Listening • Departure Journal, Volume One

I have reason to reminisce. My tenure of living in New York City is ending, and in the weeks before I move, I’m starting to forget what I dislike about New York. More on that later. But how easily music conjures memories. I think I was turned on to the Flaming Lips around the same week the dot-com pyre was lit, which is around the time I moved to New York.

One summer night there was a party in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The sidewalks were still cooling off from the sun. This was back when cabdrivers didn’t know how to get there, when the streets were empty enough at night for football, back when young people from Oberlin or Texas living in storefronts was novel. Two or three in the morning. A cramped party without any lights or food. In the makeshift bathroom, sheet-rocked by amateurs, a girl had tied her handwashed bras and underwear to a hot-water pipe like so many deflated balloons.

Around that time I’d met an illustrator, Adam, in a theater workshop. He lived alone nearby in a converted industrial building that was large enough for him to build half of a basketball court in his apartment. He’d hung a backboard on ropes and pulleys, and had measured and painted out proper court lines. Otherwise he owned a chair and a desk, a few plants and the largest laptop you could buy from Apple at the time. He complained to me that he didn’t know anyone who liked to play basketball, so the court had never been used. What do you illustrate? I asked him while we sat on two swings he’d hung from the rafters. Not much anymore; during college, he said, he’d sold caricatures of imaginary pets to a board game company that still hadn’t used them. His parents in Denver paid the rent. Adam said he was thinking about pursuing comedy full-time.

I now see him regularly on VH1’s Best Week Ever, making fun of the news. Adam is not his real name because I’ve forgotten his real name.

At the party, the rumor was that the band Modest Mouse, friends of the host, had just gotten in at JFK on a late flight. It was about three in the morning, they were back from touring Germany and would be playing the party any moment. I went outside with the crowd drinking beer in the street and saw a girl I liked in a bodega. I tried to make time with her in the beans and mops aisle. It took about two minutes to flunk. The subway stop was one I haven’t used since.

» Listen to “Dashboard” by Modest Mouse at the Underrated Blog


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Another night in abandoned Brooklyn’s warehouse districts, two tall girls stood by the unmarked entrance wearing men’s blue oxford shirts unbuttoned with nothing on underneath. They were talking to a man wearing a beard, red face paint and heavy mascara. The big room, probably large enough for 200 people, was packed tight chest-to-back: talking, smoking, dancing. “Do you have a light?” a girl shouted at me. “What?” I yelled back, because the music was too loud to hear anything. She was a head shorter than me and wore a mesh hat turned to the side, a spray-painted wifebeater, and an enormous bull ring through her nose. “I said, do you have a light?” “What?” “Fuck you!” she yelled and shoved me, but the crowd was too dense for me to do more than stand there, still pressed against her.

I was leaving when it started to snow paper. Like paint chips you buy at the hardware store, strips of variegated color, mostly peach and auburn brown. On an I-beam stretching across the room, 20 feet off the ground, a young Japanese woman was lying on her back, a Depression-era builder on lunch break, her legs straddling the beam on either side while she tore a hardcore porn magazine into strips and dropped them on the crowd. Some of the pieces featured penises and vaginas, some just showed pleasant interiors. Turns out she was staying with a friend, visiting for the summer; as an artist she was conceptually taken with tearing up paper. That seemed as good a reason as any at the time to publish her photos.

» Listen to “Rolling Down the Hills” by Glass Candy at Gorilla vs. Bear


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I met Steve Shelley, the drummer from Sonic Youth, at a bachelor party somewhere around the end of the millennium. We sat across from each other at Chumley’s, eating cheeseburgers. I was introduced as one of the editors of The Morning News. There was a look of recognition, I thought. He told me the band liked TMN, that they read it on tour, that they set up wireless networks on-stage or in the empty seats of an auditorium during sound-check lulls.

This is how I tell the story now, but truthfully, he might have just said that he preferred the Daily News to the Post, or that Thurston Moore owned a seismograph. I don’t think so—I’m 90 percent sure not—but it was a long time ago. A study I read recently said the older you get, the more likely you are to be wrong about your own memories while increasingly adamant that you’re right.

I wish I was the type to keep a journal. Forget simply putting closed-circuit video cameras in the subways—let’s put them everywhere and then let’s save the tapes, indexed by citizen, referenced to the barcodes city officials will staple to our earlobes. It should all be overseen by the Department of Motor Vehicles. Then anyone can review their individual footage—commuting, dining, trying on Helmut Lang pants—but only the dedicated narcissists will manage to get through the paperwork.

Two years ago I had the opportunity to go as a guest with Sonic Youth to Mexico City, to hang out for a few days while they played a soccer stadium. I turned it down.

I’m going to print out that paragraph and glue it to my office wall.

» Listen to “Baby Blues” by the Stills at Moistworks


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Moving friends from one apartment in Brooklyn to another, I stumbled on a tribe I hadn’t seen before in New York—stranger than Brooklyn’s cricket leagues, more fascinating to watch than West Houston’s nouveau-riche Brazilians at Sunday brunch.

It was morning on a spring Saturday. The weather was beautiful, and the street in Fort Greene was lined with new sport cars: yellow Hondas and patent-black Lexus convertibles. The men in the driver’s seats were all topless, waxed and tan, and wearing brightly colored cargo shorts. No one had a calf muscle smaller than a football. When they talked they spoke quickly with strong accents. And no one could sit still. The women beside them wore bikinis, of which the bottoms cupped apples and the tops hugged Grizzly bear cubs. Faces were white turned orange from too much tanning. Everyone was straight and coupled up. When they kissed, it was lunch hour at the casino’s buffet. Also, most of them carried Gatorade bottles, which was the final reason I suspected they were all on ecstasy and coke.

I loved them, these Staten Islanders who migrated to Brooklyn to do drugs and be fabulous early-morning weekend swingers. House music blared out from a ground-floor apartment. Everyone was deliriously participating. And I was hauling a couch up four flights of stairs, for the life of me dying to join the party, which is how living in New York has felt for eight years.

» Listen to “Early April, Still Cold (DJ Mix)” by Robert Blair at Music for Robots

 —Rosecrans Baldwin, Apr. 18, 2007

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Listening • Our Quarterly Review

The book’s closed on the first three months of 2007, which makes now as good a time as any to take stock of the quarter that’s just ended. Here are our favorite tracks from the year thus far.


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Rosecrans Baldwin

“Fake Empire” by the National
The digital revolution has turned me into a single buyer, but I’ve really enjoyed this entire album. A single song doesn’t do it justice, not the way an afternoon does.
» Listen to “Fake Empire” at Minneapolis Fucking Rocks


“Rich Girls” by the Virgins
Lots of Brooklyn sounds like this. Want to eat this. Put the tiger pants on. This is sidewalk music for the moment in the same way “Chicken Noodle Soup” was sidewalk music last summer (though probably for different people).
» Listen to “Rich Girls” at Red Blondehead


“Fluorescent Adolescent” by the Arctic Monkeys
How long have these guys been playing together? It sounds like they were born in the same room. The Arctic Monkeys carbon-date a big portion of my brain at permanently 21.
» Listen to “Fluorescent Adolescent” at Your Head’s Not Right


“Valerie” by Mark Ronson featuring Amy Winehouse
Loved the original by the Zutons, love this even more. Winehouse skins it. You can hear another take on the song, jazzier and apparently the way Winehouse plays it live, on Ronson’s East Village Radio show two or three weeks back.
» Listen to “Valerie” at Pop Tart



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Llewellyn Hinkes

“Saltwater” by Beach House
I recently saw the lead singer of a popular band stop in a song, mid-mope, to berate the sound guy. “Oh mommy, you never loved me…HEY I said no effects on the vocals!” I won’t say the name, but suffice it to say his music has lost all suspension of emotional disbelief. Live shows are good lie detectors like that. Beach House, on the other hand, were more like an amplifier than a lie detector live.
» Listen to “Saltwater” at SixEyes


“Some Summers They Drop Like Flys” by the Dirty Three
How did Explosions in the Sky and Godspeed You Black Emperor get so popular while the Dirty Three got left behind? It’s the same sombre-to-epic rising cauldron of sound with a different style. Though they didn’t exactly get left behind, they still deserve better. Please, this summer, won’t you think of the Australian instrumental post-rock bands and give to the charity of your choice?
» Listen to “Some Summers They Drop Like Flys”


The Generation Exploitation Podcast
Comedy is such a fluid thing. There are no absolutes. Except for Moms Maybelle, who is the agreed-upon queen. She tells some raspy stories about spiders getting high and then a lounge tune and then repeat. She makes it look like an exact science. And the only way I could have found out about her is via the Generation Exploitation Podcast. Fine comedy content in there.
» Subscribe to the Generation Exploitation Podcast


“Drei Zinnen” by Niobe
It’s about time somebody started bringing some Glenn Miller into the modern experimental day. It needs to be recognized for the surreal, drowsy jazz orchestration that it is. Niobe loses a bit of the ’50s terroir in the process, and replaces it with the abstract soundscape.
» Listen to “Drei Zinnen”



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Andrew Womack

“Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse” by Of Montreal
I have reversed my position on Of Montreal. I love the new album, and I also love the Outback Steakhouse commercial. I believe Of Montreal, with five-plus mouths to feed in one tour bus, can appreciate what a value-dining establishment like Outback can offer budget-minded musicians on the go.
» Listen to “Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse” at SixEyes


“Kid Gloves” by Voxtrot
In what has been the fastest backlash in the history of the record industry, the public has reacted lukewarmly to Voxtrot’s debut album—which won’t even see official release for another six weeks. For those of you who haven’t heard the album yet, that’s like going to the ultrasound to find out you’re having a Republican.
» Listen to “Kid Gloves” at Baby, You Got a Stew Goin’!


“The Nights After Fiction” by Mice Parade
The Beatles kept Ringo in the back, so ever since drummers in pop bands have been relegated to the same spot? Led by head mouse and percussionist Adam Pierce, Mice Parade turns the melody-rhythm pop formula on its head. This song shows what happens when percussion takes center stage and everything else turns into a rhythm synthesizer, rhythm vocal, or rhythm guitar.
» Listen to “The Nights After Fiction” at Herohill


“Pick Me Up on Your Way Down” by Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard & Ray Price
Last month I saw this trio of country legends play Radio City Music Hall—if you were walking up Sixth Ave. that night you may have noticed all the tractors parked out front. Price and his 81-year-old vocal cords warmed up a crowd that was getting pissed (and drunk) with every moment passing between them and “Pancho and Lefty.” But during the show’s finale, when all three were on stage, Price’s lead on “Crazy” left everybody wondering who that guy with the bandana was. (Roadie, maybe?)
» Listen to “Pick Me Up on Your Way Down” at In House With Jeremy Petersen


 —The Writers, Apr. 11, 2007

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Listening • A Crush Admitted

Spring is taking its time this year, teasing us with a few warm days. When the weather’s nice, I want to listen to HOT 97. My finger’s drawn to the pre-programmed rubber button on the hood of my radio. And three times in the last two weeks, when I dialed in, the “Official #1 Station for Hip Hop and R&B” was playing the same song: a ballad with Spanish guitar, a man singing falsetto, a great drum break. Then you reach the lyric: “U wanna roll with me / U wanna hold with me / U wanna make fires and get Norwegian wood with me.”

The mp3-blog snob consortium doesn’t approve of Robin Thicke’s “Lost Without You,” but YouTube is one with the people, it doesn’t care, it knows a perfect pop song when it sees it. So, instead of the song, a video to tease:




* * *

As an obsessed podcasting fan of Mark Ronson’s “Authentic Shit” radio show (knowing my own trajectories, I should burn out in a month or so), I’m excited for Ronson’s new album, soon to appear, so I can toss my teased pirate version. His record is a pile of covers, and one I’ve liked the most is the roadhouse stomp “Valerie,” originally by the Zutons. Wino-house covers it for Ronson’s album in her best Vaughn tribute, but the original’s a keeper.

» Listen to “Valerie,” at snuh


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This first appeared on my radar yesterday, but it was a good companion for work, and it made me look up several artists: Counterstream Radio, music by American composers. Thankfully there’s an iTunes link so you don’t need to keep the browser player open.

» Listen to Counterstream Radio


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Pop pop pop pop new new new new: Fanfarlo, “You Are One of the Few Outsiders Who Really Understands Us.” I will have forgotten both the band and the song name by dinner.

» Listen to “You Are One of the Few Outsiders Who Really Understands Us” at Music For Robots

 —Rosecrans Baldwin, Mar. 21, 2007

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Listening • Mood Music for the Old-Fashioned Set

I have a soft spot for mood music, particularly songs that can be played quietly and help me focus on work instead of on the sounds of two construction projects down the street. Jack Blackfelt, “your generation X-Y JaZz Guy,” has a great early-to-mid 20th century jazz show on East Village Radio you can grab on podcast. A crackly record player in your living room without Phil Schaap’s history lessons.

