Three Things I'm Obsessed With Right Now

Like a lot of people I'm sure, I get obsessed for weeks at a time with certain music, movies, etc. Sometimes it ends up turning into a long-time love (like George Orwell), and many others fade. In what may become a semi-regular feature, here are three things I'm Obsessed With Right Now:

1. Yeah Yeah Yeahs It's Blitz! I've been lukewarm about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs for years, there are a handful of songs that I really like, but the rest kind of annoyed me. But then I fell slightly for the hypnotic songs of Karen O's music on the Where the Wild Things Are, which led me then to this CD, which I haven't stopped listening to for the past two weeks. All the songs are good, but there are a few stand outs, the best of which is Hysteric.

2. George Carlin. I've been reading his autobiography Last Words over the past couple of weeks, which has inspired me to re-vist a lot of his stand-up. Such a funny, insightful guy. It's also inspiredme to start thinking about going back to writing some stand-up of my own.

3. How I Met Your Mother. I had seen a few episodes here and there on TV or on a plane, and always thought it was pretty witty and not typical laugh-track sitcom triteness. It wasn't until I interviewed Alyson Hannigan in December that I decided to really get into the show. Mark and I got the DVDs of the first four seasons and have been watching them regularly over the past month. It's....wait for it....Awesome!

Let it Fall

Went to the Lykke Li concert last night. It was totally awesome, especially from my dinner table perch above the hipster crowd. This is officially the most upbeat and danceable song about crying ever.



meanwhile, speaking of things falling, my magazine has been sold, my boss is leaving, things are stressful to say the least.

Metaphor?

all kinds of wonderful:

What was Great in 08

So it’s a month late for a “year end/best of” post. But here’s my list of the my personal Best of 2008.*

Music
In 2008 I got into a few artists that I only peripherally listened to in the years prior, here are the albums of those peeps that I listened to the most last year:

Cat Power…The Greatest
The Roots…Game Theory
The Fugees…The Score

I also started listening to more Lupe Fiasco, Talib Kweli, Dead Prez, Atmosphere, but more songs than albums stand out.

New music I really dug in ’08:
She & Him…Volume One
Sea Wolf…Leaves in the River
Chris Mills…Living in the Aftermath

Best soundtrack:
The Hottest State (even though it came out in 2007)


Concerts
Sadly I didn’t see much live music in 2008. So with that in mind, here are my winners.

The best show of ’08 that I didn’t attend
Outside lands Music festival August 22-24. The line-up looked awesome and I love San Francisco, wish I could have made it.

The best show I did attend
The Feist concert at Hammerstein Ballroom on April 30th. The simple and elegant shadow-puppetry wasn’t at all as lame as it might sound, it was in fact beautiful and she had an incredibility endearing stage presence. Also, I ended up singing the version of Inside + Out on this album for about four months of last year.

Movies

In the theatre
Tie between Rachel Getting Married and Slumdog Millionaire

Netflixed
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and Lars and the Real Girl


Books
2008 was the year I decided to finish everything that George Orwell has ever written. Having already read a handful of his novels, the book of his I probably enjoyed the most in 2008 was Burmese Days and Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin was a good primer with interesting insight.

Personally
Without getting too personal, here are some of my personal bests of 08…

Best Moment
Hard to say exactly, but election night was pretty awesome and my solo bungee-jumping/waterfall-rappelling/rainforest zip-lining trip was really cool too.

Biggest accomplishment
Unfortunately it’s not anything I wrote (although I did have a big feature come out in May). I think it’s my relationship with my Little Sister. We were matched last January and I was a little trepidatious about how challenging hanging out with a 13-year-old would be, I’ve been surprised how much she likes and trusts me and how even though I’m under no disillusions about “changing” her life, I do feel like having me to hang out with is something she looks forward to.


*Note: Many of these things didn’t come out in 2008, but I discovered/rediscovered them during the year, so they still fit in my personal Best Of.

Concert Review

Feist at Hammertown Ballroom April 30th: F-ing Amazing.



Also according to Feist and her opening act, it sounds like the crowd the night before was a bunch of douchebags who only liked her for the ipod song...LAME

For Your Listening Pleasure

I read a quote years ago that being a good writer is 3% talent and 98% not getting distracted by the internet. So in my quest to keep myself more focused (and because my MP3 player is dying a very slow death) I’m mildly obsessed with free music listening methods.

• Pandora: It’s the old standby, and honestly the one I go back to the most because I have rated enough songs and given enough “seeds” that they get what I like generally. I can also listen to it the most passively. The problem? It’s kind of like my bed, still nice and all, but there’s a dent in the mattress in the shape of my body that I keep falling in even when I try to sleep in a different spot (i.e. it’s getting a bit old, and while sometimes they are right on with suggestions of new music I might like other times they are very hopelessly off, and won’t take the hint that I don’t like the red hot chili peppers)

• Songza: I was obsessed with songza a few weeks ago, and it’s great for what it is (basically a music search engine). Finding and listening to bootlegs covers from concerts and half forgotten songs from your youth is pretty cool, and it’s handy for testing out a new band before investing in an actual CD. The drawback? It’s high maintenance, you can’t just sit and listen, you have to feed it all the time.

