Make room on the Portland Trail Blazers' bandwagon because here I come! They have one of the NBA's best scorers (Brandon Roy), a big man who hits the 16-foot jumper, runs, rebounds and posts up (LaMarcus Aldridge), two big men who are really big and use their size well (Greg Oden and Joel Pryzbilla, though neither is a distinguished player yet), a tall wingman who can shoot the three, drive and defend (Travis Outlaw), a crafty point guard (Steve Blake) two Spaniards who handle the ball so smoothly and shoot well (Rudy Fernandez and Sergio Rodriguez), and a roster where no one is older than 29. What?!
Watching them beat the Celtics, without Roy, last night at 1 a.m. was a true pleasure. The Celtics' dominance is mundane. Listen to a game, hear everyone exclaim about how tenacious, professional and superior they are. (Unsurprisingly, their TV broadcasters attributed last night's loss to the officials' botched call when the Blazers had six men on the court at the first half's end and scored two points. That was erased later in the game when Celtics forward Paul Pierce had an egregious travel of three steps and scored two points. Really, the Blazers killed the Celtics on the boards and in the paint. Every Boston sports fan whines incessantly.) It's a treat to watch a great team as it's born, full of raw energy, increasing intelligence and recognition of what they have and a little sloppiness that means they have to reach the top through pluckiness.
It's a shame it's so hard to watch the Blazers around here. Credit also due, again, to the Sports Guy's prescience in identifying the Blazers before the year began as the team all bloggers would fall in love with. He was quite correct.
It took an extra nine months, but I was finally able to see Beach House live. Their set was too brief and the MFA's seated venue is too conducive to unenthusiastic crowds, but it was still wonderful. (Reviews here and here.) Beach House has found a wonderful niche that few, if any, bands occupy right now and they execute perfectly within it. It's not incredibly original or transformational as rock records go, but, again, is executed so well. I love how the guitar often sounds like a second keyboard and the male vocalist provides the higher harmonies. The ambience has a surprising chameleon-like quality to it. It's wistful, sad and lonely, maybe even abandoned; it's ethereal, bleached and faded; it's a sunny, early October day on a New England beach; it's quite touching. Or, as my friend Allison observes, it's "like you hotboxed your car and took it for a drive under the ocean, and now you're lying on the sea floor watching the late afternoon sky turn gold through Snell's window and it's not alright, but right now it's all right." She's quite good at describing bands' sound.
(According to the Wikipedia entry, which I trust is reliable here, Snell's window "is a phenomenon by which an underwater viewer sees everything above the surface through a cone of light of width of about 96 degrees. This phenomenon is caused by of light entering water, and is governed by Snell's Law. The area outside Snell's window will either be completely dark or will show a reflection of under-water objects.")
How Pitchfork ranked this only number 46 in its "Top-5o Albums of 2008" puzzles me, but then, what's become of their criteria for "Best New Music" also puzzles me. They seem more interested in finding something that's esoteric and avant-garde than in finding something that sounds excellent, only so they can cement their place as the national indie scene's tastemakers. Then again, Beach House did receive "Best New Music" accolades as well. Either way, they should have been ranked higher.
Anyway, here are my other favorite records this year, in alphabetical order:
Fleet Foxes - "s/t": Pitchfork's number 1, so I'm not just hating on them. As everyone else has noted, Fleet Foxes' combination of Appalachia's backwoods and the West Coast's sun-filled beaches is so satisfying. Great production work on the vocals. They started the year opening for Blitzen Trapper and are now headlining much larger venues. Good for them. May Blitzen Trapper experience equal success.
The Sea and Cake - "Car Alarm": Curious to know what these guys' financial situation is. They've released and produced countless records for about 20 years -- as the Sea and Cake, as members of manyotherbands and on soloprojects -- nearly all of them on Thrill Jockey. None of them, I imagine, have sold more than 50,000 copies, except for the ones where they're the producers and you don't receive money from record sales there. And yet, they continue to be full-time musicians who, eight records into this band, still create great songs. The musicianship here is so high. You can tell the bass and guitar lines come to them like syrup out of Vermont trees in March. Can they live comfortably from this? They deserve to.
