computers, and we're making those computers more powerful every moment, and it's flattening the playing field. (God damnit, I really don't want to sound like Tom Friedman, but it just makes so much sense in this context!) If you've got good ears, good eyes, and an imagination, the only thing stopping you from creating something is how good you are at learning new computer programs (and your ability to acquire said computer programs, many of which can easily be obtained illegally).

It's not that all it takes to be an artist is access to particular pieces of hardware and software. It's just that it's amazing how far just that hardware and software will get you.

The flattened creative world is old news. What's remarkable, though, is how many of us find ourselves with the minimum tools required to create... but don't do it. The second half of the 20th century, in a way, was the Golden Age of Media. If you had that creative urge, you'd choose an area, go to school for it, and have a ladder to climb. At the end of that ladder, you'd be seeing your words on paper, cutting pieces of film, or listening to a tape reel as it showed you, for the first time, how awesome your guitar sounded when recorded in a proper studio.

It's quite a thing to have been born before 1990. It's quite a trip to be raised by the old world and then land in the new one. Times are always changing, but I imagine it'll be a bit less of a mindfuck for my little sister, who will never have the experience of living in a college dorm without Youtube.

In that golden age, you could spend your whole life chasing rainbows and end it happy that you caught a great glimpse of one.

But in the new golden age, the rainbow's much easier to chase. It's not the age of Chasing Rainbows. It's an age where glimpses of rainbows are old news. It's an age where rainbows stare you in the face, and you've got to decide whether or not you want to go all the way with them.

This post was meant to be a list of creative pursuits you can engage in with minimal resources, and my guide to them. I got a bit carried away with the intro, but I've decided to just keep the intro as its own post.

So stay tuned. Next time you read this, I'll bring you a guide to rainbow chasing in 2011.

2011-01-21T13:31:00.000-05:00

I've been reading Adland by James Othmer.

I decided to read it because I wanted to work in advertising.

After reading it, I don't. I've concluded that it would have been a great career to fall into, as the author did. And, at that, it would have been a great career to fall into fifteen or more years ago.

But as a career for which you'd have to spend years just to get into the door, it's not as appealing to me.

Aside from making advertising look like a good career to fall into and then leave, the book contains some interesting thoughts on how the internet has changed the world.

We talk about this a lot, but Othmer says it in so many ways that it really got to me: the internet is changing how we interact. It's more obvious to advertisers. When an interative game and a forum brings more traffic and more customers than a one-way ad, the money talks. To a human being who's not trafficking in millions of dollars, perhaps it's not as clear.

Sure, it's obvious that we all could (and many of us do) stalk each other 24 hours a day on Facebook. Sure, that changes the way we interact. But it's more than that. It's changed the nature of conversations.

More specifically, it's made everything into a conversation.

More specifically, it's made it really weird to be a one-way writer. A one-way writer on the internet is obsolete.

I've been spending years writing in a 20th century manner.

This is a mind-blowing fact. Floodgates have been opened.

My first blog was a xanga. Remember xanga? Wasn't it cool back in 2004?

I used to look back on it and think, "I'm just writing for other people. This is not good writing."

But it's a blog. Of course it's not literature. It's a conversation.

I look out and see tons of blogs that are already conversations. Did any of you all have a moment when you realized that? Did any of you used to write one-way literature? Did you all have epiphanies when you realized that the Internet was just One Big Conversation, whether you want it to be one or not?

Enhanced Jobs and Every Which Way But Loose

2011-01-14T20:56:00.000-05:00

This week began with my discovery of an apartment that was not far from mine, not much more money (not cheap, though; when you're poor in New York City, the only thing that's cheap is having a personality), a hell of a lot nicer, and a whole lot less infested with critters.

After some stress, my landlord agreed to let me go with only the "penalty" of keeping my deposit. Since I gave her such short notice and it'd be a pain to sue her, I decided to let it go.

My apartments have not been documented enough lately. That will come later.

Anyway, that's how the week began. Not far into the week, I got sick.

My job is the kind of job where people show up even though they're sick because they don't get sick days and the pay is so low that missing a day means something.

After typing that sentence, I realized that, when you take into account Planet Earth, that description pretty much matches over 90% of all jobs.

After typing that sentence, I realized that the only reason I thought anything about sick days and the lack thereof was noticeable was because I still do occasionally meet people who talk to me as if it's all my fault that I don't get certain benefits from my workplace. As if I took the job only because I was too dumb to know that you're supposed to get sick days and health insurance.

If you get sick days and your friend doesn't, and you're thinking about how he should get a real job, remember that, corny as it sounds, his job is just as real as 90% of the jobs on earth.

The phrase "real job" should be replaced with the phrase "enhanced job."

That's what Labor Day celebrates. It celebrates the creation of Enhanced Jobs for people who were not born into the upper/non-working classes. Enhanced Jobs are great.

If America's path to becoming another Latin American country (that was not a racially-motivated comment, just an economy-related one) slows down at all, perhaps my proverbial kids will one day get an Enhanced Job.

Anyway, on the day that I finally decided I was so sick that I should stay home, I checked to see what Clint Eastwood movies were streaming for free on Netflix. I played one that I'd never seen before and I had a great cinematic experience that was everything I ever could have wanted:

Every Which Way but Loose left me with an unnaturally large smile and I'm convinced it lowered my fever. Clint Eastwood falls hard for a woman who leaves for Denver. He chases her to Denver, accompanied by his dorky friend Orville and his pet orangutan Clyde. At some point, he ends up with a huge motorcycle gang chasing him. In the end, after beating up hundreds of dudes, he finally meets his match, and then the girl rejects him and calls him a creep. In the end, Orville has a girl but all he has is Clyde. Somewhere in the mix it also finds room for a country-pop soundtrack featuring Eddie "Drivin' My Life Away" Rabbitt and for a supporting role played by Ruth "Harold & Maude" Gordon.

It's got the look of depressing existential seventies films and it's got the plot of one, too. But it chugs along with so much silliness that it's impossible to do anything but smile and giggle and guffaw at the lonely Americans onscreen.

It kind of makes you wonder why other movies about lonely Americans are so damn serious in the first place.

Minor revelations on a Friday in January

2011-01-07T18:28:00.001-05:00

If you have a website - ANY website - and you check the stats, you will always be amazed by how many people have visited your site. And, in a given month, about 682 of them will NOT leave comments.

Changing the design of a website with your content management system (Blogger, Wordpress, etc.) feels a bit like removing the outer core of a personal computer and discovering that all that's underneath it is an on-off switch.

Trying to teach yourself HTML for the first time in 2011 feels a bit like learning about all the little on-off switches inside the big one while knowing that you really only need the big one.

Harry S. Truman, an underrated president, said that it's a recession when it happens to your neighbor but it's a depression when it happens to you. When it comes to bed bugs, they pretty much don't exist at all unless you go to sleep at 11 and they wake you up at 1.

Andy Warhol said, "They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself." He's right, but most of that shit is still out of your control. Sometimes you look back on shit and say to yourself, "Man, I changed things," but then take a second look back and say to yourself, "Damn... time probably would have changed that anyway." It's kinda humbling.

If there is an omnipotent god, it periodically selects certain people and says, "This person is going to learn to appreciate the value of going home alone, even if it's a holiday, you're all jazzed out on Four Loko, and that person you were making out with was really hot." For that purpose, the god created STD scares.

There are probably other people who that god wants to go home with strangers forever.

Sometimes credit card debt is a thousand times better than the alternatives. Student loans are forgiven more easily by lenders, but, if lenders were motivated by more than the statistic that college grads tend to pay back loans more often than non-grads, they'd see that buying a bureau and presentable clothes to put in it is usually a way better investment than a class.

Here's a good quote by screenwriter Frank Pierson (which contains a meta-quote by Orson Welles):

A film set, as Orson Welles was first to say, is the most wonderful electric train a boy could ever be given. What he failed to add was that most of the time it doesn't work.

I think that in life, it's probably best to stick with train sets. It is possible to do better than train sets, sure. But not that much better.

The picture at the head is the model of Grand Central Station in the New York State Museum in Albany. When I was about six, I used to stare at it and imagine that the tunnels continued out beyond what I could see. Now, I walk through the real Grand Central Station every day. It would be nice to see it from the outside as a miniature model. In any case, the model in the museum is one of those things that doesn't stop being awesome, even if you're no longer six years old.

RIP Gerry Rafferty

2011-01-06T18:07:00.007-05:00

Jeff Lynne learned of John Lennon's death when he heard an unusually long marathon of Lennon songs on the radio and realized something must be up. Townes Van Zandt's son learned of his father's death in a similar manner.

But I learned of Gerry Rafferty's death in a more 21st century way: I logged into Twitter and saw his name under the trending topics, along with Huckleberry Finn and some Portuguese phrase that I don't remember.

Within a few hours, the TT would morph into "RIP Gerry Rafferty," but when I first saw his name, it required a bit of thought before I realized that he probably wasn't a big enough name that launching a new tour could get his name into the tabloids. I realized that he had probably died.

In the news story above, we don't see interviews with fans or any other 20th century methods of demonstrating somebody's fame. We see something more powerful- we see "RIP Gerry Rafferty" as a top trending topic on Twitter and we see thousands of fans on Facebook.

The true sign of the times is not that these images exist, but the fact that they are effective.

Another sign of the times was how not-alone I felt in mourning the death of a musician whose name is not very well-known among people under 40. I can count the number of Rafferty fans I know on one hand, but millions tweeted about him. In January 2009, when John Martyn died, I felt like I was the only one who knew at all. If I'd been on Twitter then, I probably would have seen at least a few hundred fellow mourners, even if he wasn't a TT.

I'd heard this song on the radio for years, but I got to like it in 2008.

It's quite an adult song. Or a burnt-out song, anyway. I guess I associate being burnt out with being an adult. I got into this song, and other melancholy yacht-rock hits of its ilk, during the first time in my life that I really felt like I had nothing to lose and was eager to do something new.

Funny enough, listening to "Baker Street" encouraged me to move to New York City, despite it being a city that, like Rafferty sings, "has got so many people but it's got no soul." But the song's not really about being in a city... it's about feeling stuck, which is something that seems to happen in cities more often than it does in other places.

The song is easy to associate with the smooth, sleek seventies, but it's actually quite an avant-garde song. No joke there. How many other songs have a verse-chorus structure in which the chorus is nothing but a saxophone riff?

And, sure, "Baker Street" has a familiar reverb-drenced production style that was used by just about every other pop star of the decade... But, really, how many other songs in the history of the world sound like "Baker Street" at all?

Listening to the album City to City only highlights that further. "Right Down the Line," which was the other big hit off the album, is also a quite unique song. It features wooden sticks in the percussion, the intro goes on for at least a measure longer than you expect it to, and the chord changes are refreshingly unpredictable. But it's still standard fare compared to "Baker Street," which is practically a genre unto itself.

After creating it, its creator moved into a big house in which he bought valuable bottles of wine and then smashed them in the stream in his backyard. And then, 33 years later, he died. It's tempting to call it tragic, but pathetic is the proper term.

What's more haunting than the personal decline that followed his professional masterpiece is the fact that, by 1980, nothing else he could have done would have even mattered to the public, and he must have known that.

I've tried to imagine what it must have been like to be him. To know that, not only would I not have to work for the rest of my life, but that nobody would care. That no new music I made could top what I made in 1978, and that no new investments would pay off or catch as much attention as the hit song that was generating me so many thousands in royalties.

And, to top that off- imagine getting a new windfall of royalties when a song you recorded at the age of 24 was used on the soundtrack of a movie by some weird American dude called Quentin Tarantino... and then, from that point on, your voice became associated in people's minds with aural mutilation!

I'd like to think that, if I were Rafferty, I'd have run for president or donated my money for failing public schools. But I wouldn't know. I can't conceive of having that much money, nor can I conceive of having the kind of messed-up mind that would be capable of producing "Baker Street."

And you know what? The pathetic quality of his life and death only makes me want to listen to "Baker Street" a thousand more times.

Hello blogosphere, my old friend. I've come to be part of you again.

2010-12-17T14:38:00.007-05:00

Hello blogosphere, my old friend. I've come to be part of you again.

Have you forgotten who I am? No problem. I'm someone new.

I've gotten to like microblogging better than actual blogging. If you're reading this, follow Twitter.com/Bennytheshoe. Click that link or click on the left side of the page, if you're reading this on my site. I update that a whole lot more.

I used to hate brevity. Now I love it. I'm not sure if it's a real love affair or if it's a phase, like the person you'd cling to during an identity crisis.

I also used to hate jokes. For almost ten years of my life, I avoided comedy with obvious jokes and punchlines. That means no Woody Allen.

And a begrudging relationship with Mitch Hedberg, who I laughed at but wanted so badly to not laugh at.

In any case, I don't think brevity and jokes ever really hurt anyone, and they both make me pretty comfortable.

Surrendering to my love for jokes was like getting dumped by the person you cling to during an identity crisis. It was awesome.

2010-12-01T13:17:00.002-05:00

This Thanksgiving, I started to feel like I really identified with the climax of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Dave grows into a baby.

I first saw the movie when I was 12. It moved me in a way that I couldn't express. I felt like I got it without having much to say about it. This fact lead many people to tell me not to smoke weed, because, if I liked 2001 without it, my brain was already there.

I watched it at a midnight showing with my cousin in 2009. After the movie ended, I confessed to him that, even though I loved the movie in the past, I really couldn't say much about why, except that it looked and sounded cool and gives off the impression that it's full of meaning.

My cousin had a simple explanation and it was the kind of short but all-encompassing idea that my love of neverending theories had prevented me from ever coming up with. His explanation went something like this: All the space exploration business is about human progress, and when the guy turns into a baby, it's saying that we don't need to keep trying to make progress, we can just go in circles and that's fine.

So far, I've agreed with him that that's pretty much all there is to it.

My 86-year-old grandma is in a new phase of her life. She talks less than she used to. She seems incapable of hostility of any kind. She needs help getting dressed.

She used to argue. She used to make cheesecake and cheesebread that are more delicious and mind-blowing than any other cheesecakes and cheesebreads. She used to lecture. She used to be really adept at using computers.

When I was a teenager and she was in her seventies, she hit on Liam Neeson while asking him for his autograph. I don't remember what her exact words were, but I remember that his response was, "Ah, you don't look a bit past fifty."

I always thought that, when she became the way she is now, I'd feel like she was gone. Like she was regressing into childhood, or another one those things you hear people say about old people. But I don't feel that.

While I played the piano at my parents' house, my grandma stood in the corner and listened. When I was done playing John Fahey's "India-Pacific RR Blues," she said, "That sounds like an Italian wedding. And somebody said "Oh, maybe I don't!" Some years ago, she would have expressed that idea in a totally different way. I, in my 26-year-old body, would have expressed that idea in a totally different way. But not a better way. A less poetic one, maybe.

Sure, she's losing parts of her that, in my mind, make her who she is. But haven't we all lost parts of who we are? Hell, my grandma's seen me lose parts of who I was. She remembers when my cousin and I were too young to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey together. She remembers when I used to have drooling contests with him. He'd be silent, but I'd occasionally say, "Water comes out." I've lost the things that made me who I was then. So who am I to say an old person's not themselves anymore?

Sometimes blogging is hard...

2010-11-24T21:37:00.000-05:00

When you have a job where you sit at a computer all day.

I feel like I'm simultaneously plugged in to the social web and disconnected from the offline social universe.

Sometimes the only way I can escape is to disable gchat, log out of email, log out of all social media sites, and write something that is not meant for immediate web-consumption, read something that I tend to absorb and don't intend to comment on, and say something inane to another human being in the office.

Then I feel better.

Tunesome Thursday: May You Never

2010-11-05T21:17:00.001-04:00

If there was a phrase as alliterative as "Tunesome Thursday" that included "Friday," perhaps I'd change the name of this feature.

But for now, I give you a Tunesome Thursday on a Friday.

Sometimes you just want to chill.

Sometimes you want to listen to some chill-out music.

No, not the electronic kind.

The really chill kind.

The kind with sweet- yet gruff - male voices.

You think back to the chill-out music you used to listen to on the FM radio back in '04. Names come to mind- and they've all got J's. Jack Johnson. John Mayer. Jason Mraz.

Sometimes it's so hard to not have fond memories of that music. Just like it's so hard to not have fond memories of the first person you made out with- I mean, really made-the-fuck-out-with. You've got those fond memories. But you don't have much to back them up with.

The smooth music makes you think of candy. You think of an F. Scott quote:

Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.... I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

You realize that the quote is slightly less relevant than you had thought, and that, for F. Scott, the candy does not represent innocence. It represents the thing that takes your innocence away. How interesting.

In any case, like F. Scott, you don't want to be in the state you were in before you ate the candy. But you don't want the pleasure of losing it again, either. You want something else...

You want sweet male vocals but not high fructose sweet. You want sweet that acknowledges the loss of innocence. You wonder if another John out there can meet your needs.

You wonder if there is a John out there who will refrain from lying to you that all you need to feel good is a little bit of rum on a beach or that your body is a wonderland...

You want a John who doesn't give you the lingering feeling that he's sneaking it all in to get you to take your top off. You want a John who, if he does want to get you to take your top off, would at least be honest about it and wouldn't care if you didn't.

You want a John who knows the world is not sweet, but decides to sing about it as if it is.

You want John Martyn.

Forget tropical beaches and wonderful bodies. If you never stab someone in the back, get into a barroom fight, or lose your woman overnight, you'll be a happy man.

You realize that the gender of the "you" in this post has changed several times. You wonder if the author knew what he was doing. Let me tell you: he did.

A History of Voting

2010-11-03T14:04:00.002-04:00

Voting is one thing that you can't do without making a decisive statement to the powers that be.

When you don't vote, you make the statement that you want whoever has the most votes to win.

When you don't vote and let people know that you don't vote, you make the loudest statement of all: that you want whoever has the most votes to win, and you want everyone around you to know that you don't care who that person will be.

