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Volume CXXXII, Number 22 |
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Guidance on people and places
JAY KANG
COLUMNIST
It's pretty stupid to write a column reviewing albums if none of your readers buy and listen to albums. Internet file sharing programs like Limwire and Kazaa have made the full-length album review more or less obsolete, especially on a fully-wired campus where 60 percent of everyone's hard drive is dedicated to storing mp3s. So, I'll be the first to surrender and tailor my column from now on to accommodate this shift in college music consumption, so from now on I'm just going to review people.
People need guidance about people, I think, more than they need guidance about music. If you want to know some bands to download on Kazaa, here are some names:The Yeah Yeah Yeahs: if you're moving to New York, you apparently have to have heard about this band to score any quality biscuits. If you haven't, the girl you're hitting on will suggest you take the subway up to Barnard to try your luck with the chubby pea coats up there.
Steve Malkmus and the Jicks-Pavement frontman releases new album that brings a smile to anyone with an ironic sense of humor (I don't know what this means, either) and an appreciation for off-key male singers. There are no "Jenny and the Ess-Dog's" on this sophomore solo attempt, but most of the songs retain that mixture of charm, pop and sarcasm that has come to define Malkmus' solo work. Killer Mike-Turns your favorite middle school acronym ADIDAS (All day I dream about Sex) into this year's "Bombs Over Baghdad." A swinging, humorous, party banger that will educate (the Puerto Rican word for Biscuits is Chocha) and entertain at once. Kristen Hersch-Only if you like Beth Orton, Aimee Mann, or Cat Power.
Catherine Zeta-Jones: zero stars
Is her name Catherine Zeta-Jones-Douglass now? What do the children of these hippies that hyphenate their last names expect their children to do when they get married? I had a friend in grade school named Tim Porter-Devreis and as early as the fourth grade, Tim was stressing out about which one of his parents' names he would have taken when he got married. He liked the name Porter better but thought that his dad would flip out if he dropped his name. This is some heavy stuff to pile onto kids. See parents? See what all your liberation and dancing around naked did? STDs are as common as George Foreman Grills now and your kids are having major crises all because you were into "breaking down boundaries and freaking out the squares, man…"
Sunday: four stars out of five stars
I was in this pizza place trying to stretch four dollars as far as I could, which was not far considering that this was New York. Not to mention I'm not Italian, so the guy at the counter wasn't willing to cut me any sort of break. This guy told me that he'd sell me a cold jumbo slice and a coke for four dollars, which sounded alright to me. So, I went to sit down but sitting at the only table was this cop and a family of kids that were all interested in attending Columbia. They were worried about crime because Columbia is kind of near Harlem.
The cop said that gentrification had taken care of a lot of the crime, which I thought was a pretty funny thing to say, so I laughed out loud. He gave me a look like, "Hey, shut up, I'm trying to score with this mom here." So I went to sit at the counter.
Full length mirrors lined the walls, which made sitting at the counter a bit awkward. I kept staring at my face while eating, which is really embarrassing. I had this stupid literary journal with me, so I pretended to read that. Then I stared at the cop using the mirror and thought I was being sly, but I guess he was a well-trained cop because he figured it out and gave me another look.
In the corner, this fat kid with awful blonde highlights in his hair was saying, "No one else thought she was hot, but I thought she was slamming!" I laughed because sometimes lowered expectations are funny. Then I sighed because they are endearing, too. "At least this boy goes to this great college and will make a lot of money and then get married," I thought to myself, "Everyone gets married."
This thought was a consolation to me, and as if on cue this girl with a long neck and pale arms sat next to me with two jumbo slices. She ate her pizza with her hands and slurped her coke loudly. I was in the middle of debating whether her eating habits were sexy or disgusting, when these two little turds came and sat on the other side of me. They were freshmen and were talking about drinking forties, but both of them were eating their pizza with plastic knives and forks. Like really cutting the shit up into small cubes, spearing four or five pizza cubes on their fork and delicately placing the stack of cut-up pizza in their mouths. My stomach churned with contempt and I tried catching the girl's eye via the mirror so we could both sneer at these little puff-monkeys.
Somehow, it worked and I motioned towards the delicate eaters with my eyes and she started laughing. The fat guy in the corner started talking about the girl that had put the highlights in his hair, which stirred up more giggling from me and this girl. I noticed that she was wearing a t-shirt over a tight sweater. The t-shirt said, "Provincetown" on it, which discouraged me at first, but then I rationalized that her dad might be gay. My pizza slice was done, but I didn't want to leave, so I thought about doing that move where you write your name and number down on a piece of paper and drop it on their tray while leaving, but I didn't because I'm not that type of person and she probably wouldn't have been too impressed by the (207) prefix.
There was nothing left to do, so I got up and left and got in my car and drove up to Maine. In the car, I decided that hitting on girls is stupid anyway. We had our moment and there was no need to extend it any further than it had gone. A small laugh shared through a mirror in a pizza parlor in New York should always be enough. If I had dropped my number off and she had called me, I'd either do something crazy or she'd say something over the phone like, "I'm really into tantra" or "I'm ready to have babies now," or, even worse, I would have realized that our entire connection was forged because both of us were being petty and judgmental. Which would teach me a good lesson for trying to construct a house out of mud, glorious mud.
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