Another Pleasantly Unusual Year-End List

Another great, unusual list of 2008 music here, from Drowned in Sound. I particularly like Dom Gourlay's list.

Backtracking To The Source

I'm currently engaged in my annual time-suck of scanning other people's year-end music lists to make sure I miss as little good music as possible. It's a thankless task - mostly the same not-that-interesting indie-flavor-of-the-moment bands cropping up over and over.

But today I happened on a list with a bunch of stuff I'd never heard of before, and when I hunted down the bands' Myspace pages, I found myself lingering over nearly all of it. Two Sheds, A.A. Bondy, All Smiles...who knew? So good!

I don't usually pay much attention to who's picking the music I'm rushing through, but in this case I did. Twas a band called Everest. They're on tour with Wilco and Neil Young. And, surprise surprise, I like them too.

You can listen here; download here; and check out their favorite bands here.

A Few Definites For The Year-End CD

After going through my music files, I have settled on a handful of songs that are definitely going on the CD. There are a few good ones missing here, thanks to the total computer meltdown I had in the middle of the year, which means I'm going to have to go through the physical music files as well...and buy a new burner. Sigh.

Anyhow, when I try to sum up this year, it feels like it should be with a combination of angry punk, rocking anthems of hope, a few mellow chill-out songs, and a few other random songs that are good just because they're good. I think that's represented in this list, presented in no particular order:

The Kills - URA Fever: I think I listened to this song 100 times on repeat in my lime green rental car over the summer. Hypnotically catchy.



Elbow - The Bones of You: I woke up to this song playing on my alarm clock one morning, and by that evening I owned the CD. The lyrics are about the nostalgia a song can induce in you...I wonder what nostalgia this song will one day induce in me? Listen to a live version here.

Michael Franti - Remote Control. Heard this song live at All Points West. What a great election-year anthem.

TI featuring Rihanna: Live Your Life. This song has been stuck in my head, off and on, for months now. It should be illegal to be so catchy. I'm not even going to post it here lest it get caught in your head too.

Kings of Leon - Closer. Didn't really get into these guys until I saw them at All Points West. That, plus this song - one of the 10 sexiest ever, I think - converted me. Listen here.

Catherine A.D. - Carry Your Heart. Love the creepy minor key modulations in her voice. And the lyrics. Put one foot in front of the other and pray that nobody will ask how you carry your heart. That one, and another one, here.

Eddy Current Suppression Ring - Colour Television. I don't know anything about these guys, but this song is like an updated, wiser "57 Channels and Nothing On". Available here.

Calexico - Two Silver Trees. I love everything Calexico does, but I particularly love this windswept song.

Lil Wayne - A Milli. I had this album on non-stop for a while this summer, but it somehow feels already like a relic of the past. This live version with ?uestlove of The Roots doing the "A Milli" chorus is inCREDible. Listen to the banter at the end.

12 Cameras...None Work

This could be the coolest thing ever...but instead it is merely the most frustrating, thanks to pixellation, copyright issues, and the inability to view what other folks have done - or what you yourself have created once you close the window, despite what that handy little widget up there would seem to indicate.

Grumble. Fingers crossed for some improvements...

Was/Not Was: Picking The Best Of 2008

Every year I put together a CD for friends of my favorite music of the year. I always feel a little presumptuous about doing it - who am I to tell people what the best music is? Everybody has their own taste - but I do it nonetheless, because of...well...because of my inflated ego?

Anyhow, it's picking time. Over the next couple of weeks, I'm agonizing over whether or not some of the songs on the borderline should go on the playlist. If you like them, tell me so.

This first one I just stumbled across today on someone else's year-end best of list. I know entirely why I like it. It's the beat, which gnaws at my memory familiarly. I was thinking that it must be similar to some Radiohead song, but only at this second, as I was writing this, did I figure out what it reminds me of. The bass beat, the note sequence, the spaces between notes, sounds like a slightly rushed version of the Buena Vista Social Club song Chan Chan (video below - speaking of - Ah! What a song).

The Oaks - Masood

Gnarly Indeed

A few weeks ago, as anyone who scrolls down on this page can easily discover, I fell deeply in love with Long Island's Channing Daughters winery. Last weekend, after quaffing the sole bottle (what was I thinking!) that I purchased of Rosso Fresco in just a couple of days, I went on a hunt to find some more here in the NYC.

I was rudely deterred on my first tedious outing to crowded, grumpy-inducing Soho, to the Vintage NY outlet there, which at some point between the summer and now seems to have closed. But last Saturday, I had more luck at Gnarly Vines Wine & Spirits in Fort Greene-ish. I live not so far from it, so trekked over with a friend, and found it to be totally chill and laid-back, not So-ho-haughty at all. More importantly, they had a few bottles of the good stuff, and I did not buy QUITE all of them. But you should.

Cage The Elephant

Wherein a group of guys from the pseudo-south attempt to become the next Kings of Leon, with not insignificant success.

It Hugs Back

It kind of does.

We're Not Your Grandma's Band But She'd Like Us

Those Canadians. There's something in the water up there that generates indie pop goodness.

I intend to enjoy these guys now, because something about his voice makes me think he may not have it for long.

The Danks - Treaty Connector

A Basket Ride On A Moonlit Night

A friend once asked me if I thought the Hold Steady was trying to bring Christian Rock to the mainstream surreptitiously. My response was that I doubted it, and even if they were, I didn't care. I feel the same way about The Cotton Jones Basket Ride.

Midnight Monday And A Telescope

Somehow, This Seems Appropriate

Evil. Evil. Worse. Worse. Catchy. Catchy.

I don't usually post about songs with lyrics that I don't have a prayer of deciphering (well, except for Radiohead) or musicians with long histories about which I know nothing or music types that make me scratch my head (Dubstep? What does that even mean?), but me gon make an exception for The Bug's London Zoo.

As in literature and film, I am in music occasionally a fan of things that carry an apocalyptic, end of the world, doomsday reek, but with a wink and a tongue ever so slightly tucked in cheek (think the sunglasses obsession in Terminator). And this suits.

Take this series of lyrics from "Skeng," pretty much the only lyrics I can decipher on the album unaided. "You don' wanna see me get Evil den...Then...Then...You don wanna see me get Evil...Evil...worse...worse...send for the nurse...nurse...doctor can't fix ya send for the hearse...earse...black."

Or the video, below, to "Poison Dart" - it's a tank, obliterating people with the bass line. It's an army, of grime dubstep warriors. Unh!

And, to take the tongue out of the cheek for a minute, "F**kaz" is an appropriately timed, angry rant about the state of the world:

"Fi all dem f**kin' people who ignore blatant facts just so dem maintain a order beneficial only to themselves..."

Check it.

And Now, Back To The Music!

Now that I have emerged from a happy cloud of wine, it is time to Rock. NRolla.

I have heard the Subways' "Rock & Roll Queen" a few times, but not so's you'd notice. Enough that it was sitting in the back of my head, in a bin marked "just another too-cool-for-school Brit band."

But.

Introduce a Guy Ritchie movie to this song, and then insert the band playing it live at a random point in the movie - at an actual club in the U.K. called the Fire Station, if what I read here is to be believed. Follow up by splicing images of the band rawking out to the song together with images of a beatdown outside the club conducted with, well, a pencil, and NOW you have a memorable song.

Sadly, I cannot find this particular scene on YouTube. So just take the original video and...insert pencil.

Twenty Wineries In Four Days: And So We Come To The End

1:45ish: As our tour of Long Island wine country comes to an end, we've decided to eat lunch at Modern Snack Bar, which is basically a diner. It's been around since 1950, and has remained seemingly true to its roots, serving good, simple food at affordable prices. Their mashed turnips are famous, so we order some even though they don't really go with my soft-shell crab sandwich or AMP's Caesar Salad. They're so good we slurp them up anyhow.

