What I Liked in 2011: Musically

Albums of the Year (bearing this in mind - apparently I am a dude who really likes Jodeci)

1. House of Balloons - The Weeknd. I have just KILLED this album on my ipod. I absolutely fricking love it. The follow ups are also pretty stellar, particularly Echoes of Silence, but this was spectacular. Depressing, nasty, dark, anguished - it somehow expresses how you feel when somewhat ashamed of your behaviour, when you want to lock yourself in, hungover, and speak to no one. That I listen to this a lot at work is clearly a coincidence. Ahem.
   
2. Space Is Only Noise - Nicolas Jaar. Again, something I listened to a lot. I'm frankly annoyed that the person who made this album is a mere child (21!), but I think its shifts of mood wash over you beautifully and, having seen him perform some of this stuff live in December, it really is much heavier than it appears on the first few listens.
   
3. Stone Rollin’ - Raphael Saadiq. This was the perfect rock & roll/soul/funk album. Unbelievable. Could have been made 40-50 years ago, frankly, but feels completely present.
   
4. Let England Shake - PJ Harvey. I was umming and ahing about putting this on - is it really that good? And then I listened to it again. A lot. And, frankly, it is. I listened to a great guardianmusic review of the year that pointed out not just the incredible discussion of war, but how rooted it is in the land of England. It's about the cliffs, the soil, as well as the fight to protect that.
   
5. The English Riviera - Metronomy. I was really unsure about this at first, but I should have realised that this was a good sign. The initial problem for me that I struggled to get over was how different and, as I thought then, inferior it was to the previous Metronomy album, Nights Out. Now, I maintain that that album is one of my favourite albums of the last ten years, but my love for it crept up on me. Similar persistence with The English Riviera has paid off. I love the new vocalist; I love the quaint, sometimes gentle, melodic Englishness that lures you in, but the bite and darkness are there all the time. It's clever, cool and stylish, yet with none of the coldness or aloofness that those adjectives can convey. But then, I love Blur, who have been accused of all those things, repeatedly (too clever! not enough soul!). So gauge your judgment based on that.
   
6. Civilian - Wye Oak. This was a (for shame!) NPR-based discovery. All Songs Considered did a mid-year review, and I picked up some of their recommendations. This was my favourite, by miles. I love her voice over the guitars, the almost hazy, reverberating quality of it all.

Note: I would probably have included one of, if not both, the Andy Stott albums (We Stay Together and Passed Me By) if I'd had them before Christmas. Am absolutely loving them right now.

Compilation of the Year:

I have been loving the DJ Kicks by Wolf & Lamb. Most enjoyable, a really great mix of things.

Podcast of the Year:

This is actually a false category, as I seem to have been pointed to several really great dance podcasts that are now a regular part of my listening routine - Little White Earbuds, Clubberia, and, most recently, Kev Beadle. All good!

Songs of the Year

1. Mattie Safer - Is That Your Girl? I love this despite the crap rap in the middle. That's how awesome it is.
   
2. Azealia Banks - 212. This is absolutely filthy. The video is absolutely fantastic. I want to dance like them at 0:35. All the time.
   
3. Joe Goddard - Gabriel. Seriously disco. Joe Goddard is by such a mile the best Hot Chippian, and with this, he's had songs on my best of list two years in a row (thanks to the 2 Bears making it with Church last year).
   
4. Eleanor Friedberger - My Mistakes. I've never been a big Fiery Furnaces fan, but I absolutely love love love this song, this video, and particularly the cheesy saxophone riff at the end, which brings back a nostalgic pang for Aztec Camera and what I think is one of the greatest songs of the 80s.
   
5. Duran Duran - Girl Panic! They're back, baby! I love Duran Duran. Love his voice, love John Taylor's pout under ridiculous hair, love them.
   
6. Lianne La Havas & Willy Mason - No Room for Doubt. I think part of my enchantment with this song is because I can't quite believe that such a soft, wistful song could come from someone who grew up in Thornton Heath, frankly. But it's just utterly delightful.
   
7. Junior Boys - Banana Ripple. I adore the Junior Boys and although this album was not as great as the glorious So This Is Goodbye, this song was many minutes of just joy and exuberance. And far more disco-y than previous efforts, methinks.
   

Gigs of the Year

1. LCD Soundsystem - last ever gig, Madison Square Gardens. How can a gig ever compete with this? (Hint: it can't.) Atmosphere, music, raw emotion, and the sheer delight at attending, having thought I wouldn't be able to make it. Bliss.
   
2. Darkside - MHoW. I was utterly exhausted, had a six hour meeting that ended at 10.15pm, and somehow pulled myself together to go and see this - the world premiere of Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington. I was really late, and arrived at what seemed quite noodly atmospheric stuff that I was not into. Then TOH gave me a whisky & ginger and suddenly the base came in, and it was one of the best gigs I've been to. Made even better by the phenomenal encore with some tracks off Space Is Only Noise. I really can't bear how talented Nicolas Jaar is. It's annoying.
   
3. Portishead - Hammerstein Ballroom. I wasn't going, then I was - a friend got me a ticket for my birthday. Beth Gibbons' voice is genuinely a wonder of the modern world. The visuals were stunning, the music sounded phenomenal (the acoustics were brilliant), and all of a sudden, a teenage ambition was finally fulfilled. Glorious.
   
4. Friendly Fires - Bowery. Right down the front, dancing away with Ed McFarlane and his sexy dancing. I love that you can take someone who's never heard FF before, and they will have one of the best concerts of their life because FF are so good live.
   
5. Soulwax - Webster Hall. We went in very very late, just to say we'd gone, thought we would be too tired to wait for Soulwax, and on they came just as we arrived. Brilliant dance party when we'd sort of given up on going to and enjoying the gig.
   
6. Sleigh Bells/CSS - Bowery. Live, Sleigh Bells kick arse. It was a friend's 30th, we danced away, and what a double bill - CSS were a lot of fun, too. Made even better by TOH suddenly appearing, having been stuck in an airport not too long beforehand and not being expected to make it. It was brilliant.
   

Resolutions: May Update

Yikes, it's been quite the while since I rapped at ya about my resolutions. I've had a lot on my plate. Sort of.

1. Shooting, Shooting, Shooting: Take the camera off auto-settings. I'm not going to lie, I've been seriously lazy about this. But I am getting a little better at judging, not lease deciding what I don't like with the auto settings and fiddling around to change the exposure. So I am slowly but surely learning a little more but, to be honest, not that much.
   
2. Cooking, cooking, and more cooking. We've been doing pretty well on this - we did lots of slow cooking, but now the weather is better that's out of the picture. But last weekend we cooked sand shark (!) on the barbecue after marinading it in soy and ginger and honey, as well as trying out rum-laced versions of almond joy milkshakes (divine!). This is what happens when you don't update regularly - you completely forget what you've done. I firmly believe in those reports about the utter unreliability of witnesses' memory - I barely remember what I've done one week to next, let alone the last three months.
   
3. Reading, reading and more reading. An achievement! I read VS Naipaul's A Bend in the River; somewhat coincidentally, the discomfort I felt at his descriptions of women have been somewhat backed up by his words about female authors, but I can't help thinking I should act along the lines advised in this post - accept the bad, learn from it and learn from the mastery of his prose. It was an extremely uncomfortable but fascinating read. And, somewhat coincidentally I am, for the first time, reading Sense and Sensibility, mostly inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates' amazing posts revelling in Austen's writing.
   
4. Looking, looking and more looking - at exhibitions. Hmm, not so great on this, although we have used the Brooklyn Botanic Garden frequently and enjoyed the Cherry Blossom season, and also Rose Night recently (with a glorious sweet rose martini).
   
5. Solving, solving, solving. Having gone through a very good patch, I've been utterly rubbish at this recently. Partly because I've been reading a lot more (was completely obsessed with this very silly book, in part because there's a lot of discussion of the history of alchemy and science, or so I tell myself), including - shock! - my book club book for the month. It's hard for me to strike a balance, really.

So there you go. Surely worth the wait.

Resolutions: February Update

1. Shooting, Shooting, Shooting: Take the camera off auto-settings. This has been pretty hard. I'm getting better, in part because I've occasionally resorted to seeing what the contrast is between settings I use and the auto setting uses, and then reaching a compromise. It's been tricky to realise that I need to adjust the settings, often between shots. It sounds silly, but it's just not been automatic for me, but I'm training myself and getting better. And, often I choose my own settings or something close to that than the auto settings, which makes me happy. It's just time, really, that I need.
   
