My Top Ten Albums of 2012

Matt Domino unveils his Top Ten Albums of 2012.

Nilsson Week: Domino and Stern Discuss Nilsson, Part 1

 This entire week will be devoted to the legendary singer and songwriter Harry Nilsson who holds a special place in this blog's heart. Today, we bring you Part 1 of a two-part conversation about Nilsson between Matt Domino and David Stern.

New Year's Day

Last December, after I had finished my draft of The Last Mound of Dirt, I began sketching out the plot of my third novel, which would be set mainly in Madrid because it was a city I had grown fond of, in part (but not in total) due to the fact that someone I loved very much lived there at one point.  I freewrote the course that I intially imagined the story would take and then suddenly found myself writing a scene that went like this:

The journalist finds out that the poet is having a reading.  He goes to the reading and approaches the poet.  They don’t speak about their fight; they just shake hands.  Then the journalist goes out with the poet and his new girlfriend.  The poet suggests that the journalist should bring his wife sometime and that all four of them should go out together. The journalist says:

“Yes, that would be nice.”

“I think so.”

They all get drunk and the journalist slow dances with the poet’s new girlfriend.  Their dancing is innocent.  The girl tells him a story about her childhood and then the journalist asks her if she loves the poet already.

“Do you love him?”

“I don’t think like that.”

“What do you mean?”

She stopped their swaying and put her chin on the journalist’s shoulder joint.  The press felt warm and, for a moment, he wished she were his—all brand new with the smell of enthusiasm, carbonated beer, fragrant shampoo and the moisture of a warm October night.

“Anything is possible (this written in Spanish).”

“Si.”

They continued to sway.  The poet walked over to them and put his hands on the girl’s shoulder.  He eased her slowly into his chest and wrapped his arms around her from behind.

“Ready?”

The girl nodded.

“Vamos,” the poet said.

They exited the bar and went out into the street.  The wind had died down and it wasn’t cold at all.  It seemed like the morning would be unseasonably warm.  The poet took the journalist’s hand.

“Soon, right?”

“I think so,” the journalist said and smiled.  He brought the poet toward him and gave him a hug.  The girl walked over and hugged him too.  She felt warm.  The poet and the girl stepped away from him, waving.

The journalist walked along the streets.  The street washers were hosing down the garbage on the sidewalks and in the road.  The morning would be warm, so he started for his wife’s apartment.  Maybe she would let him sleep there tonight and the next day they could have coffee and fruit and read the newspaper.  And maybe then things would be better.

I have been thinking about that little sketch of writing for much of the past two months.  There is nothing that has directly made me think of it.  What pulls my mind towards those words is the feeling that my body and soul have when the image of that scene forced itself into my mind. At those instances, my mind feels fresh, relaxed and attentive to the spaces of the world – that is, the moments before and after people leave me or I leave them.  The smell of the entryway to a bar; the warmth of the hallway in a sophisticated apartment building; the spacing of cars on the sidestreets in a neighborhood; the look of melting mounds of snow when the temperature hits fifty degrees and you tilt your skullcap to the side without a care.  Maybe it is also the fact that that scene gives me a sense of my own approaching manhood for some reason.  Makes me feel some guilt or pride in getting over my immaturity – the very idea of having a wife to reconcile with.  Or it could also be the fact that I like staying out late on New Year’s and I believe in the idea that perhaps in the morning things will be better, just as long as your teeth are rearing to go at the world with that first cup of coffee fit snugly in your hand.

On New Year’s Day, I thought about this scene again.  I walked two of my best friends to their car with a hangover buzzing around my head.  Then, I took someone I love very much to the train.  After I had said goodbye to her, I tilted my skullcap crookedly on my head and stamped my boots through disappearing tracks of snow and slush.  I watched streams of water trail into sewer grates and small, old, Italian men push heaping shovelfuls of ice into the street to be matted into nothing.  As I walked, I thought of the person I had just left at the train.  I thought of how well I knew her and how long I had known her.  There was a deep knowledge of her shape, her hair, her cheeks, the smell of her shampoo and understanding of the mind.  I counted the years off and even thought of the period when I felt that all the things I had known, I would never enjoy or remember again.  Only during that time, I hadn’t forgotten them; I just didn’t allow myself to feel them, which deprives the rest of the people and parts of your life from that part that can love.  I tilted my hat once more and felt human and strong in my new wool sweater in the warmth of the winter afternoon.

When I returned to my apartment, it was quiet and slightly dirty from the guests that had slept there.  I cleaned up the debris, set the pillows on the couch, opened windows at either end of the apartment to let in air and the sound of birds, and then lit a candle.  My head felt exhausted and my hangover continued its dull buzz, so I sat on the couch in the early afternoon light, which in winter is the same light of 6:00 PM in summer.  Out of restlessness and convenience I used my phone to look up Facebook.  I scrolled through status updates and pictures until I came to a picture of a guy I used to play basketball with and the girl he dated, who used to be a good friend of mine.  They were dressed nicely, smiling and leaning into each other on a very green golf course somewhere.  I remembered the guy I played basketball with because I used to look up to him so much and he used to drive me around in his green/teal 1992 Chevy Blazer (I later got the same car) and we’d smoke cigarettes and drink beer.  A maudlin thought came into my head, “I liked playing basketball against Garrett.”  The simple sentence repeated in my head and I looked at the picture and thought, in an instant, about all the people I loved and had loved in my life – as though I were floating high above an incessantly spooling narrative of life – any life – unfurling itself somewhere in the great space of America.

Two weeks later, that moment stills seems valid to me.  We get certain moments where our hearts open up to the memory and the images of all the people we love; how they are simply spinning out there somewhere in all of this eternity we live in each day.  For instance, around the same time I wrote that scene sketch, I had a similar moment of openness while I was riding the train home for Christmas:

The train picks up steam now and I can see the snow, flat and near ice, on the Belmont.  The snow is piling high and the village steeples are beginning to show.  There are immaculate snowy playing fields and empty pool clubs with deep ends full of snow.  The night is going to come tonight and smoke will unfurl from chimneys and around the corners of those corner bars I love so much.  The snow will be stacked along the sidewalk in front of wine shops and delicatessens.  A cat will clean itself among the bare brush branches near the marsh and the streets will be lit in a scale of orange as they always are.  My mind will open with memory and I’ll think of those people I love.  I’ll think of their gestures, their happinesses, their shapes and I will get thirsty for beer.  A night in Quebec City with four feet high mounds of snow will reveal itself.  A boy with a beer is using his feet to script his name in the snow.  But that memory won’t be mine anymore.  It will belong to someone else.  Maybe a friend, maybe the protagonist of my next novel.  Because I am only as good as the shine on the water of a half frozen pond next to a school yard.  I’m just riding on the flat, trying to find Isis so that I can tell her I love her on the fifth day of May, in the drizzling rain.

Perhaps these moments spring upon us around the holidays or as each year comes to an end and we take stock of how much we have achieved in a given year or given era of our lives. Because we live our lives from day to day trying to document our memories, our successes and even the low points we get to when we just want to watch DVDs of our favorite TV shows continuously for hours just to forget, for a simple few hours of respite, that things are not constantly moving forward.  However, things are always moving forward and we should never be anxious about that. We should embrace it, because it is only in moving forward that we can remember all the people in our lives that we love so much. The motion of life ahead makes the space for those people to rise up in illumination for a moment of glory, stupid laughs, or even just an image in repose that will stick with you long after they have moved away.

 On New Year’s Day, I had one of those moments, which was triggered by the picture of my old basketball teammate.  Perhaps it’s slightly self-serious of me to expand on all of these points about memory and the fact that time continues on no matter what.  However, there is nothing self-serious, to me, about how life can be so strange and how a certain mood or the unexpected warmth of a day can open your chest up in a way that feels both alarming and welcome at the same time. You can fully visualize each of your friends and loved ones and you know that they are moving somewhere and the images are dark, but they slowly come to light and you can see them: going to the store for the weekly groceries they have to buy; sitting at the edge of their bed with their boyfriend or girlfriend late at night, leaning into each other perhaps after a fight; laughing with co-workers; feeling invincible for a moment while listening to that song of the moment.  I get pissed at everything just like anybody else and I feel trapped and want to escape all of the things in my life that make me feel itchy.  But, the world is a large place and, as Miranda once said, “has such people in it.”  When you are younger and you think you have a handle on all of your friends or even the girls you love (like any guy ever really does) you never imagine how large the world is and how many opportunities your friends have to move about it in their different ways.  Yet, it sits out there each day and calls you on and out into it. You can deny it as much as you want to, but you will always be struck at a time by some object like a photograph that reminds you just how many small moments you have had with people and about how many other small moments they have had in their own lives —when your back was turned!  That is when the heart opens and you understand more than ever how much you love people and how much people have loved you; they are all just passing images in the middle of a warm and light afternoon.

And, like always, this could all just be elementary thought.  We all know that we make memories and love other people.  We are all hungover on New Year’s Day and sprawl out on the couch, there is nothing groundbreaking about all of this. Yet, we all get worked up about New Year’s and feel bad. When, really, New Year’s is all about those moments of space in our life and how we get to them so that we can see everything and remember everything better – those strange moments of repose. And maybe then there will be coffee and fruit. And maybe then things will be better too.

My Top Ten Albums of 2010

Good evening, my Puddlers. It’s a cold evening and I have been reading about Jonathan Franzen and getting inspired to be a better writer than him so I’m going to take my talents to the manuscript of From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt this evening instead of providing you with one of my trademark lengthy posts.

Instead, in the spirit of the end of the year, I am going to give you a list of My Top Ten Albums of 2010.  Now, you can consult my list from last year in order to understand my criteria for the albums of the year.  They basically consist of any album from any year that helped to define 2010 for me in some way.  It may not be helpful in terms of helping a person decide what to buy or ask for for Christmas or to determine what the actual “best” album of 2010 was, but I liked these albums, damnit, and that deserves some credence in any person’s mind.

So, without further ado or explanation on how I came to this decision, here are My Top Ten Albums of 2010.  I hope you either buy or illegally download these albums somewhere and have some of the heart-stopping revelations about the soul, life, love, and death that I have had this year. Obviously, you can’t top my number, but you can try to come close – and the trying is what really matters.

10. Transference – Spoon (2010)

9. Keep Me Comin’ – Jesse Ed Davis (1973)

8. Hounds of Love – Kate Bush (1985)

7. Have One on Me – Joanna Newsom (2010)

6. Watertown – Frank Sinatra (1970)

5. Born in the USA – Bruce Springsteen (1984)

4. Destroyer of the Void – Blitzen Trapper (2010)

3. Teen Dream – Beach House (2010)

2. Veedon Fleece – Van Morrison (1973)

1. Lisbon – The Walkmen (2010)

There you have it – My Top Ten Albums of 2010. Let the arguing and slapping of my back begin.

Tomorrow, Mr. Alex Ramsdell graces the blog with his prose presence.

Stay warm, my Puddlers.

Puddles of My Podcast - Episode 22

Its been an action-packed week for me at work and otherwise and we are going to close it out with a podcast.  In this Episode 22 of Puddles of My Podcast I welcome an ultimate ideas man, a man of many interests and distractions and one of the founders of Brooklyn Brainery as well as Ice Cream Club,  Jonathan "Soma" Soma.  In this installment of the show Soma and I discuss the state of Virginia, Indian Food, the charms of New York, starting Brooklyn Brainery, the appeals of teaching, Ice Cream Club, the virtues of good tasting ice cream against experimental ice cream flavors, alternative rock music, collectivism in Brooklyn as well as touch on what is becoming the signature Puddles Questionnaire.  This is one of the more fascinating podcasts I have done and I enjoyed it very much. 

I also wanted to remind all you Puddlers to elect to download these podcasts so that I can keep track of which episodes you like more than others so that I can cater the podcasts in order to make them as entertaining for you all as possible.  If you go to the Puddles of My Podcast archives you'll be able to download whatever episode you like with ease.

This week marks the last week of full activity for me until mid to late September. I am going to be working on revisions to From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt until then. During this time, you will still receive weekly Mad Men reviews, hopefully one podcast per week, as well as a few other special treats that will remain a surprise.  Of course you can repeatedly read the Lisbon review and try to gain as much meaning from it as possible.  That could easily take you a month.

So enjoy this sweet and savory podcast.  Take care, my Puddlers.

Album Review: The Walkmen "Lisbon"

One of the rules of writing that I’ve mentioned on this blog is that you should never begin with a quote, whether its dialogue or a quote of someone else’s. One of thhe other rules of writing is that you should never repeat yourself.  Obviously there are only approximately eight themes that we can write about: love, birth, death, passion, friendship, good, evil and youth.  With those eight (questionable) items you will inevitably come to similar thematic crossroads. The key is that each time you come to the crossroad  you approach it from a different route.  Your destination, the overall shape of the theme or virtue remains the same, but it is the the way those themes and virtues are discerned and relayed that should be different each time so that nothing is repeated.  Our days should remain this way as well despite our routines and subway routes.

So, I have written about the Walkmen before and related their music to love, passion, death, birth and youth.  I have written about Bob Dylan and life in the city and the country and spoken about love, passion, birth, death and youth. I’m not going to avoid repetition by tackling good and evil (I’m not that excellent of a writer yet), but the Walkmen will be approached from a different route than I have approached them before. This is because Lisbon is a different album than the Walkmen have ever made before. They approach the same themes and tones of their musical palette repeatedly but manage to expand the scope of their statement each time they do so.  The main thing is that “Torch Song” on Lisbon is a fantastic song and makes your mind move in all the right directions.

