Favorite Albums of 2k13

Finally, finally. It's here once again--that time when you bust out the glitter, champagne flutes, and black tie (optional), and snuggle up to that special someone to watch a lighted ball (or acorn) drop as you reflect on the year gone by.  And maybe read a few lists that quanitfy and qualify various things that have happened in the preceding 12 months (fun!). I am fully aware that the world does not need another year-end 'best of' list. Yet, as has become part of my own personal holiday tradition, I've made a list of albums.* (*Not even gonna pretend there is anything objective about this process anymore--these are just the ones I liked the most).  It was tough to narrow it down since there was a lot of great music floating around out there in 2013, but these were my 25 favorites, in some kind of ascending order. 

Happy 2k14 everybody. 

25. Pity Sex: Feast of Love
24. Paramore: s/t
23. My Bloody Valentine: m b v
22. CHVRCHES: The Bones of What You Believe
21. Touché Amoré: Is Survived By
20. Youth Lagoon: Wondrous Bughouse
19. Parquet Courts: Light Up Gold
18. Arcade Fire: Reflektor
17. Swearin: Surfing Strange
16. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
15. Bent Shapes: Feels Weird
14. Janelle Monáe: The Electric Lady
13. Sonny & The Sunsets: Antenna to the Afterworld
12. Thee Oh Sees: Floating Coffin
11. Jon Hopkins: Immunity
10. Mikal Cronin: MCII
9. Drake: Nothing was the Same
8.  Los Campesions!: No Blues
7. The Wonder Years: The Greatest Generation
6. Polvo: Siberia
5. Arctic Monkeys: AM
4. Deerhunter: Monomania
3. Beach Fossils: Clash the Truth
2. The World is a Beautiful Place and I am No Longer Afraid to Die: Whenever, If Ever
1. Speedy Ortiz: Major Arcana

My Top 30 Albums of 2012

Presented, for once, without commentary or apology. See you in 2013.

30. Thee Oh Sees: Putrifiers II

29. Grimes: Visions

28. Dirty Projectors: Swing Lo Magellan 

27. Death Grips: The Money Store

26. Wild Nothing: Nocturne

25. Spectre Folk: The Ancient Storm

24. Purity Ring: Shrines

23. Animal Collective: Centipede Hz

22. Chromatics: Kill for Love

21. Beach House: Bloom

20. ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead: Lost Songs

19. Merchandise: Children of Desire

18. Mac DeMarco: 2

17. The Young: Dub Egg

16. Naomi Punk: The Feeling

15. Yellow Ostrich: Strange Land

14. Ty Segall Band: Slaugherhouse

13. Japandroids: Celebration Rock

12. Lotus Plaza: Spooky Action at a Distance

11. Black Moth Super Rainbow: Cobra Juicy

10. DIIV: Oshin

9. Weird Dreams: Choreography

8. Grizzly Bear: Shields

7. Micahu and the Shapes: Never

6. Metz: Metz
5. The Babies: Our House on the Hill

4. Frank Ocean: Channel Orange

3. Tame Impala: Lonerism

2. Fiona Apple: The Idler Wheel...

1. Cloud Nothings: Attack on Memory 

Travis-ty or Something Else: Revisiting Pitchfork’s Most Infamous 0.0 Rating

During its long and vaunted history, the music website/indie tastemaking farm known as Pitchfork has done its fair share of tossing its now quite substantial weight around to influence its loyal readers to purchase albums, attend shows, and climb aboard the buzz express of certain artists and bands. The rise of acts like Broken Social Scene, the Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, and Crystal Castles directly coincided with gushing reviews and ceaseless coverage on the site. This symbiotic existence often makes it difficult to discern whether Pitchfork creates the initial buzz for such artists or whether the site merely rides the waves of growing external popularity. Whatever the case, Pitchfork possesses a great deal of power, which it wields primarily by way of its wordy album reviews, but more precisely by the numeric ratings that accompany each review. Albums, five of which are usually reviewed each week day, can receive anywhere from a 0.0 to a 10.0. Records that reach somewhere above the 8.4 mark receive a coveted “Best New Music” label (though this cut-off point seems rather malleable). Many of the albums that are reviewed, by virtue of the fact that the site selects ones that its readers will care about in the first place (which does include the Taylor Swifts of the world), end up getting relatively favorable scores. It is a rare event to see an album receive a score greater than 9.0, but equally as rare to see a score below 4.0.

As of this writing, Pitchfork has bestowed perfect 10.0 ratings on 12 albums upon their initial release—not counting dozens of others that have received the score after being reissued. Because of Pitchfork’s sway over the indie world, these so-rated albums may be recognized as being part of a pantheon of ‘indie’ music classics (at least until at some point later, slight revisionism occurs: see …And You Will Knows By the Trail of Dead’s Source Tags & Codes, which received a 10.0 upon release in 2002, but barely made the top 100 on Pitchfork’s best albums of the decade seven years later). On the other side of the coin that brings indie fame and notoriety is the dreaded 0.0 score, of which the site has doled out 12. This rating, from pretty much any angle, indicates that the album is worthless. It also alerts readers that the world may somehow be worse off just by the mere fact that the album exists in recorded form. This is harsh, to be sure, but the rarity with which this horrific score is handed out and the care with which the site ostensibly evaluates albums, this valueless rating must mean something. Most of the zeros-point-zeros have been awarded to albums that Pitchfork would not be expected to review at all—including two KISS albums, Bachman Turner Overdrive’s “Greatest Hits,” and a Jet record (one that arguably got a 0.0, but no actual digits were present on the page— just a video of a monkey urinating into its own mouth). One can safely assume Gene Simmons and the guys in BTO were none too bothered by a severely negative rating by some indie music website, so the impact of these 0.0’s is quite negligible. Other 0.0’s were given to artists Pitchfork has at times adored (and even given perfect 10.0’s to), but were so far along in well-respected careers, the scores really wouldn’t have had much of an impact on their legacy or ability to sell albums in the future (see Sonic Youth, the Flaming Lips, Robert Pollard).

After sorting through these other worthless records, we arrive a little review penned by Chris Dahlen, dated September 27, 2004, in which the album Travistan by Travis Morrison receives the dreaded mark of the beast and, in a flash, Morrison’s career as an independent artist immediately crumbles. Radio stations won’t play his music. Fans stop attending his shows. Record stores refuse to carry the album. (NB: While there weren’t many glowing reviews for the record out there, critics like Robert Christgau and sites like AllMusic did give the album at least decent marks). I understand this may all seem quite insignificant. Who is Travis Morrison anyway? Well, readers of Pitchfork in the early 2000s would have been quite familiar with the band Morrison fronted from the mid-1990s until 2003, The Dismemberment Plan. Pitchfork appeared to be staunchly in the D.C. band’s corner by the time the curtain closed on The Plan’s existence (though they have since reunited). The site gave the band’s final studio album, 2001’s Change, an 8.6, and the reissue of that album’s predecessor, Emergency & I, got the high holy honor of a perfect 10.0. So, when the Plan disbanded and Morrison struck out on his own, most indications—without even hearing the music—pointed to at worst a neutral review, buoyed by the fact that this was Travis Morrison and Pitchfork loved his old band. Surely Morrison had obtained enough good will over his career to avoid a rating worse than death.

Morrison was given no free pass. Aside from the stark “0.0” looming over the review page, the reviewer said this of the record: “Travistan fails so bizarrely that it’s hard to guess what Morrison wanted to accomplish in the first place” and “Throughout the record, Morrison seems dead set on sabotaging the music’s few positive attributes with fatal dorkisms and a surprisingly dad-like sense of humor.” Call me anything, man, but whatever you do, don’t make it “dad-like.” The review sent shockwaves of sorts through the indiesphere that ultimately sabotaged any chance the album had for moderate commercial success. Morrison’s record label said the review’s effects were “immediate and disastrous.” Morrison himself said that fans’ view of him changed almost instantly due to the review. He later told the Washington Post that he felt Pitchfork was trying to “take him down a peg.” What many felt could have been a fruitful and productive career as a solo artist was pretty much over before it even began. The effects of the review were so far-reaching that in 2006, a Pitchfork managing editor told Wired Magazine that after Travistan, the site was making an effort to be “more careful about doling out such brutal reviews.”

