Best Music of the Year So Far

I've wanted to write a post about the best music of 2008 for a long time now - back when I wrote in this blog a lot, I would do that annually. Which means it has happened twice. But since it's been 5 months since it made sense to write that entry and because it would still take way too long to put together, instead I feel like posting my favorite songs of this year so far. I went to Rough Trade East today to pick up the new Grizzly Bear album, so that sounds like a good place to start (especially since I mentioned it in a blog post like 2 blog posts ago. This is a repetitive effing blog for something with almost no content whatsoever on it). The discerning reader will note that almost every single one of these songs is from an album that has been deemed "Best New Music" by pitchfork. It is sort of a coincidence - but not really - and is embarrassing, but only in a "man, I'm supposed to be too cool for that!" kind of way.

Best songs of 2009 - so far!

1. Grizzly Bear - Two Weeks (from Veckatimest)
2. Animal Collective - My Girls (from Merriweather Post Pavilion)
3. Handsome Furs - Radio Kaliningrad (from Face Control)

Honorable mention:
Animal Collective - Summertime Clothes (from Merriweather Post Pavilion)
Bonnie 'Prince' Billie - I Am Goodbye (from Beware)
Boy Least Likely To - Every Goliath has Its David (from The Law of Playground)
Sufjan Stevens - You Are The Blood (from the Dark is the Night compilation)
Buck 65 f/ Serengeti - Blood Pt. 2 (from the Dark is the Night compilation)
The National - So Far Around the Bend (from the Dark is the Night compilation)
The Decemberists - Sleepless (from the Dark is the Night compilation)
Dan Deacon - Build Voice (from Bromst)
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Contender (from the Pains of Being Pure at Heart)
The Henry Clay People - End of an Empire (unreleased)

Ohana

Given how far away I live from everyone I'm related to on the planet, family has had a profound impact on my last week. I’ve often felt life will suddenly present me with thought-provoking groups of moments or messages coded in a rush of experiences that focus me on things that deserve greater consideration. Maybe it is just my mind finding constellations where there are just disparate stars, but sometimes it feels overwhelming. Either way, recently, this has meant invisible sermons by symbolic bludgeoning. Whether it be the sudden and extensive engagements of close friends from a variety of periods of life (four in a week! one from high school, one from penn, one from fulbright, one from citadel!) or the night I ran into three different Harvard people in ten minutes reconnecting me to my social life my first three months here, or the stream of London visitors who've come knocking on my door over the last month or so that have shown me either just how much stays the same or just how much things change when you’re not watching them. And then there is my family.

I’m torn about this because even in the life I’ve lived, I’m starting to forget the look/taste/sound/smell/feel of specific places and times – the sun on my skin at the end of a school day in high school, shuffling across campus late at night in college, walking through ogikubo on a hot summer day in Tokyo, riding my bike home in sendai. How can I regret not having more when I already can’t handle the just enough that I had? But in my own family and in waves over the last week, I've seen into the lives of people I am related to and see the great beyond of all the things I still hope and believe I need to accomplish in my life, and am marked by sadness at opportunities missed in my past. And yes, most of it has to do with traveling and living and exploring life.

First, and to be honest, least unabashedly inspiring, is Makoto. He has been touring in Europe and we had dinner together last week. I say he's the least inspiring of the bunch because most of his time spent abroad is train rides and flights and time spent in cities after dark, split between room service and hours spinning drum and bass in loud and most likely drug-filled clubs. But the idea that he has spent the last decade doing something he loves and seeing the world one gig at a time is pretty incredible. The frustrations he has had chasing this dream have been many, and I do not wish them upon myself, but it's incredible that he's made it as far as he has doing this and is as well known as he is, and has been to so many places doing it. It's also been remarkable as his cousin to see how much it has changed him - maybe it's just because English is a more directly emotional language than Japanese, but since he started to speak English so much more fluently, he tells me so much more and it's so much easier to see who he is as a person.

