For the past six years I've been a student at an institution that gives me an entire four weeks from mid-December to mid-January off from school. I have always spent this time at home in Chicago with my family. I've never particularly liked returning to New York in January after my long winter break in New York, but I forgot just how sharp the shock of returning to NYC can be. I've been back for a week now, and it feels like forever.
Oddly, one of the things I miss most about Chicago when I'm not there is the local NPR affiliate, WBEZ. Although I can't fault WNYC, WBEZ is the sound of home. I've been listening to it on the internet a great deal this past week. Right now they are announcing the temperature across various suburbs: "16 in Glendale, 14 in Merrillville..."
When I listen to this weather report I feel like I speak a secret language: Merrillville is in Indiana, not terribly close to Chicago, and yet right now I'd almost rather be there than here. Okay, that's just romantic sentiment, I would not rather be in Merrillville, IN than New York City. But I do feel like one of the things that makes New York City bearable is that many of the people who live here hail from nearby places - Connecticut, New Jersey, upstate New York - and can return home frequently if they so desire. I can't.
This may be my last six months in New York. Right now I am waiting to hear from a variety of institutions - none of them in New York - as to whether I have been accepted for further study. If none of these options comes through, I am seriously considering returning to Chicago. It's not a decision I take lightly. This city has been very good to me, and I recognize that Chicago might not hold the same opportunities I have had here. But when I sit and look out on Second Avenue and listen to the traffic report from Shadow Traffic, the woman listing the forty-minute stretch of the Edens to Pulaski, my thoughts go somewhere else, and my body longs to follow.
I'm not sure where I first heard of the remarkable television show The Prisoner. Like other cult television shows (Twin Peaks being the most obvious example), The Prisoner had an extremely brief run, from October 1967 to February 1968, but has come to loom large in the pop culture imagination. Maybe I was familiar with the concept from the Simpsons episode "The Computer Wore Menace Shoes," a terrific Prisoner parody of which no YouTube clip seems to exist, sadly. In any case, I received the complete series DVD set for Christmas 2004 and watched it in its entirety over the next six months.
It was a happy time in my life. I was a sophomore in college, living in a tiny Lower East Side apartment with my boyfriend and my best friend. The apartment was advertised as a two-bedroom, but was in fact a one-bedroom. My boyfriend and I slept in what was meant to be the living room, which featured the only two windows that let in natural light (the rest looked out on airshafts). Our futon was pressed up against the windows, and it was freezing in the winter. My mild domestic impulses seemed like hysteria in contrast to the laissez-faire housekeeping of my roommates, who left snail trails of library books and sweaters in their wake as they moved through the three rooms. The bathroom was coated in tiny curly black hairs and the kitchen was almost always dirty. I had never been so happy in my entire life.
During our frequent breaks from reading Orientalism and writing about the fluidity of gender roles my boyfriend and I would sit down and watch an episode or three of The Prisoner. What joy the opening sequence always brought us:
And what happiness to hear the series' star, Patrick McGoohan, intone some of his immortal phrases. Our particular favorite was his send-off, "Be seeing you," of which my boyfriend could do a killer impersonation. More than forty years after the show was on the air, he and I had become rabid Prisoner fans. The series is terribly smart, engaging and challenging a variety ideologies. Even in its missteps - there's an entire Western-themed episode, which didn't work for me - it never condescends to the viewer. Plus, it features a villainous weather balloon.
The news that the show's star, ice-cold badass Patrick McGoohan, died yesterday at age 80 filled me with a sadness I can attribute to more than my hatred of the freezing weather. On The Prisoner he rode the line between camp and cool like it was a British sports car or a crazy-ass bicycle. Rest in peace, Number Six. Be seeing you.
I have always had only the most passing interest in the Golden Globes. In keeping with that lack of enthusiasm, here is an incomplete, vaguely stream-of-consciousness liveblog of tonight's show.
7:47 pm: They just showed Marisa Tomei. I feel like every time I've heard her name mentioned in the past five years has been in reference to how surprisingly good she looks naked. In 2005, someone mentioned this in relation to her role in Factotum. But by far the most constant comment about Tomei is that she "looks amazing" in Before The Devil Knows You're Dead. Seriously, upwards of sixteen men have mentioned this to me. Good for Tomei. I bet this skill comes in handy in her current role as a stripper in The Wrestler (Full disclosure: I have not seen any of the films mentioned above).
7:57 pm: "Please welcome the star of the upcoming films Bunraku and Happy Tears, Demi Moore!" Best sentence ever? Also, I misheard "Bunraku" as "Spunkaroo."
8:01 pm: My mom just said "There's Shirley MacLaine! She's still alive!"
8:09 pm: This announcer has not been given a lot to work with: "Here are two stars of The Dark Knight, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aaron Eckhart!" Here they are, folks! Two of 'em!
8:12 pm: Laura Linney has the most beautiful skin. What does she do? Bathe in the blood of virgins, Erzsebet Batory-style?
8:22 pm: Alec Baldwin looked adorably nervous when they announced his nomination. Also, what did David Duchovny mouth to the camera? He told me what he was going to say this morning before he left my apartment, but I forgot.
8:30 pm: Renee Zellweger's dress is hideous! This makes me happy! Also, they just cut very briefly to an incredibly creepy shot of Marc Anthony stroking Jennifer Lopez's arm.
8:44 pm: Hi, Kate Beckinsale! You and Diddy are a hilariously wooden duo. Remember when you had a career and made good movies? I don't!
Sometime later - didn't record the time: David Duchovny was so sad in front of the mike with Jane Krakowski, I can't even make a good joke about his sex addiction and how it has impacted me in a positive way.
9:18 pm: Sandra Bullock making a tired joke about the relative sexiness of the Vicky Cristina Barcelona setup is my idea of the entertainment in hell.
9:29 pm: Do the people in attendance really care enough about Madonna and Guy Ritchie's divorce to look mildly scandalized at Sasha Baron Cohen's mild joke?
9:38 pm: As Kate Winslet wins her second Globe of the evening, my committment to this project waffles. Amelie Gilette is way better at this than me: "9:20pm--Slumdog Millionaire, the only movie that could make Who Wants To Be A Millionaire even remotely entertaining, wins for best screenplay. Brad Pitt clearly mouthed, "What's this for?" as the writer went up on stage. If it's not a magical 80-year-old in love with an 11-year-old , it doesn't matter does it, Brad?"
9:43 pm: "Hello, we're TV actors." Pretty good, Rainn Wilson.
I love year-end "Best Of" lists, but the music that's important to me in a given year is rarely from that year. I become really involved with a few songs per month, listening to them over and over again. My relationship with music I love hasn't changed fundamentally since I was 13 or so - I become immersed in things very quickly and want them around me always. These are the songs that have held special meaning for me this year. They're organized in a vaguely chronological, vaguely hierarchical fashion - which is to say, not really by any rhyme or reason.
10. Kate Bush - "Suspended in Gaffa"
My mother is an old-school Kate Bush fan. For the last few years she has been attempting to get me into Bush's oeuvre, but beyond a general admiration for its cover I was relatively nonplussed by The Kick Inside, Bush's first album. Until this past January, that is, when I acquired her entire discography after hearing the song "The Man With The Child In His Eyes" on the soundtrack of the middling James McAvoy vehicle Starter For One. I listened to the one-two punch of "Moving" and "The Saxophone Song" while trying to peck out stories in my study late at night; watched the bizarre video for "Wuthering Heights" and its weird YouTube responses; and fell asleep to the sexy three-song progression at the end of the album: "James and the Gold Gun," "Feel It," and "Oh To Be In Love." As my interest in Bush grew, so did my affection for her work, and I came to be as engaged by Hounds of Love, The Dreaming, and Bush's last album, Aerial. I listened to "Suspended in Gaffa" (from The Dreaming) more than any other song, captivated by its evocation of the line between ecstasy and depression.
9. Ladytron - "Ghosts"
I first heard Ladytron during my first year of college, in 2003, when a junior in high school sent me two mix CDs and a twenty-two page handwritten letter explaining the meaning of each song. "Seventeen" was one of the only songs I liked, and Ladytron became one of my favorite bands. On Halloween 2006 I saw them play at Webster Hall with CSS, a show so killer that I purchased tickets to a September 2007 McCarren Pool Chemical Brothers concert just because Ladytron was opening. Unfortunately, not even the arctic cool of this Scottish quintet could save the ultimate lameness of a Chemical Brothers concert. This song, on the other hand, captures what the band does best: glacial statements of emotional entanglement set against a killer beat.
8. CSS - "Believe Achieve"
I bought Cansei de Ser Sexy's 2006 debut after the aforementioned awesome Webster Hall concert. Like a lot of the things I venerate on this blog, CSS's sound has the appropriate quotient of grime to sex. I bought their sophomore effort, Donkey, in August and quickly singled this song out as my favorite. I burnt it onto a CD containing most of the tracks on this list and listened to it as I drove around my hometown, singing along.
7. Dawn Landes - "I'm In Love With The Night"
This beautiful song, for which I could find no corresponding YouTube, was introduced to me indrectly by Chris Onstad, author of Achewood, who linked Landes's song "Twilight" on his character Molly's blog. At the time I was living at a villa in Florence, where I would spend long afternoons writing on an old leather couch in the lobby. After I'd exhausted what the internet could offer me of Landes's songs, I broke down and bought her album Fireproof on iTunes. The entire thing is flawless. The ache in her voice sounds hopeful to me. Also awesome: her cover of Peter, Bjorn and John's "Young Folks":
6. Radiohead - "Lucky"
Although they're probably the most acclaimed band of my lifetime, it wasn't until this year that I "got into" Radiohead. My awakening took place during my time in Florence, when three friends and I went to Milan to see the band play a Roman amphitheater. Unsurprisingly, the band was killer live, especially their rendition of this song.
5. M83 - "Skin of the Night"
I bought M83's album Saturdays = Youth after the A.V. Club noted that "It's hard to imagine finding much to fault in an album that professes a serious devotion to the likes of the Thompson Twins and Kate Bush." Score! The album's spoken word interludes are sometimes embarrassing, but then again, the band is French. They probably think English sounds cool just the way we think French does. This endless unwinding song is as long as a prom night spent waiting for the sun to rise.
4. Cat Power - "Metal Heart"
Really any of the first three tracks on Cat Power's 2008 disc, Jukebox, could have made this list; "New York" and "Ramblin' (Woman)" are just as excellent as "Metal Heart." But the latter is a rerecorded song, originally a track from Moon Pix, so brilliantly reimagined that I didn't recognize it the first few times I heard it.
3. The B-52's - "Dancing Now"
I've always loved The B-52's, probably because I was six years old the summer that "Love Shack" came out. Their sound triggers a Pavlovian response in my brain forcing me to have a good time. I liked all of the songs on Funplex, but I listened to this one more than any other on that leather couch in Florence, dancing very subtly in my seat.
2. Crystal Castles - "Courtship Dating"
I feel like anything intelligent I try to write about Crystal Castles comes out kind of muted, so maybe I'll just be honest. I fucking love Crystal Castles. Their music is the only thing that makes me feel the way all music on Q101 did when I was 12 years old, like I'm riding on top of a train and the wind is in my face and anything is possible. I goddamn love this song. I can't explain how much I fucking love it. This band makes me want to punch somebody in the face and then make out with them.
1. The New Pornographers - "Centre for Holy Wars"
I am horrified that I can't find a YouTube link for this song. The best I can do is a kind of suspect last.fm link. It's a shame, because I've listened to this track (from Mass Romantic, the band's 2000 debut) more than any other song this year. I listen to it when I'm getting ready to go out, slipping across the wood floor of my apartment in my socks, and I listen to it when I'm hopping around in my sweats and glasses, hyping myself up to go running. I listen to it when I'm happy and when I'm sad. Maybe the New Pornographers are old news, but this year they - and especially this song - were big news to me. Something about this track has made me unflappably happy. Maybe it was the chorus, the soaring words "exactly where we are" - a sort of mantra about self-acceptance, if you will - that put "Centre for Holy Wars" at the top of my list.
