Stupidfool.org

The Walkmen: You & Me

I'm pretty surprised by how much I enjoy the new Walkmen album, You & Me, never having been much of a fan in the past. It's big, and nostalgic, and kind of dark.

Kind of like the season one finale of Mad Men, which I just watched a couple of weeks ago. The best part, where Don is leading the Kodak people through the campaign for the slide projector, while showing slides of his family:

It goes backwards and forwards, and it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called "The Wheel"; it's called "The Carousel". It lets us travel around and around and back home again.

Anyway, You & Me is out August 19, but you can buy it now for $5 (5 dollars!) from Amie Street. And in so doing, you'll be helping kids with cancer. So, you know, you'd sort of have to hate music and kids not to buy this album.

Robin Thicke: "Magic"

Robin Thicke's new(-ish) track, "Magic"--from his forthcoming album Something Else, about which I'm really excited--has grown on me a lot over the last couple of weeks.

The video [1], however, is inscrutable (though, oddly enough, it does make me want to play Rainbow Road).

[1] I'd embed the video, but "Embedding [is] disabled by request". That seems reasonable--virality (virulence?) is overrated, after all.

Deals on Amazon MP3

For the past couple of months, I've been buying all of my music on the Amazon MP3 store. It's fast, easy, and DRM-free (my favorite part).

Plus, they have great deals on music. Every day they post a daily special, usually for $0.99 to $2.99; and every Friday, they post five albums, each for $5. Today's special is Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

To subscribe, follow amazonmp3 on twitter.

Dave Longstreth on summer music

As if there weren't already enough to love about Dirty Projectors--e.g., their last album, Rise Above--Dave Longstreth's new summer music playlist, commissioned by New York Magazine, is brilliant & charming & funny, and--most important--great to listen to.

To wit:

1. Jackie Wilson, "Lonely Teardrops"
"I've been looking for ecstatic voices, and Jackie’s got it. Once, while driving the family minivan on a summer vacation, my dad got a speeding ticket listening to this song. It made him drive too fast. Is there anything more summery than driving too fast?"

Listen to the mix, and read along with his annotations, here.

Culture QotW: Cheers!

Salma Hayek recommends Campari

Share a recipe for your favorite summer drink.

I can answer this one!

Lately, I've been enjoying a nightly Americano, made with equal parts Campari and sweet vermouth (I really like Vya), along with a splash of club soda and an optional slice of orange.

It's refreshing, but with a distinct bitterness, which I find I appreciate more and more nowadays.

"Something's not right."

It's a couple of months old, but here's Robert Forster writing about his latest album The Evangelist and his final work with Grant McLennan, who died last year.

He lived in a small two-storey tower at the back of a house, and I climbed the stairs to his bedroom, where he’d set out two chairs. He then played me three songs. Two of them were amazing, and one in particular, Demon Days, I immediately thought was one of the best four or five he’d ever written. It was a waltz ballad, and as he strummed and sang it, with a beautiful instrumental section included, I looked at him in wonder. And I’m glad that at that moment, as the room went still, I said: "For the next 18 months, I’m going to be writing just to catch up with you." He laughed, but it was true.

"Demon Days" is one of my favorite songs of this year. It's truly a McLennan song, and Forster sounds as if his voice is on the verge of breaking just singing it. So sad.

For the love of pork.

"I'm teaching this class because... well, I really like pork," said the instructor of the cooking class I took today [1]. And that's when I knew we'd all be okay.

And after eating what felt like a whole hog--a cuban roast pork sandwich; a mache and pancetta salad; a warm potato and sausage salad with arugula (I made that!); a pappardelle with pork sugo; a pork chili with cornmeal dumplings; a braised pork belly--after all that, I think that I can say, yes, I've had enough pork. Enough amazing, fatty pork. For today.

[1] "The Whole Hog", at Tante Marie's Cooking School.

"A Few Too Many" in the New Yorker

For Alex: the New Yorker has an exhaustive article on hangovers, both the causes and the cures:

There are other non-ingested remedies. Amazon will sell you a refrigeratable eye mask, an aromatherapy inhaler, and a vinyl statue of St. Vivian, said to be the patron saint of the hung over. She comes with a stand and a special prayer.

Water Wars

I discovered today that our monthly water bill (from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission) includes a graph of our water usage over the last year. [1] It's pretty fascinating trying to correlate it to events; for example, we used a lot of water last November, the month after Penelope was born.

I think I'm going to experiment with bringing our water usage down to see how much of an effect I can have, now that I'll have this data on a monthly basis.

But here's what I'd like next: a comparison chart (anonymous, of course) to everyone in my neighborhood; my city; my state; and so on. That way, I can see how we compare to other people in our area, and it can become a competition. Give me stats, charts, and graphs showing us how we compare, and you'll see our water usage drop!

[1] Considering that they're pushing water conservation, I'll bet this isn't a coincidence.

McAlmont & Butler

Speaking of Duffy, Bernard Butler produced a couple of the songs on her album Rockferry. Not only that, but David McAlmont provided backing vocals on two of the songs.

This pleases me greatly, as one of my favorite albums from the 1990s is the album Butler and McAlmont made together, The Sound of McAlmont & Butler. A couple of months ago I was inspired to dig it out of a box and rip it, and I've been listening to it obsessively ever since.

While the two of them created some incredible music separately (Butler in Suede, and McAlmont both solo and with Saul Freeman as Thieves, whose "Unworthy" is one of my favorite songs of all time), I like them best together, where they created two of the best pop songs of the 90s: "Yes" and "You Do".

Here's "Yes" in all its soulful, operatic glory: