Jessi Klein's NotBlog

So my wondrous awesome friend Maura Madden has written the most fantastic book.

“Crafternoon:  A Guide to Getting Artsy and Crafty With Your Friends All Year Long”

Maura reminds us of the delicious good times you can have just hanging out with your friends and making things.  Years ago, when we were both living in Brooklyn, Maura initiated the first “Crafternoon” at her sweet little apartment.  A bunch of excellent randoms, heeding a mysterious and adorable email, gathered to make valentines.  She and her mom had made cookies and brownies and all kinds of goodness.  On the table – and every other surface – was paper, magazines, string, glitter, stars.  Glue and paste and tape.  And everyone sat around for hours, people in our late twenties and early thirties reliving the glory of making a superfun mess while alternately gabbing and being quiet, serious and yet enjoying the delight of concentration.  Not the concentration of a job, not the concentration of figuring out a bad relationship or the concentration of breaking down a 401K.  Just the childlike concentration of beauty and love and friendship. 

The book would be worth it for the cookie recipes alone.  But it’s so much more than that.

Check it out here!:

http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:zXGWEDY6ZogJ:www.amazon.com/Crafternoon-Guide-Getting-Crafty-Friends/dp/1416954716+crafternoon+maura+madden&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us

A friend of mine emailed me the other day to ask if I’m into Big Star.  Well yes, of course I’m into Big Star, I write back.  But then over the course of the next  few days I think about it and realize that like everyone else, I’m not into Big Star enough.  And so I sniff around and listen to Big Star and like them more and listen and like them more still, and then I find their song, “I’m In Love With A Girl,” and I really, really don’t know when I’ll be able to stop liking them more because they’re so seventies sincere.

If I was smah-ter I’d figure out how to just post songs but I always have to youtube around to find some home crocked video using the song as soundtrack, but in this case my heart broked a bit because someone out there put this song on top of City Lights, which I saw on Christmas day last year.  I’d seen it years ago in high school as part of a terrible film class, and we watched it on a little VCR.  And I remembered that famous last close up of Chaplin’s face but it was this time, filling the screen for a Christmas crowd, every member of whom started to cry, that the completeness of the feeling and the genius enveloped me.  And I cried too, tears splashing against my box of Junior Mints.

So here is sweet sweet Charlie Chaplin and the sweet sweet song of the day.  Oh does this one make me sigh.  I don’t know what lady inspired this but if it was me I would not stop blowing Alex Chilton till I was deadzo.

I’m in love with a girl

A few years ago I was lucky enough to see Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie (and Postal Service) perform a solo acoustic show in New York.  It kind of took seeing him in this quieter setting for me to fully appreciate what a brilliant, brilliant songwriter he is.  His lyrics always seem sewn together like lace, so delicately done.  “I’ll be the phonograph that plays your favorite albums back as you’re lying there, drifting off to sleep…”, always strikes me as one of the sweetest expressions of love I’ve ever heard.

So tonight I could use a little sweetness, since I’m feeling a bit cloudy at the moment.  A bit thunderey.  I found this video of him covering Neil Young’s Harvest Moon, another favorite song (which incidentally I saw Neil perform on my birthday years and years ago at Jones Beach, one of the prettiest places you can see a show, and I remember, as he started to play, the clouds parted and a full moon – a fucking actual harvest moon – floated in a gentle arc over our heads for the entire song, and seemed to disappear the moment it ended.)

Anyway.  I just think this clip combines Ben’s sweetness and Neil’s sweetness into one cozy sleeping bag of warm feelings.  So I’m going to try to climb into that sleeping bag and get rid of this cloudy crap.

WATCH HERE

I have a massive hangover, which would be fine except for the drilling going on next door.  The crazy, loud, endless drilling.  What are they doing?  It sounds like the kind of drilling that has no purpose.  Like someone just decided to bust open a piece of concrete, for kicks.  For fun.  And then, at the exact moment it died down, I heard my neighbor yelling at his wife:  “Then let’s go see your FUCKING mother then!”  Then that fight stopped.  And then the drilling started again.  This was so awful it actually made me laugh out loud.

So I’m listening to Richard Swift right now, a nice discovery courtesy of my musically keen friend Sergio who went with me last year to see Wilco at the Greek (delightful) and Richard Swift was the opener.  Serg had somehow swindled a VIP area pass and we were swilling and eating for free.  I wanted to stay there as long as possible, because I am a fat little bitch.  But Sergio, in his wisdom, said Swift was good and we should go check him out.  I reluctantly leave the chicken satays to go hear music. 

Swift has a Tin Pan alley crackley swirleyness to his voice that is really lovely.  It’s such a genuinely nice surprise when you like an opener.  Like finding money in the pocket of a jacket you haven’t worn in a year.  I went home and bought his album “Dressed Up for the Letdown” (a very solid title) and have been re listening to it a lot recently.  And this one song, “Buildings for America” is on repeat repeat repeat right now.  He starts by singing to us, “I’m hungry, hungover” and this is a hangover song, but more specifically it’s also a still intoxicated song.  The words fumble out like the drunk dial you make at two in the morning, to the person you’re not supposed to call, that you’ve talked to your friends about not calling, that you know you shouldn’t call.  When you want to call you’re supposed to call your friend instead.  You don’t call for awhile, you resist, and then you have another drink, and then you’re going home, and then you’re walking down the street, and you shouldn’t call, but all the drink bubbles are pushing your feelings up instead of down, where they belong, and the way the streetlights are making the leaves on the trees shine like tin foil is so pretty, it’s making you think of your drunkly desired someone, and what they’re doing, and how they’re probably wanting you to call them right this second, calling before would have been wrong but now it is right, it is meant to be, this call, otherwise you wouldn’t have gone to that party and walked home under these trees, the universe has a plan and this call is part of the plan, by calling you merely are fulfilling the plan, you have no choice, it’s a Greek tragedy, we learned in high school how you can’t escape fate…just a quick call to say hi…

“Please remember/to regret it/don’t be sorry, just forget it,” he sings.  And then, “Jesus christ you’re a lovely thing,” he sighs, over and over.

It is time for me to go to bed but before I do I just wanted to put this up, one little mouse for everyone to enjoy.  I have written before about my love for Amy Winehouse which is ongoing.  And I am so sad that she’s having all these wackity crackity problems.  I think with all the nonsense (or Nunsense, if you love off broadway shows) there is now a part of the populace that is kind of turned off to discovering her or understanding that she is really fucking unbelievably great.  Oh, it pains me how much I love her.  And I maintain, in spite of everything, that she is still GFTJ.* 

In any case, I know clicking on a link is kind of a drag, but do not be a dumb dumb, just click ON THIS.  This is Amy singing “Teach Me Tonight” a few years ago, pre-beehive, when she was just emerging and before the pipe smoking.  She still had hot legs and good boobs and a sweet baby fat face anchored by that shnoz I adore (I admit I’ve always wanted a reverse nose job – I kinda wish mine was bigger.  At least wider.  I love big noses.  I hate small noses.  I hate them.  I hate them in the same way I hate Dominos Pizza.  Just fucking passionless, useless.)  In any case, this clip gives me a major case of chills, full on arm-hair-up-chills.  I love her red nylon eighties jacket and her little sway and the way you can tell she’s feeling the sexiness of the song.   I love the way she jumps around at the end all excited like a little kid.  This is what’s in there!  Still, I believe.  

It’s always a melancholy thing.  To meet someone whose full loveliness is now obscured for some reason.  Whose glow only sweeps over you now and then, like a lighthouse beam pulsing and then receding through the fog of a mysterious hurt which you can feel more than really understand.  Probably we are all as adults a bit dimmed by some bad business.  But here’s to songs and random blogged bits of youtubage brightening us day by day.

OK.  Off to brush teeth and do an under the pillow spider check and then tuck in.

Feel better soon Amy.  Feel better soon everyone.

(*Good For The Jews)

When that song “Put Your Records On” by Corinne Bailey Rae came out a couple of years ago I liked it but also didn’t like it.  I liked it because it was infectious and sweet but I didn’t like it because I feared for it.  It had that slightly annoying girl powerey-Cosmo-Fun-Fearless-Female vibe where I just knew it would end up as the song in a trailer for a movie starring Kate Hudson or someone else of her craptastic ilk.

Maybe a year after I hear that song I went to the movie Venus, which starred Peter O’Toole and maybe twenty people saw.  I really, really loved this movie.  I really genuinely did.  He got nominated for an Oscar, which he absolutely should have gotten, but then he lost, and I remember some people made fun of the shot of Peter O’Toole looking a bit sad at the Oscars when they didn’t say his name, for which all those people should be kicked squarepeg in the balls, even the girls.

Anyway, all the songs in the movie were Corinne Bailey Rae songs.  Some are from her album, some were only released on this soundtrack, and they are not so much Cosmo-ey as they are just simple and lovely and gorgeous.  (I think “gorgeous” was the final word in the script, and it’s a give-the-chills last moment.)

So  here is my favorite song by her.  It’s a slightly wintry song, what with the rain and the mention of the radiator.  When she says the line about “we sat inside by the radiator watching old black and white films” I get this weird feeling like she’s somehow singing about a memory I never told her.  Maybe it’s because I grew up in one of those NYC apartments with a radiator that made steamy whistley clinkey noises in the winter.  I loved those noises, I loved those pipes.  The radiator sound makes me think of home and my mom and hot soup and old New York winters when it would reliably fucking snow every year, a good boot topping snow like it meant business.  And this song kind of combines the mom/soup memory with a different being in love/sex memory, which on one level sounds just awful, but on another level, is maybe wonderful.  Isn’t this what we feel for our soul mates, really – a combination of mom/soup/sex/love?

Anway here is the song.

(I realize this site increasingly is just becoming the doorstep in which the cat that is me drags a little dead mouse to the person who is you.  And the cat is thinking, “I so sincerely hope you like this mouse,” and you are thinking, “Silly cat thinks we’ll like this stupid dead mouse!” and the whole situation is heartbreakingly awful.)

So.

I.

Just saw.

Stevie Wonder.

At the Hollywood Bowl.

Last night I am in a rickety sad little taxi coming home from Burbank airport after a fun week in NYC, and as I always feel in these sad taxis after fun weeks in NYC, I am resentful of the relentless cold fluoresence that is LA’s strip malled landscape.  It is late, I am tired, and feeling just about the same color blue as the lit up 7-11 signs whirring past.

Then:

We ricket down Highland past the Hollywood Bowl marquee.  This marquee is coldly fluorescent like the rest, but still, it flickers forth these warm words:

JULY 7:  STEVIE WONDER

So I called a friend and we went.

It was.  Amazing.

I could go on and on, and maybe tomorrow I will, but for tonight, I will just say, that around 10:15pm, on a beautiful warm night in California, I sat outside with a glass of sangria in my hand as Stevie Wonder, accompanied by the harpist from the Philharmonic, stood up from the piano to sing “If It’s Magic.”  My favorite song.  And in this moment, with the iconic arc lights of the bowl glowing brightly pink with real non fluorescent electricity, I felt one hundred percent perfect joy.

Happy Monday.

I am really heartbroken over the unexpected passing of Tim Russert.  I love Tim Russert.  I have always loved Tim Russert.  I was in love with Tim Russert.  Really, I was.  I thought he was so smart and kind and funny and special and hot.  Years ago I googled him to see if he was single.  Seriously.  I had a whole fantasy about meeting Tim Russert at a book party and then going for a long walk in Tribeca and talking about our lives and making him laugh, and being completely swooney over how shy but funny he would be, and the whole time I would be thinking, “oh my God, I can’t believe I’m taking a walk with Tim Russert.”  Then he would somehow get my email and would send me some cute message.  And then we would get married.

I was at work when someone told me that he had died.  And I felt that elevatorey stomach drop, really a complete knock out as if a close friend had died. 

When I got home I turned on the TV and got into bed and flipped to CNN, where they were memorializing him.  Everyone so clearly adored this man.  There were stories from so many different people all of which touched upon the same qualities – that he was incredibly loyal to the people around him, that he was the first to call when a baby was born or a parent was lost, that he staunchly defended those who worked for him and always stood up for the little guy.  I think my favorite story was someone recalling how one time in the news office a junior person was being yelled at by a superior, really humiliated, for not knowing some obscure information.   And Tim Russert was passing by and saw this and said to the superior person, “Before you continue yelling at this kid, tell me the names of all four Beatles.”  And the asshole couldn’t do it.  Aw, Tim. 

For me, I think that’s what stood out about him the most – his kindness.  As I get older I’m thinking more about how rare it is to meet someone who seems to possess that quality, of being truly kind.  It’s relatively easy for me to meet and like people who are sort of funny or charming - but it’s been dawning on me, I think that kindness is the thing.  Kindness as a priority, the desire to handle all the people who appear in your day with tenderness; this is special.  Of all the hundreds of ways I would like to be better, that is the one I aspire to the most. 

Russert was always kind, even when he was grilling some jerk on Meet the Press.  He never had to yell.  He never had to bark or talk over someone or intimidate.  He never knocked anyone down to make a point.  He never had to put a dent in anyone’s humanity.  His kindness was evident in the way he behaved, always.  And he had I think the kindest face I ever saw.  Really.  That’s why I wanted to meet him at a book party and marry him. 

I was saying to someone the other day that I’ve been feeling like having a good cry and for some reason haven’t been able to.   So finally, last night I cried for Tim Russert.

I have a confession:  I am a song repeater.

Which is to say, once I get obsessed with a song I have to listen to it.  Over and over.  And over and over again.  And again.  Back to back to back to back.  Like some kind of an idiot.  The average obsession with a song usually lasts about two weeks, during which the song is on repeat at least an hour a day, if not more.

When I was a kid and tapes were the thing I would rewind and press stop and then play and then stop and then rewind.  Over and over.  I would memorize the length of the rewind time and could hit the beginning with Tivo like accuracy.  Of course today’s advanced repeating technology only enables the repeat OCD all the more.

This has driven a couple of boyfriends crazy.  “Again?  Really?  We just listened to it.  Again?”

Why do I do this?  Because a favorite song is really just a way to experience a feeling, right?  Some necessary emotion.  And by playing it constantly for an hour I get to really nestle in it, freeze it, hold onto it, stare at it and lay my head down on it.  Root around in it with my snout like a sad little truffle pig sniffing for some pleasant melancholy.

Currently on repeat as I write this: Angels in the Snow by Elliott Smith.

Just recently on extended repeat:  Love Story by Harry Nilsson.

Repeat Hall of Fame: Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands by Bob Dylan.

On repeat in the car earlier today:  Say Hello, Wave Goodbye by David Gray.  (A word on this one.  This is over eight minutes long.  To properly repeat requires a real time commitment.  It podshuffled up right as I was driving down the canyon home from work.  Perfect melancholy soundtrack for leafy curvy canyon driving, marveling at how perfectly gold the sun was turning everything as it was setting and feeling at peace about all the seemingly unhealable hurts caused by all manner of dumb dumbs, which have somehow healed, of course; and also feeling newly calm about the formerly troubling idea that I no longer have any idea at all about what the future holds in absolutely any area of my life.  So the song ended and then I hit backtrack for one more play and ended up getting to my house before it finished.  After a moments consideration I realized I had to let the repeat play out to the end.  I parked the car and just creepily sat there, soaking in the song.)

Upshot:  I like revisiting the things I like.  Music, food, people.  Showing up at the door with unironic flowers for a spontaneous thumb wrestle. 

That is all for today.  Stay tuned for a very serious post about peanut butter.

There’s this old standard, “After You’ve Gone”, that is one of my most favorite songs in the world.  Its definitely my fave breakup song, (although props to Kelly Clarkson for “Since You’ve Been Gone”, which is frigging awesome and runs a close second), perfect to growl along to while tearing up your ex’s photo or getting drunk and weeping and eating cheese. 

I’m not totally sure when I first heard it, but once I did, it got in my gut so good I started collecting various versions.  Nina Simone has a slow burn badass version.  Bessie Smith does a stop you in your tracks big mama version which even on a scratchy old recording from the 20′s has a super satisfying Fuck You quality.  Ella Fitzgerald sings it smooth and jazzy.  And Dinah Washington does an incredible version that crackles sweet and dark like the top of a creme brulee.

But my absolute most favoritest version is by Fiona Apple.  Ah, Fiona.  Beautiful little weirdo genius.  The best way I can explain it is, she completely, truly, deeply gets this tune.  I don’t know who she’s thinking about when she sings it, but he screwed her over and she Will Not Ever Forget.  She captures every angle of the little narrative- the sweet beginning, which essentially is a “please, please don’t go” then moves on to the part that basically says, “I’m so upset with you - how could you do this?”; but the most hair raising stomach flipping moment is when she gets to the line, “You’ll feel blue, you’ll feel sad, you’ll miss the bestest pal you ever had“ and delivers a musical right hook,  a perfect pissed off punch that’s both wounded shout and accusatory hiss.  The acoustic version of giving this straying bastard the finger.

Thanks to the wonders of our best friend Youtube, you can see her perform it right HERE.  The song alone would be a joy, but watching her face (although it is occasionally obscured by some audience member’s crew cut) as she translates all the emotions is so beautiful and moving it makes me nuts.