Things and Stuff

It has now been almost five months since I last posted. In that time, there were blog posts aplenty which were written in my mind and forgotten before being recorded anywhere digitally or otherwise. I can't figure out how tragic that really is, but I think it's fairly tragic. For one thing, I'm starting to realize the reason I feel like I've been in London for several times longer than I have is because I think I have crammed a few years of normal experience into the sub-ten months I've actually been here, so there was probably a lot in the last five months that was worth remembering. Plus, my memory is nothing like it once was, and whether that is a temporary side effect of constant professional and physical exhaustion, or the result of age, or both, I can't know, but it doesn't help. And when I read my old posts from my time in Japan, sometimes it doesn't even remind me of things that happened; it describes things I don't even remember ever happening. That is scary.

So I'm just going to make a bulleted list here of random thoughts and things that have occurred to me recently. It's probably going to be really scatter shot and hardly relevant, and I'll probably add to it again later.

-First things first: I was once a pompous, confident, and sharply skilled writer; not anymore. Hell, I can't even spell properly anymore. And this blog is an interesting partial fossil record of one man's slow literary de-evolution. I also was once able to speak impromptu with impressive fluency; now I often find myself barely able to find the words I need to express myself. What I'm trying to say is my best attribute and most easily definable talent was once communication, but I've lost it completely. At this point I'm just, in the words of Coach Reilly from the Mighty Ducks, "a never was".

-I'm going deaf from listening to music almost constantly for my entire young life. In a related story, I recently noted in a French lecture that I'm also terrible at reading lips, particularly in French. This is going to be an issue in like 25 years when I'm completely deaf. During the next French lesson, I also learned I like most vegetables. I learn something knew every week in French class. I don't learn very much French though.

-A month ago, Pitchfork put out their top 200 albums of this decade. It was a pretty decent and accurate list (despite the constant drone of the pitchfork haters, who seem to miss the point; more on that), but it also had some pretty big omissions I think should have made the cut:
The Unicorns - Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?
Source Tags and Codes by the Trail of Dead was rated way too low
Menomena - Friend and Foe
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Show your bones (which was never going to be on the list, but it's an album I initially hated upon its release five years ago and now love more every time I listen to it),
New Pornographers - Electric Version (surely this album is more memorably cavity-inducing than Mass Romantic, right?)
Bright Eyes - Lifted, or the story is the soil keep you ear to the ground // I'm Wide Awake It's Morning (both of these albums are massively better than Fevers and Mirrors)
Blonde Redhead - Misery is a Butterfly
Lupe Fiasco - Food&Liquor (the album that restored my faith in hip hop as an album generating genre, right before Hell Hath No Fury reaffirmed that sentiment)
Dan Deacon - Bromst
Department of Eagles - In Ear Park (better replay value as an album than either of the Grizzly Bear LPs in my opinion)
Islands - Return to the Sea (okay, I just really love Nick Thorburn and think one of his bands should have been in there)
The Joggers - Solid Guild (one of the better guitar records I've ever heard; the fact this band isn't signed to a label right now is incredibly sad to me)
Man Man - Six Demon Bag
Mates of State - Bring It Back
Mew - And the Glass Handed Kites (!!!)
The Walkmen - You & Me
... and the fact that Prefuse 73's album One Word Extinguisher and The Books album Lemon of Pink weren't on there but The Avalanches and Girl Talk were was a little surprising (and perhaps suggests where electronica stands - glitch/found-sound out, mash-ups in), though I wouldn't have voted for them myself. They were both in the Top 10 of the 2003 Pitchfork Best Albums list; interestingly, ALL of the other albums from the 2003 Top 10 were in the countdown except The Unicorns (see above) and Hail to the Thief (which presumably would have been on the list if they hadn't limited artists to only three albums in the list).

-here is an interesting breakdown of the data for the list:
http://list0mania.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/data-crunching-the-pitchfork-p2k-top-200-albums-list/

-Just one last thing on the Pitchfork list - the fact that people so heavily criticize that site is totally ridiculous to me. Yes, they wield incredible power in breaking or making bands. Yes, they have particular tastes that can be frustrating at times. But it's not like the site is a totalitarian music government that controls our lives; people have a choice about whether they want to read it and there are plenty of other choices out there on the internet for music criticism and discovery. But Pitchfork is, in my mind, the best organized, best presented, most deep and broad in scope, and incredibly thoughtful in its commentary and research. And it's done a lot more good for music discovery for me than bad. I will say one thing though - the right question to ask about this best 200 of 2000 list is to ask why the hell they did it before the decade ended, both because so many records were yet to drop and because they seriously can't think they can accurately judge anything released in the last ten months against something released 8 years ago, right?

-I went on one incredible binge of travel in a 1.5 week period. The takeaways are: Sweden is a giant H&M and Ikea. Germany is all clean lines and efficiency (I still can't believe my driver got me from Nuremberg to Munich in time for my flight; that wouldn't have happened in the UK). Portugal's Portuguese sounds strangely Russian, and at least on the southern coast, there is no variety in their food - Matt and I had prawns at almost every meal, and every menu was essentially the same. The beaches are really nice though (except the one where the water seemed to have some sort of chemical slick on the top of it). We were also there in the midst of an election and were witness to two election marches (consisting of people strolling through the town carrying banners for their parties) and one election concert for another one of the parties; the band they hired to play in the Gazebo in the square was playing reggae for some reason. The next weekend in Ireland, the Midwest of Europe, we discovered there really are potatoes and Guiness EVERYWHERE in Ireland. And the country seems to be populated with Americans studying abroad.

-While Matt and I were traveling around Ireland and Portugal, it was pretty incredible to see some of the economic hardship. Faro in particular seemed struck by something more specific to Portugal than the credit crunch. Matt did some digging and it sounds like the region had been given a big investment push by the government, and it looks like the economic inflows never followed in a meaningful way, because there are buildings and infrastructure there (like a dilapidated stadium, boarded up and broken store fronts and windows everywhere, and graffiti-covered ghost town streets) that are just rotting ruins now. In Ireland, we saw a lot of empty store fronts in Dublin and the other small towns we rolled through during our drive around the country.

-It's a miracle we didn't die or kill someone while driving around Ireland. Between me picking up the car on Friday night and driving to the hotel with my blackberry in my left hand tracking my progress on GPS (I almost hit someone on a bike, almost drove down a street going one-way in the opposite direction, and had to drive through Temple Bar at the height of drunken pub behavior; the drive took 3 times longer than it should have) and me driving 140 km / hour down the highway and passing cars by driving into the on-coming traffic lane (Irish highways are mostly 1 lane in each direction) to get us back to Dublin at a decent hour as we drove the circle from Dublin to Cork to Blarney to Killarney to Limerick, something really should have gone wrong. But nothing did! And we had some hilarious experiences - trying to figure out what "Go Mall!" means, seeing a sign that un-ironically said "Potatoes for sale" on the side of a house, being surrounded by sweatsuit wearing street toughs at basically every stop we made, seeing all the various signs on the highways telling you how many people have been killed on that highway in the year (highest number- 169; lowest number 7).

-Ireland is some sort of bizarre cross between Milwaukee and the UK. Everyone is drunk constantly, people actually drink American beers, people are decidedly not fashionable, there are Americans everywhere, and the first meal Matt and I had was at Charlie's, a horrible take-out Chinese place on St. George's Street in Temple Bar that we were forced to eat at because it was so late (it was the worst, strangest takeout I've seen - everything on the menu could come with either rice or chips. The first person we saw was a fat Irish woman eating orange chicken on a pile of french fries). Plus, once you leave the city, it's just immediately farmland always (though more breathtaking than the boring midwestern farm country).

-The Jameson factory tour is a horrible cross between a distillery museum, Pirates of the Carribean, and The Borrowers (there are some tiny models of factory workers in there) and it is in the most ghetto neighborhood I've been to in awhile. And the opening Jameson video really tries to make triple distilled whiskey out to be one of the great contributions to modern human history (it started by arbitrarily listing the American Revolution and Captain Cook setting sail as two other things that happened around the time John Jameson arrived in Ireland from Scotland). I still like Scotch better.

-Guinness freaking OWNs Ireland, especially around the location of the brewery, which is a small city on its own. Despite this, American (NOT Czech) Budweiser is the most popular beer in Ireland apparently.

-I was in terrible shape, but then I started really running hard and I've gotten my 10K time down to sub-45 minutes. But that was before tonight, when I went to Bodean's with Aaron and his friend Karim and had a half-dozen diablo wings, the "pig out for a 10er" full rack of ribs, 2.5 coors lights (light beer in the UK! shocking!), and three scoops of ice cream. I had to stop off at Aaron's on the way home to use his toilet after the one at Bodean's didn't have a locking door. It was catastrophic.

-I have had my two worst experiences with British service in the last month. First at the USC-Cal gamewatch - USC and Cal fans were 80% of the people in Henry J. Beene's, a self-declared "American"-style sports bar. It was 11 AM on a Sunday. Sure, it was before a 3PM Chelsea match, but the manager, who refused to come out to speak to us, told us that if we turned on the sound for the game, it would disturb everyone else in the restaurant. But we were almost everyone. Such bullshit. At least I got a free USC - London Tshirt out of it. The second one was record-setting. Lux, some group that throws those garish and over-the-top "brunch" parties in New York, is starting them here. I attended the first one and while the "paparazzi" at the door who took a picture of you on the "red carpet" as you walked in were strange and the blaring techno was not helpful for socializing or my hangover, the service was the most brutal. It took them 20 minutes to poor a glass of wine. Food orders took 1.5 hours to come. The girl next to me told them twice that she was vegetarian, but then here came her omelet with ham. My order was apparently never taken, though my waitress clearly wrote something down when I placed it (she smiled and said "you never ordered anything" when I asked her). Our bill had 70pounds of items we didn't order or never received (they were actually helpful removing those things). In the end, though the whole ordeal consumed 4 hours of my Saturday and I never got my eggs benedict, I DID get to eat that girl's ham omelet for free. So I win!