» Listen to “Jack Blackfelt’s ‘Generation X Y JaZz’ show” on East Village Radio


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For more mood, my favorite moment in Crash was when Ryan Philippe sat in his car and listened to country radio (what song was it?) on a dark road somewhere above Los Angeles. Carrying the lonely car cowboy theme a little further into contemporary territory is Richard Buckner’s “Figure”—a song that deserves better than singing back-up for Friday Night Lights.

» Listen to “Figure” by Richard Buckner at So Much Silence


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Love Mazzy Star, love Ray Price and Dolly Parton, love Luna and Carl Smith. Love that slide guitar. Love Beach House? Rarely do I love precocity, pretension, precisely designed vamp lounges. But listen to “Apple Orchard” and imagine they’re not trying so hard.

» Listen to “Apple Orchard” by Beach House at Gorilla vs. Bear


* * *

For all the strugglers, for the dedicated and determined, for the vying early risers, for those who compete with themselves to get things done, for self-mitred but still-anxious types, for worker bees and aspiring queens, for the lonely and desiring, for the serious paradise seekers, for the pompadours, for the sentimental wallflowers, for the second-string quarterbacks, for anyone who’s fighting, for the poor and fair, for anyone running, waking up or reconsidering the right angles, for the never satisfied, for those with stick-to-it-ness, for anyone who lights a candle in church: as much “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” as I’ve ever seen.

» Listen to “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” by the Smiths and many others at My Old Kentucky Home

 —Rosecrans Baldwin, Feb. 7, 2007

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Watching • Video Digest: January 26, 2007

I love that there was a moment in time when we all watched The Golden Girls. Four single senior citizens, living and loving in Miami: I’m in! Obviously one of the coolest of the GGs—if not the coolest—was sparkplug Estelle Getty, who made a workout video to prove that not only can senior citizens stay active, but they can also make creative use of face towels. Those videos get the Beyoncé remix treatment in the following video. Be warned: Getty’s got skills.



I know, there’s a new Star Wars video every week, and even Star Wars fans must get a little weary of this. But none of them can compare to the transcendent joy of watching the film’s last scene played using only hands.



Speaking of transcendent joys: Have you seen Reh Dogg yet? The rapper/singer has become a web sensation with his tone-deaf tunes and love of a good shower. There’s nothing this man likes more than a nice, soapy lather. Well, maybe his grill. Or his loofah. So tell me: Why do you keep making him cry?



Oh, bloopers make the funny. You know why? Because people cuss. And get angry. And when they’re weathermen, it’s even better. This one goes out to my main man, Storm Fields.



Now that Norman Mailer is old and round and writing books about Hitler, it can be hard to remember that he was a real nutjob of a scrapper. Here, in the only scene from Mailer’s 1970 Maidstone worth watching, he wrestles with Rip Torn, who bites his earlobe until Mailer’s wife goes all Casino-era Sharon Stone on their asses. These people are effing nuts.



Woof. And now, for something completely soothing. Brigitte Bardot would like to make love to you.



 —Sarah Hepola, Jan. 26, 2007

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Listening • The One Song That Defines Life, for a Week

Masters of the musical universe who put songs in singers’ mouths, I am just sick about this track—thank you for this artist, this song! My window is open and the neighbors are torturing their cats just to have something else to listen to. As of this scribbling, iTunes reports I’ve listened to this song 24 times since it was added to my library at 4:17 p.m. on January 22, which doesn’t include the number of times (probably 12) that I’ve listened to it on my iPod, where it’s been designated as the “I’m Going to Knock You Out” track in my Nike-sneakers-chat-up-my-music set-up.

Children, I’m a loser for this song, a giant one in a coat of many lame colors, and I’m singing along to my loser anthem right now.

» Listen to “Apply Some Pressure” at The Music Slut


* * *

But where did the track come from? Gods of the internets. Friend John turned me on to eastvillageradio.com, where Mark Ronson has a show (he’s remade “Apply Some Pressure” for his new album, Versions), and now I’ve gone through Ronson’s archives and dorked out on the show until I picked up all the lingo and jokes, never mind song recommendations. I’m reminded of my college self, staying up until three in the morning to listen to various web-broadcast jungle shows.

I’d heard Amy Winehouse from less famous song-pickers, but it wasn’t until I heard her on Ronson’s show last Friday that I got it. A few days later, I had a lunch meeting in midtown with a newly single editor friend. He mentioned he needed new sex music for all “the womens” he’s meeting. Winehouse was my second pick; my first pick, for which I couldn’t remember the title in the heat of the moment, was Steve Spacek’s “Dollar.”

» Listen to “You Know I’m No Good” at My Old Kentucky Home
» Listen to “Dollar” at Lil Mike’s Last Known Thoughts & Random Revelations


* * *

But what will be the single of the week once I’ve exhausted that Maximo Park song? There’s a tune by Little Barrie that I love but can’t find online to share, and I’m also going through a Ray Price period, but that’s nothing to pump about.

But there’s always Herman Dune. Dune’s “I Wish I Could See You Soon” takes Lou Reed’s “And the colored girls say…” imperative and scores a first down on the beach: airy, sunny, southern France. So, it’s probably not great for the nighttime sexing of womens, but it’s very appropriate when the girl is gone in the morning and you’re left holding your Wii.

» Listen to “I Wish I Could See You Soon” at Burning World


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Speaking of which, I have a Wii date to play tennis next Saturday with a reporter friend. A few weeks ago, he called up some PR flaks and had every new-generation gaming system shipped over to his house “for review.” (Sony was nice enough to throw in a loaner 40-inch flat-screen HD television.) Our plan is to play some Wii tennis, maybe Wii bowl a little, then go grab lunch. My friend says he’s made several such dates with people to come over and play with his Wii.

But we’re not alone. Last night over drinks in the Village, another friend confessed she’d also made a date recently with a Wii-owning-friend to play virtual tennis. Have social video games finally penetrated the cosmos of the gameless? I haven’t owned a video-game system since I was 16—will I want one now, now that it’s genteel, appropriate with finger sandwiches? Have they released the Wii Book Club game yet, or Wii Trunk Show?


* * *

Last week I started listening to Jamie T’s “Operation” around the same time as beginning to read Rabelais’s Gargantua, the 1534 novel that foresaw the modern novel from a several-centuries-long telescope and has more high-spirited dick, pussy, and fart jokes than Michel Houellebecq can shake his misery at.

“Operation” is a good song, but not a great one, partially because it’s so affected: wearing cold and trashy, punk and erotic like they’re all part of this season’s brand new coat. But the coat’s old and it’s missing parts, like warmth and hope, which explains why that Maximo Park song, having both in spades, has had four times as many listens as “Operation” in my iTunes, and why I’m not excited by the new Arcade Fire album. What fun is fast-moving misery without some hope for eventually reaching happiness? This also accounts for why Children of Men scored so few Oscar nominations.

Warmth, hope, and humor could be part of the cutting-edge coat since they always have been—they’re patched into an older and bigger coat that would seem very new right now since no one’s big enough to wear it. The coat that Rabelais wore very well.

» Listen to “Operation” at I Was There

 —Rosecrans Baldwin, Jan. 24, 2007

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Listening • Music Inspires Memories

Four short memories of youth inspired by music randomly selected from the Hype Machine’s most popular tracks, January 10, 2007:

“Black Wave, Bad Vibrations,” the Arcade Fire

I left for college determined to be a new person: smarter and more interesting. Behind me I’d leave the corpse of an Eagle Scout who played in marching band, ahead of me would be poetry classes, beer, and girls.

I think it was a relative who mailed me a copy of The Celestine Prophecy to include in my studies. The book was a best seller that year, a thin, new-age “spirituality” manual. I read it one night after finishing studying; I went cover to cover without ever leaving my library chair. One chapter provided practical instructions on how to detect the soul in other things. I stared at a potted lime tree near my carrel and was convinced it was vibrating.

Within a month, my dorm manager was explaining to me why her hand-blown glass bong was worth over $200, and I agreed, it was a fair assessment.

» Listen to “Black Wave, Bad Vibrations” at Side One: Track One

“My Sweet Thing,” Nancy Wilson

A winter morning in central Maine. A hungover pile of us were on the floor where we’d slept. It was snowing outside, heavy gray sleet falling on chest-high packed snow. One guy put on an Ella Fitzgerald CD. “I love Ella,” he said. “Those songs with Ella and Louis? Man, just incredible.”

