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"Boy, you better go run to her..."

Animals in the womb ad from Ford

This commercial (from Ford Europe) almost made me cry this morning! Baby animals in the womb? So cute! (via Very Short List)

Two other books I've read recently (in addition to...): Plenty, which I bought on a warm spring day at the farmer's market when I was particularly inspired by the idea of eating locally; and Busting Vegas, which is another Ben Mezrich book about smart young people in over their heads (c.f. Bringing Down the House, Ugly Americans). Both were okay, but overall felt a little bit empty for me--honestly, though, I think this is my newfound bias towards fiction talking.

R. Kelly. Double Up. On Vox. Best ad evar!

Du Og Meg

Yesterday, I found a wonderful Of Montreal show captured online. Today, I listened to it, and loved "Du Og Meg," which despite my love for this year's Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? I hadn't heard (it's from Icons, Abstract Thee, a special-edition EP that was previously to this month sold only on tour, I guess?). It's a lovely, heart-on-the-sleeve pop song that reminds me of early Orange Juice, with all of the charm/giddiness/lovesickness that implies. Listen!

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

I finished Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics last night, which book sounds like some sort of weird collection of boring science essays, but isn't, at all. And I've also found that if you describe it as a "murder mystery," people just look at you kind of funny.

But so this book is to a murder mystery as green tea mochi is to ice cream: it's all sophisticated & scholarly & erudite, but in the end, it's just really good fucking ice cream.

One of my favorite passages:

I looked down at him. He looked like Hamlet. And I'm not talking about the Hamlets enamored with the language, the ones always thinking ahead to the upcoming sword fight or where to stress the line (Get thee to a nunnery, Get thee to a nunnery), not the Hamlet worried about how well his tunic fits or whether he can be heard in the back. I'm talking about the Hamlets who actually start to wonder if they should be, or not be, the ones who are bruised by Life's Elbows, Kidney Punches, Head Butts and Bites on the Ear, the ones who, after the final curtain, can barely speak, eat or take off their stage makeup with cold cream and cotton balls. They go home and do a lot of staring at walls.

From Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics, p. 399

Anyway, I loved it.

Music at Ssäm Bar

Be Easy

Aside from the steamed pork buns, the crispy fried artichokes, & of course, the glorious Bo Ssäm--thank you, kind pig, as you were one of the most delicious things I've ever eaten--reason #57 to love Momofuku Ssäm Bar:

During our recent dinner there, we heard (among other things) Ghostface Killah's "Be Easy", Pavement's "At & T", and T. Rex's "Mambo Sun".

So but yes, aside from the amazing food: great music.

Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys

As much as I loved Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, until recently I hadn't since sought out any of his other books. In particular, Wonder Boys, of which I never saw the movie, either, but whose trailer I was always sort of annoyed by. [1]

But so I read Wonder Boys last weekend, and I really loved it, and wondered again if I might actually enjoy the movie. And so afterwards, I was looking at the movie info, and based on the character list it seems as if a large chunk of the book was omitted from the movie--namely, the scenes where Grady and James visit Emily's family and celebrate Passover.

That would, indeed, be too bad, as those were my favorite passages in the book, including the following:

He inhaled, and exhaled, and then, as he started in on that old rigged four-part quiz we'd all heard Philly reel off, in weary Hebrew, so many times before--asking Irv why, on this night that commemorated a strange assortment of emergencies and miracles, he ate crackers, horseradish, and parsley and sat slumped against a crocheted orange throw pillow--the Warshaws left off their arguments, and their wry asides, and their shifting around in their chairs. Instead they just sat, motionless, listening, while James picked his way carefully through the passage, in his clear, high corrupted-altar-boy voice, as though his Haggadah were an instruction manual and there was some complicated machine there in the living room that we were all trying to assemble.

[1] I'm not a big fan of Michael Douglas, particularly when he's making faces like this. Thankfully, my paperback doesn't have his simpering face on the cover.

"Lord, beer me strength."

Wowee Zowee

This week's episode of The Office == greatness. So many great lines! "Question: what kind of bear is best?"; "Whoa, what the--why is my girlfriend here?"; and, of course, the title of this post, which may be one of the greatest Office lines ever.

A new Hey Willpower track! "Not Trippin'" is the new song I most remember from the show we saw last year (video clip of the performance), and just last week I realized it was up on their MySpace page. This is some of the best indie r&b/pop around, people!

In the mid-90s, when bands like Pavement were all the rage for the college kids (of which I was one), I was really into British music, to the point of completely ignoring any band that NME hadn't declared the next big thing. And oh, what I missed. Take "At & T", which is sweet, nonsensical, and ecstatic, & completely exhilarating.

For the first one-and-one-half minutes, Dizzee Rascal's "Sirens" is, frankly, sort of average. But between 1:30 and 2:10 it's fucking thrilling, and 40 seconds of absolute greatness is enough for me.

More books.

Over a recent trip & the requisite flights, I read Calvin Trillin's The Tummy Trilogy and J. Maarten Troost's Getting Stoned with Savages. The latter was an incredibly light read about the author's experiences living on a couple of South Pacific islands, and was exactly what I wanted for plane reading. It's fairly light stuff, which is fine.

But so The Tummy Trilogy is really quite interesting, as it's a collection of three of Trillin's short collections of stories (dating from 1974, 1978, and 1983). Trillin's a fantastic & hilarious writer, and most importantly, as a promoter of interesting & local food he's incredibly convincing--he's now made me intensely crave fried clams, smoked whitefish, and Cincinnati chili, for instance.

But what shocks me most about reading his stuff is how now, how current, a lot of it seems. Take the following passage, which sounds like it could be from any 2007 article or book about the qualities of local food (but which is actually from 1978):

A lot of vegetables at the Barnstaple market taste more like vegetables than shelf displays simply because they are the product of a kitchen garden rather than an assembly line. ... It is not unusual to come across a farmer's wife standing behind a table that holds, say, three dozen eggs, one chicken, three bunches of carrots, some beetroot, five turnips, six baby cabbages, a bunch of rhubarb, one marrow, a jar of apple chutney, and a jar of quince jelly. ... A preference for free-range eggs is based partly on the theory that a chicken that spends its life roaming around a barnyard instead of being crammed into the wire cages used for what are called battery or factory or deep-litter hens is a healthier fowl that is likely to produce a better egg.

I don't know whether to be happy or sad to fully realize how long people have been thinking & writing about these things. I think I'll settle on hungry, and leave it at that.

"I hope to God you're not as dumb as you make out..."

Rip It Up

Audio: Congrats, you're the radio DJ!  What six songs are in your first on-air set?
Submitted by LeendaDLL.

Every month, I make a mix tape [1] of the stuff I've been listening to & loving that month; every couple of months, I roll up my favorite stuff from those mixes into a "Good Stuff" playlist, where I actually try to sequence stuff nicely.

All of which is to say that I've been doing the monthly mixes for about 5 years, but have been doing the sort-of-quarterly roll-ups only starting last July, or so.

And so these were the first six tracks of that playlist, which I thoroughly enjoy:

1. Orange Juice, "Rip it Up"
2. Hey Willpower, "Chewing Gum"
3. A Tribe Called Quest, "Steve Biko (Stir it Up)"
4. Jamie Lidell, "When I Come Back Around"
5. Ghostface Killah, "Underwater'
6. Robyn, "Konichiwa Bitches"

To the right, "Rip it Up" (video): a bouncy funk/disco pulse, a wonderfully sleazy saxophone solo, and a very short but clever bit of guitar ("and my favorite song's entitled... 'Boredom'").

[1] Well, technically, it's an iTunes playlist. Why does technology have to make things so easy? It takes away all the joy, and the pain, and the work involved!

"A girl I used to know..."

Paul Rudd and David Wain singing More Than a Feeling

Paul Rudd fronting Of Montreal in a karaoke version of Boston's "More than a Feeling"? Yes please! [1]

That said, could you really go wrong with Boston?

But once you've gotten good & happy by watching the video, you might not want to read this (a month or so old, but still). What a sad, sad thing.

[1] And that's not all! There are so many more performances to choose from (Craig Wedren, Michael Showalter, &c.)!

"Not just sometimes..."

Siobhan Donaghy - Ghosts

Siobhan Donaghy's "Sometimes" may be the most gorgeous thing I've heard yet this year, even if the samples of the plane engine end up giving me Lost-ian nightmares. And with this & everything else I've heard thus far--"Ghosts", "12 Bar Acid Blues", &c.--I'm just so excited about Ghosts.

Speaking of which, the album cover art for Ghosts (to the right) is really lovely.

Freddy and Fredericka

Freddy and Fredericka

The following is just one of many lovely passages from Freddy and Fredericka, which was recommended to me six to eight months ago, and which I've now gotten around to reading--I finished it the week before last on a flight, and loved it.

"What will he be like?" Bannerman echoed. "He won't be like us. He'll arrive clean-shaven, having moved heaven and earth to make a fire in the snow, to heat the water. He will have washed his clothes. He will look, despite seven days in the wilderness, like an officer on parade. He will have strained as we have never strained, carrying the burden of the whole country and its history. And he will have carried, its weight far heavier than any gear a soldier has ever carried, his reputation as a madman and an idiot. For a person of honour, that is a difficult thing indeed."

From Mark Helprin's Freddy and Fredericka, p. 544

The book is really gorgeous & sad & hilariously funny, a sort of love note for everyone and everything involved--America, Britain, the monarchy, &c.

And combined with watching The Queen a couple of months ago, I'm now an absolute royalist! I find myself reading articles about the Prince of Wales [1] with a newfound respect & really, truly caring about the royal family as people, which is a pretty nice thing for art to've done for me. Very highly recommended.

[1] Like this one from Vanity Fair about the prince's environmental work.