I’d be lying if I said I was not just a little thrilled about getting the term “upsettingly manly” on the front page of a national newspaper’s website.
Things I am learning at the gym
1. I still have shitty knees.
2. Nobody laughs when you call it the gymnasium.
3. There is an old lady in grey sweatpants who is stuck on the treadmill. She has been there for days, possibly weeks, and needs help. Someone please take her home.
4. If you ask for a second towel at the front desk, they will look at you like you stopped robbing the bank just long enough to take a dump on the floor. Oh, I’m sorry, are we rationing now? Fuck outta here.
5. Lungfish is bad running music.
6. So is Sebadoh.
7. American Music Club has not aged particularly well. Also, bad to listen to when you are running or moving for any reason at all, really.
8. My legs are shockingly weak considering how big and fat they are.
9. Tons of guys wear briefs these days! I don’t know. Isn’t that weird? Is that a thing that’s happening now?
10. Once you turn 80, it is perfectly acceptable to blow-dry your balls in front of dozens of other men, no matter how awful and hilarious your scrotum is or how much of your asshole is visible.
11. Watching people brush their teeth in public makes me very uncomfortable.
12. Muscle shirts are just a dick move in general.
13. I would rather stand in a Macy’s display window with my dink hanging out of my pants for a full day than let anyone see me wash my butt for five seconds.
14. I think I am getting contact-shoulder hair.
15. Very few beards at the gymnasium.
"And you know what? I love this ballot. There is wonderful bughouse comedy to this ballot. This is a ballot that eats crayons. I look at this ballot, and I hear tuba music. It is a great big shrieking monkey cage of a ballot, and I love it because that is exactly what the Hall of Fame deserves. We’re talking about a hugely self-important institution populated by drunks and bigots and flakes and syphilitic halfwits that regularly goes through a massive, public spasm of pretending it’s a priesthood. (America already has one of those institutions, anyway. It’s called the Kennedys.)"
William Langewiesche shuts his eyes and takes a sharp inhale. He clutches the issue to his chest, feels its heat radiating through the gloss, starts to notice he is — wait — feverish? Years ago, he stood amongst the ashen remains of Ground Zero, but today he is at peace with his station, seated in quiet reverence before a tower that will never rumble, will never quake. He lifts the magazine slowly upwards, his lips pouting in anticipation, only then opening his eyes to see his gaze returned in squinty mahogany. A laugh escapes as he presses his mouth into the magazine’s sheen and now the tears are flowing, flowing out of rhythm with his ecstatic sucking, his hands crumpling the book’s latter half while he falls to his knees, whimpering, a witness. Langewiesche, the author, the master of flight, had finally kissed the face of God.Justin time, your Vanity Fair valentine.
| Two Jamaican ladies on the streetcar: | "[Things about religion.]" |
| Old guy: | "Are you ladies Christian or Muslim?" |
| TJLOTS: | "Oh, we're Christian." |
| Old guy: | "Ah, that must be why you're so charming!" |
| The three lock arms, disembark the trolley, shed their earthly attire and make beautiful glory-be-to-God bone-music right in the middle of the intersection. Probably. |
The longest reads in the world
I’m trying out a new “blog character” who only posts quotes and makes lists. It is going to be a big hit on the Internet, I reckon.Also, it is pretty amazing that the Longreads phenomenon has taken off, that there is a determined and expansive observance of great and important writing flying in the face of the screaming journalism death cult. Not that it’s all about money, but a lot of it is, and while this new sort of celebration culture may not offer a direct payoff, it at least makes an effort to demonstrate the work’s value and worth in a simple, subtle, organic manner. That seems like a solid first step toward ensuring we will all get to eat behind these efforts, some day.
In a year that was so rich with great writing, these were some of my favorite stories:
The Legend of Black Superman: Billy Ray Bates, Flying High in the Philippines by Rafe Bartholomew, Deadspin
There was no way Bates could maintain an NBA career while slipping into full-blown alcoholism. So what did he do? Get clean, pull himself together, and take another shot at the big leagues? Nope. By the looks of things, he found a place where he could keep playing without giving up the bottle. That place was the Philippines. In the PBA, Bates’s talent was so overwhelming that he probably could have played in a drunken stupor and averaged 30 points per game. By most accounts, he always dried out before tip-off. His career average of 46 points per game is the highest of any PBA player, import or local, and Bates will probably always be remembered as the best import in league history. Throughout the ’80s, he was a superstar in the Philippines, one of the nation’s most famous and infamous ballers, whose legacy lives on today.
Who is the Greatest Diva of the Last 25 Years? We Offer Scientific Proof by Jay Caspian Kang, The Awl
Jay’s gambling essay made the year-end rounds, and it should have, but I’m going with this offering from The Awl, not only because it made me laugh and grin idiotically about a subject of which I am thoroughly ignorant, but because it introduced me to the totally essential concept of “stank.”
Philip Roth Goes Home Again by Scott Raab, Esquire
I have almost no use for celebrity profiles of any sort, but as a Jewish male between the ages of X and Y, I have a certain surrogate grandfather-like affinity for Philip Roth and his work and his voice and his existence in general, really, and will accordingly follow up on any and all references to him, out of concern for his well-being as much as for selfish readerly reasons. So it’s wonderful to see him here, feisty and vital, giving fits to Raab’s obstinate monster (a term of endearment, honest) and still finding bizarre turns and complexities in the world even as they wander through the most mundane elderly day — a car ride through the tunnel, an old home, a school, a deli. And Raab’s portrait is lovely, a tribute without ever lapsing into a maudlin eulogy for a 70-something-year-old man. I’ve always fantasized about interviewing Roth but have had a hard time envisioning a scenario in which I don’t tearfully bring up my circumcision within ten minutes and find myself escorted from the premises. This will do for now.
The Guantanamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta Sergeant Blows the Whistle by Scott Horton, Harper’s
From a strictly journalistic perspective, this was an atom bomb, a shot across the bow aimed at Obama’s early failures and the increasingly visible sins of the Bush administration. Harper’s has been home to some harrowing torture diaries, but this went a step further: Laying out how the deaths of three Guantanamo prisoners were spun into suicides and the complicity, level by level, that allowed such an unbelievable fraud to take root.
Football Season is Over. Football Season Has Begun by Spencer Hall, Every Day Should Be Saturday
She reclined on the bed and slept for a while. In terms of labor, we got off easy: a late induction, eight hours of pure, hellacious suck, and then the epidural that landed her sleeping on the bed during the break. If you’ve been in a hospital overnight, you know it floats in its own plane of existence. No one walks the halls. The sound of intermittent moaning and murmuring nurses break the slience. Sleep deprivation makes the sound of the ice machine spitting fresh cubes into the bin seem like a crashing omen of bad, uncontrollable things. In the room, machines beep and whirr in rhythm.
On the street outside in downtown Atlanta, I watch one guy in two hours walk down the sidewalk, a tall, wispy man dragging a ragged piece of rolling, wobbling luggage so pitiful a more loving owner would have shot it. The wife slept on. Sitting on the couch I felt like Michael Collins in the Apollo 11 command module, staring out the window at a howling nothing and time that wouldn’t move fast enough for me, death, or birth. In the middle of the night in a hospital everyone’s alone no matter how many people are there.
My son was born in February. The timing was intentional, and not just for football. Pregnant women, being literal ovens of human bakery, hum along at an even 300 degrees Fahrenheit, and my wife thought better of attempting to carry a human pizza oven through the heat of an Atlanta summer. Instead, he came in the month without football when the weather was cold enough that, on good nights, she needed a single sheet over her to stay warm while I froze under three blankets. She didn’t need to have a baby in summer: she carried the season with her in bold disregard for the calendar’s conventions.
The HBO Auteur by Wyatt Mason, The New York Times Magazine
I cannot invent a more enviable career trajectory than the one David Simon is riding in ascension, so anything that offers a whisper, a peek, a page from which to crib is required. Treme provoked a surprisingly lame reception, but this feature in particular built it up to heights I thought it matched easily, all the while breaking down the complicated process that produces such a comprehensive and human story.
Brother by Pat Jordan, Slate
Pat Jordan is a fucking assassin. Between last year’s You Get Old and this, a devastating look at how family grows apart and breaks down, Jordan is providing a blueprint for a tough, kind, steeled approach to aging that’s as unpleasant as it is almost surely necessary.
Ciudad Juarez: How We Got Here by John Murray, The Awl
This is more of a canon selection. Murray’s series for The Awl about Ciudad Juarez was some of the best journalism I read this year, honest and context-heavy about a subject and region so grisly and dangerous that regrettably (but understandably) few people have the tummy to cover it.
The Comedian’s Comedian’s Comedian by Amy Wallace, GQ
“A beautiful man,” Shandling says, appraising the boxer’s fluid stance. “He’s had to put all this training in. But there’s a way that he’s still relaxed. It’s hard to describe. He’s at peace. He’s empty-headed. He’s all instinct—because he’s got his technique worked out.” He pauses. “This is how I work.”
Suddenly he launches into a story about Ali during the fifth round of the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle, when Ali said to George Foreman, “This would be a bad place to get tired.” That, Garry says, “is also what a comic would do. This would be a bad place to get tired. To this day Foreman says, You know, that got to me! It’s humorous, the idea that someone would say that in the ring. And you’re going to see how these things all tie together, because they’re all exercises in being in the moment.”
Garry rises from his chair and leads me through the house, past the Buddhist prayer flags and the many-armed statuary, toward yet another outdoor patio, where a heavy bag hangs from a chain. Before we get to it, though, he turns off a hallway and into his study, where a well-worn copy of GOAT: A Tribute to Muhammad Ali, a 792-page book of photographs, lies open on a low bench. It’s an enormous book, measuring twenty by twenty inches and weighing in at seventy-five pounds. Its binding is cracked, Garry has studied it so much. Now he leans over it, flipping to a photo of Ali in the ring.
Garry Shandling is the best.
"I use profanity less and less as I become more and more a married forty year-old living in the New Jersey suburbs for whom words like “horsefucked” are increasingly like the leather pants on an aging hipster who hasn’t caught on yet that he’s too old for the club. On the other hand, there are times when the only word that makes sense is “asshole” or even “galactic asshole,” particularly with the kind of people I’m writing about. So it’s tough. I’m sure I will learn the answer to this difficult philosophical paradox in the afterlife."
Even as someone who curses with what some may consider an inelegant frequency, it’s heartening to read this sort of sentiment from someone as gleefully and creatively vulgar as Matt Taibbi. In related news, my one resolution for 2011 is to use the word “dickhole” as much as possible, so, hey.
Yes, these were my favorite albums of 2010
You’re not going to believe it, but there were ten of them! Here is a handy list in which they are presented sequentially, in order of increasing scrumtrilescence.
10. Justin Townes Earle - Harlem River Blues
Is it possible to write about Justin Townes Earle without including a qualifier about his dad? I think it’s worth a try, and I say that as someone who loves Steve Earawfuck. Whatever. It’s a testament to the sweetness of the younger Earle’s voice and the love with which he treats his material that such a shamelessly derivative album could make such an impression. It’s the Hank Williams model, slightly updated, minus any sort of hammy kitsch. Which is pretty fantastic, actually.
Listen to: Harlem River Blues
9. The Tallest Man on Earth - The Wild Hunt
A supremely pretty album that is in every way (song-writing, recording, production) the logical, gradual successor to Shallow Graves. Now stay the fuck away from Sam Beam’s Hammond organ, son.
Listen to: Love is All
8. Gaslight Anthem - American Slang
These guys may not have an original bone in their collective band-body, but I played the shit out of this album this year. Also, “The Diamond Church Street Choir” is basically Van Morrison’s “Jackie Wilson Said (I’m in Heaven When You Smile),” and I am totally fine with that. I’d probably have a bigger problem with a band being so shameless about its influences if (1) the songs weren’t so good and (2) I didn’t grow up on those bands myself. (Call me, B-Fal!)
Listen to: Bring It On
7. Big Boi - Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
It’s always been easy to see Andre 3000 as Outkast’s resident unicorn, but this album puts the duo in a new perspective. Not that it’s a contest, but unless Andre brings some real fire, the drop-off from visionary to tin-foil dandy seems shockingly steep these days. One of my favourite things about this album? How joyously vulgar it is. I don’t know if a five-minute span has passed since its release that T.I.’s verse from “Tangerine” — specifically the line, “All I can see is titties, pussy lips and ass cheeks” — hasn’t doubled back through my dumb reptilian brain.
Listen to: Tangerine
6. Sun Kil Moon - Admiral Fell Promises
It was initially a touch deflating to hear that Sun Kil Moon’s new record would essentially be a Mark Kozelek solo joint — just him, a nylon-stringed guitar and the crushing weight of all the world’s melancholy. But then “Australian Winter” hit the Internet just in time to remind us that, right, those things actually form a potent mixture, don’t they? It might be a cop-out to call an album so claustrophobically recorded “haunting,” but every track here is its own phantasm, all memories of places and people that might have only ever been imagined — the sort of mourning you cherish.
Listen to: Half Moon Bay
5. Phosphorescent - Here’s to Taking it Easy
It’s not that Matthew Houck’s music lacks sadness — it’s there in his lyrics, certainly — but his world-weary, occasionally regretful musings are consistently mitigated by how fucking happy this guy sounds to be making music. This is alt-country at its jaunty best, replete with horns and whiny steel guitars and saloon pianos. It’s like Calexico without the pinpoint focus, and it’s a little more fun as a result.
Listen to: The Mermaid Parade
4. The National - High Violet
“Greetings, North American Male! Are you concerned for your future? Do you find your reserves of existential dread overflowing? Does the uncertainty of your surroundings engender a dull but unmistakably constant paranoia? Well, here is a man with a voice like the Grand Canyon and an airtight band of chamber-rock gloom junkies to perform scientifically perfect compositions that suggest perhaps you are not entirely alone.” So, yeah, obviously.
Listen to: England
3. Wolf Parade - Expo 86
I was pretty quick to dismiss this one after a few listens, especially as a follow-up to the just so-so At Mount Zoomer, and then…I don’t know, the ghost of Ric Ocasek showed up at my door rattling chains? On the first two albums, the split Krug/Boeckner dynamic was clear, and those discs made sense in the context of that chasm. Maybe it was how cohesive Expo 86 actually is that threw me off. They’ve always been in sync, but this is the first album that feels like a real team effort all the way through. Whatever the case may be, there isn’t a moment on here I don’t love, even the goofy synth that drowns “Oh, You Old Thing.” No, wait — ESPECIALLY the goofy synth that drowns “Oh, You Old Thing.”
Listen to: Cave-o-Sapien
2. Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz
For all of Stevens’ talk of being fed up with the album model, this had much more in common with his previous efforts than I expected it to. It’s less concerned with structure than Illinois, but he’s still playing his milk-carton banjo and bangin’ his dink on pine cones and quail eggs and whatever else. Meanwhile, it’s all bathed in a layer of bleeps and bloops this time around, and the result might be even more grandiose than its predecessors. In a good way! When you can cap an album with a 25-plus-minute ramble that somehow does not at any point feel like a chore, it’s an achievement. (Also an achievement: making the aforementioned electro-bath feel as effortlessly organic as the orchestra of live instruments it accompanies.)
Listen to: Age of Adz
1. Titus Andronicus - The Monitor
I loved this album for many of the same reasons I could not truck with The Suburbs. It’s overstuffed, under-edited, sprawling and brimming with unfiltered angst. But whereas Arcade Fire’s album felt cold and calculated and soulless and Had A Message, Damn It, The Monitor is a tornado, a shambolic mess that threatens to unravel at any given moment and yet always manages to snap back together in time for a glass-smashing chorus. I’ve listened to this album several million times, and I’m still not entirely sure how they managed to sprinkle in spoken-word segments from Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Jefferson Davis and other quote-of-the-day-toilet-paper mainstays (in addition to loosely but not really using the Civil War as the backdrop for the album, Jesus) and not have it come across as unlistenably pretentious garbage. Probably because the rest of the lyrics are about as honest as can be (without being soppingly earnest), and also for lines like, “I’m at the end of my rope / and I feel like swinging,” which handily sums up the mixture of hopelessness and rebellion that comprises the album’s action. And, like Sufjan up there, The Monitor revels in its length. Most songs are in the five-to-nine-minute range, and the closer, “The Battle of Hampton Roads,” clocks in at just a hair over 14 minutes, never losing its steam or sense of urgency (which is vital, considering this is punky Pogues-y rock we’re talking about, here). This is your album of the year, 2010.
Listen to: Theme From “Cheers”
Honorable Mentions
Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan - Hawk
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - The Brutalist Bricks
Les Savy Fav - Root for Ruin
The Black Keys - Brothers
Jonsi - Go
Capital H - The Fields
Das Racist - Sit Down, Man
Junip - Fields
Frog Eyes - Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph
Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest
The Besnard Lakes - The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night
"You need to carefully consider the reality of the demonic realm and the possibility that pagan Hinduism taps demonic powers, and yoga was/is one means of doing so. If you are into the Hindu chants, you are getting yourself into dangerous territory."
So, yes, it is true that I am a Jew and thus perhaps not vulnerable to the same sort of horrific demon-possessions as Christ’s children, but this post and the following comments are truly vital reading for anybody who wants to avoid Kundalini wriggling its way right up into his or her flexible Pagan asshole.
So, Friday night, we carved a dumb path through the city’s cold and howling hindparts right into the ballsack that is Sound Academy to see Wolf Parade. They were great! The only time I’d seen them previously was right after At Mount Zoomer came out, at Terminal 5 in New York, which is a rotten tomb unfit for live music or any other kind of joyous gathering, and which subsequently sucked the life out of the show. Sound Academy, for all the difficulties getting there, actually has pretty excellent acoustics, as well as reasonably priced beer and poutine. Anyway! The kids “moshed” and crowdsurfed to “Oh, You Old Thing,” which is kind of like seeing a cockfight at a Ric Ocasek concert, and the band played the nuts out of “I’ll Believe in Anything” and “California Dreamer,” notching some gnarly epic rock moments in the process. (We were standing next to the soundboard, where the ecstatic dancing fella working the lights was about a glowstick away from giving me a hug at a rave 10 years ago. He was pretty into his job.)
Seeing people crowdsurf from a few hundred feet away made my back hurt, but they were flopping around enough that security kept nabbing them, much to the band’s dismay, who urged folks to “not get caught” over and over. I guess they could have been smoking weed, too. But then they were wrapping up, about to kill it with “Kissing the Beehive,” and asked security not to toss anybody because this was the last show they were going to play for a long time (paraphrasing Spencer) and the last song they were ever going to play (paraphrasing Dan). That seemed like a funny joke to me, the sort of thing you say to keep security’s meaty paws off the kids and all their slam-dancing, but Twitter went all bug-fuck after, and I laughed knowingly to myself that this was surely just a ruse.
But nah, they’re on an indefinite hiatus. Whether it’s the shitty Sleater-Kinney kind or the non-existent Deerhunter kind remains to be seen. The point is, I have a fucking uncanny knack for discerning the truth from rock musicians. Anyway, glad I hauled ass out to Sound Academy. That up there is “Fine Young Cannibals” from the show. Pardon the crunchy bass.
