Things of the Year: Champagne & Spain, A taco in the back of a car after the Replacements concert, Rock Lobster & a Romanian Bear

LJ: Champagne

In 2015, I literally figured out The Answer. It is: 

If you want your life to be "good," you have to figure out how to strike the exact perfect balance between things being "safe" and things being "interesting." 

If your life is too heavy on the safe, you are probably going to be bored, or depressed in a "regular Joe in secret" kinda way, ex. Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom or pre-Henry Francis Betty Draper. And if your life is interesting but you feel unsafe inside of it, that's very dark. It's like, rock star on a bender/ I'm gonna die young kind of vibe. Over it. 

I think the best way to nail the interesting/safe equilibrium is by mostly just going for safe coziness on a day-to-day basis ("safe coziness" is like "safety" but cuter/less dull. Some recent examples of "safe coziness" from my life include: 1) going to a bookstore & being moderately helpful but also sort of bored and spacey while my friend Matt King picked out Christmas presents for his nieces and nephews; 2) eating two eggs (cooked to somewhere between over-easy and over-medium) & and an English muffin for breakfast every single morning and then one day Sainsbury's started to carry a cheddar & black pepper English muffin variant and I bought it and it was SO GOOD, SO SAFE, SO COZY) but then always having something cool and interesting to look forward to on the horizon (I stole this concept from Dr. Faye on Mad Men btw), such as: the trip to Barcelona I am taking in February, my cool new life plan of moving to Liverpool to "make an honest living"/finish my novel, even something as basic and simple as going out for dinner somewhere good, or eating a Snickers bar later that day. 

I feel like "drink a glass of Champagne" is the most failsafe and attainable "interesting thing on the horizon" I consistently have going for myself, which is what led me to invent my new life motto/semi-Answer

 "There's no light at the end of the tunnel- only champagne"

this year, which is really smart because who even cares about a crappy light? I'm not actually a person trapped inside a tunnel. I'm a regular thirty-year-old woman who loves sparkling wine made in the Champagne region of France more than anything except the Beatles, Mad Men, and maybe four or five people, but even that is debatable. 

Drinking champagne is a special thing to do. If you're drinking champagne, it means that you are a classy and special fellow, and that something excellent has recently happened, and you are using your glass of champagne to demarcate that excellence: the entire life and narrative of whatever chill little thing you're "celebrating" is now contained within that glass. The liquid is the thing. You're the thing. You're you drinking champagne. And you always will be again. That's how I keep myself from dying of boredom, or succumbing to darkness. The allure of that. 

Champagne is the Paul McCartney of wine (because it's consistent). There's not good champagne and bad champagne, there's only excellent champagne (Beatles) and good champagne (Wings), and the only way you can figure out that a good champagne isn't excellent is by taking a sip of excellent champagne directly before tasting it. My personal fav champagne ever is a tie between the mini-sip of 20 yr old Dom Perignon I once tried when I was a sommelier (tasted like if challah doused in truffle oil had a baby with the idea of a brass candelabra) and Pol Roger (NV, though I'm sure if I had an aged bottle I'd like it better than either), just like my homie the infamous classy-ass bitch Winston Churchill. Pol Roger is citric & lean & doesn't make a very big deal out of itself, but is flawless. That's my life advice to everybody: have Pol Roger be your go-to champagne. Tarlant is nice & oxidative but lacks the panache of the Pol Roger brand: it's a good, like, Wednesday champagne. Taittinger is also pretty fly, and I like the idea of Krug, which I've never had, but sounds like what Russian mafia dudes would drink so dig conceptually. Drinking Cristal is unacceptably garish. Moet & Chandon will do in a pinch.  

LJ: My Trip To Spain

I keep trying to explain why my trip to Spain was the best thing that's ever happened to me but the words "It was the best thing that's ever happened to me" do inconveniently little to express what it actually feels like to be the person experiencing the best thing that's ever happened to her as she's experiencing it. But I know that I am capable of explaining what it feels like, I know the words must be there somewhere, hidden and hard and good, really good, really good cool powerful Spain writing from Laura Jane- 

This might not be it. I'm just going to write a bunch of beautiful words down in a sort of stream-of-conscious-y way, like in a weird poem-y way, and I don't know if it's going to be good or not, it's 3:46 PM on Christmas Eve Day & this is just going to be a little chunk of words I write down about Spain before my Dad comes back to his apartment with my mom and her dog in tow, and this is my fun little thing I'm doing while left here alone and up to my own devices...

**

I flew to Santiago with my co-workers. At the airport cashpoint I decided who we'd all be if we were Beatles & I allowed myself the luxury of being the Ringo. It was freeing, being the Ringo. I'd never been the Ringo before. 

I felt as wowed by Spanish highways at thirty as I did by Disneyworld when I was five. In the cab the landscape reminded me of Ontarian suburbs, big box buildings with logos on the side. There were fir trees like home. There were hills like in Los Angeles. The car radio played that stupid Pharrell song and I thought: California is more of a home to me than England, actually. I missed everything North American desperately- sometimes the thing I miss most is the feeling of standing inside a 7-11- and loved Spain right off the bat, just for not being the place I'm usually missing it from. 

The cab driver dropped us off right smack in the middle of Santiago de Compostela, in the middle of a square. The buildings were four hundred or so years old and ornate and so beautiful I wanted to... I don't know. Not kiss the ground, though I initially had "kiss the ground" written, but I've never wanted to do that. I guess I just wanted to be there with not my co-workers, express myself in a way that comes so weirdly easy when I'm around the right people. I wanted to make the jokes that my best friends would think were funny. 

