I Was Meant for the Stage Again

On Tuesday night, we had auditions for my play Past and Present Tense, as well as two other plays that are being the staged reading treatment on subsequent weekends after mine and, I don't know how this happened, but I ended up being cast in one of them—as a college student (ha! obviously one who has been in grad school 20 years). So one place you don't want to be on December 4th and 5th is Johnstown, NY!

Creatively Cornered

Over at today's WhatTheyThink Creative Corner, I review a smattering of iPhone apps for graphic designers. But first, a caveat about star ratings:

I confess I have never especially liked star ratings; after all, some pluses of a product may not be pluses for everyone, some minuses may not be relevant to everyone, and so forth. And what is “3 star” vs. “4 star” anyway? Or worse: 3 1/2 star vs. 4 star? (I remember once in a high school English class, I had a teacher who was able to assign precise numerical grades to essays. How, exactly, did a 94% essay differ from a 95%? One wrong verb? An argument that was one percentage point less convincing? How exactly do you measure that?)

All this is to say is that there is the expectation in any product review that there will be a rating somewhere. So for Creative Corner reviews, I shall instead use as my rating icon not a star but the official WhatTheyThink question mark. This means that if a product receives three question marks, that’s ostensibly the equivalent of three stars—but the question marks themselves remind you to regard it with a grain of salt.

With the Beetles

Today was a warm, fall day in Saratoga. I wandered out to the mailbox and as I was coming back, wondering how concerned I should be about receiving an offer for personalized checks that was addressed to someone else, I happened to notice that the front of the house was under siege from hundreds of ladybugs. They were crawling on the siding, the windows, the doors, everywhere. Later in the day, a blue jay started pouncing on the side of the house, presumably to feast on them. I suddenly felt like Tippi Hedren. Now, mind you, I really don’t mind insects, at least in theory, but I’m not wild about huge swarms of them.

I’ve lived in the Northeast for 38 of the past 42 years, and I have never heard of swarms of ladybugs before. I was concerned about being outside; were these everyday, normal, placid ladybugs, or were they some weird, feral, or mutant species? Because I really wouldn’t put it past my luck to end up being skeletonized by a swarm of ladybugs, which is just the sort of Gary Larson-esque demise I’ve always suspected is in the cards. (“Help!”?)

So I did some research, and I discovered that, yes, these are normal, everyday ladybugs which, as is happens, are called in the UK “ladybirds”—although I would be far more terrified to see swarms of Ladybird Johnsons on my house. A ladybug is also apparently called a ladyclock, lady cow, and lady fly. There are— Hang on: “ladyclock”?!

There are about 5,000 species of ladybug worldwide (order Coleoptera), with 450 of them in North America alone. They are a type of beetle; hmm... I knew The Beatles were very popular again this year, but the beetles? Anyway, their common name derives from the Middle Ages, when for some reason they were dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and they were referred to as “beetle of Our Lady.” (I can just imagine her reaction; “Um, gee, thanks, you shouldn’t have.”) Ladybugs are in fact carnivorous; they eat other insects, and any decent gardener (i.e., not me) will tell you that they in fact eat aphids—people will actually buy sacks of ladybugs to get rid of aphids. (Beetles for Sale?) Ladybugs are also fairly voracious; in one bug’s three-to-six-week life span, it can eat up to 5,000 aphids. It’s kind of like me and pistachio nuts.

However, there are some species of ladybugs—specifically the squash beetle (Epilachna borealis) and the Mexican bean beetle (E. varivestis) that eat plants and can be destructive.

This is interesting: there is actually a family of beetles called “pleasing fungus beetles.” (“Please Please Me”?) Oh, I don’t know. (Their family name is Erotylidae—oh, come on, they’re making that up!). Talk about an inordinate fondness for beetles.

Many species of ladybug do overwinter in excessively large numbers, typically on the sides of houses or other large objects (typically the south side, and typically light-colored structures), and often inside houses and other structures (“Here, There, and Everywhere”?), and are getting a reputation as a pest. Still, if they do get into one’s house they are generally harmless and don’t eat or destroy things, or spread disease. Actually, their only downside is that when they sense fear, they excrete their own blood, which is yellow, apparently smells bad, and can stain walls. So going around the house yelling “Boo!” at ladybugs is a bad idea...on so many levels.

There was a recent report on NPR among other places that a town in Colorado was completely overrun with ladybugs, and many trees and leaves were a big pulsing mass of red. (“Strawberry Fields Forever”?) Just today, I came across a story on the Newark Star-Ledger’s site about how New Jersey is being overrun by swarms of ladybugs (there are just so many New Jersey jokes to insert here, I don’t even know where to start). In fact, the site has a video of a school in Maplewood that had to be closed because of them.

Again, ladybugs are generally harmless, but there’s something creepy about being in the midst of a swarm of them.

Officials recommend using a vacuum without a propeller if the beetles swarm in a home. Scientists said ladybugs eat pests to flowers and plants and can give off a foul odor if crushed.

Interestingly, many cultures and countries have nursery rhymes or other songs directed at ladybugs. In the UK there is “Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home/Your house is on fire and your children are gone.” (If Morrissey were an entomologist....) In Russia, a popular children’s rhyme exhorts the insect to “fly to the sky and bring back bread.” And a quart of milk, if you think of it. In Malta, the insect is called a nannakola, and children sing: “Nannakola, mur l-iskola/Aqbad siġġu u ibda ogħla” or “Ladybird go to school, get a chair and start jumping.” A spirited bunch, the Maltese.