2:45ish: We're faced with a choice. Head home, or take a detour to the South Fork to visit Channing Daughters, tacking about an hour onto our trip? AMP's had their wine before and she loves it, and I'm obsessing over it after reading an article in Edible about their Mosaico wine and falling in love with the label. It winds up not really being a difficult decision: off to the South Fork we go. (Plus, we both kind of want to be able to say that we've been to the Hamptons and sneered at them.)

3:45ish: There's some weird art at Channing Daughters. But there's also a large, fuzzy, friendly dog who greets us at the door. He wants to be outdoors STAT. We herd him back indoors and check out the tasting room, which is nicely done, with seriously extensive notes about how each of their wines is produced, as well as about how it tastes. The Mosaico that I'm obsessing over, for instance, is made from 32% Pinot Grigio, 29% Chardonnay, 14% Sauvignon Blanc, 12% Muscat, 7% Tocai Friulano and 6% Gewurztraminer, the signage informs me. And it's fermented in an insane number of different types of vessels: "a stainless steel tank and stainless steel barrels, two Slovenian oak barrels, two Slovenian oak hogsheads and one Slovenian oak puncheon. A total of 27% of the wine saw new oak." I mean, damn.

As the above description indicates, these guys are doing different things then any other Long Island tasting room, that we've visited, anyhow. Most of the vineyards are growing Cabernet Franc, Chardonnay and Merlot grapes. Many of them share the same vineyard managers and winemakers. Inevitably, with the exception of a few stand-outs, they all start to taste much the same to someone with a less distinguished palate than Rober Parker's. No danger of that here. Tocai Friulano? I've never even heard of Tocai Friulano. The server explains that the owners think that Long Island has a similar climate to Northern Italy, so they've intentionally planted a lot of the same grapes that get grown there.

We've pretty much been sharing a single tasting at every single place we've been to since very early on, which works well except when we both really like a particular wine, in which case the tastings degenerate into open warfare. Here, there'll be no sharing. We start with the 2007 Sylvanus, which is a blend of Muscat, Pinot Grigio and Pinot Bianco. This is a field blend, which means that the grapes are grown intermingled in the field and harvested the way they're grown. I've never heard of this before and think it's totally cool; maybe I feel that way because the wine is soooooo good, and completely different from everything else we've tried.

Next, we try the 2007 Scuttlehole Chardonnay. This has been prepared in all stainless steel, which normally I don't like, but this time it works. (We've heard a lot of people out here sputter indignantly about Chardonnays that have been over-oaked; I don't know if this is really a problem or just a way of distinguishing their wines from California Chardonnays.) It also hasn't been through malo-lactic fermentation, a process our pourer takes the time to explain to us. Basically, wine can go through two fermentations: the primary one, which converts the grape juice to alcohol, and then malo-lactic fermentation, which changes one type of acid to another and which is common in red wines and the heartier white wines. Malo-lactic fermentation can be stopped by cold temperatures, and that's what they did with this Chardonnay.

We tried a couple other whites - both incredible - then a rose, then moved on to the reds. They don't plant a lot of red at Channing Daughters, but just like with the whites, what they do do with red here is completely different than any other vineyard. We tried the 2005 Sculpture Garden, which is 97% Merlot and 3% Blaufrankisch. I'd never heard of Blaufrankisch (which also goes by the name Lemberger); turns out it's grown primarily in Germany, Austria and the surrounding region. Our pourer said it's meaty, and maybe it was just her persuasiveness, but I swear I can detect sausage both in the nose and the taste of the wine. So good!

I bought four bottles of wine here, the most I bought at any vineyard: the Sylvanus, my Mosaico (which wasn't available for tasting), the Sculpture Garden, and another red, the 2007 Rosso Fresco, which she was kind enough to let me taste. It's basically a low-brow version of the Sculpture Garden, also with the signature Blaufranksich grape, and I'm drinking it and smacking my lips as I write this. Please, don't let this bottle of wine end.

5:30ish. So that's it. That's our four days in wine heaven. To summarize day four, Channing Daughters gets the largest smiley-face of all, Old Vine and Raphael get quite broad smiley-faces, Paumanok gets a smiley-face, and Jamesport gets a fairly wrinkled frowny-face. Four days wasn't quite enough to entirely do the North Fork; we definitely could've found another five or six wineries to go to (especially Peconic Bay, Shinn and Sherwood House). But since we already felt like winos, it was time to go. I leave you with a picture of a giant duck, the "hysterical monument," which we randomly drove past on our way out of Dodge - or Flanders, actually, which is where this fabulous roadside art is.

Twenty Wineries In Four Days: The Final Day, Part One

Thursday on the North Fork of Long Island was SO FUN it's going to take two posts to do it justice. There are just too many themes here, from unusual wineries, to a theory of Merlot, to the best winery we went to.

10 a.m. We check out of our hotel sadly and wander around Greenport. This sleepy little town starts to wake up on Thursday as wine-heads head out for the weekend. All the coffeeshops are finally open, and I successfully order my necessary jolt of strong caffeine. The local bookstore is open too, and I buy a biography written by one of the founders of the first vineyard on the island, Hargrave.

11 a.m. We pull into Old Field, which is pretty much what it sounds like, a tasting room in a field. This place is so different from the rest of the wineries we visited this trip, just a shack in a field with a table set up on the porch outside. The server ducks in and out of the shack's window to get wine, which is served in plastic cups. There's a loud fowl strutting around. They sell eggs. (There's another place like this in the area, called Sherwood House, but we didn't make it there this trip.) What a treat!

Brief aside: As I've been writing this, I've been experiencing considerable angst about what to call the people who poured us our tastings. I even looked it up on Google, and there just doesn't seem to be an appropriate one. I've been using "server" and "pourer," but these don't really do it justice. Perhaps I should invent my own term? Any ideas?

11:45ish: We swore we were only going to go to three wineries before heading down the LIE, but after that taste of Raphael we had the previous night, we have to add it to our list. Boy am I glad we did - this was one of my favorite places. It's pretty much the polar opposite of Old Field in terms of presentation, with a giant, luxurious tasting room fitted out with a gorgeous circular bar in the middle meant to look like a wine barrel. Rather than go for a full tasting flight here, we opt to try just three Merlots from different years: 2001, 2002, and a 2005 "Fontana" that is 80% Merlot. I've already described their 2002 Merlot so I won't go into detail here, except to say that they're all just as good as the one we had at the Frisky Oyster.

Our server rocked - one of the bottles had been open for a couple of days, so she poured us a sample from that and from a brand-new bottle of the same year, which was a pretty interesting comparison in and of itself. And she warned us off one of their newer wines that she thought wasn't ready for tasting yet - honesty we appreciate. A lot of the winemakers out here bring out their latest vintage as soon as the previous one sells out, which, since they're generally making not very many cases, means some wines make it to the tasting rooms before they're necessarily ready.

One last thing: we asked why the 2005 wine we tasted was called "Fontana," since it was 80% Merlot. She hemmed and hawed a little bit and said it was because the winemakers wanted to name it after the fountain in front of the tasting room. We developed our own theory shortly later - more on that in a bit.

12:30ish: I finally find pumpkin fudge, at a little shop on the opposite side of the road from the Jamesport and Paumanok vineyards. The friendly proprietor has only one box, but beggars can't be choosers. He also gives us directions to a "historical - or hysterical - local landmark." More on that in the next post.

12:40ish: Here we are at Jamesport. We had high expectations for this place - almost everyone we asked told us to go here and try their whites - but sadly, our expectations were not met. The wines may very well have been decent, but our overall experience was so poor that they were overshadowed. First of all, the guy behind the counter was totally lame, not interested in human interaction at all. He told us almost nothing about their wines, even when we asked leading questions. (US: So, you had an oyster-fest here last weekend, how was that? HIM: Fine. US: Errrr...so, what wines go good with oysters? HIM: Oh, whites. (Thanks, who woulda guessed?) Also, this was the first place there were actually fruit flies IN our wine, which was just kind of gross. They were in three consecutive glasses, and I didn't see them fly in, which makes me wonder if they were in the wine bottles themselves. And when we asked him to pour one of the fruit-flied glasses out, rather than giving us another sample of the same wine, he moved on to the next one. Dude, go work in the back office and take your crap attitude back there with you.

1ish: Wow. After that experience at Jamesport, we're really hoping Paumanok can get the bad taste out of our mouths. We're thinking this may be our last tasting before we head back, and we want it to be good.

Paumanok doesn't disappoint. After our morose Jamesport server, the young lady here is a right treat. She's willing to chat, and she knows what she's talking about. We share a full tasting here, and we like almost everything we taste. They have a 2002 Merlot here too, and we try it, asking why the Merlots that people are serving are so much older then the rest of the wines available: do they take longer to mature, or what? No, says our pourer: it's that movie.

She is of course referring to "Sideways," which came out in 2004. Anyone who's seen it will not be able to forget the famous anti-Merlot speech made by the character played by Paul Giamatti: "If anyone orders Merlot I'm leaving. I am not drinking any f**king Merlot." Who knew it had such an effect on Merlot sales? Now the renaming of that 2005 Raphael wine as "La Fontana" makes a lot more sense.

I'm feeling a little guilty - I stopped drinking Merlot for a time around then, too. But the side effect is nice: because of the dip in sales, we get to taste appropriately aged Merlot on our trip, rather than wine which may be too young, which seems to be the case with some of the other reds out here. And it's good. Still, I don't buy any Merlot here, having been spoiled by the stuff at Raphael. I do pick up a bottle of Cab Franc though.

Part two, coming soon.

Twenty Wineries In Four Days: Day Three

9 a.m.: We're both eating bagels this morning.

10 a.m.: All the cute little coffeeshops in Greenport are still closed, dernit!

10:30 a.m.: Pull into a coffeeshop called Eric's somewhere on Route 48. They don't have foamy fuzzy coffee but, promises the dude behind the counter, their basic coffee is darn fine. After getting a cup, I agree.

11 a.m. I came to the North Fork once before a couple of years ago. I have a vague recollection from that trip of a winery in a strip mall. Today, it turns out that wasn't just a wine-induced hallucination - it was Waters Crest. Their whole operation is in a strip mall - they're true "garagistes." They get their grapes from others' fields - a lot of the wineries out here do - and blend them all right there. In addition to good wine, they've got a neat story. Jim Waters was a home winemaker and volunteer firefighter before 9/11. After 9/11, he changed his life around and made winemaking his full-time career. The winery just released the 2006 Red Knight Red, named after a firefighters' motorcycle club that raises money for charity. The woman who poured our wine said it was quite an experience to see 100-some bike-riding firefighters show up at the wine's debut!

11:30ish: I am hunting fudge, but I cain't find any. All these cute little farm markets are pumpkin fudge-less.

11:45ish: We're at Roanoke now, which is somehow related to Wolffer, which we did not get to. Nice enough place, and the server brings out some cheese for us out of the goodness of her heart. She's also been on a fruit fly-killing rampage, which makes the tasting room so much more pleasant. Truthfully, this made more of an impression on me than the wine did, although I did grab a bottle of the Blend One, a tasty mix of Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot.

12:30ish: Maybe the reason I can't remember any of the wines at Roanoke is because of where we went next - Macari. I won't dwell too much on how good this place was, apart from to say that AMP and I were having a debate about what's better - winemaking as art, or winemaking as business - and that Macari, like Bedell, does both successfully. They've got really nice low-end wines - I bought a bottle of $10 Collina 48 Chardonnay - and even nicer higher-end things, like the just-released $27 2004 Cab Franc I bought or the $43 2004 Bergen Road Meritage that AMP sprung for. Our server was lovely, too, putting up with us tolerantly when we decided to do our own blind tasting with two of their merlots.

1:45ish: From here we went jauntily down the road to Lieb. I've got mixed feelings about this place. I have fond memories of it from last time I was out here. Back then, we had a great pourer who let us try some old vines versus new vines wine. This time, however, the guy behind the counter was a little bit of an obnoxious hothead. In between correcting our pronunciation - it's "Merit-udge" - telling us how much wine his manager likes to drink, and waxing on about Pink Floyd, he did serve us some pretty nice wine though, so we'll let it slide. I especially liked when he pulled out their newest release, a Merit-UDGE, and forced us not to drink it until we'd swirled it for several minutes to age it a bit. He also explained to us what Meritage is - a name for blended wine that winemakers can pay to use on their bottles. Lieb also, unusually for Long Island, have made a Syrah, in memory of their vineyard mascot dog of the same name. Ultimately, we passed on buying any bottles here, but we did buy a glass of one of their Pinot Blancs - it's one of their specialties - and sat outside and drank it and ate some cheese. Because we had no knife, we bit off chunks of the cheese with our teeth. Classy.

3ish: Still hunting fudge. Still no luck.

3ish: We stopped by Osprey's Dominion somewhere in here. It was just a quick in-and-out. We tasted a few wines, pleasant but not extraordinary, and I picked up a bottle of the Richmond Creek red table wine, which at $11 seemed well-priced.

3:45ish: I'd love to say we continued on our wine-chugging ways, but really, we needed a break. So we hightailed it back to Greenport, where, miraculously, the tea shop was open. In fact, they were closing their kitchen within 15 minutes, but they took pity on us and let us have some tea and scones.

7:30ish: Ever since I first came to the North Fork, I have wanted to go to the Frisky Oyster in Greenport, based solely on its name. In fact, I have in mind that it could be a franchise, with slight variations on the name: The Ornery Oyster (which would be mine)...the Boisterous Oyster...the possibilities are endless. All that aside, this was my favorite restaurant we ate at out here. Really interesting, good food: squash and apple soup, mussels in white wine sauce. They also had a Merlot wine flight on the menu that I ordered despite myself: a side-by-side tasting of three 2002 Merlots: Medolla, Raphael, and Osprey's Dominion, some of which are no longer available to buy anywhere. The Medolla (from one of those smaller vineyards that don't have tasting rooms) was unremarkable in comparison to the other two, both of which were fantastic. The Raphael especially was incredible: so dark and thick it was almost sludge-like, and it tasted that dark and thick, too.

Our waiter held extremely strong opinions, so when we asked him what to have for dessert, he was unequivocal: "The key lime pie, of course!" On the menu, they refer to it as "The best key lime pie." We were both a little skeptical - we've both been to Florida - but after tasting it, we had to admit that it was definitely the best key lime pie we've had in the tri-state area. Finally, if I may just add girlishly, the wallpaper in this restaurant is so cute!

So, smiley-face round-up: Waters Crest gets a moderate smiley-face and Roanoke the same. Macari gets a ginormous smiley-face, Lieb a flat robot face, Osprey's Dominion a moderate smiley-face, and the Frisky Oyster gets a fittingly frisky smiley-face.

