The thing seems to have happened again where I keep thinking that maybe the next night I will write a post, and then suddenly it is a month after I started thinking that and there’s no new post here.  I did change the picture up top, though, from some train tracks to some people at a carnival. And then I went on a long train journey, and then I started reading Dead Souls on top of The Death and Life of Great American Cities for some reason, and I got some new cameras and started shooting film again. Et cetera, et cetera. All of these things have merit, as does nickd’s begging of me to write that post about Les Savy Fav that I promised. They will be gotten to! Seriously, I am setting goals here. More words will spring forth from my keyboard onto the internet within a week, or you can come over and, I dunno, yell at my wilting houseplants or something. I don’t want anyone to kick them while they’re down, and they’re getting down as the days get shorter.

Dang but a lot of things just keep happening! I am still in full-fledged recovery mode from the Pitchfork festival, highlights of which included not dying in the mosh pit for No Age and singing/yelling “Patty Lee” into the mic/Tim Harrington’s face.  (Here is a picture of Tim Harrington’s face, and also a dude who paid him $2 for a haircut.)  That bit with the sing/yelling of my favorite song of 2007 was also one of the highlights of my concert-going existence.  Holy butts.

I have an entirely different post planned about why Les Savy Fav are such a monumental live act, but first, some paragraphs are in order.  I wrote them into a little notebook while waiting for a bus last weekend, because I realized that July 3 was the anniversary of my move to Chicago.  In the first hours and days that I spent alone here, as a visitor and then as a resident who felt like she was permanently on vacation, I noticed how much longer a block seems when you don’t know what is on it.  The seven blocks from Nick’s former apartment to the blue line seemed like an epic journey of several miles for the first few days.  By winter, despite the winds and the struggle of my shoes against the slush, the distance had shrunk to a standard twenty minutes down the same path or a close variation on it.  I’d charted the path in my memory and mapped it to an accurate scale.

Having been here for one year, it still seems like I do something new surprisingly often, wheter it’s visiting a new restaurant or walking around a slightly familiar street at a different time of night or going to the Taste of Chicago.  (That last one I don’t really advise, unless you really savor watching very large and very slowly-moving crowds stuffing their faces.)  I’ve been on top of buildings and below streets, and stuck, once, on a brown line train with signal problems on the curvy cusp between stations.  I’ve learned the way the street grid bends to make way for the river and how it wraps itself along the lake.  One block is an eighth of a mile, a fact I latched onto in my first days here and still use, methodically, to count my distance from home at any given point.

Once when I was in high school, my boyfriend and I wanted to go to Central Oriental for unpronounceable Asian soft drinks and cheap tea, so we had a friend and neighbor of his who knew the route draw up a map for us.  The route from his neighborhood to the store was straightforward enough; it was what Google Maps would display automatically, or what you’d quickly deduce from an atlas.  In the surrounding space, though, he’d drawn things like space dragons and a lunar trampoline: the idea being, I guess, that when we hit the lunar trampoline and were catapulted into space in a ‘96 Buick Century, we would know we’d gone past the turn for the Asian grocery store. The thing I notice now, though, is that a city - a smaller one like Charlotte or a denser and long-established one like Chicago - has more ever-changing sidewalks than one person can ever walk down, more space than a lifetime can fix into memory. If there was a lunar trampoline we wouldn’t have known; it was off our path.

On the map of Chicago I’ve drawn up in my mind, there are lots of blank spaces where a lunar trampoline might go. There are the blocks that I’ve lived in and frequented: those are the colorful, well-annotated bits. Then there are the parts that are purely theoretical. Ever the informed native, nickd will sometimes quiz me: Where’s Naragansett? Never having been there, I answer: 6800 West. It’s far out of my way, but I have the grid to guide me, with the things I remember shining brightly and the sketchy dotted lines and lunar trampolines in the distant corners: the imagined bits of a map that I’m pleased to say I’ll never complete.

• the arch of the foot
• the direct-ass center of the chin

Summer is here! Again! Some more! I’ve spent some of it lying under a tree on a blanket and reading, which is generally my favorite way to spend my uncommitted time in good weather. I am reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which strikes me as astonishingly relevant, considering that it was written and published nearly half a century ago. It’s beginning to explain why my neighborhood is the way it is, and why it sucks to be downtown after 5 pm ever, and why Millennium Park is such a neat thing to have around. I could expand on that, or I could go the lazy and inarticulate route and say read the book. People should read that book, especially people who live in cities, or people who think that living in cities is a scary prospect.

A thing that I like that happened in a city that I live in is that I found a mix CD in a newspaper bin, and its tracklist on a website.  I always enjoy when the internet and the actual world commingle and cross over and it is for the purposes of creativity and connection, rather than bogus viral marketing and such.  Being marketed to is tiresome, but finding unexpected neat things that have nothing more to say than “here is some neat music” or “you are beautifu“? That will always be rad.

(When in doubt name your blog post after a lo-fi rock song, is what I always say. Or what I say right now. Fwoar.)

So this evening I was biking around, like I do, and thinking about all the crazy smells I encounter on my bike rides, and how I should really start a blog of the crazy smells I encounter on my bike rides, because maybe somehow it would be informative or entertaining or at least as informative or entertaining as that blog where the guy enumerates his sneezes, which I found very diverting that one time when I was home sick. Then disaster struck and my favorite hooded sweatshirt with a screenprinted octopus that allowed my friends to recognize me from many yards away was cruelly torn out of my bike crate and abandoned to the mercy of the elements! RIP, octopus sweatshirt. You are probably sinking in the river or squished under a bus into a thin, matzo-like shirt-wafer now.

In addition to the loss of the octopus hoodie, I just found out that I lost all the content on my muxtape, which I’d finally almost finished. If I do not decide to cast the internet aside in a fit of despair after finishing this post I may add to it tonight, but more likely it will remain blank for some days. Really it was just starting to get pretty good.

(Oh and today, in case you grew curious, the crazy smells I biked through were the Blommer chocolate factory and the Gonnella bread factory somehow intersecting so it smelled like brownies and yeast. Usually they are too far apart; I bike by both every day and have only smelled the two together this time. In my house now it smells like burned oatmeal, because I’m trying my hand at homemade granola and it browned sort of unevenly.)

In other news I still have a blogger’s identity crisis, which is to say I never know what I am writing about here or who I am writing for, which is why I don’t write very much (or, I reckon, very well) here. Also there are a lot of barbecues (which is Midwestern for “cookouts”) and some traveling and some shows and plenty of knitting and biking to occupy my time. I also read a novel for the first time in I’m not even sure how long. It was this novel, and it was excellent.

But and so all that is to say that I would always love to hear about what you would like to see here. I could put more crafty things or photos or rants about how I love indie rock and Chicago or stay the course with vague and dull life-musing. I had a conversation today (online, naturally, although I still feel it should be clarified) about the supposed need of my generation to make itself known in personal weblog form. I’d like to think it goes a little beyond the basest “hey, look at me” type of sharing when I get all up in my wordpress, but I don’t know if that’s quite true. I don’t know if that’s a problem: I don’t want blogging fame or fortune; I don’t want to be that girl (who sort of incited said conversation and whose NYT magazine follow-up Q&A I am linking instead of the original article because I find it more readable and incisive). Basically I do not want to take myself too seriously, here, but I don’t want to quit writing some words into a text box on the internet occasionally, either.

Oh, the internet. It is a magical land where I can find this nonsense to console me for my sad hoodie loss and existential blog uncertainty. It is also a land where I can wish Fred a happy birthday in a semi-public forum despite his being in Russia. Fred’s birthday is this weekend, and he is pretty great. I hope he drinks many a delicious and inebriating beverage to mark the happy occasion.

After many years of pining for one, I finally stimulated the economy like the government wanted me to and bought one of these things. Five minutes after starting it up, I was video chatting with my dad in Boston and the rest of my family in Charlotte all at once in a goofy little iChat box, and having a staggeringly high balance on my credit card for the first time ever was all worth it. Amusingly, as I type this, I am reformatting the hard drive on my old computer and reinstalling Windows after much consternation and many inscrutable prompts for a nonexistent administrator password. Seeing “Setup will complete in approximately 39 minutes” on the screen across the room as I type on a computer that set itself up for me in probably less than ten is amusing, in an “I want to rip out all my hair right now because how the crap-balls did this entire machine suddenly bite it and refuse to run the dang command line for crap’s sake” kind of way.

(Setup will now complete in approximately 31 minutes. Delightful.)

On to a topic that does not drive me into an inarticulate rage: knitting! Again! I am working on the leg warmer to match my other leg warmer, except each one has a different stripe pattern. I joined Ravelry, which is an incredibly wonderful and well-designed site. Geeking out about knitting and interface usability at the same time is a joyous thing.

Also, in case you are one of the folks who suggested a name for my computer or are curious about the absurd names I have for electronics, I compromised between my two favorite suggestions and called it Eulalie Eameschair. This, of course, is because of modernist furniture design and P.G. Wodehouse. Long live Eulalie!

(Firstly, because I think it will somehow color anything else I write here tonight, let me just say that I have the Nouvelle Vague cover of “Just Can’t Get Enough” and “The Room Got Heavy” by Yo La Tengo stuck in my head on top of each other, and they coexist delightfully.)

So as I mentioned in the previous post, I learned how to knit, partly to steel myself against cabin fever and partly because, well, why not? It’s kind of harder than it looks, and when I tried to show my mom how to do it (because I figured if my friends could show me how to do it I could pass the knowledge along), I realized how much I am still sort of sucky at it. That is okay though, I can make flat cloths and also cylindrical cloths with some slight holes in them where I wasn’t very good at increasing. The latter is the one legwarmer I’m wearing here, which I’m rather enamored of despite its flaws and despite the fact that I haven’t yet made the matching one. It comes from a pattern on Craftster, which I modified slightly. (Also, have I mentioned that I have a del.icio.us that I am actually sort of using these days, mostly to save things that I don’t have time to read at work? Tag some sweet knitting patterns for me!?)

All that aside, a thing I didn’t know about knitting before I started doing it is that it gives the knitter a really good excuse to sit around in public places and listen to people’s conversations. Not that, you know, I like doing that or anything. Armed with needles and some extra-bulky yarn, I started going to a different Starbucks in the loop during my lunch hour each afternoon and establishing myself in a corner. Some highlights from these ventures:

• Two people who come to the same Starbucks every day and have what sounds like a very friendly conversation entirely in Russian
• Baristas analyzing the different types of cereal milk that various frozen Starbucks drinks taste like (whatever the green was that they had around St. Pat’s was apparently a dead ringer for Lucky Charms)
• A pair of older ladies who, after having a conversation in very colorful language about what the Bush administration has done for the country, told me that if that was my second cup of coffee, I should be knitting faster (it was tea and the cup for the tea bag, but thank you for your concern.)

So I didn’t exactly hear any huge business secrets or tiny lovers’ dramas playing out as I stitched away, but it was still a good time, and now I’m nearly done with my second scarf. When it isn’t nasty out and I don’t have other errands, I knit outside these days. I’m also a bit under the weather, another good excuse to knit and to ramble semi-coherently about same. Ugh, my nose feels like congealed despair.

Hello! How are you today, the internet. I have been gone for several reasons, ranging from winter despondency (which I solved by learning how to knit, more on which later, but it gave me sufficient reason not to be despondent while busying my hands so I could not type) to the need to have an IRL encounter with the excellent Diana Kimball of dianakimball.com and ROFLcon-organizing fame. Also my computer is continuing its slow and miserable descent into obsolescence and failure, which I probably just compounded by accidentally smearing peanut butter on the keyboard. Last night instead of writing a post here I made stoutcakes, inaugurating the oven in my new kitchen. (Oh also, I moved!) Then I played a couple rounds of Fruit Mystery because it is the greatest thing, and then the internet died as it tends to do every five minutes in this apartment.

