Make it so, Number One

Happy Administrative Professionals Day. Hold your head just a little bit higher during your daily Starbuck's run for the overbearing cretin who pays your salary while slowly stripping away your sense of self-worth and hope for the future.

For almost 3 years, I administrated professionally (or assisted executively, depending on your choice of euphemism) for the head of artist development at a major record label. While this was my first full-time job when I finished college, it was my third job in the music industry. Even still, I had no idea what "artist development" was. It seemed more interesting than crunching numbers in royalties, so I wore my nice pants and gave wide-smiling, enthusiastic answers when I met with the human resources coordinator. She explained, with a nervous titter, that my potential boss was "a bit of a character." Yeah, well, I was just coming off a job in metal radio promotion where characters abound. Bring on the crazy.

On my first day of work, Steve called me into his office. He lit a cigarette and put his feet up on his desk. "Listen to me," he said. "There is nothing you can fuck up that I can't fix with one phone call. Nothing. So if you fuck up, and you will, I don't care how bad you think it is. Come and tell me, and I will fix it."

At the time, I took this as a clarification of the limited scope of my influence. So insignificant was I that any mistake I made couldn't really have any real consequences. But, as I would learn over the next few weeks, Steve's assessment had more to do with Steve than me. He was master of his domain. The reason I was there was because I needed to handle the annoying administrative details so that they didn't get in the way of his pressing business of Being Steve.

On the plus side, Steve was pretty self-sufficient, as executives go. He made his own calls, kept his own schedule and generally only utilized me to order his lunch (which he would put on his company card, along with mine), book his travel and creatively manage his expense report to make sure things like $400 worth of strippers for Mick Fleetwood were approved without too much quibbling. In return, I was left to my own devices to do my job of national tour marketing without much scrutiny. Steve and I developed an unspoken understanding that I had his back and he had mine. Even if he spent the majority of his day smoking behind closed doors while I was on hold with a promoter in Texas, trying to squeak out the last two Rush tickets in captivity.

Because he was 6'3", from Long Island and because he was one of those people who simply didn't give a fuck, people were wary of Steve. He was old school. He had no interest in office politics, so if he thought you were an asshole, he would smile at you and say "You're an asshole." There was not a lot of typical wink-wink, nudge-nudge music industry bullshitting involved. I can understand why human resources was snickering to itself when they sent me off to work for him - clearly they thought he would make me cry inside of two weeks. While there were days when he did irritate me to no end, Steve was really the best boss I've ever had. He respected the fact that I was good at my job, even if he hadn't the faintest idea what I did all day. He just knew no one was complaining to him and interrupting his afternoon nap.

The thing about being an executive assistant is that your influence, at least inside the office, isn't limited at all. The reason executives even have an assistant is because there are things they need to get done that they don't know how to do. Knowledge is power. For all their 6-figure salaries and far-reaching influence, there are moments when you realize the balance of power isn't as off-center as you thought.

After one of the many "restructurings" at the label - the next of these would liberate both Steve and myself to the greener pastures of artist management - we were all packing up to move to a different floor in the building. I had been listening to the whine of a tape dispenser coming from Steve's office all morning as he boxed up all his plaques and assorted office flair.

I was discussing lunch options with another assistant when suddenly the empty tape dispenser came flying out of the office and landed down the hall by the trash disposal.

A minute later, Steve appeared. "Fucking shit," he said by way of explanation. He pointed down the hallway. "Fucking thing is out of tape."

I maintained a straight face, against all odds. "You do know you can put a new roll in one of those things, right? You keep the dispenser and just put more tape in."

He was impressed. "Oh yeah?" He went to retrieve the dispenser from the trash.

Later in the day, I found him cleaning his glass coffee table with furniture spray and his oak desk with Windex.

I miss Steve, I really do.

Just Saying: iTunes = 1, Logic = 0

Some thoughts on today's iTunes homepage:

The Staff Favorites section features Michael Bolton, ABBA and Barry Manilow. Maybe the irony train has finally pulled into that station, or maybe this goes a long way towards explaining why we can't get placement for any of our bands. They just don't like those dirty longhairs.

Lady Saw's new album features a track called "No Less Than A Woman (Infertility)." Everyone needs an anthem, I guess.

After considering the wide breadth of my musical taste, Just For You recommends that I might also like Lindsay Lohan, Teddy Geiger, and a techno reworking of "Walking In Memphis" - which, to be honest, is pretty outstanding.

Buy a Barbie pink iPod nano for your Mom! iPod - $149.00 (plus shipping). Engraving - free. Countless, maddening hours spent on the phone trying to explain to Mom how an iPod works - Priceless.

If found, please call

"I just had my faith in humanity restored," Mark said when I answered my phone. This happened a few weeks ago.

"How's that?" My own faith in humanity is never more than dubious at best.

He said that he'd left his camcorder on the subway, displaying all the practical responsibility that's to be expected of any professional musician. For anyone who has even cursory knowledge of public transportation, the general assumption would be that Mark is pretty much fucked. Thou shall not leave thy shit on the train or said shit shall be stolen. Who actually thinks that someone would find an item of any value and say, "Well, hey now! This isn't mine, and I could probably sell it to my cousin Frank who fences hot property. But I really should find a way to return it to it's rightful owner"?

Meet Mark, optimist at large. The MTA has been aggressively promoting it's new Lost & Found hotline of late, with cute little drawings of all the various things that the MTA thinks you might lose during your commute. Like, you know, your pet cobra.

So Mark went down to the lost & found office. Contrary to the laws of logic, the MTA Lost Property Unit gave Mark back his camcorder. He either had seriously good karma coming to him or we've been miraculously transported to an alternate universe where people in NYC don't all but steal your iPod right off you to sell it for crack.

I tend not to lose things. I was the kid who wrote her name on all her school supplies, even the 99-cent plastic ruler, and kept an ever-vigilant eye on every one of her Matchbox cars. I've managed to hold on to every cell phone I've owned for the last 10 years without dropping it in a toilet or leaving it in a hotel room in Ohio or any of the other reasons why all the guys in any of our bands need to replace their cell phones weekly.

Of course, there are exceptions. I've had stuff forcibly taken from me at gunpoint. Occasionally things just disappear. For the most part, though, any time that I've lost something, it's been a direct result of my own stupidity.

When I was 13 or 14, I went with my mother to Circuit City to look at car stereos (for her, not for me). I was wearing those nylon mesh basketball shorts, which was a mistake - and not just for the obvious, sartorial reasons. Basketball shorts don't have pockets, a functional necessity that designers have even seen fit to incorporate into eveningwear these days. Because I was of the mind that there could be something at Circuit City that I might want to purchase (jumper cable? air conditioner?), I tucked a folded $20 bill - the equivalent of 4 paid hours working at my tedious job at the library - into the waistband of my shorts. This was both a) stupid and b) very obviously stupid, as opposed to bad choices that aren't really evident until after the fact. No, this was just your garden-variety, straight-up dumb. Needless to say, there came a point during my wanderings through the audio section of the store when I realized that my $20 was gone. My mother called me a moron three times in the car ride home.

I used to have a ring that I really liked. It wasn't expensive; in fact, I think it was from H&M. But I got a lot of compliments on it. A couple of years ago, I wore it to a Def Leppard show in Boston, and the drunk girl next to me couldn't stop talking about it for about 20 minutes. As a matter of fact, I got to thinking that she was going to kick my ass in the parking lot after the show and take it. The Def Leppard fanbase has a violent streak, despite all their appearances that they just want to rock it (yeah). That same fall, I was at the the Mercury Lounge for a showcase of yet another thunderingly average band that Atlantic Records had signed. In the bathroom, I took off the ring to wash my hands and left it on the sink. It only took about 5 minutes of watching an underwhelming stage show for me to realize I didn't have it on, but when I went back to look in the bathroom, it was gone. I suspected the rather large, goth-looking girl myself.

Most crippling of all, I once lost my wallet. Not to be confused with the time I was mugged because, I don't know about you, but conceding to a semi-automatic isn't so much a loss - I'm just going to chalk that up as an investment in my personal well-being. When I was in college, I carried one of those shoulder bags without any kind of closure - things fell out of it all the time. Stupid, yes, but moving on. During one of my women's studies classes, I must have kicked the bag under my desk and knocked my wallet on the floor. I didn't even realize it until about an hour after the class was over. Frantic, I ran back to the lecture hall and crawled on my hands and knees under all the desks. It was in vain. You never realize how much of your life you keep in your wallet until you lose it. Concert tickets, business cards, receipts - all gone. I didn't even think of it in the frenzy of cancelling my bank cards, but I had also been keeping my high school IDs in my wallet. They were the things I regretted losing the most. Not because it was an especially flattering picture (it wasn't) or because I had fond memories of high school (I didn't), but they were pieces of my past that I could never replace, unlike my Food Emporium rewards card. That's when it dawned on me exactly what caliber of idiot I was, stopping to consider how some things increase in value only when they're lost. That Joni Mitchell, she wasn't just blowing smoke, was she?

It's not just Mark's recent camcorder incident that made me revisit the ghosts of things lost. Earlier this week, for reasons equally as stupid as nylon mesh shorts or leaving expensive electronics on the A train, I effectively lost a friend who was really important to me. If he ever speaks to me again, I will consider myself lucky, but there are some parts of the relationship I know I can never replace. There is no lost & found for someone's regard. Consequences such as these are a necessary price of flagrant stupidity, and that's what makes this particular loss so much harder than a piece of cheap jewelry or some scrawling in a notebook. People don't simply disappear one day into some vortex, like single socks that make it into the washing machine but don't come home from the dryer. People have to be relinquished in a moment of blind carelessness. And I have no one to blame by myself.

Losing something is a one-sided pain, unfortunately. What's lost is unconcerned; it goes on to a new life. It will get found eventually by someone else who happens to be in the right place at the right time. Maybe someone who better deserves to have it.

PETA is through kidding around

That's one way to make a point.

It's the little moments that mean so much

12: 45pm. The phone rings.

It's my mother. She is driving to her hair appointment in Hendersonville.

"Sarah. Have you ever had one of those days where everything you touch is just fucked?"

A life, in writing

Today is Helene Hanff's birthday. She would have been 91 and probably on her second martini by now.

I first met Helene in 1997, about 2 months after she died. She literally fell on me. It was the end of the day, and I was shelving my last cart of books in the 400 section - languages, for those unfamiliar with the increasingly archaic Dewey Decimal System. The stacks were taller than me, and as I reached up to make room on the already packed shelf, one of the books came loose, hitting me smack in the forehead. It was a slim paperback, old and dusty, the spine held together with clear tape.

Working in a library is monotonous, even on a good day. (On a really exceptional day, the police show up and arrest the local flasher, but that's an entirely different story.) More often than not, I gave in to the distraction of browsing through random books whose covers intrigued me. Generally I preferred the 100s (philosophy & psychology) and 200s (religion) because they had the books about serial killers and astrology, respectively. On this particular day, I was looking to procrastinate before I started to work in the 500s (science - not as fun as deviants and multiple homicide), so I picked up the little book that escaped from the shelf and started flipping through it. It was 84, Charing Cross Road.

It's a simple thing on the surface - the book is a collection of letters, and it's barely 100 pages. Helene Hanff was a struggling writer in 1940s New York City who wrote to the Marks & Co. bookseller in London with regards to finding cheap copies of obscure or out-of-print books. The correspondence eventually lasts 20 years, until Frank Doel, the store's manager and her intellectual soulmate, passes away. They never met face-to-face. As I sat on the floor of the 400s, I felt the burning of impending tears as I finished the last letter, from Helene to her friends on their imminent departure to London - a place she has dreamt of since she was a little girl and is yet to go: "If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much."

On Easter Sunday in 1998, I did exactly that, feeling the same sense of pilgrimage that I'm sure Helene felt on her first trip to London. It was a bright but bitterly cold day. I walked through Trafalgar Square to Charing Cross Road. The street is winding and narrow with a seemingly never-ending stream of second-hand bookstores and other unglamorous retail. Two older English ladies asked me if I was lost. I sheepishly told them the address I was looking for.

"Oh, the bookstore," one of them said and smiled. "It's just another block. It's still there, don't worry."

It was still there, barely. Empty and all but boarded up. The address was painted in simple, stark white letters. But just above eye level, implanted into the brick, there was a plaque: "84, Charing Cross Road. The booksellers Marks & Co. were on this site which became world-renowned through the book by Helene Hanff."

When I went back five years later, the storefront was gone. In its place was a Pizza Hut. I like to think that they hung the plaque somewhere behind the register, in between the posters for Stuffed Crust Pizza and Cinnastix, but I really couldn't bring myself to go in and find out. Some things are just too heartbreaking to confront directly.

Eventually, 84, Charing Cross Road was made into a Broadway play and a movie, which is pretty amazing for the fact that the letters were never intended to be published at all.

"I never stop being awed by the incredible things that happen to me," she wrote later.

After reading 84, I tracked down everything Helene had ever written, which amounted to another four books and a handful of magazine articles. I felt an intense kinship with her immediately. Not only did she, like me, have an almost giggly affection for all things English, she came to New York with the idea that she would be a playwright. I spend an ungodly amount of money on an education to be a filmmaker. Also like me, she was outstandingly bad at it. So spectacularly inept, in fact, that it was enough to fill her first memoir, Underfoot In Show Business. She managed to write about the business of being a bad writer in such a way that it made me wonder why anyone in their right mind would want to write plays for a living. Writing about not being a very good playwright was so much more intriguing. Writing about life in general began to fascinate me.

Helene was born in Philadelphia, but she's always been my favorite New Yorker. My first apartment on the Upper East Side was only nine blocks from where she lived most of her adult life. I used to walk down 72nd Street on summer afternoons, passing her building and feeling as though I was living a parallel life in many ways. I envied the way she had been able to translate her seemingly ordinary experiences into stories - Letter From New York was a collection of her scripts from the BBC Women's Hour radio broadcast. She had been given 15 minutes every month to capture a snapshot of life in New York City for the English listening audience who simply couldn't imagine real people living in such tall buildings. She was tasked with humanizing an entire city.

Helene gave me a lot of things, not the least of which was an unwavering belief that real life could be made funny or heartbreaking or compelling all in the way the story was told. She showed me the kind of writer that I want to be.

"I wrote my life." She says it almost as though it was a realization that genuinely surprised her. She wrote a lot of things: plays, TV scripts, children's books, letters. But her best writing really came in the way she described her neighbors and their dogs, the difficulty in hosting Thanksgiving dinner in a studio apartment, and how it feels to take the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building when you're deathly afraid of heights. I imagine she was every bit in person the way she was in print - short-tempered, funny, unpretentious. One of my great sorrows in life was that I couldn't be one of the people she took tea with in the lobby of her building. She was continually amazed that people wanted to meet her at all.

In her last book, she begins with her accidental introduction to the work of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who was responsible for much of her love of English literature: "Q and I first met on a summer morning when I was 18, at the main branch of the Philadelphia Public Library where I'd gone in search of a teacher."

Sometimes the teacher finds you. Sometimes she hits you right smack in the face when you're finishing up your cart of 400s. How fitting.

Smash Hits: Revisited

A couple of years ago, I ran across Ill Mitch. I'm happy to see that he's still going strong, complete with an entertaining video section. Something about painfully broken English and a bad Russian accent never fails to translate (haha, you see what I did there?) into unintentional comedy. Fast and danger, indeed.

Therefore, in the grand tradition of wicked flow from the Eastern Bloc, you please enjoy:

Inspired by a true story

In my last year of college, I enrolled in a creative writing class with much the same zeal as the one-legged man signing up for the ass-kicking contest. I write astoundingly terrible fiction. Well, maybe that's an exaggeration. My dialogue and characterizations aren't too bad, but I have the damnedest time coming up with good stories. And seeing as making up stories is generally the crux of writing fiction, I knew I was in for a long semester. I wasn't usually in the habit of academic masochism, but the class I'd really wanted to take - Memoir: The Art of Writing Life - was full.

I went to my first creative writing class, not feeling very creative, and sized up the 10 or so people who were no doubt majoring in basket-weaving or psychic healing. What I failed to realize when I registered was that the class was offered through the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, the segment of NYU reserved exclusively for the dippy, the navel-gazing, and those who were independently wealthy enough not to need Real Jobs. I liked to joke that I went to barely-college in the film program, but this was a whole other populous of people who were required to do nothing but convince a panel of advisers that doing yoga and taking pictures of clouds entitled them to a degree. At least I had to do my time taking classes with -ology attached to them.

"You're going to be working on one cohesive piece this semester," the professor explained to us. "You're not limited by genre, but I want you think in the long term about creating a complete work." Oh, well, thanks for those parameters. I work much better with boundaries.

Right around this time, I was in the middle of the singular most destructive relationship I've had the misfortune of perpetuating. Thus far anyway. I'm sure there's worse out there somewhere and that I'll no doubt stumble into it eventually since, according to certain medical professionals, I have a lot of issues. But at the time I was spending a lot of time hanging out in the deepest, darkest hole I could have imagined. I wrote about it meticulously in my journals because that was my reflexive outlet and because my friends were fucking tired of hearing about it. I recorded entire conversations, every phone call I didn't have to beg for, the time I was so hysterical on my kitchen floor that I literally couldn't breathe. I wrote it all down in cold, unflinching detail. Part of my self-punishment was to rub my own nose in it.

When I got home after my writing class, I pulled out my journals from the preceding two years and went over the documentation of my bad choices. It was actually pretty compelling reading, if you don't mind the occasional indulgent tangent of self-pity and lots of use of the phrase "fucking asshole." Despite the fact that I wasn't really concerned with clever turns of phrase or witty juxtaposition at the time I was writing, I'd managed to capture a story. It just happened to be true. I was sort of the reverse James Frey without even knowing it. I guess I could have embellished things with a police chase or a healthy heroin habit, but that seemed a little excessive.

"We can just pretend it's fictional," I said to my professor, when I told her I was going to transcribe my journals rather than conjure up some bullshit. She was skeptical. "Look," I explained, "I really wanted to take the memoir class. Cut me some slack. You don't want to read my fiction, I promise you." She finally relented and told me that it had better be good.

"Why did you decide to use the diary structure?" someone asked when I read my initial synopsis out loud to the class.

"These are actually my journal entries," I replied off-handedly. Everyone stared at me. "Everything really happened. Is happening. Anyway, yeah, let's just pretend it's not real."

Initially this idea was born out of sheer pragmatism. I often tried to make one piece of writing serve two purposes when I could, like when I managed to knock out my term papers for Avant Garde Literature and Studies In Feminism by deconstructing the portrayal of female characters in Brecht's Mother Courage & Her Children. Less work for me in the long run, and given that I was regularly afflicted with bouts of procrastination when it came to assignments, I figured that I would be keeping up with my journals anyway so why not kill two birds with one harrowing tale of angst?

Once a week, we'd have a roundtable reading. When it was my turn, I read several entries, including the ordeal of crying on the kitchen floor. Everyone was supposed to receive a constructive critique from the rest of the class after sharing their work. Normally I do about as well with criticism as with shooting guns, which is to say not very well at all. But for some reason, in this class filled with directionless intellectuals who were judging my capacity to deal with a horribly dysfunctional relationship, I managed to take everyone's comments in stride.

Writing things down makes it seem a little more like someone else's life. It makes it easier to separate myself, to remember that there wasn't much I can do to control events that were already in motion. If I could write it all down, more or less the way it happened, the record could stand on its own. Maybe I could learn a lesson, the way you see someone else trip on a curb and say to yourself, "Oh, I'll watch out for that." It might as well have been happening to someone else. I often tell myself that situations such as these have very little to do with me in the end. I'm not a variable or at all necessary in the equation. There is never a choice that I need to make - things are never offered to me, simply awaiting my signal. Things are often taken away, though, quite without my realizing it.

Maybe that's a cop out. I like to pretend that I exist in a glass box, pounding on the walls and shouting soundlessly when I feel like I'm not getting my way. So I convince myself that I exist in a void - nothing I say or do impacts anyone. No one takes anything to heart. I'm not a blip on anyone's radar unless I crash in a spectacular display of flames and wreckage on their doorstep. At which point they politely sweep up the remains, put it in a box and mutter, "Ugh, what a mess."

"Um, first of all, I'd like to say I think it's really brave that you're doing this," said one girl who was writing an overwrought epic about vampires in medieval France. "But, um, I think you need to focus more on explaining why you - um, the narrator - was upset enough to have that kind of reaction, to be so out of control? It seems a overly dramatic in the context."

I looked at her blankly over the top of my manuscript. "Duly noted. I'll work on it." Why had I been so upset that day? I thought. How can I better dramatize the reasoning behind the closest I ever hope to get to a nervous breakdown?

While it was strange to essentially have my real life and my documentation of such come under literary scrutiny, it became less surreal as the class wore on. Every week I would show up, describe how I felt in my darkest moments to a roomful of strangers, and listen to feedback about how I could make my personal drama more palatable for an audience. By the time the semester ended, I can't say that I handed in a cohesive, complete work. It could only be documented up to a point. I had my manuscript bound cheaply at Kinko's and turned it in. To be completely honest, I can't remember what grade I got. At least I passed. Everything passes.

I've found myself writing more recently - in several capacities - than I have in a long time. Yet again I've started to compulsively write down events, conversations, what someone told me I said because I wasn't so much there when it was happening. Johnnie Walker practices a highly effectively memory wipe more often than not. Things fall apart, people leave (sometimes before they're really gone), I say things I regret, and every night I write it all down. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

So maybe I can just pretend, when needs be, that this is not my life. This is some melodrama that I am simply watching. This is someone else's heart that's breaking. After all, there's nothing special about that. But sometimes it's a good story.

Five Albums You Should Have Liked All Along (A Cautionary Tale)

We've all been there. You're minding your own business, losing a little bit more of your soul to the corporate machine, when you hear the faint strains of quality music drifting over from the next cubicle. Suddenly the otherwise competent, saavy person next to you says, "Hey, I'm really getting into this Frou Frou album - have you heard it?"

At which point it is your right - nay, your very duty! - to laugh in their face or, at the very least, subject them to a withering eye roll. Not necessarily because you are lucky enough to have Captain Calamity on your side to hip you to this stuff 18 months before it gets its turn through the VH1 meat-grinder, making it safe for popular consumption. You must mock this person so they learn not only the important lesson of keeping up with decent music but that you never admit to anyone else that you just bought an album that came out 5 years ago. Denial is half the battle.

Friends don't let friends experience this kind of shame. Get with the program. I won't tell if you won't.


Duncan Sheik / Daylight (2002)
Kind of par for the course, really - Atlantic Records manages to completely mishandle the most commercial-sounding album the guy has ever made. Yes, even moreso than the one that spawned "Barely Breathing" and made it a veritable standard in dentist offices across the nation. I know a lot of people got forever turned off when that song reached ubiquitous levels because, yeah, we get it - you can't find the air. And even if you were able to avoid that, he started churning out that Buddhist-inspired weirdness and getting all tedious and low-fi and making Low look like balls-to-the-wall rock and rollers. But for one shining moment, he got his shit together and wrote some fantastic, unconventionally hooky songs about grown-up relationships, personal reinvention, conversations with Satan, and the strange experience of seeing someone you used to sleep with posing naked in a widely-distributed publication.


Ricky Warwick / Tattoos & Alibis (2003)
When you stop to consider that Ricky Warwick used to be the frontman for The Almighty and wrote songs called "Meathook" and "White Anger Comedown," it makes it all the more amazing that he released a solo album that's a) largely acoustic and b) capably articulates the sentiment of "Here's to your enemies / Be sure that you wish them all the best from me" without the benefit of crushing guitars or the slightest hint of irony. I only became aware of his existence because he was opening up amphitheater shows for Def Leppard...playing acoustic by himself, which is pretty ballsy in front of a crowd that's drunk on Miller Lite and waiting to rock out to "Pour Some Sugar On Me." The first time that I saw him, I had a good laugh over the fact that he started his set with a song called "Mysterioso." Because, seriously? The chorus was "This world is so mysterioso." The burly Irish metal guy was making up words. But I saw a lot of Def Leppard shows on that tour, and at some point that damn "Mysterioso" song got catchier and catchier. Made-up words aside, Ricky Warwick is an excellent lyricist for a man who wears a cut-off denim vest.


BT / Movement In Still Life (2000)
Sometimes it takes a really pretty white boy from Maryland to put some soul back into electronic music. At times, BT is sort of like Trent Reznor after a heavy dose of Zoloft and some excellent highlights. After spending a lot of time trying to make people dance (see also: "do ecstacy in a field") to Sarah McLachlan and Tori Amos - often with mixed results, since college-girl angst + breakbeats = awkward - he released his own album and created a varied soundscape of hip-hop, trance and spoken word (M. Doughty loves those English girls with ghetto names, by the way). Ironically enough for a producer/DJ, it's best realized with his own vocals on the melancholy epic "Shame." Sometimes it doesn't have to be all about pigs and shit and fucking, eh, Trent? Just putting that out there. Sometimes the people just want to get funky. NB: I was kind of torn, to be honest, between this and the 2003 follow-up Emotional Technology. As a matter of fact, get both.


Mike Viola & The Candy Butchers / Falling Into Place (1999)
For those times when you find Fountains of Wayne too self-consciously irreverant and Elvis Costello too much of an asshole, Mike Viola has all your retro-influenced, tie-wearing indie-pop needs covered. As a matter of fact, he rocks a lot more than both of the aforementioned and injects a lot darker edge. Who doesn't enjoy a healthy dose of self-hating with their Wurlitzer? Then again I would probably hate myself a little too if my primary claim to fame was handling vocal duties on "That Thing You Do!"


Moke / Carnival (2001)
England, in general, rocks pretty hard.

Except when we're talking about Mika, in which case it swishes extravagantly and sings in falsetto.

This is not Mika.

This Just In: I have issues

My doctor is frighteningly thorough. In the 3 years since I moved into Manhattan proper and was forced to find someone to annually check my cholesterol and weigh me, I've had an echocardiogram, an ultrasound, and multiple blood tests for diseases I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be exposed to even if I were licking the seats on the A train.

The first time I had a consultation with Dr. Thorough, she sat down at her desk, looked at me and said, "Has anyone ever mentioned to you that your thyroid is enlarged?"

Now I could see where that's a catchy opener at a bar: "Whoa! That's a pretty impressive thyroid you've got there!" But no - up until that point in my experience of being medically assessed, no one had ever seen fit to make me self-conscious about the size of my thyroid. But thanks for that, Dr. T. Nice to meet you, too.

As a matter of fact, I had always been secure in the fact that I was relatively healthy. I take my vitamins, I'm reasonably fit, and I'm still in possession of my tonsils and appendix. After that unpleasant little episode with the boils 10 years ago, I was just trucking along, biding my time until I got whatever brand of cancer the genetic lottery was going to throw my way sometime in my 60s.

Not so, it seems. Sufficiently troubled by my massive killer thyroid (stop! don't look at it!), Dr. T referred me to an endocrinologist up the street. He had been in New York magazine's Best Doctors in New York issue, so I felt like I was in reasonably good hands. It turns out that I have what's elegantly referred in the medical culture to as Hashimoto's thyroiditis (I know, it sounds like it should come with fried rice). Oh, and a goiter. Who knew? Thanks to Dr. T's keen eye, I now have to visit New York's finest gland shaman every three months so he can draw blood, poke me in the throat and tell me that "Let's just keep an eye on that." Yeah, let's, because paying $25 for privilege of hanging out with your creepy man-nurse Gary rocks my world.

On a different occasion, Dr. T mentioned in passing that my posture was not the greatest. Yeah, well, I'm carrying a lot of extra weight up front, thanks. Like an idiot, I said that, as a matter of fact, my upper back does bother me when I try and sit up straight for long periods of time. The next day I'm sitting in the office of a holistic physical therapist who's telling me that I need to undergo 6 weeks of weird bending and possibly be medicated with anti-inflammatory drugs.

So mostly for that reason, I avoid going to see Dr. T unless it becomes absolutely necessary. I might end up having a prostate exam or losing my gallbladder, and who needs that?

For the last week, I've been having headaches. Not your standard issue headaches that one would expect from regularly being subjected to bad unsigned bands at high volumes or drinking large amounts of brown liquor. Every morning, there would be a dull ache behind my left eye. It was annoying, but I didn't think much of it. It felt more like bad eye strain than anything else, but I'd just had the prescription checked on my glasses a few months ago. I still can't see for shit, but not any differently than last year. So I'd just been self-medicating with a daily dose of Tylenol and going about my business of general bad assery.

Then on Tuesday, someone unseen started stabbing me in the eye with an icepick. I couldn't concentrate and was reduced to sitting at my desk with my head in my hands for about a half hour. I took some Advil, which sort of took the edge off. But I was officially concerned. Maybe I had a tumor. Maybe some residual nastiness from the sinus infection had leaked into my brain. Unable to think of a better option, I called Dr. T.

She shined a light in my eyes and up my nose. She looked at my chart. "This is what I think," she said. I was fully prepared to be sent off for a CAT scan or possibly an exploratory lobotomy.
"I think it's one of two things: the weather or stress."

This was kind of a relief since it wasn't going to cost me money in co-pays or hours of my life in a specialist's office wearing a paper dress. Or so I thought.

"But it sounds from what you're telling me that it's probably caused by stress," she said, giving me a look that I'd seen many times before. "Is something going on recently that's particularly stressful for you? Maybe at work?"

"I work in the music industry," I reminded her.

"Oh. Well. That sounds like it's fun."

"It's not."

She wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to me. "This is the name of someone that you might want to see. I think it might help."

"Is it an eye doctor?"

"No, he's a psychiatrist."

Holy shit, did I just get referred for therapy?

"I told you last week you needed therapy," Mark said last night when he called me. "You just thought I was being mean. Why don't you ever listen to me?"

I'm hugging you, but I'm hitting you!

I thought very seriously about going to see Reign Over Me this weekend. I even went so far as to check show times at Battery Park City and rope Leslie into going with me, even though I knew she would rather endure a continuous loop of babies crying for two hours. I spend a lot of time fully intending to do things, like when I convinced myself that I was going to learn to play the guitar. I bought a guitar. I bought Guitar For Dummies. Maybe it would have helped to instead buy Guitar For Lazy People Who Will Never Get Beyond The Three Chords Needed To Play "Kumbaya": An Inspirational Guide.

Needless to say, I ended up not seeing the movie. Instead I went out to dinner at a restaurant in Tribeca that considers Asia's "In The Heat of The Moment" an appropriate soundtrack for partaking of chicken scarpariello. Part of my decision to bail was the fact that I had read mixed reviews: it's a 9/11 movie that never actually addresses 9/11, Adam Sandler looks like Bob Dylan (surprisingly a dealbreaker in some critical circles!), its resolution is trite, and so forth. The cost of movie-going being what it is these days, I figured that I could safely wait until Reign Over Me made its way to On Demand - only $3.95 and I can bring my own snacks.

In truth, my interest in seeing it in the first place was based almost entirely on two things. Some of the TV trailers used Embrace's "Ashes," which gave my inner music supervisor a big, honking boner. My other motivation was even more perverted.

I have a man-friendship fetish.

Maybe this sort of thing goes both ways, I have no idea. Maybe there's a contingent of men who watch Thelma & Louise, hoping to glean some insight into female bonding. These are no doubt the same men who read Glamour in order to understand women and simply can't fathom why their girlfriends aren't vapid, passive-aggressive and wearing the season's hottest trend - bold prints! On the other hand, they probably are because men make bad choices.

When I was in high school, I was mildly obsessed with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - initially because I enjoyed all things BBC and Jeremy Brett was tremendous. But eventually I became utterly fascinated with the dynamics of Holmes and Watson's relationship. Watson got shit on a lot because, to be honest, Holmes is arguably a malignant narcissist and definitely a drug addict. But for some reason Watson stuck around and dealt with Holmes' crazy because he knew that Holmes needed him, even if the he would never admit it. Very occasionally, when he wasn't busy using $3 words and wantonly casting withering disdain in everyone's general direction, Holmes would give Watson some backhanded props for deciphering a clue or scoring some good dope (because, let's remember, Watson was a doctor and probably had access to quality shit). In those moments, it becomes evident that Holmes and Watson love each other in the glorious, non-sexual way that two men in Victorian England can without every having to say it out loud. Man friendship at its co-dependent finest!

Friendships among women, for the most part, are relatively uncomplicated. And not only because we just sit around drinking Appletinis, discussing our birth control side effects, or comparing vibrators. Right before we have a pillow fight in our underwear and make out in front of a webcam. Women are pretty emotionally articulate, in the grand scheme. We travel in packs. We will talk to each other incessantly about whatever random thing happens to come into our head. We can hug each other without doing that back-thumping move - one step above the fist bump, by most calculations, on the hierarchy of social interactions - to feel secure in our sexuality. There is little challenge in sussing out the subtext in the behavior of women friends. And even if there were, we would happily explain it to you because we've already had a discussion about it amongst ourselves complete with a Powerpoint presentation.

This is precisely why I find the dynamics of male friendship utterly fascinating. Men, having a chromosomal aversion to Appletinis and emotional forthrightness, somehow manage to forge intense, platonic relationships with each other based on the most indirect communication. They can cultivate some innate understanding with each other, expressed only through talking about hockey or watching Clint Eastwood movies. It's a completely alien way of relating to other people, and I'm always suckered into any fictionalization of the whole process.

The funny thing is that the majority of my friends have always been male. I remember once complaining to my mother that I wished I had an older brother. That turned out to be rather ironic, since when I grew up I suddenly found myself with about 10 of them. Considering that I'm pretty much for shit when it comes to lots of the standard man pastimes - drinking beer, watching sports, calling each other gay - it amazes me how much I enjoy hanging out with my man friends. And while I'm quite certain I've become gender-neutral to them in many ways, I'm simply too willing to say things like "You're really awesome, I'm glad we got to hang out." At which point they remember that I possess fallopian tubes, and any chance I may have had to see true man friendship in its natural habitat is gone.

No matter. Eventually someone will make a movie where Daniel Craig and Clive Owen form an deep, outwardly dysfunctional bond that goes largely unexpressed until one of them has some sort of personal tragedy. At which point they get drunk together and give each other shit about who's better at pool. Like Beaches, only with dudes. That would be worth $11.

Better to receive

Alex Dezen keeps a blog that's vastly superior to mine. His band is also better than mine, mainly because I have much more fun naming my band with nonsensical word combinations - Vintage Twix and Equine Ambulance were early front runners - than I ever would writing songs or performing. And because his band actually exists.

After spending an evening with an old friend, he made the following observation:

She tried to refuse my money but I insisted. That's what we do sometimes. We insist on giving our things away to other people because we can't give them the world.

Two years ago, my grandmother suggested that, in lieu of the rampant, overindulgent gift giving we generally engage in for Christmas, we all draw names and only buy one or two things for our assigned recipient. This went over slightly less well than the time we tried to establish family Scrabble night. My grandfather spent 30 minutes arguing that "thusly" was so a word, and he didn't care what the goddamn dictionary said since he speaks goddamn English just fine. We hid the wine in the vacuum box and put a temporary ban on board games.

It's worth pointing out that I don't have a particularly large family - in fact, my genus is likely to be extinct in roughly one generation. It's not as though there's an abundance of small children that we must placate with large quantities of disposable plastic. We may not be breeders, but we're all givers. Christmas in particular is our license to run wild like fat kids at McDonald's. We gorge on shopping, demanding to know each other's wish lists. The problem, though, with a family of givers is that none of us is especially good with receiving. "You bought too much!" someone always mutters, shifting awkwardly beside their mountain of packages. Every year we sit around the living room and stare uncomfortably at each other, unwilling to make the first move.

"Open your gifts, Mom, " I urge.

"I just want to watch you," she says.

Maybe the idea was to save as us all some money, but it was more like being told that we weren't allowed to eat for a week. Unacceptable. In the end, there was an ugly argument between my grandmother and my mom, Christmas was cancelled, and I nevertheless bought more gifts for everyone than I was fiscally able, as I always do. We've all since resumed our wallet-crippling spending for the holidays, and my mother clucked disapprovingly over the TiVo I bought her.

Being a giver is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it's a self-sustaining industry. It needs no willing audience, unlike attention-whoring. It becomes a code of sorts in how we deal with the people we care about the most. We get the next round of drinks to say we know you'd have our back if someone was talking shit. We loan you $5 for a cab to say thanks for listening to our sad story over dinner. We buy your lunch because it seems more socially palatable than actually saying "I'm glad we're friends." Sometimes that upsets people. It's easier to pick them up a coffee since you're going out anyway. No, it's cool, whatever.

