Thing of the Week: Buying A Bed, Being In Love With Chris Bell, The Coffee Candle

LJ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Buying A Bed

On Wednesday afternoon I bought a bed. In the morning I called my dad on the phone to ask him how to buy a bed, like, I don't fucking know. He asked me where I wanted to go and I said "Sleep Country Canada, because..." and he interjected, "Why buy a mattress anywhere else?" 

"That's what I'm sayin'!" I exclaimed, and, had it been real life and not over the phone, I definitely would've high-fived him. (That whole interaction doesn't make sense if you're not Canadian. Sleep Country Canada's slogan is "Why buy a mattress anywhere else?" and there's a catchy jingle about it. I think it's a brilliant slogan, personally. There is literally no good reason to buy a mattress anywhere else.)

Later on I took a streetcar to my dad's house and I put my whites in the washing machine and then I walked to the Sleep Country Canada on the corner of King & Yonge and I bought myself a bed. The salesman was named James and he was extremely helpful and informative. I got very personal with James. I let him in on a lot of information about my life, my job and my feelings and what-have-you. I told James that, my whole life, I always knew in my heart that as soon as I started making money, the first thing I was going to do was buy myself a bed. Right now my bed is so crappy I can't even tell you. It's a twin. Like, who the fuck has a twin? Besides a kid. Not to mention the fact that it's held together with bungee cord. Anyway, it was really, really heavy and gorgeous to be myself having finally achieved that goal. At Sleep Country Canada. I was wearing a leopard-print t-shirt. 

I definitely spent more money on a bed than a normal person might have. But I suck at sleeping and I just kept thinking about the movie Smiley Face. I want to be like Jane F. in that movie and care about my bed more than anything. My beautiful bed! I'm Laura Jane F. and my bed game is about to get so tight. So soft. My bed is arriving on Wednesday, May 22nd between the hours 5 and 9 PM, which means that next week my Thing of the Week is going to be ACTUAL SLEEPING IN MY ACTUAL BED! I am so excited for my one week from now self. She is the luckiest Laura there ever was. 

PS: My Thing of the Week is accompanied by a picture of Ted Chaough because Ted Chaough is my sub-Thing of the Week. I love him. I have this butterscotch Faber-Castell that I call my Ted Chaough pen because Ted Chaough is always wearing butterscotch- or mustard, if you will. I'll probably write more about Ted Chaough in the future so I don't want to blow my Ted Chaough load right now. Let's just say that I really wish I owned a "WHAT'S NOT TO LIKE ABOUT TED CHAOUGH" tote bag. Chaough. 

LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Being in Love with Chris Bell, For a Change



On Monday night I went to a press screening of the Big Star documentary Nothing Can Hurt Me. It was so sweet! Just a really sweet and lovely movie. I got goosebumps about 97 times and I cried, once, for Chris Bell. Chris Bell was in Big Star but left after the first album, and he died when he was 27. He was a sad boy, it seems; it must've been really hard to be a born-again, probably gay, hypersensitive songwriter with drug problems in the South in the 1970s. There's a part in the movie where the owner of Ardent Studios talks about being at Ardent late at night and hearing all this crazy noise and going into one of those studios and seeing Chris Bell working on I Am The Cosmos all alone, doing everything by himself. That really got me, and I also loved the part where some dude says something about how Chris Bell would always have a "full-body purple aura whenever we'd take acid together." I think it's pretty likely that Chris Bell was an actual angel. 

So yesterday evening I went to the bar where my housemate John works and drank a beer that tastes like roses and finished reading the first draft of my book and inserting notes like "a little more 'Big Black Car'-vibey here." On the walk home I stopped at the hamburger stand and got a grilled cheese sandwich for supper; in front of me in line there was this boringly hot scenester boy in his 20s, talking loudly into his phone while the counter dude was trying to take his order. The boy was meeting up with a friend, apparently, and at some point he shouted into the phone, "Head west? Dude, I don't know what the fuck direction west is." Which is so dumb! The thing about L.A. is there are mountains and, for the most part, the mountains are either in front of you or behind you or to your left or to your right, and you can tell which direction you're facing by where you are in relation to the mountains. We were in Echo Park and the sky was dusty-pink and dusty-purple and the mountains were in front of us; west was to the left. The only way you couldn't know that is if you were just weirdly out of touch with L.A./possibly spiritually diseased/totally not the cosmos. I made fun of the boy in my head and then I got my grilled cheese and walked home eating the grilled cheese, listening to a "genius" playlist based on "My Life Is Right," which was written by the beautiful angel Chris Bell:



"My Life Is Right" is my spirit song right now. I figured that out on my walk home, and also yesterday I figured out that my Rolling Stones spirit song is "It's Only Rock & Roll," and my Beatles spirit song is "Back in the USSR." Everything is pretty cool.

JEN'S THING OF THE WEEK: The Coffee Candle

 

Look at this perfect Coffee Candle I bought at the witch store yesterday with the perfect Witch Store Cat sleeping behind it. I snapped this pic while paying so I would never forget I paid 5$ for The Coffee Candle and handed the money over a sleeping black cat. According to the candle once you burn it you're pretty much set for life. Any spells anyone put on you will be broken, you'll have good luck and money. There's a lucky horse shoe on the bottom of the glass, obviously.

 

Thing of the Week: Adam Yauch & Itchycoo Parks, A Story About Mary Timony, 'Jurrasic Park' 3D

LJ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Adam Yauch Park & "Itchycoo Park"

This past Saturday was the one-year anniversary of the day Adam Yauch died, which means it was also the one-year anniversary of the day I bought an iPhone and named it Dan Humphrey. I named my cellular phone after a character on the TV show Gossip Girl because I felt similarly ambivalent toward both of them.

I bought Dan Humphrey within forty-five minutes of finding out Adam Yauch died. I wondered if maybe the circumstances of the afternoon were too grave to justify my making such a frivolous purchase but my Internet was broken and had I not bought that iPhone I knew I would've been really bored all night so I went ahead and did it anyway. 

On the day Adam Yauch died I was in shock and couldn't wrap my head around it. I couldn't accept it then, I can't accept it now, and I honestly don't think it will ever happen. Nobody was there the summer I turned fourteen and my family took a trip to Alberta for the Faulds family reunion, when I climbed up a very craggy hill and once I made it to the top realized I could see for hundreds and hundreds of miles across the prairies, all the way to the Rocky Mountains (it's this kind of thing). There were silos and tremendous bales of hay which were almost more magnificent than the mountains to me. I thought about how the land probably looked almost exactly the same as it did when dinosaurs roamed Alberta, which is the coolest thing to think about when you're in Alberta, the whole dinosaurs aspect of it, and I listened to Hello Nasty on headphones and swore to myself that when I grew up and married Adam Yauch I'd bring him back to this exact spot and it would be the most peaceful, romantic time. 

But I'm happy, at least, that now Adam Yauch Park exists. It's the second most wonderfully-named place in the world after John Lennon International Airport. I've written approximately five songs in my life, and one of them was named John Lennon International Airport, which I remembered about myself as soon as I found out Adam Yauch Park existed and tweeted "I want to write a song called Adam Yauch Park that'd be more like Waterloo Sunset & less like MacArthur Park but a little like Itchycoo Park." It was a very unpopular tweet, but it motivated me to put Itchycoo Park on my iPod and listen to Itchycoo Park on my way to work that morning. 

Because I'm a human, I've always liked Itchycoo Park, but this past week marked the first time in my life I ever loved Itchycoo Park, and it's also the first time in a long time that my loving a particular song has meant anything about myself to myself. I was just sort of skipping down the street in the sunshine when it got to the "... feed the ducks with a bun/ they all come out/ to groove about/ be nice and have fun in the sun" bit and I totally swooned over it, to a point where I needed to rewind the song and listen to it again, and I thought, "I must be very happy"- had been a year ago, I would have felt embarrassed by the phrase "fun in the sun" and resented Steve Marriott for thinking it was all too beautiful, since one year ago I thought that absolutely everything was in no way beautiful enough. It's kind of nice these days, how every time I consider what my life was like one year ago (shitty) vs. how it is today it's seriously insane how comparatively excellent things are, and my feelings toward Itchycoo Park are emblematic of that excellence. I think that "the sky" is definitely the coolest and most exciting possible answer to the question "What will we touch there?", but I don't want you to think I'm stupidly frolicking around feeling like it's all too beautiful, because it's not. What's especially excellent is that I feel like it's all the exact appropriate amount of beautiful that it should be.

LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: The Mary Timony Profile in Yesterday's Washington Post

She's just my favorite. Here's the article. It's the most I've ever learned about Mary's life and it's still not very much, but I'm grateful for it. She talks about going to see Fugazi as a teenager and sweat condensing on the ceiling and dripping onto her head, she talks about depression and how after Helium disbanded she was so broke that there was a month when all she ate was string cheese. She talks about how she writes her songs and about using music "to deal with my brain," and she says something about music as a tool for connection and it's so devastating and beautiful, kind of like a lot of Mary Timony songs. I want to quote like every other paragraph of the profile but instead you should just read it, while listening to The Golden Dove, on your headphones, ideally outside in the sun or the shade.

Plus look how cute she is standing in her backyard with her guitar. Look at that dress! It is just so very Mary Timony-y.

JEN'S THING OF THE WEEK: Jurrasic Park 3D

 

I saw Jurrasic Park 3D and it was amazing. I went with the Goldblum Gals, obviously. We laughed a lot. We bought the gigantic tub of popcorn and finished it. Joan brought it out to the concession stand and asked if there was a free refill. They said sure, this is ridiculous. We ate most of that one too! The giant popcorn came with a gigantic soda which made me laugh every time it was passed to me. It was so heavy and sweet and gross and also good. We had so much fun. We maybe had more fun than when we actually met Jeff Goldblum? This was on our one year anniversary of meeting him/starting all of our relationships with Jeff. Oh, and we were in Times Square, obviously. The last time I was at the Times Square AMC theater Joan and I saw Bachelorette. After the movie I had to pee of course and Joan came into the bathroom just to wait online with me, still eating popcorn. The image of Joan in the bathroom, surrounded by stalls eating popcorn is one of my favorite images. I tried to take a picture but I was laughing too much so it's all blurry. We relived that experience and brought the gigantic tub into the bathroom and hung out in there for like a half hour like high school.

I totally forgot about how the first scene in Jurrasic Park is scary. The movie is really good. So fun. The combination of Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum is truly a gift. Sam Neil too! I like him. I think it's really cool that Laura Dern is in Jurrasic Park. Of every actress, she's the one that got the part, like, thank god. (This is a spoiler but I kind of feel like if you haven't seen Jurrasic Park yet that's your problem) It's so beautiful that in the end a vegetarian hacker teenage girl saves everyone from the dinos.
 

Pancakes & Gram Parsons & The Spectacle of Intermittent Glory: My Beautiful Weekend in Memphis & Nashville

BY LIZ

I went to Tennessee over the weekend: Memphis and Nashville. The trip was originally meant to be reward/motivation for finishing the first draft of my book, and also an opportunity to commune with Alex Chilton's ghost. In the end it was all that and so much more.

I flew into Memphis, arriving on Thursday evening. My buddy Alissa and I were supposed to meet at the airport but Alissa's flight was delayed so I drove to the hotel, listening to a CD of Big Star songs. My favorite Big Star song right now is "You Get What You Deserve"; lately I'm really into songs that are bad-vibey in a sweet way. When I got to the hotel Alissa texted again and said her flight was delayed a thousand more hours, so I decided that was a good opportunity to go do weird Big Star things. 

I drove to Ardent Studios, where Big Star and Alex Chilton made lots of records. It was all locked up for the night and I took pictures and peeked into windows and thought about Alex Chilton. It was dusk and it had been raining all day and everything was blue. I drove around for a while and tried to absorb some Alex Chilton energy from the trees and it definitely worked. Then I stopped at a barbecue place and ordered food because I once saw a picture of Big Star hanging out there. I got a brisket sandwich, some gorgeous crinkle-cut fries, and a gigantic fountain Diet Coke with a shot of strawberry soda. I went back to the hotel and ate my food and drank some wine out of a plastic cup I got when I poured myself some pink lemonade from the cute jug in the lobby earlier.

Alissa got in around one or two in the morning and that was the best thing 'cause I hadn't seen her since Christmas 2011, and that it is way too long! I love Alissa. Pretty soon we're coming out with our debut album, which is called She's the Swordish, I'm the Cowboy.

Friday morning: we woke up! It was raining. (A fun/actually kind of annoying/ultimately totally okay thing is that it rained every day we were in Tennessee. I live in Los Angeles and Alissa spends most of her time in Florida and the Bahamas and we are not accustomed to the cold rain; poor, poor us.) We went to Beale Street and ate breakfast (fried chicken and waffles for Alissa, ham and eggs and toast and 97 cups of coffee for me), then walked around Beale Street a little while in the rain. I bought some Elvis Presley lip balm and then we went to Sun Studios and stood in the studio, where Johnny Cash and Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and U2 made records. We hung out there a while and then we drove to Graceland.

Oh my god, Graceland. Graceland changed me, man. Before Graceland my main thing about Elvis was "The Beatles loved you, so I guess that means something to me." But being in his house made me love Elvis. Partly because I'm way into his style, the joyful over-the-top-ness of it. Here's a view upstairs from the foyer or whatever you call it:

And here's the ceiling in my favorite room, the billiards room:

And here's a shot of "the jungle room" (kind of a den/second living room): 

Alissa made a really good point about how each room had a very distinctive mood and how, if you lived at Graceland, you could just go to whatever room fit with your mood. Like, "I feel like a jungle right now." Or: "I'm feelin' kinda disco." I hope I have a jungle room and disco room in my house someday.

The thing that got to me the most at Graceland, the thing that made me fall in love with Elvis a little, was how - in "the racquetball building" - they had this display with a bunch of Elvis's jumpsuits and they were playing a video of Elvis singing "Can't Help Falling in Love" in Hawaii in 1973. The video's great and ridiculous and wonderful and depressing and perfect, and I think that's an inspired combination. Very little's more inspiring to me than a once-beautiful man who's gone to seed and still trying to be beautiful, and mostly failing but still sometimes getting these tiny little moments of total glory. The spectacle of intermittent glory is a powerful thing for me, is an important lesson I learned in Memphis.

It was weird seeing Elvis's grave. I took pictures but I feel weird posting them. Next to his grave there was a fountain and I threw a quarter in and said something to Elvis in my head, but of course I can't tell you what that is.

Here's the most beautiful of Elvis's jumpsuits. After Alex Chilton and Chris Bell, he is definitely my third-favorite beautiful dead Capricorn from Memphis:

The Strawberry Fields Whatever Diet: Everything We Ate For An Entire Week (Spring Edition!)

BY LAURA JANE & JEN

Monday, April 22nd

LJ: I woke up supes hungoves and, lying in bed, drank seven-eighths of a bottle of water in one go. I ate a toasted whole wheat English muffin with peanut butter and raspberry jam for breakfast. Right now I’m working with this new variant of Kraft peanut butter, “Cinnamon Raisin Granola” flavor. It’s lovable. It’s texturally very compelling; the granola bits are like rice krispies. Also, it’s helping me cope with the Kraft peanut butter label’s recent redesign, with the Pixar-y bears peering through a looking glass, which I’ve been weirdly stressed out by.

I had a cup of coffee with two Splendas. I steal handfuls of Splendas from every coffee shop I ever set foot in. I just don’t see why I should ever have to pay for Splenda when I can just as easily not pay for Splenda. I’m a naturally sneaky human.

