Bat For Lashes – Daniel

Have I mentioned how much I love this song? I should have mentioned that before now.

Cold, Hard Facts

From Animals Talking in all Caps

What 2011 Sounded Like in My World

Oh 2011. What a year you’ve been. Such awful lows, such joyous joys. Such contentment, finally found. So many new things to worry about. The realization that we all just slide from crisis to crisis, all our lives, and it’s the quiet spaces in between that we must recognize and enjoy. Recognizing and enjoying those spaces, finally. In looking at this list, this year was a little sad, a little angry, and hell of a lot of determined.

I know all my music wasn’t captured in 2011, because I synced my iPod less, and when I did the sheer volume of songs was too much for the last.fm scrobbler, I think. So I have adjusted this list (unfairly weighted toward F+TM and against the Decemberists) to reflect what the year really sounded like. So, according to last.fm and my own memory, these were the most-played songs in my world in 2011. (You can play most of these songs if you right-click and open them in a new tab. But also please buy them and support these artists. Because they do amazing things.)

1. Imogen Heap –Wait It Out This is one of those songs that you find when you’re in that particular place that no one, ever, could possibly understand. Not even with the gentlest or most emphatic of explanations, you’re alone in this feeling forever. And then there’s a song, and that song is exactly what you feel, and suddenly the world is not so foreign-seeming. It’s about waiting for things to feel right again, and how sometimes all the things you have feel meaningless when they’re not the thing you want. Fave Lyric: Everybody says that times heals everything. But what of the wretched hollow? The endless in-between?
2. Florence + the Machine – No Light, No Light This year there was a new F+TM album. I didn’t think I could love it as much as the last one. I love it just as much, maybe more in some ways. She has the most spectacular, delicious pain. It’s like she’s doing you a favor by feeling it for you. Fave Lyric: You can’t choose what stays and what fades away.
3. William Fitzsimmons – I Don’t Feel It Anymore I’ve loved this song for a few years now, but this year it found its way onto all my playlists. It’s about things ending, and the ending being right, and it hurting anyway. Also, he’s coming to the Firebird in the spring, and if you’re in StL you should go. Fave Lyric: I want back the years that you took when I was young.
4. Florence + the Machine – Shake It Out This is a song about being happy anyway. Learning to be happy as a grim, determined, joyful choice. Fave Lyric: It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back, so shake him off. Also: I am done with my graceless heart, so tonight I’m gonna cut it out and then restart.
5. Griffin House – Better Than Love Sometimes you just want a love song, don’t you? A reminder that once in the world someone loved someone else, and it lasted at least as long as it took to write and record a song. It’s all well and good to recognize pain, but sometimes you have to recognize gentleness and beauty, too, even if you don’t really believe in it. Fave Lyric: You turned my life around. You made it okay to let you down.
6. The Decemberists – Down By The Water I don’t actually remember listening to this song that much, but I think I must have done it just because I love the way my voice sounds on that first “down by the water” line. Growly and real. I don’t know, it’s just not fucking around, this song. It’s straightforward. Maybe I needed that. And the way those words rub together, they’re amazing.
7. The Decemberists –Don’t Carry It All This is a song about community, and being a decent fucking human among other decent fucking humans. Another thing for which I hungered this year. Fave Lyric: So raise a glass to turnings of the season. And watch it as it arcs towards the sun. And you must bear your neighbor’s burden within reason. And your labors will be borne when all is done
8. Florence + the Machine – What The Water Gave Me Big and hollow and beautiful. All Virginia Woolf and the peace of giving up, and what you find in that place. Morbid, if you think if it that way. Which I don’t. Fave Lyric: And oh poor Atlas, it was a beast of a burden.
9. Griffin House –The Guy That Says Goodbye To You Again, Griffin House has these beautiful love songs. I thought this one was pretty and well written, but when I went to see him in Nashville and he played this, I straight up bawled like a calf. I guess sometimes we all really need to hear that we’re amazing and we’re worthy of love, and just because someone else doesn’t think so doesn’t mean they’re right.
10. The Decemberists – Won’t Want for Love – This is some intense rock ballad kick ass voice cracking joy driving music right here. The things I can make my voice do along with this song give me endorphin rushes. Fave Lyric: And I may swoon from all this swelling, but I won’t want for love.
11. Laura Veirs – Wide-Eyed, Legless I fell in love with this song in the spring and never stopped listening to it. To me this song is about being alone and being clear-eyed. But there are so many other layers here, of nostalgia and just plain beautiful sound and skillfull use of words. Goddamn, listening to it again now and loving it again. Fave Lyric: No more looking back, looking back, looking back, faded epitaphs.
12. The Decemberists – Rise To Me This song takes all your uncertainty away. Everything is forever, and it’s all going to be okay. Fave Lyric: I am gonna stand my ground. You rise to me and I’ll blow you down.
13. The Ting Tings – We Walk The Ting Tings. So happy! So necessary this year. This song is about running your own shit and making your own options. Fave Lyric: We got the choice if it all goes wrong. We walk.
14. The Decemberists – Calamity Song This song is like the Decemberists in disguise as REM back when I loved REM. This song is all happy nonsense and driving around and I just like to listen to it.
15. The Decemberists – Dear Avery This song is about reaching out to someone who doesn’t necessarily want to be reached out to. Maybe it’s also about reaching out to yourself. Sweet and sad. Fave Lyric: There are times life will rattle your bones and will bend your limbs.
16. Florence + the Machine – Lover To Lover This song is about trying to find yourself, or find something else, or maybe not even knowing what the fuck you’re looking for. And that being okay, since the journey is the thing. It always reminds me of my friend Kristen. Kristen you should buy this album. Have you bought this album?
17. Dr. Dre – Let Me Ride I went through a phase this summer in which I would only listen to Dr. Dre. Sometimes you’re just pissed off, you know?
18. Jim Croce –One Less Set Of Footsteps I rediscovered this album this fall. So many memories here, I always listened to this as a child with my mom. Love this whole greatest hits album, and this song in particular. This one is about taking the fuck off, and by the way, fuck you. When I was young I never understood the line about the jeans on the door. Like, who hung their jeans on the door? And really, still. Who hangs their jeans on the door? Anyway. Fave Lyric: If that’s the way that you want it, well it’s the way I want it more.
19. Tom T. Hall –That’s How I Got To Memphis So sad. This song is so sad. And hopeful. And also sad. Goddamn I love Tom T. Hall. So much. That line at the beginning “If you love somebody enough…” Indeed. If you do.
20. Themselves – Good People Check This is another one I listened to a lot this summer. Angry, fuck you music. About people who are full of crap. Fave Lyric: You can tell a lot about a man from the sound of his music. Yours is hollow sounding.