Every year that I've been at my current job, I've bought a gift for everyone in my office before we all disperse for the holidays. I do it because I enjoy it, but also because I would feel remiss in not doing it. These people are, for better or worse, very much an extension of my family. And like my family, the $10-limit Secret Santa feels insufficient. "People like you just make everyone else feel bad," Leslie told me this past year. She had received a rather generic bath set from a secretary in her office that she didn't know very well.

You can talk yourself into a certain noble victimhood, if so inclined. But the truth of it is, being a giver is as much a pathology as being anything else. We feel like we're getting away with something. Not because we expect returns - we'd prefer there weren't any, actually - but because we're scratching an itch, secretly feeding our own need. We're the one drinking Wild Turkey out of a Pepsi can at the family picnic - who's it going to hurt? No one needs to know. But in our heart of hearts, it feels selfish, which is ultimately at odds with our very nature. Walking paradoxes, all of us.

Sometimes we come face to face with the fact that what we're offering isn't so tangible after all. There's really no limit to what we can give away, contrary to how it might seem. We always find more. There is no bottom, and there is definitely a point where we start to wish for one, if only to save ourselves.

"I wish I wasn't this way," I complained recently, realizing that I had been yet again throwing good money after bad - among other things, like time and patience - toward something that was a essentially a black hole. "The alternative doesn't hurt as much."

"It hurts differently" was the reply.

The position has been filled

Once you realize that there exists a strapping 6'2" Scotsman who fronted a band while getting his legal degree, anything less is pretty much settling, no?

Thanks for your interest.

How (Not) To Pre-Pay A Rental Car

As far as my job is concerned, the SXSW Music Festival in Austin is arguably the least important thing that happens every year. But it happens every year, and every year we scramble to have our bands accepted, get good slots at showcases that involve free beer and pulled meat, and someone usually takes his pants off in an airport. I don't know that we've ever gotten a band signed as a result of SXSW. Or that anyone from my office who goes actually remembers anything that happens. And every year something - often more than one thing - goes wrong. This year was no exception.

I should mention: I've been awake since 5:30AM this morning. So was Leslie. She had to organize a rally against the governor's proposed health care cuts. I had to go to the doctor. Leslie has a real job. I burn CDs and make sure the drummer will show up on time to his meet & greet at the go-cart track. Perspective is everything.

There were 4 missed calls on my cell phone when I finally got to work around 11:00AM. One of my bands was flying out to Austin this morning, and I had a suspicion that all would not be well. Because, well, I have travelled before. And because putting any band on a plane unattended by a tour manager, mother or other supervisory figure of some sort generally guarantees that it will be delayed, hijacked, diverted or run out of kosher vegan meals. No one in a band is equipped for these kind of crises, except maybe Henry Rollins. He seems resourceful.

Three of the missed calls were from Mark, my lead singer - he never leaves a message, which I find both irritating and a general indication that whatever he wants isn't that important. One was from Jenny, our online coordinator, who happened to be on the same flight as the band. She did leave the following message: "Hey, we're in San Antonio. They might be letting us off the plane. Call me back."

San Antonio was not on the itinerary. The flight was supposed to connect in Houston before going on to Austin. Simple. Mark's band had a gig tonight, which was why I put them on an ungodly early flight in the first place. But nevertheless, ATA had made the executive decision to divert the flight into San Antonio. Due to "low cloud cover." This sounds suspect, even to me, and I've had flights delayed for everything from "broken plane" to "missing flight attendant" to the Continental Airlines specialty "You're going to board like everything is fine and then sit on the tarmac for 3 hours."

"They might be letting us off here," Jenny told me. "Can you book us a rental car? I guess we can just drive to Austin."

Not a bad solution, considering. It's only about a 90 minute drive. The band would still make their 5:00PM gig, assuming they managed to collect all their gear off the flight in one piece and in a relatively timely manner. Yeah, I know, I said I'd travelled before, but bear with me. It was still early in the day. I reserved a mini-van on Expedia and emailed Jenny the confirmation.

Jenny called me back 15 minutes later. "Never mind. They say they can't let us off the plane. It would be illegal." Oh, ATA! You kidders! You certainly had us going there for a second! So it seemed they were all doomed to linger in the purgatory of San Antonio until the vicious assault of cumulus clouds abated. However long that might take.

Still holding out hope they might make their connecting Southwest flight in Houston, I called ATA Customer Service, which routed me (naturally) to India. India did not help me. India put me on hold for 3 to 5 minutes every time I asked a question. India was really not the right way to go at this point. Both India and Texas were slowly working their way off my list of places near and dear to my heart.

Next I called Southwest Customer Service, which connected me to a very nice woman who probably wasn't working in a windowless room in Asia Minor. I explained the situation and asked what was up with the weather in Texas. "That's really strange," she said. "I mean, we had some fog issues around 7:00AM this morning, but everything should be fine now." But Southwest wasn't going to hold the connecting flight. Clearly they're well aware of the general importance of SXSW to any of our bands' careers.

It was just after lunch. Jenny called. They had made it to Houston, but there were no flights available to Austin until 8:00PM that night. If they rented a car and hauled major ass, there was still a chance that Mark would make his gig. That is, if the band could find their gear. Which wasn't happening at that precise moment. ATA had apparently eaten some guitars and possibly a set of cymbals. It seemed par for the course. Maybe India has a racket going on "misplaced" band equipment. I made the reservation on Expedia for another mini-van, not thinking that someone who was physically in Houston was going to have to pay for it. This became an issue rather quickly.

At this point, it had become a little hard to contain that something is wrong and that I was having trouble fixing it. I have a corporate American Express card with an insane credit limit that is essentially useless to anyone in this situation. People in the office are yelling at me. The fundamental lesson that I learned from this entire episode is this: you cannot pre-pay a rental car as a third party. No way, no how. Unless your ass is physically sitting in the motherfucker in some capacity, you cannot pay for it. I tried. I almost cursed out the woman at Alamo. I even called our trusty travel agent to see if she knew any super-secret backdoor trickery that could be used (she didn't). It became clear that my only option was to somehow get money from me to Jenny, so she could pay for the rental car. This meant going to Gina.

Gina never wants to hear that you need money. Especially not emergency money.

"I need to transfer $850 into Jenny's bank account, right now," I explained, which - to the already beleaguered CFO of a small company - sounds sort of like "I want to set fire to your dog." She reacted accordingly.

The next thing I know, I am RUNNING IN THE RAIN up 6th Avenue to the closest Bank of America. It's very cinematic. Someone somewhere ought to be playing "Chariots of Fire." After barreling 2 blocks at full speed, I had an uncontrollable coughing fit during which I'm fairly certain I lost control of my bladder. Yes, I have pissed myself in the line of duty. I have had better days, to be sure. Bank of America, fortunately, was deserted and the very nice teller very pleasantly took $850 in cash off my hands without commenting on the fact that I looked quite deranged and couldn't breathe. I suppose had the transaction been reversed, it probably wouldn't have gone as smoothly.

Jenny called me 5 minutes after I got back to the office.

"Please tell me that you're in the car," I said.

"...can I get a strawberry margarita...?" she said to someone other than me. "Hey, hi. So let me start at the beginning and just tell you the whole thing." The beginning, as far as I was concerned at this point, was not a very good place to start. And yet. Previously on...Hipsters In Houston:

As it turns out, they missed their connection in Houston by all of 13 minutes, which is enough For the love of Christ! to be irritating but a long enough time not to conjure images a la Home Alone of a rag-tag bunch of New Yorkers tearing through the Houston Hobby airport on their way to the gate, only to left behind, dejected.

"And then Mark left his boarding pass and luggage claim stub on the plane," Jenny continued. Oh, of course. Mark is a lot of things. Excellent front man. Undercover metrosexual. Armenian. And not least of all sort of useless in times of stress. Which, I suppose, is where I come in. Or where I would come in, if I wasn't saddled with the black death and 1500 miles away.

As it turned out, Alamo didn't have any mini-vans at all, despite letting me make a reservation online. Oh, ha ha! Joke's on me! They did, however, have an SUV that Mark was able to rent and get the band on the road. Immediately after he found out that his gig was cancelled anyway. Jenny managed to negotiate her way onto another Southwest flight into Austin.

"So I'm just going to sit here and get drunk and wait for my flight at 6:00PM," Jenny concluded. "I'll get the car receipts from Mark tomorrow and give him cash for the car."

I would very much like to get very drunk as well - in triumph as well as in solidarity with my wards, who I doubt are going to know their own names in a few hours. But I'm still heavily medicated for another few days.

For the moment, though, all seems well on the SXSW front. Or at least as good as it's going to get.

As for me, I'm going to go home and change my pants.

Getting down with the sickness

I have been sick, in one capacity or another, for roughly 3 weeks now. It started out as what I thought was a just cold, then bronchitis, then a lung infection (complete with hacking up slimy yellow chunks while making a noise not dissimilar to a gagging dog), and has now morphed into an ungodly sinus infection. I was also sick two weeks prior to Christmas, and before that, I was sick in September during my vacation in Las Vegas. Someone must have signed me up for the Disease of the Month Club. I think malaria will be in season soon. Looking forward to it.

Once I was past the requisite tangle with chicken pox, I almost never got sick when I was growing up. On the rare occasion that I did catch a cold, it would kick my ass for about 3 days and then I'd be fine. None of this low-level symptomatic shit, fucking with me for weeks on end, while still allowing me to be functional enough to go to work. It seems like the warranty on my immune system has finally run out.

I'm becoming well acquainted with the following process:

Denial: "I am not sick. I'm just tired. I am going to willfully ignore this sore throat. I mean, really, what are the odds that it will morph into a full-blown chest cold in 15 hours? If I don't actually take any cold medication, I don't have a cold, right? Besides...I feel fine. Just a little phlemgy is all. I'll go to bed early. Or have another scotch. I'm fine."

Anger: "Why am I fucking sick AGAIN? Jesus Christ on a motherfucking crutch! And could everyone stop telling me I sound congested? I'm sick, not deaf. I know I sound like Joan Rivers in a gas mask. But thanks for bringing it up, asshat."

Bargaining: "Okay. If it gets really bad, like I start coughing up blood or passing out, I'll call the doctor. Okay, well, maybe I won't have to. If Mucinex is on sale at Duane Reade, I'll get some. But only if I don't feel better by tomorrow. I think it's getting better."

Depression: "I feel terrible. My head feels like it's in a wet blanket. I can't even bring myself to enjoy this episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. And it's even a Vincent D'Onofrio one. And I've only seen it three times, so I forget how it ends. Damn, man. I think I'm out of cough medicine. I've been through 2 bottles since this started. I'm going to be sick forver. The terrorists have won."

Acceptance: "Hey, Mom? Can you send me those antibiotics you offered to send me two weeks ago? I know I said it was going away. Yes, you were right. Thanks. What? Yes. I know I sound congested."

The best band you almost heard of

Great Moments In Music Licensing

Every time I watch the Oscars, I'm reminded of the fact that even had I not strayed away from the ordained path of film production after college, my chances of having the opportunity to thank God, the Academy, the Russian woman who does my waxing and the teachers of America were pretty slim. Not only was I was an outstandingly terrible director, but I wanted more than anything in the whole world to be a music supervisor. In the world of film school, that's like aspiring to be a key grip. No one thinks it's a real job and, even if it is, no one has any idea what it means other than it probably won't get you invited to Harvey Weinstein's after-party.

The argument could be made that giving out Oscars for music supervision is akin to giving Grammys to DJs. Although, to be fair, P. Diddy won a Grammy for essentially re-purposing The Police. So let's not get on our high horse, entertainment industry. On the other hand, I can understand the backlash. Movie soundtracks have largely become marketing tools that are littered with throwaway tracks from the distributing label's roster or exercises in bargain bin licensing, having nothing to do with the movie at all (maybe some current single gets a shout-out in the closing credits). And then "The O.C." slinks into popular consciousness, plays a different Spoon song over every Important Scene, and huzzah! Music supervision is the cool with the kids! (Don't get me started on Garden State because I might roll my eyes so hard that I'll do permanent damage.)

When I was 14 and largely unconcerned with my future beyond the next issue of TV Guide, I remember watching the mini-series adaptation of Stephen King's The Stand and being deeply effected by a single scene involving the music of Crowded House. I made the decision right then that if picking music that went in movies was an actual job, then that was the job for me. My parents thought this was as viable a career choice as when I had announced I was going to join the Thundercats when I grew up.

And still, despite awards for Best Assistant Director (retired in 1937, to the outrage of coffee-fetchers everywhere) and Best Original Song By Randy Newman, the Academy is still unwilling to recognize that music supervision done right is an art. Maybe it will happen someday, through lobbying or Graeme Ravell holding a member of the Academy hostage. Maybe they'll call it the Zach Braff Memorial Award For Excellence In Making An iMix For A Motion Picture. Who knows. But in the meantime I’d like to share a few of my favorite moments in music supervision, since these strokes of genius are unlikely to receive any formal recognition anytime soon. Naturally, I'll begin at the beginning.

"Don't Dream It's Over" / The Stand


I had just finished plowing through all 1000+ pages of the novel a month or so before this aired. For those unaware, The Stand asks what would happen if all but 5% of the world's population were wiped out in a matter of days by a highly contagious disease. And then Satan showed up. I'm disappointed that I couldn't find the clip of the way the song was actually used in the movie - underscoring a montage of shots of empty streets, bodies left where they fell, the few survivors mourning their loves ones while fleeing The Evil. A haunting portrait of a realistic apocalypse. I challenge you to find anything half as effective involving any combination of Mischa Barton and Death Cab For Cutie.


"Down With The Sickness" / Dawn of the Dead


Pure genius, especially given that it's a movie about zombies. When I saw this in the theater, I actually clapped. And no one does that anymore, except maybe if Jeremy Piven gets punched in the face because who doesn't want to punch Jeremy Piven? At this point in the film, Ving Rhames, et al have set up shop quite comfortably in a suburban mall and are making the best of it, despite the frenzied mob of brain-eating undead that's amassed in the parking lot. It's an excellent exercise in irony on several levels, not least of which is using Richard Cheese's version of a laughably over dramatic Disturbed song. I’d like to point out that I spent some time on IMDB, trying to find and credit the music supervisor (who also had the stroke of good taste to use the Stereophonics’ “Have A Nice Day” during the opening credits), but no such luck. They have a credit for the “third assistant accountant,” though. Just saying.


