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Seven Good Reasons Why Gram Parsons Is My New Number-One Dream Boy of All Time

May 29, 2013, 9:23 am
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BY LIZ

On Monday I had a really cool experience that involved swinging on a swing while telling the story of Gram Parsons's life and death to two strangers and two of my friends. We were in Laurel Canyon and my audience was sitting before me on a wooden bench; I was drinking champagne from a jar and wearing my new Gram Parsons shirt that looks like this. It all started because someone asked me to explain the plot of the movie Grand Theft Parsons, which I've never actually seen. "GRAM PARSONS WAS BORN A REALLY LONG TIME IN SOME TOWN IN FLORIDA I CAN'T REMEMBER THE NAME OF," I began, logically. "His family was very, very rich! They owned citrus orchards or something." I took them through Gram's dad's suicide and his mom's drinking-herself-to-death, all the way to Gram's overdosing at the Joshua Tree Inn when he was 26-years-old. A funny part was when one of the stranger-dudes was all, "Why do you keep smiling about everything? THIS STORY IS SUPER-SAD," which is a great point. But I'm a smiler, I smile my way through most sad stories. 

Anyway the point is love Gram Parsons more than anything right now and I want everyone else to love him too. And I know you can't force that kind of love on anyone, but here's seven good reasons why you should maybe consider making Gram Parsons your new number-one dream boy, at least for the summertime:

i. UMMMMMMMM CUZ HE WROTE ALL THESE GREAT SONGS THAT WILL BREAK YOUR HEART FOREVER IN THE MOST BEAUTIFULLY FORTIFYING WAY? Duh. Last year my friend Tim made me a Spotify playlist cutely titled "Liz Parsons,"which is a pretty solid Gram Parsons primer. It's missing some of my faves by the Flying Burrito Brothers, like "Just Can't Be" and "Older Guys" and "The Train Song," but whatevsies. If you're really deeply curious about Gram Parsons though, or if you're a person who's generally into gorgeous music, then you should absolutely buy the album Another Side of This Life. It's just Gram and his guitar, and he covers "Cod'ine" by Buffy Sainte-Marie, my second-favorite "Cod'ine" cover after the one by Ver Sacrum (a now-defunct band starring Laura Jane Faulds). My second-biggest triumph of Monday, after Gram Parsons champagne swingset storytelling hour, was telling this famous musician dude to listen to Another Side of This Life. I feel like he's not gonna follow through but what I can I do about that, I'm only one woman.

ii. HE WAS THE CUTEST HAM. Gram the ham! I'm talking about the handful of music videos the Flying Burrito Brothers made, including:

a. the "Older Guys" video, where Gram is dancing up a storm, on a boat, in tight white pants:


(BTW there's a part in the documentary Fallen Angel where someone makes fun of Gram for dancing like Mick Jagger in the "Older Guys," but I don't know, I think it's just the most adorbs thing I've ever seen. Kind of a gross thought, but I wonder if Gram would have gotten by a little better if he'd existed at a time that was more conducive to his becoming "a video star.")

b. the "Christine's Tune" video, where Gram does this cutesy 'Ladies and gentlemen: Chris Hillman!!!!" gesture right when it's Chris Hillman's turn to sing (aka at 0:26).

c. the "Hot Burrito #1" video, where Gram puts his sunglasses on halfway through the first verse, sings the next few lines, then takes his sunglasses off again. That is such a good move. If more dudes in my immediate universe had even half the wherewithal displayed by Gram in that moment, then, I don't know - I'd probably be into way more actual dudes instead of falling for dead rock stars all the time.


iii. THE GRAM/KEITH RICHARDS BROMANCE IS SO ENDLESSLY ENDEARING TO ME. I don't have much to write about this at the moment, on account of the fact that I just got an idea for a short story mega-loosely based on said bromance. For now I'll just tell you that whenever you get to the part in any Gram Parsons-inclusive rock history where it's time for Gram to get kicked out of Nellcôte, it's always epically sad. This is my fave pic of those two crazy babies:





iv. THE GRAM/JONATHAN RICHMAN BROMANCE IS ALSO SO ENDLESSLY ENDEARING TO ME. I don't know much about it, beyond the fact that they were sorta pals played music together and Gram got Jonathan into all this country music. I just really like the idea of Gram Parsons and Jonathan Richman hanging out, these two baby-faced boy-weirdos with their cute little voices. Total heart-melter. 

v. I DIG HIS PACIFISM. I watched Gimme Shelter the other night. I was "in a bad place" and sometimes bad vibes on top of bad vibes have the weird effect of evening me out. The Flying Burrito Brothers played Altamont but in Gimme Shelter you only get to see the back of Gram's head, which is such a drag. Still, there's a part where Gram's trying to calm the crowd in his little-boy voice and it's really sweet and lightened my heart:


vi. I ALSO DIG HIS PENMANSHIP. A couple weeks ago I read Grievous Angel: An Intimate Biography of Gram Parsons, which is so fawning and excessively romantic that I can't believe it was written by someone who isn't me. I really liked it; it's a good read. The author got her hands on a bunch of love letters Gram wrote to his girlfriend when he was 13, most of which he wraps up with the line "Well, I gotta make like a door and close." His handwriting is so pretty and girly. Gram was always a romantic.



vii. HE WAS JUST VERY BEAUTIFUL AND I DON'T THINK I'LL EVER GET TIRED OF GAZING UPON HIS BEAUTIFUL ANGELIC FACE. And I don't care if I'm objectifying him. Objectifying beautiful sad rock-star boys is one of the things I'm best at, and I promise to never ever stop. So here are some beautiful pictures of beautiful Gram Parsons, with whom we are all now finally so madly in love:





(FYI This is Gram at Harvard, where - fun fact! - his classmates included Al Gore.)









(These last two are Gram at Joshua Tree; that's him and Anita Pallenberg. Gram loved Joshua Tree and it seems nice to end with him being happy and free.)
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Thing of the Week: Drunk-Listening to "Don't Worry Baby," Cake with Coffee Poured All Over It, Regina

May 31, 2013, 9:48 am
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LJ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Walking Home Drunk & Listening to "Don't Worry Baby" on Headphones



This week it was summer. It was that week when you remember what summer feels like, and it stops being a dream. Every wonderful thing you remembered summer as being is better than you remembered but then there is also some annoying shit about it that you repressed all winter, such as how crappy your hair will look/ all sweating-related aspects of summer in general- but it's a small price to pay, really, for how good the air feels. The air just feels so fucking great. 

On Wednesday night I met my dad for dinner at the Whippoorwill; I ate the vanilla cheesecake with wild ginger syrup and marcona almonds, it looked like this:



and it was really just, something else. It was so light and herby and green. It tasted like if the concept of "a novel about an eccentric Baroness set in the English countryside" exploded into the most beautiful dessert you've ever eaten. After din I went out for drinks with my ex-sous-chef and her girlfriend and we had the loudest blast ever. Cooks are my favorite people in the world. Front of house, we're comparatively dorky. 

We said goodbye and I decided to walk home, all the way across the city, because it's summer, and nothing- nothing- is better than walking home drunk and listening to headphones in the summertime. It is literally my ideal state of existence. Usually during the winter I remember that, spend a lot of time mooning about how bad I wish I was doing it, but this winter I forgot, so I was beautifully surprised by finding myself doing it and then realizing how happy it was making me only after becoming that happy organically! Those summer-specific walks are when I figure it all out, when songs sound the best, when the truth is so easy and I'm having so much fun, a heavy kind of fun. It's definitely when I feel most me to myself, when the words my head is saying make the most sense. 

I listened to the Rolling Stones and took pictures of the moon and tweeted a bunch of weird shit about the Rolling Stones and kept thinking about my Free Will Astrology this week, which was all about opening doors you didn't know weren't locked. So I was just Tweeting and Snapchatting all this wildness and thinking "It's a door! I'm opening a door!"- I felt very free. I played myself Don't Worry Baby, and it was perfect, and I told myself that I had to make Don't Worry Baby be my Thing of the Week this week, even though I already had this very clever other little thing already written in my head- but it wasn't true. I think if my Thing of the Week was ever a lie I'd die on instinct. 

I don't know if I've ever written about how much I love Don't Worry Baby- I've always thought of it as a given, kind of, that every human loves Don't Worry Baby, and that I am merely one of them. But nope. I think I love Don't Worry Baby more than the average person. I think it's the second-best song ever written, after You Can't Always Get What You Want; I'm even tempted to say that it's better than You Can't Always Get What You Want, but You Can't Always Get What You Want is longer and way more complicated, and I think that long and complicated things should be rewarded for being long and complicated. 

I'm thinking of a bunch of thoughts about Don't Worry Baby right now, staring at the computer and thinking them, but I don't want to write them down. They're personal. The only thing I really want to say about Don't Worry Baby is that "I guess I shoulda kept my mouth shut when I start to brag about my car" is my favorite part of- well, I was going to say it was my favorite part of Don't Worry Baby, but then the bourbon kicked in, and now I've decided that I'd like to say that it's my favorite part of life. Which is not true, but it's closer to being true than it is to being a lie. And I also wanted to mention how much I love: "And if you knew how much I love you, baby, nothing could go wrong with you"- I like the idea of having that much confidence in the power of your own love. I think, in addition to a lot more door-opening, I'd like to spend this summer acquiring that particular confidence. 

LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Cake with Coffee Poured All Over It


On Saturday I went to Canele for the first time in my life. It was so nice! I had lamb hash and a thousand cups of coffee, and for "breakfast appetizer" my friends and I shared a piece of the ricotta coffee cake. The waitress came by with the cake and set it down on the table; in her hand was a little silver pitcher. "May I pour the coffee?" she asked. "Please!" we all said -- AND THEN SHE POURED HOT COFFEE ALL OVER OUR CAKE. Oh my god it was breathtaking. The cake was this gorgeous spongy pound cake stuff, and it soaked up the coffee and there was a gigantic dollop of ricotta whipped cream on top. The coffee was really rich and the cake was really rich and the ricotta whipped cream was really rich; I'm really into things being "rich" right now. Not just foods but, like, life experiences - you know what I'm sayin? I'm also really into the idea of taking a perfectly pretty little piece of cake and drowning it in superstrong hot coffee and then eating the shit out of it. There's a metaphor there but I'm still working it out, and will be sure to keep you posted on whatever I come up with.

My other, lesser thing of the week is Nico's version of the song "I'm Not Sayin'" by Gordon Lightfoot. I heard it for the first time on Saturday night, at a screening of The Party at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. The song was playing and I tried to Shazam it but Shazam wasn't working. I asked Shane, "Shane, is this Nico?" and Shane was all, "No, I don't think so," and then I was like "WHATEVER SHANE IT'S SO OBVIOUSLY NICO WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?" - which would be funnier if you knew Shane and how he's like the sweetest and most mild-mannered dude on the planet.

Anyway, I mostly appreciate "I'm Not Sayin'" for its jauntiness, how it's so uncharacteristic of Nico to happen on a jaunty kind of level. I'm all for everybody breaking out of his comfort zone these days.



JEN'S THING OF THE WEEK: Regina




Regina is one of my most favorite people on the planet. Actually, in the universe. She's moving to France for the summer (I know, right?) so this week was our last week to hang for a few months. We got some really good hang time in. I'm going to miss her IRL presence dearly but we will snapchat pictures of cats and coffees and we'll send each other mail. Lots of mail. Regina is the best person you could possibly have sending you anything in the mail. Nothing but treasures. This week we went to my two favorite places: Cobble Hill Cinemas and Champs. We saw Frances Ha. We ate sandwiches and fries and drank lemonade with muddled berries and coffee with a cookie and a peanut butter rice krispy with chocolate on top thing. I liked Frances Ha a lot. Greta saved Noah from being an eternal snoozefest. I'm going to google image search pictures of her now. Anyway Regina is the best and she's going to spend the summer in lavender fields (really) and I'm going to spend the summer drawing pictures of bats & witch hats and mailing them to her in a lavender field. In the fall we'll go to Salem.
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Of Wolf Loafers & Whispering Witches

June 4, 2013, 11:48 am
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BY LIZ

...Like Clockwork by Queens of the Stone Age comes out today. I bought it last night around midnight and listened to the whole thing, but listening to a new record on a laptop is ugly and disgusting, even when you turn off all the lights and light a pretty tangerine-red candle and lie in your bed in such a way that you can't even see your laptop. Right now I'm in a place of brattily resenting my "laptop dependence," and last week I made the decision to never again go to a coffee place and order coffee and sit at a table and drink coffee and do work on my laptop. It's soul-deadening and makes me feel like a robot, and already my life is so much lighter, now that I don't do that anymore.

Anyway I woke up very early this morning, ripped out of a moderately cool Rolling Stones dream* by the thud of a bird flying into my bedroom window. I feel like I'm probably the world's number-one person who's most frequently jolted awake by birds crashing into her window, but who really knows. It was gray and June-gloomy out but I got up and went for a big walk, to buy a cup of coffee at my favorite hamburger stand and to listen to Like Clockwork. The air was a little drizzly and I could hear the owls and the roosters, and the corner of the Echo Park Ave/Morton Ave intersection that always smells intensely of fresh paint was extra-narcotic: all in all, pretty ideal conditions for the first proper listen of a new Queens of the Stone Age album.

So I like Like Clockwork, very very much. It sounds like a Queens of the Stone Age record, all nasty and gloomy and boneheaded and dreamy and beautiful, and hearing it this morning spirited me back to when I'd just moved to L.A. and Songs for the Deaf was still sort of new. I lived next door to these three older musician-boys and they played that album all the time; I have nice memories of sitting around their living room, on the couch that was actually a row of seats ripped out of Andy and Matt's ex-band's van, listening to "The Sky Is Fallin'" and drinking wine out of a measuring cup because they didn't have many glasses. I'm still absorbing the album or whatever, but so far my fave song's "If I Had a Tail": the very beginning reminds me of "Mr. Brightside" by the Killers and in the opening lines Josh Homme does this "Lady Marmalade" thing that kind of embarrasses me, but mostly it's sexy and thuggy and scary and gets stuck in your head real good. There's a lyric that goes "When you own the world you're always home," which resonates with me on a heavy level, and the end sounds like witches whispering, like whispering witches.

Also this morning I discovered Y.R.U.'s animal loafers and I want them. I'm most into the wolf ones up top, they're definitely the most Queens of the Stone Age-y of the lot, but the tiger and panda shoes are adorbs too**:





I think a good early-summer look would be wearing wolf loafers, listening to "If I Had a Tail" stupidly loud, ON A STEREO NOT A LAPTOP, drinking wine or beer out of a measuring cup or a cute jar, with some new and lovely weird-smelling dudes playing the roles of my surrogate older brothers. I have one in mind but I still need two more, plus maybe an alternate. Please submit applications via bar-bathroom graffiti, or love letters written in red Sharpie on cheeseburger wrappers from whatever hamburger stand happens to be your personal fave.

*In the dream somebody said to me, "If you don't like 'Paint It Black,' you aren't cool," which is a really solid example of the sort of thing you hear in a dream and it seems really deep and important and life-changing and then you wake up and it still seems really deep and important and life-changing, and then you think about it for five more seconds and it's like, "Oh...well, yeah," and it's both disappointing and amusing. 

**All the photos came from Y.R.U.'s Instagram. I don't know if these shoes actually exist in the world yet - but I sure hope they do!
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I Got Alex Chilton's Name Written On My Body Forever

June 11, 2013, 11:29 am
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BY ELIZABETH ALLISON BARKER

On Friday I got Alex Chilton's name tattooed about an inch above my left ankle. I love Alex Chilton because it seems like he generally did whatever the hell he felt like doing, and a lot of it was beautiful. That's the fast and easy explanation for why I got his name written on my body forever, but here are eight more reasons, about the cosmos and gross sex and sex poetry and summertime and bad vibes and plum trees and huge, undying, life-saving love:

viii. Astrology. I have a recurring daydream in which I meet Alex Chilton (in Heaven, I suppose) and he asks me my birthday and I get to tell him what my birthday is. The answer is we have the same birthday, December 28; we are both Capricorns born in the Week of the Ruler. One of my favorite things about Alex is he was obsessed with astrology and made a point of asking everyone his/her birthday, and thought it was very important that he and Chris Bell were both Capricorns, which of course it was.
        Jen does illustrations for Madame Clairevoyant from The Rumpus, and on April 15 my horoscope told me that week was a "good moment for wandering, at your own speed, for going where you want to go, for looking up at the sky, for seeing your own weird thoughts form in the clouds." My gut response to that was to get all high and mighty, like, "Eww, what do you think I usually do? Do you think I'm one of those super-Capricorn-y Capricorns or something?" But now I'm into it. Maybe a lot of Capricorns aren't accustomed to wandering around and watching their own weird thoughts form in the clouds - but Alex Chilton is, and I am too, and we are just the same: a couple of weird cloudy dreamers together forever.

vii. Because his dream world has the same exact temperature as my dream world. It took me a while to get into the third Big Star record, which I understand is a typical experience. I'd known and loved "Kangaroo" and "Stroke It Noel" since a boy put them on a love mixtape for me when I was 19, and I immediately fell for "Kizza Me" and "Holocaust" when I bought the record earlier this year, but the rest of the songs took their sweet time sinking into my brain. In retrospect, I'm completely charmed by and admiring of their lack of hurriedness in getting to me. 
        I fell in love with the third record late one night in February, when I spent hours and hours sitting at a table on the sidewalk near the Sunset Strip, drinking pink wine and hanging out with a bunch of strange people, some of whom were very lovely. On the way home I drove down Beverly and the sky was so foggy and black, all the light was ghosts; it was the most perfect way you could ever hear "Big Black Car":

 

Now whenever I listen to "Big Black Car" I think of that car ride and I think of the end of the first chapter in my book, which I'm rewriting to give it optimal "Big Black Car" vibes. The scene's in a car when the sky's foggy and black and all the light is ghosts, except the air's more "Massachusetts in deep summer" instead of "Los Angeles in winter": it's heavy and hot and muggy, it kills you a little but it's okay. When Alex sings it ain't gonna lassssst with that hiss at the end, it's so severe and it always jars me, but never in a way that disrupts that cool murky daze the song's put me in. Alex Chilton really knows what he's doing when it comes to "subtly twisted manipulation of vibes." I want to be more like him.

vi. Because he is my favorite girl poet. There's an Alex Chilton song called "Take Me Home and Make Me Like It (Version 2)"; it's probably the Alex Chilton solo jam I'd most rather die than live without. It's seven-minutes-long and it's basically Alex singing/playing the same shit over and over but somehow making it weirder and weirder as the song goes on. At first listen the real showstopper lyric is "Call me a slut in front of your family," but my favorite line is the one that goes "Bite my veins, cigarettes and big eyes" - or at least that's what I think he's singing. Some people think he's singing "You like my bangs, cigarettes, and big eyes," but I think those people are dumb. Obviously he's singing it exactly the way I want him to.
        I love "Bite my veins, cigarettes, and big eyes" mostly because it sounds like something I would have read in a zine written by some superweird and glamorous girl a very long time ago, like 1999. I would have read that sentence and spent the next few days or weeks of my life being obsessed with that girl and trying to write like her, walking around Boston feeling so electrified by this new world in which you can command someone to bite your veins, cigarettes, and big eyes - and maybe he'll even actually do it. That's what I value most about girl poets like Alex Chilton, how all this wild and insane and beautiful shit you never even thought of before suddenly seems so hugely possible.

v. Because he is the most beautiful sicko. The first Alex Chilton solo song I ever heard was the original version of "Take Me Home and Make Me Like It," which goes like this:



and I loved it right away but it also embarrassed me. "Take Me Home and Make Me Like It (Version 2)" is even more embarrassing; there at least three moments in the song that will never not mortify me, especially the part where he actually says the word loincloth. (I mean, I can't even tell you how much I had to psyche myself up just to type the word "loincloth" in that last sentence, such is the depth of my "loincloth" embarrassment. "Loincloth," Alex, really? Loincloth???????????)
       So every once in a while, like maybe once a decade or so, I get way into some musician-dude who's exorbitantly weird. My first one was when I was 17, and so much of the appeal was knowing it sounded way too crazy to most people. But I think maybe it might also be a sex thing. Patti Smith's point about not listening "to music by people I don't wanna fuck" is a little too limiting for me, but I could definitely I amend it to something like "I don't listen to exorbitantly weird music by people who aren't sexy, scrawny, slightly deranged dudes whose hair's always in their eyes, these perpetually bugged-out eyes that would probably be really terrifying to stare straight into, and maybe you'd just die if you looked at them too long." That's not the sort of thing I look for in a guy in real life, but it's good to sometimes fall for musician-dudes like that, to turn them into my imaginary weirdo-boyfriends that I'm endlessly grossed out by.
        So I can forgive Alex Chilton for saying "loincloth" because my creepy attraction to him balances out the horror of that. And by the time the song hits the five-minute mark and he laughs like the most adorable psychopath, I'm just incurably in love with him forever, it's so disgusting and wonderful.



iv. Because I dig his clumsy gracefulness. One of my favorite songs sung by Alex is "Friend at a Very Good Time" by the John Byrd Band - you can download it free here, and you absolutely should. It's a gorgeous song and the chorus goes:

I'd love to feel that it's all unreal, and I'd love to find my mind
But you opened my mind, with whiskey and wine
And it's right back to blowin' my mind

- and every time I hear it I almost can't believe it exists. I can't ever get over Alex's repetition of the word "mind," how it's maybe intentionally clumsy but then so completely not clumsy and just so cool and graceful. Clumsy/graceful writers are my favorite kind of writers; I love the baby-genius brattiness of messing it up on purpose and ending up with something weirdly perfect. 
        My other favorite part of the song is when the girl asks Alex how he's feeling and Alex smiles all cute and says, "Hey man, I'm doin' fine." He sounds so warm and easy, and it makes me feel like everything's warm and easy. Whenever I listen to this song, everything is so warm and easy.

iii. Because he is great at fucking up. Earlier this year I read a book about Big Star, and one of my favorite Alex stories is from the chapter about making the third record. There's a part about how when they first started recording "Downs" someone said it sounded like it could be a hit song, and in response to that Alex was like, "Cool - let's play the snare drum with a basketball." The point was that anytime anyone said something sounded good, Alex would immediately just go and destroy it on purpose.
         I don't understand or even want to understand what it's like to have that freedom to fuck everything up - but I'm still so in awe of it, or at least of the way it manifests in Alex Chilton. There's this crazy twisting-together of bravery and bullshit self-destruction, and I guess that's sort of dreamy thing I'm endlessly fascinated by in boys who make beautiful music. All those crazy boys...


ii. Because of the irrepressible sweetness of his voice. One thing that's a drag is how the AllMusic.com reviews of my two fave Alex solo albums were written by guys who hate life. They use adjectives like "drug-addled" and "dreadful" and "drunken" and "willfully difficult," and "sneering" and "sloppy" and "slipshod," and they don't use them fawningly. The word that bugs me most is "dreadful" - like, it's entirely true that there's bad vibes all over Bach's Bottom and Like Flies on Sherbert (especially the latter), but there's also some kind of scrappy joyfulness that always saves Alex from ever sounding dreadful to me.
         I think so much of it is his voice. His voice is so high and cute and a little girly sometimes; he's wacky with his phrasing. Bach's Bottom's my favorite Alex solo album largely because there's all these bits of Alex talking: when you're obsessed with somebody, it's so exciting to hear him say stupid little things like "I need a pain pill" or "The shoulders, that's where it lies" in his hot Memphis accent. And I love when he sings in Spanish at the bridge of "All of the Time," rhyming with "banana" with "manana" and rolling his "r" on the word "rrrrrrrrrrradio"; it's so goofy and little-kid-like, and I hope there was lots of little-kid kinda fun for him in making those records. 
         (I mean, seriously - just listen to all of Bach's Bottom on Spotify - maybe you'll think it's fucking awful, but maybe you'll fall in love with it/him. Listen to the second version of "Every Time I Close My Eyes" at least seven times before the end of the day today. It will be twelve and a half minutes so beautifully spent.)


i. Because I just love Alex Chilton so much and he makes everything in my life so much sweeter and wilder. Sometimes when I'm bored or annoyed by someone and I want to keep from behaving like a jerk, I'll just say Alex Chilton's name over and over in my head - not to "right myself," but just to have a cool distraction. I've been doing that for a while, and now I get to do that and look at or touch my Alex tattoo, which is so much better. My ankle is now a conduit for meditation and the achievement of supremely chill vibes.
        On Saturday I went to the nicest party, a surprise birthday party where there was a man who set up a grill in the driveway - this gigantic spit thing with a big hunk of pineapple on top - and made us all like eight million tacos. I seriously ate a million tacos, and had some champagne and a coconut jello shot, and some guava cheese pie and "hurricane popcorn." We all sat around in the yard for like five hours, underneath a plum tree strung with tiny disco balls and Christmas ornaments to keep the birds from eating the plums. I kept hitting my head on the plums and disco balls whenever I got up from my chair, and I kept touching my ankle and tracing the still-raised letters of Alex Chilton's lovely name. I didn't even have to say his name over and over in my head, because no one was annoying or boring me. Everything was cool and made cooler by the presence of Alex Chilton; it gave me such a thrill to look down and go, "Yay! Alex Chilton's still here!"
       I feel like Alex Chilton would think that was all pretty cutesy and goofy of me, and of course I think that's so cool of him. And in the past few days I've learned that it's absolutely true that hardly anyone knows who Alex Chilton is, but yesterday Emily Richmond made the point that now I get to spend the rest of my life telling everyone about Alex Chilton and why I love him. That's such a lucky way to live, I'm so happy I get to live it.
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Happy First Birthday, Strawberry Fields Whatever!

June 12, 2013, 10:56 am
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LJ:On Monday, Strawberry Fields Whatever turned a cool ONE YEAR OLD!!! I say "cool" in that sentence to mean the same as when people say "a cool million dollars." A cool one year! Also, Strawberry Fields Whatever is a Gemini, which is very cute of it. It is a smiling, apple-cheeked baby girl. 

I haven't been blogging very much lately- I know it kind of seems like I "stopped writing," but really I didn't, even though I did. Mostly I just work a lot, and am always at work, every single second of my life, so a big part of it's that I just don't have the time. And part of it's that I'm really into LIVING right now, like, the actual act of being a human being who is alive, and writing's a touch passive. And then there's the fact that I like to write the truth, the straight boring truth of it, the truth and nothing but so help me God & if I'm not writing the truth then there is truly no point in me writing, but if I were to fully do that right now- tell the truth, I mean- I'd end up writing about work a LOT, which does sound like a treat, but would be very weird for all the people whose manager I am. Nothing I have to say about work isn't inappropriate. There is no doubt in my mind that I would get myself fired. 

One day I'll write a cool and weird novel about my restaurant, like a restaurant Ulysses or whatevs, but for the time being, it's chill to not always be forcing myself to reflect upon what I did and how I did at it, then translate those reflections into wacky-grisly prose communicating some larger sort of lesson to a group of strangers. And I guess my favorite thing about Strawberry Fields Whatever is that Strawberry Fields Whatever is totally A-OK with letting me be quiet for a bit. Strawberry Fields Whatever doesn't judge! It's pro-LJ. "Whatever's best for you, my Darling, Lovely, Pet," says Strawberry Fields Whatever, to me, in a soothing whisper, even though it's a baby.  It can't choose between Darling or Lovely or Pet, so it said all of them- that's just the kind of stand-up guy Strawberry Fields Whatever is. 

When I used to write for our old blog No Good For Me I loved a lot of it but it never felt quite right. I felt like I was a puzzle piece being jammed into the wrong space. I never liked the way it looked; it didn't look the way I thought my blog should look. It didn't feel like a home. My whole life- in blogs and out of blogs- I was always pretty sad; it seemed like I never had a home even though everybody else did, so easy, without trying. I never felt like I belonged anywhere. I'm turning twenty-eight in two weeks and I just lived a really great year of my life- I used to have zero homes, and now I've got two of them! My job's not always the greatest thing in the world, but whenever I'm there, I definitely feel like it's the place where I am. Usually I feel like I'm somewhere else, off in my head. Even in my house I'm not here. 

But Strawberry Fields Whatever- it's something pretty amazing, it's the place in my head where I've always been. People work really hard to convince themselves they're safe when they're not and Strawberry Fields Whatever has cured me of those delusions- it's the one place in the world where I'll always be safe, and you need that. You need to be safe somewhere. It's a warm pink hug that I live inside with two of the best people I've ever known- Jen May knows how to make the inside of my head look like something real and that's something most people don't get to have in their lives. Liz and I's bromance has been going on for nearly fifteen years now and if I were to discuss it sentimentally it would be extremely sappy and not our style so let's just leave it at that. 

I'm proud that Strawberry Fields Whatever has existed for a year, and I'm proud of the ways I've changed and grown in the first year of its life. I am confident that Strawberry Fields Whatever will exist for the entire rest of my life, which makes me feel even stokeder than I already am about how much more life I have left, how awesome life is, all the things I'm going to get to do and keep doing, and etc. So yes- thanks for reading, everybody. As always, I'm just happy to be here. 



LIZ: I celebrated Strawberry Fields Whatever's birthday on Friday, by getting Alex Chilton's name tattooed on my ankle and going to Pie & Burger and eating a sandwich and getting a piece of blackberry pie and then going to the movies and eating the pie while I watched the movie. Later on I went out to a Mexican restaurant to drink sangria with my friends (the "sangria" was warm red wine poured into a glass of ice, with a shot of orange juice on top), and then I stayed up all night listening to Big Star and taking pictures of my ankle. It was a good day and my favorite parts were the ones I hadn't engineered to be perfect and beautiful and edifying or whatever, like when I put my foot on the table at the bar and everyone paparazzi'd my ankle, or this cool picture I took of my window reflection when I was jumping up and down to the jumping-up-and-down part of "Daisy Glaze." 
       My favorite life lesson I've learned from Strawberry Fields Whatever is that trying to make everything beautiful all the time can end up making you sick, so it's way better to just do whatever the hell you feel like, as long as it feels good and electric once you're actually doing it. And if it doesn't, just stop and go do something else. Just keep doing whatever until you find the thing that makes you feel awesome and excited, and alive instead of dead.
       My tattoo is also a Replacements tattoo and my favorite Replacements song is "Unsatisfied" and "Unsatisfied" is still one of the most major spirit songs of my life. Shit's unsatisfying and then it's not, it's perfect and amazing and nothing you ever could have ever counted on or thought up on your own. That's a pretty obvious statement but I didn't really know it in my bones till almost a year of writing here and reading LJ's writing and just being a part of the whole Strawberry Fields Whatever thing. We're such a chill and benevolent thing. STRAWBERRY FIELDS WHATEVER FOREVER <3 <3 <3



JEN: I guess I think of Strawberry Fields Whatever as a pink cave that exists in (on?) the internet. It's a beautiful cave filled with Laura Jane and Liz's words, our favorite things, cake, coffee, beautiful songs, weird images I've made/assembled, film stills, popcorn. I have loved making this place with them over the last year. I have learned to work quick. I have learned to work more regularly. I can quickly find specific images  in anything I'm reading now. I cherish getting to read whatever Liz & LJ write in early stages, finished, as vague ideas. They are both geniuses I am endlessly inspired by. There's always everything else in the world, it's all always happening. It's nice to have this space existing. It's not on the side, it's just it's own thing. It's Our Thing. I think we make sense together and to each other and I'm glad we built this Pink Gemini Internet Cave.
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Thing of the Week: Liz's Summer Uniform, 'Empathy'

June 14, 2013, 10:51 am
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LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: My Summer Uniform

This is what I wore last Friday night, when I went out for the most disgusting sangria after getting my Alex Chilton tattoo:

























It's my Flying Burrito Brothers shirt, a red cardigan, some black jeans I made into shorts last week and have renamed my "hesher cutoffs," glam/metallic ballet flats, pigtails, and this little peachy-pink fake-ivory flower necklace you can't see. I love this "ensemble" and I want to wear it every day. So many of my idols are represented: Gram Parsons, Kurt Cobain, any/all trashy metal bands beloved by heshers, David Bowie, Mary Timony, and of course Alex Chilton on my ankle forever and ever and ever. I want to represent all of my idols all of the time, I want to hold them all in my heart at every second. And the other day Kime sent me these buttons as a belated bday gift:


and I'm going to take the George one and put it on my leather jacket. On my leather jacket right now is this adorable Paul McCartney button that LJ gave me when we were drinking margaritas at the bar of some Italian restaurant on New Year's Eve 2011, so I'm gonna take Paul off and put him on my cardigan, as a cute fuck-you to Kurt Cobain. Take that, Kurt! I love you, man.

JEN'S THING OF THE WEEK: Empathy


My Thing this week is the underlined sentences in that picture. They're from Empathy by Sarah Schulman. I actually read it last week, but it has stuck with me. My other thing is the fact that Liz, Laura Jane and myself are taking a Strawberry Fields Whatever vacation retreat in Martha's Vineyard in July.

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You Will Not Even Believe How Fucking Awesome This Melanie Song Is

June 20, 2013, 12:49 pm
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Last week my best friend and I were sitting on a patio- she was drinking a half-litre of white wine; I had 2 pints of sangria- and we remembered back to a couple summers ago, when we thought of our legendary idea for a PARK-CITY. We thought of it when we saw that Toronto's slogan is "A city within a park," which we called bullshit on, and we thought, and were stoned: "What if there really was a city within a park, or rather that was a park," and last Thursday we sat on the patio mimicking our stoned selves stonedly saying "The streets would be a park" and "The shops would be a park," "The cafes would be a park,"- like, imagine if it was all a park. All of it. Only now we're smarter and older, so I decided to write it down: 

 DREAM PARK-CITY 

- it's all a park 
- "Park City" (working title) 
- green space tree canopy 
- vegetable gardens: "Your market is the garden" 
- cafes bars streets "bookshops" 
-outdoor markets 
-as much outdoor as possible 
-taken care of 
-PEOPLE WOULD BE COOL AND HAVE MURALS ON THEIR HOUSES 
-no cigs. weed farm weed encouraged 
-benches 
-no cars 
-public transit so good makes taxis unnecessary 
-bike lanes stroller disability lanes 
-separate buses STORAGE (just bought appliance lrg) 
-dog runs 
-picnic tables 
-BEST PLAYGROUND EVER cool wood playground creative artistic 
-ART EVERYWHERE 
-mobiles made out of recycled shit

Next I went across the street to a record store, a plain white record store with no illustrations on the walls and very few labels explaining what genre of music the records you were looking at were or what letter of the alphabet the artist who sung them name's began with. But I decided to commit to being there. I bought Living In The Material World by George Harrison and a record called John Lennon For President, for aesthetic purposes, Cosmic Wheels by Donovan (I had a cool convo with the cute old man owner about Cosmic Wheels being "nerdy," which I wholeheartedly feel is the most accurate way to describe Cosmic Wheels) and then I found this Melanie record, Garden In The City, which was obviously a SIGN FROM THE UNIVERSE telling me, I don't know, that I like parks. 



I also really like Melanie's dog a lot. Anyway, Garden In The City was a great investment; it's got a really cool chilled out cover of Jigsaw Puzzle by the Rolling Stones:



but People In The Front Row, the one at the top, is the one that you will not even believe how fucking awesome it is; it's so awesome, in fact, that I was just about to go leave my house and lie on the grass in some sunshine but then I was like NOPE I need to enlighten all my pals who read this blog so here you go and enjoy! I'll be in a PARK if you need me. 

-Laura Jane
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Some Lessons I Have Learned

June 27, 2013, 11:14 am
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BY LAURA JANE/ ILLO BY JEN

A few days before I turned twenty-seven, I smoked some pot and went on a really bad walk. I forget mostly everything about why it was bad, except for that pot rarely works well on me anymore, and I guess, well, I was a pretty huge bummer of a person last June- just a helpless and hopeless little lady with more chips on her shoulder than dollars in her bank account. I felt like I was about to turn a very old-sounding age, and I felt like I hadn't accomplished enough to deserveto turn such a distinguished amount of years old. Actually- no wonder I freaked out on my stoned-walk! That all sounds like shit. The poor thing. 

I cut my really bad walk short, changed into jammer shorts and ate peanut butter out of the jar, knelt down on my bedroom floor and, using my bed as a desk, wrote a list of "THREE GOALS FOR MY TWENTY-SEVENTH YEAR" down in my notebook. 

They were: 

1) Drink less,
2) Quit smoking, 
3) Get rich enough to afford air-conditioning by the time I'm twenty-eight. 

This past Monday- June the 24th- I turned twenty eight. I loved being twenty-seven, it was a cool and formative year for me, I really whipped my ass into shape, and twenty-seven's also just a cool-seeming and well-loved age in general. But I'm okay with not being twenty-seven anymore. Really, I could care less which age I am. I'm always the age it makes the most sense for me to be. Plus, isn't it so gauche when people in their mid-to-late twenties complain about how "old" they are? Like, you're in your twenties, dipshit; that's obviously known to be a young decade. That's what people mean, when they say "when I was young." They don't mean "when I was ten." Nobody remembers what the fuck they did when they were ten. It's boring. You learned some math and liked whatever fad. 

Anyway, over the course of my twenty-seventh year, I accomplished two of the goals I set out to, and- perhaps even more importantly- quit shaming myself about how I find drinking alcohol to be very much fun. I also learned a whole lot more, and the things I've learned have helped me turn into a happier, stronger, and richer person- and I mean richer in both ways. I will now present them to you in the format of "a list of life-lessons," none of which relate to the extremely dull subject of air-conditioning. I promise I won't mention air-conditioning again in this blog post. I'm twenty-eight now; I'm so much better than that. 

1. DON'T SMOKE CIGARETTES

When I was twenty-seven, I quit smoking. Sometimes, people asked me how I did it. "I stopped smoking cigarettes," I told them, sounding very bored, feeling cool to myself. I like when the tone of my voice is a shrug. 

People like to make an unnecessarily big spectacle out of everything; I know this because I am one of them. I quit smoking loudly and on the Internet. I am not going to link to the eight thousand blog posts I wrote about quitting smoking because I am too lazy to search things and then copy and paste them, ew. Anyway, people who quit smoking are obsessed with "waxing philosophical" (EWWWWW waxing philosophical), extremely long-windedly and often condescendingly, in social situations, about how they accomplished such a feat. I'm going to cut this paragraph short for fear of becoming one of them-

In conclusion, the only way to quit smoking is by quitting smoking. 

2. MONEY ENABLES GENEROSITY

The other day I was sitting at a bar talking to my friend about how much I love making money, which is true. Here is me:






My friend didn't like this. She said, money is awful. She was disappointed in me for liking money. Money is the root of all evil, she reminded me. We value money more than we value our relationships with people. I made it sound like I agreed with her more than I actually did, because I don't like arguing with people. I think it's a silly thing to do. I've literally never been in a situation where I was arguing with another person and then the other person convinced me I was wrong, and I changed my opinion, or vice versa. That's not a thing that happens. Arguing just makes peoples' faces red, and who wants that? I'd rather just agree to disagree, I'd rather not have to justify why I like contributing to society and earning a living and exchanging money for goods and services. I think the reasons why I like doing that are fairly obvious, and not particularly fucked up. And even if they were fucked up, I doubt I'd really mind. Being a "good person" has never been a huge priority of mine. 

But the thing is, the weirdest part of all of this, is that I think making money has made me a much kinder person than I was when I was broke. I never used to know I was generous because I never had anything tangible to give any person I liked, or loved, but now that I do, I'm learning that it's my preferred method of expressing affection ("writing you into a short story" was my old number one), that it can mean a fuck of a lot when done right, and that it's rarely done wrong. 

3. EXCUSES ARE WORSE THAN COMPLAINTS 

A thing I know about the manager of the restaurant that I assistant manage is that he hates complaining, which I can't blame him for, because complaining is fucking annoying, especially since nobody's ever complaining about something worth complaining about. It's like that Louis CK bit about how even "the shittiest cellphone in the world is a miracle"- I think about that every day. ("People say 'my phone sucks'- no it doesn't! The shittiest cellphone in the world is a miracle. Your life sucks. Around the phone.") At work, everyone's always freaking out about some "fucked up" (/boring/inconsequential) thing some customer, or the kitchen, or I did- "They ordered a regular-sized margarita instead of a large. Ugh, what misers." Or, "Ugh, the kitchen forgot the salsa. What idiots." Or, "You punched in tonic instead of soda, you worthless asshole," and you're just like, "There's no way in the world you actually care about that," but the thing is, I've realized, I think it makes people happy to complain. Let them. Also, when you hate on complainers, you're just complaining in your own right, so you kind of have to love complainers, for that reason. It's an interesting catch-22.  

You don't have to love excuses, however. There is no reason in the world why you ever would. I hate excuses as a manager, and I hate excuses as all the parts of me that aren't a manager, just sitting here, writing words and fucking around. I am managing nothing, and yet I still hate excuses. And I guess there's no real two-word phrasing that describes how I feel about excuses any better than good old "fucking annoying," but maybe their fucking annoyingness is a bit pithier than complaints', or maybe I just require them less:

Say, for instance, that someone forgot to put something away. (This is a work-related "for instance," by the way. Which is cool, because I know that everyone reads Strawberry Fields Whatever for "managerial solutions.") "You forgot to put that thing away," I'll tell them- very gently. Lovingly. "Here's why you shouldn't forget to put that thing away! I totally don't mind that you forgot to put that thing away! It's a perfectly natural mistake! I've done it, myself, thousands of times! We're the same, you and I!" And then they say, "Oh, well: I forgot to put that thing away because, you see, at the exact moment I was about to put that thing away, this other thing happened. This very, very important other thing. And, had I not attended to that other thing, this business would have fallen apart. So, by not doing the thing I should have done, I was actually being a better employee than I would have if I hadn't done it, and now I will continue speaking until you lose interest in dealing with this situation and walk away," and you're just like "Well yeah- I hoped that was the case. I was hoping that you made a dumbass mistake for a reason and not because you actually thought that was the correct way to do things."

Some words don't need to be said. Sometimes you can just say "Yes," or "Okay," nod even, and the problem, like a soap bubble, will vanish before your very eyes. The memory of that non-major thing you sucked at will turn to vapor and slink away into a peaceful and silent nowhere. Nobody will ever have known. 

4. THERE ARE RARELY REPERCUSSIONS

I don't do as much weird and out-there shit as I used to, but I still do way more weird and out-there shit than the average person; you've got to. You've got to remind yourself that you're allowed to do whatever you want, and you've got to keep reminding yourself that's a fucking gift, being the type of person who GOES THERE. And I think that if you're a person who isn't naturally inclined to stir the pot, you should force yourself to stir the pot more. Do it! Stir up that damn pot. One day, every single person who is alive on the planet right now will be dead, and none of it will ever have mattered. No one, in five hundred years, is ever going to be like, "Wow, that was lame of Laura when she chased a dude down the street and went apeshit on him five hundred years ago. How embarrassing for her." Like, even when I fuck my job up, it's always completely fine. Someone's like "You fucked up" and I'm like "Oh, that's true," and then I stop fucking up that particular thing. So that's my cool new approach to striking the perfect balance between laissez-faire and laissez-insane. Just coolly do all the weird things that pop into your mind. Nothing bad will ever come of it (unless it's a crime). 

5. LOOK WITH YOUR EYES, NOT WITH YOUR MOUTH

I was in the walk-in fridge with my old sous-chef and I asked him where the limes were. "Right in fucking front of you," he said, and they were. I laughed. I said "Oops" or "Sorry" or whatever.

"Look with your eyes, not with your mouth," he said, "That's what my mom always says." 

"That's amazing," I said, "I'm going to steal that from your mom," and I did. I say it all the time. It's the most badass manager-y sentence in the world; an ace up my sleeve, if you will. 

6. HONESTY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN KINDNESS, BUT RESPECT IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN HONESTY

Kindness is fine, but I don't understand why people act like it's so much better, or more important, than wisdom or ingenuity or charisma or dignity or any other of the virtues. Often, I find myself in situations where I say something rude, and another person will react like, "Oh my God! That's so mean!" and then I say, "What have I ever done to give you the impression that I'm not a mean person?"- I mean, I'm not fucking evil, and I'm often very sweet. But my goal has always been to live my life honestly- not nicely. I think that honesty trumps kindness in every situation, and I think that people often use kindness as an excuse to validate their own dishonesty, which is disgusting.

It wasn't until the last few hours of my being twenty-seven that I was forced to consider the concept of 'respect.' It was the last lesson I learned. I'd like for it to drive my next year. 

I don't think I've ever used my commitment to the truth as a mechanism for validating cruelty, but I know I've used it to justify selfishness and, worse yet, to explain away disrespect. It's possible to be honest and disrespectful, but I don't think it's possible to be respectful and dishonest, nor respectful and unkind. I think that if you strive to be respectful of every human being you encounter, you'll always be a perfectly honest mishmash of honesty and kindness, which even a semi-asshole like myself has to admit is an awesome-sounding balance to strive for. 

7. DO WHATEVER THE FUCK YOU WANT AND NEVER LISTEN TO ANYBODY


I didn't learn "do whatever the fuck you want and never listen to anybody" when I was twenty-seven; I've always known "do whatever the fuck you want and never listen to anybody." It's probably the first complete thought I ever thought, when I was two. (Shortly after thinking it, I cut off all my hair with safety scissors- there were zero repercussions.)

But, when I was twenty-seven, "do whatever the fuck you want and never listen to anybody" started meaning something different. Sometimes, I realized, you've got to listen to somebody. Sometimes other people are right, and you're wrong, and when you listen to them, you learn something. And sometimes, people are your boss, so you do what they tell you, so you don't lose your job, because you like your job. And other times, people are wrong, and you're right. Those times, you can choose not to listen to them, but you still probably shouldn't do whatever the fuck you want. You should probably communicate your objectively correct opinion in a respectful and dignified manner that gives your boss, or whoever, no choice but to love you. 

I guess it's not so much about people trying to tell you what to do as it is about people trying to tell you who you are. Sometimes, people don't want you to be you. They want you to be some other thing, some crazy thing they need and have arbitrarily assigned you to take responsibility for. Some antidote to some weird fragment of their psychosis that you'll inflame if you don't soothe. Sometimes they want you to stay as the person you were when they first met you, sometimes it's something else entirely. Sometimes people want to keep you around so you can be the one who's always worse off than they are; sometimes people need someone to envy.

Stop being that. Stop doing that. It doesn't make any sense. It's dishonest, disrespectful and unkind (the holy trinity of FUCKED UP) and if people can't see what they're doing, it's not your job to let them know. Run away fast; happiness is waiting on the other side.  

8. YOU ARE UNIMPORTANT AND UNSAFE

At the end of January I was on acid in my bedroom. I was bored of being on acid; I was bored of looking at things and seeing through them. I wanted to find something I couldn't see through, so I called Liz Barker. "I'm on acid," I said, and she said, "Oh, cool!" It was a cute throwback to three Januaries ago- I'd called Liz on acid that January, too. January is the best month for taking acid, since there's really nothin else doin. On acid in the summer, you just get too obsessed with thinking about nature. It's pretty juvenile. 

The last time I'd spoken to Liz on acid in January, we'd been writing our Beatles book. Remember our Beatles book? Maybe you don't. It was a thing for awhile. We cared about it a lot. We were rewriting every single Beatles song as a story, essay, or story-essay; I was John, and Liz was Paul. At some point, we gave up, and abandoned the proj. We never really talked about it until this past January. I don't even think we meant to talk about it; it just came up. Liz made a cool Liz point about how strange it is, to think of how huge it used to be for us, and how casually and confidently we just stopped giving a shit-

"Yeah," I said, "I mean, people delude themselves all the time..."- and when I said the word 'delude,' because I was on a psychedelic drug, my life snapped into two and I saw every delusion that everyone I know relies upon, I saw them all for what they were and I knew it, and I knew I'd never stop knowing it. I'd sleep, wake up the next morning and feel exhilarated, I went on a 'pyjamas shopping spree' the next day, thought about a bunch of LSD-propelled revelations that never stuck, and more time passed, and everything else fell away. 

I started noticing those delusions in everyone. And I kept on thinking about it, about why we do that, why we make up these weird lies about who we are and what we do and why do it, for ourselves and for everybody else, and eventually, I figured it out:

1) to make ourselves feel like we're important, and 
2) to make ourselves like we're safe. 

But we're not, and can't be. I'm unimportant. I'm a speck in a Universe. You think about people who are important here on Earth, or were, at least, in the recent past- Gandhi or  Beethoven or John Lennon or whatever, and then just think about the Sun. And then it's like you're six years old all over again, wondering "Where does the Universe end?" and you're just as meaningless as you always were, and will be. And you think of all the men, your friends, your mom and your dad and your job, and your home, and your money- they all make you feel like you're safe, but, even if they're beautiful, you won't be. The whole world could burst into flames in five minutes, for wild reasons no scientist ever thought to predict, or a piano could fall on your head, or maybe you'll get sick next year, or maybe somebody's going to murder you, or your parents, or your kid, or maybe the dude you think you're in love with's going to get hit by a car on his way to work and you're going to write a cool novel about it, which may sell terribly and depress you, and then you're probably going to get cancer, or dementia-

And there's nothing you can to do protect yourself from any of it. And there's nothing you can do to turn yourself into a planet, or the ocean. You are unimportant and unsafe, and once you fully understand and accept that, well then- oh my God. It's amazing! You're free.
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Thing of the Week: Sarah Silverman's Mom/Stupid T-Shirts, Seeing John Waters Tonight

June 28, 2013, 9:57 am
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LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Sarah Silverman's Mom, Stupid T-Shirts

Oh my god the Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee episode with Sarah Silverman is so good. I don't really even care about Sarah Silverman, or at least I didn't until last week, but now I adore her forever. She's just so smart and thoughtful and she seems really great at life, and the part about her mom delights me, and I love love love how deeply she gives a fuck about good manners and good writing. Plus they go to Millie's, and I just went to Millie's two Saturdays ago with my sister, and I got a biscuit with my breakfast too. If you've never been to Millie's, please just fly to Silver Lake right now and get yourself a "fucking biscuit." Slather it with raspberry jam, from the cute little jam pot. Drink a thousand cups of coffee. Order the Jackie G! It's my fave. Watch the amazing episode right now:



One of my other things this week is this stupid t-shirt I got last weekend at Crossroads. It's a Worn Free shirt, a replica of an Iggy Pop-referencing tee once worn by Debbie Harry. I'm not so into Worn Free; I don't see the point of purchasing/owning a $50 t-shirt if the cotton isn't of a life-changingly perfect softness and drape, and - in my experience - Worn Free cotton's just kinda meh. But I got this one secondhand and it was eight bucks and thus totally worth it:



Eight dollars is the ideal amount to pay for a halfway decent t-shirt, in my smug/humble opinion, but yesterday I wandered into some vintage shop on La Brea and you know what they were charging for a halfway decent Mudhoney shirt? THREE HUNDRED GODDAMN DOLLARS. "Does anyone who actually loves Mudhoney have $300 to spend on a t-shirt?" I wondered. "Does anyone who actually loves Mudhoney even have $300 in general?"
       And I know that's not the point, that it's about fashion and not rock-and-roll, that love's got nothing to do with it. It's a pretty obvious thing to be grossed out by, but I was: I was so grossed out by that price tag. And after leaving the shop I went to a cafe and got an iced coffee, and they were selling bowls of kale for $18 and playing Pavement, and I was grossed out by that too, by the idea of Pavement as background music for overpriced-kale consumption.
       So I felt down about all that for like three seconds - but then I felt nice and shimmery, thinking how much better it is to love music, compared to being indifferent about music or just straight-up not loving music at all. There are people in this world who don't love music, and neither you nor I will ever be one of those people. That's pretty wonderful for us. It is so good to wildly love music forever and ever.


JEN'S THING OF THE WEEK: Seeing John Waters tonight


I'M GOING TO SEE JOHN WATERS TONIGHT!!!!!
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10 Life Lessons Learned From Fiona Apple's 'Idler Wheel...'

July 2, 2013, 10:06 am
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WORDS BY ELIZABETH BARKER, IMAGE BY JEN MAY

The Idler Wheel is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do by Fiona Apple came out at the end of June 2012. These are ten things it's helped teach me over the last year:  

i. Anxiety-free sleeplessness is the province of the adolescent and/or extraordinary. There's a good chance you've read all the interviews where Fiona Apple talks about how she doesn't sleep. Why doesn't she get a prescription for some goddamn sleeping pills, I wondered after like the third article, but I mostly get it: I'm weird about sleeping pills too. I have insomnia and my brain just bashes right through that Tylenol PM shit but I'm scared of the real stuff, Ambien or whatever. I'm a big baby about pills, medications, drugs in general.
        I think Fiona Apple's insomnia sounds pretty romantic, though. I like how she gets up and walks around in the night, I like that thing about her walking around Manhattan at five in the morning in the New York feature. I have sleep-maintenance insomnia (the kind where you fall asleep fairly easily but have a hard time staying asleep), and when I wake up I usually just lie there and wait for sleep to come back. And unless there's something exceptionally cool and wonderful going on in my life at the moment, that waiting is usually taken up by the worst and most anxiety-producing thoughts I can dredge up, which I understand to be typical of insomniacs. There is really nothing romantic about it for me.
       When I was a teenager I loved waking up in the middle of the night. I'd listen to CDs and make up stories in my head and never had much to worry about, since I was a child. It doesn't seem likely that insomnia will ever be lovely like that again, but I'm hopeful that it could become something a lot less lousy than what it is now. I have some idea that the more extraordinary your life is, the less awful your insomnia feels, because there's more freedom to how you live your days and thus less pressure to find your way back to sleep. That might be total nonsense, but two nights ago I had insomnia and after an hour of watching the ceiling I decided to get up out of bed, hang out on the porch for a bit, read a little, write some things down. It wasn't ideal but it wasn't terrible, and after another hour I fell back asleep, and slept for hours and hours, and woke up feeling good.
       At the moment my only other solution is to feel smug about my insomnia, and take some weird pride in the fact that sometimes I sleep like hell. Most of my favorite people are insomniacs and I'm happy to align myself with them. And I'm curious as to whether there are people who actually enjoy their insomnia, who feel like they get something good out of it. I want to start collecting people's "beneficent insomnia" stories and put them together in a tiny book, like a storybook, to keep beside your bed and read in the middle of the night.

ii. Jack White sings the song of my stupid/amazing heart. Before The Idler Wheel and Blunderbuss came out, I was thinking of writing something about whom I'd rather claim as the voice of my generation: Jack White, or Fiona Apple. I never wrote that post, partly due to the fact that "voices of generations" aren't things I actually believe to exist, and mostly because Blunderbuss didn't connect with me on too deep a level. But I do love the song "Love Interruption," and relate much more to it than I do to "Daredevil" from The Idler Wheel. I lean more toward the "Love Interruption" side of things, of going back and forth between wanting love to ruin me and deeply, compulsively, prohibitively fearing being ruined by love: 


        When Fiona sings "Don't let me ruin me" in "Daredevil," it worries me about as much as that halfway decent Pink song from the early 2000s - which is to say: it doesn't worry me very much at all. I'm pretty aces at self-preservation, and lines like "I don't feel anything until I smash it up" don't hit me too hard. I always catch a thrill from the bridge, though - the "GIMME, GIMME, GIMME what you got in your mind in the middle of the night" part, the way she shouts it like some endearingly psychotic kindergartener. It's such a good line to turn up loud and let smack against your chest and shake your heart, to really feel it and think how that's your truest self singing, even if it freaks you out a little bit. There's a bravery to that sentiment that's missing in Jack White's song, and I like to siphon off Fiona's courage there, for just those eight perfect seconds.

iii. "Gross" and "tender" can happen together. I think "Valentine" might belong to Adam from Girls forever for me. Adam is my favorite Girl, or at least he's tied with Jessa. The only time I ever "talk to the TV" is when something bad happens to him: like when Ray called him stupid when they went to Staten Island, I yelled at Adam to punch Ray in the face. And in the scene when Hannah's watching from outside the bar and Adam starts drinking again I went "Nooooooooo..." in a dumb weepy voice that was completely real, and the fact that "Valentine" was playing intensified my heartbreak in the best way.
       The whole thing of Adam dating that hot boring girl last season killed me a little. He was trying so hard to be a normal guy - but he can't be normal, because "you can't function as someone besides you are." Adam is right to self-identify as a creep, and even though I'm never quite sure whether or not I'm glad that Girls exists, I do appreciate the uniqueness of being repeatedly grossed out by a character but then rooting for him anyway. 
        My favorite Adam moment is his AA rant about Hannah not knowing how to use soap. I love that he calls Hannah "kid"; in some ways I feel like "kid" is the ideal pet name, although of course it depends on the source. Adam listens to No Age. He stole a dog. He doesn't like wearing shirts, and he's maybe dangerous. Adam is the tulip in the cup, the idea of which grosses me out all over again, but there's a tenderness to that gross-out. Sometimes "gross" and "tender" can happen together, like with little kids and real-life love. I admire and am in awe of people who aren't afraid of coming off ugly.

*That's a line from a sweet song by another person whose lyrics I often like to appropriate. 

iv. Tragic beauty is totally sustainable. "Jonathan" is my favorite song on The Idler Wheel right now. The line I love most is "You're like the captain of a capsized ship/But I like watching you live." That line excites me because there's so much possibility in it, whereas much of the rest of the album speaks to what's impossible. I also love how Fiona growls the italicized part of that lyric, and I wholly relate to her growling. There are certain men I like watching live too.
       Sometime last year my writing teacher asked me why I don't kill off this boy in my book - he's all hot and reckless and a little bit crazy, and killing him wouldn't be all that out of line. But I would never kill Jack: I want to watch him get older and older and fuck up more and more - but to also not fuck up sometimes, to sometimes be okay and sometimes be more wonderful than anyone else in the world, to have these tiny moments where he's beautiful as ever. I think it's interesting when sweetness and beauty and maybe even purity sustain or re-emerge when you think they've been beaten out of the person a long, long time ago. And maybe they were beaten out, but maybe they can come back? Shit just comes back to life sometimes, I really do think that. I mean, of course I'm fascinated by Kurt Cobain and bunches of other beautiful geniuses who self-destructed, but I'm one thousand percent more interested in the ones who stayed alive. I will always be a crazy believer in those kinds of boys. I used to worry it was juvenile, but now I think it's divine.



v. Sometimes your own hair is the best dance partner. A few months ago I was at a big party with a bunch of my friends; we were dancing and dancing for hours and hours. I have a thing of playing with my hair as I dance, of shaking my hair into my face, then pushing it out of my face, and grabbing onto my own hair and letting it go again - it's about shyness, but it's also about the fact that I love my hair and really enjoy touching it. At one point at the party this handsome guy-pal of mine leaned in and told me, "Stop dancing with your hair and dance with me instead." Which of course was adorable, and maybe kind of exciting, but I shook my head and pushed him away. I just wanted to keep on dancing with my hair a little while longer, and that's totally fine. It's nothing to get all worked up about: sometimes it's okay and even pretty fun to be left alone. And it would be crude to ask Fiona Apple not to take everything so serious all the time, but I can absolutely go ahead and ask that of myself.

vi. It's good to get high off romantic death. Last fall there were two weekends in a row when I ran into the man who's probably the most brutal heartbreaker of my life, after having gone more than six years without seeing him at all. Running into him, and also his wife, was both awful and wonderful, overwhelming but strangely comforting. The first time it happened, I had to wander away from the party for a few minutes and go outside and breathe some nice autumn-y air. I sat on a curb and listened to a beautifully self-aggrandizing song on my earbuds/phone, leaning against a big tree and feeling shook-up and dreamy. In the morning when I took a shower I washed a few dead leaves from my hair, and it made me feel like such a writer.
      Anyway, the lyric "Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key" from "Werewolf" is perfect and true and absolutely how I feel about romantic death, the death of a romance that's changed your head in a permanent way, as romances tend to do. There's a quote from Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace* that reads:


"It is impossible to forgive whoever has done us harm if that harm has lowered us. We have to think that it has not lowered us but revealed to us our true level"

- and it took me years to get to that point with the man I'm talking about here, to genuinely feel that I hadn't been "lowered" by him. But seeing him last fall made me know that I'd forgiven him, that we were okay in our own weird way. That forgiveness shit never happens as fast as you want it to, but when it does it's heaven; there is so much relief and even power in knowing you mostly do wish the best for the one who hurt you the hardest.


*I feel obliged to tell you I learned this from Aliens and Anorexia by Chris Kraus, not from actually reading Gravity and Grace. Also: FIONA'S FACE IN THIS VIDEO. Please don't take your eyes off her face, for even one half-second.


vii. Self-identifying nice guys are dangerous, dangerous creatures. Did you ever date a guy who thinks he's really nice? It's kind of stupid, or at least it's frustrating when shit goes astray and you've got to call the dude out on some bad behavior and it wrecks his worldview and he gets all resentful and sulks like a giant baby about what a vicious beast you are. Just like "Every Single Night" makes me smug about my insomnia, "Periphery" makes me smug about my distaste for self-identifying nice guys, about their lack of ability to come up with a more imaginative way of defining themselves. I like to sing along with "I don't appreciate people who don't appreciate" in my head and think how good it is to be an appreciator, to be conscious of and thankful for stuff beyond the mildness of your own disposition. Getting off on your own mildness precludes you from being an appreciator, because appreciating requires valuing both the good and the bad, the sweet and the rough.       
        Mildness is toxic, I think. It's possible that's the greater lesson of The Idler Wheel as a whole.


viii. "Sickness cynics" can all go die. I hardly ever listen to "Regret": it's a such a downer of a song, downer-y in a way that does next to nothing for me. Obviously I love depressing music, but I want it to be depressing-slash-fortifying; I want it to be something that undoes me and then puts me back together and turns me into something different and sharper and stronger. For me "Regret" mostly feels like floating around some sad black puddle with nowhere else to go, and that's really not my scene. I just don't see the point.
       There's one line in "Regret" that always gets me though, the one where Fiona sings "Remember when I was so sick and you didn't believe me?" People who don't believe you when you're sick are the worst - so deeply ungenerous, the nastiest sort of self-indulgent - and I'm happy for Fiona for calling them out.
       On New Year's Eve 2001, one of my best friends and I went out to a tacky bar in Boston, and she got a migraine like an hour before midnight and needed to go home right away. So we got a cab and my friend felt so bad and sick and started crying and kept saying "I know people don't believe migraines are real unless they've had one - but it's real, it's real!" And I was like "Oh my god - I know it's real! Please don't think I don't think it's real!", and it was all very cute and heartbreaking. Whenever I hear that line in "Regret" I feel so protective of Elaine and retroactively sad about her New Year's-ruining migraine, even though I seriously could not give a fuck about any New Year's being ruined ever. I was 24-years-old and when the clock struck midnight I was sitting on my bedroom floor, drinking a beer and playing my guitar and listening to the then-new first Strokes album, and that was all more than good enough for me.

ix. Blissed-out/possessed is a good way to be. In my memory of Fiona singing "Anything We Want" on the Jimmy Fallon Show, she does this adorable shoulder-shimmy thing on the "shaking rain off her stripes" line. I just rewatched the video and it's not quite how I remember, but I'm newly charmed by her presentation, how it's this wild mix of blissed-out and possessed. Blissed-out/possessed isn't always a good look, but it's a good emotional state to shoot for - or to at least try to cultivate, in a relatively organic sort of way, which I think is entirely possible.

x. Summer is for hot love and hot knives. At the beginning of last summer I had a night of kissing a really good-looking boy, this green-eyed babe who's so classically dreamy; the whole night was just a dream. Our first kiss was on the Hollywood Freeway, which is such a gorgeous first-kiss location. It was all gorgeous and uncalculated and so obviously a one-time thing, and the whole night I had "Hot Knife" in my head. The next morning I walked down to the Starbucks at the laundromat and bought a big iced coffee and a bottle of coconut water, "Hot Knife" and the hot boy still stuck in my head, and I knew that summer had officially started.
         You get through this album, all the sleeplessness and smugness and heartbreak and the pretending to rise above the heartbreak - and then finally it's summer, it's hot, there's a hot boy/a hot knife. I don't completely believe the metaphor of that but I like it anyway, and I think it's sweet of Fiona to make us think that's how the world could work. Fiona Apple is many things, and a sweethearted romantic fool is absolutely one of them.
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Emily & I Ate At Hoof Raw Bar & It Was Pretty Awesome

July 4, 2013, 10:56 am
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BY LJ

Here is a photograph of Emily and I! It’s doing an amazing job of illustrating our relationship dynamic. Emily’s so “wild”! She really is. Usually, in relationships, I’m the “wild” one, but that just goes to show you how truly wild Emily is. I am comparatively innocent. I feel like if Emily and I were two of the Beatles, we’d be Ringo and George in 1975. She’d be Ringo on a bender in LA, and I’d be George in England gardening.

Emily and I work together. I am Emily’s boss, to be exact, which is very cool for Emily. Last night, Emily and I talked on the phone until 3 AM- she was drinking wine at her apartment; I was drinking bourbon at mine- and we decided that we are “girl code best friends.” Emily’s fiance was sleeping on the couch next to her, and she kept poking him awake and asking “Do you know what girl code best friends are? What are girl code best friends? What does girl code best friends mean?”- it was very funny for me. Obviously, her fiance didn’t know what girl code best friends are. No man can. 

I just wanted to take a second to shout out a couple of other cool moments from Emily and I’s friendship. We first fell in love last October, when we were standing behind a bar lining baskets with napkins and filling them with tortilla chips, and then we started saying “Basket. Basket. This is a basket. I’m touching a basket,” and thinking about how weirdly big of a part of lives baskets are, working at a Mexican restaurant, and then the word basket/concept of a basket became very funny to us, we were crying and laughing and saying “basket” over and over again- so that’s how it all began. With baskets.

A few weeks ago, after Father's Day dinner service, we ordered two desserts and ate them out of take-out containers in the kitchen; I’m not going to get too deep into it but it was definitely one of those moments where I stepped outside of myself and looked in on the situation and thought “This is why I write.” One day, I’m confident, I will write about that desserts-eating incident exuberantly and in great detail. Later that night, Emily rapped a medley of Will Smith songs- “Gettin Jiggy Wit It,” “Just The Two Of Us,” and “Miami.” Maybe I’ll write about that too, and win myself a fucking Booker Prize. 

Last Thursday, Emily and I went out for dinner at the Hoof Raw Bar. Have you ever heard of the Black Hoof? Probably not, if you’re not from Toronto, which you’re probably not. Well, it’s a restaurant. I don’t know. It’s very cool, and serves you all the nasty-sounding bits of the animal that imagining yourself eating make you feel like barfing, only in this case they’re some of the best things you’ve ever eaten, I think- I have no idea. We didn’t go there. We went to the Hoof Raw Bar, the Black Hoof’s sister restaurant across the street, which is the same general vibe and concept only with seafood, and brunch. We chose Raw Bar over regular Black Hoof mostly because Emily wanted us to drink tomato cocktails, and I am 1975 George Harrison- happy to drink a tomato cocktail, eager to chill and please.



Emily picked me up in her car and we parked in front of some ugly condos on Manning Avenue which looked like they were made of mahogany Tetris pieces. We walked to Raw Bar and ordered two tomato cocktails- we both had the English: “horseradish, gin, hot saue, worcestershire, curry, lime, tomato.” To be honest I wasn’t initially that jazzed on the concept of drinking tomato cocktails exclusively, I was just kind of “along for the ride,” but the English sure showed me who's boss: it is. It was like the Bloody Mary equivalent of the exact moment when you’ve just finished snorting a line of cocaine and you look out at the world in front of you and it’s exactly the same as it always was only sharper and harsher and you’re fucking psychotic and everything about this analogy’s pretty lame but also spot on the money and honestly what do I fucking care if anybody else ever does cocaine or not or decides to try cocaine because I wrote that sentence. If anything, try the English. The rim around the side was curry powder and I just wanted it to keep regenerating itself. The horseradish was very pronounced. I sort of relate to horseradish, on a conceptual level. I believe that I am "like" horseradish. 



The first dish we tried was a shrimp ceviche. I feel like it would be a cute thing to eat on a date. I feel like girls must look really lovable eating it. The person who invented the dish probably wanted it to be “playful” and “elegant.” It had some sort of jelly on the bottom of the dish that I remember liking but really it took us about two seconds to eat the whole thing so I didn’t have a ton of time to form any huge or meaningful opinions about it. I guess it was playful and elegant. It was hard to get all the components of the dish into one bite at the same time so a lot of my bites were like “This is a jalapeno” or “This is a piece of grapefruit.” I wish I could eat about fifteen times the amount of the portion mashed up in a big bowl with a side of the taro chips. I’d give it a rave review.




Next up we had some fish snacks, which makes you feel so cute to order- “I’ll have the fish snacks”- like you’re a little cat. I guess they switch the fish snacks up, but our round of fish snacks was:




1. On the right- smoked fish spread with some chips and little avocado pieces, the smallest avocado pieces there ever were. Haute stoner food. Kind of forgettable.

2. In the middle- fish pakora with tamarind ketchup. I loved them because I love all pakora. I love all pakora unconditionally. Even the dryest pakora, I adore. When I was in high school I wrote a lot of short stories about me-characters eating banana pakora in New York City with dream dude-characters, on dates, and I’d never eaten a banana pakora but the idea of it was perfect to me, and just the words: banana pakora. I’d like to work at a restaurant with banana pakora on the menu so I could get to say banana pakora every day. I’m sitting alone in my restaurant saying banana pakora out loud to myself and smiling because I get such a genuine kick out it. My mouth likes to make those shapes.




3. The last fish snack I tried was my favorite- this Japanese-style octopus. I know there is a name for it. It’s not okonomiyaki, but it’s very close to okonomiyaki. It was the same deal, with the squiggly mayonnaise and sauces, only not a pancake. It was beautiful. I had this one really chive-y bite, and the chive was cut so thin, like tissue paper, and the chive against the chewy octopus bound together with the gluey sauce was really perfect, and right, and it was so small, like a baby tooth, swishing around your mouth and you’re afraid you might swallow it whole.




Next up was the cured fish board, which we ate it from right to left. On the far end was albacore with citrus, which was overshadowed by bolder flavours while I was eating it, but now that the night’s over and I ate that meal four days ago, I’ve been thinking about that albacore a lot. It was very gentle. It was a nice person. It reminded me of the Tocca perfume called Stella, which I own but never wear because I don’t want to just smell like some girl. But the reason why I bought the Stella was because I tried it on once and kept sniffing my wrist and thinking of the color pale blue as well as a little segment of clementine crystallized with white sugar, and then I kept imagining a white wine that would taste like crystallized clementine, and thinking about how much I wanted that wine; I wanted that wine so bad that all I could do was buy the perfume instead. This albacore was the fish equivalent of my wine wish.

Next up was the tandoori trout. It was a loud joker. Everyone in the world would love it. Home run.


In the middle was pickled mackerel, which we were both obsessed with. We ordered bread and butter with our fish board, the bread was hot and the crust cracked in a very romantic way which made me think of people falling in love in, like, Germany a long time ago. Like, Hansel and Gretel-style people. I liked making myself little pickled mackerel and bread and butter sandwiches. It was such honest food. It was like wood, and calloused hands.

The chorizo scallop was stupid. I liked it while I was eating it the same way I like eating a Dorito while I am eating it. Then the second I’m done I’m like, “That was stupid.” Not of me, but of the thing, for existing. It was chewy and gummy and tasted like the taste of chorizo. I am not remembering it fondly at all.

The last one was a jambalaya pickerel, which was not as flavourful as I’d anticipated- the board was supposed to move from subtlest to loudest-tasting- but I liked it because it flaked off itself nicely. It had almost like an imitation crab texture to it, and I mean that as a compliment. When I was a kid and I ate imitation crab for the first time I like FREAKED OUT because I loved it so much. I probably ate an entire pack of it in a day. On the side were those lanky oniony things at the top, which I couldn’t even figure out the taste of as I was eating them. They made literally no impression on me. The cute little rosebuds beneath them were amazing. I don’t know what they were. Pickled little rosebuds. Little hearts.

I ordered a second English, and Emily had a Tequila Maria, which was guajillo tequila, Valentina hot sauce, cilantro, lime, orange, and tomato. It was incredibly floral. It was, like, SPRING. It was like May the 2nd. I think we would have loved it if we hadn’t tried the English first, but the English was perfect, and will overshadow every tomato-based drink I ever drink again. Also, our server was a really beautiful man. But you could see his phone through his pocket, which inspires a bit of an eye roll. No disrespect to him, it’s rampant these days, but I’m personally getting kind of tired of seeing guys’ phones through their pockets. It’s just, like, not that charming. I want to see your wallet, or like, you know. Your dick.




While we were ordering our second-round of drinks I impulse-ordered myself a Filet-o-Fish. I knew in my heart that I couldn’t leave the restaurant without ordering a Filet-o-Fish. I love Filet-o-Fishes, like, actual Filet-o-Fishes. They are one of a mere four items on the McDonald’s menu that I give a fuck about: second to strawberry sundaes, closely followed by egg McMuffins and french fries. I don’t think I ever ate a Filet-o-Fish with my grandfather but I always associated them with him. Every time I ordered a Filet-o-Fish when I was young my mom would tell me he loved them, which was nice to hear, because you kind of need a little bit of emotional support when you’re ordering a Filet-o-Fish. It’s obviously sort of a dorky thing to do. Our server, we found out, had never eaten a Filet-o-Fish in his life, which didn’t surprise me. Imagine watching an exceptionally handsome man eat a Filet-o-Fish? You’d be like, “Um, didn’t you mean a Big Mac?” Actually, I feel like he must have been a McChicken eater. Now I’m getting paranoid that he’s reading this.




Point being, the Filet-o-Fish was fucking amazing. The real star of it, I think, is the milk bun, because of the way your teeth sink through it really fast, and then all of a sudden you’re at the fish part, long before you expected your teeth and tongue to get there, and you’re just socked in the GUT with this immense wave of SALTY, and the fish is so hot and the cheese is so squishy, and then there’s, like, FLAVOURS, so many more FLAVOURS than you expected, and of course it was very cute how it came all wrapped up in the red-and-white checkered paper. 




I meant to take a picture of the Raw Bar bathrooms, too, because they were so lovely. At one point Emily went to the washroom and I watched the hot waiter give a cute barback and a cute tutorial in how to fold the red-and-white checkered paper into little cuplets, like diner french-fry style, and the barback was really struggling, but the hot waiter was so patient. It was a real treat, let me tell you. After dinner Emily and I sat on a curb outside the ugly condominiums. I’m not normally a person who demonstrates any tremendous amount of interest in “funny Youtube videos,” but she showed me this six second long video of this cute-ish teenager saying “This is how I kiss… DOGGIES,” and then putting a dog’s entire snout in his mouth. I don’t know why it’s so weirdly funny but we watched it about fifteen times, and I laughed so hard I cried.
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Every Song I Love: "Cool It Down" by the Velvet Underground

July 10, 2013, 11:43 am
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WORDS BY LIZ/FOREHEAD ART BY JEN

I heard "Cool It Down" by the Velvet Underground for the first time on a Friday afternoon in the spring, standing at a sink in a bathroom in a restaurant, wearing blue eyeshadow, excited about a guy. The restaurant has marble tables and sells artisanal marshmallows and elaborately frosted moon pies, the eyeshadow's called Painkiller and sparkles in the sun. I took some pictures of my eyelids and listened to the song, which felt perfectly matched to my makeup and my mood: it was jubilant, which is a weird word and slightly embarrassing to type or say out loud. But I can't stop myself from thinking that word when I think of "Cool It Down" - it's just very much jubilant song, at least in the context of the Velvet Underground:



Now it's a few months later and I've listened to "Cool It Down" at least a few hundred times, but it still sounds so new to me. Here are some of the things I love most about it:

-how the vocals kick in right in the first second: no time to waste for old Lou! And I love how the vocals are layered or "overdubbed," or whatever the hell that's called. It's like Lou's singing with himself, which I think is sort of sweet of him. This is the first time it's ever occurred to me that Lou Reed might be described as "sweet."

-the line about Lou looking for Miss Linda Lee. "Miss Linda Lee" is a cool rock name; I picture her in hot white boots and wild eyes and a beautiful bouffant. I have no idea what Miss Linda Lee looks like to Lou, and I really don't care. "What Lou Reed looks for in a woman" is of little to no interest to me.

-the part when Lou spells the word love. He sings it like love is spelled "W-L-O-V-E," which is confusing and fun and kind of fucks with the whole Sesame Street vibe of using song lyrics for spelling practice. (Not that I'm not 110 percent into that whole Sesame Street vibe - I  wish more songs reminded me of Sesame Street. Songs with counting are so killer, too; I'd be very into more songs with a "Ladybugs' Picnic" kind of feel.)

-the part when Lou sings "Somebody's got the time-time," at the start of the second verse. Lou loves saying "time-time": he says it in "Sister Ray" too, and it's somehow both tough and whimsical. The complete lyrics to that part go:

Somebody's got the time-time
Somebody's got the right
All of the other people
Trying to use up the night

- and right now those are my favorite lyrics in the whole song/world. They make me think of this great point that Molly Lambert made about the Mad Men episode where Sally visits boarding school and that awful Rolo tries to put the moves on her. Molly wrote:

Sally should trust her own feelings, even if it means not fitting in with the teens all around her, who are so eager to have tried everything. She doesn't want new experiences just to have had them. She wants them to mean something too.

I felt really understood, reading those sentences, and I feel really understood when Lou Reed is judgy about the night-user-uppers. Being careless and thoughtless about what you do with your nights probably just kills your soul. I want romance and adventure for Sally Draper, and everyone else who's cool and into shit being meaningful, and I guess that includes Lou Reed.

I mean, say what you will about Lou Reed, but the dude's definitely way into "meaning."


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My number-one thing about "Cool It Down" is how the song itself is a command. Lou Reed's telling me to cool it down, and I absolutely want to do what he says. I don't love Lou Reed and it's possible I never will, but somehow I feel totally okay with having Lou Reed being in charge of me, for the three minutes and six seconds it takes to get through this song. Within the universe of "Cool It Down," I wholly and passionately trust Lou Reed.

My earliest impressions of Lou Reed are tied to "Walk on the Wild Side," which I heard on the radio at least once in the mustard-yellow/dirt-brown Dodge Dart my dad drove when I was little. "Walk on the Wild Side" is a solid Lou Reed introduction for a kid: it's all storytelling, and the girl-group backup vocals are catchy and glamorous. "But she never lost her head, even when she was giving head" is a good lyric to memorize when you're very young and then you grow up and hear it again and think, "Oh! Oh..." I knew what Lou Reed looked like from his Rock Against Drugs PSA: he seemed a little creepy and cold, but I figured that's just what rock stars were like sometimes and you just had to accept it. The Dodge Dart's probably been dead 25 years but in some ways Lou Reed is the same as that car for me: nasty, temperamental, weirdly cool for reasons I couldn't yet completely understand. 

And then I got a little older and started loving music on my own and eventually bought some Velvet Underground records; I think the first was The Velvet Underground & Nico, when I was 18 or 19. I love so many songs by the Velvet Underground but I've always held something against them - mostly because I tend to associate them with rock-critic-type dudes who give me a hard time about loving bands they find to be deeply uncool. But that's unfair of me, and ultimately just as lame as what I'm rebelling against. It's not the Velvet Underground's fault that some people are insecure/fascists, so let's not get music mixed up with all the trash that people talk when it doesn't occur to them that they might have better things to say. That's just dirty, and even sort of rude. It's good and important to have respect for people who make beautiful songs.

***

When I started writing this post I texted my friend Tim, telling him to share all his "Cool It Down" feelings with me. He said a bunch of smart stuff but what hit me most was something about how the song starts off with a string of tiny disappointments ("Somebody took the papers/And somebody's got the key/And somebody nailed the door shut/That says hey what you think that you see"), but almost immediately there's a sense of something good coming right around the bend.

The first time I heard "Cool It Down," in the restaurant bathroom with my blue eyelids, it intensified the crazy-hopeful feeling that was happening that day - but it also tempered it, in a way that had nothing to do with the dampening of enthusiasm. I felt all fizzy and electric, but also calm and easy and free of anxiety about not getting what I wanted. Moments like that are rare (for me at least) when something superlatively cool feels very close to coming true. Generally I'm at a loss when it comes to alleviating boy anxiety, but this time Lou Reed just dissolved it for me, and I didn't even notice it was happening. It happened because I was taken over by the song, and it wasn't a song I'd chosen for myself. It was some creepy, nasty Lou Reed magic. So I guess maybe I do finally love Lou Reed. Gross.

The whole deal with the guy didn't work out, which was both hugely disappointing and completely okay. One thing I admire about my new boyfriend Lou Reed is that lazy awareness of how good things and bad things get mixed up together, and how there's really not much you can ever do about that. The world is indifferent to your shit, and Lou Reed seems like he accepts that indifference and probably even expects it. In "Cool It Down" he sings "You know it makes no difference to me" and sounds really pleased about not giving a fuck. He's saying "Get over yourself" but he doesn't actually have to say it - the "Get over yourself" is implied, just in his tone. But of course Lou Reed is never going to get over Lou Reed. And of course that's so much of why we need Lou Reed to exist.

***

On Fourth of July I went to a party in a backyard and sat on a blanket in the grass with a little dog named Vern (the dog up top in this picture here) and painted my nails gold, and then went to different party and ate strawberry cake out of a red Solo cup and drank champagne out of another red Solo cup, and watched the fireworks with my friends from the top of a big hill. I don't think I listened to "Cool It Down" at any point, but the day still had "Cool It Down" vibes: it was fizzy and electric and easy and free, jubilant in the chillest way possible.


So, congratulations, Lou Reed: you are now a bottle of gold Wet & Wild nail polish and a blanket and a cup of pink cake. Welcome to my goofy world; there is nothing you can do about it. We are all in charge of Lou Reed, in own weird way. Sweet Lou Reed just loves us so much.
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Thing of the Week: Juliana Hatfield & Feelings, Daily Tarot Cards

July 12, 2013, 9:40 am
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LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Juliana Hatfield & Feelings



My friend Laura Fisher wrote this beautiful and brilliant essay about Juliana Hatfield's album Hey Babe, and it was published by The New Inquiry last week. It's called "Minor Feelings" and asks the question Why do we canonize female anger, and not female confusion or longing?, which is the best question that's been asked in my life in a long time.  Here is one of my favorite paragraphs:

When you say that you "relate to" a song, generally that means it conjures a flash of self-recognition, essentially backward-looking (I have been there and felt this!). The song's prescience about you feels uncanny, even magical. But connecting to music can alsoinvolve a much stranger model of cathexis. I had felt awkward and alone, for sure - nothing too serious - but as I fell into the habit of listening to Juliana Hatfieldday-in and day-out, I began to think about her songs not so much as a reflection of things I had felt or experienced already but as a script for the kind of person I might yet become. Hatfield's songs weren't aspirational in any obvious way. They were all about feeling shy, rejected, obsessive, silent, ugly, and powerless. They were a permission slip to grow up ambivalent, inward, messy. Still, it was a conscious decision to anoint Hey Babe the sonic bible of my coming of age.

And all of the rest of the paragraphs are amazing and head-changing too, and you should really just read the essay over and over, or at least three times. I wish it were a book, but I'm also thrilled with whatever I can get, when it comes to beautiful and brilliant writing about Juliana Hatfield. And it's so strange to me, Laura's point about how Hey Babe is sort of a forgotten album, because Juliana Hatfield's probably means even more to me now than it did when I was a kid and Hey Babe was shiny and new. I feel like I'm still discovering her and unraveling why she's such a genius songwriter, and then figuring out how I can rip off her genius in my own writing. Hey Babe is not my favorite Juliana album (it's Only Everything!), but "Nirvana" is just everything to me:



Right now I'm also going through a major Blake Babies thing, about a million years too late. When I was a teenager I heard their cover of "Temptation Eyes" by the Grass Roots on the radio very late at night, and then I bought Innocence & Experience at the Newbury Comics in Harvard Square, and quickly fell into the habit of playing the hell out of "Temptation Eyes" whenever I got into a weird love thing with someone impossible. But I'd never seen the "Temptation Eyes" videotill about a month ago, and oh my god it's so heavy and dopey and artsy and wonderful. All of the Blake Babies in their underwear! Juliana shouting in French and playing that game where you plunge the knife between your splayed fingers and hope you don't stab yourself. Evan Dando yawning a lot and being objectified. Freda Love and John Strohm playing that game where you put your hands on top of the other person's hands and hope they don't slap you. One time in college John Strohm gave me a handful of cashews and almonds on a street corner In Rhode Island. It would have been cool to be a grownup when it was still 1990.








































JEN'S THING OF THE WEEK: Daily Tarot Cards

I started pulling daily Tarot Cards on Wednesday. I was going to see Weed Hounds play in McCarren Park but I had a few minutes before I needed to leave so I thought, Oh, maybe I should pull a daily tarot card? (Is it called Pulling?!) I bought Bea Nettles' beautiful Tarot Card deck in the winter but honestly I have barely touched them. I picked the 4 of Swords. It said I needed to rest which was true. I had just spent 4 days in a house in Rhode Island with 11 adult humans and 1 toddler human and 1 baby human. All of these humans I love dearly but I desperately needed an Introvert Reboot. I decided I'd leave after the hounds and just come home and rest. I didn't do that. I hung out. I had a beer. I had a vegan empanada. Then I had chips and guac and tacos and a marg. I didn't come home very late but I also did not rest at all. 

On Thursday I pulled the 3 of cups which was all about Friendship. Oh, good! I totally hung out with my friends instead of resting the night before because I actually also needed the joy of these pals. This one is also about helping friends. I'm not sure if I really helped anyone yesterday but I do try to be as helpful as I can to buddies in general. After work I went and got a facial (REST!) and I think I feel asleep during it. I came home and made pesto. I did not do anything else. I rested. 

This morning I pulled the 10 of cups which is about peace & joy & family. So, we'll see. 
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Of Lemonade Donuts & Lemonade Nails

July 16, 2013, 10:06 am
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Tonight I'm going home to Massachusetts for two weeks. Here are things I want do while I'm there:

1. Eat all the ice cream in New England. I'm not one of those bores who likes to whine about how "there are no seasons in Los Angeles," but I'll allow that there's something special about eating ice cream in Massachusetts that just can't happen in L.A. In winter it feels dreamy and reckless, and in summer it's "good as second childhood," to steal a line from Angela Carter. I want to go to Christina's in Cambridge, which is right down the street from my second Boston apartment, and get a cone of Banana Cinnamon or Coconut Butterfinger or Burnt Sugar. And then I want to go to the Scoopdeck in Maine and get a cone of either Graham Central Station ("graham cracker flavored ice cream w/ a graham cracker variegate & chocolate covered crisp candy") or of Twinkicake ("golden cake ice cream w/ marshmallow & cake pieces"). I also want to go to any halfway decent ice cream place in all of New England, and get a root beer float in a curvy Coca Cola glass:

And I want to go to Dairy Queen too - not so much for the ice cream, but for the ride out to the Dairy Queen. The nearest one to my family's house is ten miles out on Route 56, which is really creepy at night. You get to this one part and there's a big open field on either side and there's no streetlights, no anything, just the sky. One time I was riding out there with a boy and he told me to kill the headlights and I did and the whole world went black and I screamed and flicked the lights back on right away. It was scary and sweet.
      I also remember the Dairy Queen parking lot as being dusty in a cool, romantic, Neil Young-y sort of way. Neil Young dust is the opposite of pixie dust, but still total magic.

2. Buy a pair of shoes at the Army Barracks on Martha's Vineyard. LJ and Jen and I are going to Martha's Vineyard together next week! It's so exciting. We've never all been in the same room before - Jen and I have never even met. I haven't been to Martha's Vineyard in a few years, but when I was a teenager one of my favorite things to do on the island was shop at the army/navy store on Circuit Ave. In ninth grade I bought a pair of used combat boots there. If I were still in ninth grade and kind of a hippie, maybe I'd do this with those boots:


But I'm actually way older than ninth grade and what I really want is a pair of lowtop white Converse All-Stars. I've got some idea that they'll make me look more like George Harrison.

3. Go to the drive-in. I saw Point Break at Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Fourth of July Eve and obviously that was awesome, but outdoor movies could never really stack up against the drive-in: drinking wine and eating hummus on a blanket is just not even half as cool as being five-years-old and putting on your pajamas and getting in the car and going out for a night of candy and soda and a good double-feature. The movie plays out of the radio! That's so wild. One of the movies I most vividly remember going to see at the drive-in is Flashdance, so it's neat that I found this photo:




4. Go see the Lemonheads and Buffalo Tom. I mean, I'm going to see the Lemonheads and Buffalo Tom, on the Boston Common, on Saturday. The last time I saw the Lemonheads and Buffalo Tom together was in 1994, when I was 16. All I really remember about the actual show was getting my heart broken by "I'm Allowed" and thinking I was going to die when the Lemonheads first came on, because we were in the middle of the stupid pit and the boys were all being awful. It was the second of my five times seeing the Lemonheads and after the concert we drove back to this hot boy Paul's house and stood around his driveway for a long time. Ron's car was really dirty and we all made fun of him and then Dave wrote "KURT LIVES" on the trunk of the car, in the dirt, with his fingertip.

Let's listen to "Summer" by Buffalo Tom:


5. Not jump off a bridge. In Martha's Vineyard there's a bridge that I jumped off once when I was 17. It was absolutely an "Everyone else jumped off a bridge so I guess I will too" kind of situation, which is strange, since I'm generally not all that uncomfortable with going against the grain. Anyway, I hated it. I'm scared of heights and I remember falling and falling and thinking "How can I still be falling, how can it take this long to hit the water?" I don't remember hitting the water but somehow I feel like it hurt. The only cool thing was getting to say I did it, and I guess that still feels pretty cool. "I jumped off a bridge in Martha's Vineyard once" is a fun thing to say. It makes you sound rich and dangerous, and I am neither, but it's a good persona to embody for as long as it takes to speak that sentence.

6. Get caught in a thunderstorm. For book-writing/research purposes, I'm interested in having a thing where I'm way out deep in a lake and then a thunder-and-lightning storm starts and I'm kind of lazy about swimming back to shore. That probably won't actually happen, since I hardly ever swim in lakes, and plus I'd feel like such an asshole if I ever got electrocuted because I was being whimsical. But I hope I get to have a few good thunderstorms - along with the thing about the ice cream, the lack of summer thunderstorms is definitely one of the biggest drags about Los Angeles.

7. Hang out with these dudes. They look like they have good taste in music. This picture was taken by Marc St. Gil, who's taken so many other beautiful summery pictures I want to look at forever.


8. I want to eat a frozen Milky Way. I want to chip my tooth and burn my tongue on it. I want to hold each frozen-Milky Way piece in my mouth till it warms and melts and the caramel becomes goo again and makes my molars ache. I also want to eat a frozen chocolate-covered Oreo cookie, and a frozen hunk of mango.

9. I want to have lots of summer-specific Great Listens, or at least two or three or four of them. Once when I was 19 I drove down to Providence from home on a late-August night, to see a boy play a show at the Met Cafe. I'd never driven out of the state by myself before, and on the way there I listened to all of Butch by the Geraldine Fibbers. The album had just come out in July, and that night was absolutely the Great Listen that LJ described here. It's such a beauty of a record but I hardly ever listen to it anymore: it never sounds as good as that night, so I'd rather not hear it at all, which I recognize is a pretty extreme way to be. But if you're a sensitive teenager with kind of a nasty side, I'd totally recommend giving Butch a whirl this summer. One of the best songs is "Swim Back to Me," which has weird and dreamy lyrics like "Check out all the peaches waving from the shore." There's a cover of "You Doo Right" by Can, and if you play it in the right mood it'll make you feel immortal.
       I made a Spotify playlist of what I think my summertime at home might feel like, partly because I want to go back later and see how right or wrong I was, and mostly because I like capturing moods/moments in a little cluster of songs. I named my mix Lemonade Donuts & Lemonade Nails in tribute to how, after I land in Boston tomorrow morning, I'm going to eat a Lemonade Donut from Dunkin Donuts and my nails will be painted sunny-yellow like lemonade. It's a good mix. It starts with Dinosaur Jr. and ends with Funkadelic and my fave song right now is a cover of Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" by Giant Drag, which is a classic thunderstorm jam.
      I didn't put "Dream Lover" by Big Star on there but on the red-eye home tonight I want to listen to "Dream Lover" somewhere over Kansas and I want there to be a thunderstorm and I want lightning to flash right after Alex goes Play it for me, guitarist in his beautiful stoned voice. I want so much of life to have the vibe of Alex Chilton stonedly saying Play it for me, guitarist just as lightning's about to flash. I don't sleep on planes but if I did "Dream Lover" would be the best song to fall asleep to, with lightning happening under you, flying all dazedly through the big black sky.

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Liz & LJ's Biggest Crushes from Season 6 of 'Mad Men'

July 18, 2013, 8:49 am
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WORDS BY ELIZABETH BARKER & LAURA JANE FAULDS, IMAGE BY JEN MAY

8. GLEN


This spot was supposed to be Bob Benson's, but then Bob Benson had to go and RUIN EVERYTHING for EVERYONE by being a maybe-accomplice in this sketcho-boyfriend's- creepy-Pete-Campbell's-mom-getting-murdered-on-a-yacht can of worms we've recently opened up, although SHOUT-OUT TO HOW COOL THIS OUTFIT IS & ALSO I FIND IT VERY ENDEARING WHEN HE LISTENS TO SELF-HELP RECORDS IN HIS OFFICE: 


I've always had a soft spot for Glen. I recently re-watched the ep from Season 1 where cool 9-year-old Glen walks in on Betty Draper peeing and then asks for a lock of her hair, and I was like "Damn, some people are just born cool"- James Dean, Keith Richards, and Glen. 


Glen is one of those characters where every time he comes onscreen I get really pumped to catch up with where his creepiness levels are at and how his burgeoning sexuality is treating him and so on and so forth. He certainly delivered in Season 5, when he rocked a teen-stache and wore that chill parka to the Museum of Natural History on the day Sally first got her period. I like how Glen is always a little bit distant, disconnected from the world around him. He's an only child's only child. 

But Season 6 Glen totally brought it home. I love what a neat surprise he always is- just when you think you're never gonna see Glen again, Glen reappears to remind you that he is AWESOME, all uber-politicized in his bangin' peacenik jacket. He loves a good jacket, that Glen. 

I bet Glen's a Bob Dylan fan, and I bet his favorite song on the White Album is "Yer Blues," and I bet he thinks it's so cool when John Lennon shouts out "Dylan's Mr. Jones." I imagine Glen thinks very little of anyone who doesn't catch that reference. What do you think happens to Glen? Like, in the future? I was thinking it about Glen's final outcome on the subway today, and it made me very nervous. I was scared that Glen might die. But Glen probably doesn't die! I am looking at his Wiki and he was born the same year as my mom. It's nice to think of Glen being my mom's age, just being some chill twenty-something writer's cool old hippie dad somewhere. I feel like he probably ended up working for Apple computers. (LJ)

7. STAN RIZZO


Really Michael Ginsberg should have gone here, but then he went and grew that fucking mustache and I just can't. (I really hope he's lost his virginity by now, though - that kid's a firecracker.) And I actually don't have it that bad for Stan, but I'm impressed by his evolution from skeevy, pompous tormentor of Peggy to chill, handsomely bearded Peggy-ally who's also dude enough to go ahead and plant one on her when he's feeling it. Plus it was so hot when they were all on speed and Stan volunteered to do the William Tell thing and got the X-Acto knife stuck in his arm. Look at that tie! It's great enough on its own, but that 1960s-frat-boy move of wrapping a necktie around your forehead always undoes me. Apart from stuff about the Beatles, the only reason I would've liked to have been alive in the '60s is so I could've dated a guy in a frat-rock band. (Liz)



6. KEN COSGROVE

Three summers ago I was hanging out with my friend Jackadory on a patio at a bar called Sweaty Betty's here in Toronto, and there was a very adorable busser working. He looked like Kenny Cosgrove, and he was wearing a Wu-Tang t-shirt. You know, just a plain black t-shirt with a Wu-Tang logo on it. I nicknamed him "Kenny Cosgrove in a Wu-Tang t-shirt," and became obsessed with him in my head, and then Jackadory and I went back to Sweaty Betty's a few weeks later and I got her to inquire about his schedule for me, which was a really bro move of her, but then I got this really bad eye infection that haunted my life for almost half a year and I couldn't go out to bars for awhile, and then when my eye was all healed up and I could leave my house again, Kenny Cosgrove in a Wu-Tang t-shirt  didn't seem to work at Sweaty Betty's anymore! Then I got over it, because what more could I really do? 

So that's a big part of my loving Ken Cosgrove thing, imagining him as a present-day version of himself wearing a Wu-Tang t-shirt. 2013 Ken Cosgrove would also wear a wide-brimmed baseball cap and a slim-fitting pale pink button-up with khakis rolled up to mid-calf-length and boat shoes, and a Wu-Tang t-shirt on his days off. His co-workers and young women in line at Starbucks would probably tell him he reminded them of Macklemore, or think he was like Macklemore, and he'd know a lot about viral marketing and social media. He'd like Odd Future and the TV show Workaholics, and he'd have a Bodum, and a really hot girlfriend, and a really nice phone. You wouldn't want to like his Instagram but it would genuinely be amazing and you'd just have to hand it to him. He'd be weirdly good at photography and often hilarious. You'd just have to give him that.


REMEMBER WHEN HE TAP-DANCED? That was pretty much the best thing that ever happened. Life was so sad, for awhile there, when Kenny Cosgrove wasn't on Mad Men anymore. I feel like now that's back, I kind of take it for granted, like it's no longer possible that he'll just be ripped out of my hands and taken away, but that's a foolish way to live one's life. Who knows what kind of crazy shit Ken Cosgrove's going to get up next??? Is he going to be blind??? I am very confused as to the severity of his eye injury. I initially thought that his eyeball had literally been blasted out of his face, but it seems like nope, it's sort of minor, and now he wears an eyepatch! Which is a cool improvement for anybody. I would prefer for any given human to be wearing an eyepatch. (LJ)

5. PETE CAMPBELL


A fun thing about my life is that sometimes men who are into me tell me I remind them of Peggy Olson - it's this thing you can only notice if you've got a crush on me. One night two autumns ago I saw Don Draper and Peggy Olson on a friend date at a bar in my neighborhood, and at one point Elisabeth Moss and I walked past each other and locked eyes, and she held her gaze longer than the standard famous-person-on-normal-person gaze-holding time. It would've been cute if I'd turned it into The Parent Trap and stopped her and asked, "Excuse me, have you noticed? We look like each other." But of course I didn't say anything, I just smiled and tried to radiate as much as warmth and adoration in her direction as I possibly could.

ANYWAY MY POINT IS: I used to love this guy who resembles Pete Campbell just as much as I resemble Peggy Olson. The two traits that guy and Pete Campbell have most in common are: (1) skin tone that very closely matches their hair color (2) a voice that seems more suited to a 14-year-old than a grown man. Sometimes when Pete and Peggy are together and sharing some weird hot moment, I'm like "Oh hey - it's us," and my heart flutters a little. There hadn't been any killer Pete-Peggy moments in a while, but that scene with the two of them and Teddy Chaough getting drunk in the restaurant more than made up for lost time. The sexual tension had this easy, ebullient kind of vibe, and I was way into the stray lock of hair sweeping down over Pete's sweaty forehead. All day the next day I had the words "PETE CAMPBELL'S SEX FORELOCK" stuck in my head, and that was pretty fun.

Pete was kinda gross this season. I mean Pete Campbell's always kind of gross, and smarmy and twerpish and infuriating, but I basically love him forever. I love his affinity for exclamation: "A thing like that!" "Hell's bells, Trudy!" "You have your fingers in your ears? It's a Chip-and-Dip!" I love in the first season when he's newly married and Trudy calls him at work to ask what he wants for dinner, and he thinks for a nice dreamy moment, and then tells her, proudly: "Rib eye, in the pan, with butter. Ice cream." I love his hunting fantasy, and I love how Peggy gets turned on by it and needs to eat a ham sandwich and the biggest cherry danish afterward. I thought it was fun when he threw the roast chicken off the balcony. I like it when he wears his pajamas and I like it when he wears a sport coat. I didn't like it when he fell down the stairs. Despite all the shit he brings upon everybody else, it truly upsets me to see Pete Campbell suffer any indignity.

Obvs the best Pete moment of Season 6 was Pete getting stoned on the couch and checking out that girl in slow-motion. I took a picture of that scene and made it the wallpaper on my phone, and now when someone beautiful and exciting texts me, it's extra-beautiful and extra-exciting. I also love playing the first 23 seconds of "Piece of My Heart" super-loud and watching that moment in my mind; it's such a rush. I never listen past the first 23 seconds of "Piece of My Heart" anymore - the rest of the song's got nothing to do with Pete Campbell, so I really just don't see the point. (Liz)


4. DON DRAPER

Obviously season 6 Don was supposed to suck a bit. The writers of this television show obviously went pretty far out of their way to force us all into quitting thinking he's so cool. Like I remember reading some interview quote of Jon Hamm's where he's sounding off on how we're all missing the point by making "What would Don Draper do?" a meme instead of pitying, or maybe loathing, Don Draper for being such a fucked up sadsack, which was somewhat condescending and ungrateful of Jon Hamm, but at the same time, I get it- Jon Hamm definitely understands Don Draper better than anybody else in the world. 

For the first half of Season 6, I went in for all that anti-Don business. He reminded me of a cartoon of a perverted wolf. And Sylvia was such a scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel Don Draper mistress, like "THIS IS HOW FAR HE'S FALLEN, HE CAN'T EVEN GET A SOLID MISTRESS WORKED OUT," but then I started coming around once he locked her in the hotel room for a couple of days. I know you're not supposed to, but, you know, I've known my fair share of fucking idiots I find sexually attractive in my life, and what more can you really ask of a sexually attractive fucking idiot than to let you lock him or her up in a hotel room and be your sex slave. I mean, it's not Don Draper's fault that Sylvia chose to indulge that creepy whim of his. S&M is a thing for a reason. 

I also really loved the time he took a sick day and poured booze into his glass of OJ and then got drunk watching daytime TV and turned off Megan's soap opera- I appreciated how his disdain for horrible art outweighs his (maybe-)love for Megan. And it was very adorable when he did that little hand dance routine thing with his son at summer camp the day of the night he boned Betty, I kept remembering that moment at work all week and smiling to myself. It was sunny. 

Mostly, though, I really loved Don in the episode where they all injected speed into their bums and then he went on a wild goose-chase through the SC&P archives looking for an ad that reminded him of how prostitues have beauty marks, and he thought he'd found the answer to everything, and it was all that mattered in the WORLD? And then he woke up the next morning, didn't care at all, and was cold to Sylvia in the elevator. 

I felt that so hard. I like how Don Draper's never afraid to quit agreeing with himself. (LJ)

3. TED CHAOUGH


Here is a screencap of my desktop background. I love Ted Chaough, and loving Ted Chaough is so important to me! I think that loving Ted Chaough over Don Draper implies that you are a person who would choose good over evil. 

I have this butterscotch Faber-Castell I call my Ted Chaough pen because Ted Chaough's always wearing mustard, but pens are never mustard. I loved when he tried so hard to keep up with Don Draper's drinking and then just got embarrassingly drunk and passed out, and then told Don to have a drink before the Hershey's presentation because "My father was..." and trailed off. I loved when his little son climbed off the bed and onto his back and they were  perfect blond angel little monkeys- I feel like one of his sons must be named Brent. Brent, and then maybe Jason- Jason was probably a very au courant name to name your child in the 60s. I even loved when Peggy came into work looking all frazzled and gnar the morning after she stabbed her cool moustache boyfriend in the stomach and he broke up with her, all sentimentally geared up to make out with Ted in the office and then he BURNED HER SO HARD in the name of having an efficient work day/ being a good husband to Nan but then still showed up at her apartment all feelings-y a few weeks later and you had to watch her peel off his polyester turtleneck. And I just thought, "Wow, imagine loving someone so much that you'd peel off his polyester turtleneck"- it's a really beautiful amount to love someone. Oh, and then there was the time he said "Let's have a rap session about margarine"! Cute. I'm bummed that Ted and Peggy aren't together at the moment, but I am SO JAZZED for "West Coast Ted"! You can tell that Ted has probably been a big Beach Boys fan since Surfin' Safari-era and he'll obviously fit right in, palm trees and convertibles and auras and pineapple milkshakes. Ted with a tan! 

Oh and his nose is fucking LEGENDARY. It's an upside-down 7. (LJ)



2. JOAN HOLLOWAY


Heather Havrilesky from Salon.com once wrote something about Joan's "ability to cast all of her needs aside for the sake of her winning narrative," and I kind of think about that every day. FUCK A WINNING NARRATIVE, I want to say to Joan, who is my girl above all other girls. I love listening to "Hey Joni" and singing it as "Hey Joanie" and pretending it's about her (as in, "Hey Joanie, put it all behind you" and "Hey Joanie, now I'll put it all behind me too"). Whenever Joan cries I automatically start crying with her - like when she finds out Don broke up with Jaguar and gets all teary and says, "I went through all that for nothing?", I got all teary too and was overwhelmed by the urge to destroy Don Draper with my bare hands (and I never get mad at Don Draper).

But wait, this is supposed to be about crushes and hotness. So yeah: Joanie is really hot! I wish it'd been me and not Roger Sterling who said that thing about how a redhead's mouth is like a dollop of strawberry jam in a glass of milk. Her Serge Gainsbourg makeout sesh this season made me smile; whoever's responsible for picking "Bonnie & Clyde" for that scene is a hero. I'm in awe of her self-possession but when she loses her temper it's glorious, like when she smashes the vase over Greg's head, or throws the model airplane at the idiot receptionist. And one of my favorite Joan moments of all time is in Season 4, when she goes off on all the loser boys and does it so coolly and calmly and they all just wither.


A lot of my favorite Mad Men moments are the ones with Joan and Don alone (like that whole Ali Khan bit from Season 5), but one thing that always trumps Joan-Don alone time is Peggy-Joan alone time. The best Peggy-Joan scene is from the finale of Season 4, after they find out Don's marrying Megan: it's these two whip-smart and tough-as-nails babes rolling their eyes about a man they're each rightfully fascinated and exasperated by, and they're both so chill and funny about it, and I want them to start a band. Joan was kind of a heel to Peggy in the Avon breakfast meeting, but whatever, she's figuring shit out. And I started off this section all worried about her, but you know what? Joan's doing fine. Who knows what the hell's going on with her and Bob Benson, but hopefully she's getting something good out of it. Hopefully Joan gets something good out of everything forever. 

God, how rad is her kid gonna be?


1. PEGGY OLSON

On the last day of June I moved into a new apartment. It is across the hall from my old apartment, in my same beautiful house. It is more perfect than any in-my-head apartment my imagination ever could have conjured up, with really tight Feng Shui on top of everything. Like you can totally just feel the lightness of its perfect Feng Shui energy surrounding your face like a halo the second you walk in the front door. I'll probably post pictures of it and write about what the pictures mean sometime soon but getting myself into it would definitely be a very fatal digression for me at this point. 

The only very necessary information you need to know is that I moved into a new apartment recently, which inevitably necessitated an Ikea trip. 

I went to Ikea alone last Thursday, because "going to Ikea alone" sounded like a stupid-fun and very #classicLJ thing to do. The last thing anybody needs on an Ikea trip is another person's dumb opinion clogging up the inherent stress of all Ikea-related activities. Plus I just wanted to go to Ikea at the time I wanted to go to Ikea and face no time constraints once I'd arrived. I caught a cab to Ikea at 3, and then arrived at 3:45. My cab driver drove at a snail's pace. I feel like he should have been given a ticket for driving 1,000,000 miles below the speed limit. It was seriously bonkers. 

Once I got to Ikea I ate Swedish meatballs at the Ikea restaurant. I hadn't eaten Swedish meatballs since I was a kid and I was quite excited about it. Things had changed, though- the lingonberry, now, is a weird liquid that comes out of a pump. When I was a kid you could see the actual individual lingonberries in the dressing. And now it came with mashed potatoes instead of boiled baby potatoes. Tragically, I didn't eat a great deal of my potatoes, since I had dinner plans that night and wanted to save space for cooler food. But the meatballs delivered entirely. 

Everything about my Ikea trip was perfect. It was very pleasant and empowering to a degree that motivated me to text most people I regularly text with about how pleasant and empowering it was. I was deeply impressed by my own efficiency- I thought things through in a really REAL and honest way, and made educated decisions based on those thoughts. I feel like having another person there would have muddled up my mental clarity. Everybody else's bullshit is all up in your grill constantly and I feel legitimately confused by it on a regular basis. 

I was having a killer hair & mascara day and just felt really great about the miracle of my having been born as the enthusiastic life-lover I am and all the cooooool independent energy I was obviously projecting all over Ikea and its patrons. So many basics arguing over whether to buy the 10 or 3% whimsical bathmat and I'm just breezin' on by with my mandala rug and shoe rack and 2 trash cans and napkins and fish ice cube trays and lamp and etc. Then I got to the part where it was just me alone in the big Ikea warehouse, lifting a bunch of heavy boxes into my cart, like "Oooh, Laura, you're so strong," and then once I got it all loaded up and was waiting in line to pay suddenly all of it hit me, and I couldn't help but get a little bit, or rather very, sentimental-

I started thinking about my life. I'm a woman, and I'm twenty-eight, I have a job, my job pays me good money and I live in an amazing apartment all by myself; I use the money I get from working at my job to pay for my amazing apartment, and to furnish my apartment, and it's mine. And I saw myself as I am from the outside, as an entirely self-sufficient woman who's got everything she needs, or needs nothing, and I started thinking about all the suffragettes and Peggy Olsons, and then I started to cry. It was just so wonderful, realizing that I was exactly where I was because and only because of all the women who didn't have what I have, who couldn't have it and so devoted their entire lives to fighting as hard as they did to get it for me-

They did it. I'm here and I have it. And I realized that I'm not as proud as I am grateful. (LJ)


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Excellent, Average, & Terrible Things I've Recently Eaten: The Izakaya on College Street with Carly

July 23, 2013, 11:30 am
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Hi! Welcome to "Excellent, Average & Terrible Things I've Recently Eaten," my cool new column on sfwhatevs where I write about excellent, average & terrible food I've recently eaten. I came up with this idea one night when I was walking around drunk listening to Bob Dylan on headphones and trying to figure out what would be the most honest possible context to frame where I'm at as a writer and human right now. I've spent a lot of time over the course of the past year wondering why I write, really- I guess I just wanted to make sure it wasn't pure ego. 

I write because I think the world is magic. Like Marc Bolan said: "I think I am a child. Everything blows my mind." It seems like lately, when I'm writing about eating, I can connect with that the hardest. Eating is like stars and dirt; it's just there. I usually do it with people I love in places that don't look like offices. It helps me see what my life is now and it makes me remember how it used to be. Eating is funny and sexy and dull. 

I used to write about music because music helped me write the truth but times have changed. I am twenty-eight years old and this is how I will love writing the chill and beautiful words I know I am here to write.


BY LAURA JANE/ ILLO BY JEN

Carly texted me to say, “I feel like you’d be a fun person to go to an Izakaya with,” which was a cool and on-point compliment. That week of my life was rife with cool compliments- a few days later, my head chef told me “You are strong and powerful”- he’s from Mexico, so the y in the “you” is a j in this case. A few days after that, I surprised him in the kitchen with a limeade and he told me, “Laura- jou are the best one in town!”
        I forget the name of the Izakaya we went to. My Internet is down so I can’t check it. I am so angry about my Internet being down. The guy who moved into my old bedroom has one of those AirPort things that plug into the wall and it breaks down every five seconds and it’s connected to my old modem in my old room, and it’s so frustrating that he’s just in there Internetting his little heart out on my fucking dollar (maybe the word “my” should always be italicized, I’m thinking, in an “I Me Mine” kind of way) while I’m (I’m) writing a blog post in a Microsoft Word document in the next room over.
        The Izakaya Carly and I went to was on College Street. It is very big and looks like somebody, or a few somebodies- three guys wearing suits- pumped a lot of money into it. There are a lot of frills. I remember walls made of cork, or maybe barrels- whatever material barrels are made of- and a great deal of funky lamps. So many funky lamps. And mirrors! Hallways lined with funky lamps and funky mirrors arranged in checkerboard patterns. Black leather easy chairs and white latticed screens, like those accordion screens old-timey starlets or Dick Whitman’s childhood memories of whores used to change behind, mirrored ceilings and mirrored walls and mirrored barrels and mirrored funky lamps.
        Mirrored funky lamps. I wrote those words, just now.
        Carly and I sat on the sidewalk patio. (Real Life Update: I just wrote my roommate a sassy Facebook message about the Internet and switched from tequila to gin: gin and Campari in an iceless glassful of lemon Perrier, human history’s most pathetic Negroni.) I remember drinking weird Izakaya margaritas, which must have involved egg whites. I was thinking, “There are obviously egg whites involved in these margaritas,” but I didn’t say anything, because egg whites in your margarita just seem like they could maybe be a buzzkill. You just want some lime juice, and then you get eggs. Carly was presented with a margarita that was nearly one-third egg white head. She didn’t mind. We also had some other cocktail, with yuzu. Mine tasted like mild grape water. And I had a mojito, possibly.


We ordered the peanut tofu, which is not actually tofu- “it is juice squeezed from peanuts (!), which is combined with an emulsifier to create that weird texture happen.”
        That’s a quote from a Facebook message Carly sent me last Wednesday, which I am reading, right now, on my phone because I don’t have the Internet because life is stupid and the Universe doesn’t inherently care about my wanting to write this post on the blogger website or whatever. The next message Carly sent me read, simply, “create that weird texture happen,” just that sentence, her realizing it, and then a little frowny face, little yellow face, the classic emoji guy. But I think that “create that weird texture happen” should a full-on smiley! I love“create that weird texture happen”-      
        Weirdly, I keep typo-ing “create” as “creature.” Like I’m just sitting around writing about creatures all the time. It’s so natural for me.
        The peanut tofu definitely had, to be crass, a boogery vibe to it. I feel like over the course of the past couple years, as salted caramel has risen to glory and become the Beatles of our day, people (you know, people- the same ones who think everything is "random") have started getting really weirdly vocal about loving “sweet/savory,” which is fine- I like pineapple in Thai food as much as the next guy. It would be really easy to describe the weird texture thing happen fermented peanut juice Carly & I ate as “sweet/savory,” but really it was neither sweet nor savory nor sweet/savory. It was probably what aliens eat. If aliens came down to earth in a spaceship and fed me their food and it was that, I’d be 0% surprised. I’d be like “Yup, bored, next”- next spoonful of alien food. We were both into it.
        At one point there were just a few bites left in the dish and as the runner was placing newer, more exciting dishes on the table, Carly and I both eyed the tofu, then each other. We were both like, “Let’s just deal with this,” “Get this out of the way,” and ate the end of it really fast so the guy could clear the plate and we wouldn’t have to think about it anymore, and in that moment I knew that Carly and I were truly compatible eaters. So many people would never think to shove several spoonfuls of peanut gunk into their mouths really fast just so they wouldn’t have to “deal” with having it around to “distract” them. Some people eat at my restaurant and sit around for hours with so much food on the table in front of them, and then they just NEVER EAT IT. 
       We shared a bowl of bitter melon mixed up with some egg and some other shit that I deleted the picture of because the flash was on and it looked ugly, and then a bowl of fried mashed potato balls topped with mayonnaise and, again: some other shit. The general concensus was that either of us would be more than thrilled to bum around and eat a vat of them stoned, ideally in a basement on a couch wearing pyjama shorts in the middle of summer. Let’s get super-creative with the bongs we’re imagining us smoking out of here. 



