This morning, my best friend, Tracey, sent me this:
click to enlarge
Can you imagine all the sob stories we’ll tell our children when it comes to music pre-Internet? Like how for years, I thought the lyrics to The Bellamy Brothers’ “If I Said You Had A Beautiful Body” were “if I said you had a beautiful bonnet, would you hold it against me?”, and I wondered why anyone would be offended by a friendly hat-related compliment.
And what about music not pre-Internet but pre-AWESOME-Internet? I remember hearing The Connells’ “’74-’75″ on the radio in high school and thinking it was mind-blowing, but of course Google didn’t exist then, so I couldn’t find the song using the three or four words I knew. I had to actually call the radio station to ask.
And even better, when Tracey and I were in high school, Bush’s album Razorblade Suitcase came out, and we were dying to know the lyrics to “Insect Kin“, so we taped their “Saturday Night Live” performance on her VCR and sat watching and pausing, watching and pausing, writing down the lyrics from the closed captioning. AMAZING.
It’s funny how looking back, that seems so romantic. It seems like music really mattered back then, because bands actually had to have a whole album’s worth of material before they were allowed to record one, and we actually had to buy that music–or record it with our VCRs–to hear the song we liked whenever we wanted to.
I’m not really complaining, because I love being able to call that Justin Bieber song up on MySpace whenever I want to and not feel bad about it because I’m not contributing any money to his freaky fame, but still.
Most exciting things in my relationship with Kamran happen between 8:30 a.m., when we should be leaving the house for work, and 8:45 a.m., when we actually leave.
Yesterday morning at 8:30, he loaded a Justin Bieber song on his computer. I’ve accidentally caught live performances of this particular song on several occasions just because I watch so much crappy reality TV, but it turns out the album version is actually pretty incredible.
Kamran called it pure bubblegum pop bliss. It’s the song “U Smile”, and in a perfect world, it’ll load automatically when you click on that link.
Next, he showed me the 800%-slowed-down version, which New York magazine likened to Mogwai but I think is straight up Sigur Ros:
Isn’t it beautiful? Parts of it made us look up from our lipstick-applying and flexing-in-the-mirror-for-the-18th-time-that-hour at each other like, “Whaaaaaaaa?”
And then I had to tell Kamran this story, which I’m telling you now so I can remember it when I’m 80 and still be pissed off:
When I was a junior at THE Ohio State University, I took a poetry workshop that was supposed to lead to a career in song- and jinglewriting. I actually liked the professor’s poetry, which is kind of unheard of for me, and although it was clear she didn’t think any of my poems made any sense whatsoever, she always blamed it on herself and encouraged me to keep trying.
One of our assignments was to take a song, pretend like we didn’t know what the lyrics really were, and re-write them based on what we actually hear. So I used Sigur Ros’s “Vaka”, which was sung in Hopelandic, an entirely made-up language:
“How clever!”, I’m sure you’re thinking, and I was thinking it, too.
Only the professor said it didn’t count, because the lyrics not being in English meant I didn’t have to use any imagination to make up new ones. Well, you can guess how personally I took that, seeing as how I thought I’d used all of my imagination in coming up with such a unique song to explore. I never took another poetry class again, never started my indie rock band, and never wrote a single jingle.
What’s funny is that while writing this, I wanted to look at the Hopelandic lyrics for the song, but on almost every lyrics site, they’re in English, and they look veeeeeeeeeeeeeery similar to what I wrote for my poetry project. Which means that:
The day before I left for vacation, my co-worker Steve came to my desk and said, “Type ghetto bed intruder into YouTube.” Obviously you can’t go wrong searching for videos with those keywords, so I wasn’t surprised to laugh out loud while watching this interview (which I’m sure you all saw weeks ago, because I’m 100 years behind everyone else when it comes to the Internet):
Then Steve showed me the Auto-Tuned remix of the footage, which was so ingenious I found myself basically putting it on repeat:
I made Kamran pause his 17th viewing of an “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” episode that night so he could watch the videos, and even though he was skeptical at first, because I never find the right things funny, he actually laughed out loud, too. And we sang bits of the song to each other over the next couple of hours as we did laundry and packed for California, but I kind of figured that was it.
It happened, though, that the song would become the focal point of our entire 10-day trip. We were whispering quotes from it on the plane. We were watching it on Kamran’s iPod under the table while out for lunch with his parents. We were pretending to show it to his friends just to have an excuse to watch it again ourselves. One night, I woke up to it and thought I was going crazy until I realized Kamran was listening to it in the bathroom while pooing. And last night, a full 11 days since I first saw the thing, I couldn’t sleep because “hide your kids, hide your wife, and hide your husband, ’cause they’re rapin’ everybody out here” kept running through my head.
Back in the early 2000s, I was in love with the band Jump, Little Children and felt for them a passion unlike any I’d felt before. I fell in love with them slowly and accidentally but so fiercely that I followed them all over the country, sometimes driving 14 hours straight to make a show, and saw them well over 50 times. I joined their listserv and exchanged e-mails with their other fans for years, some of whom I became great friends with, and one of whom became my still-to-this-day arch-nemesis. We analyzed their lyrics, analyzed their personal lives, and analyzed our many meetings with them. This was a band who read and responded to your e-mails, knew you by name when you approached them after shows, and hosted heavy metal karaoke nights in Southern towns you’d fall in love with simply because you saw them play there.
When they broke up in 2006, I didn’t die like I thought I would, because I had moved to NYC and was preoccupied with my new life. In fact, it was almost better that they were breaking up, because I had sold my car and wouldn’t be able to road trip to see them in five different cities on five different days anymore. I didn’t find a new favorite band to replace them, but I didn’t think I needed one.
And then I created a Pandora radio station based on The Shins and heard Band of Horses’ “The Funeral“. I fucking loved it. I listened to it 100 times at work and at home in one day and still wasn’t tired of it. Then Pandora played another of their songs the next day, and I loved it, too. And then it seemed like every time I was clicking over to my Pandora Firefox tab to see who the band was, it was Band of Horses.
I realized that I heard them before living in Ohio but hadn’t cared about them. I realized my best friend Tracey had turned off “Is There a Ghost?” one time while I was visiting her in Ohio because she was sick of it. I downloaded their albums. Then I got their songs stuck in my head. Then I started sharing them on my blog and on my old LiveJournal, hoping that someone would say something about how much she loved them, too. I watched their live performances on YouTube. I found the best cover possible of one of their songs and thought about hiring the singer, Chris Dodgen, to play in my living room if I couldn’t hire the band itself. I listened to all of the other bands the members have been in and Wikipediaed anything I could think of related to them. I stopped caring about anything else.
The problem is that the Internet is a bit of a different place than it used to be for fangirls. I remember becoming a silverchair follower in 1995 and finding entire webrings of fan sites dedicated to them, and that was true for every band at that time. There were communities with chat rooms built right into the pages, forums for sharing band gossip, and photo galleries compiling every live and promo picture the band ever had taken. The Band of Horses website, meanwhile, doesn’t even have a Contact link, and their fan community consists of individual people writing blog posts, apparently, though I have no idea how to actually view other people’s posts.
And when they tweet a new concert date and I tweet back a legitimate question about it, they don’t respond. I can’t help taking it personally after so many years of direct contact with my last favorite band, and I know that’s stupid, but I paid for the solo album from Jump’s lead singer, Jay Clifford, last night on iTunes, and you can bet I won’t be paying for the Band of Horses album that came out yesterday.
My friend Alison works for a concierge company that books activities for clueless NYC tourists. Because she spends so much of her day recommending Broadway shows and selling expensive dinners, she’s constantly being wooed by theatres and restaurants. Last week, she let me be wooed with her.
We met at an Upper East Side restaurant for fried hors d’oeuvres that I couldn’t eat because I was trying to play it cool on the calories before my impending trip to Ohio to see my family. (Every time I lose five pounds, my great-aunt, godloveher, likes to hug me and tell me how she and my great-uncle were so worried I’d end up “round-shouldered” and alone.) Afterward, we boarded a shiny new tour bus to take us the twenty blocks down Broadway to the theatre district, and I had to look on as Alison ate a Magnolia Bakery cupcake:
I’m not really up on my Broadway, so I hadn’t heard of Million Dollar Quartet and honestly wasn’t expecting much from it. Especially when the theatre where it was playing, the Nederlander, was one of the tiniest I’ve been in. Of course crap doesn’t make it to Broadway, though, and the size of the theatre made it so that our front-row mezzanine seats were approximately a foot from the stage.
The musical revolves around the night in 1956 when Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis all came together in Memphis to record an impromptu jam session. It’s really a musical for people who don’t like musicals, because it actually makes sense when the actors break into song. And there’s nothing cheesy about the music or lyrics; it feels like you’re at a rock concert, only you don’t have to put up with any deafening 1950s-era Elvis fans.
All of the performances were spot-on, but Johnny Cash blew our minds with how close his voice sounded. And at the end, when I thought, “Okay, this has been nice, but there’s nothing they can do at the end that’ll surprise me,” they totally gave me chills with something as simple as taking a picture. You’ll understand it when you see it. And you should see it.
You should also wait outside after the show like we did and happen to run into Elvis. And when he tells you he’s on his way to dinner like he did with us, remind him to stay away from the fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches lest he die an early death.
Remember when Modest Mouse was so cool? When they were really emo, and no one you would consider “normal” listened to them, and not even your friends knew who they were?
And you had all of their albums and also all of their pins and also all of these homemade pins you bought off eBay, which you dutifully stuck to your messenger bag so everyone would know how emo you were wherever you went?
“Polar Opposites” came on my Pandora station yesterday, and I about died, so I immediately had to go to YouTube and find the best made-by-a-16-year-old music video for the song I could:
The lyrics are “I’m trying, I’m trying to/Drink away the part of the day/That I cannot sleep away,” and I remember being like, “Oh, my god, Modest Mouse, you totally get me.” Even though I had the easiest life and the strongest thing I was drinking back in 1999 in Ohio was Carnation Instant Breakfast.
I do not care about the Super Bowl. Aside from backyard basketball games involving the word horse, I think sports are pretty stupid. Especially professional ones.
I went to a Super Bowl party last night, though, and I went all the way to Jersey for it. And by “all the way”, I mean that I took a bus 15 minutes to my friend Jeff’s apartment, but I couldn’t use my MetroCard to pay the bus fare, so it seemed like a big deal. I did watch the game, unexpectedly, and I casually cheered for the Colts simply because Indianapolis is much closer to my hometown in Ohio than New Orleans is.
And also because I thought all of the pregame crap about how much a win would mean to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina–which happened five years ago, people–was unnecessarily sentimental and trying to make a story arc where one wasn’t needed. It’s a football game, and its outcome has nothing to rebuilding a city and everything to do with giving the kind of people who stand behind on-air newscasters and scream and show off their replica team jerseys an excuse to get drunk and light things on fire.
Anyway. I found the bidet in Jeff’s roommmate’s bathroom about a hundred times more interesting than most of the Super Bowl commercials, but there was one that really pulled at my heartstrings, and no, it wasn’t the Budweiser one with the Clydesdale and the cow. It was, oddly, a promo for the NFL itself, telling its fans how much better they are than are than NHL and MLS fans:
Funny what a little well-placed Arcade Fire song can do.
This weekend, instead of properly paying attention to me, Kamran combed YouTube for all of the songs listed in New York magazine’s Brooklyn Top 40, the top 40 songs coming out of Brooklyn and defining what it means to be indie right now. He made a playlist of them, which you can enjoy here:
I feel so close to all of these artists somehow. Both physically, because I live down the street from them, but also . . . not spiritually, because that’s lame, but somehow like spiritually, because this sound is so distinctly Brooklyn to me, and I feel so distinctly Brooklyn myself.
While we sat on Kamran’s loveseat, him reading cases for law school and me scanning blogs as we listened to the playlist for the second time, he looked over and said, “We should be doing this!” I said, “Oh, um, I don’t know if we could do this.” He said, “Well, not THIS. This is good.”
This is the song he was talking about:
We decided that when we need to feel better about ourselves and how easy making music is, we’ll listen to this:
I forget sometimes that I’m so freakin’ lucky to live in a city where this stuff is being made and is readily available to me. I saw Crystal Stilts open for Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, saw Amazing Baby open for Cold War Kids, saw MGMT play in an abandoned pool, saw The Dirty Projectors play on the Williamsburg waterfront. Remind me of this when I say I can’t be out at a show until 2 on a weeknight.
If you don’t work with me and don’t receive a daily instant messenger reminder from me to listen to it, you may be surprised to know that my favourite song at the moment is Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the U.S.A.”.
I first heard it months ago in the background of the Max Azria/Miley Cyrus Wal-Mart collection commercial and could only make out the words “the butterflies fly away”. Naturally, I ran to Google and typed that in but kept coming up with a song called “Butterfly Fly Away”, which was decidedly not it. Not having heard a lick of Miley before that, I had no idea that this was apparently some hit from her Hannah Montana movie.
I later found the right song, listened to it on repeat all day every day, and dreamed of the day they would make an official video for it where Miley would be wearing short-shorts and cowboy boots and would be singing into a corded microphone out in the middle of a field where there’s obviously nowhere to plug that thing in. And then they did:
SO HOT! Then, yesterday, I hired a painter to re-do the lobby of my company’s office, and he randomly started telling me that he’s also currently painting the home of the guy who wrote the new Kelly Clarkson song. I was like, “Oh, I don’t really listen to popular music,” but he assured me I would’ve heard this song, and when we pulled it up on YouTube, it turns out he was right. After enjoying that, he said practically as an aside, “This guy also wrote the new Miley Cyrus song, if you know it.” I was like
IF I KNOW IT?! So what I’m saying is–there’s three degrees of separation between Miley Cyrus and me, which practically makes me one of those friends in her video. Probably the Asian one in the red bikini top.
Wednesday morning, I was on the green line on my way to work, and the air conditioning suddenly turned off despite the fact that the subway is UNDERGROUND in an entirely ENCLOSED SPACE that doesn’t get ANY NATURAL AIR. Without the whooshing from the vents, I was able to hear the music coming from the headphones of the guy in front of me. I listened in for a second and dismissed it as some hip-hop crap, but during the bridge, I realized that I not only knew but loved the song!
When I first moved to NYC, I was dating this great guy named Todd who had this terrible friend named Sarah. On my first night in the city, she took us to eat at the Sea in Williamsburg, which would later become the neighborhood I’d move to and live in for three years and counting, even though I’m not even sure I knew we were in Brooklyn at the time. I thought Sarah was a little bit bitchy and a little bit glamourous, which is exactly what I look for in friends, and I assumed we’d be likethis soon enough.
But then Todd came home from hanging out with her one night and told me that Sarah said my taste in music was not indie but singer-songwriter. As I’d prided myself up until then on knowing all the music my friends didn’t, I was super-offended that this Goldfrapp-loving rich girl was calling me “not indie”. When I thought of singer-songwriters, I thought of John Mayer and Jack Johnson, who I just don’t consider my guys.
The other day, though, I realized that actually, yeah, I’m totally not embarrassed to like certain singer-songwriters:
But I hate all the others, and I’m totally indie, so there.
I was falsely under the impression that being in a band means you’re cool.
Back in high school and college, I went to a lot of shows. I’ve seen my favourite band well over 50 times all over the country, and that’s just the beginning. I used to be obsessed with meeting members of the bands after the concerts, so I’ve gushed to an embarrassing number of musicians. And they all seemed cool to me. Honestly, I can’t remember anyone who wasn’t cool. Some of them were assholes (I’m looking at YOU, Ed Roland), but being an asshole only adds to your air of untouchability.
A couple of weekends ago, though, Kamran made me watch the documentary Kill Your Idols, which is about the NYC no wave scene of the 70s and 80s and the current noise scene that grew out of it. The film features a couple of Yeah Yeah Yeahs performances, which was really exciting for me, because I’ve always thought Karen O is a super-sexy performer with unrivaled coolness. See for yourself:
But then they made the horrible, horrible mistake of interviewing her. She says “like” and “you know” a million times, which isn’t really an issue for me, because who do I know who doesn’t talk that way? The problem for me is how . . . Midwestern . . . she seems. I can’t look at her the same way anymore. She has a weak chin! And insecure lips! And awkward hand movements!
Someone made the best YouTube video with clips from the interview called “Karen O tells it, like, it is”. So funny:
Seriously, if this person is cool enough to front a band, who isn’t? I can put on a lot of makeup and look mean (haha 2005), and what you’ve seen of me at karaoke is 1/8th of what I’m capable of. Kamran and I even have our band named.
In case you haven’t already heard, I sort of loved the movie 500 Days of Summer but also sort of hated it for its attempts at making me feel like my boyfriend doesn’t wear enough sweater vests and for my unexplainable secret desire to see the couple in it fail.
Other than the female lead being a coldhearted jerk, I couldn’t pinpoint anything specific that caused me to not feel much attachment to them, but this morning on the train, I realized that what made me roll my eyes about them was the elevator scene, shown here in the opening of the trailer:
The problem is that I’m jealous. This exact scene is the stuff of my emo, music-fanatic, high school dreams, and it’s never happened to me . . .
The other day, Dr. Boyfriend innocently informed me that he’d been listening to Electric Six’s Switzerland album on his iPod, not realizing that I’d go crazy reminiscing about how much it meant to me three short years ago. See, I met my ex-boyfriend Todd during our senior year of college at THE Ohio State University in a German film class, and after we’d dated for six months, he moved here for grad school at NYU. I took an extra year to write an undergraduate thesis and then moved to NYC myself, thinking that we’d both loved karaoke and strawberry shortcake from Whole Foods and riding the subway equally.
It turned out that Todd only liked to sing one song at karaoke, that they built a Whole Foods in Ohio, and that the subway made his claustrophobia act up. So he planned to move back home, and I planned to move with him, because it’s hard here, you know? And it’s even harder when you don’t know anyone but five of your boyfriend’s friends. I started looking at apartments in Columbus, picked out my future dining room table one day while I was shopping on High Street with my best friend, Tracey, and even bought some candles to match the exposed brick wall I imagined my new place would have.
And then I just didn’t go. Todd still went, and my friends must have thought I was the biggest asshole for teasing them with my plans to go with him, but I stayed, and I left our beautiful 350-square-foot studio with its black and white checked bathroom tile in Chelsea and found a sublet in Brooklyn. The sublet was the ground level of a brownstone in Park Slope where the kitchen, living room, bathroom, and one bedroom were on the first floor, and the entire basement was a second bedroom with its own bathroom.
I was rather lonely during that time. I hadn’t really considered NYC my home and hadn’t bothered to accept any invitations to hang out with friendly co-workers, so the only person I had to rely on was a guy from my very first job in the city. He lived in Park Slope and had been the one to convince me to take a sublet there, so I naturally assumed he’d be my tour guide and makeshift boyfriend. We did super-romantic things like meet at midnight for walks in the park (because he didn’t go into work until 11 a.m. and didn’t care that I had to be up at 7), listen to hours and hours of Radiohead (because it’s the only band we had in common) in his one-bedroom apartment (I didn’t know anyone else who was able to afford to live alone in NYC, so it impressed me), and watch the sun set from the roof of the Met (and then go straight to our respective homes instead of continuing an actual date). He’d call me only once a week, and I’d call Tracey eight times a day to complain about it.
The lease was up for the girl I was subletting from at the end of August, and I just assumed that my friend Wen (who I met while working Barnes & Noble, which was my second job for the first year I lived here) and I could just slide right in to a new lease. But on August 29th, the landlord called to tell me he was raising the rent from $2100 to $2800 and that I could get the hell out if I wasn’t happy with it. I begged him for a month to find a new apartment, and Wen helped me move my stuff into the basement bedroom so I could enjoy four glorious weeks of sleeping in a room the size of other people’s entire apartments.
I’d met Kamran (who is, of course, the current Dr. Boyfriend) on September 14th, but I wasn’t spending every waking moment at his apartment in front of a reality TV show yet. Every morning, I’d take a shower in the first-floor bathroom (because the downstairs one had seemed too scary to me after the flooding) and then try to find a corner of my room where I wasn’t visible to Wen on the first floor. The staircase was an open one with wooden bars where a wall should have been, so anyone standing in the kitchen could look down into the bedroom through the bars and see whatever wild thing I might be doing. I tried hanging sheets up with various sticking materials, but nothing ever took, so I resigned myself to hiding in my closet to put my underwear on for a month.
And I’d listen to Switzerland every single morning. I mean every single morning. Wen was always upstairs listening to cool stuff like The Blow from the crappy speakers attached to our TV (since we didn’t have a proper stereo), and I was always trying to drown him out with “I Buy the Drugs”. Which is totally a romantic song, right? “I am your man and I buy the drugs.”
I have no idea why the album hit me in just the right spot at that particular time. Maybe it’s because I was in such a state of oh-my-god-why-did-I-decide-to-stay-here? that I needed the tongue-in-cheek-ness of it to keep me focused on my yay-I-have-the-chance-to-do-whatever-I-want-to-with-my-life-in-NYC! thoughts and to keep my mind off my oh-crap-I-have-no-money-I-need-to-find-a-new-apartment-I’m-not-tough-enough-for-NYC thoughts. It was super-exciting to live in Brooklyn for the first time in this huge apartment and super-exciting to start looking for our next new place in my now-neighborhood of Williamsburg with Wen and super-exciting to be dating this person who felt different than everyone else from the moment I met him, and I really associate the album with those feelings and that time.
And now I have a boyfriend who loves it, too. Kamran and I agree that this is the best song on the album:
And now that I’ve told you my life story, tell me yours. What songs do you associate with certain times in your life? If you’re really motivated (and I hope you are), write your own blog/journal entry about it and let us know in the comments so everyone can enjoy.
Back on April 3rd, Dr. Kamran took me to see Cold War Kids at Terminal 5 over on the waywest side. It was sorta weird to me that I was paying real money to see them, because when I saw them for a $3 donation last summer in Prospect Park, I felt fairly so-so about them. I liked their vocalist, but I didn’t care for their songs.
And then I couldn’t stop listening to them for weeks afterward and kicked myself for all the times I missed them playing $5 shows when I lived in Ohio. I finally understood why everyone was so gung-ho about “Hospital Beds” and “Hang Me Out to Dry“, and then their new album came out, and I couldn’t get enough of “Mexican Dogs” and “Against Privacy“.
So even though Kamran had spring semester law school finals the following week, he took me to the show, and it was amazing:
It just sucks, you know, because I’m to the point that I would say I sort of love this band, and yet their fans suck so hard. The people behind us were chatting through the entire show, and half of that chat was complaining about how they didn’t know any of the songs. When they started playing “Something is Not Right with Me” and everyone cheered for, like, the first time all night, I yelled, “Buy the album!” and the girl beside me who actually knew the songs turned and laughed.
But I’m a crochety old lady who should be ignored.
First, Joe Satriani accused Coldplay of ripping off his 2004 song “If I Could Fly”:
Now Cat Stevens (er, um, Yusuf Islam) is accusing them of stealing from his 1973 song “Foreigner Suite”:
And suddenly Brooklyn band Creaky Boards claims that their 2008 song “The Songs I Didn’t Write” was also copied by Coldplay . . . even though their albums came out at the same time. And seriously, when you straight up tell everyone that you didn’t write the song IN ITS TITLE, I don’t think you have a leg to stand on in the courtroom.
The fact that Cat Stevens evidently didn’t think Satriani himself was worth suing when his song came out four whole years before Coldplay’s interests me, though. If I was Satriani, I’d be super-offended.
I went to Le Royale Saturday night with some trepidation to celebrate my friend Sonya’s birthday. See, we like to go to Le Royale on Friday nights for Robot Rock, where we can be sure to hear 80s new wave and current indie music. However, Sonya had to go and be born on April 11th instead of April 10th, so we had to go to what Le Royale was calling Grand Buffet Saturday. Not appealing, right? Unless you’re into Ponderosa and cheap Chinese food, I guess. (Which you are.)
But it turned out to be the best night ever! The DJ, I later learned, was named Vikas Sapra, and he’s now my favourite DJ ever. I’m the sort of person who has a reeeeeeeeeeally great time when the DJ’s playing a song I like and an inversely more horrible time when he’s playing something I don’t like/know. It’s definitely one of my more intolerable personality traits and something I feel bad for subjecting my poor friends to, but there it is all the same, and not even two fistfuls of vodka can make it any better.
Luckily, this Sapra fellow is a master of mixes. One second he’s playing “Kids” by MGMT and I’m going crazy, the next he’s playing some shitty hip-hop song that makes me want to kill myself, but then he’s playing Bowie’s “Modern Love” and everything’s great again. And he only plays the best 30 seconds of each song, which sucks for the songs I love but is perfect for the times I’ve reached for my razorblade.
My friend Beth and I spent the night right in front of the DJ booth in order to have enough room to flail our arms wildly like white girls dancing do and to look approvingly at Vikas when he played Blur and Nirvana and not-so-approvingly when he played One Republic (who I originally called New Republic until I just had the foresight to Google their name to be sure). Now my weekend schedule will officially consist of karaoke on Fridays, Le Royale on Saturdays, and “Celebrity Apprentice” on Sundays.
I was riding the M15 up from the East Village after a Friday night of karaoke classics at my favorite place to watch my friends make fools of themselves, Sing-Sing, when at a stop near 34th Street, a man stood up from his seat and began yelling at the person behind him, seemingly out of nowhere. This is precisely what I heard:
“You want to step out?! You want to step out?! You’re not so clean! Your butt is dirty! Asshole!”
He was a stubby guy with a backpack and the leftovers of an Asian accent, and his victim was a white-haired, cane-holding black gentleman who didn’t seem to notice that he’d just been given a verbal beat-down. Now to be fair, I was in the back of the bus behind a guy who was inexplicably grunting at ten-second intervals, but I’m positive that’s what the yeller yelled. How he knew anything about his fellow rider’s butt I’m less sure of.
He strutted off the bus with an air of accomplishment, and we were all left to wonder what the old man could’ve possibly said to rile him up.
(Posted on Examiner, which pays me for your visits (hint, hint))
And because I can’t resist:
Steven and Emily singing (or, you know, not singing in this photo) a romantic duet
of Paula Abdul’s “Opposites Attract”
Nik and Charles enjoying Jeff’s rendition of “Stayin’ Alive”
Roxanne showing her Jamaican roots with some Bob Marley, which earned her the eye
of the one other Jamaican dude who sings karaoke in NYC.
Adam unabashedly doing the robot while Steven gets DOWN.
I was actually in a non-salty mood for the first Friday in ages, so I convinced some of my ladyfriends (and Steven) to go out for another round of karaoke to make up for our last sad, sad display. This time we went back to our usual spot, Sing-Sing Karaoke, which was introduced to us by Emily ages ago and which I’m going to argue is the best karaoke in New York City in terms of song offerings and awesomeness of facilities, though their private rooms get snatched up too quickly because of how great they are.
We went straight from work, which meant that we were the first ones there and got to take advantage of their $5 per person/hour private room happy hour rate and half-priced drinks. The drinks being the reason you will not see any photos of me in the following collection.
The drinks also being the reason Steven looks like he’s soooooooo into this beautiful ballad until you notice that the words on the screen are “till you holler for more”:
and the reason Jessica looks like she’s never enjoyed a tortilla chip from Chipotle more than she’s enjoying this one:
and the reason Melvin has five chins:
and the reason Jenny and Jessica actually sang a song without being threatened into it (and why Jenny may be throwing up here):
and the reason Emily is singing “867-5309/Jenny” for the second time that night in honor of Jenny with her hand in her crotch:
Okay, no, I’m kidding; we each had, like, one drink. But there’s really no other explanation for this stuff.
I mean, not to be creepy or anything, but OMG, photos of Anoop as a baby:
I mean, not as cute as my actual boyfriend (as opposed to Anoop, who is merely my future boyfriend)
but still.
And also, while I realize that Anoop looks really awkward in this way-too-cool jacket that he’d obviously never choose for himself, I still think he was totally NOT bad last night:
