Atoms for Peace - Thom Yorke - Eraser - 2006

Saturday evening I took a trip up to Cityfield for the annual visit of the Cincinnati Mets. I met up with my friends around the Penn Station area for some pre-gaming before the first pitch. The problem with this plan is that the Penn Station area ("The Fashion District") is not really a friendly place for my type of bar. The whole zone is covered with tourist traps, fratty sports bars, and faux-Irish pubs that are usually filled with the spill over of Tourists and fratty sports fans. So, it seemed like a totally great idea to go to Deno's Party House and Bikini Bar.

The logic was, ok we amuse ourselves by going into a shitty dive bar where the bar tenders are all FOB russian girls in bikinis...sounds like a win-win situation, right? The problem here is this...we aren't usually the kind of guys to go these bars. Now I don't mean that in a "We're too classy to go here" kind of way, but rather...single men go to bars to meet women, attached men go to bars to NOT HAVE TO TALK TO WOMEN. If we wanted to talk to women, we'd stay home, where we get plenty of that.

We sat at the mostly empty bar (it was only 5 in the evening on a Saturday) and ordered our beers only to have our every attempt at having a conversation interrupted by one of the two (or both) bartenders attempting to "flirt" with us. We tried to make it clear that we really just wanted to drink and talk amongst ourselves, but that didn't really work. At one point, the smarter of the two asked us our names and my buddy introduced himself as "Terd Fergeson" (classy as always, Anand)...this resulted in me laughing uncontrollably. Unfortunately our bikini clad bartender took this as me laughing at my friend's odd name and tried to console him and tell him that it was a very manly name...which resulted in me laughing further. Finally we just had to put down our beers and head for another bar.

Atoms for peace is one of the more underwhelming songs on Yorke's underwhelming solo album. Like much of the album, it's not bad...but, so what?

Archepelago - Mirah - You Think It's Like This But Really, It's Like This - 2000

...this New Years however was something of a mixed bag. The evening started out well enough. My buddy Corey offered to host at his quite swanky and spacious Bushwick loft. My ladyfriend (who looked quite fetching that night) and I had sushi at our friend Shani's and then headed over for the festivities about 830. We helped with some of the party prep and drank some wine...the evening was going swimmingly.

Soon the guests began arriving and again, things were going well. It was a nice mix of close friends and people I'd never met. Several of my ladyfriend's Russian friends showed and turned up the excitement a bit. There was a fair bit of rowdiness, juvenile horseplay, vodka slamming, and party lesbianism...exactly what you want in a good NYE party.

Midnight came and I kissed my girl and slammed champagne and prepared to ride out the evening watching Russian girls grope each other....but then, about 130 AM, one of the party attendees had to turn into That Guy.

He'd shown up about 1130 and started pounding booze. He saw a room full of attractive girls engaging in mildly risque behavior and probably thought that 2009 was shaping up to be a GREAT year. It took him till about 130 to realize that all of those girls were going home with the guys they showed up with, and he was going home alone...that's when a tantrum of epic proportions broke out. He began going around the room, having determined that smoothness would get him nowhere, and blatantly asking women to service him...usually in this request was made in front of the target's boyfriend. When he was inevitably denied, he would respond with what I'm sure he thought of as a clever witticism "You won't suck? You suck!"

Eventually one of the boyfriends decided to do something about this and chucked a piece of ice at his head...this meant that I now had a six foot two wildly drunk and angry Latino man with a gushing head wound to deal with in a room full of suddenly surly Russians at 2 in the morning on NYE. My visions of how my evening was going to end went from pornographic to sad and annoying rather quickly.

Anytime I attempted to point out that perhaps it was time to go, I was given the response of "Listen, I am HOME...I am HOME, right here!!!" He then went on to trash the bathroom, man handle my girlfriend, and at one point stand in the middle of the room with a broom handle and stamp the ground over and over. Finally at 245, everyone was tired of his nonsense and we decided to simply call the party and show everyone the door.

We threw him in a cab, only for him to refuse to tell the driver where he lived and to hurl strings of insults at him in Spanish. My girlfriend ended up paying the cabbie $20 just to get him out of there. We both went home and crashed, our visions of ringing in the new year appropriately long forgotten and the memory of what had been a really great party forever tarnished.

Needless to say, we aren't speaking to this guy anymore.

Anyway, back to the music...I love the album this Mirah track comes from, but find this particular track a little lackluster. It takes an extra-special bit of songwriting to elevate a song that is merely voice and acoustic guitar. Archipelago isn't bad, but it's hardly strong enough to be anything but NPR/Starbucks compilation bait.

Anodyne - Uncle Tupelo - Anodyne - 1993

I had to get up early this AM to make it in to work and prepare for a big meeting I was running for the first time, and it reminded me of a theory I've long had about the correlation between time and the amount of attractive women there are on the subway...(okay, I'm going back on the promise I made to my girlfriend about not writing about hot chicks ont the subway, but I'm letting myself slide on this one as I am not talking about a SPECIFIC hot chick on the subway, but rather hot chicks, or their scarcity, as a phenomenon). Basically the theory goes like this...despite all of our best intentions and desires for us to live in a better and egalatarian world, in New York, where absolutely everything is a competition, attractive women have first dibs on the jobs that start at 10AM. Granted, in many cases, these are lower paying publishing or media jobs...but none of this changes the fact that you will find almost no attractive women on the subway at 8AM. You will find a fair amount of large middle-aged women, and power-suited men...hot chicks, not so much.

No for those that wonder why I spend all this time thinking about this on my commute, instead of, you know...thinking about my job, praying/meditating, reading the great american (or otherwise) novel, sculpting...what have you. It's because, frankly, we all need inspiration to make it through the hellish and tedious slog we call life. And we all find inspiration in our own places.

Jay Farrar may have only had a brief window of inspiration: three or four years tops, but this song falls squarely in the middle of that window. So here's to you Jay, and a word of advice to you. Never ride the subway before 8:45.

Angry Angel - Imogen Heap - I, Megaphone - 1998

Man, chicks were really pissed in the nineties.

Imogen Heap back when she was still trying to be P.J. Harvey, rather than Bjork.

ABC - The Pipettes - We Are The Pipettes - 2006

Sometimes I have girlfriends. Sometimes their music ends up on my iPod. This is how this happens.

And for the record, I'd go with Rosay...though like all red blooded American males, I'd prefer the hat-trick.