After seeing Joanna Newsom perform the entirety of Ys with the Brooklyn Philharmonic.

Really. What have i done to deserve to be alive here, now, to witness moments like this? 

Knock loud (i’m home).

I just discovered this track from the 2001 Neko Case Canadian Amp EP, which is actually a cover of the original by Sook-Yin Lee, who starred in Shortbus. None of this is really as important as the song, which i can’t stop playing over and over. It is somehow the perfect complement to the fact that i am cradling a ball of raw bread dough in my left hand, waiting for it to set to the contours of my palm, hoping it will solve the problem of creating a sculpture out of raw dough in the round without using a mold. As it rises and hardens, i’m thinking about my mom, who just had her knee replaced and is bearing remarkable amounts of pain, but is still silly with me on the phone. Her optimism stretches out like a road. About Eva Hesse, whose work, whose life calmly explains that happiness isn’t as important as i thought it was. 

There is the work, this soft weight in my hand. 

Das musics of 2007.

I tend to disavow “best of” lists but this year seemed to lend itself to one, with so much to sort through, more so than i remember from last year, or maybe i was just paying closer attention. Mostly i just am afraid that some people have gone through the year without hearing the following albums/tracks, and i want to ensure that at least in the first days of 2008 you can get to the things you may have missed.

Andrew Bird: Scythian Empire. The whole of Armchair Apocrypha is engaging and warm, but this song stands out, its criticism of the Iraq War pitched against an irresistable plucked violin.

Animal Collective: For Reverend Green. Everything this band does grips me, even when i want to write it off as annoying (“We Tigers” comes to mind). Strawberry Jam i think is not as good as Feels, but this track, all reverby and raw, makes me stop whatever i’m doing when it comes on, and listen.

Arcade Fire: (Antichrist Television Blues). I already flipped out about this song in an earlier post, so i’ll just say that Neon Bible and the band live up to all the hype. Seeing them at Randall’s Island at the end of the summer was one of my favorite nights out, ever.

Battles: Atlas. Every time i hear this track, i think, Damn. It is the perfect balance of whacked-out vocals, fluid progressions and transitions, and ridiculously infectious beats. One of the best songs of the decade.

Beirut: Nantes. I really got into Zach Condon’s folk-infused project last year, and this year’s offering is just as good. Great to sing along to lines like “It’s been a long time, long time now/since i’ve seen you smile.”

Blonde Redhead: 23. It’s hard to pick one song from this incredible album, but if pressed i would say “Spring And By Summer Fall” or “Top Ranking,” the latter if only for the great Mike Mills video with Miranda July. Just try to listen to the whole album without repeating it at least once. I haven’t succeeded yet.

Bowerbirds: Dark Horse. Lovely, new indie-folk out of Raleigh, NC. This song in particular holds me in a way i thought only Neko Case could.

Broken Social Scene Presents Kevin Drew: Frightening Lives. Yes, that is the official obnoxious artist name, really Kevin, we know who you are and would have bought the album regardless of the BSS reference. The spoken word beat-driven verses here aren’t my favorite, but i can never get to the guitar hook of this track without starting to bounce around. Spirit If… is a great album, easing the disappointment from BSS’s self-titled 2005 release. That said, You Forgot It In People will always be in my top 20 of all time.

Burial: Archangel. I know this cd just came out and i admittedly know nothing about dubstep, but this track just won’t stop. All of Untrue had me at first listen, but “Archangel” sticks to me, the vocals are twisted enough to be engaging but not so much as to be annoying, and the beat bores its way through everything else. I can’t think of a better backdrop for walking the streets of Greenpoint.

Dan Deacon: The Crystal Cat. This is fun stuff. I’ve heard his live shows are insanely energetic, which is evident from the songs. It’s no small feat to take so many risks and make them danceable.

Electrelane: To The East. Oh, Electrelane. I came to you all pretty late in the game, about a year before you announced your indefinite hiatus, but my appreciation hopefully outweighs my belated introduction. No Shouts, No Calls is a huge achievement and a great note to end on, lush and open in ways hinted at in Axes and The Power Out, but really mastered here.

Feist: I Feel It All. Everybody loves Feist. This summer there wasn’t a coffeeshop, bookstore, or restaurant this side of the Hudson River (and most of Eastern Jersey too) that wasn’t pumping The Reminder, and with good reason. She’s poppy but shares with Cat Power a kind of endearing sadness that i think will only get better with time.

Jay-Z: Roc Boys (And The Winner Is…). As much as i object to the blatant love of capitalism and pursuit of the dollar he epsouses, i can’t deny that this man knows what he’s doing. American Gangster hits hard and stays long.

Kanye West: Stronger. Graduation might not measure up to The College Dropout in the end, but that’s by no means accusing Kanye of weakness. The album still says more, and is more arresting, than almost all the other hip-hop cds i’ve heard this year.

Modest Mouse: Dashboard. I was afraid of We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank after how disappointing Good News For People Who Love Bad News was. It hurt to hate it, and i was guarded about what was coming after, but this release renewed my faith in one of the best u.s. bands ever.

The National: Boxer. The most exciting release of the year. This album is damn near flawless.

Okkervil River: Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe. I just found out about these guys this year, and i’m really glad i did. Slow, sloping rhythms, really beautiful stuff.

PJ Harvey: White Chalk. I was apprehensive about this one too, given Uh Huh Her, which really only had two worthwhile tracks. But i probably listened to this cd more than any other since it came out. She’s taking all the right risks here, and the beauty that came out of it floors me.

Radiohead: In Rainbows. I’ll get it out of the way: This album is not as good as Hail To The Thief. By Radiohead’s own standards, it’s not what it should be. But by the rest of the recordings released this year, it’s still one of the best.

Spoon: Rhythm & Soul. Another new discovery for me this year, and the whole album, and specifically this track, has been on repeat ever since.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Is Is. This EP is topping year-end lists all over the place, which is well-deserved and impressive considering it only has 5 songs. Their Webster Hall show this summer was nothing but a huge, sweaty dance party with strangers. Great, great band.

It hurts to leave out Björk’s Volta which i was so pumped about, but it turned out to be a big bunch of empty promises. Any collaboration with Timbaland should have turned out so much cooler than this. I also enjoyed but never really got into the new releases from St. Vincent, Múm, Panda Bear, M.I.A., and the Arctic Monkeys. I know, everyone else raved about all of these but i just couldn’t make it past a couple of listens for any of them, except for Kala. Okay, i will say that “Paper Planes” is a fucking awesome song. But I still think M.I.A. is overrated.

A lot of music lovers and critics have been saying that on the whole this year was a bit lackluster, but i don’t think so. Granted, there was nothing to compare to Ys of last year, but other than that i got excited about the stuff coming out pretty much all year. For me, music is a large part of where i’m at, and what i’m listening to at any particular time shapes me more than i’m willing to admit. I definitely delved into old stuff like Patsy Cline, Nina Simone, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, The Ramones, Joy Division, The Cocteau Twins, Pixies, My Bloody Valentine, and Neutral Milk Hotel, but more and more i would turn to the 2007 lists when listening to music at home.

My favorite as of this second, thanks to Ryan’s recommendation: The Guillemots. I haven’t stopped replaying Through The Windowpane since i got it.

How come nothin’ tastes good.

Another warm-ish day in this schizophrenic spring is not to be squandered. The sun pouring through my apartment makes me feel just like 3:31 in the Arcade Fire’s “(Antichrist Television Blues)” when Régine Chassagne starts belting it. I had to reassure my sister that that is actually a person’s voice singing that high and that on-pitch, and not violins. Should you sadly be without this song, you can download a low-quality version here. In other musics, the new Björk is coming out May 7th, i’m already shaky-legs about it. I didn’t get tickets to see her on the three-day stint she’s in the nyc, which at first was hugely disappointing, but i decided my 86 dollars could be better spent elsewhere, in keeping with my attempts of late to examine my consumption patterns and align them more with my politics.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how i decide what i need and what i don’t. Obviously there are invariables, but there aren’t as many of those as i anticipated. I can’t compromise on things like dog food, or my, my, Metrocard, but those temporary tattoos from ebay? Admittedly i already am not a huge big-time consumerist monster, but i am a United Statesian, born and raised, and that means that i do have a positive emotional association to shopping. I want to not necessarily spend less, although that would be good, but to spend better. Instead of buying greens only when i’m feeling really tired and know it’s due to a lack of veggies, i want to get a big share of CSA and in the winter shop for produce only at farmer’s markets. What i really want is to research what grows in the NY, NJ, PA area when, and only buy local produce when it’s in season. Do i really need to eat oranges, when they’re only grown in places far away from here? It will be hard to forego avocados and citrus, but i want to try. It’s just too counterintuitive to feel good about not having a car here, and then rely so much on trucks to drive all over the country to bring me what i want.

This extends to online shopping as well. I live in New York, of all places, and i still buy things and have them shipped to me because it’s painfully easy. This is dumb. If the Big Apple can’t provide it, i don’t need it. The sole exception is the vegan dog food, which i have tried to find all over the city unsuccessfully. And maybe coffee.

I also want to be a more active freegan, which could ease my avocado cravings. I mean, if a grocery store trashes some perfectly good bananas that happen to have been grown thousands of miles away, it’s better to eat it than to offer it up to the landfill, right? I’m most hesitant about this one, due to the high potential for grossness, but i want to give it a genuine effort before i decide that only produce that has never seen the inside of a black bag is for me.

All this is a kind of internal spring cleaning, but it has more to do with the reading i’ve been getting into these last few days. I finished the 6th Harry Potter on Friday (a requisite “eek!” in anticipation of the 21 July release date of the Deathly Hallows), which meant Saturday morning i needed new reading material, so to the library i went. I want to get more focused in the artwork i want to be making, so that when i start the studio classes at Hunter i’ll be able to use my time well. I picked up no fewer than four books about science, most of them focusing on the aesthetics found in nature, the design principles of cells and trees, why they work.

I can’t think of any other ideas i’d rather be working with right now, finding the spaces where art and science intersect. In the first book, The Ancestor’s Tale, Richard Dawkins traces human evolutionary history backwards, which is not strictly about design in science but looked interesting. There’s a part where he’s talking about why we can go back in time and see parallels between ourselves and snakes and bacteria and grasses, and how the information remains remarkably intact. He makes the comparison between evolutionary history and literary history, how we use old documents to tell us about cultures and languages long dead. “The important point about DNA is that, as long as the chain of reproducing life is not broken, its coded information is copied to a new molecule before the old molecule is destroyed… Large quantities of our ancestors’ DNA information survives completely unchanged, come even from hundreds of millions of years ago, preserved in successive generations of living bodies.” How powerful, the idea that we are living relics, housing the traits that helped our ancestors thrive in the water as fish or as bacteria. I still can’t quite absorb this completely, but i will say these last few days have been easier with this knowledge. I think that’s what’s been motivating my need to get more local and sparser in my consumption; i’ve been seeing the connections between myself and my surroundings in much more explicit ways than i used to. It’s easy to get abstract with words like “environment” and “eco-friendly,” but when i peel an orange that shares some identical DNA information with me, it’s different.

It’s my mom’s doing, this fascination with science, and i can remember her trying to sound casual but unable to disguise her disappointment when she asked me why i never went into science. “You seemed so interested in it, you always enjoyed visiting me at the hospital.” Which is true. I thought i was a really lucky kid to have a mom who worked in the lab, who could teach me how to grow bacteria in petri dishes, how to look at dead tissues under a microscope. She came in to visit my anatomy class when i was a junior in high school, and it felt damn cool to hear her talk about the micro-organisms she knew so well.

I can’t wait to make things that honor the passions that she transferred to me, that explain to her why studying Ingres and genomes are not really that far off.

Skepticism takes a smoke break.

A friend and i recently swapped some music, and i’ve surprised myself by listening to hers all morning. I can be, um, hesitant about friends’ music tastes, which is to say i tend to close-mindedly assume that while i love my friends, what cds they listen to passionately i would rather use for their intended purposes, as indoor frisbees. But today i broke yet another way that i limit fluidity in my life by recognizing her tastes as both entirely different from mine and equal. Before i think i could really only say that about, hmm… one other person. No, no, two. I love that i got exposed to music i would have never found on my own, music that is already incorporating itself into memories and smells and afternoons spent productively, music that is authentic and good. Here’s to unexpected communions.