Yesterday’s Gossip is Today’s Post

45 comments

Most sites serve up a fresh plate of gossip every morning.  They are staffed by people whose job it is to cut and paste links into some sort of bulleted list, proper spelling and punctuation optional.  I have a real job, so you get the same bulleted list with slightly fewer typos, much later in the day.  And not every day.  I have a life to go with that job.

People in the Neighborhood: Bodega Edition

44 comments

New Yorkers always insist that the city is not an anonymous machine but actually just a series of small neighborhoods.  We insist that we know our dry cleaner, our coffee shop guy, our grocery store cashier just as well as you all know yours.

Actually, that’s not true, we always insist that we know them even better.

Actually, that’s not true either.  We New Yorkers are a narcissistic bunch.  We insist that they know us even better.  Trust me, your local dry cleaner does not care about you the same way my dry cleaner cares about me.

In any event, when I have lived in other places, one of the reasons you knew the “kid who bags your groceries” is because of some long generational history.  The gossip you discuss as you head back to your car is along the lines of “Oh you know, that’s Johnny’s nephew.  His momma went to school with…”  Etc.  Well no, we don’t have as much of that in Manhattan (although it is more common in the other boroughs).  Our stories are a little bit different.

And I think it’s only fair that those of you who are not from a big city filled with people from all over the world be introduced to what some of our neighborhood knowledge looks like, and the center of it all is the local bodega.*

*Details have been changed to protect the innocent.  Also, no, I do not actually believe that any of this is unique to New York.  I promise.  Okay, maybe a little bit.  Nah, not really.


The Turtle Era

The Turtle Era was the best era.  Turtle was the Day Manager when I first moved into my neighborhood.  His first language was Spanish, and he spoke perfect English.  He insisted that I only use Spanish and that he only use English.  Because, you know, that’s how you improve. But he had also learned Korean, the language of the store’s owners, and Portuguese, because there was small Brazilian community in the neighborhood.  The store was always perfectly kept while he was in charge.  Well-stocked, clean.  And the coffee.  Dear god the coffee he made was perfect.  He was funny, charming, handsome, confident, told a great story.  I really wanted to drink with Turtle.  All the time.  The owner’s wife was confused about his name and called him Tut.  Which stuck.  About half of the customers called him Turtle, and about half called him Tut.

Turtle’s assistant was named Nick.  Nick was quiet but polite.  He was never completely happy with the questionable wage and hour policies of the owners, but you wouldn’t have known it.  One of the nicest men I’ve ever known, with a genuine smile and a kick-ass mustache.

The night shift during The Turtle Era was run by a quirky older guy from rural somewhere.  I don’t know where he was from, or what language he spoke, but he was differently from the country of some country. (You know how you can sometimes tell a rural accent even if you don’t know the language?)  I was never sure what we were talking about when I went in, but I think we were talking about something. I don’t know what his name was.  I’m not even sure how I could have asked. His assistant was a quiet guy from the pacific coast of Mexico.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say more than two words.  In fact, sometimes I didn’t even know he was there and then “POOF!” he’d be standing right behind you.  Basically a not-very-haunting ghost of a man.  You will not hear about him again because that is all I know, even though he is still there.

Turtle was lucky.  He married for immigration status, or so it was implied, but he fell in love.  They had an adorable little girl.  His wife, a midtown professional, got a promotion that took her to New Jersey.  He went with her, and they bought a big house for the family.  Last I heard he was managing a restaurant out there and going crazy because he had never needed to drive before, and he didn’t have his driver’s license yet.  But he was happy.

The Nick Era

Poor Nick.  When he took over for Turtle, they didn’t hire a new assistant.  So Nick had to do everything.  And I don’t think they gave him a raise, not at first.  But we gave him a quick primer on New York labor laws and how they did, in fact, apply to everybody.  And then they did.  He was so politely sad about it all. He would politely ask me what it was like to have a good job.  He would listen to traditional music and count the hours until he could go home and rest and have a beer. He was sending money home to his wife, where she ran a farm.  Each paycheck went to building up the livestock, building a fence, fixing a barn.  Nick spoke a little English, and I speak a little Spanish.  Between the two of us, we could figure it all out.  Nick also had taken steps to learn how to make coffee from Turtle before he left.  God I miss Turtle’s coffee.

Then someone called in a Housing Violation on his building, and the city discovered his illegal apartment. We offered him a little help to find a new place, but he politely refused. Before they could shut it down he discovered he had cancer.  He decided that it would be best if he went back home.  If he could get medical help, he could get it safely at home.  If he could not, then he wanted to spend his remaining days on the farm with his wife.  He knew that either way, once he crossed the southern border, he would likely never come back.  No one has heard from Nick since he was getting a ride south from Atlanta with a friend.

The night shift did not change during The Nick Era, but I got to know the Country Man a little better.  I still don’t know what we were talking about, but we talked a lot.  When the store raised the prices on cigarettes he made a disgruntled face and refused to charge me the new price.  He would always round my charges, refusing my fifteen cents here or my seven cents there.  Either he was overcharging someone else or the owners just liked him, because he certainly wasn’t paying it out of his paycheck.

The Son Era

Good kid.  Friendly, happy, got good grades, played in a soccer league on the weekends.  New York Mets fan, but nobody’s perfect.  The son had come in on occasion to fill in as necessary, but once Nick left, he took over the day shift.  He had recently finished college and was applying to graduate schools.  He insisted on calling me by my last name, which freaked me out.  No matter how many times I tried to get him to stop, he couldn’t seem to do so.  “Are you watching the game today Mr. LeSabre?  Should be a great one!”  During his tenure they hired a new assistant, a really young kid, Johnny, who spoke only Spanish at first.  Johnny practiced his English like crazy.  He would step behind the counter as often as possible and come up with the most unnecessarily complicated questions he could.  Just to practice.   Johnny seemed to believe that my life consisted solely of making a lot of money, going out on wild dates, and drinking as much as possible.  He had no evidence for any of this.

Johnny met a girl that lived in another borough, and two weeks later he quit.  A cousin of the son was hired to replace him, and he is still there.  I think the cousin is confused about his job responsibilities.  He seems to think he is a security guard at a bank because all he does is stand about three feet from the counter like a statue.  No one seems comfortable telling him otherwise.  Much dust has accumulated since the cousin started.

The Dad Era

And now we are in the Dad era.  The son has gone back to school, and I’m stuck with grumpy under-paying, shitty-coffee-making dad.  If you buy cigarettes, he won’t give you matches unless you ask.  If you buy coffee, you have to ask for the napkin.  God forbid you ask for a sleeve.  You’d think you just tried to shake down the ATM machine.  And he never smiles.  He is a mean old man.  (Sometimes he forces a smile, but you know that forced smiles are worse than no smile at all.)  But I don’t really mind.  We have our routine.

The older son is there on occasion too now.  A character and a half.  I appreciate that he does not care even a little bit.  He would rather sit outside and smoke or rush home to his (admittedly gorgeous) new wife.  Since Turtle left, he’s by far the person I’m most inclined to just hang out with for a bit.  Because he smokes.  And because he will inevitably go on some rant about something in the pop culture news.  (He’s like a particularly incensed Crasstalk commenter now that I think about it.)

And recently, Country Man has gone from the night shift.  His wife, back in the old country, has become terminally ill.  He hasn’t seen her in years and wants to spend her last few months with her.  He may come back when she passes away, but maybe not.  I hope he does.  I miss Country Man.  Country Man’s replacement unintentionally sold cigarettes to minors on multiple occasions and got the store shut down for a week.  The doors were locked for the first time in thirty years.  They didn’t even know where the keys were.

The jarring feeling the next day when I went to buy my morning coffee, when, distracted by my email, I ran straight into a closed door and a big ol’ New York City notice, made me realize just how much a part of my life the little store on the corner is.  Good or bad, happy or sad, it’s a part of my life, and a part of what keeps the city from feeling so anonymous.  I’m no fool; I don’t pretend we are friends or even colleagues.  But I know them, and they know me.

Images from here.

Hollywood Heartbreak: More Things That Make You Say Urgh

80 comments

I love the Rotten Tomatoes site. For me, it’s the best little place to find movie critiques all wrapped up in either a big green splotch, or, and this is truly rare, a large healthy tomato, which indicates “Certified Fresh,” as reported by top reviewers in the business. Simple, but hugely effective.

When tooling around the site in preparation for the newest movies to check out, I’ve noticed more and more green monster splotches. Just hordes and hordes of ’em. A veritable army of bad, crappy, shit-laden shit-cinema. Holy Christmas Crackerjacks! Are there any good movies ever? Yes, yes, I know all the February Oscar stuffers are still playing, so if I haven’t caught The Black Swan (have, it sucked, mostly), True Grit (awesome!), The Kings Speech (Helena Bonham Carter gives me the face palsy), and The Fighter (will see it eventually, despite my disdain for Christian Bale and his gargled goat-bleats when he’s The Dark Knight), then, yes, I really should go see them all and forget anything else in the theater exists. But, well, it isn’t that easy. I love movies.

And, really, how can Hollywood so often get it wrong? Us viewers…we’re not a complicated lot. Just give us good original stories with compelling characters, add a few well-thought out surprises and mostly we’re chomping on that popcorn faster than a ferret through a sock tube. But instead we get the equivalent of dancing dollar bills dressed up like Martin Lawrence in a fat suit.

Where does all this start?

In a new weekly column, I plan to let you in on all the Hollywood stinky little secrets they’re planning for your viewing pleasure. So, if you ever wanted to know who’s greenlighting all this resplendent garbage, well, now you’ll know. Perhaps you’ll learn what to avoid completely, what to watch and mock mercilessly, or what to mock and avoid at your discretion.

Here are some things currently in development:


1) Red Sonja – Hey, Rose McGowan really needs the work! Well, since Robert Rodriguez, McGowan’s director boyfriend, lost this project to Simon West, they’re going a different way. Amber Heard (I have no idea who she is) has been tapped for the lead role. Let’s be honest. While it’s a cult classic and always good for a few laughs, Red Sonja was never a great movie. Brigitte Nielsen was like a mannequin with biceps.

That said, I don’t have much hope that this will be a better version, especially given the casting of Amber Heard, nobody person. It’s like making an already B-movie even B-ierer, if there is such a thing. The saving grace (Not really!) is that they plan to release this thing in between the upcoming Conan movies. (another pitiless reboot.) Strangely I don’t think that will help. We’ll just wonder why it was made at all.

2) Fletch – Once thought to be a Kevin Smith vehicle, but since the Clerks director has decided to retire (and go on the college tour circuit permanently?), there’s been no word on who would reprise the title role, write the damn thing, or helm it as director, for that matter. Nonetheless, Warner Bros. plans to move ahead with reincarnating the 1980’s movie about a smarmy reporter/man of disguise. Who are you thinking for the lead role? My vote is for Joel McHale or Paul Rudd, but since this is an awful idea, prepare for Shia LaBeouf or John Krasinski.


3) Highlander –  Um, okay. Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery made this famous, I suppose. Well, I think the SPIKE channel likes to air it, so I guess that means something.  There were numerous sequels, and if I’m not mistaken some sort of early 1990’s syndicated show, so it’s not as if the franchise is already suffering from overexposure or anything like that. Of course not. Apparently there is still a need to see immortal warrior dudes fighting it out in kilts and things. I assume they didn’t get the message that the only immortals us viewers like nowadays are vampires.

Neal Moritz, the producer of XXX and the Fast and Furious Franchises is involved, so that’s, uh, something. Basically what I take away from this is that the famous tagline “there can be only one,” isn’t exactly true, now is it?

4) Lethal Weapon – I think we’re all too old for this shit. Warner Bros. strikes again. Nevermind the fact that this movie is so closely related to Rage-a-maniac, Shout Monster Mel Gibson, they’re going full steam ahead with rebooting…well, actually they planned on a Lethal Weapon 5, starring Mel and Danny, but here’s what I think…the rest of the suits in that meeting just fell over dead when they heard that pitch. Just heart stopped, fucking toes up in the air dead. So, they’ve decided to find newer and younger guys to do this crazed man and sidekick retread. This is an awful, dreadful, idea…but hear me out, don’t you just see the guys from Psych doing this? James Roday and Dulé Hill would be awesome, no? No. Okay.


5) Dynasty – Break out the shoulder pads and the rat tail comb because ladies and gents Blake Carrington would like to take you on a bed of rubies. Not totally. The original creators, Richard and Esther Shapiro, are planning a prequel set in the 1960’s. So think Mad Men with more haughty stares and people calling each other “Bitch” with drinks in their hands. Thankfully there isn’t a studio ready to take this one on. But they have hope, boy, do they have hope. You can all thank the A-Team for this. Once you show that making one 1980’s laughable, egomaniacal farce in the wake of several others that have similarly crashed and burned to the ground…the point isn’t to learn from that mistake. No, the plan is to continue. Continue on like nothing happened, and let the critics pick at the dead carcass later, because you’ve made your money. Now you can go buy a boat.

That’s it for now. Your hurl sacks are situated in the tray holder directly in front of you.

Saturday Morning Cartoons

200 comments

Good morning (or afternoon if you are single). Hope your weekend is off to a good start and you get some time to relax today.

I am staying with friends this weekend and ready for some serious cartoon time with two of my favorite elementary-aged boys. They learned long ago that crazy Aunt GI will let them eat cupcakes for breakfast and watch the really awesome cartoons dad won’t.
Continue reading →

Confessions Of An Idiot

21 comments

Anyone who has spent any amount of time poking around the internet in the last decade will know that one of the internet’s gale force powers to be reckoned with is the power to make you famous for doing or saying something stupid. In dork-speak I think this malevolence would be referred to as chaotic-neutral. Doesn’t seem to matter what kind of stupid. Funny, dangerous, offensive, et al. If it was recorded, the world will see it and judge. The internet only facilitates.

I feel bad for many of these once and future memes. Haven’t we all said something dumb or had too much to drink and said “I can make that jump”? You’re a liar if you said “no”. That being said I thought I’d volunteer a couple of wickedly dumb things I’ve done in the past in hopes that you may too and we all may judge a little less harshly.

I was an art major in college. Specifically painting. As anyone who has gone to college knows you often enough end up with holes in your schedule that you can’t find anything degree-useful to fill with. After paying tuition the extra class fee seems kinda whatever so I would fill these holes with random classes. Anthropology, ancient Chinese history, whatever. I tried to do it with other art classes if I could which is how I ended up taking a marble carving class.

This class was awesome. I’m glad I took it. For one thing every other sculpture class I took firstly involved a long discussion of what equipment, fumes, radiation, glue, et cetera would kill you. This class started off with “Marble is calcium. You can eat it.”. Win! Maybe that’s what’s wrong with my teeth…

Most art carving is done with a pneumatic hammer these days. However to get the basic chunk of marble ready you need to cut it with a saw. We used handheld circular saws. The particular saws we had were equipped with safety switches whereas holding the button down it was on, slip your thumb off & it went off. I guess this prevents people from setting down saws that have watched too many Tom & Jerry cartoons that would then chase you and have a lunchbox would land on your head.

You know that rule about not wearing loose clothing around dangerous machinery? That’s a good one. Know the one about maybe not using a piece of dangerous machinery while by yourself out in a stoneyard? That one if it hasn’t been written should be.

I was cutting a block of marble by myself after hours with a loose sweatshirt on when said sweatshirt got caught up in the saw wrapped itself around my hand disallowing me from releasing the safety switch and thusly pulling the (running) saw closer and closer to my abdomen.

Fortunately I’m not much for panic. I walked over to where the two extension cords powering the saw went together, pulled them apart with my feet, put away my tools, walked downtown and proceeded to pummel my near death experience with Jack Daniels.

I’m a lot more trepidatious around power tools these days. Evisceration didn’t seem like it’d be much fun.

Oh and if you want to make fun of me for being a girl using power tools poorly I will pre-empt this urge of yours by informing you that I know how to weld. Not solder. Weld.

Ghost Stories Open Thread

182 comments

Good evening, my friend. It has been a few days since I have posted a conspiracy/paranormal/creepy overnight thread so here we go.

Did you know that UFOs were actually created by Nikola Tesla and that the CIA and Yahoo are covering it up. The proof is right here on this great 90s looking website.

Speaking of bad website design, I would be remiss if I didn’t give you at least one Reptilians link. See, Crasstalk doesn’t look so bad now, does it? Protip: The worse the website, the more epic the conspiracy theory.

Did you know that Stephen King shot John Lennon, and that Richard Nixon helped him cover it up? Now you do. You’re welcome.

Want more? Here’s a whole YouTube channel of creepy videos:

Sleep tight and watch out for the visitors.

Photo Phriday: Road Trip!

223 comments

Welcome to the second installment of Crasstalk Photo Phriday. Tonight we’re going on a road trip. Let’s see your pictures of:

  • Roadside attractions
  • Funny signs made by foreigners
  • Creepy Rob Zombie-esque desert hickvilles
  • Cars with hundreds of tchotchkes glued to the hood (not actually Tchotchke glued to the hood, hopefully)
  • Genuinely beautiful roadside landscapes
  • Those hitchikers that God told you to murder back in the cold, cold winter of 81

And since we usually do an alternate subject for those of you who don’t have ANY pictures from ANY road trip you EVER took (can you see me rolling my eyes, because I am), how about just post an interesting photo from any trip you took anywhere.

Here are instructions for how to post your pictures in the comments:

  • This is the magic computer code you use to make pictures appear: <img src=”PHOTO URL HERE“>
  • And it’s “photo URL“, not “photo file.” See, Crasstalk is a stubborn mistress, and she doesn’t accept gifts from your hard drive–only from the internet. Upload your photo to Facebook, Flickr, TinyPic, or any other online photo hosting site.
  • Or, if it’s something of which there’s more than one in the world, you might wanna just see if there’s a picture of your chosen knickknack online somewhere.
  • So for instance, let’s say I want to share with you all a photo of, oh, I dunno, my stepdad. But I don’t have any photos on my computer of him, and he’s out getting wasted again at the Applebee’s bar. Luckily, I find a picture of him online and insert it like so:

<img src=”http://www.stepdadsgettingitonwitheachother.com/passed-out/shirt_unbuttoned.jpg“ />

  • I go to the site in question, browse new pics for about a half hour (optional), subscribe to the site’s RSS feed (also optional), and then find the image of my dad. I right-click the picture (Ctrl-click, if I’m on a Mac) and select “View Image.” A new page appears, with just my photo on it! Oh boy.  Now all I do is copy-and-paste the URL and plug it into the img src html code. Voilà!

Recipes for People Who Can’t Cook Good

57 comments

As a typical aimless twenty-something, my busy schedule of wasting my life on the Internet and staring meaningfully into the distance often makes it  hard to find the time to eat properly. Unfortunately, articles with titles like “20-minute Meals” or “One Pot Dishes” appear to be written for people who don’t know how to cook yet have a kitchen stocked with fresh sage leaves, something called “cumin,” and a whole bunch of other stuff that sounds totally made up, along with the standard spouse and 2.5 kids. They do not address themselves to the concerns and lifestyles of those whose tiny pantry is mostly taken up by their roommates’ pretzels and boxes of mac n’ cheese, and whose part-time blogging job does not allow them to purchase fancy ingredients most of which will inevitably spoil.

Clearly, what is needed is a series of recipes for people who are willing to cut up and/or mix some things and put them on the stove, but not much else. The idea is to keep it as simple and minimalist as possible while still turning out things that are hopefully a step above reheated pasta with a can of tuna dumped into it. No ingredients that you wouldn’t be able to find at the crappy Associated or Key Foods on your street, no long instructions for making your own sauce if you can buy something similar in a bottle, no perishable ingredients that only come in larger quantities than you can reasonably use by yourself, and no unnecessary garnishes or decorative crap.

With that in mind, I give you:

Creamy mushroom chicken and potatoes with spices and herbs and junk

If your final product doesn't look like this, you have completely and utterly failed.

Makes one serving. If you’ve got a problem with that, maybe you should ask your loving partner to help you with the multiplication. Jerk.

Ingredients:

-1/4 can cream of mushroom soup
-1/2 boneless, skinless chicken breast, diced
-Marinade (lemon pepper, herb garlic, or Italian dressing)
-Some chopped fresh onion
-Some vinegar or white cooking wine

-2 red potatoes the size of small fists (if you’re a real cheapskate and insist on using regular brown potatoes, go ahead, but don’t say I didn’t warn you)
-Some salt, pepper, oregano and other random spices
-Some olive oil or vegetable oil or whatever
-Fresh garlic or garlic/onion powder

Cut up the potatoes into small pieces, like eighths or something, and put them in a bowl. Then pour some oil and whatever spices you have in your pantry on them. I don’t know how much, just go crazy. If you’ve got some real garlic, chop it up real small and toss some of that in too, otherwise just use garlic or onion powder. Then stir all that shit until the potatoes are coated. Put them on a baking tray lined with tin foil and put that in the oven at 550 degrees for like 25-30 minutes, depending on whether you remembered to preheat – I never do.

While those are baking, heat up some oil on a frying pan, and dump in the chicken that you should’ve had marinating for at least an hour. Sprinkle some salt and pepper on it. Toss the chopped onions in there too, what the hell. Fry it for like 5 minutes or until it looks fairly solid. Then add in the 1/4 can of mushroom soup and like half a tablespoon of vinegar or a dash of white wine, and stir that all together.  Sprinkle that with some garlic powder if you want, because there’s no such thing as too much garlic. Fry it for a couple more minutes, stirring occasionally, until you see the creamy sauce start to turn brown and sticky, then TURN OFF THE FLAME WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU DO YOU WANT THE WHOLE GODDAMN THING TO BURN?

If you have managed to get this far without hopelessly screwing everything up, dump the creamy chicken goop on top of the potatoes that you hopefully remembered to take out of the oven and OM NOM NOM NOM. But not right away, because it’s hot and stuff.

Found Footage Friday – The Movie that Scared a Generation (in one small Indiana town)

17 comments

Hello and welcome to the first Found Footage Friday, where I present all sorts of video footage you may find surprising and entertaining. I’m going to start with something very close to home.

I grew up in Bloomington, Indiana in the 1980s. Home of Indiana University and its esteemed folklore department and a small but thriving public access cable channel. I don’t know if it was a student’s folklore project or something the department decided to do, but if you say “Haunted Indiana” to any Bloomington child of the ’80s, they will tell you how it totally scared the hell out of them when they were kids. We now look back on it with great fondness and, thanks to the internet, it is something I can share with all of you.

It’s a collection of short horror stories based on Indiana folklore, shot on a budget of two buttons and a shoelace with a soundtrack stolen from Hitchcock’s Psycho and narrated by local TV personality Mike White. Here it is in all its glory. There is not much for me to tell you about it, just watch it (it’s less than an hour long) and discover the frightening horror that is Haunted Indiana-

Haunted Indiana Part 1 – Intro

Haunted Indiana Part 2 – Haunted Woods

Haunted Indiana Part 3 – The Cable Line Monster

Haunted Indiana Part 4 – The Campers

Haunted Indiana Part 5 – Burnt (a.k.a. the boring one before the really scary one)

Haunted Indiana part 6 – Monster in the Bedroom

That last one gave hundreds of children nightmares about never waking up the next morning. I hope you enjoyed the movie that was the stuff of nightmares for one midwestern town with a population (at the time) of less than 50,000 people. The world may never known the horror of Haunted Indiana, but now you do. Welcome to our nightmare.

Stray Tracks of the Week (2/14-2/18/11)

5 comments

I listen to music constantly, and I’m constantly acquiring new things. So much, in fact, that serious evaluation on an album-by-album basis is impossible. To ensure my musical hoarding doesn’t amount to too much waste, I’ve elected to begin picking out choice tracks from my catch and reviewing them, here. I’m hoping to make this a weekly thing, every Thursday or Friday night, mods willin’.

This week yielded a bumper crop of drone-folk and neoclassical records that I’m falling in love with, along with my usual assortment of House and club music oddities. We start out with Portland, the whitest town on Earth, and its lovely indie-folk.

Laura Gibson & Ethan Rose – Younger (from Bridge Carols on Holocene Music)

Hate to say it, but there’s only one thing remotely problematic with Laura Gibson & Ethan Rose’s Bridge Carols music, and that’s Gibson’s vocal similarity to a great many other indie darling folksters, particularly Joanna Newsom or Regina Spektor (it’s the heaviness of the “ah” and “aw” sounds, I think). It’s not a terrible detriment by any means – indeed, while it wears a bit thin over the entire album, it’s quite effective on a song-to-song basis, particularly in the LP’s first three tracks, the last of which is “Younger”. Ethan Rose’s bed of warm, swooning woodwinds, electro-acoustic trickery (chiming guitar and a bit of… jangling keys, sounds like) and sparingly applied brass evoke the dream-like feel of some of Grouper‘s more romantic tracks, but it only lasts for about half the song – the final 3 minutes are bog-standard, if pleasant, acoustic folk.

Gibson’s lyrics are nonsensical, all stars and fighting and dark places, but it’s fairly difficult to focus on them – the purpose of the song is the mood it creates, and every element of the song sheds definition in service to it. Not the strongest track on the album, but a beautiful and relaxing one all the same.

(“Bridge Carols” looks to be unavailable for purchase in the US on Boomkat, but it’s apparently available via 7digital.)

FaltyDL – Hip Love (from the Hip Love single on Ramp Recordings)

FaltyDL (ne Andrew Lustman) is one of the more prolific producers operating at the moment, releasing some new remix every few weeks and dropping an album or a clutch of EPs (or both) on a yearly basis, and perhaps as a result of that his sound hasn’t really grown in some time. Sure, he’s changed things up a time or two, but ever since he dropped the weirder, more melodic elements of his full-length debut Love is a Liability in favor of straightforward NY Garage revivalism, all his tracks have been either somewhat samey (most every single he’s released in the last year, plus the Phreqaflex EP) or nondescript (Endeavour, a slo-House experiment that should have been much more effective than it ended up being). One gets a sense there’s a definite “quantity over quality” problem occurring here.

While “Hip Love” has all the same elements that make up Lustman’s lackluster tracks (the shuffle in the rhythm and his signature snare / hi-hat sound)  it’s apparent that something is just a bit different this time around, and it doesn’t fully register until about the 1:45 mark, when he launches into a  jazzy drum machine solo that belies Lustman’s hidden love for jungle. It perfectly fits in with the smoky NYC soul aesthetic articulated through the chanteuse vox and horn brass samples that pepper the track. It’s easily the best thing Lustman’s done since All in the Place dropped almost a year ago.

(You can grab the “Hip Love” single, featuring a remix from Jamie xx of The xx fame, for download over at Boomkat)

Mountains – Map Table (from Choral on Thrill Jockey)

I like drone music of all kinds. Most people, I think, get apprehensive when they hear the term “drone” being thrown around, and not without good reason – the sort of dense, academic tone-music that someone like, say, Keith Fullerton Whitman routinely creates will only appeal to certain people. But there are many disparate and distinct schools of drone music, and perhaps the most accessible of these is folk-drone. Where synth-based drone is often alienating and esoteric, folk-drone tends towards the sort of uplift and sustained bliss that’s commonly associated with its stylistic cousins in post-rock and ambient music. The focus on acoustic instrumentation is a big part of it – there’s a certain vital element introduced in folk-drone that is often missing in more experimental variants of the form.

Mountains’ Choral is a good example. Many otherwise drone-averse listeners will be immediately struck by the sustained, undulating organ (is there a more beautiful sound?) upon which the title track slowly build into a vibrant wall of sound. An entire album of this sort of composition would end up rich but ultimately a little daunting, and Mountains subvert expectations to some extent with the launch of their next song, “Map Table”, which is built almost entirely around an evocatively played acoustic guitar. Comparisons to neo-folk artists like James Blackshaw are probably inevitable, but ultimately the track avoids the sort of showboating that virtuosos like Blackshaw sometimes fall prey to. A little after the 3 minute mark the melody is dropped and the guitar becomes a percussive instrument, creating a sound like bicycle spokes clicking erratically as lulling, murky piano comes to usher the song towards its end. The attention paid to the acoustic guitar is sustained over the next few tracks, holding the otherwise effervescent album together. A little bit of variety goes a long way.

(“Choral” is available digitally from the Fina store. I would strongly advise tracking down a vinyl copy, as it includes two excellent extra tracks)

Deaf Center – The Day I Never Would Have (from Owl Splinters on Type)

I have to credit Svarte Greiner (ne Erik K. Skodvin) and Otto Totland for, in large part, introducing me to “modern classical” fandom.  Greiner’s “doom folk” (his album covers are art in themselves) and Totland’s cinematic piano pieces (check out his Nest project’s Retold, you won’t regret it – my favorite record of 2010) helped me develop the patience that’s often required to digest the more deliberate compositions that I seek out in the present day. Their second collaborative LP as Deaf Center, Owl Splinters, is one I plan on reviewing in full at some point in the near future, but I thought I’d take a moment to focus on the album’s centerpiece, the grand epic “The Day I Would Never Have”.

At 11 minutes it seems daunting, but from the moment Totland’s grand piano first makes its appearance the song begins to slowly gain an undeniable momentum. Skodvin’s elegaic, quietly wailing strings surface and they build and build up in intensity, endlessly, upward until the song becomes a seething mass. Then it drops, like a continental shelf, leaving Totland to reintroduce his flitting, graceful piano in an open expanse. It’s a breathtaking piece, almost too effective for the album as a whole to hold, and it delivers fully on the promise of Skodvin and Totland’s collaboration.

(You can buy “Owl Splinters” at Boomkat)

Whew! That took longer than I expected. I might have to stick to 3 or so songs a week or at least work on my brevity problem. Hope you liked some of this stuff! I’ll be back next week, barring excessive school obligations, with more.