New Month, New Music

Back when I was in school, I used to be pretty diligent about writing a monthly post on new-to-me music. It was easier then because I spent a lot of time on Pandora and Hypem as I studied, which I did basically, um, all the time.

New-ish songs are not as easy to come by these days, but I do run across them from time to time. Behold:

• Neon Indian "Polish Girl": Anything that sounds vaguely 80s, has lots of synthesizers and contains vague, romantic lyrics is a winner in my book.
• Foster the People, "Don't Stop": I am the first to admit I had Foster the People pegged as a one-hit wonder. I am glad I was wrong.
• The Xx v. Deadmau5, "I Remember Shelter": This song is very hypnotizing. I listen to it on repeat at work so I can slip into a groove. Sometimes, it's a little too successful and literally hours will pass before I snap out of my self-induced trance.
• Brazilian Girls, "Don't Stop": This song is not at all new. I'm not sure why, but for some reason last week I really was in the mood to hear it a lot. I think the lead singer's voice is very sexy. It's easy to overdo the kittenish, cooing, sighing thing, but I think she does it just enough to be appealing.
• Delta Spirit, "California": Sad, sad, sad. Sad x 12. Sad x infinity, maybe.

Keep It Up

Barbette, Uptown's dark, stylish and crowded jewel box of a French restaurant and bar, is one of my favorite places to go, probably because it's a little more expensive and harder to get into than most spots. I didn't just go out for a drink, I went to Barbette.

Last night, I was sitting at the bar when out of my peripheral vision, I saw an older guy take a seat next to me. He ordered a cocktail and a piece of carrot cake. He was alone.

After enough time had passed that it became clear that he was not waiting for anyone and was just by himself, I started paying less attention to what the person across from me was saying and more to the man behind me. I saw that he spent a lot of time staring straight ahead at the bottles lined up behind the bar and pushing gobs of white frosting around on his soon-empty plate.

At one point, I heard him say "What brings you out tonight?" to the two women on his other side - two women who were pretty clearly lesbian and on a date with each other. Something in me recognized that impulse to be friendly -- to just be friendly -- even in the face of improbability.

If the women said anything in reply, they were curt and soon left. A little while later, he tried to strike up a conversation with two other women (heterosexual this time) further down the bar, but made just about as  much progress with them, although they at least smiled at him.

As I was getting ready to leave, I looked over at him and saw that he had taken an index card out of his pocket.

"How are you?" it said across the top.

Next line: "What brings you out tonight?"

Next line: "Talk about the weather. Ask what they do for work."

When I left, he was still rotating his empty cocktail glass and, presumably, working up the courage for his next foray into socialization.

I felt that saying something into the moment would have admitted that I had observed his failed attempts to strike up a conversation (and doesn't that make it worse? When you know that someone saw you fall flat on your face?), so I'll say it here instead: Keep it up, buddy. It's hard to be gregarious and alone. I know it is. Keep it up, because sometime you will hit paydirt - a friendly, single, age-appropriate woman who likes to talk and laugh and is out for a drink by herself because she just didn't want to go home, too. The world doesn't ever work as fast or as smoothly as we'd like it to, but it does work.

Don't Take It Too Seriously, Manohla

I chose this picture of "The Hunger Games" cast from a Vanity Fair photo shoot because it represents the movie in that it's very pretty and entirely sanitary.

I read the New York Times review of "The Hunger Games" today and it made me wonder whether the reviewer and I saw different movies.

My take on Manohla Dargis' take (how's that for meta?) is that she really, really wanted to flaunt her knowledge of themes and mythology and classic literary tropes. To me, that's a little inappropriate, given the subject matter. I don't think anyone is looking at "The Hunger Games" as an enduring classic of literature. It's just a fun and pop culture-y book that lots and lots of people have enjoyed reading.

The movie is much the same way and in this case, that's perfectly fine -- maybe not admirable or particularly noteworthy, but fine.

