YouTubes of the day

One:



(In this century of Internet memes, where the TroLoLo guy can conquer the planet in a way he never could have before the Wall came down, you could imagine a song like this going the same way. What is even harder to imagine is that this was a real life hit single back in 1982. Which, in this country at least, probably demonstrates the power that "Countdown" -- or, really, one man, Ian "Molly" Meldrum (click on the link; please, click on the link) -- had over the record-buying public. Also notable for the very small Casio keyboard, which can also be heard on several songs by The Fall.)

Two:



(This is best appreciated if you don't know who is behind it. It is somebody you will be familiar with if you follow the music blogs, and who may well end up having made one of the albums voted best of the year. But he also does these video mash-up doohickeys that are works of art on their own.)

Three:



(Unleash your inner nerd. Dude has an amazing voice. Lyrics are clever. Technical expertise definitely required. Four and a half out of five.)

Song of the day: overload edition

"Halleluwah", by Can

While we are on the subject of long songs, "Halleluwah" is the jam to end all jams. Liebezeit's drumming grabs you from the outset and doesn't loosen its grip for the next 18 minutes. How does he keep it up? If they had performance-enhancing-drug testing for musicians he would be high on the list of likely suspects.

I am not sure whether I am allowed to say that I find "Tago Mago", if taken, in the modern way, as 72 minutes of uninterrupted music, frequently too diffuse, too unanchored, to sustain my interest, particularly over much of the second half. But if you consider it as it originally was, way back in 1971, as two 12-inch pieces of vinyl, I think it makes more sense. There is a natural separation between the three rather engaging tracks on side one and the two slightly less engaging but equally rewarding tracks on side four, and the two epics that make up sides two and three. "Halleluwah" makes its case. "Aumgn", on the other hand, doesn't (my opinion), but when changing from disc one to disc two it is just as easy to flip straight over to side four as it is to cue up side three (youngsters, just go with this; you will likely have no idea of what archaic witchcraft I am speaking).



"Black Sweat", by Prince

I started thinking of this song when I was out in the garden this morning, trying to get a few things done before the heat kicked in, working up a skinny-white-dude sweat, imagining Prince conjuring up this song while doing his own weeding, or perhaps a bit of digging and planting. It's warm work either way.

(Regrettably, Prince won't let you listen to the song via YouTube. You can watch the clip, but only in silence. Boo, Prince.)

"Song To The Siren", by This Mortal Coil

As written about by Martin Aston in yesterday's Guardian. Seems I wasn't the only person not to realise that the words weren't written by Tim Buckley. I bought a vinyl copy of "Starsailor" in the early 1980s (I have since lost it: easy come, easy go) from the room up the back of Greville Records that subsequently disappeared and then, some years later, reappeared again, as if by magic. I have bought many fine records from those few square feet, some of which I have managed not to lose. It was the first Buckley I had ever heard. I didn't understand what I was listening to, but "Song To The Siren" is its own reward, and is the one thing from the record I kept with me. A couple of years later, being a Cocteau Twins uberfan, I was knocked out to hear on the radio the unmistakable voice of Elizabeth Fraser singing that song. It leaves me speechless, and spooked, to this day. People can (and probably will) continue to cover "Song To The Siren" until the cows come home, but Tim and Liz will always be the be-all and the end-all.



"Beachy Head", by Veronica Falls

Moving abruptly to the present day, don't be surprised (or, necessarily, care) if "Veronica Falls" ends up being one of my favourite albums of 2011. People seem to have them tagged as "twee", but really they aren't any more twee than (to pick a couple of echoes at random) The Cramps (I swear I can catch them in the sound of the guitars), The Raincoats and the fabulous, underrated Electrelane. Style never goes out of fashion.

Check ... one ... two ...

Unless Aunty Kate pulls a rabbit out of her hat in a couple of weeks time, it is highly unlikely that I will like any song released in 2011 more than these two songs: "Banana Ripple", by Junior Boys, and "One Sunday Morning (Song for Jane Smiley's Boyfriend)", by Wilco.

Both are long songs. "Banana Ripple" tops the nine-minute mark while the Wilco maxes out at 12 minutes. Neither outstay their welcome, and neither would benefit from being either shorter or longer. They are what they are.

