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?

Atomic - Blondie - Eat to the Beat - 1979

So the other night I was out with my buddy Anand and we ended up in some wine bar on the outskirts of Soho/Tribecca. In our quest to find new bars, we had intended to close out our evening at City Winery on Varrick, only to discover that there was some sort of show going on that you had to have tickets for to even come into the bar. Having decided to close out the evening with wine, we ended up going into this hole in the wall place.

It was quiet and tasteful seeming, with oak book shelves and a jazz tro playing in the corner. The forty something, librarian-ish hostess spotted us and took an almost immediate dislike to us. It's probable that she assumed that we were wasted (correctly) and that we might cause a scene. Little did she know that we were trained professional drunks with ninja-like skills at keeping it together. She was condescending from the get go, trying to usher us into a back corner.

Once we were seated, we ordered a couple of glasses of wine and a meat and cheese plate and got on the business of planning our next adventure. A youngish waitress brought out our glasses of wine, and promptly proceeded to dump both glasses on me. Now I wasn't dressed terribly well, and it was Rose, so it wasn't really a big deal...but still...

Anand and I both looked at each other to confirm that niether one of our drunk assess had been responsible for the accident. The condescending hostess zoomed over to wipe down the table and move us to another one, her condescention now tempered by the knowledge that her staff had fucked up...but still present. Our wine, was of course on the house. The waitress who had spilled on me refused to look at either us, or her boss for the rest of the night...spending the following half an hour furiously scrubbing the espresso machine.

As we wrapped up, the hostess came around to give us our check and asked what had made us come into her place. Anand told her that we liked to wander from neighborhood to neighborhood and check out different bars.

You could see the lightbulb go off in her head...she thought we were restaurant reviewers...and she realized that her waitress had probably shot the review in the foot. It was totally amazing the speed with which that condescention turned to obsequeisness. Our remaining five minutes in the bar were filled with ass kissing on a level I've rarely experienced. We quietly left, tipping well, and letting her stew in the fear that she'd shot her business in the foot.

I'm just barely old enough to remember the time when Heart of Glass was a hit. To me, Blondie were always that band. It was only as I got older that I discovered that there was a much more interesting band behind the hits. Atomic, with it's Spaghetti Western Guitar, disco drums and typically haunting vocals show a band with much more going for it than you'd think.

At Last The Night - Amusement Parks on Fire - Out of the Angeles - 2006

So there is a restaurant/bar not too far from my office called Edward's. Edward's is apparently owned by a former Cincinnati sports figure and as such has a monthly event called so creatively "Cincinnati Night" wherein they fly in food from 4 different Cincy eateries that do not have NYC locations. They fly in Montgommery Inn ribs (which are good, but I don't crave them), Greater's Ice Cream (Which is good, but it's just ice cream) and La Rossa's Pizza (Which I've never understood the fuss over) I go for one reason and one reason only, it's the only place in this town to get Cincinnati style chili.

For those of you that don't know what that is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_chili

If you have ever met anyone who is from Cincinnati or spent time there, in all likelihood, they are obsessed with this food. It's more addictive than crack and only slightly less bad for you.

For years I have been considering going and always had other things going on, or it simply slipped me mind...I was going to go in February, but the date was when I was in Europe. Then I tried to go in March, only to discover a line out the door and that only customers with reservations were being seated (Reservations! For Cincy Chili!!! Amazing).

So this month I did it right, I made reservations and showed up on time, and the chili was definitely worth it. Oh sure there were little things off, the spaghetti was too thick, as was the grated cheddar. The hot dog on my cheese coney was a little too thin and red...but the chili itself was a wonderful bit of happiness and I fully intend to go back next month.

At Last The Night is an instrumental...and is really only noteworthy in that it is one of the few Amusement Parks On Fire songs to not sound exactly like every other Amusement Parks on Fire songs.

AT and T - Pavement - Wowee Zowee - 1995

Can't use an & in a title I guess.

So I had to go pick up a package at the post office this morning. I got to the door at 845 only to discover that my PO had changed their hours and wouldn't be opening until 9...so I got a cup of coffee and waited for it to open. There were a couple of people in front of me, and shortly a line formed behind me.

When 9 rolled around I was walking in the door and I saw an older man with a cane waiting to go in. I stood back, held the door and offered him to go first. Then I got pushed in the back. The guy behind me starts giving me shit for letting the old man go first. "Come on man, I don't have time for this, I got places to go!"

What the fuck is wrong with people...if I had blown by him they would have yelled at me for being an entitled white dude and not respecting the older generation. I hold the door for him and I'm wasting people's time. It just doesn't pay to be kind, I guess.

Anyway, I used to think of Wowee Zowee as a bad misstep from Pavement...but in later years I find it to be their most enjoyable, most fun album. I've never held them in the reverance that so many do. But I like them well enough, and this song brings enough rock and very little of the hippy tendencies that tend to infuriate me about the band.

Approaching Lightspeed - Wolfsheim - Casting Shadows - 2003

So I was riding the elevator in my office downstairs to buy a soft drink, when it stopped on the third floor to pick up a passenger. To the best of my knowledge this was the first time I'd seen the 3rd floor of my building, and I noted with some curiosity that it was an empty floor, completely gutted.

This reminded me of something that I hadn't thought of in a good while. Back when I worked for my crazy dotcom in the financial district in the early part of this decade, there was a similarly gutted and vacant floor in our building that the young men of the company adopted as "the clubhouse".

Due to the fact that we were all over worked and underpaid (and all the bars in the financial district are either ungodly expensive or meant for fire fighters and construction workers) we'd go down to the local delis and pick up six packs (which were equally inflated - $11 for a 6 of Bud, $14 for imports) and go hang out on this abandoned floor, drink and smoke and play baseball with a broken mop handle and the company's branded stressballs that we had in droves. It was nice to have a cheap hang out, in a city where space is at a premium and watchful eyes are everywhere.

I'm certainly guilty of romanticizing this period of my life on a basically daily basis, but tell me that it doesn't sound appealing. An empty floor of a an office building, a bunch of guys, a few six packs, and a game...what more could a man ask for at the end of a hard day of work?

Anyway, this is more German electropop. Not bad and a little more energetic than their previous entry.

Anyone Who's Anyone - Sloan - One Chord to Another - 1997

Ok, sorry for the lack of updates last week. It was a hectic week for me, both personally and professionally. Hopefully, the semi-regular service will resume now.

So, to resume the bitching...I was out during my lunch break and realized that I didn't have enough cash. I swung into a Duane Reade where they have Chase ATMs. An old Russian woman and her daughter were at the machine and there was one guy in front of me, so nothing too bad...except that old russian woman stayed at the machine for easily ten minutes. It was ridiculous...adn this is an ATM in a drug store...it's not like she could do balance transfers and deposits. She was taking 10 minutes (with her 30 something daughter's help) to WITHDRAWAL CASH. Seriouly, if you can't handle the complicated technology in a freaking ATM machine, it's time to move out of The Big Apple and down to Florida. You're holding the rest of us up.

The problem with multi-singer songwriter bands is frequently that not all the songwriters are on the same level of skill. Some of your writers could be John or Paul, others Ringo. I've never liked Sloan enough to try to discern which of it's 4 songwriters are which, but whichever one this is...he's the Ringo...though honestly, he's a little better than Ringo. I mean, this is no Octopus' Garden, but it's certainly much weaker than the other material on this not coincidentally Beatle-esque album. Other than the uncharacteristically abrassive sonics, this is pretty dull stuff on an otherwise decent album.

Anvil - Tapes n Tapes - Walk it Off - 2008

So my boss took me and my department to lunch today at a semi-swanky Thai place in Soho. The food was good (though Thai food, much like Indian food is always the same, regardless of how nice the ambience) but the most notable things about the place where the bathrooms.

The back wall of the restaurant was a wall of mirrors in which two descrete doors were located. When you entered the single stall bathrooms you discover that the mirrors are all two way. This means that when the door is shut, the people on the outside see a mirror, but you actually see it as a window. So, even if you are consciously aware that the people out eating their lunch can't actually see you...it still subconsciously feels like you are peeing with your back to an audience. And I can't imagine being a girl, sitting down to an entire audience in front of you...

Why exactly is this a desirable feature in a bathroom?

Tapes n Tapes first album had a few moments of inspiration. They're second album nearly defines the term sophomore slump. Which is a shame, because I had high hopes for the work of producer Dave Fridmann. But yeah, this album blows.

Anticipation - Cut City - Mammoth - 2007

Here in New York it is CMJ week. For those of you not familiar, allow me to explain. CMJ weeks is sort of the music business equivalent of sweeps week. For one week all of the music press and record label talent scouts descend down onto New York City. In order to accommodate all of the bands that will clamour for the attention of these music industry luminaries, every single bar that has anything remotely resembling a stage books bands all day long. Indie record labels book the bigger clubs in order to showcase their talent stable, and smaller bars take the unsigned masses.

This will be my 9th CMJ week since moving here. My attitude towards the festival has evolved in stages characterized thusly:
Stage 1 - "CMJ is one of the best parts about living in this city! I can't believe I get to check out all of these awesome bands"
Stage 2 - "These CMJ shows are kind of a pain in the ass...you have to deal with a truck load of tools, drinks are expensive, and the band you want to see is going to play a short set cause they gotta fit in those other bands. But I really want to see this band, so I guess I'll deal.
Stage 3 - "There is no fucking way I'm going to a CMJ show"
Stage 4 - "Fine, I'll go to a CMJ show, but I'm showing up five minutes before the band I want to see and leaving immediately after"

So, Wednesday night my roommate had talked me into going out to Southpaw and seeing his friends' band. Now Southpaw is in reasonable walking distance to our apartment and the show was at 830 so I figured it wouldn't be too bad for a cold Wednesday night's entertainment. But we showed up only to discover that there was a $20 cover. Okay...now I've been here long enough to know that everything is more expensive than you think it should be...but seriously, if you want to attract attention to your band, making people pay $20 just to walk in the door is not the way to do it. Alex and I decided the only appropriate response was "fuck that noise" and we went and got a few beers at a local bar. It was the only reasonable solution to that.