But now, some eight years since the bomb went off, how does Travistan hold up? Does it still carry the fetid stench of that 0.0? Though I’ve long been a fan of the Dismemberment Plan (and saw them play live just a couple of weeks ago), I had totally and completely avoided Morrison’s solo album like the plague since it was first released. I didn’t want a genuinely horrible record to somehow color the way I viewed the band’s previous material. Yet I also have a morbid fascination with things that are considered objectively bad. So, after many years of delaying, I put my fears aside and listened. And while the album was not one I would recommend to a friend I actually liked, or turn on at a party unless I wanted everyone to flee for the exits, I didn’t turn to dust or stone once the soundwaves reached my ear canal. But for someone desperately waiting for a conclusion to the “ellipsis in sound” of the album closer “Ellen and Ben” from the final Plan album Change, I was sorely disappointed. And that perhaps is the whole issue. When you have lofty expectations for how something should sound and then the music goes in an entirely different direction, you’re naturally going to judge more harshly than you would had you no preconceived notion of what it should be like in the first place. So it is almost impossible, as someone who has heard Morrison’s prior work, to not yearn for something in the same vein as later Dismemberment Plan material. Travistan is decidedly not that. But I have tried, upon multiple listens, to divorce my expectations from what the album really is as a stand-alone creation independent of any precedent. Unfortunately, even after this effort, the record still sounds pretty dreadful.

The biggest problem with Travistan, which Dahlen mentions in his Pitchfork review, is the head-scratchingly dopey Schoolhouse Rock-esque interludes in which the presidents on various pieces of American coinage sing from their own perspective about wanting to be removed from said coinage. There are four of these on the album and if they sound like a terrible joke, they play out much, much worse in reality. They are silly and pointless. The rest of the album is all over the place thematically, as we cover zoo animals on “Song for the Orca,” the story in which Travis gets the snot beat out of him on “My Two Front Teeth, Parts 2 and 3,” the harsh reality of death on “People Die,” and modern political discourse on “Che Guevara Poster.” There is no apparent cohesion in these ideas, which makes one wonder why they are all here.  And the lyrics—the lyrics! They are almost completely groan-inducing and lame. For example, on “Born in ’72,” we get: “I'm born as male as can be/Well, I'm still more important than she/My friend got passed over for a raise/And she said she thought she'd sue for days.” And, honestly, it gets worse, but I’ll spare you.

The album reeks of someone trying too hard, yet seemingly not trying hard enough. That’s a symptom that shows up all over the album, in just about every song. We delve into a really heavy concept and then just dance around it until the time runs out, and the listener is left wondering what the purpose of even having bothered to write the song is. Yet, in spite of baffling rhymes, trite lyrics, and herculean efforts to sound ‘unique,’ there are moments on the album that approach ‘good’ And while these moments are rare and never hold a majority in any one of the songs here, they do exist and give the album some—albeit miniscule—value. Surely, the oddly listenable chorus on “People Die” or the sweet near decentness of “Angry Angel” must place this album somewhere north of ‘devoid of any worth whatsoever.’

Let me be clear: this is not a good album. I have now listened three times all the way through and I don’t anticipate putting myself through that ordeal once more. But how bad is it? I feel like a real 0.0-worthy record would have to be far worse than this one. There are a few stretches of a few songs that sound kind of interesting and, I admit, got my toe tapping. I figure an album that is one of the worst of all time would have to be unlistenably offensive musically and lyrically from the first note all the way until silence returns again. I am no Pitchfork reviewer, but surely this album couldn’t have gotten much lower than a 2.2.

I wish I could say I learned something from this experience, but just as my penchant for watching late era Eddie Murphy films (Norbit!) leaves me feeling nothing but dumb and empty, I don’t believe I gained much from thrice listening to Travistan. Though, I’d advise anyone who is curious to check it out to go ahead and do so, and decide for yourself what you think of it. We all see (and hear) things differently. I hope someone somewhere out there falls completely in love with this album and blasts it loudly from their car on warm spring days. But please, for the love of God, don’t do it while I’m around. 

Mountains and the Plains in Between: On Road Trips

Zack was talking, but I don’t remember what he was saying. He inhaled deeply, then allowed a cloud of carbon monoxide and other assorted toxic compounds to slip from his lips. Most got sucked out into the cold darkness. The remainder drifted over to the passenger side of the car, where I was fiddling with the radio. Without thinking, my lungs automatically closed, just as they did when my dad smoked while driving me around town as a child. I thought, for a second, that maybe if I held my breath for a second longer, I could stop time. I drooped my head to the right and gazed out the window at the towering, lighted bridge that crossed the Narrows and led to Dartmouth. The Bedford Basin was lying silent, its creaking, immense cargo ships tucked away to bed along the shoreline. We’d just eaten at the Henry House near downtown Halifax and there was a warm fire going and people chatting at small, wooden tables. I was quite full and quite drowsy. The air on the outside was cold and grazed my face as the heat from under the car’s dashboard warmed my feet.  If I’d cared to think hard enough, I would have thought to that F. Scott Fitzgerald quote about how he was riding in a taxi and looking out at the sky and buildings and he started to cry because he had everything he wanted and knew he would never be so happy again. I could feel it in the damp Canadian atmosphere: this moment of softened peace belied the terror of everything suddenly ending, lurking just beneath the surface. Reality was setting in to my obstinate brain: this might be the last road trip I ever take.

I’ve learned over the years that when it comes to travel, some people are ‘get in, get out’ types who usually fly to their destination of choice, take a hired vehicle to a hotel, do some sightseeing around town/spend a few days on a beach, and then get carried by metal wings back where they came from.  Other people are more taken with the concept of a road trip, of forcibly navigating an automobile across terrain to get from one place to another.  While I come from a family decidedly in the former group, I most assuredly belong in the latter. The same would be said of Zack, whom I have road tripped with throughout the Southeast (2004), to the Pacific Northwest (2008), to Ontario (2010), and, on our latest trip, to the Maritime Provinces of Canada. I have also taken several other Zack-less road trips to Boston (2008), Maine/Northeast (2009), and Minnesota/Great Lakes (2010). These last few years, I have lived for them. Though the phrase ‘half the fun is in getting there’ is a tired cliché, there is some truth in it—though I’d argue it’s more like three-quarters of the fun.  I would gladly trade the conveniences of not having to meander through the complex roadway systems of the American Northeast for the freedom of being able to actually see what exists in the spaces between point A and B.  I’ve found traveling this way creates a different perspective of the place you end up in; you can more easily conceptualize the interconnectedness of dots on a map when you physically pass through the Great Plains, the Rockies, and the deserts of eastern Washington to get to Seattle, instead of being magically transplanted from the East Coast to the wet metropolis surrounding the Seattle-Tacoma Airport.  I understand I am usually in the minority in having this travel preference, so I’ve learned I must jump at the chance to take a road trip whenever the opportunity arises. 

There are few undertakings as American as a road trip (NOTE: it may also be as much a part of the Canadian experience, seeing as four of my road trips have taken place at least partially in that country—so it may be best to call it a ‘North American thing’).  Though it can sometimes feel overstuffed with humanity and fast food restaurants, ours is a nation with copious amounts of space. And like a restless people, we feel we must traverse every inch of it. From Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley to National Lampoon’s Vacation, our popular culture is littered with commonplace tales of traveling across the country by automobile. By the time Henry Ford rolled out the Model T in 1908, the nation finally had the mechanism it needed for traveling long distances, though it took a long time until the process of driving from the East Coast to California was practically plausible. A big step towards that end occurred when the U.S. Highway System was developed in 1925 thanks to the Federal Aid Highway Act, which took the administration of interstate roads from private entities and gave it to the states. (It also began the all-too-logical standardization of highways being identified by numbers rather than proper names.)  In the ensuing years, technology proliferated and car travel became an inextricable part of the American experience. By the middle of the 20th century, a new system was needed to accommodate the influx of so many automobiles, so in 1956 the Interstate System was created by way of the Federal Aid Highway Act. Today, that road system covers some 47,182 miles.

