Archives for the month of: February, 2006

Band of the moment

February 27, 06 //
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I don’t know what it is about Scottish bands, but so many of them are just irresistible. Okay, maybe it’s not fair to generalize quite so broadly—there are 5 million people in Scotland, after all—but a disproportionate percentage of Music I Really Love seems to emanate from Scotland. The Delgados, for instance, are perhaps my favorite “discovery” of the last decade (along with Dolly Varden), and since finding the Delgados, I’ve become a big fan of a lot of other artists on their label, Chemikal Underground. There’s Malcolm Middleton, whom I’ve discussed here, and his band Arab Strap, and Mogwai. And then, in another corner of the Wonderful World of Scottish Music, there’s the magnificent James Yorkston and the Athletes, whom I unaccountably left off my best of 2005 list. Not that they had a record out in 2005, alas, but I did want to mention their gorgeous 2004 release, “Just Beyond the River,” as my favorite record of 2004 that I didn’t hear until 2005. And of course, my affection for quirky Scottish pop goes way back before any of these bands to the heyday of the great Postcard label, especially Orange Juice, whom I’ve been listening to a lot lately now that their mid-period stuff has been anthologized (on “The Glasgow School,” which I just put on my iPod last night, to go along with the best-of collection that’s been on there for a while. There are few songs in the world, and I’m not even exaggerating when I say this, that make me as purely happy as “Felicity.”). Not to mention the Delmontes and Josef K and, well, Scotland rules, pretty much.

And just recently, I’ve become reacquainted with another slightly quirky and enormously entertaining Scottish pop band: Spare Snare. I used to hear Spare Snare all the time on Radio K, the University of Minnesota’s often superb student-run station, way back in the mid ’90s, but I’d all but forgotten about them until I found out that a guy in a CD-mixer group that I belong to is a member of the band. They just launched a MySpace page (have I mentioned how much I love it when bands have MySpace pages? Let me mention it again), and after listening to all the songs there this evening, I can’t wait till they have a full-length CD out so that I can give them my money for the import. I’d call them charming, but that makes them sound sort of twee and cute, and they’re not that; they’re just completely original and entirely captivating. (And sort of vaguely lo-fi, which is a bonus for me.) They’ve also got one of the best Websites I’ve seen in a long time, and given how thoroughly over the Web I’ve been feeling lately, that’s high praise indeed.

There’s a fair amount to talk about on the music front lately: an early entrant in the race for CD of the year (that would be the new Rosanne Cash), the allegedly forthcoming Scott Miller record (“allegedly” because it mysteriously disappeared from the online CD retailer site from which I had preordered it, something I didn’t find out until they sent me an order update about a CD I’d never heard of, rather than Scott’s CD; Sugar Hill still lists it as due on March 14, but I’m a little suspicious), the overhyped but still thoroughly enjoyable Arctic Monkeys CD, and more. But just at the moment, I’m all about the Scots,* and Spare Snare in particular. Go listen to them.

*Okay, and the Clientele, of course. Nothing has yet knocked them out of heavy rotation. But hey, their frontguy has a Scottish name, so maybe they count too. Sort of.

That song again

February 17, 06 //
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I haven’t been looking at my blog stats much in the last couple of months, mainly because I haven’t been doing anything online in the last couple of months besides working. But today, in a rare moment of lull-ness—rare and fleeting; I’ll be back up to my eyeballs in work again later this afternoon), I had a chance to glance at February’s. Blog stats are curiously fascinating things; who are all these people, and how did they find my silly little blog? (They’re also vaguely creepy sometimes—there are more little bots out there crawling endlessly through the blogosphere than I would have ever imagined.) When I first discovered them, I checked them almost daily, and ran whois searches on the IP addresses to see if I could figure out who the visitors were. (Sometimes I could, sometimes not. There are people reading this thing and/or the Twangblog in Europe, even, which is indescribably weird to me. In a good way, but still.) Lately, though, like everything else in my life that isn’t w-o-r-k, stat-checking has fallen by the wayside.

The thing that fascinates me most about the stats is keywords. It’s relatively rare that anyone gets here through a keyword search, but it’s really intriguing to see the search strings that do get them here. Intriguing to me, anyway. After all, that kind of thing is my life these days…plus it’s entertaining to see what random, improbable combinations of words lead people here. (Or sometimes not so entertaining—someone’s fetish for penny loafers brought them here yesterday. I’m glad they were thwarted, at least temporarily. To each his or her own and all that, but fetishes skeeve me out.) And one of the keyword searches that appears more than once in the stats is “since k got over me lyrics,” so apparently, someone or several someones are trying to find the lyrics to my current (yep, still) favorite song.

The new Rosanne Cash record has been in heavy rotation in my ears lately, and there’s finally a new Scott Miller record on the horizon—only a month away, in fact. (More, likely much more, about that to come. I don’t talk about Scott Miller nearly enough these days.) And I’ve been playing the Morning After Girls quite a bit lately, probably because they’re playing at SXSW and I’m wishing I could somehow see that show without actually having to go to SXSW. But the Clientele are still dominating my personal playlist in a big way. So on the off chance that anyone else Googles the lyrics to “that song,” and since there are some completely garbled lyrics out there on the Web at some of those cheesy lyric sites, I’m happy to provide them.

“Since K Got Over Me”
Juliet
I get on my knees
Speaking in tongues
In a washed-out sun in perfect clarity
But I get so delirious, I think my sides will split
Standing on the sidewalk
Sometimes it’s as if

I don’t think I’ll be happy anyway
Just scratching out my name
And everything’s so lucid and so creepy
Since K got over me
Since K got over me

All my senses sharp
My hands are fists
I’m pretty tired of making lists
It’s just this emptiness I can’t chase away
And when the evening paints the streets
When the evening paints the streets
It’s like walking on a trampoline

I don’t think I’ll be happy anyway
Just scratching out my name
But everything’s so vivid and so creepy
Since K got over me
Since K got over me

There’s a hole inside my skull
With warm air blowing in
Standing on the sidewalk
Where do I begin?

I don’t think I’ll be happy anymore
I guess I closed that door
But every night a strange geometry
Since K got over me
Since K got over me

Home

February 13, 06 //
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Another week, another business trip, and flying back yesterday (from a trip that, to be fair, had a pretty ideal ratio of business to pleasure: an hour and a half in a business meeting followed by a whole weekend with my beloved Seattle friends), I noticed how much I was looking forward to being home. Looking forward to it, that is, in spite of my (at best) ambivalent relationship with this town and this house. I wondered if this meant that people can adjust to anything, even ugly ranch houses in too-small red state towns, but I think it’s more that the pleasures of home—husband, cats, familiar comforts, and so on—outweigh geographic and architectural concerns. But it occurs to me that it wasn’t quite possible for me to feel that way a year ago, when I was just emerging from the depths of a severe depression and, equally important, when I was still stuck in a job I detested. Which I guess means that the business trips and the long hours are entirely worth it, if they keep me in the kind of upbeat frame of mind that allows me to appreciate the joys of home far more than I notice the petty irritations of the house and the city.

(And it is pretty churlish of me to complain about a business trip that gave me a free weekend in uncharacteristically sunny and warm Seattle, including one night in a really great hotel and one spent at Laura and Jim’s wonderful house. I love spending time with the Seattle people; it would be very hard not to be in a good mood around them. The other times I’ve been out there have been big group events, with lots of us out-of-towners visiting, and it was cool to see them in a more normal setting this time. They’re like a little extended family, and I feel totally at home with them.)

But I’d still like to go at least a few weeks without another business trip. Even if leaving town makes me appreciate home more, I’d still rather appreciate it from close up instead of far away.

Obsession

February 5, 06 //
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Yeah, so I have an obsessive nature. I admit this freely. Fortunately, my obsessions these days are pretty harmless, as obsessions go. Instead of getting obsessed with people or relationships or other potentially risky things, I get obsessed with stuff like songs, TV shows, knitting, and…shoes. I think Friday was the first day in two weeks that I didn’t spend time browsing on Zappos, the locus of my biggest current obsession. And though I’m supposed to be working right now (8:30 on Sunday evening, and I need to get started soon so that I won’t be up too late, and so that I can sneak in some knitting—my other major obsession at the moment—before I go to bed), I am first warming up by looking at shoes.

I am in slight danger of buying a pair tonight, mainly because I just feel like buying something. Usually, I like to wait at least a month, and usually more, between purchases, and my latest pair just arrived on Friday (aren’t they lovely?). But just at the moment, I’m convinced that I absolutely must have a pair of wedge shoes. Of course, I wouldn’t even be particularly aware of wedge shoes if I weren’t spending so much time browsing shoe sites, but that’s neither here nor there—now that I know they’re out there (and very in at the moment, apparently), I must have them. The only problem is that I haven’t yet found the right pair of wedges, so I may be forced to wait a little longer. But they’re out there somewhere, and they shall be mine, dammit!

I admit I find this raging consumerism a little bit distasteful. I mean, I’ve always been a shopping enthusiast in one way or another, but in the last year, I have been trying to cut down. My CD habit is back under control, after a stretch last fall when I went into a buying frenzy; I’ve learned to reign in my clothes shopping, and I’ve been good about getting rid of old clothes and only buying new ones if I actually need them…mostly. But I am currently completely powerless to resist the lure of shoes.

It’s particularly embarrassing because I already have so many shoes. Under the bed, there is a dust- and cat hair-covered suitcase full of shoes that I haven’t worn since I lived in Chicago in 2000. I’m not even sure which shoes are in there, actually, except that the mates to some of them are in my closet. Eventually I’ll get rid of them through Freecycle, or just by donating them to a local thrift store, but for now, they’re just sitting there gathering dust and making it seem like my shoe problem is really serious. Which I guess it might be.

The truth is that I’ve had a thing for shoes for most of my life, ever since I first persuaded my mom that I didn’t need to wear sensible oxfords all the time and that my feet weren’t too narrow for penny loafers. I come by my shoe fetish honestly: my mom was a serious shoe obsessive who bought so many shoes that she eventually started sneaking them into the house so that my dad wouldn’t see them. (Not that he would have gotten mad; this was at a time when they were doing fine financially, and neither of them were ever big spenders to begin with, so it was a harmless enough obsession. It was more that he would have teased her even more than he already did.) She had great taste in shoes, too—accessorizing is one of those skills that you either have or you don’t, and she had it. I’ve always considered it a tragedy that when I was in my late teens, my feet grew until they were a full size bigger than my mom’s. My aunt—who is, it must be said, no slouch in the shoe-collecting department herself—claims to have said, on first hearing the reports about Imelda Marcos owning more than a thousand pairs of shoes, “That’s even more than (my mom) has!” I once helped my mom clean out her shoe closet, and we lost count at around 35 pairs, with at least 10 left to count. So I blame it all on heredity.

But things changed about ten years ago when I started making a conscious effort not to buy leather. It was a decision that I should have made much sooner, because I never felt like wearing leather was an appropriate choice for me as a vegetarian (and I speak only for me, needless to say; I don’t judge other vegetarians who choose to wear leather). And it wasn’t a particularly difficult decision to stick to, but it did make shoe-shopping more challenging and less fun. For years, most of my shoes came from Target or from places like Payless, where you can find fairly attractive nonleather knockoffs of current leather styles. Attractive, but cheaply made, usually, and unyielding, and sweat-inducing. (Most of my sweat glands seem to live in my feet anyway, and vinyl shoes make that worse; summer shoes worn without socks never last more than a single summer with me, because by the end of the summer they smell too awful to keep. And that’s my quota of unnecessarily specific personal information for the month.) I got in the habit of finding one or two pairs of shoes that were comfortable and fit okay and just wearing them till they died. Occasionally, something exciting would happen, like finding “vegetarian” Doc Martens in London (though it turns out that Docs are too heavy and wide for my skinny, narrow feet), or stumbling on some designer shoe that happened to be microfiber or velvet or something. But mostly, I’ve lived in $20 vinyl shoes for the last ten years or more.

And then, last summer, I started shopping at Zappos. My friend Matt was the one who first put me on to the place, three or four years ago, but I didn’t follow up on his recommendation at the time because I was broke and didn’t really need shoes. But I couldn’t help noticing that they had an entire category for vegetarian shoes, so I kept them in the back of my mind. I can’t remember what made me finally make a purchase there, but I did, and now I’m hooked. I started off slowly, buying a rather bland, utilitarian pair of sandals that I wore all the time last summer. Then I started following the advice of Trinny and Susannah, the fashion geniuses behind the BBC show “What Not to Wear” (not to be confused with its US counterpart, which is awful), and one of their snippets of advice for women with my body type is to wear heels. I’ve never worn heels, so I’m not sure why I started to just because they said I should, but they were right—heels look much better on me than flats, and now I won’t even look at shoes with less than a 2″ heel. That led first to these (cute but uncomfortable, like most Unlisted shoes, alas), and then to these (the most comfortable shoes in the world—I own them in two colors, and I never do that kind of thing), and even eventually to these extremely silly things, which I got on sale. (Zappos’ prices are not actually all that good, but they make up for that with free shipping and amazing customer service. They hooked me in early on by sending me a coupon after my first purchase, and they keep me hooked by upgrading me to expedited shipping about every other time I shop there. That’s smart business practice, if you ask me.) Silly shoes are good for the spirit, and wearing those goofy pink-flowered heels always makes me smile.

Looking at my order history, I see that I’ve actually only made 6 purchases from Zappos, which isn’t so bad for a year’s worth of shoe shopping. Okay, so it’s pretty bad. I’ve gone whole decades without buying that many pairs of shoes. But at least it isn’t as bad as I thought. And after all, I’ve been working so much lately that I have relatively few opportunities to…well, to do anything, really, but in particular, to spend money on myself. And if the worst thing that comes out of my current period of workaholism is that I buy more shoes than I actually need (along with a bunch of knitting supplies), well, there are worse things in the world, right? Right?

At least I hope there are…because I just found another pair that I have to have. They’re not wedges; I had a pair of wedges all picked out, but then I decided that I liked this other pair better. Aren’t they adorable?

Argh. Stop me before I shop again.