"Wise Up" / Magnolia


Generally I dislike Magnolia for being an overlong, indulgent, meandering mess (although it did paint a believable portrait of Tom Cruise as an insane cult leader - synergy!). However, I have to give Paul Thomas Anderson credit for the following: writing a screenplay inspired largely by the Aimee Mann songs he went on to use in the film and having the insane vision to employ this much-maligned technique of breaking the 4th wall. Just enough to emphasize the spectacularly relevant lyrics and connect each of the characters at a similar point in their individual downward spirals. I remember very few specifics from the film, but I've always thought of this scene as groundbreaking and a less than subtle example of what good supervision is supposed to achieve.


Opening Credits / Inside Man


I have an affection for Inside Man for two simple reasons: Clive Owen (who is hot) and the fact that it was both set and filmed two blocks from my apartment. The building that was used as Manhattan Trust Bank is now something called "Beaver Bar" - I don't even want to know - with a large yellow banner and a wry-looking cartoon beaver, enticing passers-by to "Come on in." I'll take a pass, thanks. But, really, one of the most excellent moments in the film happens in the first few frames: the remixed version of "Chaiyya Chaiyya" that plays over the opening credits captures both the uneasy multiculturalism of New York City as well as the impending cat-and-mouse between crook and cop. I half expected Spike to trot out some tired jam by Public Enemy. Happy surprises all around. And Clive Owen? Hot.

We should have that framed

Tracy is an only child. We commiserate about many things.

One day when I was in her living room, she pointed out, "We have a lot of pictures. Of me." This would prove to be an understatement akin to "Men In Black II is not a good movie" or "hot tar roofing is a bit messy." There are pictures of Tracy everywhere in her parents' house. I had never noticed it before, but of course as soon as she said it, it was all I saw. Tracy as a baby. Tracy at gymnastics. Tracy at the prom. Tracy at graduation. Tracy and the dog. If she wasn't standing next to me, I would have thought that Tracy had died in a tragic accident and her parents, overcome with grief, had turned their home into a shrine. It was a little JonBenet, to be honest.

I mean, I guess it makes sense. OK, well, maybe "sense" is overstating. But there's an expected amount of parental crazy that you put up with when you don't have any siblings to whom you can delegate it. You are simultaneously the most wonderful, special child in the whole word and the biggest fuck up. There is no little brother doing meth or older sister getting knocked up by her teaching assistant to which you can point and say, "Well, I might have cut 3rd period chem lab once or twice, but at least I'm not that bad." And there's no one else to distract them when they keep taking pictures of you. Some people have kitchens that are chicken-themed (this is true, I've been in one). The parents of one kid can have entire interior design schemes that are child-themed. It happens.

Except in my house. We had pictures of the cats (past and present), pictures of my aunt and uncle, and lots of ceramic animals on display. No one would ever come over and think that I had died in a terrible scooter accident and that my mother could only assuage her grief by surrounding herself with my image. Or that, you know, she had kids.

My living room only ever contained one picture of me. It was the 8x10 that came in package with my senior pictures. All of the packages of any school picture I've ever had included an 8x10. Why is that? At the time it was taken, my hair was too long, and I had recently been initiated into the cult of blond highlights, in the grand tradition of the Evans women. I am hugging a tree (not my idea), sort of smiling, and I look a little dazed. Dead in the eyes. You never look in pictures like you think you do in real life. So we framed it and put it in the living room, next to the ceramic fish. When I got my prom pictures back, I tried to frame the inevitable 8x10 and put it in the living room. Mom's response: "Jesus Christ, do we need to put the big one in a frame? Why do you keep getting the 8x10s?"

The last time I had a professional picture taken (not including the DMV) it was for my college graduation. I remember thinking precisely that at the time - this was the last time I would ever have a professional picture taken, unless I ever made Employee of the Month at the Costco I was sure I would end up working at. It was relief, really, since I never know what to wear for those things. They always tell you not to wear white, which isn't too hard when pretty much everything I've owned since 1994 has been in varying shades of black and brown. For picture day in my sophomore year of high school, I wore a Co-Ed Naked Volleyball t-shirt. It wasn't white, but I think they still ought to put that on the What Not To Wear list. Some people just don't know any better. Honestly, I have no idea what happened to my graduation pictures. I certainly don't have them, and I've never seen them hanging anywhere in Mom's house. It's probably for the best, since I look like a Stepford wife with the way they made me tilt my head.

A few months ago, I was standing in my mother's kitchen while we were cleaning up Christmas dinner. On the side of the fridge, there was a large picture of me leaning over a pool table, lining up a shot. Not a particularly flattering angle. Cooper had taken a bunch of shots at Crash Mansion one night, as he's wont to do, and I had forwarded some of them to Mom. Not thinking, of course, that she was going to print them out and decorate the kitchen.

"Mom, why the hell do you have this hanging up?"

"Well," she said, handing me a dish towel, "you never send me any pictures."

Then I noticed something on the bulletin board. It was a picture of Tracy.

Just Saying: Geek Rock Edition

The new Fall Out Boy video was on VH1 this morning.

Hey, guys?

Barenaked Ladies called. They want their schtick back.

But you can keep the eyeliner.

The song remains the same

There are two things that keep me sane when it all seems to have gone wrong (again): Annie Lennox and writing it all down. The latter isn't terribly practical, at least not in a public forum. Who wants to be one of those people of dubious mental stability on the subway, scribbling in a little notebooks and looking balefully at their fellow passengers? I try to keep my level of overt instability down to a shout when possible. So in addition to being the more discreet and portable option for sanity maintenance, Annie Lennox is more eloquent than I am in matters of emotional exposition. And Scottish, which also counts for a lot.

Last night, as I was shuffling along yet another street on another night, surfing another wave of familiar melancholy, "Cold" came up on the playlist, the one I specifically engineered for walks such as this. Not exactly the Walk of Shame, more the Dramatic Stride of Pretending This Is Your Montage Sequence. It is very cold and I am sick and I felt well entitled to my flagrant wallowing.

This playlist which has so often gloriously exacerbated my dark moods has its genesis in a mix CD that I first made during my last year of high school. At first it was one volume and then two. I wore it out, I had to remake it. Sometimes a few of the selections changed, most made the transition. When I got my first iPod - the one that weighed 4 lbs and only had 15 minutes of battery life on a good day - the first playlist I made was comprised of those songs I felt were in it for the long haul. It even kept the same title as it's predecessor.

Quite obviously, the main advantage of a playlist over the mixtapes of yore is that playlists are infinitely fluid, adaptable. You can add and delete at your leisure without sacrificing $20 worth of blank CDs. Your number of tracks is limitless. Gone are the limitations of physical media! Nevertheless, this was one playlist to which I gave strict guidelines. It would be serving a highly specialized purpose, as it had in its original incarnation. It was the Navy SEALs of playlists. I've added things to it, but only after careful consideration - "How much this really make me want to cry deep, wrenching sobs of despair?" In reality, though, the same songs that I painstakingly burned on that mix CD almost a decade ago have served me well all this time.

But last night a strange thing happened as I began my shuffle of impending montage. Instead of settling into the comforting sit bath of self-imposed depression, I had a startling jolt of clarity. I had walked down a different street on a different night, surfing a different wave of righteous self-pity over a different mess. I listen to this same playlist each time that I go screeching into the brick wall of reality and begin to think that my best option is to hurl myself in front of the M6 bus, hope that reincarnation is real, and start over again. Hopefully not as a spider monkey or an Arquette.

Last night, the playlist got a little fed up with me.

"Don't be a silly twat," said Annie Lennox in her dulcet tones. "This too shall pass."

I'm not going to mess with Annie Lennox. She hasn't done me wrong yet.