The road trips of my life began, as most things do, at the discretion and will of my parents. We would board our Suburban and get hauled to the beach or down to South Carolina to see my great grandmother. These early road trips didn’t do a lot for me. While the destinations themselves were fine, I found traveling by car to be simply a nausea-inducing nuisance. At that point, largely because it was so foreign to me, air travel was the more thrilling mode of transport. All that changed, however, when I was 15 and I took a bus trip over the course of several weeks across the entire span of the United States— from San Antonio to San Francisco to Colorado and Memphis. For me, it changed everything. Finally, I learned the red and yellow squares and misshapen polygons on classroom maps were actual places I could stand on. There was real territory west of the Appalachians after all. I knew that as soon as I returned home and got a car, I would hit the road and explore every nook and hiding place on the continent. My heady youthful enthusiasm got ahead of me, though: for a while the only car trips I took were to decidedly non-exotic places like Roanoke, Virginia and Myrtle Beach. Eventually, during my first spring break in college, I realized I finally had the opportunity to just get in the car and go. Zack, an aspiring road tripper himself, was game, so we loaded up our things, surveyed the snow-covered ground and decided that going ‘somewhere south’ was the best plan of attack. Over the course of that week, we traipsed through the southern wilds, from Savannah to St. Augustine, from Panama City to Baton Rouge, from Jackson to Memphis, then back to our starting point. We did nothing that resembled the MTV spring breaks I had long viewed with awe, but it was glorious.

No matter how enjoyable the other trips have been, none can compare to the summer I cajoled my aging metal machine from North Carolina to Baltimore (to get Zack), out to Seattle, up to Vancouver, down to San Francisco, through Nevada and Missouri, and back home again. This trip took place under the guise of attending the Sasquatch Music Festival in central Washington (which was excellent), but in truth, the trip itself was what I most cared about. It took three full weeks. Along the way, we saw the things you’re supposed to see—the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Mount Rushmore, Fisherman’s Wharf, the Space Needle. But it was all that space in between the places you’re supposed to see that stuck with me. They appear in my brain often: Driving through empty Kansas during a violent storm at night and my body growing rigid out of some fear that a twister would snatch us up and transport us to a land of witches and dancing scarecrows. Or winding our way around a twisty road in Northern California and noticing how the sun was hitting the dusty mountains in a peculiar way. Or plunging off course to find a town called Box Elder because of a stupid Pavement song. Or stopping in the middle of nowhere in Montana so we could touch real snow in late May. Or listening to that Band of Horses song while driving past the Great Salt Lake it was named after. All of this vast meandering is a type of freedom that I have been unable to replicate in any other undertaking in my life. It made me feel like an American and it made me feel free. 

The thing about road trips is they take a lot of time. As we grow older and the carefree days of spring breaks and summer vacations evaporate, our time is put at a premium, and the simplicity of flying becomes too difficult to pass up. Thus, as my twenties drag on, I know full well that the door is likely closing on the road trips of my life. Thanks to my journaling habits, which began on that first bus trip out west, I have meticulously documented the banal details of these trips, listing everything I ate, the names of roads we took, my best estimations of temperature and humidity, and the music that was playing when we crossed that one bridge into Jacksonville. These small bits don’t mean a lot by themselves, but taken together, they create a fuller picture of what these trips were like. I can now read what I wrote, listen to the same songs I was listening to, and look at the pictures I took to try to recreate what it felt like to actually be out there, on the open road, with new possibilities at every stoplight.

Road trips, at their philosophical ideal, should serve as a reminder of how big and how small the world really is. They should also give us hope that there are still spaces out there to explore, even on a planet that at this point has nearly every square inch mapped and surveyed and viewed with a just a swipe of the finger. But going there and seeing for yourself that these places exist, where you can collect tiny memories on back roads and keep them forever, is really what’s important. If I’m not again standing on the rocky point at Peggys Cove in Nova Scotia or gazing at the sun setting into the Pacific in Eureka, California sometime soon, with the wind whipping through my hair and the sun blinding my eyes, I feel pretty secure that the mental images of those places will stay with me for a long time to come. But even if they don’t last, at least I have pictures, which maybe will be able to create in me a glimmer of the things I was feeling when I took them. Until hopefully, one day soon, I’ll grab my trusty atlas and head out on the open road once again. 

It’s a Pity You Won’t Get to Read My Essay About Throwing a Pity Party

It would have been perfect. Almost too perfect. My essay on how to throw a pity party for yourself had everything you could want in a thousand-word blog post: drama, intrigue, cerebral humor, nostalgic pop culture references. There was going to be a hilarious picture of me wearing a pointy Sesame Street birthday hat, with my arms crossed, frown on my face, my eyes drooping towards the ground. Pure art, I tell you. And the words! You wouldn’t believe how many inventive rhymes, alluring alliterations, side-splitting metaphors, and well-positioned hyperboles one man could fit into such a small space. The vivid description of eating hummus with your bare fingers would have made your mouth water. The colorful imagery of rooms filled with red and blue balloons and the heavenly sounds of My Chemical Romance bellowing through the walls was so real it would have kept you up at night. There were even allusions to Hansel and Gretel, Mighty Ducks 2, the War of 1812, and the fourth Black Flag LP. Though the piece was near bursting with moving parts, it was all tied together in a harmonious balance of subtle satire and clear-eyed seriousness. It was insightful and had universal appeal. I just wish you could have read it.

