Bubbie's House

This is stupid.

I don't know anything about 2007. I don't think I was present for any of it, in the sense of an awareness of the culture. This is an egoist's best of 2007 list; a list of the best things I discovered in the last year. This entry will be a little bit about music. Maybe the next one will be about books. This one isn't.

Music
Édith Piaf
I cannot say enough about Édith Piaf. Sure, I'd heard of her before this year and, sure, I had even obsessively listened to La Marseillaise, but she's more than that. She's, well, she's Édith fucking Piaf. You must listen to Milord while dancing extravagantly around your home in the post-shower nude. It's wonderful. And sing along where you can (just the badadadadadada... and the "MAY WE DANCE").
Turns out that I can say enough about Édith Piaf.
She's wonderful.

Erik Satie
I'll be the first person to say that classical music's gods are too revered, too discussed, too venerated, and oddly limited. Maybe they're great. I'm not a musician and my measure of music is not expert in any way at all. I'm a layman, maybe not the layest man, but pretty well laid and if the music doesn't do something to me, it can basically be dismissed. Erik Satie jams his demented fingers into the hole of my discontent and probes. There's something more to him, something more personal than the other composers. It's abrupt (not Bartók abrupt, but still), but soothing; it takes note of all of life's horrors and accepts them. For his ubiquitous Trois Gymnopedie (in which you can hear almost everything Philip Glass ever wrote), for his Gnossienne(s), and even for his more conventional Je te Veux, Satie gets a mention here.

On The Sunny Side of the Street
I love to compare covers of a song by a variety of artists and this (along with As Time Goes By and La Vie en Rose) has been one a favorite. Another wonderful song to play in the morning. Especially, Louis Armstrong's version with the extended trumpet introduction. The first notes just explode the fuck out of my shitty laptop speakers and then, a minute and forty seconds later, his big honeyed voice comes rolling out and it just gets better and better. A tip of the hat to versions by Benny Goodman (with Peggy Lee) and to Count Basie (with Ella Fitzgerald). Both are mellow and wonderful, but they don't quite have the smooth ecstasy that Armstrong and his trumpet can produce. Sinatra's isn't so bad either.
If I never had a dime, I'd be rich as Rockefeller, indeed.

Joy Division
Hats off to Olga, who has played Joy Division in my vicinity for years. Still, it wasn't until I heard Dead Souls that I realized that the band is greater than their epically shitty song, Love Will Tear Us Apart. I hate that damn song. Dead Souls, however, and She's Lost Control (and All of This for You, and No Love Lost)just remind me of the Velvet Underground (sometimes) and the Kinks (sort of) and maybe the Clash (a little). I guess what they remind me of is good music. With a British accent. That kicks your ass.

Summation
My favorite artists of the year are dead, I heard them all before this year, and I have nothing interesting to say about them.

This post is stupid and doesn't make any sense.

Addendum
Another notable artist that I only discovered in November of this year is Wanda Jackson. Her country songs are the kind of treacly girl-country crap that makes me vomit slightly into my mouth, but her rockabilly songs (she recorded covers of Carl Perkins' Honey, Don't and Hard-Headed Woman, and also Money, Honey and slew of others) are the best shit. Her sweet country-lass voice gets all throaty and raw and she sings with all feral grace of a drunk amphetamine junky. With all her hair and teeth. And also, wearing pants.

Celebrities--They're just like us!

Famous People I've Seen
(Since Moving to Hyde Park):

-Action STAR/Bad-Ass, Mr. T
-Law Professor/Author, Cass Sunstein
-Law Professor/Author/Judge, Richard Posner
-The Congressman, Bobby Rush
-Obama's attactive half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng
-25th District Representative, Barbara Flynn Currie
-Philanthropist and Widow to Adlai E. Stevenson III, Nancy Stevenson

Really, the créme de la Hyde Park.

Cute!

“There was one detainee, Mustafa, who joked that I was his favorite interrogator in the world, and I joked back that he was my favorite terrorist -- and he was.”

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16993136

Notes on the New Season

The new season, of course, being winter, which came, as it must, with snow. Fuck snow and winter and change, but not yet, because I require change to free me from this obscene season and all its abominable chill. I have a warmish hat and I have a warm coat (too warm, in fact, and it makes me sweat some) and I have new boots (which offer me unheard of traction whilst falling down the three stories of thickly frosted wooden backsteps) and I have gloves (that once fit Jessica, but that I pulled onto my hands in defiance of space and with reliance on elasticity and so what if I can see my fleshy fists through the stretched-out knit?) and I have warm socks. Outerwear, my friends, is not the issue. The issue is that I cannot will myself to get out of bed because the floor is cold and will never be warm and while it was refreshingly chilled during the summer, it is now cold enough to preserve meat.

Possibly.

And it is after 4pm and I've gotten out of bed once today (and then only to urinate) and I am past hungry and I do have shit to do tonight (like fry goat cheese and wash overhead transparencies) and I have done nothing today but download music (mostly bad) and read books (mostly bad) that have former graduates of my high school (not my classmates though) in supplementary pictures. Also, I am out of Puffs (my favorite brand of Kleenex) and I am still kind of cold and I am not so far past hungry as I claimed before. And the leftover pizza in the fridge belongs, in a just world, to Jessica. I might eat it anyway, or at least some ice cream.

Possibly.

Which is utterly absurd because, as I've made abundantly clear, it's cold (the IT of it ALL) and I'm cold (an unlikelihood, given my enormous bulk) and YET, I still would like some ice cream, even though I'll be forced to juggle and boggle each bite around my mouth in sweet creamy horror. Or maybe I'll have a can of Sierra Mist (my favorite brand of uncola) to clear from my throat the detritus of my (scarcely fled) cold. Getting over a cold is like having a roommate leave mid-lease and leave behind a lot of their shit. I'm forever stepping over humidifier parts and crusty Puffs (again, Kleenex) and there's a glass of water on the bookshelf with a shot glass in it and, in that, the dregs of a double dose of cough syrup that really made me cough even more in disgust at the flavor which was like a mockery of everything orange.

But anyway.

I need to go to the grocery (some three blocks away) and buy goat cheese (for frying) and maybe to the bakery (eight blocks away) to buy rolls (for buffalo burgers).

I need to get out of bed.

Now.

9.thirty PM Addendum

Utter Failure. I decided to eat some ice cream and urinate (the order is iffy right now; my sense of chronology has never been good. Suffice it to say that they were not simultaneous events) before venturing to the market and bakery. As I urinated, my cell phone began vibrating in my hip pocket (a distinctly unsettling sensation, I assure you) and it was Jessica. As my phone had been set to vibrate and I had worn no pants until that moment, I had missed seven (7) calls from various (3 (three)) people all asking me time-sensitive questions. Jessica wanted to know what time dinner was being served (on my days off, I delight in preparing exceptional and sumptuous gourmet meals) and all I could tell her was that it would be ready whenever the damn restaurant was finished preparing it. So we went to the damn restaurant and I ate the smallest pizza ever. It was good.

Then we came home and took a nap before bed. Grueling day. I mean, not so much for me, but for someone, I guess.