A few years ago LJ and Liz started a writing project based on taking Beatles songs and retelling them as stories or essays or story-essays. We named the project Let It Be Beautiful, and eventually turned our stories/essays/story-essays into little books and began selling them on Etsy.
Now we have four brand-new zines, our first new Beatles books in almost two years. LJ wrote While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Birthday, Liz wrote Sexy Sadie and I Wanna Be Your Man, and Jen illustrated all four zines. The zines cost $4 each or $15 for all four, and you can buy everything in our Etsy shop. Here's a little sneak peek at each book:
i. WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS
While My Guitar Gently Weeps is about the time LJ fell down the stairs at work and landed chin-first on a piece of shattered margarita glass, and about LJ locking herself in the office at work to eat dried papaya and read a J.D. Salinger quote, and also about wanting to drink a glass of aggressive white wine with notes of pineapple.
ii. I WANNA BE YOUR MAN
I Wanna Be Your Man is a valentine to some guys in some rock bands. It's about Mick Jagger and self-possession, Neil Young and being sick/free, Alex Chilton and graceful bitterness, Jonathan Richman and sweetness/responsibility, and Richard
Hell and self-transcendence.
iii. BIRTHDAY
Birthday is about being the moon, finding a copy of Franny and Zooey in the street, wanting to shoot a gun boredly at the ceiling, and not being indoctrinated by anything but the Beatles. It's also about colorstrology and kissing.
iv. SEXY SADIE
Sexy Sadie is a short story about a girl who looks like Joni Mitchell
but wants to look like Chrissie Hynde, and about her best friend who
possibly looks like Ray Davies. It takes place on the night of the day after Christmas and there's a lot about eyeliner and eyelashes and records and hair, with a little bit of alcoholism and semi-unrequited love.
So yeah, buy them all! We'll probably also throw in a Strawberry Fields Whatever sticker, because we are so sweet. Happy day-after-George Harrison's-birthday to everyone xo
David Bowie named his album Low Low because he was feeling low when he wrote and recorded it. It came out on January 14th, 1977, which is perfect. Everything about Low sounds like January. It is sharp and sparkling like an icicle, like sunlight reflecting over snow that fell a week ago. Snow that's just been sitting there, hanging out and being gorgeous but annoying you, the air's too cold to melt it since it's January and so a skin of thin, crisp ice forms across the top. When you step into the snowscape with your boot it cracks the ice and sounds crunchy like the sound of cutting paper on TV. Low is that layer of ice. It's glitter, yellow-white and light blue.
David Bowie recorded Low at a place called the Chateau d'Herouville in France. It was built in 1740 and is a dirty colour white like a dapply horse who's been running through the mud. It looks like it's probably haunted, but let's be honest with ourselves- nothing is haunted. You associate Low with the city Berlin but I like that it's from somewhere more ornate. I've never been to Berlin but based on everything I've ever heard about it, it seems like it's the exact opposite of every kind of thing I like.
You can hear the sadness in Low if you strain for it, but it's very faraway. David Bowie at his saddest still reads as peppy from mostly anybody else. He says there's "oodles of pain" on it but there you go, right? Low's pain is one that's been modified by the cuteness of the word oodles. It's not an album about a fucked up human bleeding his "issues" all over his audience like an "oodles of pain" album by John Lennon or Kanye West would be. It's just slightly more morose and less danceable than your average David Bowie record. I Iike that about David Bowie- it's a very rare and endearing trait in an artist, being happy more often than you are sad.
This January, I have been sad only marginally more often than I've been happy. Most of the time, I'm neutral. I work so much and my job is so involving that I feel like I only really exist two days a week, on my days off. The other five I slip into a coma of general management and don't have time to think about anything else, though lately I've been starting to figure out how to be more "real" as a general manager, getting a little rowdier and punchier with my staff, though that winning attitude's more of a February thing. In February at least there's hope. In January you're trapped inside of something, a season. You are at the very bottom of the canyon. In February, you've started climbing out of it.
My commute to work is stupid. I have to double-back two blocks the one way and then another three the other, and I hate double-backing, but in the wintertime I have no choice. It's either: 1) walk to work in the freezing cold, 2) take a cab there, or 3) double-back a little bit. I'm sure you feel me on this one. My commute's about the length of the first four songs on Low if you listen to Speed of Life and Breaking Glass twice, which I always do. It took me maybe thirty-five listens of Speed of Life before I realized, "Hey, there's no singing!" It doesn't need it. It's like a really great steak that a really good sauce would only ruin.
Breaking Glass is my baby, my pet. I like how you can hear the Brian Eno in it. When Brian Eno shows up a song it's like running into somebody you're actual friends with who you haven't seen in forever on the street. Like today I ran into my boyfriend on the streetcar, and it made me feel like God for sure is real. Brian Eno sounds always remind me of waterfalls made of light, but on Breaking Glass they're like waterfalls made of light that have frozen. Just hanging there, hanging out.
In January business at my restaurant was very slow, because in January business at every restaurant is very slow. It's cold and people want to eat take-out under blankets at their houses. Plus they feel fat as a hangover from Christmas and the last thing they want to spend all their post-Christmas no-money on is food. So on weeknights I would have to cut all my staff to save the restaurant from going bankrupt, and then I'd have to busser-close the restaurant myself, which means a ton of things but mostly is a bitch because of sweeping and mopping the floor. I'd sweep and mop to this song and just kind of dance around in a way that felt really cool and David Bowie-y to me but probably wouldn't call David Bowie to mind in anyone else's opinion.
My restaurant has four floors if you count the basement and sometimes once we're all closed up I'll run from the bottom to the top of it five times as cardio, which I think says a lot about who I've been this January- "You're a wonderful person, but you've got problems," David Bowie might tell me, very democratically. Crazy things go on in a person's head when they're not allowed to spend time outside. Time spent out in nature, underneath the sun and moon and sky, should be the best thing any one person's life has got going, and in January that time is ripped away from you. It becomes your enemy.
Sound and Vision is my favorite David Bowie song. It's usually the exact length of the walk from my streetcar stop to my restaurant, and on days when it isn't, I just don't even have it in me anymore. I don't want to bother with my day. I feel like the point of living out a day is to find out if anything interesting happens over the course of it and if I don't get to start out with at least hearing David Bowie sing "Blue, blue, electric blue, that's the color of my room," well I quit then. I'd rather just burrow out beneath my comforter and never know.
One Friday I woke up feeling gruff as hell but fifteen minutes into dinner service I paired a tempranillo with the octopus ceviche to a fat old man who looked like a gargantuan toddler, and I mean that as a compliment, and then I found out he was crazy-rich and owned a vineyard in Serbia and deeply approved of my wine pairing, which made me feel like I'm on the right track in a deeply important way- and that's why I show up. For anything. Everything's so fucked this time of year and yeah, I wonder all the time about sound and vision, and how these days are all for nothing, the winter: it's all because of nothing. We whine and moan our nights and days away, nothing to read and nothing to say, slips of paper inside our parka pockets reading Ways In Which The Winter Inconveniences My Human Life, "my cuter boots are also slipperier" and so on, when all it really means is that the Earth is further away from the Sun. It means nothing. It's only the Sun's fault.
