Living Just Enough for the City

Single of the Week: Jazmine Sullivan, "Holding You Down (Goin' In Circles)"

2010-08-01T14:30:00.000-04:00

Spoiler alert: This song is pretty much perfect.

If I had to pinpoint the moment I really, truly fell in love with music, it would have to be somewhere around 1994. It was just about then that hip-hop soul emerged as a formidable force, marrying thumping beats with stacked harmonies and church vocals. Mary J. Blige's heartrending My Life was the music of the moment, and producers like (then-named) Puff Daddy and Trackmasters began to fully explore the sweet spot between the swagger of a rap beat and the soul of an R&B track.

My love of that era is why I was bowled over by nostalgia and affection upon hearing Jazmine Sullivan's "Holding You Down (Goin' In Circles)," the debut single from her sophomore album, Love Me Back. The song is a pastiche of sounds from the early and mid-90s. On first listen, I counted at least four samples: the break-beat of Biz Markie's "Make the Music with Your Mouth," the drum line of The Honey Dripper's "Impeach the President," the lyrics and melody of Mary's "Be Happy" as an introduction, and the eerie harpsichords of Nas's "Affirmative Action" throughout. The two former tracks are rather familiar hip hop riffs, particularly "Impeach the President," which has been sampled by a litany of artists on classic tracks (LL's "Around the Way Girl" and Janet's "That's The Way Love Goes" come to mind). It's that sense of familiarity that causes a immediate connection to the song, as though it's a leftover track recently rediscovered from that bygone era when Biggie ruled the world.

The abundance of samples mashed together would be a cacophony if not for Jazmine's ample vocals. She always produces strong material, but the emotional affect of her music is rooted in her rich, throaty alto. There's a certain conviction in her vocal style, particularly as she reaches higher and higher in her range and a bit of scratchiness creeps in. Even at the age of 11, she was an accomplished, commanding vocalist. Now 23, she's really grown into her voice---besides tearing down absurd gospel runs, she makes you really believe them. As with "Need U Bad," the first single from Jazmine's debut, the comparisons to Lauryn Hill are inevitable. The aching, minor harmonies that cut through the second verse almost explicitly recall Hill, specifically "I Used to Love Him." Their voices share that lived-in quality, one that can effortlessly evoke heartbreak.

With so many soul artists moving towards a Euro, techno-inspired sound, it's refreshing to hear Jazmine once again swerving in another direction. I think I've found my song of the summer.

Listen Up: Jazmine Sullivan, "Holding You Down (Goin' In Circles)"

Album of the Week: Janelle Monáe, The ArchAndroid (Suites II and III)

2010-06-13T12:40:00.006-04:00

Janelle Monáe's The ArchAndroid is one of the most important soul albums of the past decade.

I wouldn't mind just leaving it at that; if you take the hour required to listen to Suites II and III of Monáe's Metropolis series, you'll come to the same conclusion. It's evident from the first surge of cinematic strings of the album's opening track, the orchestral "Suite II Overture," a grandiose beginning to a bold conceptual undertaking. Concept albums are few and far between, and artistically successful, commercially-accessible ones are practically unicorns. Where Monáe excels is building an album upon a rich storyline (a dystopic future of social inequality and android oppression loosely based on Fritz Lang's 1927 sci-fi film, Metropolis), yet still crafting music that feels emotional, present, and relevant to a mainstream listening audience.

The album skitters through genres frenetically. Though it's all rooted in a funked-up soul sound, the influences that Monáe, along with co-producers Nate "Rocket" Wonder and Chuck Lightning, layer atop result in unexpected, exciting musical fusions. The frantic insistence of Suite II's "Cold War" is unclassifiable. The drum line is a fast frenzy, the guitars zoom, and above all, Monáe's voice wails. It's James Brown on a spaceship, a cybertronic Marvin Gaye. This musical notion of intergalactic soul, once the provenance of George Clinton, has found a new avatar in Monáe. Her conception of Afrofuturism, though so fully realized, doesn't seem gimmicky.

Perhaps it's the way in which she so deftly works with the sound, like through the sunny soul triple play of "Dance or Die," "Faster," and "Locked Inside" that opens up Suite II. They each feature small tweaks that give them their futuristic quirkiness, whether it be the odd electronic bleeps that skitter through "Dance or Die," or the just-too-fast tempo of the (appropriately-named) "Faster." "The writers and the artists are all paid to tell us lies / they keep us locked inside," she warns on "Locked Inside," a track that borrows its sonics from Michael Jackson's early work, right down to a drum roll snagged straight from "Rock With You."

The album has a mild obsession with itself---songs are frequently re-referenced and sampled, melodies from earlier and later tracks weaving through interludes. Most explicitly this happens with "Neon Gumbo," which replays the coda of Suite I's "Many Moons" in reverse. The result is both eerie and striking. Given the conceptual nature of the album, it probably means something. But I have no idea what that is.

And that, quite frankly, is the album's major strength. While there is an overarching narrative, and a concerted effort made towards cohesion, it all just sounds really, really great. So when the references, lyrics, or intention become too oblique, the music itself is still fascinating and fun. Though it's meant to work as a whole piece, individual songs remain just as enjoyable out of context. It's an album that welcomes both the casual listener and the lyrical deconstructionist, searching for post-modern meaning in Monáe's words. Some of the album's boldest experiments are its most successful, like the bratty, punkish ranting of "Come Alive (War of the Roses)," or "Mushrooms & Roses." The latter filters Monáe's sweet voice through an acid trip haze, cushioned by guitars blazing. It's a soaring, triumphant finale to Suite II, and yet its languid groove foretells Suite III quite presciently.

Suite III, in contrast to Suite II, is more romantic, more nostalgic. Its main conceit is the forbidden love affair between android Cindi Mayweather (whose persona Monáe adapts for much of the album) and a human, Sir Anthony Greendown, in the year 2719, and their attempt to break free from android slavery. If Suite II is the courtship of Greendown and Mayweather, Suite III is their battle to topple their oppressive overlords, separated by society and pining for each other across the miles.

If it sounds silly, it should be. And yet Monáe musically renders it with such tenderness that it feels weighty and meaningful. The strings of "Neon Valley Street" soar behind Monáe as she intones "May this song reach your heart / May your ears love the sweet melody / Every note, every chord / I've arranged them for you and for me." She manages to sum up the history of Mayweather and Greendown in a succinct moment within that song, via a tweaked spoken section: "We met alone forbidden in the city / Running fast through time like Tubman and John Henry." It's not an easy feat to construct a relationship between an android and a human in the far future as a paradigm of classic, star-crossed lovers, and yet...it works.

This idea of Mayweather and Greendown as some sort of classic romantic trope is furthered by "57821," probably the riskiest moment of the album. A three-minute vaguely Gregorian chant of a song about a man searching for the post-apocalyptic android messiah whom he loves? Yes, please. It's striking. Perhaps it's the intensely mixed and layered harmonies, or the fragility with which Monáe delivers the final lines of the song. Either way, it's one of the more affecting ballads I've ever heard.

As both a conceptual experience and a commercial offering, The ArchAndroid excites and compels. Upon my first listen to the album, my immediate reaction was that Monáe had created something really, uniquely special. After sitting with it longer, I've realized that, more than just "special," this album is a rather transcendent musical experiment. Who would have ever thought that androids could be this artistic?

Album of the Week: Monica, Still Standing

2010-03-23T10:57:00.011-04:00

R&B music has been going through an odd midlife crisis in the past few years. As album sales have continued to decline across the board, many traditionally soul artists are attempting a more global sound, incorporating more pop, dance, and hip hop elements. Hell---Mary J. Blige is covering Led Zepplin with Travis Barker. It is this musical context that makes Monica's sixth studio album, Still Standing, so incredibly satisfying. In what plays like an homage to the early offerrings of Whitney Houston, Anita Baker, and Toni Braxton, she eschews most current trends and settles into a midtempo groove across the album's well-edited 10 tracks, allowing her voice to carry the minimal production.

The album focuses, above all, on Monica's voice, a powerful instrument which has only grown more rich and interesting in her 15 years as a recording artist. The Missy Elliot-produced, Jazmine Sullivan-penned first single, "Everything to Me," is a glorious showcase of her vocal talent. Built around the instantly-recognizable orchestral track of Deniece Williams's "Silly," it serves not just as a reintroduction to Monica, but a reminder of just how formidable a singer she is. The song features extensive riffing, nearly every line modified by some sort of vocal flutter. It's the rare case where melisma actually services the emotion of the song. There's an air of desperation to the lyrics, one which Monica's almost indulgent vocals heighten to a palpable level.

The super-sized vocals continue with seductive "Here I Am," possibly the disc's best track. It features an addictive fuck-me-gently bass line not unlike Ciara's "Promise" (and delivered by the same producer, Polow da Don). The drums clack as though played in an echo chamber, providing a sparse yet expansive sonic space for Monica's voice to fill. In a song about sexual enticement ("Morning, noon, and night/You can have me any time you like" she pleads), one might anticipate a breathy, seductive delivery. However, she starts out big and blows it out from there. And yet, she's still effectively restrained, never overselling the emotion.

The album's Whitney moment comes on "Love All Over Me," a song that could have easily been featured on Nippy's debut. It begins as a simple piano ballad, but grows with synths and a snapping bassline. Once again, it's Monica's voice that soars above the rest, with a grand, belted chorus. It's this album track which, more so than the rest, reinforces this idea of returning to the heyday of big-voiced balladeers such as Karyn White and Stephanie Mills. Ballads have lost a considerable amount of traction at both urban and mainstream radio over the years. And yet Monica has delivered many on this album, "Love All Over Me" among them, that show that perhaps there is still a place for them to succeed.

Though the album is heavy on balladry, it takes a few tentative uptempo steps. Elliot and Sullivan return for "If You Were My Man," a slick rewrite of Evelyn "Champagne" King's post-disco classic, "Betcha She Don't Love You." As the album's only certifiably uptempo track, it injects a strong dose of 80s funk energy. But even the midtempo tracks feature smart production tricks that keep them from dragging. The Jim Jonsin-helmed "Mirror" has enough surging synths and twitchy drums to keep the album from devolving into ballad-driven monotony. Even "One in a Lifetime," which can be easily written-off as a retread of Mary J. Blige's "Be Without You," has a tumbling drumline and a sense of urgency that allow it to transcend the typical boring ballad trap.

The album's only major failing is its brevity. Many artists have released classic 10 track albums that, despite their short length, still resonate as large musical statements (D'Angelo's Brown Sugar and Amy Winehouse's Back to Black come to mind). While each individual track on Still Standing is enjoyable, it does seem to be lacking in some sort of amorphous, general sense. A few of the early leaked tracks may have brought it a better sense of completion, such as the plaintive "Taxi," or the hip hop soul throwback "Let Me Know." Despite this, Monica's accomplished something quite special with this album---amidst constantly shifting music tastes, she's offered an album that feels current and yet still representative of the artist she's always been.

Listen Up: "Here I Am," "Love All Over Me"

Back to Reality

2009-11-15T13:22:00.004-05:00

So I disappeared for quite a while.

Whoops?

I thought that I would have the energy and time and inspiration to keep two blogs updated. I should have realized that, since I could barely keep one alive, adding another one to the mix probably would make things worse.

But it looks like there's been a foreclosure on my second home, and I miss writing, and my head is sort of messy today, so here I am.

I don't want to make any promises, because I know I'm pretty good at breaking them, but I'm going to try to write more. I think that I've realized that I'm not writing for anyone but myself these days, and that's a good thing.

So if you're reading, thanks. If you're not, that's okay too.

New Lows

2008-07-13T20:49:00.005-04:00

I'm watching Camp Rock right now, and I'm, like, mildly disappointed. This is no HSM, son.

Also? Watching the Jonas Brothers makes me feel like a pedophile, and I'm not okay with that. Time to change the channel.

Taxi Cab Confessions

2008-07-09T20:15:00.004-04:00

I just took a hilariously wonderful cab ride.

My driver was a Tucson-born Mexican/Navajo Vietnam vet who's been driving his cab for 38 years. We struck up conversation about traffic jams and flipping fares, and then I asked him about where, after all these years, he still gets lost (Brooklyn, and occasionally down in the Financial District).

When we got closer to my neighborhood, he started telling me about what it was like when he lived there, in high school. The Lower East Side was all Spaniards and Puerto Ricans, with the Italians on the other side of the Bowery. "Orchard Street," he told me, "had the best shopping. All these shops. It was the best time then. Everyone got along. It was the best place to be. Not the same anymore."

When we got to my place, I sat in the cab for another 10 minutes and he told me about trying to earn street cred in high school without joining a gang (it involved befriending the Spanish gang leader, Carlos, and helping defend Seward Park on Essex Street from a takeover by the Italians). "Right around the corner, on the corner of Clinton Street, there used to be a theater, with people playing music and doing The Twist all night. I miss it."

I knew I had to get out, but part of me felt guilty leaving. He was fully enthralled in the rush of his past that met him once we hit the LES and was excited to share. More than anything in New York, you must respect your (neighborhood's) forefathers. I needed to indulge him, and I wanted to. His story wrapped up, and I got out and told him I enjoyed listening to his local lore. "I always get nostalgic when I come down here," he said with a smile, and drove off.

And the funny thing is, in my short Manhattan life, I do too. So many people come to Manhattan because they love the idea of how it reinvents itself continually (giving us the chance to do the same), but we still grip viciously to the past. When I walk through the East Village, my mind flips through a series of what-was-here-before and remember-when-we-went-here and I-can't-believe-they-closed-that-down. There are always two New Yorks---the one of the present, and the one of the past, and they seem to run parallel, one transposed on the other. It's a disjointed life---I guess we like the disorientation.

A New Home, Pt. II

2008-06-24T18:49:00.003-04:00

So I failed to mention that, not only have I moved to a new site, but I also moved into a new apartment this weekend. Probably because it was an EPIC FAIL. I didn't, um, really pack too much before Saturday, which was the big moving day. My sister Femina and her fiance Erik graciously volunteered to help me out, which was a BAD DECISION on their part.

I kind of sort of decided to go out for Trina's birthday the night before instead of actually, you know, finishing my packing. I had been prepping all week---I literally threw out 10 TRASH BAGS OF BULLSHIT. I live in a tiny studio---lord knows how I was keeping it in the first place. So I spent Saturday morning attempting to pack, which the hangover slightly impeded.

But the major impetus was the size of my apartment. I got to a point where I literally could not pack anything else because there was NO ROOM LEFT TO PUT SHIT. I called Femina having a mild panic attack, which she quickly assuaged.

So basically two car trips later, I got all of my shit there. The hilarious part? I moved four blocks. Literally. But the thing is, my new apartment is on the fifth floor. Do you know what it's like to travel up and down 5 flights of steps, over 20 times, over the course of a single day? I'll give you a hint: it feels like this.

Regardless, I'm officially moved in, and really in love with my new (one bedroom!) apartment. It feels good to finally have space to move around in, to actually have DOORS THAT LEAD TO OTHER ROOMS. And while it was only four blocks, the neighborhood is completely different. New cafes, new bars, new restaurants (I'm in one right now, on Clinton St., drinking too much wine and typing this up).

What I've always loved about Manhattan is that you can travel 2 blocks and find a completely new world, and I'm ready for a bit of a change of pace. Goodbye, Cafe Pick Me Up. Hello, Cafe Falai. After three years in a small cage, I'm ready to live like an actual person.

A New Home

2008-06-19T19:57:00.003-04:00

Linda and I have decided that, since we tend to offend people so much on our own, we should join together and start a little joint site where we can spew the verbal equivalent of genocide, even though genocide isn't funny (except when it is).

You can find us both at Why Are You Yelling? There's no real specific focus for the site (not surprising) other than it's just the two of us dicking around and chit chatting about shit (cultural, racial, sexual, and otherwise) that catches our collective eyes.

But don't you worry---I'll still be posting here with the same sporadic irregularity that I have been. So bookmark and comment away.

This is why I don't have cable

2008-06-08T20:57:00.004-04:00

(Click to enlarge)

Breaking News: John McCain Is Old and Bitter; Will Probably Lose in November

2008-06-08T18:57:00.004-04:00

Clearly, I've pretty much given up on that whole let's-not-talk-too-much-about-politics thing that I tried out for a while.

So anyway, the presidential race is now officially down to two contenders: Obama and McCain. I think it's quite obvious where my loyalties lie. Frank Rich's Op-Ed in today's issue of The New York Times, One Historic Night, Two Americas, is incredibly effective in demonstrating how, even with his relative youth, Obama has delivered a surprisingly comprehensive, sustainable, and utterly modern vision for America. More importantly, he understands his message from all angles, and how to effectively describe and disseminate it:

He has never deviated from his much-quoted formulation in “The Audacity of Hope,” where he described himself as aloof from “the psychodrama of the baby boom generation” with its “old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago.” His vocabulary is so different from that of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain that they often find it as baffling as a foreign language, even as they try to rip it off.
The selling point of Mr. Obama’s vision of change is not doctrinaire liberalism or Bush-bashing but an inclusiveness that he believes can start to relieve Washington’s gridlock much as it animated his campaign. Some of that inclusiveness is racial, ethnic and generational, in the casual, what’s-the-big-deal manner of post-boomer Americans already swimming in our country’s rapidly expanding demographic pool. Some of it is post-partisan: he acknowledges that Republicans, Ronald Reagan included, can have ideas.
Opponents who dismiss this as wussy naïveté do so at their own risk. They at once call attention to the expiring shelf life of their own Clinton-Bush-vintage panaceas and lull themselves into underestimating Mr. Obama’s political killer instincts.

And those political killer instincts have been what have allowed Obama to effectively out-wit, out-strategize, and out-message the most well-known modern Democrats, the Clintons. He built a campaign built on change, on rebuilding the American brand both domestically and internationally, before many Americans had truly articulated what it was that they wanted from the next president.

The consistency of this message has allowed him to push past the gaffes he's had in the past few months. Ultimately, his message has the same sort of fluidity as his multiracial identity---it's agile and adaptable in a way that feels genuine, rather than reeking of political pandering. Because of this, McCain will have a lot of trouble nailing him down. McCain clearly defined his maverick persona years ago, but his recent voting record, coupled with his regurgitation of far-right talking points in order to appease the Republican Party's conservative base, has diluted it to a point where his "Straight Talk Express" seems laughable; it's all flip-flopping and pandering to garner votes. In the face of someone like Obama, who deftly deflects criticism and turns it into his opponent's weakness, McCain is going to have to put himself on solid ideological footing. He's been working on that lately, but it seems that, as he's moved further to the right, he's eroded his brand that made him popular in the first place.

But more than that, Obama is such an utterly modern political identity, and the Republican bag of tricks and smears is so dated that they don't know really how to be innovative enough to take down Obama, other than character assassination. And while that works in many cases, it seems like America is starting to get a little tired of those dirty games:

Mr. McCain’s speech in a New Orleans suburb on Tuesday night spawned a cottage industry of ridicule, even among Republicans. The halting delivery, sickly green backdrop and spastic, inappropriate smiles, presumably mandated by some consultant hoping to mask his anger, left the impression that Mr. McCain isn’t yet ready for prime-time radio.
But the substance was even worse than the theatrics. Incredibly, Mr. McCain attacked Mr. Obama for being insufficiently bipartisan while speaking to the most conspicuously partisan audience you can assemble in today’s America: a small, nearly all-white crowd that seconded his attack lines with boorish choruses of boos. On TV, the audience came across as a country-club membership riled by a change in the Sunday brunch menu.

You all absolutely must watch the highlight reel of McCain's speech on Tuesday. Three weeks in the making, and it was just painfully embarrassing. The creepy smile, the disingenuous delivery. It's surely not going to be a campaign decided solely on oratory, but it makes a considerable difference. All I can say is this: I CAN'T WAIT FOR THEIR FIRST DEBATE. And it's not just to see how laughably bad McCain will be in terms of speaking off the cuff and controlling his temper, to see how Obama rhetorically spanks him. For so many people, especially long-time Democratic voters who, still grieving over Senator Clinton's departure from the race, have threated to vote for McCain in the fall, there is a resounding image of the Independent McCain. In a recent poll, a significant number of female Democratic voters (I think it was upwards of 20%) who were contemplating voting for McCain, had wrongly assumed that he supported a full-slate of reproductive rights. HE THINKS ROE V. WADE SHOULD BE OVERTURNED FOLKS.

Once Obama and McCain get a chance to go toe-to-toe on policy, I think that a lot of people are going to realize that McCain is just another conservative trying to cut a Democratic stance where it suits him. And Obama? Well, I think that they'll see that his youth is what has made him what he is: a modern politician who understands modern concerns, who wants to solve issues in innovative ways rather than rely on the same solutions that will ultimately fail us in the end. Change is scary, but we're at a place where we have no choice. And I think that Senator Obama is the best choice to lead the nation where it needs to go, to remain a world power and regain the sense of prosperity that seems to be fading.

Really, I think we'd all like to just be able to dream again. And Senator Obama provides that chance.

One Historic Night, Two Americas [The New York Times]

Just Something to Think About

2008-06-08T18:30:00.002-04:00

Life in New York is fascinating to me for so many reasons, but the one that I've come back to over and over again for the past five years is the expansive yet limited personal contact one has with others. In much of America, even in densely populated American cities, most people live lives that constantly insulate them from interaction with strangers. They drive to work, they go to bars in groups.

In New York, every day is filled with thousands of different people, ones who you've never seen before and probably never will. There is the man in front of you ordering the macchiato, the girl who is swiping her Metrocard too slow, the Jamaican nanny struggling to haul her two blond charges up the subway station stairs in their Maclaren strollers. We are all living these completely separate lives in these shared spaces, never saying a word, never knowing if the man who just walked by is the one who could change your life.

I guess this is why Missed Connections on craigslist is so popular.

We all ignore each other. We're in a rush. We're five minutes late to work. We need to grab coffee between meetings. There's a train to catch, a sale to hit up, dinner reservations to make. And yet, once in a while, there is that shared moment. It's when the tall guy standing in front of the 6 train doors starts recording himself loudly performing a reggae song, hip gyrations and all, and you lock eyes with the young girl sitting down and you both burst out laughing (true story---it was terrrrribly awkward). It's when you actually help the Jamaican nanny carry that goddamn Maclaren up the steps. It's when your friend is in the bathroom, and you're sitting at the bar, and you start talking to the person next to you because sometimes the unknown can be more comforting and exhilarating than everything you already have figured out.

I'm really just waxing on and on about this for no good reason other than I recently re-encountered a piece of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass that I forgot that I loved. I haven't read the book since early in my college years. I remember laboring through it, reading it more as an obligation than an experience. Anyway, I'd love to read it again because at least, this time around, I won't have to worry about writing some obscenely asinine paper about it afterwards. And maybe then I could actually enjoy it. Take a read.

To a Stranger
by Walt Whitman

Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me
     as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall'd as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate,
     chaste, matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours,
     only nor left my body mine only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you,
     take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or,
     wake at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

Identity Politics & Transcending Gender

2008-06-07T17:52:00.001-04:00

Isn't that, like, a really serious title for a post? I thought so.

I've had my issues with Senator Clinton throughout her primary battle---while I think that she's an incredibly strong candidate, I think she ran a very poor campaign that just wasn't in step with the changing face of national politics. Despite this, it's undeniable that, while it may not have been her intention, Senator Clinton has blown the national dialogue around sexism wide open, and has opened the eyes of many young women to the struggles fought by their mothers and grandmothers so that they themselves could have a better shot at cracking the glass ceiling.

Ruth Marcus penned a great op-ed in The Washington Post about what, exactly, Clinton's campaign accomplished in terms of the cultural discussion of gender and feminism. A brief expert:

Yes, there have been sexist episodes and comments. Yes, it's infuriatingly more acceptable to make cracks about gender than about race.

But the notion that Clinton was the victim of unrelenting, vicious hatred because she is a woman -- is it safe to call this reaction overwrought? Clinton managed to win more votes than any primary candidate in either party ever had before. It's hard to square that result with the notion that her candidacy exposed a deep vein of misogyny.
...
More important than helping candidates figure out how to talk about gender, Clinton's candidacy has dispensed with damaging myths about women's capacity to compete in presidential politics. Not tough enough? If anything, Clinton came off as too tough. Too emotional? Clinton teared up in New Hampshire -- and, confounding male pundits, this display of vulnerability helped her win. Too fluffy? Clinton, perhaps to her detriment, out-wonked the competition.

She demonstrated stamina and determination, a dogged workhorse to Obama's delicate thoroughbred. Improbably, she ended up winning the white-guy vote -- and not all of this can be explained by the notion that these voters faced an unpalatable choice between gender and race.

I agree with Marcus' assertion that, while sexism from the punditry was overwhelming, disgusting, and rarely rebuked, Senator Clinton showed that it's still quite possible to transcend this. While she missed the top prize, her astounding successes in this campaign demonstrate that, while we may not be in a place as a nation where gender equality it always understood, where sexism is a historical issue, a woman can be a front-runner (sorry Steinem, I disagree with you---for the early half of the campaign, Senator Clinton was just that).

As Senator Obama has cast himself as the post-racial candidate, perhaps, as Marcus notes, Senator Clinton will be remembered for being post-feminist.

The Ground Clinton Broke [The Washington Post]

Hope is the thing with feathers

2008-06-03T23:46:00.006-04:00

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I ’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

-Emily Dickinson

After an exhausting year and a half of voting, debating, waiting, gaffing, and, most importantly, inspiring, I would to say this: congratulations, Barack Obama.

"This is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past and bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love."

-Senator Barak Obama, Democratic Nominee for United States President

Updated: Senator Obama's acceptance speech in St. Paul, Minnesota on June 3:

It's Your Fault

2008-05-14T13:50:00.011-04:00

Jezebel's daily feature, Crappy Hour, is a sometimes incoherent morning round-up between two of the editors, Megan and Moe. While it's sometimes a bit rambling and cyclical and just not edited down into anything that is not painful to read, their musings usually have a few bright moments underneath all of the, well crap. Here's an incredibly insightful nugget from today, courtesy of Megan. It's basically everything I would like to say to the jackasses who say that they will stay home or vote for McCain if Clinton loses the nomination, rather than vote for "Arugula Elitist" Barry Obama, the "bitter" folks who vote on social issues that ultimately have no material impact on the quality of their lives rather than focusing on the economic issues that do.

"Hey, Reagan Democrats! It's your fault. You didn't like the panty-waisted Carter, you felt emasculated by the Iranian hostages, and you liked the big actor-fake-cowboy thing and so you voted for him. And, by doing so, you voted for the decline of your own jobs, and your own industries, of your towns and your cities. You voted for your kids to move away to find a job or to join an increasingly-utilized military. You voted for the ascendency of Wal-Mart and of the super-rich. And now you're mad at people for that? Look in the mirror. Then go cast your vote for McCain like you know you want to because you find Obama scary because he doesn't wear a damn flag pin and do the same thing to your kids and their kids that was done to you because who needs health care reform when we can have tax cuts."

Goddamn, that's good.

If you believe in your love and you can't give him up, say oh

2008-04-20T23:08:00.005-04:00

Sometimes a song enters your consciousness and refuses to leave---you spend your day waiting to hear it again, anxious to dedicate another 4 minutes of your life to the microcosm of love and yearning that it presents. Jazmine Sullivan's latest single, “I Need You Bad” is one of those songs. I've spent the past three days with it on repeat, and I have yet to reach anything that could be mistaken for a point of saturation.

The song is a long time in the making. At 20 years old, Jazmine may seem young, but she's been working on her big break for quite a while. She started out as a regular performer while still a preteen at the famed Black Lily sessions in Philadelphia, which essentially birthed the Philly Soul movement by developing the talents of Jill Scott, Floetry, Kindred, Musiq Soulchild, and Jaguar Wright. Currently signed to J Records, she's spent the past few years in artist development limbo at Jive Records with the likes of Missy Elliot, who featured her talents prominently on backing vocals for the likes of Fantasia, among others. She also penned Christina Milian's “Say I.”

But I can't spend this many words introducing her without just jumping to the real meat of it all---her voice. Jazmine has a once-in-a-lifetime voice, a voice that is explosive but controlled, a tone that is composed of equal parts sugar and grit. A number of her demo tracks have leaked over the past few years, building ample excitement for a girl who's name has, until recently, been buried deep among liner notes. I recently mentioned her dramatic yet impeccably restrained performance of Thelonius Monk's “'Round Midnight,” a perfect summation of the immensity of her vocal talent. Her precision and penchant for scattering her lines with innovative riffs is well beyond her relative youth.

So on to the song, the first single off her her soon-to-arrive debut album. “I Need You Bad” (produced by Missy Elliot, who thankfully keeps her typical DJ-like shouting to a minimum here) begins as a reggae stomp, introduced by a woman speaking in an intoxicating Jamaican patois. The melodies of the verses are nearly an afterthought---it's almost as though they simply exist for Jazmine to flex her considerable vocal muscle, bumping over a summer-ready beat.

It's the dramatic shift to the chorus that ultimately makes the song so incredibly sticky, so exciting. The tempo shifts, the reggae thump disappears, and it is all about Jazmine's voice, looped in a passionate call-and-response with a stacked choir of herself. “I need you bad as my heartbeat” she wails, and, well, you know she really does. The song breaks no new lyrical ground, but it is her voice that sells the sentiment so believably. The chorus is brimming with such a dynamic, intense tenderness that it only bears repeating a mere three times.

Perhaps you'll take a listen to this and think I'm crazy for leaving behind all other forms of aural satisfaction this weekend and devoting myself solely to Jazmine Sullivan's pleading ode to a broken relationship. But I'd like to think you're just as absurd as me, and you have just found the new song of your spring.

Jazmine Sullivan's Official MySpace Page

Poem of the Day: 4.17.08

2008-04-17T10:16:00.004-04:00

Linda just sent me this poem and I had to share. Sorry to bring you down on a sunny day, but this is heartbreaking---and yet, it's a beautiful testament to life and love (I'm so Oprah right now, AMIRITE?!). Grab your Kleenex and enjoy.

Her Body Like a Lantern Next to Me
by John Rybicki

      There's this movie I am watching:
my love's belly almost five months
      pregnant with cancer,

      more like a little rock wall
piled and fitted inside her
      than some prenatal rounding.

      Over there's her face
near the frying pan she's bent over,
      but there's no water in the pan,

      and so, no reflection. No pool
where I might gather such a thing as a face,
      or sew it there on a tablet made of water.

      To have and to haul it away,
sometimes dipping into her
      in the next room that waits for me.

      * *

      I am old at this. I am stretching
the wick again into my throat
      when the flame burns down.

      She's splashing in the tub
and singing, I love him very much,
      though I'm old and tired

      and cancerous. It's spring
and now she's stopping traffic,
      lifting one of her painted turtles

      across the road. Someone's honking,
pumping an arm out the window,
      cheering her on.

      She falls then like there's a house
on her back, hides her head in the bank grass
      and vomits into the ditch.

      * *

      She keeps her radioactive linen,
bowl, and spoon separate. For seven days
      we sleep in different rooms.

      Over there's the toilet she's been
heaving her roots into. One time I heard her
      through the door make a toast to it,

      Here's to you, toilet bowl.
There's nothing poetic about this.
      I have one oar that hangs

      from our bedroom window,
and I am rowing our hut
      in the same desperate circle.

      * *

      I warm her tea then spread
cream cheese over her bagel,
      and we lie together like two guitars,

      a rose like a screw
in each of our mouths.
      There's that liquid river of story

      that sometimes sweeps us away
from all this, into the ha ha
      and the tender. At night the streetlights

      buzz on again with the stars,
and the horses in the field swat their tails
      like we will go on forever.

      * *

      I'm at my desk herding some
lost language when I notice how quiet
      she has been. Twice I call her name

      and wait after my voice has lost its legs
and she does not ring back.
      Dude, I'm still here, she says at last,

      then the sound of her
stretching her branches, and from them
      the rain falling thick through our house.

      I'm racing to place pots and pans
everywhere. Bottle her in super canning jars.
      For seventeen years, I've lined

      the shelves of our root cellar with them.
One drop for each jar.
      I'll need them for later.

April Is National Poetry Month

2008-04-07T17:32:00.003-04:00

Yes, I'm a little late on this, but, well, whatever. April is National Poetry Month, and in my running tradition, I'll be posting poems all through the month to get all of you assholes to read more (love you!). So here we go.

The Elephant is Slow to Mate
by D.H. Lawrence

The elephant, the huge old beast,
      is slow to mate;
he finds a female, they show no haste
      they wait

for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts
      slowly, slowly to rouse
as they loiter along the river-beds
      and drink and browse

and dash in panic through the brake
      of forest with the herd,
and sleep in massive silence, and wake
      together, without a word.

So slowly the great hot elephant hearts
      grow full of desire,
and the great beasts mate in secret at last,
      hiding their fire.

Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts
      so they know at last
how to wait for the loneliest of feasts
      for the full repast.

They do not snatch, they do not tear;
      their massive blood
moves as the moon-tides, near, more near
      till they touch in flood.

A Few of My Favorite Things

2008-03-30T11:20:00.005-04:00

There's a lot of stuff I like right now. A sampling:

Wonkette: Gawker's political blog is the only thing that has kept me sane during election season. I've read it on and off for years, but it is currently my favorite source of, um, "news." What I adore about the site is that there is no bias---they serve up hilarious, outlandish criticism to all politicians and presidential candidates. With nicknames for the current slate of candidates such as St. Barack (or, alternately, their "Luo Shark God"), Walnuts (for McCain---ouch), and MITTENS! (Mitt Romney), everything they write it charged with sharp analysis and wit. While watching debates, I refresh their liveblogs religiously, because their debate analysis is really what matters. An example from their liveblog of the California Dem Debate:
9:29 — Did anyone notice that Barack “The Most Liberal Senator In Luo Tribe Land” Obama is wearing a purple tie, like the gays? John McCain is furiously scribbling “FAG” in his diary, for talking points he’ll need later.
9:45 — OH HEY LOOK, THE RETARDED PERSON HAS A RETARD QUESTION: “Hillary, if you can’t control Bill now, how will you control him when ~~he’s president again~~ you, the wife, is president?”
9:46 — [CACKLE]
9:46 — [HILLARY SENDS BRAIN TRANSMISSION TO HIT MEN, SAYING, ‘KILL RETARDED QUESTIONER’S CAT’]
9:47 — Hillary responds: “I have a feeling you won’t be worried about that much longer, dear. Go home to your cat.”
9:50 — Last Question: Will you guys make the other one vice president, even though there’s no chance you’ll answer that, but it might make Hillary look like a huge bitch whatever she says?
9:51 — [CACKLE]
9:51 — [HILLARY CALLS KAZAKHSTANI URANIUM MINER HIT MEN FRIENDS, SAYING, ‘GO TO WOLF’S HOUSE, KILL HIS CAT, MY OTHER TEAM’S KILLING A CAT ALREADY’]
9:52 — Hillary responds: “I have a feeling you won’t be worried about vice presidents tonight, Wolf. Maybe you should go home and play with your cat.”
9:53 — Over.
Also? The commenters are essentially the funniest around. Unlike Gawker (where the commenters are so self-obsessed and pretentious that it's one big not-funny circle jerk where everyone's just touching himself) or Jezebel (which has been flooded by so many obnoxious commenters lately that even the most mundane of posts gets at least 100 inane comments), the commenters at Wonkette are bitingly sharp, and never stay too long in one place (most posts get, at most, 60 or so comments). Here's a personal favorite of mine.
Erykah Badu's New Amerykah, Pt. 1: 4th World War: I purchased this album the day it came out, but I haven't reviewed it, mainly because it is hard to say anything really intelligent about an album like this, one which unfolds for you in different ways with every listen. If Badu's last release, 2003's Wordwide Underground EP, was a Friday night funk session, New Amerykah is a basement political rally, rife with conspiracy theories and calls to arms. It is shaded with a blaxploitation sound and feels, in some ways, like a newly-created artifact of the Black Power movement. On "Soldier" (the album's most radio-friendly offering) she declares, "I got love for my folks / baptized when the levees broke." In structure, the album can best be compared to a mixtape. Some of the songs feel like sketches, but are nonetheless still compelling. The album closes with "Telephone," a breezy, touching tribute to J. Dilla, who, even in his passing, seems to be the largest sonic influence on the album. It's not an easy album, nor is it one to throw on in the car or bump to with your friends. But it's an album that will make you think, and probably the most interesting R&B release in years.
Postcards from Yo Momma: a site devoted to immortalizing unintentionally hilarious and sweet emails from your mother. No, really. Stephanie introduced me to it and it's genius.
Wheat Thins: I've been eating, like, two boxes a week. SOMEONE MAKE ME STOP OMG. I'm going to Miami with Nicole for Memorial Day Weekend, so no more Wheat Thins for me. My "I'm going to be be on the beach so I need to tone up and get rid of residual winter weight" diet starts in literally an hour (I'm off for a run shortly).
Will Arnett's "Sex Tape" on funnyordie.com: Holy shit, this is basically the funniest thing ever. "I'm going to impregnate your MOUTH":
Jazmine Sullivan's live performance of Thelonius Monk's "'Round Midnight": For those that don't already know, Jazmine Sullivan is the truth. At 20 years old, she's already received intense acclaim for her rich, jazz-inspired vocals (featured prominently on many of Missy Elliot's productions) as well as her song-writing skills. She started out as a regular feature at the famous Black Lily nights in Philly. She's bounced around from label to label since she was about 16, but seems to have found a permanent home at J Records. I'm dying for her to finally release an album, but in the meantime, her version of "'Round Midnight" will hold me over. There is an incredible depth and control in her voice. It's a smoky room, and it's a square of dark chocolate. While her take on this song maybe be a bit overly melismatic, it's essentially a vocal master's class. Every note is perfection, and her final riffs are beautiful. Also? There is not nearly enough scatting these days.
Barack Obama: Obv.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead: A Novel: I actually read this book a while ago, but it's still on my mind. Not in a haunting sort of way, but the overall glow of this novel is one that doesn't fade. The 2005 Pulitzer winner, it is a fictional series of theological musings from a dying elderly pastor, John Ames, a memoir of sorts intended to be given to his young son after he passes. While I've drifted very far from the religion of my youth (and I find myself critical of the bureaucracy and institutional nature of most organized religions), where this novel excels is in that John Ames' religious teachings are so well-strucutured. They amble along and it is heartening that he, too, struggles with the most basic of Christian teachings. It is a meditation on a complicated personal and religious history, one that is surprisingly accessible. I'm accustomed to reading quite fast---however, this is a novel that forces to sit with it, walk with it slowly.
Sunshine: Thank God for spring.
Prada's Black Leather Large Bowler Travel Bag: I have been stalking this bag for, like, a year now. It is only $2200. Why haven't you bought it for me yet, assholes?

Ok, that's it. Time for my run.

Everyone's A Little Bit Racist

2008-03-18T22:14:00.002-04:00

Barack Obama gave a speech regarding race relations in America from Philadelphia this morning, and I'm still swooning.

He's been under significant scrutiny over the past few weeks, mainly for his longstanding relationship to controversial preacher Rev. Jeffrey Wright. Rather than simply denouncing (and rejecting?) the comments and Wright himself, Obama instead took a political gamble and presented a moving speech in which he challenged America to look deeper into race relations in America and realize that---hey, guess what?---racism is still a pervasive force in our culture, so inherently interlocked with our society that we fail to recognize it anymore. If we are to truly transcend color lines, he posits that we must 1) recognize our own prejudices, 2) understand the root of prejudice in others, and 3) work across racial barriers to fight the actual injustices that are collectively oppressing us all.

To watch the speech is to see history happening---this is a speech that will be recognized for years to come for its utter frankness, as well as Obama's call to action directed towards nation that has become come to accept racial inequities and historical underlying tensions over time. Admittedly, I'm young, but I will say that I have never seen this type candor and sincerity in a political speech in my life. For a politician who has had a number of landmark speeches that have sparked considerable inspiration in his supporters, this is one of his grandest achievements. I just hope that this speech does successfully open the dialogue---the words are out there, but the true question is whether or not the American people will keep talking.

Watch the speech below, and try not to cry at the end. I dare you.

PS OMG WHY ARE YOU NOT PRESIDENT YET?

Edit: Take a moment to read Roger Cohen's op-ed in The New York Times, where he relates his childhood experiences in apartheid South Africa to Obama's speech. It's a poignant contextualization of Obama's words, and definitely worth checking out.

Beyond America's Original Sin [The New York Times]

Some Sunday Afternoon Reviews: Indie Soul Edition

2008-03-02T15:33:00.011-05:00

I have scads (ha!) of not-so-new (but they're probably [maybe?] new to you) albums that I've been meaning to talk about. They're all from independent soul artists that may lack visibility, but are doing some of the most exciting things in R&B right now.

To start:

Donnie, The Daily News

I'll be quite honest---I really don't know too much about Donnie. It's an interesting challenge for me to simply listen to an album and interpret the music itself; I'm accustomed to using the artist's life as a sort of context. All I know is this: it's his sophomore effort, and he was booted from Motown Records after his debut album, The Colored Section (a source of critical acclaim without mainstream success which I've never had a chance to hear). So without knowing anything else about him and simply judging this album, I can confidently say this: The Daily News is an accomplished collection of songs, a musical State of the Union lambasting the failures of modern society. It is the work of an innovative and at times fearless vocalist and lyricist.

As a whole, the album predominately evokes the feeling of a long Sunday spent at church. The songs are loosely constructed, so rather than a verse-hook-verse-hook format, many feature a powerful chorus of background singers riffing back and forth with Donnie. Ultimately, even the most secular of songs on the album feels like a gospel romp. The album sparks to life with "Impatient People," where Donnie presides almost as a pastor over a soaring choir who challenge, "Oh can we be civil y'all? / I'm not a refugee / I'm an evacuee / I'm just a citizen." Musically, it has all the hallmarks of 70s Southern-fried funk, but the raw mix of the vocals is straight church.

Donnie's voice shares a number of similarities with that of Stevie Wonder---it has the same brightness, a similar endearing, throaty strain as he reaches higher and higher. And even his instrumentation and lyrics, at times, broach Wonder territory. This is most evident on "If I Were You," easily the album's most radio-friendly offering, buoyed by a sharp harmonica and Donnie's impassioned vocals. "Can you spare change / Make a change?" he asks, and the positivity is a bit contagious. It doesn't come off as a pose---there is a definite authenticity to the sentiment that is refreshing in an age of prefab popstars. (Also? Why hasn't Barack Obama picked this song up as an official campaign song? Lyrically, it couldn't be more appropriate.)

Like Wonder, Donnie's politics and societal indictments span the album. But where Wonder had politically-charged tracks that were still buoyant (like 1980's "Happy Birthday"), Donnie's commentary is darker and more conspiratorial in tone. The eerie "Atlanta Child Murders" recounts the Atlanta Child Murders of 1979-1981, where a number of black children and adolescents were kidnapped and murdered in Atlanta. The case has been opened and closed a number of times over the past three decades, with the original suspect, Wayne Williams, convicted of 2 of the 31 murders but still maintaining his innocence. Donnie proposes a more controversial explanation of the killings: "Center of Disease Control right in Atlanta / The Atlanta Child Murders conspiracy / was a modern-day lynching like Tuskegee / A political prisoner Wayne Williams is / Scientific experiments on our kids." Probably the most interesting aspect of the song is that, despite its polemical content, it is extremely well-produced, with a slick melody line on the chorus that is addicting.

Indeed, the political content is served in such a palatable form that at times it can be jarring. The album's second single, "911" is a prime example. It's easily the disc's smoothest moment, but probably its most complicated: "I'd trade the World Trade to spend some time with you babe" he wails. "I'd trade my racism, my sexism, my homophobia / Trade all my funny ways, my financial center / Gonna be a cold and lonely winter without you babe / 9-1-1 / let's just come together." Um, okay, what? No but really, whaaaat? Do with that what you will. All I can say is that it is a provocative moment, enhanced by Donnie's sharp delivery.

I could go on further about the album's many highlights (the fierce urgency Donnie brings to the Underground Railroad ode "Mason Dixon Line, his scathing condemnation of the pharmaceutical industry on the comical "Over-the-Counter Culture"), but instead I'll just say this: buy this album and love it. Albums with such a successful marriage of politics and soul are hard to find, but Donnie pulls it all off with much aplomb---and with funk to spare.

Listen Up: Donnie, "911"

Rahsaan Patterson, Wines & Spirits

So now I get it. Really.

For years I've heard people extol the virtues of Rahsaan Patterson, but my only real knowledge of his music was through 1997's "Where You Are," the video for which was always on BET when I was younger (and I always changed the channel without listening). After hearing his latest album, Wines & Spirits, I finally understand all of the chatter. Patterson has the nasal twang of Raphael Saadiq, but with a surprising, almost feminine quality that adds a certain tenderness to his voice. More importantly, he presents a range of exciting soul sounds on Wines & Spirits with consistently strong lyrics and vocal arrangements. And that, my dears, is the key to a good album.

So here's his pedigree: an original cast member of Kids Inc. along with Fergie, Mario Lopez, and Jennifer Love Hewitt, he's released several critically-acclaimed albums (his self-titled debut in 1997, 1999's Love in Stereo, and 2004's After Hours, the latter independently after he left MCA Records due to low sales), and worked with artists like Brandy (he penned "Baby,"), Trina Broussard, Chico DeBarge, and Van Hunt (his frequent collaborator since Love in Stereo). His latest album, Wines & Spirits, has the easiness of a Saturday afternoon, but it's still got a summer-smooth funk that gives it direction.

I'm just going to cut to the chase: "Deliver Me" is easily one of the best songs I've heard in months, maybe longer. It begins as a somewhat standard guitar-driven funk track, but it quite dramatically flips at the chorus into a dreamy, drum-heavy affair. It's an exhilarating and unexpected moment, and it doesn't lose its novelty with multiple listens. Patterson's vocals are well-nuanced and textured, balancing his falsetto growl on the verses with a soaring belt on the chorus.

Seemingly simple songs are made exciting in Patterson's hands. On the stripped-down, finger-snaps-and-acoustic-guitar track "Feels Good," he catalogs a series of delightful metaphors for a relationship: "It's a song in your head / Eating chocolate in bed / ... / it's like taking sips of your cup of coffee / smokin' a cigarette after dinnertime." It's a blessedly serene, sweet song that so effectively embodies the sentiment it describes. The same can be said for the morose "Water," where Patterson offers a restrained delivery and melancholic declaration: "It's become clear / that I'm drowning in your tears." I swear, in context it's not nearly as sappy as that may sound now---it's actually quite poignant and ultimately successful.

The album's most energetic moment comes courtesy of "Higher Love," which has what I can only describe as an 80s-funk-gospel sound, heavy on the synth, stacked vocals, and drama. In all aspects (vocals, lyrics, and production), it successfully conflates spiritual and secular love, to a point where the listener is hard-pressed to determine which is actually the topic of the song. It's a song that shines so brightly with its spunk, it nearly erases the ten tracks that precede it. And that's a hard feat to accomplish---this album is one that moves gloriously from track to track, each one a success.

Listen Up: Rahsaan Patterson, "Deliver Me"

Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, 100 Days, 100 Nights

You've surely heard The Dap-Kings before---it's just that you may not have heard of them. The much-lauded funk ensemble has existed in various incarnations since 1996, offering uncompromising, authentic 60s soul, recorded on analog. In 2006 they served as the backing band for 6 of the 11 tracks on Amy Winehouse's sophomore set, featured prominently on the singles "Rehab" and "You Know I'm No Good." They later backed her on tour, and performed on nearly every track of Mark Ronson's Version. So for those who appreciate the rich, Stax-inspired, girl group sounds of Mark Ronson's recent productions, 100 Days, 100 Nights is both familiar and spirited.

The Dap-Kings seeks to replicate what they consider to be the golden age of soul music, and they do so with remarkable accuracy. Honestly, it would be impossible to tell that any songs on the album were created after 1970 if no one told you. The horn-driven title track sounds more like an old Motown hit rather than anything that's come out in the four decades. The group nails it not just on the instrumentation and the production (the use of all analog technology adds a warmth that music has lacked since everyone went digital), but even in the song structure. Many of the songs are quite short (around 3 minutes) in a throwback to the simplicity of the 60s sound, and have lyrics that feature blissfully retro lines like "The lines that you've been spinnin' up are runnin' out of thread, / And your crafty little pencil is running out of lead," (from the delightful "When the Other Foot Drops, Uncle").

However, the group's draw is ultimately what is limiting to them. While they are masterful in their recreation of the 60s sound, they don't necessarily add anything to it---there is no sense of interpretation or modernity. In their quest to be authentic, The Dap-Kings fail to make the music relevant to now. I hate to do it, but I can't help but compare it to the work they did on Amy Winehouse's album, where they used the 60s-sound as source of inspiration, but ultimately (under the guidance of Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson) made it feel current without sullying its purity. I'm not saying that I don't think that the album is successful---I think that it is actually quite amazing. But as good as it is, it's almost an anachronism, like an album found buried in Berry Gordy's attic that was never released and is now just making its way to the local store.

Nevertheless, it's a lively, brash affair with some of the best instrumentation this side of The Funk Brothers, all significantly enhanced by Sharon Jones. Jones, like Winehouse, has an impressive vocal instrument. It has a ferocity to it that never fails to steal the spotlight amidst the chorus of horns that blares through most of the tracks. Even at her most vulnerable moments, Jones voice is commanding, in a manner reminiscent of Etta James, all belty and bluesy. On the aching "Humble Me," she's at her best, vacillating between pleading and demanding. She brings her almost arrogant swagger to each song, like the bumping "Be Easy." Jones constructs herself as the sage, sassy older woman providing advice to an inept man: "Don't you know it's just a fool who plays love hard / Runnin' a girl down like she's a game in the school yard." Like, okay, come on, HOW GREAT IS THAT LINE? More importantly, it's completely believable in the song, completely due to Jones' cocky yet nuanced delivery.

The album is smart to not overstay its welcome---it's a well-edited little collection of 10 tight tracks, each showing facets of the 60s sound with Jones riding expertly along. While it may come off as, perhaps, too good at being authentic, I can say this---it sounds just as great now as it would have in '63.

Listen Up: Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, "100 Days, 100 Nights"

Teh Gayz Luv Obama

2008-02-28T19:22:00.004-05:00

So yes, I know I've been saying that I was going to try to keep politics out of here as much as possible, but with the fervor over the 2008 election (and my personal obsession with it), it's basically my life right now. And so, well, I really can't help but talk about it. Which I clearly keep doing (okay so that last one isn't political so much as genius).

Barack Obama just released a comprehensive, compassionate letter to the LGTB community, and I am incredibly impressed. It doesn't feel at all as though he's pandering for votes---I mean, I don't think he's counting on a queer constituency to win him Ohio and Texas. Rather, it feels like a genuine appeal and a clear plan for creating a nation of tolerance, acceptance, and ultimately equal rights.

What I'm saying is that I'm basically obsessed with him and want him to be my president immediately.

Here's the full letter:

Open Letter from Barack Obama to the LGBT community
I'm running for President to build an America that lives up to our founding promise of equality for all – a promise that extends to our gay brothers and sisters. It's wrong to have millions of Americans living as second-class citizens in this nation. And I ask for your support in this election so that together we can bring about real change for all LGBT Americans.

Equality is a moral imperative. That's why throughout my career, I have fought to eliminate discrimination against LGBT Americans. In Illinois, I co-sponsored a fully inclusive bill that prohibited discrimination on the basis of both sexual orientation and gender identity, extending protection to the workplace, housing, and places of public accommodation. In the U.S. Senate, I have co-sponsored bills that would equalize tax treatment for same-sex couples and provide benefits to domestic partners of federal employees. And as president, I will place the weight of my administration behind the enactment of the Matthew Shepard Act to outlaw hate crimes and a fully inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act to outlaw workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

As your President, I will use the bully pulpit to urge states to treat same-sex couples with full equality in their family and adoption laws. I personally believe that civil unions represent the best way to secure that equal treatment. But I also believe that the federal government should not stand in the way of states that want to decide on their own how best to pursue equality for gay and lesbian couples — whether that means a domestic partnership, a civil union, or a civil marriage. Unlike Senator Clinton, I support the complete repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) – a position I have held since before arriving in the U.S. Senate. While some say we should repeal only part of the law, I believe we should get rid of that statute altogether. Federal law should not discriminate in any way against gay and lesbian couples, which is precisely what DOMA does. I have also called for us to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and I have worked to improve the Uniting American Families Act so we can afford same-sex couples the same rights and obligations as married couples in our immigration system.

The next president must also address the HIV/AIDS epidemic. When it comes to prevention, we do not have to choose between values and science. While abstinence education should be part of any strategy, we also need to use common sense. We should have age-appropriate sex education that includes information about contraception. We should pass the JUSTICE Act to combat infection within our prison population. And we should lift the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users. In addition, local governments can protect public health by distributing contraceptives.

We also need a president who's willing to confront the stigma – too often tied to homophobia – that continues to surround HIV/AIDS. I confronted this stigma directly in a speech to evangelicals at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, and will continue to speak out as president. That is where I stand on the major issues of the day. But having the right positions on the issues is only half the battle. The other half is to win broad support for those positions. And winning broad support will require stepping outside our comfort zone. If we want to repeal DOMA, repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and implement fully inclusive laws outlawing hate crimes and discrimination in the workplace, we need to bring the message of LGBT equality to skeptical audiences as well as friendly ones – and that's what I've done throughout my career. I brought this message of inclusiveness to all of America in my keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention. I talked about the need to fight homophobia when I announced my candidacy for President, and I have been talking about LGBT equality to a number of groups during this campaign – from local LGBT activists to rural farmers to parishioners at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Dr. Martin Luther King once preached.

Just as important, I have been listening to what all Americans have to say. I will never compromise on my commitment to equal rights for all LGBT Americans. But neither will I close my ears to the voices of those who still need to be convinced. That is the work we must do to move forward together. It is difficult. It is challenging. And it is necessary.

Americans are yearning for leadership that can empower us to reach for what we know is possible. I believe that we can achieve the goal of full equality for the millions of LGBT people in this country. To do that, we need leadership that can appeal to the best parts of the human spirit. Join with me, and I will provide that leadership. Together, we will achieve real equality for all Americans, gay and straight alike.

Barack Obama Writes Open Letter to LGTB Community [towleroad]

Barack Obama brought you cupcakes

2008-02-20T14:37:00.006-05:00

This site makes me really, really happy. [barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com]

Linda: haha it is pretty funny

barack obama folded you an origami crane! hahaha

Shawn: also: barack obama recited a poem that reminded him of you

Linda: barack obama left a comment on your blog

lol

Shawn: hahahaha

barack obama set your voice as his ringtone

is it weird/creepy that i kind of think these are all things barack obama would do?

Shawn: i told stephanie this site makes me blush like a schoolgirl

Linda: yes it is. i forgive you
im giggling over here

...

Linda: Hillary's:
Hillary Clinton pimped out her daughter for your birthday party.
Hillary Clinton gave your husband a blowjob....Fair's fair?
Hillary Clinton hemmed your pantsuit.
Hillary Clinton cried when you told her your good news.

Shawn: OMG

where is that site?

i need to see it

Linda: are you kidding?

Shawn: no, did you just make those up yourself?

Linda: in my BRAIN sucka

Shawn: HAHAHAHA

you just made my life

Linda: let me tell you, i got a kick out of myself for those

UPDATE: Ummm, can we talk about the Hillary version of the site that's up too? And the fact that Steph, Elle, Jacob, Katie, Linda, and I have now spent several days making up our own ludicrous versions and sending them back and forth? I think that the email chain has broken a hundred and now includes quips about McCain and Nader. Some of the better ones:

John McCain used your toothbrush.
John McCain fell asleep while you were talking.
John McCain always waits for you to buy rounds.
John McCain took one look at you and said "I bet you have a MILF."
John McCain went dutch on your first date.
John McCain did your crossword puzzle this morning before you got to it.
John McCain shoveled snow onto your driveway.
John McCain traded in his iPod for a Zune.
John McCain only likes poems that rhyme.
John McCain convinced you to buy an HD-DVD player.
John McCain fell on your front walk, and threatened to sue you.
Hillary Clinton yells out the answers to Jeopardy before you can.
Hillary Clinton canceled your TiVo season pass.
Hillary Clinton likes the way stamps taste.
Hillary Clinton didn't wipe down the elliptical after using it.
Hillary Clinton asked you to work overtime.
Hillary Clinton asked you to join Friendster.
Hillary Clinton wears her cell phone on her belt.
Hillary Clinton asked for her steak well-done.
Hillary Clinton asked you if you should really be eating that.
Barack Obama helped you practice parallel parking.
Barack Obama got rid of the virus on your computer.
Barack Obama held the door to the F train so that you could get on.
Barack Obama was rejected from eHarmony.
Barack Obama bought you something pretty on the way home from work...just because.
Barack Obama wants you to get enough fiber.
Barack Obama brings dinner home when you are too tired to cook.
Barack Obama makes sure you always have enough quarters for laundry.
Barack Obama reads the New Yorker, but he doesn't make a big deal about it.
Barack Obama just wants to watch you play Guitar Hero for hours.

Okay, now I'm done. I'm so sorry you had to read that.

Also? Welcome to the absurd things that constitute the majority of my free time.

Motion Therapy

2008-02-14T10:08:00.002-05:00

Sometimes when I'm running on winter-cold mornings and I'm pushing my body as hard as I can, I realize that there are tears streaming down my face and I don't know if they're just from the wind.

Today, I became an uncle

2008-02-09T23:39:00.001-05:00

Kellan Mikael: 4 lbs, 7 oz. 18 inches. 5 weeks early.

Today has been the most unexpected, scary, and fulfilling day of my life. I came to Jersey yesterday because my sister Feni's baby shower is tomorrow. She's due on March 15. Femina and I were to spend the day at her house, helping out with the last few things from the move and catching up. Instead, we got to Feni's house to find that her water had just broken.

We rushed her to the hospital, and I marveled at the fact that there we were: the three of us, driving together to the hospital---it was perfect. I never expected that I would be able to be there for it, but it was just what we had wanted. Brian thinks her labor was triggered by the fact that she wanted me home for it, and knew I wouldn't be back to visit again until she went into labor.

Brian met us at the hospital, and my parents arrived soon too. Even though the baby was going to be 5 weeks premature, the doctor thought he looked like a good size and wouldn't have to spend time in the NICU. Everything was moving so quickly---within 5 hours of us arriving, she was 6 centimeters dialated and they expected that she'd have the baby within 4 hours.

It was even quicker than that---before she even had a chance to push, they ended up doing a C-section. Her blood pressure was dropping and so was the baby's, so they thought it best to get him out as quick as possible. Not at all Feni's ideal situation, but at that point she just wanted the baby out and healthy at whatever cost.

I'm so proud of Brian. My brother-in-law, who can't even talk about blood without wincing, played the part of the doting, supportive husband during the surgery. He even took pictures of Kellan coming out and seeing the world for the first time---drinking in his first breaths, opening his eyes to see his parents.

While in the waiting room, we heard a knock on the previously-shaded nursey windows, and we rushed over. There he was, our little man. I've never felt my heart swell like that, experienced that sort of fully-realized excitement at the sight of someone.

And it was like we had always known him. He was so pink; in his skin color he is so much his father's son. But his hair, his nose---they are his mom. His eyes are yet to be decided. The doctor thinks that they will settle on a blue-green hue, a blessing from Brian.

And while I'm just his uncle, I see myself in him too---in the curls of his black hair, the plumpness of his lips. He's an Aquarius like me. Feni and Brian will have to put up with his precociousness, his aloofness, but will learn to appreciate his empathy, his ability to reason, his strength of character.

Welcome to the family Kellan. We've loved you for so long already.

She was DEFINITELY fucking Matt Damon

2008-02-01T08:06:00.000-05:00

You either find Sarah Silverman's brand of metabigotry-comedy hysterical, or you want to drown her between punchlines. Regardless, her appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live last night was one of the bright spots in the post-strike TV world we live in (she and Kimmel have been dating for nearly six years). In music video form (with some help from Matt Damon), she delivered Jimmy a little message about their relationship. Watch it below.

Hip hop is bigger than religion

2008-01-28T21:59:00.000-05:00

Okay, so everyone on the interwebs is totally juicing all over Erykah Badu's new song, "The Healer." So go listen to it, because it is the eeriest, most exciting thing to come out of soul music in a long time, and probably hip hop as well. "Honey," the 9th-Wonder-helmed first single from her new album, New AmErykah, was sweet (ahem, sorry for the pun) but felt rather flat in comparison to her body of work. With "The Healer," Erykah is back in her element.

It's been 8 years since Badu's last proper release (Mama's Gun in 2000; 2003's extended funk session Worldwide Underground was considered an EP). It's so satisfying to hear her still challenging the perceptions of what soul music is, and, at the same time, viscerally and artistically demonstrating her love of hip hop. Erykah Badu needs music, and music needs her just as much.

The Cause for Change

2008-01-28T21:01:00.000-05:00

I try to stay away from political blogging.

I read many blogs about politics, but it's (somewhat) rare that I post too much about my own political views. Part of it is that, when I first started blogging, every time I wrote an even vaguely political post, I would inevitably receive a handful of ass-hat anonymous comments lambasting me for my views. And it's not that I'm not willing to engage in intelligent debate. It's that, well, the comments were never intelligent---they were usually worked-up rants and raves from people posting incendiary comments to piss me off. It's a waste of time responding to people who's minds are set in a particular manner, who won't listen to reason and fact, and they would get exactly what they wanted out of me---I would end up angry and sulky.

I follow politics closely, but the fervor that I've experienced this election cycle is not like anything I've felt before. I've made no secret of who I'm backing (and who I'm not). It feels so good to be excited about an election, to feel a part of a movement, a moment that future generations can look back on as the point in time where hardened institutions fell in the face of a national movement towards the want of a better life. I know---there are a lot of people that would probably contend that I'm caught up in the rhetoric of Obama's campaign, and that I'm parroting his stump speech mindlessly. The thing is though, I believe it because it is so very clear that he does too. There is an authenticity to Obama that is rare in politics, especially in Washington. And Obama has frequently laid out clear implementation paths for his policy proposals, but what the media focuses more on is his ability to inspire. And I don't think it's because his policy is weak---I think that it's because his capacity to excite a nation is so grand, almost palpable.

This is not to say, however, that I'm anti-Hillary (or anti-Edwards, for that matter). I don't think that, to support one candidate, you have to demean or deride the others. This time around, the Democrats are lucky to have a handful of really strong contenders, all of whom would probably be incredibly adept at commanding the nation. However, everyone is so fierce in their loyalty to their candidates that the field becomes contentious and divided, losing sight of the greater purpose that everyone should be working towards---building a stronger nation for the future. Only one of the Democratic contenders will make it to the Presidential election, and it will be that much harder for him or her to win if he or she has faced months of being slammed in the press by members of the same party. It makes it even easier for the Republicans to create a strong, unified base to push their candidate into the Oval Office.

Anyway. Enough of that. Just a little background on my thoughts this election season (and, I guess, some relevant background for why/how I connected to the following article). This week's New York Magazine cover story on Barack and Hillary is a really intriguing look at the campaigns thus far, and does a good job of presenting even coverage of the successes and foibles of the Democratic front-runners. What I appreciate about the article is how John Heilemann effectively boils down the candidates to the essences of their campaigns, then uses that information to distill the nature of their supporters and reason for their appeal:

"If you find yourself drawn to the Clinton candidacy, you likely believe that politics is politics, that partisanship isn’t transmutable, that Republicans are for the most part irredeemable. You suspect that talk of transcendence amounts to humming “Kumbaya” past the graveyard. You believe that progress comes only with a fight, and that Clinton is better equipped than Obama (or maybe anyone) to succeed in the poisonous, fractious environment that Washington is now and ever shall be. You ponder the image of Bill as First Laddie and find yourself smiling, not sighing or shrieking.

If you find yourself swept up in Obamamania, on the other hand, you regard this assessment as sad, defeatist, as a kind of capitulation. You’re perfectly aware that politics is often a dirty business. But you believe it could be a bit cleaner, a bit nobler, a bit more sustaining. You think that paradigm shifts can happen, that the system can be rebooted. Most of all, an attraction to Obama indicates you are, on some level, a romantic. You never had your JFK, your MLK, and you desperately crave one: What you want is to fall in love.

A vote for Clinton, in other words, is a wager rooted in hard-eyed realism. Her upside may be limited, but so is her downside, because although the ceiling on her putative presidency might be low, the floor beneath it is fairly high. A vote for Obama, as the Big Dog said, is indeed a role of the dice. The risks of his hypothetical presidency are higher, but the potential payoff is greater: He could be the next Jack Kennedy—or the next Jimmy Carter. The gamble here entails both the thrill and the terror of letting yourself dream again."

As an Obama supporter, I found the paragraph describing the typical devotee of Obamamania to be a spot-on description of myself. I'm an unabashed romantic. I think we all have the right to hope for something better tomorrow in love, life, and yes---even politics.

The Test [New York Magazine]

Ice Prince(ss)

2008-01-27T20:42:00.000-05:00

You're going to have to excuse me for everything I'm about to say. I think it's the booze talking.

So for some reason I'm watching the US Nationals Figure Skating Men's Championship (don't ask). Johnny Weir just finished his long program, and it was amazing. And as soon as he finished, he broke down sobbing, and I ate it up. I totally teared up---he had me completely.

I cry too easily these days, which I think is actually a good thing.

What I Listened To in 2007

2008-01-21T20:21:00.000-05:00

Since there has been a glut of year-end "Best of Music" lists (Idolator has done, like, 40 of them), I figured I would jump into the fray.

I wouldn't necessarily call the list below a "best of." Rather, it's more of a general representation of the albums and songs that I loved last year. It's by no means comprehensive---I excluded the songs that I listed in my mid-year music review, and I also tried to skip out on songs that I featured prominently in album reviews. The list skews much more heavily towards mainstream R&B than I would have expected, but I guess that happens---I have a long list of indie soul albums that came out last year that I've been meaning to check out.

So take a look, and let me know what you think. Oh, and they're in no particular order, except for a vague sense of chronology (clearly, I sorted my iTunes by date to help myself remember what actually came out this past year). Also, I swear I'm not trying to be twatty and all self-promotional with all of the internal links to reviews I've done---they're simply there for further reading so that I don't have to go on at length about songs/albums I've already discussed (I'm lazy).

Amy Winehouse, "Valerie" (from the album Version): I spent much of the last year loving Amy Winehouse---over and over (and over) again. It's rather difficult for me to pick just one of her songs when everything that's come out of her mouth this past year (even this!) fascinates and inspires me. I chose this track because I think that it demonstrates why Amy is such an interesting artist. She (with the help of Mark Ronson) took The Zutons' track and completely flipped a funk-driven jam into a jingling tune with the buoyant swing of "You Can't Hurry Love" (The Supremes original, not the Phil Collins version, obv). It's a perfect example of Amy's nuanced, measured vocals. Even with its soaring horns, the track never overpowers her---she owns it with a vocal delivery that is equal parts vulnerable and aggressive. It is a performance of subtlety and passion that clearly shows why Amy's one of the best voices in music right now. I promise, for everyone's sake, I will stop gushing over her soon. New Year's resolution...?
Joss Stone f/Lauryn Hill, "Music" (from the album Introducing Joss Stone): Any song that gets the notoriously reclusive Ms. Hill out from whatever bunker of insanity she's currently hiding in is worth a listen. It's not necessarily my favorite track on the album (which I reviewed in full when it dropped), but Hill's presence probably makes it the most noteworthy. In some ways, the song is a take on Erykah Badu's "Love of My Life," but here the love of music feels almost morbid---there is a melancholy element to the song that is striking. The sonic bleeps of the track, paired with live instrumentation and Joss' smoky voice, create a haunting sound that is fully realized by Lauryn's staccato flow. I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT SHE'S TALKING ABOUT but that shit sounds deeeeep. It makes me that much more anxious for Lauryn Hill's long-fabled comeback, though it seems highly improbable at this point.
Fantasia, "When I See U" (from the album Fantasia): Sometimes a song comes around that is just so simple, and it's simplicity is what makes it irresistible. The love-struck lyrics are made so much more interesting by Fantasia's church-forged, passionate pleading. The sense of yearning that she has in her vocals is palpable. It's just one of those great, great songs that gets better each time you hear it.
Tank, "Please Don't Go" (from the album Sex, Love, and Pain): Tank's been making great music for a long time now, and I'm glad to see people finally sit up and take notice. The tale of the tail-chasing thug who realizes the error of his ways once his girl leaves is an old trope for male R&B singers, but Tank's velvet croon and an incredibly catchy melody make everything old new again (not to mention the beauty of his falsetto as he repeats "Please don't go" over and over again---it's enough to break your heart).
Musiq, "Teachme" (from the album Luvanmusiq): In terms of his history as an artist, there's nothing terribly new or interesting about Musiq's "Teachme." But that doesn't mean I don't still totally love it. What can I say? I just love male (emotional) nudity.
Rihanna, "Breakin' Dishes" (from the album Good Girl Gone Bad): I want to hate Rihanna, but how can I when The-Dream and Tricky Stewart throw her on an electro-synth R&B track that shows more attitude in 3 minutes than she has in her whole career? From a purely logistical standpoint, the song is completely ludicrous. I don't think that Rihanna would ever "fight a man" as her synthed voice so angrily declares on the chorus---she'd be too busy staring at herself in the mirror and fluffing her bob. But she nails the spunk of the song spot-on, and the lyrics are genius in their hilarity ("I'm roasting marshmallows on the fire / and what I'm burning is your attire"). It's a raucous call to arms and I can't help but sing along.
Eric Roberson f/Algebra Blesset, "iluvu2much" (from the album ...Left): Eric Roberson has sort of become my discovery of the year. After checking out his latest album, ...Left, I couldn't believe how much interesting, quality soul music he's put out over the past decade that I never heard. "iluvu2much" is one of my favorites on the album, though it's hard to pick just one track. I don't have too much more to say about this track that I didn't already say in my review of the album, so I'll just say this: check it out.
Paolo Nutini, "Last Request" (from the album These Streets): I happened on Paolo Nutini via Amy Winehouse. He was supposed to open for her at her concert at Central Park's Summerstage, so I picked up his album to get an idea of what I was going to hear (of course, Amy famously canceled her North American tour dates, so I never got to see either of them perform). Nutini has a rich voice with a just a hint of vibrato that gives it a vulnerable quality, perfect for this song. It's my favorite song from his sharp debut album, which was released in 2006 in the UK but didn't arrive stateside until January of 2007.
Chrisette Michele, "Like A Dream/Mr. Radio" (from the album I Am): I really couldn't choose between these two songs, so I threw them both on here. Suck on that. Both stood out to me immediately when I first listened to the album, and they've spent much of the past year on repeat. "Like A Dream" comes alive because of Chrisette's voice, soaring and diving, with the clipped precision of a consummate jazz diva. "Mr. Radio" shows a completely different side of her voice, whiskey-warm and sensual. Though I didn't really mention this in my review, I found her album to lack the overall spark that makes a classic. However, these two tracks show that Chrisette has the chops to make something really quite special.
Kelly Clarkson, "Irvine" (from the album My December): Yes, I know, everyone hated Kelly Clarkson's My December. Oddly enough, I didn't. It's not exactly what I usually listen to, but I think that it had several very successful moments. The pensive "Irvine," a haunting note at the end of the album, is one of them. "Can you feel how cold I am?" she asks, her voice airy and sounding on the verge of breaking for the entire song. It's an eerie, melancholy track, and a surprising moment for an artist who initially came to national attention through a spunky rendition of Aretha Franklin's "Respect." The album may have failed commercially, but it does show significant growth of Kelly as an artist, and as a vocalist.
J. Holiday, "Bed" (from the album Back of My 'Lac): Oh, the magic that a catchy hook can make. J. Holiday's voice vacillates between whiny and pitchy, and yet this song is easily one of the best to come out of 2007. It has the hallmarks of a hit---inventive, rebounding sonics and a repetitive chorus that practically asks to be imitated (or wailed at full voice). The lyrics are honest with a sugar-sweet sentiment. It's a decisively modern take on the traditional R&B ballad, with the choppy electro elements that dice through the track, but it's classic in its own right.
Emily King, "U & I" (from the album East Side Story): I highlighted this track when I reviewed Emily King's album in October---it is easily the strongest track on her debut offering. It combines plucky instrumentation with airy, stacked harmonies that are as summer-sweet as cold lemonade. The relatively sparse track sufficiently highlights Emily's vocals, breezy and bright. It's just a great love song.
Jill Scott, "My Love" (from the album The Real Thing: Words and Sounds Vol. 3): As I noted in my review, Jill Scott's third disc is so satisfying because it represents such a fully-actualized sexuality, one that barely crept into her previous work. It simmers beneath much of the album, each track dripping with sensuality. Even on "My Love," a song about recovering from a breakup, there is still an undercurrent of sex---it burns slow and soft, but it's there. Jill's never sounded better, her quiet coo building into a passionate belt. It's a sexy song even though it shouldn't be.
Keyshia Cole, "Heaven Sent" (from the album Just Like You): Amidst an album packed with filler, this track shines. The bass line feels like a march, working in welcome contrast to the slickly-produced vocals. As I mentioned with a few other songs on the list, I love its inherent sweetest, the unabashed yearning. I'm a sucker for love, I guess. Also, Keyshia's lead vocals blow the track up---her voice sounds incredibly pure as it soars through the song. You can read my full review of the album here.
Britney Spears, "Why Should I Be Sad?" (from the album Black Out): I hate endorsing Britney simply because she's such a disaster now, and I feel as though talking about how good this song is just enables her more (because, you know, she clearly will read this). But fuck that---this song is gooooood. The Neptunes wrap her in layers of sonics that reduce her voice to just another instrument in the mix. It has a hynotic mid-tempo bounce that feels quite progressive from the traditional Neptunes sound. But even though Britney might not be the main focus of the song, the lyrics are sharp and revealing---it's probably the most openly Britney has spoken about K-Fed. (Interesting fact that completely negates that point---she didn't write a lick of this song. Pharrell wrote it himself, based on what he knew about Britney's issues with her ex-husband via gossip rags.) Whatever---she may be totally insane, but Britney's still making some interesting music. Or, rather, producers are featuring her on great material, since I don't really think she did more than (barely) lay down her voice on the tracks.
Mario, "If" (unreleased track from the Go! sessions): I feel really bad for Mario. No, seriously. His album was delayed for over a year, and the majority of it leaked several months before it came out. It's a shame because he's one of the better male R&B vocalists right now, and his material is pretty solid. "If" merges two songs---the lyrics and melodies from Beyoncé's "If" (featured on the rerelease of B'Day), and the track from Trey Songz's "Can't Help But Wait." He deftly shows up both artists. Mario's vocal delivery is honest and nuanced where Beyoncé's is overcooked and melodramatic, and "If" suits the winding, melodic beat much better than Trey Songz's attempt. Perhaps for his next album, his label will know what to do with him, because they are wasting his talent.
Chris Brown, "You" (from the album Exclusive): I'm just going to come out and say it---I really just don't like Chris Brown. His songs are generic, his voice is all kinds of nasal, and I don't even think he's that cute (he can, however, dance his ass off, but that's neither here nor there). But this song is crack for me. No, seriously. I spent, like, two weeks listening to it on repeat. Written and produced by hitmaker of the moment, The-Dream, it features The-Dream's hallmark repetition on the hook, as Chris pointedly shouts "You!" in a call-and-response with a chorus of layered harmonies. Musically, it recalls "Benny and the Jets" with its piano-anchored hard beat. It's really the freshest thing that Chris Brown has ever done.
Alicia Keys, "I Need You" (from the album As I Am): It's hard to pick a single song from an album brimming with well-crafted hits, so I went with one that I didn't talk about in my review of the album. The drum solo is a masterful introduction to the song. It's Alicia in her true element---stripped-down live production, simple but direct lyrics, and a melody that lets her ample voice shine amidst its highs and lows (most notably the fervent "Yes, yes, yes!" on the chorus). Why don't you have this album yet?
Jermaine Paul, "Teach Me" (album to be released): Jermaine Paul cut his teeth as a backup singer for Alicia Keys, his powerful tenor featured prominently on "Diary" and their Grammy-nominated duet, a remake of "If This World Were Mine." His first solo track, "Teach Me" is equal parts Prince (for its flagrant falsetto and screeching guitars) and D'Angelo (for, well, everything else---this song could easily be Part II of "Untitled"). The amount of time that Jermaine spends in his falsetto could be distracting if it weren't for the quality of his performance. It's not wailing for the sake of simply wailing, another soul singer mindlessly invoking a musical tradition. There's a welcome rawness to his delivery. I'm not sure how the song would fair at radio (I don't think this is his first single, just a leak), but I think he just may be the next big thing.
Adele, "Daydreamer" (from the album 19): This is another one of those songs that I had on repeat for longer than I'm willing to admit. I was excited when I first discovered Adele's music, and I've only come to appreciate it more the longer I've sat with it. Her delivery is blissfully unadorned---there is no need for spastic runs when you have a tone this pure and controlled. I hate tired clichés, but her voice is angelic on the chorus. As I noted with Fantasia's "When I See U," sometimes a song is made that much better by its simplicity, and this is one of those cases. It's a quiet, soothing little song, but it is addictive and beautifully rendered.
Ledisi, "In the Morning" (from the album Lost & Found): I've been meaning to check out Ledisi for a long time, but her Grammy nominations finally got me to pay attention. Her album is a polished collection of Urban AC with few surprises, and it's better for it---it lacks gimmicky production and instead puts her vocals at the forefront. Her voice is commanding, but she knows how to tease the listener with a taste of its power and pull back. On this track she lets it rip at full tilt through the bridge to incredible effect. It's almost an angry sort of pleading, part victim, part predator with its vulnerable force. Ledisi has a voice that can break a heart and put it back together in the course of a single note.
The-Dream f/Rihanna, "Livin' a Lie" (from the album Love/Hate): Why do I love this album so much? I shouldn't for so many reasons---the tired thug bravado, his thin voice, the repetitive nature of the production. But clearly, I don't care about all of that. I'm completely juicing all over it. His collaboration with Rihanna is all about its sticky chorus and easy production. I love the hilarity of the introduction, with him shouting "Ar! Ar! Ar!" with her response of "Aye! Aye! Aye!" I love the idea of Rihanna deigning to commit any form of sexual act with The-Dream, given that the song describes an affair (my sister is convinced that he is actually a drag king in the middle of the gender reassignment process---think about that for a moment). I love how The-Dream always finds something to repeat in the chorus (here, we find them stuttering "I'm really hurting inside/side/side"). Where The-Dream really excels, though, is the way in which he's dressed up their voices. Neither he nor Rihanna have very strong voices, but he places the song in the middle of both of their vocal sweet spots so that they come off as studied vocalists rather than studio singers.
Mary J. Blige, "Just Fine" (from the album Growing Pains): If you can find a way to make it through this song without singing along and dancing, my hat goes off to you---you are of a much stronger resolution than I. But that also means that your poor shriveled heart is black, because, well, the happiness that radiates from this song is infectious. It's one of Mary's most satisfying uptempo cuts in recent memory thanks to its high BPM, exciting melody, positive (but not saccharine) lyrics, and hilariously good chorus. Sing it with me---"See I won't change my life, my life's just / fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine / Ooooh!" Can't help yourself, can you? That's what I thought.

If you actually made it to the end of this post, I applaud you---it was faaaaar longer than I intended (and no pretty pictures or videos to hold you attention!).

A Change Is Gonna Come

2008-01-04T18:40:00.000-05:00

I love Barack Obama for so many reasons: for his realistic policies that are about practicality rather than just wooing voters, for his ability to inspire, for his understanding that America is a nation that needs hope, for focusing on unifying the country rather than more partisan politics, for motivating young people to get involved with and excited about politics again. He is a fresh face in politics when everyone is so tired of the status quo.

And I couldn't be more pleased that he came out swinging in Iowa to best Clinton, who focused more on how she was the inevitable candidate rather than really understanding the character of the electorate.

Of course, the battle is not over---this is just the first of 50 states. But it's a landmark in US politics, one that makes me feel hopeful for our future. In an Op-Ed column in The New York Times, David Brooks writes:

Barack Obama has won the Iowa caucuses. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to feel moved by this. An African-American man wins a closely fought campaign in a pivotal state. He beats two strong opponents, including the mighty Clinton machine. He does it in a system that favors rural voters. He does it by getting young voters to come out to the caucuses.
This is a huge moment. It’s one of those times when a movement that seemed ethereal and idealistic became a reality and took on political substance.
Iowa won’t settle the race, but the rest of the primary season is going to be colored by the glow of this result. Whatever their political affiliations, Americans are going to feel good about the Obama victory, which is a story of youth, possibility and unity through diversity — the primordial themes of the American experience.

I couldn't have said it better, so I'll say no more.

Watch his victory speech below:

And a transcript of my favorite part:

I know how hard it is. It comes with little sleep, little pay and a lot of sacrifice. There are days of disappointment. But sometimes, just sometimes, there are nights like this; a night that, years from now, when we've made the changes we believe in, when more families can afford to see a doctor, when our children -- when Malia and Sasha and your children inherit a planet that's a little cleaner and safer, when the world sees America differently, and America sees itself as a nation less divided and more united, you'll be able to look back with pride and say that this was the moment when it all began. This was the moment when the improbable beat what Washington always said was inevitable.

This was the moment when we tore down barriers that have divided us for too long; when we rallied people of all parties and ages to a common cause; when we finally gave Americans who have never participated in politics a reason to stand up and to do so.

This was the moment when we finally beat back the policies of fear and doubts and cynicism, the politics where we tear each other down instead of lifting this country up. This was the moment. Years from now, you'll look back and you'll say that this was the moment, this was the place where America remembered what it means to hope. For many months, we've been teased, even derided for talking about hope. But we always knew that hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path.

It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it...Hope -- hope is what led me here today. With a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. Hope is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be...The same message we had when we were up and when we were down; the one that can save this country, brick by brick, block by block, (inaudible) that together, ordinary people can do extraordinary things.

Full transcript [The New York Times]

Real Women Have Curves

2008-01-04T13:13:00.000-05:00

I'm a little late on the Jezebel bandwagon, but it's fast becoming my favorite site of the Gawker empire. It's a refreshing take on the traditional women's rag (i.e., Glamour, Cosmo, etc.) in that the writers inject a hearty dose of reality into everything they post.

They recently posted an article from The Times about the critical backlash against Nigella Lawson, celebrity-chef and total hot bitch. Commentors on The Times' site have lobbed extreme insults about her weight, chiding her for setting a bad example by cooking and indulging in fatty foods.

I've been a fan of Nigella since the first time I saw her on Oprah years ago. She is strikingly gorgeous---raven-haired and fair-skinned with the unabashed curviness of a Vargas Girl. On her show, she fuses a barely-contained sensuality in the way she cooks and eats, reminding all of us that the kitchen is a place for enjoyment---it shouldn't be a source of fear.

What I find so disgusting about the situation is that, after the brainwashing that people have from super-slim actresses, a woman of a normal size is deemed a "porker." When did a size 2 become the status quo, especially when it doesn't reflect the body of most woman at all?

What made me really appreciate the article (along with the great commentary on Jezebel, with support from a band of up-in-arms commentors) was Nigella's reaction to the controversy:

“I think it is a fear of flesh,” says Nigella, “maybe of vulnerability and softness.” Is that ultimately a fear of sex? “I don’t know. But I do think that women who spend all their lives on a diet probably have a miserable sex life: if your body is the enemy, how can you relax and take pleasure? Everything is about control, rather than relaxing, about holding everything in.”

...

“In my experience, the weight thing is an almost totally female problem. I never feel bad about my weight around men, only women. Women act like it is somehow a moral failing to have hips.”

It's refreshing to hear a celebrity constructively muse on mainstream fat-scism, especially compared to Tyra Banks' melodramatic response when the glossies made fun of her beach body. With celebrities like Nigella vocal and unafraid of their bodies, maybe other women will start to listen too.

Nigella Lawson Feels Bad About Her Body [Jezebel]
The Big Issue [The Times]

PS Is it really useless of me to make a post to comment on a post commenting on an article? Or just exceedingly meta?

NYC: A Brief Modern History

2008-01-04T12:51:00.000-05:00

For his last post, Choire Sicha, Gawker's once and probably future (if poor judgment brings him back for a third stint) managing editor, toiled through the past seven years of the Metro Section in The New York Times to construct a history of New York City over the past seven years. It's quite a fascinating read.

What Happened To New York: A History of the 00's So Far [Gawker]

It's amazing to see the cyclical nature of news, as well as see how Manhattan has reacted (and overreacted) to commonplace daily news in the frame of a fear-mongering war culture.

My favorite bit? This January 2001 NYT gem about Manhattan rents coming back down to Earth. If only.

Just a Little More Drama

2007-12-24T14:58:00.000-05:00

Mary J. Blige, Growing Pains

In 2001 Mary J. Blige announced that there would be no more drama in her life. Now, when you've made a career out of singing about your personal blues, it may not be the best move to make. Since then, Mary has had a few great songs and even some decent albums, but none have matched the ferocious tenderness that made albums like My Life and Mary such classics. Last week Mary released Growing Pains, her 8th (!) studio album in 15 years. It is a fine return to form, with Mary alternating between a sage, world-weary warrior with advice to dispense, and a woman who's realized that there are always problems in love and life. The authentic range of emotions that Mary serves up amidst an exciting backdrop of electro-funk fused with smoothed-out jazz makes for one of her best albums to date.

I haven't been this excited about a Mary album since Mary. As a whole, Growing Pains feels confessional but still inviting---Mary makes you a part of her struggle. It works so well for exactly the reasons that No More Drama and the albums that followed did not. Mary's ultimate problem on those albums was that, conceptually, they were based on the notion that everything in her life was okay, that she finally figured it all out. What has always made Mary so popular is that she is relateable, the People's Diva. And when she's not crying about her pain, we don't know what to latch onto. We like her because she's flawed like us---she's looking for happiness and running into as much trouble as we are, and she has a knack for documenting the search on wax in a way we can all understand and believe. With Growing Pains Mary demonstrates that she's still trying to get herself together, and that it's not always easy, no matter how famous she may be. Musically, this album is a perfect fit fore Mary---it feels current without reeking of blatant trend-chasing (she'll have to thank The-Dream and Tricky Stewart for working their magic, as they handled the bulk of the album's writing and production).

So on to the music---the album knocks out the gate with "Work That," the album's second single (which has been prominently featured in iTunes ads recently). It sets the tone, both musically and thematically. It has a summertime-windows-down-bump that is undeniably catchy, and finds Mary wailing lines like "I'm talking 'bout things that I know." She immediately constructs herself as your knowledgeable older sister, your best girlfriend. It's a role she loves to play, and one that she plays well. The album's first single, the buoyant "Just Fine" is a fitting prequel to this---it's a celebratory anthem and she immediately requests that you join the party. It would stink of false peppiness if it weren't peppered with lyrical subtleties (thanks to The-Dream). Her life isn't perfect, but it's, well, "Just fine." And isn't that good enough sometimes? It's a hard song to resist---the melodramatic hater in me wants to pee on her good cheer, but instead I find myself doing the wop and shouting "Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, oooooh!" while I get dressed in the morning.

Thankfully, Mary doesn't spend the entire album spouting off words of wisdom. If she did, it would make for a pious, detached experience---when you're known as the Queen of Hip Hop Soul, it's hard to remain grounded, but necessary to keep your fans invested in your problems. Lucky for her, Brian Michael Cox serves her up one of the freshest songs he's done in years, "Stay Down." He finally ditches the now-tired 808-and-piano loop that he's used for nearly ten years in favor of a more electro-oriented sound. The smooth stutter of the beat is the perfect medium for Mary's love-soaked, yearning vocals: "Stay down, we're almost at the very best part," she pleads. Mary, stop making my soul HURT. It's a pitch-perfect, well-measured track, and easily her next big hit ("Be Without You Part II," if you will). If you don't believe me, just ask Rich.

And really, the quality of Mary's vocals is what makes this album so great. For the first time in years, there is a studied sense of control and nuance to her voice. Her church-bred wailing is still her hallmark and weaves into many tracks (if it wasn't there, it wouldn't be a Mary album), but here, when she goes wild on a track, it's because the emotion merits it, not because she thinks that she should start screaming for the sake of it. Her vocals on some tracks are, dare I say, understated, like the off-kilter and delightful "Smoke." It's the most maturity I've seen from her as a vocalist in years.

The-Dream and Tricky's "Roses" is one of the album's fiercest moments. The beat drums along with the sound of a gun being cocked, and Mary laughs maniacally as she denounces the common perceptions of love: "Welcome to this new definition of love / It ain't all roses!" Clearly, married life has not had an effect on Mary's blunt rawness, the essence of her early work that made it so invigorating. It's a track that no one else could pull off as well as her, with her potent combination of pain and anger tempered by a certain vulnerability of a woman who's been hurt too many times before.

The album wins in terms of sequencing. Mary's last few albums have droned out into a serious of nameless ballads at the end, a mush of generic tracks. They have a tendency to stay around a little too long, as though just when you think she's done, she realizes that she has another piece of advice to deliver. It's like trying to get off the phone with my mother, as she throws in several more interjections after I say "goodbye." Sometimes her albums just aren't well-edited, and other times they just feels front-loaded and peak too early. While it wouldn't hurt Growing Pains to lose a few songs (like the sweet but boring "Shake Down," featuring Usher), it feels much more consistent than some of her more recent releases.

It helps that the album closes on a track that shines so brightly, it makes Chernobyl look like a tealight: "Come to Me (Peace)." Once again we find Mary trying desperately to repair a broken relationship, and it serves almost as an inspired second movement of "Stay Down." If it weren't for the little flourishes that Tricky always tosses into his productions, or The-Dream's smart melodies and bitter-sweet lyrics, it would sound like a tired 80s power ballad. Instead, the track soars as a chorus of equally battered Marys supports her impassioned plea: "Let the air of your voice dry my tears / Let 'I love you' fall on my ears." No Mary, come dry MY tears, because YOU JUST MADE ME CRY. It is an interesting note to end the album on, as it's the not the traditionally uplifting sort of track that Mary has closed out her albums with recently. Instead, it's more like the closing to My Life, "Be Happy." It's a non-conclusion in that it leaves us with the feeling that Mary hasn't worked everything out---she's still searching for the resolution. And if this is what her search sounds like, I'm ready to be her therapist. Tell it to me Mary, and we'll cry together. Because that is what you want, right?

Listen Up: Mary J. Blige, "Stay Down"

Also, below is a video of Mary performing "Come to Me (Peace)" at the CNN's Heroes: An All-Star Tribute. She hits a few flat in the beginning, but she more than pulls it together. It's one of those performances that gives you goosebumps, enlivened with the gospel fervor that makes Mary such an exciting performer when she's at her best. I think it's up there with her famous 2002 Grammy performance of "No More Drama." Not gonna lie, I was totally crying with her at the end. I'm such an easy sell. Enjoy.

I have no words

2007-12-18T20:26:00.000-05:00

Britney's Teen Sister Jamie Lynn Spears Pregnant (via People)

Seriously though---no words.

Existential Questions

2007-12-17T23:15:00.000-05:00

Okay, not really, but still---after a few drinks, everything seems philosophical, right?

I had dinner and drinks with Linda this evening. Among many things, she's my partner in (literary) crime, and we've always pushed/encouraged each other in terms of writing. We started talking about how both of us have little (read: no) actual writing to speak of lately.

(Warning: Carrie Bradshaw moment) I couldn't help but wonder: why do I write? And why don't I do it anymore?

By "writing" I don't mean blogging---though I've been, at best, vaguely consistent in keeping up with this, it's still updated on a semi-regular basis. What I mean by "writing" is the actual writing that always kept me so excited---poetry. What's sad is that we live in a culture where poetry is given no respect---when you tell people you write poetry, they think of emo-Myspace musings and that terrible Creative Writing class they took in college. Poetry was once (not long ago) the highest of art forms, literature at its most refined, tightly edited and emotionally impactful. People view modern poetry as opaque and detached from reality. It's a shame, because there are a lot of modern poets who have an extremely tight and critical lens on modern society. I could talk more about that, but I've done it before. Your TV may be in reruns, but I'll try not to be (see what I did there? TOPICAL HUMOR!).

Thinking back on why I began writing makes me a little sad, because I know it was always all so false. I started out writing poetry because, when I was young, teachers told me I was good, and they encouraged it. That, of course, is a great thing. However, I started writing because I got excited by the notion of doing something great, rather than writing because I had something to express, or some artistic inclination that needed an outlet. As I've grown, I think that it's easy to spot poetry that lacks that certain authenticity of emotion, when it's work rather than art.

So these days I'm trying to write when I actually have something to say, rather than when I think I should be writing. And it's surprising how sometimes, I don't have much to say. Sometimes life mulls along patiently, quietly. We look for the big moments: the changes, the deaths, the marriages. We wait for those things to come along so that we can document them.

But these hours in between, perhaps, are the most interesting. Our lives are more these little moments, the time between your first great love story and your next bout of depression, than they are the big markers that we see when we look back.

So maybe I need to start looking at these small, inconsequential minutes of my life instead of waiting for the next.big.thing. Life is always happening, I think.

Maybe I should write a bit more.

Blue-Eyed (British) Soul

2007-12-10T21:15:00.000-05:00

Who knew that all the best new soul singers would come from London?

Adele, a honey-voiced 19 year-old indie artist out of South London, just received the Brit Awards Critic's Choice Award. Vocally, she bears more than a passing resemblance to Amy Winehouse, and I'm sure that more than a few people will accuse her of swagger-jacking. People are already saying that she's "Amy Winehouse, just not fucked up." They both have classic jazz voices, rich and impeccably controlled.

However, she has much more traditional phrasing than Amy---it's somewhere between the Ella-inspired precision of Chrisette Michele and the clipped, airy growl of Joss Stone. Also, unlike Amy, the production is incredibly sparse---most of the tracks I've heard find her paired with an acoustic guitar and nothing else, a sharp contrast to Mark Ronson's interpretation of Phil Spector's Wall of Sound on Amy's sophomore album.

What Adele seems to lack is that complex world-weariness, that insecurity that makes Amy's voice, and her music, so fascinating (my love of Amy is very well-documented). Comparatively speaking, Adele comes off a bit sunny and soft. But hey---I'm a sucker for a gorgeous voice. I'm interested to hear how the rest of the album fleshes out, and to see if she can find a way out of Amy's (scary-thin yet) dauntingly-large shadow.

Check out Adele's MySpace here, where you can listen to four tracks off of her album.

And since I'm in a giving mood, here's one of her tracks, "Daydreamer."

Edit: After sitting with Adele's songs for a few days, I really think that the Winehouse comparison is quite superficial. If she should be compared to anyone, it should be Joss Stone (which I already mentioned, SUCKAS), but with more control and jazz-influence. Anyway, I'm still in love with the way she bends a phrase. She has a great notion of how to give just enough ornamentation to a note, letting the sound hang for a moment. The sweetness that I mentioned in her voice really feels more like nostalgia than anything else, which is surprising for someone her age.

Gobble Gobble

2007-11-22T16:24:00.000-05:00

I'm visiting my family for the week to eat too much and relax a bit before I start my new job. A detox, if you will. I'm trying to get my old company out of my veins.

It's funny being in the suburbs sometimes. I grew up here, but I've grown so accustomed to the pace of life in Manhattan. I'm used to walking fast and getting home late, using mass transit and cursing cars. I'm used to walking down the street to shop instead of into a mall. I like to have a cigarette with my wine.

But the breaks are important---I never love New York more than the moment I return to it after a break, see the skyline from the NJ Turnpike. It's rare that I feel that crushing sense that one gets when returning from vacation. There's always the excitement of coming home.

Happy Thanksgiving loves. I'm thankful for you.

"Alicia what you wanna do?" "I wanna do it again!"

2007-11-16T23:37:00.000-05:00

The soul music tradition is a hard one to live up to. Inevitably, when artists claim to be inspired by some of the greats (Stevie, Marvin, Prince, etc.) they come off as a cheap mimicry of what was once something so unique and innovative.

What makes Alicia Keys' new album, As I Am, ultimately so satisfying is that she has finally cast off the albatross of vintage soul and instead infused her own musical point of view into her work, making for a truly unique album that is easily her most accomplished to date.

Alicia's oft-noted influences figure less prominently in this album. The stunning "Like You'll Never See Me Again" is like a long-lost epilogue to Prince's "Purple Rain," but for the most part, the album finds Alicia in a much more stripped-down sonic space. I'd be willing to say (well, I guess I am saying) that on As I Am, we find an Alicia who draws more from The Beatles than she does from Stevie Wonder. The Linda-Perry-assisted "The Thing About Love" begins as a rather standard piano, string, and drum-driven ballad. However, at the bridge, the tempo switches up, and Alicia cries "Oh, tell that I am not the only one that's going through it all" as the drums thrash around her. The swing of the beat reminds me of "Penny Lane" for reasons I can't clearly articulate. It's not the rich horn-and-bass sound that we would expect from her, and it is so much better-suited to the song than a more traditional soul treatment. It's a cleaner aesthetic, one which allows her voice to take center stage.

And really, on this album, Alicia's voice is her most interesting instrument. She's always been a technically strong vocalist with distinct character, but it is on this album where she has finally come into her own as a singer. Gone is the typical polish that is on her vocals. Usually, even in her Aretha-inspired hoots and hollers, Alicia is pitch-perfect. However, here we find her vocals rough, with lilting flat notes and breaks that could only be inspired by a pubescent boy. It is these flaws that ultimately make each song feel so genuine. On the disc's first single, the exuberant "No One," Alicia sings the entire song just outside of her typical range, straining for each note and sounding like a Jackson-5-era Michael. The roughness of the vocals adds an immediate sense of authenticity to the sound. Nothing feels too overproduced or smoothed out; rather, the songs sound as though they were written and recorded in a fervor, Alicia rushing to commit her passion to tape.

This is all not to say that Alicia has completely abandoned her soul roots; instead, she's refined the way in which she draws upon them. One listen to the call-and-response between Alicia and a cooing chorus of male backup singers on the thumping "Wreckless Love" and you know that she's still Stevie Wonder's musical grand-daughter. She howls through the trumpet-and-snare-laced chorus with a love-starved ardor that is palpable. Unlike her soul predecessors, though, the instrumentation is comparatively light, allowing her impassioned vocals to drive the song more than anything else.

The album's biggest triumph is "Lesson Learned," a track that was co-penned and co-produced by John Mayer. (Well, it's a close call between this track and "Like You'll Never See Me Again," but I talked about that one enough already.) Lyrically, like much of the album, it's rather introspective, a song essentially about learning from a rough breakup. Its success is through the combination of meditative lyrics and Alicia's emotional delivery, a perfect balance of strength and vulnerability. "Yes I was burned, but I call it a lesson learned" she says. Her voice breaks and you know the wound is still fresh, but the perspective that one needs to heal is already in place. Alicia's matured from a girl who could play the piano to a woman making some serious contributions to the canon of American music, and I couldn't be happier that she is finally living up to her reputation.

Listen Up: Alicia Keys f/John Mayer, "Lesson Learned"

Early Morning Rambling

2007-11-13T07:30:00.001-05:00

I don't know what it is, but sometimes there's a little spark, and everything is brand new again.

It's not fair

2007-11-09T00:58:00.000-05:00

....when TV shows make you tear up. Worse? When re-fucking-runs make you cry. I just vaguely-drunkenly rewatched the episode of Sex and the City where it's Miranda's wedding and Samantha tells everyone she has breast cancer.

Why am I so easily moved to tears by poorly written (and acted) sitcoms?

Don't answer that.

Leaving the Nest

2007-11-05T22:19:00.000-05:00

I resigned from my job today.

It's completely and totally surreal. After 4 years at a (relatively) small organization, you reach a level of comfort. It's home. A dysfunctional home, but still a home. I work with a group of people who have, over the years, become so much more than colleagues.

It's rare that you end up at an organization where you forge relationships like this. These are people who I see on the weekends because I want to, people who have counseled me through petty life drama and celebrated the important milestones along the way.

These people have been with me through a lot. Shit---a lot of them literally saw me grow up, helped guide me through that awkward figuring-it-all-out period that ate up much of my time at NYU. Erin was the first person I came out to. Not at work, mind you. The first person I ever told.

It's going to be hard to leave. But if I don't leave now, well, I feel like I never will. And how can you grow when everything around you stays the same? I'm trying to not let nostalgia blind me. It's been really rough there the past year or so, and I know I have to move on.

I'm completely and totally terrified at the notion of starting over somewhere else, having to prove myself again to a bunch of people who don't know me from Adam. But I think I'm ready for the challenge, and my new position feels like a move in the right direction for me.

It's been a good four years. See you back on the east side, where it all began.

Soul Star

2007-10-29T19:40:00.000-04:00

Alicia Keys knows how to make me wet. No joke. I've been listening to her new single, "Like You'll Never See Me Again" on repeat, and I'm basically obsessed.

Sonically, it's a logical follow-up to her triumphant first single, "No One." Both forgo more organic sounds for synthetic bumps and bleeps. LYNSMA (I'm too lazy to type out that long-ass title for the rest of this post) opens with a tingling melody, and faintly, you can hear Alicia wailing far back in the vocal mix. It's a haunting yet beautiful introduction to the track. A fitting one at that, given the inherent morbidity of the songs lyrics.

Let's just get it out there---this song is clearly a homage to Prince, but in the best way. This is no artless imitation (I'm looking at you, Mariah Carey---"Mine Again" has such an authentic Prince influence until it devolves into a typical Mariah power ballad). Like Amy Winehouse's genius reinterpretation of the Ronettes, Alicia takes hallmark aspects of Prince's sound and puts her own stank on it. And it smells delicious. The strained, airy falsetto, a melody that speeds up and slows down easy like your last best fuck---it's all very "Purple Rain." Even the way the song builds with guitars thrashing in the midst of this bedroom-smooth jam reeks of The Purple One.

But as the song progresses, we get to see more Alicia. She drops into a slightly lower register and goes to church over the chorus with a ferocity that makes you believe her. The song closes with a stacked choir of Alicias, crying out in wordless "oohs." They loop on for 8 bars longer than you'd expect, until they've taken over the track with the same sort of triumphant celebration of love that makes "No One" so invigorating.

If this is how Alicia's coming back out, I think she'll finally quiet the naysayers who've always seen her as overhyped. Everything she's doing right now is so far outside of what's going on in mainstream music. As I Am may just be the album that cements her position as one of the living legends of modern soul music.

And now I just creamed myself. November 13 needs to get here soon.

Edit: So Alicia just did a live performance of the track, and it's the TRUTH. I could do without her speaking over it (it's a bit melodramatic), but otherwise it's solid. I've seen her in concert twice, and, even if you're not a fan, she knows how to put on a live show.

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New Music Roundup

2007-10-28T10:32:00.000-04:00

I'm not joking when I say that I've had this post drafted for, like, the past month, and have not had the time to reread it, tweak it, and post it this entire time. I clearly need to get my life together. Anyway, enjoy.

Emily King, East Side Story
In an age of American-Idol-inspired vocal histrionics, it's refreshing to hear an artist who understands restraint. On her accomplished debut album, East Side Story, Manhattan native Emily King does just that. She doesn't have the powerhouse voice of her contemporaries, but through thumping organic tracks and introspective lyrics, she manages to convey personality and, more importantly, authenticity.

While her bio might give you some Alicia Keys-isms (both interracial Manhattanites on J Records with strong lyrical and instrumental abilities), the comparison essentially ends there. Emily's guitar-driven tracks have much more in common with the folksy singer-songwriter sounds of Regina Spektor than the 70s-soul-sounds of Alicia. Also, her ethnicity seems to factor more significantly into her lyrics. On the surprisingly catchy “Color Blind,” she sings, “I used to think I was the same as everyone / Until I heard a word that turned it all around.” A little heavy-handed, yes---at 21, her songwriting still needs some time to mature. However, I applaud her for going outside of the usual pop topics of love lost and found.