The air felt humid-cold like the water inside a stone. The sky was super-blue like if you were really going to town on your Instagram saturation filter. I was delighted, and I knew my childlike enthusiasm was coming off as endearing to my co-workers and so I played it up a bit. I spoke in a higher register than usual. I knew I wouldn't be doing a ton of sulking that weekend, which was a relief.

We all wanted to get drunk, especially me, it seemed. We went to the first bar we found, which was perfect, where I drank a mini-bottle of shit cava & connected with a dog. He was wearing a hi-vis vest wrapped around his tummy and under his haunches. He was a rescue dog. I changed into my jean shorts. My legs were pale and my eyes were red. I leaned over the side of my chair and let my hair hang over the dog's head so the dog & I could be alone in a secret world together. 

We went to a coffee place where we all liked the business cards and the leather on the chair. I dumped a thing of brandy into my coffee and we ate medicore churros that left my fingers sticky. I regretted eating them. Oh and the vermouth place! Where we went on a vermouth binge. We called one vermouth "the Christmassy one" & then shortened it to just "Christmas," as a nickname, and the other one was a white vermouth; my boss and I both liked it better. It tasted brackish, like what cleaning supplies would smell like in heaven. I felt like I was rinsing myself out with it: the Laura equivalent of a juice fast. In Spain they feed you for free while you drink: a thing of tinned mussels in paprika-coloured oil, and endless baskets of potato chips. At a different bar, they kept us supplied with endless ramekins of Haribo. Little jelly stars, hearts, shapes. I had a blue one, a star, with the foamy white stuff on the back. That was my favourite Haribo. 

A lovely woman with cute crooked teeth whose name was short for "Immaculate" picked us up in a car and drove us to a hotel by the vineyard. The night felt Californian again, with stars shining like a basic bitch's diamond studs against the mossy cape of a hundred thousand trees. They were on the side of a mountain. This is the part that becomes too beautiful to explain. 

The Hotel By The Vineyard. I guess being there felt like... if someone ripped the chunk of your brain where you keep your own personal vision board of all the things in the world you think are beautiful and then chucked it at a blank canvas and it leaked across the canvas and you stepped into the canvas and then all of a sudden you were vermouth-drunk with your boss, colleague & wine supplier inside of it.

My phone ran out of juice. I couldn't take any pictures of this place, this most beautiful place, which at the time I was happy about. I wanted to keep it pure in my memory and belong only to me, to my best friend the inside of my brain, forever. Those memories were a present to the back of my brain from the front of it. But I wish I could see it again. It's nowhere on the Internet. 

I had the best room, the only one with the balcony. I was the princess of the scrappiest castle and out the back window was a field and a dog and an old man and, in the morning, I realized, a sheep. I asked the lady named Immaculate "What is that tower?" and she said "It's a chimney"- it was so beautiful, I'd thought it was, like, this important piece of architecture- but it was just a shitty chimney! It's the chimney in the picture.

I fell in love with the winemaker. We went to the winery. In my notebook I wrote down tasting notes like Bubblegum! Sand Synthetic Fruit Juicebox Rubber and Candied Lemon Peel Plastic Baby Doll Barbie Doll and I was exactly where I was and I was myself.

That afternoon I ate a croqueta that melted in my mouth in the style of a soft mint sweet made from sugar and milk, I ate a really real crab pate that reminded me of wines you say are "gamey"; I sat next to the winemaker and he showed me an app of the biodynamic calendar on his iPhone & I thought how fantastic it is that you can live in this tiny town in rural Spain where the roads are made of rust-colour dust and when I asked if we could stop into a store there was just... no store- but you still get to have an iPhone. That really sold me on moving to rural Spain. On the app there was a little emoji of a strawberry that meant it was time to pick the fruit and my hair looked like shit because I'd forgotten my hair dryer, my straightening iron, my phone charger, everything except my feet and my Vans and my tongue, now shredded up and ragged from the acid in the probably seventy or a million wines we'd tried. He lifted the nearly-neon pineapple or raspberry liquid from the barrel with his Riedel pipette that he did this weird thing of resting against his cheek and we made a "Is that a Riedel pipette in your pocket" joke about him which was funny. After we tasted the wine he showed us that we should dump the dregs of our glasses right back into the barrels, which we did, dutifully, and then he sealed them up again. So my spit and germs will be inside those wines of his forever. People in countries I've never been to will buy them in a store and they'll drink a piece of me. Like when you go to Liverpool and breathe the Beatles in the air.       

LJ: A Whole Bunch of Other Things (Including But Not Limited To...)

The part in See Me Now by Kanye & Beyonce & Lil Wayne where Kanye raps "He just walked into Nobu like it was Whole Foods; the part in See Me Now where Kanye raps "Pour the champagne; let your watch show"; the part in See Me Now where Lil Wayne raps "Be SUCCESSFUL" and it's basically the most motivating thing in the entire world to me. 

Drawing and amazing Christmas gift by Matt King

I loved Mad Men, clearly, particularly Peggy Olson with her cigarette on Roger Sterling hangover day, and I loved the movie The One I Love starring Peggy Olson and my fake boyfriend Mark Duplass, and I loved my fake boyfriend Mark Duplass' TV show Togetherness, and more than anything I loved the part in Togetherness when Amanda Peet was like "You see this smile? I'm DEAD INSIDE." That was how I felt for most of 2015, a year that I did not live with a particularly impressive amount of honesty or integrity. So, my New Year's Resolution for 2016 is going to be: live my life with honesty and integrity. Right??? I'm also going to start exclusively referring to movies as "flicks."  