1. The part in Chronicles, Volume One Where Bob Dylan Says But what he say, I knew not what About James Joyce
Bob Dylan is so important to me that the only reason in the world I don't have his name tattooed on my body is because I think he would think that was pretty lame and pathetic of me. I read his book last Autumn; it's an excellent book. My third-favorite part of Bob Dylan's excellent book is when he talks about how Joan Baez was famous before him but he knew in some fiery and guttural way that one day he would get to her. That's so magical for Bob Dylan- I wish every crazy thing I knew in some fiery and guttural way would come so fantastically true. My second-favorite part of Bob Dylan's book is when he says that Al Capone "seems like a man who never got out alone in nature for a minute in his life," which is a cool point to make about Al Capone or anybody and also stresses that Bob Dylan thinks it's important to get out alone in nature for a minute or two in one's life, which is true- I'd be pretty heartbroken to find out if Bob Dylan didn't think that. My favorite part of Bob Dylan's book is when he says But what he say, I knew not what about James Joyce. It's one of my favorite sentences I've ever heard, humbly shoved into the extremely boring section of Bob Dylan's book about how he never collaborated with a playwright named Archibald Something on some project I forget now. The entire rest of Bob Dylan's book is written in proper, regular English, and then all of a sudden in the middle of reading it you're so thrilled to realize that you're about to find out about Bob Dylan's James Joyce opinions, and then it turns out that they're written in this wildly grammatically incorrect way: But what he say, I knew not what. The first time I read that sentence I immediately Googled it because it was so gorgeous, so perfect to me, that I thought it must have been a quote from something else that Bob Dylan reappropriated. But it wasn't. It was just Bob Dylan writing down the sentence But what he say, I knew not what about James Joyce, because that's what the world is. The amazing, perfect place where that sentence happened. -LJ
2. The Scene When Pete & Peggy & Ted Chaough Have Oysters & Whiskey Sours & Everyone's in Love with Each Other
That was one of my favorite things in 2013. It's from the third-to-last episode of season 6 of Mad Men, which is titled "Favors." Pete and Peggy and Ted Chaough have just flown on Ted Chaough's plane to some meeting with Ocean Spray somewhere, and they're nicely drunk and laughing a lot - giggling - and you can really feel the looseness of their shoulders. Ted Chaough and Peggy are in love and Pete's a little jealous:
but he's also happy for her and says that sweet thing about "I've seen that look." And then Ted Chaough goes to call his wife, and Pete and Peggy are in love with each other again for a minute, and then Peggy makes fun of Pete for being in love with Ted. It's all very romantic and Pete refers to it as "a romantic dinner," and the restaurant has checkered tablecloths and lots of nautical decor and those cute dumb red candles with netting. The best is how Peggy asks Ted to order her a whiskey sour and then the whiskey sour comes and Pete steals it, then pours half into his own glass:
and Peggy looks a little annoyed, but whatever, she's cool, it's all right. I was listening to a Grantland interview with Chuck Klosterman and he was talking about this scene and saying how Pete and Peggy have an "easy knowledge" of each other that's kind of rare on Mad Men/in life, and that really got to me. Easy knowledge is everything. Whiskey sours and oysters and loose shoulders and nice warm restaurants with wood paneling are everything. Along with this scene, another of my favorite things in 2013 was the end of "Freak Scene" by Dinosaur Jr., the part that goes "Sometimes I don't thrill you/Sometimes I think I'll kill you/Just don't let me fuck up will you/cuz when I need a friend it's still you." Sweetness hidden inside something weird and messy is one of the best kinds of sweetness, I feel.
I saw the Big Star documentary at a press screening last May and I loved it, because it's about Big Star. It also kind of bugged me, for reasons that are unfair, like how so tragically little footage of Big Star exists in the world. After a while I got antsy watching a bunch of dudes talk about how great Big Star is (even though those dudes include Lenny Kaye, who's basically my favorite person). But now the movie's streaming on Netflix and I rewatched it last Sunday and it was less antsy-making: probably because I knew what to expect, but also because I watched it in bed in my PJs when it was nice and hot and sunny out. Bed is the best place for watching a Big Star movie; Big Star is very closely associated with sleeping and dreaming and being lazy and feeling perfect about it, at least in my book.
The movie's called Nothing Can Hurt Me, by the way, which is so smart. It's a lyric from "Big Black Car," which is maybe my third favorite Big Star song, I think? If you could get songs tattooed on your body - not song lyrics but like actual songs, with their complete actual sound and aura - then I'd get "Big Black Car" tattooed on myself. But you can't, so I got Alex Chilton's name tattooed on me instead. So here is a list about Alex, and everyone/everything else I love in the Big Star movie:
i. ALL OF BIG STAR, ALL TOGETHER
For some reason the other day I read the first paragraph of the New York magazine review of Wolf of Wall Street, which says how in the movie Martin Scorsese "continues his worship of masculine energy: energy for its own sake, energy as a means of actualizing the self, energy because there’s nothing worse in Scorsese’s cosmos than passivity, which inevitably translates as impotence." I like Martin Scorsese's movies just fine, but mostly that sentence interests me because I'm into the idea of Big Star as an alternative to Scorsese-y energy: energy that's masculine and feminine, tough and dreamy, neither active nor passive, just...receptive. That's the sort of energy I worship.