KEXP's Top 903 Albums

This is an ambitious project. I'm happy to see Radiohead with four albums in the top 20 (explaining why I love KEXP so much). A little puzzled by Arcade Fire at #3 and Neutral Milk Hotel at #6. And lest we fail to scroll down, New Order just snuck in at #903. Oh hey and wow, there's Love and Rockets at #899! Remember them? Although I would have picked their album with "So Alive" on it for this list, since that song TO THIS DAY still gets randomly stuck in my head. Your legs are strong and you're so so long and you don't come from this town...what does that even mean?

I just realized these guys have been touring this year, so lots of their stuff is available online. Start here.

I want a playlist...where's the playlist?

Twenty Wineries In Four Days: Day Two

9 a.m. I have a bagel for breakfast. AMP does not. Shortly, the folly of her ways will become evident.

10 a.m. Dear Lord, Greenport is a ghost town on Tuesdays. All I want is a decent latte, and I'm not going to Starbucks, dammit!

10:30 a.m. We have to drive to do it, but I finally find me some froofy coffee, at a little place called the Blue Duck. As it turns out, we are there on its first day. Good thing it opened, otherwise all these wineries wouldn't have much liked seeing my cranky coffee-less face.

10:45 a.m. Hmmm. Pugliese says they are open at 10 a.m. So why aren't they open? Why? We drive over to Bedell instead, and sit in the parking lot waiting for them to open. How pathetic are we? There's a car parked in the lot with a custom license plate that I think says "Grapest," which would be awesome: "Grape! Graper! Grapest!" But no, it actually says "Grapes1". I take a picture to occupy the time.

11:03 a.m. Bedell is open!!! They have a beautiful tasting room with a genial fella behind the bar. The people who work at these places are interesting - some of them own the wineries and make more money than ex-Lehman Brothers' traders once did, some of them are hired hands who are clearly just collecting a paycheck and don't know the first thing about the wine or care for that matter, and some of them are folks like this guy - pretty young, interested in the industry, not sure exactly what they want to do (maybe a brewery, he says), but they know their stuff. Wineries really ought to pay more attention to who they put behind the bar - it's amazing how much of a difference this can make in whether or not you enjoy the wine.

Bedell - like Corey Creek - is now owned by Michael Lynne, who used to run New Line Cinema and was executive producer of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. There's a certain cinematic flair in their presentation - the labels on the bottles, the design of the building, the view out on the vineyard. (Our pourer pointed out to us the difference between Bedell's lovely green vineyards and those next door, which belong to a winery that we won't name but that was mentioned already and rhymes with "Hen Bar".) No hobbits, although there is a timid dog. We spend full on an hour - maybe more - here, tasting the wine, wandering around their gorgeous building, and sitting on the porch in the sun watching some grapes being processed. It's pretty neat to be out here at harvest season; you get an idea for how much work actually goes into making good wine, watching the grapes being hand-picked and hand-sorted and just generally treated like small purple kings. I buy two bottles of wine: the First Crush red and the (wince) $48 2006 Bedell Gallery. I love me a big buttery Chardonnay, and this one makes my tongue water.

12:15ish - Back to Pugliese, which is now blessedly open. They have a vineyard cat, who shuns us. To be honest, it isn't really the wine that I like about this place - although it's more than decent - it's the bottles. They're all hand-painted, every single one of them. So pretty. I buy a bottle of '06 Cab Franc. Long Island originally planted Cab Franc as a blending grape but it turned out that the grape did really well in the climate, so now it seems like the island is obsessing over it. It's a rare vineyard where you won't find at least one bottle of the stuff, and lots of folks think that this grape is the future of Long Island. We've already had a good laugh over a headline in one of the rags we've picked up that starts off thusly: "Let's be franc."

12:45ish - Oh dear God, it's 12:45 and I think I'm drunk. Some of these wineries don't even have spittoons out on the counter. What's a girl to do? In our case, putter a hundred feet or so down the road to Lenz. Thank goodness these wineries are all scrunched together so you don't have to drive too far from one to the next.

Lenz is picturesque without being over the top. There are workers harvesting grapes in the fields, strategically placed, artfully toppled-over wine barrels, and a garage that you can peer into to get an idea of what's going on behind the scenes. In the tasting room, we get a real treat: a blind tasting of three different Merlots: the 2001 Old Vines Merlot, the 2001 "Estate Selection" Merlot, and a 2003 Merlot. I have been known to wax poetic about how much better wine from old vines is than from new ones, but I really got my comeuppance in this tasting. I guessed the 2003 Merlot was from the old vines, and entirely mixed up the two 2001 bottles. Our pourer gave us a tip: as wine ages, it gets darker...so you should, when tasting wines from several different years, be able to figure out the year based on which wine is darkest. But our utter confusion was yet more proof that you should just drink what you like, and who cares about the price or the vintage or the nose.

1:45ish: We put a moratorium on wine-drinking until 3 p.m. We - especially bagel-less AMP - need to eat. We drive over to Love Lane, which might be the shortest road on Long Island at maybe a quarter of a mile, and settle in at the Love Lane Kitchen, where neither one of us is tempted in the least by the wines by the glass on the menu. Just water please, and keep it coming. I'm pretty sure my chicken/avocado sandwich was tasty, but I can't really recall. After, we wander around Love Lane a little bit. There's a candy shop that has pumpkin fudge, but the store is a little creepy, so I pass. We do buy some cheese next door, where we are involuntarily sucked into a cheese tasting almost as serious as all the wine tasting we've been doing. (Blueberry cheese? Not for me.)

3ish: Honestly, if I didn't have my camera as evidence I wouldn't remember that Duckwalk is where we went next, but I have photos to prove it, so I guess that's what we did. The Duckwalk we went to is the Northern cousin of the main vineyard, which is in the Hamptons. It is owned by the same folks who own Pindar, and it's got the same commercial thing going on. Now, in snooty winemakerese, "commercial" seems to be a synonym for "bad," but I have to say that there's a little room in this world for commercial. I mean, why is slapping some cute ducks on your label a bad thing? And the wine? They make some perfectly fine stuff, and it is more reasonably priced than comparable mediocre wines at other vineyards out here. I bought a $12 bottle of red table wine that I am going to enjoy thoroughly with a pizza sometime soon.

One other comment on this place. I am not a big fan of dessert wines. I'm not a fan of sweet wines in general, so I don't bother with dessert wines - I'd rather just have dessert. Perhaps this will change as I get older and wiser, but for now my modus operandi is to taste the dessert wine, make a face, and let someone else finish it. But Duckwalk makes a truly lovely blueberry port - it was my favorite of all the dessert wines we tasted out here.

3:30ish: We are trying to go to The Tasting Room, a little store that pulls together a bunch of the smaller wineries that don't have their own tasting rooms. Sadly, it's closed Monday through Thursday, like rather too much of this silly island, so no tiny boutique vintage tastings for us. Instead, we tried pumpkin preserves (disgustingly sweet) at the shop next door and then headed for Castello di Borghese.

This is one of the oldest vineyards on Long Island, although it changed hands a few years ago. It's owned by Italian royalty now, and it gives off an impression of gravitas that can be a bit off-putting. But for us, that was lightened by the big truck advertising "Pinot Noir" out front, and by the guy behind the counter, whose idea the truck was. Turns out he's a Pinot Noir freak, and as such, he knows that fellow Pinot Noir fans will do u-turns in the middle of a highway to check out a bottle of the stuff. Pinot Noir is pretty rare on the island - I'm not even sure if we tasted another - so of course we had to try it. It was good but I wound up going for another bottle I liked more, the 2005 Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon.

3:45ish: We've moved just up the road to Vineyard 48. In retrospect, I'm not quite sure what I thought of this place. I guess my overriding impression was that it was a little odd. It is owned by several families who appear, in addition to their love of wine, to really, really, love chess. And it makes a mean peach wine, under the cheesy "NoFo" appellation. And that is all I will say about that.

4:29 p.m.: At Duckwalk, we got a free tasting coupon to go to Pindar, since they're owned by the same folks. So we try to go back. We think we've slid in just before their hard-ass 4:30 deadline. They appear to have a different clock. They've been wiping down the bar for the past five minutes. No tasting for us, but we're welcome to buy! Are you kidding me? I won't be drinking your wine any time soon, thanks entirely to your crappy attitude. As far as "commercial" goes, this place embodies all the bad aspects of it.

7:30ish: At several points during the day, we've asked people where we should go for dinner, and one place keeps coming up: Seafood Barge. The guy at Castello di Borghese even told us exactly what table to ask for. We drove past it on the way to our hotel on the first night, and thought, well, dive. Looks like a dive, has a dive name, so, dive. Au contraire: the only thing divey about Seafood Barge is its external appearance. Inside, it's very cute, done up in a nautical theme without being nauseating. And the food, oh, the food...curried crab spring rolls...pan-seared tuna with coconut rice in soy and ginger broth...yum.

So, smiley-face roundup: Bedell gets a giant smiley-face, Pugliese a moderate one, Lenz a moderately smilier than moderate one, Duckwalk a robot flat line, Castello di Borghese a moderate smiley-face, 48 a robot flat line, and Pindar a giant, giant frowny-face.

Twenty Wineries In Four Days: Day One

My friend AMP and myself are setting off on a tour of North Fork, Long Island wineries. We leave Brooklyn Monday at 1:30ish, and are in the land of the wine trees, as I once drunkenly called them, by 3ish.

2ish: In the car, we listen to an NPR segment about how listening to music while tasting wine can influence how you like it. We hear about one winemaker who actually plays music to his grapes. Later, we listen to Kings of Leon and debate what kind of wine they would go well with. A big mean red? Maybe whiskey would be a better accompaniment.

250ish: We drive by a sign that announces the existence of pumpkin fudge. I am intrigued, but say nothing, figuring we'll find more of it later. We're on a mission here, and it isn't a mission to find fudge.

3ish: We're trying to find Schneider Vineyards, which is on the map in the Long Island wine book from 2001 that someone gave me, but that's the peril of old books, 'cos this place ain't here. Maybe they just don't have a tasting room? Ah well. Instead, we go to Palmer Vineyards. There are insane numbers of people here, which puzzles us, until we figure out that it's Columbus Day. We are also swarmed by fruit flies, which we will soon discover is typical for this time of year. Our unfriendly server discourages us from just having a taste. They're too busy, she says, so we should order a glass. Ummm...hello? The whole point of wineries is to sample a variety of what they have to offer. Their tastes are also excessively priced - something like $4 for an individual taste - but we nonetheless order a couple and sample them (they're not great, or maybe the experience has just soured us). We sit out in the back yard and listen to a live bluegrass band, which was pleasant enough, but overall, this place gets a black mark. (They do have a fun sign, on the way in, though - see the pix.) Moving on.

3:30ish: We pull into Diliberto and instantly feel happier. They have a cute tasting room, in the kitchen of the Dilibertos' weekend home in Jamesport (during the week he's a lawyer in Queens, or so the Internet tells me). The tasting here is also a little weird - rather than standing at the bar and sampling the wine, you order it and they come around to your table and pour it - but we're game. We settle in and while we're tasting the wine, the classical guitarist who is noodling around in the corner drops by and gets our life story out of us and a few of the folks at other tables. It's some one's birthday, so we all sing happy birthday to her. The guitarist starts another tune, and suddenly the owner of the place is standing next to him belting out opera. And he's good, too! I buy a bottle of the 2004 Diliberto Cantina red table wine, and later wish I'd bought more, but it's too late - this place is only open on weekends and holidays. Make sure you don't miss it.

4:15ish: A quick in and out at Laurel Lake. Nothing special, but at least they like you to taste all the wine.

4:32: We try and hit one last winery, Pindar. Their tasting room is only open until 4:30, and they're militant about it. There's not going to be any tasting at Pindar today, and they're not shy about telling us. But we can buy until 5! Thanks, but no thanks. Moving on.

5ish: We check into the hotel in Greenport where we are staying, crack open the Diliberto, and have a glass on the balcony. Perfection. We also start plotting out our course of action for the next day with the copy of Wine Press that we picked up. Essential reading, I'd say. Little profiles of all the vineyards and an up-to-date map (no Schneider's). I start making a smiley-face guide to the wineries we're visiting. Diliberto gets a big smile, Palmer a big frown, and Laurel Lake an expressionless robot face.

7:30ish: We wander over to Claudio's for dinner. Claudio's is pretty cool, a weird combination of dive bar and legitimate seafood restaurant. They have a sign saying they're the oldest family-owned restaurant in the U.S. A beautiful old wooden bar that they apparently got from a hotel on the Bowery. With a real marble railing, and some gorgeous glass details. During prohibition Claudio's was a hot spot for the bootleggers to bring in the liquor, or so they say, and there's still a trapdoor under the bar. The seafood here is good and fresh, and the pumpkin pie is nothing to sneer at. We both have a glass of local wine with dinner. I can't remember what the heck I had a mere four days later, so it must not have been anything worth mentioning. AMP had a glass of Bedell's 2007 First Crush. It's the first vintage of it, and you'd think 2007 grapes might be a little young, but this is pretty good. More on Bedell later, but for now, wine tasting is hard work, and it's off to bed for us.

Swamp Cabbage

Swamp Cabbage, I just learned, is a recipe that involves hearts of palms (apparently best if freshly harvested your own dang self) and bacon - lots of it, with whatever other ingredients you want, stewed together.

While I have not (yet!) eaten swamp cabbage, I imagine it tastes like this band sounds.

Can't Believe TI Sampled O-Zone

Sometimes, you should let sleeping Eurotrash dogs lie.

Maybe THIS Is The Sexiest Song Ever Written

This song...it's plucked strings that hurt the fingers to listen to...it's sitting alone in a spooked-out empty room in an old house...it's a growl from the back of the throat that the voice can't recover from...it's one four-minute-long moan that you feel right down in the pit of your stomach.

Kings of Leon - Closer: Go here to get it.

'Exile In Guyville' Live

I (like 99.9% of Liz Phair fans) mourn the death of the old Liz Phair, anything post-Whitechocolatespaceegg. But she lives again, sorta, by playing 'Exile in Guyville' live in a few cities 15 years post its release. (Fifteen YEARS??? Gulp.)

I dunno, she says she's "emotionally present" in it, but I'm not so sure. Streaming over at NPR, here.

Keep Bringing It The Rest Of Your Life

I saw Michael Franti at All Points West, and while he might be too much of a cheeseball for me in general, this is one of my favorite songs this year. I'd like to figure out a way to blast it from the rooftops...

Don't ever doubt the power of just one man
The worldwide power of just one rhyme
Don't ever doubt the force of the bass line
Or a record gone round to burn the house down
You've got to let go of remote control

Janis Joplin On The Blues

Studs Terkel: I gotta ask the cliched question about the blues being a black man's music.

Janis Joplin: Anybody can sing the blues. Well, I don't know whether they can sing them or not, but they can feel them. Everybody's got feelings inside of them. It's just the faculty of being able to transform it into music. I mean, everybody's got 'em. Everybody's got those things, they've just got to know what to do with it. You either repress it or you use it. Sort of. I feel better after singing, yeah.