Those are the top 20, and here are a few I couldn’t leave out.

Jeremy Messersmith Dead End Job. Just pure heartbreak about doing anything you can for someone who won’t do shit for you. If you’re not listening to Jeremy Messersmith, you really should be.

Public Image Limited – The Order of Death. A good reminder, always, of the difference between what you want and what you end up with. And that you’re by far not the only person that’s happened to. So be angry, but get over it.

And that’s it! That’s what 2011 sounded like, here in my world.  A good year. Well done, music. You got me through like you always do.

Consuming Media Consumption

I used to listen to NPR because it made me feel smart. I liked to hear the issues of the day and learn more. I liked to talk to other people about “Things I Heard on NPR This Morning.” Often I was offended, or heartbroken to hear that news, but I appreciated the insightful commentary, and I liked learning new things. Listening to NPR made me feel like a grownup. I liberal, worldly grownup.

I stopped reading the New York Review of Books in 2005 because it continuously made me feel frustrated and stupid. Every article I read felt like an assemblage of knowledge I’d somehow skipped, and therefore an accusation of idiocy and sloth. Why did I not know these things about the situation in Palestine, the history of the Congo? About André Malraux? I felt as if every richly detail-laden article was a rebuke, more knowledge that I should have acquired by now. How did I bumble through the world not knowing the definition of precoetanean?

I think a lot of that came from some internalized inferiority regarding my middle-class education. I went to an OK high school, and found it no challenge. I went to an OK college, and found it no challenge either. I’ve always thought there was some brilliant upper-class of others, the people who really understood what was going on, the people who read the classics and had encyclopedic knowledge of pretty much everything that ever happened in world history and could also pithily sum up all current events by referencing Molière. And then they’d laugh together and drink red wine and manage their wealth for awhile.