But the main moment of clarity came via missing the Chang family reunion which just ended in Hawai'i. Aside from the fact that it was sad to miss this reunion (the last one was incredible and changed my entire perspective on my family in Hawai'i and its place in my life), it was completely eye-opening to see the list of people not attending because of conflicts. And "David is living in Europe" was the most boring one! One was Jeff, who I'm sure I've written about before on this blog because he's one of the people I respect most in the world - a talented and respected writer with strong opinions and views and belief who sticks to them vehemently both professionally and personally, and someone who has cut his own path in the world and left behind a musical and literary legacy that is undeniably significant. Another is Leah, who I'm not incredibly close to, who has spent nearly the last 2 years in Africa doing aid work. Another is Ryan Lee, who I don't even think I've met more than once, but is in Tibet on a spiritual journey (!?). But most of all, it is Kalei.

Kalei hasn't even gone to college yet - she's 18 and on her gap year - but she has always struck me as much more mature in many ways (not every way) than her age would suggest. Two summers ago, she was in Chicago and we only we are able to see each other a few times, but I never felt like she was just my kid cousin; well, except the time she decided to climb into a tree during a crowded girl talk set and I thought she was going to die and her blood was going to be on my hands. But otherwise, she was totally cool! But I've been extremely impressed and moved by who she has become since making the extremely wise decision to take a gap year before college - something most American kids do not do. She has spent her year in Alaska essentially doing manual labor to fund her year, traveling the US and Europe a bit, teaching in Africa, teaching in the Himalayas, and traveling around India; and I'm sure there is more to come. Reading her blog (I haven't talked to her since right before she left Africa), I'm not only struck by her extremely mature perspectives and casually skillful analysis of her situation and what is surrounding her or her writing abilities, which are tremendous, but by just how impressive it is that a girl who grew up on Oahu has come to dream on such a profound scale at such a young age. When I left high school to go to college, the farthest I could see to the horizon was leaving California to live on another coast; Kalei has managed to stitch together a year traveling the world that I'm not sure I would have the imaginative breadth to put together right now. And she somehow has the perspective to digest it in astoundingly astute ways.

It makes me wonder - has life changed so greatly in the last two decades that generation gaps occur in ten year periods now (seems possible - I don't understand Twitter!)? Was I so sheltered and narrow-minded and innocently simple in high school that I just completely missed the opportunity to live and experience on the scale my young cousin is doing now (even more plausible, really)? Whatever it is, it makes me think I completely missed out on an opportunity to make my life truly extraordinary, but I can't blame myself because I just wasn't capable of thinking on the scale necessary to live it out. But now I feel like I am; with every passing day there are goals that I set for myself that have nothing to do with my life today that I feel I must accomplish or risk quietly feeling like I've peppered my time with minor failures. As always, that is overly dramatic and fatalistic, but I also think that fear and drive is what gives me hope that I'll be able to sit down one day years from now and feel truly satisfied with how things turned out. And that is another thing the last few years and being related to people like Jeff and Kalei has done - it has slowly evolved my concept of success into something completely different. Or it has at least added a completely different dimension to it. And that's not to say my idea of what 'success' meant was some narrow-minded, dollar or title-based definition; I always realized the many different possible ways to approach it and realize it. But it's the difference between knowing something and truly believing and understanding it. And I'm beginning to see life as a kaleidoscope, and starting to think maybe I've spent too long gazing intently at the tiniest colors and shapes and opening up my field of vision and turning the god damn barrel to see just how much I can possibly see.