-From 'And They All Sang'

Hang Me Up To Dry

Have had this Cold War Kids song on repeat all day. Despite not caring much for this group generally, something about it is just grabbing me, randomly. I like the real simple riff, played emphatically, that carries the song all the way through. I like the weird "cat walking on a keyboard" piano that kicks in late in the song, which make me wonder if someone in the band was trying to engineer a Jonny Greenwood-esque destruction of it. I dig the lyrics, which you can make work for pretty much any situation you care to. I'm making 'em a soundtrack to a tough deadline. Careless in our summer clothes/splashing around in the muck and the mire.

In A Hurricane Without An Umbrella

Yesterday morning was supposed to be wet and windy, as Hurricane Hanna rolled through, but instead it was just overcast and oppressively humid. So with a friend, I made the trek into Manhattan to pick up some wine and some fancy groceries, keeping a wary eye on the sky, mindful of what a little rain can do to the New York subway.

Come 3 p.m.-ish, Hanna got serious. Pulled out the cheap-ass umbrella I bought at the subway the other day and within instants - not even minutes - it was blown inside-out and busted. Picked up another umbrella at Kmart, which either teleported itself to a Caribbean island without me noticing or wandered away from me while I was distracted by some boots at the Union Square DSW (they were nice boots). Rather than go for umbrella #3, I gave up, took the subway home, and walked the half-mile from the subway stop in nothing short of a torrential downpour. The paper grocery bags, ever more sodden, finally gave out right at my front door.

Inside, we shut the windows, made dinner, drank two bottles of wine, and blasted some blues music. The hurricane did whatever it did outdoors, but we didn't care none.

This here is what we played. A super cool cover of Ri-Ri. And an appropriate message for those who would venture out in a hurricane without an umbrella.

Corona!

I am at Brighton Beach with my friend AMP. It is a gorgeous August summer weekend. The perfect temperature. The ocean, a perfect shade of blue. The waves, not too wavey. The beach, not too packed.

Ahh, Brighton Beach. There is, behind me, a not-couple of gay man and not-gay woman drinking what would ultimately be five bottles of Sovetskoye Shampanskoye. Somewhere to the right, someone with a boom box playing, of all things, Russian accordion music - loudly. Several entrepreneurial types are plying the beach, selling water - "ice-cold water! Water that's almost TOO cold." - beer - "Ice-cold beer! Corona! Smirnoff Ice! Kholodnoye pivo!" - and solid advice - "All the pretty women, pay attention! Ladies - if your man beats you, leave him!" Seedy, yes, but somehow in a normal, non-threatening, "it's just Brooklyn" kinda way.

Eventually, surrounded by such temptation, we begin to want Coronas. We buy one apiece from one of our entrepreneurs. This one is lugging beer around the beach in black plastic bags, and having his two - daughters? - help him to make change and open the beers. We toast ourselves. We toast our befuddled champagne-drinking friends. We take pictures of our feet on the beach with the surprisingly cold Coronas and otherwise feel as if we have suddenly inhabited a beer commercial.

A watchful neighbor notices the beach police drawing near in their beach buggy. We hide our beers under clothes and in bags. The police take up residence 20 feet away from us, apparently hitting on a couple of women. The entire beach near us - all drunk, all - pretends to be asleep. My friend's phone rings, but she cannot answer it without taking the beer out of the bag. The police leave, undoubtedly knowing that they could bust every single one of us if they wanted to (the trash can nearby, filled to overflowing with empty Corona bottles, is a dead give-away).

A comic moment.

I know I just posted about Calexico, but I have to link to this. It is so perfect.

There on the beach.
I can see it in her eyes.
I only had a Corona.
Five cents deposit.

Miles Of Highway Poppies

Liking the new Calexico stuff that people are posting. Just like always, the mariachi trumpets and gee-tars send my mind down an empty shimmering highway in a Cadillac, windows down, on my unhurried way to a dusty sun-baked Mexican bar - and I have a very specific bar in my mind's eye. Where there will be an outdoor area without any shade, with mellowed-out drunks and maybe someone noodling on an acoustic guitar. And cheap Christmas tree lights at night.

The stars in their slowness took us by surprise. Thank you, whoever posted this picture.

Here.

"Which One's The One?"

My favorite stage banter of All Points West (liberties taken where memory fails):

Sia, to crowd: Well, hello there! How are you all? Can I get you anything? A cup of tea? No? Why, you're not very demanding, as crowds go...

Kings of Leon frontman Caleb Followill: Hey ya'll. I hear they're not letting you get very drunk out there. (Disapproving boo from crowd.) Well, they didn't say anything to me, so I'm gonna have a drink.

Radiohead's Thom Yorke: This one's dedicated to Kings of Leon. If we were better-looking, we'd be friends with them.

Girl Talk's Gregg Willis (with abnormally high energy): I just got back from Norway - I played with these guys Mayhem - those guys just go on stage and kill each other and they don't even care. Let's party!

Thom (to Jonny, trying to figure out the down beat to "Videotape"): Which one's the one? Which one's the one? Jonny! Wake up! Which one's the one?

Jack Johnson (peering at odd large balloon/bamboo animal being held aloft in front of him by the crowd, during an impromptu bridge in his first song): That thing is very strange. What is it? It's phallic, yet oddly feminine. I think I like it.

Thom (to crowd, apropos of nothing): Cool beans.

All Points West - The Money Shot

Thom & Jonny on acoustic guitars.

Every picture I took before this one and most after were blurry messes. The Radiohead gods smiled upon me for one moment only.

Blackness

Whoooo boy. It's been a long time since a book has made me cry, and that's all I'll really say about that, except to add that were I the one doing the soundtrack for the movie version (which one has difficulty imagining will be anything but a mess compared to the perfection of the book), I would secure the rights to these songs, in no particular order, except for the first one, which is, well, first:

Nada Surf - The Fox. (Here.) I just happened to hear this just as I was getting sucked into this book, and I found it cropping up in my head as I got further and further in. The more I listened to it, the more it seemed that the band must have written the song while reading this book. It would be good for any number of stretches of text that find our father and son struggling across their post-apocalyptic world. We're in a different war, with ourselves and some of you, so many things that don't hold true. With the fear that dims all light.

Radiohead - The Gloaming. Genie Lantern light a fire, this is now the witching hour. What if it were always the witching hour?

Arvo Part - well, anything, really, but how about Fratres...redemptive and cleansing, but still a little ominous. For the closing credits.

The Frames - Dream Awake. For a flashback or two. (Here.)

Massive Attack - Inertia Creeps. For when it does.

El-P. Flyentology. Or Run the Numbers. Or both. For when there are bad guys.

Liars - The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack. For aloneness.

Peter Gabriel - We Do What We're Told. For your random general creepy scene.

Pela - Rooftops. For, I think, the closing scene.

Menomena - Running. For the long stretches without food. (Here.)

It's a little creepy, how different all these songs are if you imagine them from another point of view. Now, off to stock up on canned goods.

Hmmm.

I find this worrisome. Footloose as silly little movie about kids who just want to have fun in a small uptight town - yes. Footloose as tribute to deceased sibling? I dunno...

You can stream a wee bit from it here (scroll down) too.

My Perfect Driving Mix

When driving a lime green rental car to Cape May and back, the following CDs hit the spot.

Bloc Party - Silent Alarm. Perfect for getting the hell out of the Avis parking lot and then immediately getting stuck in traffic on the BQE.

Massive Attack - Mezzanine. Perfect for zoning out across vast swathes of the Garden State Parkway.

Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III. Perfect for feeling vaguely bad about blasting out your windows as you roll into bucolic little Cape May - until you realize that you just passed two other cars also blasting it out their windows.