He’d recently finished a jazz history class in the music department. But, Ella? Louis? Starting when I was 12, I’d been a jazz fanatic with rare Yusef Lateef LPs and a secret fantasy of being Charlie Parker or Mose Allison. Not for 50 bucks would I have referred to John Coltrane as “Trane” to anyone. Now this guy goes to a couple lectures one semester and he feels entitled to appraise “Bird’s” career? My head was exploding. I’m still outraged, thinking about it.

» Listen to “My Sweet Thing” at Sugartown

“Breezin,’” Cornelius

I played in two bands in college: a jam band and, in my senior year, a dub-techno duo. Studying abroad in South Africa, I’d discovered drum and bass and also learned from a roommate in Cape Town that shampooing your hair removed its natural oils. Both my findings came back with me to Maine where I tried to spread the word.

My music partner in the electronica duo was a hip-hop snob who looked like Keanu Reeves. We only “performed” once, in a tiny coffeehouse with a slideshow of Franz Kline and de Kooning paintings playing behind us in the dark. I remember pressing the button that cued a sample I’d made from a Nature Company soundtrack—Natural Awakenings: Volume III—and thinking, “I don’t want to live in Maine anymore.”

» Listen to “Breezin’” at Obscuresound

“You’re the One for Me, Fatty,” Morrissey

After college, I spent a few summers abroad teaching writing to high school students. In Oxford, we stayed at St. Hilda’s College, an all-girls school on the outskirts of town. The only benefit to that location, besides being down the road from where Gaz Coombes supposedly lived, was a Jamaican bar around the corner where we gathered once the kids were in bed.

One night, the history teacher on our program pulled me into conversation. She’d recently graduated with a first, but for some reason was nervous around Americans. “Have you read Portnoy’s Complaint?” she said timidly. Why? I asked. “Well,” she whispered, “one of my students gave it to me to read. He said I wouldn’t understand American Jewish boys otherwise. You know him, Daniel Cohen.” “Did you like it?” I asked. “But you have, you’ve actually read it?!” she cried, appalled, and almost stood up. “Didn’t you find it disgusting? Crans, listen to me, my student gave this to me. It’s his copy. Don’t you understand?”

She stared at me. I didn’t know what she was getting at. “Don’t you like liver?” I asked.

» Listen to “You’re the One for Me, Fatty” at Hate Something Beautiful

 —Rosecrans Baldwin, Jan. 10, 2007

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Listening • Our Favorite Tracks of 2006

Rosecrans Baldwin’s Favorite Mp3s of 2006

“Ain’t No Other Man” by Christina Aguilera
I think I’ve several times performed dance routines to this song.
» Listen to “Ain’t No Other Man”


“Smile” by Lily Allen
Why don’t other seasons get songs? The summer afternoon party anthem.
» Listen to “Smile” at Pound for Pound


“Fidelity” by Regina Spektor
Still irresistible, a hundred listens later.
» Listen to “Fidelity” at The World Forgot


“Your Eyes Are Liars” by Sound Team
Hard to pick one song from my favorite album of the year.
» Listen to “Your Eyes Are Liars” at Rock Insider


“I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor” by the Arctic Monkeys
Also—hard to pick one song from my favorite album of the year.
» Listen to “I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor” at Kwaya Na Kisser


“Born Under a Bad Sign” by Richard Hawley
And yet again—hard to pick one song from my favorite album of the year.
» Listen to “Born Under a Bad Sign”


“Pick Me Up on Your Way Down” by Jimmie Dale Gilmore
See above—favorite album number four.
» Listen to “Pick Me Up on Your Way Down” (opens player)


“Roscoe” by Midlake
The lead single from Thom Yorke’s solo album in my fantasy world.
» Listen to “Roscoe” at Both Sides of the Mouth


“Boy From School” by Hot Chip
I miss clubbing.
» Listen to “Boy From School” at I Guess I’m Floating


“Block Rock” by Ghostface Killah
Makes me wish I had a car and some children to scare.
» Listen to “Block Rock” at Gorilla vs. Bear


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Llewellyn Hinkes’s Favorite Mp3s of 2006

“The Orchids” by Califone
Bright, acoustical joy.
» Listen to “The Orchids” at Aquarium Drunk


“Wildcat” by Ratatat
A live-action video game soundtrack.
» Listen to “Wildcat” at Gorilla vs. Bear


“LDN” by Lily Allen
No reason why I shouldn’t be sick of this song by how much I can listen to it on repeat, yet it just hasn’t happened.
» Listen to “LDN” at Both Sides of the Mouth