Beef//broccoli

Tonight I had dinner at Saf for a wine-tasting event that is usually only open to club members, but since almost no club members were willing to show up this month (which was either a coincidence or a testament to the state of the raw/vegan restaurateur business here in London at the moment), a whole host of people were invited to bring in an organic wine and enjoy a tailored menu for the evening. I will write more later, but it was interesting to sit at the table - it was perfectly divided down the middle between full vegetarian/vegan-lifestyle embracing devotees who run related businesses on one end and meat-eating financiers at the other. To be clear, I vaguely straddled the middle - a non-vegetarian who lists Saf amongst his favorite London eateries, and an employee of the financial world who has nothing to do with financing businesses such as Saf. I've eaten at Saf now too many times to count (given my not so tenuous connection to my family through Joe) and I have to say that even while it's given me a greater appreciation for raw vegan cuisine, tonight's menu was particularly delicious and the wine pairings gave me at least a reinvigorated interest and slightly broader understanding of vinology (one not felt since my dinner at Alinea over a year ago, though it does not come close to overshadowing my passion for cocktails, scotch, and 焼酎). I was in particular moved by the dumplings, the tacos (a new, welcome addition to the menu), and the risotto (as always). But back to the philisophical and lifestyle divide. Even in the two designations, the variation was huge - the Californians (Joe and I), the American with the annoying British affectation in her speech, the Indian-British (i think?) with the long hair and raw diet, the annoyingly critical British couple with the vegetarian business, the artsy Australian, the shy and awkward British couple who were constantly slightly out of place, the vulgar Italian chef, the Turkish banker and his girlfriend, the three almost silent Turkish financiers. It was truly a strange mix that only really gelled due to the presence of copious amounts of alcohol and general goodwill toward the restaurant experience since one of the Turkish financiers is the president of the company that owns Saf. In the conversation over dinner varied topics arose - the great London snow of 1987 and the even greater storm of that year that leveled many of the trees in London; the sourcing and pairing of many wines and foods; the difficult life of a young Ecuadorian girl searching for a liver transplant; the exploration of the ancient cultures of Europe, Northern Africa, and the Middle East by people from nations of much shallower culture; the consumption of British ales. On the outskirts of these conversations were messages in my blackberry from relatives who are here in London now and friends far and wide who were either just checking in or who have major life announcements to make. The entire situation - eating a cuisine that isn't particularly important to my lifestyle while discussing fairly broad topics with people I don't know with the intermittent major announcement from people who actually matter to me - made for a strange juxtaposition that made my life seem extremely strange when looked at in not particularly studied repose. I am slowly aging but I am seemingly not adjusting anything for the increasingly weighty passage of time from the far distance I watch from. Major events are happening in lives I have cared about, and I am content to sit around a table of strangers in a country thousands of miles away and drink wine and discuss the history of the world in thinly-veiled sophomoric terms. Only time will tell whether choosing to do this at this time is a mistake or harmless, but I worry that even in describing it in those simple terms it seems that there is only downside, that the only outcome is either neutrality or loss. I've said this often recently, but time will tell, and it is a sad truism that by the time I have the answer, it will be too late to do anything with that knowledge.

You are the blood flowing through my fingers

Also for you:

You are the blood flowing through my fingers,
all through the soil and up in those trees.

You are electricity and you're light.
You are sound itself and you are flight.

You are the blood flowing through my fingers,
all through the soil and up in those trees.
You are electricity and you're light.
You are sound itself and you are flight.
You are the blood flowing through my fingers,
all through the soil and up in those trees.
You are the blood flowing through my fingers.

You are the blood that I may see you -
that I may see you -
you are the blood in me.

You are the earth on which I travel
on which I travel.
You are the earth under my feet
that I may travel,
that I may travel with you.
You are the earth on which I write the circumstances.
You say what you want from me.
You are the solitude that goes against me,
that goes against me.
You are the quiet in which I dream,
in which I sleep, in which I wander.

-the Castanets

No One Does It Like You

For you:

Out in the morning come
you don't need to ask an alibi.
And in the morning comes
you don't need to be so honest.

And in the morning come
you don't need to ask an alibi.
And in the morning comes
you don't need to breathe so easy.

I laughed so hard I fell down;
I cursed these lanes I walked on.

No one does it like you.
No one does it like you.
I tried so hard,
but no one does it like you.
No one does it like you.
But I tried so hard.

