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Duffy's "Warwick Avenue"

My favorite video of the moment? Duffy's "Warwick Avenue", which is one of the most gorgeous and intimate videos I've seen in a long time. And, of course, the song is lovely as well.

(And if those tears aren't real, she should be an actress.)

Buffalo!

My new favorite sentence in the English language:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

It's a grammatically correct sentence that utilizes three different meanings of the word "buffalo": one as an adjective, one as a noun, and one as a verb. Pay close attention to the capitalization!

It sort of makes you appreciate the difficulty of learning English (or any language, for that matter).

Hence, the fanatical devotion of fans of Crazy English, maybe? From the New Yorker article about Li Yang's shouting-as-learning program:

Li's cosmology ties the ability to speak English to personal strength, and personal strength to national power. It's a combination that produces intense, sometimes desperate adoration. A student named Feng Tao told me that on one occasion, realizing that he had enough cash for tuition to an out-of-town Li lecture but not enough for train fare, "I went and sold blood."

You, sir, are no Prince.

I love Lil' Wayne, but, well, this is kind of ridiculous:

But I guess everyone has to start somewhere! (Via Idolator.)

Roots

We launched a new sixapart.com a couple of days ago, and I'm so proud to work with the team that built and implemented such a beautiful and useful site!

On Elevators

I'm sure it's old news by now, but I'm just getting around to reading this article on elevators in the New Yorker, and this, in particular, stood out to me:

In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer.

It's true: even though I know that the close button doesn't work, I still use it.

"Why Bother?"

Michael Pollan poses a question that I'd assume a lot of people have about how to fight climate change on an individual basis--"Why bother?". For my part, I was (again) inspired by the thought of planting a garden:

But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can’t do much of anything that doesn’t involve division or subtraction.

Now, to actually do it.

Dirty Projectors: Rise Above

Out of laziness, I missed the Dirty Projectors show last week in San Francisco. I'm pretty disappointed, because I'm sure I missed an amazing show, and Rise Above--their most recent album--is one of my current favorites.

If you're not familiar with the concept of Rise Above, here's how I described it around eight months ago:

[it's] a reinterpretation of Black Flag's Damaged, made without listening to the original album, recorded on a four-track that Dave Longstreth picked up mid-inspiration at the local music shop (apparently), but with merely a 25-year-old memory of said album and its songs & lyrics ...

I love this because--yes, taking the story with a grain of salt--Rise Above is what Damaged sounds like inside of Dave Longstreth's head! This is how his twenty-five-year-old memory of the album has evolved, and that's pretty neat. Frankly, it sounds better than Black Flag ever did, to me, and probably a lot worse to people who grew up listening to Black Flag.

The best thing about Rise Above--and what makes it all work--is the sense of urgency in Longstreth's voice; "Police Story" may start with Getty Address-style strings, but then he wails:

This fucking city
is run by pigs!
They take away the rights
from all the kids.

As a reference point, Longsteth's take on punk sounds very much like early Scritti Politti: scratchy, nervous guitars combined with a mix of anxious yelps and R&B crooning.

And, perhaps despite itself, some moments of really intense beauty. The album closes with "Rise Above", one of the most conventionally pretty songs the Dirty Projectors have ever recorded, and a gorgeous end to a truly brilliant album.

Extending your life

Today, I read this Michael Kinsley piece in a recent New Yorker, the premise of which being that longevity is essentially the last competition that you'll ever have, and that after arriving at sixty years old, it's totally up for grabs whether you'll die tomorrow or live until ninety. Fun!

Oh, and, I certainly wasn't aware of the state of surgery/repair w/r/t Parkinson's:

[The symptoms] got even milder after I had an operation, a couple of years ago, to implant wires in my brain and two pacemaker-type batteries in my chest ... During the operation, your head is screwed into a metal frame and the frame is screwed into the operating table. My surgery lasted nine hours, and for most of it I had to be awake, so that the doctors could test the connection, like asking somebody to go upstairs and see if the light in the bedroom comes back on while you fiddle with the circuit-breaker box in the basement.

It's the future! And it's pretty fascinating.

I always knew Fabio was a dick.

There's a fascinating profile of George Clooney in the latest New Yorker. I particularly enjoyed this description of Clooney's altercation with Fabio last year:

I asked Clooney about the Fabio incident last November, and he laughed, saying, "What do you want? Dinner at an Italian restaurant with Sarah and myself and my buddy Benny and his girlfriend Meilani, and there's a table sitting there full of four or five women and Fabio with his back to me, and it's one of those things where they just keep taking your picture." He went on, "This isn't new to me. I'm going to go to dinner tonight, and they'll do it, they'll position themselves. I know it, and I'm used to it. But it went on and it went on, and I gave them the finger"—a photograph of the gesture was published online—"and they kept doing it and Fabio was looking over his shoulder and laughing and smiling and shit. So finally I go, 'O.K., enough.' I go, 'Knock it off, enough.'" And, speaking across to Fabio's table, "'I thought you were a nice guy.'"

Pop in 2008

2008 started with a glut of indie pop, for me: Magnetic Fields, Raveonettes, Nicole Atkins, Vampire Weekend. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

But, well, it all started to feel like I was in a bit of a rut.

Which is why I'm so happy that the last month or so has brought some real honest-to-goodness pop and R&B: Duffy's "Mercy" and Estelle's "American Boy"; new Usher, new Erykah Badu, new Lil Wayne; a rediscovery of Girls Aloud's "Can't Speak French"; and perhaps most unexpected, an incredible track from Mariah Carey!

It's a good year.