Daddy don't live in that New York City no more.

This is the story of my favorite music video. It's "My Old School" by Steely Dan, and it's from 1973.

Now, Steely Dan is everything I should hate about music rolled up into a doughy white ball. They've got all that lame rock trivia: they named their band after a dildo in a Burroughs novel (“In Naked Lunch, the dildo Steely Dan is a prop used in a porn-film scenario based on the orgasms that accompany death by hanging.” That quote is from a 1977 New York Times article titled, “Fancy Dan: Nobody's making better music than an unlikely duo named after a dildo”). Chevy Chase played drums in an early incarnation of the band called The Leather Canary, then renamed The Bad Rock Group. Ugh. They co-opted the blues, Dixieland, cool jazz, and r&b, then threw in conservatory chops, just in case that conglomerate wasn’t stiff enough. They have a chord named after them. They're most famous for a song that everybody hates ("Rikki Don't Lose That Number"). Their lead instrument is often an electric piano that sounds like the third patch on the battery-powered keyboard you sometimes play at Goodwill. Their nearest sonic touchstone is perhaps a more restrained Hall & Oates. They make David Bowie’s plastic soul sound like Sexual Chocolate (Coming to America, holler!). But they’re, like, one of my favorite bands ever, now? And now I’m trying to convince all my friends who hate Steely Dan as much as I used to that, Steely Dan is awesome.

But, as the man said, you don't have to take my word for it.

(why did this have to be the first picture of LeVar Burton I could find?)

Look at the haircut. Look at the sunglasses. Look at the hippie in the tunic playing rhythm guitar.

Look at the token be-afroed dude in the leisure suit. Look at the guy in the 3/4-sleeves baseball T playing a Firebird bass. Look at the backup swingers swaying from the hip in a marijuana'ed frenzy. Look at the rock-god mustache on Walter Becker. And is that...? oh my god, is his shirt completely unbuttoned?!?! It's perhaps the rawest, purest distillation of whatever it was that makes white people in the 1970s whiter than they've ever been, or ever will be again, that I've ever seen. More importantly, listen to this fucking song!!!! You could timewarp this exact lineup to Lollapalooza Mark 73 and the ironic hipster legions would swoon. Steely Dan is AWESOME. On purpose, and... less... on purpose. But mostly on purpose. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker are my heroes.

Perhaps the greatest appearance ever of the masturbating bear

Accidents will happen. (Well, that was a freebie.)

We took a left out of the Applebee’s parking lot. “Soon” had looped back around to “Only Shallow” on the stereo, and as we came to a red light, I ejected Loveless, pulled a random disc from the console and pushed it in the slot. The dash gears whirred and Laura said, “I like the way the cds go in.” I looked down to see what she was talking about - the gentle slant in the instrument panel that pulls cds in at an upward angle - as the first song started.

As it turned out, I hit the SUV in front of us to the tune of “Little Discourage” by Idlewild.

She took off through the intersection at a good clip, and I followed. I couldn’t see that the traffic light was red over the roof of the Bravada. She hard-stopped in the seconds it took me to glance from the road to the blue-lit dashboard. I looked up in time to see fifteen feet melt into ten feet before my foot found the brake, ten feet bleed into six feet before the ABS shuddered and yanked the car right and then left, six feet shiver into two feet before the inevitability set in. “I am going to hit this Oldsmobile SUV.”

SKREEEE.

A tiny earthquake of pumping struts and cracking plastic. The aquiline fender of my Civic tucked under the Bravada’s back bumper. A fanciful vignette played in time lapse: a fist-fight, a lawsuit, prison issue oranges, a million dollars in debt. Eventually, I clicked the shifter up three notches to park, and down another notch to reverse. Backed up two feet. Stopped, still ten feet into the intersection. All around a creepy calm. No rubberneckers, ambulance chasers, paddy wagons, death moths. I said, “I should probably back up farther,” but then the driver door of the Bravada swung open, and a beautiful essence-of-Iowa whitegirl, impeccably dress-casual, stepped out onto the pavement. I opened my door and climbed halfway out.

“Where do you want to go?” she shouted.

“What?” Me, not understanding the gist.

“Where do you want to go?” Her, approaching me now.

I pointed to a parking lot. “Over there,” I yelled back.

“Ok.” Very pretty girl I just hit with my car.

She stepped onto the running board and back into the cab and shot off past the light, which had turned green in the hullabaloo. Nearing the lot entrance, she turned on her left blinker, and I said to Laura, “Wouldn’t it be great if I just kept going?” I thought about just going, flooring it. But I turned in after her, meek as a lamb.

We pulled neatly into spaces in the middle of the largely empty complex. She was already out, crouched under her car’s tail. I reached into the glove box for the insurance card that my mom had thoughtfully coated with contact paper. I went around the back of my car and said, “I’m not going to lie, that was really embarrassing.”

She laughed. “It really doesn’t look that bad,” she said.

Her passenger, a frumpier, beglassed girl, swooped around to the hood of my car. “It really doesn’t look that bad,” she said.

“Well, here’s my information,” I said, waving the shiny white card at them.

“You know what,” said the driver, “I think we can just let you go. Unless you want my information for something.”

“It really doesn't look that bad,” her friend offered, running her hand over the hood of my car.

I crouched under the Olds next to her, posed to inspect but not processing anything, heart ballooning with adrenaline. “Why would I want your information?”

“Well, I was the one who went through the red light.”

“But… I hit you.”

“I think I could just let you go.”

“Okay.”

It’s hard to remember, but I think she clapped me on the shoulder. A solicitous, familial pat. I must have looked very guilty. She smiled.

I walked back to my car and sat down, heavy. “I don’t know if I should wait for them to go first, or if I should go first, or what,” I said. I looked over at their car, and both of the girls’ faces blazed blue from cell phone LCDs.

I drove away.

“Don’t cross the road,
You’re under a spell –
A broken violin.
(Discourage).
Don’t cross the road,
You’re under a spell
Of broken violence.”
~Idlewild, “Little Discourage”

Noble, servant of the powerful one

This is technically my 100th blogger post, and I went back and forth and back and forth about whether or not I should post this crazy screed I wrote at a low ebb in life exactly 367 days ago. It seemed a poignant counterpoint, considering comparatively, I'm doing fine these days. Ultimately I decided not to because I felt withered by disapproving eyes burning at me from the past. 2006: the year I tried to convince everybody who would listen that goddamnit, I can feel! I can feel, goddamnyou!!! AAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! LOOK AT ME FEELING!!!! It's a decent rant as rants go, and it made for an ok appraisal of where I've been and how shit's coming. But I really wanted my 100th blogger post to pop, and it just wasn't it.

So I'll just post these pictures of Kareem Abdul-Jabar.


Now that's it. That's my 100th blogger post.

Dwight Yoakam's Chicken Lickin's Chicken Fries

Really, I meant to try to be a vegetarian. But then I went shopping, and I saw these.

The official name seems to be, implausibly enough, "Dwight Yoakam's Chicken Lickin's Chicken Fries," further elaborated as "breaded fully cooked chicken breast patties with rib meat." I don't know what "Chicken Lickin's" is supposed to mean. What's more, I don't care. All I care about is that I am now the proud owner of some chicken sponsored by country music sensation / Panic Room co-star Dwight Yoakam. Put another way, I am now the giddy consumer of a processed food product whose namesake is this guy.

Sometimes all that matters is that something be as unlikely as possible.

Not in a Slint way, but I miss you

I'm watching PBS right now, and there's a Middle-Eastern man interviewing another Middle-Eastern man about the Middle East in English, and I realize, I don't think I have ever seen this on television before. This, for one reason or another, embarrasses me.

Actually, it would be more accurate to say that I'm listening to PBS, because ever since I got my new glasses, I've had intense headaches all day, every day, and I'm only comfortable after an hour in the dark. But hey, the optometrist can squeeze me in next Wednesday, to "run some tests." (He's been on vacation for 2 weeks, and patients are backing up!) Fucker. Why is it that every time I've gone to a doctor in the last five years, they've just made my shit worse? If I had a fist made of electrified bees, I would go around punching doctors with it. As it stands, I have no punishment cosmically appropriate enough bother with, so I'll just let them go about their business, helping orphans and indigent elderly for free and shit. Oh wait.

devildog

This is Chloe. She's a dog. This picture is unedited. Today, I when let Chloe into my parents' house, I thought she was choking on something. Her breathing was labored, and her throat looked swollen, and she had her teeth clenched. But she was so excited to get inside, I finally just stopped worrying that anything could be wrong. So she hunkered down on the floor and spat out a bloody, fuzzy rabbit foot. My mom started screaming at the top of her lungs, "AHHHH! A FOOT! A FOOT!"

Housin’ Thangs

It’s not easy being one of those birds whose songs are too beautiful to survive a cage. My life is the instant it takes a snowflake to melt on an eyelash. I'm the fleeting smell of fennel in a speeding country car; a bonnie stranger's quick-evaporating breath on a cold neck in a crowded room; a soon forgot pad of fresh-cut grass underfoot.

I'm a total fucking spaz. Just a great big spaz.

I mean, I tend to freak the fuck out about not that much and melt into a puddle of anxious ooze, eventually internalizing so much angst that I overreact something fierce and make totally inappropriate gestures of one kind or another. Some of you have been on the receiving-end of some of these gestures.

It doesn’t have to be a life-altering circumstance that puts me on edge this way. It took me ‘til about age 18 to be able to feel confident – or at least not terrified – when I picked up the phone to order a pizza, let alone to call the Chlamydia doctor, or to complain that I had been overcharged at the DMV. I tend to let all people, at all times, walk all over me. OK. KO.

This is part of why so many of my late-model friendships fall apart as soon as they get airborne and swallow up the landing gear. (The other part is that I don’t like very many people very much, which is perhaps better articulated as, "I'm a prick").

It’s also why it was a mixed blessing to have such an iron-clad support staff throughout college. I imagine that if you could compare my undergraduate lifestyle to all the lifestyles of history, it would most closely resemble an 18th Century European prince. Not a good, important prince. A shitty prince that wasn’t due to inherit anything. Or, like, the 7th child of a minor duke. Total luxury, insofar as luxury connotes inactivity. I was like Hamlet if he'd been kind of a stupid douche, and had never been the scandalous crux of any international intrigue. My activities can be summed up thusly: 1) learning bullshit, 2) reclining, 3) pining.

I didn’t have to pay for shit because my Great-Grandma married an heir to the Amana Refrigerator fortune (or whatever), and she set up a trust fund that covered every dollar I spent in those four years (and not a penny more). I had tenacious friends who loved to scout places to live, and didn’t trust anybody else to handle the bills. Of the three houses I lived in during college, I only saw one before I moved in. I wrote them checks, and never saw what happend to the checks. I uttered the phrase “you pick” more than any other.

And now, somehow, I have to reach down my throat and pull up the guts to find an apartment in Baltimore, a city I’ve been to once since I was 12.

I think DMX said it best when he said, “I would tell you to suck my dick, but you might suck it.”

So you log into the U veryspecial website for incoming students with listings, and you get a half-paragraph about a one-bedroom (“CLEAN! SPACIOUS! DISGUSTING! NO DISHWASHER! AN ABSOLUTE MUST-SEE!”) with a non-negotiable June 1st lease.

Or you log onto Craigslist and try to make a decision based on pictures like this.

