At this moment in my life, my top 10 albums of all-time

I've always had a rather embarrassing penchant for top 10 lists. They're so arbitrary, and yet -- so necessary! And really, is there a greater, more iconic top 10 than the fabled "Top 10 Albums of All Time" list? Mine, as I'm sure yours is too, is in a constant state of flux, but that's why it's so much fun to document it, frozen in time, every once in a while. This morning it dawned upon me that I haven't done this in years, so I figured I'd give it a shot. What I like about this incarnation of my list is how conventional and "obvious" most of these choices feel to me, and yet, how much each of these records mean to me personally, from the bottom of my guts. Here are some brief reminiscences of the first five (in no particular order); expect five more some time later in the week.

Wilco - Being There
I am at least half of the person I am today because the first cable TV package my parents purchased included MuchMusic. I was 9 at the time, but I think it took me a year or two before I began to fully appreciate how much cooler the Canadian music video channel was in comparison to MTV. I watched their weekly Top 25 countdown diligently, I sent in requests to Much On Demand, and, after some help from my dad, rigged up our stereo so that I could record the audio from my favorite songs right off the TV and onto a cassette tape. (Yeah, really.) One of these tapes had the song that went with one of my favorite videos on the channel, which was "Outtasite (Outta Mind)" by Wilco. At one point, it occured to me to buy the album, but I remember looking for it in a Borders one day and not being able to find it. Then about five years later, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot happened, and as a 15-year-old with a subscription to Spin, I couldn't help but notice. I bought it, I fell in love all over again, and then proceeded to go back and buy Wilco's entire discography over the next year or two. Since the end of my days of hometaping, I've come to attach a memory to almost every song on this album; some are very nice, some are very sad, but they all feel incredibly potent to me whenever I hear them, which is the true mark of an album that's made a top-10-worthy impact on your life. Indisputably, YHF is a better album; on most days I will tell you that Summerteeth is as well. But I like this one best, for reasons that don't need to make much sense. I wish there was a less punny way to say this, but I like it most because it's always just been there.

Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited
On a very small plane coming back from Colorado, I heard a line which we have all heard hundreds of times, which is this one: "You're invisible now, you've got no secrets to conceal." It was a revelation that I can't even try to put into words. I can only tell you what I was looking at in that moment, which was a cloud formation shaped like two lumberjacks playing paddycake. This is one of those albums that is full of tiny surprises like that, and it's pretty magical how they all start to unpetal as you get older.

Liz Phair - Exile In Guyville
I love Mariah Carey but I certainly can't relate to a sexuality like that; I don't own nearly enough miniskirts. I love Bikini Kill, but I shave my armpits. Mine is a femininity is adjoined by semicolons; full of contradictions and strung together by the feeble architecture of expressions that are barely cohesive enough to be sentences. Growing up, I saw this quality in only a few of the female musicians I admired (mostly Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss). I see it, now, so clearly in Liz Phair. Hearing Exile In Guyville for the first time (about a year ago) was huge. It felt like the unearthing of some very plain and simple truth, one that has been on the tip of your tongue this whole time but has seemed to small or obvious to articlulate, let alone sing about, let alone sing about in that deadpan, pitch-perfect, "I-sing-like-a-good-canary" voice. This album is just perfect, and I can't think of another one that even comes close to some of the things it does.

Sam Cooke - Live At the Harlem Square Club
We will dance to this in heaven, I think.

Pixies - Doolittle
Doolittle knocked me down so hard that I still remember what I was wearing the first time I listened to it. Not only is it one of the greatest records of all time, but it completely encapsulates a moment of my life for me. 15 years old, wearing skirts and this grimy pair of sneakers every day, totally weird but still at the moment right before I would meet the kind of people who would fully understand and appreciate my weirdness. There were days then, like when this girl in my Spanish class stumbled over the title Un Chien Andalou when she read it aloud from a Dali biography in our textbook, when I truly believed that the universe was just one big inside joke between me and Black Francis. My 10th grade Doolittle story has a sad ending: a girl robbed my gym locker some time near the end of the year and took my old headphones, my CD player and my copy of Doolittle that was inside. I've always liked to think that she turned on the CD player just to make sure it worked and that it was cued up to that riff at the end of "Mr. Grieves," which made her just melt, because how could it not? And then of course she would sit down to listen to the rest of the album and ultimately decide to forego her young life of crime and just start listening to the Pixies all the time. I bet it didn't happen that way, but Doolittle works in mysterious ways when you're 15, so you never know.

What's your top 10 looking like these days?

I think I love: Netherfriends

A few weeks ago I went to the best South Jersey house show I've been to in ages. Most of the shows I've attended in the few weeks I've been hanging around here have made me feel like Alice when she eats the mushroom and suddenly becomes so uncomfortably overgrown that her limbs are poking out of the windows of the house; in a word: old. But then my friends' band played a show at this place called the 1619 House in Williamstown, which was a refreshing experience. It was also great to see some touring bands coming through, rather than, say, your friend's brother's new youthcore side project that you have probably seen eight times this summer, and not by choice, mind you.