Still, the ladybug is one of the only insects that doesn’t get a bad rap, and it is the state insect of Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. (Other states have some sort of butterfly as the state insect; the honeybee is well represented; and get this: New Mexico’s state insect is the tarantula hawk wasp. Why doesn’t that surprise me?) Curiously, Tennessee has four different state insects, including an official butterfly and an official agricultural insect. I guess their state legislature has a lot of free time on their hands.

The Ladybug Lady answers questions about ladybug infestations.

Q. Why do the ladybugs come into my house and die?

A. They require a little humidity. But our homes are usually not very humid during the winter. In fact, they are rather dry causing most of your ladybug guests to die from dehydration. Occasionally, you might witness a ladybug getting a drink of water or even drinking some other liquid.

That’s fine, just stay away from the beer. And bring back some bread.

Na Nook of the North

Barnes & Noble has officially unveiled its e-book reader, the Nook, which will be on sale in Barnes & Noble stores this holiday season. The Wall Street Journal has a video of the event (h/t Dr. Joe).

Gotta love it: the Kindle is only referred to as "that other reader."

Morans

I've heard of actual news sources inadvertently printing Onion stories as if they were real; this time, the reverse happened. The Onion seems to have accidentally reprinted a story from a recent New York Times or, more likely, any cable news broadcast:

Nation's Morons March On Washington State

OLYMPIA, WA—With random cries of "Enough is enough," "Do something now," and "Huh?" thousands of the nation's biggest morons descended on Washington State this week, some 3,000 miles from their intended destination of the nation's capital.

...

While authorities maintained that the gathering was largely peaceful and most of the fires were set purely by accident, demonstrators appeared visibly angry about a range of topics, including war, peace, food, music, money, baseball, cars, the people following them around as if this were some kind of rally, siblings, animals, plants, colors, and movies.

"Come on out of that precious little palace of yours, Mr. President. We're right here waiting," Pennsylvania resident Kip Callahan yelled toward the marble-columned State Insurance Building. "I didn't come all this way to be ignored. I got kids!"

"No Social Security for Medicare!" Michigan idiot Kevin Liston added. "Not in my backyard!"

Throughout the day, the number of protesters grew to include not just morons, but more than 6,000 nimrods, 3,500 dunderheads, and approximately 12,000 of the biggest fucking dipshits known to man.

They've Done It to Me Again

Yesterday, I received a letter in the mail from Americal Express' fraud department, saying they have been trying to call me and that I should call them ASAP. It seemed to be a legitimate letter; one good thing about phishing scams is that they tend not to use print. So I called them back and the phone system was labyrinthine and irritating, so I knew right away that it was really AmEx's. Anyway, it turns out that they had detected suspicious activity on my account--and, indeed, I had not bought a $1,000 sewing machine from singer.com, nor had I bought $1,600 worth of leather handbags from some place called coach.com that I have never heard of. These guys (or girls, judging from what they bought, but maybe not) were apparently pros; they somehow changed the mailing address and phone number on the account (the AmEx rep asked me, "Have you recently moved to Tennessee?"). I also noticed online that they had made up a phony e-mail, too.

I haven't been using that card much, but the suspicious transactions are dated shortly after I had used it to get gas at a Citgo off I-90 somewhere near Rensselaer (I was coming back from a meeting in Holyoke and was on fumes)--the card reader on the pump was out of order and there were some suspicious people inside behind the counter...but then most people who work in gas stations look suspicious. Curious...

Anyway, say what you will about credit card companies--and they can certainly be evil--but when it comes to catching and helping with identity theft, I really am quite impressed with American Express. I usually check my credit card account activity online once a week for this very reason (this is the third time I have had a number nicked) but I hadn't had a chance to do so recently. So, word to the wise: always read your statements carefully. And perhaps use cash as much as possible.

More Decade-ence

The countdown of my twenty-six favorite albums of the past ten years continues.

21–26 are here.

20. Barenaked Ladies, Maroon, 2000, Reprise

Sometimes, it’s all a question of context. I was a fan of Barenaked Ladies first album back in 1992—I liked their wit, humor, and somewhat unconventional instrumentation. I lost track of them after that, but was happy to hear that in 1998 they finally had a hit with the song “One Week” and the album Stunt, although I never heard Stunt until 2002, when Ken A. played in his car on one of our road trips somewhere. I liked it a lot, and a couple months later happened to be in a used record store on a visit to Torrance, California, and came across the follow-up, 2000’s Maroon. I picked it up, ripped it to my iPod, and it was one of two albums (see later this countdown) that I played in the car over and over again during my two-week trek around the American Southwest. As an album, I think it’s every bit as good as Stunt. All the wit and silliness and self-deprecating humor BNL have always had are there, and it’s become more mature and sophisticated since their debut. There is a great moment in “Conventioneers,” a tale of two coworkers who accidentally come together while at an out-of-town conference: “And we laugh...and we laugh...and we laugh/And we have to or we’ll end up in the bath/Now we’re in the bath.” It’s delivered perfectly. And only this band can makes lines like “If you think of her as Catherine the Great/Then you should be the horse to help her meet her fate” funny and yet oddly romantic at the same time. It’s really quite remarkable. “A world that loves its irony must hate the protest singer.” The two or three records they’ve released since have never quite seemed to me as strong, although they’re not bad. The song on Barenaked Ladies Are Me (2007) about the would-be bank robbers who get cold feet when they find the bank filled with nuns is very funny.




