…being able to find just about anything on the Web.

In one of those weird series of mental leaps that you do when you’re blogging or tweeting or posting to Facebook or whatever—in this case it was a note on Facebook in which I was musing about whether any movie had ever gotten the essence of NYC punk right—I started thinking about one of my favorite books, Like Being Killed, by Ellen Miller. It’s a book that is, though I never met the author, essentially about me, if I had been an East Village junkie when I was in my 20s. Seriously, I have never identified with a character in a book as intensely as I did with Ilyana, the narrator of the novel, and no one has ever delineated the specific type of depression that has dominated my life as effectively or precisely as Ellen Miller did in that novel. I don’t know if she was ever a junkie herself, though clearly she at least knew a few, or if she ever suffered from depression, though her description of it is so accurate that it’s hard for me to imagine she didn’t have at least a passing acquaintance with it. And in addition to mirroring my mental state back to me, she described an East Village world that I recognized, even if I was never part of it in (at least not in the way that a junkie would have been). It’s an amazing book, one that I’ve been meaning to re-read for about a year now. (I haven’t read it since shortly after it came out, more than 10 years ago.) I used to tell people that if they wanted to understand me, they should read Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock and then come ask me why it was supposed to help them understand me. That would actually still work, but if I still told people what to do if they want to understand me, I would say that to understand me even better, they should read Like Being Killed and imagine Ilyana without the heroin.

It was a book that kept catching my eye at the library, the title undeniably intriguing. I picked it up and put it down several times, wary of anything that glorified heroin addiction (it doesn’t, it turns out), but finally curiosity won out and I checked the book out. And it floored me. It quickly became one of my five or so favorite books of all time, and I kept checking back to see if Miller had written another novel. She didn’t, and I stopped expecting her to, though every few years I would check library catalogs and Amazon to see if she had anything new out. The closest she came was a story in an anthology of “edgy” Jewish fiction, which I never picked up (but might buy now). I started to think that she was destined to be like another author, a guy named Lowry Pei, who wrote a dazzlingly wonderful novel called Family Resemblances and then apparently vanished without trace.* The fact that there’s no further work from such talented people is maddening, but somehow makes me appreciate the writing that does exist even more.

Last year, I had an urge to read the book again. It’s out of print, sadly, but I bought a used copy on Amazon for seven cents or something. And I poked around to see if I could find anything out about what she was doing–was she teaching, writing short stories, or what? Google didn’t yield much except for a bunch of reviews of the novel, and a mention somewhere of a class she had taught at the New School. Nothing else. But I guess Google has gotten better at indexing blogs, because tonight, after being reminded of the book (which isn’t a movie that gets NYC punk right, but is a book that gets postpunk NYC right), I found a handful of blog entries mourning her death from a heart attack, in December 2008, at the age of 41.

It’s not a personal tragedy for me, of course. But it’s tremendously sad to think that such a powerful, wise, original voice, won’t be heard again. And even sadder because the words of those who mourned her make her sound like a wonderful, vibrant, strong person—happier, not surprisingly, and saner and just generally better than her memorable antiheroine, and gone from the world much too soon.

It would almost be better if I didn’t know, and could still hold out the faintest hope of more words from her someday. Stupid internetz.

*Except that he didn’t; apparently he’s been teaching at Simmons and writing for many years, and now all of his work, including the entire text of Family Resemblances, is online, for free, at his site. Highly recommended.

Cartoonist Sam Hurt has had a Web presence for ages; I can’t even remember when I first discovered that he was online, but I’m thinking it was sometime in the mid to late 1990s, when I was still endlessly delighted by all the obscure things that you could find on the Web. Fairly soon after that, he started putting some of his wonderful “Queen of the Universe” strips online. “Queen of the Universe” is a great strip, and Peaches is an amazing character, but I was still pining for Eyebeam, the strip that introduced me to Sam Hurt.

“Eyebeam” started a few years before I moved to Austin; it ran daily in the Daily Texan, the student newspaper, which was a pretty decent paper when I lived there in 1984-86. Sam Hurt was a law student, and his eponymous lead character was too—a slightly weird and unconventional law student (and in later strips, a lawyer) with a roommate named Ratliff*, a delightful girlfriend named Sally, and a pet hallucination named Hank. “Eyebeam” was hugely popular in Austin, so much so that Hank was nominated for student government at the University of Texas—and won. Reading “Eyebeam” was something I looked forward to every day. The strips were collected in books, and I bought every one of them as soon as each came out, even though I had read all the strips in them. I still own every single one.

I don’t know exactly what I found so appealing about the strip, but I guess it was the juxtaposition of slightly boho domesticity and everyday routine with flights of utter fancy; I don’t know any other cartoon that features a hallucination, much less a hallucination who has a girlfriend. It was also distinctively Austin-y, and for much of the time that I lived in Austin, I adored the place and its lifestyle, so that worked for me too.

I still find the strips both hilarious and charming, though I have no objectivity about them at all and don’t know if anyone else would see the appeal. But finally, I can invite people to find out for themselves, rather than trying to explain the strip to them, because they’re all online, even some super early ones from when Sam was an undergrad. So go read them all (I recommend starting with 1983 rather than the very early strips). And if you do, be sure to tell me what you think.

*I was fascinated by this, because I had moved to Austin along with a good friend from college, Bill Maxwell, who was taking a year off between college and grad school and had decided to spend that year hanging out in Austin, home of his close friend John Ratliff. I had never encountered the name “Ratliff” before—we don’t grow them in NYC (and this was before Ben Ratliff started writing for the New York Times)—and suddenly there were two of them. I considered this an amazing coincidence, though of course since then I’ve met or heard of all sorts of Ratliffs and Ratcliffes, and it turns out not to be a particularly uncommon name at all. But I was very provincial back then.

(Another boring technical note: I’m in the middle of switching hosting companies, after repeated site outages this week while I was sending the URL for my portfolio to half a dozen prospective employers. I actually posted this last night, too late for it to be included in my database backup, so I had to reconstruct it through the magic of phpMyAdmin. But I really did write it last night.)

That’s the “Jeopardy” answer to the following question: what two words strike fear into my heart when I’m trying to stick to an exercise program?

I work on the top floor of a building that is trying hard to be a real office building, but still has a ways to go. A lot of it is unoccupied but is under construction as it gradually gets prepared for use by the business school of a local university. (Last year, the construction work meant that the mice and rats that were living in the unoccupied parts were displaced and wound up on the two floors that my company occupies.) And the fire alarm system is constantly under construction too, apparently; for a while, we had false alarms at least twice a week. That means we tend to ignore the alarms, which isn’t the best idea in the world, obviously. But over the summer there were two that weren’t immediately identified as false alarms, so we all trooped dutifully down the stairs. That’s 17 flights of stairs, for the record. Long flights of stairs, too.

There are a few activities that are especially bad for my knee problem (patellar subluxation—I remembered to look it up)—basically anything that involves putting downward pressure on the knee with my full body weight. Cycling is terrible, although I biked for years—not any great distance, but regularly, and my knees got used to it. Running isn’t great, even if I’m ignoring that fact now. And walking down stairs is pretty much the worst. I always have a little bit of discomfort walking down stairs, especially if there are a lot of them, or they’re steep, or I try to go fast. (I get vertigo when I go down stairs too, so it’s altogether not my favorite thing.)

So the first time we had one of these fire drills (shortly after I was moved from the 16th floor to the 17th, not that one flight makes that much difference), I didn’t think too much of it, but the next day, I couldn’t really bend my knees, and walking became painful; even going down the few steps we have in our split-level house was a challenge. It was about three days before I felt normal again. The next time, which was about three weeks later, the aftermath wasn’t quite so bad, but it lasted just as long. And today, when my co-worker came over to tell me that we needed to go downstairs (I had my noise-canceling headphones on and was completely unaware of the alarms…which is a little, um, alarming), my first thought wasn’t “Wow, I wonder if there’s a real fire this time,” but “Oh no, not today—I’m planning to do Day 2 tonight.” But the alarms kept going, and I didn’t have any choice but to trot down the stairs in my high-heeled boots.

At one point I noticed that my knees weren’t bothering me at all, and I wondered if exercise was helping. Then I looked at the number on the next landing. Oh. We were only on the 14th floor. By the time we got to the 3rd floor, my knees would have been screaming if they had vocal cords. And after we’d gotten back upstairs (the alarm was triggered accidentally by some idiot who tripped an alarm panel on one of the unoccupied floors by leaning on it) and the day went on, I could feel the weakness and cramping start to set in, just a little bit.

But when I got home, I did my workout anyway. I don’t know if that was smart; maybe it will make things worse, though I’m not sure why it would. (And I raised the incline on the treadmill a little in the probably misguided hope that the climbing motion would somehow balance out the strain of the downstairs motion.) In any case, it was fine, I’m happy to say—just slightly easier than Monday’s was, which is as it should be. Whether I’ll be able to do it again (or to walk, for that matter) on Friday is another matter. But I’ll worry about that on Friday.

So some years ago, I saw a short travel feature on some cable channel or other about an island town in Italy where all the houses were painted bright, vivid colors, and anyone wanting to paint their house had to request approval from the local government. It looked like an absolutely wonderful town, and I always had it in the back of my mind that I would try to visit it someday. (This was when I was going to Italy for the book fair every year, and the idea of getting to travel around the country seemed much likelier than it does now.) Except that I couldn’t remember the name of the town or which region it was in, only that it was an island, in the northern half of Italy.

And then I forgot about it, mostly. But every so often when I’m wandering aimlessly on the Web, I’ll try to think of things that I’ve always meant to look up, and the name of this town falls into that category…except that I never remember to look up half the things that I’ve always wanted to look up. But today, for some reason, I finally remembered the little town with the multicolored houses. It turns out that my memory was accurate, if fuzzy: the town is called Burano, and it’s an island in the lagoon around Venice. And it looks just as magical as I remembered from the travel show. Funny thing is, I’ve never particularly wanted to go to Venice, which I’ve heard is overcrowded and too touristy; I’d rather go back to Milan or Rome or Florence or, God knows, Bologna again. But I think Burano would be worth the trip.

In an effort to maintain the illusion that I’m still blogging, and because I’ve gathered about 20 new WordPress themes that I like, I may be switching themes frequently for the next little while. Then again, I might not, because I’m kind of smitten with this one (although I may tweak a few things). The image at the top is London—traffic lights in Kingston, to be precise, so Greater London—and I’m in a city kind of mood these days. (By “city,” I mean “somewhere bigger and city-er than here,” and I really mean “NYC or London,” because really, those are my cities.) It’s been a longish winter, and I’m feeling the tug of going somewhere I belong, warring with the complacent pressure of staying here where it’s cheap and liveable.

I bought a stunningly wonderful laptop (aided and abetted by a friend who works at Apple) a couple of weeks ago, and since it’s more or less lived in my lap ever since, I’m hopeful that I might start blogging regularly again. If I can find anything worth saying, that is. I’m not going to start tonight, however. After a moderately frantic workday followed by fooling around with WordPress and themes and assorted other meta things, I am laptopped out.

It’s a little strange (but only a little) to find myself weeping for a dog I never met, but having just learned about the passing of Zeke, I can’t help mourning. Undoubtedly, a lot of that is because Chris Clarke has written about him so beautifully, but I also know, despite the lack of empirical evidence, that Zeke was a truly good dog. Read all about him—and there’s a lot to read—here. Warning: have some tissues on hand.

(It seems like nowadays I’m only blogging to note the passing of important creatures, which really isn’t my intention for this blog. I’ll have to do something about that.)

I was terribly saddened to learn on Friday of the death of the great writer and thinker Ellen Willis. Back in the Dark Ages when I was an impressionable preteen and early teen and already beginning to compose entire record reviews in my head in rock-crit-ese, there were precious few women writing about rock. And of the few who were around, none could touch the lucidity and originality of Ellen Willis. It would be hard for me to overstate the impact she had on me back then, and throughout my teens and twenties. When she moved on from rock criticism to general essays (most of the obits referred to her as a feminist writer, but that ghettoizes her unnecessarily, and inaccurately), I continued to read her avidly, and I believe I’m a better writer and thinker for having done so. It had been a long time since I’ve read her regularly, but looking at some of her recent work, it’s easy to see that she never lost her sharp eye or her fluency.

I never met her, but I’ll never forget her. May she rest in peace.

Yeah, I haven’t been around much lately. This is partly because it’s getting increasingly difficult for me to be at the computer when I don’t have to, and partly because I haven’t really had a whole lot to say lately. Apart from an ongoing crisis of confidence about my ability to be any good at all at my job, things have been pretty quiet in my world. I’m not depressed, not at all (although I can sense some weather-induced doldrums coming on, as the forecast for this week has temperatures climbing to the mid-80s in friggin’ April); I’m just not up to much, I guess.

A few things have come up that are worth talking about recently, though. For one, against all recent signs and indications, there is going to be a Twangfest this year. It was a nightmare to book this one, and I don’t even do much booking. (As it turned out, in fact, I didn’t do any booking, though it wasn’t for want of trying.) It’s the tenth year, and we wanted it to be spectacular, or something close. We wanted to bring back some performers from the earliest days of Twangfest, and then also have some totally new and dazzling headliners. A major country artist, say, like Marty Stuart or Dwight Yoakam, or someone totally unexpected but entirely appropriate, like Sharon Jones. But when we started putting out feelers and making inquiries, it was one disappointment after another. One artist who we thought was absolutely locked in got some dates in Europe in June, and we couldn’t even be made at him because we know he makes better money there than he does here. (And because he loves Twangfest, as we love him, and wasn’t trying to shaft us, I hasten to add. He’ll be welcome to play anytime he wants, if there are more Twangfests to play.) Others weren’t touring in June and would have had to be flown in to perform, an expense that our budget couldn’t handle.

In the end, we’ve put together, completely out of our asses, a great lineup that I’m quite excited about, with an array of fine purveyors of American roots-ish music ranging from the Dirtbombs to BR5-49, and much in between. See for yourself in a few days when the lineup is posted on the Twangfest site. And in the end, Twangfest X will be as memorable a musical and social experience as all the other Twangfests have been; I’m completely confident of that. I know the next ten weeks or so will be thoroughly dominated by Twangfest, and I’m looking forward to that (though juggling it with my more than usually heavy workload will be, um, interesting). I’m sort of dead weight when it comes to most of the work that makes Twangfest happen—I don’t really do booking, and I’m even less useful when it comes to finding sponsors, because I am almost pathologically incapable of asking strangers for money. But this is the time of year when I try to sort of make up for my uselessness. I coordinate the Dan Pack (named for our beloved friend and Twangfest supporter Dan Bentele), which allows people to make a small donation to Twangfest and get a good deal on tickets and a t-shirt and poster. (Asking friends and acquaintances for money is apparently easier than asking strangers, I guess.) This year, I’m back to answering the queries that come in to our general e-mail box, which pick up in volume this time of year. I’ll be writing a press release.

And then my favorite part: running the on-site merchandise sales and paying the bands. I love paying the bands, because I’d be too shy to talk to most of them otherwise, but paying them gives me a built-in excuse. (And somehow they always seem to like me. I’m sure the fact that I’m handing them money has nothing to do with it.) Paying the bands means I have to stay sober at the club, which is a good thing, and handling merch means that I get to hide behind a table instead of mingling, so that people won’t quite figure out how truly shy and awkward and tongue-tied and unprepossessing I am. It all works out very well. Twangfest is as social an activitiy as I can imagine, and it’s the sort of thing I’d ordinarily fervently avoid—I’d rather eat dirt than go to SXSW, for example—but somehow when it’s Twangfest, its okay. It’s pretty much the best thing I do all year. It’s almost scary how much of my identity is tied up in being part of the Twanggang, actually. That’s something I prefer not to dwell on too much or too often, though it’s been harder to escape this year because there are questions about the future of Twangfest and about my future with it. More about that if and when it’s appropriate, though.

Anyway, Twangfest fever has officially set in, and that’s cause for a blog post if anything is. There’s more to talk about too—for one thing, the new record by (Twangfest X performer) Scott Miller has been out for several weeks now, and I haven’t even written about it. I’ll save that for next time, along with some other musical commentary.

So, about that best-of listâ?¦

(I realize that I’m the only one who will care if I never do a best-of-2005 list, but I don’t think I’ll be able to focus properly on 2006 posts until I get this one taken care of.)

2005 was the first year that I can remember when I truly couldn’t do a numbered top-howevermany list. There were just too many good records that bunched up in the 6-20 (or 50, more like) spots, and putting them in order was too much of a chore. I already posted a (very) partial list, but it’s actually changed since then, because the Clientele record so thoroughly dominated my December (and January, so far) that it moved up a few spots.

Anyway. My list, which will be missing records that I’m forgetting about, I’m sure (no notes added, because I’ve written about a lot of these here before, but ask me if you’re curious about any of them):

1. Son Volt, “Okemah and the Melody of Riot”
2. Robbie Fulks, “Georgia Hard”
3. The Clientele, “Strange Geometry”
4. Malcolm Middleton, “Into the Woods”
5. Steve Dawson, “Sweet Is the Anchor”

and the rest, with the first five representing most of what would be my top 10 if I’d done one, and then the remainder in no order:

the everybodyfields, “Plague of Dreams”
Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, “Naturally”
The Morning After Girls, “Evolve”
Bettye Lavette, “I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise”
Dallas Wayne, “I’m Your Biggest Fan”
—–
Dierks Bentley, “Modern Day Drifter.”
Gary Allan, “Tough All Over.”
John Doyle, “Wayward Son”
Lasarfhiona ni Chonaola, “Flame of Wine.”
Cathie Ryan, “The Farthest Wave.”
British Sea Power, “Open Season”
Dogs, “Turn Against This Land”
Brakes, “Give Blood”
Richmond Fontaine, “The Fitzgerald”
Bettie Serveert, “Attagirl”
The Hacienda Brothers, s/t
Reigning Sound, “Home for Orphans”
Chatham County Line, “Route 23″
Caitlin Cary and Thad Cockrell, “Begonias”
Sleater-Kinney, “The Woods”

Two promising, if flawed, EPs:
The Love Experts, “Cuba Street.” A St. Louis band with a very distinctive sound. Too distinctive, maybe, because I find that the singer’s voice starts to get on my nerves by the end of the EP. But I’ll still be paying attention to whatever they do next, and I hope I’ll get a chance to see them live sometime.
The Squares, “Very Sharp.” I was very taken with this Columbus band’s debut EP when I first got it, though unfortunately I became less so with repeated listens—the record starts to seem a little too long, which isn’t a good thing for an EP. But I think they have oodles of potential, and you really can’t go wrong with a sound as straightforward and rocking as theirs.

Song of the Year:
If you can’t guess what this is going to be, you have either never read my blog before or you haven’t been paying attention. Yes, my song of the year is “Since K Got Over Me” by the Clientele. Duh. I think I finally figured out why it gets to me the way it does, too: it’s a London song, in the same way that Nick Drake’s “Bryter Layter” is a London album. There are no explicit references to London, but it just seems to permeate the song, and the line “But when the evening paints the streets/When the evening paints the streets/It’s like walking on a trampoline” immediately takes me to a very specific place and time in London and sends joy and heartbreak coursing through my veins all at once.

It beat out my previous lead-pipe-cinch single of the year, Alan Jackson’s “Monday Morning Church” (with magnificent backing vocals by Patty Loveless), which is a perfect country single. I like Alan Jackson better as a singles artist than as an album artist anyway, and between this song and “Drive,” he’s released arguably my two favorite country singles of the decade.

Other runners-up:
Son Volt, “Jet Pilot”
Robbie Fulks, “Georgia Hard” and “Where There’s a Road”
Malcolm Middleton, “Break My Heart”
Bettye Lavette, “How Am I Different?” (her astonishingly good cover of an already great Aimee Mann song)

In a way, I should have put more effort into my Song of the Year list than my albums list, because so much of my listening now is via the iPod, on song shuffle, so songs are more relevant than albums. But I’m an old person, and I still think in album terms. I’m doing a mix CD for a group I belong to in April, and though it’s going to include some songs from before 2005 (yes, I’m already planning/obsessing about what songs to put on it), I may use it as an opportunity to come up with a Best Songs of 2005 comp too. But I probably won’t, since I’m always too lazy to do those sorts of things. Maybe next yearâ?¦which is to say this year.