70,000 Reasons Why Your Life Is Really Weird Right Now

BY LAURA JANE

If you are reading this it means I moved to London and as you read this I am busy doing whatever Londony thing I happen to be doing and didn’t die on the plane to London, unless I did die. In which case I am sorry for your loss. And mine.
        I am sitting at my kitchen table in Toronto. It’s Thursday. I only have three entire days left to live here and I’m already halfway through one of them so that isn’t even a true sentence. I have two and a half days left to live here, plus another half of a day on Sunday. Then we- my boyfriend Mark and I- will go to the airport, where we'll interact with a machine that prints out our boarding passes and can never read my passport because it got bent up in my wallet and then we'll check our luggage. They'll put our luggage in the belly of the plane with all the coffins and sedated dogs and we'll trust they won’t lose it and then we'll go drink Canadian beer and eat stale french fries in a "lounge" and nothing we could look at each other and say would express the enormity of it. And then we'll get on a plane and the plane will fly us away. The ocean will sit still and ferocious beneath us. It doesn’t need us.
        The plane will land in the morning. We'll get off the plane and hey now we’re in LONDON in ENGLAND and everything is different except for the language people speak and that we’re still Laura and Mark. But even then, even right away, we’ll be a different Laura and Mark. We’ll be Laura and Mark who moved instead of Laura and Mark who are moving.
        I wanted to write about moving because I only have two and a half days left to live here and if I don’t write about moving now I know I’ll never write about moving. And I wanted to write about moving.
        I spent the first three weeks of July moving, doing all the moving things. I thought it was going to be a non-time but it was a big time, big the way you’ll say a certain wine is big, big like “I’m kind of a big deal.” It was a big old jerk animal who showed up at the end of June and plopped himself (he is a boy) down on his big fat butt in front of me and in lieu of a formal introduction yelled his name- “Packing All Your Shit Up And Moving To London And Like Calling The Phone Company And Whatever,” that’s his name- right up in my face so close I could smell his breath which smelled okay but still. It was rude. Packing All Your Shit Up And Moving To London And Like Calling The Phone Company And Whatever chained his hands to my hands and his feet to my feet and together we thumped across the first three weeks of July as one clumsy, blundering idiot in an idiot costume who hated each other. Who hated itself.

My Perfect Weekend of The Clash & Bananas

BY LIZ

I'm home in Massachusetts right now; it's perfect. On Friday night I took the train into the city and got off near Fenway Park and stopped at Nuggets, in hopes of finding some weird treasure you could only find in Boston, and guess what was right by the door? Earwig, by Blake Babies, on vinyl. It was $55.99, which made sense to me on some levels but also seemed potentially impossible, since nearly every other record around it cost about 12 bucks. So I brought Earwig up to the counter and pointed to the price tag and said to the counter guy, "It's $55.99, really?" - which I understand was an annoying question: I'm self-employed, and it's super-exasperating when someone questions the value of whatever good/service you're providing. So the counter guy was rightfully annoyed, and made an annoyed face and spoke to me in a scolding tone, saying "It's rare - and really hard to find!" If I'd been more on-the-ball I might've sassed him back and told him, "That's a redundant statement - and it makes the same point twice!" But instead I just sighed and said "Well, yeah, I know," and shrugged and smiled and put the record back. Hopefully it'll find a good home soon, with somebody who'll love it intensely forever. Everyone knows Blake Babies fans are generally a moneyed and powerful lot.

I left Nuggets without buying anything, and I walked all the way from Kenmore Square to Porter Square to meet Laura (not Laura Jane! She lives in London now!) and her brother Todd for cocktails at The Abbey. I got a drink called The Fearless King (muddled basil, whiskey, grapefruit juice) and a pint of Rapscallion Honey beer and both were lovely, and then Sarah and Rich met up with us and we went over to Redbones to eat dinner at the bar. Sarah and I split a pulled pork sandwich plus about 5,000 sides, including hushpuppies, which were extra-oily and hot and heaven and so beautifully Munchkin-like in their sphericalness. Pretty sure I hogged most of the hushpuppies, but the experience of dunking them in the little paper cup and let the vinegar soak through the crispy-crackly batter was so satisfying and addictive, I just couldn't stop. 

