wilco needs to try harder this time.

...so last week i was hanging round the apartment & i'd just finished watching this week's episode of rescue me. i'd opened a bottle of lagunitas wilco tango foxtrot (which i'd first tried last june) & i was playing on the internet & randomly learned that wilco has a new album--the whole love--coming out near the end of september. since i was having a beer with "wilco" in the name & they have a new album on the way & i haven't been listening to music much recently & haven't enjoyed much of wilco's recent output but believe in second chances, i got this crazy idea. starting with 1995's A.M., i'd listen to a bunch of wilco's discography in chronological order as i had myself a lagunitas wilco tango foxtrot, eventually, i fell asleep & when i woke up the next day, i listened to some more wilco, finishing with 2009's wilco (the album).

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the fifty states project #5: NY.

if i ever see that car commercial again, the ad with the new york yankees' derek jeter tooling around in a ford whilst jay-z's "empire state of mind" plays in the background, i might have to take a hostage. don't get me wrong. i ♥ new york. i'm indifferent to fords. though i hate derek jeter as a yankee, i respect him as a player. what gets me is that friggin' song. i know it's got the state nickname in the title & all, but it's been played SO often & in SO many places that we risk opening a black hole if we continue to revisit it. let's instead honor new york by co-opting "across 110th st." since interpol's now irrelevant, maybe they can sell off "NYC?" i'd even tolerate the sting version of "englishman in new york" for a while if it meant putting "empire state of mind" to bed. of course, all of these songs are about new york city & not new york state, but that's ok, because new york state is pretty much all about new york city anyhow. deal with it, schenectady.

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cut copy bday BBQ.

photographic evidence of food & drink at my oft-brooklyn flea companion jessica's bday BBQ gathering in prospect park just outside the bandshell, where cut copy was playing...

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#193 - mid-year hype.

is it really that time of year again? you bet your sweet ass it is...it's time for my mid-year top five list of albums, accompanied by some sort of snack-drink list! for the past two years (2009, 2010), i've paired my top five albums with five snack-drink pairings that i'd planned on writing about but never got around to. this year, since i'm feeling slightly nostalgic, i'm changing it up a bit & pairing the top albums with the top five posts of all time on eat!drink!snack! isn't change exciting?

has it been a good year for music so far? it's been aight i suppose. while the list of bands who've put out albums is impressive, the quality of those albums is much less so. over the last six months, we've had lackluster new efforts from a bunch of bands i expected more from--the decemberists, arctic monkeys, tv on the radio, the strokes, art brut, deerhoof, destroyer, okkervil river & the beastie boys.

even with all these letdowns, there have been a bunch of good albums released thus far. the dodos, pains of being pure at heart, yuck, man man, bon iver, the kills & radiohead have all put out albums that are worthy of being in my top five. in the end though, there were just too many albums to cram into a top five, so i sort of leaned toward my current faves.

as a predictor, last year only one of the songs from my mid-year albums list ended up on my end of year "top ten songs" list. in the previous year, four of my favorite mid-year albums had songs on the 2009 end-of-year list. how will this year's mid-year albums fare? more importantly, how drastically will my mood change by the end of december? you'll just have to stay tuned for another six months to find out!...or you can skip the next six months of amazing blog posts & check back here in january if you want to be a jerk about it. but for now, here are the top five...

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only in ny #9: sweet afton.

  

snack: beer battered fried mcclure's brooklyn pickles
drink: southern tier hop sun

you know where i hardly ever go? queens. as far as nyc goes, it's WAY THE FUCK up there. i've lived in brooklyn the entire decade that i've been in nyc & these days i live in south brooklyn, so for me queens is a galaxy far, far away. most of my experience with queens has been trying to get to the airport. back round the end of march, my brother & amy (his lady friend) moved to queens & more specifically, astoria & since then i've found myself up there at least a handful of times. at the beginning of june, the bro was traveling to vegas for the weekend to participate in a kaiju big battel performance & amy was off gallivanting around switzerland, so they needed someone to stay with their two pooches--harriet (staring at the camera in the below photo) & olive (lying down). that "someone" was me. vacation in astoria!

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