Q:Is living in NYC really THAT awesome? I mean, how much better than everywhere else can it be, right? I've wanted to live there for almost as long as I can remember, but I'm half a world away. If I wanted to move there after I graduated, it'd be a crazy huge undertaking, and risky with it. Would it seriously be worth all that?
Anonymous
I’ll tell you the same thing my friends and family told me when I was unsure about moving here: the worst thing that can happen is you just come back home. You only live once, Anonymous, and the weight of regrets and what-ifs will haunt you far beyond any risks or sacrifices you make to get here.
Have you ever visited New York, though? The first time I did was about 9 months before I packed up my life and made the big move, so obviously I fell in love with the city right away and haven’t really looked back since. Is it that much better than living anywhere else? I think so! But remember, I had several things going for me right off the bat that made it 1000% easier to move and start a life here. I had a job (watching my friends search for jobs in NYC can be heartbreaking), I had friends (a lot of people I went to school with moved here too), and I had a place to live with unbelievably low rent (low enough that I won’t mention the number here because it’s uncharacteristic of New York in general and I don’t want to skew the facts: this is a very expensive city). Finding those three things can be hard in any new city you move to, but I’ve noticed a kind of kinship among New Yorkers when it’s brought up here, like it’s this special, weird, hellish experience that they’ve all been through that bonds them together.
Also keep in mind that, even though New York is bursting with culture and history and myth, living here is not all Alicia Keys choruses and autumnal strolls through Central Park. Eventually you will settle into a routine and you’ll deal with the same day-to-day boredom you’d have anywhere else. People live mundane lives here, too. For me the trick is to try to have one of those reflective, poetic moments every now and then where I see the city with fresh eyes and can’t believe I get to live here. In those moments, it feels like the greatest city in the world.
So yes, come give it a shot!
Q:How do I choose the right IPA for me?
Keep in mind that there’s no accounting for taste. Your results may vary. BUT:
The biggest thing that turns people off of IPAs is of course the bitterness from the hops. I happen to like my beer as hoppy/dry/resin-y as possible, with a nice golden/orange color to it, so I don’t get involved with IPAs that advertise themselves as “balanced with malty sweetness” or anything like that. These tend to be light on flavor but heavy on texture. They’re the ones that give you that too-full feeling. Besides, hops offer a different, more citrus-y sweetness if you add enough of them. A good, crisp IPA should be light and drinkable while still delivering a total flavor beatdown. India Pale Ales are a lopsided, specialist type of beer; they’re not supposed to deliver everything to everyone. My endpoint for this, the beer I currently hold as my gold standard of IPA perfection, is Brooklyn Brewery’s Blast Double IPA, which I realize is not exactly available at every corner store. In fact, if you take a look at the list of locations on that page you’ll see you kinda have to live in NYC/New England to even have a shot at trying it, which makes me feel all kinds of smug and hipster-y things but I don’t care because this beer is just that good. I’ve never seen it sold for less than $8 a pint and if I go to a place that sells it I can’t pass up having one (or four). Most “double” IPAs cross the line from bitter to sweet (again, in that citrus/floral way that you get from excessive hops) to the point that they can become cloying, but Blast is strong and refreshing. If/when you can’t drink that, I find it’s best to reach for beers that approach a similar experience. Lagunitas, Goose Island, Smuttynose, Firestone (Union Jack), Green Flash, Cigar City, and Sweetwater all make great IPAs that won’t bog you down.
Huh. This sort of turned into ‘picking the right IPA for me, not you‘—sorry—but I suppose that’s to be expected. Whatever you do, stay at least 500 feet away from Redhook’s Long Hammer IPA at all times and try not to be in the same room as any Samuel Adams pale ale/IPA. Those can get awkward, to say the least.
***ED: These are all American IPAs, which are stylistically different than British IPAs, which tend to be those darker, heavier ones that I’m not really into.
***ED#2: If you’re feeling adventurous and a little self-destructive, try a Dogfish Head 120-Minute IPA. They make one batch a year and it’s practically a hop liqueur. Dangerous stuff.
Q:If you had someone trapped on a desert island, what disc would you play to slowly drive them mad?
The easiest answer is something very outsider-y and “difficult” like Metal Machine Music or Philosophy of the World, but even those can develop their own kind of internal logic that stops bothering the ears after a while (sort of…). Has William Shatner put out an album lately?