The Ting Tings - We Started Nothing. Perfect for frantically trying to get to one last winery before it closes at 5 p.m. (We made it!)

The Kills - Midnight Boom. Perfect for driving along the beach at night to. Also good for replaying the first song over and over again at any random point along the drive.

The Hold Steady - Separation Sunday. Perfect for the bittersweet sensation of having to leave Cape May. Wahhhh!

Joe Turner Been Here And Gone

I'm reading this Studs Terkel book, "And They All Sang," which has to do with the musicians he interviewed on his Chicago radio show back in the day. And I'm considering that reading this book is a mistake, because I don't need any more stacks of CDs tottering precariously on the edge of my stereo, and I suspect that I'm about to acquire them.

Already, I am intrigued by a man called Big Bill Broonzy, and a song of his called "Joe Turner No. 2", which Terkel sets the stage for thusly:

This is the one. If ever there was a hush in the control room, the edge-of-the-chair anticipation, it is now. Bill is retuning his guitar. This one calls for extra-special tuning. "You guys can go for a drink while I'm doin' this." Now he's ready. We hear a guitar, but it's like no guitar we ever heard before. It's a human voice, not one but a whole ramshackle town...And now that chord - whang - only it isn't that - it's crying, everybody crying - a cry of salvation.

By chance, one happens to be able to hear this song in its entirety online at the moment, thanks to this fabulous replay of this fabulous Americana show that aired July 3. It's the third song in.

PS. Fast forward through the drugged-out DJ's vacant ramblings.

Adam Yauch Is My BFF

According to a recent "My New York" column in the NY Post, Adam Yauch is my doppelganger.

Consider:

*"I actually find Brooklyn much more interesting than Manhattan at this point," he tells the paper. Well, duh. He also loves Prospect Park.

*He likes the fish cake and green papaya salad at Sri Pra Phai. I'm more a fan of the fried salad myself, but I would totally order the papaya salad for kicks.

*He says Regal Battery Park Stadium is his favorite big cineplex in NY for the same reasons I like it: "There will be like 25 people in a stadium that's made to hold 300 people." He also says he and fellow Beastie Boy Mike Diamond battle over whose personal theater is. Sorry guys: it's MY personal theater.

I'm totally going to also check out the Manhattan Special Coffee Soda he talks about: "It's this crazy, weird, nasty soda that they used to have commercials for when I was a kid."

I recently saw Yauch's movie "Gunnin' For That Number One Spot" with him in attendance to answer audience questions. Afterwards, as my friends and I walked to the subway, we were right behind him. He's like the anti-P. Diddy: just this normal guy that you wouldn't know was a rap superstar. Nobody recognized him. Given all the above, I wonder how many times I've walked by him and not even known it.

Just Somethin' About Sittin' On A Stoop

Back in the days when I had a stoop, I used to do a lot of sittin' on it. There just aren't many better ways to spend a lazy summer evening. My Puerto Rican Social Club neighbors undoubtedly thought it was weird that I sat on it with a glass of wine rather than a 40, but damn, what's the point of a stoop if you can't do what you want while you're sittin'?

So when I first heard this frolicking Little Jackie song "The Stoop" no more than five minutes ago, it immediately took up residence on my soul's stoop. It encapsulates the whole experience. So frickin' good. I seriously need me some stoop sittin' time now, so I'm gonna go hunting for somebody else's to sit on. (Go here to get it.)

Sittin on the stoop in Bed Stuy
Always say hi when the brothers walk by
Just for the etiquette sittin on the top step
With a bag of chips sit back relax enjoy the bricks
We got a heavenly philosophy
I don't mess with you you don't mess with me
It is what it is it ain't all hard
Up in the hood sittin on the front stoop
It's all good.

No Longer Eating My Heart Out

I confess to some jealousy of those bloggers who are eternally moaning about all the free review copies of music they get that they don't have time to listen to...but NO LONGER! I have just received my first review copy of a CD.

After I wrote briefly about Robin Danar's Altered States CD here, the nice folks over at Elemental Consulting/Shanachie were nice enough to contact me and I ask me if I'd like a copy. That was an easy enough question to answer. So now I have one!

This is mostly an album of covers, but I think my favorite is an original track by Jessca Hoop, which you can hear over here...

What's With...

Blogs that when you land on them, start playing music at you without you doing anything? Grumble...

Although, I must confess that the last time this happened, I liked what I was hearing well enough to fumble around the Web page until I figured out what it was. And it has tilted me from being in the "I dunno about Santogold" camp into the "Alright, I'm digging Santogold" camp. Twas this, in less invasive format:

You'll Find A Way

Reasons #242 and #243 Why Lil Wayne Rules

#242.

The lyrics!

Man I got summer hatin on me cuz I'm hotter than the sun
I got spring hatin on me cuz I ain't never sprung
Win-ter hating on me cuz I'm colder than yall
And I would never I would never I would never fall
I'm being hated by the seasons
So f--- yall for hatin with no reason

#243.

Wherein Lil Wayne thanks all the fans for buying his history book and gives a shout out to the book drive. Eh?

Not Duke Ellington's A Train

Another stolen photo...

Gosh, I didn't know toting around a boom box was back in style. It is in the outer outer boroughs, at least, where not one, but two boom boxes were going on the shuttle back to the A Train after my trip to Rockaway Beach. Along with a guy drinking a Corona on the train, two barefoot kids (eek!) and several people eating chicken and rice out of styrofoam containers.

Sadly, neither one of our boom box entertainers had put much thought into their playlists: one was playing an abominable, abysmal, asphyxiating slow jam, and the other, more boppable but somewhat irksome gangsta rap.

If I were lugging a boom box on the A train and drinking a Corona at this very moment (and I kind of wish I were!), this would be what I would be playing.

Beastie Boys - An Open Letter to NYC (duh)
Bryan Adams - Summer of '69
Notorious B.I.G. - Anything. Everything
The Ting Tings - Great DJ
Def Leppard - Pour Some Sugar On Me
Lil Wayne - Lollipop
Smashing Pumpkins - 1979
Flo-Rida - Low
Ludacris - The Potion
The Replacements - Kiss Me On The Bus. Or maybe Bastards of Young
Foghat - Slow Ride
Santogold - L.E.S. Artistes
Billy Idol - White Wedding
M83 - Highway of Endless Dreams
Jurassic 5 - Quality Control
Dead Prez- Hip-Hop
The Raconteurs - Salute Your Solution
Nas - Made You Look
M.I.A. - Galang
Soul Coughing - True Dreams of Wichita
And of course, The Ramones - Rockaway Beach

Hot In The City Tonight

Two small NY vignettes.

1. I am running in Prospect Park on Sunday. It is 7:45ish p.m. but it is still blazing hot. It is Puerto Rican Day, and the park is CROWD-ed and festive. I look to my left, see a guy lying face down in the grass in a very chalk outline-esque way. All around him, people partying, wandering, sitting, and this dude, face planted in the dirt. I ponder what to do. A half mile or so ahead there's an African drumming group that's always there on Sundays, and there's usually cops there to quell the drummers, should they, I dunno, start throwing drumsticks viciously. So I run along and find me a slightly pudgy cop, stop, and say, "there's a guy lying face down in the grass back there." He looks at me and goes: "drunk." I stare at him. "Maybe," I say. "Or, he could be dead..." Says he: "How far back is he?" I explain. He looks sad, and hot, and makes general noises about how he's going to check it out. I sure hope he did...

