IS TROPICAL – THE GREEKS (official music video) from EL NINO on Vimeo.

I love the Guttmacher Institute.

The world has changed so much since my last blog entry – the Rapture came and went, the Bulls got knocked out of the Finals, and… well, that’s about all that needs to happen for my world to become utterly shattered.  It’s strange not reading every other person’s opinion on Derrick Rose and the Bulls all the time or  booking two or three ‘medical appointments’ a week towards the end of the workday in order to rush to the nearest sports bar.

Now that I have all the time in the world and my ‘life’ back (though really, what life is worth living when the Bulls aren’t on?), I went shopping for the first time in months on Tuesday.  During my shopping hiatus I had made a long mental list of items I needed/wanted to get and I’d grown sick of all the clothes I do have.  Also, I haven’t done my laundry in weeks, and there’s only so many ‘sniff dirty clothes tests’ a girl can take.  Anyway, I went to town in Urban Outfitters that night and was feeling pretty satisfied with my purchases until I saw this article today:

http://www.good.is/post/miley-cyrus-outs-urban-outfitters-for-donating-to-anti-gay-candidates/

While it may seem naive to think that stores that market their products towards certain generations should reflect the values of those generations, it IS an expectation that I hold of companies I purchase from.  We spend so much time focusing on where our food comes from, which products are produced in an environmentally ethical manner and so forth that I thought that the products we purchase were, in a sense, synonymous with our life philosophies.  I understand there’s a wide spectrum of youth that Urban Outfitters caters too, and that it’s not realistic to think that everyone who dons their clothing is a liberal, gay loving, pro-choice hipster (at least, in cities not named San Francisco), but it seems egregiously disingenuous to their consumer base to sell ‘Hilary is my homegirl’ t-shirts (too tired to look up a better example) and then donate money to a notoriously anti-gay senator.

So my question to myself is: do I return the clothes I purchased?  And from here on out, where do I shop?

From Letters of Note

I could watch a whole trilogy of their shot for shot remake (but I’m sad that I can’t get the video to embed properly)

Cherry blossoms in full bloom at Golden Gate Park this weekend.

Derrick Rose being Derrick Rose.  And the Bulls on top of the Eastern conference!

An unexpectedly amazing line up… and a fun day of piecing together clues.

All these inspirational stories: Announcing The 2011 Goldman Prize Recipients

Most importantly, my favorite couple getting engaged!

In anticipation of the Strokes new album I spent a large part of yesterday and today listening to their previous albums, reading articles about the band, checking out the singles streaming online (You’re So Right and Under Cover of Darkness), and staring at Julian Casablanca’s face.   The more I listen and read, the more I wonder if this album has trainwreck written all over it.

It sounds like, in the course of their career, Julian went from having total control over the song writing to an increasingly shared role with the other band members, to where the Strokes are at present – the other four writing songs together and Julian recording them independently at a separate location.   I love all three albums, but I feel like there’s been a slight drop off in quality from each album following the first, and I have to wonder if there’s a correlation.

The following quotes, pulled from the Guardian, NYT and Pitchfork aren’t exactly reassuring, either (and they should probably fire their publicist):

Pitchfork

Talking about the making of Angles, Valensi admitted,  ”I won’t do the next album we make like this. No way. It was awful– just awful. Working in a fractured way, not having a singer there. I’d show up certain days and do guitar takes by myself, just me and the engineer. Some of the third album was done that way, but at least we were on the same page about what the arrangements and parts were. Seventy-five percent of this album felt like it was done together and the rest of it was left hanging, like some of us were picking up the scraps and trying to finish a puzzle together.”

He later goes on to say “…I feel like we have a better album in us, and it’s going to come out soon.”

Julian rounds out the article with a full hearted endorsement when asked if he likes the finished album “I mean… yes… It’s a tough question because I think the whole point was that I was going to let things go so there’s a bunch of stuff [on the record] I wouldn’t have done.”

Guardian

“I feel lucky, actually, to have these guys and this thing,” Albert continues. “I feel like it definitely… I’m just glad that I had it, friendship and music.”

“Past tense…” notes Julian.

“Did I say that?”

“You said past tense.”

New York Times

“I think ‘collaboration Strokes’ is more on the side of just poppy than what I am interested in personally,” he added. “I’ll take what I can get, so I’m happy.” (Not totally. Asked if he was excited about touring, Mr. Casablancas said no. He was most animated talking about raising his infant son; he and his wife, Juliet, prefer “co-sleeping” to having a crib.)

Can’t wait to hear the album!

(I hope I’m terribly wrong.)

I love watching Rose play, but his vocabulary makes Stephanie Meyers sound like Shakespeare.  I want to think he’s getting better, though.  Here’s a cool clip that doesn’t force me to mute the video, though I really think the NBA could’ve chosen better highlight reels (how about the between the leg assist from last week or Rose bursting past Wade and LeBron from last weekend’s match up?).  Still, I’m happy that the NBA seems to be more and more behind Rose.

That said, the hype behind the Bulls is starting to freak me out.  It seemed like they went to possible second rounders to multiple title contenders over the weekend… what?  I don’t think I’d mind it if Rose missed out on the MVP honors this year; not because I don’t think he deserves it, but I do think that more credit is due to the team efforts and the absence of Del Negro.  Also, if star status slights forced him furiously work on his game over the past summer, imagine what damage he’d do the summer after an MVP slight?

I’ve always been a fan of the music that came out of the ‘90s; perhaps even more so in the last decade then when I had been growing up with it.  I don’t think I was particularly angst ridden (anymore than a teenager already is), but a lot of the music that I listened to had a very cathartic and awakening feel to them, an outlet to channel out the frustrations built up over the course of dealing with day to day inanity.  I think it’s why nineties music makes for such great music in karaoke.

Anyway, for several years I’ve been mulling over what really draws me to the genre, whether it’s a byproduct of acoustically having a blank slate when grunge/alternative music came to prominence, it being a consequence of built up emotional repression (a function of me not being able to articulate my feelings well), the music itself having an unparalleled quality to it, or some hybrid of the aforementioned reasons.  Helping along that thought process I’ve come across two pieces in the past couple of weeks that I felt compelled to post.

The first is on All Songs Considered on NPR – “The ‘90s Are Back, Or Whatever…” Bob Boilen et al discussed their favorite songs, albums and some of the worst part of the music in the 90s.  They start off the podcast featuring the “Dream of the ‘90s” clip from Portlandia (above).  Interestingly, Carrie Brownstein, the cast member in the show that isn’t Fred Armisen, was a former contributor to All Songs Considered (Monitor Mix).  I love it when worlds collide!   I also totally want to move to Portland now.

The second is a ten part series on the A.V. Club entitled “Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation?” A long read that could take hours, depending on how much you like to indulge in the comments section (I do, but each part has at least 700+ comments).  I haven’t gone through them all, in part because even I’d feel bad about abusing my paid to surf online privileges at work, and also because I wanted to unpack each section with a bit of time in between.   The author, Steven Hyden, is no longer enamored by the genre (at all, it seems like), but goes back to the music of his youth to rediscover what drew him to alternative music when it still enchanted him.  I was feeling a bit disconnected from the first part until I read this paragraph:

I always hate that moment in documentaries about social movements where somebody insists that whatever incredibly exciting and revolutionary phenomenon they were a part of could never happen again, because the world has inevitably changed for the worse, and today’s kids are just too jaded or clueless to do what they did. What they’re really saying is that it will never happen for them again, because they’ve reached the age where they’re too jaded and clueless. When you’re young, whatever you’re doing feels revolutionary because the world is opening up for you in ways that will never be more exciting than they are right now, in this moment, forever and ever.

That said, I honestly wonder if the rise of grunge and alternative rock in the early ’90s will be the last time that a musical movement has that kind of impact on youth culture. With the Internet, we know about every promising band seemingly from the time it records its first demos. By the time the album comes out, the backlash has already kicked in. Now the challenge is to not be informed; surprising people has gone the way of putting current events on newsprint. It’s almost like we don’t want to be surprised anymore, because that means we’re somehow out-of-the-loop, or not savvy enough to be there first, which seems to be of the utmost importance when it comes to music these days.

It’s an interesting point that the All Songs Considered podcast also mentioned.  We’ve changed the way we access music so much that there’s no longer any common genre we all coalesce around.  Grunge wasn’t only a music genre; it was a cultural/social movement that influenced that way we dressed, our attitudes [turned apathy] and became the voice of a generation.  I think it could happen again, but it’s interesting that what’s arguably today’s most dominant youth movement (hipsterdomism?) is so anti-mainstream that anything that gains any kind of momentum is killed by a backlash against its own success.

Anyway, I’ll post more after I finish reading through the A.V. Club series if there’s anything worth posting about.