Plus I just really love this picture because they're brothers. Weird brothers, I guess: I
can't imagine too many brothers spend a lot of time sitting around bedrooms together. They're probably like the Darjeeling Limited brothers, bitchy and impossible and hotheaded and wonderful. Wes Anderson is a nice alternative to Martin Scorsese.
ii. BIG STAR MINUS CHRIS BELL, I GUESS
It's sad that Chris Bell left when he did but we have to accept it, I guess. And they look pretty all right as a trio, especially here, with Alex being a big diva and Jody having amazing bangs as per yoozsh:
And what's happening on Alex's shirt here? Are those spaceships? They look like spaceships, but also like hamburgers. I don't know how you pull off wearing a shirt printed with cartoon things that look like spaceships and hamburgers and still be completely tough and elegant, but there you go: Alex Chilton.
If Strawberry Fields Whatever was going to have an official, or unofficial, jewelry designer, I would definitely have to make it be Venessa Arizaga. There's a lot of weird and beautiful things to look at on her website, which you can find by clicking on her name in the heading of this section. The bracelet seen above is called the Hawaiian Punch bracelet- my favorite part of it is the kiwi fruit, and how it makes me remember the taste of Hawaiian Punch on my tongue. She also names a lot of her jewelry after songs, songs that I love; most impressively, there's a Dear Landlord necklace, which is a very strange choice of Bob Dylan song to name a necklace after. I really have no choice but to support a jewelry designer who names her shit after John Wesley Harding album tracks.
PS: Also I think that SFW needs to have bonkers Venessa Arizaga friendship bracelets! This bracelet is called the Makai bracelet, and I think Jen May should have it:
Lately I've been dressing pretty boring and sexy because I'm a boss and want to be feared a little, so this wolf-shaped bag really hits the spot and honours my boring sartorial present and wacky sartorial past at the same time; plus what the fuck is the fucking point of wearing something not-animal shaped if there is an animal-shaped option available?
Welcomecompanions is a really weird brand; their website is worth checking out. The concept is, they make things that look like other things. For instance, this really gorgeous banana-leaf shaped purse (I would still rather a purse was shaped like a leaf than not-a-leaf, even though a leaf is still inferior to an animal)
I posted the link to this page of fantasy animal babies to my Facebook wall and the link did this really trashy thing where the picture it attached to the link said IT'S SCARY HOW REAL THEY LOOK. A RUSSIAN GIRL MADE THEM AND NEVER EXPECTED A HUGE RESPONSE... and there was nothing I could do but accept the fact that my Facebook page was going to look lame in an Internetty way which I guess it does implicitly for being a Facebook page. But my point is, it was worth it to me, because look at this little cheetah baby alien!
And look at this little deer baby alien! I feel like Kanye West should buy some of these for Nori.
Speaking of Kanye, look how fucking awesome this Kanye-coat is!
Kanye-coat, I really like the word Kanye-coat. Kanyecoat. This whole collection is definitely the best effort I've seen from fashion-Kanye to date, there's a sweater that says "Le Ski," which is nice. There are a couple of misses, like a collarless white maybe scuba-material jacket with elbow-length sleeves, but isn't that the greatest part of Kanye West? The misses?
The rest of the collection is mostly just chill and sexy dude clothes that would make me want to kiss the men wearing them if I ever had the good fortune of seeing a man wearing them. Excellent Kanyecoat after excellent Kanyecoat after excellent Kanyecoat.
In the traditional Kanye West style, Kanye accompanied this collection with a very long and weird speech that begins, It's like if you had a housekeeper, and she was the best housekeeper in the whole world, and she said she had the idea to start being a florist. You would pay her three times as much to not follow her dream of being a florist. That point about paying her three times as much to not follow her dream is SO not where I saw the housekeeper/florist metaphor going! I thought it was going to be about helping your housekeeper.
2013 was not really a huge music year for me. It was a food year and a life year. I worked very hard and I got a lot of things done in the very standard way that you're supposed to; it didn't leave me too much time to do much wandering or reflecting. No sitting on too many docks of very many bays. When I think of all the songs that moved me most this past year, I think of specific moments rather than phases or vibes. Hot Love was crossing the street west-to-east on the south side of Bathurst at Bloor last February. It was late into the month, past Valentine's Day, and I was wearing one mitten. I was on my way to go buy a new pair of mittens, which made me angry- I'd been hoping I could make it through the end of winter without having to buy a pair of mittens again, and the fact that I didn't made me feel like winter was lasting longer than it should have. I resented it. As I crossed the street I pressed "next" on my iPod on shuffle and Hot Love came on. It was what Valentine's is supposed to be- happy and hoppy, hoppy like a cute bunny jumping and also hoppy like a complicated beer. It fixed things. It reminded me to care about T.Rex and caring about T.Rex overtook me like the rush you feel after smiling. Marc Bolan is one of the most important artists ever to have spoken to me and he never would have if he hadn't that one weird day. Daisy Glaze is from the spring. For some reason I always hear that song as if someone- Alex Chilton, I guess- is swimming in a pool and singing up at me from underneath translucent Yves Klein blue. Daisy Glaze is one of the only times in my life when the song from the album with the best name is also the one I love the most. Life is so good when that happens. On Cinco de Mayo I kissed my boyfriend for the first time. It was one of those times when you finally kiss the boy you've had a crush on forever and you think everything's going to happen but as it turns out nothing happens. You're all nervous-excited to see him the next day, your pupils are hearts and the animator is drawing trails of hearts flying out of your head, and then you show up and he's being dull and work-oriented and it's crushing. Then you have to live out the next week of hoping for the best but expecting the worst and accepting it and it's just a generally shitty thing to go through, especially when the dude's your boss, which he was. But oddly, the Universe sent another boy into my life to temporarily distract me- the only Leo I ever kissed. I kissed him seven summers ago and then some lame Tuesday night seven years later and he saunters into my restaurant ten minutes before the kitchen closes, smelling like a dusty bookcase and accompanied by his little brother. I gave them free drinks duh, and for about twelve days I could tell the Leo and I were both thinking "Hmm"- the allure of unfinished business enhanced by the why of "Why did life bring us back together?" and somewhere in the middle of those twelve days, I had to run to the liquor store to buy Bacardi on my break. It was a work-related errand; I would never drink Bacardi, blecch. I rode the subway one stop to an ugly liquor store inside an ugly underground mall, and I was bumming hard because I knew I'd never love the Leo the way I loved this other guy- my boss who'd become my boyfriend- and I listened to Daisy Glaze on repeat the whole way there and the whole way back, waiting in line holding 3 squishy bottles of Bacardi made from some newfangled 2013 booze bottle material, and I misheard the lyrics and thought that Alex Chilton was singing "I'm trying to look sad about you," and I envied him- I've never had to try and look sad about anybody, I just naturally look it. But really he's singing "I'm driving alone, sad about you," so don't worry. I'm not alone.
The rest of spring was Machu Picchu and Wakin On A Pretty Day- Machu Picchu was in April, the month I got promoted to assistant manager of my old restaurant and decided that I would openly and unapologetically love the Strokes forever- great decision. On the second day of the month the city of Toronto turned off the water in my restaurant's neighbourhood so they could repair a pipe or whatevs. We closed for lunch and dinner, and my future-boyfriend-boss and I came in to clean the entire restaurant. I got down on my hands and knees and cleaned all the muck and grit and rotten lime wedges out from underneath the bar fridges listening to the Strokes' entire discography on shuffle and every time this song came on it was like someone was feeding me a pina colada and some dirty bad-for-me cheeseburgers intravenously. Wakin On A Pretty Day fasts forward into my May, mostly just walking to work early- I served brunch then- and remarking upon how green the trees were- no. I'm selling myself, and the Universe, short- the greenness was astounding. Chill music tricking me into feeling chilled out, though today it just makes me tired. I listened to Freaks a lot then too. It's a cool song. One night I was lying down on one of the banquettes at my old restaurant waiting for Mark to finish, White Album on the speakers, and my two impish line-cooks, young people from today who don't know how to understand that Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da is actually, somehow, cool, hijacked my iPod and played Freaks loud, started dancing with their arms and knees to make some point about how the Beatles aren't good. I thought it was sort of sweet. Miss O'Dell is my favorite song (you can read about it here), and this was the year I found it, which is a cool trait in a year: The Year I Found My Favorite Song. Isis was another very important thing that happened to me. 2013 was also The Year I Found Bob Dylan- earlier when I was writing about Marc Bolan I wrote a sentence about how Marc Bolan and Bob Dylan are the two halves of me and then I deleted it because I felt like I was being mean to Ray Davies, but now I'm thinking that maybe Ray Davies is my Sun Sign, Marc Bolan is my Moon Sign, and I'm Bob Dylan Rising. Wow. Okay, I feel like I just figured my entire life out. I hope to write about Isis in a more in-depth way as a part of my ongoing Ten Bob Dylan Songs I'd Rather Die Than Live Without in the future, so for the time being I'd just like to shout out the song lyrics I was thinking about turquoise, I was thinking about gold for changing my fucking life with how cool and beautiful they are as well as the part when he sings I was thinking about Isis, how she thought I was so RECKLESS, the way he sings the word RECKLESS- he tastes it, like he's eating it- you can tell he's not just being the character in the song anymore. You can tell that Bob Dylan really sees himself as a reckless guy, that every woman he's ever loved has sighed over his recklessness, and every time I feel like maybe I've grown up and moved on, that I don't care about any crazy thing I actually care about and am only A Person With A Job, his RECKLESS reminds me that I am what I am, that I haven't, that I can't be. (Last but not least: if you'd like to win a copy of this mix CD, along with a handful of Strawberry Fields Whatever stickers and maybe something else depending on how busy I am that day, please email a cool response to the question What's your favorite song on Blonde on Blonde and, most importantly, WHY? to laurajanefaulds at gmail by the evening of January 5th; I don't know how I'll pick a winner, but I know that I will.)
2013 Wasn't an Especially Big Music Year for Jen Either
Seeing The Punk Singer
reminded me that Bikini Kill is my favorite band. In the film Johanna
Fateman says something like, “they weren’t the best girl band, they were the
best band”, and she’s right. The songs are as important and emotional for me
today as they were when I first heard them as a really angry baby teen.
I got super into the B-52’s for a while. The outer space/big hair thing was exactly
what I needed. Mostly the first 2 albums but I also became especially obsessed
by "Girl from Ipanema" goes to Greenland. The Song. The video. THE VIDEO. It also has the most true truism in the lyrics –
wherever you go, there you are, which is so comforting and depressing at the
same time.
The "Theme to Female Trouble" by Divine is my #1 song of the
year. Even if it had nothing to do with John Waters I would love it. Luckily it
has everything to do with John Waters, the world’s most perfect man. I don’t
know how to write about music in that way where you can hear it. There’s a
definite groove, and amazing lyrics like, “hey spare me your
morals/look everyone dies” and "I'm Berserk!/ I like it fine". I’m also pretty into Divine’s disco hit, “I’m so Beautiful."
As always, The Monster Mash remains one of my most favorite
songs.
Body/head Coming Apart,
is a dream of a record for me.
The songs on Weed Hounds upcoming album are all cool and
lovely, but also top secret so you can’t hear them yet.
Tom Scharpling had been ending the music portion of the Best
Show with a song by The Sweet for most of the year. I’ve grown to really love “Blockbuster” especially.
I’ll continue listening to it at least once a week from here on out in honor of
The Best Show, one of the great loves of my life. I will also listen to a lot of Led Zeppelin in 2014.
I became interested in Grimes as a person before I listened
to her music. I listened to a few seconds and felt it was too sweet and not for
me. It felt like swallowing sugar.After
following her on tumblr for a while I gave Visions
another try and was surprised to find I really liked it. Like, a lot. It’s
not so sweet and I’m not sure what my problem was but now I love Grimes.
I saw the flawless goddess Julie Klausner's cabaret show at Joe's Pub this year. She & Bridget Everett covered the Monkees song "Nine Timed Blue". I wondered - why don't I listen to this song constantly all of the time? Then I started listening to it constantly all of the time, along with other Mike Nesmith Monkees songs.
I listen to Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk and Helium’s The Magic
City repeatedly while in the studio so they are both forever and
permanently on my best music of every year list. Forever.
Liz's 2013 Was Sweet Like Cinnamon
That's a picture of a fortune I got with my fried rice at a Manchu Wok at the Salt Lake City airport, on my way back to L.A. from Tennessee last May. Right before I left for my trip I finished the first draft of my book, and in Tennessee I went to Graceland and ate chess pie and drank lots of beer and whiskey with my cool buddy Alissa and saw Gram Parsons's Nudie suit and had brisket and french fries and a strawberry Coke at a barbecue place because I once saw a picture of Big Star eating there, and then when I got back to L.A. this crazy thing happened and it was crazy.
Anyway my point was it was a BIG WEEK and full of fun and steeped in the richness of life, and the fried rice was fantastic. On the drive home from the airport I stopped at an In N Out by the side of the highway and got a strawberry milkshake and listened to "Hot Burrito #2" by the Flying Burrito Brothers, which is one of the songs I put on this Spotify playlist I just made. It pretty nicely encapsulates my year and it's got songs by Dinosaur Jr. and Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers and Beyonce and Deerhunter, plus all of these fine-looking people:
BLAKE BABIES & LANA DEL REY.My number-one song of summer 2013 was "Out There" by Blake Babies tied with "Cola" by Lana Del Rey. I associate "Cola" with the Friday afternoon in June when my little sister and her bestie were visiting, and we went to Beverly Hills and bought cupcakes and brought them to Farmers Market and ate them with champagne: it was Lana Del Rey's birthday and my cupcake was cinnamon, as in "Now my life is sweet like cinnamon/Like a fuckin dream I'm livin in." And "Out There" is driving thru the drive-thru at the Dunkin Donuts near my parents' house on a hot rainy Tuesday or Wednesday at the end of the July, and getting a big iced French vanilla coffee, and going to a used bookstore and buying a big stack of used books. Each of those songs is an anthem in its own weird way, and I like the vibe and ridiculousness of swirling together Lana Del Rey's sleazy/glamorous L.A. princess thing and Juliana Hatfield's lonely/glamorous hiding-in-her-bedroom thing and letting them mean something great and grand about me and everything.
COURTNEY BARNETT.Courtney Barnett is a 25-year-old from Australia and my favorite new music person I found this year. I dig her chill romanticism, how it's both dreamy and pragmatic, but more than anything I'm in love with her vocabulary. In "History Eraser" she sings about margaritas, "You Can't Always Get What You Want," French kissing, soccer players, ducks, dudes, vermouth, a farm. In other songs she sings about asthma attacks, radishes, schmoozing loser-y users, masturbation, marijuana, flowers and porcelain and coffee and TV. Her songs are the kind of stories I wish were little movies, and the sex scenes would be so sweetly awkward, like something from an alternate universe where Girls is a world you actually want to know more and more about instead of less and less.