This past weekend I took Friday off from work to take a long weekend upstate.  The summer is hot and my job is good.  I work with all kinds of women all day and am easily swayed by passion so each day I am constantly exhaused by promise.  Living in the country has always been part of my dream, like Levin as Tolstoy’s alter-ego surveying the fields surrounding his family’s estate, watching the sun change color, water dry in the reeds and marshes and purple mountain flowers sway with the breeze and insects all the while tractor wheels or ancient scythes flash in the light below the lime groves.  So, when I can leave to go to rural places I do – mostly on the hope that I might learn to enjoy something concrete about life by paying attention to the change in demeanor from the city to the country or from the feel of dirt and the difference of air. Yet, usually, I just drink beer try to get dirty.

I left work and met my friend at the apartment she was staying in on the Upper West Side.  The friend she was staying with decorates for weddings in the city and around it.  Her apartment was littered with old bottles for flowers, pieces of wood, pinwheels made of color patterns.  There was a window next to the crates of bottles that opened out to a courtyard where small stairwells descended to the center and plants and flowers sat in the evening light.  The girl apologized about how messy the apartment was and explained that she had been very busy.  I told her that I liked a place with clutter, all the bottles looked neat and cool stacked in crates near the window, it made the apartment warmer in sme way.  She laughed at that and told my friend and I that the wedding would be near our destination upstate and that we could both stop by on our way home on Sunday. My friend and I agreed that would be nice.

Then, with coffees in hand we were in the car on the way towards the Taconic.  My friend was telling me about some new people she had met that were designing different clothes among other objects and materials.  She was making contacts in the industry she wanted.  That was where we were heading – the home of the designer she worked for.  The sun was setting and yet that coolness of August away from the city wasn’t setting in as the sky turned from orange purple to the periwinkle of the gloaming.  I thought of all the people I tried to contact and of other friends I knew who contacted other people and tried to make a start in some kind of creative business.  I thought about how much talent I had, but that thought was broken by the memory of my friends and I trying to sneak on a ferry boat from New London out to Orient Point.  I thought about the heat of the day and the look on the ferry hand’s face as we drove onboard without a ticket and he pointed us away with his brown, worn finger.

We arrived at a humble Mexican restaurant in an upstate strip mall and walked in to greet my friend’s designer boss and his wife.  They treated us to margaritas and a mexican dinner.  It was a Thursday and as the Designer Boss said, “We come here every Thursday.” The wait staff all knew the Designer Boss and his wife and they brought over several dishes that we ate down greedily.  Finally the meal was over and I motioned to pay for the check, but the Designer Boss wouldn’t hear of it and paid for the check happily. As we walked out, I thanked him and looked at a tiled waterfall in the lobby of the restaurant.  Outside, my friend and I asked if we could buy any wine or liquor.  The Designer Boss’s wife said, “You couldn’t drink us dry if you wanted to.  Besides, there’s no where to get it at this time of night.”  And as I looked around at the darkened strip mall and then the hills that rose above its sad roofs, I realized she was right.  So, we got in the car and my friend tried to keep up with her Designer Boss who was speeding around the country roads and hills he knew so well.  He beat us to his home and the motion detector spread out over the gravel drive.  There were planters with purple flowers and a built up hill the stood over the driveway and led to forest.  Next to the home, a sunroom stretched over and back and my eye was drawn to a garden and dark barn.  The light gave to the darkness and I saw the vague silhouette of a straw owl. Out in the night, I felt a great sense of distance, which I have felt at various points in my life, it felt as if some great vastness of the world sat in front of me althought it was completely unseen.

“You’ll see the view tomorrow,” the Designer Boss said.

“I’m sure I will,” I responded.

He led us into his home and we set down our bags.  He showed us proudly around this home that he had built.  He complained about dried caterpilars on the floor.  He showed us exposed beams of wood that stood underneath skylights and above the loft of the second floor.  He showed us the guest room we would be staying in – the B suite, because the A suite was being occupied by his neighbor whose floors were being redone.  He showed me his library because I confessed to working for a magazine and being interested in writing. I spotted a pool out by a light in the side backyard.

“You’ll go swimming in there tomorrow,” the Designer Boss said.

I laughed. “I imagine so. It’s going to be hot I heard.”

“Beautiful weather.”

Then he led my friend and I into his kitchen and offered us tequila, which I accepted.  My friend asked for whiskey, which the Designer Boss dismissed but poured anyway, like a doting father to a daughter, which in many ways he postured himself as.  We had our drinks in hand and then the Designer Boss said he was going to have a cigar.  He asked me if I would too, but only if I didn’t puke.  I said I would too and that I wouldn’t puke.  So we both smoked cigars out in the sunroom with a fan on above us and the humidity slowly giving way to the coolness that enters a summer night in August usually around midnight, though perhaps sooner if you are further in the woods or somewhere more northern.

“I smoked a lot of cigars in the summer of 2005,” I told the Designer Boss.

“These are good cigars he said.”

My friend asked him about his son, Max, who was in New York from Africa.  They would be seing him after he went to his friend’s wedding. Perhaps he would be staying longer.  He had a crush on my friend.

“You should watch out little girl,” he said to her. “Max likes you.”

We all laughed and the Designer Boss and I puffed on cigars and I thought about how much he would have enjoyed that. “I would that it were true.”  Then, I asked the Designer Boss’ wife about where they had lived in New York and they told us about Brooklyn in the 70’s and buying in Manhattan at the turn of the 80’s on the Upper West Side.  They told us about celebrities and neighbors who masturbated in the window.  The cigars turned in our fingers and the smoke puffed out as the red craters slowly drew towards the band by the butt. Then, the Designer Boss said he would retire with his wife and they did.  My friend and I stayed up and drank another glass each of whisky in his library with the TV on mute.  I admired a book of beatnik interviews and we talked about our separate love lifes and stumbled into slight disagreements as friends will do when they are comfortable and tired and finishing their last drinks.  Then we went up to bed, where I insisted on sleeping on the floor with a white duvet wrapped around me and pillows strewn about, claiming it was good for my back.

“I knew you’d do this,” my friend said.

Then we both slept.  She woke in the morning with the remaining coolness, which Hemingway said was the best time to write. She left the room and I spread out on the bed. I woke to an empty house, I supposed they went to get breakfast.  So I washed my face and slicked my hair back, brushed my teeth and put on clean clothes.  Then I went downstairs and into the sunroom feeling very neat with my notebook and novel hooked under my arm and then stacked on the wicker white table.  I started writing as I looked out to the view of the slight mountains and hills that spread in the distance.  The house sat above a golden hill of rye.  I looked around and thought of the Designer Boss and his family and of other small lives that were lived in these hills and began to feel melancholy. So I started to write.  It wasn’t long when the car pulled back down and my friend shouted out to me from the kitchen. They had eggs and bacon and all things for breakfast, but first we would walk.

We walked and the Designer Boss led the way.  We walked along roads that were lined with corn fields, corn to feed cows.  My friend ate some corn and mooed.  We encountered actual cows and the Designer Boss’ wife and I let them suck our fingers as we pet their heads.  We looked at barns and climbed long, slow sloping hills.  I stepped on rocks to pick unripe apples that had the perfect sourness for my enjoyment. I walked along and thought of Levin and Tolstoy and Bob Dylan in 1970 surveying their respective properties.  I had a notion of happiness and I believed that it was tied to the ability to perhaps know something greater about life in general by simply taking the time to observe it.  I reminded myself not to get to close to being like a hippy.

We returned to the house feeling healthy, warm and sweaty.  The Designer Boss cooked bacon and made over hard eggs.  We ate the eggs and bacon out on the sun room. The Designer Boss ate a bagel and pickled herring from Zabar’s.  I spread their homemade strawberry and blueberry jams out on my bagel.

“Which do you like better?” the Designer Boss’ wife asked.

“Blueberry is better.” The Designer Boss said.

“I like blueberry best,” I said.

We lingered over breakfast and made jokes. I thanked the Designer Boss and his wife several times and then asked him about hiking a hill to the fire tower.  The Designer Boss got very excited and told us that he would take us there to hike while he cut some of the rye that his neighbor had missed cutting with his tractor. Then, when we were done, we could swim in the pool with him before he went golfing at 4:00.  We agreed it was a perfect plan and were soon speeding behind him through the small town to the small mountain.  We got to the mountain and he pointed out the way.  We thanked him and climbed. I forced my friend to move faster than she wanted to as we climbed to the top and found the fire tower.  As we climbed the fire tower we paused momentarily to take in the views from the various elevations until we reached the top and watched the turkey vultures and red tailed hawks circle the tops of the trees.  We read out graffiti and then looked out at the clouds that formed shadows on the hills.

“Do you like my boss?” my friend asked me.

“I do. He likes you very much.”

“You think?”

“You remind him of something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure he knows either, but its something that he can understand and it is something good.”

We were quiet after that and then made a joke about some acquaintance we both knew and decided to climb back, get back, swim and then leave.

We completed our task of swimming with the Designer Boss in his 85 degree pool (“It has to be 85 degrees”) and set off to meet our friends further upstate.  The Designer Boss was visibly sad as he helped us figure out the route to take to meet our friends.  However, he piled us on with homemade jams, zucchini bread and pesto.  As we left, the Designer Boss’ wife showed me some catnip that grew by the driveway.  We held it out to their cat, which the son had brought from Africa and watched as he curled his lip and pawed at the flower before curling up with it on the gravel.  Then I thanked her and the Designer Boss for everything and hoped I would see them soon.

“See you on Tuesday,” the Designer Boss said to my friend.

Then, we were driving up 202 N where we met our friends at my friend’s grandfather’s house.  His grandfather was an old Frenchman who did various odd jobs throughout his life but who retreated to this remote spot in the late 1970’s.  He spoke in a thick but clean French accent and seemed to wink every time he said something.  I felt something familiar when talking to him. It could have been the warmth of accumulated human experience that most grandfather’s have, or it could have been that I shared some trait of simplicity of the world with this man – the same peasant heart.  Maybe we were both just men.  I couldn’t decide.  But my friend and his wife were happy to see us and there were other friends there as well, so we cooked fresh corn and drank cold beer and cooked our dinner over a fire on an old cauldron while country music played.

The night fell in and it grew colder than it had been the night before.  We kept drinking and slowly but surely people had crawled off to bed in various spots, except myself, my friend, the grandchild of the grandfather, and his friend, the Photographer.  Since it was late and we were drunk we decided to wander without purpose in the fields and forest around the house. My friend, the grandchild of the grandfather, had directions of the properties printed in his head from memory and nostalgia so we followed him.  A new barn was being built and its fresh wood seemed to glow in the night, so we climbed in one of the windows and surveyed the craftsmanship, using our cell phone light to guide us.  When that was done, my friend wanted to walk on the path that led from the neighbors’ house to his grandfather’s rabbit hutch.  He had taken the neighbor’s daughter there one time.  We walked quietly through the yard, but couldn’t find the path.  My friend got caught in the prickers and we decided to finally give up. So the three of us boys took the road back and admired the full scope of stars that had stretched up above us.  Yet, we had to make a stop at the other neighbor’s home, the Architect.  We walked up his drive and into his yard since he wasn’t home.  He had a treated pond in the backyard and we drank beers along its zen edge.  Bullfrogs honked in the darkness and before I knew it, we were asleep out there.  We all awoke minutes later and retreated to our own beds – my friend into bed with his wife.

The next morning we cooked breakfast over the fire – eggs and bacon – and then took a trip to a waterfall landing to swim in the cold water.  I drank beers on the ride over the hills to the falls and then alongside the falls.  The boys swam to the falls and talked, watching a gay couple and their dog play with a big stick among the rocks of the fall bed.  Soon, it was time to leave there, so we drove back, picking up some supplies for steak dinner.  We played lawn games in the high heat of the late afternoon and cooked different courses of mushroom, turkey burgers and other vegetables over the fire before it was time to cook steak.  We ate thick steaks as the night grew dark and we poured chimichurri on the meat alongside beat salad and other greens. Then, there was a champagne toast, for my friend, the grandchild of the grandfather and his wife had been married only recently.  We all admired their connection and union and returned to our cups and cans.  The fire roared on and some of us fell asleep as my friend, the grandchild of the grandfather, relayed wild stories from his youth.  I dozed in and out, sipping cheap corn whiskey and making smores.  Finally the exhaustion set in.

“I was drinking for all of us,” my friend said.

“I was tired,” I said.

“No roaming tonight.”

“Maybe just some nights.”

We all retired to our beds.

The next morning we made another big breakfast. I felt rested and ate my eggs and bacon as well as homemade english muffins that my friends wife had prepared.  She cooked them over the fire.  I drank beers because the morning was hot. The conversation lingered and we discussed leaving.  Before we did, we took artsy photos in the woods with props at different locations.

“My parents definitely have these pictures. I’ve seen them,” one of the guests said and we all laughed at that.

Then, it was time to leave.  So my friend (the girl) and I set off in her car back to New York.  We drove smoothly back to the city and when we got to New York, the streets were clear, because it was a summer Sunday.  A  phrase that that day sounded so simple, old and beautiful to me.  The heat wasn’t terrible and there was no one on the road or on the streets and for a second, this great city seemed manageable.  I felt that I could smell salt water.

My friend dropped me off and I was dirty, tired, and exhausted from drinking beer and being in the sun.  So, I shaved, showered, made dinner and  bought cold Miller High Life bottles to drink in the evening.  I drank them next to the fan in my apartment and thought of going back to work on Monday.

This is supposed to be about  the Walkmen album Lisbon.  I’m not going to pretend to know what this fantastic new album is about.  All I am going to tell you is that it is the best album that the Walkmen have ever put out.  Wheras You & Me was all about a kind of wild passion for youth and catharsis – the pain of understanding that time is passing and that things are not as they once were, that what was may not ever be again, because your sisters are now all married – Lisbon is about what happens after that moment or era in your life.

The Walkmen started off as a loud band that had strange echoing guitars, organs and pianos (not to mention a fantastic drummer).  We fell in love with the anthem “The Rat” and moody numbers like “We’ve Been Had,” “Wake Up,” or solemn songs like “New Year’s Eve.”  Or, like me, you fell in love with the unbridled rock n’ roll of A Hundred Miles Off that made a person (especially a tortured soul) find meaning in the world.  There was something uncontrollable about their ability to go from cool and solemn to unrestrained and wild that fit someone who was making their way through their college years.  Then, when You & Me came out in my early twenties when I was learning to love New York and leave the romances and memories of my youth behind me and embrace the new strangeness and perhaps changes I would have to face in the coming years, it all made sense.  There was something poignant about that album. It was intoxicating enough with its use of horns, its ballads and its anthemic rockers that you just had to fall in love with it – there was no way not to because it represented something so strongly to life, to some kind of impalpable feeling or era that all people share.

Lisbon then one-ups that. Lisbon is the sound of a band that is completely comfortable in their skin.  Lisbon is the Walkmen. In many ways it is a superior summation of a band than Wilco (The Album) was for Wilco in its own clever way.  Lisbon has the rockers, it has the pop songs, it has the wailing anthems and it has the moody atmospheric pieces.  Yet, they never reach an extreme, they all feel natural, as though they are not one different song. Where sometimes that effect can make an album seem long or drawn out, here it never is.  The Walkmen understand the dynamics of their sound so well that they can subtly adjust from track to track without it seeming completely different, but when you pay attention you realize how different it is and you are never bored – there is always a vocal wail or hook or a tinkling piano, or a substantial throb of bass or some clever percussion that makes your head spin.  You’ve heard these songs before, but they have never been this good, they have never been this natural and you will never be able to get them out of their head. There isn’t much of a difference between “Victory,” “Angela Surf City,” “Torch Song,” “Blue as Your Blood,” and “Lisbon.”  The only difference is the subtle shift in dynamics. “Lisbon” itself is a tour de force in tone and atmosphere and is perhaps one of the best songs of the last ten years and it isn’t even the best song on the album, which would be “Torch Song.”

We often feel sad when athletes pass their prime or when musicians become older and start forming families.  The Walkmen have been around for about a decade.  They are starting to get their just due as one of the best rock bands around.  And I find it funny after the Strokes just played a legendary show at Lollapalooza to be talking about bands reaching maturity.  Lisbon, to me, is the sound of maturity.  It is concise at 11 tracks and each song, no matter what it is actually saying, says something about moving on with your life and finding a peace within your skin.  It is an album where you identify what your problem is, accept it and figure out the ways how to fix it.  The romance is over and so are the triumphant horns, now something else has inserted itself into your life, perhaps something that isn’t completely palpable, but something that feels comfortable and you can’t shake, because more than the romance it is this essence that you have always wanted – whatever it may be.

You can connect the dots for what this means about  a married couple, an old Frenchman in Upstate New York, a Designer Boss, two friends travelling, fires and drinking a beer in the coolness of the night.  I’m not sure what all those objects mean in the general context of the world other than that they exist and enter into my life from time to time as I try to make my way through time and learn to trust the things that I really want and not the things that the world suggests make me comfortable. Lisbon is that point, that city you reach when you find the balance of “what I want and what the world expects of me.”  That balance that can be explained by a Summer Sunday in New York City in a car, or by walking by a campfire with a cool beer and seeing a pool of water.  Those are the objects that may be there, that may reside in that city, but its all about how you get there and when you do, the music is sweet, it is challenging and it is good.

Just Puddles

It's going to be a long weekend for me so this will be the last post.  I'll be back on Monday with a recap of Mad Men and then Tuesday will bring, what I believe will be, the first comprehensive review of the new Walkmen album Lisbon, which I have managed to get my hands on before its release.  And you all know how much I love the Walkmen, so you know that its going to be a fantastic post.  Just one more thing to look forward to next week so you don't drink to give up the ghost over the weekend.

But, to keep you occupied over the next few days, I post the next installment of From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt.  We now begin Part III of the novel, which resumes the first person perspectives of the O'Donnell family as they come back to their home after Rose's funeral and have to address the individual issues between them and in their own lives that have been rising throughout the course of the book.  So here is the first section of Part III, which you can analyze and scrape for meaning in the heat.  Enjoy:




James


“I can’t believe you did all of this, Aunt Erin.  We could’ve handled some of it.”

    “Please, James,” Aunt Erin says to me.

    I want to say something about responsibility and about mom being my mother and that I should do better, but instead I don’t say anything.  I smile and I put my arm around her little body and pull her close.

    “I love you, Aunt Erin.”

    “Thank you, James.”

    I let her go and look around the kitchen.  There are about a half dozen aluminum catering trays filled with food.  There are plenty of plastic cups and plates and untensils all wrapped and stacked on the counters.  She has two liters of soda and also plenty of beer.

    “That was a nice service.  They have a good cemetary out there in Calverton.”  Uncle Connor is sitting at the kitchen table.  The fading grey light comes in from the skylight.  Behind him against the back windows there is a little red and purple from where the clouds are breaking and letting the sun through.  He drums his fingers on the kitchen table. “And Douglas and his family have always had a fine business at that home.”

    “I don’t know how with that crook of a father of his and the faulty hearses they used to send around.” Dad walks in with the bottle of Sark the girls found him with last night.

    “He wasn’t a crook, Ben.” Uncle Connor says.  I can see him want to smile.

    Dad grabs two tumbler glasses.  He turns to Uncle Connor and points a finger. “Revisionist.”  He puts the glasses down on the table and unscrews  the Sark cap. “Scotch?”

    Uncle Connor shakes his head and looks at Dad. “I don’t think so, Ben.”

    I watch Dad meet Uncle Connor’s gaze.  Dad turns away and pours himself a glass.

    “Well, I think so.” Dad says. “James?”

    I shake my head.  “I think I’ll just stick with beer.”

    Dad sits down at the table and pulls his glass in.  He takes a long drink off it and exhales.

    “James,” Aunt Erin says, grabbing a tray. “Why don’t you get Tom and help me carry this stuff into the dining room to set up.”

    “You got it.”

    I walk out of the kitchen, through the living room where Eve is sitting with Liza and looking over a book.  Eve looks at me and smiles.  I feel the hollow dread in the bottom of my stomach.

   “Why did you hide my grandson from me?”

    “I didn’t, mom.  I didn’t mean to.”

    She shuts the oven and my mouth tastes like an onion.

    I move through the main hallway and to the front door.  I look out and Maggie is sitting on the front step with Jake.  The sun is shining red.  He still looks good and it surprises me how happy I am to see him.  Surprise isn’t the word – I always admired him and thought that we saw eye to eye in some way.  Even though I always felt that Maggie would break his heart somehow.  But he’s back and it would be like him to show up to the funeral without telling anyone.

    “Tom?”

    I jog quickly up the stairs, my feet making that soft warm thudding sound on the carpet.

    “Tom?” I ask again.  I turn down the hallway and look into his room.  Tom is sitting on the ledge of his window, legs draped out the window. “What’s going on, Tom?”

    He turns around and smiles. “I’m not going to jump.”

    “I didn’t say that.” I cross my arms.

    “You looked that,” he laughs.

    I shake my head.

    “What’s up?”

    “Aunt Erin wants us to help set the food up for the guests.”

    Tom turns his feet back into the room.  Red light enters onto his tan carpet.  It reminds me of too many summer afternoons.

    “Who’s coming?”

    “I don’t really know. Friends?”

    He nods and steps into the room.  He slides the screen back over the window.  I suddenly feel hot around the collar of my shirt.  Tom stretches up.  He looks lean and sharp.  He looks healthy and slightly sad.

    “I’m sorry,” I say. “About the look.”

    He walks over and pats my shoulder.

    “Thanks for coming up to get me.”

    He passes me and walks out into the shadow of the hall.  I follow him.

    “Who was that girl from last night anyway.”

    Tom doesn’t answer and disappears down the stairs.  I begin to descend but I can feel mom behind me.  I turn.

    “Be patient with your brother.  He needs your help just like everyone else.”

    “I know, mom. I know.  I love him.”

    “Good,” she holds her arm against my cheek. “Now where is that grandson of mine?”

    Of course she’s not there.

A Link to the Past (?)

It's been a long week for some reason and I am just about ready to get to the weekend.  I will be back next week with some thoughts on Ryan Adams as well as, hopefully, two new podcasts for you all to take a listen to.  However, in order to take you through the weekend, here are a few links for you all to check out in your free time/boredom time at work, or in that hungover period when you don't quite want to drink water and eat breakfast yet and would like to kill some time.  This is all for you.

- The New Yorker put out their Best 20 Writers Under 40 last month and Gary Shteyngart was on that list.  He recently did an interview with the New York Times that is quite worth reading I must say.  You can check it out here.

- In some Conde Nast news (wink, wink), GQ did an interview with Bull Murray that they have made available on their website.  Of course, Murray is hilarious through much of the interview, although he does waver on dickhead/hipster doofus boundaries in some areas.  The best thing about Bill Murray is that even when he is sending off those type of vibes, some part of you has to think that he is doing it completely on purpose.  Take a look.

- Of course, this Sunday we all know that Season 4 of Mad Men will be coming on the air.  This is a moment that I have been waiting for basically since last November.  I've been reading advance reviews of the first episode and if you aren't afraid of spoilers, check out this review on Salon.com.

- My good friend, sometime editor, and most valued creative soundboard when it comes to writing, Alex Ramsdell, recently reminded me of this writer, Nicholson Baker, who our fiction teacher, Steven Millhauser, mentioned when we were in college.  Some of these novels are ones  that I intend to read, because they sound like novels that I myself would write. 

- My good friend, Janelle Sing, pointed me in the direction of some of these designers who she recently met at a trade show this week.  She may be working with them sometime soon.  Now, I may work for a fashion magazine, but that doesn't mean I know much about it.  Janelle does, so I'd check out the following: Taylor Supply, Baron Wells, Schott NYC,  Ernest Alexander, and Crisp NYC.

- In other news about the fall, the Walkmen will be coming out with their next album Lisbon. I have been scouring the internet to find out more information about the album and it turns out, a few more of the tracks have been released.  Here are all four of the released tracks in one place.  Please enjoy them as much as I have been.

- In the wake of the LeBron Decision, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Charles Barkley have all publicly criticized LeBron, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh for playing together.  Here is a smart rebuke of Magic Johnson's criticism.  And here is an interesting TrueHoop article about Michael Jordan's complaint.

- In some other blog/bookish sort of interest, here is today's Blogger Blog of Note.  It is a website that analyzes and comments on different book covers. Actually a very interesting blog to check out.  Take a look at the Caustic Cover Critic.

- Finally, here is a terrific article I found while looking up this William Blake quote:

"a female descends to meet her lover or husband, representative of that love called friendship, which looks for no other heaven than the beloved, and in him sees all reflected as in a glass of eternal diamond."

The article doesn't have very much to do with that quote other than William Blake may be mentioned once.  But it is a thought provoking article that gives some good analysis of Stendhal, which we rarely see so often these days. As well as play with some notions of modern romanticism. It may be a little didactic, but I think its overall optimism in the end gives it a bit of charm or at least an endearing quality.  Take a read right here.

Alright, my Puddlers, that's it, that's all I've got for you this week.  Enjoy the weekend.  Try to stay cool.  Have a few cocktails, read some kind of good fiction and be sure to enjoy Mad Men in the coolness of however you keep your home cool this Sunday evening.

I've never met you but I love you. 

Live From New York...

It's ridiculously humid!  Seriously, I have to go on record and say that this is one of the best weather New York summers of all time - granted it is only my third REAL one.  I mean its hot, our apartments are sweltering, the average amount of sweat is up, power is running low, people are burning LeBron jerseys, we are definitely reaching classic summer psychopath levels here - you have got to love it.

Anyway, the reader comments are rolling in about my LeBron column and I just want to thank you all for doing so.  Keep up the comments and continue to let me know what you think.

Tomorrow, me and my associates will be submitting our sketch material to Saturday Night Live for consideration.  Here are a few synopses for your brief reading pleasure:

1. A teacher who literally has a stick up his ass conducts class.
2. The matriarch of a family - used to eating from a trough - doesn't know what plates are.
3. A husband has been lying to his wife about knowing famous people.
4. A fourth, tone-deaf Wilson brother joins the Beach Boys in the studio.
5. A racist guru delivers his wisdom to unsuspecting pupils.
6. A commercial for old fashioned duck sauce.

Do any of those topics interest you?

Now, to clear the backlog of items with a few links:

- I am planning a podcast this fall with the Indian writer Chandrahas Choudhury.  You can check out his blog here.  Chandrahas has one novel out called Arzee the Dwarf  and has just finished editing a collection of Indian fiction called A Traveler's Literary Companion. He is a friend of my friend, the artist, Janelle Sing and he is coming to America in the fall. Stay tuned for that and get acquainted with his work in the meantime.

- Another podcast I am planning is with the guys who run the bookstore, Book Thug Nation, on North 3rd Street between Berry and Wythe. I have met one of the guys, Corey, who runs the store at a party at my apartment and he definitely knows his stuff. I have heard a lot of good things about their collection and I will be stopping by this week.  They do readings and other kinds of events so hopefully you will be hearing about a reading that I will be doing there in the near future.

- First news from the Walkmen's new album, Lisbon.  A new track, "Stranded" has been released through NPR radio.  It seems like the Walkmen are taking up right where they left off on You and Me and are even looking to enhance and polish their sound if ever so slightly.  I am looking for a very brooding and wistful end of summer/fall listening to an album's worth of these songs.  Who knows, maybe I'll write about it in about four years.  But you need to check this song out for now.

- Finally, my current, upcoming reading list:

1. Finish Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (classic Domino toolbox book)
2. All the Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren (classic Domino toolbox book that I just wrote about and in the process reminded myself that I need to re-read it.
3. Rabbit, Run by John Updike (talked into by this New York Times article. Updike reminds me of me).

Alright, my Puddlers, stick with me.  Enjoy my sports writing and I swear we are going to have another podcast up here this week. Too much basketball talk to cover that if I can't get a guest I may just literally podcast myself to get it off my chest.

It's just Puddles of Myself.

Podcast of Myself Episode 1

As promised, the Puddles of Myself Podcast aka Podcast of Myself is now available.  Once each podcast has been booted off this main page, you will be able to find them archived in a section that you will see at the top of the main page called "Podcast of Myself."

In the inaugural episode, we welcome guest Erik Lilleby, a childhood friend of mine.  In this conversation, we test the waters on such topics as the Dalai Lama, Baby Mama, The Walkmen, prostitutes, the NHL and the Dick Cavett Show.  Parental discretion is advised.

2006-2008: A Fan's Notes

In the summer of 2006, I was maybe as lost as I’ve ever been.  That summer vacation marked the thankful end to an alienating second semester of my junior year of college.  I had returned from my study abroad in Ireland which was nothing more than a prolonged drinking binge with little study of linguistics and a brief visit to the Martello tower on the sea where Joyce lived with Oliver St. John Gogarty where I watched an old couple swim under grey December skies.  I had returned to a school I wasn’t quite fond of to see most of my friends either graduated, graduating or dismissed.  This semester had begotten quite a few bad habits that I was more than hoping to get rid of.

As that May got off to a wet start, I found myself looking for ways to occupy my time, which is also known as a summer job.  I had spent most of my summers before 2006 working in my father’s warehouse that was part of his veterinary supply business.  However, we both thought that it would be better for my own sake that I move on from those canine and feline anesthetics, antihistamines and antibiotics to something less dusty and more substantive. 

I applied for jobs as a strawberry picker (not a racial or sexual innuendo), a waiter at a country club, a janitor at a pool club and a journalist at the town newspaper.  None of these options took and I was beginning to get desperate.  However, I soon found a job working as a camp counselor for a summer camp at a boarding school near my home whose campus happened to sit right up on the waters of Head of the Harbor – anyone who is familiar with the North Shore of Long Island knows that this is quite a beautiful area. Simultaneously, I had happened to land a minimally paid (read gas money) position at a local fitness magazine with a staff that was comprised of myself and an overweight woman who would sometimes massage people by candlelight while I interviewed local fitness celebrities over the phone.  Although, I did once interview Victoria Recano of Entertainment Tonight.

That June was tremendously hot - as the rest of the summer was, or maybe I just remember it that way – and work at the camp seemed easy enough.  They needed me to “float” from group to group, but when one of my teenaged colleagues would be spending too much of his summer vacation vacationing with his family, they stuck me with a group of fifth graders.  Although the work was fine, I was still finding myself in bad habits: getting drunk at strangers’ houses and falling asleep to wake up in the middle of the night and walk home or to call the mortalest of enemies to “just help me with a ride home, man,” littering beer cans in the roads in my neighborhood, riding around with drunk people.  As I saw my final year of college approaching once the weather grew cooler and more exciting in September, I began to feel anxious at the walls of my life, which I had constructed with such uncaring indifference and distance, caving in.

It was at this time that A Hundred Miles Off by the Walkmen came out.  I had followed the Walkmen sporadically before that album.  As most people my age, I was infected with “The Band Fever” during high school and scrounged for any new piece of music by a band that had inserted the word “the” in front of their name.  So, I had gotten my hands on the Walkmen’s first two albums in bits and pieces, downloading singles.  I knew they had come from a cult band by the name of Jonathan Fire*Eater as well.  However, it was A Hundred Miles Off that set the tone for that summer and for perhaps some change in me that I am still feeling or trying to understand.

During the heat of the day, I would take the kids to the pool, to the harbor of Head of the Harbor, to the sound at Long Beach in Smithtown, to the dirt fields to play soccer, to the basketball courts to teach them the art of the layup and the bank shot and to relive my past high school hardcourt glories; I would encourage their weirdnesses, hobbies and secret interests that they may have normally been embarrassed to share, because if I thought it was OK and if I looked like an older kid who was not quite an adult but not quite a kid, then I must know something about what was cool.  So while my colleagues were groping and horny teenagers or teachers trying to make money during their summers, I was a privileged college student, daydreaming rock n’ roller/country singer (listening to a LOT of Gram Parsons in these days) and aspiring writer who was prematurely trying to dry himself up on the short side of forty (40). 

So, after the last pieces of dust from the last SUV picking up the last kid had settled around 3:30 or 4:00 in the afternoon, I would hop in my own SUV - a 1997 Nissan Pathfinder - and slide A Hundred Miles Off into the Bose CD player.  Then, I would begin to imitate Hamilton Leithauser’s insane Dylan whine as the mariachi horns of “Louisiana” spoke to me about having “my hands full all summer long” while there is “thunder and lightning a hundred miles off.”  I’d get wistful – and so did the plunking and playful piano - as I drove along the sloping horse field lined streets and through the shimmering leaf sunlight and think of hammocks under trees and of past summer girls that I’d lazily cared for and of Levin standing on the balcony of his home looking at the storm clouds roll in over his lime grove.  It seemed like things would get better just like he’d thought at the end of Anna Karenina.

Or on other days, I would feel my restlessness rise and subside, just like the insane rubber band tempo of “Tenleytown,” which thrashes and then stalls like no other song in the history of mankind. I’d listen to this gem of a song and scream at the top of my lungs with the windows of my car rolled down, feeling young and unjaded, feeling everything very immediate and real and knowing that even though when I got home, things would all be still in the late afternoon to evening light, that the energy was always out there.  That I could grab it and access it whenever I wanted to and that even if things were still and hazy, that it was OK to sit on the porch and think about that.  Or, in the dank basement of the magazine office, flubbing my way through another interview with a mother of three weightlifter while my “boss” and her Latvian boyfriend fed each other cheesecake, that in the end its all just a damn joke anyway, tempered by our own made up melancholy and seriousness at not getting the whole thing.

And yet, there were other days, when I would temper my own perceived melancholy with a real melancholy while I listened to “Emma, Get Me a Lemon” with its pounding verses and soaring gut wrenching choruses.  And I would think about moments with girls that I actually did love or maybe could have loved if I paid attention or were astute enough to listen to myself.  I’d play my air guitar behind the wheel of the car and while thinking about those passing, starry visions of my past, would feel the extreme restlessness that the chorus builds in a listener as well.  Sometimes I would be driving at night and listen to the album, and if, while stopped at a stoplight or stop sign, “Emma, Get Me a Lemon” was on, I would look out into the darkness and smell in the perfume from the trees and homes all around me.  First, I would let the car stall and wish I had a cigarette, then a notion would hit me, something profound, something to due with the slight shade between the darkness of tree leaves in the summer and of the sky when its clear.  That notion would pass and I, not knowing what it was, would drive on, ambling after it in my mind.

Soon, though, the camp was over and my body had been appropriately sunburned with little use of suntan lotion throughout its duration.  I wrote the kids nice messages in their camp yearbooks and told them that I wished them the best.  I meant all the things I wrote to them; because what I learned from them was that their little lives were infinitely more interesting than mine and that if these little kids thought that I was a good camp counselor, than there must have been something still human left in me after all.  And that was something to build on; that was something to have confidence about, as small as it may have been. 

The summer wore on for a few remaining weeks and I drank comfortable beers by my pool with whatever friends were still around and I cooked dinners with my family.  But, I always found myself up late at night driving and listening to the album.  The last song is a cover of the Mazarin song “Another One Goes By.”  It’s a shuffling soul beat that could have even been a Roy Orbison song.  I’ll break my little “voice” character here to say that it is literally one of the best songs of all time.  There was one lyric that always stuck with me, “Don’t know what to offer you when I’m only broke and lonely.”  It struck me because that was how I had often felt towards the people in my life.  And yet this summer had gone by, another one floated by, and there was more that I could offer and I was bound to determine that as I packed my gold SUV full of crap to take to my final semester at a college I had outgrown enough to finally enjoy.

Flash-forward two years and I’ve of course fallen in love with other bands and other girls and other waterfront settings.  Now, I’m living in Brooklyn, finishing up one of the best and most exhausting summer of my life and lo and behold (Bob Dylan and the Band Basement Tapes reference) the Walkmen are releasing a new album under the radar.  I of course leap on the damn thing once I hear about it.  I get it early and I start playing the songs to death on my rooftop sitting there in the heat with my friends and piling up beer cans and laughing while the fluorescent light of my kitchen shines out onto the black tar and above us, the light pollution makes that terrible illuminated canopy bed that feels so inevitable.  The songs this time around were subtler, refined in places were  they were edgier.  They had not lost their edge, but rather they had grown into it, expanded on it.  There was something comfortable in the guitar and vocals on these songs and there was something comfortable in my foot up on the white table on my black tarred roof.

I got tickets to a show the Walkmen played at the Bowery in August 2008.  They blew me away.  It was the most excited I had ever been to see a show.  I knew all the songs and the show took place on the day the album was released.  And those reverby, echoey songs stuck with me as the summer died out with the romances I had.  Those wailing and wistful vocals grew stronger and bolder as the winter months came and I enjoyed the first snowfalls of my living in New York.  And as the rest of the world caught on to how good the album was.  I realized that this album and this band had transcended being simply good or important to me – they were a part of me, or rather they felt like they had come from the source of my creativity of what causes me to speak and want to put something out into the world.

You & Me is an extremely melancholy album. The single “In the New Year” is all about a narrator who is still living at an old address even though things around him are changing.  His friends are married to all of his sisters, and even though everything is changing and his heart is in the strangest place, its going to be a good year moving out of the darkness and into the “fire.”  This song was an anthem – at least to me and those I knew – when it came out.  It was to me because my life had certainly changed and was – is – continuing to change and I could only see the good in that.  Even, if sometimes those old yous and those old times get blurry and out of focus and don’t seem familiar to you, you have to believe its going to be a good year, because even if you are living at the same old address, your old bum friends got it together enough to marry your sisters.  And if your heart is in the strangest place, then you are on the verge of figuring something out.

And then there is “Red Moon” a slow pirate or boat waltz that makes one think of a calm night at sea.  The singer and his horns think of some loved one that he’s lost and the dynamics and space of the song allow this common tale to gain a resonance.  The rest of the music falls out at the right places to emphasize the echo of the vocals and then the horns come in to suggest the warmth of the breeze before the singer says, “I miss you, there’s no one else. I do. I do.” And the song comes to a graceful end.  It doesn’t matter who that’s about.  Those lines are true because they’re simple and we all want to say that to someone. Whether the motion or the words are inappropriate or misplaced or not.

“Red Moon” flows perfectly into “Canadian Girl,” which builds and builds from a pleasant little shuffle to a soaring coda with horns and chiming guitars as the singer tells the girl he’s singing to that she’ll miss him when he’s gone because she “is the morning” and he “is the night” and only he “still calls her” his.  I could never quite figure out what this song was about, but it sounded romantic enough and if you don’t fall for that horn coda, then I don’t know what kind of soul you have or if you are even capable of romanticizing the small postures in life.

The Walkmen don’t lose their edge ever and “Four Provinces” proves that.  Maybe the most artfully aggressive song since “The Rat” this song packs a thump that doesn’t allow you to not shake or groove.  There is a break in this song where the horns come in that adds an element of grace that “The Rat” never achieved.  When the singer says “the next time I see you at Sophia’s place” there is a mastery over the phrase.  He knows the world he’s traversed in and even moved past, however the familiarity still makes him uneasy and puts him on edge as he finishes the song “every bone in my body broken one time or two/every hour of the long day trying to spend it with you/every year that I’m living trying to stick by your side/the sun goes down moon comes up sky is black and blue/me I stand running with you.”  There is something simple and also tumultuous in the lines, which is just like the whole song itself.  When you know your world in and out, it can be very simple, but the simplest things, when focused on can breed endless complications and disturbances.  Just ask Joyce’s Dubliners.

The main event of this album is “If I Lost You,” which perfectly melds the two sides of the Walkmen – the aggressive and dramatic, and the cool, controlled shuffle.  This is all about a car driving through the night, maybe even just circling a neighborhood with the kids in the backseat.  Yet, just like in all the songs on the album there is a line about missing someone when they’re gone.  The song picks up steam and you can start hearing those horns in the background, while the drums begin to pound a little louder and that guitar chime becomes more of a wail to match the singer’s vocals as he asks someone throw him a rope. “I knew you when I was young…I wish you were still around/I waited a long time/I lost you/ I was sleeping in the backseat when I got home/I lost you.” That’s how the song finishes on a dramatic and powerful blast.  And that’s very much how I felt – and still feel – about a lot of things in that end of summer through winter of 2008.

I saw the Walkmen two more times in that stretch.  They were the band of that moment for me even as Animal Collective became the band of the moment and of the scene and perhaps rightfully so.  However, what this has all been for is the fact that the Walkmen grew with me as I grew up.  I could have described that time period when You & I came out in the same Frederick Exley voice I did for my description of A Hundred Miles Off, however, I grew up.  In 2006, I was wild and all over the place just like The Walkmen were.  They were fidgeting and couldn’t stay in one spot.  Then they reached a mood on You & Me, they reached a mood and fleshed it out as far as they could and in doing so, they touched on levels of poignancy and craft that they never had before.  That’s what we should all be capable in our lives and our arts.  Focus and flesh it all out, know your form and your craft to its fullest to create what is timeless and forever poignant to others.

And maybe you can’t just compare yourself to a band or an album and maybe I haven’t grown up and maybe most of us haven’t grown up.  Sure, this isn’t anything that is going to change the world or make tragedy any easier.  Art wasn’t made for that, art was made for us to question our own makeups in a cracked looking glass and it is only through doing this that we can then go out and make that decision to change and heal the world – to take on the pain and toil that others can’t.  I’ve seen glimpses of that in myself and I’m going to try to find more and more of it as I figure out that I’m the least interesting person I know.   I can only hope the same for the rest of you.