I loved all my friends, who I'm not going to bother naming individually because that's boring for other people to read, but if you suspect that you might be one of those people, you definitely are. I also loved The Great British Bake-Off, I loved beautiful perfect Nadiya as much as everyone else because beautiful perfect Nadiya was so, so deserving of my love and everyone's. My favourite Nadiya moment was "Happy, Paul?"- God I loved "Happy, Paul?" 

I loved the book May We Be Forgiven by AM Homes, and I loved Purity and the experience of fully coming into my guilt-free own as a Jonathan Franzen-appreciator. I even nicknamed him Franzo, and refer to him exclusively as Franzo. If I ever meet Franzo, I'm going to fucking LOSE IT. I'm going to give him a low-five and be like "Franzooooooooooo" & he'll look at my hand like it's sticky and have a weak handshake I bet- he'll come around to me in the end, though. 

In January I tasted the best wine I've ever tasted. It was a Cabernet Sauvignon from the Walla Walla Valley in Washington State. I drank it in the most unromantic of circumstances: at wine school at two in the afternoon. The light was creepy in the room. My wine teacher looked like Wallace Shawn and he was not cute. Whenever I described wine as tasting like anything other than the most MOR wine descriptors imaginable he'd tell me I should "go write a poetry book" in a really derogatory way. So I kept my mouth shut when I tasted L'Ecole No. 41 and wanted to write like ten epic novels about the way it smelled exactly like the workshop my dad built harpsichords out of in the basement of the house I grew up in, and that in that smell my my entire life lived. (I refuse to make the obvious Proust reference here. Do you understand? I refuse.) 

I also had a great year for Pinot Noirs and Chenin Blancs; I particularly loved the Savennieres I drank with Matt King in Paris (which tasted like The Flavor Of Water, like if you amplified the cool clean rocky flavour of the purest mineral water in the world and then gave it a Chenin Blanc honey-nut twist) and the Savennieres I drank with my Dad at St. John (which was SO AMAZING and SO WEIRD & tasted like mallow root, popcorn, and tomato leaf). Foodwise I am going to have to give the 2015 gold medal to the blueberry Baked Alaska I ate at The Marksman with Laura Goodman & Amanda, and beigels, obvs. SO MANY BEIGELS. Beigels beigels beigels. Beigels 4eva. The perfect food. 

At the beginning of December Nadine came to London and we went to Harrods in the morning & then ate SO MUCH fried fish for lunch & took the bus to Soho and talked really loudly about Blur for our entire bus ride and then drank overpriced orange wine and wrote a subjective/objective list of the Top Ten Best Blur Songs & then went to see the Kinks musical & got drunk at Bradley's Spanish Bar and these two cute brunette chicks were like "Why aren't you hanging out with us?"- they, like, friend-hit on us, which is such a phenomenal concept. Best concept of 2015. 

Blur were my great musical obsession of 2015; the two non-wine-related things I loved doing the most this year were 1) "mopily listening to blur" and 2) "working on my novel"- I really loved writing my nov in 2015. Realistically, I should have given it its own section, but I don't want to talk too much about it now and then ruin the surprise of it for everyone once it drops. You've just got to drop a novel. They're like mixtapes that way. 

"Resigned" by blur was the song I loved and listened to most in 2015; it's one of those songs you can listen to a thousand times in a row and it never stops working, and in fact improves, just like a 20 yr old Dom Perignon that tastes of challah bread. Resigned (which it would mean a lot to me if you listened to) is the exact perfect amount of tragically beautiful that I want all my writing to be: always wistful, never sad. 

LIZ: A taco in the back of a car after the Replacements concert

(a picture I took of a house in Echo Park on April 17)

On April 16 I saw the Replacements at the Hollywood Palladium. It was a Thursday night, and before the show started I got a plastic cup of champagne at the bar in the lobby, which is the last I really remember about the whole thing. Other than that it's this crazy blur - kind of like how, after my first kiss, I couldn't remember what the boy looked like, despite having known him for years. All I could recall was the general outline of him, and his plaid flannel, and the tacky-spray-gel texture of his hair. My memory of him was just pure feeling, and the same is true for Replacements night: I remember the cup of champagne and I remember everything after the lights came back up - but the show itself is lost, except for the feeling of being ecstatically happy for hours, and of every second seeming unreal, like some magic present sent from some other time. The Replacements don't really even exist anymore but I got to see them, and now I'll never see them again and that's so perfect, just like how you only get to have one first kiss.

(a picture of Divine Fits by my friend Danielle Petrosa)

My favorite song this year was "Baby Get Worse" by Divine Fits, which is Britt Daniel and the hot-voiced boy from Wolf Parade. I love Divine Fits because they're so over-the-top romantic, always inventing dramatic scenarios about girls where their own romanticness seems like the point of the whole thing. I'm into that. Being in love with your own romanticness is the way to go, as long as you can make it look good and sound good. To me the best-sounding part of "Baby Get Worse" is the bridge, when it's stripped down to just the drums and throbby synth thing and Britt Daniel takes over the vocals and his voice is all scratched-up on purpose and he sounds so elegantly put-upon. Everything about Divine Fits is so elegantly contrived.