I tried so hard.
I tried so hard.
-Department of Eagles

A weekend of artists

Sean decided to stick around after his girlfriend Jen's relative's wedding in Oxfordshire and was here for the weekend. Thanks to him, I skipped a couple of parties I had been invited to and ended up having one of the most relaxing weekends I have had essentially the entire time I've been here. Friday night, instead of going to Portsmouth for a birthday party that probably would have actually destroyed my weekend, Sean and I went to the National Gallery to see the Picasso exhibit (which had been excitedly recommended to me by a friend a month ago) which was open until midnight for that night only. It was one of the best and best presented art exhibits I had ever seen. The work was presented across two dimensions - aesthetic themes and time. There were six rooms, which presented Picasso's work in groups - self-portraits, seated women, female nude, variations on classics, men, still lifes - and each room spans his entire prolific career as an artist. The most fascinating feature of the exhibition was the opportunity to see the breadth of styles that Picasso masterfully employed in his artistic vocabulary. His work wasn't just cubism - he employed a variety of realistic styles early in his career. Maybe it's my own lack of education in art history and lack of thought about developing artistic style, but it's interesting to see an artist transform from employing traditional styles to cultivating his own radical style. It was fascinating to see the incredible skill Picasso had beyond the abstract cubist style we are so aware of, and just how broad the variations of his own explorations of the style for which he is best known were. It's also interesting to see just how consistent his understanding of form, shape, lighting, and color were across his several styles. And seeing an artist take the risk (whether conscious or not) of deciding to embrace an extreme and abstract form of art when he has an incredible understanding of so many styles that are less challenging to observers was inspiring - even if he enjoyed acclaim the whole way.

Sean and I came home after taking an extremely long walk along the river from central (in which my new pair of vans sliced the skin over my achilles tendon open and I bled through my sock) and bought some Peronis and watched 30 Rock dvds before going to bed. It was nice to have such a college-esque night again for once and to act so American. Go U.S.A.!

Saturday Sean let me sleep in awhile and then we headed out around 2 PM to go to Abbey Road. As a Beatle freak, it's strange that I hadn't mad the trek up to Abbey Road - or even thought of doing so for that matter - but at least I've done it now. Abbey Road is in North London by St. John's Wood, and it was a pain getting there because the Jubilee line was shut off, but we made the voyage to Marylebone and just walked up from there. We took the requisite (and quite embarrassing) "crossing the street" photo, and there were loads of other tourists doing the same (including a guy from mexico who was having his friend take pictures of him in different t-shirts and shoes so that he could photoshop the whole thing into one picture of him crossing the street as a group). The trouble is that intersection in front of Abbey Road studios is INCREDIBLY busy in actuality. We also tried to go into the studio, but you can't really go any farther than the stairs. It was pretty cool just to be there though. It's interesting to see the fanaticism though - the walls for the gates outside the studio have been written all over by fans, and it has messages that are as pedestrian as you would except: "All you need is love!", "Give peace a chance!", "God Bless the Beatles!", "When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me", etc. It's a little embarrassing. And there was a girl who works at the "Beatles Cafe" at St. John's Wood station handing out flyers for her cafe and talking about the Beatles - "Ringo was here last week, but I had to work a shift at the cafe!", "Paul is actually at his flat just around the corner right now! It's the same flat he lived in when the fan tried to sneak in through the bathroom window. Which is why he wrote the song "She Came In Through The Bathroom Window!" I was just hoping the conversation would end quickly so it wouldn't be awkwaaard. Afterward, I took Sean to eat Nando's on Baker Street, which is my go-to "people visiting, gotta eat something delicious, quick, and affordable!" meal. He loved it thankfully because I love Nando's with all my heart. At lunch there was a crew of Brits sitting next to us and one of them kept asking if the Titanic set sail from Liverpool and so finally I answered yes, and I guess they didn't appreciate that I was eavesdropping on their convo. Whoops! On the way home, we stopped at Diesel so I could get a new pair of Safado jeans, which is embarrassing but I love Safados. The guy at the register said it was his last day because he's going to Japan for three months to DJ. His name is Andre and he spins electro, dub-step, and drum-and-bass. I dropped the Makoto connection on him and I'm going to put Makoto in touch with him because he needs help getting d&b bookings in Tokyo. Unfortunately, his website is "harikiri.co.uk", so he's already spelling "harakiri" incorrectly, like everyone else in the world. Bad start.