“Cut From the Cloth” by the Evens
Was there another album with actual lyrics this year?
» Listen to “Cut From the Cloth” at Wolf Notes


“Shake” by Ying Yang Twins ft. Pitbull
Original, catchy Miami bass beats (ignore the lyrics) made by mental patients.
» Listen to “Shake”


“Please Visit Your National Parks” by Oxford Collapse
Is it possible to go back and do the whole Braid influence thing again but without venturing into pop and screamo?
» Listen to “Please Visit Your National Parks” at The Underrated Blog


“Buchstabe” by Knorkator
I like my industrial music like I like my women—gutteral, German, and absurdist.
» Watch the video for “Buchstabe”


“Children’s Christmas With Steak Knives” by Diamanda Galas vs. the Jingle Cats
Nothing says Christmas like “Meow meow meow meow STEAKNIVES meow meow meow meow.”
» Listen to “Children’s Christmas With Steak Knives”


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Andrew Womack’s Favorite Mp3s of 2006

“Soft & Warm” by Voxtrot
This year Voxtrot won the hearts of everyone who likes to cry while blogging. Sorry—whilst blogging.
» Listen to “Soft & Warm” at Under the Rotunda


“Phantom Limb” by the Shins
I will admit to having lost all faith in the Shins. I will admit to saying this because I want you to believe I hate Garden State. But only if you admit how perfect this song is.
» Listen to “Phantom Limb” at Who Killed the Mixtape?


“Wasted State of Mind” by …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead
Pianos and tribal drums are probably too expensive to hurl off the stage at the end of the show. Bravo to a new sound and more cost-effective tours.
» Listen to “Wasted State of Mind” at The Underrated Blog


Viva Voce, “We Do Not Fuck Around”
Profanity never solves anything. Except maybe songwriting dilemmas.
» Listen to “We Do Not Fuck Around” at Chromewaves


Certified Bananas, “Call Around You”
What happens when your Tortoise records turn up in your Montel Jordan sleeves.
» Listen to “Call Around You”


“The Fall” by Peter & the Wolf
A stripped-down acoustic track that’s all drone-y vocals. My kind of song.
» Listen to “The Fall” at Whiskey & Apples


“I Never Cared for You” by Willie Nelson
A few months ago I bought a copy of Willie Live off eBay for $156K. On the back a previous owner had written: “Hot Smokes.” Hot damn.
» Listen to “I Never Cared for You”


“Through the Wire” by Belaire
A re-interpretation of a Kanye West song off The College Dropout, as performed by English majors.
» Listen to “Through the Wire” at Gorilla vs. Bear


“Angus” by Aux
You only have one chance to hear this song for the first time. And when you do, I’d like to see your eyes at the 1:30 mark.
» Listen to “Angus” at Instrumental Analysis


Loudon Wainwright III, “The Swimming Song”
Whether it’s a metaphor or really about swimming, this was my favorite song this summer. And thank you, petroleum producers of the world, for now making it summer all year round.
» Listen to “The Swimming Song”


 —The Writers, Dec. 20, 2006

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Listening • Humbug

The holidays are when someone died. Or a grandfather got worse instead of better in the hospital, or a friend drank too much and had a car accident while driving home from a party. The phone call comes on a weeknight. There’s a long silence after the news is delivered, and then you go back to bed, to the Buster Keaton movie you were watching, but the gags don’t work anymore.

I used to drive an ambulance, and we always drew straws for Christmas duty; I drew short twice. Terrible accidents occur around the holidays. There’s lots of drunk driving, but you also see relapses, suicides, overdoses, domestic abuse. We tried to counter the gloom with small gestures. EMTs would wear Santa hats. The crew chiefs would wire wreaths to the ambulances’ grills (I used to imagine rear-ending someone with two tons of cheer). On Christmas Eve the crew roasted a turkey in the kitchenette’s oven. But then a call would come in, 10 minutes before midnight, and it would be an old man, alone in his house, who fractured his ankle going down the basement stairs. The house would be dark. Neighbors would come out when they saw the flashing lights. Before breaking the door in, the police officer at the scene would ask if anyone had a spare set of keys; they didn’t; “we didn’t even know someone lived there.”


“I’m Waiting for the Man” by The Velvet Underground

This year my wife’s and my Christmas tree is a six-foot Douglas Fir I bought off a sidewalk salesman from Vermont. Every New York corner features racks of trees in December: Vendors commute down from Quebec and New England after Thanksgiving and set up commando holiday posts from Coney Island to the Bronx. With all the trees lined up, the encampments resemble missile silos.

