30 November 2010

Another chapter of...The Trumpeter Chronicles


I’m in the office kitchen, rinsing off a Tupperware container – still burping up Banana Leaves’ awesome baba tofu curry – when in walks the Trumpeter.

“So, did you have a nice Thanksgiving?” Trying to shift the conversation away from me while saying as little as possible, I say, “Yes, it was lovely. How was yours?”

“Well, [husband] and I went to a restaurant, and we had a great time.” I let this sit. “So, no cooking at home for you? Like everyone else does?”  She quickly tries to explain that for her, Thanksgiving is “all about turkey.” She qualifies this in a way that suggests that she believes it is odd to insist on turkey on Thanksgiving. “So,” I ask, “they did a special Thanksgiving menu?” “Well, yes, but what’s most important, is that they also had all their regular items. Which was great, because we decided we should go back there some other time.”

I let this sink in. She didn’t go out with her husband to celebrate Thanksgiving at a restaurant she knows, or even a fancy one, given the way she dresses (bag lady chic.) She apparently didn’t even specifically go out seeking a Thanksgiving meal from a restaurant. She just went to some random restaurant, where they happened to be serving turkey. None of this is all that weird, I guess, but it’s hard to capture context. For example, as she’s telling me this, do you know what she’s doing? She’s microwaving leftover McDonald’s French fries. About a half a serving, I’d say. Did she really set aside the second half of her fries the night before and decide she’d get a lunch out of them?

Sigh.  


23 November 2010

don't you love it when...

...you drive to a different part of town that you only visit every couple of years - ahem, the DC DMV inspection station on Half Street - and when you come back to your own part of town, everything looks slightly unfamiliar and different? I can't explain why this happens, but I always find it exhilarating.

11 November 2010

Emusic is not my beat, but I will fearlessly address something of no interest to anyone anyway.

"Gordon" does a much better job with emusic than I do, but here are some thoughts nonetheless:

One of the great things about emusic, which this catalog addition will irreversibly change, was the fact that you were somewhat limited in your choices. The fact that you had prepaid for the month or year meant that the money was essentially a sunk cost, and it allowed you to take chances that you otherwise might not have. With a $7.99 transaction cost, I would never have discovered a band like the Rural Alberta Advantage:



It's a lovely little indie debut - heartfelt, awkward, largely about failed relationships, growing old, and moving to a big lonely city. And it's an album that feels totally mine, because I stumbled across it on emusic and thought, "why the hell not?" It matched the number of downloads I had left for the month, and it was "use it or lose it." If they're competing for my attention with canonical things that I never got around to picking up - say, Neil Young, or Prince - I'm probably going to be more likely to spend those downloads on musical vitamins than I am on a wild gamble.

Of course, I'm blaming emusic for my own behavior here, but there was something really liberating about the emusic outlook, and the idea that you're choosing music from a slightly skewed catalog. The constraints were nice, actually, because it meant that I could be current on whatever pitchfork's flavor du jour was, and I could also get a little wacky:



Why the hell not, right? Plus, given the lengths of each track on the Lindstrom - Prins Thomas album, you were looking at a real deal. And this brings us to the other problem I have with the pricing scheme: Fela Kuti albums are no longer 2-4 downloads. Jazz albums - many of which are under 50 minutes in length and no more than 5-7 tracks - will cost the same as a 14-track, 65-minute long indie record. Theoretically. The upside is that, potentially, hip-hop albums will carry less of a penalty (given all the skits, non-musical tracks, etc.) A lot of these trends had actually started once emusic moved from downloads to credits, but I'm afraid that the move to actual dollar values will continue this trend. If a Fela Kuti album is 12 tracks, I'll look for a hard copy in the discount bin instead of getting it from emusic.