2. Cooking, cooking, and more cooking. We've been ok on this. This month we made a pepperoni pizza soup from Tasting Table, which was pretty good but I'm not desperate to repeat it. There hasn't been as much cooking as usual because work during February was somewhat overwhelming - it was a lot of leftovers and cobbling together what I could find in the cupboard. Hopefully March will prove a little more inspiring.
   
3. Reading, reading and more reading. Not good. I don't even have one of the 100 book list entries out from the library to pretend I'll read and then have to return. Will remedy that now. A Bend in the River is what I will not be reading in March.
   
4. Looking, looking and more looking - at exhibitions. Again, a little bit of a fail. As in, I didn't go anywhere. But again, February was a bit miserable in terms of time to spare for fun things.
   
5. Solving, solving, solving. Done some but not many.
   

So, February was far less successful than January. But I'm hopeful that March will be a little better...

Resolutions: January Update

2011's resolutions are actually going ok so far. Here's an update (other than this update):

1. Shooting, Shooting, Shooting: Take the camera off auto-settings. Well, I'm definitely trying this stuff. It's proving a little tricky - I thought it was just the shutter/aperture but apparently I've got to mess with the ISO settings as well, it not being a film-based camera. I'm still not sure how to change the ISO settings - I seem to change them but end up doing weird things to the menu, too. I've also been using the wide-angled lens and messing around with it. I'm not getting classic shots but, hopefully, I'm getting a little better. Most things are, thus far, overexposed. I'm trying to use the histogram feature to teach myself what the problem is and, thus, how to fix it. But it's usually overexposure.
   
2. Cooking, cooking, and more cooking. Doing well on this one. On Thursday (SNOW DAY!) I made a "peppery beef stew" from our Italian slow cooking book that was absolutely brilliant, with fresh bread and acorn squash lightly braised in chicken stock. Very easy and very tasty.
   
3. Reading, reading and more reading. This is the biggest failure so far. I got out The French Lieutenant's Woman and had to promptly return it unread to the library. Oops.
   
4. Looking, looking and more looking - at exhibitions. This has been the best kept resolution thus far. On Saturday I went to the Balenciaga retrospective with someone who actually knows about fashion and art. The structure of the exhibition was to show the influence of Spanish culture - religion, art, flamenco, bullfighting - on Balenciaga's designs. It worked extremely well, I thought. One of the most remarkable things was how he took traditional male outfits - cassocks for monks/priests, doublets for knights - and made them into a feminine design. And he was doing this well before trousers became truly acceptable, everyday clothing for women. I really wanted to steal half the clothing - gloriously structured suits with remarkable detailing, and one extraordinary dress with a train that actually had pockets so you could switch it up into a cape. Plus one that looked like a giant black truffle that you could just picture being worn by a mistress at a funeral of a famous Casanova or conductor or raconteur - that would make a serious statement.
   
   Additionally, we rejoined the Brooklyn Museum and had a look around the Norman Rockwell exhibition currently showing. It was extraordinary. Rockwell took tens to hundreds of photos for each of his paintings, and then selected odd little bits here and there to compose his actual painting. How he chose them is beyond me - that shows the real creativity but also mastery and control he exerted over the final version. Yet it seems strange that paintings that were supposed to be naturalistic snaps of everyday American life were so carefully controlled and thought out, so contrived. A strange juxtaposition. Seeing the covers of the Post, too, provided amusement at some of the stories - one featured Klaus Fuchs, the traitor at the Manhattan Project who was selling secrets about the bomb to the Russians; another advertised an article querying whether husbands should be used as baby-sitters to your own children. Also remarkable - the only people of colour were several black people used in servile roles - apparently that was editorial policy and ended up contributing to Rockwell's severing of the relationship. We also saw The Dinner Party and an amazing Kara Walker - I find her work constantly interesting and beautiful - so it was grand.
   
5. Solving, solving, solving. I've been getting back into these and while not completing them, I am - with some, at least - getting back into the swing of them and increasingly able to do them. But I need be a more devoted student with concentrated blocks of time rather than small snippets here and there.

Right, that's January. Midnight on Monday and I start the now annual No Drinking in February. I'm actually looking forward to it quite a great deal.

ps I also managed to go to the movies on Friday! I know! Have now seen THREE of the ten movies nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars - what an achievement. It was True Grit and comes highly recommended by me - surprisingly funny, tender and tense - I really enjoyed it.

Keeping Up

Ok, so it's only the second week or so of January, but this past fortnight has gone so well resolution-wise that I thought I had to show/share the results.

Saturday 8th we went to the Frick museum. Apparently I've never mentioned the Frick before, which is a bit of an oversight, as it's my favourite museum in New York. I have also been shocked to find out that a couple of my friends here haven't even heard of it, let alone visited. Mr. Frick was a coal baron who made a ridiculous amount of money and spent a ton of it on a gorgeous townhouse on the park and 70th st, and then filled it with unbelievably wonderful paintings. The first time I went simply staggered me - one walks into a room and there above a mantel is a glorious El Greco of St. Jerome, but one's eyes are not drawn there, but to the Holbein to the left of it, where Sir Thomas More sits. It's the one you see in textbooks, the first image on google images, that sort of thing.

It's phenomenal. It is hard to describe how perfect it is without seeing it in person; as illuminating and revealing and detailed as a portrait could be, whatever medium. He is firm and set of jaw; there are clear signs of strain, gritted teeth in the clenched muscles at his temple, with a slight wrinkle in the nose, too. And the velvet on his sleeves is one of the most accomplished things in a painting ever - you just want to touch its gleaming surface. The portrait to the right of Thomas Cromwell is less appealing to look at - it's more cartoonish, less realistic. But reading Wolf Hall as I am, it is rather frivolously amusing to have these two mortal - literally - enemies facing each other, even if Saint Jerome is in the middle to try to calm them down.

We've also made a chicken and olive thing for the slow cooker, Mark made an ethiopian chicken soup (doro wat) that was ace, and I've attempted several crosswords, although I think I need to make more of an effort to actually finish them. Some photos of the chicken & olive cooker to follow...

Reductio Ad Absurdum

Today has mostly been spent trying to write a brief (not so successfully, but getting there) and doing a bit of spring cleaning. I did not point out to TOH that it is nowhere bloody near spring yet as, bless him, he had his heart set on this. New year, new lack of stuff. That sort of thing. So today has consisted of numerous attempted ruthless re-categorising of things. No, I don't wear those shoes and haven't worn them for a year - off they go! You get the idea.

Of course, it turns out that we're both more than a little sentimental and have had to have a special category of "yes, I know you never wear it and will never wear it again but I can't bear for you to throw it away." Nevertheless, there is a big bag of things to go to the charity shop consisting of numerous bags, shoes and coats, the bathroom cull has produced two bags of products to go into the giant rubbish tip in the sky (and the earth - ahem. I know it's not great but I promise, we are recycling/donating where possible), and I've recovered two necklaces and an eyelash curler that for the past year have appeared to be irretrievably tangled together. It seems that I have not only a great capacity for hoarding and storing things, I can also be quite ruthless when purging myself of these things. Which leads me to the conclusion that I am a stuff bulimic - I store it all up only to throw it all out. Or something like that.

Resolutions: The 2011 Edition

It's a new day, a new year, and of course, some resolutions have to be made, if only to break them. This year, they are:

1. Shooting, Shooting, Shooting: Take the camera off auto-settings. Yes, I've taken some fab shots, but I've been lazy and not really got to know the camera well because I've used the auto settings a lot. Which means that I'm not really any more clued up than I was before, although I do know how to mess around with the white balance (although even then I've used those auto-settings). So it's a year of taking proper photos and getting to know the beast. TOH got me a fabulous wide-angle lens for Christmas so I will be trying to get the best out of that, too.
2. Cooking, cooking, and more cooking. And, in conjunction with 1, taking more photos of the results. We got a delightful Italian-inspired slow cooker book from these lovely people, and a new Nigel Slater, so I need to do more / take more photos of it. We've been good about trying new things, but I still think one recipe a week isn't much to ask, is it?
3. Reading, reading and more reading. Yes, every year it's the same, but still: I want to read more, and more "good" stuff. So, apropos of that, I want to read 5 off the Observer 100, as well as two each from the Booker and Orange shortlists. That'll do.
   
4. Looking, looking and more looking - at exhibitions. One of the best things about living in this city is, in theory, the availability and range of spectacular museums. Yet we almost never go. So I'd like to go six times - just six, for goodness' sake! So right now I'm signing up for information emails from various museums so that I know what's going on, when and where. Or, at least, I'm trying but the museum websites are a pain. I will persevere!
   
5. Solving, solving, solving. I would like to do three crosswords a week. That is all.

So that's it. Let's see how it goes.