Step into the Arenas

See you just have to love the NBA.

I was walking down the street on New Year's Day this year, not so much headache hungover, but bleary-eyed and feeling loose and goofy.  I was walking with my roommate of Motel Motel fame and four of my best friends from growing up.  I had one beer already and we were looking forward to having a few bloody mary's at the local French restaurant, Le Baricou.  My friend stepped into a bodega to grab a pack of smokes, when I spotted the always beautiful back cover of the New York Post.  The headline read:

Wizards Gilbert Arenas and Javaris Crittenton pull pistols on each other

This eye-catching headline was followed by a scintillating bit of reporting that reads accordingly:

Guess they're still the Bullets at heart. 

NBA all-star Gilbert Arenas and his Washington Wizards teammate Javaris Crittenton drew guns on each other in the team's locker room during a Christmas Eve dispute over a gambling debt, The Post has learned. 

Now, when I saw this I just had to laugh.  There is only one sport where this sort of headline is conceivable.  Just when you think the sensational stories of Stephon Marbury and Isiah Thomas having group sex in the back of an SUV while they were both with the Knicks weren't low brow enough, this sort of head scratcher comes along.  Of course, the dry way the Post reports the story gives the chuckle effect, because when you read an action like two teammates pulling guns on each other in a dispute over a gambling debt in a newspaper it just seems too crazy to be true.  You also get the image of a smug sports reporter typing out the story in its detached manner and thinking "Oh, yes.  I am better than these two idiot millionaires."

That journalist may very well be right.  I haven't been the biggest Gilbert Arenas fan over the years.  Admittedly I was sleeping on college basketball when he attended the University of Arizona from 1999-2001 and went to the NCAA Championship Game against Duke in 2001 on team with Richard Jefferson and Luke Walton.  Even when Gilbert was catching fire in 2003, 2004 and 2005 with long 3's and big scorig nights, I didn't find him that appealing.  I only liked that he started calling himself Hibachi and fit under the category of "this guy is eccentric, he might be crazy, sort of makes up for him being a selfish player."  The thing about Gilbert that always rubbed me the wrong way, was that he espoused the fact that he was one of the top point guards in the league, but was never unselfish enough to truly be one.  Gilbert always reminds me of another era of basketball, one that I have only read about and not seen enough of to truly speak on: the late 70's early 80's.  He doesn't fit the mold of the spoiled stars in the late 90's and he certainly falls short in the golden era of '87 to '93.  However, his eccentric personality, his grace, and his undeniable talent put him snugly into another era of stars such as George Gervin and Elvin Hayes.  Gilbert has a terrific jump shot, but he relies on it too much - too many pull up threes.  He has great off the dribble moves, but he doesn't use them enough.  He has talked big and then choked like against the Cavs in the Playoffs in '05 and '06.  On a team with an unselfish and equalled skilled player like Antwain Jamison and a quality third man like Caron Butler, Gilbert should be facilitating more, those Washington teams should be doing a whole lot more to make an impression on sports fans and on an open era in the NBA.  However, they have not and I think a lot of it falls on Gilbert.  But who am I to say and who knew I would have gone on this long about Gilbert Arenas anyway.  I barely even care about him as a player.

But that New York Post reporter might not be correct.  Maybe I'm a sucker.  I know carrying guns with the correct license is legal and part of this country's core legislature - but its probably not the way to go.  I know that Gilbert bringing a gun into his team's locker room and then pulling one on his teammate over a gambling debt (doesn't sound any less insane the more you type it) is probably a little unwise. However, when I see those headlines about NBA players, it hits some soft spot in me.  Like the class clown or the rebel who can just never do good, but there is something so endearing about it, something that makes you want to say "Ah, he just doesn't know any better."  That's what the NBA is to me.

Its unfortunate that's the way its become. However, you have to take the highs and the lows - the ultimate arena for one on one showdowns, the most personal team battles, the most physically demanding and beautiful of all the sports, and the sport that draws the most "how is that even possibles." For all of the continued bad behaviour and the head scratchers that occur, I will be there every October through June scrolling through box scores, laughing at players I hate, trying to jinx players and teams I hate, and loving the players I love with complete and utter blissful ignorance.  Wade is better than Lebron - you're damn right.

Around the NBA:

- One of my favorite things about the NBA is watching players I appreciated and followed in college begin to grow and fit into their roles in the league.  This is happening in Memphis and Oklahoma City as a lot of young players are playing together and starting to gel.  We all knew that Oklahoma City would soon be a good team because Kevin Durant had star quality written all over him.  However, we didn't know that Westbrook would be able to continue his strong point guard play and that Jeff Green would become one of the best young "glue" players in the entire league.  Throw in rookie addition James Harden who has been giving them quality minutes and they are filling in the Durant-Green-Westbrook foundation well.

Memphis likewise has a nice foundation of O.J. Mayo-Mike Conley-Rudy Gay that has mixed suprisingly well with Zach Randolph who seems to have revitalized his career this season.  He is averaging a double-double and actually seems motivated.  They even picked up a nice bench piece in the draft when they got Sam Young from that tough Pittsburgh team from last year. The average age of the team is 24.3 so there is a chance that some of these guys will be able to stick together to actually gel into a team and perhaps gain some fanbase and momentum in Memphis.  I like the idea of a team in Memphis - maybe not the Grizzlies as a team name, though.

- The Heat.  They are terrible.  Wade needs help.  We need to get Chris Paul in Miami or we need to get Wade to a team where he will not be wasting the peak years of his career.  Right now, it is like watching a more complete, friendly, team orientated version of Kobe from 2005-2007.  Arguably the most talented two guard and arguably the best player in the league floundering on a sub-par team during the peak years of his career.

- Are the Celtics for real? Will they be able to make it all the way to the Finals? Will Rasheed appear to care about basketball so that his fans and supporters over his crazy years (me!) can continue to get his back.  Rasheed has always been one of my favorite players and personalities, but he seems to have just lost it.  I hear there is a rift in this team between the young players like Rondo (All-Star) and Perkins (one of the toughest low post players playing) and Garnett, Pierce and Allen.  Big Baby comig back will give them a boost and help spread out minutes, but if this team can't completely gel as they once did, then they may not make it to the Finals.

- Are the Lakers for real? What happened to that team that looked like a history maker?  Will Bynum ever become the center all basketball fans were hoping he would become? Is Kobe really becoming the reincarnation of Michael Jordan in 1997? He has tried so hard to emulate Michael and he is actually doing a damn good job of hitting Michael Jordan in 1997.  Sort of weird.

- Portland and their injuries.  They seem to be losing players left and right, but they are still at the top of the West standings.  I don't know how far they can actually make it, but when you watch them, you just imagine if they had all of  their players healthy, and a stronger veteran presence thrown into the mix to give them some sort of killer edge.  They just don't have it and I don't care how many nice, young talented guys like Roy (could become a killer maybe) they get, they need a killer.

- The Mavericks.  Maybe its their year.  Dirk is playing out of his mind and they have a toughness or an savvy that they lacked when they were so good in 2006 and 2007.  They sort of feel like an early 2000's San Antonio team.  Dirk is no Duncan.

- The Spurs.  They're lurking around.  Dejuan Blair.

- I don't know what is going to happen the rest of the season, but the offseason keeps getting more and more interesting. I hope it doesn't let down.  We are also getting closer and closer to the trade deadline and the All-Star Break so we'll see if there are any midseason shakeups.  This is a weird NBA season so far.  I can't get a real grasp on it.  But I'll keep you all up to speed.  Plus I'm catching a Knicks-Heat game in April with my buddy at the Garden so I get my first in person look at Dwyane Wade on the court.  Hopefully, he's not resting and the Heat don't suck as much as they do now.

Next: The much hyped, the much heard about, the award winning synopsis of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band starring the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton and a FRENCH HORN!!!

Now: The next installment of From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt.

 Tom

  
Drum kick punch and the cymbols tip. I can hear the music from the speakers, they are wired along the edge of the roof.  It’s a good song but it sounds stale from overplay.  With space and time will come the love remembered; like any classic, like any old thing.
  
I move my attention from my ears to my eyes.  My heart is on edge watching Natalie as she fingers the bridge of her nose.  She must be self-conscious of it now that I’ve professed my love for its shape – its Grecian curve, although an art  historian would have a field day with that and with me in general.  How can I speak when there is flesh like that in the world? Taaaakeee and ssseeeee.  When objects move and perform and have a past that is well known but never fleshed out.  I’m not simple, but her nose is and I must take action in the silence among the torches.  Speak!
  
“Is this the first time you’ve been here since you’ve been home?”
  
“Yes.”
  
“Afraid to be seen out?”
  
“No.  Well maybe yes.  I like to go to the Corner sometimes.”
  
I didn’t think she had it in her to go to a place like the Corner.  I’m always surprised that there are ever girls in there at all.  The bathroom is disgusting and seems like it hasn’t been cleaned in a decade.  The urinal doesn’t flush and runs a somehow never rising pool in its small ceramic basin.  The plastic soap dispenser is forever empty.  I’m not sure there is a girl’s bathroom.  But she goes and now that I look at her finger on the very tip of her nose - her glass oozing a slug’s trail on the flicker lit table – maybe it does make sense.
  
“I like the Corner,” is what I can say.
  
“What about you?”
  
“Me?”
  
Now she’s leaning over her drink. Her finger extends down from her nose where everything seems to emnate from – at least now – and falls over her pouting lips.  Not big and cartoonish and not thin – they simply are lips.  And that’s what makes my heart sharp.  The torches show themselves in the small puddles of condensation and melted ice on the table.  I can’t help but think of my friend Jeff.  He drank nothing but water until we were sixteen years old.  He was slim and nothing ever seemed to stick to him.  It was only until recently I connected that to his always drinking water.  Now he’s gone and I’m here.  He’s made of water -75 percent, maybe 80 – and I’m made of something I can’t figure out.  But I’m here and the torches burn and she’s leaning with a nose.
  
“Yes, you.”
  
“And?”
  
“Aren’t you afraid to be seen out?”
  
“Well its not like I went away anywhere.”
  
She is about to say something.  She decides to touch her hair instead and I’m fine with that.
  
“Why was that?”
  
I’m not weak and I can’t really say why it was that it was that I did or didn’t.  But there is something about her that makes me want to tell her everything.  Even in this thick night that belongs to Georgia or Alabama, where the air smells faintly of fertile dirt, when she speaks I smell the mothballs of a church basement.  Which is to say that I want to confess everything to her as if I were seven and truly believed in reconciliation.  When I was seven and first understood death through the story of a cat being hit by a car in my CCD book and then later that night when I read – in bed with dad - the story of Martin Luther King.  And now mom is dead like the cat and the Doctor Martin Luther.  But she is here in torch light and wants to know me like we once knew each other.

“I can’t really say.”
  
“You can’t or you won’t”
  
She turns away.  All of sudden this seems much more intimate.  Her nose in profile, the dancing light, the moistness and earthy fragrence  of the night air.  It seems like we are a reconciling couple.  We were friends – very close friends at one time – sure, but the way she is acting would sound and look like something more.  If we were a painting on display, or merely caught by a nosy churchwoman walking her dog to burn calories.
  
“This is strange.”
  
She’s turned back. “Why?”
  
“Its been so long since we’ve spoken and now.  This feels like some kind of familiar rhythm.  Our postures.”
  
She looks at me.  She’s looking long and hard.  Studying my face to see if I’ll move or flinch or look away.  Maybe I’m too stupid to look away.  Maybe I’m too strange like everyone has always said.  But either I can’t or I won’t and she knows it now.
  
“Yeah,” she looks down. “I think there is something.  It makes me think that there might’ve always been.  There might’ve always been and…”
  
“I can’t really say why because I don’t really know,” I find myself saying.  She on the edge of a secret, revealing her sentiment, and I find myself talking.  Not wanting her to show everything, not wanting her to bear that.  Because I’m not sure if I am ready to hear what she has to say.  I just want to watch the glow around her nose and cheeks and feel my blood. I want to feel the dabs of drinks I’ve had over the course of this day.  I’m not ready to have anything bared.
  
“Oh,” she says.
  
Or am I?
  
“Let me buy you another drink.”
  
“No,” she says.  I’d be nervous, but I’m not.  I see her pause.  She looks back up, squinting a little.

She’s trying to see me better. “Do you want to come to my house?”

 I look at her.  I know I’m simply looking.

 “Er…my parents’ house?”
  
I smile at her.  I know I’m simply  smiling.
  
“Yes.”
  
I don’t know if I want her to bare anything to me.  I might just want to walk with her and breathe in the soil richness of the air.  Or maybe its that I want to run.  To find a place that’s quiet like snow.  I’m kidding myself of course.  I just want to kiss her.

Link Track

The title of this post refers to the old track-listing of the Beatles' White Album where between "Long Long Long" and "Revolution 9" there was a slight segue that received credit as a track.  Its still in there as background talking, but no longer listed.

Irrelevant? Oh, you've got it.

I just want to use this space today to reference two sites that I go to quite frequently to read things and I actually don't browse the internet that often and, because I am super smart and was World's Coolest Dude 2007, that should be some HIGH praise.

The first is Bill Simmons "The Sports Guys'" page off the ESPN website.  I reference Bill Simmons a lot on this blog and for good reason.  He is one of the definitive, if not the definitive voice for professional basketball at the moment.  His mailbags often produce great lines connected to sports and his podcasts feature a wide variety of guests from David Stern (NBA Commissioner) to Chuck Klosterman (overrated writer) to Adam Corolla. I value and admire his passion for basketball and hang onto his every word regarding it.  You should buy his book (pictured above).

The second is What's Alan Watching. Obviously, I love Mad Men - its really the only TV show I have ever been invested in and truly paid attention to.  Alan Sepinwall's website breaks down Mad Men (and plenty of other shows) and provides terrific insight into the very tight thematic nature that each episode of the show has.  He also gets good interviews with the cast and writers that are valuable to read as well.  So, check that out too if you are ever bored.

Coming up on this space, though:

I will be posting some of my ruminations on this whole Gilbert Arenas gun situation that is going on, as well as a general NBA storyline update for those sideline fans out there.

I will be posting a breakdown of the "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" movie starring the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton. In doing so, I will tie in the all-time movie feat: how do you make a stupid movie legendary.  Watch how Bill and Ted fit in.

And, ah just because I am listening to it right now and loving it, I may have to write a review of the Van Morrison album Veedon Fleece, which a friend of mine just turned me on to.

So there is plenty coming up.  Keeping checking here, because I'm going to be famous and its my promise to take you with me.

Just remember, "I'd be better off dead, than to live without you." Immortal words.

Now, the next installment of From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt:

Liza

    “So is it true?” Lindsey aks.

    “Is what true?”  She can only mean about mom.  At least that is what I think she can mean.

    “That you’re coming home because of…well…”

    Yes and no.

    “No, where did you hear that?”

    “Mikayla sent me a message on Facebook.”

    “She did?”

    “So is it true?”

    Lindsey is leaning in close to me like she always had a bad habit of doing. I can smell her Chanel.  And Mikayla made up a lie to tell her, all the way from College Park, Maryland.  This is exactly what I was dreading.

    “Yes and no.”

    “Oh.”

    “Only for the funeral.”

    “Oh,” she says. “Yeah, because it really would suck to be stuck back around here.  I mean there is nothing to do.  Where can you go from here?”

    I have no answers for her.  There isn’t anywhere you can go from here.  The only place you can go is somewhere else and it is extremely important that you do that.

    “How is your brother by the way?”

    “James?”

    “No. Tom.  I saw him outside before with that girl, Natalie, you remember her.  She was in his grade.  Real pretty, real nice.  She played clarinet.  Karen wanted to be like her. Karen’s home too by the way.”

    That’s who it was! I knew I recognized her face.  She’s striking in the same way Eve is.  Statuesque, glowing, a girl that should be on a magazine cover but would never let herself get photographed for it.  That’s how I see Eve at least.  I never knew Natalie. How does Tom?  What’s gotten into him tonight?  Gotten into us all?  We should be going home shouldn’t we?  I see James still by the bar.  He looks drunk.

    “Maggie.” I look over Lindsey’s shoulder to my sister who is talking to Eve. “Shouldn’t we go?”

    “Are you alright?” Lindsey asks. She fondles her cell phone in one hand and pushes her hair behind her ear with the other.  I don’t know what to say to her.  She is my friend, I guess.  I haven’t talked to her and Mikayla since I left, which wasn’t so long ago, and now that I’m back and everything is the way it is I don’t feel like talking anyway.

    “My mom’s dead.”

    “I know, honey.  I’m so sorry.” The cradling of her cell phone from hand to hand.

    Maggie is next to me now  and she throws her hair over her head and ruffles it with her hands like she’s trying to add volume to it.  My father is a dying movie star and my sister is just in her prime.

    “What did you say, Liza?”  She’s sizing Lindsey up.  I know she’s been doing it since Lindsey came up to me.

    “Shouldn’t we go?”

    “No more darts or Led Zeppelin?” She acts surprised.  Lindsey peeks at her phone for a second.  And over her shoulder  James comes up to Eve.  Eve looks a little coy and James seems big and is trying to nuzzle her. “I’ll get my coat”

    “Everyone seems to be taking this well,” Lindsey says now that Maggie is gone. “I mean you’re all out drinking together.”

    This hits me and pisses me off.  I know it is strange and is probably wrong that we’re out doing this together.  But Maggie didn’t make a joke about it and Eve didn’t question James about it on the walk down so Lindsey doesn’t have a right to say it like that to me.

    “What are you doing home, Lindsey?  I didn’t ask.”

    She peeks down at the phone. “Just some things I forgot.”

    “Oh.”

    “I’ve got to go meet someone outside.”  She leans in close with her sticky sweet smelling Chanel and gives me a hug that feels like I’m in seventh grade and Billy is trying feel my nonexistant boobs by his blue locker right before we go to the buses. “I’m so sorry,” she says.

    “Thank you.”

    She moves past me and out the front door.  Maggie comes back over.

    “Where’d Chanel go?”

    I laugh.

    “C’mon,” Maggie says. “Those two are staying.  James said he’d bring Tom back.” She stops, looks towards the window. “I think Tom will bring himself back.”

    We walk together and quickly wave to Eve and James.  James doesn’t see, he’s leaning into Eve’s neck.  But Eve gives us a small wave and sips her fizzing drink.  Maggie and I move past the bar.  She pulls up the collar on her coat.  And as we pass the flapping wood door of the flushing bathroom,  “Good Times, Bad Times” comes on.

    “Right on cue,” Maggie turns back as she opens the door into the moist night.  But stepping out she bumps into a guy.  He’s wearing a thin grey sweater that fits him tightly.  He looks down at her.

    “Is this the elusive Maggie O’Donnell?”

    “Big word for you, Mike,” Maggie growls.  My skin tingles.  My sister is a growling movie star.

    “That’s a drink I’ll buy.”  The guy smiles and touches Maggie’s shoulder.  She looks disgusted.

    We’re not safe home yet.  Dad’ll have to wait.
 

The Journey Forward?

All of this listening to Spoon’s “The Beast and the Dragon Adored” on repeat for some reason.

I’ve been overdosing on the Mad Men Season 2 DVDs the past few days.  I don’t know what that means after the last post I put up before the New Year - my last “serious” post. I have Don Draper on the brain (not just because I look exactly like him and I am always thinking about myself). The show seriously comes up with the best lines and themes episode after episode.  Right now, I am thinking to the fifth episode of the second season called the “New Girl” where (sorry if you don’t watch the show) Peggy has a flashback in the hospital after she gave birth to her baby and she is visited, surprisingly, by Don.  Don, sitting across from her and looking darker and more sinister than he ever had or ever has since, leans in and says:

“Peggy, listen to me. Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.”

This line ties into all kinds of themes that the show touches on: identity, the past, sculpting your reality, deceit, truth.  The words that always stick with me (this may be because of the way Don delivers them) are “move forward.”  These two words stick with me the most not just because of the recent string of “end of the decade” and “end of the year” posts I have been writing, because they remind me of myself; of some of the very principles that I believe in.

I was at the apartment of two of my friends the other night.  The two of them are engaged to be married this upcoming summer/fall – I forget the date off hand.  So, I was over there with my roommate and five beers, a big bottle of Gato Negro and a bottle of nice wine a friend of mine had given me at dinner on New Year’s Eve – oh, also a small little champagne bottle.  The night was freezing with wind so we got nice and drunk sitting on the couch and on chairs in the yellow-pink light of the room (this is because there are slight paint slashes on one of the walls where my friend works on her paintings). The nicety of my drunk was hitting when my friend, never bashful, posed to us the age-old question, “What do you think this year or this era is going to be remembered for?”

Of course, this question opened up a Pandora’s box (Avatar? Avatar? I didn’t see it? What happened?) of conversation.  Would this Brooklyn art scene that we lived in be remembered in twenty or fifty years?  Would it be just another city in another decade where the price of living fell a certain percent and allowed younger people to move in to spacious places near each other and fumble at the extremities of art?  Is Lady Gaga more relevant than Grizzly Bear?  How many albums did the Dirty Projectors actually sell and how many sold in Iowa?  How much do we actually like Animal Collective and what do they actually mean?  Is this myopic vision of our cultural importance the fault of our city and coast and upbringing (New York, east, liberal northeastern)? Or is it the fault of merely being in the eye of the storm? Or is it a drizzle?

Very far from Don Draper telling his (to him) reluctant protegee to “move forward,” right?  We’re getting there.

This series of questions gave way to smaller set of ideas that we could all agree on.  Now, my friends reading this may have to be lenient with me as I was happy talking and listening and enjoying myself so I may have missed recording a few of the points.  The agreement started earlier but I remember it coalescing around a story I relayed about my mother, who had read the Williamsburg spread in the New York magazine.  My mother had said, “Do you think your neighborhood will be like San Francisco in the 1960’s?”  To which I responded of my belief that nothing will be like that scale because the culture is much more fragmented and we lack causes to rally behind.  There will always be cities with artistic ebbs and flows of populations in every decade, there are fewer rallies, and no decade has been sold as much as the 60’s either – it just a superior product to so many different demographics.

This we could agree on.  Earlier, you had mediums of communication, soapboxes, to stand on and be heard, to craft your public image, however, they were fewer and far between.  Now, we have the luxury of allowing anyone a place to stand and speak, which like anything else, is good and bad.  There are too many fragments and causes to rally behind that there can never be one movement. Artistically, as this article in the New York Times this Sunday points out, there are too many constant classifications of musics and genres for any one genre to become truly popular and generation defining.  Don’t even get me started on sports, especially in football season where one week seems like a month, with its inundation of analysis and proclamation about the death of this athlete, and the firing of another coach, and who isn’t “manning up” (oh, see that was funny – football, get it?).

Where is the Draper?  We’re getting there.

My friend’s argument to his fiancée was that, even if we are in the middle of the storm, isn’t it the literati, the intelligencia that write the histories? Don’t people have pictures of the kings of England because of Shakespeare?  So isn’t what is relevant to this market, what is what will be relevant to the bowl-cutted kids snoozing over their history textbooks when our decade’s culture gets a blurb in some Houghton-Mifflin 8th grade hardcover?  The fiancée’s argument was that you can never just trust or be taken in by the reports of the liberally educated.  Isn’t this decade and era as likely to be remembered by auto-tune, Kanye West, Lady Gaga, Amy Winehouse and others as it is to be remembered by Brooklyn’s art scene? We all agreed that we remembered the Latin pop craze of the late 90’s more than any culturally relevant city or neighborhood that was mentioned in a coastal newspaper.  What is the truth? What New York knows or what Iowa knows?

The difference between the end of the last decade and the end of this one is that the amount of outlets for voices has increased exponentially, so now we have plenty of voices from the eye of the storm (it’s a light fog isn’t it?) telling you more than ever how important it is and you are, so you are more likely to drink the Kool-Aid, even if you have tried your damn best to avoid it.  This overwhelming amount of opinion creates the image of our time more than any movement or future relevance.  Because our cozy argument is simple in the end – life and culture will always be torn by perspective, and there is no true memory besides these subjective ones, because anything in a history book is just like an old coin that falls lifelessly in the corner of your pocket; it’s the imagination that makes history more than a well sequenced and summarized chapter.

Now, the Draper.

In a time like this, what worries me is that I am the one writing on a blog, about myself; about personal experiences and that I spent the time before writing this trying to figure out how my blog can help me to make money.  The character of Don Draper is interesting, because he falls into a character that we always hope still exists: the self-made man, the shadow, the Great Gatsbys and Bob Dylans of the world.  However, with so many soap boxes in front of us, how do we keep people from getting so close to us, how do we “move forward” with our creations and illusions, the things that make us immortal and keep us free?  There are only so many “truths” that we can invent about ourselves and show to others on a computer screen and through a blog.  When I was distressing with my family about what I wanted to do, my aunt told me that if she were my age, she would be figuring out the best way to market herself as a commodity, as a name, as a brand.  At the heart, this is sage advice.  This is the advice of our times.  Because who will read this blog unless I put my mark on it? And what is my mark? What is the product that I can give you but myself?  And how many times can I move forward from that? How many times can I change my identity to save myself and to keep myself safe from revealing who I really am? But, how do people gain an audience unless they take to their soapbox and say what they feel and show people privileged glimpses into their own human heart?

“Peggy, listen to me. Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.”

In the end, I think, that we all want to “move forward” like Draper says.  We don’t necessarily want to forget that anything happened (which is one of his character’s flaws), but we are willing to forget, in order to move on, in order to make ourselves over again, to find a new high spot to talk from and to see the world from.  Because we have so many spots to speak from, there will never be another movement or school again, no one will ever read each other’s work in attempt at betterment and competition – there will only be competition.  And that competition is over the ability to sell to and to grab the heart of the heavy eyed man and woman under a big sky in the middle of nowhere America, who we imagine just want to work and come home and be happy.  However, we always assume, which is why we’ll never get at that heart unless we forget and can move forward like hobos and forget ourselves and what was true in order to find out the truth.

But maybe its all like that revelation Levin had in the lemon garden? I’d like to watch the storm clouds roll in and think the same.

Next, I get FUNNY again.

Coming up short

I'm still getting everything together from New Year's Eve and New Year's Day aftermath. I caught some really great movies on TV yesterday including the legendarily terrible (read: amazing) Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band movie starring the Bee Gees, Peter Frampton, George Burns, Steve Martin, Alice Cooper and Billy Preston. I may just write a synopsis of it up here just to prove how hilarious it is.

Just want to post today to give a shout out to a blog that some friends of mine run. These guys are all alumni of Mary Washington University in Fredericksburg, Virginia. I met them when I was living with a friend of mine down there who went to school at Mary Washington. These are some of the best guys I know and I was lucky to spend part of New Year's Eve with one of them. The blog is: Grave Digger Never Dies.

It has also been added to my links sidebar, which I hope you all check out because it has links to some very good art and music that people I know are putting out. It would really benefit you to look at these sites, buy things from these people, tell them how great they are, tell me how great I am. You know, normal human decency stuff - that is was 2010 is going to be all about: people giving me and my friends money. Oh, you thought I meant that human decency part? Sorry.

Now, the next installment of From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt:

James

It’s great to see all these familiar faces. When you first come back from school you’re a little tentative about it, but now that I’ve gotten older I welcome it. We have a good social life in D.C. – sure – but this is something different. I mean this is coming home. I have a reputation here, a reputation that isn’t based off my work status and my office career. That’s the thing about getting older isn’t it? You start to lose the romance that you once had about yourself. There is nothing sexy about working with numbers or about doing taxes, paying insurance, wanting to get a good night’s sleep. When I used to see a girl like Arielle, I’d think of nothing but the possibilities. I’d think about how I could be the best man for her, how I could cook her dinner or make her laugh. I’d try to invent scenes in my head – about as creative as I got.

She lays across my lap. Her dark hair draped down my thighs to the faded denim of the couch. I’ve never been in this house before. There are white french doors that open up to a dripping deck and back yard.

“I could cook ya big Chinese dinners,” I say.

We touch fingertips.

“I bet you could.”

“When are your parents coming home?”

“I don’t have parents.”

The girls in my dreams always had small eyes so its strange that I would eventually fall in love with Eve. Can something inside of you see it coming? There’s something to that. And that’s the thing about being young too. You’re looking for answers to questions like that and you can fathom being a philosopher. I could ask myself questions about love for a living. That seems feasible then and you’re all the more romantic for it. Because you’re full of potential then and can wonder about those things, time doesn’t pass and bring on routines and threats of gingivitis from forgetting to brush at night and drinking too much coffee. Then again, the real girls I romanticized turned out to be sluts for older guys - like Arielle out there.

I flush the toliet. The handle is slimy. There is a flyer for Reckoning who are playing an acoustic set the next Friday – Grateful Dead covers are perfect for the nook of liberals curled away in this fair town. I look at myself in the mirror. I widen my eyes and the pores on my nose look dirty. The faucet handle is slimy too and the hot water handle only gives off cold. I should’ve remembered that. The nights I’d have here. The Thanksgiving breaks. Faces on faces who I’d known, forgotten and some who I was still slightly in love with. But all of that was before Eve. I splash my face with water and run my hands through my hair, wetting and pushing it back a little. She’s out there and she needs her gin and tonic! I never got it for her! I rub my forehead feeling my hand’s clam.

“What does yours say?”

“It looks like a pink line. Yes, one pink line. What does that mean?”

Eve sat on the sink counter in the bathroom. She pushed open boxes out of the way. All of those brand names. Answer, First Response, Rite Aid Brand, E.P.T and E.P.T Ordinary. The pictures of women on the pink laminated cardboard, always looking so gentle and soft like a photographed Virgin Mary. Some were already holding babies – greedy bitches. And there were the women peeking over the pharmacy counter at me while I looked at them, unshaven. I wrapped my arm around a handful of those clean, neat boxes and smiled at them. That was something that felt good.

She picked up the white thin paper instructions and spread them out.

“Not pregnant,” Eve grunted. She groaned. She never made noises like that until we started testing. Her hair was pulled up and a few strands hung down in bangs. I should tell her to wear them like that more often, I always like it when she does that – when she’s being messy.

“Are you sure you missed it?”

“Yes. I’m sure. I’m very familiar with it by now.”

Strange to hear her voice snippy. But I should’ve known, it always came towards the end of the month. Her usually even keel rocked a little by the waves within her, the waves I’d never undersand. It felt good to know her that well, it made me feel like a man. The last thing I’d ever think would make me feel like a man was knowing a girl’s cycle.

“OK, well here’s this one. It’s supposed to make a smiley face if you’re pregnant.”

She picked up the box and held it gingerly, only on her fingertips. A slight glare came off the blue box. She dropped it and it bounced off the tile and fell on the peach bath rug. Eve sat on the toilet, pregnancy tests littered the floor – pick up sticks in shades of white and tan. I looked down for a moment. One of them simply read, “Not Pregnant.”

“I don’t want to make you sit outside while I pee and only have a frowny face to show for it.”

She leaned forward - head towards thighs, bangs floating out – and covered her face. I knelt down on the rug and slid over to her, letting the peach fur bunch and roll. I put my hand on her neck and stroked it. When she first spent the night, I rubbed her neck and in a moment of glee, pure silliness, she screamed, “I’m not a cat, I’m a woman!”

“I won’t care if it’s a frowny face.”

She looked up puffy.

“You know what I mean.”

I pulled her close against my chest and held her head tight with one hand. With my other I grazed against the sticks. One caught my eye. It had a blue plus sign and something about that seemed wrong to me. I coughed. She looked again, puffed.

“We can see a doctor if you want.”

“I’ll think about it. Maybe. Yes.”

Then, later. I was in the downstairs bathroom. It was a Rite Aid One Step. I read the box. Blue + | means pregnant. I looked back at the stick. Blue + | . She missed it. Was she too impatient? It had to be right. How did she miss it?

I looked at the box. It was one of the women smiling with a baby next to her cheek. How could she be so uncaring? I watched my pale face in the mirror. Then I washed it. The phone rang. I heard Eve get up and thump. She was crying.

“What’s wrong?”

“Your mother’s dead.”

My crotch itches me and I turn the water on again just to feel the heat from the tap. I look once more in the mirror. I can hear “Ruben and Cherise” on the jukebox. I’ll step back out now. People know me here and I’m not ready.

Until Next Episode

In order to start this post, you have to picture me in a restaurant. I’ve just gotten off work early at 6:15 PM from a job that I don’t particularly enjoy very much, but which I happen to find myself good at. The mild air of the day has begun to turn and the frigid breeze of the night has left my face red as I step into the tight, gold warmth of the Little Italy restaurant. I unfurl the worn purple, grey and brown scarf that I wear, which was inherited from a grandfather I never met. As I look up, I see my mother and my sister sitting upstairs at a table with my aunt, my uncle, and their three children: boy, boy, girl – none older than eleven. Neil Young is ringing in my ears as I sit down and I feel especially strong, ragged and young, but also vulnerable, because I have to pretend that I’m not invincible to this people, because I’m actually not – I just feel that way when I’m hungry and remember that I’m young in a world full of strangers and tall buildings.

So, I sit down. Hugs and kisses are exchanged. The kids are cute, funny and well behaved as always. I eat bread with sundries tomatoes and oil. I ask my sister if she liked “500 Days of Summer.” I ask my one little cousin what book he’s reading. I ask my other little cousin why he doesn’t like samurai. Then, because the adults at the table have seen me grow from book to book and from not liking certain action figures, and because they love me, they ask me questions.

“When are you leaving the job, Matt?”

“At the end of the month.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m not really sure. I think it will work out.

“What do you like?”

“I like to write”

“But what do you like?”

“I like basketball and music.”

“Well there you go.”

“I like writing about my generation. What they are doing. The choices they make and don’t make.”

“That’s what’s interesting about your generation. There isn’t any kind of defining voice.”

That last line is what my uncle said to me. It wasn’t a revelation to me, but it articulated, very simply some of the ideas that have been swirling around in my head recently as I have begun to think of these end of the decade sentiments, columns and lists that are being distributed and waxed upon. Now it is very true that all generations don’t have a defining voice or a theme to bind them together. It is very true that the idea of a “generational voice” or a “united generation” is just an object that is produced and presented to us as a commodity to help understand time better. All of this may be true, but that doesn’t stop us from asking, “Yeah, but what about me? What about my generation?”

I am not going to try to sum up this generation, nor am I going to try to sum up this decade, I am simply going to write about what I have seen and how it appears to me. What I have seen of late, is the summation of this past decade as one of superficiality: the Paris Hilton decade, The American Idol decade, the Kardashian Decade. However, for as many people as I have seen welcome high-paying jobs, platinum jeans, revolving door cell phones, I have seen just as many people reject the same allures. And why is that superficiality wrong? What is wrong with accepting objects in order to make you happy? What is wrong with being able to buy things for people in your life to make them happy? This comment is not meant to be facetious. This life and this world are made up of objects. The image of an investment banker is the same object as the image of an artist – both can be crated and bartered like anything else.

To harp on a subject of great interest to me, Mad Men has certainly given us insight into this trait I am talking about. In the first season of Mad Men, Don Draper shacks up with his artsy mistress who is living in Greenwich Village. Draper smokes weed with his mistress and her bohemian friends who scoff at him because of his slick and polished appearance. At the end of the episode, when the bohemians are nervous about approaching cops outside of the apartment building, it is a stoned Don Draper who is able to walk out to continue on his life with a simple, “You can’t go out there.” What does this mean? This means identity. Both the artist identity and the ad man identity are one in the same – they are both goods, disguises we put on. Draper is constantly battling what disguise he is going to wear and which one works for him. His office identity is the one that fits him best, as he says to Peggy in season three:

“There are people out there who buy things. People like you and me. Then something happened. Something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves... is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do. And that's very valuable.”

Is this quote not essentially true for this generation, this decade? “Something terrible” always happens to us in varying degrees and we can’t see ourselves. That the something terrible can be as disparate as anything in this world, but it is usually tied to time. So we try disguises, we try objects to try to find that thing that is real to us, that thing that we can take with us.

The novel Netherlands by Joseph O’Neill covered the same issues. The narrator of the novel has a successful finance job and his wife is a high-powered attorney. His wife becomes extremely affected by the 9/11 attacks and can’t feel safe living in New York, while the narrator, always feeling distant from his actual life (much like a Nick Caraway), doesn’t completely understand her distress. It takes their separation and his subsequent friendship with a Trinidadian gambler to understand that he has always been looking for something real that is his. From his fragmented childhood on, he has only been left of vague images and memories of who he is and where he came from. The narrator begins to understand that this is something that is wife values and that it is actually something that he values as well. His wife is concerned with what is hers, which is their child and living in an “unsafe” city. Once the narrator begins to understand how to connect to his own life, he can begin to understand what belongs to him and what he can take with him.

Even little Wall-E, as he rolled along the brown debris on the earth and found the inherent joy in the smallest objects, couldn’t take it with him. Just like all the humans who left the garbage couldn’t take that with them. It is through objects that we may gain access to “the incorruptible eon of the gods,” but that isn’t where that realm lays - that soundless, floating, reach of space of the soul.

Perhaps this struggle has caused such great music to be created in this past decade. There have been phenomenal new albums that have come out in the last ten years; some of my all-time favorite artists have come of age since 2000 and some of my all-time favorite albums have been released in the same space. Maybe it is the inevitability and the immediacy of communication and information. Maybe it is the fact that we can Google the answer to any question, even the questions that the great art spent answering, like “what is love?” We can now Google, “clinically, when am I supposed to fall in love?” We can even Google ourselves and people we don’t even know.

Now, I know I’m supposed to be funny – and I AM. And believe me, I love every second of my computer and the abilities I have to Google “when do I fall in love?” “How fat should I be if I am 5’10?” or “Animal Collective new album leak MPP blog .rar.” However, we have been shown this new decade of “superficiality.” We have been shown jobs in finance, accounting, but have been left wanting more. The past ten years have offered a fluid glimpse into the lives of the privileged, of what money offers. However, in the end, with the economy already failed, we have been given an even greater look at the invincibility of the American Dream. Perhaps that term is even too narrow. What we are truly talking about is “promise.” This decade as it comes to its close, to a book-ended and encapsulated commodity to be sold like the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s or 90’s leaves us on the precipice looking at the promise of the next decade to come. It leaves us as someone who was once very dear to me said, “with infinite potential.” It leaves us with the ability to overtake the old institutions and I’d like to think that this has come and has been earned without the incessant marketing of our President as a good and the term change as a vegetable. I’d like to think the palpable opportunity of the next decade, and the indecision and searching of all the peers I look to, is because of the fact that institutions won’t satisfy us and will not dictate us. We will elect our presidents, we will respect and appreciate them, but they will not dictate our creativity or ambition – that is and should be left to us alone.

In the end, though, it’s back to the basketball, the music, and the beer. However, that doesn’t change the fact that I work hard at and am damn good at a job I don’t care about. That I love my family. That this world is strange and changeful and that I am going to have to fail in order to ever find something worth searching for, worth making real. That nothing feels like its mine and every evening I am left standing on the doorstep, hungry, invincible and with the wind whipping on my face. And maybe I’m not like a dog, maybe I’m just young and unappreciative, and maybe that’s all that it ever is. However, I’ve heard the chimes at midnight, just like the rest of you.

I’ll see you in 2010.


Editor's note: Ten Things I Hate About You really should have been number 9 on the Top 20 Movies to Watch on TV. It really is one of the top movies to watch on TV. The girl from Alex Mack plays the hot girl. A career defining performance by the late Heath Ledger. The only movie with both Ledger and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in it - arguably two of the best young actors of the past decade- plus the one friend looks like my buddy Jeff (except my man Jeff is skinnier). You would watch this on TV. Come on.

Too Bad I Like It...

These year-end lists can be intoxicating. I read them and I just want to argue the merits of the way a list plays out with each of my friends. In my mind, we sit over a freshly French pressed organic brew, gesticulating in a dimly lit cafe with half burnt cigarettes between our ring and middle fingers.

"Zis Springsteen alboom ise shite."

We speak in some sort of accent that is vaguely French, German and Irish.

But seriously, I have been seeing all of the usual year end lists carted out in attempt to sum up the year. This year has been even worse because it is the end of a decade so now writers attempt to sum up the cultural importance of this year of music, film, theatre, TV and current events as a microcosm for the entire decade. Now, don't get me wrong, if I had a weekly column to write and I needed to meet a quota, then I would list it up without a doubt. In fact, I don't have any deadlines to meet, any column quotas to make and I have given you (the GOOD reader) three straight list posts (oops! I just spoiled the ending for this week). However, after seeing these lists placed in each newspaper I read, each website I visit and each egg roll I eat for dinner, the summaries have become a bit repetitive. Because I am a constuctive and optimistic person, I am going to halt my naysaying here and bow to the year-end list, because they are entertaining to read. I will also bow to the decade summary column, because I will be putting my own spin on that very same column, this very same week (I'm actually going to work on this one, cogent ideas, worthwhile theories, etc.).

So, without further ado, I submit to you my "Top Ten Albums of 2009." Now keep in mind that the criteria for this list was not that an album had to necessarily be made or released in 2009, but rather that I listened to it 2009 and thought it made my top ten. The criteria for that top ten being its relevance to me and also how good the music actually is. You may call this subjective (and oh it is) but if we are going to tango, we might as well go all the way and not regret the damn thing in the morning when we are wearing each other's clothes.

As I was saying:


10. Little Feat - "Little Feat"

When I wanted a "go-t0" album for party music this year, I picked up Little Feat's self-titled first album. This sounds like Exile on Main Street-era Stones before the Stones even hit that stride. However close Lowell George and the boys come to sounding like Mick and the Stones, they don't have the same experience and cunning to make it as iconic as the Stones did, yet, there is a looseness here that can't be denied. On "Strawberry Flats" when the band hits those high notes with all of the backing vocals added in, you can see the bar laid out in front of you. The piano is especially terrific on the whole album and you can also hear the a little bit of the roots of Jay Farrar's delivery on some of the vocal tracks. The whole album is a must listen of course, but you can't skip "Druck Store Girl," "Snakes on Everything," "Strawberry Flats" and "Crazy Captain Gunboat Willie."

9. Julian Casablancas - "Phrazes for the Young"

This album was not widely regarded as a success and again Julian picks an odd title for an album (First Impressions of Earth?) that tries to hard to make a generational statement, however, I thought it was one of the best albums to come out this year. Julian overreaches in some parts, but you can't deny that overall, he is very much in control of his sound. The first song "Out of the Blue" is all driving guitars like a brand new Strokes song until we reach the chorus and the synthesizers come in and the song reaches a hook that rivals and perhaps betters any Strokes song and a lot of the top singles of the 80's as well. "Ludlow Street" has gotten the most press because of its wide mixture of genres (country shuffle, rock, electronica) but for me it isn't one of the must listens. "11th Dimension" is obviously the pop hit, but it is the lyrics of "Left and Right in the Dark" and the album closer "Tourist" that really show where Julian has reached a new level of maturity. "Tourist" especially leaves you feeling impressed at where he is standing at his career.

8. Fleetwood Mac - "Rumors"

Obviously a lot has been written about this album. Admittedly, I have been a late arrival to its praise. This year I did give myself the chance to listen to it, not out of any sort of heartbreak, but merely because the time had come. The familiarity of the songs can be jarring at first, however, as you follow the course of the entire album, each song feels right at home and you suddenly lose your identification of songs like "Go Your Own Way" as songs that were overplayed by your classic rock radio station and remember them as "yeah I love that song that comes after 'Don't Stop'. Oh yeah, I love 'Don't Stop'" The album never lets up from the first song "Secondhand News" (my favorite) on. And there aren't many songs that are more fun than "I Don't Want to Know."

7. Paul Simon - "Paul Simon"

At about this time last year, I began looking deeper into Paul Simon's solo catalogue. I had grown up, like most people, listening to Graceland on vinyl at my friend Erik's house when his mom was out and smoking pot on the roof while we tilted the speakers out the window outside towards his lawn. I knew some of the other singles like "Kodachrome" because it was used in every "looking back on growing up montage" in movies. As I was looking into Simon's catalogue, I realized that I had gotten his first solo album a few years ago, but had never really delved into it. Last winter, I took my time in knowing defining songs like "Mother and Child Reunion," which is one of the most lyrically true and moving songs written on Planet Earth, "Peace like a River" and "Run That Body Down." There are also the slighter songs like my favorite "Papa Hobo" (ok it has the line "its a natural reaction I learned in this basketball town" of course I love it) and the album ender "Congratulations," which could be one of Paul Simon's most underrated songs. It is Paul, acoustic guitar and organ, but manages to sound so big when he repeats "love is not a game". If there were an actual church, temple, or mosque that mattered, this would be the music that they played. Holy and simple.

6. Bon Iver - "For Emma, Forever Ago"

This was one of the darling albums of 2008 and I know that. But you saw how it snowed last week, right? This album is the sound of fresh snow. I listened to this extensively last winter (a lot when I was writing) and the breeze of songs like "Flume" were truly inspiring in their simplicity and in how natural they came off without any contrivance of being natural. This may have something to do with Bon Iver's insane voice, which actually sounds like wind. Balance this appeal with the anthemic sound of songs like "For Emma" with its mournful yet celebratory horns (see I like paradox) and the explosive rises in "Creature Fear" and you have an album that will truly hold up years from now. This album blows in, rises, passes and is over before you know it. And once its gone, its like the end of that first snowy night - you just want it back again.

5. Grizzly Bear - "Veckatimest"

I jumped on the Grizzly Bear bandwagon right after Yellow House with everyone else. While I enjoyed that album's ability to explode and change dynamics at a turn, I did feel that the songs went on too long and could be too languid. I hoped that they would reign in that explosiveness into finely crafted songs that didn't exceed the three to four minute mark. When "Two Weeks" first popped upin the summer of 2008 on the Letterman Show, I thought that Grizzly Bear had realized this potential. It turns out they hadn't, but they still made one hell of an album in Veckatimest. It is a much more psychedellic album than Yellow House and features more hooks and songs that stand alone than that album as well. "Southern Point" is one of their finest and most manic songs; we know about "Two Weeks" and the incessant stomp of "While You Wait for the Others"; "Ready, Able" was one of the pleasant surprises, but there are songs on this album that are real "glue songs," and it is obvious what their job is. A song like "About Face" is unremarkable, but in the realm of this album it becomes a welcome respite after "Ready Able" and after the album's pinnacle "While You Wait for the Others", "I Live With You" and "Foreground" help end the album on two very different provocative notes. Had those two songs closed out another album, I don't know that they work as well or are rendered as memorable as they do in their placement here. That is the great merit of this album: it worked much better as an album than Yellow House, which felt at times like "oh, look, there's 'Knife'."

4. Fleetwood Mac - "Tusk"

The discussion of this album deserves its own post entirely and I will get to that someday, but for now I need to keep it concise. The follow-up to Rumors, this album is as schizophrenic as them come. It feels like Buckingham and Everyone Else, which is what makes it work so well. Buckingham's songs come on like distorted Buddy Holly stomps and Brian Wilson Jr. compositions, while Stevie Nick's wicked witchery is kicked up in places ("Sisters of the Moon") and refined in others ("Sara"), and all the while Christine McVie is singing some of the sweetest and melodic songs put to music (besides McCartney). The range of emotions that the album covers from "Ledge" to "That's All For Everone" to "Honey Hi" to "Tusk" to "Never Forget" is almost unparalleled. There is a reason why this is the ultimate Sunday afternoon/evening album.

3. Neil Young - "After the Goldrush"

I have always been a great Neil Young fan. The Ditch Trilogy touches a part of me that not a lot of other music has been able to. When I was in bad places, I held my copy of Zuma over my chest and recited the lyrics to "My Country Tis of Thee." However, I never gave this album enough attention as I did to his other work. This album kicked around my car when I was a little kid and when I first heard the song "After the Goldrush" when I was seven years old, it was the first time I have a memory of a palpable feeling of melancholy - what that melancholy was, I don't know and still don't, which is probably why Neil Young can sing in the voice he sings on in that song: it's just a mystery. You can't escape the walls on this album "Oh, Lonesome Me," "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," "I Believe in You" and the title track. Nor can you escape Neil's taste for levity and groove on "Until the Morning Comes" and "Cripple Creek Ferry". And there is the inevitable ragged glory of "Southern Man" and "When You Dance You Can Really Love." You want one song to steal the show, because it seems like that's the way it should play out, but it never does - they're all phenomenal.

2. Wilco - "Wilco(The Album)

I've already written a full post about this album this year. You all know how I feel about the self-referential aspects of the album title and the opening song. This band is perhaps my favorite band of all time so I am biased and openly biased. Their latest album hit me in just the right way. As I see people assessing the past decade - the ups and downs, the illusions and the promise that the next ten years will hope to build on until it too becomes a commodity - this album showing a working band assessing its career and its ability to always come back with a new approach on each successive album seemed to make sense and seemed timely in a strange way. The album is filled with excercises and poses from Wilco's entire career, but they never feel posed or contrived - Wilco are just telling you that this is what they do and what they can do and we should all appreciate it, because with each chance they have taken on each successive album they have become this band. So let's have them continue on and let's allow our young bands to do the same. I hope they don't become Springsteen.

1. Animal Collective "Merriweather Post Pavilion"

Oh, come on! This one was going to be obvious. The album of the year, the album of the moment, of the movement. You can't deny it. Its all been said: endlessly experimental, accessible, a communal album. However, my friend recently brought up a good point when thinking back on Merriweather Post Pavilion. He said to me, "I hope that Animal Collective don't start making world music." And its true, what is experimental and accessible about this album about "Brothersport" and about "Taste" can on a turn become some sort of bland ambient world music that all races can listen to, which is a strange thing to say about rock music. However, the great thing about Animal Collective is that we never have to worry about that actually happening, because they write lyrics like "I want to walk around with you," and "I want four walls with adobe slabs for my girls." They say these things and actually mean them - which is what is important, because phrases like those and the sentiments behind them, are what the greatest art is made of. Now, if only they can reincorporate some of that alienation and regret from "Cuckoo Cuckoo". Maybe next year...

Next, the decade summary as seen from 2009.

Now, the next installment of "From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt"

Ben

They put the drape over her body. I could see the last glimpse of the red along her ribcage. Then it was all blue.

“We’ll take it from here, Dr. O’Donnell.”

I nodded and watched as they wheeled her corpse down the hall. I looked over at the nurse’s desk. They looked down at their paperwork.

My shoes clacked against the floor. It was freshly waxed. I was wearing dress shoes. I got to my office and realized I still had my gloves on. The blood was turning dark and dry on them. It already looked old.

I opened the door peeling my left glove off. Connor was sitting in one of the chairs that faced my desk. He was still wearing his scrubs too. He didn’t turn around.

I pulled off my left glove and the band smacked rubber.

“What is it, Connor?”

Silence.

“What the fuck do you want to say to me?”

He turned around. That one strand stretching across his forehead.

“It’s over, Ben.”

I take another drink of the Cutty and place the bottle down next to my record player. I kneel down and open up the cabinet below. I run my hand along the musty smelling carboard of the vinyl covers. I know just where I want to go. Let it Bleed. I slide it out and pull the sleeve off, holding the record gently on the edges. I place it on the turntable. I pick up the needle and line it up on the track line. The black wax is spinning and now the old crackles come from the speakers – strumming guitars.

Well we all need someone we can lean on
And if you want it, you can lean on me.
Well we all need somone we can lean on
And if you want it, you can lean on me.

Jagger is singing like he always wanted to be a cowboy. When I hear a Stones song like this I remember all of the smokey bars and clubs I’ve been in. The times when people crowded around and the talk itself was pure energy and no matter how bad I felt the next day if I could get some of that feeling in me again I knew I would be alright – the invisible vision of a good time and of tinkling glasses. How much of that is just the elusiveness of youth? Because I can remember how important everything felt just because I was young and could talk to people and people knew me and knew about my legendary nights and bouts with the bottle. Now who knows me? I’m sitting alone in a study that is made up of years, pictures, books and dust like anything else. What is that thing that is always on the tip of your tongue when you’re young? Is it a word? The answer would mean a whole lot.

Yeah, we all need someone we can dream on
And if you want it, well you can dream on me.
Yeah, we all need someone we can cream on
And if you want to, well you can cream on me.

When you think about it, though, life can be very simple. Like our engagement party. Rose’s father – old Gerald with his stately moustache drinking Tokaj in a teacup – had it in the VFW Hall basement. He’d done well as a lawyer but he liked the basic things. He was just an average guy. All of our friends were behind the little concession counter they had giving out cups and cups of beer while above them the the menu was missing letters. Ham urger. F ench Fri. Pe s – Cola. My dad dancing with Rose and her mother. I watched them twisting their legs and feet when Gerald clasped his hand on my shoulder.

“You’re a smart kid, Ben.”

“You saw that article too?”

He had a hearty laugh that sounded as though everything funny surprised him, or as if it were the first joke that had ever been invented.

“No, but I mean it. I’ve never met a quicker young man than you.”

“Thanks, Gerald.”

“I’m very happy for the two of you.”

“That means a lot.”

“You’re going to do right by her? Aren’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

He pulled up the waist of his pants, they were already a little high.

“I mean a smart young man like you – things come easy. I know you’ve got a lot of ambition. I just hope it doesn’t tempt you too far. So far that my daughter might suffer because of it. You know I can always put in a word at the firm for you. I know you haven’t studied for that but you should consider…”

We all need someone we can feed on
And if you want it, well you can feed on me.
Take my arm, take my leg
Oh, baby, dont you take my head.

“No,” I said firmly. Maybe I was too firm. “You don’t need to help me out with your firm. We’re going to be alright. I love Rose. I know that.”

“That’s what I thought and I’m happy. That’s also what I’m afraid of.”

He turned, grabbing my shoulders, and hugged me.

“I have some Tokaj behind the counter.”

And I always hated him for that. I hated him for being afraid of how devoted I was to his daughter and always doubting my dreams and disguising it as some sort of respect or awe for my intelligence. Maybe even that night wasn’t as simple as I thought.

We all need someone we can bleed on
And if you want it, baby, well you can bleed on me
We all need someone we can bleed on
And if you want it, why dont you bleed on me

But as time passes with songs like this one and the other musics of life, I still see everyone linking arms over shoulders - Connor and I there with all of the neighborhood guys. It was simple because it was a night all about me and Rose. That’s all it was ever really about for me. Even when I slept past noon or woke up in the bathtub wet after one of those city nights.

I wasn’t close to being famous. I don’t think anyone knew me just like no one knows me now and I’m alone in my study.

“Come on, Benny, open your eyes.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You’ve finally made it and now you don’t want to look in the lights?”

“Maybe I don’t want to know.”

“Come on, open. You promised me in our vows.”

“Did I?”

“Yeah, in sickness and death.”

I open my eyes. It looks and smells like the VFW hall.

“What is this?”

“Something simple. Dad would’ve liked it.”

“Yeah.”

“I wish the kids could’ve seen it.”

“Yeah, me too.”

The Eve of the Eve of the Eve...

Like I said last week, I am going to keep in the spirit of the holidays by doing another post that is essentially a list. I've been pretty damn busy at work and my internet is slipping in and out and hard to get a handle of as I try to steal it from neighbors and other innocent bystanders (the real holiday spirit) so excuse me if I can't give you the usual inspiring and soul supporting prose that you all (all?) know by memory by now and love so much. Plus we had a big party at the apartment this past weekend that I am still throwing garbage out from (it was one of my favorites on record, though).

So, in the spirit of being tired, like the episode Eumaeus in Ulysses, and the After the Goldrush album I am listening to, I am giving to you - the viewer (right medium? no?) - my list of the "Top Twenty Movies To Watch on TV." This list is based on my theory that there are a certain canon (buzzword college readers) of movies that only get better with commercials. This list has also been culled from countless college weekends being hungover and needing a shitty TV movie to grip onto to bring me back from the brink of desolation. I have spouted these movies off ad nauseum to friends much to their disgust, however, now I am going to really document it so everyone can puke. Worthless? Sure. Serious? Maybe. Serious? Just like everything.

Now stay out of my way while I hope "Cripple Creek Ferry" on repeat buoys this writing. I might need a little Little Feat with "Crazy Captain Gunboat Willie" if things get real tough.

20. A Time to Kill - Melodramatic. Hot, sweaty Sandra Bullock. Matthew McConaughey when he had potential. "Yes, they deserved to die and I hope they burn in hell!" With soundbytes like that, you need commercial to give you a break while you contemplate what a stupid movie it is.

19. American Pie - Surprisingly classic even ten years later. After all the other crazy (but genius) latter die sequels you forget that the first movie had a good teen vibe, Stiffler was actually hilarious, and it wasn't that stupid. Although it sort of was. Better when you can zone out and have it broken up by commercials. Do you need to own it?

18. Wedding Crashers - Has gotten TV overkill and has been overquoted and over Will Ferrelled, however, Owen Wilson translates to a shitty movie being on TV and making you feel comfortable. You'll see later on.

17. Mystic Pizza - Now, you're going to say, "Domino, you've gone soft. Go watch some more basketball or drink some more of that booze you're always talking about." I say, "Just watch it."

16. Can't Hardly Wait - The ultimate shitty high school movie that is widely regarded as being great. I feel like this movie was made with commercials inserted into it. Ah, 1997.

15. Mummy - Some of the movies above this movie are far better than it. However, nothing sucks you in like this damn movie when its on USA or TNT or TBS or sometimes all three at the same time. You have terrible Brendan Fraser as the poor man's Indiana Jones, plenty of bit stereotype characters. A somewhat entertaining Egyptian legend and Rachel Weiss holding the whole thing afloat. Yet, I can't stay away. Gimme a beer.

14. Rocky V - There is no other time you are going to watch this move except at the end of a Rocky marathon on AMC. However, you get one of the dumbest plots of all time and one of the best characters of all time "George Washington Duke." Next time a Rocky marathon is on, take a risk on V. I'm sure you will regret it.

13. Teen Wolf - Not on cable as frequently as you'd expect so it loses points. I only catch it on HBO usually. However, I had to put it on here. It goes without saying that this is one of the best movies of all time. And if you read Bill Simmons' Book of Basketball when he compares Kobe to the Teen Wolf and compares the Teen Wolf/Scott Howard transformation to the "Secret" of basketball, you will understand everything. Plus, as Simmons points out, it has the worst sports editing of any movie, fascinating stats in the final game, and one of the weirdest high school dynamics in any teen movie, let alone an 80's teen movie. What an enigma! It should be number 1!

12. Look Who's Talking - Again you are going to say, "Domino, what happened to the ball? The masculinity? This movie is stupid." Yeah, but its about a talking baby who tries to communicate with his thoughts and he sounds like Bruce Willis. Rock this baby (no pun intended) on mute with your friends and you are in stupid heaven.

11. Breakfast Club - The ultimate 80's movie. It just misses out on the top ten. Its a staple on TV. Like I said about Can't Hardly Wait, it feels like the commercials are in the movie at this point.

10. 3: The Dale Earnhardt Story - The top ten starts off with a movie that was actually a made for TV movie. ESPN Films brings it home with the story of Dale Earnhardt. Barry Pepper delivers a tour de force performance as the Intimidator. Spouting off lines like "Nobody beats me ever!" to Dale Jr. when they are carrying bags of lawnseed. Gets better every time you catch it on at 2:00 AM on ESPN 2. Goes great with a Dr. Pepper Bomb (half cup of Miller Light with a shot of amaretto dropped in).

9. Jaws - Three hours flat. The shark. The music. Brody. Quint. Quint getting eaten. But you forget about the commercial break they squeeze in right before Brody and Hooper swim into shore once Jaws has blown up. Plus you have to love when long, classic (in this case, classic scary) movies get further drawn out by commercials. This works well in the afternoons on Saturday when you feel like you are accomplishing something by not watching college sports or in the evenings on Saturday when a classic movie makes sipping those first two beers seem that much classier. Ah, hell its probably not.


8. Aliens/Alien(tie) - Its hard to choose between these two. Again, they are both relatively long movies, which translate (in my ranking system) to great TV movies. Do you go for the action and "Game over man!" soundbytes of Aliens? Or do you go for the drawn out outer-space haunted house feel of Alien? Either way, with the commercial when you go to take a piss you get to freak yourself out before you grab the next beer. Even though its a tie, I think the edge goes to Alien. Watch that movie on mute with some music on (Grateful Dead) let the observations and the jokes fly.

6. Ghostbusters - Are you turning this off when it comes on TV? How often do you reach for it on your DVD shelf even though it makes sense as an addition and most people have it? I don't and you should just throw it out and let Comedy Central sweep you away with promos for their next shitty show.

5. You, Me and Dupree - A recent addition that keeps gaining steam. A cozy performance by Owen Wilson, a rock solid Dillon performance, a decent friend premise, nice Hudson underwear shots. Would you own this on DVD? No. Would you watch it exhausted on a Sunday night before Mad Men? Absolutely.

4. Major League 2 - By all means a much better movie than Major League, it goes through such dry patches being on TV that it loses points. However it is sustained by the classic "this is only one year later how did everying get so crazy?" questions you ask yourself and your friends when you watch it. You can see Charlie Sheen mailing in his performance. And it has the immortal, "Fly ball. Caught." You are not changing the channel. Oh, wait. You are. That's the whole point of this list.

3. Godfather - Strangely more episodic than the extremely episodic Godfather Part II. Fits perfectly on TV. Classic commercial break after the hospital scene with Michael, Enzo the baker, and the cop.

2. Major League - When I first moved into my apartment in Brooklyn, there was a night when some acquaintances from college came over to drink. This was before I had started my job and I wasn't necessarily close with some of these people, but we were having a good time. I had Major League on mute while we listened to music. The movie ended at 10:00 PM on AMC. Followed by an encore. I left the encore on and laughed my ass off knowing all the lines. Mute or no mute this is one of the best sports movies of all time and one of the most "Yes! I can't believe its on! Its a miracle movies" you'll ever find - even if TV does take away from the fact that it is the best cursing movie of all time. Plus it spurred my "Reverse Major League" movie idea. Where an old kind man owns a baseball team in a terrible town like Bismarck and all the players want to move to Miami. So the old man hires Steve Urkel to give him a potion to make himself young so he joins the team and starts trying, foiling the tanking plans of his teammates and becoming a legend of the state of North Dakota. Genius? Sure.

1. The Godfather Part II - Over three hours long without commercials, this legendary film becomes over four hours when it is put on AMC. There is something strangely assuring about a movie being on for almost five hours in the middle of the day on one channel when you are feeling desolate, drunk and depraved on late Sunday afternoon in November. And this is made all the better as you watch Michael Corleone swirl himself into isolation and power in the best impersonation of Shakespeare (i.e. Henry IV) of all time. Thank god there was never a mobster Henry V. ST. CRISPIN'S DAY!

Welp, that's that. I'll be back after the Christmas weekend no doubt with plenty of new ideas and meditations for you after getting drunk in my hometown and not being able to accept gifts from my family. Plus the new year will be coming up, the end of a decade, tons of lists, people feeling terrible and trying to foist plans on us both - there will be endless things to ramble about. Look forward to it.

Now, the next installment of "From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt":

Maggie

Its hot in this god forsaken hole in the wall and my cramps are bad. This is all fun, though. Tom outside having a chat with that girl. I can’t see him from here. It’s all fun for us depressives to come out and get a drink. Poor dad sitting alone up at the house. We shouldn’t have left him like that. Is he crying about her? About tomorrow? Has he cried yet? Ever? All men have to come to tears sometime don’t they? That guide in Siberia. He cried when one of his dogs died on the trip with us. His knee bent in snow pants quietly scruffing and scraping the snow the breath rising and his staccato sobs. I never saw Jake. Not even…

I throw the dart.

It lands in the first level of nineteen. That closes that one out. The others did nothing for me. I walk up to the board to circle my X.

“Now all I need are the bullseyes,” I say to Liza.

“Let’s hope you can get those quick.”

“That’s the competitive spirit I like to see.”

We’re both bored but what else are we going to do in this shitty place? I have been in worse - bars with dirt floors in Central and South America. Its only that this place is in our backyard and I get to be reminded of watching old friends puke in the back when I’d come home from college. Guys a year older than trying to make out with me because I’d “gotten hotter and really become a women since you went away to college.”

Liza steps up and throws her first dart. It hits the outside section of ten. I don’t know why I agreed with Tom’s idea to come down here, but then again I do know why because it is better to get out of the house and it even looks like James is loosening up over there in the corner. I remember hearing about him being involved with beating up Danny Christian. His friend Paul and the other James almost got sued for it. They were good friends in the end because they admitted that James never through a punch – never touched the kid.

And look at Eve just watching him. Shame on him. Shame on her too for not going over there and just listening to him about saying a quick hello. She should’ve known he was drunk. I could tell. Ah it’s uncomfortable in here.

“Eve you should go over and drag him back.”

She puts on a smile and pretends like its not bothering her. But it would bother me. I wouldn’t let him talk to a slut like Arielle Gregors.

“Oh, no,” she says. “I’ll let him catch up. He needs to lighten up a little. He’s taken this all so hard.”

We’ve all taken it hard. Maybe we should be taking it harder. Maybe I should get out of here before I see someone I know and go sit with dad.

“Yeah, he has a way of doing that.”

“That’s what attracted me to him.”

I take a drink of my pint and set it down. “What that he was so serious?”

“No that he welcomed responsibility. That he was willing to. You know it feels different when you date a guy who you could recognize as a husband or a good father. I don’t know maybe I’m crazy.”

She’s not crazy. She’s right.

“Jake, I’m home.”

I walked down the hall, the lights were dim and there he was to take my coat. His tie was draped around his neck. I looked down at the coffee table. Two glasses of wine. One red and one white.
His hands on my waist.

“I’m not sure I know,” I say.

Eve looks down at her drink. Liza taps me on the shoulder and hands me the darts. I touch one sharp tip and feel it try to pierce my skin. Over Liza’s shoulder I see a girl with blonde hair sneaking up on her. I raise my eyebrows and motion with my head for her to turn around. She does.

“Liza! What are you doing home?”

“Oh, hey Lindsey,” she says. She’s tentative. She doesn’t want to be there or be seen just as much as me. My baby sister. The other girl hugs her. I’m sure she’s a bitch.