Achtung!

Please be forewarned that any e-mail delivered to me with the word "breast" in the subject line will be automatically forwarded to my trash. And for the last time, I don't need breast enlargement. Do I?

Pop Antiheroes

I think I missed a golden opportunity by not trying out for American Idol before the last show. Not, mind you, a golden opportunity for superstardom. Who, thinking clearly, would really want that anyway, even if you didn't sign the draconian contract that's required of all participants who make it past the opening audition. Your life isn't your own anymore. You can't go anywhere. And you become the punchline to a national joke. No, thank you.

Phil and I caught a good chunk of the first episode this season, the one with the guy who slashed the side of his jeans to make them look like a miniskirt and then proceeded to sing something that would have made Lou Reed singing opera palatable. Afterwards, he was told, rightly, that his singing stunk and he went into a blind rage and spewed obscenities at the judges. Tee-hee.

So Phil commented that he would love to audition (the boy's not quite tone-deaf, but let's just say he's no Frank Sinatra either). He was hoping for an exchange like this:

Simon: Given how consequential disposable pop stars are to the artistic landscape, I can't possibly let you move on to the next round. I mean, you would make every recording studio in the country burst into flames and every recording engineer in this country amputate their own ears.

Phil: Okay.

Simon: I mean, you're horrible, you know that?

Phil: Yeah, I know. But you had to listen to me! Ha! OWNED!

I had a different idea. I would go in and sing something completely inappropriate. Originally I was thinking something Leonard Cohen or Lou Reed. But when I was going home last night, it hit me. This, "No Children," by the Mountain Goats, would have been perfect. Either that or anything from the Wesley Willis oeuvre. Can you imagine Paula Abdul's face upon listening to a sexy, jazzy rendition of "Kris Kringle was a Cat Thief" or, if one wanted to be topical, "Kick Saddam Hussein's Ass"?

Reefer Madness

I seem to recall an article in The Onion titled "Drugs Win Drug War." I'm sure it's still there, lurking in the archives somewhere, but it's rather late and my head is going to explode, so no direct link for you. Nanny nanny boo boo. Also speaking of which, I'm gonna be speaking more in generalizations than I prefer, since I'm tired. I'll go back and find some of the sources I've read and put 'em up later.

I wonder how much money the taxpayers of this country have spent "fighting" the "drug war." Heck, I wonder how much money was spent last night "fighting" the "drug war." As you might gather, I'm not exactly a fan of saidsame "drug war." If you're from the SWAT team and you're reading this and wondering where I live so that you might ransack my home, I have some bad news for you. I don't actually exist. I'm a replicant. Not only that, but -- perhaps more importantly! -- I don't use, nor have I used, illegal drugs of any kind. Sorry.

But I do find the drug war repulsive. I'm repulsed by its tactics -- overblown, hypocritical television ads; spraying defoliants all over foreign countries to wipe out coca crops (and if food crops and innocent people are harmed by this practice, tough!), imprisoning nonviiolent drug users at great taxpayer expense, civil asset forfeiture laws that have for some bizarre reason been upheld in the courts. Nevertheless, I do feel compelled to offer some advice to the people who are waging this "war."

1.) Don't enter a war without defining reasonable objectives and a plan to get there. Oops, too late!

History tells us that if people want something bad enough, they'll get their hands on it. Prohibition tells us that if people want an intoxicant bad enough, a lucrative black market will spring up. At any rate, people will get their hands on narcotics no matter what the government may do about it.

Keeping historical lessons in mind, it seems clear that completely ridding this country of all forms of intoxicants that aren't alcohol, caffeine, cigarettes, or lucrative to drug companies is not a reasonable objective. So the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) was fighting a losing battle from the beginning.

This has to have been clear to the ONDCP, and if it wasn't clear in the heady days of the early 1980s, it must have become clear in the ensuing years. At this point, then, the ONDCP is in somewhat of a bind; if drugs are legalized or decriminalized, the "drug war" will have to have been deemed a failure -- an expensive failure in which hundreds of thousands of people were imprisoned or worse, often for nonviolent possession offenses that could not possibly have impacted anyone other than themselves.

2.) The role of government is not to save the governed from themselves. If the government should decide to take on this difficult role, it will be far more likely to be successful if it does so in a consistent manner.

Various court rulings -- many involving the aforementioned civil asset forfeiture laws and random drug testing in schools and at workplaces -- have established the axiom that restricting and limiting drug use in this country is a compelling interest of the federal government. But the inconsistency of drug laws in this country and the way they're enforced lead people to ignore the intent of the drug war -- while one might cynically note that the drug war has made a lot of people in high places an awful lot of money, could the people behind it at its inception really have foreseen the extent of that.

Theoretically, the government's interest in banning drug use is to promote public health and public welfare. But it's difficult for people to believe and take that seriously when drugs like tobacco are legal. Tobacco causes more deaths per year, and on a per-user basis, than any other drug. It's also among the most addictive, along with heroin and some opiates. Yet it's legal.

Science on marijuana and ecstasy, to name a couple of salient examples, is somewhat limited in this country, as one effect of the drug war has been to stymie research on controlled substances.. But from everything I've read, most scientists tend to agree that the effects of these two particular drugs are at most, moderately harmful with prolonged use; neither are deadly drugs as a matter of course. Certainly neither are as anywhere near as harmful as tobacco. Yet the same people who crusade on locking all the drug users up for the sake of the children don't seem to be in favor of limiting availability of the legal drugs that are already on the market.

People do notice this. And it takes away a lot of the government's (and the ONDCP's) legitimacy on this matter. If the question is really a public health issue, as advocates of stringent drug control would have it, then a line needs to be drawn at which scientists can generally agree that the public health risks of an intoxicant outweigh the potential difficulties of keeping it illegal. And if that line is low enough to exclude some of the milder illegal drugs, it should also exclude alcohol and/or tobacco, as the scientific evidence would have it. After all, it's for the children, right? Speaking of the children:

3.) Children aren't dumb. Treating them like they are is counterproductive to your purposes.

Journalists the world over make a big deal of Dubya's "white hat/black hat, you're either fer us or agin' us" mentality. It's a lot like drug education memes in this country writ large.

I was one of the earlier DARE kids. DARE featured a cop who'd come into the schools and intimidate you, but looking back, the program was very simple. Legal drugs are very bad for you, but adults can use them responsibly. Illegal drugs will all kill you and make you a vagrant and ruin your life. No exceptions. They're all equally bad.

The problem with this comes when the indoctrinated kids are around high school age. Invariably they'll know someone who smokes pot or does ecstasy or drops acid every once in a while. Whatever. When that person's life doesn't fall apart, their natural reaction will be to feel kind of stupid. After all, for years they were taught that this stuff was bad news. It will kill you! And the danger is that they might assume that it was all lies.

Some drugs really are bad, bad news. Heroin will kill you, given half a chance. But to spread the meme that we make drugs illegal because they're bad and that all people who use them are fuck-ups and losers just doesn't wash. I've known people who used ridiculous quantities of drugs and had no problem pulling 4.0s in advanced college classes or work incredibly technical, demanding jobs with aplomb. And I've known people who were complete idiots and fuck-ups who stayed the hell away from drugs. We all have. Spreading the meme that all drugs will destroy your life is counterproductive to the public health intentions of the anti-drug contingent.

4.) Adults aren't dumb either. Don't insult their intelligence by trying to feed them lines with logical holes so big you could drive a truck through them.

Is it just me, or has the new "drugs and terror" campaign backfired miserably? I read a study a while back -- I'm not sure where, but I'll try and find it -- that talked about the groups identified by the U.S. State Department as terroristic and their funding sources. There were, I believe, 16 groups. Of those, fourteen were either not funded at all by drugs or it was such a minor part of their funding that denying them of all drug funding would be fundamentally inconsequential. One was the Taliban, which was essentially dismantled by the time the "drugs and terror" campaign came out at the Super Bowl last year. And another operated exclusively in South America and had not struck at American interests. The main sources of the remaining fourteen's funding? Oil and armaments. I've beaten that horse in this space previously, so I won't beat it again. It's beginning to kind of smell. And does anyone really think that the guy in the apartment next door who grows weed and sells it to his friends is part of some huge terrorist conspiracy?

Besides that, there's an even more workable solution to the whole "let's stop giving drug money to bad people" thing. It goes like this: no drug illegality, no black market. No black market, no money to large drug cartels. No money to large drug cartels, no druglords. No druglords, no drug violence. No drug violence, no dead children appearing in trains. Problem solved. As it is, though, running ads about a spurious link between drugs and terrorism -- one you don't have to be especially well-informed to mentally debunk without much effort -- in an attempt to prey on this country's "OMG NEVAR FORGET" spirit is insulting, especially when networks refuse to air commercials discussing the real root of terror funding (again, previously described in this space). Like I said, I've never been a drug user, nor have I ever had a desire to use drugs, but every time I see one of those stupid ads, I want to go out and buy lots and lots of drugs just out of spite.

So where does this stupid, pointless drug war end? You could be cynical and say that too many people stand to make too much money by the continuance of the drug war for it to ever stop. I believe it will someday; it's simply too opposed to reason for it to continue indefinitely. Even a number of Republican governors have come out against the drug war. More and more people are realizing that the way things are going now isn't effective at curbing drug use and has social costs far exceeding what they're trying to fix.

You really wanna reduce drug use in this country? Try honest and accurate drug education, decriminalization and regulation of the drug markets to take the money out of the hands of druglords, and public, free drug treatment centers opened with the proceeds of stopping the drug war and taxes collected on a government-regulated drug trade. But that may not happen until people who have absolutely no stake at all in the outcome -- people who don't use drugs now and wouldn't use drugs even if they were legal -- start to take an interest in the issue. Just as the civil rights movement became a national issue when whites stood alongside blacks to protest Jim Crow and just as continuing the Vietnam War became politically impossible when middle-class, older adults started protesting alongside those of draft age, stopping this gigantic waste of funds and resources may not stop until the people the "establishment" can recognize as legitimate -- adults, middle- and upper-class taxpayers, non-drug users, parents -- start to stand up and insist that the drug war is not only pointless, it's just wrong.

But if you wanna make sure that you'll have lots of people to arrest and a "nationwide drug epidemic" in your hands? Oh, that's easy. Make drugs the stuff of teenage rebellion, spread easily ignored misinformation about the effects of drug use, and resist any attempt to have a real, informed national dialogue about what kind of drug policy would best suit the needs ot the citizenry or any attempt to conduct research on drugs to find out what they really do to people's systems. Hey, I think I just figured out what the ONDCP's really good for!

If Quentin Tarantino Actually Had Cojones . . .

. . . he would make City of God, except for the little problem that it's already been made. But that probably won't stop him from ripping it off to create an actually hyper-realistic crime flick. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy Tarantino and I can see why so many young filmmakers worship at his altar, but I don't think anyone confuses a Tarantino flick with anyone's real life, y'know?

If you get the chance -- and if you've got a very high tolerance for graphic violence and cursing in Portuguese -- go see City of God. You'll lose all track of time. And you'll come out feeling amazed and exhilarated -- and horrified and relieved all at once. See it.

Mad Props . . .

. . . go out to Seester for kicking some butt at the Fourth Circuit today. Way to lay down the Habeas Corpus smackdown!

Crack the Whip

Happy note for the squeamish: no references to sexual deviance, taming lions, or animal cruelty in today's post! Can't many any guarantees about tomorrow's, however.

One of my favorite books of recent vintage, Mark Salzman's Lying Awake, concerns a Carmelite nun, an author named Sister John of the Cross, who begins having profound visions, revelations of God's presence, accompanied by severe headaches. She's driven by these visions to write vast quantities amazing prose and poetry about the mystic life and her religious experiences, and her writings bring fame, money, and converts to her order.

As it turns out, the hypergraphia, the deep concern with religious and philosophical phenomena, the visions and feeling of the presence of God, and the headaches after the visions are over are all due to temporal lobe epilepsy. The bulk of the novel concerns Sr. John's coming to grips with the knowledge that her visions may not be her sensing the presence of God at all, and trying to decide whether to accept the epilepsy as a "gift" from God or to have surgery to repair the condition and potentially stop the visions.

I identified with the religious struggle -- I've always been a little jealous of friends for whom faith seemed like a state of being than a decision -- but I had another nagging thought the whole time I was reading the novel, one that, truth be told, made me feel a little -- okay, a lot -- guilty. "You know, that hypergraphia thing sounds pretty good!" After all, take a look at all the famous creative types who are known to have had (or are suspected of having had) epilepsy in various forms. Probably the most famous TLE sufferer was Fyodor Dostoevsky, who wrote quite a bit about his perceptions of how epilepsy affected his work.

But when it comes down to the real world, where one needs to make some bling-bling, I've concluded that I can't just rely on the vagaries of fairly uncommon neurological disorders to get me working. So this is actually a cry for help. And if any of you stop reading at "cry for help" and call some suicide hotline on my behalf, you have my word that I will find you and I will hunt you down and give you the most terrifying swirlie imaginable.

As I was saying before I started threatening unknown persons, this is a cry for help. I'm looking for a writing partner, preferably someone who does not have temporal lobe epilepsy and would therefore make me feel bad about having neither hypergraphia nor deep, fulfilling religious experiences on a regular basis. I'm looking for someone who writes seriously, preferably prose. So if you're looking for same or would be willing to do some ass-kicking out of some perverse, long-repressed desire to run a boot camp , drop me a line.

Oh -- S & M, lions are hard to tame, and pigs in slaughterhouses are castrated without anaesthesia. I lied. Sue me.

Excerpted from Phil's Super Bowl Party Announcement

"Well, the teams are set -- John Gruden and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers against Bizarro John Gruden and his Earth 2 team, the Oakland Raiders*

*On Earth 1, they were based out of L.A. and died in the explosion of an orbiting nuclear reactor built by Vandal Savage."

Fuzzy Logic

I was hanging out with my sister-in-law and my niece yesterday when this story broke.

The first* thing that comes to mind: "We're talking about going to war with Iraq because of the possibility that they possess weapons of mass destruction. Yet because the inspectors actually found evidence of saidsame, it'll probably be longer before we actually go to war with Iraq, since we can always point to this later, but might as well just let them see if they can just find some more." How's that work?!

* Of course, that wasn't the first thing I thought. The first thing I thought was, "Wow, that chick on CNN really does look like a cocker spaniel!"

Courage

It's just not something you see a whole lot of these days. Granted, every once in a while you'll see a news story about rescued minors or people who stopped to drag out the victims of a particularly gruesome car accident or whistleblowers who exposed unethical or inhumane practices at their companies at great potential risk to their financial well-being, but you don't see it that often.

That's part of what made outgoing Illinois governor George Ryan's recent speech so interested. I really encourage you to read it -- it's a well-written piece that explains thoughtfully and rationally Ryan's rationale for the commutation of the sentences of 157 death row inmates in his state.

The death penalty being a political issue, people naturally run the gamut from "kill 'em all, the sooner the better; we'll sort 'em out later, and if we messed uip, they were probably miscreants anyhow. Probably deserved it!" to "empty the prisons! All we need are more after-school sports like drama and chorus and it'll save all the children!" Myself, I don't see a good reason to support the death penalty over, say, life without parole. The death penalty simply isn't a deterrent, is irreversible if new evidence exonerating a convict comes through after the sentence has been carried out, is more expensive, and is simply inhumane. I personally don't sit well with the idea that the state -- or anyone! -- has life-or-death power over someone no matter what they've done.

Prison is meant to serve three purposes -- two in the case of death penalty or life sentence inmates. It's supposed to mandate social retribution, ensure that criminals aren't committing further crimes, and, in the case of persons who will be released back into the population at large, rehabilitation. The death penalty was never meant to do the last one, and it seems to me that life without parole takes care of the first two just as well as the death penalty without the risk of innocent blood being shed. No, you can't give back the years of an innocent person's life, but you can at least give them the chance to pick up the pieces.

Ryan's actions were noteworthy, first of all, because he was acting on the courage of his convictions; second of all, because he was a longtime advocate of the death penalty; and third of all, because upon acting on the courage of his convictions and doing what was necessary, Ryan gauged that the people of his state were upset and confused by his decision and decided to confront the main arguments against his actions directly.

He didn't have to. While the chief executive of a state or of the country doesn't (and shouldn't!) have the power to unilaterally sentence someone to prison or revoke their civil rights, they are given the power of mercy. In a humane society, that's probably the way it should be. Ryan could simply have stated that he was exercising his prerogative as governor and decided not to elaborate upon his decision any further. He didn't even have a political future to think about. Agree with his actions or don't agree with his actions, the simpler course would clearly have been to let the men on death row either die or run through their appeals and perhaps be released. Perhaps. Whether it was the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do, Ryan did what he did, even though it was the more difficult course, because he thought it was right. And that is courage.

Courage, however, does not describe the Bush administration's recent actions with respect to the state of water in this country. Currently, the EPA, with the blessing of Shrub, is attempting to -- very quickly, very quietly, and with as little public input as possible -- roll back Clean Water Act (CWA) protections on a significant number of waterways in this country. You can read more here (thanks to Washington Trout outreach director and all around super-cool human being Leah for bringing this to my attention!), or for the EPA's spin on the issue, here.

How many people does the death penalty affect, really affect? Well, there's the death row inmates, the victims of capital crimes, and the families and friends of both the inmates and the victims of capital crimes. It's a not insignificant number, mind you, but clearly a small minority of the population. Now, how many people does clean water affect? Well, all of us, unless there are already dread cyborgs living among us who get their sustenance from plastics and the parts of 1970 Dodge Darts. For us boring old carbon-based life forms, it's a little bit on the important side.

The water shortage erupting throughout the world has become quite the chic topic for environmental and social journalists over the past two years or so. And the United States isn't immune, folks. Water privatization, coupled with drought conditions in many parts of the nation, unsustainable farming practices, and population growing faster in many areas than water and sewage systems are built to sustain, all point to water crises of our own in the near future.

I think we can all agree that Dubya is no friend to the environment. Depending on which side of the aisle you hail from most of the time, you may or may not believe that's especially important. But given just how important water is in the human life cycle, do we really want to take the chance that the actions Dubya is trying to take -- without much publicity or much call for public debate at that! -- might adversely harm the quality and quantity of our clean, drinkable water, not to mention the quality and quantity of wildlife habitats and waterways? I mean, you might quibble with the science behind global warming -- Dubya certainly does! -- but there's a pretty decent amount of empirical evidence regarding what happens to people without water. And it ain't pretty.

I'm certainly not comfortable with that. And I'll be writing my congresswoman and my senators on this issue just as soon as I'm done blogging. You can too, if it floats your boat. Ha! Floats! Get it? I kill me!

Spoken by an Incredulous and Indignant Newscaster

"However, the United Nations is unlikely to authorize a pre-emptive strike on Iraq in the absence of evidence that Iraq is trying to create weapons of mass destruction."

And this is a bad thing why, exactly? God forbid that an organization charged with promoting world peace would have the gall to vote against war in the absence of evidence of wrongdoing. I don't know what this world is coming to.

More Haiku About Inappropriate Topics

Falling gracefully
into the pan, it sizzles
on contact -- bacon

Basho contemplates
death on the riverbank, like
Tommy Vercetti

Legal in three states,
including Louisiana --
poignant cockfighting

More lithe than new life
as it melts upon one's tongue --
the Spamburger

What Rocked the Year That Was

I think it'll take a couple of years for me to make a decision as to whether 2002 was a good year for music or not. This is mostly because I tend to acquire vast spates of music after the first of the year, when I buy all the spiffy cool "best of" magazines and read about things I just have to have. (I also tend to spend hours and hours poring over the Village Voice Pazz n' Jop poll when that comes out February-ish. I've found it's the best way to find out about stuff I might've otherwise missed.) That and given the line of work I'm in, I make a disproportionate amount of my yearly income just after the holidays, so I'm usually fairly flush and can get stuff that's been on my list forever.

So I really won't have most of the stuff I'd be interested in from 2002 until, say, 2005. But that's OK. If I can vote for elected officials based on incomplete and possibly inaccurate information, then I can sure as hell inflict my musical opinions on the rest of the Internet! So, without further ado:

Album of the Year. I think this'll win Pazz n' Jop in a walk, even though it technically came out last year on the Internet. Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot exceeded every expectation even a geeked out fangirl like myself could have had for it. Which in and of itself was amazing. Here's a band that got excellent reviews for their first full-length, A.M. Then Being There, their double album, came out and that got incredibly lavish praise. The one thing everyone agreed on? That it was better than A.M.. Ditto for Summer Teeth (along with Beth Orton's Central Reservation, head and shoulders above anything else that came out in 1999) -- virtually everyone I know of who heard it loved it, and critics seemed unanimous that it was a giant step forward in an already stellar career.

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot isn't as immediately accessible as Summer Teeth. But that transition isn't quite the same as, say, Radiohead's transition from OK Computer to Kid A. The difference is that while Summer Teeth is an almost flawless rock record, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, for all its discordance between tracks and atmospheric studio tricks, is pure pop songwriting in the grand tradition of Burt Bacharach (before the drivel he put out with Elvis Costello) and Serge Gainsborough and Cole Porter. The lyrics are lush, evocative, and inventive, but the amazing part are the melodies, which you'll find yourself singing at inopportune moments for literally weeks and weeks after you hear the album. The true test of a great album? You don't feel like that's a bad thing. You get "Poor Places" or "Pot Kettle Black" or "Kamera" stuck in your head and it's not like getting "It's a Small World" or "Blame it on the Rain." These songs make you want to sing, not commit seppuku. Wow, what a ringing endorsement!

Album of the Year, Dinner Party Division: Zero 7's Simple Things actually came out in 2001, but it really didn't get that much of a push here until the very end of 2001 and the beginning of 2002, so I'll include it. Best way to describe it: imagine if a band who actually seemed to like each other spent a year holed up in a house listening to Air's Moon Safari repeatedly and then came out and made an album of their own. To be honest, some of this album is indistinguishable from Air, especially the instrumentals. While that's not a bad comparison, and not a knock on either band by any means, the vocal numbers are where this album really shines. Check out "Destiny" and "In the Waiting Line," as well as the title track, preferably with martini in hand. It'll make you feel magically delicious!

Album of the Year, "Is That What All the Hype Was About?" Division. The temptation is to give this to the Strokes, since they had the lion's share of the hype, and Is This It is no Never Mind the Bollocks. But it's a great little album on its own terms, and shows a lot of promise. (The bootlegs I've heard of new songs to appear on their upcoming album, especially "Meet Me In the Bathroom," are a lot of fun and should portend an excellent spring/summer album). I give this award to another album released in late 2001, The Avalanches' Since I Left You. They got tons of hype for getting the first authorized Madonna sample, and it seemed like tons of rock critics were lining up to . . . well, this is a family blog. We won't go there. The maddening thing about this album is that "Frontier Psychiatrist" may well be the best piece of sampling and turntabling I've ever heard. It's daring, it's hilarious, it's technically astounding. And the rest of the album just kind of fades into the background. Knowing what they're capable of just makes the rest of the album so much less exciting to me.

Album of the Year, Old Favorites Division. This is a tie between the Indigo Girls' Become You and Beth Orton's Daybreaker. The Indigo Girls were one of my first two musical obsessions (along with R.E.M.), Bethie one of my current two (along with Wilco). I flew up to New Jersey to see the Indigo Girls perform (along with a fine performance of the Vagina Monologues) in February, a couple of weeks before their album came out, flew to Washington, D,C, to see Bethie perform, a couple of weeks before her album came out. At each concert there was an acoustic rendition of a new song that just dropped my jaw: anti-war protest song "Our Deliverance" from Become You and Ryan Adams-penned "This One's Gonna Bruise" from Daybreaker.

That's about where the similarities end. I view Become You as a return to form for the Indigo Girls; I really liked almost all of their last album, Come On Now Social but it didn't really have much cohesion as a whole record to me. I think Amy Ray getting her solo album (Stag, which happens to be good stuff) out of her system was good for their chemistry. Shaming of the Sun was very good in parts but frightfully uneven, and I don't listen to it that much anymore. Become You gets rid of most of these problems and is their best since 1200 Curfews and Swamp Ophelia in the mid-90s.

I don't so much see Daybreaker as an improvement for Bethie; I think it's an excellent album on its own merits, but what I get out of it is a tension between all the different genres Bethie has bent from the beginning of her career in the early '90s, rather than a synthesis like her previous work. Adding a strong country influence on top of the folk and the jazz and the techno might just be too much. More and more the electronica feels false -- although when it works, as on the opener, "Paris Train" (probably the best thing she's ever recorded), it sounds like absolutely nothing else -- compared to Trailer Park, where she really blazed that trail. My guess is that she'll go for more of a full-out Bobbie Gentry/Emmylou Harris sound on her next album.

Album of the Year, Other Stuff I Got and Liked Division: Ben Folds Live is worth the purchase price for the bonus DVD performance of "Tiny Dancer," complete with gaping mouth and gigundous pink sunglasses alone. Ben Folds is perhaps the best live performer I've seen; his concerts have an amazing energy to them, he does great crowd participation, has witty (not annoying!) banter, is just an amazing musician, and does a good job making sure everyone has fun. My only complaint about this album is that a lot of my favorites simply aren't included, but one never knows how well tthey translated to solo piano.

I loved Norah Jones' Come Away With Me as much as everyone else did. I probably should have had a "best new artist" division, but frankly, it's getting late and I'm getting quite tired, so fie on that idea. Yes, it was overplayed, yes, "Don't Know Why" was ubiquitous, but it's a great album, especially "One Flight Down" and "Turn Me On."

I wasn't able to find Ed Harcourt's Here Be Monsters anywhere in town (and I hunted and hunted for it -- I got a hankering and went to seven record stores in one day. I need a life, don't I?), so I downloaded a good chunk of the album to tide me over while I continue looking. I must own it! He's a UK songwriter and his style . . . I guess it's sorta like what would result from a collaboration between latter-day Elvis Costello and Ben Folds.

Truth be told, I haven't gotten a chance to really sit down and listen to a lot of the stuff I got this year. I tend to buy music in binges, and the last binge was in November, so I haven't really ingested it all. I will say that I enjoyed the new Life Without Buildings and Her Space Holiday albums (which were played incessantly on the best all-purpose music station in town). Also good stuff from Britain: Eileen Rose's Long Shot Novena. She uses her voice -- which is good, but not diva-esque -- to good effect, and her songwriting is classic and a bit unusual. It's just a mighty sexy album. Expansion Team by Dilated People rocked my world beginning of 2002, even though I think that came out in 2001 too. New Lambchop feels good on some kind of instinctive level, though they're just as inscrutable as ever. I think that's supposed to be part of the charm.

I just got the new Coldplay album for Christmas (thanks, Craiggers!!) and haven't really gotten a chance to hear it yet. Haven't really gotten to hear the new Groove Armada (well, it's not that new, but it's new to me!) album either, but I expect I'll like it, since I like everything else I've heard them do and haven't heard anything to indicate that Goodbye Country, Hello Nightclub is a radical departure in style. I didn't buy, but did hear (thanks, Seester!!) the new Caitlin Cary and Ryan Adams albums. "Nuclear," the opener to Adams's Demolition, is about the template for a perfect rock song, and I'm not just saying that because it includes the line "When I saw her, the Yankees lost to the Braves." Even though Adams and Cary were bandmates (with Whiskeytown), the albums are tough to compare. Cary's While You Weren't Looking is just a damn gorgeous album. But it doesn't really stick with you after listening to it so much. Demolition is a bit uneven, though I'll agree with Jenn that it works better as an album, curiously enough, than Gold did. The best moments on Gold are better, but the worst are pretty damn icky.

And finally, things I've heard all or part of and am jonesing for: Ivy's Guestroom, their covers album, includes a brilliant cover of the Ronette's "Be My Baby." They're my new heroes just for covering the Go-Betweens' "Streets of Your Town," an excellent song that might actually attract some sort of audience now. The new Ladytron, from what I've heard, is going to be very, very good. If Aimee Mann's Lost in Space is as good start to finish as "Humpty Dumpty," which I got on a compilation, is, I'll kick myself for mot buying it sooner. I almost bought Jerusalem by Steve Earle and didn't. I'm sure I will once I solve the whole indigence thing. Then there's the new Beck, the new Neko Case, the new Flaming Lips, the new Guided By Voices (there's always a new Guided By Voices), new Thievery Corporation, the B.R.M.C. album. I've heard good things about Interpol and the Vines and want to check them out. But hey, that's what 2003 is for, right? Now I just have to keep reminding myself that getting money to buy saidsame isn't quite as easy as it is in Vice City. Thwack!

Shout Outs and Outshouts

If you haven't checked it out already, come see Craig's splendiferous, yet never odiferous, 192-song modern rock tournament! You're getting in right at the beginning. I would be cynical and say that you can watch the progression to a final in which no one really likes either of the two songs involved, but cynicism is for the outre, the haute, and anyone else who could be described by a French adjective, which by definition excludes me. I will say that I have a dark horse favorite to win it all, and said dark horse favorite has a bye in the first round.

Suppose you're a college football running back. Suppose you're an underclassman, considered a likely NFL prospect but likely not a high first-rounder. Suppose further that on January 2, you were on the fence about whether to return for your junior or senior season.

You think we'll see an unusually high number of underclassman running backs declare for the draft after what happened to Willis McGahee after the Fiesta? I know I do.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I Present to you . . . the Internet!

Boy, is it nice to have the internet again. I just hope this particular service provider doesn't go out of business or piss off my husband. The hardship of relying on smoothies for my internet access is more than I can possibly bear!* I do hope everyone had happy holidays and as minor a hangover as possible on New Year's Day!

So I found my old creative writing notebook, and I'm reworking stuff for submission, and I'm actually looking for a little bit of constructive criticism. I'd almost prefer unconstructive criticism, since let's face it, hate is damn funny, but I'm not quite sure that overtakes the great despair I'd feel upon hearing scathing "I'd suggest you get a job at McDonald's, but I suspect they wouldn't hire you based on your inability to master even the very basics of the English language"-type reactions. I might cry. And when I get set, Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset. And when Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset, people die, yadda yadda yadda. So it's my first time. Be nice, or I'll kill you.

Blue

Every night it is like this -- a voice cries
from a nearby room, a tale of heartache
and sophistication. Her name is Ella,
and she sings to you alone. Even though
you never met her. Even though you never
paid to hear her wrap that voice
around the blues. She knew
you'd be unraveled to
discover her, and try to sing along.
A cast of characters, Count and Miles
from the room next door, where
someone bothered to learn the words.
It spoils the surprise. If only once
that golden tongue could have lapped sounds
in your ear. You'd be so good;
you wouldn't even whisper back,
but you'd do as you always do:
erect yourself upon your feet,
caress each eyelid with its sister,
and sway, a drunken prisoner
to the music as you swim
across the landscape of the night.

* In normal circumstances, I'd go to the library, but I think I'm persona non grata there due to a little difference of opinion. They thought I should take the due date on the last batch of books I checked out literally. I disagreed.