And we had this tuna tartare. It was supposed to be beef tartare, but they were out of beef. There was this one night, at my work- it was Father’s Day! That was the most gorgeous part of everything, that it was Father’s Day- and we ran out of beef. Fuck! Dads love beef! The kitchen realized we were out the night before, and I was, on some level, pissed off when we came up with a solution (it was: “go to the grocery store and buy beef”). I’d sort of wanted us to have no beef. I thought it was funny and weird. I wanted to see what it would like to have to get through Father’s Day without having any beef at all to serve to anyone. I wanted to find out what would happen, but I never will, because we’re grown, and life is serious. Money is on the line, and we must placate people: these fathers, these strangers- you just walk across the street to the store and you buy them their beef. It’s easy and it’s boring and they eat it.
         I’ll go to France one day, you know, and I’ll eat the beef tartare that MFK Fisher talks about: “a dependable reviver for those who can cope with its surprising powers”- I can! I can cope! I am one of them! And it’ll be that day one day, the day I eat beef tartare for the first time, and my eyes will sparkle so hard they’ll erupt like flying fireworks out of my head, or maybe they won’t at all. Maybe I’ll shrug and be unimpressed, and move onto the next thing. Be so jazzed to have my mind blown by, like… horse-face. “Oh it’ll be so fucking beautiful when I eat a horse’s face…”
         So it couldn’t have been as good as it could’ve been, because it was tuna, which I taste all the time. I remember when I first tasted good-ish tuna, I guess it was mildly revelatory-     
        There used to be this sushi restaurant by the movie theatre near my old house I grew up in, in Oakville, a bland town even I no longer have to care about- I’d eat there in the middle of the day, with my mother after a movie, and I never thought about breakfast or lunch or dinner then; there was just eating- this abstract, useless thing, and I don’t use the word useless absently here; I was, truly, severely distanced from its use. It’s sweet, now, to think: eating is very useful!
        I don’t know what it was to me then, I don’t care. Just another dumb thing I was wrong about because I hadn’t lived the ten years I’ve lived since I was wrong about it. I just remember this salad I'd get there: iceberg lettuce, most likely some shredded carrot, dressed in the same tangy, brownish vinaigrette as most salads of the “soup and salad that come free with your Bento box” fame, topped with, I don’t know, some tuna I guess. Some rare pink seared tuna, and I learned the word Ahi, and I talked about it, bragged about it: I wanted everybody I knew to know that I knew the word Ahi and ate raw tuna and loved a salad with the word Ahi in the name. I brought my boyfriend to this place and I watched him watch me eat it and in my head he knew: she is very cosmopolitan. And we had scallops! We ate scallops; he was lucky. He was seventeen. He had scallops and a girlfriend. 
        At work I feel like all the sushi-grade tuna we have on our menu is a little bit 1996 but it’s summer so I sell it. And it’s expensive so that’s cool because I make a bit of money. I wouldn’t say I’m in the restaurant industry for the honor of it, but I’m not in anything for the money- I’m in everything for my future self’s house in the south of France with so much beef tartare than I can’t remember how wanting to know what beef tartare tasted like was ever even a thing, a couple thousand vats of Chablis, gardenful of lavender, couple pan bagnats to create that weird texture happen, 3 novels, no children, and a dog named George. A few stray cats loping around and not annoying me. Skin like an Australian person’s.
        I remember medallions of charred baguette cutting up the inside of my mouth, liking the chive, egg yolk drizzling and imagining where the taste of the beef would have been but being okay with where it wasn’t. I remember talking to Carly or listening to her and sometimes looking across the street to notice the drugstore attached to the grocery store, the shoe-repair booth in the middle of the parking lot and the coffee shop attached to the bank, my fifth summer of that boring-looking vista and my eleventh of sushi-grade tuna being a thing I have heard of, and for the first time in eleven or five years or summers or whatever, I chill-ly did not give even 0% of a shit whether or not I ever saw any of it again and I did not wonder what my life might maybe be without it, not then or not then or not now. After dinner we walked home to my apartment and drank the bottle of Chablis my dad gave me as a housewarming gift. Emily called to complain about work and my phone sweated up half my face. We listened to the song “Song of a Baker” by the Small Faces so Steve Marriott could sing the words “While I’m thinking of love, love is thinking for me" fifty years ago and we'd have our minds blown, swoon, and agree with him. 
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The Blake Babies Are So Beautiful, It Hurts To Look At Them

July 29, 2013, 11:09 am
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BY LIZ

Today Blake Babies are my favorite band and my favorite song is "Out There," from the album Sunburn. I've watched the video for "Out There" about 30 times in the past week and it's hurt me every time, but it also makes me stupidly happy and giddy. It's like a video you'd make if someone let you make a video when you were in seventh grade: there's low-grade gymnastics, some dippy choreography, bubble-blowing, making out, the eating of flowers and of crayons, everyone in the Blake Babies cutting off her or his hair. It's a very preteen idea of arty, but it's so elegantly realized and makes me think that you should never forget all the weird shit you wanted to make when you were 11, 12, 13; you should return to it and use your grown-up brain and resources to make it as good and genius and gorgeous as possible.


Blake Babies were based in Boston, and I grew up in Massachusetts, and I've decided it means something that we come from the same place. They got together in 1986, when I was eight. When I was eight the most exciting thing in the world was helping my older cousins out with their Sunday-morning paper route: waking up when it was still dark out, delivering all the papers, and then taking our tip money and buying tons of candy at the gas station. It's so mind-blowing to me that while I was eating Swedish fish and Reese's cups for breakfast on the disgusting ground of a gas-station parking lot, the Blake Babies were existing an hour's drive away and making songs together, songs like "Wipe It Up" and "Better'n You." They were kids then too, still teenagers, but thinking of Blake Babies in that context makes them seem so glamorous and dreamy in their olderness. I mean seriously - LOOK HOW DREAMY THEY ARE:






Because I'm a goofball and a romantic, one of the most glamorous and dreamy things about the "Out There" video is the recurring theme of Juliana all alone vs. John and Freda together and in love. It's so sweet when John kisses the top of Freda's head when they're waltzing together, and I adore his eyelashes/lovey-dovey eyes in this little moving picture our buddy made here: 




And then there's Juliana smiling into the camera as she waltzes with herself, and calmly stroking her own face with a pair of scissors. She looks really cool when she kicks over the flowers, and cooler when she pricks her finger with the sewing needle and touches her tongue to the blood.





My favorite thing about "Out There" the song, apart from its being perfect in every way, is how Juliana changes her mind in the final chorus. The last lyric of the bridge is "Went away and tried to come back/Maybe I shouldn't have done that," and then she goes from singing "I know it's out there, it must be out there somewhere" to "There's nothing out there, it's not out there anywhere." Owning up to regret and lack of hope is a crazy thing to pull off in a pop song, and Juliana Hatfield always does it masterfully. I'm so into the parts of the video when it's just her singing her head off and everyone else is blurred out and gone.





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Everything you were born too late for but love anyway is automatically cooler than everything from your own time: you'll never know the reality of it, so you can make it into whatever kind of dream you want. That's generally true of all the dead-and-gone bands I obsess over, but with Blake Babies it's a little different. I think it's partly because they were so close to me (geography-wise, time-wise), but it's also got to do with there just being something patently uncool about them. I mean they're beautiful, and their songs are beautiful and often devastating, but there's also something very un-figured-out, preliminary, a tiny bit childlike. It makes me want to protect them, even though I know they're going to grow up amazingly and obviously don't need any protection.

So I want to babysit the Blake Babies, but I also want to go back in time and have them babysit me. I'm going to write a story about an eight-year-old girl and the most exciting night of her eight-year-old life, when a fictional version of Blake Babies are her babysitters. It will be the proto-grunge version of Adventures in Babysitting and then we'll all make it into a beautiful movie.
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So Many Beautiful Pictures of Strawberry Fields Whatever's First Annual Martha's Vineyard Vacation

July 31, 2013, 9:58 am
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Last Wednesday Strawberry Fields Whatever went on vacation together, on the island of Martha's Vineyard. We stayed till Friday morning and squeezed so much fun and beauty and whimsy and food into those 40 or whatever hours. Here are lots of pictures from our perfect vacay.

LIZ: Here's me and LJ on the bus from Boston! LJ's the one on the left, in case you somehow don't know us. The bus was totally the worst part of everything, but still we are so radiant and bright-eyed.

LJ: I like this photo because I'm an "angelic goof" in it. Liz is sly. 


LIZ: And here's LJ on the ferry, being Nan Rupert. You'll learn more about Nan Rupert in like two and a half minutes.


LJ:As I'm sure you can imagine, I'm very into my Nan pic. I look so "tra-la-la" and droll, and it's magic how my plastic cup of beer has somehow turned itself into a deep rouge strawberry daiquiri! However, the photo (below) of me looking SO HAPPY while Liz is sly (again! Liz was so slyyyyyy en route to Martha's Vineyard) and George Harrison-y in the background is definitely my fav pic from our ferry ride, because my face looks as happy as I truly was. Our ferry was named "Island Home," by the way, which is lovely, and should be the name of a Kinks song, from 1966. 

I REALLY fucking loved the ferry. I remember thinking, on the ferry, that "it seems right now like" being on that ferry was one of the greatest and most important things that had ever happened to me. It was almost sad to look forward and imagine all the other great and important things that were about to happen to me on Martha's Vineyard, over the course of the next couple of days- I was a little bit worried that I'd forget all about the ferry. 

But I wouldn't! I never did. The ferry was one of my favorite parts of all Martha's Vineyard, and one of my favorite moments of the whole ferry was when Liz and I were both looking out at the light against the waves of the water, we were silent, and I thought how nice it was to get to spend my time with someone who also just wanted to look out at the waves and be silent, and neither of us had to to explain about it, or apologize, or try to compete over who loved the waves the most or how or why we loved them. So here are those two perfect wave-watchers: 

LIZ: And then we got to the island and met up with Jen! Look how cute she is, with her wine and banana. This photo was taken on the back porch, with a stunning view of the tennis courts at our lovely Martha's Vineyard Resort.

LJ: I agree that Jen is extremely cute. 



LIZ: Oh my god our hotel room was so great. It was like an entire mini-house, with a kitchen and living room and a gigantic bedroom downstairs and another bedroom in a little loft/attic space that you accessed by climbing a spiral staircase. That was my bedroom and I miss it so much. I made this photo the wallpaper on my iPhone home screen and now I just stare at all the time and dream of being back in that bed.


LJ: Jen and I were Martha's Vineyard roommates because we are both insomniacs who need to pee a million times before we fall asleep or else we'll have worse insomnia over not having easy access to a toilet. We slept in a king-size bed that was very comfortable and great but also excessively huge. Oh rich people and their crazy needs! There is no reason for any bed to ever be that big.

LIZ: Our first island dinner was at the Lookout Tavern, where we sat outside at a picnic table. Jen got hearts-of-palm salad and fries, LJ and I split a lobster roll and fried clam strips. For drinks Jen and I had margaritas and LJ had something called Catcher in the Rye, which I think involved bourbon? Maybe she'll explain. After dinner we had beers at the bar of a restaurant called Nancy's, then went back to the room and dished and gabbed.

LJ: Sure! I'd love to talk about my Catcher in the Rye, the most ideally-suited to me drink I've ever drunk, right down to its JD Salinger-themed name. It was: Bulleit bourbon, ginger ale, soda water, lots of ice, and lemon and lime. I like how I am eyeing those clam strips fucking lecherously. 


LIZ: So one of the most important things we did on Martha's Vineyard was conceptualize a feature film, which happened during our Wednesday-night gab sesh. The movie's titled Blurred Lines 1: it's written by Laura Jane Faulds, Elizabeth Barker, and Jen May, and directed by Wes Anderson. Set at a tiki party on Martha's Vineyard in the early 1960s, Blurred Lines 1 stars Laura Jane Faulds as Nan Rupert, Elizabeth Barker as Tippi Taylor, Jen May as Kit Jones, plus the entire cast of Mad Men as the tiki-party guests. Here are our preliminary notes on the characters/plot:


To translate, for those who can't read my handwriting: Nan Rupert (née Tate) is a dry-witted party animal who knows how to live, Tippi Taylor (née Klönschnack) is a feminine, beehive-coiffed lover of tiki, and Kit Jones is a newspaperwoman and a bachelor in Manhattan. Nan is married to Roland "Buddy" Rupert, a dashing alcoholic who works in the train industry. Nan and Roland have two Schnauzers, named Kirby and Lindsay. Tippi's husband is Chaz Taylor, a blonde meathead who's a bad manager but a good guy; they've got two sons, Mattie and Chaz Jr. Kit's steady is Bob Cosgrove, a literary hotshot and freelance writer.
       Robin Thicke plays Roland Rupert, Owen Wilson plays Chaz Taylor, and Bob Cosgrove is played by the fictional character Ken Cosgrove from Mad Men. EVERYBODY SMOKES and they all went to VASSAR.
       We also established that the seventh most central character in Blurred Lines 1 is a "ne'er-do-well," an old flame of Roland Rupert's who turns up at the tiki party uninvited in a brazen attempt to win Roland back. Later on we identified the ne'er-do-well as Evelyn Stone, a struggling artist who sleeps with lots of artists and works as a secretary at a magazine for artists.
       Blurred Lines 1 will be succeeded by Blurred Lines 2: The Fondue Party, a comedy of manners directed by Nicole Holofcener.

LJ:One thing I just wanted to add is that Buddy Rupert is a self-made man. Oh and also I think that Lindsay is probably a boy Schnauzer, but I am not 100% sure about that. 

LIZ: One of the few things that could possibly rival Blurred Lines 1 in importance is the discovery of Our Market, a grocery store down the street from Martha's Vineyard Resort. It's the most gorgeous grocery store any of us has ever seen in her life.



LJ: My thing about Our Market is that it is my favorite store. Literally. Out of all the stores, in the entire world, it's my favorite. Fuck it. Fuck Creatures of Comfort or, like, the Commes des Garcons store or a really good record store or whatevs. I prefer Our Market. Groceries, Newspapers, Liquor. Boom.

On Thursday we were at Our Market buying booze and Cape Cod potato chips, and I was standing in front of the beer fridges at the back of the cool liquor store portion of Our Market holding a bottle of regular champagne in one hand and a bottle of pink champagne in the other, as is my wont. "Should we also get beer?" I asked Liz, "Is that excessive?" 

Before she had a chance to reply, I said, "Actually, I don't care if that's excessive." 

"I don't care either," said Liz, and then this stranger standing a few feet away from us said "I don't care either!", and it was SO COOL OF HIM. ONLY AT OUR MARKET WOULD A THING THAT COOL HAPPEN. We loved him so much. He reminded us of David Brothers, and he was wearing a pink shirt. 

LIZ: Also on our street was the Book Den East, which is probably now my favorite bookstore on the planet. The store's inside a house - but, like, the back house of the owners' property; it's really creaky and musty and cluttered and magical. This is the backyard of the Book Den.



And here's a shot of the windowsill in the Book Den children's nook.



LIZ: The third best thing on our street was this haunted house, which we've adopted as Strawberry Fields Whatever official headquarters.




LIZ: The alternate headquarters for Strawberry Fields Whatever is this darling pink house, which we found in the little village of gingerbread cottages.



Here we all are, posing in front of the heart house two-by-two:





LJ: There was something about the gingerbread houses that made my inner Nan Rupert kick in. I just can't see myself, as a fully-functioning adult female, wanting to live in a house that is painted in the same colors as a child's toy. I mean having a whimsically-painted house be your alternate Strawberry Fields Whatever headquarters or backdrop to drink iced coffee against is one chill and wonderful thing, but to live in? I don't relate.

So here is my favorite gingerbread cottage, a very serious gingerbread cottage. I admit that the Astroturf tarp lining the front porch is kinda gauche, but check out all the churchy windows! Oh who cares about the south of France, pleeeeeease life let me live here when I'm seventy:



LIZ: We visited the gingerbread cottages on Thursday, when it was gray and chilly and sometimes rainy. Here are LJ and Jen, hanging at the beach and loving life despite the bad-news weather:






LJ: Here is the dumbass picture of my sandy foot that I am obviously taking in the picture above, just to put things in perspective for you:




LIZ: Also on Thursday we went to the Flying Horses, which is a carousel or - to put it more Strawberry Fields Whateversy - a merry-go-round. Here is us on the merry-go-round:




LJ: Also on Thursday, we ate some fudge. Well, sadly, Jen didn't- Burdick's Fudge on Martha's Vineyard doesn't make vegan fudge, which is stupid of them. Everybody should be able to have this fudge. 

My piece of fudge was cranberry-flav, and it was my favorite thing I ate on Martha's Vineyard. I took one bite of it and announced, "If there was any doubt in my mind that I would one day come back to Martha's Vineyard, it's gone now. I will have to come back to eat this fudge again," only probably in real life there were more likes in that sentence.

My favorite dessert in the world is strawberry ice cream, and this fudge was like a smarter, cooler, richer, weirder take on even the best strawberry ice cream I've ever had. It's like regular strawberry ice cream is Love Me Do, and the cranberry fudge is It's All Too Much. 


LIZ: Our last island meal was at Nancy's. This was the view from our dinner table:


LJ: Here is the NAN view from our dinner table! I like describing the Martha's Vineyard ocean and sky as being "moody." 

PS: Now it is later and I am looking over this post and just noticed something very important, which is that (I think) these two photographs of Liz and I's respective Nancy's dinner table views PERFECTLY represent EXACTLY how we each see the world, as the writers you know us to be:

LIZ: For dinner Jen got a Mediterranean plate that was not very awesome, and LJ and I split a fried seafood platter that was pretty much heaven. Jen drank Narragansett beer and I drank a glass of malbec and LJ drank an Amstel Light, aka "Nan's beer." 

LJ: I feel really cool about how I drank Amstel Light at Nancy's. That is probably the most romantic detail of all Martha's Vineyard, to me. The fried whole belly clams from our seafood platter were my (VERY close) second-fav thing I ate on Martha's Vineyard after the cranberry fudge. They were grey and slimy and had sand in them. They tasted like the ocean. The fried clam strips from the night before were also awesome, but they were just a dumbed-down version of the real deal designed to prevent boring rich people from getting grossed out by, God forbid, a non-boring thing. Every day since I left I think about what it felt like for my teeth to cut against the hot fried batter and hit the gummy grey ocean-flavored belly of a mollusc hid inside. 




LIZ: One last Nancy's shot. Look at LJ's hoodie! Look much I love my phone. 





LIZ: Back at home we read tarot cards, and drank pink champagne and cans of Malibu + pineapple juice and cans of Dark & Stormy cocktails. Each of us had a really great tarot sesh. I'm in love with my final-outcome card and think about it all of the time and it's already changed so much for me.

LJ: My Heart of the Matter card was the QUEEN OF CUPS!!!!!!!! #everything



LIZ: LJ and I took the ferry back to the mainland early Friday morning. Here's Martha's Vineyard going away from us, breaking our hearts.


LIZ: It's too sad to end with that last pic, so here's one of the three of us on the beach. It really captures our Nan/Tippi/Kit spirits. Our Nan/Tippi/Kit spirits will live and breathe inside us forever, no matter where in the world we are.

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Thing of the Week: A Psychotic Muffin, A 1994 Issue of 'Bikini,' AN ENDLESS HARVEST

August 2, 2013, 9:30 am
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LJ'S THING OF THE WEEK: The Psychotic Muffin I Ate at the Airport After Missing My Flight to Boston 


A little-known fact about Strawberry Fields Whatever's seminal 2013 trip to Martha's Vineyard is that I missed my initial flight to Boston! My "behavior concept" for our Martha's Vineyard trip was to play up to my Beatles-archetype (JOHN LENNON), so I definitely got that one off to a strong start. I think it's pretty obvious that if one Beatle were going to miss his flight to the vacation he was taking with two of the other Beatles, it would be John. Paul McCartney is probably two hours early to every flight he's ever taken, and makes sure to bring along a couple granola bars and one of those neck pillows that looks like a toilet seat. 

I arrived at the airport 55 minutes before my flight left (it was traffic's fault) and tried to check in on one of those automated flight terminals ("flight terminals") but then it wouldn't let me because they cut you off after an hour. A lady rushed me to the front of the check-in line and then a zillion different airport employees brusquely asked me why I hadn't checked in online beforehand. "Because I don't have a printer?" I offered weakly. I asked one of the nicer ladies if she thought I was going to miss my flight. "It's not looking good," she said, "But you never know." 

At customs I asked a handsome hippie-looking airport employee if I could cut to the front of the line so I could make my flight. He said no, which was really fucking dumb of him- I was at a charismatic place in my life, and my hair looked great that day. So I waited in the customs line behind this Good Charlotte-looking guy holding a hockey stick for an entire half-hour, FLIPPING THE FUCK OUT. I was shaky and anxious and really wished I could just know if I was going to miss my flight or not. I was very angry at the Good Charlotte-looking guy for not inviting me to go ahead of him. 

Once I got to the part where you take your shoes off and put your bags through the conveyor belt, the airline went really far out of their way to help rush me through. They put me in line in front of everyone and then I realized I'd forgotten to take one of those little plastic bags to put all my liquids in and I started whimper-yelping "I need one of those bags for my liquids! For my liquids! I need a plastic bag to put my liquids in!" and the Air Canada lady, who was pacifying and I LOVED HER, was like "Shhh, it's okay, take off your shoes, honey," and brought me a plastic bag for my liquids. I finished up with that part of my "adventure" five minutes before my flight was due to depart and proceeded to run barefoot across the airport toward my gate. I arrived panting, but was too late. I hadn't even just missed my flight. The airplane was already rolling away. 

I really resent the airport for putting me through all that, by the way. They shouldn't have let me try to make it. It was a stressful and unpleasant experience that I endured for literally no reason. 

After it happened, I calmed way the hell down and was mostly just stoked I could go get myself some food and caffeine. I only had to wait another couple hours to get on the next flight to Boston anyway. I'd noticed this really cool-looking baked good as I was booking it down the moving sidewalk, since that's just the sort of person I am, a person who can't not notice a cool-looking baked good, even at the most inopportune of moments- it looked like a long, conical flowerpot, and in my mind I imagined that the recessed center was filled with caramel. I think the first thought I thought after missing my flight must have been "Oh awesome! Now I get to go eat that crazy flowerpot thing!" 

As it turned out, there was no caramel involved- it was just a muffin. But it wasn't just a muffin, it was also a psychotic muffin. You know? Look at that fucking behemoth! It's psychotic. It's psychotic, it's a behemoth, and it's a muffin. That's it. Those are the only things it is. 

I chilled out at my new gate, Gate 66, eating my psychotic muffin (it was carrot-flavored, a little chalky, but mostly excellent- muffins are my favorite food; I love them all), swigging from a bottle of Diet Coke, reading a tabloid about Cory Monteith's death and listening to "One Of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" on headphones. I Instagrammed a pic of my psychotic muffin accompanied by the caption I feel like the cosmic reasoning behind my missing my flight to Boston was so this psychotic muffin and I could meet each other. I still agree with myself. 


LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: A 1994 Issue of Bikini Magazine That I Found in My Parents' Attic on Tuesday

Obviously one fun highlight for me this week was when John Strohm from Blake Babies left a comment on my Adventures in Blake Babysitting post and told me I could come to Nashville and babysit his eight-year-old. Also, speaking of Blake Babies, I got back to L.A. on Wednesday night to find a package from my friend Mike which included this beautiful GRAY VINYL 7-inch of "My Sister" by The Juliana Hatfield Three, plus a 7-inch of "American Jean" by Helium. That was basically the nicest Boston-to-L.A. transition a girl could ever ask for, and I'm superthankful. 

Anyway before leaving Massachusetts the other day I went up to the attic at my fam's house and found a 1994 issue of Bikini magazine, with Liv Tyler on the cover. The cover story's by Thurston Moore and it starts like this:

Liv Tyler buzzes my buzzer about 1 p.m., a good half-hour before I thought she might appear. My wife, Kim, and I have a newborn baby named Coco Hayley who has wrecked sweet havoc on any semblance of a sleeping schedule for us. I drag myself out of bed. "Take the elevator up to the 7th floor," I croak through the intercom. Then I rush back into our bedroom and throw on some jeans and a T-shirt that says "Satan."

Hahahahahahaha/yikes!! The article's actually wicked boring but there's lots of pretty pictures, and I like that they went with "You're Liv-in All Over Me" as the title. Liv Tyler + Dinosaur Jr. is a cool life concept - like, soft and dreamy and ethereal + melancholy in a snarling, punchy sort of way.


Also in the same issue there's an interview with Parker Posey and I'm so into this pic of her eating a hot dog and wearing orange fishnets. I want orange fishnets! And a hot dog. Orange fishnets + hot dog is maybe even a better life concept than the thing about Liv Tyler and Dinosaur Jr.


JEN'S THING OF THE WEEK: AN ENDLESS HARVEST


On Wednesday I picked up my CSA share. This time it came with a book that kinda looked like a thick coloring book. I assumed it was filled with recipes I couldn't eat (half true) and didn't really care about it. Later Charlotte texted me, "Did you pick up your vegetables? This book is great!", I was like, really? I pulled it out and looked at it. AN ENDLESS HARVEST: Getting the Most out of Seasonal Produce Year-Round. OK, cool. I start flipping through it and slowly become completely obsessed by it. I ended up sitting there reading it for about an hour an a half. Did you know you can store carrots in a bucket of saw dust for the winter to limited success?! I do. It's more highly recommended to just store them in a plastic bag in the fridge but, whatever. I learned what vegetables should be in sealed bags. Wrap eggplant in paper towel in a bag. OK. Leave some bags open. Some in containers. I kept texting Charlotte about how much I loved it and we decided next time we pick up our shares we're going to make cocktails together afterwards and color in this book. My new favorite book! When I haven't been reading AN ENDLESS HARVEST I've been reading Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which I am also super into.
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10 Bob Dylan Songs I'd Rather Die Than Live Without, In No Particular Order, Part 1

August 13, 2013, 10:53 am
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ILLUSTRATION BY JEN/ WORDS BY LAURA JANE

I love Bob Dylan so much I feel like I am dead. I don't know when I'll write Part 2. Maybe on Wednesday. Maybe in a month. 

I'll Be Your Baby Tonight 

I moved into the apartment across the hall on the last day of June and I put a couch in my kitchen. "Nothing says "I'm a chill person" like putting a couch in your kitchen," I said. 

My kitchen-couch is brown, kind of a velour/suede-hybrid texture. Next to my couch is a little brown table and on the little brown table is my little brown record player, and a bunch of records and record sleeves are always lying beautifully askew on the table in front of it. Records and record sleeves don't know how to lie any other way. 

It's all a very laid-back, seventies sort of brown- "It's always 1972 in my couch-nook!" is definitely a sentence I've heard myself say; it's my couch-nook's slogan. It's really begging for some Bob Dylan. You can listen to other records too, but it became so obvious so fast. The first time I ever sat alone on that couch I put on John Wesley Harding, because it was the only Bob Dylan record I had. I'd never heard it before. 

I didn't have Internet for a week. All I did was chill on my couch reading MFK Fisher and listening to John Wesley Harding. I learned the whole thing in two days. It is wide-wale tan corduroy with a little bit of the brown suede-velour to it too. At first I thought it was from 1972, too, but my favorite thing about it's how it isn't. It's from 1967. 

I fucking love Bob Dylan, for straight-up refusing to participate in psychedelia. He was just like, "Fuck it. I'm not even gonna touch that." Everybody else in the world and their brother were singing "Gelatin kangaroos leaping over a leprous purple moon on Sunday..." and Bob Dylan decided to make a couple rickety little country albums, which was lovely of him- my exact preferred style of defiance. 

I decided on one of my sunny Internetless July mornings laying around listening to John Wesley Harding that I'll Be Your Baby Tonight was from that moment on going to be my Romance Anthem. Everybody needs to have a Romance Anthem! It's a very cool unexplored concept that I am basically a genius for inventing. A Romance Anthem is like the theme song for your romantic self, explaining how you like to be romantic. It's not about the way you want love to be; it's about the way love is when you're involved. 

I'm very romantic too. "Kick your shoes off, do not fear, bring that bottle over here"- it's all very kind, very lazy and kind, but it's a very alpha love song! He's the one doing the bulk of the soothing, he's definitely calling all the shots. He's not worried or afraid of anything that's going to happen in his room. All he's got to do is get drunk and show the girl the moon. 

Subterranean Homesick Blues

I almost didn't go to my favorite line cook's 22nd birthday party because it was the same day I got my Internet back and I was so stoked to go home and buy Bringing It All Back Home off iTunes so I could listen to Subterranean Homesick Blues; I'd been dying without it. So thank God that night was so shitty and my hair was so dirty; by the time I got to the end of the night I couldn't not have a drink. I had a hundred drinks: double gin and sodas in a pint glass with lots of lime and lots of ice. They were doing incredible things to me. Words were falling very smoothly out of my mouth and hanging out in the air like music notes in a comic strip. (I just typoed "comic" as "cosmic" which I think says everything you need to know about where this story, and every story, is going...) I have been blessed with the magical ability to never seem as drunk as I am, and also was stealing sips of my ex-sous-chef's banana slurpee, which helps. With everything. 



One of my line cook's best friends showed up. I asked him what he did and he answered evasively so I said "Oh, you're a drug dealer." He found out I'd taken acid after I asked him if he could get me any acid and asked me the kind of questions a twenty-two year old who's taken acid twice would ask a strange woman trying to suss out if she's enlightened or not. He asked me if I'd ever seen God and I told him I had. He asked me if I though God made everything and I said "No, I think God is everything"- he texted me the other day asking if I'd like to take mushrooms with him. I said sure. 

I arrived home at 3:45 AM and thought I left my phone at the bar before realizing that I'd actually just plugged it into my charger like the responsible adult I have weirdly somehow become. I downloaded Bringing It All Back Home and listened to Subterranean Homesick Blues somewhere between seven and eleven times in a row, and it sounded so good I cried and made a couple small "yelp" noises here and there, flexed my toes and tweeted about how all I want out of life is a t-shirt that says "Don't follow leaders" on the front and "watch your parking meters" on the back, and little else, and then I tried to use those little letter magnets the person who lived in my apartment before me left on the refrigerator to spell out that sentence, which is everything, butI  ran out of rs. 

I listen to Subterranean Homesick Blues every day now, usually about three to nine times per day; there's some magic thing about about it which allows me to always connect to how grateful I feel to get to listen to it, which I think relates to seeing the video once when I was a little kid, and needing to get inside of that coolness. And it's just got so much energy! It definitely makes you understand why square old people used to think rock and roll was the devil's music. It's black magic! 

I was listening to Subterranean Homesick Blues while drinking an icy and giant black iced coffee as early in the morning as I'll ever be at a subway station on a Saturday, I think I'd probably slept better than usual because I remember feeling particularly alert, like in a drugs way, and I think I probably thought I looked pretty cool in my outfit and my hair was going the way it's supposed to and everything, and I saw this guy look at me, look at me. I didn't care 1% about him, romantically or sexually or even aesthetically, but I still felt a little pissed that he couldn't have known I was listening to Subterranean Homesick Blues. Like every other thing about me counted as being 1% of me and then the entire 99% rest of it belonged to how I was listening to that song. And then I thought, "God, it's just so smart to be listening to Subterranean Homesick Blues!" and I thought about how dead wrong people have it, living their lives and not listening to Subterranean Homesick Blues anywhere near as much as they ought to. Now every time I see any neutral or lame or even cool-seeming person on the street or train plugged into headphones I just think, "God, Christ, it could all be so much better for you..." 

And then, that same night as the day of the iced coffee morning, I was walking home from work listening to Subterranean Homesick Blues and some drunk frat boy held up his hand to high-five me and I high-fived him, and then the same thing happened four days later, and I thought that's just me I guess, wandering around the world listening to Subterranean Homesick Blues on headphones because I know what's good, high-fiving drunk frat boys if they ask for it because what kind of bitch would I have been if I hadn't, and why the hell wouldn't I. 

Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues

Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues is the first Bob Dylan song I ever loved, and I loved it before I even heard it. The Beastie Boys, my beautiful wicked wonderful Beastie Boys, sample my favorite line of the whole song- I'm going back to New York City, I do believe I've had enough- in their song Finger Lickin' Good off Check Your Head. I just listened to it, just now, twenty seconds ago, for the first time since Adam Yauch died- I was going to take a shower and then write about Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues with my hair wet, to let my hair dry, but now I'm feeling very emotional, and heavy, but in a sort of good way, like if inside my body there were no blood or bones, just ocean water, all the way up to the very top of my neck, but my head is still just my regular had. So I think that's a good way for me to feel for writing about Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues. I'm drinking champagne.

A Bob Dylan lyric in the middle of a Beastie Boys song sounded to me, as a very young teenager, like turning on a light. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues is my favorite Bob Dylan poem, if you took away all the sounds from every song; every line of it hits me hard, it's a story about a lost person, a guy who's not where he's supposed to be- that's where I used to not be too. And when I was little I used to hear that line and think that New York's the city I'd need to go back to too, but it definitely never would be, and has never been. But I've definitely had enough, and enough and enough and enough, a thousand times, and this song's the one I always went back to, sitting cross-legged in a field dragging my forefinger across the wheel of one of the seven thousand iPods I Have Known, too impatient to hear the whole thing over again- I've always just wanted to hear that line.  

But there's others, too, and anybody who's ever LIVED has lived through all of them:

-when you're lost in the rain
-and negativity don't pull you through
-don't put on any airs
-they really make a mess outta you
-please tell her thanks a lot
-my fingers are all in a knot
-i don't have the strength to get up and take another shot 
-and you're so kind and careful not to go to her soon
-she takes your voice and leaves you howling at the moon
-if you're looking to get silly, you better go back to from where you came-

He's a really a genius, you know. He's so much better than we are, any of us, at writing songs and at writing words down. Like if you took the person you know who is best at writing songs and mixed them with the person who is best at writing words, they'd still probably be only about 15% as good as Bob Dylan, and I'm happy about that, I want him to have that, he deserves that-

I started out on Burgundy, but soon hit the harder stuff,
Everybody said they'd stand behind me when the game got rough, 
But the joke was on me, there was nobody even there to bluff- 
I'm going back to New York City, I do believe I've had enough. 

I think there's more genuine sadness in the first three lines of that verse then there are in the entire Beatles, Ulysses, and every story JD Salinger wrote about Seymour Glass put together and timesed by three, or even four! I wish I could watch a video of myself every time I ever listened to those words and related to them just so I could remember who I was when I felt so sad; I was sadder than I'm now capable of remembering how to feel. Now when I listen to it, I realize that my life today's the New York City I'd want to go back to. It's a happy ending for us both.

Don't Think Twice, It's Alright 

At work one afternoon in July I got in minor trouble for fucking up the Excel spreadsheet I filled out on the night of the storm. The storm flooded half the city and the subways stopped running. It was a stressful, ugly night at my restaurant; the sky was darker than just dark, the street flowed like a river and strangers crammed themselves beneath our awning to hide from the rain. Everybody eating dinner was hiding from the rain, and I was wishing I could have gotten to know the crazy-rain they were hiding from. I was sad that I was hidden away from all the drama. You can't be a writer who doesn't love a storm. 

When I found out I fucked up, I reacted terribly- very dramatically, in a manner that might have validated scores of early-twentieth-century misogynist's beliefs that women are too emotional to work. And it was even stupider because, you see, even "minor trouble" is an overstatement in this instance; to tell the truth, I barely got in any trouble at all. Somebody just told me that I did it. 

I just kept thinking that I'm frivolous. I was totally out my head and probably on my period and definitely exhausted; I didn't storm out the front door but I marched out fucking fast, right down the street and into a Starbucks, where I ordered myself a Caramel Ribbon Crunch Frappuccino, "as light as you can get it but with whip" and sat out on the patio, which is located next to a gigantic cement hole in the ground. I guess they're building a condo or whatever. 

I tried to read my stupid book but I was too tired and sad about how frivolous and crappy at my job I am so I put Don't Think Twice, It's Alright on headphones and just listened to it. A couple nights before I'd watched the episode of Mad Men where Don Draper comes home to an empty house on Thanksgiving, sits on the stairs and his grey suit creases where his elbows and knees bend beautifully and I'm assuming thinks about what a crappy husband and father he is and Don't Think Twice, It's Alright plays and in doing so inadvertently, or maybe advertently, becomes the official anthem of All People Who Fucked Things Up Everywhere; in particular, of spacey assistant managers who once upon a time tried to do anything in the world that wasn't write and fucked it up and couldn't find her headphones that very fucking morning before realizing they were tucked inside the leg of a pair of pyjama pants, in her laundry basket, who walks into oncoming traffic and into trees and can barely even manage walking to the fucking bathroom without tripping over the fucking molecules of the fucking air and falling flat on her face- 

I hadn't cried in months, at that point, because everything's going really well for me these days, but that afternoon I cried so hard I had to get off the Starbucks patio STAT for fear of somebody who works at my restaurant bumping into their assistant manager weirdly whimpering while drinking a stupid-looking Frappuccino 45 minutes before Saturday night service was due to start. 

I put Don't Think Twice, It's Alright on repeat and locked myself in a Starbucks washroom wondering if "We never did too much talking anyway" was tragic or celebratory, slurping up the end of my Frap and crying so hard felt so right and so good that I forced myself to remember up every single thing in my life and the world that could possibly bring me to tears, just so the tears wouldn't have to stop. And then I wrung it all out and went back to work and had a great night, though I forget precisely why, and- boringly enough, for anyone keeping me score- I never even came close to making that  same mistake about an Excel spreadsheet again. I'm not a frivolous person, just an appreciator of weird beauty who is a little bit shitty at math. And this will not be the last time I ever sobbed my brains out while listening to Don't Think Twice, It's Alright and knocking back a novelty Frap: it's the exact type of weird beauty I was born to appreciate. 

Idiot Wind

I used to hate Bob Dylan for being an asshole but now I love Bob Dylan for never pretending not to be an asshole. I was thinking I might re-watch that clip from Don't Look Back where he's mean to the science major and try to defend it and then relate that to everything I love about Idiot Wind, but I really can't be bothered. All I can think is, imagine if somebody'd made a movie about me when I was twenty-five, and they'd managed to capture some footage of me being a dick to one of the seven hundred-ish people I was an unbridled dick to during the second half of 2010 and/or the first of 2011, and then in the future some person who never knew me tried to have an opinion about it? That would be such a giant fucking waste of that poor person's time. Let's just call a Bob Dylan spade a Bob Dylan spade and let our Bob Dylan bygones be Bob Dylan bygones and accept the fact that Bob Dylan's only as big of a jerk as any other semi-intelligent human being who doesn't like lying.

Blood on the Tracks makes me really excited to be thirty-five. It is the #1 rock and roll album of all time that is most like a book. He's definitely made peace with his contempt for the majority of humanity and seems to be taking it all considerably less personally than he did during Bringing It All Back Home. There are things about Bob Dylan that you can tell make him fundamentally angry and by Blood on the Tracks he's reached a very inspiring state of acceptance. Bringing It All Back Home and Blood On The Tracks bookend ten years of his life; in 1965, when he's a little twenty-four year old baby, he just wants to wage war against every fat square who has ever pissed him off, they're all dipshitty Maggie's Ma et al. and they've got it all wrong and he's a poet and that's just the way it is; ten years later they're still as stupid as ever only now he's a bit stupid too- "We are idiots, babe"; it's no longer a moral issue, since There Is No Right- that's what getting older is like. When you're young you think, "You're stupid, I'm smart"; then you age a little bit and learn to doubt yourself and it becomes, "You're stupid, I'm mean." Then you age a little bit more and realize, "We're all stupid, and I'm only mean sometimes."

But isn't it great to be mean sometimes? My third-favorite lyric from Idiot Wind is "I can't even touch the books you've read"- I fear he might mean it metaphorically, but I like to imagine that it refers to physically touching ANY SINGLE BOOK THAT THE IDIOT YOU HATE HAS EVER READ IN THEIR ENTIRE LIFE. Like you're chilling at some dude's place and he's trying to light his joint but his lighter's out and he's all "Hey, can you pass me that matchbook?" and you look to where he's nodding at the matchbook and you notice that it's partially obscured by a copy of In Cold Blood and you remember back to how once five years ago that dipshit once tweeted some blood-chilling slop about Truman Capote and you're just like, "No. Nope. Sorry. I can't pass you that matchbook"- I think that's such a perfect way to hate someone. 

But my first-favorite lyric from Idiot Wind is the one where he's "daydreaming about the way things sometimes are"- it's just so fabulously unromantic! Unless you're some losery fanfic guy who daydreams over turning into a vampire who has sex with Harry Styles, who is also a vampire, or whatever- which is also unromantic- "the way things sometimes are" is the only dull thing even your daydreams, which I should hope are significantly less dull than your real life, can ever be, which just goes to show dull life is, which I guess is why once I got a little older I fell in love with the guy who sang, "Well, anybody can be just like me"- 

Obviously.
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