Saturday night, Sean and I played some indie rock on guitar and shakers (so typical!) and then watched my Arcade Fire dvd (extra typical!) and then I went to a party that was themed "what the hell are you wearing" (which was the most American party I've been to in awhile. People actually started chanting U.S.A.! U.S.A.! while "Don't Stop Believing" was playing and immediately after "I'm Proud to Be an American" ended. yeah, it was extreme) and drank a ton of beer and scotch (extremely typical!). I stumbled home, made a music dvd for Sean and then went to sleep.

I woke up, worked out, exchanged my multi-region dvd player for one that is actually multi-region, headed to bricklane to get a CD from Rough Trade (Grizzly Bear) and then had a Mama's Jerk Sausage wrap, and headed to the office for a bit before meeting Justin for a beer at a great pub in China Town.

Here are a couple of links of the day (as though there are ever links of the day):

Weezer covering MGMT at some corporate T-Mobile event in LA; a few observations - (1) it's strange they just did a straight-up cover of it rather than Weezer-izing it, (2) Rivers looks REALLY awkward without a guitar, (3) I didn't realize Poker Face fit so neatly over Kids, though maybe it fits neatly over any song with a beat:

http://stereogum.com/archives/video/weezer-cover-mgmt_069762.html

The first single Two Weeks from the forth-coming Grizzly Bear album Veckatimest, which I am extremely excited for and will likely prove to be one of the best albums of the year from what I've heard so far. I love Department of Eagles and Grizzly Bear both. And it's not just because Grizzly Bear is called Grizzly Bear and Department of Eagles is a Grizzly Bear side project - it's because they have a beautiful sound that is from some New York City newsreel from the first half of last century. I swear:

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/11250-two-weeks/

And Two Weeks live on Letterman (I would have linked to the Jools Holland performance, but this way you don't have to hear Jools Holland speak):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5UHZZx9xw8

The difference between me and people smarter than me

I wrote a 760 word post three days ago. Jen (smarter than me) provided me with a quote from Clifford Geertz (infinitely smarter than me) that explained nearly the entirety of my disjointed, uncertain thoughts in a twitter-friendly 35 words.

"One of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one." --C. Geertz

Poorly written rambling returns

I had one of those nights last night where I make a huge miscalculation deliberately and with the best intentions full well knowing I will regret it horrendously for at least the entirety of the next day. My cousin Makoto was in town after touring around Europe (and even when he's in the UK, he's all the way over in Bristol, which is a three hour train ride from London, which is ridiculous) and was spinning at an underground lounge called Ruby Lo in Mayfair, which seemed like a strange location for that - I figured the East End or south of the river would be a better place for a show like that. Beforehand I had dinner with a friend at yauatcha, a 1 michelin star uber-trendy dim sum place (and to be clear, I had a private dinner tonight at Claridge's main restaurant, which is a Gordon Ramsay joint that ALSO has a michelin star - 2 stars in one week!) which was a delicious meal. My kumquat cocktail was a bit too kumquat-y, but all of the dim sum was incredible. Afterward, I skipped out and headed over to ruby lo for Makoto's set, and as I feared, there were only about 30 people at the club (he warned me it would be small). It was a bit strange because London is the place where drum and bass was born, and this was by far the lowest attendance I've seen at one of Makoto's shows over the last seven years. It was either the location, the lack of promotion, the fact that it was a wednesday night, or the fact that Makoto was just guest DJ-ing at a weekly event rather than at a proper show (likely the last reason). It's a shame too because it was the best set I've ever seen him perform. He's mixed in a lot more aggression and changed up beats and builds to counter his funk and jazz tendencies and the ultimately monotonous drum and bass beat. Plus, it was short and sweet - i was only there for 2 hours instead of the 7 hour shows I've been victim to before at Makoto's other shows (where I'd watch one DJ spin after another until 6 in the morning, at which point you want to die BECAUSE you're not on drugs).

Anyway, I didn't get home til 2 AM, which was terrible. i got just over 4 hours of sleep and was borderline narcoleptic at work today. I would literally fall asleep just randomly sitting in my chair - my brain would shut off and I'd only wake up because my body would note the emergency caused by me beginning to fall over in my chair.

Another note - the tube not having air conditioning is going to be hellish SOON. It's not even warm outside yet and I was sweating through my clothes on the tube tonight because of how hot it gets. It's absurd. Also, this business dinner I had tonight caused me to miss two different events I was invited to. I hate business dinners! Schedule meetings during work hours! Please!

Ahem*... And here comes the weekend once I get through tomorrow. This has been a busy and exhausting week at work because of all the meetings I've had. I just need more sleep. Speaking of which, good night.

Lightning bugs to die in jars

When I said "more substantial post coming soon!" I meant no later than three months later. I swear. All zero of you who read this blog will be comforted to know that the subject, content, and very point of this post has been written and rewritten ad infinitum in my head during the last 90 days as my life here unfurled itself in its various directions - the non-starters, the exhausting and frustrating, the beautiful and rejuvenating, and everything that falls inside of that triangulation. I wasn't writing in the blog for an obvious reason - I have been too incredibly busy to - and while it seems crazy to be too busy to write a quick blog post, I do actually take a long time to write blog posts, so it was this mental barrier. And most of the time when I have a little free time, I'd rather spend it playing guitar or watching some TV (japanese or other), out at drinks or dinner with friends, or actually talking to people I care about on the phone or internet. But I am truthfully pretty disappointed to not have sat down a couple of times in the last couple of months to write some thoughts and record some memories. My memory has become frighteningly unreliable, spotty, and quickly erased as I age and become increasingly exausted by work and over-exertion (if there is anything I have been criminal about here, it is sleeping the right number of hours; it's just one constantly building web of sleep deprivation). I know it sounds ridiculous, but it makes sense to me - I'm almost 27 and the number of signs of being old are increasing rapidly. To be fair, I know I am still young - it's just the increase is becoming more consciously noticeable.

And so much has happened in the last few months! A roller coaster of emotion and uncertainty and fear and redemption and minor confusion during most of my waking hours on weekdays, and an effing carnival of drunken retardation, empty-socializing, money-wasting, and seven or eight countries worth of extremely over-due (and only occasionally mind-numbing) European travel. I've visited almost every country on the mediterranean now and really need to turn my attentions north, where I've only been to Germany and Sweden. I think I'll write some huge post later reviewing all of my travels (ie, no I won't do that), so for now, I'll just leave it to that commentary.

One other thing of importance (this is going to be a short post as I need to go to sleep ASAP) as it relates to aging is the feeling that I'm running out my youth. And that sounds like such an obvious observation that I should be punched in the face for saying such a stupid truism, but I don't mean youth as in being quick-minded and physically spry. I mean having so much of your life still open to chance and wonder and dreams. Our lives are largely path-dependent vehicles, and as you make it down the path, the number of probable branches you can travel down diminish as a matter of course, at least in my mind. When you're 16, the possibilities are endless. When you're 27, the possibilities start to have some ends. I know - so much of my life has yet to be written so it seems funny to complain about it, but it's just that I feel the doors sort of closing and that in the next five years, I need to accomplish a lot of my dreams and goals or risk not ever achieving them. This feeling is caused by a lot of things - getting deeper into my career, careening towards higher and higher numbers and new decades in age, seeing friends and family everywhere getting married, the inevitable increasing responsibility I feel toward planning for a future - but it universally has made me feel both a little sad and a little anxious recently. It has made me question so much about the decisions I have made over the last 10 years of my life and whether they were right. It's a question I've asked myself constantly during that decade and one that has no answer whatsoever since it's impossible to, you know, actually know which decision would have been superior. But I do know I want to make sure the next 5-7 years are incredibly productive and fulfilling because I'm afraid of what will happen if they aren't.

Hopefully I'm either wrong about the timing or right to feel anxious.