19. The Flower Kings, Space Revolver, Foxtrot Records/InsideOut, 2000

This is how I like my progressive rock—sweeping, symphonic, and Swedish. Roine Stolt is a brilliant guitarist who cut his seventeen-year-old teeth in the early 1970s with the Swedish prog rock band Kaipa. He left toward the end of the 1970s and kind of vanished, since after 1977 anyone who played—or even liked—progressive rock became pretty much a pariah. By the early 1990s, fans were rediscovering (or starting to admit that they liked) the music of Yes, Peter Gabriel-era Genesis, Van Der Graaf Generator, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, and all that lot, and new progressive bands were starting to form which took the music of their forebears and expanded upon it—often exceeding it. Stolt released an album in 1994 called The Flower King, which was his return to symphonic progressive rock, and was the pilot project for the band The Flower Kings, which released its first album a year later. Stolt is a great guitar player, with sort of a Zappa-meets-Jeff Beck style with a little David Gilmour thrown in. He’s also the band’s chief singer (sounding like an amalgam of Roger Waters, John Wetton, and the Swedish Chef) and primary songwriter. Sweeping epics are grounded by a very strong melodic base, but they are not loath to go off on sprawling instrumental flights of fancy. And majestic guitar solos. Lyrics tend to be very positive and life-affirming, and vaguely spiritual, but not oppressively so. I think the band is utterly brilliant. If they have a flaw, it’s that some of their albums tend to be a bit much—that is, they are not shy about releasing double-CD sets, and each disc is stuffed to the limit with music. It can be rather a lot to absorb. 2000’s Space Revolver was the first single-disc set after two back-to-back double albums, and it benefits from its focus and editing. The album is bookended by “I Am the Sun” parts one and two, which is the sort of sweeping epic that is the Flower Kings’ stock in trade. Jazz elements occasionally enter the mix, courtesy of Ulf Wallander’s saxophone. Tomas Bodin’s keyboards complement Stolt’s guitar and the interplay between the two is one of the highlights of any Flower Kings record. Second singer Hans Fröberg (he has the technically better voice but it’s less distinctive) gets a song credit with the lovely acoustic “You Don’t Know What You’ve Got.” “Rumble Fish Twist” is a wild instrumental with some exceptional bass work from Jonas Reingold. Stolt also loves big power riffs, and this album has them in “I Am the Sun” and “Monster Within.” The strangely-chorused “Chicken Farmer Song” (“I’d rather be where the chicken farmers run”) is a breezy pop song with a great guitar solo from Stolt. The five-minute instrumental climax to “I Am the Sun part two” is a thing of beauty, and ends the record on a perfect note. Their music started to get a lot more diverse as the decade wore on, but Space Revolver stands as the perfect essence of this extraordinary band.




18. Rush, Vapor Trails, Anthem Atlantic, 2002

Like most people my age (i.e., horribly old), I came of age with the two quintessential Rush albums—Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures. I lost track of them in the mid-80s when the synthesizers became a bit too much (come on, “Big Money” just screams “1985!” and I don’t mean the Bowling for Soup song). Rediscovering them in the late 1990s and their latter-day discography, it was actually a joy to hear them get their mojo back, so to speak, and return to a more guitar-oriented sound. At the same time, they kept developing as musicians and going into different directions that were at least better than the highly dated synthorock of the 80s. Indeed, 1996’s Test for Echo was probably their strongest record since 1981’s Moving Pictures. It’s a shame then (on so many levels) that drummer/lyricist Neal Peart’s family tragedies (he lost first his daughter in a car accident and his wife to cancer, all in the space of a year) curtailed whatever momentum they were building, and the band effectively went on indefinite hiatus. Peart took off on a motorcycle trip around North America on what he later called “the healing road,” and attempted to pick up the pieces of his life, a struggle later recounted in his touching Blue Highways-like book Ghost Rider (it’s no surprise to any Rush fan that Peart is a very good writer). They tentatively reunited in 2001 with no real expectation that anything would emerge, but it turned out that Peart was ready to continue. And the result was 2002’s Vapor Trails. The opening drum pyrotechnics of “One Little Victory” make no bones about it: Rush are back. There is nary a synthesizer to be heard, the songs are direct and loud, and rock harder than almost anything they have ever done. it sounds like they’ve been listening to all the bands that were inspired by them. And, happily, Lee’s voice has lowered with age, sounding less like a smoke alarm than on some of their mid-70s records, which has tended to turn off some people who probably might have liked the band otherwise. Lyrically, the songs—as one would expect—deal with loss, some personal (“Ghost Rider”—“Pack up all those phantoms/Shoulder that invisible load/Keep on riding north and went/Haunting that wilderness road/Like a ghost rider”) some national (“Peaceable Kingdom,” written in the aftermath of 9/11). I saw them on this tour—and two out of three subsequent ones (they usually play the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, only a mile walk from my house)—and they were phenomenal. The follow-up album, 2007’s Snakes and Arrows, is also just as good. It’s good to have them back.




17. The Shins, Oh, Inverted World, Sub Pop, 2001

I came to Oh, Inverted World a couple years after the fact, after having heard “Know Your Onion!” and “Caring is Creepy” on Radio Paradise in 2003. I liked both those songs almost immediately, but it was only a year later, when Zach Braff used a couple Shins songs in what is probably my favorite movie of the past ten years—Garden State—that I had to pick up the album. And it stayed on the iPod for a while. In fact, there is a scene in the movie, when Braff’s character Andrew meets Natalie Portman’s character Queen Amidala—I mean Sam—and she is wearing headphones. She tells him to listen to a song, saying, “It will change your life.” That song is The Shins’ “New Slang (When You Notice the Stripes),” which is perhaps a bit overstated, but I do like the song a lot. The album is rather hard to describe, as it is a strange amalgam of all sorts of parts and pieces cobbled together from all over the history of rock and pop, which is probably why I like it. It’s somewhat reminiscent of 60s pop via Syd Barrett or Brian Wilson, but with a more modern indie vibe to it. The lyrics alternate between sweet and charming and strange and surreal, sometimes within the same song (as in the aforesaid “New Slang”—“And if you’d ’a took to me like/A gull takes to the wind/Well, I’d ’a jumped from my tree/And I’d ’a danced like the king of the eyesores/And the rest of our lives would ’a fared well”... and later, “God speed all the bakers at dawn may they all cut their thumbs/And bleed into their buns till they melt away.”) It’s one of those albums where you find yourself singing along to the strangest things. The Shins’ follow-up, 2003’s Chutes Too Narrow, was in some ways better, but as I have said before, context is often what matters. As they have added layers of complexity to their music (and I still can’t make it through their third album, Wincing the Night Away, which kind of lives up to its name) one doesn’t want to disparage their continued development, but one misses the simplicity of Oh, Inverted World.




16. The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America, Vagrant, 2006

Finally! You know, ever since the late 1970s, it seems like every band has had to bow down and worship at the altar of punk. What I adore about The Hold Steady (based in Brooklyn now, but from Minneapolis) is that they realize that there was actually good rock music being made before 1977. And their chief influence is classic guitar rock of the mid 1970s. Big riffs, guitar solos that would make Angus Young envious, piano bits that could have come straight off Born to Run. As if that weren’t enough, singer/lyricist Craig Finn is one of the great rock’n’roll storytellers, his songs populated by a cast of vividly drawn characters either on the fringes of society or headed there—suburban mall rats, compulsive drinkers, stoners—all told with a sense that this isn’t entirely fiction. It’s the sense of authenticity that gives Finn’s stories their added dimension. The sense of been-there-done-that is what makes these characters somewhat sympathetic, even if they’re not people you would really want to hang around with. Or at least I wouldn’t. Well, most of them. The album’s opening song “Stuck Between Stations” has grown on me over the past three years to become probably one of my favorite songs ever, opening with a Jack Kerouac On the Road reference (always a plus in my book): “There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right/Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together.” (Sal Paradise was, of course, the narrator of On the Road. The full quote is “Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk—real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.”) To wit: the protagonist has met a girl who “was a damn good dancer but she wasn’t all that great of a girlfriend.” In the next verse, Finn imagines the Minneapolis poet John Berryman walking with the Devil along the Washington Street Bridge—where Berryman actually did leap to his death into the Mississippi River in 1972. “He said, ‘I surrounded myself with doctors and deep thinkers/But big heads and soft bodies make for lousy lovers.’” Oh, I don’t know. Though I don’t know that Berryman “loved the Golden Gophers but he hated all the drawn-out winters.” Still, the Golden Gophers did beat Syracuse last month. “She said, ‘You’re pretty good with words but words won’t save your life.’” Tell me about it. The album culminates with the almost theatrical “Chillout Tent,” where guest singers (including Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum) sort of play the parts of two young people who go to a music festival, take too much of various substances, and end up meeting each other in the titular tent. “They started kissing when the nurses took off their IVs/It was kind of sexy but it was kind of creepy.” But, alas, “She was pretty cool/They kind of kicked it in the chillout tent/He never saw that girl again.” Another great line from “Citrus”: “I’ve had kisses that made Judas seem sincere.” Anyway, it’s a great record. Alas, their follow-up Stay Positive just didn’t quite capture that certain je ne sais quoi that Boys and Girls in America has. And if I am ever at Saratoga Race Track and there is a horse called “Chips Ahoy,” I will bet on it. Probably not $900, though. Yeah, this one stayed on the iPod throughout the summer of 2006, in the car with the windows down. Just the way nature intended. The Boss would approve.



To be continued...

I Was Meant for the Stage

On November 13–14, the Colonial Little Theater in beautiful, downtown Johnstown, NY, will be presenting a staged reading of a three-act play I wrote called Past and Present Tense. What's it about? Well...

It is Christmas Eve, and thirtysomething Daniel Harper is about to become a father for the first time. He hopes the birth of his child will help reunite him and his estranged brother Kevin, their parents’ “golden child,” who abruptly and mysteriously stormed out of their life one Christmas morning 20 years earlier. As both brothers plan to meet again, they each reminisce about the events of the past—and wonder what they mean for the future.

Creatively Cornered

Yesterday, my new weekly column/feature/thing--called the "Creative Corner"--debuted at WhatTheyThink. What is it?

WhatTheyThink’s “Creative Corner” is a weekly feature/column targeted toward graphic designers (print, Web, and beyond) and other creative professionals. In this space each week, I’ll be presenting business tips, hardware and software reviews, sales and marketing strategies, emerging technologies, and graphic communications and media trends.

In the debut installment, I discuss the process of sales and how it applies to graphic designers. Next week: a review of iPhone apps for designers.

