These are, uh, 4 of my favorite things: second edition

RIP Tom Verlaine, As You Wish, Cuckoo Land, and Smile School

Doubling down on the bad Sound of Music-based wordplay of my previous short-ish “favorite things” post, here are four things that are really doing it for me recently. Knowing me, it won’t be that brief.

1. Marquee Moon by Television In the summer of 2002, I worked two jobs (an ad agency internship and as a clerk at a record/video/book store) in Jackson Hole. While there, I became friends with a guy named John, who’d spent the 90’s in Seattle, right in the flannel thick of the alt-rock (grunge?) scene as tour manager/merch guy/etc for—and friend to—Pearl Jam¹, Alice In Chains, Mark Lanegan, and more. He said he’d been briefly married to D’Arcy Wretzky of Smashing Pumpkins even. And after, in his words, “seeing one too many of his friends die”, he bailed on Seattle and the music industry and found his way to the altogether different vibe of Wyoming. Anyway, he saw I was a big music fan and one day handed me a big Case Logic zipcase full of burned CDs (this was pre-streaming) that were a treasure trove of great music I’d never listened to: Tim Buckley, Fela Kuti, 13th Floor Elevators, Buzzcocks, Replacements (I know, I know…but they weren’t even on the average East High kid’s radar, and I was very much an average East High kid), and—most importantly—Television. All the albums were good, but Marquee Moon was the one that stuck out. Incredible, angular guitar playing with drawn-out solos and punk soul. Television guitarist Tom Verlaine passed away over the weekend and I’ve been re-listening to Marquee Moon ever since, realizing that my awe over his playing has only increased with time. The interplay between Verlaine and Television’s other guitarist Richard Lloyd is inspiring—singular, jutting, economical on one side and sprawling, serpentine, bratty on the other. When I first heard Television, I wondered how The Strokes’ guitarists could so blatantly rip off² the way Lloyd and Verlaine played off of each other. A lot of really, really good guitarists can sound like other great guitarists. But most of my favorite guitarists—this includes Verlaine—can only sound like themselves³.

Photo by: Gus Stewart/Redferns

2. The home-recorded, Covid-era celebrity version of The Princess Bride. I love the original movie like most people who grew up in the 80’s, so this wasn’t a hard sell. But it’s really, really charming. The actors all show an unfeigned affection for the source material (as well as some fun and dumb creativity). Holly & I watched it again last night and laughed and gasped and teared up when (SPOILER) Carl Reiner says “as you wish” at the end.

3. Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. My mom gave me her copy of this book, saying something like, “This seems like something you’d like.” I think that was a compliment, though it did seem asterisked with the fact that it wasn’t her kind of book. She was right, though. Five different stories from five wide-ranging times—the future, 15th century Constantinople, 2020 Idaho, the Korean War—tell a story about the importance of…stories (as Doerr puts it, “as a way to slip the trap”⁴ that is the difficulty of life). And, in the end, they all intersect. They all matter to each other, puzzle together in the final act masterfully.

4. This is me, every time I’m photographed. For real. There’s a great song by Minor Alps called “I Don’t Know What To Do With My Hands” that applies to me in photos, except substitute My Face for My Hands.

So, yeah, those are five things that happen to be doing it for me as of January 31, 2023.

1. The 90s were something else….

2. I love the Strokes first two and a half records. And I adore the way the two guitarists play off of each other. It’s just that I heard the Strokes first and, hearing Television later, it kind of blew my mind how much the 00s could sound like the 70s.

3. Neil Young, Marc Ribot, Madison Cunningham, David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), Michael Hedges, Jimi Friggin’ Hendrix, Nels Cline, Daniel Lanois, The Edge, Blake Mills…are a few of my favorites who I consider to be shaping (or have shaped, RIP) their own sound and style of playing. When they die, that sound goes with them, which is tragic, but also it also means they were more Picasso than Currier & Ives.

4. I loved what Jason Sheehan wrote on NPR.org about Cloud Cuckoo Land:

”The book is a puzzle. The greatest joy in it comes from watching the pieces snap into place. It is an epic of the quietest kind, whispering across 600 years in a voice no louder than a librarian's. It is a book about books, a story about stories. It is tragedy and comedy and myth and fable and a warning and a comfort all at the same time. It says, Life is hard. Everyone believes the world is ending all the time. But so far, all of them have been wrong.
It says that if stories can survive, maybe we can, too.”