Among the bands that played were Chicago's Netherfriends. They were fantastic. Though their set was marred by technical difficulties, they seemed really apologetic about it, not realizing the oft-forgotten maxim that if the music that happens in between technical difficulties is good, the next day nobody will remember that there even were technical difficulties to begin with. Which remains true, as now, a few weeks later, I can't remember what was wrong with their equipment, but I can remember the songs -- bursting with melody and kinetic energy. The Netherfriends' sound is warm and synth-y; some of their songs remind me a little bit of The Anniversary, which is high praise since even eight years later, I am poised to fight anybody who thinks Designing A Nervous Breakdown is anything less than a masterpeice. There's a little bit of Animal Collective in there too; the first part of "Nunya (Beeswax)" makes me feel like I'm in the Rainforest Cafe at that part when all the animals start waking up and squaking at each other one by one, in the most rocking way possible. Their EP, Home Is Where My House Is, is thoroughly terrific. Do yourself a favor and check these guys out.

Blogging My Way Through Anna Karenina, Part I: How Embarrassing That I'm Actually Doing This

At the tender and wily age of twelve, my grandmother asked me on the phone what book I was reading at that moment. Always a fan of obtuse literary jokes that I pretended to understand, I casually replied, "War and Peace."

"Oh my," she said. "That's a big one."

"Yeah, you know," I yawned.

Of course, I was not reading War and Peace and had no intention of doing so, and even today I don't know why, as a sixth-grader, I would think it funny or even worthwhile to make a joke about a book that I had probably only ever heard referenced on Wishbone. Suffice to say, I was always a weird kid. I forgot about the whole thing until a week later when my eleven-year-old cousin and I were visiting my grandmother at her house. With the same forced air of pre-teen literary ennui, he heaved down onto the kitchen table a hardback copy of War and Peace with a bookmark nestled about 25 pages in.

"Isn't this wonderful?" my grandmother asked me. "Your cousin heard that you were reading War and Peace and he decided that he should too!"

Needless to say, I was immediately racked by a burden of Raskolnikov-sized guilt. I felt that I'd been caught in a shameful web of deceit. My crime haunted me at night; I thought I'd never be able to face my grandmother again. I tried to forget about it, but I made the mistake of mentioning it to my mother a few days later.

"You told her what? Why would you do that?" she asked. I had no answers. "Well, you need to call her and tell her the truth."

So I did, I called my grandmother and confessed to the garish lie. I was not reading War and Peace. I was very sorry that this misunderstanding had caused my cousin, seized by a sense competitiveness so pure and transparent that it could only occur within the claustrophobic confines of a family, to waste his time trying to read this awful book.

Ever since then, Tolstoy has loomed large and statuesque in my mind, more like an abstract law of physics than an author I would ever actually want to sit down and read. I'm not sure what caused me to suddenly change my mind and pick up a copy of Anna Karenina last winter. Might have been my love of Dostoyevsky, or all the good press that the new Pevear/Volokhonsky translation has received. And lest we discredit the "if Oprah can do it, then I can too" mentality.

As of page 176, I've found that Anna Karenina is the opposite of the dense and inaccessable Tolstoy of my childhood imagination: it's so incredibly readable and fluid that I can't put it down. The way Tolstoy moves so swiftly through the consciousnesses of a bunch of different characters is what amazes me most. There are no minor characters in Anna Karenina. Tolstoy fleshes out each of his characters beautifully with human complexities and contradictions. I think I like Levin best right now because I find myself sympathizing with him most, but we'll see what happens as I keep reading.

Thank You, And Goodnight

Last night I went to a show at a place that shares a wall with Alfred's Tomato Pies, and so the outside area where smokers and smokers' girlfriends hang out between bands is characterized by the divine aroma of Trenton pizza. Inside, though, it smells like a dentist's office, which is fitting since it used to be one. As you walk in, you are greeted by a large framed cartoon, drawn in what appears to be crayon, of a giant tooth with human facial features sitting in a dentist's chair, letting off a speech bubble that says, "The bill is HOW much?!?!?!" Outside, Matt smoked Marlboros and I popped Tic-Tacs, and suddenly everybody was corralled inside with a general, "They're going on!" I waited until Matt finished his cigarette and then we went inside too.