You see, this blog post could have made me a star. It could have taken this sleepy blog from the dregs of Blogspot-ville and launched it into the cushy stratosphere of internet buzz, massive site hits, and thousands upon thousands of loyal followers. Ten years down the road, I’d be sitting in a palatial estate, pet chinchilla resting on my lap, donned in a navy blue velour bathrobe, chatting with Barbara Walters for another TV special, when I’d get the Big Question once again: “How did you come up with the blog post that started it all—the so-called ‘Pity Party’ essay?” I’d smile knowingly, take another sip of my peach bellini, and say, “Well, Barbara, to tell you the truth, it just came to me. I was at home alone on a Saturday night and a lightbulb went off, so to speak.  I started writing, knowing all the while that things would never be the same again.” And off we’d go.

The entirety of this inevitable narrative arc would have been so compelling. I’d be chased down the street by paparazzi daily and I’d dine only in exclusive restaurants. Everything would be different. If only you’d been able to read this essay, you would have re-posted it, tweeted it to your friends, and scribbled its memorable quotations on the back of love letters. We as a people would finally conclude that, yes, truly transcendent, everlasting literature can in fact be created in this sorry modern world.

But alas—it was not meant to be. As with so many things on the great wiring system of words and pictures that is the internet, someone else had this simple, brilliant idea before I did. In fact, so many people had already written on the topic that producing a tongue-in-cheek discursion of pity parties must be just another pedantic step all humans must take on the path to adulthood. The other blog posts out there already had droll little pictures, humorously appropriate party tips (even food and music suggestions!), and similar jokes to the ones I was going to tell (not as eloquent, of course). And then I realized the gig was up. These ideas were old and tired. I couldn’t force the multitudes of readers of this blog to shuffle through just another irony-fueled instructional essay about how to throw a party for one. It just wouldn’t be right.

So, perhaps a measure of gratitude is owed your humble author for sparing you the horror of propagating a mildly humorous but overused idea for even one more day. This act of mercy does not come without cost—you should have seen my joke about playing Super Mario Brothers while drinking four-dollar cabernet—but in the end, pulling the plug on the project was the only reasonable course of action I could take. I hope you’ll come to understand and forgive me in time. But do not fret, dear Reader: I have been blessed yet again with the inspiration to write a totally original, 100% unique piece on a nostalgic journey into the popular culture of 1990s as seen through the eyes of a Millennial that is sure to knock the proverbial socks off the entire world wide web. Prepare thyself. 

Act Now: A Life of Infomercials

Like most kids, my sister and I relished the opportunity to wake up early on a Saturday morning and spend some quality time in front of the television. Unlike most kids, however, my sister and I typically ended up watching not animated tales of anthropomorphized animals chasing each other off cliffs, but good old American infomercials. For hours, we’d sit there, admiring the wonders of food dehydrators, suction bags that could transform your closet into a clutter-free zone, knives that could slash through metal, and exercise machines that could melt away fat in a matter of seconds. If a broadcast opened with “The following is a paid presentation,” we were probably going to spend the next 30 minutes watching. The thing is, we really weren’t all that interested in what these new-fangled, not-sold-in-stores creations could do.  We did, however, find the presentations of them to be utterly absurd and ridiculous. We would thus spend the duration of the program howling at the processed spectacle of modern commercialism. It was all great fun.

Over time, as we became seasoned connoisseurs of infomercials, their predictability became part of the humor of it. Like clockwork, payments would be slashed (“BUT WAIT…”), additional worthless goods would be tossed in the package if you called in the next 10 minutes, and there’d be a sloppy demonstration of ‘the old way of doing things.’ These ‘why go on living this way’ demonstrations were often shown in black-and-white, and contained perplexing happenings like lemon juice being inadvertently squirted in an unsuspecting woman’s eye or a cabinet full of Tupperware avalanching down on someone’s poor grandmother. 