“MUST-SEE! Only $1,250 / day. Water, electricity, heat, gas, garbage, parking, and various peripheral taxes not included (apartment complex is technically its own sovereign nation wherein you must Render Under Caesar, Caesar being in this case the name of the landlord, a 5'3" bald Greek dude who likes to take his aggression out on poor, unwitting tenants).”

My undergraduate animus, a guy who is perhaps as talented than I am, but who is a much much much much harder worker and a vastly more qualified candidate, just flew back from North Carolina, where, I gather, he just locked up his housing arrangements at Duke. Already.

WTF?!

As far as I know, places with August leases haven’t even been released yet.

But I don’t know, because I’ve never had to do this shit. Or anything like it. Because I had awesome roommates. Roommates who will be terrible parents, because they’ll never let their children learn any lessons for themselves. Bloody busybodies!

It’s always been one of the strangest laws of nature – the more recently something died, the better it tastes. So while I’m reveling in this cosmic injustice of agency, I’m trying to figure out how the FUCK I’m going to find an apartment halfway across the country. No, check that, I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to find a BUNCH of apartments that I can set up appointments to view, and then how I’m going to drive to Chicago to fly to Baltimore to view said apartments. I’m too young to rent a car, and too broke to take a bunch of cabs. And this is so ludicrously arbitrary to me, because I’m completely bereft of the ability to distinguish between interchangeable two-room shitholes. Either I have loud neighbors or I don’t, and I won't know 'til I get there, and I’ll suffer in silence either way. So I just sit there, every day, staring at 27 open tabs from craigslist, knowing I’ll never live in any of the apartments they suggest.

My friend J hit it right on the head when he said, “it’ll be as hard or as easy as you want it to be.” I’m the type of person who wants this shit to be as hard as possible. I’m a martyr, without any of the positives the term implies (like being dead). This is hard stuff for somebody as neurotic as I am to deal with. How neurotic, you ask? I’ve been knighted as an honorary Jew by Jews, and I was once affectionately referred to as a “faggot” by Lee the lesbian bartender in Chicago. Ahhh, that was a good day. Even if it's all internal (isn't that a seedy porn website? yeah it is!), I am one persecuted motherfucker. This ought to be a fun month.

Also: The wikipedia trivia for Lil Flip:
• Lil' Flip has his own soda called 'Gangsta Lean'.
• Lil' Flip is 6'2".
• He calls his car "The Lexus From Texas".

PS, I'm still more charming than any of you cretins. (Just trying to save some face.)

Did you see my menagerie?

I went to see Animal Collective on Friday. They're too big to play in Iowa City, and they sold out an all-ages show at the Picador - probably could have sold it out for twice what they charged for tickets. They left it all on the stage, then hung out after the show and talked to people. These are obviously some cool motherfuckers. They may, when all is said and done, constitute the apogee of compendious post-ironic hipsterdom.

Cuz I think Animal Collective is, in a way, the best band in the world. In a way, they're half-again as good as the next best band, Roger Federer style. Their highs are just so high. Their last two records, Sung Tongs and Feels, both start with untouchable one-two punches: "Leaf House" / "Who Could Win a Rabbit?" and "Did You See the Words?" / "Grass," respectively. Those four songs, they're better than any four songs anybody else has written in a decade. (I'll bring my gang, you bring your gang, and we'll dance in the streets with butterfly switchblades.) After the initial barages, both albums are mixed bags - the songs alternate, on basically a one-to-one ratio, between deadly boring and holy-fucking-shit-this-is-the-best-song-ever.

And they're a slam-bangerous live band, too. Their chemistry and charisma are peerless. They seem to be totally ego-free on stage, but they're all completely singular presences. Avey Tare pulsates and freaks out and spazz-dances to music of varying levels of undanceability. Panda Bear just stands there, very intense in a bookish way, sometimes wailing on that floor-tom he wails on that sounds better than any other floor-tom I've ever heard, looking a good deal more like a young Stephen Malkmus than I would've expected. Geologist does whatever he does, anchoring things with his samplers and boards, waving his headlamp around. It's an impressive display. I couldn't see a lick of it, because the mean height of the audience was 6'3".