My earliest recollection of voting is from 1988. The memory consists of vague images and details filled in for me by adults. I remember that the big machines were cool and that it was cool when my mom (or was it my dad?) picked up me up and let me pull the levers. My parents voted for Dukakis but, in my preschool mock election, I voted for Big Bush. Why? Because, in the picture they showed me at preschool, Big Bush had glasses. I was three years old. If I'd seen a picture of him without glasses, I might been a little bit more conflicted, but I still might not have liked Dukakis due to his comparative lack of resemblance to my dad.

I wonder if the rest of the country had a more sophisticated thought process than my three-year-old self did.

[The only picture I found of Bush I with glasses. Don't know where the bespectacled portrait I saw at preschool came from.]

[Michael Dukakis]

[My dad.]

The first election I voted in was in 2004. It was the re-election of Little Bush. What I remember more strongly about it was that it was the election of David Soares for Albany County DA. I remember that because I canvassed for him.

[David Soares]

I canvassed for him because the guy he was running against, Paul Clyne was one of the bratty cool kids of Albany County- he lived in the perfect suburb of Bethlehem, didn't give a fuck about the crime and grime in the neighborhood where I grew up, and was a full-blown member of the city's Democratic machine.

I also canvassed for Soares because he lobbied for reform of New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws.

Albany is the only other city in the USA besides Chicago where the political system is regularly referred to by scholars as a machine (and without even an ounce of humor). You can feel it more in Albany than in Chicago, though, because Albany is about 1/90 the size of Chicago. If you live in Albany, chances are you're friends with someone who doesn't have to pay parking tickets or follow the speed limit or refrain from punching and groping people when they get drunk.

As a result, Albany elections are exciting and tense when there is potential for new blood. Imagine growing up in Soviet Russia and then finding out that, for the first time in your life, you can vote for more than one person. That's how it felt when David Soares ran for DA. And he won!

This election was also the first time I discovered that I could feel (and actually be) progressive just by voting for candidates on the Working Families Party line. It's pretty awesome.

As for the Big Election - the one in which Little Bush defeated Kerry - I have minimal strong memories. I recall standing inside that booth and feeling a strange rush at how much power I had. I'd never voted in a national or even state election until that moment. I pulled the lever (they still had the levers in 2004, and it was awesome) and then I felt a thrilling rush as I realized that I could retract that lever and vote for Bush and nobody would find out. Earlier that year, I had taken my cousins and my brother for a hell of a ride in the Adirondacks. I had sped recklessly through an abandoned quarry in a 1989 Volvo. The way I felt when I realized nobody would find out who I voted for was very similar. I voted for Ralph Nader and didn't feel guilty when Kerry lost. He won New York, anyway. I was just surprised to find that I was "one of those people" who felt rebellious while standing in the voting booth.

I can best describe the way I felt after that fight with two words: "free" and "ambivalent." When I was 19, it wasn't usual for me to feel those things.

The next election I voted in was the 2006 NYS gubernatorial election. I don't remember a thing other than that I probably voted for Eliot on the Working Families line. Any other memory I have of voting for him has been overshadowed by this:

When I learned of Eliot's resignation, I was standing in front of the Great Pyramid.

In 2008, I voted for Obama. It was the first time I voted outside of Albany. I voted at the Doris Cohen School in Kensington, Brooklyn.

I remember feeling relieved when Obama won. I remember getting a heartwarming text saying, "We did it," from a friend of mine. I can't say exactly why it was as heartwarming as it was, but I think it had something to do with the fact that my friend is Iraqi and I'm more-or-less a Progressive Zionist and both of us were very poor at the time.

I was also unemployed, uninsured, sick living on a couch at the time, racking up thousands in credit card debt and desperately seeking a way to remain living in Brooklyn. That was sobering. I didn't hold it against Obama, or even Bush, that I was in that particular situation. It was just that the epic political victory wasn't as festive as it might have been.

In 2010, I was disappointed and flummoxed by the new ballots. I'd always liked the NY voting machines. Something about the old analog machines felt official and almost holy. Maybe it reminded me of taking the Torah out of the ark. Maybe it's just the weird kind of pride that I feel when I see old things that don't need to be fixed. In any case, paper ballots seem primitive, undignified and just silly to me. But that's how I had to vote this year.

Old NYS voting booths.

A Torah ark.

I filled out my vote for Cuomo on the Working Families Party line. And I could only vote in pen. "Fuck!" I thought. I'd been thinking about voting for the Green Party candidate. I didn't know if I was allowed to request a new ballot or if I cared enough about who I voted for for it to be worth it or if I'd still make it to work on time, so I handed it in with my vote for Cuomo.

The private booths we got to fill out our ballots in were still kind of cool. They seemed a little bit like Torah arks even if they weren't as cool as the old ones.

Tunesome Thursday: Vintage foreign music videos on Youtube

2010-10-29T20:21:00.005-04:00

Fact: foreign pop stars of decades past hold a special place in some people's hearts.

Maybe it's because hearing X country's "answer to the Beatles" is a bit like hearing the Beatles for the first time, which, for many people, is a bit like becoming a pre-teen again.

Maybe it's because of the innocent sound that a lot of older music seems to have, and hearing that sound in a foreign language makes it sound even more innocent.

Maybe it's just the mind-expanding combination of the familiar (but still heady) trappings of psychedelic rock with unfamiliar cultures.

Only ten years ago, vintage foreign-language pop music was known only by record-store owners and movies directed by the kind of person who hangs out in record stores (Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson).

The internet has changed that just like it's changed most things. You can download audio rips of rare records and you can watch obscure videos of obscure artists.

Youtube has done many things for humanity. They say it has been the democratic leveller of talent and knowledge. That's debatable. But the following is not debatable: Youtube has opened the world to a wealth of kitschy and awesome foreign music videos from decades past.

And here are some of the best:

Michel Polnareff - La Poupee Qui Fait Non

This has got to be one of the catchiest songs of the 20th century. Whether or not you speak French is not relevant. If you speak French, though (or paste the lyrics into Babelfish), you'll discover that, in the song, Polnareff refers to a girl as a doll who says, "No, no no," andhe would do anything just to hear her say, "Yes." The minimal Bohemian decor of his apartment and the deteriorated black-and-white film add extra nostalgia value to an already vintage song.

Raul Seixas - Gita

Raul Seixas (pronounced something like "Ha-oow Say-shas") doesn't have the exotic Afro-Brazilian quality that non-Brazilians tend to look for in Brazilian music. Aside from the Portuguese language, there's nothing Brazilian-sounding about his music, which sounds more Rocky Horror Picture Show than Tropicalia.

In this song, he sings lyrics (written by Paulo Coelho!) about all of the metaphysical things he is, concluding with "I am, I was, I will be" as he floats in front of classic works of art.

Vintage song, vintage beard, vintage special effects. Sometimes there's not much more to life than that.

Los Brincos - Amiga Mia

If you do a search for "the Spanish Beatles," you'll likely come up with Los Brincos. That's how this blogger found them. If you, like this blogger, have ever thought to yourself, "I know what French '60s rock sounded like and what British '60s rock sounded like, but it's really bothering me that I don't know what Spanish '60s rock sounded like," or "I wonder what Spanish fashions looked like under Franco's dictatorship," then Los Brincos will be a goldmine of satisfaction.

The answer to those queries is that Spanish '60s rock was pretty good, too, and that, despite being isolated by fascists, Spanish fashions of the era looked a lot like everybody else's.

The fashion's not much of a surprise. It almost never is. What is a surprise, though, is that the set of this variety show looks like the USS Enterprise.

Another contender for the title of "the Spanish Beatles" is the frustratingly (for Americans) named Los Angeles.

Gilberto Gil & Os Mutantes - Domingo no Parque

No, two Brazilian videos on this list is not redundant.

This video, from a few years before Raul, is vintage tropicalia, featuring two of the movement/genre's biggest stars in an odd setting: Os Mutantes look like medieval pages and Gilberto Gil performs in front of an orchestra with one foot on a stool. Brazil's '60s icons left a bit less vintage footage behind than their American and European counterparts, which makes this one extra notable. The outdated hard cuts and tight closeups only add to this video's quality as an artifact.

Kaveret- Hamakolet

Even if you don't understand the Hebrew, the introductory skit to the song is pretty trippy and funny. It's something about a guy who never sees the girl he had a crush on as a kid because the local supermarket shut down. At some point, he has a hallucination/dream involving an old prophet.

The vintage feeling in this video, like many things Israeli, has a tragic element to it. It's not only a nostalgia for a great era in music but a nostalgia for Israel before the 1973 war and before the state was embroiled in a self-destructive occupation. It's the kind of nostalgia that can make a Jew mourn while simultaneously nodding in pride.

***

This is only the top of the barrel. Foreign music video lovers, show yourselves! What are your favorites?

A Guide to Famously Obscure Musicians, revisited

2010-10-26T10:57:00.005-04:00

This is almost the same post that appeared 9 months ago. I suppose that version is the messy conception and this is the birth.