The album was helmed and mentored by Carl "Chucky" Thompson, formerly a member of Diddy's Hitmen, the production team responsible for Bad Boy's runaway success in the 90s. With Emily Chucky has taken a markedly different route, one that eschews lush soul soundscapes and instead embraces acoustic minimalism. The drumlines on the album all seem to be a riff off the famous intro to Al Green's "I'm Glad Your Mine," a sparse 808 that lilts and moves, an immediately recognizable organic sound. Thompson actually sampled the drum pattern on both Biggie's "Dead Wrong" and Mary J. Blige's "Time." The timbre of the drumline serves as a welcome compliment to Emily's throaty mezzo soprano. It adds a sense of consistency to the album, almost that of one song with many movements.

The immediate standout track of the album is "U & I." A bright-eyed look at new love, the track finds Emily cooing over a sparse track. It's simply one of those songs that is immediately addicting, with a mesmerizing chorus that loops in your mind. It also does a lovely job of sounding as summer-sweet as the descriptions of nascent love that it describes. The breezy, bossa-nova-inspired "Moon" is another highlight, as Emily soothes a long-distance lover. The intro to the song is nearly a minute long, but it's just so goddamn sweet that it's totally okay. “Just look to the moon / And you'll feel that my love's right here for you,” she sings, and you might just believe her.

The album's first single, “Walk In My Shoes” smartly samples the melody line of Diana Ross' “Love Hangover.” Once again, the lyrics fall a bit towards cliché at times---while trying to convince us that she's just like the rest of the common folk, she falls into some overused imagery. However, with its bouncing beat and Emily's aggressive delivery, it's a great survivor anthem about a girl on her grind, trying to make it in male-dominated industry.

While Emily still needs some time to develop her lyrical artistry, East Side Story is a promising soul debut that thankfully features no T-Pain-vocoder mess on it. In a world where more and more R&B music is sounding the same, with the same producers doing the same songs, it is refreshing to hear an artist willing run a little to the left.

Listen Up: Emily King, "U & I"

Keyshia Cole, Just Like You
Though she's carved her own niche with hits like "Love" and "I Changed My Mind," for better or for worse, Keyshia Cole is constantly compared to Mary J. Blige. With her sophomore album, Just Like You, rather than fight that comparison, she embraces it. In many ways, it follows the formula of what was arguably Mary's strongest album, 1994's My Life. Confessional in tone, My Life is one long ode to a difficult relationship. On “Give Me More” Keyshia even ends the track with the famous “la di das” that open the title track of Mary's album. However, what she ultimately lacks is the authenticity of emotion that made her first album a success and My Life so relateable.

Make no mistake---I'm not saying the album is bad. By no means. It's actually quite enjoyable. Keyshia settles into a midtempo groove that suits her well for the majority of the tracks, like “Fallin' Out” and “Give Me More.” My problem is that it ultimately lacks the raw essence that's always made her so exciting as an artist.

Part of the problem may be the influence of Ron Fair. A legendary svengali, he's guided the likes of Christina Aguilera to pop success. He handled much of the production on Keyshia's album, adding a polish and a refinement to Keyshia's sound. However, it's always been her grit that made her interesting. You can take a girl out the hood and clean up her weave, but homegirl is still gonna be ghetto as hell. Tracks like “I Remember” and “Work It Out” feel like total pop fluff. They have the shine of plastic. Don't get me wrong---vocally, Keyshia sounds flawless. She knows when to let her voice rip and when to pull back. But it all feels too forced.

Even when Keyshis tries to go for harder-edged, urban tracks, they sound boring. "Shoulda Let You Go," is, at best, "Enough Cryin'" by Mary J. Blige but more uninspired. "Didn't I Tell You" featuring, oddly enough, a verse from Too $hort, has a catchy Southern bounce, but once again, there's just nothing "wow" about it.

Despite her more pop direction this go round, Keyshia still has some tracks that feel genuine. The first single, “Let It Go,” shamelessly samples Mtume's “Juicy Fruit,” most notably sampled by Biggie on “Juicy.” Missy lends her trademark shouts over the track, but for once they actually enliven the track. Lil' Kim even shows up to drop 16 bars, and does one of her best features in recent memory. While it all may not be terribly creative, it's the perfect Friday-night-up-in-the-club-with-my-girls track. And sometimes we all need one of those. “Heaven Sent,” easily the album's strongest midtempo cut, features a stuttering snare drum paired with a chorus of smoothed-out Keyshias. Here she is at her most vulnerable, and her passion is palpable.

However, the inclusion of “Last Night,” Keyshia's feature from Diddy's Press Play, is painful. I'm secretly convinced that, after Keyshia laid down her vocals, someone shifted the entire track up a half step. She caterwauls her way through a series of off-key adlibs. It's a shame, because the track itself has such a great 80s synth sensibility. And Diddy's rap-singing makes everything even worse. Remember when Ja Rule did that, like, 6 years ago and we all got really tired of it? Yeah, me too. No need to reach back into history and repeat it.

While her sophomore effort may not be the best representation of who she is as both a person and an artist, Keyshia has still managed to create a sexy little album that solidifies her position as one of the better R&B vocalists around right now. Perhaps for her next album, she'll do a better job of capturing her personality rather than trying to simply capture mainstream listeners.

Listen Up: Keyshia Cole, "Heaven Sent"

Jill Scott, The Real Thing: Words and Sounds Vol. 3
Seven years ago, Jill Scott stepped on the scene, the face of the burgeoning Philly Soul phenomenon. With the release of her third studio album, The Real Thing: Words and Sounds Vol. 3, she has put forth another album of smoothed-out soul, witty lyrics, and spoken word that still demonstrates her continual growth as a singer-songwriter.

Unlike her previous albums, the Jill we see on The Real Thing is a much more sexual being. Sure, on “Cross My Mind” from her last album, she cooed “You would spread my limbs 'cross continents.” However, on her latest album, a sensual groove underwrites nearly every song. On the instantly-addicting “Crown Royale,” she moans “You're in so deep I'm breathing for you / You grab my braids, arch my back high for you.” She successfully walks the line between being sexual and being explicit. It's a difficult compromise to navigate, but she does so deftly.

She follows this with the spoken word track “Epiphany,” detailing a bed-thumping sex session. She says, “I take charge of the ship / moving my with the back of my hips like my ancestors did / Speaking the Bantu, Ronga, and Tonga.” It's raw and dirty, but once again in a way that's never lewd. “He plows inside as if he's makin' beats,” she says, “as if this year's harvest depended on it.” The way in which she connects the highly sexual lyrics to a history in herself is quite genius---I wish I could whip out something more academic to say, but that's the best I can do for now. However, it is the conclusion of the song that best shows her self-awareness: “But why do I feel so empty?” she asks, just as the music stops and her climax fades. Girl, I know what that's like.

On the disc's second single, the slow-burning “My Love,” Jill eschews thumping bass lines for a finger-snaps and a tittering high hat. “Baby are you happy without me?” she says, following a laundry list of her ex's new love's best attributes. “My love is deeper, tighter, sweeter, higher, fly-er, / Didn't you know this, / didn't you notice?” It's an ironic statement to make---she knows she's already lost. But it aptly demonstrates the way in which we cling to the things we can never have again.

“Celibacy Blues” has the summer sweaty, sweet burn of whiskey. She laments her accidental abstinence both comically and poignantly: “I'm trying to clear my mind / but all I seem to find / is this gangsta, gangsta type of need.” After so many years of listening to Jill coo coyly about love, it's refreshing to hear her sing about her body's needs, and being a sexual woman.

As the label of neo-soul has come and gone, leaving many artists in its wake, Jill Scott has
managed to consistently evolve and remain relevant. With her latest album, she demonstrates that she can be just as sexual as the young tarts running around without compromising her artistic integrity.

Listen Up: Jill Scott, "Crown Royale"

Just Something to Say

2007-10-09T01:38:00.000-04:00

Last night while we were half-sleep, N. rolled over and held me, wrapped his arms around me apocalypse-tight. In my nighttime delirium, all I could do was smile.

Sometimes, you just know exactly how you feel. Nothing but summer peach sweet and delicious.

I drink too much sometimes

2007-09-25T00:16:00.000-04:00

I'm pushing myself to write more poetry lately. It's scary how hard I find it to commit something to paper. Thinking of a line is one thing---believing in it is another. Sometimes these ideas I have seem so outside of myself, words that would never come from me. That is how I know they're what I really feel. Maybe it's not about believing it then. It's about realizing that these feelings are a part of me.

I guess we're all a bit delusional.

I've lost the visions of poetic grandeur that I had for so much of my childhood. I don't think about getting published, about writing volumes, epics. I'm thinking now about writing for myself. Writing to keep my sanity.

I don't feel like I've given up. I feel like I'm finally starting to get it.

One Year Later

2007-09-03T18:33:00.000-04:00

My skin still smells of last night's bourbon
under the hotel-white sheets.
You are in the kitchen pressing
coffee (black, always) into white
porcelain cups, their lips etched
with blue doves.

We find you on the couch
(we: me, the orange tabby, the old blond
retriever) waiting in the early morning
electric glow, a day waiting
to be wasted in bed: breathing
your skin, reading
the pulse of your chest
when you are after-sex
sweaty. Your eyes aren't here

and your lips will never say
words you've said
to others before.

Instead you tell me
The space between us is God
and all I can do is believe
the hieroglyphics in your smile.

Like Ike Loves Tina

2007-08-25T15:42:00.000-04:00

By now, most have you have probably seen the gory photos from Amy Winehouse's latest row with her husband Blake Fielder-Civil. For those who haven't, I'll allow you a moment to take a look.

...

Done?

Good.

I think that there are probably a lot of people who see them and laugh, just another part of the hilarity that is Amy's boozy, beehived public persona. Personally, I found them really quite disturbing, because I don't think that it's a persona, a ploy for attention---I think that she and Blake might just be that fucked up. It's just really quite sad to see anyone, especially an artist who's work I really admire, look so destroyed---her trademark beehive and Cleopatra cat tails askew, the champagne ballet flats she always wears stained with blood. What would happen if the most startling and exhilarating artist music has seen in years burned herself out (or, quite possibly died) just as she hit it big?

You already know about my love of Amy Winehouse. While some view her as just another example of a drug-addled young celebrity, I think she exists in a different category. Primarily, she doesn't just have potential to be a great force in the industry (a la the defense of Lohan)---she already is. Back to Black is one of the most simplistically complex, genre-bending albums in recent years, and it represents a milestone in modern R&B sound (that was a really fucked-up sounding sentence but I don't know how to fix it).

One of the more interesting tidbits about the creation of the album, however, is that Amy wrote all of the tracks during a 6-month breakup with Blake. The themes of angst, self-loathing, insecurity, addiction, and self-destruction weave in and out of tales of love gone wrong, and they are the songs of she and Blake. I mean really, the album is about a lot of fucked-up relationship messiness. And it's about the man she married.

Amy's maintains that Blake didn't hit her---instead, she claims that he found her cutting herself in her hotel room, preparing to do drugs with a call girl (why is this not a Lifetime Movie?!). He tried to stop her, and she attacked him.

And maybe that's all true. Maybe he loves her so much that he's willing to fight their demons together. Even after their fight, she has a ferocity in her eyes as they're walking together, a look that says that she needs this man more than anything else.

But maybe, if they have any hope for the future, they have to break away from their collective past, and break away from each other. I clearly have no insight into the inner-workings of their relationship, so I'm no one to pass judgment. But I mean really---the two of them are doing too much damage to themselves together.

Basically I'm just bitter that she canceled her concert in Central Park that I had tickets to.

10 Questions

2007-08-14T22:37:00.000-04:00

Things are getting better, I think.

It's been sort of a miserable month so far at work---I'm at a place that is beyond any notion of burnt out that I've ever known (complaining!). My mantra has always been that work and life are two separate things, and that I can't let my frustrations at work affect me outside of the office. I've been pulling a lot of long hours lately, though, and suddenly the division between the two is fading. Though the insanity there is never ending, today I reached a big milestone in this crazy project I'm working on, and I left the office feeling accomplished for the first time in a while.

Anyway, enough of that mess. Some things to think about:

Where the hell is Sade? I've been listening to her (them, I guess, if we want to get all technical) on repeat lately, rediscovering all of my old favorite songs. Even her music from the early 80s still sounds fresh. A big part of that is Sade's smoky alto, with a sound rich enough to compete with Stuart Matthewman's sax. It's interesting to listen to the progression of their sound. 2000's Lovers Rock ditches the jazz sound for more acoustic guitars and synths, but it is still undeniably Sade. For the uninitiated, I would recommend starting off with The Best of Sade, which truly captures almost all of their best musical moments. Then take a listen to Lovers Rock. To cap it off, pick up Lovers Live, the group's 2002 live album. Then you'll understand.

It's been nearly 7 years since their last studio release, and I think that what music needs now (and always) is some Sade.
Equally important question: where the hell is Lindsay Lohan? Clearly, wherever she is, she didn't drive there (wokka wokka wokka!).
Why is no one talking about last week's Village Voice cover story on Rudy Giuliani? I think it should be required reading for everyone across the nation who is willing to hand him the keys to the White House solely based on their perception of his handling of 9/11 (does the White House have, like, keys? It would seen bit gauche, or, at least, low-security, if they did).

I'll give him credit for his composure the day of 9/11 but I'm not willing to grant him anything in regards to his preparation for a large-scale attack or his botched handling of the cleanup that followed (or, more accurately, that didn't follow). Whenever people tell me that they'd possibly "go Republican" for Giuliani, I try to give them my basic shtick about how he failed to adequately prepare the city for a terrorist attack, how he spent much of his administration targeting petty crime like jay-walking, cutting education funding, and busing homeless people out of New York until 9/11 changed everything, how lower Manhattan is essentially still a crater, how there are tons of rescue workers who are dealing with the after effects of exposure to harmful toxins at the cleanup site. So it's nice to have an article that really just lays it out there.

Oh, and there's that thing about how he's basically a huge dick in every interview and appearance he makes. And he married his second cousin.

I'm patiently awaiting all of the cunty anonymous comments I'm about to receive for making a vaguely political statement. It seems to happen a lot here.
Why are the Charlie's Angels films always on television, and why do I watch them from beginning to end every time?
More importantly, why do I own both films?
Why did I watch The Color Purple for the first time ever (!) a little while ago and cry for basically the entire three hours, even though I already knew the entire plot after having read (and loved) it years ago? I swear, by the end, I was sobbing so loudly that I would have closed my window if the air conditioner wasn't in the way.
Why am I ridiculously obsessed with my new MacBook Pro? Oh wait, I can answer that one: because it is THE SHIT. I think I'm naming it Valerie. Don't judge.
Why was the Beyonce/Robin Thicke concert I attended with my sisters two weeks ago the best $140 I've ever spent? You can hate all you want, but that shit was FLAWLESS. Robin Thicke puts on a solid live show---contrary to popular belief (a.k.a., people whose sole exposure to his live show is "Lost Without You" at the BET Awards), he has an incredible voice, great stage presence, and band that knows how to throw a jam session.

And Lady B---this bitch works hard. She danced and sang her ass off. At one point, she was wearing a diamond-studded flesh-colored leotard, and she had NO CAMEL TOE. I think she's honestly one of the best entertainers out there right now.
Am I a horrible person for hoping that Amy Winehouse decides to clean up her act and go to rehab after September 12, solely because I have tickets to her Summer Stage concert and I'm insanely excited to go see her? I mean, there's a gamble involved: she could decide to wait on rehab, keep the show scheduled, and then just not show up and instead wander the streets of New York (let's be honest, she'll totes be in Williamsburg) in a ketamine-induced stupor (horse tranquilizers are the new cocaine!).

While I think that it's extremely important for someone to be treated for addiction, it's interesting to wonder how that would affect her future musical aspirations. So much of the beauty of her sophomore album (reviewed in detail a while back) is her self-awareness, her recognition that she's fucked up and feeling helpless and self-destructive. If she banishes those demons, I wonder what will be left underneath to inspire her. That's not to say that it won't be good---I'm simply saying that it would be interesting to see how a new lifestyle would change the persona that dominates her album.
What should my next vacation destination be? I haven't gone on a big international trip in a long time and I really want to go somewhere completely different. I'm between Spain, Germany, and basically every South American country. Suggestions?

Okay, I think that's it for now. My alarm is set for 6 AM (6:30 5 mile runs are the new 7:30 3 mile runs), so I should rest up. Night.

New Music

2007-08-03T16:07:00.000-04:00

Some new albums/songs to discuss---I'm sure you know the drill by now.

Chrisette Michele, I Am
The reimagining of traditional jazz phrasing through modern hip hop on Chrisette Michele's sharp debut, I Am, is not a novel idea---she follows in tradition already enacted by the likes of Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, and Amy Winehouse. However, while it may not be the freshest idea, Michele's dynamic voice soars and scats through tracks with such technical efficiency that she proves herself worthy of such lofty company.

The album opens with "Like a Dream," a string-laden, bass-heavy mid-tempo number that finds Michele romancing a drummer at a show. The song is a breezy summer-love jam, aptly capturing the excitement of new romance. However, it is Michele's voice that shines above all. Unlike most modern R&B singers, she understands the nuance of sound, how a subtle shift in phrasing can sometimes convey emotion better than any scattered run. She even shouts the ladies out on the will.i.am-helmed "Let's Rock": "I've been studying Miss Billy, Miss Ella, / Miss Sarah Vaughn and Miss Natalie Cole," she intones, and it's quite clear.

Despite the heavy-weight names behind the boards on her album (will.i.am, Babyface, and John Legend all make contributions), Michele does not take a back seat to anyone, writing nearly every track on the album. Her voice is at times commanding, as on the soaring ballad and first single, "If I Have My Way." However, as impressive as it is, it is when she scales back that she shows her chops. On the Babyface-produced "Best of Me," backed by not much more than an acoustic guitar, drums, and finger snaps, Michele's voice pours out like liquid metal, the rich tone of it filling out the soundscape. “Mr. Radio” finds her cooing at the DJ to thank him for his baby -making jams, her voice velvety and honey-sweet.

Even with her decisively left-of-center stylings, Michele proves that she can hit mainstream radio without compromising her artistry. "Be O.K." finds her riding a will.i.am beat and features a verse from the producer himself. However, it succeeds in that it marries her vocal prowess to his bass-driven production. With an arsenal this diverse, I Am will likely be a debut that people won't soon forget.

Listen up: Chrisette Michele, "Like A Dream"

Eric Roberson, ...Left
Though he's been on the scene for nearly a decade, Eric Roberson only recently caught my ear. An indie artist with an impressive resume of songwriting and producing (Carl Thomas, Musiq Soulchild, Vivian Green, and Jill Scott), his third album, ...Left, is a solid soul offering.

I know that I'm quite referential when speaking about artists, but it's helpful to give some context (every artist is essentially modeling him or herself after another artist in some manner---who's completely original, really?). So here's Eric Roberson: shades of Carl Thomas, D'Angelo, and Anthony Hamilton. The latter is most evident on the plaintive “Only For You,” with its layered vocal braid of dueling lead vocals and stacked harmonies. I would hate to label him as neo-soul---it's a term so overused and antiquated that its meaning has essentially been obliterated. However, it's the most adequate title I can muster for what Roberson presents to the listener.

The album is ultimately what one would anticipate from an independent soul artist: (mostly) live instruments, playful harmonies, and lyrics divorced from the club-hopping, bottle-popping, coochie-dropping fare that most mainstream male R&B artists pass off as music. Roberson's smooth voice is not necessarily as distinct as some of his contemporaries; however, it has a rich tone that makes the album superb mood music. I found myself mildly disappointed with the album at first listen. With the second listen, though, it began to grow on me, until I found myself listening to the songs on repeat. The melodic harmonies are mesmerizing, and Roberson allows his voice to become another instrument in the lush jam session that is the album.

“Too Soon,” the song which introduced me to Roberson, deals with telling a new lover that he's not quite ready to say “I love you,” instead wanting to wait until the relationship has grown into something stronger. The vocal arrangements are on point, with a resonant chorus of background vocals echoing his phrases. It's a strong emotional statement, played out successfully over a track blessed with symphonic strings.

“Iluvu2much,” one of the album's standout cuts, is a drum- and guitar-driven duet with Algebra Blessett. Their voices join into a vulnerable harmony on the chorus. Once again, props to the vocal arranger who placed Roberson on the higher note, creating an eerie, tentative harmony which perfectly mirrors the song's theme of indecision.

Perhaps the most inspired of all of the tracks on the album, “Couldn't Hear Her” finds Roberson reflecting on how his years as an artist have been detrimental to his girl. “I couldn't hear her over my music,” he admits. It's quite meta---“She cries with the song telling me that I'm so wrong / Writing songs about her pain.” And that line presents the ultimate conflict of the song—while he laments the problems he's caused in the relationship by choosing his music over his girl, he does so once again, exploiting her heartache for his art. It exemplifies one of the major conflicts of the artist: drawing boundaries between one's life and one's art. The song closes with an exceptional 4 minute-long guitar solo, as though Roberson himself is at a loss for words given his repeated transgressions. It is this sort of rich storytelling and thoughtful delivery that makes ...Left a consistent, satisfying soul album.

Listen up: Eric Roberson f/Algebra Blesset, "Iluvu2much"

Hotter than July

2007-07-31T20:48:00.000-04:00

I don't seem to write too much anymore, but I guess I say that a lot. No, really. A lot. I'm starting to wonder if this little site will just become a place for me to talk about music and poetry and pop culture. While I don't doubt that my vanity will get the best of me and I'll feel the need to talk about myself every once in a while, I feel somewhat less compelled to do it than I used to. Not entirely sure why, but I guess that's how these things go sometimes. And I really do love to write about music, because there is nothing I enjoy more than when someone tells me that they discovered an artist, song, or album through me.

I would do a whole jazzy bulleted-list-rundown of my life as of late, but I'm too lazy. The one thing worth mentioning was my trip to Miami. I went to Key Biscayne, South Beach, and Jupiter (just north of West Palm Beach) with Nicole for a week (but you knew that already). It was probably the most relaxing vacation I've ever been on. We didn't party too much; we got up early in the morning to run along the island and spent our days baking on the beach. I'm not joking when I say that I was quite literally the color and sheen of chocolate fondue when I got back to New York. I really don't think that the color of my tan is one that occurs in nature. One of my coworkers described the shade as "radioactive" and decided that I could quite quickly be cast on a telenovela. Clearly, I've found my career path.

The highlight of the trip was my second night there. Nicole and I had spent the day lounging around on South Beach, and, after nursing our tans and burns, we went to Coconut Grove to meet some of her friends for drinks. We were sitting outside having drinks (I swear, every bar and restaurant in Miami is outside, which I'm sure doesn't work well in hurricanes), and I notice this kind of sketchy guy crossing the street and walking towards our table. He was more or less completely average: medium height, brown hair, middle-aged. A little stringy looking, not very well-groomed (at least I'm not judgemental!). So he walks over and he kind of pokes me with something and then puts it on the table between Nicole and I. I'm assuming that something has fallen out of my pocket (by "pocket" I mean "bag"), and I hear him say "This is from him." He darts away and Nicole and I realize that it's a rose. Fashioned out of palm fronds. And Nicole says, "He didn't say 'from him.' He said 'This is for him.'"

WHAT THE FUCK.

So we spend the next 10 minutes or so trying to figure out what just happened. Was the creepy guy awkwardly hitting on me? With a palm frond rose? Are you SERIOUS? Why the hell did he practically assault me with it and then run away? Did Nicole misunderstand what he said?

All was resolved shortly after, when the man returned and said to me, "Did it work?" Umm, what? Did he expect that to win him a date? A blow job? No, but really. What?

I'm really bad at turning someone down, but the ridiculousness of the situation made it easy. I said a firm "No" and shook my head. He sort of sulked away. Which made me feel bad. Well, almost feel bad. That shit was tooooo weird for me to feel bad.

Welcome to my life.

Nicole and I vacation really well together. We're both really low-key people and don't require a lot of action to stay entertained. The beach at Jupiter was one of the most beautiful I've ever seen---the water was cerulean and clear, the sand white. It was the perfect way to destress after a long drag without vacation. I actually looked rested when I got back. Clearly, that didn't last.

Work is vaguely crazier than ever, which makes me wonder what I'm really doing there at this point. I guess it all depends on how much they're willing to do to keep me around...

Enough typing for now. I need to get to bed soon---6 AM run with Nicole tomorrow, and I want to make it a good one.

So I'll leave you with one more thing: a poem. It's an old one, and you may know it, but I recently discovered it. I've always love poems that have an exceptional volta, and I find the final lines of this one striking.

So have at it.

A Blessing
by James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more, they begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

2007 In Music. So Far. Kind Of.

2007-06-12T19:56:00.000-04:00

Since we're about halfway through 2007 (!), I initially intended for this post to be my top 10 songs so far this year.

However, when I got down to it, I really couldn't pick 10 great songs.

Well, okay, I'll be fair. I could pick more than 10 songs. But nearly all of them would be from either Amy Winehouse or Joss Stone's recent albums. No, really. I'm serious. I would literally pick all 10 songs from Amy Winehouse's album, two or three of the bonus tracks, and most of Joss Stone's album. Really, it's the best stuff going on in soul music right now. But since I've bored you with pretty descriptions of these albums already, I'll move on to some other good aural experiences in '07. There aren't 10 of them, but there are some pretty decent ones to check out. Some of them aren't actually singles---they're album tracks or other songs that leaked. Here they are, in no particular order (with the caveat that I've intentionally excluded Ms. Winehouse and Ms. Stone):

Kelly Clarkson, "Sober": So maybe "Never Again" was a grower, not a show-er. It didn't have the immediate appeal of "Since You've Been Gone" (or the catchiness), but it got decent after a few listens. A good album track, but not really a single.

On the other hand, My December's second single, "Sober," is one of the best pop/rock songs in recent memory. Blender's review of the track was spot-on in its comparison of the track to U2's "With or Without You." It has the same slow burn, building to a painful crescendo. The climax is utterly beautiful, with Kelly's voice finally soaring in her trademark belting register. It's an understated yet ultimately successful song. What makes it work is that you believe her when she sings. It's a strong dose of reality---she's not over it, but she's trying to heal. It's all you can really say after a bad breakup, right?
Rihanna, "Umbrella": Okay, so I'll be honest. I really don't like Rihanna. Don't get me wrong---I find her music catchy and generally enjoyable, and she seems like a sweet girl. I'm just not into it. With the exception of "Pon de Replay," her sound just seems contrived and ultimately inauthentic to me.

However, this shit has been stuck in my head for weeks now. Because of the sheer frequency with which I shout "Ella, ella, ella, ay, ay, ay!" over and over again in public places, this song earns a spot on the list.
Tweet, "Give It to Ya": This might have actually leaked last year, but I'm not entirely sure. This song represents a great progression of Tweet's music. Most people know Tweet through songs like "Oops (Oh My)," so what people don't know is that she's put out two really strong quiet storm albums (see tracks like "Always Will," "Come Over to My Place," "Cab Ride," etc.). This track fuses that sensibility with an electo-thump that's a far cry from Tweet's typically organic arrangements. Her voice and the haunting layered harmonies create a subtle, sexy groove.
Robin Thicke, "Look at Me": Okay, so I already talked about this. How desperate do I have to be to plug my own shit? Anyway, it's worthy of a spot on the list.
Ciara, "Promise": It's actually from September of 2006, but I still play it like it's new. And what?! I'm tempted to say that this track is one of my favorites from the past few years. The Roger Troutman-inspired synth paired with the thump...thump-thump of the bass line creates a lush sonic soundscape for Ciara's sugar-coated, airy vocals . It's juvenile in its candid, unabashed declarations of love, but it's the innocence of the lyrics that makes the song as good as it is. It's clearly all a throwback to the New Jack Swing ballads of the early 90s (I could see SWV rocking this shit), but still feels modern and relevant. It's a pure artifact of your first and best love. This shit is straight high school.
Corinne Bailey Rae, "Since I've Been Loving You (Live)": Interesting fact---before CBR hit it big, she sang Led Zepplin covers with her indie rock girl band. It wasn't until she started working at a jazz club and filling in as a vocalist on some nights that she moved her sound in a more soulful direction.

Her cover of this Led Zepplin track (which she also performs at her concerts---and you must go see her, since she's incredible) takes a blues rock song and reinvents it as a soul-funk jam. It begins with just a piano, later joined by a bass. At the bridge, when the full band joins, her voice soars, bringing the song to a chilling climax. Her voice has an eerie quality that adds to the haunted tone of the lyrics. She's the truth, basically.
Mario, "Crying Out for Me": This is Polow Da Don's second entry on the list---he produced this track, along with "Promise." Both share the Roger Troutman synth and early '90s sensibility. The track does a great job of displaying Mario's vocal maturity---homeboy has some chops. The way his voice loops at the end of the song is just genius.
Joss Stone, "Girl They Won't Believe It": Yeah, I know I said I wouldn't throw her on here, but fuck you, it's my list.
Amy Winehouse, "Tears Dry On Their Own": See #8, suckas.

June showers bring...

2007-06-11T22:09:00.000-04:00

Today was the first real summer shower. I walked home from work today and it started to rain around the time I reached Union Square. Plump drops from a few lazy clouds that couldn't hold onto the condensation in the air. It was still evening-sunny and warm.

It was one of those summer storms where the air heats up instead of cooling down, where the pavement lets out hisses of steamy protest. People don't mind getting caught out without an umbrella because the warm rain feels good on sticky skin. The air smelled humid, like soggy paper, but it's a smell that smells like summer, like summer in Manhattan.

And the summer showers remind me of monsoon season in India, explosive flash storms that turn the roads to mud and offer a soggy respite from the oppressive heat.

The rain perfumed East 4th St. with the scent of hydrangeas but I couldn't find any along the entire block.

When I was little my mother used to tell me that, whenever the sun is shining during a rainstorm in the summer, it means that a fox is getting married in the jungle. I still believe her.

On Houston and B

2007-06-09T18:06:00.000-04:00

I was walking west on Houston on my way to Nico's place on Thursday night, unlit cigarette between my lips, fiddling with my iPod and lighter simultaneously. I reached the corner of Houston and B and heard a screech, turned my head in time to see a cab cut too close on an illegal U-turn. He crashed over the divider and all I saw was his license plate and a bicycle skid across the street.

Everything stops there. There's a single moment of paralysis, followed immediately by one's (selfish) sense of personal preservation. Even 30 feet from the scene, I checked around myself to see if anything was flying, if the cab was going to keep coming, if any errant pieces of scrap metal were hurling themselves away from the scene.

Next: the bicycle. Bicycle's don't sit on dividers unless someone's on them. I couldn't see anyone. And all I could think was that whoever it was had to be crumpled in front of the car.

Running across the avenue, people faster than I reach the divider first. From my new vantage point, I could see him. He was just a kid, not more than 18. White shirt, Eminem-blond, laid out on his stomach. The streets were already crowding, cars in either direction honking because they couldn't figure out what the fuss was.

And then he stood up. The kid stood up, brushed himself off as the bystanders held him straight. He's okay, he's okay. The cab driver was out of the car already, apologizing profusely, this kid screaming at him. Fear can turn to anger right quick. Someone brought him his mangled bike and a cop appeared (like magic?) diffusing the scene. Nothing to see here. Move along.

You see things like this, and you have this (selfish) need to instill in them some lesson for yourself. Live every moment as your last, cherish your health and freedom, treat others as you want to be treated. After a while, it feels false. It's not about you at all. Why should it be? I'm not the hero. Not the victim, not the antagonist.

I walked away from the scene unchanged. A little shaken, but the same. I lit my cigarette and turned up the volume on my iPod. What else can you do? This wasn't my tragedy.

6 Days and Counting

2007-06-07T20:43:00.000-04:00

I leave for Miami in 6 days. Discuss.

I'm going with Nicole and we're staying at her mother's apartment, on a little island just off of South Beach. Lately I've been feeling just completely wiped. Late nights at work, coming home and working more, working on the weekend...it blows my mind that I'm becoming one of those people who's just always working.

Thus, my only goals for Miami are to return to Manhattan black and relaxed. I think I may just accomplish that.

I don't exactly know why I haven't been posting lately. Looking through my old posts, for some reason, I just don't post a lot in May. I think it's always been from the whole end-of-school-year-beginning-of-summer clusterfuck.

Now, I think that a lot of it is from the general exhaustion of working too much, and the inevitable emotional investment that I have with my job (it's taxing, FYI). I think the other part of it is that my life right now just seems sort of status quo. That's not to say there's nothing exciting or good going on---there's the BF (we've hit a nice stride lately---there is a perfect balance of comfort and newness), there was Elle's triumphant return to Manhattan for Memorial Day Weekend (highlight: after a marathon brunch at Essex, 10 of us went to Nicole's apartment with 5 more bottles of champagne and drank mimosas and sunned for the majority of Sunday on her roof---discuss), etc. But just, well, nothing that's really inspiring me to write right now.

I don't know. Perhaps that will change soon. I miss writing (not just in here but poetry too---Linda gave me a gorgeous journal for my birthday and I'm far from filling it up). I miss having energy when I get to the office in the morning after a good run.

So clearly I'm expecting a week-long vacation to completely revolutionize my life and get me through what is shaping up to be an insanely busy summer...

A boy can dream, right?

Poem of the Day: 4.29.07

2007-04-29T21:03:00.000-04:00

I first encountered Suheir Hammad at the Geraldine Ford Poetry Festival back in 2003 (where I previously mentioned meeting Billy Collins). If you can't already tell, it was a day that completely opened my eyes to the world of modern poetry---up until that point, I only really consumed poetry through school, and it's rare that many high school English classes expose students to living, writing, poets. We get so caught up in the history of the art that we forget that there are still many people writing quite stunning poetry in the modern world.

Anyway, a friend of mine had heard of Suheir before and convinced me to accompany her to the performance. I immediately fell in love. A Palestinian-American from Brooklyn, she's typically categorized as a slam poet, but I think that her art is much more refined than most. Her work, while amazing when performed, stands on its own on paper. Suheir also understands that histrionics aren't required for a convincing slam performance; frequently, slam poets place more weight on being loud than being sensitive and emotive. I was so enamored that I came up with a question to ask her after her performance just so I could talk to her (Q: "What music influences your work?" A: "Dead Prez, Talib Kweli, and Johnny Coltrane" [I think]).

In 2004 I saw Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, namely to see Suheir perform. She wasn't as dramatic as the other performers, but it worked to her advantage. Her performance was by far the most nuanced and dynamic.

I just ordered her new collection, ZaartarDiva, and I'll surely be talking more about it in the near future. But for now, enjoy this poem. She read it at the Ford Poetry Festival and it was what won me over. Even though it's been 5 1/2 years since 9/11, this poem still feels just as current and poignant as it did the first time I heard it.

"first writing since"
by Suheir Hammad

1. there have been no words.
i have not written one word.
no poetry in the ashes south of canal street.
no prose in the refrigerated trucks driving debris and dna.
not one word.

today is a week, and seven is of heavens, gods, science.
evident out my kitchen window is an abstract reality.
sky where once was steel.
smoke where once was flesh.

fire in the city air and i feared for my sister’s life in a way never
before. and then, and now, i fear for the rest of us.

first, please god, let it be a mistake, the pilot’s heart failed, the
plane’s engine died.
then please god, let it be a nightmare, wake me now.
please god, after the second plane, please, don’t let it be anyone
who looks like my brothers.

i do not know how bad a life has to break in order to kill.
i have never been so hungry that i willed hunger
i have never been so angry as to want to control a gun over a pen.
not really.
even as a woman, as a palestinian, as a broken human being.
never this broken.

more than ever, i believe there is no difference.
the most privileged nation, most americans do not know the difference
between indians, afghanis, syrians, muslims, sikhs, hindus.
more than ever, there is no difference.

2. thank you korea for kimchi and bibim bob, and corn tea and the
genteel smiles of the wait staff at wonjo – smiles never revealing
the heat of the food or how tired they must be working long midtown
shifts. thank you korea, for the belly craving that brought me into
the city late the night before and diverted my daily train ride into
the world trade center.

there are plenty of thank yous in ny right now. thank you for my
lazy procrastinating late ass. thank you to the germs that had me
call in sick. thank you, my attitude, you had me fired the week
before. thank you for the train that never came, the rude nyer who
stole my cab going downtown. thank you for the sense my mama gave me
to run. thank you for my legs, my eyes, my life.

3. the dead are called lost and their families hold up shaky
printouts in front of us through screens smoked up.

we are looking for iris, mother of three. please call with any
information. we are searching for priti, last seen on the 103rd
floor. she was talking to her husband on the phone and the line
went. please help us find george, also known as adel. his family is
waiting for him with his favorite meal. i am looking for my son, who
was delivering coffee. i am looking for my sister girl, she started
her job on monday.

i am looking for peace. i am looking for mercy. i am looking for
evidence of compassion. any evidence of life. i am looking for
life.

4. ricardo on the radio said in his accent thick as yuca, “i will
feel so much better when the first bombs drop over there. and my
friends feel the same way.”

on my block, a woman was crying in a car parked and stranded in hurt.
i offered comfort, extended a hand she did not see before she said,
“we’re gonna burn them so bad, i swear, so bad.” my hand went to my
head and my head went to the numbers within it of the dead iraqi
children, the dead in nicaragua. the dead in rwanda who had to vie
with fake sport wrestling for america’s attention.

yet when people sent emails saying, this was bound to happen, lets
not forget u.s. transgressions, for half a second i felt resentful.
hold up with that, cause i live here, these are my friends and fam,
and it could have been me in those buildings, and we’re not bad
people, do not support america’s bullying. can i just have a half
second to feel bad?

if i can find through this exhaust people who were left behind to
mourn and to resist mass murder, i might be alright.

thank you to the woman who saw me brinking my cool and blinking back
tears. she opened her arms before she asked “do you want a hug?” a
big white woman, and her embrace was the kind only people with the
warmth of flesh can offer. i wasn’t about to say no to any comfort.
“my brother’s in the navy,” i said. “and we’re arabs”. “wow, you
got double trouble.” word.

5. one more person ask me if i knew the hijackers.
one more motherfucker ask me what navy my brother is in.
one more person assume no arabs or muslims were killed.
one more person assume they know me, or that i represent a people.
or that a people represent an evil. or that evil is as simple as a
flag and words on a page.

we did not vilify all white men when mcveigh bombed oklahoma.
america did not give out his family’s addresses or where he went to
church. or blame the bible or pat robertson.

and when the networks air footage of palestinians dancing in the
street, there is no apology that hungry children are bribed with
sweets that turn their teeth brown. that correspondents edit images.
that archives are there to facilitate lazy and inaccurate
journalism.

and when we talk about holy books and hooded men and death, why do we
never mention the kkk?

if there are any people on earth who understand how new york is
feeling right now, they are in the west bank and the gaza strip.

6. today it is ten days. last night bush waged war on a man once
openly funded by the
cia. i do not know who is responsible. read too many books, know
too many people to believe what i am told. i don’t give a fuck about
bin laden. his vision of the world does not include me or those i
love. and petitions have been going around for years trying to get
the u.s. sponsored taliban out of power. shit is complicated, and i
don’t know what to think.

but i know for sure who will pay.

in the world, it will be women, mostly colored and poor. women will
have to bury children, and support themselves through grief. “either
you are with us, or with the terrorists” - meaning keep your people
under control and your resistance censored. meaning we got the loot
and the nukes.

in america, it will be those amongst us who refuse blanket attacks on
the shivering. those of us who work toward social justice, in
support of civil liberties, in opposition to hateful foreign
policies.

i have never felt less american and more new yorker – particularly
brooklyn, than these past days. the stars and stripes on all these
cars and apartment windows represent the dead as citizens first – not
family members, not lovers.

i feel like my skin is real thin, and that my eyes are only going to
get darker. the future holds little light.

my baby brother is a man now, and on alert, and praying five times a
day that the orders he will take in a few days time are righteous and
will not weigh his soul down from the afterlife he deserves.

both my brothers - my heart stops when i try to pray - not a beat to
disturb my fear. one a rock god, the other a sergeant, and both
palestinian, practicing muslim, gentle men. both born in brooklyn
and their faces are of the archetypal arab man, all eyelashes and
nose and beautiful color and stubborn hair.

what will their lives be like now?

over there is over here.

7. all day, across the river, the smell of burning rubber and limbs
floats through. the sirens have stopped now. the advertisers are
back on the air. the rescue workers are traumatized. the skyline is
brought back to human size. no longer taunting the gods with its
height.

i have not cried at all while writing this. i cried when i saw those
buildings collapse on themselves like a broken heart. i have never
owned pain that needs to spread like that. and i cry daily that my
brothers return to our mother safe and whole.

there is no poetry in this. there are causes and effects. there are
symbols and ideologies. mad conspiracy here, and information we will
never know. there is death here, and there are promises of more.

there is life here. anyone reading this is breathing, maybe hurting,
but breathing for sure. and if there is any light to come, it will
shine from the eyes of those who look for peace and justice after the
rubble and rhetoric are cleared and the phoenix has risen.

affirm life.
affirm life.
we got to carry each other now.
you are either with life, or against it.
affirm life.

Grey Friday

2007-04-27T18:29:00.000-04:00

So I haven't said much (and by "much," I mean "anything") about the recent shootings at VA Tech. It's one of those situations that's so horrifically sad that I don't think that I know how to properly discuss it.

I consume a lot of news, whether it be through the paper (The New York Times is my drug of choice), or somewhat less traditional news sources (I know you probably disagree, but Gawker keeps me informed). I haven't been able to drive myself to read about the tragedy, hear the stories of the lucky survivors, learn about the short lives of those who were caught in the cross fire. And I have been most noticeably unable to read about the killer.

I can't read about him because we all know him. Even at large campuses like NYU, we all knew kids from class who were quiet, who were brooding, who were loners in a school of thousands. Kids who wrote weird poems and stories in my Creative Writing classes that sometimes raised a question about their stability. We can't flag every single one of them as a potential threat, but when a tragedy like this occurs, we wonder why we don't.

I can't really intelligently say much more about this, so instead I'm going to send you over to Margaret Cho's blog. Her take on the racialization of the tragedy is quite poignant and says everything I would like to much more elegantly...

Margaret Cho - Our Humanity

Poem of the Day: 4.25.07

2007-04-25T12:03:00.000-04:00

It's been a while, I know. Suck it.

To My Twenties
by Kenneth Koch

How lucky that I ran into you
When everything was possible
For my legs and arms, and with hope in my heart
And so happy to see any woman--
O woman! O my twentieth year!
Basking in you, you
Oasis from both growing and decay
Fantastic unheard of nine- or ten-year oasis
A palm tree, hey! And then another
And another--and water!
I'm still very impressed by you. Whither,
Midst falling decades, have you gone? Oh in what lucky fellow,
For the moment in any case, do you live now?
From my window I drop a nickel
By mistake. With
You I race down to get it
But I fund there on
The street instead, a good friend,
X---------- N---------, who says to me
Kenneth do you have a minute?
And I say yes! I am in my twenties!
I have plenty of time! In you I marry,
In you I first go to France; I make my best friends
In you, and a few enemies. I
Write a lot and am living all the time
And thinking about living. I loved to frequent you
After my teens and before my thirties.
You three together in a bar
I always preferred you because you were midmost
Most lustrous apparently strongest
Although now that I look back on you
What part have you played?
You never, ever, were stingy.
What you gave me you gave whole
But as for telling
Me how best to use it
You weren't a genius at that.
Twenties, my soul
Is yours for the asking
You know that, if you ever come back.

Back to Black

2007-04-19T08:40:00.000-04:00

I know I already told you that you need to listen to Amy Winehouse, but for those who are too lazy to actually go out and pick it up, I'm going to make this easier. Here's an acoustic performance of "Valerie," a cover of the 2006 Zutons track. Her version appears on Mark Ronson's new album, Version, and I basically can't stop listening to it. Once again, the combination of the buoyancy of the 60s girl group-production and Winehouse's inherently melancholic, rich vocals, provides a striking contrast. I think what I really enjoy the most about this performance is how effortless it all appears. She's picking her nails while she sings, fidgeting, looking around, but her voice still powers out of her. Love love love.

Watch and fall in love.

Poem of the Day: 4.10.07

2007-04-10T14:12:00.000-04:00

A little schmaltzy and romantic, I know, but aren't we all?

No, Love Is Not Dead
by Robert Desnos

No, love is not dead in this heart these eyes and this mouth
that announced the start of its own funeral.
Listen, I've had enough of the picturesque, the colorful
and the charming.
I love love, its tenderness and cruelty.
My love has only one name, one form.
Everything disappears. All mouths cling to that one.
My love has just one name, one form.
And if someday you remember
O you, form and name of my love,
One day on the ocean between America and Europe,
At the hour when the last ray of light sparkles
on the undulating surface of the waves, or else a stormy night
beneath a tree in the countryside or in a speeding car,
A spring morning on the boulevard Malesherbes,
A rainy day,
Just before going to bed at dawn,
Tell yourself-I order your familiar spirit-that
I alone loved you more and it's a shame
you didn't know it.
Tell yourself there's no need to regret: Ronsard
and Baudelaire before me sang the sorrows
of women old or dead who scorned the purest love.
When you are dead
You will still be lovely and desirable.
I'll be dead already, completely enclosed in your immortal body,
in your astounding image forever there among the endless marvels
of life and eternity, but if I'm alive,
The sound of your voice, your radiant looks,
Your smell the smell of your hair and many other things
will live on inside me.
In me and I'm not Ronsard or Baudelaire

I'm Robert Desnos who, because I knew
and loved you,
Is as good as they are.
I'm Robert Desnos who wants to be remembered
On this vile earth for nothing but his love of you.

A la mysterieuse

Poem of the Day: 4.5.07

2007-04-05T11:18:00.000-04:00

Today's poem comes from an unlikely source: the elevator in my office.

For National Poetry Month, they've been showing short poems from elementary students, I sort of loved this one. It comes from a 4th grader who seems to know what's up:

Happiness is
pink.
It tastes
like popsicles.

Poem of the Day: 4.4.07

2007-04-04T23:31:00.000-04:00

I met Billy Collins in the Spring of 2003 at the Geraldine Ford Poetry Festival. It was my first introduction to his work. I hadn't really gotten acclimated to the climate of modern poetry. He did a reading, and I basically fell in love with him. He's one of those poets who knows how to make a piece come to life when he reads---he's clearly great on paper, but he understands the inherent performative aspect of poetry and how much it can transform a piece. I've always believed that poetry is not just meant to be read, but to be read aloud.

While waiting in line at his book signing that followed, I spent my time devising witty, interesting, poet-y things to talk to him about. So what did I say upon meeting him? "How does one become a Poet Laureate?" He laughed (I think he thought my question was a strategic one and that I was vying for his position [P.S. I love the way the word vying looks on a page; I think it has something to do with the way the v and y look next to each other]). He was sweet and told me that it involved a lightening bolt from the Library of Congress.

Anyway, I digress. Enjoy.

The Best Cigarette
by Billy Collins
There are many that I miss
having sent my last one out a car window
sparking along the road one night, years ago.

The heralded one, of course:
after sex, the two glowing tips
now the lights of a single ship;
at the end of a long dinner
with more wine to come
and a smoke ring coasting into the chandelier;
or on a white beach,
holding one with fingers still wet from a swim.

How bittersweet these punctuations
of flame and gesture;
but the best were on those mornings
when I would have a little something going
in the typewriter,
the sun bright in the windows,
maybe some Berlioz on in the background.
I would go into the kitchen for coffee
and on the way back to the page,
curled in its roller,
I would light one up and feel
its dry rush mix with the dark taste of coffee.

Then I would be my own locomotive,
trailing behind me as I returned to work
little puffs of smoke,
indicators of progress,
signs of industry and thought,
the signal that told the nineteenth century
it was moving forward.
That was the best cigarette,
when I would steam into the study
full of vaporous hope
and stand there,
the big headlamp of my face
pointed down at all the words in parallel lines.

Poem of the Day: 4.3.07

2007-04-03T19:25:00.000-04:00

Anyone who was in my 12th Grade AP Lit class probably remembers this poem. I first read it as a part of an essay prompt and I thought it was quite lovely and evil. Enjoy.

Siren Song
by Margaret Atwood

This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:

the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see the beached skulls

the song nobody knows
because anyone who has heard it
is dead, and the others can't remember.

Shall I tell you the secret
and if I do, will you get me
out of this bird suit?

I don't enjoy it here
squatting on this island
looking picturesque and mythical

with these two feathery maniacs,
I don't enjoy singing
this trio, fatal and valuable.

I will tell the secret to you,
to you, only to you.
Come closer.  This song

is a cry for help: Help me!
Only you, only you can,
you are unique

at last.  Alas
it is a boring song
but it works every time.

Poem of the Day: 4.2.07

2007-04-02T22:33:00.000-04:00

See, I'm totally on the ball. Here's your poem for today.

Such Is the Sickness of Many a Good Thing
by Robert Duncan

Was he then Adam of the Burning Way?
hid away in the heat like wrath
        conceald in Love’s face,
or the seed, Eris in Eros,
        key and lock
of what I was?          I could not speak
        the releasing
word.          For into a dark
        matter he came
and askt me to say what
        I could not say.        "I .."

All the flame in me stopt
        against my tongue.
My heart was a stone, a dumb
        unmanageable thing in me,
a darkness that stood athwart
        his need
for the enlightening, the
        "I love you" that has
only this one quick in time,
        this one start
when its moment is true.

Such is the sickness of many a good thing
that now into my life from long ago this
refusing to say I love you has bound
the weeping, the yielding, the
        yearning to be taken again,
into a knot, a waiting, a string

so taut it taunts the song,
it resists the touch. It grows dark
to draw down the lover’s hand
from its lightness to what’s
        underground.

National Poetry Month

2007-04-01T18:30:00.000-04:00

As you may remember from last year, April is National Poetry Month. In honor of this momentous occasion, I'm going to (attempt to) post a poem every day for your reading pleasure.

I found this one on an ad on the subway. Don't judge.

A Little Tooth
by Thomas Lux

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It's all

over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.

Musicology

2007-03-26T20:01:00.000-04:00

Lately I've been waiting for some good new music---I feel like soul music has been lacking strong releases lately. Instead, I've been throwing on older albums (my iPod's been giving Anthony Hamilton's two albums a work out), as well as some albums from late last year (Robin Thicke, John Legend, Corinne Bailey Rae) that have yet to wear out their welcome.

Lucky for me, March has delivered some rather incredible albums.

Exhibit A:

Amy Winehouse, Back to Black

Rich of the Four Four already did a rather comprehensive review of not just the album, but the persona behind it, but I'll do my best to add something new.

It's hard to ignore Winehouse's decisively un-pop presentation: she performed piss drunk on The Charlotte Church Show (to her credit, I'm sure it was necessary, and there's no doubt in my mind that anyone willing to give Charlotte Church a sketch comedy-interview-performance show was shithoused when making that decision), she nonchalantly discusses her eating disorders, and her first single, the brilliant 60s girl group-inspired "Rehab" is, well, just about that---trying to avoid an inevitable trip to rehab.

That was the longest sentence EVER. I apologize.

Even if you find her public antics intolerable, Winehouse's voice is undeniable. You can't speak about it without invoking cliches: soulful, rich, raw. It's the words that we always use, but what else can you do when tasked with describing a voice that vibrates everything inside of you, hits you with a wave of nostalgia? Her tone is a jazz connoisseur's dream. Etta James comes to mind. Nina Simone. Billie Holiday. Ella Fitzgerald. Shirley Bassey. Lauryn Hill. It's not simply that Winehouse is swagger-jacking. Rather, great voices are compared to great voices, and Winehouse's voice is the stuff of which legends are made. It's whiskey-raspy, pain-ravaged (also cliche, but fuck you, I need some adjectives). She licks every word completely, wrapping her voice so fully around each lyric that melisma and runs are rendered unnecessary; the simple tone of her voice and her crafted phrasing are enough to pull emotion out of every song.

On Winehouse's nearly flawless second album, Back to Black, Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi both craft an aural soundscape that is anything but neo-soul. It's actually just real soul. Winehouse's dark, bitter honestly comes face-to-face with horn-inflected, jingling 60s sounds that provide a perfect compliment to her classic voice. They harken back to a time when the band was as big as the singer, when a little company in Detroit called Motown was putting out every song worth listening to. These are songs that are summer time barbeque soundtracks; they are sweet tea good; they're what you listen to when the windows are down and you're driving and you feel so alive. They're nothing short of instant vintage.

Between her unique voice, the percussion, the sputtering horns, and the tinkling pianos, Winehouse creates a sound that sounds genuinely old school without relying on an abundance of samples. "Some Unholy War" has Winehouse doing Lauryn Hill better than Lauryn Hill has done Lauryn Hill in the past 8 years---she goes all Tammy-Wynette-"Stand-By-Your-Man" over a beat that could have been created by the Rza for Wu Tang's first album, and she owns it. The title track, "Back to Black," is aptly titled---it's an eerie piano and tambourine affair, made all the more menacing by Winehouse's slick lyrical interpretation, sliding and bending her voice effortlessly and to chilling effect. On the flip side, songs like "Just Friends" and "Tears Dry On Their Own" are summer-sun buoyant and fresh (the latter brilliantly reworking Marvin Gaye & Tami Terrell's "You're All I Need"), demonstrating that Winehouse is, for all of her flaws, not simply a tragic figure. "Tears Dry On Their Own" is a standout on an album of standout tracks. Winehouse's lyrics are painfully self-aware, like the following: "Even if I stop wanting you / And perspective pushes through / I'll be some next man's other woman soon. / I shouldn't play myself again, / I should just be my own best friend / Not fuck myself in the head with stupid men." The album plays like one long long affair gone wrong, but it's the type of car wreck that you can't help but stare at. (How'd you like that mixed metaphor? It made more sense in my head.)

Winehouse is, at her core, a singer-songwriter (she penned every track on the album). She has a willingness to be playful and honest, emotionally present but never taking herself too seriously. On "Me & Mr. Jones," backed by thumping drums, bleating horns, and a chorus of cooing backup singers, Winehouse wails, "What kind of fuckery is this? You made me miss the Slick Rick gig," with no self-congratulatory eye-winking for actually saying "fuckery" over a Motown-ready track. With her second single, "You Know I'm No Good," Winehouse balances her self-deprecation and word play perfectly on top of another horn-laced track that, once again, feels modern despite its clear roots. "You say 'What did you do with him today?' / And sniffed me out like I was Tanqueray." She bends each phrase with the skill of ladies like Ella and Billie and really reinvents this distinct sound with undeniably modern lyrics. More importantly, she's willing to admit that she's flawed. There's no Britney-style plastic facade, no svengali behind her pulling strings. She drinks too much, she fucks too much, she dates the wrong men too much. Don't we all?

I can't do the album much more justice without you listening to it, so do it.

On to...

Exibit B:

Joss Stone, Introducing Joss Stone

Most people either are or aren't Joss Stone fans---there's really no happy medium. I've always been mystified by her voice---it's a warm, husky alto that never overpowers a song. It's well-nuanced and controlled, a veritable feat for a teenager in an era of melisma-happy singers. I think she's put out two pretty solid albums that do a wonderful job paying homage to her forefathers in soul. However, with her new disc, Introducing Joss Stone, she finally shows where she fits into this tradition.

Primarily, what this album has is a sense of cohesiveness, no doubt in part from Raphael Saadiq, who was behind the boards for every single track. His work on the album lends a consistency that is lacking in many modern albums---many of the tracks almost effortlessly bleed into the next, and there is a general sweet soul vibe that sticks around from beginning to end---it's an album that can be listened to in its entirety without skipping a track.

The album kicks off with the doo-wopping "Girl They Won't Believe It," where Joss coos over a chorus of throaty background singers. It's the perfect introduction to the album---the swooping orchestra, the snare kicks, the guitar licking along with her. Joss makes the smart move of rarely doing her own background vocals. She has the same three singers on nearly every track, and their sharp, off-kilter delivery provides the perfect contrast to her honeyed voice (here we see it in a more ethereal state, floating in her upper register for much of the song).

"Put Your Hands On Me" throws Joss on top of a bass thump, jingling bell, and turntable scratches. It's early 80s hip hop at its best, and Joss' voice sears right through the track in a manner that would make ReRe proud (or not, since Aretha never seems like she's really into the younger generations of soul singers who pay her homage). What's notable is the lyrics---while they are not racy by any means, they do show off a more sexual Joss. It can't be easy growing up on wax, but she's made the transition extremely well. She jumps back another decade with "Arms of My Baby," which has a clear Shaft-era inspiration in its fast-paced snare. The song truly comes to life at the breakdown, where the drums slow and the strings come in, along with Joss' trusty backup singers. It's one of the few moments where Joss' typically contained vocals let loose, demonstrating the influence of divas past like the aforementioned ReRe on her delivery.

The Lauryn Hill-assisted "Music" is one of the disc's true highlights, with a brazen horn trumpeting through to highlight Joss's voice. Joss somehow found a way to pull the elusive Ms. Hill out of seclusion for 16 bars (FYI: her verse is amazing). It's an ode to music that works in the same way that Erykah Badu's "Love of My Life" did. However, here the song is somewhat darker, a more tragic love in comparison to Badu's playful love affair with hip hop. Joss continues to pay homage to Lauryn Hill on "Tell Me What We're Gonna Do Now" (which features Common, a genius pairing), a track that would have suited the former Fugees singer back in her glory days.

The album is by far Joss' most mature, fully-realized offering. Even if you don't like her, you have to admit---this shit is gooood.

Exhibit C:

Alice Smith, For Lovers, Dreamers, & Me

Okay, so I have to admit, this album actually came out in September, but I just bought it, so it counts, alright?

Anyway, I found out about Alice Smith in a rather unlikely place---a movie theater. I was sitting through the movie trivia waiting for Pan's Labyrinth to begin, and all I could hear was this voice that made me sit up. Smith's voice reminds me of Trina Broussard a bit, but what makes it so impressive is its sheer power and range. However, she rarely belts for belting's sake. While she does have a powerful four-octave instrument, she understands that the best vocal is usually not how big you sing it, but how well.

I got the album today, so this will be brief since I'm still getting a feel for it. But I can already say that it's one of the better albums that's come around in a little while. The first track, "Dream" (which was what caught my ear in the theater) is clearly the album's standout song. It begins with a simple piano and drum (with a sound reminiscent of "Benny and the Jets). However, the song builds with horns, strings, and a chorus of background vocals. Not surprisingly, it's Smith's voice that truly commands the song amidst the competing sounds. Even as she croons "I need to be everything you see in your dreams / It seems to me you’ll never find another lover good as I / to give you all that you need /And I’ll be there to love you each and every night and all through the day," her voice is all that you hear.

What's probably the strongest aspect of Smith's album (and what most likely has most radio execs scratching their heads upon receiving her singles) is that she has no clear genre. Her voice is one that lends itself to soul music. However, tracks like "Woodstock" have a more folksy appeal, whereas on "Desert Song" she switches to a classic bluegrass sound (which later invokes strings that give it almost a Middle Eastern appeal). Smith is a veritable vocal chameleon, dipping into her rich lower register on "Gary Song" quite successfully. Her willingness to adapt her sound and voice both leads to a rather exciting listening experience, every song acting as another facet to one of the few new artists who is really bucking convention and doing something unexpected.

Well, that's it. Buy these albums and enjoy. You can thank me later.

Secrets

2007-03-20T19:25:00.000-04:00

I read by candlelight at night. I tell myself that it's to conserve energy, but it's really because I broke my lamp months ago and I've been too lazy to replace it.

In middle school, I learned the full choreography to Aaliyah's "Are You That Somebody?" by watching the video on repeat.

I have both Charlie's Angels films, and I watched them in a row on Sunday afternoon instead of doing laundry.

I enjoy porn.

I sing so loudly in the shower that I embarrass myself.

Until at least my freshman year of college, I always assumed I would end up at the Grammys in some capacity or another (luckily I wasn't too delusional---I figured that, if anything, it would be for a songwriter's award).

I get nervous walking through my neighborhood at night sometimes.

I enjoy bad reality television much more than I'm willing to admit.

I just accidentally broke the Backspace key on the new laptop I got a week ago for work, and I don't really know how to fix it.

I have (what I thought to be) a set of two tiny scars just below my chest. According to my doctor, they're actually a pair of rudimentary nipples. Does that make you uncomfortable?

I'm horribly passive aggressive.

I'm good at convincing myself that I'm really happy when I'm not.

I love to tweeze hair, and sometimes I'll just start pulling them out even when I don't need to because it's oddly satisfying, albeit really painful.

I automatically transfer a certain amount of money every month from my checking account to my savings, and then inevitably end up transferring it back sooner or later because I can't manage my finances well.

Speaking of which, I haven't used a credit card in six months because I don't trust myself to not overspend.

Sometimes I get really lonely living by myself.

I haven't driven a car in over 2 years and at this point, I'm kind of petrified at the thought of doing it again.

I've been shaving my chest since middle school. I'm not a hairy person, but I hit puberty really early. At this point, I don't really actually know what my chest hair would even look like if I grew it in.

I cry any time I watch a film by Pedro Almodovar.

I think smoking can be really sexy, and I hate myself for thinking that.

I have an irrational dislike for Will Smith, even though I watched reruns of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air nearly every day growing up (or maybe that's why...?).

I'm still rooting for Lindsay Lohan to come out of her early 20s okay.

I check my email obsessively, sometimes three or more times an hour.

I think I just fixed that Backspace key.

Nope, never mind. Still pretty broken.

The sweetest hangover...

2007-03-13T21:41:00.000-04:00

And I don't want to get over...

It's Diana Ross night on American Idol (don't judge me...okay, you can judge me), and hearing "Love Hangover" reminded me just how much I love that song. It's genius---Ms. Ross' (show respect) vocals drip with sex, and she plays the perfect cocktease until the disco beat thumps in. Why aren't more people making music this good anymore?

...

After last week's freeze, we've (unofficially) hit spring. I walked home from work today because the weather was really putting me through it. Girl. In a good way. (Can one be "put through it" in a good way? I'm going to say yes.) It took an hour and I didn't even notice. There was just enough chill in the air, but it felt good on my skin. There's something enchanting about the way Manhattan thaws after winter. The city comes to life in a way that only happens in a place where people spend so much time on foot and outdoors. Shedding layers to bloom and such; I guess that's our way.

...

The two best things I've heard on the street in the past week:

Characters: (1) Older woman, (2) middle-aged woman with granny cart (MAWGC)

Setting: Saturday afternoon, walking with Steph on 8th St. by NYU, after inhaling a chocolate cookie dough cupcake at Crumbs (sidebar---go there now)

Scene 1

[Two women are walking along the north side of 8th St.; Older woman is heading west, and MAWGC is heading east. Both are seemingly enjoying the balmy weather and the promise that the early evening of a Saturday holds. As they both weave their respective ways through the crowd, MAWGC improperly maneuvers and bumps into Older woman with her cart]

Older woman: Watch where you're going!

MAWGC: I'm pregnant and I can't see well!

Older woman: Whatever.

MAWGC: Nasty bitch.
Characters: (1) Mother, (2) Toddler, (3) Baby

Setting: Tuesday afternoon, in front of my office in Midtown

Scene 1

[Mother is walking, hunched slightly as she loudly reprimands Toddler in front of all of 7th Ave. The Baby toddles along behind, at least 15 feet, and Mother doesn't notice. We join them in mid-argument. Well, not so much an argument, since Mother is basically yelling at Toddler as he stares, dumbfounded.]

Toddler: [crying]

Mother: It's not ALL ABOUT YOU! Daddy wanted to play with his friends. It's not always all about you, Zack!

...

The First Marriage
by Peter Meinke

for Gretchen and Herb: June 15, 1991

imagine the very first marriage a girl
and boy trembling with some inchoate
need for ceremony a desire for witness:
inventing formality like a wheel or a hoe

in a lost language in a clearing too far from here
a prophet or a prophetess intoned to the lovers
who knelt with their hearts cresting
like the unnamed ocean thinking This is true

thinking they will never be alone again
though planets slip their tracks and fish
desert the sea repeating those magic sounds
meaning I do on this stone below
this tree before these friends yes in body
and word my darkdream my sunsong yes I do I do

...

Remember that time I wrote coherent posts that were at least somewhat linear in structure?

Neither do I.

Wind Chill

2007-03-06T12:24:00.000-05:00

Seriously, all I can think about is how goddamn cold it is outside. Like, honestly? I was wearing a light jacket by the end of last week, and today I got brain freeze while walking to the subway. Global warming is really putting me through it, girl.

Anyway, I know I haven't been writing too much lately. My head's been everywhere and I can't focus long enough to write something interesting/coherent. I apologize to all (two) of my regular readers---I'm sure you wait with bated breath for my latest witticisms. I'm not really sure what the cause is...I haven't been in the mood for the emotional nudity required in writing something worth reading.

However, I have started writing some poetry again. I have yet to commit to paper anything that resembles a decent piece, but I'm glad that I'm at least trying again and have words on a page. I took a rather long hiatus, and it feels really nice to at least feel like my mind is working and I'm producing something, anything really. My motivation was stirred by Linda, who got me a gorgeous little kelly green leather journal for my birthday. Having something pretty to write in makes it a lot easier. I've been carrying it around with me at all times so that I have it if something hits me. Clearly, that hasn't happened, but I like to be prepared.

So since I have nothing to share, here's a poem for you.

What Do Women Want?
by Kim Addonizio

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I'm the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,
it'll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

Listen Up

2007-02-19T13:05:00.000-05:00

It's not often that I post actual songs, but Robin Thicke apparently included a new track, "Look At Me," on the rerelease of his latest album, The Evolution of Robin Thicke. I reviewed the album a while back, but I never anticpated that the album would suddenly gain mainstream success. "Lost Without U" is now the #1 R&B/Hip Hop song according to Billboard, and his album has jumped into the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 chart. It's really great to see quality music being recognized for once.

So anyway, the new song: Robin Thicke - "Look At Me" (right click to save).

The reason why I posted this is that there is just something so painfully frank about this song. If nothing else, Thicke has a keen ability for imbuing a song with palpable emotion. By the time the song mounts at the bridge ("Girl you don't have to worry/I won't get in your way"), his voice cracks and he gives way to wails. What's interesting is that the song lacks, for the most part, Thicke's trademark falsetto (except for a handful of obligatory coos at the end of the track), but it's not worse for it. It's great to hear him singing at full voice and demonstrate that he's not just a lesser-known JT (which a lot of people like to classify him as).

So listen up and enjoy.

"Voici mon secret."

2007-02-18T21:49:00.000-05:00

"Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux."
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince

I've always had two competing sides: the realist and the romantic. The cynic and the dreamer. They're always fighting, and one's always winning---depends on the day, the weather, caloric intake, fuck whatever.

Neither of them is making much headway right now. Who knows where things will go, but one of them needs to take charge.

Another Rainy Monday

2007-01-08T11:01:00.000-05:00

I ran for an hour in the rain this morning. It felt like ice on my skin and my arms were numb when I got back home.

Nothing better than starting the week with a clear head and cold limbs.

(Well, relatively clear, considering the smell of gas that is poisoning all of Manhattan right now. It reeks in our office and I'm scared to light a cigarette for fear of accidentally blowing up Midtown.)

There's nothing more dangerous than a boy with charm

2007-01-07T20:56:00.000-05:00

Two things:

Go to Momofuku immediately. The steamed pork buns melt in your mouth (Pork belly? Soooo good.), the skate is crusty on the outside and soft on the inside, the bahn mi is crunchy and well-spiced, and the service was surprisingly attentive. Go for a bottle of the riesling (can't remember the name, but there was only one on the menu). It's surprisingly sweet but cuts across your palette perfectly after all of that delicious Korean/Japanese/Vietnamese/Southern cooking (I'm not being ignorant---those are really the influences for the menu).
A man outside of a bar last night who saw me from behind stopped me to tell me that I looked "exactly like Prince." Apparently it had to do with the curly hair, the super-slim jeans, the pointy shoes, and the curly hair.

I'm not sure if it's a compliment or not. Thoughts?

I mean, I have a soft spot in my heart for Prince. I saw him in concert about two years ago, and though I've never really found him physically attractive, he oozes sex when he performs---you can't resist him. After 2 hours of watching him, he just leaves you all juicy. Too far?

But I just don't think that, if he wasn't the performer the he is, I wouldn't find him attractive. Therefore, I'm not sure how I feel about strangers telling me I look like him.

Unexpected celebrity comparisons are really putting me through it, girl.

Spring Summer Feeling

2007-01-06T17:05:00.000-05:00

I feel undeniably wonderful today. It's January 6 and 70° outside. I woke up this early this morning, well-rested for the first time in ages, and I couldn't fathom sitting inside and doing laundry. There aren't many days as beautiful as this---warm and perfectly breezy. It feels like the first real day of spring, when everyone starts shedding down and wool layers, trades hot coffee for iced tea, and lets the sun warm pale cheeks.

I ended up picking up chai and a muffin from Cafe Pick Me Up and spending all afternoon sitting in Tompkins Square Park, people watching and catching up on my reading. It felt like all of Alphabet City had come out to enjoy the weather. There was a father and son who were dribbling a soccer ball for at least an hour, and there was a rotating cast of characters who popped in and out of the game. For some reason, it was enthralling to watch.

Dinner and a movie with Nico tonight. Today is a good day.

By the way, happy new year.

Family Tree

2006-12-27T22:40:00.000-05:00

Welcome to the ridiculousness of my family, a.k.a., Christmas dinner.

It starts off with a few bottles of wine (who knew that the Lebanese make a damn good rose?), really good food (my sister tested out a new mac & cheese reciped---I'm literally drooling thinking about it), and general holiday festiveness (festivity?).

So Femina says to my mom, "I was talking to this guy that me and Erik met and, when he found out where in India we're from, he said that everyone over there is part Portugese." Of course, my mom adamantly denies this, because everyone's really big on being "pure Indian." But we all pushed a bit more, since none of us really look very Indian, and they're from a coastal town, so there are a lot of travellers, merchants, etc. who pass through, and Portugal would make a lot of sense.

So I ask my mom what her paternal grandfather looked like: "Well, he looked like a tall white man." Ummm, okay. Mind you, my grandfather (her father) has bright green eyes and was always very pale. We're all telling her that maybe her grandfather wasn't exactly Indian, but she keeps saying, "No, no, he's Indian."

"How do you know?"

"Because he is."

So this goes on for a bit, and then we start questioning my dad about his family.

"Well, my mother's father pretty much looked like a big white guy too."

"What was his last name?"

"Petros. My mother's maiden name was Monica Petros."

"Dad. Your grandfather was Greek."

My mom tries to justify this, but she only makes it worse: "I mean, there is some Portugese and Spanish mixed into the language, but that doesn't mean anything. 'Petros' is just how we say 'Peter.' And we say 'Paolo' for 'Paul.'"

At this point, we're all laughing hysterically, because my mom's just proving our point. Basically, it looks like I might be 1/8 Greek and 1/8 Portguese, or something else crazy and mixed-up like that. Who knew?

***

I just saw Dreamgirls with Divine and all I have to say is this: go see it right now. The shit is bananas. Jennifer Hudson is really putting me through it, girl.

I heard her version of "And I'm Telling You" before I saw the film, but watching her perform it, and seeing it in the context of the film, is amazing. Jennifer Hudson is the truth. I hate to sound cliche (sidebar: isn't it ironic that, by saying "I hate to sound cliche," you actually compound the cliche-ness of the statement that follows, because saying "I hate to sound cliche" is a bit, well, cliche?), but I got chills over and over again every time that bitch opened her mouth. Flawless.

I was surprised how well Beyonce did. There are a few times where I think she fell a bit flat, but overall she was impressive. However, her role in the film is a bit small, so it irks me a bit that she got a Golden Globe nod for Best Actress, with J. Hud getting nominated for Best Supporting, when the film is really Effie's story (Effie is Jennifer's character). Effie is really the emotional center of the film, and she has more screen time. But really, while Jennifer stands out, it's an ensemble cast more than anything else. Everyone delivers really strong performances.

It's one of those films that I think everyone needs to see on the big screen, so catch it in theaters before it goes on video. It's worth the $10.25.

Damn. Manhattan movie ticket prices are really putting me through it, girl.

The Gift that Keeps on Giving

2006-12-17T16:57:00.000-05:00

SNL basically sucks these days, but last night Justin Timberlake and Andy Samburg did a sketch that was genius. It's called, well, "Dick in a Box." It's giving me serious Color Me Badd flashbacks. Why is it that only the prerecorded sketches on SNL (i.e. the mock-commercials) are funny still?

Also, JT performed his new single, "What Goes Around...Comes Back Around." I hate to say it, but he literally turns me into a 13-year-old girl. I don't know what it is. The performance is amazing---while he spent the first half of his career in a completely prefabricated group, and his first solo album wasn't so much an homage to Michael Jackson as it was a rip-off at times, he's really come into his own. There's undeniable artistry in his performance, a reality behind the wailing that separates his performance from any number of flat entertainers out there who have no connection to their material (Cassie, I'm looking DIRECTLY AT YOU). This performance totally demonstrates what difference a live band makes, rather than just singing over a performance track. Anyway, enjoy it (quickly, because NBC is a bitch about their content being on YouTube).

You know, just some stuff

2006-12-15T20:34:00.000-05:00

I'm beginning to feel like I'm in a long-distance relationship.

The bf lives just over a mile from me---it's a brisk fifteen minute walk over to Nolita. However, we've basically been seeing each other once a week for the past few weeks. We just don't have schedules that line up. Either I'm working late, or he's at dinner with a client, or I have plans that I can't get out of on his free night. or he's on a business trip to LA. We talk every night, do the little I-miss-you's and the pencil-me-in's and the I-hope-we-can-see-each-other-soon's but it doesn't really make up for a lack of physical contact. I consider myself a "phone person" but I've always felt that a lot of our intimacy is built on a sort of tactile relationship, so conversations always feel a little emptier when we're separated.

I don't need to see him every day---I mean, I wouldn't mind it because I like spending time with him, but I think we have a relationship that's strong enough that we can handle being apart. We both have our own lives, we do our own things. But sometimes I just really want someone there with me, on those days when I come home from work and I'm so tired and bitter and I just want someone to say "It's okay" and distract me with a glass of wine or a plate of brownies. We all have our fantasies and delusions, right?

I know I don't have all of him, but having a part of him is better than nothing. Right?

We're both trying to make it work, and that's all I can ask.

***

Last night was the company holiday party, which was, as usual, a drunken sloppy mess. This year I, for the most part, planned the entire party, which was extremely nerve-wracking (and also made me lose nearly all faith in the people at my company---each person expects everything to be planned around their individual needs. I literally had someone who declined the invite to the party and proceeded to send me a six-point bulleted list of reasons why he did not want to attend. WTF? People really just can't appreciate things.).

Annnyway, the party was actually a huge success---people looked like they were having a really great time, and tons of people complimented me on the venue (Guesthouse), the food, my outfit (clearly the most important part) and the overall party. I was just happy that I had an excuse to wear my new Viktor & Rolf tux (that was how I justified the purchase). I was also really good about not getting too shmammered, as I'm all about not being That Guy at the company party (or, alternately, That Girl).

I think what made everyone have such a good time was not just my impeccable party-planning skills (yeah, I said it), but the fact that everyone's been having a pretty bad time at work lately. I've more or less been locked in my office for the past few weeks. I'm thinking of just getting a Murphy bed that flips out from under my desk. I'm working on two huge, time-consuming, important projects that are on impossible timelines that basically have me busting my ass. I'm starting to feel so worn down. I wake up at 6, go running, get to work, run around all day doing shit and generally freaking out, stick around late to get some more stuff done, get home around 8, eat dinner, pass out, and then do it all again the next day and the next day. I've been putting in time on the weekends and I'm putting my usual week-long holiday vacation on indefinite hiatus (thank God for rollover). I really just have to make it through the next 3 weeks and I'll basically be okay, but it just feels so far away.

But back to the party. I found myself actually talking to a lot of people who I typically don't chat with at the office (but I still found time for the usual suspects---Erin, Divine, and I found time to be catty and quietly judge people together). As per tradition, after the party we went for karaoke at Muse in Chelsea. I clearly got up on the mic for a few numbers---I did "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley and "Somebody to Love" by Queen. Oh, wait, and "Unchained Melody" by the Righteous Brothers. And, like, 15 other songs that I can't recall right now. I made the smart decision to not keep drinking once we made it to karaoke. Others did not. Everyone was basically going wild, in true drunken corporate fashion.

I had a personal day today so I didn't have to come in to work, so I feel bad for the people who were out all night and trucked into the office. Those are the real troopers.

I actually woke up this morning without a real hangover to speak of. I had big plans for what I was going to do with my day off---clean my apartment, do laundry, pad on over to Soho and finish up my Christmas shopping. So what did I end up doing? Work. Not only was I working, but people from work were calling me to ask when I was going to finish shit. Like, okay, I know that it's my day off and I might be working, but I should have general amnesty from having to accomplish anything according to other people's schedules since, you know, I shouldn't even be working in the first place.

I hate life.

Whatever, I'm over it. I just better get a sweet raise this year.

Emily Explains It All

2006-12-01T20:15:00.000-05:00

For those of you who think that I have a ridiculous life, I would like for you to read the following, an account by Emily to me regarding her and Steph's Wednesday night.

Emily had to go to a salsa bar in Alphabet City for one of her classes, and clearly, it turned into a total mess. And by "it," I really just mean "Steph." Emily had this entire conversation with me whilst in class (and apparently, trying not to laugh, especially at her mention of "an old man's grundle"---I swear, it makes [some] sense in context).

Enjoy.

anubelisama (4:28:02 PM): let me describe my evening
anubelisama (4:29:11 PM): well....i started out the evening.....being invited into a couple's threesome.
anubelisama (4:29:33 PM): this was after being left alone for about five minutes while steph changed out of her painting clothes.
ShawnAF85 (4:29:42 PM): i literally already can't handle this
ShawnAF85 (4:29:43 PM): go on
anubelisama (4:29:47 PM): hahahahahha
anubelisama (4:29:52 PM): we then make our way to plan b. the club
anubelisama (4:30:37 PM): ok, we get some drinks
anubelisama (4:30:59 PM): about five rounds later....the band is leaving and these two dudes are like...come to this other bar.
ShawnAF85 (4:31:04 PM): hahhah
anubelisama (4:31:11 PM): so we finish our booze...and of course, we go.
ShawnAF85 (4:31:16 PM): so clearly you take the route that leads to roofies
anubelisama (4:31:22 PM): exactly.
anubelisama (4:31:42 PM): side note---my guest lecturer just said "anus and penetration"
anubelisama (4:31:46 PM): ok...
anubelisama (4:32:00 PM): so we're walking down 10th street to avenue c.
ShawnAF85 (4:32:02 PM): HAHHAHAHHA
ShawnAF85 (4:32:18 PM): so you're going from roofie-town to shankville?
ShawnAF85 (4:32:23 PM): nice move
anubelisama (4:32:30 PM): so true.
anubelisama (4:32:59 PM): on the way....we see thi pile of shit on the sidewalk
anubelisama (4:33:46 PM): among this pile of shit...is a shelf. on that shelf...we see some powerpuff girls. in front of the shelf was a giant poster of usher. so naturally, we cross the street to investigate.
ShawnAF85 (4:34:05 PM): fair
anubelisama (4:34:49 PM): as i'm reaching for one of said objects...we see a mouse frolicking amongst the powerpuff girls....so we walk on
anubelisama (4:35:36 PM): on avenue c....we turn south (which stephanie thinks is north...she was a little lost)
ShawnAF85 (4:36:11 PM): hahahahaha
anubelisama (4:36:25 PM): and we see them men standing outside of super sketchy bar
anubelisama (4:36:31 PM): they are happy to see us.
anubelisama (4:36:56 PM): so we go in...and get some rounds...and we dance with scary men.
anubelisama (4:37:02 PM): on the wall...
ShawnAF85 (4:37:19 PM): honestly?
ShawnAF85 (4:37:23 PM): HONESTLY?
anubelisama (4:37:25 PM): there are small plastic dolls
anubelisama (4:37:27 PM): hahah
ShawnAF85 (4:37:34 PM): hahahhaha
anubelisama (4:37:49 PM): but they are like...melted into a plastic block
anubelisama (4:38:16 PM): among them....ursula. captain kirk. barbie. ken. mr. potato head.
anubelisama (4:38:32 PM): i have pictures of this.
anubelisama (4:38:52 PM): so we obvioiusly need another drink
anubelisama (4:38:55 PM): or like...100
ShawnAF85 (4:39:28 PM): hahahhahahha
anubelisama (4:39:57 PM): we then go to smoke a cigarete.
anubelisama (4:40:20 PM): and a man...outsid...offers to light our cigarettes...because he is a "genital...oops, i mean gentleman"
anubelisama (4:40:33 PM): so i took to calling him genital
anubelisama (4:41:46 PM): needless to say...we had some more rounds...and a shot....and then we left because steph was huhwasted.
anubelisama (4:42:34 PM): so we make it to veselka and steph needs a burger.
anubelisama (4:42:54 PM): so we go in and sit. and in aboot ten seconds she says, "i'm going to go try to puke"
anubelisama (4:43:22 PM): we had ordered...and i'm like, excuse me waitress, we're going to need some bread and more water
anubelisama (4:43:27 PM): stat.
anubelisama (4:43:34 PM): steph is gone forever
anubelisama (4:44:02 PM): so i go and knock knock knock on the shitter door.
anubelisama (4:44:45 PM): she had taken off her sweater and left her purse at the table....the bathroom looks like she was not the first person to berf all over it....or piss
anubelisama (4:44:55 PM): it smells like an old mans grundle.
anubelisama (4:45:27 PM): she pukes a little on the sink (i say ON...yes, on.)
anubelisama (4:46:32 PM): so i get her outta there and she sits down...i pay the check and she runs outside through the side door
anubelisama (4:46:56 PM): i have...two burgers in bags, my purse, her purse, her sweater....
ShawnAF85 (4:46:58 PM): CHRIST ALMIGHTY
ShawnAF85 (4:47:05 PM): WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU TWO?
ShawnAF85 (4:47:07 PM): this is amazing
anubelisama (4:47:14 PM): she is leaning on a parking meter
anubelisama (4:47:20 PM): puking all over
anubelisama (4:47:37 PM): so i put her little sweater on her
ShawnAF85 (4:47:49 PM): good idea, since she needs something else to puke on
anubelisama (4:47:50 PM): take her arm...and we walk down 9th street
anubelisama (4:47:54 PM): there is a puke trail
anubelisama (4:47:57 PM): a biggun
anubelisama (4:48:00 PM): hahahahahah
ShawnAF85 (4:48:01 PM): hahhahhahaha
ShawnAF85 (4:48:03 PM): SO GOOD
anubelisama (4:48:21 PM): so we make it to her building
anubelisama (4:48:27 PM): and ryan, the security guard is working
anubelisama (4:48:38 PM): and she tell him about her puking escapades.
anubelisama (4:49:18 PM): promptly after this....she passes out. and scene.
ShawnAF85 (4:49:26 PM): HAHAHAHHA
ShawnAF85 (4:49:38 PM): did she pass out in the lobby, or at least make it to her room?
anubelisama (4:49:48 PM): hahah she made it upstairs. barely
ShawnAF85 (4:49:58 PM): and why would you sit down and order burgers? the only option for someone that drunk is pizza
ShawnAF85 (4:50:07 PM): quick and little effort required
anubelisama (4:50:10 PM): drunky's idea
ShawnAF85 (4:50:14 PM): fair
ShawnAF85 (4:50:17 PM): how were you feeling?
anubelisama (4:50:27 PM): tipsy...but that's it
anubelisama (4:50:48 PM): well..a little drunk, but not wasted
ShawnAF85 (4:51:37 PM): lord
anubelisama (4:52:02 PM): what is my life
ShawnAF85 (4:52:15 PM): really good
anubelisama (4:52:24 PM): hahaha
anubelisama (4:53:13 PM): i also have a picture of the powerpuff/usher combo
ShawnAF85 (4:53:48 PM): thank god

A Poem for a Rainy Monday

2006-11-13T19:40:00.000-05:00

Sometimes little things suprise and amaze you, little things that you never expect.

I just got a comment on an old post and I found it really striking (it's the second comment). I have no idea who wrote it, but I want to thank him or her for giving me some faith in people's faith in poetry.

Here we go:

Funeral Blues
by W.H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Words for Wednesday

2006-11-01T11:29:00.000-05:00

You said this to me and it's been ringing in my head ever since.

"The space between us is God."

I Do

2006-10-28T20:12:00.000-04:00

I feel somewhat compelled (or, perhaps, required) to write a few words about the recent victory for gay marriage in the Supreme Court of New Jersey.

Ever since I came out, the idea of a real marriage in my future is something that I never really contemplated. It seemed like an implausibility, one of those things which I would inevitably have to give up on if I wanted to live my life the way that I really felt. However, I'm beginning to see more and more that there's no reason why I should have to accept a second-class citizenship because I'm gay.

The idea of "violating the sanctity of marriage" is frequently touted by Conservative base as the reason for not allowing gay marriage. Here's the thing though---the word "sanctity" is rather problematic. Remember that whole thing about the separation of church and state? Yes? The Bible may say that marriage is a union between a man and a woman, but, well, we can't pass laws based on the Bible. Not everyone follows Judeo-Christian beliefs, and we can't pass laws to enfore them. And in a nation where half of all married couples get divorced, I'm not sure we've really preserved that sense of "sanctity" that gay marriage would apparently destroy. There are thousands of gay couples in this country dying to get married, and lawmakers are denying them this opportunity simply because they're not accustomed to the concept.

Massachusetts passed a law allowing gay marriage a few years ago, and that has yet to corrupt the institution of marriage, as doomsayers had predicted. Sulfur rain has yet to pour down on the earth, and I think we still have a while to go before the apocalypse. It comes down to an issue of equal legal rights---if two adults are in a loving relationship, why shouldn't they have the ability to legally ratify it in order to receive the benefits due to them? I really can't see how allowing gay marriage could ever have an effect on heterosexual marriage rates or success. And no, it doesn't mean that people are going to start fighting for the right to marry their animals, as some people like to say. The difference is that two gay people are not animals. They are committed adults with full decision-making capacities. There's a bit of a difference.

Now I see my future differently. I don't have to be treated differently because I'm gay. I can love who I want to love, I can settle down, I can have a life that doesn't exist in the margins.

While the option is open for there to be either civil unions or actual marriages, depending on what the legislature decides, all I can say is that this is a huge step forward into a future of actual equality. There were times when interracial marriage wasn't legal in a number of states. One day, I hope that later generations can look back at the gay marriage debate in disbelief at the narrow-mindedness of history, thankful for their freedom to love.

Read It

2006-10-17T23:33:00.000-04:00

Since I clearly have nothing to say of any importance, I have something for you. I'm reading The Waterfront Journals by David Wojnarowicz right now (you get $1 and an unlubed hand job if you can actually tell me how that last name is pronounced). It's a collection of autobiograpical short stories, told in the voices of the various people that the author encounters in his travels. It's truly haunting; the stories frequently disc uss prostitution gone wrong, violence, and harrowing sexual liaisons. One story in particular stuck with me---it felt much more like a narrative poem than a short story. Have at it.

Young Woman in Coffee Shop
on the Lower East Side
NEW YORK CITY

Sometimes when I'm walking through the streets I want
my fingernails to grow long and hard so I can make
scratches in the concrete or make grooves in the side-
walk or scratch windows or by concentrating real hard make
all the windows shatter and rain down on the street or make
cigarette smoke go back into cigarettes like a film running
backwards or make the streets crack open like earthquakes
like huge crevices split open in the surface of the asphalt.
Sometimes I think by staring hard enough I can make the sky
turn into a storm, make dark clouds suddenly twist around
and send rain and lightening over the rooftops. Sometimes if
I'm feeling frustrated and men hassle me on the street I wish
I could raise my hand and suddenly dimes would be welded
on their eyeballs so they couldn't see where they were go-
ing. And when guys on the street make kiss noises at me I
wish I could make their dicks wither and drop off.

Sometime I'd like to make a film of a woman murdering
someone in which she stabs the person butchers and dismem-
bers him rips his stomach open and at the end of this she sits
down in the midst of all this, her clothes and hands and face
all covered in blood and she starts crying...

Sing It

2006-10-09T22:12:00.000-04:00

I haven't done an album post in a while, so here we go. You may or may not have heard of either of these artists, but what both have in common is that they're both very well-crafted albums that show that people are still making quality music. Buy them. Now.

Robin Thicke, The Evolution of Robin Thicke
For those not acquainted with Robin Thicke, here it is: his father is Alan Thicke (of Growing Pains fame), he cut his teeth as a Grammy-winning producer and writer for the likes of Usher, Mya, and Christina Aguilera, among others, and his debut album, A Beautiful World, was one of the true overlooked gems of 2003. It's easy to throw him into the category of "blue-eyed soul"---his malleable falsetto has a tendency to recall Justin Timberlake at times. However, what his music has that Timberlake's does not is a sense of authenticity (nor does he have that annoying nasal quality that occasionally taints Timberlakes cocals). While JT's music, as experimental as it is on his latest offering, is clearly pandering to pop crowds, Thicke isn't afraid of doing music that radio would typically shy away from. Having cowritten, coproduced, and handled much of the instrumentation (guitar, piano) on the album, the album clearly reflects his own artistry rather than simply hopping on current musical trends for the sake of popular exposure.

Unlike his previous album, this one is heavily groove-oriented, with a number of midtempo cuts that recall the likes of Marvin Gaye and Al Green with a sense of artistic reinterpretation rather than blatant mimicry of vocal stylings. "I Need Love" simmers with a piano loop and opens with a simple guitar line and a wail that is reminiscent of Al Green's "Simply Beautiful." While it is clear that Thicke has the vocal prowess to take on a track, he is a master of laying down simple, sex-dipped vocals that allow for a distinct groove to emerge. His voice is undeniably smooth---it's velvet wrapped in cashmere. His duet with Faith Evans, "Got 2 Be Down" shows that he's not just balladeer; he bounds over a thumping baseline and keeps up with Evan's powerhouse voice. Even his collaboration with Pharrell Williams, a very typical Neptunes track, shows Thicke's apt yet entertaining lyrical skills, as he croons, "And now my life is sweeter than berries/I guess if we had sex our love would turn to wine." He's not subtle by any means, but his willingness to be forthright comes off as endearing rather that unpolished.

The album is not without its missteps. "Everything I Want" features such a generic salsa sound that it's almost parody of latin music. Thicke is much more successful when he strips down the latin groove to its more base form, with a guitar and his voice, as is the case with the beautifully simple "Lost Without You." It's a song that, from the tingling instrumentation and guitar plucks, should be enjoyed with a mai tai (if you listen to it, you'll see what I mean). Lil' Wayne's two appearances ("All Night Long" and "Shooter;" the latter appeared on A Beautiful World sans Wayne) seem gratuitous at best. They don't add much to either track, and in the case of "Shooter," he turns what was previously an offbeat 70s-inspired funk song into a rather generic rap song.

It is "2 The Sky" that serves as the true centerpiece of the album. Thicke's voice darts back and forth between a mellow growl and his usual falsetto, creating an eerie sense of melancholy over a piano and guitar that build into a pseudo-rock climax. The dynamics of his vocal are gorgeous---he sweeps from a full-voice belt to his falsetto smoothly, deftly altering the tone of the song. He is both vulnerable and commanding, assertive and meek. The track succeeds at fully abolishing the genre boundaries that have kept Thicke off of the radio and in the hearts of critics everywhere. Listen and love it. This is one to watch.

Corrine Bailey Rae, Corrine Bailey Rae
It's a well-known fact that the UK pop public is much more willing to listen to more experimental sounds, so it's no surprise that Corrine Bailey Rae, with her idiosyncratic voice (think Macy Gray mixed with Erykah Badu) has achieved much success abroad. The songs that comprise her debut album nearly all focus on mystery, enchantment, and wonder---not surprising, since her voice inspires the same sort of feelings. It wraps around each lyric, delivering a depth that isn't typically found in pop music without the need for Mariah-style melismas.

The haunting "Like a Star" opens the album, complete with a squeaky guitar and breathy vocals. It is the perfect introduction to Rae's style---bereft of the bells and whistles, it's just her voice and a few live instruments, drawing attention to her simple yet intriguing lyrics. Her sound is vaguely neo-soul (is that term even valid anymore?), but songs like "Choux Pastry Heart" are muscially more experimental with a Cold Play-esque sound. Rae's voice is inherently melancholy with its old-soul-scratch and whiskey-warm sound; therefore, songs like "Enchantment," where Rae coos about her unexplicable submission to a beguiling man, are brought to life in a way that a more "traditional" voice could not do. Funked-up tracks like "Breathless" and "Call Me When You Get This" add a more dynamic element to the album, with live horns and vamped-up snares.

The album as a whole sounds like a too-hot summer day, the sticky-skin kind that you miss when they're gone. Rae's breezy voice inspires this sort of nostalgia effortlessly, proving that one need not wail all over a track to make it memorable.

Sunday Morning

2006-10-01T22:30:00.000-04:00

I spent nearly all day lounging around Nico's apartment, talking and drinking coffee and laying around with him and sporadically having my leg humped by his golden retriever, Oscar (I'm over it). We more or less both adamantly refused to do anything productive or worthwhile and instead stayed in bed and just relaxed.

Things with him have been going better than I ever could have expected. I don't even know what else to even say...I'm really happy right now. I'm not used to this lack of drama, to the absence of games, to maturity, to security. Things with him are honest, comfortable, sweet. This is what (or more accurately, who) I've been hoping for and it feels almost surreal in its utter reality. I wasn't expecting at all to be feeling like this, but I'm not fighting it. I'm not one to push a way a good (or, potentially amazing) thing.

I met Steph for dinner at Bar 89 (actually, we were supposed to go see The Science of Sleep, but she thought that I bought tickets, and I thought that she bought tickets, and clearly neither of us did, so we got there and it was sold out---over it). For some odd reason, I saw fireworks going off downtown on my way over to meet her in Soho. Not a few small ones even---these were full-blown (albeit dangerously low) Fourth-of-July-style fireworks. I have no idea why (Yom Kippur? Do they do fireworks for that?).

It was the only logical end to to the day. I think I'm beginning to feel those fireworks for the first time in a long time...

(The cliche police can take me into custody for that one but I don't even care---suck on that).

I think I'm in love with lazy Sundays.

If you have a question

2006-09-19T22:06:00.000-04:00

then this is the answer.

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
by e. e. cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

10 Things I Learned During Fashion Week

2006-09-18T21:03:00.000-04:00

I tried to keep myself pretty sequestered from the "go-to" spots during Fashion Week (I can't tolerate the fame-hungry crowds), but I ended up going to two after parties on Friday night: Jay McCarroll (winner of Season 1 of Project Runway) and Jeremy Scott. Jay's party was at Thom's Bar, which is in 60 Thompson, and Jeremy's party (a big blowout, since it was one of the last parties of the week) was held at (wait for it) a strip club on 21st and Broadway called, appropriately enough, Tens (who knew?).

This is what I decided about the whole debacle/gloriousness of the night in my hangover-haze on Saturday morning between cigarettes and mimosas:

No one at the parties actually sees the show. I'm serious. Literally everyone I spoke to had somehow managed to get into the party without really knowing the designer or collection. It wasn't until I left Jay's party and was on my way to Jeremy Scott's that I found a girl who had seen Jay's show who was able to describe it to me in extremely vague terms that basically encompassed every fashion show. Ever. She may as well have told me that it was a show where models walked down a runway wearing expensive clothes.
No offense (I'm sure he's a great guy, and his clothes are deliciously subversive and creative), but Jeremy Scott kind of smells the way he looks. Which is not, well, good. I know he'd probably had a long day, but one should freshen up a bit when one is the belle of the ball.
There are a lot of unfabulous people in fashion. I stressed far too much about what I was wearing. Don't get me wrong, a lot of people had their shit together, but there were far more people who didn't. And it wasn't like they had the whole I'm-trying-but-trying-to-look-like-I'm-not-trying look going on. They just weren't trying. SACK UP, HOES. IT'S EFFING FASHION WEEK.
Jay McCarroll is extremely nice and approachable. I chatted with him at Jeremy's for a while and he super sweet.
A super cute model from Jay's show (and, apparently, a good friend of Jay's) started chatting and dancing with me at Jeremy's and told me that he really liked my style and had meant to tell me as much at Jay's party. When I confessed that I didn't watch Project Runway and had felt really out of place at the party, he told me it was a terrible show that was a waste of time, and then told Jay that only losers win. So good.

There was no really no lesson learned here---I just wanted to mention the cute model who liked me.
It's a basic assumption, but after seeing the crowd, the stereotypes ring true: everyone in fashion is GAY, GAY, GAY. I'm not complaining.
I know this is really obvious, but the differences in the designers' styles and the crowds who influence them make a HUGE difference in the people at the party. Jay's party was a bit reserved and perhaps more "mainstream" in terms of the look of the people at the party (to be fair, it was a 100 person VIP event from 8-10). Jeremy's party could have easily passed for a night at MisShapes, horrible jet-black bowl cuts and all. It was positively bacchanalian.
You make a lot of new friends when you start drinking purposely at 8 o'clock and keep the pace up for 5 hours. I was yip yapping with everyone. My favorite? Emily, an Italian teacher at FIT I met at Jay's party who gushed about her love of romance languages (except for the black sheep, Romanian).
You only get swag bags at shows, not parties. I figured that would be the case, but I had my fingers crossed just in case.
I'm totally over the Fashion Week party scene. It's far too much about being seen and the whole hipper-than-thou downtown aesthetic. If I enjoyed that, I would have stayed at NYU for another year.

Notice that I mentioned nothing about the actual shows. That's the sad thing about what the parties do to Fashion Week. They really take the attention away from the purpose of the week. More people talk about trying to get into Marc Jacobs afterparty (considered one of the best of the bunch) than people do the show itself.

I really enjoy watching shows (or, alternately, flipping through all of the looks on men.style.com and being covetous). This year, all I want is the entire John Varvatos collection. Is that too much to ask for? Not gonna lie---the clean, slim lines and the creamy khaki colors make me a little wet. I haven't had a chance to go through all of the lines yet (you know, during all of that free time I have), but I plan on it over the course of the week to get ready for the inevitable onslaught of fall shopping.

Free booze aside, while the parties are fun, they're, well, already over.

Success

2006-09-08T12:43:00.000-04:00

Betsey Johnson sat next to us at dinner and we struck up conversation with her (she was so sweet), and she even said goodbye when she left. And then we saw Marc Jacobs walking along Prince St. when we left.

It went beautifully. Conversation was easy, and the silence was even easier. I'm learning to appreciate quiet moments, I think.

But even without the fashion-celebrity sightings, it was a perfect evening. I think I may have found a good one...

Another Rainy Day

2006-09-05T19:51:00.000-04:00

Today, Amel Larrieux's velvety, pliable voice has made the rain and my exhaustion and the inevitable end of summer so much more bearable. That, and the date I have tomorrow. I hate jinxing things or expecting too much, but this one looks promising...

"Gills and Tails"
by Amel Larrieux
I looked at my reflection in the water
Thought, what an unlikely pair
Closed my eyes,
Held my breath,
Plummeted down, down, down
And anchored myself there
Can't tell how long I've been
In the company of gills and tails
I think I feel my skin growing scales
Can I come up for air?
Can I come up, can come up?
Can I come up for air?
I'm getting eaten up down here
I'm just not built like them
The big fish have a monopoly
The little fish get buried in the sand
This here world I'm in sucks your life out,
Leaves you comatose
Take back your salt and fins
Send me a lifeboat
Can I come up for air?
Can I come up, can come up?
Can I come up for air?
I look up at longing at the surface
Hypnotized by the way
The sunlight seems to ride each ripple
And they do a dance
Every ray becomes a beckoning hand
I miss the sweet taste of oxygen
I mistook this for the promised land
Can I come up for air?
Can I come up, can come up?
Can I come up for air?

I'm (Not) Over It

2006-08-27T17:02:00.000-04:00

In an odd twist of fate, my addiction to the phrase "I'm over it" has neatly coincided with a little limited column that Gawker ran last week entitled "Already Over," in which they detailed various pop culture points that are, well, already over. The one that really hit me was "Already Over: New York."

Because, well, it's true.

New York is arguably the most fucked up group of people on one island who cohabitate in a completely absurd manner, most accepting levels of squalor that would be balked at by people in any other major city. (Case in point: we just stand around and fucking hope that a subway comes sooner or later---there aren't any goddamn schedules. And if you think that's bad, try getting a bus.) We're cranky, judgmental, elitist, self-important, (redundant), and juvenile at best (and clearly retarded at worst).

And in a statement that will most likely lead to judgement from any and all who read this little blog o' mine (and really, I pity you if you still do---it's been terribly boring as of late in these parts), here's the thing: I could never live anywhere else, and nor do I want to.

I'll be honest: part of that is fueled by the fact that, well, I can't drive anymore, and there aren't very many American cities with a public transportation system that's as extensive as New York's (notice that I did not describe it as "convenient" or "reliable"---I digress). But really, while I hate talking in flowery abstraction (ok, no I don't, but whatever), New York is the one city that I romanticize with a complete and total knowledge of its flaws.

It's always too hot or too cold. My apartment is too small, and everywhere else on this island is too expensive. We move too fast. We can't even keep up with what restaurants are hot, let alone clubs, bars, and designers. We're all about aethestics when half of the city is falling apart (remember that time that lower Manhattan was destroyed in a terrorist attack and then 5 years later it didn't look any better?), and half of the people who set fashion trends would be laughed out of nearly any other city in the world for their sheer absurdity.

But I miss it when I leave. The best part about leaving is coming back. I can go sit in Tompkin's when I want to relax and read when the weather is good and I need to clear my head, I can sit in Washington Square Park when I want to people-watch, I can walk through Soho and soak up over-priced fashion. I can go to the West Village and appreciate the brownstones, and I can go to the East Village and appreciate the culture of the ethnic enclaves that still exist, even with the rampant gentrification pushing us all to the boroughs. I can listen to the water down at the Seaport, I can go Uptown, parade down Fifth and feel classy when I go into designer botuiques even when I'm not and I feel poor. I can see Kathleen Turner on stage at a Sunday matinee and stand next to Nicole Kidman during intermission, and not gawk at either. I can go to the Met and see the some of the most important works in the history of visual art. I can have mimosas for brunch in the LES and then find unknown designer's at a market in Nolita. I can look as absurd as I want and not turn a single head. I can eat food from six continents in three blocks. I can do anything.

I can in this city. It's the city where you can.

Fuck Gawker. New York, I don't think I'll ever be over you.

Discuss

2006-08-20T15:52:00.000-04:00

I don't think that I have the proper words to sum up everything going on here.

As you know, my Beyonce addiction is endless, and while a lot of people are not into her two new Sophie Muller-helmed clips, I contend that they are sheer genius. She's coming completely out of left-field and doing exactly what people wouldn't expect her to do. Beyonce knows what she needs to do to sell records---look pretty, dance well, etc. But now that the R&B market is flooded with girls who are simply pretty, sound good, and dance well, she's doing whatever she wants and standing out from the pack. I think she's growing into an artist.

You might just think she's batshit. I'm over it.

So here it is: Beyonce's new video, "Ring the Alarm" (produced by Swizz Beats and co-written by Sean Garret) off of her sophomore album, B'Day. Enjoy. Or, alternately, be horrified.

To You, Part I-Don't-Even-Know-Anymore

2006-08-14T11:23:00.000-04:00

I would like to apologize for everything I said, but I'm not sorry.

I needed to say it all, and you needed to hear it. You need to hear honesty from someone. I don't know how many people you have in your life who are willing to tell you about yourself these days. I know it hurt to hear it, but I didn't say it to upset you. I said it because, after everything, I still want you to be happy.

I spent a lot of time trying to save you, and that was my last attempt. You have to start saving yourself. It's not my job anymore. It never should have been.

I've moved on with my life. I think it's time for you to grow up too.

"And from the first to the last time the signs said 'stop'---but we went on, whole-hearted, it ended bad, but I loved what we started..."