This reminds me of a story. I think my old roommate told it to me (don’t know where he heard it*). So these two guys lived near this diner—one of those old school retro joints with a jukebox that still works—and one day as a joke/”social experiment” they went in, put $20 worth of quarters in the jukebox, and preceded to play Tom Jones’ “What’s New Pussycat?” over and over and over again, sitting in the corner booth and watching the reactions of everyone else in the restaurant. I mean, that’s a hard song to stomach one time through, much less 10-12 times in a row. Plus it’s very repetitive and doesn’t have very clear start and end points, so at first people didn’t seem to realize just how long the song had gone on. But gradually, of course, they started to see signs of visible annoyance and exasperation. It got worse with each play, to the point that every time “What’s New Pussycat?” started over again an audible groan resonated through the diner. They’d pushed the tension about as far as it could go, so they played Jones’ other signature song, “It’s Not Unusual,” next and the whole place practically erupted with sighs of relief. Finally, no more pussycat! Even another cheesy Tom Jones song is better than hearing “What’s New Pussycat?” again! After “It’s Not Unusual” ended, though, they started playing “What’s New Pussycat?” again. That, I think we can safely assume, is when more than a few people lost their minds.
Ask Me Questions?
Please? I’m in need of a jolt of inspiration. Or something to riff on that doesn’t end up a 1,000-word slough no one ever reads. I am stuck in my ways—help shake me out of them!
(I am, however, prepared to speak at length on non-musical topics such as fried chicken in north Brooklyn, the ins and outs of choosing the right IPA for you, and working from home as a sustainable lifestyle.)
Listening Journal: Alabama Shakes - Boys & Girls
It’s hard to make soul music sound fresh. Perhaps there are one too many gold-cased 20-disc Time Life compilations in the world. Or maybe there’s just something in the stylistic DNA that tends to make it feel comforting and a little nostalgic. Bloody and visceral, too, but forgiving in ways rock ‘n roll rarely is. With that said, everyone getting excited over Alabama Shakes should really consider giving Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings another shot. Brittany Howard’s voice doesn’t play super nice with the muffly analog sound of these recordings. She sings with such heavy, spastic inflections that some of the detail actually gets lost, turning emotive songs into something resembling a tantrum. Like late-career Jack White (with whom they share a stage) and late-career Black Keys (with whom they undoubtedly share a fan base), Alabama Shakes’ sound doesn’t scan as ‘modern hybrid’ so much as ‘grab-bag of “classic” stuff.’ They’re clearly not art school weirdos and shouldn’t be held to those expectations, but I can’t help asking if the world really needs another record like this. Or, rather, if a record like this deserves the massive audience it’ll surely have. Hey, like what you like and who am I to begrudge people their taste and enthusiasm—I just don’t see what all the fuss is about.
"Why the Old-School Music Snob Is the Least Cool Kid on Twitter"
Oh boy. OK, here’s the thing. I tend to think of taste and notions about taste as a sort of developmental issue, the idea being that people develop/inherit tastes and some attendant modes of thinking long before they develop the capacity to consider them self-critically. Your ideas about what is good and bad taste—about where music’s value comes from, in other words—aren’t inherent, but they do tend to precede you or anyone else being able to articulate what they are. This mindset where obscurity is valuable unto itself is something a lot of us picked up when we were teenagers and, if you’ll allow me a moment of blind psychoanalysis, it probably has more to do with burying the insecurities of a person than it does engaging with art. I think maybe that’s what Alexandra Molotkow is getting at when she says, “I liked the idea that my favorite movies, books and music are for me and a select few others, because they’re special and they’re part of my life. To think that everyone in the world might love them just as much makes me feel like a salt molecule in a tub of brine.”
Why should anyone feel unspecial because of the music they like? I say this because it takes one to know one, but what a horrible, flimsy thing to tie your identity to! Culture is always in flux, so even if you feel secure in relentlessly favoring the obscure no matter what it happens to sound like, you can’t rely on obscurity itself retaining any value over time. That’s part of Molotkow’s point, I think, but I would go a step further and say that the value of obscurity is/was a house of cards that everyone who subscribes to it builds for themselves. When did modern culture ever collectively agree that knowing about underground stuff was the paragon of cool? Or has that always been the province of a certain kind of person (myself so very much included) who made the mistake of piling their eggs in the music + coolness = self-worth basket?
My point in all this is that Molotkow doesn’t (or shouldn’t claim to) speak for everyone who listens to music in 2012, just herself and maybe some of us who’ve had to carefully confront our own backwards thinking. Recognizing and refining (with fire if necessary!) your own ideas about taste is a developmental stage that hopefully every music fan goes through at one point or another. Some people just get to do it in public via the New York Times, is all.
Why I Don’t Like Mad Men
My resistance to and even occasional contempt for the phenomenon of Mad Men is probably, at its deepest, a cultural issue. What I mean is: were the show to exist in some impossible vacuum outside of the fervency of its fan base, I believe I’d be much more inclined to view it charitably. As it stands, though, I both can not and (perhaps most tellingly) will not grant it the all-loving pass it seems to get from others. It’s a great looking show. Even someone with a transparently contrarian agenda would have to agree with that. It’s not just the striking historicity of the furniture and clothing and hair styles and what have you (as if those of us who weren’t alive in the early 60s couldn’t be easily fooled otherwise), it’s the way these things are shot and arranged—clearly with the trained eye of a designer—to call attention to themselves as aesthetic objects. You don’t notice John Hamm’s suit or January Jones’ hair because they’re dated, you notice them because like everything else on Mad Men they’re presented in such a way as to brashly announce themselves to your eyes. The show’s style is heavily stylized, and even though this contradicts the whole point of the historic detail it supposedly stakes its name on, it is a pleasurable style to watch.
That pure pleasure of viewership ends up having some warped implications, though, often due to the social conditions of the early 60s Mad Men also goes to great lengths to portray. The show features a parade of beautiful women, for example, dressed all prim and fancy-like, who happen to be living in a time where the male domination of society dictated that they be relentlessly objectified, sexualized, and treated as second class citizens. The well-known relationship between viewership and voyeurism creates a scenario whereby modern viewers find themselves simultaneously presented with oppression (their reaction to which is ideally disgust) and partaking in the pleasures of it via their own (or the camera’s) gaze. Mad Men doesn’t exactly take measures to reduce the effect, either. The camera is constantly panning across Christina Hendricks’ famous figure in the same way that, say, John Slattery’s lecherous cad looks at her. In attempting to portray the sensual ‘realness’ of its characters, to bring the viewer into its world, the show ends up implicating the viewer in its sexism. Sure, my armchair analysis is probably on the shallow side and I don’t pretend to be an expert on such issues, but it remains that Mad Men treats the history it tacitly claims to revere with a misguided and irresponsible hand. Is it really in our best interest as viewers/consumers/people to indulge the kind of holistic time travel the show flaunts? I can’t escape the feeling that all kinds of strange crimes are smuggled in—knowingly or not—under the guise of cold, systematic accuracy. ‘That’s just how it was back then,’ we get to say, shrugging our shoulders as Slattery dons blackface makeup at a party. And since Mad Men would never commit the ultimate TV sin of asking us to think about what we see, the modern consequences for those actions are easily dismissed.
I find myself wondering if this is why none of the show’s characters are particularly likeable in the sense of traditional storytelling. Elizabeth Moss’ Peggy Olson is the most sympathetic, especially because she’s so readily dismissed by every other character, and Slattery’s Roger Sterling wields the villainous charm that we permanently-stunted man-children often take shelter in. (I also enjoyed the earthiness and genial warmth of Anna, Don Draper’s first wife who lives in California, so of course they killed her off. Nice people are not long for the world of Mad Men.) The show takes the apparent artistic liberty of letting its characters be complex and imperfect—people who are driven by impure motives and who make irreversible mistakes. Sounds like it should be a laudable achievement, doesn’t it? But there’s something about the way the historical and fictional sides of Mad Men come together that never sits right with me no matter how many episodes I see. It feeds you ‘objectivity’ from one side—the meticulous design, the incorporation of news events and social mores, the flawed non-heroics of its characters—while Trojan-horseing a lot of sexy Hollywood flash from the other. It declines to comment on its objectionable bits with a documentarian’s distance and then uses that same stance to sweep its own machinations under the rug. In other words: if Mad Men was really about accuracy on both personal and historical levels, it wouldn’t be fun to watch.
Since so many people do find it fun to watch, I have to wonder what they’re ignoring in order to soothe the dissonance. Some (many? most?) probably just don’t care. I get that. And hey, I’ve got my own sets of things I like that are not morally, socially, or intellectually defensible, so I won’t act like it’s impossible to watch Mad Men with a clear-ish conscience. I do find it disturbing, though, that I don’t see more people talking about the contradictions of the show and the ways it manipulates them through notions of viewership. I don’t know anyone who watches it with an eye out for those things, just people (wonderful friends whom I love dearly) who get excited to comb their hair, put on a skinny tie, and mix up a round of cocktails for the next theme party. Like I said, in the end it’s the culture of Mad Men—the way it inspires such avid fandom in people who then look to play out fantasies of living in its refracted world instead of confronting it from ours—that I don’t want to be a part of. “I hate to break it to you, but there is no big lie, there is no system, the universe is indifferent,” goes a famously stern quote from Don Draper, as if to defend his show against my qualms. Of course, this is the same man who quipped, “If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation,” so why would I ever believe him?
