It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

I like your typical holidays – Christmas is nice and my birthday lasts two pretty terrific weeks usually – but tomorrow marks the beginning of my very favorite time of year. Beginning now in the dead of winter and extending until early April is my season. The high holy days that I look forward to all year and miss as soon as they are gone. They are, in succession, TCM’s 31 Days of Oscar and the NCAA Basketball Tournament. I have no need to lament the weather outside when I can get genuinely excited about being stuck in the house all day staring at my television like a true, red-blooded American.

March Madness is still a ways away; these are the days of studious preparation (or in my case, blind delusion mixed with scorn) but fortunately TCM’s annual cinema celebration is here just in time for the winter storm that will surely kill us all. Every movie the network plays will have been nominated for an Academy Award in some category and they are grouped each day according to themes. If you find yourself snowbound this week, these are my best bets to pass the time:

Citizen Kane – kick off the festival tomorrow with what is widely praised as the best movie of all time. Airing at noon central time (as all listings will be here), it’s an obligatory viewing for everyone at some point in life, so why not watch it when you have absolutely nothing else to do? It’s a perfect snow day movie – there’s a sled. But that’s as much as I’ll say about that.

Five Easy Pieces and Easy Rider – Wednesday night is a marathon of Jack Nicholson films, and these are the most exciting. Airing at 7p.m. and 11:30, you’ll have no reason to miss them if you live somewhere where you’re actually expected to go to your job in the middle of Snowmageddon or the Icepocalypse. Back in the early days before the unbearable ego and one-note performances, Nicholson was just a terrific actor, which is why he has more Oscar nominations than anyone else. You don’t want to miss the man at his best, and maybe films about the irrepressible fight for freedom will help those trapped-in-the-Overlook-Hotel feelings you’ll surely be facing before you wind up searching for an axe.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? and A Streetcar Named Desire – Thursday brings the goods with classics featuring family tension that might make you pretty pleased to be snowed in by yourself. There are two rules of thumb with classic cinema: Watch anything with Sidney Poitier, and watch anything with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Guess Who at 9:30a.m. meets both rules, so no sleeping in. And the only thing in the world wrong with A Streetcar Named Desire is that Jessica Tandy is not in it, and Vivien Leigh almost always annoys me. But she won an Oscar for it, as did Karl Malden and Kim Hunter. Only Marlon Brando didn’t, and he defined the Stanley Kowalski role for the rest of eternity. So there. Airs at 4:30.

The Lion in Winter and The Bridge on the River Kwai – Friday offers up more Katharine Hepburn at 1:45, bringing it hard as Eleanor of Aquitaine alongside Peter O’Toole and a young and sprightly Anthony Hopkins. This is a favorite for any history nerd, as is The Bridge on the River Kwai at 9p.m.. This one will probably make you cry, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

If you need me this week, I’ll be getting “snow drunk” (where you can drink wine all day long because you can’t have anywhere to go) and burning my retinas with the great American pastime.

This Is What I Did Today

It’s been a lazy Sunday, and I spent a good part of it shopping the internet for free music, as has become my habit. And since I’m a thoughtful, sharing person, I thought I’d parlay my hard work into your reward and give you the best free music I’ve downloaded this week. You’re welcome.

Low Rising by the Swell Season – This single is over a year old, but it showed up as a free download on the 93XRT website earlier this week for some reason. Doesn’t matter why, because this is one of my favorite songs, and I jumped on that immediately. If you loved Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova in Once singing “Falling Slowly” you’ll love this song as well. The instrumentation and Hansard’s voice combine perfectly – this is one of the sexiest songs you’ll hear today.

Violin by Amos Lee – iTunes has this one off of Lee’s brand new album Mission Bell as their free Discovery Download of the week. Lee’s vocal is great on this song, which doesn’t really sound like anything new, but it doesn’t really have to. You want it anyway.

Get Some by LykkeLi – This is one badass Swedish broad crooning “don’t make demands, I don’t take none.” The percussion on this song and her unmistakably European sing-song voice will have this one interminably stuck in your head. The bright side is that it sounds really, really good.

Cousins by Mumford and Sons – Vampire Weekend’s upbeat ditty “Cousins” gets made over with Mumford and Son’s signature folk/bluegrass sound and it works perfectly. Marcus Mumford’s deep, gritty voice is the opposite of Ezra Koening’s peppy style. Combined with the earthy arrangement, it sounds like any song you’d hear in a backwoods barn dance. And I would know.

Black and Gold by Wale – I am a big fan of Sam Sparro’s “Black and Gold” – just try to sit still while listening to it – but to my surprise Wale managed to make it way better by rapping over it. I love this right now.

99 Problems by Jay-Z with the Dap Kings – Continuing the remixes. This song is not new at all, but I just found it today, and this is what my life has been missing. The hard-rocking original is irreplaceable, but it’s definitely a welcome change to hear this Prince Ballard incarnation. Where the original was an incensed, driven rock, this relaxed version sounds like Jay-Z is just sitting across the room, telling you a story about his bullshit day while the jazzy soul sound of the Dap Kings crackles from your record player. That’s my new favorite daydream. As a bonus there’s a super sexy photo of the man to admire while you download.

Rolling in the Deep/Childish Gambino Remix by Jamie XX – I’m loving this mash-up of Adele’s latest single combined with raps by the alter ego of Community’s Donald Glover. Despite his age, Glover has a teenager’s voice with no hint of swagger, but his wit and smart rhymes make him worth listening to. The layering of both artist’s songs to lost lovers is what’s compelling here. Adele can get revenge on anybody with those pipes, and Childish Gambino uses a sharp tongue to put his ex in her place. When you get to the end of this, you just think “somebody just got told off good.”

Also, if you haven’t heard Adele’s “Rolling In the Deep” yet, get your head out of your ass. The video is here, and it will give you goose bumps.

This Week's Obsessions Are As Follows

These photos from the Kingston Lounge – This photo essay of an abandoned quarantine hospital on North Brother Island in New York’s East river is incredible. The history he includes is very cool and the photos are both beautiful and interesting. I keep going back to this over and over. Eventually I’ll get to the rest of the blog.

Kids Politics – Last Friday's episode of This American Life centers around children learning about democracy and trying to practice self-governance, and it’s even more moving and compelling than usual. Maybe just because I’m a sucker for stories about kids. But it’s hard to not want to hug these youngsters who want to create a world according to their vision of fairness and goodness. The segments about the Reagan library (there is no better voice to tell this story than Starlee Kine <3 ) and the young Glenn Beck devotee conjure a discouraging skepticism about these students’ prospects of navigating a complicated and demanding political landscape in the coming years. The frustration in their voices is heartbreaking, and reminds me of my own desperate wish for a system that doesn’t seem to always be defeating us instead of making progress. But where I hear a premature resigned cynicism in my own voice, I hear the passion in theirs that only comes with not even having thought about giving up yet. It’s almost worse, knowing what they’re in for.

Discouraging skepticism is not really something I’m in short supply of, having spent a good amount of time on Sunday discussing “kids today” and how unfortunate they are to have all those damn cell phones and Rihanna romanticizing getting the shit knocked out of her (if you’ve not heard my “Love the Way You Lie” rant, you are luckier than a lot of people at the Blue Dome Diner). So it’s a really good thing Ira begins and ends with uplifting segments that let us cuddle with the warm and fuzzy hope that the youth will change the world for the better. A third grade class – in CHINA – practices democracy and somehow manages to independently invent and destroy negative smear campaigns, realizing that they feel better when they are nice to each other. If you’re not getting verklempt yet, the story about the kooky-hippie-experimental-free school where the kids call all the shots will get to you. Even though this is a test tube with a small population that miraculously makes it happen, students who have a say in their rules actually self-correct the amount of time they spend on computers and gadgets and decide to not call each other whores. It’s amazing.

This left me feeling mostly great, with just a few reservations, which is nice. I guess the scary stuff is good for you, and that small percentage of me that’s not totally dejected really wants to try and save the world. I believe that children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way (unless you’re going to teach them wrong, scary Reagan library people, then just shut the hell up).

College Radio – I really don’t know how or why I got into this, but I can’t stop. I’ve stumbled upon a curiosity to know what kind of music college radio stations across the country are playing and how good they are at it. But it’s become sort of a train wreck of a hobby. Once I find a good station it is really hard to turn away. With Pandora, I turn it off and it stops existing. But with the radio I just know I’m going to miss something good, and listening to far off and distant college stations seems like accidentally finding a frequency on a ham radio that you probably shouldn’t have, and maybe never will again.

I don’t listen to Ivy League stations – I don’t need their condescension. “Not only do I go to Princeton but I know about all the indie bands you don’t.” Pass. I like community and regional colleges a lot. This blog post was composed while listening to KVSC 88.1FM from St. Cloud State University. I like listening to Chicago stations, to remind me of my dear city. I feel like I know these people. Radio DePaul is the best I’ve found, but this familiarity has gotten me into trouble.

I really should not listen to college radio because now that I’m old and uncool, I get way too jealous of any girl d.j. with good taste in music who also plays video games and knows cool stuff about comic books or geeky genre movies and probably has a perfect pair of cat-eye glasses, because I know she must have no trouble scoring with all the nerd guys that I pined for in college. It’s ridiculous to be jealous of the anonymous DePaul student on the computer radio hundreds of miles away, but it’s also ridiculous to get choked up and a little teary when she plays a Yellowcard song I used to listen to freshman year. It happened anyway. I just know she looks like Ellen Page and when she makes an offhand remark about dancing around in her underwear to hellogoodbye you can almost hear her co-host guy falling in love with her as he mutters “Um, uh... we should talk about something else.”

But it’s nice to remind myself, when she says to him “Oh you’re 21, you’re old now” that they are just kids. And when she plays a Format song that I once played on my college radio show four years ago, I see it all coming full circle. One day a few years from now she’ll be a single 25-year-old trying to figure out how to meet people in Chicago after all her friends have moved away, wondering where all the cute, non-married guys who don’t wear Axe or cutoff shorts are. At least, I hope she’s got those problems. If 29-year-old me actually does have to compete with a perfect, smart, manic pixie dream girl 25-year-old her, I’m going to be fucking pissed.

Take Me Back To Tulsa

I haven’t had much to say lately, which is a new feeling for me, but I’ve been sort of busy. It’s a surprise to me too. Last weekend I went to Tulsa for my best friend Casey’s birthday, which was a dream come true for me. For one thing, I have a serious crush on Tulsa. I’ll admit it. And I think it’s okay. Someone told me recently that Tulsa is reputedly becoming a “Little Austin.” That’s not surprising. Some of your very favorite musicians are from Tulsa, you probably just don’t know it. But while the trend in recent years has been to move away to say, Austin, there is a new wave of musicians who are staying local and keeping it fresh in the Big T. I’ve read it in a couple of magazines, but also had a genuine Austinite telling me last week how much he loves Tulsa and the totally legit music scene they’ve got going. So there.

I would love Tulsa even if not for these things though, simply because it was my second home growing up. Its cool new rep gives me an excuse to love it when I’m trying to justify it to outsiders, but my adoration is more sentimental. That’s why, as much as I loved going to the cool new bar in the Blue Dome district to see the rock band play, I think I had more fun at the Caravan Cattle Company, which is a cowboy dance hall of the highest esteem. I spent all of last week looking forward to the retro boot-scootin’ scene that I’d get to soak up under the guise of celebrating Casey (like I can’t do that from home?). Growing up in Arkansas I visited a few dances at American Legion and VFW buildings, attempting to two-step around a dance floor and line dance with the best of them. But these were small, community places where everybody knows your name, or will call you one if they don’t. The idea of the Caravan is enticing to me though because it’s in Oklahoma, where my parents lived in the early 80’s, back in the heyday of big country dance halls. It was on a trip to OKC a few years ago when I discovered that they used to go out to those clubs all the time. When I learned we’d be going to the Caravan I pulled out old photo albums to pore over pictures of them with my dad dressed up in his trademark plaid and my mother with big, big hair. Visions of Urban Cowboy danced in my head, I could almost smell the Bud Light as I went to sleep at night. I couldn’t wait.

Mom and Dad way back when

And it was everything I hoped for. There was a sea of flannel shirts and cowboy hats, there was swirly, twirly two-steppin’, there was loud country music, a guy with a mustache asked me to dance. There were some things that seemed out of place, like the Affliction tees and the brief hip-hop interlude where we got to feel fly like a G6, and my friends and I got to dance and shout to a Ke$ha song with the joyful abandon of youth after all, so that dream came true in the unlikeliest of places. But those things make sense actually, since really it is the Caravan that is probably out of place. The very reason I wanted to go there is because line dancing went out of fashion 15 years ago. The giant dance hall can stand strong against the Oklahoma winds but even the Caravan can’t withstand the winds of change. Ke$ha will find you wherever you go. Playing old Alan Jackson music and line dances can create an atmosphere for a while, but seeing more people out on the dance floor for “We R Who We R” the place still looks like 2011. I can wear a western shirt and a year’s worth of eyeliner, but I’ll never be able to tease my hair as big as my mom’s. I would have loved to look the part, but when I was clumsily trying to hop around and stomp the dance floor, ultimately I just looked like myself.

I rocked plaid all the time in the 80s

(yes this was taken in Tulsa, duh)

(I drew an arrow for you)

 Hope you all had a weekend as cool as mine.

The dresses are all that really matter, right?

Last night reminded me of something I tend to forget, which is that the Golden Globes are completely irrelevant. I attempted to watch for a few minutes, but between the awkward order of the awards, the way they had people introducing their own films for Best Picture awards, and the fact that they gave an award to Burlesque, I realized that the Golden Globes are like the Deep Impact or Edtv of awards shows. They realize they are doing the same thing that other awards shows are doing and hope that, by setting themselves apart by appearing first or far enough after, people will pay attention. But they just don’t get it right. Hollywood pays attention to the Globes for about a month and then everything belongs to Oscar. It seems like television harps on Golden Globe achievements even less. The self-congratulations fall silent after a couple of weeks because the Emmys define good television.

The Golden Globes are awkward. The television awards get pushed aside – it seems like the night had barely started when they gave the award for Best Drama series, which is the ultimate prize at the Emmys – or are combined carelessly in categories that compare apples to airplanes. The TV people spend all night in the shadow of Movies, but Movies only care about these awards as a prequel to real achievement.

I’ve always heard that the Golden Globes are the most fun awards party, and that the stars like mingling with one another and having a big table full of food and drinks to enjoy while people aren’t talking about them. I think we should just let the Golden Globes be the fancy midwinter fashion show that it is, and let the beautiful people have their party with Ricky Gervais, because that’s fun. But pretending to assign significance to the trophy is a little silly. I think next year I’ll watch the Red Carpet, then spend the evening actually watching good films or good television instead of inevitably feeling awkward and sorry for half the people in the auditorium. Then I’ll do what everyone else does, and wait for the Oscar nominations…

I need Yoshimi to help defend my laundry

The Future Dryer at my parents’ Jetsons house is like a laundry robot. I’ve seen these Future Machines on commercials and in demos at Sears over the last few years and it’s intriguing the things they can do nowadays. There’s steam baths and cold water ionic sanitizing with silver particles and I think if you tip the sales guy, the washers give you a happy ending.

The Whirlpool dryer at my parents’ house, which appeared sometime last spring, is a most curious thing. It thinks on its own, forms opinions, and uses those opinions to decide it can do something totally different than what you told it to. I wish I had a line to the holy ghost of Isaac Asimov to see what I should do about this. The dryer senses how wet your laundry is, and adjusts its drying game plan accordingly throughout the process. You can say you have “super delicate” clothes that need to be “more dry” on the “ultra low heat” setting and it says “okay that’s cool it will take 35 minutes.” Well, it doesn’t really talk, not like Rosie the robot, but there’s a digital number that you agree to when you press the start button. And then it starts “sensing.” And somewhere in those 35 minutes the dryer says to itself “oh this is totally not going to happen in 35 minutes, we are still like 40% dampness in here guys” and changes the display to 51 minutes before your very eyes. I say this because I tend to stare at the machine for most of the cycle to see what it will do next.

The Future Dryer is the most captivating appliance in the house, but not the only one that’s gotten to feel smarter than me since I got here (and I know it does). The night I first got here a couple weeks ago, my parents were still in Minnesota and I had the run of the place on my own. It’s probably for the best, because at least when the robots judge me they can’t talk about it – yet. I spent several minutes in the hallway staring down the thermostat and trying to figure out if it was trying to communicate with me. Really. The thing is, I would walk past it, and it would light up. It’s a blue LED screen with a digital rundown of the thermostatus (a word I just made up, I hope), that I thought was maybe motion sensitive. Perhaps it was saying, “you know, I’m right here, if you’d maybe like it a little cooler than this. Just checking.” The sad thing is, I lived here for a year, some time ago, and I once had a grasp on the Future Thermostat. But I gazed at it wide-eyed and perplexed for quite a while before I figured out it just lights up whenever anything changes, and that I was setting it off by opening and closing the front door a dozen times.

Honestly, my parents’ house isn’t really a Jetsons house. It is three years old, that’s it. Compared to a house that was built this year, it’s probably outdated. But for me, having a microwave that turns into a convection oven or a gas-electric hybrid Prius-like cooking range is jaw-dropping. My last apartment was about a hundred years old, and the appliances were all at least as old as me. I don’t know how to work a thermostat anymore because I’m used to the ancient gas furnace with a dial that I can’t read and a crack in the front glass (that’s safe, right?) that had two settings, in my opinion – “hot with flames” and “it’s cold why can’t I see fire?” I maybe used the oven three times in the year I lived there because it was a gas oven, and gas ovens suck a lot. I did my laundry around the corner at a place where the dryer had two settings on the dial and there was a wood-paneled t.v. set in the corner with vestigial rabbit ears, propped up on a box on one of the folding tables. I wonder, when the Maytag guy was installing those washers and dryers in the 1960’s, if he could see the future George and Jane and Judy and Elroy enjoyed ever becoming a reality.

As crazy as it sounds, I miss my old apartment. When I speak of it reverently, I call it a shitbox. Other times I’m less kind, more honest. There were days I got stuck in my bedroom because the inside of the door never had a knob. Since the door hung crooked, a gust of wind could suck it closed and jam it in the frame. The gas leak that persisted the last few months I lived there was repeatedly a pain in the ass. And I’m still suspicious that the attic was haunted by the 94-year old woman who lived there for 50 years before she died.

But there was a sense of connection there that was unique and inimitable. Last year when I was reading The Jungle in my tiny bedroom I could imagine cold and weary Chicagoans hiding from the wind in that room a century ago, or opening the same window for a summer breeze when it got so hot out that people were collapsing in the streets. I miss doing laundry and catching up on my telenovelas at the same time, while wondering how that teeny tiny hipster is going to fit in those teeny tiny jeans he just folded. Laundromat people are irritating, and always fighting with their children about something. But when one of your neighbors holds the door while you carry your things out into the street and hands you the sock you dropped, you feel a part of a community. There was no hiding from the people who lived next to me, or across the alley from me, or in the same room as me generations ago. Maybe at times I wanted to, but if it comes down to choosing that or being isolated in a bubble helmet and arguing with the sassy robots that do my household chores, I’m not sure the Future is for me.