1. BERT JANSCH

Personal background: Born into a lower-middle-class family in Edinburgh. For a good part of the '60s, he lived in various friends' living rooms. Gained considerable success as solo guitarist and also as a member of the folk/jazz supergroup The Pentangle. Made a brief foray into American-style country-rock in the 1970s. His last album of new material was The Black Swan, which featured Beth Orton, Devendra Banhart, and other young folk-rock stars, and was released by Drag City records in 2006.

Most famous name-droppers: Jimmy Page is perhaps the most famous Jansch fan, and one of the earliest to jump on the bandwagon. Jimmy Page was, as Homer Simpson says, "the greatest thief of American black music who ever walked the earth," and he may be the greatest thief of white British music as well. His famous instrumental "Black Mountain Side" sounds is nearly identical to Jansch's arrangement of the English folk song "Blackwaterside."

[Jansch came up with this about 4 years before Zeppelin I. Video taken by the author. Listen for an ironic "so intimate" shouted by a bona fide Philadelphia hipster around the 3:55 mark.]

Neil Young is another famous Jansch name-dropper. If you're a Neil Young fan, Jansch is definitely worth a listen. Jansch's influence on Neil Young is a lot more subtle than his influence on Page. Page copied Jansch, but Neil just learned a lot from him, and Jansch definitely played a role in the development of Neil's pretty distinct style.

Donovan, Bernard Butler, Johnny Marr, Vetiver, Devendra Banhart, and even Elton John also name-drop him like it's their job.

Obscurity level: Very obscure. Many music snobs and hipsters don't even pretend to have heard him- that's how obscure he is. Several of his songs featured heavily on the soundtrack to Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, which has gained him a few new fans, but he remains, for the most part, a "musician's musician."

You'll like him if: You have a soft spot for the acoustic songs on the classic Led Zeppelin albums. You like Devendra Banhart's guitar-playing. You'd like to hear the transatlantic roots of Neil Young's fingerpicking style. You could get down with a gruffer and deeper-voiced version of Nick Drake.

Hip factor: Slightly hip, though he's certainly hip enough to have a genial Twitter account (@bert_jansch). His songs aren't easy to sing a long to but he's also not weird enough to attract the kind of attention that many other "outsider" musicians attract. His signature outfit is a button-down shirt and khakis. (I think that's totally hip, but I haven't yet found hipsters who agree with me. Eventually they'll pick up on it and by then I'll probably have moved on to another minimal outfit.) It doesn't help his case that his most famous album (which is the only one many people get to hear) is not his best, and that some of his best work was out of print for three decades.

2. LOU REED/THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

Personal background: Brooklyn Jew rock n' roll married to experimental minimalist music and appropriated by Andy Warhol's scene. Lou Reed had a slightly more successful solo career after the breakup of The Velvet Underground. His most popular album was Transformer, which was produced by David Bowie and featured Lou's only major hit single, "Walk on the Wild Side."

Most famous name-droppers: Brian Eno said that "not many people bought the Velvet Underground's records, but everyone who did started a band." The "everyone" referred to by Eno includes not only Eno himself but also David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Jonathan Richman and David Byrne. Take away those guys and there would probably have been no New Wave. I've tried to imagine how English-language rock would have turned out without the VU. I can't.

Obscurity: Not very obscure. It's not that the average person is familiar with them. It's just that, when a person decides to get into overlooked American bands of the rock era, the Velvet Underground are often the first one they come across.

Worth listening to if: You like old rock n' roll but you'd like the guitars to be a little more dissonant and you'd like the lyrics to be a little more self-conscious and perverse. Or if you'd like to hear a less nasally Julian Casablancas.

Hip factor: Super hip. In addition to all the stuff I've already said about Lou, he has a mysterious past, a mysterious sexuality, and awesome sunglasses. Plus, the Velvet Underground played at Andy Warhol's Factory. Why that makes them cool should be self-explanatory.

3. NICK DRAKE

Personal background: Born into an upper-class English family. He suffered from social anxiety and depression for his entire life. Recorded three albums of pastoral folk. Died of an antidepressant overdose in 1974 at the age of 26.

From the cover of Made to Love Magic.

Most famous name-droppers: Even before his 21st century "resurrection," he was name-dropped by the likes of Elton John and REM in interviews. Dream Academy's hit "Life in a Northern Town" is vaguely about Nick Drake's life. But much of his recognition comes from his songs' appearances in film and television rather than from name-drops by other musicians.

Obscurity level: Not very obscure. Since the famous Volkswagen commercial of 2000 and his subsequent appearances on the Royal Tenenbaums and Garden State soundtracks, Nick Drake has gained a cult following. Many people my age will say, "I like old folk music- you know, like Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake." To those who know him, it's easy to forget that many people don't.

You'll like him if: You like any sort of peaceful or lethargic music- especially the acoustic variety. When it comes to peaceful, lethargic acoustic guitar music, he blows most people out of the water.

Hip factor: Nick Drake's hipness is an odd kind of hipness. Nick Drake the legend is a good-looking man who made great music and left a beautiful corpse. Nick Drake the legend is in beautiful corpse-heaven along with Morrison, Hendrix, and Cobain. But, according to producer and long-time Drake champion Joe Boyd, the real Nick Drake's tragedy wasn't that he was self-destructive as much as that he held back too much. No video of him exists of him performing, so all that's left is beautiful music and beautiful still photographs. Nearly 40 years after his death, Nick Drake, via photos and music, continues to hold a certain aura of mysterious yet sensitive cool that not many other musicians do.

This unusual and sparse documentary made for Dutch TV (English-language, though) manages to build up the legend while demystifying him at the same time.

4. GRAM PARSONS

Personal background: Born into a wealthy alcoholic southern family. Joined the Byrds. With his help, the Byrds spun off into the Flying Burrito Brothers. Hung out with the Rolling Stones. Proclaimed that his goal was to create "Cosmic American Music." Died at the age of 27 after a long bender in a hotel in the Joshua Tree Desert. The legend usually goes that he was a nice country boy who couldn't handle the rock n' roll lifestyle. The legendary story of his corpse is completely true and was turned into a movie starring Johnny Knoxville.

Most famous name-droppers: The Rolling Stones are probably his most famous name-droppers, but Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, Ryan Adams, Wilco, and others regularly speak his name.

Obscurity level: Moderately obscure. For years, I never met anyone else who knew who he was, but I've recently concluded that he is to country-rock fans what Lou Reed is to punk/new-wave fans. It's just that there are more punk/new-wave fans than there are country-rock fans in the New York area. In other words, many people don't know about him, but when you start delving into overlooked country musicians, he's one of the first who pops up.

You'll like him if: You like classic rock and classic country. You have ever enjoyed the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers or Exile on Main Street. You like Hank Williams but wouldn't mind it if he were a lot louder and had electric guitars. You like the Eagles but sometimes wish they were a little bit less smooth.

Hip factor: Hip. Gram is gritty and mystical enough to be both the Lou Reed and the Jim Morrison of Americana.

5. TIM BUCKLEY

Personal background: Tim Buckley and Jeff Buckley. Father and son. Tim was a haunting blip on the musical radar during his lifetime. Jeff was a bonafide cult star. Tim died at 28 of a heroin overdose. Jeff died at 30 in a swimming accident. His son's brief and mysterious career makes Tim's equally brief life seem even more enigmatic.

Most famous name-droppers: Tim Buckley doesn't get name-dropped so much the way others on this list do, but still, many have heard of him. Most discover him by the way of Jeff, who, funny enough, frequently claimed that his father was NOT an influence. Other than that, Radiohead have covered a few of his tunes, but that has not lead to a widespread revival, and This Mortal Coil had a minor hit with a cover of his "Song to the Siren." (That version was featured heavily on the soundtrack to Lost Highway.)

Obscurity level: Very obscure. Within the significant subset of the population that are Jeff Buckley, all know who Tim is, but less know his music.

You'll like him if: You like Jeff Buckley. Both were blessed with otherworldly singing voices. Genre-wise, Tim covered a lot of territory. If you're a fan of baroque folk, listen to his first two albums. If you're a fan of Van Morrison, listen to his middle-period albums. If you like experimental, adventurous rock music without self-consciousness, listen to his later albums Starsailor and Lorca, which would make Animal Collective cower in shame at their timidity, and would make Radiohead and Grizzly Bear bow in humility. If you're into '70s sleaze, check out Greetings from LA, which makes most other sleazy music of the '70s sound chaste in comparison.

Hip factor: Moderate. His music is cool and surprising and all kinds of good things, but he'll probably remain as obscure as he is today until he makes a notable appearance on a Wes Anderson soundtrack. (Notice that I said until, not if. That's because his music is exactly the type that would end up in a WA movie.)

6. OS MUTANTES

Personal background: Os Mutantes (Portuguese for "The Mutants" and, contrary to popular belief, pronounced something like "Ooz Mootantees") were formed in Sao Paulo in the mid-'60s by brothers Sergio and Arnaldo Baptista and their friend Rita Lee. They are famous for building guitar pedals out of household electronics, using aerosol cans as percussion instruments, and being hounded by Brazil's military government during the late '60s. Outside of Brazil, they are probably the most famous proponents of Brazil's Tropicalist movement in art and music. In the '70s, Sergio transformed them into a more standard prog-rock band. In 2006, Sergio and Arnaldo reunited (without Rita) and toured the world, finding more success than they ever did in the '60s.

Most famous name-droppers: Kurt Cobain tried to secure Os Mutantes as an opening act when Nirvana toured Brazil, but the reunion never materialized. Beck, David Byrne, Of Montreal and Devendra Banhart worship the group and have spent the last decade doing their best to make sure that the rest of the world does, too.

Obscurity level: Moderately obscure. Their name is nearly as well-known as that of the Velvet Underground but they are not nearly as listened-to as their more famous American counterparts. Like Nick Drake, their exposure has dramatically increased since one of their songs was featured on an American TV commercial (in Os Mutantes' case, it was McDonalds).

You'll like them if: You are a musical backpacker who enjoys adding exotic foreign bands to your listener's repertoire. Or if you like psychedelic rock in general. Os Mutantes covered pretty much the entire psychedelia spectrum from garagey and lo-fi to hi-fi and hard-rocking, so all of your psychedelic rock n' roll needs can be met.

Hip factor: Hip. If someone hasn't heard them, they've very likely still heard of them. The band fills venues throughout North American and Europe over 30 years after their heyday. Their foreign exoticness also endears them to many an English-speaking fan.

Things an amateur has learned about blogging

2010-10-20T21:18:00.010-04:00

I have a blog with under 30 official followers. According to Blogger stats, the vast majority are other Americans, but there are a few stragglers in Canada, the UK, Spain, and Russia. That's OK with me.

Anyway, this post is exactly what the title says. It's a list of things that I - an amateur - have learned about blogging:

1) People who are looking for partners-in-venting will listen to all the little details of your life because it means you will listen back. That is one way to gain followers.

2) It's usually more interesting to get an idea of what it's actually like inside somebody's head than it is to read what they want to unload out of their head. In other words, many readers don't just want partners-in-venting.

3) It's more interesting, healthy, and all kinds of good things to write about your personal life through the lens of some other interest of yours than it is to look at yourself in the mirror and write about it. Maybe your lens is pop culture. Maybe it's travel. Whatever it is, lenses are better than mirrors.

4) Keep a private handwritten diary. It helps you to tell the difference between the things you just need to work out in writing and the things that are really worth sharing.

5) On the subject of venting: remember that pain is meant to be shared, not dumped on to somebody else. As a famous communication theorist whose name I can't recall once said, "The internet is for conversing, not announcing." (It might be Robert Bacal or Jay Rosen. It also might have just been some dude.)

6) Lists! Lists! Lists! According to Blogger's stats, my most frequently read posts are the ones that contain lists of some sort. Aside from that, lists help you organize your thoughts. Lists are harder to write than rants, but they are usually more satisfying. The insides of most of our heads are also actually far more organizable than we think.

7) It's tough to change horses in midstream. In other words, it's easier to start a whole new blog than it is to reconceptualize the one you have.

8) A blog based around yourself is harder to keep up than you'd think. It's hard to maintain your own interest in yourself. We all contain more multitudes than we'd ever imagine. That's why blogs that are themed around ourselves as individuals often result in a whole lot of "So, I haven't updated in a while, let's see what I have to talk about..."

9) Blogging is like standup comedy in the sense that it's best if you know which genre you fit into. As far as I can tell, the biggest distinction in standup comedy is between observational comedy and persona-based comedy. The very same genres may apply to blogging. I can't tell yet. In any case, the best blogs, like the best comedians, can usually be described in one sentence- a strange, headscratch-inducing sentence, but one sentence nonetheless.

Tunesome Thursday: Ariel Pink + getting into new music

2010-10-14T16:08:00.000-04:00

Sometimes you think to yourself, "Oh yeah, I guess there is new music out there."

Usually, that thought is followed by a discovery of a new artist who sounds old.

Sometimes, you get excited because you think you've finally gotten to like someone who sounds new.

That was the case with Ariel Pink.

After several listens, you realize that he does sound old. Just not the type of old you're used to. You're used to old psychedelic folk-rock. Ariel Pink doesn't sound like that. You listen to him as you walk to work and you can't put your finger on what the hell he sounds like. Then you listen to him at night and it hits you: He sounds like '80s goth music. You wikipedia him, and, sure enough, you discover that he lists Bauhaus and The Cure as some of his biggest influences.

You're glad that a guy from California with a sunny name like Ariel Pink has the drive to create this austere music.

His music makes you think of bright colors. You wonder if that is because his name is a bright color or if that is because of the occasional bright spots... such as the smooth Rhodes-type keyboard in "Round and Round."

You think to yourself that "Round and Round," doesn't sound so distinctly New Wave the way his other stuff does. You realize that, in addition to making you think of New Wave, it reminds you of 10cc.

You begin thinking a bit taxonomically about the differences between 10cc and Ariel Pink. It overwhelms you and you decide that, if you are ever going to think that taxonomically again, it will be because you have decided to have a career as a librarian or a geneticist.

You think about how there's really nothing new and you stop trying to come up with fantastical descriptions of music that make it sound as if it sounds like nothing that was ever created before.

You wonder if you'll come up with something interesting to say about Ariel and why you like him, instead of just using him as a launchpad to talk about music in general.

You have the feeling that his music could play an important role in your life in the future. It has a certain x-factor that makes you think that.

You have a very specific taste in music.

My alma mater, SUNY Albany: not only Fountain Day-famous, but now Stanley Fish-famous

2010-10-13T23:51:00.003-04:00

My alma mater once made headlines (or at least minor links that received lots of hits) for its reputation as America's Number One Party School. Today, it is in the news again. And not just in a little human interest blurb. It's in an opinion piece in the NY Times by Stanley Fish entitled, "The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives." And, sure enough, SUNY Albany is the site of that crisis.

Fish talks of how SUNYA's president (this president wasn't around when I was, so I have nothing funny to say about him) cried "crocodile tears" over the situation and said that there was nothing he could do about cuts to the language and theater departments. And on the subject of administrators, Fish concludes that, "It’s not their job to value the humanities or even to understand them. But it is the job of presidents and chancellors to proclaim the value of liberal arts education loudly and often and at least try to make the powers that be understand what is being lost when traditions of culture and art that have been vital for hundreds and even thousands of years disappear from the academic scene."

It's interesting when something you used to be a part of gets held up as a model situation. As a "lesson for all." A warning sign. I'm sure SUNYA is all of those things, but I can't help but think the following thoughts:

1) SUNYA actually offered a surprisingly large quantity of languages considering the relative lack of interest by the student body, but it had very few actual classes. From what I remember, it consisted of only introductory and intermediate-level classes in all languages but Spanish, French, and German. Most students were not that interested. I remember there being a lot of, "Hmm, I'm Jewish, so I'll take Hebrew to fulfill my one language requirement," "I like anime, so I'll take Japanese 1... oh shit, that class is hard, never mind." Meager course offerings correlated with students' mild interests. More-interested foreign language students either gave up or transferred to a school that had what they wanted.

2) The theater department propagated a very confused image of itself. It chose high-minded plays such as Pinter's The Birthday Party and Stoppard's Arcadia (which appealed to about 5% of the student body) while allowing any student to progress through their acting track (all you had to do to get to Acting 3 was pass Acting 2, and everyone passed). It didn't reach out to students but it also failed to cultivate an aura of prestige or even a mild aura of exclusivity. It always seemed like the way to get into the club was not by associating with the right people but by merely sticking around.

It also suffered from what I think is a common small-town ailment- the sense that art is both necessarily abstruse (I just learned what that word means, and it's even more useful than I thought) and easy enough that anyone can do it.

There also were no musicals whatsoever in the department. It's bizarre. Most theater departments become lame because they're too popularity-minded and unimaginative to do anything but musicals. SUNYA's department didn't even make it to that point. Come to think of it, I don't even know its strictly non-musical repertoire managed to draw students and audiences for as long as it did.

I feel a tiny bit sad looking at myself from a distance as I type these things. A few years ago, I would have denied that I went to a low-brow university, or that The Birthday Party and Arcadia were even esoteric.* These days, I can barely tolerate Pinter and I associate Stoppard (in a good way) with being a student. Reality checks are ultimately good for you, but they're still a little sad.

3) Students who care the most about the humanities find other schools to go to. Sensitive and/or quirky types who can't shell out for sensitive/quirky liberal arts colleges have SUNY New Paltz, Geneseo, and Purchase. In the past, some of these students went to Albany and regretted it. When that type of student looks at Albany today, they'll have a better idea of what kind of school it is at heart: one that is not unwelcoming to humanities-types, but makes it clear to them that they are on the fringe.

I myself am not that bothered by my alma mater's historic cuts, but I hope that Stanley Fish will use his enthusiasm to lobby for other universities to keep their theater or language departments. SUNY Albany's humanities programs did not do much for me when I was a student, but I hope that their well-publicized demise will end up being a good thing for humanities students of the future.

*Come to think of it, ca. 2005, I didn't even know what esoteric meant. I was a member of a curious breed of student, somewhere between the half-engaged type who has one foot in reality as he bullshits his way through school and the truly educated type who is aware of but undaunted by how little he fits in with the majority of the population. I was the type of student who never decided whether he wanted to use school avoid reality or to better confront it.

some minor thoughts on David Lynch

2010-10-08T17:01:00.000-04:00

I emerge from hibernation with this short post that I think contains an important idea. I was inspired by some posts I found message board. They've gotten me thinking a whole lot about the nature of art.

Said message board is here. It's about David Lynch. I don't remember what inspired me to do searches for "David Lynch and sexuality" and "David Lynch and feminism" but it had something to do with me thinking about how many years I'd been treated to David Lynch's aggressively horny consciousness.

Anyway, these are the sentences that caught my attention.

For all of their alleged sophistication, they are actually geeky and kinda provincial... Lynch seems to have never gotten over the fact that seemingly normal people engage in some rather abnormal things.

Bogdonavich's "The Last Picture Show" is a far more "grown up" and sophisticated take on this basic fact of life.

Thanks...much of his work seems to spring from the mind of a 12 year old who has just... found porn magazines in the woods. And will never get over it.

Many people who make "shocking" art... are coming from a place of naivete or provincialism.

The authors of the posts are known as "Mitchum" and "Jade Fox." I looked to see if they had any blogs to link to, but I couldn't find any.

I still think that Blue Velvet is fun. But it's mainly a nostalgic thing. It reminds me of the way I felt when I first discovered that I could look for porn on the internet and my parents' wouldn't find out. I was about 14.

That's the interesting thing. Lynch doesn't make me feel like a man. He makes me feel like a little boy, shocked and awed by the depravity but grateful to see the tits.

Goodness. When you put it that way... being a man really, really is better.

For a long time, I'd forgotten that there was anything more to us than who we date, which drugs we take, or what we do with ourselves all day. But there is.

2010-09-28T22:27:00.001-04:00

Have you ever stumbled upon something that had retreated to the back of your mind and welcomed it back into your life like it was a lost pet?

I found two lost pets this week. The first was a website that I found by googling my own name. I'd completely forgotten about it. Journalist Jeremy Herb, who at the time was attending grad school at Columbia, found me in a Facebook group called "Irish Jews, Irish People and Jews" and interviewed me for an article about Irish Jews. I talked and talked and he quoted and quoted. Man, did I talk. And I'm glad I did. Otherwise I'd probably have forgotten much of those thoughts by now. And man, am I glad to be reminded of them.

The article came out 1.5 years ago. It's comforting that that doesn't feel like very long ago. It's comforting in the same way that it's comforting to hear a 33-year-old say, "Ahh, I remember when I was 26... I was a baby then." Anyway, I'd forgotten about it. And I was happy to see it again.

It used to make me really happy to think about the cultures I was born into and raised in and to put it all in a context.

It's so easy to do that too much. It's so easy to fill that hole of "Who am I?" with a tattoo or an undying support for a pro sports team or a beyond-rational support for a nation-state.

But we need that. I really think we do. All of us. I think we all need that. I do, anyway. I don't bear tattoos or wave flags, but I need to know that they are out there.

But what is even easier than draping your soul in a superficial flag is to actually forget that your identity has got that kind of context at all. For a long time, I'd forgotten that there was anything more to us than who we date, which drugs we take, or what we do with ourselves all day. But there is. There are all kinds of things. There's the society we were born into, the family we were born into, things chosen by the people who raised us, things chosen by ourselves, things we chose in order to fit into some desirable context, and things we chose with minimal regard to fitting in anywhere in particular.

For some people, it's the Jewish community, or the intellectual community, or the Great American Suburb. For me, it's something so specific that I nearly forgot it and didn't remember it until I googled myself. Consciousness of being an Irish Jew isn't a miracle cure, but I do feel like it's necessary.

What fills in your gaps?

Tunesome Thursday: Ralph McTell

2010-09-23T22:30:00.003-04:00

This entry is composed partially of my aborted first Tunesome Thursday.

As an exercise, I came up with the idea of writing these in the second person. It was a fun exercise, and I hereby reinstate it from her on.

Sometimes a song creeps up on you like a mutated, peaceful, but initially terrifying creature rising out of a swamp.

A swamp like the one on this album cover.

Ralph McTell is the sixtysomething British folk musician you haven't read about on Pitchfork. Ralph McTell is the one you were turned on to by the late-thirtysomething British friend you met at a concert by another obscure sixtysomething British folk musician. He is the musician who your late-thirtysomething British friend talked up to you by saying, "When I brought girls home, I'd always put a Ralph McTell record on. Ninety-percent of the time it worked, every time." Ralph McTell is someone it took a personal connection for you to find. He's not merely floating out there in internetland like so many musicians. You heard of Mr. McTell after you'd been burnt out on digging deep on the internet for new music.

Bert Jansch, Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, John Martyn, and other members of the Obscure British Folk Canon (OBFC) all hold a place in your heart, but it's a place that was created by the internet. None were ever superstars and their current mild resurgence is due to the the internet. Thousands like you have googled them out of curiosity on lonely college nights.

But unlike them, McTell is not a reminder of a time when you only learned of music from the websites of strangers.

McTell lacks the edge that the other OBFC members have in common. He doesn't make you think of a lonely boy smoking weed in his parents' basement (the Nick Drake archetype) or a rugged, beer-guzzling, silent gardener who sees all (the Bert Jansch archetype). He has a more mainstream reference point. He makes you think of James Taylor if only he weren't so incredibly smooth, had a distinct British Isles influence, and were a much better guitar player. If James Taylor were the modestly emotional guy playing in the corner and captivating everyone at parties rather than the guy who demanded a spotlight on himself before exposing his sensitive nature to the world (a comparison which was partially inspired by a friend of mine), perhaps he would sound something like Ralph McTell.

Make no mistake, he is part of the OBFC. But his OBFC street cred is certainly not helped by his resemblance to more mainstream singer-songwriters or by the clean sound achieved by producers Gus Dudgeon and Tony Visconti, both of whom are more famous for their work with David Bowie, Elton John, and T. Rex.

You get to love Ralph McTell. You read about his life story and you learn that he has been married to his wife Nanna since 1966. You begin to think that only a man who was in love and in a long-lasting relationship could write a song as confidently, unabashedly vulnerable as "Summer Lightning" (which is below) or the waltz "Let Me Down Easy," (which is only available on Youtube in cover versions recorded on somebody's laptop).

His love songs are earnest and knowing enough that you start to think of people in your past and ask yourself if they could have been your "Nanna." That thought fades and you move on to songs like this one, a song that sounds to you like a plea for just a tiny bit of love and positivity in one-night stands:

And then you move on to songs like this, his hit single (which excludes him from the pantheon of obscure musicians) "Streets of London," which is not about sex at all, but about the kind of misfortune that puts all that stuff into perspective. Ralph McTell becomes one of your favorite members of the OBFC, and he may be good enough to hold a place in your heart among musicians in general.

A Young Urban Amateur identity

2010-09-23T12:04:00.000-04:00

Even though it was not even a year ago, it's hard for me to remember exactly what inspired this title. But I know that it meant a lot to me.

It was something to do with my identity as somebody who's here to learn and discover, not just to partake in the soulless commercial NYC culture. It had something to do with my dismay at the dominance of consumer culture (cliche, I know, but I can't think of a better phrase) in New York City. Even drab, dangerous Bushwick is branded. It's marketed as a prime place to be poor. I tried it out. It was expensive to be poor. It's a luxury to live in a decaying warehouse.

I worked an overnight shift during a summer. I had eight hours of just sitting there and doing whatever I wanted. It didn't make me into a cool edgy writer with lots of zen time to himself. I found myself wishing more than anything else to feel more like I was a part of things.

The thing they don't tell you about being poor is that it takes a whole lot of support. Those happy, resigned poor people aren't me. The starving artist living in a loft? He's only starving because his parents and/or student loans will only pay for his room, not his board.

But that's obvious. What's less obvious are the states of the other young urban amateurs of this city. The cool old Puerto Rican dude who sits on his porch playing the guitar all day? He's cashing government checks. And the determined long-haired, smelly Bohemian who squats and maintains some sort of collective and is not supported by his parents? Even he's got some inbred confidence that, no matter how low he gets, he's still right. Maybe he grew up rich enough that he's got that confidence in his DNA. Or maybe he grew up poor enough that he never feels like he's missing out on anything.

Either way, he's not me. My neural pathways are different. To get the kind of confidence that these folks have, I need an equation that I don't have right now:

$$ + Security = Stability

NYC was once a place where security meant knowing that the building you were squatting in wasn't going to be demolished. A place where security meant that being friends with the pimp on the corner meant that you probably weren't going to get mugged. A place where the other punks and hippies sleeping on couches reassured you that you weren't the only punk or hippie sleeping on a couch.

Today, security = money. New York City was once a stimulating place because anything could happen. Now it's a stimulating place because anything can be consumed. Human unpredictability used to keep people enraptured by the place. These days, there's a financial unpredictability more than there is a human one; the human beings here are predictably destitute or predictably employed.

This culture doesn't enrapture people but it does keep us in a similar state of stimulation. The struggle for survival distracts us from how little we're actually investing in ourselves.

Paying rent is not investing in yourself. Working a job that leaves you ready to create something when you get home- that's investing in yourself. Travelling- that's investing in yourself. Supporting charitable causes because you have a few extra dollars that you don't need to spend on food- that's investing in yourself.

When you're a young urban amateur, it's hard to invest in yourself. Like "Sir," or "Doctor," it's a great title, but it's not a great identity.

Tunesome Thursday: the elusive soft rock feeling

2010-09-17T10:18:00.005-04:00

Soft rock is one of the most vast and vague genres out there. Lots of stuff rocks and lots of stuff is soft.

Soft-rock, to me is not Steely Dan. They are too complicated and too interesting. None of my brain shuts off when Steely Dan come on. Steely Dan are more like jazz fusion with lyrics, or an updated type of big-band music. They may be smooth, but they are not soft rock.

Nor is Elton John soft rock. When he rocks, he rocks too hard, and when he gets soft, he's too emotional to truly be soft.

And mellow folk-rock is not soft rock. It's smooth, but it's usually too personal, or too based in tradition to really have that kitschy soft rock feeling.

When I used to think of soft rock, I'd think of Peter Cetera & Chicago's "If You Leave Me Now."

With my tongue in my cheek, I can allow this song to pummel me into sweet ambivalence. But without that tongue-in-cheek filter, I just can't take it. It makes me think of shopping at K-mart in the 20th century, wishing that I didn't have to buy new shirts and shoes, because buying new shirts and shoes only made me think of going back to school.

K-mart. Not Walmart. Peter Cetera's brand of soft rock is the kind that once made me run and hide inside those circular clothing racks. I'd hide inside and be sheltered from the shopping and the fluorescent lights around me, but Cetera still managed to get me, even through the protective ring of t-shirts.

That kind of soft rock makes me think of back-to-school shopping in the less-artsy part of the Hudson Valley, so I had a deep and personal distaste for it. But I don't know anybody who likes it.

Some people can't even bring themselves to listen to it with that defensive tongue in their cheek.

But my opinion of smooth keyboards and nasally male vocals drenched in gallons of oozy reverb has increased over the years. I'm not sure why, but it began about two years ago while I was packing up to move from Albany to New York City and I discovered Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street."

First of all, this is the only song I know of that, instead of following the pattern of verse-chorus-verse, follows the pattern of verse-saxophone solo-verse.

That is only one of many things in the song that are artfully done. All of the things that make me laugh in most seventies soft-rock hits - Rafferty's high and smooth voice, the chimey keyboards, the processed saxophone, the bongos - made me laugh slightly less the first time I heard this song. And the second time I heard the song, I barely laughed at all. I realized that it was a good song. I realized that what's funny about other soft rock songs is that the presentation dilutes whatever emotion is behind the music and renders it into a kitschy mess.

But in "Baker Street," the languid and depressingly overproduced sound is part of the point. It's like the obnoxious malaise that he sings about can only be expressed by an obnoxiously loud saxophone solo. It's so poignantly obnoxious that by the end it's not obnoxious anymore.

And that sense that you're experiencing something meant to appeal to everyone - in other words, "kitsch" - only improves the song for me. In the best kitschy songs, it doesn't feel like its reducing emotion to some cookie-cutter experience. In the best kitschy songs, the kitsch feels like a way of saying, "By the way, everybody feels this way, so get over it."

Since discovering the genius of Rafferty, I've dug a bit more into music for that era, and I've found a few more soft rock classics that fit that mold. Songs where over-production and over-emotion meet and create something awesome. Songs where smooth actually = classy and sexy, instead of tacky. Songs that make me want to come out of that ring of t-shirts instead of continue to hide in it. Songs that sound like an upstate K-mart but also manage to artfully address that feeling you get in an upstate K-mart.

I'll level with you: I'm not sure what I just said there. I may have mixed metaphors. But I know I really meant it, and I'm not going to mess with it. Enjoy the songs. I've heard that they sound best on quaaludes, but they don't make those anymore, so I recommend a humid or rainy evening and your downer of choice. My downer of choice, these days, is a full box of buttery mac & cheese. And maybe a xanax. Seriously, though, I usually eat nothing but vegetables, soups, yogurt, and Indian food, so that shit hits me hard.

"He knows how not-in-love I am with living in an international consumer zone full of soulless strangers who walk either too fast or too slow. Said friend also wants me to move to Cleveland."

2010-09-14T11:42:00.009-04:00

This article has been making the Chat Status/Facebook/Twitter/Email rounds for the past week.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/84-million-new-yorkers-suddenly-realize-new-york-c,18003/

Sometimes, reading the Onion is reading satirical, hysterical brilliance. But sometimes, it makes you laugh, and then makes you wish what you were reading wasn't more-or-less true. I just can't see this article as satire! Every time I read it, I ask myself, "Is this the world I live in? Is it?" Is New York City this bad?

One of my friends even tagged me when he posted the article on Facebook. He knows how not-in-love I am with living in an international consumer zone full of soulless strangers who walk either too fast or too slow. Said friend also wants me to move to Cleveland.

The jury's still out on whether Cleveland has the potential to make me happy, but I do know that one of my biggest fears is ending up in a place like Pittsburgh, PA. They call it "the Portland of the Northeast," on account of its green initiatives and proximity to mountains. I visited that place. I wanted to love that place. On the surface, it looked like it housed the great soul of America. But, with its nondescript houses divided by highways and bridges, and the way that what they call "going to the city park" is what I (even when I lived in Upstate New York) would call "driving outside of the city and going to hang out of the woods," Pittsburgh gave off an aura of crushing isolation. It tricked me into thinking that NYC was paradise. I wanted to love it. Maybe some day I'll chill out and be able to be happy in a place like it. But not today.

Let's get back to the Onion:

"I always had this perverted sense of pride because I was managing to scrape by here," said Brooklyn resident Andrew McQuade, who, after watching two subway rats gnawing on a third bloody rat carcass, finally determined that New York City was a giant sprawling cancer. "Well, fuck that. I don't need to pay $2,000 a month to share a doghouse-sized apartment with some random Craigslist dipshit to prove my worth. I want to live like a goddamn human being."

"You see this?" added McQuade, pointing at a real estate listing for a duplex in Hagerstown, MD. "Two bedrooms, two baths, a den—a fucking den—and a patio. Twelve hundred a month. That's total, not per person."

This sounds like a real NYC resident. When I got to the part about Hagerstown, Maryland, my first reaction was to look the place up on Wikipedia and see if it was a nice place. It does look like a nice place. Nicer than Pittsburgh, perhaps.

But I have to take issue with one aspect of this joke-character. The thing is, I fantasize about leaving New York City all the time. I really do. Other people's misery reassures me a whole lot. But this Andrew McQuade of jokesville makes two common errors in his judgement of NYC.

The first is that you really, really don't need to pay $2,000 for an apartment here. That's the price of a nice one-bedroom apartment in a super-gentrified area. The average cost of a one-bedroom is under $1,500. And if you want, you can find a shared room for under $700. If you're willing to pay $800 and are willing to share, your options are very open.

New York City is expensive, but the famously astronomical prices we all hear about only apply to extra-nice apartments in Manhattan (or one of the "Manhattaned" areas of the boroughs).

The second issue is that, if you moved to Hagerstown, you'd have to own a car. You'd probably pay $600 a month for a nice room in a house with a pool and a patio and all the space you could dream of, but you'd have to get a car. You'd have a more dignified quality-of-life at home, but you'd also have to drive. You'd work less hours, but you'd also have to drive. Before you knew it, you'd be paying over $800 a month to live, just like in NYC.

My dreams of a better lifestyle are crushed when I remember that, no matter where you are, it probably sucks to be poor.

I know that there are places where dollars from decent jobs go farther, but that's not relevant to me now. Are there places where it's truly easier to be poor? Places where "I'm poor" doesn't also mean "I'm poor but I pay for my car with a magical credit card whose bills I've been evading for the last decade?"

A Preview Entry

2010-09-10T16:44:00.000-04:00

I was determined to write an entry like I'd never been before. But then I got more work than usual at work. I was also more burnt out than usual at work. I also had a good night last night.

Now, I will give you a preview of what's to come. (And, to a lesser extent, an incentive for me to actually follow up on these entries.)

1) That soft rock entry I talked about a while ago will get done.

2) That internet privacy entry I talked about a while ago will get done.

3) A rebuttal + agreement + appeal for advice based on the Onion's article, "8.4 Million New Yorkers Suddenly Realize New York City A Horrible Place To Live."

4) A list of the entertainment world's greatest GILFs. (Hint: #1 is not Stevie Nicks.)