In addition to wreaths, garlands, and syrup, my tree man was selling a barn. The flyer showed a traditional red New England barn, sitting on a few acres deep in the woods against a hill. I carried my tree home thinking about leaving Brooklyn to grow Christmas trees in Vermont—oddly enough an occupation shared by one of the characters in a novel I’m working on. But a few minutes later the fancy passed; my wife is a warm-weather breed, I don’t even like Vermont, and the character in the book is an asshole.


“Thoughts of You” by Dennis Wilson

Being a cook, at night I’ve twice baked cookies and then sent them all to my wife’s office the next morning. The shopping’s almost done, our plane tickets are purchased. Tonight I’ll burn eight custom CDs for half a dozen relatives, and then tomorrow there’s the office holiday party, and soon afterwards a Christmas dinner with my family, and then after that—

This year I can’t get it over with soon enough. There’s too much work and too many deadlines, and all this extra work—this Yuletide battle campaign—is getting in the way. My nerves are frayed. I buy a carton of eggnog, drink half of it and feel sick to my stomach, then throw it away. Late at night one evening I bully my wife into decorating the tree just after she walks in from a 13-hour workday. I’ve become a Grinch, though I believe a few of my complaints are justified. Watching holiday commercials on TV, haven’t we all bought enough electric shavers?

Then bad news arrives about a friend’s death and I’m ready to fast-forward to April.


“Spirit on the Water” by Bob Dylan

I used to have a Christmas problem. Around Thanksgiving I’d start having difficulty falling asleep I was so excited. Even into college, I’d need some sort of pacifier to knock me out on Christmas Eve: first Tintin books, later Scotch. I remember always looking forward to December 13th because then the “12 Days of Christmas” became literal. Our family had reels of holiday traditions and I was a precocious stickler on making sure they were properly observed.

Now married, my wife and I have started making our own traditions, but they’re young and slightly hollow. This year Christmas seems empty. The commercial aspects are repulsive to me, the Christian ceremonies are alien. I’m ready to disappear off the grid, except I miss what I had as a child, even if it was only frosting.

Re-reading that paragraph, I wonder, maybe I’m not in touch yet with the bad news.


“Cabbage Patch Christmas”

Last Sunday I joined my wife and a friend to see the Alvin Ailey Dance Company at City Center. The friend had never seen Ailey perform. She was shivering with anticipation. My wife and I have seen them every December for three years in a row and it’s probably our best new tradition. The choreography has nothing to do with Christmas or Hanukah, but by virtue of scheduling, it’s a holiday treat.

The evening’s bill included “Caught,” performed by Clifton Brown. “Caught” is a David Parsons piece featuring a single dancer and two strobe lights. The stage is black except when the lights explode at intervals to catch the dancer in mid-air; with precisely timed leaps, he’s able to appear like he’s floating. I’ve seen it three times with Ailey and I still laugh with astonishment. Our friend couldn’t stop saying, “Oh my God,” and then we decided not to talk about it, because it’s one of those things that’s ruined when you put it into words.

Writing a letter of condolences last night, I couldn’t figure out what to say. Words didn’t connect for me like they normally do; I tried to grasp whatever I was feeling and couldn’t find it.


“Silent Night (Live)” by Tom Waits

There’s a terrific joke James Thurber wrote in a letter to TIME after they ran an article about him filled with mistakes: “This is a little like finding out that the injury you suffered in the Cornell-Pennsylvania game was actually syphilis.”

I don’t understand how death affects me. I’ll be humming along working, calm and steady, and then suddenly plunge. Watching Buster Keaton, I knew why all the jokes and goofs were funny, but I didn’t laugh—I wasn’t able to receive them. Christmas is all around me, but it takes a dancer magically flying through the air to make me feel like a kid again.

In another letter, this time addressed to a friend whose child had died, Thurber wrote, “There is and will be no day or hour of our life that you cannot call on us for anything whenever you feel that you want to. You are precious and important to Helen and me. I know that the four of us belong to those that stick through everything. You have our everlasting love.”

I clipped that out when I read it a few years ago in a newspaper. I looked it up again in my files last night because I have a bad tendency to bury any feelings of anger or sadness, which are grief’s components, plus love.

Rest in peace, Leslie.

 —Rosecrans Baldwin, Dec. 13, 2006

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