Saturday, December 31, 2005

Control.

I don't usually disappoint myself. I exist in a constant state of general disappointment -- off the top of my head, I'm disappointed in my mother for calling me almost twenty times between December 23 and December 25; disappointed that my only New Year's Eve option at present appears to be going to some party in Bushwick featuring a band that will be trading on our generation's endless thirst for empty novelty1 by using a vaccuum cleaner as an instrument; disappointed that my copies of Prince's Sign O' the Times, His Name Is Alive's Mouth By Mouth, and the last Coachwhips record resolutely refuse to rip properly to iTunes; disappointed that I am going completely bald2; disappointed with the book/comix-buying public that David B.'s Epileptic didn't outsell the far inferior work of his apprentice Marjane Satrapi. But I don't get disappointed in myself very often because I think that, generally speaking, I do as good a job as I'm able. For example, this blog entry could obviously be better written. Much better written, as a matter of fact. I just spent two minutes trying to decide whether or not "better written" should be hyphenated, and I'm still not sure. But anyway, sure it could be better written, but not by me. This is my level best, which I know is sad, but the point is that, while I'm not proud of this paragraph, I'm not disappointed in it either.

Yesterday, though, I disappointed the hell out of myself by losing my patience with a customer. I make it a point not to be overtly angry to customers for several reasons, none of which have anything to do with ridiculous notions of good customer service; mainly, I try to keep in mind that none of it matters, not just in the Grand Scheme but also in the Small, Immediate Scheme. So what if a customer is rude? So what if they can't understand basic principles like alphabetical order? So what if they come straight to the desk, after having made no attempt whatsoever to find the book they desire themselves3, and ask for something that is displayed prominently two feet to my right? It doesn't matter. This is not my career. I am, when you get right down to it, above that sort of pettiness.

But this guy. He comes in, and he asks for a book by what sounds like "Audrey Gronnit." Asshole move #1: When I ask him to repeat the author's name, he does it veeeerrrrryyy sllllloooowwwly, as if the reason for my incomprehension is that I'm a retard, not that he has an accent and is mumbling4. I do realize the second time that the author's last name is "Grant," pronounced with a British accent to rhyme with "gaunt." Asshole move #2: he then realizes my problem, and pronounces it the "American" way, but in an exagerrated way which I think was supposed to parody a New York accent but ended up sounding more midwestern. Quite why he felt the need to do this was unclear since I'm pretty sure I don't have any sort of identifiable accent, and if I do it's southern.

Thus enlightened, I find the books he's looking for in the computer and tell him they should be on the second floor in the Games section. "I've already been up there and I didn't see them," he replies. "It says you have them?"

"Yes, but there could be any number of reasons why the computer says we have them even though it's not on the shelf. They could be on hold for another customer, someone could have taken them off the shelf but not purchased them yet, they might just have gotten lost or possibly stolen5. It says here that some of the other stores should have at least one of them, I can call them if you'd like."

Asshole move #3: "Well, I don't think you're being very helpful."

Here's the thing: I don't give a good goddamn about the quality of the work I do at Barnes & Noble. I don't care even a litle bit about helping people find the books they want; I don't get a warm fuzzy feeling when a customer compliments me on a job well done6, and if a customer gets pissed off at me for any reason at all, it rolls right off my back. Usually. I think what happened here is that while normally a customer will get pissed off at me for something that's completely beyond my control, like today when I told a woman that her not having her gift card physically in her possession meant that she couldn't use it in the store, even though she had the gift card number written down and even though she came all the way from 60th Street, in this case he's telling me that I did not look up the books for him, did not explain to him the many possible reasons for the discrepancy between what the computer said we had and what he found on the shelf, and did not offer to call another store and see if they could put it on hold for him. Essentially, he's telling me that I am wrong, and there is nothing I hate more than being told I am wrong when I am quite clearly right7.

So. I, admittedly caught off guard, reply to his accusation: "Um, well, I'm gonna call another store and see if they've got it --"

"Well, I don't find you very helpful at all. You're telling me it might be this or it might be that, but you're not helping me find the book!"

This is where I start to lose it. "All I can tell you is what's on the screen here. I told you what the possible reasons for the discrepancy are, I don't know what else you want me to do. I can't tell you what's on the shelves up there."

"Well why not??"

I'm angry now. "Because I work down here! There are people on the second floor who can help you find books on the second floor."

"There isn't anyone up there," he says, which is generally code for "I didn't look for anyone."

"Yes there is. There are several people up there." I make no effort to disguise my anger as I point to the escalator and say, "You should probably go up there and ask one of them to help you find it if I'm not helpful enough for you."

He glares at me. "What's your name."

I hold up my name badge and glare back. He writes my name down on the piece of paper where he'd earlier written "The Club Series," "Play of the Hand," and "Audrey Grant." Keep in mind that a manager has been standing next to me this entire time and, amused by the whole thing, hasn't intervened at all. I'm not going to get into any trouble for this8.

"What's your surname?"

"I'm not giving you my last name."

"Why not?"

"I don't give my last name out to people."

More glaring. "Well, I don't find you helpful at all."

"And I'm really fucking upset by that. Go find someone upstairs."

He does just that, and I don't encounter him again. I pace around the info desk for a few minutes, unaccountably filled with rage.

Later, a customer tells me that her experience ordering some books from me over the phone was easily the quickest, least painful, and overall best one she's ever had. It doesn't make me feel any better.

1 If I had time -- I don't, but if I did -- this point would be a lengthy digression. Someday, maybe.
2 This is disappointment tinged with acceptance, as my recent haircut shows pretty clearly.
3 Funny story: Customer calls wanting to know what happened to an out-of-print book order (she actually wanted a particular essay) she placed recently. I look it up, see what book it is, and immediately it seems strange that she would've had to special order it at all, let alone that the only available edition would be OOP. So I tell her that the essay should be readily available in any number of collections in the store, and upon looking it up I see that sure enough there are no fewer than two collections containing this essay. Had she looked in the essays section to see if she could find it, I asked. The answer was, of course, no; she'd simply gone straight to the info desk and asked an (apparently rather dim) employee to find it for her. The essay in question was Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance."
4 More and more since starting at BN, I think that it's just human nature to assume that if someone says "excuse me?" after you say something, it's due to their inability to comprehend you rather than their inability to hear you/decipher what you're saying through your thick accent. Working there, I'm constantly reminded of my first psychiatrist, who in the course of asking me about the side effects of the medication he'd put me on, asked me if I was experiencing constipation, or if "the feces [was] hard." Because of his thick Mexican accent, I thought he'd asked me if the feces was "heart," which while very evocative makes no sense in a medical context, but when I replied "What?" he assumed I didn't know what "feces" meant and said "The....shit." Of course, because of his accent it sounded like he'd said "sheet," which confused me even more.
5 Given the books he was looking for, "they got lost or shelved in the wrong place" was by far the most likely explanation.
6 This is an entry unto itself, really.
7 It's also possible that the disappointment of my December staff recommendation never coming in was weighing particularly heavily on me yesterday.
8 Don't bother complaining about your treatment at the hands of a BN employee unless the employee in question was a complete bastard for no reason at all. Believe me, nobody cares.

Thursday, December 29, 2005

In my areas.

A sort of counterbalance to that last entry: If you are reading this at a time when you could be buying John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise1, I urge you to close your browser and go buy it right goddamned now. I say this because the book itself is riotously funny, but also because Mr. Hodgman is a very friendly fellow who, when he showed up at the store today to sign the book2, not only graciously agreed to personalize a copy for my girlfriend, but personalized the fuck out of it, writing that I am a considerate boyfriend and referencing a conversation that I'd had with him about the recent Calvin & Hobbes box set, which my girlfriend bought me for my birthday. So bump Mr. Hodgman's sales up by five units, loyal readers. He's a nice guy, and nice guys deserve your money3.

1 As seen on The Daily Show!
2 One of the nice things about working at a bookstore in Manhattan is that occasionally authors will just show up and ask if we have copies of their book that we can sign. I know this phenomenon is not unique to Manhattan bookstores, but it being Manhattan, we get a ridiculously high percentage of honest-to-god writers, often because they, like Mr. Hodgman, live here. Recent authors who popped in to sign their books include Simon Winchester, whose books The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa are great stuff, Vikram Seth, who I'm told is good but whose books are way too long for me to even contemplate having time to read, Nate Blakeslee, author of the excellent Tulia, and the very nice Susan Jane Gilman, author of a pair of books I will never read, Kiss My Tiara and Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress. The dark side of this is that sometimes the authors are belligerent, arrogant, entitled, pushy, and/or they just bother me for some reason. No names named, of course.
3 Unlike Annie Proulx, who I'm told is kind of a bitch.

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Holiday reflections from a shallow pool.

Not anything even remotely like a comprehensive catalog of the hellish swarm of last minute credit card-carrying locusts that descended upon the store in the two days before Christmas. Just a few things that've been bugging me.

To the woman who, on Christmas Eve, tried to bypass the line by calling ahead and paying for her book over the phone, then sarcastically told me to have a merry Christmas when I told her we don't do that: Your difficulty is caused, like many difficulties customers have, by an inability to think about the larger implications of your request. I hate to get all everything-I-need-to-know-I-learned-in-kindergarten on you, but the things people say to shut kids up aren't just for kids; in this case, if we did it for you, we'd have to do it for everyone. The result: two separate lines, one for people who've paid over the phone and one for people who aren't comfortable with giving a stranger, whose phone calls are not monitored and who can thus use a fake name and claim he never talked to you if he decides -- out of pure spite -- that he wants to fuck you over hard, their credit card info over the phone. This inability to think through the consequences of what they're asking applies to a lot of customer complaints. For example, if we sent books between branches we'd have to, in effect, hire a fleet of Barnes and Noble bike messengers1. Or if we took pre-orders for signed books when authors sign in the store? "Sorry, Mary from the Bronx2, who left work early so she could get here in time to get her book signed by David McCullough, these last two copies are going to Bob from Wisconsin. I don't know why he needs two copies, either. I didn't ask! Bye!"

As a corollary to the above, here are things that are guaranteed to not get you through the incredibly long holiday line any faster:

- Complaining to me about the length of the line.
- Complaining to nobody in particular about the length of the line, presumably just so the people around you know how displeased you are. Loud sighing also counts in this category.
- Asking me if you "really have to wait in that line."
- Asking me if there's another line.
- Complaining to me about there not being enough registers.
- Telling me that you don't have time to wait in line.

The answer to all of the above is "it's Christmas Eve." I know you, dear reader, already know this, and I don't have to remind you, because you are classy and self-possessed, but I cannot tell these things to people when I am working and I need to vent.

This year's shitty, thoughtless gift book from people who don't read books, for people who don't read books:



I gave up on trying to convince people to put this down and buy Close Range: Wyoming Stories, the Annie Proulx collection that contains "Brokeback Mountain" and ten other stories, after being met with blank stares and outright hostility3 from customer after customer. If you bought this for yourself, you're merely an idiot: at $9.95 for 55 pages of story, it's probably the worst value in the store, and it gets even worse when you consider that the text is larger and spaced farther apart to stretch it out from the thirty pages it occupies in the collection. But if you got it for someone as a gift, fuck you, seriously. I hope they turned to you and said, "You couldn't have dropped the extra four bucks and bought me a copy of Close Range?

To the people who actually have the gall to sit on the big stacks of books and then get pissy with me when I suggest to them that people might not want to buy something that has touched their ass: Fuck you. One of my biggest problems with BN is the overly permissive attitude that is company policy when dealing with assholes who not only make my job more difficult but also make it more difficult for people to get the books they want. Say, for example, a customer is sprawled out on the floor in front of one of the fiction bookcases, making it all but impossible for people to browse the bottom three shelves. I am not allowed to go up to that person and tell them to move. Same deal with the kids who make the manga section a fucking obstacle course every goddamned day. This is so irritating that some guy even wrote an editorial about it in The New York Times Book Review. And yet I can do nothing about it; it's store policy to let people kick back on the floors, as long as they don't do one of the only things that can get you kicked out of a BN, falling asleep. But people actually sitting on books? They do not fall into that category. That is why I told you to move. So stop looking at me like that. Asshole.

Another installment of Detonation Radio should arrive in the next few days, but you surely know better than to hold me to that.

1 I suspect the real reason this policy hasn't been implemented is personal rather than fiscal. Have you ever dealt with a NYC bike messenger? Yeesh.
2 Or Queens, whatever.
3 Actual quote: "She said she wants 'Brokeback Mountain,' not a bunch of other stories."

Thursday, December 22, 2005

Now that the transit strike is over, all we have to worry about is the Robot Holocaust.

It seems like at least once a month, I come across the kind of news story that makes me think that all of our science fictional cautionary tales have gone right over the heads of the scientific community.

This month: Robot demonstrates self-awareness.

A new robot can recognize the difference between a mirror image of itself and another robot that looks just like it.

This so-called mirror image cognition is based on artificial nerve cell groups built into the robot's computer brain that give it the ability to recognize itself and acknowledge others.

The ground-breaking technology could eventually lead to robots able to express emotions.


Just what I wanted for Christmas: A robot that can get mad at me.

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Transition.

There are idiots and assholes on both sides of NYC's transit strike, so blaming one side or the other seems kind of pointless. Yes, the offer that Transit Workers Union Local 100 President Roger Touissant1 walked away from seems pretty damn good to, say, someone with a college degree barely scraping by at a retail job; the MTA caved on many of its demands (including the raising of the retirement age that TWU 100 found so odious) and offered respectable compromises on many of the others. And yes, every single time -- let me emphazise this: Every. Single. Time. -- I have dealt with a transit worker, I have been met by the sort of surly, utterly uncalled for rudeness and hostility that I, my perceptions having been shaped by the various mass media that raised me, had initially expected from New York's general population, a populace which I in general find no more rude than anywhere else I've lived2. "Oh," I thought after having to ask a simple question of a booth attendant shortly after moving here, "that's where people get the idea that all New Yorkers are assholes3.

At the same time, the MTA is well known for being corrupt and incompetent, so I understand why the union rank and file4 thinks the MTA is sitting on a big pile of money and refusing to share with them: the MTA has done little to earn their trust, or the trust of anyone else for that matter. That said, people whose arguments for the strikers amount to little more than pointing out the MTA's billion-dollar surplus should really get a handle on the fact that the surplus is dwarfed by the staggering budget gaps the MTA faces in the next few years. Obviously the MTA has been hugely mismanaged, which is exactly why they're trying to cut costs, and unfortunately some of that is going to hit the rank and file laborers. That's just the way it goes. If dad blows the family's savings in Vegas, Tommy doesn't get an Xbox 360 for Christmas. It's not Tommy's fault, but them's the breaks.

As for the strike itself, though, I think it's a really awful thing to do to the millions of people who ride the trains to work everyday, and in particular the working poor who make far less money than even the lowest-paid transit employees. Just today, as I worked at a different B & N5 than the one I normally work at because it's closer to my home, I spoke to an employee who was freaking out because she can't afford to take a cab to work every day and she can't find anyone to carpool with. I assure you that she makes far less than a transit worker, and she's completely fucked by this strike.

Yes, that's right, faithful readers: a new store. A new layout. A new info desk. New co-workers. New managers. New horizons! Yes, well, it wasn't quite as exciting as all that. The store I worked at today, and will presumably be working at for the duration of the strike, is much smaller than the one I normally work at (I joked with one new co-worker buddy that I was ill-equipped to deal with fewer than four floors), with a much smaller selection and much fewer shoppers6.

What the customers lacked in numbers, though, they made up for in sheer stupidity. Maybe I'm imagining this, but, and I had my opinion seconded by someone who has worked both at this store and others in Manhattan, the customers at the new store were noticeably dumber than the ones I deal with at my normal place of employment. Dumber and much more rude. I know it's the holidays and all, but I worked Christmas at my regular store last year and it was nowhere near as bad. People coming in with impossibly broad requests like "What Italian cookbooks do you have?" People who are shocked when we have the book that a major motion picture was based on, or that Oprah's Book Club is reading7. People who call to ask how to get into Manhattan8, or to get a listing of every single audiobook in the store, or to get a detailed survey of the items for sale in the cafe. In short, the kind of pure nimroddery9 that I never have to deal with at my regular store.

I wish I could say that this was limited to the customers, but the sad truth is that a good number of the employees were, at best, lacking knowledge. To be fair, some of them were surely seasonal hires and/or people who, like me, were working their first day in an unfamiliar store. But at least one of them was not, and he was the guy who stood out. The guy who was clueless when asked about major bestsellers like Freakonomics and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. It's not just that he didn't know where they were in the store, which would have been excusable, sort of; he had no idea what the books were. He also responded to the perennial question "Is The Da Vinci Code out in paperback?" with "Well, of course it is!!" I contemplated letting him look all over the floor for it, but decided to break in and inform him and the customer that The Da Vinci Code is not in paperback, and we have no idea when it will be. Really, we don't. Stop asking.

This was not the first or last time I had to break in because a co-worker didn't know what he or she was talking about. Granted, this happens a lot at my other store, too, but at the new place it was out of control. I was correcting people on spelling, pointing out bestsellers that were like four feet to our right, answering questions for customers who had a description of the book but not the title or author...it was kind of exhusting. At one point, one of the employees asked me what store I was from. After I told him, he asked if, at that store, I worked at the info desk or in the cookbooks. "Info," I responded after pausing for a second to wonder what made this guy think I worked in the cookbooks section. Later, I remembered that I'd stepped in to help him look up a book for a customer after his spelling abilities had proved lacking: The Mad Cook of Pymatuning by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. The Mad Cook of Pymatuning is not a cookbook10.

My favorite customer of the day was the guy who was looking for Danielle Steel's Echoes. Because of his accent, an impossibly irritating mixture of Italian and Retard11, I thought he was saying "ankles" at first. While I was looking for what I knew couldn't possibly be Danielle Steel's Ankles, I overheard the following conversation between him and his companion:

Not-Actually-Retarded: "She should write a book about being a porn star!"
Companion, Also Not Retarded: "She was a porn star?"
Not-Actually-Retarded: "Yeah, she made some movies."

I did the research, dear reader, because I care about you, and the veracity of the information I present to you here. I did a whole three minutes of research on Google, and can state with confidence that Danielle Steel was never a porn star. There are Danielles in the porn industry, and there are Steels12, but the only facial Danielle Steel has ever received, at least as far as the viewing public is concerned, took place at a salon.

Not-Actually-Retarded returned a little later to ask whether the Stephen King hardcover he had pulled off a display was his most recent book. I'm pretty sure that the hardcover in question was actually a special edition of a previously released book, but I guessed that the distinction would be lost on the guy and answered in the affirmative. He responded by pumping his fist and shouting "Yes!" Here's hoping he doesn't already have the book.

Tomorrow, I return to my adoptive store, hopefully for the last time. Until then, do me a favor and cherish your transportation options, whatever they may be.

1 Who is, make no mistake, a flaming asshole of the highest order, whose ludicrous rhetorical excesses mark him as being cut from the same cloth as one G. W. Bush.
2 If, understandably, higher strung.
3 Cab drivers, too.
4 Note that I say nothing about Mr. Touissant, who I don't think for a second actually believes his own rhetoric.
5 Since starting this blog, I've been indirect about saying which monolithic bookstore chain I work for, but fuck it, it's not like it's that hard to figure out, and the only people who read this, assuming anyone does, are my friends anyway.
6 It's not inconceivable that the strike actually helped business at the store, since presumably lots of people who normally would've gone to the much bigger and better BNs in Manhattan were forced to shop in the neighborhood. The people who worked there seemed to be unprepared for it; I actually forgot the rules of polite society and laughed in a manager's face when she described as "crazy" a level of business that would barely be noticed at my store.
7 Memoirs of a Geisha and A Million Little Pieces, respectively. As a side note, the ever-popular pastime of mangling the title of the latter book took on unexpected new life today when, for the first time in a good while, I heard a variation on the title I hadn't heard before: "A Million Shattered Pieces." As you can surely imagine, the rest of the day was kind of boring after that kind of excitement.
8 After being briefly taken aback that someone would ask me that, I almost -- almost -- responded with "vroom vroom!"
9 Did I just make up a new word? I think I did.
10 My sense of fairness compels me to point out that The Mad Cook of Pymatuning is a fairly little-known book by a fairly little-known author, but at the same time I have to wonder why anyone would think that The Mad Cook of Pymatuning is a likely title for a cookbook.
11 He did not, of course, appear to actually be retarded. I like to think that if he had appeared so, I would refrain from mocking him. Unless it was really, really funny.
12 And Steeles.

Monday, December 19, 2005

Love.

This makes me smile.



In the absence of anything particularly eventful happening lately, this will have to do for now.

(Found via The Comics Reporter.)

Friday, December 16, 2005

Detonation Radio two: The exercise.

More laziness from me tonight1, as GiSoL forgoes any sort of thought whatsoever with the first in what I guess will be a long line of lazy-as-hell podcasts. The big theme for this one: my favorite songs of 20052. I'm sure nobody else is doing this sort of thing right now. What a coup.

Given how much trouble I had even thinking of records from this year that I like, maybe keeping the podcast current is not the best of ideas. Here's hoping that I will do a better job of keeping up with new music in 2006, and here's hoping that the music itself is worthy of the effort3. That said, this podcast is longer than they will normally be, both to accomodate the long songs and because I skipped last Sunday and will probably skip this Sunday because I have to buy Christmas gifts and see Sunn 0))).

Podcast can be direct-downloaded at http://totale.libsyn.com. You can also plug http://totale.libsyn.com/rss into your podcast catcher of choice and have each new episode of Detonation Radio sent right to you whenever I can be bothered to make and post them.

Below is the tracklisting for this week's episode, along with a little blurb on each track. I will probably continue to post the tracklistings here, but I doubt I'll be doing any more explanatory notes; writing about music is torture for me, and once I'd committed to writing those blurbs, the process delayed the posting of this episode by at least two days. So perhaps not.

On and on and on:

1. xbxrx - "Against the Odds": Off Sixth In Sixes, my favorite album of the year. The old, teenage, out-of-control xbxrx was a hell of a lot of fun, but the slightly older and much wiser Touchton brothers, with help from drummer/producer Weasel Walter and bassist Ed Rodriguez, fucking destroyed this whole sorry year and staked a claim to being the only remaining screamo/spazz/punk band worth listening to (i.e. fuck the Test Icicles). The live show is not to be missed.

2. Andrew Bird - "A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left": I remember seeing a lot of message-board ire directed at Andrew Bird this year, and I'm not sure why exactly why. Maybe it's the ostentatiously clever lyrics, or the mellow, Starbucks-friendly sound. Maybe it's that he used to be in the Squirrel Nut Zippers. All I know is that I gave this record a chance when I learned that former Jesus Lizard guitarist Duane Denison plays on one of the tracks, and was shocked to find a really great, sophisticated pop album with erudite lyrics and some impressive whistling. Fuck, as they say, the haters.

3. Silver Jews - "Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed": David Berman's comeback record is not his best, despite what you might be reading in clueless outlets like my blissfully unknowing nemesis, The L Magazine4. That said, a merely good Silver Jews record is way better than I thought we'd be getting, so perhaps lowered expectations have worked in this tracks favor, earning it a coveted spot on the Girls in Skirts on Ladders Best of 2005 podcast.

4. Lavender Diamond - "You Broke My Heart": Becky Stark's voice is a marvelous instrument, and while I don't know if this is my favorite track from Lavender Diamond's The Cavalry of Light, it's definitely my favorite vocal performance from her. Lavender Diamond features Jeff Rosenberg, formerly of Young People, and Fort Thunder alumnus Ron Rege, Jr., who contributes outstanding artwork to the EP, but the second the vocals start up, it's Stark's show, no question. More battle hymn than indie rock, I imagine this is great in a live setting.

5. The Harmonettes - "Can't Go Halfway": I'm cheating here, as this wasn't originally released this year, but fuck it, The Numero Group has been doing such an amazing job of unearthing incredible yet somehow unknown music that they deserve all the praise they can get, even from minor entities such as myself, and of course you should go buy all of their releases starting with Cult Cargo: Belize City Boil Up, which contains this track. And no, this isn't a song from 2005, but fuck you if you claim to have heard it any earlier.

6. The Mountain Goats - "Up the Wolves": Lord knows I hate admitting that I'm wrong, but I had to do an about face on The Mountain Goats' The Sunset Tree. When I first heard it, it was probably the most disappointing new record I'd heard by an artist I loved since The Fall's Are You Are Missing Winner, and I would've sold it except for a few tracks that I really liked ("Dance Music," "This Year," "Pale Green Things"). What ended up changing things was a download of the vinyl-only Come, Come to the Sunset Tree, and in large part this song right here. Maybe the songs just needed to be stripped of the glossy production for me to appreciate them, I dunno. "Lion's Teeth" is still a terrible song.

7. Mice Parade - "Passing and Galloping": Gotta love that fuzz guitar. Up until this year I'd never paid much attention to Mice Parade, despite having been given like five of their albums, and frankly I expect to go back to ignoring them in the new year. But for one brief, shining moment, when the twinkling went away, the drums started rolling, and the fuzz guitar started...didn't we almost have it all. Didn't we.

8. Brian McBride - "Silent Motels": I'm a Stars of the Lid fanatic. The Dead Texan album by Adam Wiltzie was among my favorite releases last year, and if the Lid's other half wants to put out a solo record while a new album from the duo proper continues its interminable march to completion, so be it. "Silent Motels" isn't as melodic as either most of this album or SOTL's recent work; it's barely there, then all of a sudden it's everywhere, and you didn't even realize. Perfect.

9. Electrelane - "Those Pockets Are People/The Partisan": Electrelane's third album, Axes, was such a willfully perverse move -- "Here's a complete live performance featurng lots of long, unwieldy songs! Thanks!" -- that I have to give them credit for, if nothing else, having the balls to follow the concise pop bursts of The Power Out with such a sprawling mess of an album. Here we have the two sides to Electrelane's coin in one handy bundle: a long, mostly instrumental jam that segues into a frantic punk cover of a Leonard Cohen song.

10. The Fall - "Trust In Me": The final track on Fall Heads Roll, and the one on which Mark E. Smith barely appears at all. He might be in there somewhere, but other vocalists carry the song while guitars buzz away, menacing and spectral. Not at all the sort of thing I expect from any iteration of The Fall, which is probably why I like it so much.

11. Eluvium - "Everything to Come": Matthew Cooper's first Eluvium album, Lambent Material, was one of my favorite records of 2003, so I was mightily disappointed when his last EP, the name of which I don't even remember, consisted of a bunch of Yann Tiersen-lite solo piano pieces5. He's back to the drones on Talk Amongst the Trees, and while this isn't my favorite track on the record, my favorite track (the gorgeous, ever-ascending monolith "Taken") is sixteen minutes long, and so sacrifices have been made. How can you harm what could have been, etc.

12. Animal Collective - "Grass": I think it's the sheer exuberance that wins me over to the side of this poppier iteration of the Animal Collective. Everything about this song is likeable in an extremely hyper way, and when they scream, it begs to be joined. Best tried in the privacy of your own home.

13. Tuxedo Killers - "Don't Rape the Okapi": Texas spazzout. Yeah, they're my friends. Well, except for their eminently-replaceacle douchebag of a bassist. But yeah. I love this song, and the M. Night Shyalaman's Tuxedo Killers EP from which it is taken. Do yourself a favor and pick up the vinyl version, which omits the CD-R's excruciating cover of Adam Green's "Baby's Gonna Die Tonight"6.

14. Hood - "The Lost You": It is so goddamned easy to forget about Hood given that nobody really seems to be interested in either post-rock or morose Brits anymore, and well where the hell does that leave the brothers Adams when it's year-end time? Outside Closer, purportedly the final Hood album, is about as close to a great album as this frustratingly inconsistent band will ever get, and "The Lost You" is a perfect summation of the electronic direction they've been moving in for the last few albums. Here they sound more than ever like their heroes in the defunct Disco Inferno, with a stuttering Robert Wyatt sample as the songs rhythmic guiding light, lending a fragile funkiness to the otherwise typically downcast material. Excellent stuff.

15. Coachwhips - "Did You Cum?": Weasel Walter shows up again here as the producer of this, a track from the only Coachwhips album to capture the glory of their berzerk live shows, Peanut Butter & Jelly Live at the Ginger Minge. I was lucky enough to catch the last Coachwhips show ever on a rooftop in Brooklyn this year, and it was about as spectacularly unhinged as a rock show can get without anything's head getting bitten off7. My sadness that the band is no more is tempered by the belief that there was nowhere to go from here but down.

And there you have it. I'm sure I forgot stuff, and you're welcome to call me out on that sort of thing, but keep in mind that I would rather talk utterly cruel shit about a band that I really like than admit to having made a mistake. For now, I'm done waiting to find out whether or not there's going to be a transit strike today. Frankly, I'll be a little disappointed if the trains are running tomorrow. I had all these plans for what I'd do with my day off. Some other time, perhaps.

1 Actually, I wish it was laziness. The fact of the matter is that I've been busy as hell for the last week or so, but not really doing anything I felt like writing about here, as my injuries have kept me from working the retail gig. Fret not, for the holiday season is well underway, and I expect to get approximately a week's worth of customer bad behavior every day from now on.
2 I feel less qualified than usual to do the whole year-end thing, as my lack of both money and interest in new music have kept me from hearing a huge chunk of this year's new releases. Off the top of my head, I've yet to hear the new Sunn 0))) or The Rebel's latest, both of which I'm sure would be contenders for my favorite album of the year. I have heard most of the big hype records this year: Wolf Parade, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Love Is All, Blood on the Wall, Broken Social Scene, Sufjan Stevens, Wilderness, Art Brut, M.I.A., Bloc Party, Antony and the Johnsons, The Go! Team, and of course my old friend Devendra all come to mind (after a quick browse of Pitchfork's "Best New Music" section, I admit). You couldn't pay me to listen to any of the aforementioned records even one more time, except for the Bloc Party which I find sort of charmingly clueless.
3 Have I mentioned how completely inescapable the new Cat Power is going to be next year? Now, I know what you're thinking: "Ooooh, bold fucking prediction. The new Cat Power, popular? No way." But you, Mr. Strawman, have failed to understand. I'm not saying, "The new Cat Power is going to rule college radio," although it surely will, and I'm not saying "Cat Power is going to get namedropped on Gilmore Girls next year," although I predict she will. What I am saying is that the next Cat Power album is going to be everywhere. The next Cat Power album is going to be an integral part of your trips to Borders or Starbucks or the multiplex or the couch to watch whatever the hell it is you watch. It could very easily be the biggest record in Matador's history, and on top of that, it's good. It's really, really good.
4 There will be a reckoning, L Magazine. Just you wait.
5 And let's be honest, Yann Tiersen is already pretty fluffy to begin with.
6 Yes, I wrote this knowing full well that the only people who might be reading this are either in the band or friends with the band and have thus probably already made up their minds about our friends the Tuxedo Killers.
7 Although John Dwyer did tell me I'm cute, which is pretty freaky in and of itself.

Sunday, December 11, 2005

Laziness.

No podcast today. Tomorrow I return with stories. Yes, stories.

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Redacted.

The entry that used to occupy this space was written one night after I got home from a spectacularly bad experience with a cab driver. It has been replaced by this picture of bunnies in a car.



I wonder where they are going.

Sunday, December 04, 2005

Detonation Radio one: I'll come running.

I used to do radio, back in college. Which was not so long ago in objective time, even though it seems like it was. Anyway. I miss doing my radio show more than probably anything in the world. I would go in there every week, and for two hours I was. if not the God, certainly a god. One of the minor ones. A demigod, perhaps.1

I've never really bothered trying to do radio after graduating, mainly for reasons of time. Podcasting, while somewhat appealing, lacks the real-time aspect that is at least half the fun of DJing; without that element, you're just making a mix CD, an exercise that I generally find tedious and boring. Of course some DJs manage to make live radio DJing tedious and boring by burning their tedious, boring shows onto a CD and just playing that CD over the air, something that makes no sense to me on any level whatsoever. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned.

The last time I did any live DJing was back in June. On Friday I went to a party at the domicile of the publisher of a certain online publication for which I wrote a widely ignored record review shortly before swearing never to write more than a paragraph about any band ever again. This guy is one of the ten or so people that I've conned into thinking that I am a good writer. Anyway, the party was fun, many drinks were had, and I extracted a promise from a friend of mine that I can DJ at her next party. All good things. The bad things started, as they so often do, on the L train. Or, more specifically, at the L train station, where I ate it hard on the stairs. I was hoping that my face would end up looking like I'd been in a fight, which would've afforded me the opportunity to make up a cool story, but alas, as my Little Swan confirmed, it just looks like I fell down a flight of stairs.

More importantly, though, I hurt my knees really bad. Not only do they look like hell, but the pain in them makes it difficult for me to perform strenuous activities like, er, walking. Or standing. Or sitting down. So as I lay in bed contemplating suicide and several missed days of work, I thought I might as well try out this podcasting deal. If for no other reason than that my opportunities for actual DJing are, well, nonexistent.

So. Detonation Radio one, for use in all finer mp3 devices. Available every Sunday, in theory. Not necessarily themed, not interested in blowing your mind with obscure tracks, not really coherent at all. My injuries have compelled me to make this inaugural edition a celebration of the joys of mobility. I do hope that its meager audience comes away sufficiently entertained.

Podcast link: http://totale.libsyn.com. Playlist is there, too, although I'm sure you're cool enough to recognize every song seconds after it starts. Just in case, though.

And if you're into catching podcasts on iTunes or iPodder or what have you, plug http://totale.libsyn.com/rss into your aggregator thingy to have Detonation Radio delivered right to you whenever there's a new one.

This should be a weekly thing, so check back every Sunday. If you're reading. Which you're not.

1 You may have noticed that this post, so far, has nothing to do with Jonathan Safran Foer. In fact, I might as well tell you right now that this entry is never going to get around to talking about Jonathan Safran Foer. There is a good reason for this, I assure you.

Thursday, December 01, 2005

Late night repeats.

Now that GiSoL has amassed an audience that makes it the envy of every two-bit Everyone-Is-An-Idiot rantblog in the Western Hemisphere, I can't help but feel like I am letting you, the reader, down by not delivering everything I promised in my little "next time" blurb in the previous entry. This entry contains nothing about Jonathan Safran Foer or the dumbest sentence I've ever read. Next time, I promise.

What follows is actually something I wrote in a previous blog, with slight alterations. Yes, I know: three posts in and we've already got a re-run. But I feel the situation warrants it. Obviously, when one works at a retail store, there are certain situations that are going to pop up on a regular basis. When I worked at a grocery store, I knew that I was going to have to deal with price disputes pretty regularly. At the current job, I know people are going to ask where the bathrooms are, ask me if I'm going to answer the phone as if the thought had never occurred to me1, and get irritable when I tell them that we cannot send books to prisons. Monday, though, I had a repeat performance of a scenario that I didn't think would ever get repeated, and so below I reprint the blog entry I wrote the first time it happened.

+++++++++++++++++++++

Customer walks up to the desk. Asks for



and after asking where it is, he adds, in a really pissy manner, "And it's not for me," as if I'd made any indication that I even cared. This is one of the things people don't seem to understand about the place: we don't care what you, as an individual, buy. We may not be happy that, say, Patricia Cornwell is a top ten bestseller and not, say, John Banville, but as far as what your book selection says about your mores, peccadilloes, and fetishes, we really don't care, and I guarantee you that no matter how weird you think you are, we've seen way weirder2.

But anyway, as my silent revenge, I spent the next however long writing down haikus for my friend the very heterosexual dude.

Don't get defensive.
It just makes me wonder what
You're hiding from me.

Shut the fuck up, guy.
You're as gay as the day is
Long and hard and thick.3

"I am gay! Yes, gay!"
This is what you are screaming
With your denial.

Potential gayness
Should not be embarassing.
Bad taste, though, should be.

Do a Google search
For the words "on the down low"
And so, find yourself.


And so on and so forth.

+++++++++++++++++++++

No new haikus this time around, sadly.

Next time: Jonathan Safran Foer and the dumbest sentence I've ever read. Promise.


1 This one really gets me. Complaining about the ringing phones is arguably the most annoying thing a customer can do. Let me make it clear, so you don't make this mistake: There are between ten and twenty lines at your average Large Chain Bookstore. Even if the employees are really good about answering the phones (which we are), they're still going to be ringing pretty much constantly, and believe me, it is way more annoying for the employees than it is for the customers. The phones get answered when they get answered, and when some wanly grinning moron comes up and asks "Is someone going to answer that?" while operating under the underlying assumption that it is my job to provide him with a tranquil little oasis of peace in the middle of a heavily trafficked area of Manhattan, it is all I, or any of my co-workers, can do, not to throw the fucking phone at him. The best interaction of this sort I've ever seen was when a particularly persistent asshole confronted several employees, all of whom stammered out weak excuses, about the ringing phones. Finally, he unknowingly pulled this on the store manager, who curtly told him, "You get the phone." Asshole then answered the phone and handed it to the store manager with a smug grin, saying "It's for you." Store manager then hung up the phone, to Asshole's utter disbelief. This footnote has gotten way, way out of hand, but I'd like to finish it up by pointing out that, for the most part, the managers at this store are really fucking awesome.
2 I do confess to getting a chuckle out of things like the simultaneous purchase of a secrets-of-how-to-be-a-millionaire book and a get-out-of-debt book, or helping Drew Barrymore find a copy of He's Just Not That Into You, which I'm sure was for a friend.
3 This is easily my favorite. A front-runner for the finest thing I've ever written.