RYAN ADAMS

Ryan Adams Didn’t Die. Now the Work Begins.
NY TIMES

ONE afternoon, as Ryan Adams was recording his new album, “Easy Tiger” (Lost Highway), at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, the singer-songwriter Steve Earle dropped by to visit. Jimi Hendrix had built Electric Lady in the late 1960s, and Mr. Earle pointed out that “there are some good ghosts here.”

“Yeah,” Mr. Adams blithely responded. “There are the ghosts of about 45 speedballs from when I was recording here a year or two ago,” referring to a mixture of heroin and cocaine.

At once self-deprecating and self-mythologizing, the remark is characteristic of Mr. Adams, who is in the process of shoring up a career — and a life — that he had done his best to blow up. “There was intense loneliness, end-of-the-world stuff going on in my mind, bottomless depression,” he said, describing an extended period of substance abuse that ended a little over a year ago. “Without exaggerating, it is a miracle I did not die.

“I snorted heroin a lot — with coke. I did speedballs every day for years. And took pills. And then drank. And I don’t mean a little bit. I always outdid everybody.”

Among Mr. Adams’s friends, colleagues and fans the hope is that “Easy Tiger,” a title that speaks wryly for itself, will complete his restoration. It is focused — read: not insanely self-indulgent — in a way that recalls albums of his like “Heartbreaker” and “Gold,” high points in a catalog that defines the term checkered. In one among many orchestrated signs of Mr. Adams’s stature, Stephen King wrote the record company bio that will accompany the album’s release on June 26. Mr. King calls it “maybe the best Ryan Adams CD ever.”

The plan is for it to be his biggest seller as well. Mr. Adams is touring to promote it, and “Two,” which features a harmony vocal by Sheryl Crow, has been released as a single. Starbucks will carry “Easy Tiger,” and pre-order campaigns have been set up with iTunes, Amazon and other outlets. For an artist whose notoriety has far exceeded his sales to date, it’s a full-on marketing push.

Mr. Adams has also reunited with his former manager, John Silva, a veteran who has worked with the independent-minded likes of Nirvana, Sonic Youth and the Beastie Boys. ”I just crawled back and said, ‘Look, I made a mistake, many mistakes — I don’t know what to do,’ ” Mr. Adams said.

“I got good advice on what tunes seemed to be working, and how to pace myself,” he said about Mr. Silva’s help in putting together “Easy Tiger” from the dozens of songs he was considering. “He led me to view that process as a type of discipline — like going to the gym or something. Focus. Work on one thing. Make the one thing really good.”

Meanwhile Mr. Adams’s contract with Lost Highway is coming to an end, and his erratic and willful ways, while enhancing his status as a cult figure, haven’t exactly made him an industry darling. Nor, for that matter, have his public denunciations of his label, which is generally known for being sympathetic to artists. In that context “Easy Tiger” is a virtual case study of Mr. Adams’s ability to make the sort of record that people once routinely expected of him: smart, accessible, fun, poignant and potentially commercial. It’s an advertisement for the once-unthinkable possibility that, at 32 and sober, Mr. Adams might finally have matured.

Luke Lewis, the chairman of the Nashville division of the Universal Music Group, of which Lost Highway is a part, seemed wistful as he pondered the departure of his old nemesis. “He’s like a kid to me,” Mr. Lewis said. “I’ve always loved him. We’ve had a couple of fights, and we’ve actually contrived a few fights, to be honest. It wasn’t lost on either of us that it’s not a bad thing for him to be the petulant child of a record label.”

So will he try to convince Mr. Adams to stay with Lost Highway? “If you love him, set him free,” Mr. Lewis said with a laugh that suggested a former partner who recalled the bad times as well as the good. “Do I want to stop being friendly with him? Never. Is he a valuable asset to a label? Yes, no question. Did we make money? Yes, both of us. I have no sour grapes about it at all.”

A native of Jacksonville, N.C., where he played in punk-rock bands as a teenager, Mr. Adams became an alt-country sensation with the group Whiskeytown in the mid-’90s. After going solo in 1999, he briefly flirted with “next big thing” status with the release of “Gold” in 2001 — on Sept. 11, to be exact. “Gold” coincidentally featured Mr. Adams posing in front of an American flag (albeit an upside-down one) as well as a rousing anthem to his adopted hometown, “New York, New York.” His irresistible optimism, energy and sheer talent provided a bracing tonic.

Then things began to get weird. He started making records at a blazing clip, at least by the rules of an industry that at the time preferred releases every two or three years. He put out at least an album a year — three in 2005 — and vilified Lost Highway for not releasing even more. Mr. Adams posted dozens of songs on his Web site, some ridiculous and some drawing comparisons to his best work. Whether he could tell the difference began to emerge as a question.

His official albums drew similarly polarized responses. “Heartbreaker” (2000), “Gold” (2001), “Cold Roses” (2005) and “Jacksonville City Nights” (2005) live up to his promise. His other four albums — “Demolition” (2002), “Rock N Roll” (2003), “Love Is Hell Pt. 1” (2003) and ”Pt. 2” (2004) and “29” (2005) — are mixed bags at best. “Gold,” his most commercially successful album, has sold fewer than 400,000 copies; “29,” his most recent, sold about 81,000.

More disturbing was Mr. Adams’s strange behavior. A heckler’s sarcastic request for the Canadian rocker Bryan Adams’s “Summer of ’69” at a New York show in 2002 incited an onstage meltdown. A negative concert review prompted Mr. Adams to leave a caustic message on a critic’s answering machine, which widely circulated on the Web. Mr. Adams’s shows took on a shambling quality that left many fans befuddled or angry. By the time he fell off a stage in Britain in 2004 and shattered his left wrist, both supporters and detractors began to worry about him. With good reason, as it turned out.

MR. ADAMS sat on a chair on the tar roof of Electric Lady, as traffic sounds blared from the street below. Wearing a red MTV T-shirt and torn jeans, he squinted in the sunshine as he struggled to recount his descent.

“My behavior was getting extreme,” he said, smoking an American Spirit. “I was running the risk of becoming one of those people who talks to himself all the time. I was about to walk over this line that there was no coming back from, and I could feel it. I was seeing ghosts and hearing stuff. Having horrible nightmares. I was creating as much distance from people as possible so that, in the event that something terrible happened, it wouldn’t hurt them.”

Mr. Lewis of Lost Highway worried that he was going to die. “I think anybody who knew him well and cared for him went there,” he said.

Mr. Adams said that people were imploring him to clean up. “I got a call one day from two people who have looked out for me for a long time,” he said. “They said, ‘We think you need to go away.’ I said: ‘Look, I can do this myself. And if I don’t succeed, I’ll agree to that.’ ”

So he did not enter a rehab program; instead he did a modified cold-turkey cure with the help of his girlfriend, Jessica Joffe, a writer who has also modeled, most notably in a prominent Banana Republic campaign. “I could have done it alone, but it would have been harder,” Mr. Adams said. “I got some valium, which sounds like cheating, but it really wasn’t.”

As the agony of withdrawal kicked in after a few days, he went out, got drunk and then called Ms. Joffe. She fetched him from the bar and brought him back to the apartment they share. “That was it,” Mr. Adams said. “That was the last time.” He now occasionally attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

With more than a year’s sobriety under his belt, a new album and an open road ahead of him in terms of how he chooses to release his music, Mr. Adams nonetheless continues to dream of a world better able to accommodate his particular brand of unfiltered creativity. It’s evident that a conventional record contract will never satisfy him. It’s even possible that he could end up epitomizing the recording artist of the future: making music available online at will, performing theater-size shows for a devoted core of fans and leaving it up to his audience to decide which of his songs they care to own.

“It’s not, like, ‘He’s over-prolific because he’s wasted,’ ” he explained. “No, man, you haven’t heard anything. You think that’s prolific? That’s just what trickled through. But that’s the whole thing. It’s a marketplace. I wish it was more like a museum of wack ideas.”

Those wack ideas were prominently on display at Electric Lady as Mr. Adams grew distracted while working on “Easy Tiger.”

“Obviously keeping up with him is a big part of the job,” said Jamie Candiloro, who produced the album. Mr. Adams was preparing to record his guitar part for “Locust Pocus,” a song he’d written minutes earlier for “Numb Chunks” (or maybe it’s “Gnome Chunks”?), a fake-metal album he’d conceived a few minutes before that.

Mr. Adams, Mr. Candiloro and the drummer Brad Pemberton had been listening to the background vocal Sheryl Crow had recorded for the ballad “Two.” Mr. Adams had first been enthusiastic and obsessive during the playback (“God, she can sing. Take my vocal down, and bring hers up”), then restless, then bored. As he listened over and over, he drew a caricature of himself holding an acoustic guitar and singing lyrics that parody the song’s aching chorus. The caption read, “Blah, blah, blah, whine, whine, whine/It takes two when it used to take one.”

It was midafternoon, at least two hours before rehearsals at another studio. By Mr. Adams’s standards, that’s easily enough time to get a couple of new songs written and recorded.

As Mr. Candiloro adjusted settings at the console, Mr. Adams stood at the microphone, played a blistering riff and screeched a placeholder vocal: “This is where the verse is gonna go/And it’s gonna be emo.” He came back into the control booth, wrote the song’s actual lyrics (“I am the wizard ... . The world is at your command”), recorded the vocal and the song was done. On to the next one: “Cobra Kadabra.”

A week after the conversation on the roof of Electric Lady, Mr. Adams vanished from a rehearsal minutes before a reporter was set to arrive for an interview. No one could locate him, and he never reappeared.

While par for the course a couple of years ago, this is precisely the sort of thing the new, improved Mr. Adams is supposed to have grown out of. A few days later at his apartment in a Greenwich Village brownstone, he is, if not apologetic, at least at pains to manufacture some sort of comprehensible excuse, an effort at which he pathetically fails. Yawning between manic bursts of words, he was clearly uncomfortable. “All these different lines of communication got messed up,” he said sheepishly.

When Ms. Joffe entered the room, he brightened. “I met someone who has become my closest friend,” he had said of her earlier. “She’s nothing like me — two different worlds. She’s a person rooted in reason. Imagine that. She’s very kind.” She said she had gotten sober a short time before Mr. Adams did. “It sounds so cheesy, but we have these miniature A.A. meetings with each other,” said Ms. Joffe, who agreed to discuss their relationship at his request.

In jeans and a black top that she fiddled with constantly, Ms. Joffe struggled in a perfectly enunciated British accent to find the terms in which to encapsulate their relationship. Mr. Adams, meanwhile, repeatedly left and re-entered the room, flattered and teased her and succeeded in derailing her train of thought.

“We went from being Sid and Nancy ...,” Ms. Joffe began at one point, alluding to one of punk’s most famous doomed couples.

“Not that cool,” Mr. Adams insisted.

“No, darling, not that cool,” Ms. Joffe agreed, laughing. “More like, a low-rent, mall version of Sid and Nancy. Or, like, romanticizing that sort of debauchery and excess. At least for me there was a weird aesthetic enjoyment of it. Then we flipped it over 180 degrees.”

Mr. Adams said: “We were holding each other together. Or should I say you got me through it? It was sweet, even though it was messed up. But we had skills.”

Ms. Joffe acknowledged, “Toward the end it was getting a little worrying.”

“Everybody says that!” Mr. Adams declared in cheerful frustration, the prospect of his own demise having become, at least for the moment, merely a punch line.




radiohead


arcade fire


ryan adams

FRESH FROZEN; FRIENDLY FIRE

U.S. soldiers killed eight Afghan policemen Tuesday after mistaking them for Taliban forces. A spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition force says the police fired on them first. How do troops normally avoid friendly fire?

With "combat identification systems." These vary depending on the combat situation. For example, airplanes talk to each other using a system known as Identification Friend or Foe, a call-and-response technology similar to that used by air traffic control. An "interrogator" device on one plane sends a coded signal to a transponder aboard another aircraft. If the plane replies, it is considered friendly. Ground troops use several different systems to separate friends and enemies. One works a lot like IFF, but for ground vehicles instead of planes. Another system, called Blue Force Tracking, takes advantage of satellite communications to map out all the friendly units in a certain area, but doesn't refresh in real time. While these technologies can help to identify the positions of friendly vehicles, they don't provide much information about individual soldiers.

Not all battlefield ID methods are so high-tech. During Operation Desert Storm, ground troops wore infrared beacons known as Darpa lights and Budd lights, which were visible to anyone with night-vision goggles at up to 5 miles. (This method is less useful now that night-vision technology has become more available to enemy forces.) Troops also signal their allegiance using glow sticks or thermal tape arranged in different shapes. During the first Gulf War, for example, coalition forces taped a "V" onto their uniforms.

To avoid deadly mistakes, soldiers are expected to follow rules of engagement detailing the appropriate action for every situation, both offensive and defensive. Each country has its own rules, often tailored to specific operations, as do coalitions like NATO. In 2005, American soldiers received "anti-fratricide training" to reduce the number of attacks on British and coalition forces, while the British were instructed to display the Union Jack prominently on their vehicles and approach American convoys slowly.

Fratricide, also known as amicicide, "friendly fire," or "blue-on-blue" hostility, has always been a problem for modern armies. During the French and Indian War, a ship commanded by Gen. George Washington and another commanded by a British officer fired on each other, each thinking the other was French. Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson died after catching three friendly bullets in the right hand and left arm. During World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, estimates of the rate of American casualties resulting from friendly fire ranged from 2 percent to 16 percent. More recently, the 2003 attack on a British convoy by U.S. aircraft gained international attention after a video featuring the pilots' frustrated dialogue leaked to the press. The death of soldier and former NFL player Pat Tillman in 2004 was also the result of friendly fire.

TONY

i thought the last episode was perfect. I'm not disappointed at all. We were privileged, over the past eight years, to receive an all-access pass to David Chase's brain. The pass has been revoked, but I think we were lucky to have been let inside in the first place. Sure, he played a trick on us, and it was even a pitiless trick (the final sound we heard after 86 hours of modern-day Shakespeare, after all, was Steve Perry's voice), but so what? When the screen went black, I laughed.

I thought the greatest surprise last night was not Phil Leotardo's death (talk about curbing!) or A.J.'s fair-weather patriotism, but Agent Harris' chest hair. (His moral corruption was not that startling.) Isn't there some antique-but-still-on-the-books Hoover-era regulation prohibiting such jungly man-growth?

But onto the issue of the moment: I disagree with Tim's miffled suggestion that this trick of an ending came about because David Chase couldn't imagine another way out. I think you're not crediting Chase properly. Anyone who could envision Janice's shooting of Richie Aprile, or Junior's shooting of Tony, or, for that matter, Silvio Dante's hair, or the murder of Cosette, could, I suspect, gin up a finale that smelled more like a finale than this one did. That said, I think Tim is right: Chase should have had the courage of his ambivalence and let Phil Leotardo live. Of course, then he'd have to crush someone else's head under an SUV, because how do you pass up the opportunity to stage such a scene as that, once it comes to you?

But I think Chase's mission throughout the series was to make an anti-television television series, and in this, he succeeded perfectly. He also, by the way—and Brian has taken note of this—delivered an above-average Sopranos episode in the process. Several lines were priceless, and Tony delivered what might be the greatest comeback ever issued on the show:

Meadow: "The state can crush the individual."
Tony (incredulously): "New Jersey?"

That's what I'll miss most about the show: the acid, hypocrisy-puncturing humor. Unless, of course, this isn't the end of The Sopranos, after all. There might be a more quotidian reason we were left hanging: A Sopranos movie, or an entirely new season, a few years down the road.



UH OH

QUICK STREAM-OF-THOUGHT TYPING WHILE ON A PLANE LISTENING TO AN iPOD SHUFFLE

Running diary of plane ride to vancouver:

- Smooth talk way into maple leaf lounge to load up on snacks/drinks/bad magazines
- see old lady with ice cream cone and ask her where I can get one like it. She offers to buy one for me which makes me wonder if a) I look poor b) she's trying to make a new friend. I politely declined (but did get a raspberry-chocolate swirl)
- 60 minutes waiting on plane at gate for "stewardesses" to show.
- read a great, tragic, funny bil simmons article on the poor celtics. Love his passion but there are far harder-luck teams to love
- already seen the movie on the flight (which I won't name since I'm embarrassed that I've seen it already)

Songs I enjoyed on the airplane:
Families - neil young ("in the Uuuu Ssss Aaaa") -- have been reading a lot lately about nixon (by conrad black), reagan (new diaries released confirming his simple nature), lincoln (new yorker . I still want to read manhunt btw)

Songbird - willie nelson ("and I feel that when I'm with you it's alright" "I'll give the world to you" "and I love you I love you I love like never before") -- actually it's ryan adams' band's backing track that makes this track, not the lyrics)

California love - 2pac.-- not sure how this made it on the shuffle but I was tapping feet like I was "back in the wild wild west")

Ashes - joseph arthur -- thinking of bill taylor tonight; hope he's ok.

Ballad of big nothing - elliott smith -- I wonder if he'll get nick drake-level status someday and be rediscovered in 2020 by fledgling TV writers to score a teen drama ("do what what you want to whenever you want to, though it doesn't mean a thing. Big nothing.") He used strings sparingly but nicely.

The river - bruce springsteen -- I wish there were more of these story-songs around. Not the green day version with a snappy video (is anyone surprised that that actress from said video and thirteen is dating marilyn manson?) but the compelling, i-could-have-been-there ones. ("For my 19th birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat").

Guess I'm doing fine - beck -- speaking of videos immediately I'm thinking of this one. Check it out on youtube. It's perfect for the song. Life goes on. Summer arrives. ("I can do whatever pleases me.")

Stratford-on-guy - liz phair -- blast from the past. Great flying song: ("in 27D I was behind the wing looking out as the landscape rolled by like credits on a screen")

Still fighting it - Ben folds -- reminds me of being a dad, a relatively new one or a potential one. ("Everybody knows it hurts to grow up... you're so much like me.. How I picked you up and everything changed... And may you feel the same things... One day you'll fly away from me...") It hits cats in the cradle territory. Looking forward to going home this weekend and looking forward to the wild wild wild month ahead.

Never say goodbye - bob dylan -- an appropriate song as I head to a wonderful wedding this weekend ("you're beautiful beyond words. You're beautiful to me. You could make me cry. Never say goodbye" "crashing waves roll over me as I stand upon the sand and wait for you to come and grab hold of my hand")

Supernatural - vic chesnutt --("still they see him shimmer ephemeral. It aint supernatural... Out of body experience. I flew around a hospital room once on intravenous demerol...it weren't supernatural"). "Injured bird: something clobbered me in the head. I was flattered but ambivalent."

Betty Lonely - vic chesnutt -- "Betty lonely lives in a duplex of stucco, on the north bank of a brackish river. Her ears omit the sounds from the nearby airstrip." Can there be a beter opening to a song? When vic is at the height of his powers (withering, cutty sark, expiration day, panic pure, parade) there are few better lyricists. "Her maidenhood was lost beneath the spanish moss...."

Diamond ring - joseph arthur -- I'd see him live again.
Others: if you wear that velvet dress, mercy mercy me, pink moon, you only live once, israelites, fever (reggae version), waitin for a superman ("is it getting heavy? Well I thought it was already as heavy as can be?")

I'm to blame - Hayden -- wow this brings back some shit memories. What a depressing record. Should be banned for teenagers. Pretty melody though. He seemed to underachieve?

Brandy alexander - feist -- I guess this is a drink. My version would be the martini, or more subtly sangria. Every time. would have liked to see feist this weekend. I like how she dances. She does it in every video. I've seen her live though and she doesn't dance much.

Ticket to ride -- beatles -- what a melody. I love the drums in this song.

Comfortably numb - van morrison et al. NO song has been used to greater effect than this two weeks ago on the sopranos. I can't shale that episode from my mind and the terrible doom that seems to await T.

That voice again - peter gabriel -- interestingly, and oddly in retrospect, I used to ALWAYS listen to this song whenever taking off or landing in a plane when I was young. On my silver sony walkman. So is a good record -- haven't heard it in a long time. His creativity seemed to dry up after Us. Reminds me of red house painters. Or country feedback which came on next but I'm not in the mood for. ("Its the wolf that knows which root to dig, the octopus that crawled back to the sea. Instinct. Gut. Feeling.")

«Aside: there is a thick layer of cloud below me but there's a river or trough the plane is following where you can see the sun shining through to the prairie below. I think we're on the Gimli Glider. The guy next to me is browsing soft porn on his laptop. Classy. He has a pic of a muscle car on his desktop»

Wilco - promising/either way -- ("cross yr fingers behind your back. Squeeze mine til they crack. I should have known you were just promising.") People are complaining the new wilco is too vanilla, too eagles, too steely dan. I think it's briliant, restrained music but I do predict that they will become a phish/grateful dead like band in the next 5 yrs. ("Nmaybe the sun will shine today. The clouds will roll away... Everything has its plan...") Reminds me of a long wide open road trip across canada.

Dear chicago - ryan adams -- love this short, sad, confusing song. Is it new york, chicago, a girl?
Dance all night - ryan adams -- not sure of the odds of this coming next on ye olde shuffle. ("Yeah I got someone I love").

Neighbourhood #1 - arcade fire -- quintessential AF song in my mind. ("Then I'll dig a tunnel frommy room to yours...") I feel like it could be the soundtrack to saramago's Blindness (which, interestingly, is being shot in toronto). Wake Up: must admit I was disappointed not to hear this live the other night. Such a powerful experience for some reason, rivalling only WTSHNN maybe. ("Now that I'm older, my heart colder, and I can't see that it's alive")

You're missing - springsteen. -- speaking of quintessential songs, is this the one for 9/11? Not sure. But the firefighters' wives are bloody clear in my mind here. "Everything is everything.". It's like "it is what it is". "How is everything, everything?" Perhaps 9/11 requires an angrier tone an angrier anthem.

Foolproof - ron sexsmith -- takes a special songwriter to write this and get away with it and then some. (Nb. Saw ron on conan. He's put on weight)

Angelyne - Jayhawks -- the canadian blue rodeo. I wonder who has sold more records. I predict BR -- ("cool cool water running down my back")

Hells bells -- AC/DC. I first heard this via my neighbour who was ~5 yrs older than me on regent st in london. I preferred this to whip it and tom sawyer which were also introduced.

Trouble in the fields - Sarah Harmer -- one of those voices that could sing the phone book and I would be hooked. Like this melody more than any other on this record. Ties back nicely to her environmental focus right now.

Already dead - beck. ("Times wears away all the pleasures of the day all the treasures you could hold. Love looks away in the harsh light of the day") But it's not the words here. It's the acoustic guitar that makes this song entirely.

Kite - U2 -- I don't know how or why U2 sounds 50X beter live with 3 instruments being played than other bands who have 5 or 6. Their sound is so full. This is, I think, their most perfectly recorded live song (live from boston 2001 or dublin 2002). ("I'm a man. I'm not a child. I'm a man who sees a shadow behind your eyes... I know this is not goodbye... Is there somewhere I can taste the salt of the sea? There's a kite blowing out of control on the breeze. I wonder what is going to happen to you. You wonder what will happen to me.")

Aint that enough - teenage fanclub -- I need to search out the full songs from northern britain album, their best record in my mind.

Hey joe - jimi h -- along with down by the river, two of the best songs (and guitar solos) ever walk on the dark side. The gentle 'ahhhhhh' in the background only further uneases. "And that aint too cool".

My favourite mistake - s crow -- uh, ok, two guilty pleasures. This and 'if it makes you happy'. Not sure why but they've both always gotten right to it for me. It does make you wonder how many mistakes she's made never having married.

Ocean breathes salty - sun kil moon -- after covering acdc and modest mouse I would like to see kozelek tackle jay-z, arcade fire or nazareth.

Lover, you should have come over - Jeff buckley -- I remember seeing an early episode of alias several yrs ago. This played well near the end. As a result it reminds me of complicated love lives in los angeles.

Beautiful - Aimee mann -- I guess I could have stopped listening to her after magnolia. This doesn't stand up over time.

Dead man's will - Iron&Wine -- I think I might want this played/sung/read at my funeral.
("Give this string to my mother. It pulled the baby teeth she keeps inside her drawer. Give this ring to my lover. I was scared and stupid not to ask for her hand long before.")

Side of the road - lucinda williams -- independence in a relationship. Growing independently. Growing together. Setting free. Time alone. Freedom. The road. Time itself. Creating space. Others' relationships. Other homes.

Letter from an occupant - new pornogrpahers -- 133 alcorn was a wonderful home.

5:55 - charlotte gainsbourg -- reminds me of her starring role in science of sleep. Worth seeing but not brilliant like eternal sunshine. She's on the beguiling side.

All I want/ Come in from the cold - joni mitchell -- wedding this weekend is on sunshine coat, where joni has a pad. She's top ten on my have lunch with list. But it would have to be in summer, outside, so she could smoke and I wouldn't be bothered. 'All I want' has perfect lyrics.

Solitary man - johnny cash -- we can't forget john now that the spotlight has turned away.

Wrapped around yr finger - police -- hmm a reunion tour. No thanks. Sting became adult contemporary in 1993.

Where will I be? - Emmylou harris -- did you see ELH in heart of gold, neil's movie? Holy facelift. Love the voice though. And that "this old guitar" duet was killer.

Scatterbrain - radiohead -- train rides in europe last summer. Like clockwork. Like this song.
«Spicy clamato break. Notice baby crying. Uh oh. Already bracing for August flight»

Impossible germany - wilco -- good noodling at the end. Pour me one mikey. And then "She's a jar. A sleepy kisser. She begs me not to miss her. Watch me floating above inches above..."

Since I've been loving you - led zeppelin -- they don't play or write music this stunningly epic and even-mannered, skilled, and confident anymore. Jimmy page could play.

Thunder on a mountain - bob dylan -- easily summed up with these lyrics: "thinkin about alicia keys... Where on earth could alicia keys be?"

Some song by the killers (I think when we were young) -- "you sit there in your heartache". I can see the appeal of this band

It's only time - magnetic fields
Steady as she goes - raconteurs - ok this is what I'm looking for. Let's get this plabe moving. I would love to see these guys at massey.

Jealous guy - donny hathaway -- a must for any mix cd for summer 07.

Shoot you down. Stone roses -- excellent drumming on one of my fave songs from the 1980s second best record. Belongs in the 90s though. Rabbit with a backpack.

In the aeroplane over the sea - neutral milk hotel. The best song featuring the siren-y saw. Listen to it float above like a scooby doo halloween soundtrack...

And we approach Vancouver.

SOME VIDEOS:


leonard cohen
"cracks: light"


police vancouver


wilco


wilco II


journey


duranx2

ON CHESIL BEACH
By Ian McEwan.

203 pp. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $22.

They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy.

The geographical distinction that marks Chesil Beach in England is the grading of the shingle — the pebbles, that is — that forms its 18 miles: the pebbles are arranged, by wind and rain, in a spectrum of sizes and textures, so that the beach forms a spatial map of time. Each stone confesses a part of its relation to the whole. Local fishermen brag of the ability to make a blind identification of the original placement, on Chesil Beach, of a given stone.

Among the encompassing definitions we could give “the novel” (“a mirror walking down a road,” “a narrative of a certain size with something wrong with it”) is this: a novel is a vast heap of sentences,

like stones, arranged on a beach of time. The reader may parse the stones of a novel singly or crunch them in bunches underfoot in his eagerness to cross. These choices generate tension: in my eagerness to learn “what happens,” might I miss something occurring at the level of the sentence? Some experience this as a delicious agony, others distrust it. Our appetite for Ian McEwan’s form of mastery is a measure of our pleasure in fiction’s parallax impact on our reading brains: his narratives hurry us feverishly forward, desperate for the revelation of (imaginary) secrets, and yet his sentences stop us cold to savor the air of another human being’s (imaginary) consciousness. McEwan’s books have the air of thrillers even when, as in “On Chesil Beach,” he seems to have systematically replaced mortal stakes — death and its attendant horrors — with risks of embarrassment, chagrin and regret.

... young, educated ... virgins ... wedding night ... sexual difficulties. The first stone on McEwan’s new beach indulges his radical efficiency with a hook. If McEwan’s first chapters generally ought to be sent, like Albert Pujols’s bats, to the Hall of Fame, then we may agree that in this instance his first sentence is a first chapter of its own, as well as doing extra duty as its host book’s perfect piece of ad copy. (Here’s my spoiler warning: “On Chesil Beach” is far too lean and pure for me to muse on more than a few of its sentences without giving some secrets away. If you’re inspired by the hook above, read the book — it’ll be nearly as quick as reading my review, and more fun.) Then comes a second thought: But it is never easy. With startling ease these five words deepen and complicate the book. Who speaks, and from what historical vantage? The sentence entrenches the facts that precede it — and the facts to follow — in the oceanic retrospect of a ruminative mind, even as they claim to universalize the lovers’ predicament, to forgive them their place in the history of sexual discomfort.

With his lips clamped firmly onto hers, he probed the fleshy floor of her mouth, then moved around inside the teeth of her lower jaw to the empty place where three years ago a wisdom tooth had crookedly grown until removed under general anesthesia. This cavity was where her own tongue usually strayed when she was lost in thought. By association, it was more like an idea than a location, a private imaginary place rather than a hollow in her gum, and it seemed peculiar to her that another tongue should be able to go there too. ... He wanted to engage her tongue in some activity of its own, coax it into a hideous mute duet. ... She understood perfectly that this business with tongues, this penetration, was a small-scale enactment, a ritual tableau vivant, of what was still to come, like a prologue before an old play that tells you everything that must happen.

The bulk of “On Chesil Beach” consists of a single sex scene, one played, because of the novel’s brevity and accessibility, in something like “real time.” Edward and Florence have retreated, on their wedding night, to a hotel suite overlooking Chesil Beach. Edward wants sex, Florence is sure she doesn’t. The situation is miniature and enormous, dire and pathetic, tender and irrevocable. McEwan treats it with a boundless sympathy, one that enlists the reader even as it disguises the fact that this seeming novel of manners is as fundamentally a horror novel as any McEwan’s written, one that carries with it a David Cronenberg sensitivity to what McEwan calls “the secret affair between disgust and joy.” That horror is located in the distance between two selves, two subjectivities: humans who will themselves to be “as one,” and fail miserably. The horror is in the distance between these sentences, which reside terrifyingly near to one another on the page: Florence: In deciding to be married, she had agreed to exactly this. She had agreed it was right to do this and have this done to her. Edward: When he heard her moan, Edward knew that his happiness was almost complete. The horror further exfoliates in the (utterly normal) physical calamity that ensues: Had she pulled on the wrong thing? Had she gripped too tight? He ... emptied himself over her in gouts, in vigorous but diminishing quantities. ... If his jugular had burst, it could not have seemed more terrible. By this point McEwan hardly needs the specter of murder to convince us that mortal stakes lie behind closed doors. Embarrassment is the death of possibility.

If “On Chesil Beach” is a horror novel, it is also as fundamentally a comedy, one with virtual Monty Python overtones: The waiters were arriving with their plates of beef, his piled twice the height of hers. They also brought sherry trifle and cheddar cheese and mint chocolates, which they arranged on a sideboard. After mumbling about the summoning bell by the fireplace — it must be pressed hard and held down — the lads withdrew, closing the door behind them with immense care. Then came the tinkling of the trolley retreating down the corridor, then, after the silence, a whoop or a hoot that could easily have come from the hotel bar downstairs. For need of surviving the folly of his own desire, Edward mustn’t observe the satirical similarity in McEwan’s descriptive language (pressed hard and held down, withdrew, immense care, trolley retreating down the corridor) to the language of pornography, to paraphrases of what will or won’t occur soon in the suite’s four-poster bed: The bed squeaked mournfully when they moved, a reminder of other honeymoon couples who had passed through, all surely more adept than they were. He held down a sudden impulse to laugh at the idea of them, a solemn queue stretching out into the corridor, downstairs to reception, back through time. It was important not to think about them: comedy was an erotic poison.

In the painstaking and microscopic one-night structure of “On Chesil Beach,” McEwan advances his exploration of slowness in fiction (early evidenced in “Black Dogs” and “Amsterdam,” and exemplified in the 24-hour time scheme of “Saturday”). This suggests modernist experiment — not only James and Woolf, but even, in its combination with McEwan’s legendarily “forensic” vocabulary (here we’re greeted by the most instrumental pubic hair in the history of fiction), the chilly Alain Robbe-Grillet. But McEwan’s tone is more normative than that of his forebears, and it may be worth asking: Why doesn’t he feel like a “late” modernist? And what does he feel like instead?

The answer may lie in the fact that modernism in fiction was partly spurred by the appearance of two great rivals to the novel’s authority, psychoanalysis and cinema — one a rival at plumbing depths, the other at delineating surfaces. McEwan, who comes along later, shrugs at such absolutist contests, and has for that matter already engulfed (most brilliantly in “Enduring Love”) the latest challenger to the novel’s throne: neurology. In fact, McEwan may in retrospect be seen as the quintessential example of the recent integration of scientific interest into fiction, precisely because in McEwan (as opposed to, say, Richard Powers) such matters cease to be in any way remarkable.

Similarly, in “Atonement,” McEwan showed a capacity for writing in a more pressured modernist style and then, in the metafictional postlude, to gently amplify it with an air of sympathetic diagnosis. It was as if to say: We want to feel our reading minds bear down on character and consciousness with the intensity of Joyce or Woolf, those stream-of-consciousness titans, but we also want access to the retrospective embrace of our more forgiving and homely hearts. McEwan’s mode is synthesis, his signature the reconciliation of diametric modes — scalpel observation and civilized compassion — into a persuasive and relaxed whole. His style, too easily taken for complacent, is recuperative. His confidence in the authority of his chosen form is absolute, which is why he conveys such dazzling authority of his own. To paraphrase Paul Nelson, as Greil Marcus does in his book “The Old Weird America”: the tests have been passed, and what we’re seeing are the results.

Just before dawn he got up and went through to the sitting room and, standing behind his chair, scraped the solidified gravy from the meat and potatoes on his plate and ate them. After that, he emptied her plate — he did not care whose plate it was. Then he ate all the mints, and then the cheese. In the genuinely heartbreaking aftermath of the newlyweds’ disastrous night, our sympathies are in no way undermined by this late return to mutedly sniggering comedy, and body horror too (the solidified gravy recalling those vigorous but diminishing gouts). How Hitchcockian the linkage between food and sex. And what detail could speak more eloquently of the compulsive, cyclical humiliations of the life of our poor minds (stuck inside our bodies forever, until death do us part) than that we might make note of ourselves gobbling the mints before the cheese?