Aside from epic broadband failure (which, we’re told, has something to do with the fact that this building is about a century old), the most recent excuse for my lack of an Online Presence is that spring is finally here to stay. I didn’t believe it for weeks; I’d check behind me constantly, thinking I’d left my coat, hat, and gloves at work or on the train, because surely I wouldn’t go outside in as little as a hoodie. No, my friends, today I broke a sweat biking home from work, and it wasn’t because I was wearing a down coat and three pairs of leggings. It was because it is ACTUALLY A PLEASANT TEMPERATURE OUT.

So that brings me to the saying that Chicago has two seasons: winter and construction. The first was illustrated by the five-month swath of frozen woe that was my initiation into really living here, the second appeared when, a mere week after I moved in, on my first coatless foray into the wider world of the new neighborhood, the park across the street, of which I’d been so much looking forward to having an unspoiled view from my deck, was encircled in a tall chain-link fence covered in green cloth. But hey, on the plus side, all the man-eating potholes are getting filled in!

I’m inclined to prefer Chicagoist’s version of our two seasons (winter and festivals), and I’m very much looking forward to Pitchfork weekend, which I will probably begin calling “my birthday party with Les Savy Fav”, but I’d broaden the definition and call the seasons winter and redemption. I’m glad that spring, in its first moments, is already worth the wait.

(I have to go fix my bike now, but I have every intention of honoring the quasi-pact I made with Diana to write more things on the internet. Also, the new version of flickr uploadr is completely excellent and I want to cram it full of pictures all the time, so that is something too. Thank you for reading; please reward yourself by playing Fruit Mystery. Pinables and stratberries!)

cookie dough!, originally uploaded by interrobang.

As promised to folks following my flickr, here is how to make some delicious cookies. I think my mom got the recipe from Gourmet but it is not on epicurious, annoyingly. I mailed these to Phil because he linked me to some quality Jens Lekman audio, and then he said that all of the chocolates were in his mouth, dancing. (This is basically the actual quote, verb tenses and pronouns adjusted for context.) I made a lot of batches of them over the holidays to give as gifts, during which period they became colloquially known as “chocolate sex cookies.” And so:

Chocolate Sex Cookies (or, How Phil Dokas Learned to Stop Worrying and Dance with the Chocolates)

4 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped
6 TBS butter
2 cups semisweet chips
1/2 cup flour
2 TBS cocoa powder (not dutch processed)
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup sugar
3 large eggs
1 1/2 tsp vanilla

Melt unsweetened chocolate, butter and 1 cup of chips in a quart saucepan over low heat stirring occasionally. Cool.

Whisk together sugar, eggs, vanilla in a large bowl at medium speed until pale and frothy, about 2 minutes. Mix in melted chocolate, then mix in flour and other dry ingredients at low speed until well combined. Stir in remaining cup chips. Refrigerate until firm, about 2 hours.

Put rack in middle of oven and preheat to 350.

With dampened hands, roll heaping teaspoons of dough into 1 inch balls and arrange 2 inches apart on ungreased baking sheets. Bake in batches until puffed and set, 10 - 12 minutes (cookies will still be soft in center).

Cool cookies on baking sheet on rack for 10 minutes, then transfer to racks to cool completely.

Heck yes! It’s going to be 4 degrees this weekend! I may need to learn to bake something slightly less rich than this.

Aside from a few other things like some lightning and the Sears Tower with a cloud that seemed to have gotten tangled in its antennae, this is pretty much the most beautiful thing I’ve seen today. It makes me miss shooting film and wish that I had the financial capability to do so. (Which I would, if it was What I Did, but I also buy records and coffee and website hosting and old Schwinn road bikes and silly things like that. And so I come once again to have $100 to my name and bills to pay. Ah well. It’s an awfully good bike.) I often wonder, though, what I could do if it was What I Did, if I really disciplined myself into a knowledge that my day job was really just providing the funding for me to hack old cameras, or write essays, or bike to a different state every Sunday, or sew an army of pink plush octopodes. The problem is I’d rather do a little bit of all of it and a reasonable amount of nothing. Well, it’s not really a problem, per se, just a way that things have gone.Speaking of things and their ways of going, my own personal laptop is slowly going the way of the dodo and the bison and art deco, to borrow a phrase which somehow stuck in my head from the latest collection of short stories by David Foster Wallace, which I’ve just started reading. (1.5 stories in, the verdict: surprisingly non-sucky! I’d heard some less than positive things and had low expectations.) Anyway, I keep pushing the hard drive to capacity, which is pesky, and the AC adapter now makes a high-pitched shriek, which is pesky to the point of unbearable in a quiet room. I am sort of informally saving up for a MacBook but probably won’t get one for at least a month or two. I am currently typing on nickd’s roommate’s MacBook (thanks, Austin). nickd has stopped playing the record which is just a bunch of locked grooves that Akufen and some other dudes who are not Akufen but also like making noises that last exactly the length of one groove on a record did, and he has also stopped playing the other records that are very pleasant kinds of techno. I am going to cut this post short and poke nickd with pointy objects, such as the corner of a David Foster Wallace book, until he puts on more of the pleasant techno.

I forget if I had a point. I think just hello, and what could we all do if we had all the time in the world to do it and love doing it and not have to worry about sleeping or eating or looking reasonably like people who did not bike through at least fifty-eight separate mud puddles on the way to work in the morning.

List-making is delightful, and I listened to music last year. (Man, 2008. That year is entirely too incomprehensible. All of its numerals are too round and will take a week to get used to.) So and but: here are my favorite albums of 2007, loosely ordered by some sort of algorithm of how awesome vs. how critically shafted they are. (There is no algorithm. I don’t even know what that word means, really. Bah.)

10. Do Make Say Think - You, You’re A History in Rust
The bombast of “The Universe” could literally rock one’s socks off. Also this band put some semi-intelligible words in their songs on this album for the first time in their career, to my knowledge, and I was impressed with that. I listened to this a lot in Chapel Hill in the springtime, so now I guess it is sort of an album of leaving a place with really fond memories of it, and of dumpster-diving and then rocking out on top of buildings.

9. Feist - The Reminder
More Canadians! Totally sweet pop songs! Maybe one of them was in an iPod ad or something! I am glad I finally heard this album, because once I did I listened to it fairly exclusively for about two weeks. The fast songs are better than the slow songs but the songs are all pretty nice. If I had a choice of a person to sing like, it would be Neko Case, Leslie Feist, or Corin Tucker, in that order. Instead I just sing terribly.

8. Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala
At this point I should probably stop pretending that I am not cribbing John Allison’s music-review writing style wholesale, because that seems to be what is going on. His review of this album can be found here. I think all I really have to add to the fact that Jens Lekman “gave up fame to become a bingo caller but then thought better of it” is that if I ever accidentally slice off the tip of my index finger it will be hilarious fun times in the emergency room because of “You Put Your Arms Around Me.” Also this Swede covered “You Can Call Me Al” in concert, which I just barely caught after biking all the way across town to retrieve my wallet with the concert ticket in it from an ice cream parlor, and it was wonderful, and if you can obtain for me high-quality mp3s of Jens Lekman covering Paul Simon I will probably mail you baked goods.

(Sub-list item: This was somewhere around my third favorite live music moment of 2007, a bit down the list from seeing “Testament to Youth in Verse” performed live by an actual living Dan Bejar on an actual stage where some other people were also playing instruments while Dan Bejar drank some beer and had very chaotic hair. It is my favorite New Pornographers song. Anyway!)

7. Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha
Oh yeah, another extremely fine concert moment of 2007 was seeing this gentleman do his thing with a violin and some spinning Victrolas. It’s also another album that I listened to a lot towards the end of my time in Chapel Hill; “Simple-X” was kind of the informal theme song of graduation week in my mind. There’s something strangely reassuring about Andrew Bird’s verbosity and about his music in general: it must take a really special sensibility to write a song about the apocalypse that invariably puts a smile on my face. (The song in question, “Tables and Chairs,” is not on this album, but it’s the best example I can think of to describe the quality that I like so much in his music.)

6. Matthew Dear - Asa Breed
I really don’t have much to say about this other than it’s very fun to listen to and the first time I ever heard “Don and Sherri” I unconsciously started dancing a little on the train platform. I just Googled it and the first adjective I noticed in skimming the label’s capsule review was “accessible.” The subject of a whole ‘nother rant sometime should be my feelings on that word, because I invariably read it as backhanded condescension to the listener/reader/viewer/consumer-of-”accessible”-cultural-artifact. Like everything else that can possibly be said about music, accessibility is all a matter of perspective, and so writing about music continues to be like wanking about architecture, and so on and so forth blah blah blah. Loud electronic noises and vocoders are hella rad, and here you will find them!

5. Ricardo Villalobos - Fabric 36
Counterpoint: This shit is probably about as inaccessible as it comes. I mean, we are talking about the dude who made a 37-minute track that is essentially one beat with an occasional weird sampled horn-bleat (and then these dudes danced to it, which was pretty great). In the context of all of the insanity of the rest of this album (which is actually something sort of in between a DJ mix and an actual proper album, since he made a bunch of original tracks and then mixed them together, in contrast to the other 35 mixes in the Fabric series, which draw from other artists’ tracks), the last few minutes are some of the more revelatory and beautiful this year, I think. The beat drops out into spare, bell-like sounds, and it’s like leaving the world’s most ridiculous dance party alone to see nothing but snow and hear nothing but echoes. Really it’s an awfully good few minutes.

4. Radiohead - In Rainbows
Everyone already knows everything about this. Some songs are on it, they ditched their major label, etc. Along with loads of my friends, I adored Kid A-era Radiohead back when that happened, and In Rainbows is a fairly glorious return to form. Here I’m partly running out of steam and partly not feeling like repeating everything that has been said about pop music for the past three months. Listening to “Videotape” and looking at the antennae of the Sears Tower through the fog is goosebump-inducing and supremely creepy. That’s all.

3. Burial - Untrue
I don’t know if this is quite as insanely hyped as I feel like it is, but it’s nevertheless pretty worthy of it. This album is like the atmosphere I was desperately trying to evoke in describing the end of Fabric 36, but for 45 minutes instead of 3. In fact, the description of it that Burial (whoever he actually is) gives in one of his only interviews pretty much says what I look for in the less-crunk types of electronic music: “What I want is that feeling when you’re in the rain, or a storm. It’s a shiver at the edge of your mind, an atmosphere of hearing a sad, distant sound, but it seems closer - like it’s just for you.”

Yeah. I don’t even know. It’s the theme music of walking around Chicago at night, taking pictures, hearing whatever distant sounds or mind-shivers there are around: the lake, people leaving bars, trains and traffic coming and going.

2. Les Savy Fav - Let’s Stay Friends
And now: the noisy side! With drums! And electric guitars! And yelling about the state of indie rock! “Patty Lee” is sort of my favorite song of the year. It reminds me of a demented pillow-fight: “this party’s gotten out of hand.” Like most other albums I ever really love, my least favorite thing about it is that it’s not very long. I would desperately love to see this band someday, I hear it’s pretty much the best time one can have at a concert.

1. The Field - From Here We Go Sublime
Decidedly my favorite album this year. It’s also electronic, and I recently learned that it was recorded in one take, which is kind of impressive and a nice contrast to the months or years of obsessive insanity behind anything Ricardo Villalobos makes, for instance. The title of this post is the first song I heard from this album. For me it doubles as the sort of music you might dance to and the sort of music you might listen to if you wanted to be alone with your thoughts - to pull a Burial, as it were. Though this may sound strange and even degrading, I think my favorite kinds of music are ones that are just as rewarding to hear as background noise as they are to scrutinize and obsess over every beat. Putting “The Little Heart Beats So Fast” on across the room as I type this, I’ve noticed new tones in it whenever I start to space out. It’s the kind of thing I think will reward years of repeated plays; it’s something I know I’ll go back to. And so! Album of the year ftw wtf lol pwn.

Unfortunately, listening to the Field will not cure a head cold, so I’m off to make yet another pot of white tea and stare blankly at another crossword puzzle. Happy new year and pleasant music-listening to everyone!