Good News for Newspapers

This just in:

Report: Majority Of Newspapers Now Purchased By Kidnappers To Prove Date

According to a report published this week in American Journalism Review, 93 percent of all newspaper sales can now be attributed to kidnappers seeking to prove the day's date in filmed ransom demands.

"Although the vast majority of Americans now get their news from the Internet or television, a small but loyal criminal element still purchases newspapers at a steady rate," study author and Columbia journalism professor Linus Ridell said. "The sober authority of the printed word continues to hold value for those attempting to extort large sums of money from wealthy people who wish to see their loved ones alive again, and not chopped into pieces and left in steamer trunks on their doorsteps."

"These are sick, sick individuals," Ridell added. "God bless them for saving our industry."

From The Onion, of course. (h/t Gail at PrintCEO Blog)

iNoble?

Gizmodo has an exclusive first look at the impending new Barnes & Noble e-book reader, which is said to "feature a black and white e-ink screen like the Kindle has—and a multitouch display like an iPhone underneath other."
If only I knew someone who worked for Barnes & Noble...

Next Stop, Willoughby

This was one of the oddest encounters I've had in a while...

Last Saturday afternoon, after the abysmal SU-West Virginia game, I was walking in downtown Syracuse near Armory Square looking for a place to eat (via the Yelp iPhone app). A trio of youngish guys came up to me and one of them asked me, "Where is the balloon festival?"

The what? Before I could say "Um, I don't know; in the sky?" he added, "Is this Utica or Syracuse?"

It should be pointed out that at that exact moment, I was wearing a bright orange T-shirt with "Syracuse" emblazoned across it, and a cursory glance around the street would have identified at the very least a half dozen signs for businesses with the word "Syracuse" in them--including, I took especial note, the Syracuse Suds Factory half a block away.

"This is...is..this is Syracuse," I replied, for some reason sounding like Bob Newhart.

They were in disbelief. "Are you sure? We took a cab from Rochester and told the cabbie to drop us off in downtown Utica." I hope they didn't tip the guy.

Wait: they were taking a cab from Rochester to Utica? That's a good 120 miles. Wouldn't it have been cheaper to rent a car? Or charter a hot-air balloon?

"I'm absolutely positive this is Syracuse," I said. Now I was starting to question where I was, like those Twilight Zone episodes where middle-aged men wake up in strange towns and have to relive their childhoods.

Anyway, they still refused to believe me. "You're putting us on," he said to me.

Yes, because nothing fills me with puckish delight more than to don a Syracuse shirt and wander around downtown Utica confusing people. Curses, they've called me out!

They were taking a cab from Rochester to Utica and I'm the jerk? I guess it was appropriate that they were looking for a balloon festival since they seemed to be as high as one.

Wasn't anyone in their party paying the slightest attention to where they were going? I have driven to and from Syracuse (from east and west) many many many times, and I know for a fact that there is ample highway signage; "Syracuse Next 6 Exits," "Entering Syracuse," "81 South Syracuse," all those "Carrier Dome Parking" signs, the big "Hey, Dipshits, You're In Syracuse!!!" billboard...it's really not Brigadoon.

Anyway, they remained convinced that I was putting them on. A car pulled up and a couple of women got out, and the lads walked up to them and asked, "What city is this?"

One of the women gave him a look that suggested she thought it an odd pick-up line. And she would have been right. "Syracuse," she said.

"Told you!" I shouted back to them.

I wandered off; I don't know if they were yet convinced, or were going to try for best of three. Perhaps if they ask enough people, Syracuse will magically transform into Utica. Which is a pretty terrifying thought.

Decade-ence

The end of the decade—improbable as it may seem—is drawing nigh. And everyone is starting to compile their “Best of the 2000s” lists. I came across Pitchfork’s top 20 and thought, heck, I’m pretty much a Nick Hornby character (if I were to make a list of my favorite movies of the past decade, High Fidelity—based on a Hornby novel—would definitely be on it), I can do that. (Actually, Pitchfork does the 200 best albums; I’m not that ambitious.)

So I am starting my own countdown of my twenty-six favorite albums of the past ten years. Twenty-six? Yes; round numbers are boring. If I were more ambitious, I would add fractions of albums and come up with my favorite 26.54 albums. I’m not that ambitious.

I’ll start at number 26 and over the next few weeks continue the countdown to number 1, my favorite album of the 2000s. Some of you may already be able to figure it out, or can at least narrow it down.

I should point out that this is not meant to be a definitive “Best of the Decade list.” It’s just my own personal favorites.

26. Interpol, Turn on the Bright Lights, Matador Records, 2002

Mi hermano introduced me to Interpol (the New York City-based band, not the international police organization) a couple years ago, and while I like all three of their albums (to date), their debut is the one that stands out. All the reviews I have read about it liken the album to Joy Division, but I really don’t entirely support the comparison. Joy Division (one of my favorite bands ever) songs sound like transmissions from a dark and terrifying alternate universe. Sure, Turn on the Bright Lights is dark and atmospheric, but doesn’t quite bring the Joy (if you know what I mean). Still, I’m not a big fan of identifying all of a band’s influences; the album is perfectly exciting to listen to all on its own. The snaky guitars, the moody if often cryptic lyrics (in “NYC,” for example, “The subway she is a porno/The pavements they are a mess/I know you’ve supported me for a long time/Somehow I’m not impressed”; well, they have a point), the often tremulous vocals—sure, they may wear their influences on their sleeve, but it all adds up to a dish that rises above its ingredients.




25. Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Nonesuch, 2002

I had been aware of Wilco for a few years (especially their Mermaid Avenue collaborations with Billy Bragg), but not being a big fan of alt-country, I never really went out of my way to listen to them. But their fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, effectively transcends all genres—it’s all over the map, which is what I find to be much of its appeal. And part of its problem. The story behind the album is probably more famous than anything on it: the band recorded it for Reprise Records (a Time Warner label), the label felt it was not commercial enough and refused to release it. The band bought the album back from them and left the label, streamed it in its entirety on its Web site, site traffic went through the roof, the subsequent tour was a hit, and other record labels began a bidding war for the right to release it as a proper album. Ultimately, Nonesuch (ironically, another Time Warner subsidiary) won and it was released in 2002. Some could argue that the record fails to live up to its hype, but I’m not one of them. How can you not like an album whose first song (“I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”) opens with the line “I am an American aquarium drinker,” or gets you to earnestly sing along with silly lines like “Take off your Band-Aid because I don’t believe in touchdowns”? (Hmm...that could be the Syracuse University football team’s motto.) Elsewhere, sonic experimentation and musical complexity sit side by side with simple melodies and bright choruses. The lyrics also get a bit more coherent and often wistful; “I still miss those heavy metal bands/She used to go see on the landing in the summer/She fell in love with a drummer/She fell in love with the drummer...I miss the innocence I’ve known/Playing Kiss covers/Beautiful and stoned” (“Heavy Metal Drummer”). What may have turned off Reprise is that many of the songs fail to end properly; even the simplest most straightforward tracks are likely to devolve into weird bits of noise or, as at the end of “Poor Places,” a woman repeating the words “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” over and over (letters of the phonetic alphabet, lifted from a box set called The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations—boy, that sounds like a compelling listen!). This one stayed in the iPod for a while in 2002.




24. Morrissey, Years of Refusal, Attack Records, 2009

I know what you’re thinking: Morrissey? Really? In this decade? Are you time-tripping back to the 80s again? Well, um, er, yes. I mean no. I mean... Sure, after about 1993 or so, I sort of lost track of Morrissey—and he actually went into hiding from about 1997 to 2004. Curiously, rather than emerging as the sort of old, past-it dinosaur he lampooned in the 1990 song “Get Off the Stage,” he seems to have taken on almost elder-statesman status, and has even been embraced by all the emo fans—a genre, it bears mentioning, that largely owes its existence to Morrissey. And to his credit, he’s not always still whining about the same old things; he’s settling into a graceful middle-age (he turns 50 this year), with a whole new set of things to be miserable about. (And, heck, if Mick Jagger still can’t get no satisfaction at age 60+, what makes anyone think Morrissey ever will?) His three records this decade (2004’s You Are the Quarry, 2006’s Ringleader of the Tormenters, and 2009’s Years of Refusal) haven’t changed his basic formula, but have expanded it a bit, and even added a few new wrinkles (literally, as well as figuratively). By post-comeback album number three, most of the rough edges have been sanded away, and it’s probably the most focused album—and best set of songs—he’s come up with in a while. In fact, when we last left Morrissey in 2006, he had apparently found love and was living in Rome. That, unsurprisingly, didn’t quite work out, and, after all, Moz happy is not what the punters pay for, so now in 2009 he’s throwing his arms around Paris “because only stone and steel accept my love.” We’ll see about that; the next album he’ll be writing nasty songs about the Eiffel Tower. Anyway, the opening song on Years, the raucous “Something is Squeezing My Skull,” pretty much addresses the likely criticism: “I know by now you think I should have straightened myself out/Thank you, drop dead.” That’s telling ’em. One of the singles was “That’s How People Grow Up,” which is fairly typical Morrissey: “I was driving my car/I crashed and broke my spine/So, yes, there are things worse in life than never being someone sweetie.” I guess “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” didn’t quite work out. Anyway, Years of Refusal is not likely to turn around anyone who never liked the guy to begin with. But for those of us who have grown up with him (The Smiths were required listening in college in the 1980s), it’s nice to still have him around.

[Video embedding disabled. Bastard.]

23. The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Warner Bros., 2002

For my money, and it is my money, actually, the one perfect Flaming Lips album is 1995’s Clouds Taste Metallic, but most people tend to agree that 1999’s The Soft Bulletin is their high-water mark, eschewing much of the psychedelic trappings for a new emotional directness. Yeah, I suppose, but I think the follow-up, 2002’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots perfectly captures the twin essences of the Lips (the two lips?), the out-there wackiness and the down-to-Earth humanity. That this is all dressed up in a concept album about a Japanese girl who has to defeat evil robots—and works far better than you would think—is quite remarkable. Technically, the concept ends about halfway though the record, or at the end of side one in the old days of vinyl. The problem, as laid out in track two, “One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21,” is that the robots are developing human emotions—which can never be real emotions. (It sounds kind of like the premise of the new Battlestar Galactica.) Anyway, a big part of what makes the record work are the beautiful melodies and near sonic perfection of the production. Like Pink Floyd, whose influence is all over this album’s follow-up, 2006’s At War With the Mystics, the Lips may not be virtuoso musicians, but they know how to use a recording studio to their best advantage. Another big part of this album’s success is Wayne Coyne’s fragile voice, which can even make you weep as you sing along with lines like “Oh, Yoshimi, they won’t believe me, but you won’t let those robots eat me.” Still, what puts this album on the best-of list is the stand-out track “Do You Realize??” which is quite possibly the most beautiful song ever recorded, and if it doesn’t make you weep, then you are a pink robot.