TV on the Radio - "Dear Science": More out of admiration for the career they've built than this particular record, which I think is their weakest. (In fact, the first EP is their best release and they've slid ever slightly downhill since. However, for them, it's all relative. On an absolute scale, "Dear Science" is far above average.) Their music is almost indescribable. It can't be broken into quantifiable, discrete elements such as bass, guitar and drums. There is too much warping, reconstituting and unusual melding to tell exactly what's happening. What I loved about their early records was when David Andrew Sitek, their multi-instrumentalist, programmer and producer, would be credited with "music" in the liner notes. Brilliant! How they can do all this, sell a decent number of records, play large venues and stay on a major awes me.
And as further proof I don't hate Pitchfork, High Places' "From Stardust to Sentience" is my favorite song of the year. It was number 57 (out of 100) for them.
Funny how this post reads so much like last year's equivalent.
Their mannerisms are perfectly reserved. Instead of incessantly complaining about daily working life, as so many do, they realize the inherent absurdities of office culture and decide, "Why not have fun with it?" I can't wait until they kiss. Each time Jim leans over Pam's desk to whisper gleefully about a prank or joke, it seems like he wants to explode across, grab her face and lock lips. When they actually do it, it will almost be like this this deep timbre of emotion, all trumpets and woodwinds and beautiful. Their love for each other on the show is so real it's hard to believe it's only a fictitious love and that off the set they don't feel the same.
Interesting story in the Times' sports section last week about the end of era for the Phoenix Suns, once the NBA's most fanciful and joyful team, but now, apparently nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the league's above-average defense-oriented ones. Most intriguing is some players' admission that they're unhappy about the change, a break from players typical fare where they strenuously adhere to saying nothing while talk all post-game long. (Sometimes I wonder if professional athletes spend more time practicing their interview patter than their game patter, but it might be that sports reporters don't practice at all.)
Star point guard Steve Nash, always a delight to watch, after the trade of two role players, point forward Boris Diaw and shooting guard Raja Bell: “It’s hard. I have a hard time committing to this as a business. I take this personally, and I take my career home with me. I care about my teammates. When you lose two of your best friends on the team suddenly, it’s hard.”
Diaw, a loose-limbed Frenchman who could never seem to put his whole game together, on the replacement of Coach Mike D'Antoni with Terry Porter, the main reason why one era has ended: “It definitely wasn’t as fun. It wasn’t as exciting for the fans...I’ll always remember Phoenix with Mike. We went from a winning team that was the most exciting team in the league to a half-winning team that wasn’t exciting at all.”
Of course, a franchise's owner reserves the right to change coaches and perhaps this one was right. Under D'Antoni, the Suns had several excellent teams that never quite made the NBA championship round and reached their ceiling. (The Sports Guy was prescient to chronicle this, particularly with a melancholic, wistful, angry recap last May.) Who knows? Maybe the Suns will turn it around this year; they're a respectable 16-11 at the time of writing. Maybe they're a better team in the long-run now. It's nearly impossible to catch Suns games in Boston.
But it will always be hard to shake the memory of those 2004-08 Suns teams. Nash was so thrilling to watch, always on the verge of discovering brilliance, much the way musicians improvise -- find a line you like and drive it home, it always works. (Will there ever be a cooler athlete? A friend once sat near him in a restaurant. He was with his lab mates and the only who know who Nash is. He told me he was ecstatic and had no one to share it with.) Forward Shawn Marion's jump shot seemed to originate under his jersey, if that makes any sense. Guard Leandro Barbosa had these slinky drives that could burrow in anywhere. And Amare Stoudemire had a wonderfully rare combination of deft touch and overpowering determination. In the 2005 playoff series against the San Antonio Spurs, before his knee injury, Stoudemire's strategy seemed to be: Catch the ball at the free throw line, shoot. If it didn't go in, he had an 85 percent chance of grabbing the offensive rebound and shooting again from a closer distance. It worked!
Oh, and here's a clip of Bell's clothesline takedown of Kobe Bryant, a player who embodies all the lifeless, soulless things the Suns thankfully weren't, in the 2006 playoffs. While perhaps no player deserves it, it's a joy to watch this:
More profoundly, Nash's and Diaw's comments remind me of the theme of "Jennie and the Ess-Dog": Remembering that time, those four seasons, back when things were good, when things felt right, when we were free (in this case, running the court with grace and joy, and winning), and how they're not like that any more. Are careers (lives?) only like that for athletes, artists and, like Jennie, fictional characters? Or are they like this for all of us? I worry about that these days.
How could I not read Dean Wareham's autobiography, "Black Postcards," in less than two weeks? There was a period of my life, probably circa 2001-2003, where I thought his life was the most enviable possible -- working occasionally and even then, it was never really working, but rather, making a record and playing shows, and making a career of it. Turns out it was quite unattractive, which is what makes his book so engrossing.
The book has some of what one would expect from a rock 'n' roll autobiography -- casual drug use makes lots of appearances, for example. But the rest of the book demystifies being in a band in a hard-hitting way. Much of it is about petty squabbles in the touring van and the recording studio, dirty hotel rooms, underwhelming audiences at shows, underwhelming affairs, (aside from the one with his band Luna'ssecond bassist, which led to his second marriage), underwhelming receptions from the label, labels that disappear from under you. As I described it to someone, the book, at its philosophical level, is about the choices people make, never quite breaking through and never quite being happy. The book's subtitle, "A Rock 'N' Roll Romance," must be a joke, because Wareham seems very (narcissitically?) bitter about his rock 'n' roll life.
Wareham is also quite talented at showing brief glimpses of important moments, enough to satisfy and then tantalize when he leaves it behind. (He often did the same equally well with lyrics, I always thought.) It's impressively literary, though. What would one expect from a Harvard graduate? Vargas Llosa would be proud.
Above all, the book has same very valuable lessons about being in a band, mainly from when he chronicles his days in Galaxie 500, his first band and the best band ever to come from Boston. (I used to stridently take Luna over Galaxie 500, but these days I realize they're even. My friend says Luna is Dean Wareham playing with B+ ideas. I disagree.) Here are some of the ones I jotted down before returning the book to the library:
1. "You can spend your time placing ads in the Village Voice and sifting through messages left on your answering machine by idiot musicians, or auditioning for other people's bands, but the best thing is to start a band with your friends. Your friends are tasteful and smart and like the same things you do. Who cares if one of you doesn't play an instrument? She can learn."
2. "It's hard to get your friends to go out of their way to see you at midnight on a Thursday. They'll do it once, but you can't really ask them to come back again two weeks later. People have stuff to do."
3. "The moment you make a record, you are in business. It's too bad that we never bothered to sit down with a manager or a lawyer who might have explained that lots of bands fight about this staff, and that there are common formulas for working out who contributed what...I think critical incidents like this arise for many bands, and that in those moments your friendship essentially disappears for good. You may still be able to laugh together and have fun, but at the heart of it all something has changed forever. Your friendship has been poisoned."
The first two quotes are essentially my band. Three of my friends were playing songs together for a couple of weeks, wanted me to be the bassist and asked me if I wanted to learn. I said "Yes" pretty shortly after. That was nearly three years ago. It's so great. We don't do much publicly either, mainly because we have other career ambitions, but related to that, we don't want to bother our friends to come to many shows (or bother to promote ourselves) so we play when we have a new set of polished songs. We've played two shows. Hopefully, we never reach the feelings that provoked the third quoted passage. I don't think we will.
This is a much better way to follow Wareham, I think. Play by his mantras, rather than write fake concert reviews of Luna at Southpaw in August 2003, back when I thought being a music critic would be a cool career (it wouldn't) or encourage making out to "Penthouse" in my college radio station's studio, which, regrettably, I wrote in my record review. And it's regrettably memorialized in black pen ink. We still can't get away from Wareham, though. "Who needs more than three slow chords with lots of reverb?"
It was always a pleasure, though, to see the band during one of its between-record monthly shows in the city. There was the time my friends shouted a request for "Bonnie and Clyde" in my honor. (Reading "Black Postcards" reveals Wareham probably hated that. The request devolved into lots of people shouting out other people's names.) Or the time when I was 16 and didn't know how to use the subway that well yet, especially when around Tribeca, and missed the last train home. (My parents picked us up.) Now, we play our instruments like Wareham does, generally motionless, though I think that's because we're too nervous to do much else, whereas he was purposefully detached.
It's hard to separate myself from Wareham's music. When I changed the approach of my Facebook profile from all-time favorite bands to what I'm listening to at the moment, thereby removing Luna temporarily from the list, a friend wrote, shocked, "Oh my god, you no longer like Luna?" (That's why I don't like Facebook's "news updates.")
Was searching YouTube for an old clip from the good days -- one of those monthly New York shows, but was unsuccessful. Instead, here's a professional video of them playing "Chinatown" in Belo Horizonte, Brazil:
Update: My newspaper's excellent editorial page editor has an annual end-of-year column where he asks the staff for their favorite book of the year. Predictably, I e-mailed a blurb about "Black Postcards." While I may have read better books earlier in the year, Dean Wareham's photo is now on the front page of last Sunday's "Opinion" section. Mission accomplished.
In these pages this time last year, I wrote warmly about Sam Zell's debt-laden purchase of the Tribune Co. Turns out his initial public comments about rebuilding the company's papers were only comments -- all ofthe centralones have cut lots of jobs and redesigned their papers so there are fewer stories over less space. Then, last week the Tribune Co. declared bankruptcy, which may be the equivalent of Chrysler doing so (though I don't think Tribune or any newspaper company [or any car company?] deserves a Congressional bailout).
Also, worth noting again is how Zell, one of the country's wealthiest men via real estate, structured the deal. He put up $315 million of a $8.2 billion deal, while employees became the owners through an ESOP. That means they're at the back of the bankruptcy line. Severance deals for the recently laid-off employees are also in jeopardy. (Remember: Debt before equity. Of course, though, the Cubbies and Wrigley Field, really the only valuable assets left in the company, are not part of the filing.)
As if the week couldn't get any worse for the Tribune, the next day's arrest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich revealed he leaned on Zell to fire the editorial page staff who was calling for his resignation from office. (No one was fired.) Fortunately, Blagojevich did the work for himself. Ugh.
Some of the reasons I very much liked my week in Spain:
* The tapas bar in Sevilla that keeps one's tab running in chalk on the bar. How unbelievably and effortlessly cool is that? (See above photo.)
* One of the main department stores is named "(Sfera)," actually within parentheses, like Smog once was. How unbelievably cool is that? Obviously, this one is not effortless -- likely painstaking full of focus groups -- but Macy's, or something, equivalent would never try it. Also, none of the departmentstores in Madrid occupy massive buildings. Instead, they have smaller parcels, so it's common to see three stores of the same company within two blocks of each other, each devoted to different items. For some reason, I find something amusing about wandering around different countries' department stores. We probably spent an hour doing that one day, in search of an alarm clock and shirts. Overall, as further proof I probably should've lived in a previous era, I think department stores are wonderful. They sell clothes of a higher quality than their prices suggest -- and there are often saleswoman hoping to give you an extra discount (or did that only happen to my bubby?) -- and the designs are simple, nice colors that aren't marred by tattered bleach stains and annoying, over-sized fonts spelling out companies' name. (cough cough American EagleAbercrombie Fitch cough). It's a shame they've been reduced so much by hyper-niche markets.
* Even around the largertourist destinations, the restaurants and souvenir stores aren't gratingly aggressive about trying to lure you into their shops. (And, yeah, those tourist destinations are wonderful.)
* President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has this great voice that's so much lower than his boyish face would suggest and is a little froggy. Here's a video from the good times, in his acceptance speech after winning re-election, before his popularity rating started to fall because of the global financial crisis:
Those fall days in Boston when it gets a bit warmer and the leaves are a deep color but the sun hits at a lower angle and everyone is out walking and you need an extra layer at night. Corners and layers and reverb.
