My Favorite Naughties Songs

With the Naughties winding down, everyone’s making their lists of films and albums and songs. I’m joining the fun.

I wouldn’t call this a list of the ‘best’ songs from the decade. Rather these are the 25 songs that I spent the most time with, that changed my mind about a genre, that made me fall in love with a band, that stuck in my head and just wouldn’t let go.

• 25. Off The Record, My Morning Jacket
• 24. Wickerman, Pulp
• 23. The Underdog, Spoon
• 22. Angel, Shaggy
• 21. Crown of Love, Arcade Fire
• 20. Go With The Flow, Queens of the Stone Age
• 19. The Hand That Feeds, Nine Inch Nails
• 18. Question!, System Of A Down
• 17. Wolf Like Me, TV On The Radio
• 16. Do You Realize??, The Flaming Lips
• 15. The Widow, The Mars Volta
• 14. Little Lover’s So Polite, Silversun Pickups
• 13. Kids, MGMT
• 12. NYC, Interpol
• 11. Use It, The New Pornographers
• 10. Theologians, Wilco
• 9. Pilots, The Notwist
• 8. Walking With Thee, Clinic
• 7. Jesus Of Suburbia, Green Day
• 6. The Rat, The Walkmen
• 5. Fell In Love With A Girl, The White Stripes
• 4. Mr. Brightside, The Killers
• 3. Time Is Running Out, Muse
• 2. Rebellion (Lies), Arcade Fire
• 1. Maps, Yeah Yeah Yeahs

The Nobel-winning solution to your 401k drawdown?

Paul Krugman thinks we need to deter financial speculation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/27/opinion/27krugman.html?_r=1

Places I’ve been in the world where financial speculation is ‘deterred’ include Tijuana, Detroit, the Banlieue of Paris. Walking around these places, talking to people, hearing the stories of squelched hope, failed attempts to get out and the very real speculation in underground markets, where the players gamble with their lives. The idea that a serious economist like Krugman (writing in the newspaper of the capital of capitalism no less) could believe that the world needs *less* financial speculation reminds me of a Dead Kennedys song…

Thinking about storytelling form

Catching up on some reading this week. One piece that caught my attention, besides reminding me that I have bookmarks going back 6+ months that I still haven’t looked at, is this one about Joyce’s Ulysees in the NYTimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/opinion/16mccann.html

The form of the first three paragraphs – the story that leads you into the essay – is what really caught my attention. There’s three steps here, what you might call paint, punch and fade. The character is the catalyst for the punch. The fade explains why.

Paint your character

A LONDON nursing home. The shape of a figure beneath the sheets. My grandfather could just about whisper. He wanted a cigarette and a glass of whiskey. “Come up on the bed here, young fella,” he said, gruffly. It was 1975 and I was 10 years old and it would be the first — and probably last — time I’d ever see him. Gangrene was taking him away. He reached for the bottle and managed to light a cigarette. Spittle collected at the edge of his mouth. He began talking, but most of the details of his life had already begun slipping away.

Throw the punch

Long wars, short memories.

Fade away

Later that afternoon my father and I bid goodbye to my grandfather, boarded a train, then took a night boat back home to Dublin. Nothing but ferry-whistle and stars and waves. Three years later, my grandfather died. He had been, for all intents and purposes, an old drunk who had abandoned his family and lived in exile. I did not go to the funeral. I still, to this day, don’t even know what country my grandfather is buried in, England or Ireland.

Manchester on a fall morning

Up at first light. Clear morning after all night pouring. Stop for an 87 cent double espresso, well-pulled with a layer of oily crema. Dodging downed branches all the way. Parking lot’s empty, nobody else on trail yet. Crunching steps, all the maple leaves blown down overnight. A fox up ahead, doesn’t hear me at first, all red fur and squat legs making a blur as he tears outta there. Then a deer down in a thicket – we spook each other – white tail vanishing into a fir stand. Back up, to the muddy meadow. Withered blackberries on bushes going gnarly. Seals arping down in the cove. The wood stairs go down into the cedars, slippery, have to hold the hand rail. At the edge of the cliff, out of the cedars, full sunlight, Seattle way out over the whitecapped Sound. Standing in the warm sun, sending down a joyous stream onto the rocks below.

Back

So I live in Portland, Oregon now.

First impressions have been simplistic, based on fleeting glimpses as I chase from item to item on my move-in task lists. This appears to be an artistic city, a city that cares about food, a young city with a very European feel. A public transportation city. A city colored green by parks and trees.

Parks everywhere in this city. Standing in one this afternoon, waiting for my Streetcar. Across the street from me is a strand of maples, and under the maples is a brick building with a cafe on the ground floor, and inside of this cafe a girl is sitting in the corner table. She’s facing away from the window. Bent over her book. Studying. That steep-angled September sun pouring in, turning her blond hair into strands of gold while maple leaves flutter by in the breeze.

There’s a moment every fall when summer capitulates. A cold wind that sends leaves flying and chills running up your spine. A sign: Winter is coming. It’s time to stop screwing around. It’s time to start squirreling away nuts.

I’ve reached that moment. It’s been six months making hay. Nonstop play – with plenty of work in between, but even the work has been play, done wildly and with abandon. It’s time to slow it down. Contemplate my losses and consolidate my gains.

Autumn in my new home. Portland, Oregon. Leaving behind all this doing, retracing towards being, and the return of the artistic mind…

Notes from the other side of the money/time divide

Seems like it’s always one or the other. Money or time. If you have money, your time is limited. If you have time, then money’s your obstacle.

For the last decade I’ve been firmly on the money side. Cash was coming in, thanks to good luck and hard work, and my challenge was to milk as much life as I could out of whatever free time I could scrape out of each week.

Now that I find myself dabbling on the other side – I’m not exactly destitute, more like my cash flow has shrunk to meet my expenses – I have time for days like this:

7AM
Wake up at Mike’s house in AG. I’m crashing on his couch. Only there’s no couch under me because Mike’s buddy Ben called dibs. That cold spot on my face, it’s Ben’s dog’s tongue. Mike and Jun are up and rearing to go. They’re off to Magic Mountain this afternoon. I’m snagging a ride down the hill to Grover Beach.

8AM
Have breakfast in Grover Beach. Explain to the waiter that I’m waiting for a train and might be here for an hour or more, if that’s cool. Sure, it’s cool… but he still has to interrupt my typing every five minutes to ask if I want more coffee. Nah bro, I’m cool…

9AM
Dunk head in Pacific Ocean on Pismo Beach while dunebuggies roar and kids dig for clams. Think about how a day like this would have driven me crazy a year ago, when I had 15 vacation days a year and ‘wasting’ one with such idleness was unacceptable. Dunk head in Pacific Ocean again. The fuss and the roar and the lines of breakers all the way to Japan.

10AM
Retreat to Grover Beach Amtrak station. Two hours to go. Luckily there’s a plug. Laptop time! Emails. Bookmark organization. Task scheduling. A guy asks me if I can help him with the ticket machine. “Well, it’s pretty easy. See the instructions? Find the name of the station you’re headed to on the list. Where you going? SLO? What letter does that start with?”

Noon
Twenty minutes on the Surfliner and I’m in SLO. Fries and a Chimay at Bel Frites. A stroll through the humid summer downtown, tan legs flashing everywhere under pastel shorts and skirts. The half-sized cigar shop, and men inside huffing on Billy Clintons. Buying a picnic, a sandwich and a beer at Gus’s Groceries. The mural at the post office shows cows in the brown grasses of a Cerro-side, it’s so SLO, perfect, and I spend a few minutes just looking at it. Squinting my eyes at the park, a game I learned called Pretend You’re An Impressionist Painting. What’s that? Seven black columns on the gazebo. Getting closer, I see it’s a wedding party. Photo time. A bum shouting encouragement, yelling “you don’t even hear me do you?”. I grab a maple leaf. The velvet underbelly. It’s such a hot day, and there’s the corner store, where it’s been all these years, underneath an American flag.