Overall, I think the movie would have benefited from little more darkness and grimness.It was filmed in North Carolina, so District 12 -- described as a bleak and hopeless place in the novel -- and the arena where the televised fight to the death takes place looked just a little too leafy and pretty. And in order to get the hordes of tweens who loves these books into the theater, the filmmakers had to go with a PG-13 ranking, which means they had to whitewash a lot of the violence and more mature themes. The end result is a movie that's a little dry and aseptic in places where the novel was gripping and scary, but then again, I should be careful what I wish for; I'm not sure I want to see extended scenes of teenagers murdering one another.

Final grade: B +.

Loki, The Dog From Hell

I read this story just now and it reminded me of Loki, the approximately 2,000 lbs. of hell-beast that terrorized my childhood. 


Here, let me tell you about him:

When I was younger, my family had a dog named Scout. I loved Scout very much and because walking him was primarily my responsibility, I thought - no, I knew that he loved me more than he loved my siblings. Scout was hit by a car when he was a puppy, so he hobbled through life on three good legs. He never complained (obviously), but clearly, he had it a little harder than other dogs.

I liked walking Scout except for the part of our route where we passed a certain neighbor's house. This certain neighbor had a German Shepherd named Loki. A German Shepherd named Loki whom he rarely bothered to restrain. A German Shepherd named Loki that had a severe, severe anger-management problem.

If Loki was outside and if he was not chained up, he would attack. It was terrifying. I have no idea why, but something about a 12-year-old boy and a crippled dog walking past his domain sent him into a mouth-foaming, eye-reddening rage.He would stand there in his yard for a second, looking at us, and then he would barrel forward in a blur of tawny fur, bared fangs and a growl that sounded like a rabid T. Rex.

Now, pardon the expression, but what the fuck was Loki's problem? Why bother attacking a three-legged dog at the end of a leash who was 50 feet away? Even now, the only conclusion I can come up with is that Loki was one of Satan's minions and that his soul was black.

If I yelled at the top of my lungs, sometimes Loki would stop his attack and slink away. Sometimes he and Scout would scrap it out, Scout would get in a few good nips and Loki would retreat. Loki never inflicted serious damage. But it doesn't matter. I hated Loki with all my might. I considered carrying  weapon from time to time, but weapons are hard for 12-year-olds to come by.

In retrospect, Loki was pretty old, so he died after a few years of this. If he has a grave and if I knew where it was, I would go dance on it. Seriously.

What's Your Number?

 

I would like to tell you that I rented "What's Your Number?", the lady-oriented sex comedy that bombed at the box office this fall, because RedBox had nothing else besides cartoon animals and torture porn, but that would be inaccurate. I have actually wanted to see this movie for a long time because I think its star, Anna Faris, has comedic talent.

Faris may be funny, but "What's Your Number?" isn't. Or it is, but only in certain parts and there aren't enough of them. What's also interesting about this movie is how it is entirely about social mores regarding promiscuity and chastity, yet doesn't really understand its own grasp of sexual politics.

The movie starts with Faris' character, Ally, reading a magazine article that says that 96% of women who have had more than 20 sexual partners never get married (or only get married after age 45, or are never happy in their marriage, or some such fate worse than death). She just hit her 20th notch on her bedpost, so she decides to go back through her list of ... encounters to see if any of them are The One. Naturally, she has to enlist the aid of her hunky neighbor, a police detective's son, to track them all down since they have common names and Google is of no help.

Like I said, I find Faris pretty funny, but I recognize that her brand of wide-eyed, perpetually flustered comedy may be an acquired taste. "What's Your Number?" gets in some good bits at the beginning, but by the middle it starts skewing more toward "romantic" than it does "comedy" and becomes just like every other movie in this genre that you've ever seen.

I did think it was weird, though, that Ally was sort of slut-shamed by her number of sexual partners. The movie can't really make up its own mind about Ally: is she a lovable tramp, or a modern, sexually liberated woman?  Spoiler alert: in a scene near the end, she gives up on the guy whom she thought was Mr. Right because he's grossed out that she's slept with people other than him and runs into the arms of her neighbor, a notorious womanizer who has slept with half of Boston. It's a very muddled message; it's okay for Ally to be ashamed about her sexual history but her neighbor doesn't need to worry about his? I still didn't understand this movie's message by the time the end credits were rolling.