ALEX CHILTON.I feel like this is maybe a pretentious or dickish thing to say, but I don't really think about Big Star when I think of my Alex Chilton tattoo. I think of shit like the song "Walking Dead" and its fucked-up creepy nowhere-going beautiful bullshit, and of Alex looking like this - a cool sicko who can't ever help being at least a little bit wonderful:
I held off on watching Greenberg because every single person/reviewer was like, "OH MY GOD SO DARK, Ben Stiller is so loathsome, just the worst." I'm not very into movies largely populated by loathsome characters; I just don't find it all that amusing or exciting to watch people be miserable assholes to each other for 90 minutes. But then a few Thursday nights ago I slept like hell and on Friday I didn't have heaps of work to do, so I took a sick day. First I watched Frances Ha, the first Greta Gerwig movie I've ever seen. Frances Ha bugged me for the first half-hour or so, but then I loved it and I loved Greta Gerwig and I wanted more of her. I watched The Dish & The Spoon (wonderful, adorable, such a weird sweet heartbreaker), and then I watched Hannah Takes the Stairs (two and a half out of four stars), and then I watched goddamn Greenberg. I put it on because it was there to be watched, and told myself I could shut it off at any time if I started hating everyone in a life-sucking sort of way.
But I loved loved loved Greenberg; it was very much the highlight of Greta Gerwig Sick Day Film Fest. To me there is absolutely nothing loathsome about Greenberg the movie, or about Greenberg the character. I truly have zero understanding of why anyone would hate Roger Greenberg, and the only explanation I can come up with is so cynical, something about people being too ungenerous and unimaginative to feel any love for someone who has a hard time living in the world; they mistake his anxiety for aggression because it makes them anxious too. Is that it? I really don't know. I recognize that Roger is an asshole but I don't quite hold it against him, though I don't feel bad for him either. He's a kicked puppy who's done all the kicking himself, and he's sort of trying to stop and maybe he's going to work it out. I thought it was so sweetly hopeful. So that's the main reason why you should watch Greenberg instead of It's a Wonderful Life on Christmas Eve this year, if you're into the ritual of watching edifying and delightful movies the night before Christmas. Here are four more reasons, and they don't even include Chris Messina and Mark Duplass and Serge Gainsbourg and "Jet Airliner," although of course that's all important too:
RHYS IFANS. I have three main dude types: the first is the dark-haired, slightly bug-eyed, vaguely Ichabod Crane-esque look of Ian Svenonius and the guy who played Josh on 30 Rock; the second is that sandy/pasty/hair-color-matches-skin-tone thing best represented by the Culkin Brothers and Vincent Kartheiser and the first boy I loved in L.A.; and the third is the rugged Welsh beauty of beautiful Rhys Ifans. He's the Greenberg character I'd most want to hang out with, he's so irrepressibly kind and patient with Roger; he's got lovely manners and that cool beaten-down-by-life-but-still-totally-chill vibe. I love his beard, his blondeness, his nice blonde beard. I love the first scene he's in, with Ivan and Roger's amazing conversation about the movie Gung Ho. All of Greenberg is worth watching for that goofy little 13-second chat about the movie Gung Ho, this I swear to you.
MAHLER. The best movie dog ever, maybe? Marissa made this cool point about how Roger's carefulness with Mahler is one of the things that most redeems his character, which is neat to think about in the context of Wes Anderson and that theory of how "offhand and abrupt acts of canine disregard are examples of the slightly anti-social lack of sentimentality that runs through all of Anderson’s work." And when Roger wakes up on the floor after the party and looks up to see Mahler's cute li'l paws hanging over the edge of the couch, my heart just sings. I want a German Shepherd for Christmas. Also: a cinnamon tree.
FLORENCE. Before I saw Frances Ha my friend Rachel told me that Frances reminded her of me. And then I watched the movie and spent the first half-hour deeply worried that I'm generally perceived as someone who galumphs around acting like a complete idiot all the time. My big prob with Frances Ha, initially, was I just felt like "Nobody is this much of an idiot. You couldn't be this idiotic and exist in the world and not, like, die." But then I got over that, because it's not true, and I started to love Frances and her bonkers exuberance. In Greenberg that joie de vivre is a little tempered but it's still palpable, in Florence. They made so many brill choices with her character, like how she sings a Shawn Colvin song at her show and it's both beautiful and lame, but mostly beautiful, and how she wears her rad Henry's Tacos shirt with that big chunky cardigan, and how she's got a copy of the Sarah McLachlan album Fumbling Towards Ecstasy on CD in her car.