The Junior Boys track is surprising for them, in that it more or less sheds the faint air of melancholy that hovers over most of their songs, for what might easily be mistaken for a lost New Order dancefloor anthem. Sitting, as it does, at the end of what is quite a weighty album (and also unquestionably one of the year's best), it also acts as something of a palate cleanser. It leavens their customary electronics with just the slightest trace of (stylishly fonky) guitar, and is possibly one of the few songs brave enough to foreground the click track. Jeremy Greenspan starts the falsetto revival. People have given it the remix treatment (which it probably lends it to more than most JBs tracks), but, as is often the case, there is no improving on the original.

By probable coincidence, "One Sunday Morning", similarly, is one of Wilco's lightest songs. Which is not to say it's a confection. Far from it. This is a pop song, pure and simple, that bears real emotional weight on its featherlike wings. There are a small number of 12-minute songs that can sustain the length. "Marquee Moon" is one of them, and Wilco have nodded towards Television several times previously. (Here, they don't.) If there is a reference point for the musical palette employed (an exquisite acoustic-guitar figure, embellished with piano flourishes, and other tonal stuff floating by underneath), it might be "Five Leaves Left"-era Nick Drake. It drifts, that's what it does. Damn near perfectly.

Wilco's recent critics (of which there are dispiritingly many) seem to have a problem with a band that has so much indie/avant rock talent not chasing the extremes. But what Wilco are really doing, I think, is even braver, and rarer: rather than seeing how far out they can go (which Tweedy has, arguably, already proved), they are seeing how far they can go the other way: specifically, what are the limits of restraint. It is instructive to listen closely to their last three albums, watching out for how little everyone is doing, and what they are, or are not, doing with it. (Similar notions might have been afoot on Yo La Tengo's "And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out", another album that works brilliantly within its own terms, and which was also somewhat misunderstood on release.) "One Sunday Morning" is where the Wilco strategy proves itself.

Both YouTubes will, of necessity, cripple your monthly downloads. But here they are anyway:

Mere Pseud Mag Ed

The New Yorker is an august, urbane, steadfastly middle-class journal of record. It gives theatre, classical music and architecture as much coverage as cinema. It also has Sasha Frere-Jones. He has given it instant street cred by giving valuable column inches, over the last five years or so, to artists as wide-ranging as Arthur Russell, Robyn, and Norwegian death-metal purveyors. This week, he writes about The Fall. This would be very high on the list of things I never expected to see in the New Yorker. You can read it here.

While four or five columns in a mainstream magazine is barely going to scratch the surface for those of us who are lifelong devotees of Mark E Smith's long-running circus (and will likely piss off a lot of Fall purists for not being 20 pages long), I reckon he does a pretty fair job of explaining the curious appeal of the band, and perhaps even allowing a cursory listen to their usual mayhem to make sense to the novice. He writes:

The world flows through Mark E. Smith’s lyrics, in all their venom and wonder, while the band keeps us rooted, promising us nothing more than a sure footing.

And you can't argue with that.

Smith's current band, which is now, if my mathematics is right, an astounding three albums old, is the finest rock band he has had behind him since the two-drummers days of "Hex Enduction Hour" et al. The new album, "Ersatz G.B.", shows off one of the most nimble yet forceful rhythm sections of recent vintage, and the guitar has such a classic post-punk sound and fury that those of us who grew up ingesting the sound of records made in the UK between 1978 and 1980 may find ourselves checking our calendars to see what year it is. Smith, too, is in fine form, studiously moving from moments when he sounds like he is doing nothing except clearing his throat into the microphone, to moments when he is a deranged pensioner who has wandered into a recording studio, to other moments of genuine hilarity and/or insight. ("Nate Will Not Return" is a particular lyrical highlight.) You would hesitate to call it a collection of "songs", but I don't know what else you would call it.

And in the midst of all this mayhem Smith generously gives us "Happi Song", which is stop-you-in-your-tracks gorgeous. The Fall have done this before: I am thinking of the chorus of "Slang King". I am also thinking of "Wings", but would have to listen to it again to be certain. It mentions Australia. It is sung by, I am assuming, the current Mrs Mark E Smith, Elena Poulou, who sounds like nobody so much as Clare Grogan with a mittel-European accent. And that's good enough for me. (See what you think.)

One more thing. Frere-Jones, in a blog entry associated with his Fall piece, refers to loons like him who would never be sorry to hear "Cruiser's Creek" for the hundredth time. Those are also loons like me. Make that one hundred and one:

This Goes With This (Sacred Cow Edition)

There is a fine line between the gentle homage and the rip-off. Love Is All take the keyboard line from The Clean's "Tally-Ho" and run with it. Which side of the line does it fall? You be the judge.

Song of the day

"Black Ribbons (Spring Mix)", by The Apartments.



So, like I said, I wasn't expecting the new album by The Bats. Well, I -- LIKE TOTALLY -- never imagined, when I woke up this morning, that I would discover that The Apartments, after a hiatus of 13 years, had released a brand new seven-inch single. It's enough to make one believe in miracles.

Peter Milton Walsh's voice seems to have fallen victim to the ravages of time, but this newly exposed fragility suits these typically fragile, melancholy songs. Actually the two sides of the record are two takes on the one song. The one above is the Spring Mix. The other side is the Autumn Mix. The latter title seems a bit redundant, as there is a sense of the autumnal permanently suspended over The Apartments.

Shout-outs to Chapter Music for putting the record out, and to That Striped Sunlight Sound for alerting me to it.

Where did I come from?

Earlier this year I was at the picture framers, having my Christmas present from Adrienne put in a frame suitable for hanging at work. The woman who took my order made some observations about the unusual nature of the name "Stan", and was it a family name (it isn't), and did I know how it came about. (Generously, she also told me a story about the appearance of the name "Stan" in her own family, although I hadn't asked her to and, on balance, would probably rather she had just measured up the picture and given me a price.) I kind of shrugged and made the sort of noncommittal noises one makes when one isn't the kind of person who likes talking to complete strangers, particularly in a business or commercial setting, about personal matters.

As it turns out, I do know something about how I got to be Stan. There is a long answer and a short answer. The short answer is that my mother said to my father, "Call him whatever you like, just as long as it's not Arthur." (I probably wouldn't have minded being "Art", or "Artie", but I'm sure I would have been given even more hell at school than I was actually given; "Stan" doesn't carry a lot of baggage that country high school kids could readily latch onto and throw back at you. It's not common, but on the other hand it's also not a signifier like, say, "Adolf".)

The longer answer gets to the same punch line, but by a more circuitous, although not necessarily scenic, route. It is a tale that was related by my cousin Max (at my mother's direction) at my 21st birthday. I was only half listening then (or, more likely, I was listening but in a state of extreme self-consciousness on account of its being about me, thus causing the story to drift into one ear, pass straight through and out the other side, leaving little or no trace), and I have since lost the piece of paper which had most of the story sketched out on it, and my 21st birthday is a generation ago now, and neither of my parents have been around for a long, long time, making it impossible for me to seek clarification of the details. But, from what I do remember, it is kind of a good story. And what does it really matter if it is not 100 per cent fact?

According to Wikipedia, nothing interesting happened on Sunday, 3 May 1964. And yet there I was, at Foster Hospital, preparing to make my big entrance into the world. Trouble was, my position was such that I was folded around on myself, like a piece of tiny human origami, so that every time I moved I kicked myself in the head. (This perhaps explains some things.) Medical facilities in a small country hospital at that time being, it is fair to assume, somewhat rudimentary, my mother's doctor, having decided that I probably wasn't coming out that way any time soon, or not alive, anyway, determined that there was nothing for it but to send her (and the incipient me) to Melbourne, a two-hour drive away.

At this point, a number of "degree of difficulty" factors presented themselves. The regular ambulance driver was on holiday. The relief driver had a heart condition. The ambulance had a heart condition of its own, namely a failing battery. It also had a non-functioning radio. Oh, and its siren didn't work. Nevertheless, our mercy dash seems to have gone smoothly, until the driver went to turn onto Swanston Street, in order to take us across the city and thence to St Vincent's Hospital. The good people at Foster had rung ahead to advise of our mission, and arrangements had been made to close Swanston Street to ease our passage through the city. Unfortunately, on account of there being no working radio on board, there was no way of communicating this to the driver, who, entirely understandably, thought, "Crikey" (or words to that effect), "the flamin' road's closed. What do I do now?", thus putting unnecessary strain on his already strained ticker, and adding valuable minutes, or tens of minutes, to our trip as he sped off up Flinders Street to find another way through, along roads that would have been more congested than they would normally have been, given the closure of Swanston Street (my fault; everything has always been my fault), and unable to alert other drivers of the urgency of his mission, given the lack of a siren. (In the interests of verisimilitude I should point out that all of this isn't quite as dramatic as it sounds; the events in this story took place many years before there were any signs of life to be found in the city on a Sunday afternoon, aside from the destitute and those travelling from one side of Melbourne to the other.)

At the end of this ordeal, the ambulance arrived at St Vincent's, only to find (there must always be one further complication in a story like this) that the maternity ward turned out to be on the other side of Victoria Street from the rest of the hospital. Well, this wasn't anything that a speedy U-turn couldn't fix, of course, and by that stage our driver must have thought he was a cardiologically challenged Evel Knievel. (I can only hope his trip back to Foster was less eventful.)

I, after all that, was born. My spine has been slightly twisted in a couple of places ever since, and I required two blood transfusions (all I know is that my mother once told me they weren't for "the usual reason", whatever that may have been), but in any event I survived. As did my mother, somewhat against the odds. At some point, after I had been taken away and mum had emerged from whatever sedation she had needed (if any; I have always assumed she had passed out somewhere along the way), my father said to her, "What are we going to call him?", to which she replied, "Call him whatever you like, just as long as it's not Arthur." At which point my mother fell asleep for a long, long time. (Three days later, she looked at the nurse and said, "Do you think I could see the baby?" It would appear that that minor detail was overlooked in all of the other excitement.)

And so it was that I became "Stanley".

(My middle name, "Bruce", on the other hand, has always been a bit perplexing. Could there be any good reason for naming your first (and, as things turned out, only) child after Sir Stanley Melbourne Bruce, the man who was, at that time, the only sitting Prime Minister to have lost his seat at an election? (As readers with long enough memories will know, this is no longer the case, which alleviates me from that particular burden, but also kind of proves the point: can you imagine Mr and Mrs Smith calling their little boy "John Howard Smith"? Well, I suppose there would have to be somebody, somewhere. There always is.) I imagine that in my case it was simply a matter of innocent and probably subconscious word association. The world will never know.)

Song of the day

"Simpletons", by The Bats.

I neither expected, nor had knowledge of, a new album by The Bats. And yet, lo (behold, even), here one is: "Save All The Monsters", on the resuscitated Flying Nun label. (Nor did I know that they were playing Melbourne and Sydney last weekend, or I would have urged you to get out and see them.) With the exception of a relatively fallow couple of years in the early nineties, when, for misguided but perfectly understandable reasons, they took the commercial option, a new Bats album has always been a thing of joy. And this is no exception.

The thing about The Bats is, they are at their best not when they try to push the boundaries but when they stick to their formula. They are slowly moving towards creating the perfect Bats song. Three and a half minutes of understated pop bliss. And when they get there we will be able to discard everything else and listen to that one song, on an endless loop, forever. But until that point is reached we have quite enough very fine Bats songs to be going on with.

Ooh, look, here comes one now.

Song of the day

"Terrible Angels", by Charlotte Gainsbourg.

As good as this song is (and it really does bounce along), you can see why it wasn't included on her last album, "IRM". While that album was in name and execution a Charlotte Gainsbourg album produced by Beck, this song is almost pure Beck, save for the vocals. If you close your eyes, you might think you are listening to something from "Modern Guilt". Which is not a criticism. The music works well with the post-Michael Jackson dance routines of the video, which you may now watch (spoiler alert: it has a somewhat alarming ending).

Not every coincidence is a happy one

During the weekend I intended, but ran out of time, to make a Song of the Day entry for "Lyke Wake Dirge", a song off Pentangle's "Basket of Light" album. I was going to make some light-hearted crack about how it reminds me of the scene in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" where the monks are walking along, chanting and hitting themselves on the head with wooden planks.

And then I woke up this morning to the news that Bert Jansch has died. (It probably suits his famously reticent nature to have had his death overshadowed by that of a certain world-changing computer entrepreneur.)

Here is a different Pentangle song, "Train Song", highlighting Jansch's quicksilver guitar playing:



And here he is, alone, doing a song called "Angie", from his first album:

And here is what Sasha Frere-Jones has to say.

Song of the day

"Still Cold", by Mazzy Star.



I have always secretly loved the way that at around the 3'30" mark this song finally does what it has been threatening to do all along: morph into Boston's "More Than A Feeling". Only for a fleeting moment, really, but it's enough.

John Zorn 2010 - Third Quarterly Report

Getting back to a project we started some time ago and then lost sight of, viz., tracking the progress of John Zorn in his attempt to release an album a month over 2010. We can now say with some certainty that he did achieve that goal (the one we have deemed to be the December release may not have turned up until the new year, but we should cut the guy a bit of slack: even eleven albums in a year isn't something normal people could manage). But we will for now confine ourselves to July-September.

First up was "Haborym", the most recent in the ongoing Book of Angels series.

You probably know the story of Masada; how Zorn wrote a couple of hundred tunes (I believe they may be called "heads") based on some mutant -- but inspired -- combination of Ornette Coleman's harmolodics and klezmer music, and put together a knockout quartet to record a few of them. Over time, thanks both to the original studio albums and to any number of (legit and otherwise) live recordings, many of these tunes became almost standards -- well, in our house, anyway -- so that, by the time Zorn started bringing in different combinations of musicians to interpret them, the amazing thing was not the tunes themselves but how they could be pulled apart and put back together in any number of ways and still hold up.

And then one day Zorn, who may or may not be easily bored, woke up and said to himself, okay, I think I will write another 300 or so of these things. And I will call it the Book of Angels.

And he did.

By this time, though, the original quartet had disbanded, so instead of starting with a solid and uniform template through which to introduce the new pieces, and from which variations could later spring, variations this time around are all we have. On each album a different combination of (mostly) "downtown luminaries" is brought in to interpret, under Zorn's watchful eye, several pieces from the Book of Angels. Practically none of the pieces have appeared more than once. Because of this, and because for the most part these pieces themselves sound like variations on the ones from the Masada songbook, the Book of Angels was always going to struggle to gain the recognition of the original Masada tunes.

Not that that would stop John Zorn. This album, the 16th (!) in the series, is an encore performance by my favourite of all of Zorn's journeymen combos, the Masada String Trio. Double bass, violin, cello. For what can be difficult music, it is seemingly effortlessly played, and cleanly recorded: there is not much more to be said. If you have crossed paths with these characters before, you absolutely know what you are going to get.

Masada and its offshoots, for me, are the core of Zorn's repertoire, and, although a certain, perhaps quite large, contingent of his followers might label it "conservative" (and perhaps, by his earlier standards, they would be right), well, outside of American politics that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

The next disc to come along, in August, was "The Nobel Prize Winner", aka volume XXIV in the Filmworks series. This recording is something of a showcase for the piano playing of Rob Burger, who sets up an understated, melancholy mood, with little room (or need) for disruption or tension. (Although, this being Zorn, you do get a little of both.) Zorn regulars Kenny Wollesen (drums) and Trevor Dunn (upright bass) provide a rhythm section when called upon, with the overall effect that of being at a better class of smoky piano bar. If you find yourself thinking of Vince Guaraldi during some tracks, and Philip Glass during others, you are probably not alone. And, yes, I know the Tzadik website blurb mentions both of those surnames, but that doesn't make them wrong or not independently verifiable. (Besides, how do we know they weren't referring to Hopey Glass and, erm, Charlie Guaraldi?)

September, on the other hand, spawned a monster. "Ipsissimus" is the fifth release in the Moonchild series, and an altogether more raucous affair than the above two records. (It doesn't rupture your spleen as completely and instantly as "Spy Vs Spy", say, but we're all a lot older now.) Dunn again appears on bass, this time utilising electricity and amplification, alongside Joey Baron on a much abused drum kit. The two of them (over)drive these tracks, with their odd time signatures and thrash metal tropes. Texture is provided variously by Marc Ribot (in meistershredder mode), Zorn himself on sax, and Mike Patton's, uh, "versatile" vocal cords. On the one hand I was listening to this kind of thing 15 years ago courtesy David Brown and his pals. On the other hand it is still pretty freakin' awesome. (Note, especially, the Morricone-meets-"Rango" desert twang of "The Book of Los".) Best consumed loud -- very loud -- while wearing oversized shorts, runners and a black t-shirt bearing your choice of antisocial message, and using your free hand to throw a whole mess of devil's horns.

Song of the day

"Misery", by Veronica Falls.

Veronica Falls sound variously like The Raincoats, The Wedding Present, The Cannanes, The Bats (and if you are going to do a song in homage to that particular pocket of the Flying Nun sound, you might as well call it "Stephen") and The Ampersands (the Melbourne ones). But what they might lack in originality they certainly make up for in verve. Their just-out self-titled debut album is full of it. If we were 20 years younger we would be bouncing around the living room. Heck, we are anyway.