It took me a long time to realize that the purpose of the articles in the NYROB was to educate the reader. That this was not a compendium of facts everyone else in the world knew, it was meant to give readers a framework to understand current written works, and see how they fit into history and (if existing) the body of work already surrounding that particular issue. (It seems strange to me, now, that I didn’t understand that. I think maybe the word “review” was what confused me. That and the aforementioned inferiority thing.)  But gradually, as I became less defensive about those things I didn’t know, I was able to embrace learning as an adult. Educating myself, continuing to gain new knowledge, not because I was playing catch-up with the rest of “educated” society, but just because I wanted to know more things. Knowing things is awesome. And everyone I know is way smarter than me in some area. Everyone has their specialty, and constantly expecting myself to have no knowledge gaps at all is pretentious and obnoxious and stressful, and takes away the joy of learning things from people I trust and respect.

That said, I still listen to NPR, and doing so still makes me feel smart. But now it makes me feel that way not because I am learning new things, but because I can now identify as total horseshit 85% of what the commentators on NPR have to say. Not only do I gain in facts as I age, I gain in the certainty of my own ability to apply logic. So I hear what they’re saying, and I know they’re full of horseshit, and that does make me feel smart. But not in a self-congratulatory, pleased way. In a sad, aggravated way.

Anyway, the point of this all is that my $3.95/month Kindle subscription to the New York Review of Books is the best media I’ve spent money on this year. Yay for learning things, yay for not feeling guilty for needing to learn them, yay for additional facts leading to better reasoning ability. And especial yay for confidence that your brain is going to help you make your way in the world.

Half-Thoughts

A very happy and busy life has been getting in the way of my blogging for the past several months. And that’s just fine, I think. I miss sitting down and forming my thoughts into a semi-choate wordmass, but I will get back to that at some point. For now I just like letting them swirl around in my head, like happy iridescent fish who’ve just been fed.

Anyway, was reading NYROB review of “Boomerang” about the global financial quagmire we’re in. (I’ve yet to read the book, too much on my reading list.) And according to the review the book deals with how the financial crisis played out differently in each country, depending on its moral character. Which plays into a half-formed thought I have, or a few of them, about how a decline in (gasp) morality (ungasp) is part of what has led to our financial undoing. And that decline in personal morality has perhaps followed the decline in organized religion in most of the Western world. (Insofar as organized religion prescribed the ways people were expected and allowed to behave, and most communities’ cohesive religious attitudes formed societies that were self-policing, so this code of ethics was enforced by everyone. The decline of organized religion combined with industrialization thus leading to the dissolution of the sense of community that keeps people acting right.)

Now, far from arguing that we need a return to religion, which I loathe for all its atrocities and hocus pocus nonsensical insistence that everyone abandon logic, I am starting to wonder if what we’re in now is not some kind of proving ground for humanity. Can we move PAST personal morality dictated by supernatural entities and enforced by the mob, to a new kind of personal and collective morality, in which we all act in the ways that best support our society? And to do that, do we have to unglobalize ourselves, and get back to tribes that share core values? Or are there some universal human values that we can agree on? And how many hundreds or thousands of years will it be until we reach that consensus?

But until we reject avarice and irresponsibility and consumption WITHOUT using religion as our reason for doing so, until we just understand that some things are wrong because they make life worse for everybody, I believe things will continue to cycle good/bad (probably with some violence thrown in to get us back to good, before we decline back to bad.) Anyway, that’s today’s half-thought. Maybe some of you will finish digesting it for me, I am on to other things.

Gradient Nails

Finally attempted gradient nails! I don’t think they’re too bad for my first try. There are a lot of different methods for doing this, using sponges and brushes and orange sticks and doing the dark color first and doing the light color first, etc. So I did a base coat of a pale neutral, then a light coat of the pale purple, then a thin stripe of the dark purple, covering the top 3/4 of the nail with a light glitter polish after. I think there’s too much difference between the light and dark here, and the glitter coat is too heavy, I might switch to China Glaze Fairy Dust next time, instead of the OPI DS Coronation. The two purples are also OPI, sorry I don’t have those names with me at the moment.

These look way cooler in motion than they do in a still. I really like them. Kinda creepy and strange with this dark purple.