Poetry: “Happiness Is A State I Want To Call Home”

May 11, 2012 By 3 Comments

Cameron Diaz: An OCD beauty

I started “Happiness Is A State I Want To Call Home” last night and finished it this morning. What inspired me to write this was, in order: learning a friend had terminal cancer, reading the first half of Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, and my own incurable restlessness. Looking at this poem on the page I am hypnotized by the funky “F” it calls to mind.

I wrote the poem in HTML format, in a way where each quatrain arrived at the same stopping point. The web site does not reflect this. Womp womp womp! I blame my fixation with the lines matching on an article I read about celebrities with obsessive compulsive disorder. Cameron Diaz and Leo DiCaprio have it, I learned.

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Album Review: Celebration Rock by Japandroids

May 11, 2012 By 1 Comment

Celebration Rock out June 5

Sure, the songs possessed a primal energy and a “damn the torpedoes” take on life that sounded familiar. Except they were new to my ears. And so, the last time I saw Japandroids live I could not wait for the second half of their set – the half where they played tracks from their debut album, Post-Nothing.

Listening to Japandroids’ sophomore album, Celebration Rock, the past week has made me realize the err of my ways. The album, not surprisingly for fans of Post-Nothing, is all about enjoying life’s ride (a la banging your head at Japandroids’ songs you don’t know).

This batch of eight guitar-and-drums blitzkriegs fit the album title to a T. Leave it to two men from Vancouver, B.C., who had all but quit their band a few years ago, to make a record with a life-affirming punk spirit, a slew of “oh-oh-oh” choruses, and a dogged focus on making the present count.

This is the sound of summer. For me, at least.

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Track Review: “We Can’t Be Beat” by The Walkmen

May 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Leithauser at One Eyed Jacks in NOLA

A decade ago, Hamilton Leithauser opened the Walkmen’s debut album with a tense, atmosphere-heavy number called “They’re Winning”, in which he shrugged at impending defeat. “Now it’s not fair, but what is?” he said, projecting more disconnect and resignation than dejection.

Whereas once the Walkmen represented a drunken, downtrodden elegance, the NYC-based band has morphed in recent years into the picture of triumphant sophistication in the face of life’s defeats. In this vein, “We Can’t Be Beat”, the lead track on their upcoming seventh full-length album, Heaven, builds from modest origins into a song that feels at turns majestic and uplifting.

Heaven drops May 29 on Fat Possum Records. Hearing “We Can’t Beat” and the title track has pushed my expectations into the stratosphere. It’s not hard to envision this album being one of my favorites this year, based on those two songs and the Walkmen’s track record alone.

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