new music notes

I spent much of the weekend rocking out to the new Shins album, Wincing the Night Away.

If you're on the fence about getting this album, let me just push you off, right into the buy camp. You won't regret it. If you require further convincing, go visit the Shins' myspace page – you can listen to ten complete tracks there.

It's a really satisfying record, with wonderfully imaginative melodies that recall everything I have always liked about Morrissey's more spirited songs ("Australia" is the particular Shins track I'm thinking of here – don't you hear a little bit of "Piccadilly Palare" in there?).

In other delightful music news, my friend Jose recently sent me a tidbit about Rufus Wainwright's forthcoming album, Release the Stars:

The LP, which is due to be released in May, has been executive-produced by Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys.

Wainwright said of the new record: "The theme is just about releasing your love and your brilliance, or acting on your impulses and basically laying it all down on the line.

"I think so much of life is spent hoarding and saving and protecting, and very few of us really live our full potential."

Speaking about his recent creative activity, Wainwright told the Ann Arbor News: "I'm definitely in my prime and ready to flex all the artistic muscles I have been training over the years."

Needless to say, I am quivering in anticipation over this one.

Doing My Little Part to Check World Population

I spent almost the whole day on Sunday in the kitchen. It was the kind of grey, cold January day that just makes you want to stay put and not really do anything useful or meaningful. The rain was falling steadily outside. I decided to make a chocolate buttercream cake from the first Barefoot Contessa cookbook. I took particular pleasure in picking a great soundtrack for my baking, hitting Marvin Gaye's What's Going On before firing up Hem's Funnel Cloud and Madeleine Peyroux's Half the Perfect World.

It was the kind of blissful day that was completely free of obligation. While the cake layers were baking and cooling, I ran some laundry, sent a few emails, and read a few chapters from the flighty little novel I'm reading. These days come along only every once in a while, but they refresh me completely and leave me ready for whatever is around the corner. At the end of the day, as I finished dressing the cake with luscious buttercream frosting, I had a single thought:

"This kind of day would be almost impossible for me if I had children."

It was last summer, after reading Anne Lamott's foreword to this book, that I finally realized that I Really Don't Want Kids.

I'll get her words all wrong here, because I don't own the book and returned it to the library months ago. But in the foreword, she says something like: "Some people think that having a child is the only real way to truly find yourself, connect with the deepest parts of life, and return your own gift to the world that you came from. But frankly, I think that is a total crock."

She pretty much nailed it for me with that sentence.

Of course, even months after arriving at this place, I still notice an edge of tension entering my body whenever the question comes up in conversation with others (especially other women). I'm not quite sure why. Billie Jean King famously defeated Bobby Riggs before I was even born; how is it that a single woman living happily on her own in this century even has to ask herself this question multiple times? (I should add that nobody's begging me to have children, anyhow.)

I really enjoy children and find them beautiful and fascinating, but I've never, ever longed for one of my own. Coincidentally, I also have a fairly mild gross-out threshold when it comes to baby drool, baby spit-up, baby poop, and any other type of waste byproduct emerging from these amazing creatures with the giant, reflective eyes and wobbly necks. I don't think I'm cut out to be a mother.

So I'll probably never know how it feels to buy one of those impossibly tiny pairs of baby socks for my baby's impossibly tiny feet. And I'll probably never know the absolute purity of holding a baby of my own in my arms and singing her to sleep. I think Sunday let me know that I'm really okay with that.

materialism, money, raw silk, dovetail joints

Lately I've been carrying around a lot of anxiety regarding money.

The money concern I am dealing with now is the opposite of the money concern I had a year ago. In 2005 I went through a real drought with my freelancing work, and my bank accounts pretty much bottomed out. I was able to scrape by, but that's about it.

Last year I set aside freelancing, got a steady job and started saving. I replaced my wheezy 13-year-old car, opened a Roth, established a money market account, started a relationship with a financial planner, and started maxing out my contributions in my new company's 401(k) plan.

It was a good year, financially speaking.

Now I'm feeling flush and would like to buy some Stuff® for my apartment. Ah, the lure of the big box retail store! I would like some grown-up furniture. Most of the furniture I own was given to me when I graduated from college, or secondhand stuff I bought over the years. It has a certain "vintage Holly Hobbie" quality. The bed is particularly troubling. In addition to the vestiges of old marriage juju still clinging to it, it's squeaky, too small, and prone to collapse at inopportune moments, as on Saturday when my boyfriend made the grave error of sitting on it. I'd like a new couch, too. (I'm currently fixated on this one.)

However, when I begin to think about separating myself from a decent amount of money, I am hit with a wave of anxiety over my parents' financial situation.

To put it mildly, they are not so great with money. I know that it's easy for a child to criticize her parents when she doesn't really know anything about their financial reality, but I have a few clues. First, they just started saving about five years ago for retirement -- and they're in their early 60s. Second, they still owe a tremendous amount of money on their house -- which they bought with a lot of assistance from my grandfather back in the 80s. They just don't make a lot of money. What they do make, they seem to spend pretty quickly.

My brothers are also concerned about my parents' finances, but they have money issues of their own. One works part-time as a schoolteacher, and one works in the restaurant industry and lives in an expensive city. We are a solvent bunch, but we aren't exactly rolling around in big piles of Benjamins.

As I languidly leaf through this Pottery Barn catalog, I'm wondering: What is the best response to my parents' financial situation? Do I need to be saving for their retirement as well as my own? If so, what do I need to save -- where do I draw the line?

For some reason this issue feels hopelessly thorny. And really irritating. I would like to arrive at some point of rest with this question, because I've been struggling with it for a couple of years now. I feel like I'm being slowly eaten to death by a pack of crows. The genuine pleasure of enjoying my money is pecked away by these worries.

I crave your advice, if you have any to offer. In the meantime, I shall be selecting the finish of my choice on my Farmhouse Collection Canopy Bed, and perhaps picking out a cute little throw rug to tie the room together.

I sing of arms and the man

Every year or so you'll bump into a newspaper article or a radio story about the "famous first lines" of acclaimed novels. You've read these little articles, right? They always trot out "Call me Ishmael," which is the "Jesus wept" of opening lines.

A list you see less frequently is great opening lines of songs. Death Cab for Cutie's Transatlanticism album delivers a fine opening line, perhaps because it's beautifully couched in thundering drums and guitars:

So this is the new year
And I don't feel any different

I have an endless affection for good opening lines, and my exhaustive research suggests a few important ways to deliver a memorable first line.

A good opening line often sizzles when it's served up on a bed of epic music. Big horns or big drums or a mysterious chord played on the organ that builds and builds. I've always been partial to "Heroes" by David Bowie for the way the music leads you way, way in, and then kind of drops you off on a dark corner:

I... I will be king
and you... you will be queen

The Waterboys' song "This Is the Sea" features 9 acoustic guitars playing the same chord progression in unity, and an opening line full of superhuman wisdom:

These things you keep
You better throw them all away

Another fine approach is to spin a yarn.

Falling James in the Tahoe mud
Stick around to tell us all the tale
Well he fell in love with a Gun Street girl
And now he's dancing in the Birmingham jail
dancing in the Birmingham jail

("Gun Street Girl" – Tom Waits)

A well-placed oddball line can be enormously satisfying, as with so many of the songs recorded by Belle & Sebastian ("The State I Am In"):

I was surprised,
I was happy for a day in 1975

Perhaps my favorite current opening line is from Drive-By Truckers' 2003 album Decoration Day. I have to admit that it's the only song I know by this band ("Heathens"), but word for word, it's one of the best opening lines I've ever encountered:

Somethin' 'bout the wrinkle in your forehead
Tells me there's a fit about to get thrown

I'm sure there are some great lines I'm leaving out here, so post a comment and share your favorite with us. Or maybe an anti-favorite – an example of the world's worst opening line. Kind of like Pat Benetar's "Hell is for Children":

They cry in the dark, so you can't see their tears
They hide in the light, so you can't see their fears

Clearly, friends, this is the songwriting craft at its finest.

photo-a-day

As a person who aspires to use my camera as frequently as possible, I've flirted several times with a new year's resolution to take one photo per day.

It sounds like a lovely goal, doesn't it? Just one photo each day! No problem! But usually I get to January 8 or 9 and then give up in frustration. Finding interesting photos is really challenging (at least for me). It takes a lot of effort to get a good image on a consistent basis.

Somebody who does this very well is Seattle photographer Doug Plummer. He's been posting an image a day for 600 days in a row (!). What's remarkable is that his daily photos are really good. You can view a Flickr slide show of 2006's photos here, or scroll through his photo-a-day site here.

One of the things I like best about Doug is how thoughtfully he writes about his photographic process in his written blog. He gracefully articulates a lot of issues for which I've never found language. Which is one reason that I make a point to visit the blog every day.

Even without the words, his work is delightful, and his dedication to his work is deeply inspiring.