5) If you are in the NYC area and are not doing anything at 7pm tonight, go see this show. I'll paste the description of it so you don't have to click.

Just because your favorite sitcom went off the air, doesn't mean they can't show you that smile again. Watch the TBC players as they put on a brand new episode of an old favorite-- Written by Luke Ward.

I'm not sure if I'm feeling well enough to make it myself. And I'm not happy about that. But I highly recommend it. The people involved are very funny, and not in the typical intense "NYC improv" way. They're just funny .

I slipped that advert in there pretty slyly, didn't I? You thought you were going to read about me, didn't you? But I plugged somebody else, didn't I?

Tunesome Thursday: Peter and Gordon's "Go to Pieces," John Prine's, "All the Best," and the Great Clusterfuck

2010-09-09T15:32:00.014-04:00

I will now attempt to make all Thursday posts related to music in some way. I like "tunesome" better than "tuneful" and I like the sound of Tunesome Thursday better than the sound of Tunesome Tuesday.

I just re-read something I wrote about three months ago.

I was expecting it to make me cringe and hide. It didn't. It was pretty honest and minimal, and I like those qualities.

I was surprised at how much that post really was about songs and not about that breakup.

David Ackles' "Love's Enough" is still up there with The Elephant Man and - I don't give a fuck what anybody thinks because it is a sad-ass movie and the acting is so good and it was written by Larry McMurtry so it's still kind of masculine by default - Terms of Endearment on the short list of Things That Sometimes Manage to Make Me Cry. Oh hell, I'm getting weak just thinking about that song. It's like Lil' Brudder. God damnit.

I didn't feel like I understood the Ackles song until that breakup, but, to my surprise, the song itself doesn't make me think of that breakup anymore. "Go to Pieces," on the other hand, makes me weirdly nostalgic for the way I felt while I wrote that post. It's very different from how I feel when I reflect back on that relationship from today. It's been three months since then. I've technically been out of that relationship for as long as I was in it. That should be a milestone- the kind of milestone that makes you feel incredibly free. Andy Warhol, as always, was right. ("They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.")

On the day that it ended, my instincts told me to avoid her for at least two weeks, if not more... however long it took for me to be reminded that I'd spent most of my life single and that being single again was just a return to a comfortable place. I was looking at all the things that made me upset and realizing how much I could control them and how little she ultimately had to do with my unhappiness. I saw the end of it as something that would ultimately be good for me. I was sad but not frustrated or depressed. Sure, I missed her, but I was free. I felt a not-in-love kind of love for her as a human being. I felt like we were just kindred spirits who were not meant to talk to each other right now.

The open wounds were healing and were not turning into scars. She was on her way to becoming someone I had a positive nostalgia for and would one day be happy to see again.

But, a week after the breakup, I received a puzzling text message from her. I wish I had just turned on the Zen and not responded. She probably would have forgotten about it. But I did respond to that puzzling text and it led to a puzzling conversation. From that moment on, the relationship was back on - but without any of the sex or love or friendship that makes relationships worth having. That went on for a while. It was nightmarish. Eventually, I cut off all contact. I feel shitty about that, but it did more good than harm, and staying in touch with her probably would have done more harm than good.

I hate unfulfilling endings. I hate slamming on the breaks and getting whiplash and then driving away with a rattled brain that leaves you terrified of driving, and I hate the lingering, regretful feeling that maybe, somehow, I could have saved myself in a less damaging way. I hate abandoning things and I hate the feeling that follows, which is such an inhuman sensation that I can only compare it to the way I feel when novocaine is just starting to wear off. But more than any of those things, I hate being destroyed, and I'm glad that I didn't get destroyed.

Anyway, "Go to Pieces," one of the songs I posted in that mid-June entry, makes me weirdly nostalgic for that first week after the breakup. It makes me nostalgic for a time when I was just sad. A time when I felt more human.

The thing is, there aren't many songs that conjure up the way I ended up feeling once it was really over- that feeling of ambivalence, exhaustion, longing, relief, sadness, coldness, and fear. Feelings that are fine on their own, but are a clusterfuck when they're together.

I feel like most musicians don't want to write songs about that clusterfuck. Because, when you feel it, you'd rather not feel it. You'd rather feel something less annoying. You'd rather feel love or anger... anything but the Great Clusterfuck.

The closest I've come to it is John Prine's "All the Best." And that song barely even gets at it.

It's a great song. It's humorous and honest and contradicts itself in ways that anyone who's ever felt that way can totally understand. It's a masterpiece, but it also makes me want to listen to a song as satisfyingly sentimental as "Go to Pieces." The emotions in that song are so much easier to handle. God damnit. The Great Clusterfuck is real and true, but it's so unappealing.

I suppose my biggest hope for my next breakup is that it only gets as far as "Go to Pieces," and never makes it to "All the Best" territory.

I thought about Peter and Gordon and wondered what became of them. I thought of how it'd be a shame if, after making such great recordings, they just disappeared and lived off of UK welfare in some tiny town. After all, they didn't write songs. They just recorded them ("Go to Pieces" was by Del Shannon). No royalties to make them rich.

But their lives didn't turn out so badly. Gordon, who died in 2009, seems to have had a successful but unremarkable career in music publishing.

Peter met a guy named James Taylor in 1968, became his manager, and then got extremely wealthy peddling American soft rock to the masses.

That's a pretty happy ending.

Today I'm just going to talk about other bloggers.

2010-09-03T14:18:00.004-04:00

Today, I'm just going to talk about other bloggers.

The following blog/gers have inspired me or cheered me up in some way lately, and I want to talk about them.

The Danaconda has birthed a comedic persona online, which is not easy. I'd say that his dirty jokes conceal a warm-hearted nature, but that's not it. It's more like he unleashes a constant stream of dirty jokes that manage to be 100% good-natured.

And not good-natured like a bullshit flick that compensates for its forced and unfunny retard jokes with a forced and unmoving redemption scene underscored by high-fructose strings. No. I mean actually good-natured. When he says that he butt-fucked a pie with his mouth, I think, "Mm, if you butt-fucked it with your mouth, then it must have been a good pie." And then I actually get hungry for pie... despite the fact that pie was just mentioned in the same sentence as anal sex!

P.S. In addition to all that, his posts inspire me to write comments that are probably better and funnier than anything I post on this blog.

Steven Slate writes a blog about the nature of addiction. He believes that addiction is a lifestyle choice rather than an alien disease that invades us. On one hand, it's a psychological/medical blog. But he mainly cites pop culture to make his points, and, when he does cite something clinical, he does it with wit and brevity (which, according to Shakespeare, is a redundant thing to say). Most of all, he constantly deals with the big questions, which is something that not many people are able to do.

It also will have educational value for anyone who's ever guiltily or angrily had the thought: "Hey, how come all of these certified addicts get so much sympathy, but whenever I fuck up, I just get called an asshole?"

P.S. It's hard for me to define what I mean by The Big Questions, but I know it has something to do with daring to ask questions and offer answers that could potentially shatter our conceptions of who we are and why we're doing what we're doing.

Hipstercrite bridges the gap between blogging about yourself and blogging about pop culture. [For all you English Studies people out there, I'll translate that: "She transgresses the socio-political boundaries between the Cultural and the Personal."] When she reveals things, she always makes you feel like you're fortunate to get such a glimpse. So many of us talk about ourselves and our emotions in a way thats comparable to holding a viewer's face up to the cigarette butt that Jackson Pollock stuck in the middle of "Full Fathom Five," but she holds us at such a distance that we get to see and appreciate the intimate and abstract beauty of the entire painting.

P.S. I know that the usual metaphor for this sort of thing is Monet's "Waterlilies," but I think that Jackson Pollock is a more accurate metaphor for a human being.

P.P.S. As with Danaconda, her blog somehow encourages me to write comments that are probably better than most of the stuff I write here.

P.P.P.S. I also like her because I feel like we fiber optically share a deep longing for the pre-Giuliani New York State of Mind.

Madame Librarian is pretty great at blending quotes with her own reflections. She also writes the "You know what peeves me," type of blog entry with an awesome amount of restraint and intelligence. She never makes me go, "Ooh boy, another complaint entry." And she never hates on people in that way that makes you think, "Wow... this writer is actually a bitter person who I'd rather not hang out with." What she does do is give you the relaxing feeling that you're reading something by a gentle person who is constantly amused and moderately bothered by the less-gentle world she inhabits.

P.S. In offline life, it was Madame Librarian who introduced me to the Magnet Theater.

Lalalalauren has never written anything too long or too short, and her entries that are about nothing aren't really about nothing. She also has a layout that is a great mix of sparse and uncreative with slight bouts of creativity. I suppose all of the bloggers on here have that, but hers stands out to me. She makes no attempt to have a theme other than herself. Everything she writes feels like a pleasant anecdote- even when the anecdote is, "I was doing nothing and I was thinking of this."

P.S. She also brings out the best in my comments.

Full disclosure: I nicked all of your url's for your icons. I assumed you wouldn't mind.

And to everyone else: Keep blogging and you may one day find yourself in a post just like this one.