3PM
There’s my Starlite, ten minutes early. Sitting in the park next to the station, thinking how nice it can be to be forced to wait somewhere. I remember reading how too much freedom can be the worst curse for an artist. The wild mind gropes and grasps and starts a hundred holes in the backyard without finishing any, while the constrained mind makes beauty from what it finds. At least that’s theory.

5PM
What a ride! The twisting Cuesta grade, a triumph of another age, man’s marks carved into these honey hills in steel and tunnels. The iconic view when the trains turns sharply enough so you can see its silver engine and cars snaking ahead of you. Goats and cattle and even horses grazing the browned pasture. Chevron derricks. Darkskinned men hauling-ass Fords pickups along the siding, dust and hats and big grins, iPhone says a hundred degrees out there but there I go in my air-conditioned silver bullet – though cars on that 101 pass us up like we’re standing still.

6PM
East of Eden country. Soft hills to the east, harsh hills to the west. A tri-tip sandwich + Murphy’s stout == dinner.

7PM
Salinas = Salad. Men all lined up at the taco trucks. Pelicans pace the train over the Elkhorn Slough where herons crowd on little islands. Hawks over hillsides. A fat guy being arrested by the local sherrif. A kittycat hella-scooting across the road. An abandonded gravel mine. Gilroy and all the garlic you can reek.

9PM
San Jose. Bottom of the bay. First buildings that say City since LA. Also Node Zero of these vast lattices we’ve built aka Headquarters of Virtual Sanity. True to form, she don’t look like much from the train. In the Sillicon Valley, unlike any other urban area in the world, the spirit lies in industrial parks, warehouses and ultimately garages.

10PM
Jesse and Kristin’s place. Three blocks from Stanford. I walk the half mile from the CalTrain station. A cool wind blowing in off the fog bank to chill the warm night. Maples rustling. The old professor homes squatting so close to the streets, just two and three bedrooms each. Redwoods in yards silhouetted against banks of stars. Walking with my full pack on my back. Walking with a whistle and a sense of that pirate spirit that describes how I’m making my way in the world. Walking to Jesse and Kristin’s house, and her six months preggers with twins.

9:12 on Amtrak

Buy online, pickup the ticket at Union Station, it’s super easy. 12:00 Pacific Surfliner to San Luis Obispo, arrives 8:30. It’s 11:20. 40 minutes is plenty of time to walk up Kettner and get a picnic at Mona Lisa. Two ham sandwiches and a bottle of pink. Make it back with five minutes to spare.

On the train they freak out over my picnic. “A train is like a restaurant.” is what the conductor says. “You can’t just bring your own food and wine.”

I’m not the only one they freak out on. An overly-officious crew. Customer service? It’s more like the DMV on here. Makes me wonder if it’s a coincidence that my car is maybe 80% empty.

But beautiful. No jackass train crew can trump the SoCal coast. The flat run across Los Penasquitos lagoon. The idleness of a Del Mar afternoon and no shirts to wear. The big horsering by the sea, ready for another season to start. Cardiff-by-the-Sea, as if it’s somewhere in England. Oceanside-upon-Thames. The pier at San Clemente, afternoon sun gleaming on an aquamarine sea, the Pacific so placid & passive here in the lee of the big bay that extends from Gaviota to Tijuana.

Santa Ana. Fullerton. Anaheim. A blondie 40-going-on-22 sitting with her daughter 12-going-on-22. Both cross their wonderful bronze legs at the same time and wave goodbye to daddy as the train pulls out.

Round the corner, it’s LA. U.S. Bank Tower, the Colossus of the West, tallest thing west of the Mississippi – tallest thing we’ve made at least. No match for the San Gabriels, let alone Shasta, Tahoma, Denali, Whitney, the Rockies – but that’s another story. This is the capital of the southern West Coast, capital of everything from here clear to Mexico City. Financial hub. Transportation hub. Service hub. Immigration hub. Style hub. Sociological hub. Hub of hubs, setter of trends, and nowhere is she encapsulated as in this view from the Surfliner: Her skyline front and center. Her freeways criss-crossing and laden to the guardrails with cars. Her cemented river running alongside, tagged and tagged, some of the vilest and best graffiti art in the world. LA!

North to Burbank. Glendale. Chatsworth. Moorpark. Camarillo. San Buenaventura. Clearing Ventura, windsailers, a jet ski flying over gentle breakers, a pack of dolphins arcing out of the green sea.

Delays all the way to Santa Barbara. “These delays are not usual” they keep saying. Ah Amtrak, you lovable deadbeat, we want so badly to adore you too…

Wishing we could have those delays in Santa Barbara. Thinking of a pint of Guinny at the James Joyce, all those peanut shells under foot. Thinking of tacos at Super Rica. Thinking of strolling up State Street, lounging at the Mission.

Gaviota. California’s big turn at Point Conception. Desiccated grasses leading to a greasy sunset sea. A quarry, the light, cattle grazing on the plain above the sea. A dirty haze on the horizon, a line of fog beyond – the friendly fog bank of the northern California coast. A creek knifed into the ancient seafloor-turned-land, dropping ten feet for a four-foot wide crick.

Appears out of a golden mist a lone oil rig, maybe seven miles out.

Lines of breakers from here clear to Japan.

Lone pickups at the end of drives on the edge of the beach in Lompoc CA.

The sad Lompoc-Surf station with not even a house in sight.

Vandenburg launch platform.

Honey hills of Santa Maria Valley in mid-July.

SLO Town, forty minutes late, end of the line. A couple kids and an old couple going on by bus. As for me, Mike’s cooking mussels when I call. Here he comes to get me. Ride’s over… Pacific Surfliner + Verizon Broadband card = not a bad way to spend a long afternoon and evening.

In San Diego For The Weekend

Maybe it was the 4AM wake-up call talking, but this morning I wasn’t even that excited about coming down. Just another trip. Part business, part pleasure. But as soon as the plane broke the cloud cover, and there was the naval base and all of National City with tiendas and lavanderias and great grey clouds wafting up from taco shops, and then the oddly angled towers of our silver city, purple splots where Jacarandas are throwing out their blossoms, the I-5 which I used to imagine was our Seine, all the yachts bobbing up and down like corks, rectangular Ronald Reagan in her Coronado slip, that Grecian sun sparkling gold on the blue harbor, my iPod flipping from Paolo Conte to Tristeza… stoked to be home. Home that was never quite home. San Diego!

Back In The USA

Living in Paris was everything I’d expected it to be: exciting, indulgent, transcendent. I worked, I played, I ate. I lived my dream of living in Paris as a young man.

I’m spending the summer in Port Orchard, a smallish town on the Kitsap Peninsula in Washington state. Kitsap is a strange splotch of land that looks like New York State, Florida and Thailand has a bizarre love triangle and planted the child in the midst of the Puget Sound. We’re only about 12 miles from Seattle as the bird flies, as they say, but we’re a good 1:30 travel whether you go by boat or by car, and like other American spaces which lie outside of one hour’s travel to the nearest city, we’re pretty rural out here.

It’s been quite a change, moving from one of the most cosmopolitan spaces in the world to an mildly-economically-depressed small town. Culture shock. I look around and see a town full of people motivated by boredom and fear. The two create a deep ugliness, as they always do when they parade together. You don’t always see it, but you always sense it, just underneath the surface of every interaction.

But life in a small town isn’t all bad. It’s also beautiful here. Actually stunningly so. From our back porch you can see the Sinclair Inlet, Bainbridge Island, Bremerton and the Manette Bridge, the carrier base, lines of clouds over the Hood Canal, and on clear days the eastern Olympic Range, the Brothers and Mt. Constance and the lesser ridges stretching all the way to Juan de Fuca. It’s paradisaical… and there are some good people here too, people who’ve escaped the traps that decaying rural cities lay and live in peace out here. They’re friendly. They wave when you drive by.

In the coming weeks I’ll be sharing more about the Northwest cities I’m considering moving to, as well as what I’m doing during my work hours these days.

Thanks for everything,

Jon O

Notes from the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts

This is one of my favorite art museums in the world.

I take an art museum hard. They overwhelm me. Paintings are not like books. In a bookstore you can ignore all the books except the three you’re looking for. The ideas in books need time to get their hooks into you, and if you don’t give them the time, they’re just dead trees on the shelves.

Physical art, on the other hand – painting, sculpture – is like an odor. Unless you’re blind, you can’t ignore it. It assaults you.

I like going to new museums, but I love returning to one.  Knowing a collection makes it easy to do what I like, which is put my head down and make straight for what I’m interested in. Only after digesting what I came to see am I encounter something new.

I go to the Musee de Beaux Artes for the Bruegels.  More than just simple celebrations, Brueghel’s paintings present an alternate history, like Don Delillo’ Underworld, which posits that what’s really happening is what’s happening in the layers deep beneath what’s reported as happening.

In this small but (and) wonderful collection, Bruegel says: We want to dance with our ugly townsfolk, because we are the ugly masses ignorant of Icarus and other big dreams.

Says, turn off the TV, the Icarus of Fortis and Lehman Brothers et all aren’t all that important to you and me.

Says, go to work (plough or sail), play, drink, go forth lustily and lust after fat wenches – as Jordaens in the next room down says, you too can be KING (but don’t forget to change the brat’s diaper).

Says, to mash-up Gary Snyder and Tom Waits: Fuck the noisy machinery on the boob-tube, get behind the mule in the morning and plow.

Says, let the angels have their battles with the world’s absurdities. Maybe even kick back with a beer and watch it on a quiet Sunday, while the kids ice skate and build snowmen. But don’t fret it. It’s their fight, not yours. You and they both shall pass, and you’ve got better things to worry about.

***

After Brueghel I checked out one of Cravach’s Venuses (Venusi?), poked around the collection of adoration imagery, and spent some time checking out the temptation of St. Anthony. But I decided to skip most of the older works, including Reubens, and headed downstairs to the modern wing.

***

Delvaux:

Look what flesh does to bones, yes, but like St. Anthony upstairs will tell you, flesh turns to bone as well.

And his train coming in the night, with the girl hiding behind the fence that she’s outgrowing… it is adolescence arriving in the spooky night, and it’s also an appreciation of the heavy feeling of a night train arriving at an empty provincial station.

***

Seurat inventing the pixel.

***

Dali’s St. Anthony resisting his giantess temptations. He kneels and with wiry arms holds up the most pathetic simple cross. Making a firm & what appears to be a final stand in the middle of the mind’s broad plain, no kind of defensive position.

Left me laughing, thinking hell, resistance? 21st Century American doesn’t even try. 21st Century American asks the elephant where to stick his credit card. 21st Century American sits making snide, ironic comments about stilts while his wants trample him to mush.

***

But finally the best – Khnopff and his Caresse! (Has to be said in French, ‘luh caw-ess’, to realize that it’s an onomatopoeia, in our integrating it into English we’ve managed to trample the romance out of the word – certainly not the first time it’s been done.)

The Caresse is like Leda and the Swan reversed. It had me scribbling a poem, which I’m leery about posting here, since it’s not really fleshed out much beyond a first draft at this point, but here goes:

In or Out?

Like when, handling our staff
we find our other hand
finger-deep in a tuft
of coarse fur, feeling
another strange heart beating
the ribs & teats of a long & lean torso
& a face in our face
whispering “Like to?”

A silly girl.
Her taut thighs ripe for the spreading
if we’d like to.

But watching that long, thick tail throb
and the points of claws on a belly
we remember being bitten by a kitten
who’s line of play didn’t align with ours
and would a cat care how we answer?
All the ways she has to shred a swan
if she’d like to.