The structure of these shows was also part of the entertainment. The old school infomercial conceit was the completely transparent trick that we were watching a ‘real TV show,’ some kind of regular program that you just happened to catch while flipping through to a find a Welcome Back, Kotter rerun. These faux shows featured a saccharine host (who was always oddly identified as a ‘famous TV personality,’ though I’ve yet to see one anywhere outside the parallel universe in which infomercials exist), replete with a diverse and ebullient audience who seemed just a bit too enamored of the item we were discussing. They would clap vigorously, gasp at incredible new features, and nod knowingly at their neighbors in utter amazement because holy cow, she just cooked a chicken in plastic bag in the microwave. Often, these presentations took the form of gradual discovery, as some inventor or ‘guest star’ would guide us to the light and the way (accessible exclusively through this new device). We would begin our journey like a naïve Magellan, embarking out towards the unknown. All we have is a problem (not enough time, too many unused bananas, too many pots on the stove), and then we’d find a simple new product to resolve this issue (an item impressive in its own right, no doubt). But over the course of the half hour, we would uncover an endless array of features, bells, whistles, and would then be offered a lengthy line of cookbooks, starter kits, dish towels, coupon packets— just about everything under the kitchen sink. And then we’d learn, like spying new land in the distance that could not possibly exist, that the whole package was, by some act of a higher power, a “$200 value for only 3 easy payments of $29.99.”

As long as I’ve been alive, infomercials have been to American television what Fergie has been to the Black Eyed Peas—I know that it existed beforehand, but I shudder to think what that time must have been like. Thanks to the deregulation of commercial content over the air during the 1980s, the infomercial business took off in the mid-90s and has continued to grow and evolve to this day. Though the infomercial has changed a great deal since those halcyon days of the 90s, the general concept has remained the same: we get the opportunity to reach well-beyond the average 30-second spot to learn the ins-and-outs of some of today’s most history-altering products. The standard bearer in this field has been and will likely always be Ron Popeil and his “set it, and forget it!” Showtime rotisserie oven—one amongst a large arsenal of inventions Popeil developed. As soon as my sister and I saw Popeil’s name appear on the black title screen, our spirits would rise, and our minds would race to consider what new device Ron had in store for us today. In a world full of glossy and generic faces, Ron felt like the kindly avuncular figure down the street who tinkered with gadgets in his garage and was just so delighted that you’d asked to see what he’d been working on. The programs on which his products were featured contained all the best and most entertaining elements of infomercials—the overly enthused host, a crowd bursting with excitement, price slashing, revelations of the highest order, call-and-response shouting—it was basically like an easy-to-digest tent revival. All infomercials that came after have been judged against Popeil’s work. In the time since, sadly, few have come close to reaching that lofty ideal.

The other day, I had the pleasure of partaking in what may be the last of the great infomercials. It was a presentation of the Magic Bullet (a device my sister has actually ordered, I might add). This program is centered on the totally plausible idea that a British* man and his purported wife have invited some neighbors over for the sole purpose of demonstrating how unbelievable this little food preparation gizmo is (Spoiler Alert: it’s basically an unnecessarily small blender that you can put in the microwave). The houseguests, gathered round the kitchen like eager scouts at a campfire, gush with mouths agape and eyes wide over the fact we can make chicken salad in six seconds, then turn around and whip up a fluffy chocolate mousse in less time than it takes to say “Type II diabetes.” (NOTE: I calculated, and at the rate these folks were cranking out food, you could make some 600 new dishes in an hour—a pretty impressive feat). Though our hosts are quite amiable, it’s the gathered neighbors that are the most entertaining characters in this piece (just as the audience in the old Popeil infomercials was always the reason you watched). There’s a grumpy doubting Thomas in our midst, not sold on what his friends are serving. There’s a seemingly strung-out lady who comes over with cigarette in hand (with ash a mile long) and disheveled hair, donning a nightgown (who does that?). But by the end of the show, once everyone has been plied with nachos and frozen drinks, the skeptics among us are stamped out, and we arrive at the inevitable conclusion that, yes, this really is indeed the ‘ultimate party machine.’ We’ve all learned an important lesson here today, though I cannot exactly say what that that lesson is.

I have attempted fruitlessly to derive meaning from all the hours spent watching infomercials throughout my life. In all that time, I have ordered exactly one product—a speed reading kit that I asked for when I was not yet old enough to call in. I quickly learned to my chagrin that the cassette tapes the kit contained mostly discussed how to alter your diet to speed up mental processes (not a convincing argument to the chicken nugget fiend I then was). So, if I wasn’t interested in purchasing anything, why should I spend so much time watching protracted advertisements? To me, infomercials occupy a weird alternate universe built upon layers of canned absurdity and bastardized reality. Everything feels like it’s on the verge of descending into a maddening hell (see what happens to Ellen Burstyn’s character in Requiem for a Dream, for example), yet it also seems not all that distant from what we know of the world. There is a kind of magical allure to a place in which everyone is enthusiastically trying to peddle something amazing to you with a smile that’s a bit too wide. It’s a Pleasantville-esque planet where everything is gee whiz, so exciting and fascinating and simple. The humor comes in the fact that someone is trying to pass off gussied-up consumerism as real life and think they are getting away with it. I’m sure it made us feel smart, my sister and I, to sit there as kids and think we were sharp enough to see the man hiding behind the screen. In another light, infomercials are a distillation of what makes contemporary life so frustrating and weird—having to constantly separate the authentic from what someone is trying to sell you. These programs confound this process that in a way that is impossibly hilarious to me. So if liking infomercials makes me a weirdo, then so be it. They're still better than Jersey Shore.

*Americans must have some keen propensity to mindlessly trust whatever comes out of a British person’s mouth—they are inordinately represented in infomercials, though I rarely see them on this side of the pond in real life. 

Kool Thing of the Week # 6: Peanut Butter

Yes, seriously, peanut butter is the koolest thing going this week. This humble yet incredible paste made from legumes grown underneath the earth--which has served as a major source of nourishment for yours truly since I was about four--deserves a bit more recognition than it receives. I eat peanut butter sandwiches every day, but I somehow never get sick of it, so I thought I’d take a second out of my life to state publicly that peanut butter is pretty awesome. According to my precise calculations, I’ve eaten roughly 4400 peanut butter sandwiches over the course of my life—some with jelly (grape only, please), some with honey, some with bananas, but an awful lot of it has been just by itself. This figure does not factor in all the peanut butter-related snacks I have consumed, from Reese’s cups to ‘nabs’(Lance Toast-Chee crackers to some), to slathered on celery in the form of 'ants on a log.' So, it's safe to say I have had my fair share of food products covered  in copious amounts of peanut butter. For most of my existence, I have preferred the smooth variety of the stuff, but in recent years, I have become quite attached to the chunky version. But any which way you try it, peanut butter is perfect for any occasion.

I had long (incorrectly) believed that famed scientist George Washington Carver was the man who invented peanut butter, but apparently that is not the case. While Carver did do a lot of work with peanuts, the first patent for peanut butter was issued to Marcellus Gilmore Edson of Montreal in 1884. Edson, a chemist, reportedly concocted peanut butter for people who had trouble chewing solid food. So there you go. I just don’t know why this guy wasn’t more famous. Someone should have given him a medal. Or perhaps he should be on our currency. Surely the invention of peanut butter is as praiseworthy as anything Alexander Hamilton did.

Even though National Peanut Butter Day won’t come around until January 24^th of next year, now’s as good a time as any to celebrate and enjoy one of humanity’s great achievements by preparing peanut butter on an apple slice or fixing a peanut butter sundae or just chowing down on a plain old peanut butter sandwich. And don’t forget to tip your hat to old Marcellus while you partake in this food of the gods, because I shudder to think where our society would be without it.

Oldies Corner

While the vast majority of my favorite songs fall somewhere between two minutes and six minutes in duration, I can recognize that sometimes you don’t need that much time to get your point across. (See all those great early Angry Samoans songs that were like 30 seconds each.) Lo-fi heroes Guided by Voices have always been quite adept at distilling a melody down to its most essential parts, putting it on tape, and then moving on to the next one. Nowhere does the band do that better than on “Pimple Zoo” from the 1995 album Alien Lanes. Clocking in at just about 40 seconds, it may be, per second, my favorite song of all time. I used to get frustrated that the song didn’t carry on just a bit longer, but now I can say I think it’s fine just the way it is. See for yourself (it won’t take very long):