• Muxtape : I just discovered this one today, so it’s my current obsession. It’s totally web 3.0 user generatedness, so it’s of course hit or miss, but the basic idea is that you can sign up and make your own “mixtape” of songs that other peeps can listen to (and of course buy the songs from Amazon). But without signing up you can just listen to random mixes, and once you find someone with decent taste you got an hour or so of good listening. The drawback seems to be the unsearchability of the site, either for artists or users, so the mix I’m currently listening to that’s pretty cool I may never be able to find again. (Correction: It looks like each has it’s own address, so I guess you can remember that to get back to it, still not that convenient)

ps. I officially enter my late 20s in one week, and my birthday always makes me get all retrospective about my life, which may explain why this song seemed to fit my mood so perfectly today

Things I’ve thought about this Week

I’ve thought about writing about several things this week, but didn’t have enough to say about any of them to warrant their own post. So here they are in a convenient “listicle”:

• As if people needed more forums on the internets to whine, there is a site called angryjournalist.com. Sometimes though, they make a point…the best I saw: “If you got a journalism degree, you probably don’t even know how to spell obituary nevermind write one.”

• Speaking of spelling, to know me is to know my spelling anxieties, and my creative methods of getting around my dyslexic shortcomings (i.e. looking up synonyms of words I want to use in order to find how to spell them because even spell-check doesn’t know what I’m trying to say.) Truly, my poor spelling is one of the things I am most self-conscious about. Imagine then my horror last Saturday night when I was forced on stage during 30 plays in 60 minutes to participate in a Spelling Bee! I lost of course. And was told “ You have to decide if losing this means that you are a loser for this moment, or if you will be a loser for life.” How about a little from A and a little from B?

• I have found pretty much everyone to be mildly to highly annoying in recent weeks. Top honors to these “anti-sprawl arsonists/activists” though, way take a worthy cause (anti-sprawl and environmentalism) and get it completely f-ing wrong. Burning “green” houses to make a point about conservation? Well done.

• I am completely over Obama-fever. In fact, I am over the presidential primaries all together, they reached the oversaturation point a month or two ago, yet still managed to hold my attention. Until now. Seriously, I don’t care if Bill and Hillary took a walk in the park or if Obama is now using the word “transformative” instead of “change”. I’m just over it. For now. At this point, I’m voting for Nader. Also, wil.i.am? The first video was cheesy, but sure, inspiring. The second video? the chanting is kind of creepy, and um, really why don’t you just sleep with him and get it over with already, he’s going to need a restraining order if you keep up this kind of fawning.

• Despite myself, I don’t hate Ellen Page as much anymore. I watched Hard Candy last weekend and was quite impressed with her performance. I think that maybe all the hype about her in Juno was because people wished they made bigger deal out of her in Hard Candy, but torturing a pedophile isn’t as mass market friendly as an emotionally unconvincing poorly written pregnant high schooler. Plus she made fun of the lame Juno dialog during her SNL monologue, and for that I am grateful.


• And finally, this week I’ve been mildly obsessed with Songza

And in my best behavior, I am really just like him

The Village Voice’s review of Sufjan Stevens’ BQE Symphony started off with this:

“All my friends who don't live in New York hate New York. Near as I can tell, they imagine the city as one giant, loathsome American Apparel ad, a crass, joyless, narcissistic, careerist, emaciated, insincere, hopelessly uptight, suffocatingly twee cesspool of white-privilege Williamsburg hipsterdom.”

This description prefaced the review to describe not only the trying-to-hard-cuteness of the show, but no doubt its audience too. My desire to go probably puts me in at least three of those categories if not all in some people’s eyes.

Sufjan’s symphony about an expressway sold out so quickly though that I didn’t get a ticket and as much as I love him wasn’t will to pay the $150 asking price on craigslist.

Still, without actually attending, I can mostly agree with the review. Sufjan is helluva talented, and yeah some of his songs make me get a little teary, and damn if he isn’t cute. Which is exactly the problem, he sometimes over does the cuteness, and sometimes gets a little too ambitious (even he had to know the 50 state thing was going to get old fast), or overkills a good thing (the wings, the Avalanche CD). Still though, he tries, which is more than you can say for a lot of people. Sooner of later he’ll realize that when he doesn’t try so hard he makes some pretty amazing music.


(Sufjan trying too hard)

As for me, well that’s in the eye of the beholder I guess. I think the description of New York isn’t totally off base, but then again I still don’t think I consider myself a complete New Yorker. I’m more of a citizen of the world…

Doggie Howser + Animal= Great Music

Even though they kind of seemed like they didn’t want to be there, Two Gallants put on what was perhaps the best show I’ve seen this year*

I have been listening to their new CD and EP kind of non-stop lately and unlike some of bands, they are actually just as good live as recorded, at times even better (like when they played three songs into each other with obviously rehearsed yet improvised feeling transition mini-songs).

I probably would have enjoyed the show a lot less if I would have been on the floor closer to the stage where not only would I have to be much closer to people than I prefer, but would have had to endure a mosh pit (Really? People still do that?)

From my seat directly behind the soundboard, I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that drummer Tyson Vogel looked exactly like what Animal would like if he was a person, and Adam Stephens looked like a scruffier much cooler version of Neil Patrick Harris (See Photographic evidence below). And according to this interview, Vogel most likely is modeling himself after Animal, but I doubt Stephens wants to be compared to Doggie Howser, MD.

Regardless, it was a good show, despite the fact that it made me slightly more depressed than I was going in, and they seemed kind of like they were just fulfilling their obligation to ROCK (and were possibility as depressed as me).


Animal and Tyson Vogel

Neil Patrick Harris and Adam Stephens

*Disclaimer: I have been to about three shows this year, but that makes Two Gallants no less brilliant.