Saturday morning I took the train home and listened to Blake Babies and The Clash, who are my #1 at the moment. I used my parents' copy of The Story of The Clash as the backdrop for a bunch of pictures for this post, mostly because I just want to look at Mick Jones all the time. I first fell in love with him in ninth grade: I remember sitting in Western Civ and staring at the back of Marissa Vanesse's hair and hearing "Rush" in my head and being hung up on the sweetness/snottiness of Mick's voice, and ever since then I've gone through a thing of being obsessed with him at least once every few years. And on Saturday night I watched Westway to the World, which is a Clash documentary you can watch in its entirety on YouTube. It rules because it's basically just The Clash talking about themselves for 80 minutes, plus lots of really great footage of them playing live. My fave moment's when they tell the story of going to an ice cream parlor and taking their cones outside and writing "I'M SO BORED WITH THE U.S.A." on the windows with their ice cream. I also loved when Paul Simonon did his impression of Mick Jones's hair:

The I Live In The City I Was Born In Blues

BY LAURA JANE/ ILLUSTRATION BY JEN

Hi. I was born on Dundas Street in the city of Toronto when I was zero years old and lived in a town forty-five minutes outside of the city for the first eighteen years of my life. I came back to Toronto six years ago and have lived here all the way up until today. I am moving to London, England in about five hours. Here is the story of the past six years of my life.  

I moved back home the summer I turned twenty-three. A couple months earlier my boyfriend and I had broken up in Montreal. We went to go see a movie about nothing called Last Night At Marienbad. I didn’t like it because it was boring and I knew I was supposed to pretend I was too smart to think it was boring which made me want to make an even bigger deal out of how boring I thought it was. My boyfriend loved it because he loved everything I thought was boring and I hated everything that he loved. If we were two overlapping circles the ellipse between us would only have been big enough to hold: Tomorrow Never Knows by the Beatles, a couple Faust albums, Thai food, Ulysses and- kind of- each other. A few years later I asked him if we could collaborate on a blog post about the night of our break-up and call it Last Night Of Our Relationship At Marienbad and he said no because it hit too close to home. But now a thousand years have passed and he’s thirty and I may as well be. He’s marrying a girl in New York City and I’m moving to England in a week and I can say whatever the hell I want. I thought I already could but I didn’t realize how much I actually could. There’s always another level of truth sitting around and waiting for you to move to another country.
        I was sick that summer. Not as sick as I had been, and not as sick as I would be, but when I look back on the diaries I kept of everything I ate then I’m horrified. A lot of garlic salt, fruit salad, and steamed broccoli.
        I was staying at my parents’ house in a suburb forty minutes west of the city. They were in the process of splitting up and I told people that I was only staying in Oakville to help them sell the house but I’m pretty sure that the entire five months I lived there I didn’t life one single finger to help them once. I just sat around and freaked out about what I was going to do with my life and in the evenings made them drive me to Whole Foods. I’d take the commuter train into Toronto on weekday mornings and walk up to Kensington Market, to Urban Herbivore, where I’d buy a sweet potato date muffin and walk it over to the Tibet Café where I’d order a strawberry-pineapple smoothie and eat them together while doing a crossword. When I was sick I could only eat if I was doing a crossword at the same time.
        In August I got a job downtown, at a store called Lavish & Squalor, which does not make any sense. It should be either Lavishness & Squalor or Lavish & Squalid. I haven’t been in there since the day I quit five and a half years ago. They sold Cheap Monday jeans and all my co-workers made a big deal out of how skinny I was. Most of the women who worked there were older than me and they all made a point of telling me “I used to be a twig like you”— a twig, like, “You are literally nothing more than a small branch. A piece of a tree that fell off it.” I hoped it meant that they used to have eating disorders but then grew up and got over them. But I knew in my heart that they’d never been as skinny as I was. They only meant to say that they were once skinnier than they were now, and lying to the anorexic girl about their past levels of skinniness aligned them with me and my body and somehow made them feel skinnier to themselves in the present. No one who was ever as skinny as I was then would ever say “I used to be a twig like you” to a girl as skinny as I was then.
         I moved in with two of my co-workers. Let’s not get too deep into this. One of them stole a thousand dollars cash out of my file cabinet and I didn’t pretend it didn’t happen so he turned on me. He put his hand on my leg and told me to calm down and that was it- the only appropriate response to “Calm down” is “I will not calm down!” or, in extreme cases, “I will never calm down.” He and his friends left signs around the house calling me an anorexic bitch or occasionally a [sic] “bulemic” bitch. The thief wiped his ass with my towel. I dried my hair with it and smelled his shit and looked at it and gagged and then washed my hair again and dried it with a different towel. What else can you do?
        I drank a lot. I ate very little. My eating disorder was my eating disorder, as tiny and specific as an advent calendar chocolate, belonging to that day and the way that that day was my day. And it was as big as the world. It was bigger than my whole world. It was an evil little aura surrounding every moment of every day, a tiny black halo hanging over every letter of every word like an accent grave or aigou or an umlaut. Every day was defined by a hunger that felt like a hundred thousand stomach crunches layered on top of one another and the only way to get through it was by drinking a bottle of wine per night to distract myself. My face went puffy from all the drinking. I’d fondle my ribcage and found it more amazingly there than ever but I’d press my finger into my fat face two seconds later and it was even fatter than it was when I was fat although I never was. I quit drinking for a couple weeks and then went back to drinking again. A bottle of Diet Coke exploded in my purse and broke my phone. I broke the lease on my apartment. I bought a new phone.

Everything We Love About Ultraviolence

Our special guest columnist today is David Brothers, who co-writes the amazing blog 4thletter! and who has the distinction of probably being the #1 most-beloved-by-Strawberry Fields Whatever individual on all of the Internet/planet. Apparently David was partly inspired to start listening to Lana Del Rey after reading a silly post I wrote about sea anemones last year, so I thought it would be cool to rope him into talking about everything we love about Ultraviolence here, at great length. What follows is our Lana convo, with thoughts on funeral soundtracks, Memphis hip-hop, romance novels, role-playing, weird jogging, and unabashed lameness. You can also find David at I Am David Brothers Dot Com, as well as on Twitter. -Liz

i. HER BEAUTIFUL DARK TWISTED FANTASY

DAVID: My first reaction, when I sat down to think about Ultraviolence, was that it's an album with a lot of songs about love that are delivered in an unromantic way, sometimes deeply so. It's just a feeling right now, one I'm still trying to suss out, but it's real fascinating to me. I'm used to the standard romantic mode for love songs, where you build up your buttercup because you love them so much. The relationships she sings about are in the past tense or sound more like a power struggle than a partnership.
       I think that's part of what makes the album feel as dark as it does, the way so many of her lovers or relationships are painful or beneath her or gone. I felt like a lot of the songs on Born to Die upended the usual love song format, throwing a knowing slow wink and sly smile into the proceedings and giving the songs a little extra fat to chew on. This album takes it a step further, making me feel like Del Rey isn't above romance, exactly, but she's definitely over it.



LIZ: That's really funny and cool to me, because in my mind Ultraviolence is super-romantic. I think so much of why I love Lana Del Rey, and Ultraviolence especially, is she lets me access this teenaged part of myself that's obsessed by semi-trashy love stories with an almost-tragic bent to them. In particular I'm thinking of this Alice Hoffman novel from 1977 that I loved when I was 14 - it's called Property Of and it's about a girl who falls in love with a drag-racing junkie and ends up strung out too; I read it so many times as a kid that the cover fell off. Reading the opening paragraph of this New York Times review of that book (about how Alice Hoffman "views life as if through the jagged prisms of a broken whisky bottle or a haze of heroin" and how "[a]lthough much of her material is familiar - the corner candy store, warring teenage gangs, leather jackets, young love in customized cars, dope and disaster - she brings a fierce personal intensity to it"), it's like the critic could be talking about Lana Del Rey.

      One thing I appreciate about LDR is how her songs are like semi-trashy/almost-tragic romance novels in song form, and most of that appreciation's got to do with my wanting kids today to get their imaginations fed in a way that's dark and fucked-up but ultimately gunning for some sort of transcendence. I mean I know that the youth of today have their dystopian YA books and their vampire shows, but that kind of reality-bending seems so constrictive. The danger and desperation in those stories is all so tense, but there is nothing tense about Ultraviolence. Lana Del Rey's un-tense enough to the point of being asleep, because everything is all a dream. She's singing about all these bad men and even though there's some uncomfortable-making shit going on, experiencing herself through bad men is her way of trying on different selves. There's so much possibility in her romanticism.

       And I know that Lana said she thinks feminism is boring, but when she whisper-sings about stealing the guy's gun and bible in the second chorus of "Cruel World," it gives me goosebumps. It reminds of that thing Mallory Ortberg said, about how real feminism is robbing men blind after sex.

My Trip To The Zoo, by Laura Jane

BY LAURA JANE/ PICTURES BY LAURA JANE & HER FRIEND ERIN

On Monday, I went to the zoo! I am moving to London in nine days so I am cramming these last few weeks of Toronto life very full with fun and adventure and beer and butter and cream. And wine! And the entire animal kingdom. 

I went to the Zoo with Erin and Matt King. Bear with me. I am still in the process of experimenting with my spin on Zoo vs. zoo. I was really pleased to discover that admission to the zoo wasn't $80, which I for some/no reason thought it was. Under The Sea and Hakuna Matata were playing on loudspeakers when we arrived, which was particularly cool because I'll Be There For You by the Rembrandts had been playing on the 90's XM station in Erin's car and Friends and The Lion King are both major players in the history of Erin and I's friendship. Thanks to the Universe for going that extra mile to help us celebrate. (PS: I feel like Erin would want me to tell you that she only has XM for a 3 month trial and is not the kind of person who would actually pay for XM radio.)

The first animal we saw at the zoo was the Weird Pig. I posted him to Instagram and everyone got really into the #weirdpig hashtag. It's just got a certain je ne sais quoi. I like saying WeirdPig with a heavy emphasis on the "Weird." WEIRDpig. Weirdpig. 

Weirdpig was a girl. I know because I googled the name of the animal she is, babirusa, and it turns out that boy Babirusas have four tusks in the middle of their faces. I don't have time for that. 

Babirusa means "pig" and "deer" in Indonesian. It means deer-hog. Weirdpig is such a beautiful deerhog. I know it's kind of a bad choice, but Weirdpig was the number one animal I related to most in the entire zoo. I felt deeply emotionally connected to Weirdpig and her beautiful sleek grey body. She had a really cute curli-cue tail. She was fairly entertaining, wandering around elegantly, which was a lot better than SOME animals *cough, cough* SLEEPINGWHITE LIONS *cough, cough* SLEEPING CHEETAHS WHO WERE BASICALLY INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM PILES OF MULCH etc. If I ever had a daughter, I would want it to be WeirdPig.

I really respected the zoo's excessive dependence on the word "pavilion." Everything at the zoo is a "pavilion." Pavilion this, pavilion that. I wish more things in life were pavilions. I'm going to start calling my apartment a pavilion. I'll be like "Do you want to come over to my pavilion?" and people will be like "Oh, wow, cool, yeah!" and then they'll see it and be like "Um, isn't this just an apartment?" and then I'll be like "Nope! Totally a pavilion." Boy am I ever sneaky or what. 

Anyway, here's a cool picture from the Indo-Malayan pavilion. It's of a tapir that we nicknamed Diaper Pig, or #diaperpig. See that giant white high-waisted diaper the tapir is wearing? That's the tapir's skin. Sucks, huh? Yeah.

After Diaper Pig, we looked at a rhino and then moved on to another pavilion. Erin and I bought Diet Cokes and Matt bought an iced tea. We saw a chimpanzee eat carrot chunks out of an empty plastic container of cat litter (we thought the zoo could have done a little better than that. A nice green zoo-branded bucket would have been fine) and watched a white-handed gibbon struggle to get the lid off an empty soda bottle (again- the zoo are cheap) filled with fruit. We stood outside of his habitat exaggeratedly unscrewing the lids off our soda bottles trying to lead him in the right direction but he gave up and sent his bottle floating down the river. 

Soon we came across this little gang of ring-tailed lemurs havin' a cud. Ring-tailed lemurs were the Animal of the Day that day. Animal of the Day is some stupid promotion the zoo made up to unfairly pit all the zoo inhabitants against each other. There's a Pixar movie being made about it as we speak. "Do you think the zoo made ring-tailed lemurs the animal of the day because today is Ringo Starr's birthday?" I asked the Universe. No reply. 

Here's the baby gorilla, Nneka, and her mother, Ngozi I think. Obviously we were really fucking close to them and it was adorable and amazing and we loved Nneka and it was the highlight of all of our lives and now we will never be able to go back to the way we were before we saw a baby gorilla up close. Sorry about the "NSFW" element of Ngozi's droopy nipple but now that I think about it, actually, get over it. If you can't handle a mama gorilla's droopy nipple, maybe this is not the blog for you. 

All The Songs We Loved In June

BY LIZ & LJ/ ILLUSTRATION BY JEN

Paul Simon, "The Boy In The Bubble" (LJ)

Every year, the week before my birthday, there is a festival on College Street called Taste of Little Italy. College Street is barricaded on either end of about fifteen blocks. They put up carnival rides and those types of games where you throw a ring around a doe-eyed plastic frog to win a stuffed animal of a Pokemon and there are a lot of carts selling all the different countries' interpretations of meat on a stick. The air is full of smoke that smells like the meat. For a street festival named Taste of Little Italy, it has only a very small focus on the actual country of Italy.

The day before I left for New York, I had to walk to the drugstore to buy a tube of superglue and- for better or for worse- forgot that Taste of Little Italy was on. I was listening to Graceland on headphones- no new music really found or grabbed me last month; it was a nice homey time for focusing on reliable old favs. I was born in 1985 so obviously dancing to Graceland in my living room was a magical and significant part of my childhood. I feel like recently a lot of people born in the eighties have decided to throw in the towel and accept Graceland back into their lives and hearts like the rattiest and softest old t-shirt this collective band of nostalgic twenty-nine year olds has ever known. 

The drugstore closest to the eastern barricade was closed for no reason and at first I was pissed off but then decided it would probably be a cool experience to start Graceland over from the beginning and walk through the festival to the next-closest drugstore while watching people eat funnel cake and interact with bouncy castles and reach some sort of conclusion as to whether everything was horrible or not. Clearly every song on Graceland is fucking brilliant but when I say "listen to Graceland" I usually mean "Listen to Boy in the Bubble three times and then listen to I Know What I Know twice and then listen to Boy in the Bubble another couple of times and then listen to Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes and then go back to I Know What I Know and then listen to the whole album all the way through." To give credit where credit is due, Graceland the song is pretty beautiful too, but I always find the line about the girl in New York City who calls herself the human trampoline a little grimace-inducing. And I don't understand how he arrives at the conclusion that her calling herself that means he and his son are bouncing into Graceland. Sometimes you just have to accept that some of Paul Simon's "I'm a forty-two year old man" logic will be lost on you. 

If the opportunity to walk through a street festival or carnival-type environment while listening to The Boy in the Bubble ever presents itself to you, I urge you to take it. "Paul Simon is really tolerant of the human condition," is the thought it made me think. It made me feel like Paul Simon and I were a little team together, on a sort of Ghost of Christmas Past-style expedition. The point was for me to walk through an event populated primarily by normies and basics while thinking the least amount of hateful and negative thoughts possible. I feel like Paul Simon believes that to be a great artist you have to see the beauty in everything which I neither do or wish I did. But it's a nice take to have on walking from one drugstore to another. 

"BEST OF FRIENDS," Palma Violets (Liz)

"Best of Friends" by Palma Violets is a very mean and sweet song, but mostly sweet, I think. The lyrics at the chorus go "I wanna be your best friend/I don't want you to be my girl," which is a story I'd like to see made into a novel or a movie. In fact: if books had opening credits, I'd want "Best of Friends" to play during the opening credits to my book (although in the movie version of my book, the opening-credits song is totally "Pretty Persuasion" by R.E.M.). Anyway: the reason I'm linking to SoundCloud here is that the version of Palma Violets presented in the "Best of Friends" video is wildly incongruent to my own vision of the band. In my mind, they all should look like this picture of Jim Reid, which is how I want you to see them when you listen to the song - "scampish but soulful," I suppose is what I mean:

"WOULD YOU FIGHT FOR MY LOVE?", Jack White (Liz)

I guess at some point in the past few years everyone decided to turn against Jack White for being a megalomaniacal drag, but whatevs: I think it's great that he's so aggressively and flamboyantly his big weird curmudgeonly self. I bought Lazaretto the day it came out, and I only love two songs on it (this one, and "I Think I Found the Culprit") - but I love them enough that they're absolutely worth the $10.99, or even more. I love "Would You Fight for My Love?" partly because it sounds like a haunted house in some black-and-white movie from the '30s that Jack White would probably make a big annoying deal about loving; it's so deep how he sings the word "ghost" and then the background singers actually turn into ghosts. Also I think it's fun how Jack's always yelling at women for failing to love him as immoderately as he expects them to. His commitment to his own macho bullshit impresses me.

P.S. Reading all those Lazaretto-related think pieces (especially this one), I wonder whether Jack White is really as obsessed with Meg White as music journalists are always saying he is. I guess I hope he is, because it's romantic. Last month Filter ran this thing where Jack shared a few of his Polaroids and wrote paragraphs about them, and I loved the Meg picture/paragraph so much that I'm just going to include the whole thing here:

"The Names Of All The Flowers," by Laura Jane Faulds

(ABOVE: Covent Garden Study: Final Maquette for the Third Movement, by Helen Frankenthaler)

Hi guys! This is Laura Jane, coming at you live from sitting in my bed cross-legged and wearing pyjamas. I recently woke up to the extremely cool surprise of finding out that a short story I wrote, "The Names Of All The Flowers," is up today on one of Strawberry Fields Whatever's best-blog-friends, Ohio Edit. 

HERE is the story itself. 

I am so happy this story exists and is out in the world living and breathing in its new home. Like most of my stories, it's about my homegirl Samantha Silver, nothing too exciting, waking up in the morning and living a day and procrastinating cleaning her bathroom and walking to the drugstore and drinking wine. It's about broken phone screens, a cat falling off a roof, and Denny Wilson's death.

I like to write because I like to say what happened. My writing is a celebration of how boring it is to be alive.