The theme of my day was “extreme thirst.” I drank an entire bottle of water over the course of twenty-five minutes on a treadmill, usually I’ll have like half a one. I normally would have gone for thirty minutes but I was so fucking thirsty I couldn’t make it. I ran out of water around twenty-three minutes in and then figured, “Fuck this” and ran to the bathroom, where I pounded another bottle and then wanted to throw up and die. I am growing older and hangovers are becoming a problem. People warned me about this.

Thing of the Week: "I Am With You" by Ty Segall, Portuguese Man-O-Wars, Fishing with John/Willem Dafoe

LJ'S THING OF THE WEEK: "I Am With You" by Ty Segall

I'm a big Ty Segall fan. I love his big fat moony Nordic face. I love closing my restaurant to Twins and Goodbye Bread; I think it's a cool thing, "closing down a bar or restaurant" music. I love "Gold on the Shore" on the subway, the chunk of "Comfortable Home" where he's like "She said she wants to buy a couch/ I said "Why do we have to buy the couch?"/ I understand why/ She wants a comfortable home," and you're just like "Oh God. Dudes." He's like a scuzzier Beatles, one of the only guys who's ever been able to adequately articulate an audible John Lennon influence, a Revolver-y thing: it's cool, it's rock and roll, it's lazy and perfect, perfectly lazy. I like how he's just some crappy dude from today who is two years younger than me. This morning I watched a video of him doing that "What's in your bag?" Amoeba Records thing and it was so standardly 2013 and boring and I really appreciated it. I'm at an unromantic place in my life where I mostly just go to work and like work and think about making money; I'm not really in the mood for anything Kinks or George Harrison or any crazy meaningful shit to change my life or anything. All I need's some chill guitars for spring. 

"I Am With You" is my favorite Ty Segall song because it starts out a bit glimmery and psych-y, but quickly deteriorates into almost a whole minute of lyrics beginning with "I'm sick of..."- Ty Segall's sick of so much shit! It's funny and great. I hear him. Then it changes into a different part, with sunnier and more laid-back vibes and he sings "Breathe the air/ Feel the sun/ Don't you know/I am with you" for nearly the entire rest of the song, but it never feels weird, like he shocked you out of the first place, where he's sick of things. It sounds very honest and natural, to switch up from being so hateful and negative into all dazey and sweet a second later. I feel like songs are often meant to represent only one emotion, and that's a shitty thing about music versus writing. You can explain like seven thousand emotions over the course of one novel, but songs are usually only a) happy or b) sad. Really cut and dry. 

In my life I hope to hear more and more songs that switch from nasty to sweet like that, take heed all songwriters who are reading, but for now I am cool with just this one. He's set the bar pretty high. 

LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Pictures of Portuguese Man-O-Wars

THESE ARE REAL PICTURES OF ACTUAL THINGS THAT EXIST: Portuguese man-o-wars, as photographed by a dude in Florida named Aaron Ansarov. Here are three of my favorites:

You can see the rest here. 

My other thing of the week is I'm going to Memphis on Thursday to commune with Alex Chilton's ghost. Get in touch if there's anything else you think I should do/see/eat/experience while I'm in Memphis.

JEN'S THING OF THE WEEK: Fishing with John/Willem Dafoe

On Wednesday night I went to see Fishing with John episodes played at Nitehawk with John Lurie there doing a Q&A after. It was so fun to watch them there, and to see John Lurie, who was super generous with his answers. They also played a little film of images of Lurie's paintings, which I like, and a song by him, which I also liked. The Fishing with John episodes screened were: the Willem Dafoe episode, the Tom Waits one, and the Dennis Hopper one. I don't like Tom Waits and honestly, that is the worst episode. It's good, they are all good! Of the 5/6 (does a 2 parter make it 5 or 6?) it's the dud. Dennis Hopper is nuts and the rapport he & Lurie have is so fun to watch. The Willem Dafoe episode is A DREAM! They are both so funny and goofy and clearly enjoying each other's company. What a little sweetheart Dafoe is! The episode sparked a mild obsession/strong interest in Willem Dafoe for me (all of Fishing with John sparked this with Lurie for me. Right after I first fell in love with Fishing with John I watched Paris, TX and Wild at Heart without realizing he was in them!! Psychic connection). Part of my Willem interest is narcissistic. I think I look like him. I haven't had anyone back me up on this but that IMDB pic...pretty much looks like me! But older! I also just like him. During the Q & A someone asked John who was the most easy going, down to earth person to hang with while filming the episodes. Obviously, he said Willem! The Question Asker then said something like, "Oh weird, Willem seemed a little creepy". WHAT! I haven't read that book The Psychopath Test yet, but after I heard this guy's reaction to Dafoe I thought of my own psychopath test. If someone watches the Willem Dafoe episode of Fishing with John and DOESN'T like him afterwards I think they are probably a psychopath.

Boston is the Best Place for Becoming What You Are

BY LIZ

I grew up in Massachusetts and I used to live in Boston, from when I graduated college (in 1999) to when I moved to Los Angeles (in 2003). When you're little Boston is for field trips to the Aquarium and Quincy Market and the Children's Museum and the Museum of Science, where there's a glass case displaying a piece of petrified lightning and a gigantic tank with a simulated ocean wave. And then when you get to be a teenager the best thing is getting your parents to take you and your best friend to Boston/Cambridge for the day so they can drop you off in Harvard Square and you can buy CDs at Newbury Comics and shop the Urban Outfitters bargain basement for quirky ringer tees and clever polyester skirts for hours and hours, and then just walk around and check out all the weird kids who are a zillion times cooler than you or anyone in your hometown. I really miss that about being a teenager in a town kind of near Boston - how there's this place you can visit every few months or something and everyone there is better and wilder but it's exciting and it inspires you and gives you all these new ideas of who you might be as you become what you are, or however you want to put it.
           So I made this Spotify playlist thing of songs from Boston that I love. It's purposely non-completist; I wanted it to be songs that sound like walking around Boston and Cambridge when I was lots younger and being romantic about what the city might turn me into. Of everyone I included, these are the bands/people whose songs mean the most to me:

MARY TIMONY/HELIUM. Mary Timony and I lived in Boston at the same time so I used to go see her every day, or at least about once a month. Once I saw Bjork at the Wang Center and then Mary Timony at the Middle East Upstairs, both in the same night, and seeing Mary after seeing Bjork was so good and restorative. I mean of course Bjork's a big genius, but Mary Timony is so much more my breed of weird, with her tiger tapestry draped over her keyboard and her cat mask pushed up over her forehead and her Pete Townsend guitar windmill thing that's totally not a joke because Mary Timony is no joker. Bjork wore the swan dress, or something kind of like it, and that essentially means zero to me. Who cares about a swan dress when Mary Timony is playing some long crazy version of "Poison Moon" that SEGUES INTO A COVER OF "ISOLATION" BY JOY DIVISION and I don't even like Joy Division very much but in Mary Timony's hands it's transcendent and perfect and everything.
           That show happened right around when The Golden Dove came out. Once on nogoodforme.com Laura Jane wrote the sentence "If I could describe The Golden Dove by Mary Timony in one made-up adjective, it would be "Elizabeth Barker-esque," which was a cool moment in my life.

JULIANA HATFIELD. Laura Fisher thinks it's fun of me that Only Everything is my favorite Juliana Hatfield record. And I was going to make some point about how I'm inordinately influenced by cover art when it comes to processing the sound of an album, and how Only Everything sounds exactly like it's cover art, like some heavy majestic animal painted in bright hot colors. Which is all true but the greater truth is that Only Everything is my favorite Juliana Hatfield album because it's the one that sounds most like me, all snarly and sludgy and sweet and shiny. My favorite song on Only Everything is "OK OK," and my favorite "OK OK" lyric is the one that goes "I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you."

Between Hopeless & Despondent On The Sadness-Continuum

A Track-By-Track "Review" of Comedown Machine by The Strokes 

BY LAURA JANE (ILLO BY JEN)

TAP OUT

1) I’m sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor eating Easter candy and drinking a bottle of Spearhead Hawaiian or should I say Spearhead Hawaiian Style Pale Ale. Oh God, I shouldn’t. I should never say that. 
        We’ve got Spearhead Hawaiian on tap at my restaurant. “I feel very passionately about it,” I tell customers, “There’s pineapple in the beer.” It’s the first beer I’ve ever felt passionate about, probably because of the pineapple. But the tap is fucked up. It’s a fast and aggressive tap, and pouring Spearhead Hawaiian is, to quote myself while pouring a pint of it yesterday, “the worst thing I ever have to do in my life.” The pints are top-heavy and it spills all over my hands. My hands are sticky and smell like pineapple-beer.

2) I’m sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor eating Easter candy and drinking a bottle of beer.
        I wasn’t even supposed to be working tonight. I was covering the busser’s shift, because the busser is on vacation. He’s in London and Paris, which are not places where the or any busser should be. Either you bus tables, or you vacation on the continent. You can’t do both. It’s illogical. Stop bussing tables.
         My shift got cut. I ducked into the drugstore within seconds of receiving my manager’s text; that’s where I bought all the Easter candy. There were actual things I needed to buy- conditioner, toilet paper, soap- but I was like, “Fuck it, I’ll buy them tomorrow,” and walked straight to the Easter candy. I bought five different kinds: a baggie of mini-eggs, a Caramilk egg, a three-pack of Cadbury crème eggs, a marshmallow rabbit, and a peppermint lamb.
         I knew when I got home I’d wash my lipstick off. I knew which pyjamas I’d put on. I laid out all my Easter candy on the floor in front of me and tried a bite of every kind.

3) I’m sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor listening to Tap Out by the Strokes and biting the head off a peppermint lamb. I’m ignoring my beer for a second; I’m too into the lamb. I’m the happiest I’ve been all month, but this song is making me sad.
         I hear the Strokes as being sadder than everybody else does. I know this is true for sure; it’s an ongoing thing. They’ll be playing in some social situation and I’ll say, or wistfully remark rather, “This song makes me so sad!” and then everybody else’ll make a big old everybody else-style fuss about disagreeing with me. Classic everybody.
         Sad is too big of a word for the particular little sad I hear in songs like Tap Out. This sad occupies the space that falls between hopeless and despondent on the sadness-continuum. It sounds like getting lost in one of the boxy old beige highrises that housed the optometrists, podiatrists and allergists of my childhood, trodding the carpeted hallways while crying out for my mom, quietly, too worried to panic.

ALL THE TIME

I like this song because it’s the only one that sounds like the old Strokes, the Is This It Strokes, the Strokes I was once lucky enough to be sixteen for. They were the perfect band for a sullen sixteen year old from suburbia to fall in love all over: they were dirty, they were porcelain, they were from New York. They seemed tiny and collectible, like the Beatles must have. You could tell they all had radically different personalities; they were the kind of band where you need to know the drummer’s name. It’s all their fault I started smoking cigarettes.
        I had the biggest crush on Nikolai, will always have the biggest crush on Nikolai, was going to marry Nikolai, and would still marry Nikolai, if God came down to Earth and gave me twenty seconds to choose one man on the entire planet to spend the rest of my life with. I never saw him once the entire time I lived in New York City but two Octobers ago I was in a cab to the East Village from Port Authority, very early in the morning, and I saw him skulking across West Tenth Street at Sixth Ave, carrying a wooden child’s bike over one shoulder. He was wearing desert boots and corduroy pants.
        All The Time sounds a lot like Room on Fire, which is my favorite Strokes album. The melody veers off and takes you in a bunch of unexpected directions, like getting lost in that office building again, only this time you’re drunk and grown and falling all over your best friends, laughing, eating sour keys out of your tote bag.