22. XTC, Wasp Star, TVT Records, 2000

I put this on this list simply because XTC is one of my favorite bands of all time, and this album, as it happened, ended up being their swan song. Steven H. got me into XTC back circa 1986 via the Waxworks collection of singles—and it was just about this time that Skylarking and “Dear God” had come out. Most cool people have one or all of the “holy trinity” of essential XTC records—Drums and Wires (1979), Black Sea (1980), and English Settlement (1982)—but some of us have it all. Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding were (are?) two of the best songwriters around and that XTC were never a household name is one of history’s great injustices. Another was their record company-induced “lost decade”; after 1993’s not very good Nonsuch, they got stuck in record contract hell and were prohibited from either recording anything or getting released from their contract. They were simply ignored and it took six years and a phalanx of lawyers to extricate them. So by the time they finally reappeared in 1999 with Apple Venus—a lush, acoustic-orchestral album—they had lost guitarist Dave Gregory and were down to a duo. Recorded at the same time, but the other side of the stytlistic coin, was Wasp Star, released in 2000, which was what the punters wanted: a straight ahead album of pop-rock gems. And it delivers. “Playground” is a great set opener, and if there are any weak moments, it’s “Wounded Horse” (which should be shot). “I’m the Man Who Murdered Love” got some radio play, at least in L.A., at the time. Alas, after Wasp Star, Colin Moulding retired from music, but Andy Partridge has been releasing some rare recordings and demos, and working on new material. (He apparently has been collaborating with Robyn Hitchcock.)




21. The New Pornographers, Twin Cinema, Matador Records, 2005

The New Pornographers are a Vancouver-based collective (or “supergroup,” if you prefer) spearheaded by AC Newman and comprising alt-country diva Neko Case, John Collins (The Evaporators), Dan Bejar (Destroyer), and Kurt Dahle, among others. (I know, household names, all.) Every two years, they come together, record an immaculate collection of po-rock gems, and then return to their proper projects. 2003’s Electric Version was great, but 2005’s Twin Cinema is even better, with just about every track a gem. This one stayed in the iPod throughout most of the latter half of 2005. AC Newman writes most of the stuff (Dan Bejar usually gets a surreal song or two per album, in this case “Jackie, Dressed in Cobras,” whose title and refrain “On a train devouring the land/A girl’s going insane over her man” wouldn’t make this out of place on a Robyn Hitchcock record. Neko Case’s solo showcases, “The Bones of an Idol” and “These Are the Fables” make me want to explore her solo records. Twin Cinema has more hooks than a coatrack factory, smart writing, great harmonies, and loose yet flawless performances. I confess, the much mellower follow-up, 2007’s Challengers, was more that a bit of a disappointment. But it’s 2009, and there’s still time for a new New Pornographers record to come out. Hope springs eternal...



To be continued...

App Happy

Over at PrintCEO Blog, I tell the sordid tale of my growing obsession with iPhone applications.

Building a Bridge to the 20th Century

So I am at this moment on eternal hold with Verizon, as I am trying to get rid of my landline phone service. The process had been going well; it was all being done by an automated system, and it seemed like it would be fairly simple, and I could avoid the awkwardness and guilt I always feel when having to cancel via a human. Then, after I chose the option not to transfer my account to another residence, the system decided it needed to transfer me to a human, which then put me on eternal hold (8:54 and counting).

The awkwardness and guilt will not be there this time.

So while listening to the cheesy hold music, I thought I would try to accomplish the same thing online and see which was faster. I naturally assumed that I would have to set up an online user ID and password, which seemed silly since I was only trying to cancel my account, but whatever.

So I get to this sign-up screen, and had to run upstairs to get a glass of water so I could come back down and do a spit-take (emphasis added):

PIN Delivery

Full Access My Verizon Registration (Temporary PIN required)
View and pay your bill, add or change services, plus cool stuff like listen to your home voice mail over the Web and more!

Please choose the delivery method for your temporary PIN:

• Phone call/message to XXX-XXX-5280
• U.S. mail

For immediate access while waiting on your PIN, continue with Limited Access Registration.

Limited Access My Verizon Registration (Temporary PIN will be sent via U.S. mail)
Pay your bill and set up automatic payments. No other features available.

• Limited access

Please complete full registration when your PIN arrives.

So let me get this straight. If I want "immediate access" while waiting for my PIN, I need to get a temporary PIN--but the temporary PIN is sent by U.S. mail?! That's an interesting definition of "immediate." And how long does the proper PIN-getting process take if the "immediate" option involves U.S. mail?

Haven't they ever heard of a little thing called e-mail--you know, that crazy thing all the kids are using? What century are we in? Wait--I'll send my liveried footman round in my horse-drawn brougham to pick it up and bring it round to my Victorian drawing room where I can read it by gaslight.

You know, I can set up user accounts online just about anywhere else and get e-mailed PINs in literally seconds. So now I have either sit on hold forever, or wait for someone to call me back, or wait for a PIN to arrive in the mail? Just to cancel my phone service? Even if I were setting this up as a new account to pay bills online, it would still be pretty ridiculous. I think I shall avoid doing business with Verizon in the future. Or the past, as the case may be.

Finally got a human after 13:51. Total length of call: 16:24. She was very nice, I will say that.

Apres Moi, Le Deluge...Or, I Am a Klutz

Coffee is a remarkable substance.

It has self-replication and multiplication abilities that seemingly defy the basic law of conservation of matter. Some time ago, I was in a diner that advertised a "bottomless cup of coffee," so I asked the waitress, if one overturned such a cup, would it flood the planet? (We didn't see her near our table much after that.)

Even more curiously, I have found the the consumption of a single cup of coffee triggers an improbable series of biochemical processes that makes it necessary to stop at every travel plaza on the New York State Thruway and/or Mass Pike. Again, there is a very basic violation of the law of conservation of matter going on here.

I bring up the subject of coffee because I happened to spill a full cup of it this morning, and the sheer volume of liquid coursing over the desk and--more to the point--into my MacBook Pro was far greater than the initial quantity in the cup. I could literally watch it increasing before my eyes. If I hadn't been in such a panic to unplug things and rescue various electronic devices from the deluge I probably would have wrung out the entire spent roll of paper towels and attempted to develop a series of formulas that can calculate the extent to which coffee replicates itself in a given unit of time.

However, my rescue attempts were futile; the MacBook made a "pfffff" noise, there was the smell of burning plastic, and the screen went dark. That's never good. I took it down to the Apple Store in Crossgates Mall and as soon as they tried to boot it up, pink smoke billowed out from under the keyboard. Leave it to Apple to even design stylish billows of smoke. Either that or Jeannie had been trapped in my computer. Still, it rather stunned the Genius Bar folks. Needless to say, there was a mass shaking of heads that was reminiscent of a particularly tragic episode of ER. I am a Toastmaster; that now means that I am the master of a computer that is toast. So I guess it's time to get a new computer... They are, at the moment, seeing if they can rescue my hard drive or at the very least the files on it. Happily, most important stuff is backed up.

I will say thanks and kudos to the staff of the Crossgates Apple Store; every time I have ever had some sort of problem (and happily there have never been too many) they have always been exceedingly helpful and pleasant. I guess my only complaint is that I have been using Apple computers literally longer than most of them have been alive...

P.S. Robert/Kristin: do Lucy or Trixie have an extra sippy cup I can have?

Off Keynote

I just subscribed to the McSweeney's iPhone app, which beams over its daily "Internet Tendency" stories. A recent one that should be required reading is the very Robert Benchley-esque "A Literal-Minded Corporate Executive Gives the Opening Address at His Company's Sales Conference." An excerpt:

The past year has been a challenging one. Many of our clients went out of business. Many of our friends lost their jobs. Many of you who hate working here had to continue working here because no one else was hiring and you couldn't move back home because your parents rented out your room to avoid foreclosure.

However, the year ahead looks brighter, or at least not nearly as apocalyptic. The economy seems to have turned a corner, and we have emerged from the worst recession in a generation stronger than before, thanks in large part to nothing in particular that we did so much as crippling failures on the part of our competitors. While your hard work during this difficult time has been commendable, now is the time to return to doing what we do best: disinterestedly selling software that will eventually render us professionally irrelevant.

The Most Horrifying Thing I've Ever Read

Today on Yahoo! News:

among the findings of a new "60 Minutes"-Vanity Fair Poll released Sunday...[n]early half of the respondents chose Wal-Mart as the institution that best symbolizes America today.

Nooooo!!!!! I mean, have you been to a Wal-Mart?

I can't help but think that last week's Onion story was correct:

Nadir Of Western Civilization To Be Reached This Friday At 3:32 P.M.

An international panel of leading anthropologists, cultural critics, biologists, and social theorists announced this week that Western civilization will reach its lowest conceivable point at 3:32 p.m. Friday.

"From the prehistoric Lascaux cave paintings to the stirring symphonies of Mozart to today's hot-dog eating competitions and action films with comical gerbils, culture has descended into a festering pool of mass ignorance," said Yale sociologist Paul Riordan, who has spent his career analyzing western civilization's fall into the depths of depravity. "If our calculations are correct, this complete erosion of all that is enlightened and unique will reach absolute rock bottom on the afternoon of Sept. 25, 2009."

Added Riordan, "It is scientifically impossible for civilization to sink any lower than it will this Friday."
...
Experts predict that the penultimate catastrophe will occur at approximately 7:15 p.m. Thursday night, when the social networking tool Twitter will be used to communicate a series of ideas so banal they will instantaneously negate the three centuries of the Renaissance.

It Might Have Been Finished!

Whew! The final chapter of It Might Have Been is now up at http://massmedea.wordpress.com. Now the hard part: selling it!

Prints Charming?

Via Gizmodo, someone has worked out that if you printed the Internet (and I think we all know people who have tried, in one form or another; you know, the ones who can't bear to read anything on screen), it would take, among other things:

• 57,000 years of non-stop 24/7 printing
• 45 million ink cartridges, or half a million liters of ink (personally, I'd use toner, but that's just me)
• 700 square miles of paper
• 40,000 trees

Actually, if for some reason I were going to print the Internet, it would be more environmentally sustainable to first create a printer that prints directly on the trees without having to cut them down. And if readers can't make it to the forest where those trees are, I would set up a live Web cam in the forest so they can view on the Internet the printout of...um...the Internet... Hmm...this is sort of a media Möbius strip, isn't it?