{Dressel}

Scenes from a Friday evening stroll.

Fri, 18 May 2012 20:30:31 -0400

Scenes from a Friday evening stroll.

It was sort of difficult for me to bestow this evening’s...

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:25:00 -0400

It was sort of difficult for me to bestow this evening’s Worst Person on the Uptown A Train Award, as it was between Sleeping Beauty (pictured), who needed a whole bench on which to recline, or the young dude who was all tan and teeth and gums and insisted on stripper-twirling around the subway pole to amuse his lady friends. So! I just gave the prize to myself, for being tired and judgy, in which case everyone wins (by which I mean everyone loses)!

richardrushfield: The theater is a candy shoppe of dreams!...

Tue, 15 May 2012 13:29:04 -0400

richardrushfield:

The theater is a candy shoppe of dreams! Where glamourous but tough lady producers can still make their nattily dressed assistants carry their cell phones!

I can’t believe it’s the last Smash for almost a year!

The Smash season finale hangover, both physical and psychic, is pretty crushing today.

thanksforsharing: For anyone else who’s sunburnt and spending...

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:38:00 -0400

thanksforsharing:

For anyone else who’s sunburnt and spending the eve at home with a martini and maybe some carbonara: Song Travels with Michael Feinstein has become one of my most favorite radio shows. This week the guest is Liza Minnelli, and in a few weeks—!!—on June 8th—it’ll be Rickie Lee Jones!!

PS: This episode is amazing for 5,000 reasons, one of which:

Michael: What was [Laura Nyro] like?
Liza: Fabulous!
Michael: [knowing laugh]
Liza: A little weird.

Reblogging because a) this episode is indeed amazing for umpteen reasons—Elaine Stritch references begin around the 30 minute mark!—but also b) I cannot stop staring at this weirdly framed image of Liza looking quite serious, speaking to this microphone-wielding, black-gloved interlocutor. It is odd, yes? It is like a still from a Stasi interrogation or something.

[Wainwright’s] new songs reflected a need to be...

Wed, 02 May 2012 01:42:13 -0400

[Wainwright’s] new songs reflected a need to be “silly and young still,” without taking away from his core appeal to the “dispossessed” listener Wainwright describes as, “someone who senses the tragic nature of our world but also appreciates the romance and the beauty and is also positive in a weird way.”

richardrushfield: What kind of an unfeeling monster proposes to...

Wed, 02 May 2012 00:35:00 -0400

richardrushfield:

What kind of an unfeeling monster proposes to Karen when she’s in the middle of tech!? Is that what they teach you in politics Dev? To distract people when they’re in tech? With rings and engagements?!

If “Smash” has given me nothing else this season—OK besides some amazing back channel e-mail convos and an ability to roll my eyes farther back in my head than I thought possible*—it has given me this moment. It almost makes the crazy carnival ride worth it.

*Edited to add: It is worth noting Depends is a commercial sponsor because there are moments throughout each viewing I’m near pooping myself. SYNERGY!

My friend Josh was in town last weekend and we all gathered for...

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 01:58:00 -0400

My friend Josh was in town last weekend and we all gathered for brunch, and as as he was scrolling trough his iPhone he (somewhat jokingly) lamented the days when you had to search out an obscure music LP or cult film on videocassette and we were all, ah yes, remember when.

I recall buying this single as a UK import from some local record store and paying a dumb amount of money for it because, well, how else was it to come to me? Then I think something tragic happened to the disc concerning my younger sister and a beverage, but I may be off in my recollection.

Still! The other night—because I’ve been lately having some Edina Monsoon moments—I wanted to hear this version again and blammo, it was to be had at a keystroke. So, yes, I guess we can all mourn the days of hipper than thou-ness through art product obscurity, and the rewarded effort of record-bin foraging. We’ll just now take comfort in our Klout scores or something? I’m not so much bothered.

Oh man this lite muzak duet, I seriously need some crackers with...

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 03:54:00 -0400

Oh man this lite muzak duet, I seriously need some crackers with this…

Spotify has been leading me to some embarrassing musical choices...

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 01:37:00 -0400

Spotify has been leading me to some embarrassing musical choices of late and I’m NOT SORRY.

It’s not that I’m wrong, you’re just not asking the right question.

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 04:08:45 -0400

It’s not that I’m wrong, you’re just not asking the right question.

It’s easy to forget just how famous and anomalous this...

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:08:00 -0400

It’s easy to forget just how famous and anomalous this cross-dressing west country Mephistopheles was during that Britpop-happy era. His debut album, 1995’s Maxinquaye, was the anti-Parklife: a ghost world of dissolving identity, sexual turmoil, oblique violence and very dark jokes. It was, despite its creators’ best efforts to the contrary, a hit. Tricky beat Blur, Oasis, Pulp and Elastica to album-of-the-year laurels in the music weeklies, was profiled for a magnificently pretentious magazine featureby none other than David Bowie and even, during a brief liaison with Björk, became paparazzi fodder.

— Tricky’s album Maxinquaye is seventeen years old. Do with that what you will.

Audio

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:17:00 -0400

My copy of Reuben Butchart’s Nameless and Awake arrived...

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

My copy of Reuben Butchart’s Nameless and Awake arrived recently and it is a gorgeous product, both sonically and physically. I am fond of the conceit: the album consists of eight poems by John William Carroll set to music, produced and sung by Butchart with arrangements by the Millworkers. The drawings that accompany the hardbound packaging are by Butchart as well. I am not alone in being enamored of its charms (but I’ll admit my bias too).

Having lived abroad for close to six months and then having couch-hopped in New York for two, I have for the sake of my sanity (and the schlep) tried to learn to divorce myself from my attachment to too many bulky possessions. (Anyone who’s moved more than a couple of cartons of books…). I like my mp3s, and my new e-reader and I are now simpatico. Convenience and ease and portability, yes. But that is not always hard and fast, and some things are more than worth the physical space they inhabit! The hardbound CD version of Nameless and Awake doesn’t feel disposable, it is album as artifact and art product. Not a mere collection of throwaway singles but a collectible thing that one wants to reference: a blend of images and words and music.

That said, Nameless and Awake, above all, is an intense labor of love, one that is deeply felt, elegant and mature and swoony and earthy and ethereal all in equal measure—that alone is something which stands out, or at least askew, nowadays—so ultimately seek it out in whatever format you may desire, if you so desire.

Below, the text of the first track, “The Vanity of Song.” [listen here]

By knowing what I know,
I am; so now,
what shall I, being, do?
For money, saith the preacher,
is a defense.
But I have no inheritance.
What work is mine? In what do I rejoice?
Only the vanity of giving voice
to thoughts in time –
and when I’m done with time –
and singing – singing under the sun –
what’s the news?

These songs have brought no money
and the singer sang unsung

Not trying to read too much into this vintage ad from the flea...

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 22:35:00 -0400

Not trying to read too much into this vintage ad from the flea market but dang, wut?

The Cabin in the Woods. Friday the 13th. Perfect. This movie...

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 21:49:00 -0400

The Cabin in the Woods. Friday the 13th. Perfect. This movie was, despite some reports to the contrary, pretty much everything (your mileage may vary). In fact it was the movie I’m pretty sure I wrote in my head in college when I was smoking too much pot. Speaking of my head, I will need to check with the cinema’s lost & found because I’m fairly certain my brain fell out of it midway through the movie and I would like to reclaim it. Also midway through the movie, during Chris Hemsworth’s big St. Crispin’s Day-esque speech, there appeared by the exit what I’m pretty sure was a guy in old lady drag, replete with walker, yelling about how s/he thought this was a screening of Mary Poppins, and it was so distracting that nearly everyone was silent for the tirade, before the inevitable shushes and boos started. So either we got trolled or Lionsgate has very misguided ideas about amping up audience interaction. Then after, still brainless, standing on the corner, a team of city employees started coming by and grabbing stalks of tulips out of those big cement planters, but very silently, and only certain ones, and it was a little too controlled in a Truman Show, strike the set way for comfort. A birthday party followed, in the bowels of the East Village, ending with pizza as we could not, being of an age, muster the energy to usurp some rather lackadaisical youngs from the table they were hogging at San Loco. #

The Piers show at Leslie/Lohman on Saturday. Relevant to my historical and cultural interests (perhaps yours too? If so run don’t walk etc.) and well-conceived. Followed, of course, by a stroll along the Hudson waterfront, which I suppose you could play the game of which do you prefer: old piers or new piers, in the way one plays that with Old/New Times Square. #

Later in a hotel room in Chelsea, waiting while six women fight apathy and the effects of day-drinking to apply make-up and tight dresses and step out for a Bachelorette party. M. is in town for her hen do, and she said it would be great to see me, And that is how I end up making small talk with M., her sister, our mutual friend Wingfield and three relative strangers for an hour in the room, and then find myself in the lobby bar of the Ace Hotel, now a new bullet point on my “places in New York I’m vaguely uncomfortable” list. S. is coming to the Ace Hotel as well, at some point. I had made plans with him earlier in the week to meet, a reunion of sorts, until I was rainchecked. It is amazing how things change and yet don’t, and both he and she seemed to have barely aged since I last saw either of them, which is going on five years now? S. and I spoke but little and as I was on my way out we hugged and he kind of cocked his head in his earnest, puppy-ish was and was like “when are we gonna see each other again?” and I was like I reached out last time so I guess it is on you, a statement I didn’t mean to come off as snide but he might have taken it as such. #

(At some point during the weekend I read Cather’s “A Wagner Matinee” on the train. I’m working my way through Youth and the Bright Medusa.)

Waiting for my brunch date on Sunday morning, Wingfield calls to say that M. found bedbugs in her hotel room which, eww. Bachelorette Party Bedbug Bonanza. Blargh. Not how anyone wants to cap their night. Having not seen J. since I’ve been back, I could dine out on my stories from my time abroad, even though by now that’s a meal I’m almost sick myself of ingesting. That and, we talked about how to ensure we get tickets to Into the Woods this summer. Afterwards we found some vintage ads at the Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market for his apartment, before leisurely strolling up 9th Ave. #

[of the above image I can only say I took it as it is relevant to an inside joke that is lost in translation from the German, and a not-really-funny joke at that. But the image made itself known to me on 14th St. Friday night so I had to photograph it.]

Not trying to bite Matt G.’s style, but I do admire this...

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 01:20:00 -0400

Not trying to bite Matt G.’s style, but I do admire this feature of my new nabe.

"[Q]ueers are getting dumbed down at a rate far exceeding the requisite hosing down of straight trade..."

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:55:47 -0400

“[Q]ueers are getting dumbed down at a rate far exceeding the requisite hosing down of straight trade that is a commonplace in their mythology. The greatest enemy of the homosexual may now be the other homosexual. Queers can do things to the self-esteem of other queers—witness the Chelsea Boys—that no heterosexual schoolyard bully, no cruel father, has ever matched.”

- James McCourt, Queer Street

BEWARE GIRLS: the call is coming from inside the house!

(via macartney)

Ding ding ding!

Travel makes you innocent again, someone supposedly once said;...

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 23:54:00 -0400

Travel makes you innocent again, someone supposedly once said; couch surfing makes you a twitchy, unsettled mess and a bit bonkers, I am here to tell you. It is the disconcerting feeling of being a nomad in the city you supposedly call home. Plus. There is the thing of having more keys than a high school janitor. Learning on the fly the particular quirks of each new apartment (every New York apartment is squirrely in its own way), the shower that runs too hot, how many times you have to jiggle the handle on the toilet. Really, the nightmare that is other people’s toilets. These are the ones you never want to overflow. The best place to safely exit in case a fire breaks out in the middle of the night. Remembering who said to only lock the bottom lock and be sure to open the curtain so the plant gets light. Feeling the urge to leave the house in the morning and not return until the end of the day, even if you have nothing to do apart from look for a more permanent living situation, because its slightly weird to lounge around while your friend-cum-host is busily dressing for work at 6 AM. That minor tug of guilt—and feeling of fecklessness—at having to rely on the kindness of close friends, like a first draft Tennessee Williams heroine. (You’re grateful for the lucky breaks where someone is out of town and let’s you crash at their place, in exchange for keeping a pet or plant alive.)

I can now find these tribulations amusing since I’m currently ensconced in a new place in upper Manhattan. A door to shut and the indulgent vanity of (semi-) privacy. A sense of autonomy restored. Though, the sublet is up in a half a year, give or take. Anyone have a couch free around then?

Ah, fantastic, new Ann Magnuson. (Well, old Ann but new to me.)...

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 16:21:00 -0400

Ah, fantastic, new Ann Magnuson. (Well, old Ann but new to me.) From her Facebook:

Just discovered someone posted a very rare recording I did with John Cale (yup, from the Velvet Underground) - a spoken word piece done in the style of John Cage for a tribute record done in 1993. Wacky how everything comes back to bite your bottom! And if the bottoms are as glamorous as the ones on these Helmut Newton models, why the heck not!?

Last night I was talking about Willa Cather’s short story...

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 18:49:09 -0400

Last night I was talking about Willa Cather’s short story “Paul’s Case,” which, depending on the lens through which you want to interpret the story, could be subtitled It Doesn’t Get Better. Well, there is a made-for-TV adaptation from 1980 which you can watch on Netflix I believe or you can pay YouTube 3.99 for the pleasure of viewing it there. The first part moves at the speed of molasses through cheesecloth. But never you mind, because you can also watch it through the lens of young Eric Roberts sure was a doll.