Elegance is a quality that's become more important to me this year; I like how one definition of elegant is "focusing on the essential." As someone who makes her living as a writer and lives in a part of L.A. that's changed so much over the past few years and that keeps getting more and more grossly/boringly expensive, focusing on the essential with grace or whatever feels like a good goal. It's so trite to complain about how these pizza places and hamburger stands and Mexican restaurants you've loved for years are getting pushed out and turned into prissy coffee shops and clever boutiques; it's much better to pay attention to the good stuff that's still there and use it and love it and make what you can of it. I've lived in L.A. for 12 and a half years and it's never stopped being a wonderland to me, and it would be just weak and lame to let anything wreck that.

Lately I've worked for a few musician-kids who keep misusing the word "architecture" to make it about the process of constructing pop songs, which I'm into. Anyone can be an architect of anything. I think my thing is to be an architect of moods or vibes or whatever it is that colors everything when you're walking around in your ridiculous neighborhood. I think it's important to build a cool life for yourself in spite of the encroaching prissiness, and listen to music that brightens you and turn down some street you've never been on before and get your coffee from the bakery with the 35-cent dulce-de-leche empanadas instead of the place with the $7 coffee that doesn't taste as good. Last night on my way back from Christmas I decided my #1 L.A. song is "When the World is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around" by the Police, but really it's David Bowie's version of "Across the Universe." David Bowie is the most capable architect of cool-weird-beautiful vibes. 

Probably the most elegant thing I did this year was eat two tacos de carnitas in the back of a car in the parking lot of a supermarket after the Replacements show at the Hollywood Palladium. On the way home from Hollywood my friends and I stopped at the taco truck outside Vons and got our tacos wrapped in hot tin foil and buried them in salsa and cilantro and radishes from the plastic buckets lined up all along the taco truck door and then we sat in the car and ate them. It was a real focusing-on-the-essential moment. Everything was perfect; there was nothing more I wanted.

The thing that everyone always says about the Replacements and that the Replacements used to say about themselves is they’re so sloppy and fucked-up and shambolic - but the truth is they’re perfect. Their songs are perfect. The melodies are perfect. They are perfect melodists and songmakers. And the perfectness makes the fucked-up-ness something glorious and transcendent and all those words I always use when I'm writing about the rock & roll music that I love more than anything. If the Replacements really were awful, it would be useless. But instead they're the opposite of useless: I love using them, every single day of my life.

The most major Replacements song for me at the end of 2015 is "We're Comin' Out." "One more chance to get it all wrong" is a good line to have in your head at the start of a new year and make it mean something useful and perfect.

Jen's Things of the Year:

1. The song Rock Lobster. This is the #1 best thing of all time.
2. Seeing Sleater-Kinney cover Rock Lobster with Fred Armisen twice.
3. Seeing Sleater-Kinney 3 times this year.
4. Joyce.
5. Books from Kim Gordon, Carrie Brownstein, Patti Smith, Jessa Crispin, Jessica Hopper, Mary Gaitskill and Maggie Nelson all being release this year.
6. Wynne Greenwood's New Museum show and Yoko's Museum of Modern (f)Art retrospective, even though it was too small.
7. I saw this cool 40 year old bear named Betsy in at the Libearty Bear Sanctuary in Zarnesti, Romania.

8. Roasted Broccoli.
9. Difficult People, a perfect show.
10. Seeing Hedwig on Broadway three times (twice with John Cameron Mitchell, once with Taye Diggs).
11. The moon.
12. Acupuncture.

13. I ate at Kajitsu, a beautiful and fancy vegan Japanese zen Buddhist cuisine restaurant that I love maybe an excessive amount of times.
14. Mochi.
15.  Scharpling & Wurster’s live show.
16. The Best Show, always.
17. Having my aura photographed regularly.

18. Congee with shiitake mushrooms and ginger.

Fashion Tips From Rock 'N' Roll Models, in 'Details' in 1987

BY LIZ

Details is folding. Along with Sassy, it was my favorite magazine in high school, and probably just as formative. Reading Details in 1992 in 1993 and 1994 made me want to write about music in a way that was weird and beautiful and probably overly preoccupied with rock-and-roll glamour but also funny and sharp and crackly and deep. The Details pieces I remember most lovingly are: that Anthony Kiedis/Sofia Coppola/Debbie Harry/Sonic Youth fashion spread/short film that I already wrote about here, a Blake Nelson feature I remember as being titled "How to Kill Yourself Without Actually Dying," the Nirvana cover story where there's a photo of Kurt with his back all scratched up by Courtney, and the Evan Dando interview where Evan says "The grungiest thing I did all week was pull the tablecloth out from under four place settings and they all stayed there."*

*Actually, this whole Evan interview is gold. Some other gems:

What have you learned from women? I've learned how to put my hair up in a towel after a shower. I never knew how before - it keeps your hair from whacking your back. That and patience.

Do you consider yourself a poet? Not yet. I would love to be, though I don't think I'd call myself that. That's like grunge, y'know. Grunge poetry! Yeah: "I was bustin' my pencil! I blew up the word processor!"

You're prone to saying "No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should be." What does that mean? I just dig it. I think that the universe is cool. I'm at ease with it and I just wanna do what I can do to make sure it unfolds as it should, which is not doing anything. I just wanna have fun and hang out and try new drinks.

Also, the accompanying photo is a beauty:

Anyway. The point of this post is a fashion editorial that ran in the Summer 1987 issue of Details, which I found last year at Avalon Vintage in Highland Park (aka my favorite vintage store in the world; it's run by Carmen Hawk of Jovovich-Hawk and I bought my beautiful ripped-up U2 shirt there and right now I'm dreaming of this dress and this blouse). As the coverline says, the article's fashion tips from rock 'n' roll models, none of which are all that enlightening or useful. Aimee Mann's is the worst: what a bore! But it's still a cool little artifact, and at least Details had the good sense to put the Bangles in the centerfold. I typed in the captions where the rock-n-roll-model handwriting was too hard to read:

Richard Butler: "Check it fits. Make sure your mother doesn't like it!"