(You know how some crowds are good crowds, and some crowds are bad crowds, and the only way to describe it is in terms of something nebulous like vibe? This crowd had the worst vibe ever. Bad voodoo, man. Steve gives a very good account of it here.)

I was worried that it would be a really, really, really disappointing show. So I did some research. I hunted around on Youtube and found the stuff they've been playing in Europe lately. Songs from their new album, like "For Reverend Green" and "Cuckoo Cuckoo." And then I got excited, because this stuff is SO FUCKING AWESOME. They're the big fractured epics that Animal Collective does so well, like "Banshee Beat" and "Purple Bottle," with sex-underwater guitars and seizure-heartbeat drums.

So I expected it to be a disappointing show. Then, I thought it would be awesome. It was like expecting a gutpunch, then unflexing your abs and breathing a sigh of relief, and moments later, catching a whistling-fast kickball in the solar plexus.

They didn't bring Deakin, their guitar player. They didn't bring a guitar. NOBODY BOTHERED TO PLAY A GUITAR. The best guitar pop band in the world left their sixstrings in Brooklyn.

I can respect that they feel like being a guitar pop band is too small, too insignificant a way to define yourself. Like they have more to give. Like guitar pop lacks gravitas, like it's not something that they can throw themselves into with all the elan they can muster.

Further, I recognize that I'm one of "those fans" - the kind of fan a band hates - the kind that tries to cattleprod them back into the middle of the (main)stream and play rock song singalongs, the songs I can wave a beer bottle to. The kind of fan that yells "Born to Run!" at a Springsteen concert. The kind of fan that complains that Radiohead doesn't sound enough like U2 anymore. The kind of fan that tries to hem in musicians, to make them feel claustrophobic and stalked by the past a la the archetypal high-school football star gone sour and bald and fat and three-kidded, who still goes out to get trashed and throw the ball around with his old teammates every weekend. The kind of fan that wants Animal Collective to be the indie-rock 3 Dog Night, in itinerant arrested development, swooping from festival to festival to play the old hits without letting the new stuff get in the way. The kind of fan who takes the phrase "this is a new one" as an opportunity to hit the bar and the bathroom, or even just get his thoughts in order. Outside.

And I'm sorry for it.

I understand that fans like me are the enemy, and I respect the urge to follow the academic micro-Afro-Eno-Neubaten-LaurieAnderson bell curve, grinding out plinks and squeeks and bleeps and blips and whispers and roars and skitters and saw wave shrapnel. It's commendable, I think, to try to push music as far as you can, even if what you end up with isn't terribly musical. This is what the beer halls of North American college towns are for - white guys making art-trash sounds that verge between beautiful and unlistenable. And Animal Collective, you are a very decent noise act. An exemplary noise act, really. When you did those tribal stomp versions of "Hey Light" and "We Tigers" and "Rabbit" and "Leaf House," I had a big fucking smile across my face. And I was occasionally soothed or amped by what you did in between. If I didn't know you, I might have been won over.

But lest we forget, YOU'RE THE FUCKING BEST GUITAR POP BAND IN THE WORLD. It's not just for me that I'm frustrated here. It's for both of us. Because if you ask me if your ass looks fat, I might tell you that your ass looks fine. But I can promise you, I don't want you walking around in pants that make your ass look fat. Not any more than you do. For both of us.

Animal Collective, on this tour, your ass looks ehhhhhh...ok. But you have a FANTASTIC ass. And you're selling yourself way, way, way short. What are those, Route 66s? Wranglers?! Get thee to a boutique!

Play thee "Did You See the Words?"!

Turn into something! DON'T turn into something!

Things to do before I die (2)

Direct a hugely successful, profane exploitation film and insist that, in the broadcast version of said film, the word "motherfucker(s)" be redubbed with the word "numbercruncher(s)" - as in, "numbercrunchers be trippin'!"