You can't watch the official video for "Misery" on YouTube in Australia (what's with that?) but you can watch them playing it live:



(They make a bit of a meal of the vocals in the first chorus but just bear with them. Also, the recorded version -- download it here! -- ends with a very sweet bit of acapella, sounding more like Steeleye Span than any of the names listed above.)

Song of the day

"Penobska Oakwalk", by Quilt.



The best that I can say about this song, which is quite new although it doesn't really sound it, is that it starts off good and gets better. I think what really won me over is how, tucked away in the dusty corners of their sound, you can hear the faintest trace of Galaxie 500.

Downloadable from Altered Zones. Take note of the obligatory band photo: at least two of the members are smiling. That will never do.

Song of the day

"Caught in a Landslide of Love", by Debra Jackson.

Here is a curious thing. The first 38 seconds suggest nothing you would ever wish to listen to again. But then it turns on the head of a pin and becomes something that, if you were able to blot out the entirely inappropriate piano, and replace it with some charmingly rudimentary guitar playing, might well have come out of the "twee" side of the Pacific North West scene of the late 80s / early 90s. (It's actually from 1984.) The final two-part harmony, for example, is pure Softies.

Un-YouTube-able, so download it here.

Warning: hardened cynics need not apply.

Song of the day

"Kick The Can", by The Junior Boys.



Isn't it strange how, the first time you hear a song, all you can think of is "Smalltown Boy", and yet by the tenth time you have heard it, "Smalltown Boy" no longer registers at all, the trace of melody (okay, in this case a bit more than a trace) having been absorbed into the fabric of this new song. It is probably the music fan's equivalent of composting.

(If the same melody appears in another song in 10 years time, will the music fan say "that's 'Smalltown Boy'", or will he say "that's 'Kick The Can'"? I guess that will be the real test. But right now I am reaching for the new Junior Boys CD, not Bronski Beat.)

Song of the day

"One Million Year Trip", by Laetitia Sadier.



I have been listening to quite a lot of the elaborate prog-pop of Elektra-era Stereolab recently. I always assumed that Stereolab operated a bit like I understand Portishead do, in that the guys (or "guy" in the case of Stereolab, that guy being Tim Gane) came up with the music and, at some point thereafter, Laetitia Sadier threw down some kind of Marxist-Leninist tracts to sing over the top. But listening to her solo album, "The Trip", I can see that this wasn't in fact the case: there is a lot of the Stereolab sound on this record, not least on this song, which I interpret, lyrically and perhaps musically (most evidently in the backing harmonies), to be "about" Mary Hansen, who went on her own million-year trip as the result of a cycling tragedy in London, after which Stereolab were, understandably, never quite the same. (Although their last few albums nevertheless contained enough good-natured pop experimentalism to keep me coming back, and I do miss them.)

There is also something in this song, a particular chord change or guitar line perhaps, that reminds me of "Two Rivers", by The Meat Puppets, a song that I am always happy to be reminded of. Oh, look, here it comes:

Song of the day

"The Town Halo", by A C Newman.



This song has some of the most rockin' cello since the golden days of ELO. That's all you need to know, really.

Conspiracy theory of the day

We haven't received an issue of the New Yorker for over a month. This is bad. (Adrienne is climbing the walls over the sudden absence from her life of "Talk of the Town".)

Now I notice the following two documents, which I have liberally borrowed from Sasha Frere-Jones's tumblr.

I have put two and two together, and reached the following conclusion:

OUR POSTIE IS A SC**NT*L*G*ST!!!

[editor's note: all good conspiracy theorists use lots of exclamation marks]

I would just like to point out that I most certainly did not read the "expose" in question; even if I did read it, I most certainly did not enjoy it; and even if I did enjoy it, I most certainly did not share it with and/or recommend it to anybody.

Honest.

Can we please have our New Yorkers back now?

Where It's At

People like me: you have my sympathy. You should also read this recent Pitchfork column by seemingly erstwhile scribe William Bowers. You will recognise many of the thought processes, anxieties, petty rationalisations and antisocial tendencies contained therein. (You will also note, with misguided satisfaction, that you are not the only person to obsessively alphabetise your "collection", and to know who sits next to whom on the shelves.)

One qualification, though. In the case of Maggie Gyllenhaal, I think I could turn a blind eye to the occasional Jim Morrison poster.