Wastin' Away Again

The start of Labor Day weekend brought news of the passing of Jimmy Buffett (no relation to Warren).  He was only 76, the same age as both of my parents. If you’ve come anywhere near classic rock radio and/or Times Square recently, you’re familiar with Buffett's work, especially “Margaritaville,” the catchy, calypso-infused 1977 single which he parlayed from modest chart success into a multibillion-dollar empire of themed restaurants, resorts, cruises, and senior living ("55 and Better") communities. The song and the enterprises it spawned all celebrate a singular statement of purpose: the sea, the sun, and (especially) frozen tequila-based cocktails will deliver succor and redemption in the face of life’s hardships, be they severe foot injury, regrettable drunken body-art-related decisions, or existential angst represented by misplaced dispensers of sodium chloride.

Like no other artist of his generation, Buffett’s trajectory and philosophy were the ideal representation of Boomerism: youthful hedonism co-opted by the comforts of American-style capitalism.  All of the tourists covered in oil were not just objects of artistic reflection from a porch swing: they were a market to be catered to. Which Buffett and co. did, cultivating a lifestyle of tasty waves and cool buzzes which particularly appealed to those in their autumn years.  As a few cocktails at the end of a long day make everything feel all right now, so would the Margaritaville lifestyle deliver a breezy coda to one’s retirement. No bad days, as the bumper sticker says.

What keeps the narrator of “Margaritaville” just on the right side of sympathetic is his sheepish acceptance of responsibility. Some may blame their exes for their misfortune, but by the third chorus, he's ready to concede that it’s his own damn fault.  By all accounts, Buffett himself was a decent guy: he spent generously on conservation and hurricane relief. He bailed on the Florida Keys after they became too commercialized, perhaps understanding that the hazy good times would not roll on forever; that sooner or later Americans, especially those close to the shoreline, would have to contend with the bummer consequences of limitless consumption. I wonder if he appreciated the irony of building a business empire based on a scene that will most likely be underwater by the end of the century.  Or maybe he understood it perfectly, and concluded that strumming his six-string all the way to the bank was as good a response as any.

Things Will Be Fine

I spent late 2022/early 2023 performing my annual ritual of trying to cram as much new music into my head as possible, ostensibly in an effort to compile year-end best-of lists, which some of my old musician friends and I have done off and on for the past thirty or so years.  Increasingly, this exercise is probably less about grooving to the latest Taylor Swift release, and more about straining against the inevitable pull of mortality, an observation which is pretty tedious and best left unexplored.  

With that out of the way, I present to you my list of top ten albums of 2022, which features mostly kind-of-obscure artists, along with references to other mostly kind-of-obscure artists. Enjoy!

 

10. Melody’s Echo Chamber, Unfold — French neo-psychedelia, with a breathy lead singer (Melody) who evokes Dominique Durand from Ivy and who will probably be a movie star or doing Louis Vuitton ads before the year is out. Hangs out with the dudes from Tame Impala, and it sure as hell sounds like it. The album clocks in at 21 minutes, which to my aging, impatient self feels like the ideal running time.

9. Yard Act, The Overload — Funny, sharp, very British (an actual British person shared this observation, so it’s not just me making a sloppy generalization), similar in both content and deliverance to Mike Skinner. These guys also remind me a lot of Art Brut, and I suspect their career trajectory will be similarly brief and forgettable, but good fun while it lasts.

8. Elvis Costello & the Impostors, The Boy Named If —  The most Brutal Youth-sounding album since, well since Brutal Youth. If a new artist dropped something like this, we’d all be doing backflips. But because it’s EC, we don’t make so much fuss. The curse of greatness, I suppose.

 

7. The Paranoid Style, For Executive Meeting — Elizabeth Nelson writes extraordinarily erudite and insightful pieces in places like Pitchfork and The New York Times on subjects as diverse as Warren Zevon concert films and the rivalry between Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka. As someone who once fantasized about challenging Hootie and the Blowfish to a match play competition in which they would be able to scramble four balls against my one, let’s just say I fit quite snugly in her demographic.

 

6. Carly Cosgrove, See You in Chemistry — The guitar tone on this was so similar to Home Like Noplace Is There that I had to check the Internets to see if it was the same dude from The Hotelier.  It’s not, and for a moment I imagined a good-natured effects pedal exchange program among emo bands, which, ridiculous as it is, still gave me a warm feeling.  Anyhoo, emo is normally not my thing, but there’s an awful lot to like here. Wicked guitar playing. Scream-y vocals not overdone. Musical themes introduced and re-introduced in just the right places. Girl bass player. Strong ending. 

 

5. The Beths, Expert in a Dying Field — Irresistible Kiwis with talent and energy to burn. They haven’t really made a misstep on their last two efforts, so I hope they can keep this up. 

 

4. Steve Lacy, Gemini Rights — “Bad Habit” is one of the most unlikely tracks ever to grace the single-digit end of the pop charts. Two chords, dorky synth, totally undanceable, lyrics about regret; yet there it was, firmly lodged at the very top of the Billboard charts and in our brains.  The rest of the album also resists attempts at classification. Apple Music tells me this is “R&B/Soul,” and I suppose one could see a little Frank Ocean or Andre3000 in his vibe (sexually and otherwise), but then a track like “Mercury” drops, and he’s doing Tropicalia in waltz time. I should stop trying to place him into a genre and just leave him be.

3. Richard Dawson, The Ruby Cord — Newcastle’s chief troubadour completes his trilogy (with 2017’s Peasant and 2019’s 2020) covering a span of roughly 2000 years — the first set in the 5^th century in the kingdom of Bryneich, the second in present-day UK, and now this one several hundred years into the future. Guess what: things have not turned out so well. Crow-pecked corpses litter the landscape, cities are deserted, videos looping in a museum are all that remain of the life that you and I know.  Yet through the characters which Dawson so fully inhabits, he shows us that, no matter the epoch, it’s always the same stuff with us humans: love and death and cruelty and tenderness and survival. And, as intellectually juicy as the concept is, it’s Dawson’s drop-dead gorgeous melodies, and choruses that repeat until they start to resemble the movement of the oceans, that make this such pure joy. RIYL: Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors.   

 

2. Black Country, New Road, Ants from Up There — Since last year’s offering, these kids have turned down the spazz a bit, but they’ve dialed up the melodrama in the best way possible.  Isaac Wood croons/moans about leaving home and missing home and coming back home (depending on the situation, “home” may be a person, whom Wood often addresses in second person), over a well-oiled but loose-limbed ensemble. This might have topped my ballot if they had ended the album following the barn-burning “The Place Where He Inserted the Blade,” but instead they chose to plow ahead with not one but two not-so-great tracks clocking in at over 9:00 each. Maybe they were trying to emulate Illusory Walls from last year, which is easier said than done.  

 

1. Metronomy, Small World — All these albums exist for us at a particular point in time, and one of the reasons — maybe the reason — we do this every year is to give these albums and the year in which they arrived some enduring meaning beyond the ephemeral experience of living through them, and it. We realize, a little more each year, these attempts at assessing and ordering and ranking are kind of futile, but here we are. The track list for Small World — “Life and Death,” “Things Will Be Fine,” “It’s Good To Be Back” — reads like a string of headlines for the kind-of-but-not-really-post-Covid world of 2022. Sad and complicated and hopeful but still sad. Each day’s a little mystery.

 

P.S. In the 2+ months since I compiled this list, The Ruby Cord is the only thing I've listened to on anything approaching heavy rotation.  Make of that what you will.

P.P.S. Most of entry #7 refers to golf.

P.P.P.S. (*=recommended):

070 Shake, You Can’t Kill Me – Auto-croon.  Resembles early The Weeknd more closely than The Weeknd does these days.  

2nd grade, Easy Listening – Aspiring to be the GBV of jangle pop. Snotty lead singer and noise guitar in the background doesn’t match Bob Pollard’s swagger. Back to triple-A. 

*Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul, Topical Dancer – Belgian dance act with a Roisin Murphy vibe. Best and funniest closing song. 

Animal Collective, Time Skiffs – I cannot believe that any of the people who gave this album gushing reviews actually enjoyed themselves while listening to it.

*Beyonce, Renaissance – Ranges from breathless, mindless disco anthems to deep cuts where she discusses the color of her vagina and the stretch marks on her breasts. These are not the kind of moves one sees every mega-star making. 

Dayglow, People in Motion – Owl City-esque. Should be doing ads for Skittles or toothpaste, or maybe Skittles-flavored toothpaste. 

*Frontperson, Parade – Man/woman share lead vox over a bed of synths that sounds like a second-grade recorder orchestra playing Loveless.  Intriguing.

Alex G, God Save the Animals — No relation to Kenny, I assume. Alternates vocal effects and styles from Sufjan Stephens’s gentle coo to early Kanye sped up samples. I find it hard to relate to, but the drum tone is amazing.

*Kendrick Lamar, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers: I read something recently about how the purpose of art is to make us uncomfortable, and this does that. Taylour Paige and Tanna Leone make the best female guest appearances since Nicki Minaj. 

Father John Misty, Chloë and The Next 20th Century – Singer-songwriter stuff over full orchestra, brushed drums, etc. Lyrics have a tinge of darkness that makes this more interesting than it sounds. I might like this more when I’m like 65. 

Office Culture, Big Time Things – From the band name, I was expecting something literate, hyperactive, wry, maybe Vampire Weekend-y; instead it sounded like the verse to “Baby Come Back.”

Open Mike Eagle, Component System With The Auto Reverse – Name-checks an entire roster of backup NBA centers.  Deserves a re-listen.

Beth Orton, Weather Alive – I believe I’m in a demographic that’s supposed to like this, but I do not like this. The music is moody and tasteful enough; singer sounds like she has been bouncing around NA meetings for a while now. 

Pinegrove, 11:11 – An awful lot of first-person singular going on here.  Like on every single song. Was this the guy who was accused of sexual assault or something?  Heavy solipsism doesn’t help his case (e.g., “I climb inside my iridescent mind (?!)), no matter how nice the guitar tones are. 

*Aaron Raitiere, Single Wide Dreamer – High-octane country music and deft observations of the human condition in America. Blue-staters will hear the pedal steel and deny that this applies to them, and they would be mistaken. 

Saba, Few Good Things – Chicago rapper with a fondness for triplets and a desire for familial stability. Channels Kendrick and Drake on a couple of tracks, but who can blame him. 

Sloan, Steady – Straight-faced MOR rock, nothing really not to like. Kinda reminds me of David Schreiber, RIP. 

*Spoon, Lucifer On The Sofa – We always knew they could bring winning guitar and drum sounds, but Britt Daniel pulls off an impressive shift from aesthete to swaggering Texas (and seemingly born-again) rocker. Great bass playing.  

Bartees Strange, See Through You – Guitar playing that sounds like a tape loop which is kind of cool.  Sags in too many places, but like he says it’s been a hard year.

*Harry Styles, Harry’s House – what is it about Harry Styles that makes him such a likeable character in a way that, say, Charlie Puth is not? Musical inventiveness and leanness helps. Not a song on Harry’s World is too long; he knows when to trim a measure from a pre-chorus, etc. 

Sudan Archives, Natural Brown Prom Queen – Experimental R&B. Wants to have her titties out, apparently

Taylor Swift, Midnights – Who am I to give advice to Taylor Swift, but here it is: more Emily Haines, less Emily in Paris. 

Wet Leg, Wet Leg – All the rage, but I just can’t get past the ASMR vocals. Music producers: please please please stop with that.

Billy Woods, Aethiopes – closer to spoken word or slam poetry than hip hop. Bonus points for finding a rhyme for “poultice” and for name-checking DFW.

*Nilüfer Yanya, Painless – Annie Lennox fanatics and their heirs will lap this up. Great drumming.

Years and Years, Night Call – Music for the horny.  Bright and clean like a penny whistle.

*Other albums I liked but I didn’t listen to enough to say anything useful about: Belle & Sebastian, Julia Jacklin, Ezra Furman, Kiwi Jr, Big Thief

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

A gray rain fell without ceasing on the 41st Annual JP Morgan Healthcare Conference.  People huddled in hotel doorways and waited on Ubers. The bellman offered me a plastic sleeve for my umbrella as I shook it out. “Water and marble don’t go well together,” he said. In San Francisco, we didn’t get the heavy flooding and evacuations seen in SoCal, but our phones lit up with alerts of a dangerous and life-threatening situation.

Security was heavy at the Westin St. Francis. I hadn’t picked up my badge yet, so a blazered guy with an earpiece pointed me to the side entrance, where I navigated another three security people before making it to the roped-off “presenting company check-in” section. My QR code wouldn’t scan, but the friendly young woman in a white silk top said she trusted me. She handed over my badge and lanyard and a bone-white canvas tote bag with a blue embroidered JP Morgan logo. The bag was of a heft and quality that assumed there was a decent chance that its recipient would own a matching sailboat.  

The corridors and stairways of the Westin teemed with characters who in one way or another were looking to make their fortunes in pharmaceuticals.  Tall, bearded banker bros; C-suite executives in dark suits and European eyeglasses; female buy-side analysts with blonde hair yanked straight back who looked like they spent their pre-dawn hours astride a Peloton; South Asian PhD/MBAs. The Colonial Room was SRO, so I leaned against the back wall and listened to our CEO talk about how we are transforming the practice of medicine and how our operating margin was on track to reach 32% by 2025.

I spent most of my week down the hill at the Omni, shuttling between conference rooms. The company I work for is Large Cap (nestled between between Mega Cap and Medium Cap), and as such my days were stacked with one-hour blocks of presentations from different small-to-medium biotechs looking to “partner” with us. Between two and ten people would show up for each meeting, their eagerness for partnering generally in direct proportion to the number of people there.  

In general, each of these folks was either a Science Person or a Money Person. The Science People wore clothing suggesting a teenager being dragged to a wedding. Many had one minor but unignorable physical characteristic: a wandering eye, excessive ear hair, dermatitis. The Money People clustered at both ends of the fashion spectrum, either wearing suits, or going for venture capitalist casual chic: fleece vest or quarter-zip sweater over a checked button-down shirt and high-end running shoes. On’s were in abundance. Despite being Money People, they were not necessarily slick: I observed one BD woman inspect her split ends assiduously through our entire meeting.

As they spoke to us of novel therapeutic targets and cytokines and mouse models, I would regret that I had selected English as my undergraduate major. 

“Never drive a fancy car,” a former boss once said to me, “Because we don’t want to give the impression that we are profiting off of the ill health of the American public.” I suppose it’s tempting to look at all this cynically and to disapprove of the baser desires behind it. The industry has done plenty of unsavory stuff over the years. My favorite communist podcasters would go a step further and call out the unsustainability of the entire system: look no further, they might argue, than the contrast between the bright lights, fancy presentations, and carbon footprint over at the Westin St. Francis, and the rising flood waters outside.    

I can’t argue with any of that. I also know that I’m not in a position to work for free, and I suspect you aren’t either. And despite my attempts at clever commentary above, the people I spent time last week with were not caricatures; they were intelligent people trying to do decent work. Meanwhile, people are still getting sick and dying from nasty diseases.  If, God forbid, one of our kids were to come down with one of these diseases, we would pray for someone to show up with some medicine. We can all dream of a day when our elected representatives prioritize medical research over DDG 51 Burke-class Aegis Destroyers. But in the meantime, the powerful and greedy pharmaceutical industry is our best hope. Wish them luck.    

Welcome to Acedia

Over the past few months, I’ve run into several people who have told me that they read and appreciate the stuff I write here.  This always leaves me surprised and humbled.  It also makes me feel guilty for how little I’ve written the past year or so.  I have a trunk full of excuses for why that might be: too much work, too many early morning meetings, too much going on with the new house, etc. 

I also think that living in the US again changed the way I perceive things, moreso than I thought it would.  I recently read an interview with Wes Anderson, who talked about living outside one’s home country: “I think there’s something about when you’re living in places where you don’t really speak the language…There’s something that isolates you…You’re sort of an observer…Every day that you’re abroad, you’re discovering something new.  It’s sometimes challenging to do basic things.  I remember when we were doing The Life Aquatic [in Italy] I had to go buy lightbulbs.  I was able to communicate what I needed to communicate in order to find a buy the right lightbulbs.  In America that would not be a particularly rewarding experience.”

In any case, perhaps most importantly, this website is supposed to have something to do with spirituality, and, for whatever reason, I’ve been feeling pretty spiritually languid lately.  I still say a small prayer of thanks most mornings, but I’ve been going to church like once every two or three months.  The “spiritual” books on the shelf next to my desk at home sit there untouched.  Nothing seems really novel or energizing, God-wise. 

* * * * *

I read Dante’s Inferno over my summer holiday, an appropriate choice for a heat wave, or a rapidly overheating planet, or a society plunging ever deeper into a spiritual abyss.  I had read at least part of it years ago for a college class, but I didn’t remember much.  I suppose the Divine Comedy wouldn’t be labeled a “fun vacation read,” but there’s a reason why people make such a big deal about Dante.  Granted, he plays to the LCD a bit with some of the gory punishments he inflicts on the eternally damned.  His hierarchy of sins can also seem puzzling (do alchemists and counterfeiters really belong on a lower rung of hell than murderers?).  But structurally, thematically, symbolically, it’s hard to find any work of art so rich and rewarding.

Dante drops us right into the action in Canto I, where the narrator finds himself in midlife/spiritual crisis.  Volumes could (and probably have been) written about the opening line alone: “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.”  His gently sloping but straightforward path is suddenly blocked by three beasts -- a she-wolf (understood to symbolize the sins of incontinence), a lion (violence and bestiality), and a leopard (fraud).  His path to salvation must pass through the recognition of sin (Inferno), the renunciation of sin (Purgatory), before finding the rapturous presence of God (Paradise).  He can’t make this journey by himself: first Virgil (human reason) and then Beatrice (divine love) must guide him.   

This preceding paragraph was liberally plagiarized from the fine “How to Read Dante” by John Ciardi, who translated the version I borrowed from the Cambridge Public Library.  Discussing the key themes introduced in these first Cantos, Ciardi talks about sin, specifically the deadly sin of acedia.  This is better known to us as “sloth,” and we typically associate it with being lazy, sitting around staring at your phone, that sort of thing.  But to Dante, Ciardi argues, acedia was the central spiritual failure: “the failure to be sufficiently active in the pursuit of the recognized Good…to acknowledge Good, but without fervor…The Divine Comedy is the zealous journey from man’s recognized spiritual torpor (neglect of God) to the active pursuit of his soul’s good (love of God).” Emphasis mine.

* * * * *

I’ve been sick for the past week.  Not Covid, one feels obliged to say these days.  It was one of those old-fashioned upper respiratory things which starts out with a nasty sore throat, then spends a couple of days in your sinuses, then spends a couple more days in your chest.  Nothing serious, and almost quaint in its course, recalling a time when a tickle in your throat did not come with the psychological and logistical baggage of a global pandemic.  Still, I was pretty tired for a few days. 

This morning was Thanksgiving and I woke up early and fed the cats.  Then, rather than doing what I usually do (eat breakfast while staring at my phone), I meditated and stretched and did a little Pilates and tried to write something about Dante and I started to feel better again.  

Leaning into Recovery

“There is optimism overall as the industry, companies and travelers worldwide lean into recovery and the much-needed return to business travel."   (UPI, 17 Nov 2021)

 

My business travel game is extremely rusty.  I forgot to pack socks on a recent trip to Lisbon, leaving me hand-washing and blow-drying the same pair for three days.  For last week’s trip to DC, I forgot to pack jeans, so on the trip home I was rocking the suit pants, t-shirt and hoodie combination which suggests a hedge fund manager with a psychiatric disorder.  I used to be able to pack my bags like sniper assembling a rifle while blindfolded.  Now I stand in my bedroom staring at the floor, sure that I’m forgetting something but not sure what.

Things have changed at the airports.  Going through security, I don’t need to remove my laptop and iPad from my backpack anymore, although maybe that’s only because of TSA PreCheck, which I think I qualify for because I have Global Entry, but I’m not sure if this is the case at every airport.  Now there’s also something called CLEAR which you can pay for to get through security even faster.  I’m not quite sure how this works, but they’re selling it hard: one dude practically dragged me to the ground to offer me a free trial the other day.  “CLEAR makes you unstoppable,” promises their website.

I don’t know if there have been breakthroughs in airport screening technology which have enabled all this; or if the powers that be in the transportation industry have decided that a little less security is acceptable to get more people traveling again; or if people have simply stopped giving a shit about terrorism in the same way they seem to have stopped giving a shit about COVID-19. 

In any case, returning to traveling at least provides a respite from 7am Zoom calls, and an opportunity to stare at the ceiling in different transportation hubs around the world. 

Airport Ceilings, Vol. 3

Aeroporto Humberto Delgado, Lisbon (LIS).  Kind of cool to look at, in the way that early computer animation wireframes were kind of cool to look at in the 1980s.  This image in particular makes me think of the original Tron, or better yet The Black Hole.  Yet I feel like the designers have missed the mark here: this cold metal has nothing to do with the warmth one feels when visiting Lisbon.  And, for God's sake, if there’s one airport in the world which is crying out for tiles on the ceiling, it’s this one.

Oslo Gardermoen Airport (OSL).  This was taken pre-pandemic, which means that it feels like I was there either 5 months ago or 5 years ago.  Large, impressive, lots of natural wood, which seems on-brand for Norway.  I’m in the middle of doing some renovations, so I am unable to look at this ceiling without mentally calculating how much all that custom woodworking must have run them.

Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA).  Bright, domed, and teal, evoking the Capitol building and Disneyworld in equal measure.  I was down there for a conference and stayed at the Gaylord, itself the size of an airplane hangar.  These type of places always leave me marveling at the audacity of the human beings who conceived and executed such an immense structure.  “Live” conferences have started up again, and, from the upper floors, you could peer down the atrium into the lobby bar, which thrummed with industry people until way past their bedtimes.  It was also oppressively hot and humid during my visit, which amplified the languor one senses around DC, and which made the "swamp" metaphor feel a bit more well-chosen.

Aéroport Nice Côte d'Azur (NCE).  It’s hard to see from this picture, but this is a raised walkway, around 100 feet above the main terminal.  As if the designers had understood the desire to look at the ceiling, or to approach the sky, so they gave the airport visitors a lift.

This one was from February 2020.  I was on my way back to Geneva after a global leadership meeting in the south of France.  Our colleagues from China didn’t attend because of a virus which we had read a little about but didn’t give much thought.  I gave the same presentation four times, to different groups of my colleagues who rotated through.  On the last night, a bunch of us got on stage and sang “I Gotta Feeling” with the French cover band.

Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG).  As I’ve noted before, midwestern airports seem to have a thing for displaying fossils mid-terminal.  I was carefully positioning myself to get the McDonald’s logo in the background of this photo for maximum wry effect when I heard a voice over my shoulder:

“That’s the only one of those in the world.  You’ll never see another one like it.”

I turned to see a man, middle-aged and sandy-haired in a teal uniform shirt, who was working the information desk.

“A mammoth?” I replied, ready to counter that there is in fact a mammoth skeleton in the Beneski Museum of Natural History at Amherst College.

“That’s not a mammoth," the man said. "It’s an American mastodon with wooly mammoth tusks. Mastodon tusks are straight.”

I looked back up and confirmed that the tusks on this animal were in fact curved.

“They had mammoth tusks lying around, so somebody had the bright idea to stick 'em on a mastodon,” he continued.  “Took a 7^th grader to tell the museum people they had gotten it wrong.”

The man and I considered the mastodon/mammoth for a moment.

“Well,” I said, “perhaps they did that so no one would bang their heads on the tusks when they were walking by,” indicating with my hand the approximate angle at which mastodon tusks would intrude into the walkway and bonk the unalert traveler.

“Ha!” the man said, “I would love to see that!”

Airport Ceilings Volume 1 and Volume 2.

She gets it while she can

I finally got around to watching that new Beatles documentary.  I admit that, even for a Beatles nut like myself, it felt daunting: 8+ hours of them sitting around smoking and drinking tea and playing “I’ve Got a Feeling” a thousand times and fracturing under the tremendous weight of who and what they were. Did the world really need more Beatles content?

The pre-marketing of Get Back promised to “set the record straight” about the original Let It Be project.  Peter Jackson and co. would show us that their break-up really wasn’t the acrimonious, Yoko-induced feud that we’d been fed, that there was still sublime musical collaboration going on, that they hadn't lost their Liverpudlian cheekiness, that The Beatles were still The Beatles. And yes, the film checks those boxes. We feel the tension (especially when George bails for a while in Part 1), but we also see how much they loved playing music, and loved the creative process, and loved each other.

But the joy of watching Get Back is not about seeing something new. It’s about seeing everything that leads up to all the magical stuff we already know is going to happen. We know that pretty soon, Billy Preston’s going to show up and breathe life into the sessions. That George is going to stop passive-aggressively noodling around with his wah-wah pedal and come up with the sublime descending lead part during the verses of “Don’t Let Me Down.”  That Ringo’s eventually going to change his drum part on “Get Back” from a straight 4:4 to the sly gallop that propels the song. That these snippets of “Something” and “You Never Give Me Your Money” and “Carry That Weight” are going to coalesce into the miracle that is Abbey Road. 

We also know what will happen to John 11 years later.

The ostensible climax of Get Back is the rooftop concert in Part 3. It isn’t really much of a “concert:” they only play a few songs, and the people down on the street below can’t even see them, and John forgets some of the words, and his fingers are too cold to play the solos well. But they are still glorious, and people down on the street stop and look up and try to see this music that seems to come from the heavens. 

Playing amplified rock music in the middle of London is noisy, and at a certain point the cops show up. “Is this really necessary?” one of them asks, with a British politeness that is almost laughable (one suspects that the Minneapolis PD wouldn't react to a similar situation in quite the same way). He repeats the question a few times, as do the few (mainly older) people out on the street who are complaining about the noise. "Is this really necessary?"  

I wonder if any of those people are still living, and if they saw this movie and thought about the question they asked. What exactly did they think was more “necessary” than stopping what they were doing and listening to the vocal harmonies on “I Dig a Pony?” Catching the next bus? Getting home for dinner? Sleeping? Making sure the wheels of commerce continue to turn undisturbed? 

As I’ve mentioned before, it feels like it gets harder to complete my Critics Poll with each passing year. Between work and doing the dishes and amateur epidemiology, it’s not easy to keep up with what new music has come out, much less to listen to it critically and try to put a year-end list together. I can’t say that I did a great job of it this past year. I crammed most of my listening into December and January, so I’m sure I missed a lot of good stuff. But I keep doing it because all these artists will be gone one day, and so will I, and so will you. Because there are more important things than the next Zoom meeting. Because music is more than entertainment or a sound bed for an Applebee's ad. Because music and the artists who make it and the emotion and meaning it carries are, indeed, necessary. 

 Top Ten Albums of 2021

10. Miranda Lambert, Jack Ingram & John Randall – The Marfa Tapes

Lo-fi country replete with tape hiss, beer cans cracking open, and what sounds like a campfire, or maybe a horse nibbling on straw. These are bona fide Country Music Stars, so you suspect that the casualness itself may be produced, but there’s no denying the songs and the performances.      

9. Tyler, the Creator – Call Me if You Get Lost

What in God’s name is Tyler, the Creator doing rapping about Geneva, Switzerland?  I suspect that he hasn’t ventured too far away from Quai Wilson, but in any case it’s refreshing to hear an American call his passport his most valuable possession.  

8. St. Lenox – Ten Songs of Worship and Praise for Our Tumultuous Times

Andrew Choi brings the confessional indie-pop heat. This deserves more than a one-line summary, especially given the “spiritual” leanings of this here website, but I haven’t listened to it in a while, and I don’t want to do it injustice. Trust me on this one. 

7. Juan Wauters – Real Life Situations 

Like a long Saturday afternoon ride on the 7 train; at each stop, the doors part to reveal a pure, gorgeous glimpse of life in the city.  The protagonist is a very likeable Uruguayan transplant, who breaks the 4^th wall mid-album to say he hopes we’re enjoying ourselves.

6. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard – LW  

Melbourne's favorite microtonal freaks release the 7,000^th album of their career.  This was my first foray into the “Gizzverse” (eew), and I can imagine how easy it is for young impressionable types to venture in there and never find their way out. 

5. Black Country, New Road – For the First Time

Progressive Klezmer played by some uni-types from Cambridge, UK.  RIYL: Morphine, The Lounge Lizards, John Zorn. The vocalist, who does more of a basso profundo spoken-word thing, might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I dare you to sit still through this one.  

4. Espanto – Cemento

As if someone had commissioned Kraftwerk to score a Spanish-language version of Teletubbies directed by David Lynch.  No, that’s not right: the synths might feel cold and distant, but Teresa and Luis are coming with mucho joy and love and warmth here. Recalls Dead Media by Hefner, come to think of it.

3. Bad Bad Hats – Walkman

Groovy, well-structured, sympathetic female lead singer, even more sympathetic guitar tones. Aspiring pop music producers, take note: pulling out the bass guitar for the verse and then bringing it back in for the chorus is a very useful maneuver.

2. The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die – Illusory Walls

Triumphantly captures the vertiginous bridge between prog and emo. Like Muse without the stadium pretense. I think having a female vocalist helps. Drums like cannon fire. 

1. Kiwi Jr. – Cooler Returns

I find myself wanting to apologize for putting these dudes from Toronto at the top of my list. There are certainly other acts with better chops, more thematic consistency, more scrutable lyrics, (certainly) more sex appeal.  I think I compared them to Pavement last time out, and the lead singer does indeed bear a timbric resemblance to Stephen Malkmus. But these guys don’t have the same need for irony or archness. Sometimes good songs, played well with winning energy are enough. Being Canadian probably helps too.

Story Time

 

Twitter is the Lust of Dante’s Circles of Social Media. It’s still hell, but things could be a lot worse.  Amongst the trolls and doom and Capital One promotions, one does find some interesting stories and glimpses of humanity. Maybe a better metaphor is Twitter is the Marshalls of social media: it’s not a pleasant place to be, and you're going to wade through an awful lot of crap, but there are a few decent items to be found.

One such decent item is Story Club by George Saunders, which came to me courtesy of Maria Bustillos. It’s essentially an English class held on Saunders’ substack. It’s behind a paywall, but it’s great value for money if you’re a fan of the written word, and/or if you believe that engaging with stories in a thoughtful way might be an important and helpful thing to do, especially at this particular moment. We started by reading a Hemingway's “Cat in the Rain,” one paragraph at a time over the course of a week: kind of the antithesis of the Twitter experience.

There are writing exercises as well. Last week, the assignment was to write a story of 200 words (exactly 200, not 199 or 201) using only 50 unique words. So you keep a running tally of the words you’ve used, and once you get to 50, you have to start re-using words (or go back and swap out another one, but the grand total can’t exceed 50). And you're supposed to do this in only 45 minutes. Judging from the comments, many of my fellow students had the same experience I did: you hit 50 words pretty quickly (I think I was at around 90 total words), and then you find yourself in an awkward spot.  But then some interesting things happen as you wriggle free.   

My attempt:

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking, and I am happy to welcome you aboard on today’s flight to Oahu. Our flight time today will be only two hours, and Connie and her team are here to make your flight as pleasant as possible.

And I would like to go ahead and welcome you newlyweds aboard today! Congratulations! Time flies. I remember. A good time. A pleasant time. 

A time you would think would go on and on being good and pleasant. Right, Connie? Go ahead and remember. Our time was good and pleasant. This was our time. You think you are happy today, but I would like you to remember. You and I are right. You and I are a team. We would be happy. I am speaking here. Your captain is speaking to you. 

And to you newlyweds: your time is like this flight. Be happy here, but the hours will go and go. Hours and hours. You are here. This is possible. Today will welcome you. You have this today and you think you are happy, but remember: today is only today. Today will go. Make your today right. Go ahead.      

Have a pleasant flight. Mahalo!”