The place was dark except for sound-activated stage lights of so many competing colors that they all just bled into a dull, muddy purple. I stood at a place on this ramp where I couldn't exactly see the band that was playing, but I could see everyone staring raptly into the purple glow. I changed positions a few times but still couldn't see anything, as though a shifty man in a trenchcoat were holding all the flickering secrets of the universe balled up in his hands and constantly turning his back on me so I wouldn't get to see what was inside. Before I found a good spot, though, I decided that I liked them. I couldn't hear words and I couldn't even hear notes; there was just the duration of yells -- long, long, short, long -- like some sort of familiar morse code in which every member of the audience was fluent. They sounded like New Jersey, in the most nostalgiac, outline-of-New-Jersey-stenciled-on-a-piece-of-fraying-fabric kind of way, and I took immediate comfort in the fact that New Jersey sounds exactly the same even when I am not listening. When I finally made my way up closer to the stage, I saw that New Jersey looks the same too: skinny girlfriends with tattoos and too much eyeliner leaning languidly against their man, who is probably wearing a black hoodie and navy athletic shorts, a uniform that flies in the face of conventional ideas about matching, and one that pays some sort of sartorial tribute to when everything got really weird and angry and people started stabbing each other.

While Matt was setting up, a guy in a torn denim vest who I judged to be about sixteen tried to strike up a conversation with me. "Did you go to the Warped Tour, or whatever?" he asked. I told him I had not. "Well, would you have wanted to go, if you could have?" he asked, and I somehow understood his question completely. "I guess not," I said, though I had no idea who was playing this year. I resisted a sudden and embarrassing urge to explain my laconic answers by saying to him, "I don't live here; I live in DC," but I wasn't sure that that was entirely true. During his set, a kid wearing a sombrero came and sat down on the stage next to Matt. When the song was over, he politely asked, "What do you write your songs about?" Matt said, "Existential dread." Someone in the audience groaned, and rightfully so.

Later, outside, we talked with a guy who said he really liked the set. Then, completely unprovoked, he launched into a vivid description of a fight he was in at a show recently. The show took place at a roller skating rink where I had some of my best birthday parties in grade school. He lifted up his sleeve and showed us where some guy had stabbed him with a box cutter there. And he acted disgusted with it all, but then, with a creepy flicker of pride in his face, he told us a few keywords to search for on Youtube if we wanted to see a good video of the fight. I told him I probably did not want to see that. I liked it better before people started throwing chairs at each other and wielding baseball bats wholeheartedly; I liked it better when it was just a room full of starving eyes squinting at an almost invisible glow.

Summer of Strummer

Anyone who is from the Philadelphia area or has at one time or another found themselves scanning the radio dial while driving through its clutches can tell you one thing for sure: XPN rules. XPN is a local member-supported radio station affiliated with UPenn. NPR enthusiasts will know it as the place where they record World Cafe with David Dye. The good folks at XPN always seem to be cooking up some exciting special program, and this summer has proven no exception. On the ride home from the train station yesterday, I heard that XPN is doing a series called Summer of Strummer, where they are broadcasting hour-long segements of Joe Strummer's radio shows that he did for the BBC in the late 90s.

This is huge. These shows have never before been broadcast in America, but Julien Temple provided some memorable excerpts from them in his fantastic 2007 documentary Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten. I've been itching to find some recording of them since seeing the film (which, if you're keeping score, is so much better than Westway to the World), so I can't wait for next week's broadcast. They'll be airing them every Monday afternoon at 3 for the rest of the summer. If you're not in the area, you can listen live online.

I Wish My Life Were A Smashing Pumpkins Video

Last Friday was Free Slurpee Day. Walking towards 7-11 in my work clothes, I found myself wishing that my current life was a little more like the Smashing Pumpkins video for "1979."



More often, though, I wish that life was more like the video for "Today."



Specifically around 1:42. There is something about the gleeful nonchalance on James Iha's face, his dress aflutter in the breeze as he hangs out the door of the ice cream truck, that makes me think, "they just don't make videos like that anymore."

In search of a summer anthem, part I

It wouldn't be a trip back home without some time spent digging through my old CDs and finding another ancient comp to upload onto my computer. This time around it was one that I had been looking for for maybe years now: the summer 2002 Drive-Thru Records compilation. True, even people who will still admit to being Drive-Thru enthusiasts for one fleeting moment of their youth will tell you that 2002 was a good year or two after the label had jumped the shark. And true to that, a few of the tracks on there have not held up well at all (even among the most die-hard of Movielife fans, I didn't know anyone who thought Steel Train didn't suck). But there are some bona fide pop-punk masterpieces on this disc. Here's my favorite:

Homegrown - "I'll Never Fall In Love"

What a summer anthem! Guaranteed to make you feel like you are fourteen again, nursing what could be sun poisoning because you were too cool to put on sunscreen at the Warped Tour. I was never a big Homegrown fan, but I've always loved this song; I would still contend that the beat in the beginning of this song when the drums kick in is one of the most sublime moments in the whole entire Drive-Thru discography. Here's an added bonus:

Allister - "Scratch"

I can think of no better time than right now, knee deep in summer, to roll the windows down and blast these tracks in your tricked out Civic. Or, you know, if you're really concerned with things as trivial as good taste, feel free to leave the windows up.