2010 Jamz

The SadBear albums extravaganza is (hopefully) on its way.

In the meantime, (because of boredom and the want to write about some musical things), I present to you my 15 favorite (notice I say "my favorite" and not the best) tracks of 2010. You'll probabaly note that (when you see my albums list), a lot of these songs come from said albums. That's because I am, at heart, more of an "albums" guy than a single songs guy. (Not that there's anything wrong with listening to a lot of singles. It's just a different way of digesting and enjoying music.)

Again: These are just my jams that I played on repeat this year. I don't know if they're better or worse than any other songs that came out this year. I just couldn't stop listening.

Let's do this, countdown-style.

15. The Roots (feat. Joanna Newsom) - "Right On"
I did not listen to the album that Joanna actually released this year, but who knew that anyone could make her sound this funky? Leave it to Questlove.

14. Caribou - "Jamiela"
The kettle drum/synth climax halfway through this song makes me cream my jeans a little bit every time.

13. Black Keys - "Every Lasting Light"
Note to Dan and Patrick: More falsetto-stomp, please.

12. Titus Andronicous - "A More Perfect Union"
One of my favorite moments in song comes in at around 1:45, when Patrick Stickles yells "Baby we were born to die!" Then comes a messy solo that probabaly isn't that hard to play but just makes me want to pump my fist along the whole time. Also, the outro with "Rally round the flag" is very cathartic. I think it's about a relationship and not about war, but I have no real idea.

11. Thermals - "I Don't Believe You"
Always count on the Thermals to write a hook.

10. She & Him - "In The Sun"
Zooey sounds great (as Econ says, "her voice is actually pretty hot in this song") and M Ward mostly lays low until that solo at the very end, which is very tasteful yet kind of trippy with all the reverb layers. Also, the video: M. Ward is just fucking cool the entire time, and she's adorable.

9. Beach House - "Silver Soul"
It was really a matter of "which Beach House song on the album is best?", since I love all of them but have limited myself to one song per artist. I went this route because I think it's the most representative of the album and what I like about it.

8. Wavves - "Green Eyes"
Real stoner love.

7. Kanye West ft. Pusha T - "Runaway"
Pusha T's verse on this song has been lingering in my head ever since the first time I heard it. "Power" might be the more epic song, and most representative of the album thematically, but I think this one takes the cake musically and production-wise.

6. Broken Social Scene - "Forced to Love"/"Meet Me In The Basement"
These both count as one in my mind, mostly because it's hard to seperate "Basement" from the album since it's only an instrumental. But, boy, what an exhilarating instrumental. When the horns come in near the end, you're almost sad to hear it end, and wish it could go on for another four minutes. But it does. So you have to listen again.

The other song here, "Forced to Love", is perhaps the exact opposite. It announces its intentions quickly, with a fluid keyboard-and-flute main riff and pretty easily-digestible (probabaly disposable) lyrics about love. It's nothing new, but it all comes together so nicely. I thought I would get sick of these songs/this album after seven months, but I still haven't.

5. Hot Chip - "Take It In"
Hot Chip at their most vulnerable.

4. Cee-Lo - "Fuck You"
If this song doesn't stick in your head after just one listen, you have no soul.

3. Janelle Monáe ft. Big Boi - "Tightrope"
I came into Janelle late in the game (try three weeks ago) so maybe this should be No. 1. Time will tell. Regardless, she sounds so exuberant in this song — it just drips with excitement.

2. Big Boi - "General Patton"
The rap world needs more opera samples. This one is downright triumphant.

1. LCD Soundsystem — "Dance Yrself Clean"
Any doubt as to why this song is No. 1 on my list? 3:07. Just hang tight til 3:07 and all your questions will be answered.

East Boogie

Call it a morbid curiosity.

On the way back from St. Louis this weekend — my dad visited me since I'm not going back for Thanksgiving — I had some strange and sudden desire to get a glimpse of what local residents call "East Boogie."

That's right. For reasons unknown even to myself, I decided to venture inside and get my own firsthand glimpse of East Saint Louis, Illinois.

I've already been interested by the rise and fall of East Side's ridiculously good football team. But I wanted to see it first hand.

And now I have.

I didn't take any photos — I didn't have a camera, but even if I did I think I would have been too dumbfounded to actually stop and photograph things.

There is, however, a website where you can gaze upon the horrors of East Side. Built Saint Louis is this great website that documents cool old buildings and architecture — still standing and not — around Saint Louis and vicinity. It devotes an entire section to ESL, which you can find here.

Do I have some sick sense of intrigue? Well, maybe. But I am somewhat fascinated with post-industrial America. Maybe this is a byproduct of growing up in Detroit and being born in Joliet.

At any rate, I wasn't really prepared for what I saw today.

Don't get me wrong. I EXPECTED lots of urban blight and I expected to see a sad-sack city down on it's luck. I guess I just didn't expect it to be THAT bad. Maybe like Detroit on a smaller scale.

But the reality is much worse. Imagine Gary, Indiana (I'd say Detroit, but Gary is a similarly-maligned satellite community of a major city). Then, take away 70,000 people, remove every single worthwhile industry (factories) and leave only a Casino and about 15 strip clubs. Then, detonate a bomb that levels half of all the buildings that are left.

Yeah. THAT'S East Saint Louis.

I saw rows and rows of houses that had plywood walls instead of brick. I saw two project buildings, probabaly built in the 1970s, that were maybe seven stories high and easily the tallest buildings on my route. The only businesses to speak of were: a single convenience store, a single funeral home and a church. There was also a massive junkyard that took up what seemed like an entire city block. It was mostly full of trash.

I only drove down one street — Illinois 15. Basically, I was in Belleville and was on the road anyway and the sign said "East Saint Louis - 4" so I thought, what the hell? Why not at least drive in and say I've set foot in there? You can see my route here — I got as far as the project on 14th St. until I'd decided I'd seen enough. An old man watched me turn around, probabaly bemused that I had no idea what I was doing.

I should note that, unlike Gary, it's not easy just to "pass through" East Saint Louis. Gary is situated right on 80/90, and if one wants to, they could easily stop to get gas or whatever on their way to Chicago.

Such is not the case with East Saint Louis. By diverting the three interstates around the city, East Saint Louis is boxed in on the north, south and east. To the west, of course, is the River. One basically has to go out of his way to get anywhere other than the casino, which sits right on the River anyway. All of the exits have two options: towards East Saint Louis, or towards somewhere else (not that Brooklyn or Sauget, its direct neighbors to the north and south, are better options... Belleville, Collinsville, Edwardsville, Fairview Heights, and the other towns that don't directly border the river are actually livables places, but most of the Metro East suburbs are more rural than their Missouri-side suburban-sprawl neighbors to begin with).

What's the moral of this story? (Well, other than to share my weird fascination with this stuff and urban exploration.) I guess I'm just horrified that this is America. This is a city where 2/3 of the population is on federal assistance, 50 percent live below the poverty line and has one of the worst crime rates in the United States.

We have allowed this to happen to so many places in America. And at least in Detroit and Baltimore and Cleveland and regular Saint Louis there are redeeming qualities to the cities in question. Actual business. And some form of tax base that pays the bills.

The point is, there's something worth saving.

East Saint Louis almost seems like the type of place where no one would miss it if we started completely from scratch. And they might as well have — at its height in the 1950s, there were 80,000 people in the city, lots of factories and a bastion of blue-collar prosperity (at least, according to some articles I read today). Then everyone left, took all the jobs with them and allowed the people who couldn't leave to wallow in their poverty.

It's a sad state of affairs when an American city gets so bad it has to sell its municipal buildings and the residential neighborhoods start looking like a shantytown in the third world. That's East Saint Louis. If any city is a stand-in for American poverty, it is this place.

Fall = Time

Why hello, fall weather. So nice of you to show up. I know, I know, I ran into you in Chicago last weekend and it was awkward. Really, I wasn't ready to see you again. But now that I'm back Downstate I can say, for certain, that I'm glad you're back. I don't like watching high school football games in 90-degree weather. Without you, it just feels wrong.

But now, with you back, I will pledge to wear a sweatshirt and jeans every day. That's a promise. Really. Maybe flannel every once in a while.

One thing, though: Could we not move so fast, so soon? I like you and all, but I think we just need to ease into this. I don't want to get sick. Please.

Things I read

Magically, moving has found me more time to read that I ever did in Missouri. This probabaly has much to do with the fact that I no longer have cable and watch stupid Adult Swim shows during the wee hours of the night. Anyhow, here's a few things I've been reading as of late:

•Baseball biographies, including this great one on Satchel Paige and another on pre-1940's ballplayers (just re-released after being out of print for years, apparently).

•Harvey Pekar. I tried in vein to find some American Splendor comics at bookstores but everyone was sold out (or did not carry them). Instead, I bought his graphic history of the Beats. A re-reading of On the Road follows.

•My recent (a few months ago, that is) discovery of Longform.org has fueled my interest in long journalism (obviously). Some recent highlights have included the story of Paris' most secret society, TV's Crowning Moment of Awesome and The Mark of a Masterpiece.

•Most significantly, though, is the David Foster Wallace piece "Consider the Lobster". This because, I had somehow forgotten about DFW. The man wrote possibly one of my favorite sports pieces ever, on Roger Federer. (I'd also read the piece "Host", which appeared in the Ira Glass edited New Kings of Nonfiction.)

After reading the lobster piece, and because I had a $25 gift card to Barnes and Noble for my birthday, I decided to give his collection of essays (also called Consider the Lobster) a go. Recommended, for two main reasons: the piece on the national porn convention and the piece on the McCain2000 campaign. Unfortunately, the Federer piece is not in there but I think that might be one of the very last things he published. Thank god for the NYTimes archives (and, again, R.I.P. Play magazine). The point here is, DFW seems like the kind of guy I should have known about forever, yet I know painfully little about him.

My next question is figuring out if I want to attempt his fiction, and if I will like it. Lots of footnotes work for certain pieces of nonfiction, but I'm wary about authors who like incorporating them into 1,000+ page works of fiction. Any insights?

•There happens to be another short piece in Consider the Lobster on Dostoevsky, which convinced me I need to start re-reading Crime and Punishment (a book I never actually got around to finishing). Wish me luck. (Edit: This would probabaly be easier if I could find my goddamn copy of the book.)

Thoughts on today's World Cup matches

No further commentary needed.

Plagerism

Reebok's new sneaker commercial sounds awfully familiar, no?

Unfortunately, this is not the first time a sneaker company has ripped off aspects of rock and roll culture to sell its wares.

Reflections on my job

Gary Cartwright, 1969 in Harper's:

Still, ethics is a nebulous question to a profession that has never really defined its purpose. To report? To expose? To speculate? To entertain? To criticize? To subsist and endure? A good sportswriter does it all. I do not know a sportswriter who would accept, say, one hundred dollars to print something he did not believe.

Also:

Many times I put out the paper alone. All the sportswriters did. We staggered in, tore the night’s run of copy from the United Press machine, selected the stories according to the page dummies supplied by the advertising department, assigned headlines and wrote them, clipped box scores and other trivia from the morning Star Telegram, selected pictures and sent them to the engravers, made up the cutlines, then hurried to the composing room where a printer named Max would be waiting to change everything. Like Charley, Max was a professional. All he ever said was, “Who the hell do you think you are?”

We survived on the assumption that no one read our paper anyhow. It is the same feeling you get on a college newspaper or on mind-expanding drugs. There are no shackles on the imagination; there is no retreat, only attack. One of my jobs was to make up little “brights” or boxes:

John Doughs made a hole-in-one yesterday at Glen Lakes Country Club when a snake swallowed his tee shot, a dog swallowed the snake, and an eagle carried off the dog, dropping him in the cup after colliding head on with a private plane flown by Doughs’s maternal twin.

We went heavy on the irony. Under these circumstances you might think we. got a lot of letters to the editor, but I don’t remember any.

-from "Confessions of a Washed-Up Sportswriter" by Gary Cartwright. Required reading for all sportswriters (and journalists, for that matter). In this book, which is well worth getting.

No Love Lost

The description to this video says simply "smoking is cool." And, really, I must agree. Only Don Draper makes smoking look cooler.

Composure

More photos here.

Dear Yo La Tengo...

Dear Yo La Tengo,

Please record an album filled with nothing but wordless instrumental noise jams like this one. I will listen to it every day.

Love,

Jack

Say You Miss Me?

Quickly, relating a dream I had last night:

First, in Hillsdale. Sunny. I think I was in art class. Not sure why. So this is going on normally enough.

Then, cyborgs. And lasers. No idea where they come from, or why, but good old Hillsdale College melts away to reveal a dystopian nightmare of steel, machinery and holograms. Some sort of combination of Blade Runner and TRON.

At one point, I shoot a double-barreled laser gun at some ominous television screen, nicking a Big Brother robot through both its eyes and somehow frying its circuits through the screen.

I woke up at some point after this.

Playing on continuous repeat through this whole ordeal— through Hillsdale, during the great cyborg/ android rebellion, and right up to the point where I killed the Big Brother stand-in robot— was "Say You Miss Me" by Wilco.

I would try and deconstruct this but I really have no answers. Mostly just a question: Does Wilco support or reject the pending android rebellion?

Zen?

If we holler loud and make our way...

(...We'd all live one big holiday)

Back from all my holiday travel, and ready for the grind. And it's a new year. Meaning, a new commitment to updating this thing a bit more often. Let's see if it takes, eh?

Playlist for January 6th, 2010:

My Morning Jacket - "One Big Holiday"
Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Matt Sweeny - "My Home is the Sea"
Ha Ha Tonka - "Walking On The Devil's Backbone"
Jay-Z feat. Alicia Keys - "Empire State of Mind"
Neil Young - "Don't Let It Bring You Down"
Nick Cave - "Get Ready For Love"

Also, a few links to savor (like Chase + Silliman):

The Stylus Decade
Beer drinking flowchart
Gangs on Indian Reservations
RATM tops the UK music charts (really!)
9,000 words about the KC Royals (proceed at own peril!)
The best sports feature I have read in a long time (Gary Smith in SI)
Boston Globe Big Picture: Best 100 Sports Photos of 2009
Cormac McCarthy does not think highly of Joplin, Mo.
Nick Southall