Reminiscing is a Dangerous Game

If you're wondering what sticks with me the most these days, it's this:

I had just arrived. I was tired from my trip but felt artificially propped up by the thought of seeing you. You were finishing up at the office, so I staked out a table next door, nursed a cup of coffee I didn't really want and waited for awhile. Apartment to train, train to airport, airport to plane, plane to new city; this was the first time in awhile I had had a chance to stop and collect myself

I saw you before you saw me. You were walking slowly, trying to pick me out of the crowd but also taking in the scene around you.

It was nice to look at you for a moment when you didn't think you were being observed. You had that little close-lipped, half-smile I so strongly associate with you. Sometimes, you remind me of a bird with the way your long legs bend so sharply at the knees and you swivel your head quickly from side to side so that nothing around you gets by unnoticed.

It isn't often you get the chance to feel that something is about to begin; usually, it just happens and by the time you realize it has started, the opportunity to savor that moment has passed. But here, for a few seconds, I had it - you and I together, even if just for a few days, after too long a long time apart.

Yes, it's better this way. Yes, this is all very pragmatic, logical, responsible. Yes, yes, yes it is. But still, this memory still stings a little more than I'd like and refuses - just refuses - to lessen in poignancy.

March 10, 2012

It smelled like spring last night.

It had been an unusually warm day and even though  night was cooling things off, it still smelled like moist earth, sun-warmed pavement, melting ice and the slow, almost secretive changing of the year.

Around 12:30 a.m., my apartment felt stale and close, so I decided to go for a walk.

It was a beautiful night, with a full moon wrapped in the faintest suggestion of gauzy cloud. The streets were empty, making for a very atmospheric setting. It was the kind of night where I felt certain, absolutely certain, that the universe was trying to tell me something. I walked several blocks at a brisk clip, waiting for the moon and the warm weather and my own strange, anxious feeling to get to work.

Nothing happened.

That, in a nutshell, is my life: romance, insomnia and an unflagging, unmerited belief in the cinematic.

White Guilt To The Maximum

The convenience store across the street from where I lived in staffed, and I assume owned, by people who seem to be recent immigrants to the U.S. I never thought much about it until last night.

As I approached the cash register, an agitated woman cut in front of me.

"I can't find anything else I want, so you can just forget it," she said. I realized later she had been trying to buy a $1.19 bag of popcorn kernels and was mad that the store has a $6 minimum for credit cards.

The cashier, a dignified older man with an accent and ethnicity I've never quite been able to trace, shrugged. This only seemed to make the woman angrier.

"This is illegal, you know," she said, apparently in reference to the $6 minimum. "This is America. We don't do things like this here."

That, of course, made the cashier angry. He and the woman shouted at each other for about 30 seconds. He said something about having to make a living. She said something once again about this being America and she "didn't know where he was from," but he should have to "play by our rules."

What she said upset me, and I felt even worse when I saw it really upset the cashier. I apologized on her behalf and said not everyone believes the things she does. For all I know, the cashier could have been an illegal immigrant, but I really don't care. The idea that the woman felt that being white gave her the authority to tell others who is and who is not American bothered me.

The cashier tried to shrug it off and called the woman a redneck, but after I had paid and thought the episode had blown over, he said something like "I was born in this country. My grandfather fought for this country. I have three degrees - I am not an idiot. Why does she feel like she can talk that way to me?"

I won't lie. I get frustrated sometimes with people who don't follow commonly accepted American customs or people whose English isn't great. It's hard sometimes; it really is.

But we are literally a nation of immigrants. Given that we're, what, 230 years old, can there really be such a thing as an ethnically distinct American? When my great-grandfather came here from Germany, people didn't want to hear him speak German and my family either changed its last name or had it changed for them. Many of my maternal relatives, who were either Native American or had some degree of Native American blood, were manhandled by the governments of the day; I think one even lost custody of his child and died in a sanatorium. Yes, there is some liberal revisionism and romanticizing in that view, but the point is the same. America is supposed to give everybody the chance to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. This idea of racial, economic or class superiority - didn't we as a society leave that behind a long time ago? I had hoped so, but I guess not.