A Mixtape for Those Who Refuse to Be Played Like a Penny-Cent Trick Deck of Cards

(I'm doing a thing where I custom-make Spotify playlists for everyone who wants one. If you want one too, read "the guidelines" here and email me here.)

All right this one's for Anne, who asked for "a playlist for that time when your best friend stops talking to you because you've suddenly begun making out with her ex-boyfriend, even though they broke up two years ago and she's since been dating and fell in love with a girl." It's sassy and vitriolic and I'm especially passionate about the inclusion of "None of Your Business." And "Effect and Cause" too, mostly because "You're like a little girl yelling at her brother 'cause she lost his ball" is what I want to say to anyone who ever gets mad at me. Also, in high school, this cute skater boy two grades behind me used to wear a Breeders shirt that said "I Just Wanna Get Along (Bitch)" and I'm retroactively so impressed with him right now.

Here's the tracklist:

Thing of the Week: A Stranger's Straight to Hell Tattoo; This Weird Thing Some Chick Said on 'Chopped' Last Weekend; How Should A Person Be?

LJ'S THING OF THE WEEK: A Stranger's Straight to Hell Tattoo 

Two days ago my friend Charlie wrote me a text message reading Just put on lose this skin at a 4th of July party and a friend said he saw Joe & the mescaleros and tymon played it and I'm eating noodle salad, which would have been the best Clash-related thing that happened to me this week if a stranger with a Straight to Hell tattoo hadn't come into my work the next day. But what happened was a stranger with a Straight to Hell tattoo came into my work the next day, and I loved him.  

        The stranger's Straight to Hell tattoo was of the cards/skull/words picture from the Straight to Hell single seen above (only minus the words "The Clash," which makes it cooler in my opinion because to get it you have to be in the know), and it was on the inside of his left forearm. I didn't fall in love with him, because he was old, but in the wake of this event it has become obvious that I probably couldn't fall in love with anybody who doesn't have a Straight to Hell tattoo, so that complicates things. 

        When I first saw the stranger's tattoo, I freaked out. I was deliriously exhausted as it was, and a weird thing happened to my body. My jubilation made me light-headed, and I thought I might pass out. "OH MY GOD I LOVE YOUR STRAIGHT TO HELL TATTOO SO MUCH," I exclaimed, and he seemed a bit taken aback, so I calmed down and cleared my throat and told him, "Straight to Hell is my favorite Clash song," which was when he came around to me. "Me too," he said, "Since I was eighteen." 

       I wanted to break down and sob into his arms and tell him every single Clash-related thing that's ever happened to me; instead I cleared out my head a bit and tried to tersely and coherently explain as much as I could about my relationship with the Clash within the confines of a socially acceptable timeframe. We shared a heavy but brief exchange about the concept of #CLASHLIFE, and by the end we were both a little teary-eyed. When he left he called me "Sweetheart" in the Clashiest and least-sleazy way any middle-aged man could ever call a young woman sweetheart. It's just like Joe Strummer said: "Without people, you're nothing."

LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: This Weird Thing Some Chick Said on Chopped Last Weekend 

 

Do you guys ever watch Chopped? It's this show on the Food Network where four chefs compete for $10,000 and there's three rounds and in each round the contestants are given four bonkers ingredients and 20 or 30 minutes to create a dish from said ingredients. It's so good, I'm addicted, I highly recommend it. Last weekend there was an episode in which one of the contestants was this super-wacky Laurie Anderson-esque chef named Gillie Holme (that's her, on the left) and in the first round the chefs were given peking duck, cape gooseberries, biscuit dough, and eggplant to make their appetizer. Chef Gillie was kind of an asshole about the biscuit dough ("hideous," she called it) and for some reason it took her like nine years to figure out how to open the tube. Her dish was kinda lame; she didn't really do much to "marry" the ingredients or whatever the hell, and the judges gave her major guff about just baking up the biscuit and flopping it down on the plate. But then Gillie said this amazing thing, while defending her biscuit decision to the judges: "I would like each of you to go with me on the journey of assembling your own interesting biscuit," she told them. It didn't fly, of course; Chef Gillie was "chopped" in the first round. But I think that's a really cool sentiment. We should all join each other on the journey of assembling our own interesting biscuits: free-spirited and free-thinking, yet totally united and supportive of one another's striving to create the yummiest, most interesting biscuit we can. That's so beautiful, guys. I am so thankful for Chef Gillie.

JEN'S THING OF THE WEEK: How Should A Person Be? 

I started reading Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? On Tuesday. I’m almost finished and I wish I wasn’t. I’m really loving this book. I love it. I feel excited and acknowledged. It makes you (me) want to make art and talk. It’s about thinking and not and being alive and trying to make art as a woman right now and female friendships and sex and email and everything else, really.  Believe the hype. A special bonus is that Sheila is a writer living in Toronto drinking Campari & sodas so I am thinking of LJ often while reading.

I Want Men to Look Like "Cape Cod on LSD"

Twice a year comes the bittersweet day when I look at Thom Browne's new collection and have my mind blown by his endless nailing of the whimsical/cerebral dichotomy while simultaneously wanting to move away from the world because men don't dress like this and never will and why does everything have to be so boring and drab. Let's all go live in an abandoned hotel in Cape Cod this summer; maybe if we really put our minds to it/ take enough acid, cargo shorts & Aeropostale t-shirts will start to look like this. Maybe that's the best we can ever do. 

My Top 6 Summertime Muses

1. "HOLD IT NOW, HIT IT" BEASTIE BOYS

Licensed to Ill came out when I was eight-years-old, which means my sense of irony was not quite sophisticated enough to grasp that the whole thing was a big joke. I thought Mike and Adam and Adam were these awful and dangerous men who put some girls in cages and threw beer cans at other girls' faces; I also had some vague notion that if you went to see the Beastie Boys in concert everyone in the crowd would spend the entire night violently headbanging and setting each other's hair on fire and throwing up all over the place. I feared the Beastie Boys, but was also intrigued by them.

For a few weeks after MCA died, I watched the "Hold It Now, Hit It" video multiple times a day. They look like they're having so much fun, and that makes me happy and warms up my heart. They're the goofiest goofballs and while part of me wishes I'd known that side of them back in the day, I also think it's sort of neat to have "legitimate fear of the Beastie Boys" as part of my childhood history. Here's what I love most about them in "Hold It Now, Hit It":

-MCA looks so good. Wifebeater + plaid shorts + necklace + skateboard is such a good look, for MCA, in 1986. I love when he ties his sweatshirt to his head. I like his teeth and scruff.

-It's so cute to me how Ad-Rock just makes the same face over and over again throughout the entire video. His acne's cute too. This is the most I've ever liked Ad-Rock, apart from the part in the "Hey Ladies" video when he talks with his mouth full.

-Mike D's such a nerd. No wonder the other two used to gang up on him all the time and dump potted plants on him while he was sleeping.  Mike D is my favorite Beastie Boy.

-Such good dancing! The dancing at 1:31-1:40 is my favorite. If you're sad or stressed, just watch that dancing; I bet you'll feel at least a little bit better.

2. THE NEW CAT POWER SONG

I think I read an interview with Chan Marshall once and it got me down, and then I never read another interview with Chan Marshall again. I'd rather just make up my own idea of "what Chan Marshall's like," drawing mostly on her whole Miami/Malibu thing, and her hair, and her voice, and the whole sexy/weary/thunderstormy vibe of the Cat Power songs I love the most. I like thinking she's some weird bronzey babe who's good at being at the beach, a beautiful swimmer who's never scared of the sun, drinking coconut milk out of coconuts and rolling her own perfumey cigarettes and all the time she just glistens. "Ruin" really glistens too, especially on the guitar parts that sound like something you'd hear in a bar on a yacht in 1981. I love the chill-sanctimonious vibe of the lyrics just before the chorus and I love the part where she goes "argenteen chee-lay may-hee-co, taiwan" -- it makes me feel so glamorous and cosmopolitan, singing along in my head when I'm walking down the scuzziest part of Sunset Boulevard to get a turkey sandwich from the Subway at the laundromat. It's going to sound so good on the beach.

8 Life Lessons Learned from The Darjeeling Limited

BY ELIZABETH BARKER & LAURA JANE FAULDS (ILLUSTRATION BY JEN MAY)

I CARE ABOUT "THIS TIME TOMORROW" BY THE KINKS ON AT LEAST SEVEN DIFFERENT LEVELS (LJ) 

Once last summer, I called in sick to work because fuck work. I rolled myself a joint without a filter and smoked it while walking through a labyrinth of alleyways, on a weeknight, and I think I was listening to Rubber Soul. I walked to the park and sat under a tree and listened to Tomorrow Never Knows and imagined myself as a famous writer in the future kissing a dude I really should never be thinking about, kind of like it was a movie, set in my future self's kickass apartment and the part where Tomorrow Never Knows really kicks in was when he'd kiss me-
       "WHOA WHOA WHOA HOLD UP LAURA JANE," I thought, "You really need to never be thinking about things like this, ever," so then I put a year-long Fatwa on myself listening to Tomorrow Never Knows because, hey, you know, sometimes tomorrow knows, you know? And then there was a space with no music. "What's ANY SONG IN THE WORLD I can be listening to that isn't going to snap me into losertown daydream fantasyland about assholes" I asked myself, and scrolled down to K as in Kinks because my love for Ray Davies overrides my love for any and all other men I have loved, wished to love, and ever will love. I chose This Time Tomorrow.
      I went outside for a second, in the middle of writing this paragraph, to go sit on my porch and smoke a cigarette and try to hear This Time Tomorrow on headphones the way it sounded then, when I thought "Oh, okay, wow, okay, this is literally the most beautiful song that has ever been written," but I think that what happens is that when you love a song, you only get one Great Listen of it- you loved it before the Great Listen, and you'll love it after the Great Listen, but you'll never get back to the Great Listen itself. It's impossible to have your mind blown by the same thing twice.
      Tonight, I kept tuning it out to watch my across-the-street neighbours celebrate Italy winning a soccer game; mostly, it made me think of the word sandpaper, and I liked And I watch the clouds as they sadly pass me by- I relate to Ray Davies' tendency toward sadness, to being the mopey type of guy you'd have to be to see the clouds as something sad. I don't know, I don't know about "most people," but I get the impression that clouds are for most people a light, happy thing.
       I came back upstairs and searched "liz barker this time tomorrow" in my gmail to find out what I wrote her last July 11th, when I came back upstairs from having my mind blown and emailed Liz Barker a Youtube of the song and the question "What does this song sound like to you? (Hahaha, such stoned phrasing). She wrote back, "my brain is mush and all i can think is it sounds like the beginning of 'the darjeeling limited.' also, it sounds nice. what does it sound like to you?" and I wrote back "THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SONG EVER WRITTEN," but I thought she was confused. I thought she was confused about the Kinks. I thought she was mixing up This Time Tomorrow with Strangers, the only Kinks song I remembered being in The Darjeeling LImited, which I'd only seen once, back when I'd decided I was too cool for Wes Anderson, which was a bad decision. I am not and was never too cool for Wes Anderson; being too cool for Wes Anderson means being too cool for great art, and if you think that great art is a thing it's possible to be too cool for, you're lame. Sorry! You just are. 
        I re-watched The Darjeeling Limited the next day, and as it turned out, I'd been wrong. This Time Tomorrow is very much a part of the beginning of The Darjeeling Limited, and it goes like: 

Lazing in the living room with a song too beautiful to be blasting overtop of my roommate getting bleary in the kitchen with his buddies, I guess I'll probably write about this summer next summer huh, I might be impervious to the song alone forever but that night I thought "I'm the kind of person who always has to run for the train, but makes it," and it still makes me shiver, all of it, and that's what my half of this story's all about.

        It's about being a train-runner-catcher, a shaky-handed sunglasses-wearer, a pill-popping belt-borrower, sad-eyed snake-loser, a fidgety kid-killer. It's about how deeply I relate to the character of Peter Whitman, the Adrien Brody brother; I thought I had some things to say about Jack/Jason Schwartzman and Francis/Owen Wilson, and also Wes Anderson himself, but I ended up deleting them. It's like how when you have a crush on someone, you'll quietly orchestrate all conversations to veer in the direction of whatever subject matter might prompt your fellow conversation-haver to say his name, and just hearing it, it thrills you. 

Joe Strummer Jughead, & Other Punk Rock Archie Things

In the early 1980s, Jughead Jones became punk rock for a bit. It doesn't surprise me one bit that the punk rock ethos helped him externalize some of his pent-up aggression toward his dull friend Archie. 

Are you KIDDING me? Congratulations on being the hugest closed-minded killjoy ever, Archie Andrews. 

A Mixtape for Rising Above the Bitches and Pettin' Good Dogs in the Sweet, Sweet Sunshine

BY LIZ

(I'm doing a thing where I custom-make Spotify playlists for everyone who wants one. If you want one too, read "the guidelines" here and email me here.)

This playlist's for Saaniya, who requests "a mixtape for when you're really sad because people are shitty and mean and talk only about other people but then you go out on a walk and listen to good stuff and pet some dogs and the weather is awesome and you're happy again." I made the songs start off all hotly self-righteous/indignant and then slowly transition to chill and reflective and transcendent and lovely. The turning point's "Obvious" by Jane's Addiction, which is a perfect song for when you're trying to rise above the trash-talkers -- I always sing the line "Fools don't fit in the boots that I tread in" out loud whenever I listen to it.

BTW, the middle pic above was taken by my friend Casey Revkin -- that's her dog Baxter, who often tries to dance with me and/or eat my feet. He's a good dog and a cool buddy.

Here's the tracklist: