They say of the month of March that it comes “in like a lion and out like a lamb,” but those in the state of New York know better. In reality, March is “in like a polar bear, then sort of like a seal for a little while—where it’s still pretty cold, but you bake on a warm rock in the sun—then like a stuffed rabbit riding a caribou, then a robin flying back north, then, finally, out like a warm plate of veal.”

In spite of this slightly pessimistic knowledge that twenty-seven years within the Empire State affords one, it is nonetheless refreshing to don a light jacket or warm sweater for an entire weekend. But a word to the wise: don’t pack that winter coat away… just yet.

____________________

This weekend, in celebration, I walked and looked at humans—those phenomenal things. Happiness was omnipresent, drinks flowed without concern of cost, and bare necks brought a tear to many a Ray-Banned eye. Even more importantly, a lighter soundtrack played in my mind-jukebox, and I believe, the collective mind-jukebox of a city. (For the last few months my nickels had only been buying White Denim, Wu-Tang, and Fleetwood Mac.)

As I traversed the snow-free sidewalks of Brooklyn and Manhattan, I heard strings and vocal harmonies and major chords. Free of chapping, I believe I even pursed my lips and whistled a few bars. It was lovely to be amongst people who weren’t just rushing towards a vestibule or charging about with their rosy faces towards the ground. We were all just walking, with a peaceful gait.

If it hasn’t been said yet, it should have been:

“He who walks with a destination in mind walks with a sense of pride. He who has no destination, walks with a sense of wonderment. He who does not walk, sits or lays.”

____________________

I will now share with you some of the songs in heavy rotation in my mind-jukebox. I encourage you to share with me, and the readers of glassesglasses. Hasta luego!

Cumbias En Moog – Cumbia Del Sal Cumbias En Moog – Cumbia Del Sal

Oh No Ono – Helplessy Young Oh No Ono – Helplessly Young

The Morning Benders – Excuses The Morning Benders – Excuses

ATCQ – After Hours A Tribe Called Quest – After Hours

Think About Life – Johanna Think About Life – Johanna

The Oscars were on recently.  If you missed them, a nice substitute is here at McSweeney’s Meta Awards.

In case you DID miss them, get hip to the first lady of film, Kathryn Bigelow.

Maybe you are a sourpuss and already miss winter, like this lynx here who absolutely loves the snow.  Get cold and purse-lipped with Otto Dix at the Neue Galerie.

Maybe you love being sad, if you do I highly recommend this gorgeous poem which is also about winter.

This week, in no particular order: tracks from Splash by Jeremy Jay, Make You Mine by Best Coast, Looking for Some Action by Bare Wires, Travellers in Space and Time by Apples in Stereo, and Hologram Jams by Jaguar Love.

Jeremy Jay:  Jeremy Jay is incredibly prolific these days–his latest album (the first of two set for release this year) is called Splash and comes out in March on K.  To be honest, Slow Dance set an unbelievably high bar that Splash mostly fails to surpass; all the same, it’s a wonderful and increasingly consistent effort from Jeremy Jay, and the two tracks below are prime material: deamlike, with cold, spacey synthesizers and an anglophile, Godard-modern approach to pop music that Jeremy has really claimed for his own.  It would be impossible to mistake this for any other band’s work right now.

• Out On The HighwayOut On The Highway
• Just Dial My NumberJust Dial My Number

Best Coast:  Cutting to the chase, this band represents an incremental yet clear improvement upon the formula previously explored by the Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls, Frankie And The Outs, et al.  But Best Coast’s vocals are slightly superior to those of their peers, their melodies are stronger and clearer, the rhythm section is more sophisticated, and if your eyes were closed, you might opine that the Vivian Girls haven’t crafted songs so good since Where Do You Run To.  Already the best in a growing sub-genre, I’m hopeful that this EP marks the start of a great career.

• Make You MineMake You Mine
• Feeling of LoveFeeling of Love

Bare Wires:  Apparently this band’s already released a full-length, which I went back and listened to after checking out their new 7″.  Looking For Some Action is definitely an improvement upon what came before, though I now know that Bare Wires has been solid for some time now.  Actually, the band has a legitimately amazing pedigree, founded by Alicia Trout from Lost Sounds (my favorite Jay Reatard side project), and they more than deliver on any expectations that this backstory promises.  To me, Looking sounds like a superior In The Red genre album, maybe like a less stupid version of The Hunches or a less schticky King Khan.

• Looking For Some ActionLooking For Some Action

Apples In Stereo:  It isn’t as though Apples In Stereo are afraid of funk/dance music (see The Bird That You Can’t See off 2000’s The Discovery of a World Inside the Moone).  But with Travellers in Space and Time, they take things to a fantastic new level: danceable fuzz that isn’t cartoon disco or Sgt. Pepper psychedelics.  The burned out late-70s feel of these tracks is palpable, yet this doesn’t feel like a calculated effort or a nostalgia act.  To my ears, Travellers‘ breezy, pitch-perfect charm may have its closest cousin in Ariel Pink’s Can’t Hear My Eyes 7″ from Mexican Summer (and, I pray, his upcoming full length on 4AD).  Considering that Can’t Hear My Eyes was easily my favorite single of late 2008-early 2009, please take this assessment as the very highest praise I can offer.

• Told You OnceTold You Once
• Dance FloorDance Floor
• Hey ElevatorHey Elevator

Jaguar Love:  Pitchfork’s assessment of Hologram Jams, as usual, better deserves a 2.0 than the album it reviews.  This isn’t genius (were the Blood Brothers ever ”geniuses?”) but it’s tons of spastic fun, like shotgunning a Sparks Black before those spoilsports took away all the taurine.  I was going to add more about this LP but the Sparks Black description actually summarizes things pretty nicely.  Does the concept get a little old over the course of however many tracks?  Sure, and these lyrics aren’t exactly Mark E. Smith caliber, but who cares.  Check out the song below, and please, by all that’s holy, check out the video for the album’s best single: Started A Fire.

• A Prostitute, An AngelA Prostitute, An Angel

by Bennett Elliott

The barred glass door swinging back on its hinges as the chimes above it jingled, noon heat poured inside along with the slow bass rattle of a car stereo. Shouting in Spanish, two boys sprinted to the back for cold sodas, flip-flops slapping dirty tiles as they raced. The pair tore past the Korean cashier’s argument with a stooped, sweaty man in his early seventies about the convenience store’s refusal to accept unrolled pennies in the purchase of lottery tickets.

In a wedding dress and veil, flowers in hand, she was nauseous, burning up, suffocating. Heavy and still—the one store fan rotating behind the bulletproof glass—the air in the store would have made the barely dressed light-headed. Slowly curling in it for over a week now, day in and day out, she was used to that, though—the heat wasn’t the explanation for the queasiness. Nonetheless, were she capable of moving, she’d have wiped the moisture from her glossy forehead, eased her posture, thrown down the flowers and dropped the smile, permanent and glowing, from her face.

It was the same with the view in front of her: back-hair sticking out of the old man’s tank-top, ass-crack showing above track-pants, spit firing across resentful, patterned shouts of English and Korean. Taking nothing else into account, that sight could set anyone to gagging in the humidity. Remove all of that, though—the swelter, the ass-crack, the spit and bellow, the abrupt and unidentifiable noises from the street and store—and still she felt sick, felt weak, felt scared.

Nothing could save her. Standing in the heat, dress held in her hands as she bent forward, she knew that someone would come to take her away—she’d seen it happen to many of the others. And when one of them hauled her out, carried her away, she would never be back, would never see him again. That was what left her nauseous: she would never see him, the one thing in her short life that had been kind, again.

The moment the florescent lights blinded her, in her first instant of consciousness, wet and rolling along, gears and wheels clattering a pneumatic racket, there was a cacophony, a terror— to be followed by torture, kidnapping, days of dark in crowded trucks, and endless rough handling by strangers at odd hours. The doors of the truck slamming open, she was pulled from a pile of others and thrown face-first onto the sidewalk, shivering from fear until sunrise, when the cashier dragged her out of the open street, pitching her on the tile and cutting her loose with a knife before situating her on the rack.

Disoriented and fatigued from her ordeal, the cashier smoking a cigarette and shuffling her to the left and right of the others, she immediately saw him. Through the pre-dawn chaos and rising heat, she noticed him over the cashier’s shoulder, sitting sideways on the counter, ashtray on his head. Worn at the edges, he was propped stoically against the cash register, pen beside him—a certain weight, a calm, to his presence.

He was dark yellow, measured about 5×12, and on his spine, cased in a square about the size of her torso, rested a two-floor house with a green, perfectly trimmed yard bearing a sign that read: ‘Jenkins Realty: SOLD”. Confident in a blue blazer, a square jaw and glimmering eyes, a man in his early 30s stood beside the sign. Pictured in silhouette, two inches left of the square, a partially closed hand—index and middle fingers extended like a pair of legs—treaded pages.

Being forty percent type and sixty percent photographs, she could, of course, read. So she knew—long before they brought it up—that what the others said was true. At their different angles on the rack, some of the other women, most of them in bikinis, witnessed her sighing after him those first days and nights. They let it go at first, but felt obligated to help as her pining drug-on.

It’s hopeless, they informed her—magazines went with magazines, stacked in bathrooms or on coffee tables. Phonebooks were solitary figures, lone wolfs locked happily away in drawers or used to prop doors and tables, outmoded dinosaurs. Phonebooks, assured the girl from ‘Maxim’ eternally tugging a bikini-bottom string, are wastes of paper; just forget it.

Setting her mind, silently repeating the other girls’ rationale—though, her position on the rack demanded she face him—she tried. It proved pointless; she was railing against her nature: there are no ‘unromantic’ bridal magazines. Ignoring the other women, some of whom had since been purchased, she made up her mind to try.

Illustration by Bryce Wymer

The night of her third day in-store, she attempted a conversation. Being a phonebook, he didn’t budge: not a word. She tried a variety of topics—the heat, new sodas wheeled in that day, the fistfight between the two teenagers over cigarette money. None of them worked. She had two more nights of trying with the same results. Frustration set in, and hard to get, she thought, might be the way to go.

She began flirting with the basketball players, the movie stars, trying to make him jealous as she chatted them up well into the night. Nothing made him jealous, and the conversation annoyed her, musicians and movie stars all being the same: self-obsessed and shallow, constantly flirting with the nearest woman. Regardless, had they all been wonderful to speak with, she felt there still wouldn’t have been those feelings, that spark. She couldn’t explain it, her attraction to him. Most nights, after hours of attempting to hold a conversation, she would give up, standing on the rack till morning in silent agony, mulling over what made her love such a stupid, standoffish phonebook.

In the wake of the terrifying ordeal that led to the store, she’d wondered about herself, about who she was. Obviously, she was a bridal magazine, but the face, the image seen by a world passing in and out of store-doors, the person on the cover—in her table of contents, that photo, the cover-photo was un-credited. Who am I? The phonebook, he knew exactly who he was, who everyone was; it was all there between the pages.

But then, what did he know of life? She had seen, had stored on her pages, some of the happiest days of people’s lives—gorgeous beaches, vineyards, even a wedding held in an amusement park. He’s never been to an amusement park, she thought, saddened that he had no way of seeing one, nobody to even show him how great amusement parks, beaches and weddings, for that matter, could be.

The cashier slammed his fist down on the counter, shoving a finger in the old man’s face: the old man could call the fucking police, he wouldn’t take goddamned ten dollars in unrolled pennies for lottery tickets; this was America and he didn’t have to put up with this bullshit. Soft-drinks in hand and waiting to pay, bottles already half empty, the boys swore at the old man, in English then Spanish, to get the fuck out of the way. The door opened as the four of them yelled with one another through the heat. A pretty young woman in her early 20s, wearing tights a t-shirt and large belt, walked back and grabbed an energy drink. Glancing at the argument as she walked back to the front, the woman made her way to the magazine rack, giving it a minute before she walked up. Brushing her hair back and shifting on her heels, she made a few passes through the music and fashion magazines.

Each perusal came dangerously close to the bridal magazine’s place on the rack. Her pages sticking in the heat, she panicked; she couldn’t leave now, not now. It was only three nights ago that she had finally gotten him to speak. She’d won him over with a series of questions about names in her pages, saying she was trying to get phone numbers for some of these people, as she had to make a call. This was an obvious lie, and she knew it: magazines don’t make important phone calls, as everyone, especially a phonebook, is well aware. Still—nothing.

Just as she was about to give up, he began to call the names back, phone numbers and addresses following each one. Stunned, she stammered her thanks. He said it was no trouble, and before the conversation could die again, she began talking to him about, well, names and numbers. Leading first with questions, then getting him to talk more about himself, they shouted awkward conversations across the store in that dog-whistle pitch that all print converses. In the next two nights, he read her some of his favorite names and addresses, listed off identities to her, unique names of people and places—some pretty and some ugly, but all interesting. She told him how far in advance you should rent hotels in Montego Bay for your honeymoon and about the new Twister of Fear rollercoaster at Six Flags.

After they had been talking for hours, somewhere in the middle of last night the phonebook—politely though in his normal, rough way—introduced himself as Rob Jenkins, then asked her name. Embarrassed, she admitted she had no idea who she was, and that she thought about that a lot. The phonebook apologized. There was a long pause, an uncomfortable silence that the other magazines (who couldn’t help but eavesdrop) awkwardly filled with chatter.

Alice Posey, she looked up, the magazines falling silent as he called out 212-456-9876/ 207 11^th Street, Brooklyn, NY 1125. When she asked if this was her name, the phonebook nervously repeated himself, the ashtray on his cover shinning in the security light over the counter. When she asked again, he repeated once more, then was silent for the rest of the night. The rest of the night, right into the day, she stared at him, turning that name, that identity—her identity—over and over.

The woman picked Alice up, flipping through a few pages, stopping on the spread about outdoor weddings in Maine. Panic overwhelmed Alice as she turned and walked to the counter with her. It was really happening; Alice would be laid down right beside him.

The cashier screamed for the old man to get the fuck out. Shouting in protest, the old man swept the pennies dumped onto the counter back into his plastic grocery bag, promising to come back in the night and fucking burn the store down. Yelling at the old man, the boys put their money on the counter. The young woman placed her magazine on the counter. Cover facing up, Alice lay less than two inches from him. Literally half her life, and, finally, there she was. Struggling for the words, she tried not to just repeat something romantic straight off one of her pages, working instead to say what Alice Posey, not someone else, really felt.

Thank You—just before the woman reached for Alice, he thanked her. Before she could respond to Rob, the young woman snapped her purse and rolled Alice in her hand, cover facing up.

A blast of heat washed over as the door opened, the sun beating onto her gloss, a ripple of sheen washing from veil to train. Just above Alice, the chimes rattled, a lilt of polished metal casting flashes in the sunlight as she moved out into the heat, the door easing shut behind her with a thump, the bass rattle of music in her ears.

First published in the His & Hers issue of glasses glasses, March 2009.

So the other evening I was making my way to something cultural, oh I don’t know, a book signing or something. I am a lady of society and therefore was wearing a long coat. Also it is winter outside, and it always will be. I am proud of this long coat, because it is cutting-edge. By “cutting edge” what I mean is that it has an “interesting shape” which is just a fancy way of saying “it doesn’t look that good on me”.

Just because you like an article of clothing does not mean it likes you back. That evening I wrestled with the green beast – no, not jealousy, I mean this coat – squeezing it into new shapes with a belt, sprucing it up, like a Christmas spruce, with different accoutrements.  Something was wrong, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.

I sighed, giving up on Fashion for the evening, grabbed my bag and … oh. That’s when I saw the problem. In the mirror. The long, green coat, which had always seemed a little bit World War II, Rosie the Riveter out for cocktails or something, had suddenly revealed its true colors. Dusty green, and, well, I looked like a Civil War reenactor. Complete with leather satchel, which had suddenly transformed, in my mind, to my trusty musket case.

Imagination can be simply debilitating.

But maybe I am not making it up. I have written before about the ideal outfit to prevent Unwanted Public Conversation and Streetside Interrogation. Usually it involves a delicate balance between crazy and dangerous. Just looking bad is never enough, as, and I’m sure women everywhere can vouch for – I have never been harassed MORE than when I am greasy, sick, sweaty from athletics, or just generally wearing sweatpants. Set the bar low, men. You will never grab onto it.

I am quite certain that I drew the attention of no men whatsoever, clad in this newly christened Civil War coat. I imagined the jangle of my musket case, the beat of my revolutionary drum, the toot of my flute, and other such notions gathered from the entire span of American History. Plan backfired: the moment you appear brave and confident is the moment you are approached – this time, by a young woman. I was ascending the subway stairs, long coat hitched, prepared for battle. She bounded up next to me, breathlessly. We were all alone on the gray staircase, alone save for the mottled memories of chewing gum’s past, pebbled beneath our feet.

“Excuse me,” she said, confidentially. She was chewing gum and her lips were perfectly lacquered, crystalline and reflective. I began to feel nervous. Why? She looked NORMAL. What could this attractive young girl want with ME, the Civil War veteran? I racked my mind: she could, of course, be insane, or a criminal, but none of those warning bells were ringing in my head – just a strange self-consciousness, the ever-present and subtle Competition of the Female. With these thoughts trumpeting through my mind, like Joan of Arc’s distracting voices, I did not hear the girl’s request. “What?” I said, making a terrible face and squinting at her more closely.

“Would you mind looking at the back of my pants? And telling me if there’s anything on them?”

OH. Um, of course?

She ran up ahead of me, jeans perfect from behind, cinched belt, cropped jacket. Nothing.

“You’re fine!” I called up, and she threw me a dazzling smile, a distant light reflecting from her mirrored lips.

Truths:

-This is New York City. You are never the weirdest person in the room.
-This is New York City. You will never determine who the weirdest person in the room is.
-This is New York City.  You might sit down in fresh chewing gum.
-This is New York City. The girl with a regular coat will ask you to look at her ass in a public place, and you will not expect it.
-This is New York City. There exists a cross-cultural, pan-class, no-holds-barred sisterhood of the traveling pants.
-This is New York City. All costumes encouraged. Accepted. And ignored.

You will need:
1 avocado, chopped into large chunks
2 cans chickpeas
1/2 red onion, finely chopped
1 green pepper
1 cup brown rice
whole wheat tortillas
olive oil, salt to taste

Cook rice. You can follow the directions on the package, but a simple way to remember the water/rice proportion is 2 parts water per every 1 part rice. Bring water to a boil, add rice, reduce heat. Cover and cook for approximately 40 minutes.

While rice is cooking, drain and rinse chickpeas. Chop up avocado, onion. Mix all three in bowl. Now for the fun part. I didn’t feel like roasting the pepper, but I wanted to have an element of roasted veggies in this burrito. Since it’s not warm out (and I don’t have an outdoor grill anyway) I decided to cook the pepper over the flame on my stove top. Using tongs, rest the pepper over the flame until outside turns black. Rotate the pepper until all sides are nice and burnt. Remove from heat, chop. The pepper will be almost al dente-nice and roasted on the outside, warm and crunchy on the inside.

Mix all the veggies together in a bowl with a drop of olive oil and a pinch of salt. Add rice, veggies to tortilla. You can roll it up into a burrito, or eat it like a taco. Or do both (which is what I did).

So, let’s add it all up:
2 cans organic chickpeas $2.18
2 avocados $1.99
1 organic green pepper $$0.99
1/2 small red onion $0.45
1 cup organic short grain brown rice (about) $0.67 *serving size per bag is an approximation
2 large whole wheat tortillas $0.28

Grand Total: $8.55

Wow! Look at that! I bought two avocados and still had money to spare! I decided to splurge on some broccoli ($2.33) to roast on the side, but this dish is so hearty and filling that you don’t even need a side dish to feel full. What I really like about these burritos is that they are extremely hearty, but not heavy.

Happy Cooking, everyone!

Generally, I try to avoid reading too much about a show before going, but with the Biennial I feel I need to do some research. Partly because I worry about not being able to process the volume of information without adequate background information, and partly because it seems to be such a momentous occasion that reading other experiences would be fulfilling.  And I just have not had enough time as of late to devote myself to proper preparation, so I will not be going to the Biennial yet.

Instead, while everyone makes their way up to the Whitney last week, I went over to the International Center of Photography, a favorite of mine.  Along with my fellow Grand Tour-er A, we started on the lower level, to see Twilight Visions: Surrealism Photography and Paris, a collection of 1930s and 1940s photographs, video and memorabilia from Paris.  Displaying images with varying levels of abstraction, the show is a great opportunity to see classic works by Brassai, Ilse Bing, and Man Ray alongside others showing the Paris café and cabaret culture of the time.  Like many, I am a sucker for Parisian photographs from this era.  Call me a teenager staring at a heartthrob, but I will never tire of seeing images of Paris.  I know, how cliché.

Upstairs, the main exhibit area is devoted to works by Miroslav Tichy, a Czech artist who, in the 1960s and 70s, made his own cameras out of cardboard and other scraps.  I did read the short New York magazine blurb before going, and the photographs turned out to be not quite what I expected when they described images of women.  Curators describe the artist as spending his days in his small Czech hometown photographing street life, on a regular basis, and that the locals considered him “harmless” although a bit of an eccentric (though he was wielding cardboard cameras, some of which are on display).  They also mention his work only began to get awareness after an exhibit in the last decade.

We could not help but feel that the images of women, often blurry and many times seemingly taken without the subject’s awareness, were slightly creepy – although voyeurism may have been part of the point.  Perhaps this was also our reaction as women living in 21st century New York, immediately skeptical of strangers, especially men, in public places.  Some of the images were charmingingly sweet though, capturing a woman fixing her shoe strap in the street or other glimpses of daily street life.

But overall the show’s curators did bring up an interesting point by explaining Tichy’s work in the context of the continual progression and evolution of photography.  By the 1960s, photography was already quite developed yet Tichy chose to use the medium in his own way to record his impressions, or rather what the curators refer to as the recording of “nothingness.”  Which makes me wonder how now, in an age when everyone has a camera, can one make his or herself remembered as a photographer?  Thoughts welcome, of course.

More information on the ICP (which also has a fantastic bookstore and a school) here.

Happy travels!

Do I recognize you from… that Palmolive commercial?

Best of the best: Writing Advice.

And then: one girl did it.  One Girl, One Novel.

New York, I Love You is on Netflix Instant now.  It is the worst. Let me prevent you from making that mistake.

I opened with feminism, I will close with it.

I spoke to a friend of mine this weekend that I consider a  life-guru—one of those people who has an infinite reserve of energy and is naturally good at anything they get their hands into. We drank red wine out of empty beer glasses and I voiced my concerns about the “working for the weekend” lifestyle. Like, isn’t there more to life than this?

He agreed. Then he said, “but this is fun.”

Maybe I’m misconstruing his words, that is, twisting them to selfishly validate my lifestyle–but I really needed to hear that.

People have fun in different ways. Some people collect miniature spoons. Some people watch “Dancing With the Stars.” Some people dress their dogs up like humans. I go out. And there’s nothing wrong with that. As long as it’s done in fairly good taste.

So for the first time in a while, I wasn’t ready for the weekend to end. In fact, I could have used another three or four days. I explored majestic North Brooklyn, spent time with old friends and new ones, and made some questionable decisions.

Today, I salute the adventure of the weekend, and all other beauties it encompasses. Whatever it is you have fun doing—do it more often.

Gold Zebra – Six Years Gold Zebra – Six Years