Aimee Mann: "Drink lots of water + avoid alcohol. This will keep you thin + clear-complected. Then you can wear anything + look good."

Julian Cope: "Wear black leathers anytime, anywhere. The only clothes I own. Black Lewis leathers wear you as you wear them. There's no fashion to it, just pure style."

A Shattered Chocolate Bar, A Confusing Tragedy, & Hair That Means Something About the Ocean

BY LIZ

I finished Eve's Hollywood by Eve Babitz a couple weeks ago. Jen May sent it to me, along with the Cher + cats print I'd ordered from her print shop, plus a bunch of other gorgeous prints and that cheese-sandwich sticker stuck to my book in the above photo. Reading Eve's Hollywood made me feel like I've been ripping off Eve Babitz my whole life, or at least for the past 13 years, even though it's the first time I'd ever experienced her writing. We're both in love with Los Angeles, and the L.A.-love thing takes up a lot of our heads. And I love these few sentences of hers, from her essay "Daughters of the Wasteland," even if I don't completely agree with them:

"It takes a certain kind of innocence to like L.A., anyway. It requires a certain plain happiness inside to be happy in L.A., to choose it and be happy here. When people are not happy, they fight against L.A. and say it's a 'wasteland' and other helpful descriptions."

My prob with that is most people I know who've got attitude about L.A. are actually pretty plain in their thinking, or at least unimaginative. I think it takes imagination to love L.A. and to be happy in it; I think it's one of the easiest things in the world to look around the beautiful-disgusting city and only see the disgusting part. You've maybe got to have a slightly twisted sense of wonder, and if that doesn't come naturally to you, I'm not sure how to twist it on your own. Maybe start by walking around more? It's good to look at things up close. That nobody-walks-in-L.A. thing is a lie.

One night at the end of August, in the bar of a luxury pizza restaurant, I was talking to my friend Christine about my trip to Seattle in July and how Seattle wasn't quite what I'd expected. I told her how I couldn't feel any Nirvana vibes anywhere, which was fine (I loved Seattle!) but so different from my first trip to Los Angeles. The first time I came to L.A., as soon as I got off the plane it was like, "Yes, okay - Jane's Addiction, Guns N' Roses, Red Hot Chili Peppers: got it.'" And I still think that's true: L.A. still feels so mystical/sleazy/cosmic/electric to me, like a beautiful-disgusting amalgam of those crazy bands I just mentioned. What I love most about Eve Babitz is that she absolutely embodies the mystical/sleazy/cosmic/electric dynamic, despite being a writer instead of some guy in a band. Plus she adds a goofy elegance to all of that, along with her whole secret-nature-girl thing of being so enchanted by bougainvillea and lavender and roses and all the other pretty nature growing around us all the time.

(P.S. While Christine and I were talking at the bar, Paul Kinsey from Mad Men walked past us, wearing a white polo shirt tucked into dad jeans, total dad look all around. My celeb sightings have really gone to the dogs lately - I used to see famous people all the time, but now it's just like, "Tony from No Doubt walked past us at Blur. I saw Paul Kinsey from Mad Men at a pizza restaurant four months ago." Where have all the famous people gone?)

All The Songs We Loved In August

WORDS BY ELIZABETH BARKER & LAURA JANE FAULDS, ILLUSTRATION BY JEN MAY

The Beatles, “The Ballad of John and Yoko” (LJ)

Once upon a time it was a zillion years ago and I didn’t live in London and I was really young and I lived in a room that felt like an attic. And in that atticky little place, which I loved, and miss dearly, I sat at my desk with the top drawer pulled out and my laptop, with the broken screen that refused to show me anything but a series of crackling rectangles in saturated pastel, resting precariously upon that drawer and connected to an ugly Dell monitor with a series of cords that always got jangled up in each other and knocked over bottles of Diet Coke, I wrote a thing.
        It was for the dead old blog that Liz and I used to write for. The thing was called "If People Were Beatles Songs," and it was about which Beatles songs all the different people would be if they were Beatles songs instead of people. Like, for instance, Jay-Z would be “Baby You’re A Rich Man,” and God would be “Hey Jude.” I like that kind of thing; I think it’s really comforting. You can’t just limit somebody to being only their name and address and phone number and birthday and personality. People also have to have zodiac signs and spirit animals and spirit Beatles and spirit wine grapes and Spice Girl names from the parallel Universe they were a Spice Girl in. They have to know which Hogwarts house they’d belong to, and they have to know which Beatles song they are. If People Were Beatles Songs is the most important people-category of all, because Beatles songs are just about the only thing that exists that are as complicated and nuanced as actual people.
        Over the years, since I was twenty-four and first thought of the idea, I’ve been Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, Girl, Wild Honey Pie, and Tomorrow Never Knows, in that order. I was Tomorrow Never Knows for longest of the four and I did once believe that I’d be Tomorrow Never Knows forever. But ever since I moved to London and ripped myself out of my comfort zone of being a big fish in a small pond, Tomorrow Never Knows has seemed to have less and less to do with the way I perceive myself— or, more accurately, to the way I perceive the way I’m perceived by other people. I used to feel like I was this, like, weirdo psychedelic, like, guru who came along to shake up other peoples’ perceptions of, like, what life is all about or whatever…
        I don’t feel like that at all anymore! I feel really drab in a cool way. Drab In A Cool Way. I’m so disinterested in psychedelia, and being involved in other peoples' perceptions of things. I like for things to be simple and intense and funny and honest. I wear tortoiseshell horn-rimmed glasses and some variation of plain button-up shirt with either jeans or a miniskirt and black pointy-toed flats or penny loafers. I boringly/elegantly eat eggs and English muffins and white Burgundy and red Burgundy and pieces of fish and coffee and bagels. My favourite weather is: eighteen degrees, grey sky, makes me nostalgic for several Septembers ago. I don’t want a Dalmatian but Mark does so I’m like, fine, whatever, let’s just get a fucking Dalmatian, as long as we can name her Francine. My favourite shape is: rectangle.
        I listened to The Ballad of John and Yoko like twenty-five times over the course of two very grey days at the beginning of August. I became obsessed with the perfection of the bassline, and I thought about how special it is that only two Beatles play on that song. You know which two Beatles? John and Paul.
        Paul really smashes out that bassline. It’s the same little phrase over and over again and you can hear in your head the way you want him to switch it, to satisfy you— it’s some weird bodily impulse that explains why music exists at all in the first place— and he doesn’t, he doesn’t, he doesn’t— but then… he does! And he’s been depriving you of the thing you wanted for so long that once he does it tricks you into feeling like it’s so generous of him. What a classically Paul McCartney thing to do. (Side note: earlier today, I read an interview with Art Garfunkel where he talks about how George Harrison once came up to him at a party and said “My Paul is to me what your Paul is to you.” I don’t really know how I feel about that yet but… food for thought, you know?)
       The day I realized The Ballad of John and Yoko is my new Spirit Beatles Song was- of course- perfectly, gorgeously grey. I was on my way to the beigel store to go buy myself a (chopped herring) beigel, thinking about the bassline, and then hating on myself for thinking too hard about the bassline. What I actually should have been thinking about was the words. The words!
        John Lennon wrote them. They are my exact style and shape of words, perfect words, the way my and/or all perfect words should be. Brown and slack and lazy, like all the chillest John songs ever written by John. I’m So Tired, Mother, Jealous Guy… I love when he just writes the simple, easy truth. The truth is sharp and dull and usually a little bit funny. It’s a shrug, smirk, and an eye-roll. He says they’re going to crucify him because he gets a naughty thrill out of saying it, pronounces “Seines” incorrectly and name-drops the irrelevant Beatles Inner Circle member Peter Brown. Marriage is supposed to be the best thing that ever happens to a person but when it happens to John Lennon it’s just, you know, fine.
        The most important part of the song, to me, personally, is when he sings the word “London.” London is the name of the place where I am, the place where I am always standing or moving when I hear him say it now, and that means something very very heavy to me about the trajectory of my own life. I did it! I got myself to the place where the Beatles were! The place where John and Yoko caught the early train back to.
        And he sounds so coolly indiff, so bored of saying words out loud, when he sings it. He kind of makes it sound like his own last name: “Lon'in.” I feel so proud when I hear him sing that word.
        I am thirty years old and have accomplished so little of what I thought I would have accomplished at this point but I have accomplished two very, very major things. 1) I moved to London, and 2) I didn’t die. I’m thirty years old, my spirit Beatles song is The Ballad of John and Yoko, I should buy something tweed, or maybe I won’t, and I’ve got my whole life ahead of me. I’m feeling very coolly indiff about how intensely Ballad of John & Yokoey it’s gonna be.

The Breeders, "Safari" (Liz)

"Safari" is one of those one-in-a-million songs that, whenever it comes on, puts my head into a cool place that's completely impenetrable to whatever's going on all around me. I'm just instantly sunk into the weird world that the Breeders built from those guitars and bass that're so heavy and boxy and blocky and thick, and Kim Deal's voice is a lullaby but for staying awake and warping into some other dimension.
        I'm so fascinated by Kim Deal and the way she puts words together; I don't understand how this woman from Ohio who was a cheerleader and a lab technician ends up writing a lyric like:

I wait for you in Heaven on this perfect string of love, and drink your soup of magpies in a pottery bowl that looks as I am now: brown, round and warm

- I mean that's crazy, right? Those words were from "Fortunately Gone," and "Safari" has words about a safari and a guy, and the vocals are some kinda tropical air. In the video Kim's wearing a bomber jacket and art-teacher earrings and Kelley's dressed like a high school administrator, Tanya Donelly has hoop earrings and a scrunchie. It's too bad that lineup of the Breeders didn't exist for at least three more decades. But it's also neat that it's this flash-in-the-pan kind of situation that's so faraway now, it may as well have been completely made-up in the first place: a band as perfect and imaginary as something from Greek mythology or Norse folklore, or an ancient-Egyptian love poem inscribed on a tomb.

A List Of All The Things I Think Are Cool, by Laura Jane Faulds

Hello everyone! I made a new zine. It's called "A List Of All The Things I Think Are Cool," obviously, and it's made out of poems. It costs either £0 or $0, depending on what country you live in, since let's be real here, I'm not really in the poetry zine game for the money. I truly am in it for the love of the game. 

