My son and I are having a movie day for Father’s Day, and I’m finally getting him to watch the Lord of the Rings movies, en route to eventually conning him into reading the books. So I’m going to make this quick; I assume you can find it within yourselves to forgive me.
Dinner was at the Bosphorous Cafe, and dinner made the trip worth it all by itself. The damn show could have been rained out and driving down just for Turkish food would have been completely fine. I had Lamb Mediterranean, along with a pile of other stuff. Absolutely delicious. And the first things I noticed when we walked in was a relative lack of white people and a table or two speaking Arabic, which is always a good sign in any restaurant featuring non-American cuisine.
We had really good seats:
That’s without any kind of zoom happening, and there were huge screens on either side of the stage, so … yeah, great seats. And we’ll be back in a few weeks for Weird Al, and we have better seats for that show.
The openers, the Gaslight Anthem, weren’t bad at all, and they played a deep Pearl Jam/Mother Love Bone cut called Chloe Dancer, which … well, I figured out who my people in the crowd were really fast.
The Crows hit the stage at 9:03. Here’s the set list, if you’re a fan. They did four songs from the new album, all of the ones I wanted to hear except for one– they didn’t play Bobby and the Rat Kings, which is one of my favorites. We got an acoustic set and a few piano songs over nearly a two hour show. Adam had to stop a song because he sneezed. And the crowd got really into the show:
… assuming, that is, that the Indianapolis police department doesn’t decide to turn the protests violent. I’m only a teeny bit worried about it; I bought the concert tickets well before the No Kings protests were a thing, and I’ll be traveling right during when most of them are going on, but I assume that particularly in a city the size of Indianapolis nobody’s gonna be super concerned with the official start and end time. I’ve never seen the Crows live, but I’ve downloaded a bunch of their shows and I’m expecting a really good show. And I’m planning on hitting the Lego store on the way home on Sunday, so Father’s Day is gonna be lit.
Last night I texted my wife and said that I wanted to go to an Italian place called Carrabba’s for dinner tonight. It’s a chain but they’re not exactly ubiquitous, so if you haven’t heard of them don’t worry about it. What you need to know is I didn’t actually want one of their entrees– they do a ridiculous carrot cake and I actually wanted some of that. Bek agreed and so the three of us headed off for Italian after she got home from work.
We walked in and immediately something felt off. We were seated immediately and made a sort of half-confused eye contact on the way to our table, then after being at the table for a moment she leaned over to me and asked if the place had seriously remodeled since we’d been in there last. I remembered the decor, but it wasn’t matching with what I had in my head. Then we got the menus and that’s when I realized it– we were in the wrong damn restaurant. So I’d said I wanted to go to Carrabba’s, and we’d gone to Carrabba’s, but what I actually wanted was Papa Vino’s, which is a much more local place (only three locations total, all within an hour of each other) that was a block away. The really ridiculous thing is that my wife was also thinking of Papa Vino’s, and had made the exact same mistake I’d had– when I said Carrabba’s, she heard that, and drove to that place, all the while expecting it to be Papa Vino’s when we walked in.
Anyway, we’re cowards, so once we’d been seated the notion of getting up and leaving was unimaginable, and it turns out the lobster ravioli at Carrabba’s is pretty good, but I didn’t get my God damned carrot cake. I mean, come on. Look at this:
So, yeah, we have to have Italian again next week, I guess.
Okay, so this time it’s really-really the first day of spring, the calendar says so, so instead of 70 degrees and beautiful like it’s been who knows how many days recently, we had fucking snow. Again. And there’s more expected later this week.
That said? This wasn’t a bad day at all. Work was productive– actual teaching happened in all of my classes, which is always nice, especially after how messy yesterday was. I bought tickets to a Counting Crows show in June, meaning that I’ll be seeing both the Counting Crows and Weird Al Yankovic at the same facility within three weeks this summer, and to be honest I can’t decide which show I’m more excited about. I’m seeing Weird Al with my family and the Crows with one of my oldest friends, which is going to be super cool.
And then I came home and since I got tomorrow’s planning done at work (!!!) I had time to shoot some Nazis. This poor bastard up here got killed with a grenade, dropped neatly at his feet from a bush a dozen meters away, and blew up both him and his friend. He ragdolled into the barbed wire, which I find incredibly hilarious for some reason. I never found the other dude’s body, which I assume was blown directly to Hell.
There’s probably something really creepy about how relaxing I find WWII-based sniper games; there is something incredibly cathartic about blowing a Nazi’s face off (in high-definition, bullet-cam, slow-motion detail) from 300 meters away with no one the wiser about where you were or where the bullet came from. It’s okay, see, not because it’s a video game, but because Nazis aren’t human beings.
I really shoulda booby-trapped that guy’s body, though. Maybe I’ll go back. I left a trail of destruction behind me so who knows if there’s even anyone alive to find him (no one heard the grenade) but they’d cut back to it if something happened. It would be worth it. There are always more grenades, right?
I bought about an album a week this year, which is roughly on par with previous years, although this year my music purchases seem to have been focused on filling holes in my collection– I spent a lot of time listening to Outkast and REM and Black Crowes and Jane’s Addiction and Alice In Chains, and it turns out that I didn’t have everything they released. Prince had a new release and that got me to go back and pick up a few of his records that I didn’t have before. A lot of the new stuff (as in 2020-21 releases) was kind of experimental and a lot of it didn’t work out. But this article from Albumism, full of shiny new music mostly by artists I’ve never heard of, popped up on my radar today and that got me thinking about the new, or at least newer, music that I bought this year that made an impact, so I figured since I always write a ton of end-of-the-year pieces during the week between Christmas and New Year’s I may as well start with this. Other than one album I’m not going to be ranking anything, but here are six albums that I bought this year (mostly; we’ll get to the exception) and that I think are worth you checking out.
Mazbou Q, The Future Was. I actually encountered this guy through his TikTok feed, believe it or not, where he talks about the musical theory behind hiphop, and does so at great length and in incredible detail in a way that is incredibly interesting and illuminating, especially to someone like me who doesn’t have much technical knowledge about music and frequently struggles to talk about it in a way that is compelling. The guy’s smart as hell and his lyrics are complex and fascinating and I’m pretty sure I’m the only person I know who has heard of him, so let’s see if we can’t bring that number up a little bit.
Counting Crows, Butter Miracle Suite One. Technically an EP– this includes four new songs and four single edits of those four songs, but that didn’t stop me from keeping it on repeat for quite a while after it came on. Adam Duritz is one of my favorite singers, and while the Counting Crows aren’t nearly as big as they were in the nineties everything they release is directly up my alley.
Lil Nas X, Montero. A confession! I’m not actually that big of a fan of Old Town Road, the song that made sure that everybody on the Goddamned planet knew who Lil Nas X was, mostly because we all had our own guest spots on the remixes. That said, this album is fucking brilliant, and the fact that I still think it’s brilliant despite the fact that I can’t turn on the radio without hearing three songs from it is damned impressive. The guy’s got an incredible amount of talent, both as a musician and a visual artist (my jaw was hanging open for the entirety of my first couple of viewings of the music video for Call Me By My Name) and I hope he has a really, really long and prolific career.
Billie Eilish, Happier than Ever. This was probably my single most eagerly anticipated album of the year, as I was looking forward to Billie Eilish’s follow-up to When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? pretty much from the moment I first listened to it. I’m not sure this is quite the triumph that Asleep was (and I have utterly no idea at all what the relative sales were like) but it’s a damned impressive record. I also bought her brother Finneas’ debut, Optimist, and while I enjoyed it I think his skills are probably more on the production end of things. That sounds like an insult. It’s not. I had this whole metaphor here about playing tennis against LeBron James but I don’t think it quite makes sense so I’m just going to assume you know what I’m talking about and move on.
Taylor Fuckin’ Swift, Evermore. Yes okay technically this came out in December of 2020 but it’s close fucking enough, and I only bought this because I wanted to see if my enjoying Folklore was a fluke, and then I found out the reasons behind her re-releasing Fearless and Red and I ended up buying both of those on release date too, just out of, like, solidarity, and Jesus Christ have I turned into a fucking Swiftie?
Okay: Evermore and Folklore are both really good. I couldn’t tell you which one I like more because they tend to blur together in my head. And I found myself really enjoying Fearless’ re-release, but Red is kind of the perfect example of Why I’ve Never Really Liked Taylor Swift, because I wasn’t even remotely a fan of hers until this year and yet somehow I can tell you every dude she’s ever dated and that’s kinda fucked up. And I am absolutely on Team Conspiracy Theory about the ten-minute version of All Too Well, because no song written back when that was supposed to have been written would have had the words fuck the patriarchy in it. But fuck it; I’ve always been very clear that Taylor is phenomenally talented if for no other reason than that I have half of her catalog memorized without ever deliberately listening to the songs, and I like the idea that she’s re-releasing all of her old music so that she can screw over this asshole record executive dude, so I’m going to keep buying the re-releases even though I’m going to sigh a lot and roll my eyes while listening to some of the songs.
(I also, and this is related, bought Olivia Rodrigo’s debut Sour this year. I have nothing to say about it until Olivia Rodrigo is no longer a minor.)
(I have just discovered that Olivia Rodrigo is 18.)
(Someone needs to give this kid a hug and a therapist.)
Anyway.
Willow, lately I Feel EVERYTHING. I am not sure that Willow Smith really deserves to be a single-name person yet, but picking this album up was another one of those impulse, what-the-hell-it’s-$9 purchases this year, and I actually haven’t dug into her backlist but whatever the hell era of her music she’s in right now I want a lot more of it. lately I feel EVERYTHING is only 26 minutes long and all but one of the tracks don’t even make it to three minutes, which makes it even more ridiculous that I love it as much as I do. I said I wasn’t going to be doing any ranking, but this is still hands-down and far away the best new music I bought this year; the only thing close to it would have been Montero, which is also full of short-ass songs. If like me you’re an old person and you haven’t given Willow Smith a single thought since back in her Whip My Hair days, you owe it to yourself to check this out, especially if you’re an old 90s head like me. Her music weirdly blends together everything I love about rock and roll, alternative music and hiphop, and it’s just great.
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