This is that band that I thought was Interpol and is not. I still like it better than Interpol.

Another Girl, Another Planet - The Only Ones - The Only Ones - 1978

I was speaing to a friend earlier today about a place I had crashed for a while when I first moved to NYC. It was located on Bleeker St. in the days when that section was still somewhere in between Dylan's village and the attrocious alterna-mall it has since become...though it was already well on its way to being crap.

Anyway, as I'm fairly sure I've mentioned, when a person first moves to the city in their mid-twenties they are generally ungodly poor for at least the first year. Rents are astronomical, everything is expensive, and there is just SO MUCH TO DO and you don't want to miss a thing.

My girlfriend at the time had this sublet for the summer, and I was crashing with her while looking for my own apartment. She lived with another girl from her college that summer, and that girl also had a boyfriend that basically lived in the apartment too...so essientially there were two couples splitting a one bedroom on bleeker street and we were all flat broke. We had all pooled our money and gone down to the local grocery store and had bought the ingredients to make some sort of chicken noodle/cream of mushroom casserole sort of thing.

I spent the better portion of the evening cooking this thing, and then we took it out of the oven and sat it on top of the stove to cool. We then retreated to the living room/our bedroom to watch some tv while we anticipated our feasts. A few minutes later, we heard the crash and we all knew what it meant.

Like many NYC apartments, the floor was kind of slanted. This had caused our caserole to slowly, slowly slide forward off the stove. And there it was all over the kitchen floor.

The other guy and I took stock of the situation and immediately grabbed a pair of forks and squated on the floor and went to work. The ladies whoever stopped us. The girl who I was not dating was actually a rich upper west side girl (she had never taken the subway till that summer) "slumming" in the village, so she saw this as the excuse to whip out her mommy's "For emergencies only" credit card and bought us all chinese. To this day, I was still totally willing to eat the floor caserole.

Anyway, this classic by The Only Ones is sort of the Ur-text, along with "Lipstick" by the Buzzcocks, for a kind of punkish british power pop. To this day it's still a fairly amazing song, and has lost little of it's power.

Animal Farm - The Kinks - The Village Green Preservation Society - 1968

Last night, I met up with two of the guys I used to work with back in 2001. They are two of my best friends and I see them most weeks, so it's not like it was that rare of an event. But as we get older and our free time gets less, it is less often that the three of us hang out all together and without wives/girlfriends (in my case)/other friends present...and I think all three of us wanted a little moment. Much as we pretend to be gruff cynics...all of the reminders we got on the day couldn't help but make us think a bit about where we were 7 years ago.

At the end of a very very involved night of drinking, I split a cab back to Brooklyn with one of the two. Despite being in Alphabet City, we told the cab driver to take the battery tunnel so that we could swing down by the old site, where the twin light memorial was shining. We had lucked into a mini-van cab and it was definitely cool to lean back and look at the lights, with the moon caught between them, and think of happier times.

The Kinks knew a thing or two about Utopia...sadly, we seem further than ever from that kind of dream.

Anhoi Polloi - Most Serene Republic - Phages EP - 2006

There is a story in the New Testament that most Christians with any basic knowledge probably know, but few think about the realities of. On the week before his crucifixion, Jesus comes to Jerusalem to celebrate passover with his disciples. He enters the temple and almost immediately flips his shit. In this place that is supposed to be sacred, he sees commerce. Money changers are exchanging Roman currency for Jewish, animals are being sold for sacrifice at outrageous rates.

Well, the big JC does not take kindly to this and kinda flips his shit. He goes around knocking over tables and grabs a bull whip and drives them from the temple. Most scholars, when attempting to assess the historicity of the Gospels believe this was probably the act that got the guy in trouble with the Romans in the first place.

Anyway, I give you this little bit of bible study knowledge cause it most accurately sums up my feelings about 9/11. Working in the financial district at the time...I saw the tables set up a mere week later. Tables selling hats, and pins and commemorative crap with the two towers and eagles and flags...while the smell of burning flesh hung in the air. It was in that moment, for one of the few times since I've been in NYC that the phrase "What Would Jesus Do" actually held meaning for me. I would have gladly driven the money changers from the temple...except there were all these dudes with machine guns everywhere.

Anyway, Most Serene Republic is like a knock-off Broken Social Scene...they do alright, but nowhere near as good as the original.