Anyway, I only made fifty copies of it, so you better act fast or these puppies will be gone for good! Don't miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime, email laurajanefaulds at gmail dot com with your address and preferably a sweet little comment & I'll send you a copy in the mail. It would be cool of you to send me a lil trinket back but no worries if not! We all have a lot going on in our lives and sometimes motivating yourself to get out there and mail somebody a trinket is harder than it looks. Anyway, here are a few of my favourite sentences from the zine, to give you an idea of what a ROMP it is: 

-"I'm gonna circle all the names of all the different dog breeds"

-"I NEED that Halloween back!"

-"Dying in a car crash in a wine region" 

-"Not to brag or anything, but I got the juice for free." 

"I've got a big clock & everybody knows it." 

Okay cool! Peace out everybody. Buy my free zine! 

Love,

LJ

PS: NO COPIES LEFT GUYS. IT'S OVER. LIGHTS ON, GO HOME. EVERYBODY OUT. 

The Strawberry Fields Whatever International Supper Club, Vol. II: Bao, Hot Dogs & A Berry-Themed Dessert

WORDS BY LIZ & LJ, ILLUSTRATION BY JEN

Welcome to our new (-ish!) column wherein LJ (who lives in London) and Liz (who lives in Los Angeles) will go out to eat and order the same foods and report back on those foods, from their respective continents. Here we are with bao, hot dogs, and berry-themed desserts. (You can read Vol. 1: French Onion Soup, Spaghetti, & Doughnuts HERE) 

1st COURSE: BAO

LJ: To celebrate our "one year of living in London" anniversary, Mark and I gave in to the foody bloggy Instagram publicity machine that had spent the past couple months brainwashing us into believing that our lives were valueless and would remain so until we ate dinner at London’s hottest bao hotspot, Bao, by eating dinner at London’s hottest bao hotspot, Bao. Bao was the talk of the Instagram town for most of the beginning of summer, until it was knocked off its pedestal by the jiggly magenta pork fat rectangle immersed in a puddle of different kind of fat dessert from the restaurant everyone calls “Nuno Mendes’ new place” like “Nuno” is a friend of ours who we all know personally and hang out with on the regs. In fact he is sitting across the table from me as I write these words.

I arrived at Bao a little before Mark and had expected to see a queue around the block but there was no queue! Or so I thought. It turned out that the Bao queue was positioned across the street instead of out the door, which is a deceptive place to put your queue since it tricks people who don’t initially see the queue into thinking they don’t have to queue outside a restaurant that you infamously have to queue for and that gets you extra-stoked to dine there THAT SECOND but then you’re hit with the harsh blow of realizing that you actually DO have to queue, but you’ve just gotten yourself so revved up for it you’ll do ANYTHING… I don’t know, maybe it just relates to zoning laws and I am reading too deep into things. 

        Anyway, the queue was not too long since it was mad early. A nice young Irish or Scottish (I forget- don't worry, I know the diff between the 2 accents) gent was tasked with keeping the queue-peoples' morale up and frequently came by to take our drink orders. He was peppy and upbeat in a really waitery way that I didn’t love but respected. I ordered a Diet Coke and he was distracted so said “Sorry, Coke, or Diet Coke?” and then I changed my order to a cider because that was obviously the Universe’s way of telling me not to get a soft drink, you know? Very cute cider, nice hefty glass bottle with the little apple-tag, the natural kind of cider that tastes like you chucked a bunch of apples into a vat of brown vinegar and then blended them up and ran the results through a Sodastream. It sounds like I am trying to describe something very disgusting but I like that taste. I love a vinegarious cider.

        Mark arrived and ordered a queue beer. About fifteen minutes later, our table was ready, and the Irish/Scottish guy led us inside. The restaurant was tiny, but not unpleasantly so, and paneled in pale wood— teak? I don’t know the names of all the woods but I’ve been calling it teak in my head. Bao is aesthetically neutral in a way that a dyed-in-the-wool maximalist like myself can’t help but respond to with a resounding "eh" (I WANT A STAINED GLASS YIN YANG! I WANT AN AQUA EAMES CHAIR! BE ROCOCO! BE BY DAVID SALLE!)— but I’m not too proud to admit that it’s a decent-enough space to have spent forty-five minutes of my life dining inside. Although, as an extension of the Spartan décor, the poor waitstaff are forced to wear offensively drab labcoat-style jackets as a uniform: they’re white, buttoned up the front, with Nehru-style collars and Bao logos emblazoned on the chest. They would make anyone who wasn’t a one hundred-and-thirty pound dude look like a lump of something. Fabric, marshmallows, laundry, cake. Etc.

We ordered a bunch of little bits and bobs, as one does, in London in 2015. Bao is one of those places that gives you a little notepad and you tick off which dishes you’d like to eat, which I guess is meant to be "authentic"— but the font, and the little graphics of all the different bao flavs, were unabashedly “hipstery little bits and bobs London in 2015 place”/inauthentically the thing I think they were trying to be ("like actual Taiwan"), which I found a bit confusing. But authenticity is a pretty confusing concept, "authentic" a word that begs to be confined by a set of quotation marks and accompanied by an eye-roll and a shrug. But hipsteriness is pretty straightforward, pretty point-blank. 

        On the one hand, I wish Bao would pick one avenue and then go with it, but on the other, I don’t care. Bao can do whatever it wants. It's not really my prob. Bao was good enough that I would eat at it constantly if I worked across the street, but I don’t. It's majorly out of the way for me, and everything we ate there was only kind of good. Or maybe it was properly Good, but I’d been led to believe that it was going to be… not just excellent, but MIND-BLOWING, and that too confused me— were all the Instagram food blog corporate machine bloggers who claimed that these pouchy little dough-wiches changed their lives lying? Do they not love Bao as much as they say love Bao, or do they just have lower standards than I do? Or am I wrong? Was my palate off that day? Is Bao paying them money? Can Bao pay me some money? 

Of all the dishes we ate that day, only three were actual bao. My least favorite bao was the fried chicken bao, which I can only describe as being “forgettable,” because I forget it, and my favorite was the classic bao, which has peanut powder on top. The bun was perfectly glutinous— a chilled-out, manageable level of wet— in a way that reminded me of either sushi rice or congealed white cheese on, say, a day-old baked pasta dish, eaten cold. Another thing that sounds revolting that I mean as a compliment. The peanut powder was cool because it tastes like peanuts and peanuts are delicious but I would have liked it better if it were just, you know… peanut butter. Or like a decadent peanut butter-oriented dessert or something more in that vein.

        I think that if I could have reinvented Bao to suit my exact Laura Jane needs, I would have nixed every single bell and/or whistle, and ordered two plain buns: both served hot with a generous pat of melted butter. And I wouldn’t have queued for them; I would have eaten them standing up, problematically drunk, in my kitchen at three in the morning. I probably would have said, or hummed, “Mmmm” aloud. The butter would have dribbled down my chin, and I’d’ve thought I was going to puke before I ate them, but then I wouldn’t puke. They would have cured me. 

LIZ: My bao day was two Saturdays ago, during the last gasp of L.A.'s disgusting mid-August heat wave. My friends and I had tickets to see Straight Outta Compton in the dome at Arclight early in the afternoon, so at some weird hour of the morning I drove down to Long's Family Pastry, which is a bakery in Chinatown I found by googling "best bao in los angeles." On the way I stopped at Guisado's and got a horchata spiked with cold brew and it made me feel like I could live forever.

        Chinatown was a ghost town. L.A. was hot and asleep. The only other people in the bakery were a bunch of old men drinking coffee, hanging out in the ugly plastic booths. But I'm sure at some point in the day things really get hopping at Long's Family Pastry, since everything seriously costs about a dollar and it was all so yum-looking. While I was there I decided I'd go back every Saturday for the rest of my life, which is a promise I've already broken - though this past Saturday I did go to Big Sugar in Studio City and got the most beautifully gooey/salty oatmeal cookie in the world, oh my god.

       So here's the part where I tell you I messed it all up: I thought I was getting black bean bao at Long's Family Pastry, but really what I ordered was black bean cake. And I have no regrets; my black bean cake was perfect. I don't even know if they have bao at Long's Family Pastry, so who knows what those weirdos on chowhound.com were going on about. Along with the black bean cake I got a pineapple bun and this crazy little can of iced coffee:

I brought the black bean cake home and ate it on the deck. On the ride there I'd listened to "Where Are Ü Now" and I had Justin Bieber's cute sad baby voice stuck in my head, which really enhanced the whole experience. My black bean cake was so fat and heavy and thick; each time I bit into it, my teeth sank so slowly through the nice gummy mochi and then the sweet crumbly black-beany paste. It was floppy and powdery and I held it with two hands and, after a few bites, peeled the top layer off: I like deconstructing my foods; sometimes when I'm eating sushi I take my chopsticks and pluck out the center of the roll, especially if it's an avocado chunk. I liked the textural experience of eating the top layer of mochi on its own, but then I missed the fatness of the intact cake and wished I could go back. I also had a few bites of the pineapple bun, which wasn't what I'd hoped for. I wanted it to be this insane thing where you crack it open and there's a whole world of pineapple inside: like, pineapple that's been smashed up and thrown into the oven until the sugar's crystallized, and now it's all sticky and sticks to your sticky fingers. Instead it was some plain old fluffy bun vaguely flavored with essence of pineapple. Whatever. This is my black bean cake btw:

After about half the black bean cake I felt full of mochi, so I wrapped the cake back up and stuck it in the fridge, then went to meet my people at the Arclight "Cineramadome." My review of Straight Outta Compton is I loved it and I mostly don't care that it's all sweetened up and sanitized. Like Eazy says to Cube: I like after-school specials. It gave me goosebumps at least half a dozen times and I cried a little and was completely unbored for the whole two and a half hours, and that all constitutes a successful movie-going experience for me.

       That night my pals went to see Hannibal Buress at the Bootleg but I skipped it, since I just saw Hannibal Buress like a month ago and really I just wanted to stay home and go swimming and listen to my currently fave band, Spoon. Before getting into the pool I stood at my kitchen counter and ate the rest of the black bean cake and read the pieces about clams and vermouth from the previous Sunday's New York Times, listening to "Holiday in Waikiki" by the Kinks and "When You Dance I Can Really Love" by Neil Young and "Super Stupid" by Funkadelic and "The Bed's Too Big Without You" by the Police and "Pressure Drop" by the Clash. Then I made myself a white wine spritzer with riesling and Le Croix pineapple-strawberry, went down to the pool and put Spoon on, swam and swam and swam and swam. I thought a lot about how every swimming-pool movie scene shot from underwater is beautiful, and also about when Betty Draper says "Night swimming: it's divine" to Roger Sterling in season one. And I thought about how the shimmery-quivery thing that happens on the floor of the pool from the reflection of our Christmas lights matched up really nicely with the synth on They Want My Soul, and how I value and admire Spoon because they're so elegant about being immoderately romantic. I can't remember which Spoon songs I listened to but I'm sure I played "Anything You Want," which is my seventh or eighth favorite Spoon song right now, and maybe of all time: