Looking for the spirit of MCA

I’ve never listened to Paul’s Boutique (for shame, je sais), but when my friend Kristen summoned a posse to head down to the eponymous storefront on the LES after MCA passed away on Friday, I knew that’s where I needed to be. Voyaging by bike, I rode down Kent Avenue and up South 4th to the entrance to the bridge. With the Beasties’ Gotham-grown contribution to global culture on my mind, the clatter of a passing train was the sweetest cacophony, the loveliest hop. I felt so happy to be a New Yorker in the memorial night.

But on the LES, there wasn’t a memorial to be found. In the first place, I couldn’t find Paul’s Boutique itself. Walked up and down Rivington, then up and down Stanton, but no luck. I did find an old synagogue with a stone, six-paneled Star of David that looked like the eye of a sleeping Transformer, but that was about it.

When I met Kristen at Iggy’s on Ludlow, we marveled that the bar’s speakers weren’t blaring Beastie music: shouldn’t this have been the neighborhood’s own Michael Jackson moment? Out on the streets, I heard nary a mention (nor beat, sample, or verse) of the Beasties or MCA. Where was the sense of history? The calling to mourn? It just seemed like pleasure as usual, although K did tell me that two candles were burning outside the elusive landmark.  

Where, can you guess, was the spirit of the Beasties alive and well? You got it—Hello, Brooklyn. At the Smorgasburg on the East River on the following afternoon, I heard some wacky vocals and party beats coming from the Brooklyn Salsa Company booth. I couldn’t make a positive ID at first, but like a post-jalapeno burn, there was soon no denying that these were the legends.

Turns out salsa slinger Nick had been representin’ from his rugged red boombox all day long. “It’s pretty funky stuff to play at 11 in the morning,” he said. “I’ll be dreaming it tonight,” averred Cassandra, who was working next door at quinoa/falafel mash-up artists Saucy by Nature; “Can’t stop won’t stop,” chipped in Kem, her partner and a fellow fan. Cassandra also reported that Paul’s Boutique was “her childhood on a disc.”

As some vendors began packing up their nosh, Nick searched Youtube for the one song he didn’t have on his playlist. When he found it, across the river from that curiously quiet former capital of Beastiania, “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” boomed in the ‘Burg. Couldn't think of a better way to say goodbye.

Chocolate Alchemy

Yo! Been a while, as I’ve written before. I feel compelled to mention yet another vocation in which I possess a lack of skill: chocolate alchemy. That’s right: when I want chocolate, but convince myself that it’s the wrong time of day or find none in the house, I put on my alchemist’s robe and try to make magic happen. My not-so-magical ingredients are oatmeal, soymilk, honey, peanut butter, and bananas or apples. Mixed together, I figure they have a whirlpudlian chance of evoking chocolate on the palette…which they sometimes sort of do. When they don’t, it’s like they’re working anyway, because sooner or later some cocoa verité will take place in my kitchen. Regarde la preuve:

Happy Birthday Ziggy Stardust

This past year, I’ve been listening to David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (which is a hell of a long album title for 1972) about 18 years after I first got into it, and I mean got into it: a friend of mine said that reading Hemingway in high school opened doors to art for him, whereas for me, it was listening to Five Years, Soul Love, Moonage Daydream, and the rest: songs that, as Allen Ginsberg described the effect of Beatles tunes, went right through my skull.

Such transport, I sensed then and know now, was due to the influence of my mother’s Parisian and North African background, which made it easy to identify with Bowie’s cosmopolitan music and style. Special shout-out to my Aunt Gabi, who is a thin, short-haired blonde given to wearing high-waisted pants and the occasional beret, and used to smoke cigarettes on the balcony of her apartment near Place de la Nation.

As I’ve listened, I’ve heard three things. The first is Bowie’s confidence. Already on Five Years, he sounds like he knows he’s good, a star who’s arrived. He must be confident because he drops some of the shittiest lyrics in his catalogue. After creating a tableau of urban confusion, Bowie focuses in on a love interest with the line, “I think I saw you in an ice cream parlor / drinking milkshakes cold and long.” I didn’t mind those adjectives as a kid, but I wouldn’t criticize anyone who chortles at them today. In the next cut, Soul Love, Bowie explains that “All I have is my love of love / but love is not loving”; again, not necessarily so bad, but certainly open to mockery. The great Lester Bangs despised the opening line of the last track, Rock and Roll Suicide, rightfully asking what in the hell “Time takes a cigarette / puts it in your mouth” means, and the rest of the image doesn’t get any better: “You pull on a fing-a, then anotha fing-a, then your cigarette…”?!? But I don’t think Bowie-as-Ziggy minds, because, as Rob Sheffield might write, he knows he’s got the kids on his side. After all, “cold and long” milkshakes are appealing to sweets-loving nine-year-olds and coiffed teenage lovers alike, audiences that Bowie would later address in songs like Drive-in Saturday and Panic in Detroit on Aladdin Sane. So the throwaway lyrics serve to endear him to a young listenership that would grow up with him throughout the seventies.

And, as Rob Sheffield has written—see the excellent penultimate paragraph in his chapter on Bowie in Talking to Girls about Duran Duran—in the case of Ziggy Stardust, it’s the lyrics, towards the end of Rock and Roll Suicide, that ennoble the entire album. Lou Reed once said he hoped that listening to the Velvet Underground’s catalogue would “make you feel less alone.” It’s hard to remain isolated in the face of Bowie’s screamed insistence that “You’re not alone! You’re wonderful!” with the Spiders chanting “One-da-full” in the background. The artist is at his best here, because rather than setting himself up as someone for his fans to worship, he’s speaking, genuinely, to the common humanity of each and every one. Taken in the context of an outlandish decade, it’s a rare moment when the Starman is on terra cognita. (I have to give Mr. Sheffield full credit for that line—his sentence, “Even at his most out-there space-trippy, he’s making the case for earth,” has been in my brain for at least half a year.)

Speaking of earthiness, the second thing I noticed while listening to Ziggy, which other writers have also mentioned in one way or another, is that Bowie bolsters his self-creation as a crossdressing, alien star by identifying with the working class. The gritty little Star, nestled between the handsome balladry of Lady Stardust and the fast lane junket of Hang on to Yourself, depicts the lives of a group of regular, maybe hard knock young men. “Tony went to fight in Belfast / Rudi stayed at home to starve / (Ooh Wah Ooh) I could make it all worthwhile as a rock and roll star.” The kids in Starman, a kind of fantasy update of the Reed-penned Rock and Roll, could come from all walks of life, but by addressing them collectively, Bowie makes it seem like he is singing for everyone. And for all the lyrical references to stardom, the album cover portrays Bowie standing alone outside a nondescript London building. The sign reading “K.West,” with its epic resonance, may be above his head, but the cardboard boxes and garbage bag by his feet are just as constitutive. Ziggy may look scrawny and sound shrill, but the character’s origin in the street makes him built to last.

The third thing about the album is that its fixation on stardom, its glam and alien imagery, and its slighter kind of rock—sure, the Spiders could rip, but they don’t rip as heavy on Ziggy as they do on The Man Who Sold the World, two albums earlier—accommodated my fear of romantic and personal failure in high school. (Yep, it’s a blog.) Identifying with someone like Bowie first, and Morrissey later, helped me deny the fact that I wasn’t the academic superstar I thought I was; that girls, who liked me in middle school, had turned their attention to more athletic peers and upperclassmen; and that, for the most part, I was just an insecure little kid. At the time, bands like the Stones and Zeppelin didn’t jibe with my psyche—I needed remote, self-absorbed frontmen, not lusty dudes who sang and played about getting it on. But obviously I missed something (Exhibit A: All the Young Dudes, the 1972 chestnut that Bowie gave to Ian Hunter), ‘cause Bowie and the Spiders were probably getting it on every night. Mozza, not so much.

C'est la vie. On the occasion of the dude’s recent 65^th birthday, I would just like to say once and for all that I love David Bowie. Seeing photograph #22 of him in this flavorpill piece, which depicts him walking down the aisle of a grocery store in Chinatown, wearing a straw-colored cowboy hat, a thin t-shirt, grey jeans, and a backpack, makes me think of the song Move On off of Lodger. Sings Bowie, in a gallant tone:

Sometimes I feel

The need to move on

So I pack a bag

And move on

And move on

Well I might take a train

Or sail at dawn

Might take a girl

When I move on

When I move on

The lyrics go on to mention Africa, Russia, Japan, and Cyprus, as Bowie admits, “I’m just a travelling man.” In the diversity of his seventies catalogue (’69 to ’80 to be precise, and Let’s Dance, commercial though it may be, is both good and relevant enough to merit inclusion here), he does something that the Stones and Zeppelin, at least in their work that I know, don’t, and that’s aggressively travel. Go places. Experience, describe, and embody different parts of the world, different influences. That’s why Bowie slakes a thirst for global, sophisticated pop like no other superstar can. Growing up outside Boston with Paris on the brain, this quality of his oeuvre, which is both contrapuntal to and inclusive of the Ziggy period, was also—well hello there Ric Ocasek, thanks for giving me my first autograph back in 1980something—just what I needed. It feels good to experience the fact that I still do.

Rajon to Derek for a pair

Yesterday, I watched clips of Rajon Rondo's incredibly tough, and thus rarefied performance against the Miami Heat on Saturday night, which featured the dislocated elbow, the matter-of-fact return to the Celtic bench, the left-handed steal off a Jeff Green deflection and ensuing baby dunk, and the post-game, just-as-matter-of-fact deflection of an interviewer's implication that Rondo’s elbow should keep him out of game four. (Friends, are we watching at Turkey’s Nest, The Gibson, or Lulu’s?) After watching the clips, I also read an article that placed Derek Jeter’s decline in context with the production of some of the other great shortstops when they reached the age of 37.

Cycling at the gym this morning—who sells their Swiss-designed road bike at the beginning of May? Yeah Ma, I can’t explain that one either—I caught part of the replay of yesterday’s Rangers-Yankees game, including Derek Jeter’s first home run of the season, an opposite field punch into the Rangers bullpen that the row of sitting relievers leaned away from as if it was a gob of plague. With Rondo’s game and the article on my mind, I recalled Jeter's return to the field in a game against the Red Sox six or seven seasons ago, when he fell like an upended toy soldier into the left-field stands after trying to catch a foul ball. This was the game that Sox shortstop Nomar Garciaparra famously sat out for what some in the media identified as a minor issue. Jeter has long been known throughout sports for his consistency, clutch playing, and his lack of drama (in the colloquial sense). Off the field, he was known, to the degree that an American Express commercial riffed on it, for his dating life, but a paparazzi video of he and Anna Kournikova in the back of a limo in South Florida did not affect his professional reputation.

I don’t know anything about Rajon Rondo’s romantic life—I saw in a basketball magazine that he has a young child—so I can’t compare him to Jeter as a swashbuckler, to use a stinking old term. But in other, professional respects, I think that the point guard of the Boston Celtics is becoming the Derek Jeter of the NBA. I can't support this comparison with a fanatic's knowledge of statistics, just a casual fan's observations. I did read that Jeter’s best season, by the numbers, came at age 25, and Rondo’s best season to date is probably last year, when he was 23 going on 24, or this one, when he turned 25. It doesn't hurt that Jeter's balletic, fully-extended toss to the plate against the A's in the 2001 playoffs looks a little like Rondo's signature fake-pass, back-handed scoop layup, or that a shortstop is a little bit like the point guard of the diamond.

It’s really something intangible, though, something about Rondo’s reflexive commitment to being on the court, that suggests that when Boston fans were cheering for their one-armed point guard as he dribbled towards the basket after the steal, they were cheering for a southern-raised version of the great hardball captain in the Bronx. Rajon Rondo may not have the public life to match Jeter’s, but the way that No. 9 plays, and the way that he talks about playing, betray his similarity to No. 2, a player whom Boston fans used to taunt with that now farcical chant, "Nomar's better.”

Extra! Extra! Old News on Arcade Fire

It feels a little strange to be turning to the "G-d forsaken computer" just a few seconds before the end of the first Arcade Fire album, seeing as how the phrase appears at the end of the list of recording devices they used to make Funeral. It should also feel strange to be sharing my thoughts about this pretty durn good record seven years after it came out, but so what. Airs find ears in different ways and at different times. This afternoon, stirring a new jar of peanut butter, eating lunch, and then reading along with the lyrics while I listened, I finally gave Funeral some the attention it deserves. And what did I hear? Yep--a pretty durn good album, just as legions of peeps have said.

No surprises here: Une année sans lumiere, Haiti, the beginning of Rebellion (Lies), and In the Backseat are my favorite songs. I think the first two lines of Rebellion, plus the chorus, are my lyrical takeaways from the album. The ones that are usable to me, and the ones that help me understand younger people's love for this fiercely-loved band. And they are:

Sleeping is giving in, no matter what the time is. Sleeping is giving in, so lift those heavy eyelids.

Every time you close your eyes Lies, Lies!

A friend from grad school married a 25-year old woman in Tennessee who loves Arcade Fire, I think, like 11-year olds love fantasy series, or like artsy kids in my generation loved Cure t-shirts. I imagine that their songs are like illuminated texts for her, the lyrics appearing in a fiery scrawl in her mind. These lines make me feel closer to her, like I can meet her in the burn.

Night-Shining, 'nuff said

Hey folks,

If ya needed something more pleasantly atmospheric to counter the remaining gloom of February--and you fancy an occasional saber in your soundscape--try Dark Age, an older album by Mike Romeo, who records as Night-Shining. Night-Shining, by the way, is an adjective that describes a type of cloud. Who Nuage.

Here's le review:

Night-Shining is the nom de tune of Williamsburg’s Mike Romeo, and it amply describes the wandering, hazy dreampop that leaves vapor trails all over last summer’s full-length digital release, Dark Age. Opener “Ghost” also features the kind of mid-tempo, stylish electronica that could easily reside on Bibio’s Ambivalence Avenue, and the stately, minimalist beginning of “Believe.Never” could likewise grace Beach House’s Teen Dream. Skittering piano notes and dainty Wurlitzer runs ornament these promising songs, and while the lyrics are hard to make out, Romeo and a female singer lay soothing, gauzy vocals over the instruments. With acoustic guitar and shaker, “Vultures” emerges from such lush reverie into a parched, articulate menace: “After all we are just animals / Picking up the scraps,” Romeo sings. Dissolving into a threatening shimmer, the chorus continues to evoke a sense of dread.

Then, the album drifts a little. “We Wait” is a derivative example of West Coast songwriting, and “December,” “White Rose,” and “Woods” resume the starlit walks of the album’s two openers, but don’t seem to get anywhere. Like glimpses of illuminated animals in the underbrush, ghostly synths appear and disappear on the margins of the soundscapes, but they aren’t enough to offset the aimlessness here.

But Dark Age turns again on another desert dirge: the splendid, penultimate “White House.” Over a simple acoustic melody, Romeo sings about a reunion in the shadow of a place that is “lonely and dead.” Backing chants, tambourine and snare, and the quiet, steadfast guitar line complement each other perfectly. Closer “This Silence” is a piano meditation on emptiness that recalls elements of The Verve’s “Sonnet.” “Why does it always have to feel this way?” Romeo asks. Preceded by the stellar accomplishment of “White House,” the singer’s sentiment gains legitimacy, and sets the stage for future work.

Talkin' bodega drink bottled water Middle East blues

When I walked into the bodega a few Wednesdays ago for a flavored water drink, I looked for a moment at the assortment of bottles in the cooler. Earlier in the day, I had been reading an article by Jeffrey Greenberg in The Week (the article had originally appeared in The Atlantic Monthly) about a series of conversations and hang-outs the writer enjoyed with Fidel Castro earlier in the year. It was a beautiful article, especially when Castro took Greenberg to an aquarium in Havana to see the dolphins. “‘Do you like dolphins?’” the Cuban leader asked the writer. “‘I do,’” Greenberg replied. Castro claimed that they were watching the world’s only underwater dolphin show, and picturing the dictator and the journalist in front of a large, blue-tinged glass window in Cuba was marvelous.

Before describing this episode, Greenberg writes about Castro’s complex, reasonable thinking about Israel. Castro believes that Israel has an unqualified right to exist, despite calling the nation the “gendarme” of the United States in the Middle East. He thinks that Israel needs to relinquish its nuclear weapons for regional peace to occur, and calls for every nuclear-armed nation on earth to do the same. Castro also chastises illegitimate Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for calling for the destruction of Israel, and even says that Ahmadinejad should “recognize the special character of anti-Semitism” (Greenberg’s words). For me, Castro’s remarks reflect an unusual level of sensitivity, education, and candor. I wish more people were as thoughtful as he is, at least in regard to these subjects.

Probably because I had read the piece, Israel was somewhere in my mind when I walked into the bodega to buy the drink. When I saw the rows of brightly lit bottles in the cooler, including various flavors of Vitamin Water, Honest Ade, and some new aloe vera drink, it occurred to me that some criticism of Israel is kind of like criticism of bottled water. Here’s the parallel: While some writers and activists focus attention on Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians—of which there is plenty to pay attention to—there seems to be far less discussion of the harmful acts and/or cold shoulders of neighboring countries such as Syria, whose leaders may prefer that the democratically inclined Palestinians remain stateless and oppressed. Similarly, while everyone seems to discuss the environmental cost of bottled water, I’ve never heard anyone question the cost of the myriad other drinks that are also bottled in plastic. But it may be that sourcing the various ingredients in these drinks and manufacturing them is more harmful to the environment than tapping a spring.

Focusing on the beverage side of the analogy, the obvious response is that cold water flows freely from home taps, so it’s inexcusable to purchase water in plastic containers that require shipping to get to market—we should purchase metal thermoses instead. It’s a great point, even though tap water in some places (I love you, but hello, Greenpoint) tastes much worse and probably contains more harmful chemicals than spring water. For substandard water, there are Pür filters, there are Britas, and there is our planet to think about. With all of these available resources and ameliorants, it’s an affront to our environmental health to purchase bottled water.

But not everyone has access to tapwater. In most cases, a prerequisite for tapwater is a sophisticated, functioning state. During the European Holocaust of 1939—1945, most of the Jews of Europe were dispossessed of their states. After the war, many remained dispossessed, and were also traumatized. Literally and metaphorically, they didn’t have dependable access to tapwater. Neither, I would guess, do many of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank today, along with numerous other staples that middle class people in even moderately prosperous countries enjoy. We know that Israel sets the policies that forbid delivery of certain staples into Palestine, and we also know that some policy makers claim that it is the violent attacks of a minority of Palestinians that make these policies necessary. I’m not equipped to comment on the specifics of these policies or make an informed evaluation of their justness, but I do think that the larger point is that both peoples, Israeli and Palestinian, need tapwater. And it also might be fair to draw a particular, limited comparison, with regard to the issue of statelessness and statelessness only, between the Palestinians of today and the Jews of Europe during and after World War Two.

Returning again to the physical bottle of water, the counterpoint to the environmental criticism of bottled water is that not everyone has enough access to tapwater to survive. If we affirm the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s principle that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, then we should all advocate for people who do not have tapwater, or, by extension, a functioning state that provides them with it. Clearly, the conditions in Gaza and the West Bank must concern all the peoples of the world, as should the suffering of anyone.

But I guess seeing the many-colored drinks in the bodega made me think that the problem in the Middle East is not a problem between Israel and Palestine alone, or even the surrounding countries in the region—it involves all of us, and the decisions that we make every day. Why should buying a bottle of Vitamin Water be any different from buying a bottle of Poland Spring? Both bottles may end up in landfills, and we can certainly make fruit juice at home. Perhaps the point is to keep the manufacture and purchase of all drinks that come in plastic bottles to a minimum, just as the point is to keep injustice to a minimum, everywhere and at all times.