I Want To Live In A Wine Cellar

BY LJ

I am moving to England in the summertime. In England, I am going to do a lot of things, and a very important one of them is: become a “chill sommelier.” A chill sommelier is basically the same as a regular sommelier, only the chill sommelier is not an asshole. For the past ten years, since the very day I first saw Sideways, my #1 goal in life has been to make sure I am the exact human opposite of Paul Giamatti's character, AKA the worst grossest human being ever to have fake-existed, whose gross name, it turns out, is "Miles." Of course his name is Miles. 

Unfortunately, now that I am becoming a sommelier, it is no longer possible for me to be "Miles"'s exact human opposite. We'll just have too much in common, wine-wise, though I don't think Miles was even a sommelier. I think he was just a (barf) "wine enthusiast." But I can still strive to be the least Miles-y sommelier there ever was. The least douchey dickbag sommelier with a chill fun-loving spirit this world has ever known. I'm even going to make business cards, or get somebody else to make me some, that literally say “LAURA JANE FAULDS: Chill Sommelier.” And then people who want a chill sommelier will know to hire me and not some uppity uptight old-timey sommelier who looks like the candelabra from Beauty and the Beast. I mean can you even begin to imagine how many sommeliers there are out there who aren’t chill? Like, all the seventy year old man sommeliers in Paris who wear waistcoats? Or any French city? That’s where I come in. The sommeliers need me, to lighten up their rep. 

The other day, I bought my boyfriend some really shitty wine. Obviously I wasn’t intending for it to be shitty. It just was. I’m not a sommelier yet. We were watching the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad (ew- saying "penultimate" was so not chill sommelier of me. I bet douchey Milesy sommeliers say "penultimate" soooo much. Sorry about that) when Mark asked me, "Should I make myself a cup of coffee, or should I have another glass of wine?" I had another sip of the shitty wine to confirm whether or not it was worth drinking another glass of, and I said his shitty wine tasted like the shitty dregs of coffee you would find at the bottom of one of those clear brown-handled coffee pots, which has been sitting around for hours at a truckstop diner in the middle of, like, Kentucky, and there’s still smoking allowed in the diner because it’s, like, 1987, so it also tasted a bit like cigarette smoke. I guess my point was maybe that he shouldn't have coffee. Since I detected notes of coffee in the wine. There’s some romance in that!” I explained, earnestly. 

The moral of the story is that Mark had a cup of coffee and another glass of wine, and that the process leading up to his decision was a great example of my future chill sommelier style in its nascence. Imagine if you went to a restaurant and the descriptions of all the wines on the wine list were winding and verbose and heavy on the metaphor? And written in my insane narrative voice? You'd have to be either boring or an idiot to not be all the hell over that, so welcome to London wine culture circa 2017 starring Laura Jane Faulds as London’s great pioneer of the legendary "chill sommelier" movement.

I love white wine more than I love red wine. I want to get a tattoo that says WW>, which means "white wine over everything." I also want to open a white wine bar called WW> that only sells white wine and cute snacks such as beet salad or a clever little take on a peach cobbler. There have been two unforgettable moments in my life when taking my first sip of a glass of white wine did something insane and gorgeous to me, something that changed me forever, having felt so blissful and isolated inside of those tastes and those smells and even those chilled, physical glasses. I have always wished to devote my time on this planet to frivolity and ephemera. And so I have decided to center my professional life around chasing down more and more of those moments. I want to trap myself inside of those sips and I want to live in them forever. And I want to be drunk all the time. 

When I was a little kid I had an L-shaped desk that slotted into one corner of my bedroom. I liked to sit in the nook under the desk and peek out from behind my desk chair. I have always loved existing in nooks more than I've loved existing anywhere else, except maybe by the water. And wine cellars are the ultimate nooks: they are nooks that have wine in them! They are dark and dank and probably smell weird. They're like the grotto where Ariel keeps all her kooky treasures in The Little Mermaid (2 Disney refs in this guy; cool), except instead of dinglehoppers they have wine in them! 

Once I was lying in bed, and I was very stoned, and started reciting the Hare Krishna mantra to make myself fall asleep. I was high enough to feel connected to how powerful those words were. I thought about how many millions and billions of times those words had been recited been recited by human beings over the course of thousands and thousands of years. It occurred to me that perhaps every time those words were spoken, the actual physical words as blank, faceless objects, were imbued with extra power. And so to recite the Hare Krishna mantra in 2014 meant more than it did to recite the Hare Krishna mantra in 701 or 1865. And as I whispered those words over and over I started to feel like those words were not the words as I was saying them. They were every time they'd ever been spoken at once. I certainly didn't fall asleep right then. 

Wine makes me feel the same way. It is the ultimate nostalgia, the taste of the passage of time. There's a bottle of champagne that sank on a ship in 1907, they found it underwater, that today a person can buy. I know if I drank it I could taste the ocean. You can teach yourself to detect notes of lychee and oak and roses and currants but I know if I drank it I could taste terror and the ocean. I think if I worked hard enough, I could teach myself to taste a person's life. 

Nicole Kidman in 'The Paperboy' Makes Me Want to Wear Canary-Yellow & Fake Eyelashes at the Same Time, Forever

BY LIZ

Basically I'll watch any movie with Matthew McConaughey in it, and one of the few McConaughemovies streaming on Netflix is The Paperboy, which I kind of hated but also loved a little. It's set in Florida in 1969 and it's directed by Lee Daniels; it's gruesome as hell and it gave me awful, insomnia-triggering nightmares on Sunday night. But then there are also some Paperboy moments that are so beautiful - mostly because of Nicole Kidman, whom I'd never thought to care about before. She plays a woman from Alabama named Charlotte Bless who gets her kicks writing love letters to prisoners, including a convicted murderer named Hillary Van Wetter, who's played by John Cusack and so hideously scary that I'm pretty sure my John Cusack feelings are now fucked for life.

After watching The Paperboy I read a bunch of reviews of it, and a lot of dude reviewers were whining about how there's so many shots of Zac Efron in his underwear. But I really hardly even noticed that; I was too busy loving Nicole Kidman. A lot of the reviews also make a deal about stuff like her blowjob-pantomime scene and the part where she pees on Zac Efron at the beach, but I'm more fascinated by the way Charlotte's got a fucked-up heart and lust for darkness but she's also the brightest thing. She's always in canary-yellow and hot-pink and crazy florals and dreamy blue, and all that swirly-girliness is a cool contrast to her infatuation with exceptionally bad men. She looks like Brigitte Bardot and a trashy Barbie doll, and she makes me wish the word "sexpot" weren't stupidly obsolete these days. But then at the same time there's this mystical/groovy quality to her: like, she talks about how people in love have telepathic powers and she ends a lot of sentences with the word "dig," used interrogatively, in her tough Alabama accent. I don't want to be her, but I could watch her talk and walk around for hours on end.

Mostly I wish I could take her character (along with Matthew McConaughey's and Zac Efron's and Macy Gray's), and put them in another movie with a storyline that's more indulgent of my excessively romantic temperament. That movie could keep a lot of actual moments from The Paperboy and use them to make something more uniformly dreamy, like the part where Charlotte and Jack dance in the rain:

It could also have a bunch of these other shots of Charlotte being amazing. I don't know, I just think tiger print + baby-pink lipstick is a pretty smart move.

And those sunglasses are so fly. And I love her headscarf. The beach scene has this really gorgeous shot of Zac Efron swimming really far out into the ocean, maybe some of the best movie-swimming I've ever seen, and then there's an equally gorgeous shot of some jellyfish floating up to him underwater (which then turns terrifying, and ends with the aforementioned Nicole-Kidman-peeing-on-Zac-Efron bit, which I'm just not that high on).

Hurray For John & Yoko! Cries Bob Dylan

Yesterday in the middle of walking home from running errands and listening to Love Minus Zero/ No Limit it occurred to me that Bob Dylan has penmanship, and that it inevitably must look like something. I swear I've never been so grateful for the Internet as I was last night, walking in the front door of my apartment and Googling "bob dylan penmanship" before I even took off my shoes. It's such a bummer to think about all the poor people from the 1980s who walked home listening to Love Minus Zero and wondering what Bob Dylan's penmanship looked like but then had to wait for Rolling Stone magazine to print an image of it or whatever.  

Bob Dylan writes cute, sassy little As. I feel like here you can definitely tell that he's a Gemini: 

And this is sweet:

But clearly the John & Yoko letter is the kicker here. Its coolness obviously goes way beyond the novelty of seeing what Bob Dylan's penmanship looks like. I think so much about the Bob Dylan lyric Name me someone who's not a parasite, and I'll go out and say a prayer for him- that sentence is literally one of the top five things I think about, ever. I like how Bob Dylan is always kind of bummed out about his own having to be an asshole. He wants not to be an asshole! But the cruddy old world makes it so darn tough. 

John and Yoko, however, are not parasites! So he's so sweet and gorgeous about them! "They help others to see pure light," he thinks. Me too, Bob Dylan! I think so too. 

-LJ

We Have New Little Beatles Books For Sale

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

Low is for January, Obviously

BY LJ

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. 

Two Things That Create A Really Cool Atmosphere Together

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.

-Liz

Everyone I'm in Love with in the Big Star Movie

BY LIZ

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. 

iii. JODY STEPHENS