2. I am exiting the PATH train at the WTC station. There are two people at the turnstile next to mine, an unruly-looking guy coming in and a fierce-looking woman going out, who have reached an impasse. He has put his money in. She is halfway through the turnstile. Finally, she backs down and out, but he has already lost his money. "I lost my money!" he says, and as she breezes through the turnstile next to him, he slaps her in the back of the head. She hauls off and punches him. A flurry of half-hearted slapping ensues, as I stand frozen in the turnstile next to them, with my jaw on the floor. Two PATH employees are nearby, and they're like, "WTF?" And the guy is like, "I lost my money!" And they're like, "Dude, you just hit a woman because you lost your money???"

In the summer, in the city.

Like Being In Hell With A Cool Soundtrack

(I had to link to this picture. Click here for the original post by its original author.)

Saturday I went to a music festival down near Atlantic City at a place called Appel Farm. It would have been awesome had it not been 250 million degrees in the shade. Oh wait, there was no shade. The last time I completely sweat through every piece of clothing I was wearing was at the Mermaid Parade a couple of years ago, and I had totally forgotten what a disgusting feeling it was.

Anyhow, I think Enter the Haggis was pretty good, but I was so hot I couldn't pay attention. By the time Suzanne Vega came on, I had resigned myself, and managed to enjoy her stage banter quite a bit ("Do I look like Alice Cooper up here? Maybe not the best idea to outline my eyes in black ink before coming out here...and now, we're going to play a song in a major key!")

She ended her set with "Tom's Diner". Now, when I was growing up I absolutely hated that song, mostly because local radio overplayed the crap out of it. But compared to what radio plays today - well, I'll take it. And the live version she did was surprisingly rock 'n' roll...lots of bass, lots of drums.

Then there was They Might Be Giants, who were enjoyable simply because they were clearly having a good time, and because, as they say, they might be the only band on the planet that employs a full-time confetti artist. And maybe because, by that point, the sun had retreated at least five feet away from my head.

My friend advanced a theory that with They Might Be Giants, you can totally date someone by what songs they're a fan of. In my case, it's "Istanbul Not Constantinople" and "Particle Man", but there were some people in the audience grooving to "Fingertips," which I found to be an incomprehensible mess. So what TMBG era do you hail from?

Yay!

New Calexico album

Parental Apocalypse

Spied outside my building in Brooklyn the other night: a small child, perhaps six or seven years old, skipping down the sidewalk singing about lollipops. Bucolic childhood scene? Maybe, if it weren't Lil Wayne's song about lollipops. Disturbing, seeing a child utterly absorbed in singing "She lick me like a l-l-l-l-lollipop."

Stoked/Not Stoked

I am

Stoked: That Radiohead has 167,147 fans on Facebook (which I just joined!), currently 80,848 more fans than Britney Spears. All is as it should be.

Not stoked: That Coldplay has more fans than Radiohead. Which reminds me of a distasteful interaction I once had:

Me: (playing Radiohead CD)
Unnamed blasphemous one: They sound like Coldplay!
Me: (ominous silence)... ... ... Uh, nooooo, Coldplay sounds like Radiohead.

As a side note, Linkin Park, Justin Timberlake, and Chris Brown all have more fans than Radiohead, as does Victoria's Secret Pink. (?) And someone called 'The Stig'. (But not, thankfully, Tool.) Curious, this Facebook...

Stoked: To be going to All Points West.

Not stoked: In sign number 5,644 of the pending CD apocalypse, I was stalking the new Ting Tings album this weekend (i.e. too lazy to look up release date so just checking to see if it's out whenever I'm at a record store) and it was available, but only as LP or MP3 download. If want CD, must wait until June 3. Which happens to be today, but see, I wanted it Sunday, see.

Stoked: Waterfalls in New York! Really!

Yahhhhh!

Okayyyyy, I might be a teeny bit obsessed with Soulja Boy Tellem. Or whatever their name is. First I frightened my neighbors by learning, slowly and clankily as a 30+-year-old woman trying to be cool does, how to do the Superman dance. Now, I can't stop laughing about this "Yahhh Trick Yahhh" song. In its lyrical genius, it outdoes "Supersoak that ho" (is that realllllly what they're saying!??!) by, like, a factor of one million. I think I will try the move at about 3:32 of the way in the next time someone messes with me on the subway.

The Million Dollar Quartet

Another "how did I live this long and not know about this?" moment.

If you ever go to Memphis (and you should), your number one stop, even ahead of Graceland, must be Sun Studio. This two-room, 45-minute tour is one of the best I've ever been on. I got to hear great stories (Elvis lied about his mother's birthday to get that legendary first Sun recording), hear great music (sure, you've heard 'Hound Dog,' but have you heard 'Bear Cat'?), and stand in the studio itself, ground zero for rock and roll.

The picture here hangs in Sun Studio (several times). It's a shot of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash. They randomly got together (Cash left) for a jam session. Sam Phillips recorded the whole thing, without anybody else knowing. The session sat, dusty and unheard, for some time; according to our tour guide, it was because Elvis was by that time under contract to RCA and no one else could record him. But after his death, the session saw the light of day. And it's great: as historical record, as music, as way of making legends real. It's got gospel. It's got blues. It's got Christmas music. It's got Elvis impersonating the first Elvis impersonator.

Click here for Sun Studio's own opinion of the top ten lyrics ever recorded there.

And, one of the best tracks on the CD:



And, speaking of Memphis, the Hold Steady is streaming a track from their new CD on their MySpace page where they depart their traditional northern U.S. climes and move south. Is that a joke, that fried reference?

Forever's Not So Long

I have two favorite Devotchka songs so far - maybe three now - and they played one - maybe two - Saturday night at the Fillmore in Philly. It was a good show...I don't really feel like my life has been enriched by the odd encore of scantily clad gymnast, but oh the string section, and the intricate piano work, and the sheer temerity of the sousaphone. And the mariachi trumpets. And his voice.

And these lyrics.

How It Ends

My other old original favorite is "Too Tired." And my new maybe but lemme think about it a little while favorite is "Transliterator."

The Opposite of Dank

Quite a tasty little wine, this odd combination of shiraz and viognier. It's a red wine that tastes fizzy without actually being fizzy...that makes your stomach sparkle...a mouthful of it is the opposite of dank. Which we can all use some of in New York this unsparkling, unfizzy, undelightful spring.

Check it out at this store.

The Bones Of You

Every so often, I hear a single song and I know that I have to be able to hear it again whenever I want for the rest of my life, and probably whatever other songs it has been packaged with on a CD as well, and that I must possess this capability immediately.

This happens less and less often as I grow more cautious about all the previous CDs bought on a similar impulse that turn out to be, well, junk. But it remains a happy impulse when I can't rationalize myself out of it, and so it was yesterday morning.

Now that we've got a decent radio station in NY at 91.5FM, my alarm clock tunes in at 7 a.m., just in time for the NPR round-up, after which I usually drag myself out of bed. But yesterday this song comes on after the news and glues me to my mattress until it decides that it has had enough of me, and ends. Partly because of the determined guitar strum that kicks in at beat one and carries all the way through, building at around 2:20 to a great contemplative noise before pausing and then striding forward again. Partly because of the lyrics, which are simply true, and were especially true for me yesterday morning, and start off something like:

So I'm there
Charging around with a juggernaut brow
Over draft speeches and deadlines to make
Cramming commitments like cats in a sack
Telephone burn and a purposeful gait
When out of a doorway the tentacles stretch of a song that I know
And the world moves in slo-mo
Straight to my head like the first cigarette of the day

And partly because of the ending - is that "Summertime" being played so faintly in the background? Curious...

"The Bones of You," this song is called (listen here), by Elbow, who I had previously lumped into the "another indie band that I don't have time for" category. No longer.