Twofer Tuesday: Turn Your Dry Ice Machine On

MOUNT SIMS

Dear departed Burma House. I don't think you truly knew how good you were. And you may not have even known that this bizarre and brilliant song was your anthem.

Mount Sims is the stage name of Berlin-based DJ Matthew Sims, Wikipedia tells me. But Wikipedia fails to tell me why Mr. Sims instructs his listeners to turn their dry ice machines on because he likes "the smell of it." Is that the sound of you laughing? DO NOT LAUGH HE WILL BITE YOUR HIP. (And ... yeah. Totally ready for Arts Fest.)

OF MONTREAL

Ah, Athens, Ga. and your mythical talent for producing pretty freakin' awesome bands. I first fell in love with Of Montreal when my senior class video used "Oslo in the Summertime" for a montage about my high school's sports teams. (Odd, no?) Then, the flames of love were stoked by iTunes's decision to offer "Id Engager" as a free music video of the week this winter. But lately, "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse" has emerged as one of the definitive songs of this summer for me.

I don't know what it is. It's certainly not the bizarre music video, and it doesn't sound like much else I listen to. But it has me hooked. And I do not mind in the slightest.

Boo v. Woo: Haiku Review

Blog note: Trying out a new series. Let me know if this is interesting or awful. :)

WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS? by KATE ATKINSON



Hurrah, Atkinson!
One more complex mystery
Is Brodie a crutch?

THE PROPOSAL


Cuter than should be
Betty White has charm in spades
Stupid premise, though

SKINS



Able MI-5
Successor, and a teen show
With real heart and brains

Summer Hot, Summer Holiday

Every year, I make a mix for Valerie and Simon's teachers as an end-of-the-year present. No curses, no "themes" - as my mom puts it. This is 2009's offering. What say you, blogosphere?

1. Kids - MGMT
2. Mouthwash - Kate Nash
3. Snow is Gone - Josh Ritter
4. Leftovers - Johnny Flynn
5. It's Alright - Dar Williams
6. People Got a Lotta Nerve - Neko Case
7. Handle With Care - Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins
8. Lisztomania - Phoenix
9. Whale Song - Big Tree
10. The Lucky Ones - Tim Myers
11. Folding Chair - Regina Spektor
12. Days of Elaine - The Decemberists
13. This Time Tomorrow - The Kinks
14. I Feel It All - Feist
15. Gates of the Old City - Looker
16. Take Me Anywhere - Tegan and Sara
17. Pull Shapes - The Pipettes
18. Sweet Darlin' - She & Him
19. Her Morning Elegance - Oren Lavie
20. Moab - Conor Oberst
21. All My Days - Alexi Murdoch

A City Underneath the City: Wednesday's Written Word

I'm a Jew, and I love literature. Ergo, I tend to love Jewish literature. But I'm not much one for schmaltzy Holocaust dreck, and I can't stand overly sentimental memoirs. No, much like the Jewish journalism I like (the vintage that says 'We're journalists who happen to write about Jewish issues,' not 'We're professional Jews, who dabble in journalism'), I like Jewish novels that are grounded in some regularly identifiable secular reality. I like the kind of novels that would be interesting, compelling reads even if you remove their niche-market packaging.

So Dara Horn is extra special. She's a brilliant writer, and she's totally accessible to goyim! What more could you want? In The Image is an excellent Book of Job parable, The World to Come paints on the epic canvas of Chagall and Vietnam and her newest, All Other Nights, crafts an old-fashioned Civil War spy epic - with Jews! Here's a (rather long but totally worth it) taste of In The Image:

"Leora is the only person in the world who knows this: There is a city underneath the city of New York.

We are not talking about the subways, or the basements, or the parking garages, or the money vaults, or the underground shopping arcades or the train stations or the sewer systems or the telephone cables or the rat nests. Nor do we mean the organized crime rings or the drug smugglers or the sex merchants or the undercover agents, or the palm-greasing or the deal-breaking or the star-marking or the muckraking, or the illegal immigrants or the sweatshop slaves, or the children crammed into tiny homes, or the secret interlocking passageways that run between private people's hearts. No, we are talking about a real city, a parallel city whose foundations rest on the bottom of New York Harbor. It is a city made up entirely of things that the people in the world above it have forgotten, all that they have decided, deliberately or otherwise, to cast into the ocean.

Now, you probably already have an image in your mind of what this lost city might look like. You probably imagine people riding those giant-front-wheeled bicycles down streets bustling with bustled women, to the tune of ragtime music. Or maybe you envision trumpeting jazz bands, real-live swing dancers, or speakeasies, or white gangsters. Maybe you're thinking of robber barons wearing monocles while smoking pipes in palatial homes, or scrappy, good-natured newsboys in tweed caps shouting "Extra! Extra!" Or perhaps you've even drawn a mental picture, not yet painted-by-numbers, of billowing sailing ships and men in powdered wigs. But the lost city is no warehouse for nostalgia -- not a showcase of the versions of the past that exist only in the present, created out of a mix of thin air and our even thinner ability to see the ability of the current moment. No, the lost city -- and there may well be other lost cities, lurking beneath the Seine or the Yangtze or the Crimean or the Nile or the Baltic or the Ganges or the Amazon or the Danube or the Amsterdam canals, but here we are speaking only of New York -- contains only things that we have truly abandoned, created exclusively out of what we believe to be lost forever.

It is a walled city, this city beneath the city of New York. Its southern wall stands thick and strong, composed of the remains of the wall that once lined Wall Street, the old fortifications built long ago by the settlers of New Amsterdam -- back when the greatest sign of a city was what it was capable of keeping out, rather than what it was capable of letting in. As we have said, the lost city is a walled city, but only nominally so The city is so crowded, so overwhelmingly full, so teeming and screaming and churning and burning with all that we have now forgotten, that it spills out over its walls, the wretched refuse of its teeming shores pushing out in every direction until the walls surrounding its inner core become little more than a technicality. In this underwater sanctuary, however, the huddled masses all breathe free. Its citizens, their bodies remembering the form of a fetus inside a saline womb, breathe through gills in their half-severed necks.

The language spoken here varies from time to time. In the beginning, it was the chirping of birds, vast flocks of birds, sent down below by slash-and-burn farming above., Then, and this has been true for centuries, the lingua franca of this lost city became Manhattan. No, not some metaphorical imaginary language of wealth and poverty and crime and art, but the actual language Manhattan, spoken by the Manhattan tribe of natives who gave up the island a few hundred years ago for sets of beads worth approximately twenty-four dollars. (Some residents of the lost city, the municipality's much-envied elite, wear these beads around their necks.) Of course, other languages are spoken here too. A few hundred citizens speak seventeenth century-Dutch; a dozen or so pride themselves on having mastered Esperanto. And lately, some people are picking up Yiddish.

Outside the walls, the road to the lost city underneath New York is paved with tefillin."

Twofer Tuesday: Comes and Goes

MGMT

So I'm taking on two giants today that I'm well aware I don't love quite as much as I should - but goddamnit, I love these songs. Much like the TV on the Radio dilemma of last week, I like "Kids" - and on the same note, "Electric Feel" - way more than I like the calculated oddball hipster vibe MGMT's rocking. They're a little stylized, a little detached for me, but I'd be lying if I didn't tell you I've played this song about 70 times in the past week.

Other great things/hard questions: Is it child cruelty to torture that little baby with scary Brooklyn monsters? How'd they snag Joanna Newsom for the video? WHY IS THIS SONG SO CATCHY?! (This is why I'm lame: It's now my new ringtone.)



ANDREW BIRD



Andrew Bird's another titan. And he's an indie giant I usually really, really hate. That's what makes the minimalist charms of "Fitz and the Dizzyspells" all the more beguiling.

There's no self-conscious, winking-at-the-audience, indie tricks here. It's just a pleasant, interesting song - one that would work just as well for a "name" like Jason Mraz or John Mayer as it does for Bird. And for me, though I love my indie strummers, maybe that's what makes this Bird song accessible.

Twofer Tuesday: Your Grandsons, They Won't Understand

ADELE

I love me some covers, so the BBC Radio 1's Live Lounge series has always been a friend to me. It's what produced Katy Perry's "Electric Feel," The Fray's "Hips Don't Lie," Ben Lee's "Float On" ... the list goes on and on. My new favorite entry is this cover, from British songbird Adele, of The Strokes' "Last Nite." Like she manages to do with everything she sings, Adele infuses the punk classic with a plaintive melancholy, even as she keeps the song's fast tempo and energy.

TV ON THE RADIO

You don't need to tell me how much I should love TV on the Radio. I'm well aware that Dear Science, this Brooklyn-based indie superstar group's second album, topped just about every "Best of 2008" list. Tunde Adebimpe had a banner year, capping off his musical success with a well-received turn in Rachel Getting Married. And the band's Prospect Park Bandshell appearance is the must-have ticket of the summer.

But when Aubrey and I bought Dear Science at City Lights Records in State College, we found the whole shebang curiously hard to get into. I've finally fallen, though -- and hard -- for "Dancing Choose." How can I not love this line: "He's a what? He's a what? He's a newspaper man." And the video's just golden: