apricot sunset

The sunset from the train window this evening is a fantastic apricot color. I just had a great evening walking around Greenwich Village with a friend- we got sandwiches, got lost, walked past the house where my maternal grandma grew up, and then got some delicious hazelnut gelato. Yum. It was an evening to remind me why I moved to NYC, there is really no where else quite like it. I do miss Belltown incredibly and I'm looking forward to spending a few weeks there soon, but it's hard to top the Village when the weather is perfect on an early Friday evening.

And to go with my appreciation of life as a Jersey girl, I'm listening to some 80s hair metal music on my ipod- Jump, Come on Feel the Noize, Lay Your Hands On Me. Also in there is Hunger Strike by Temple of the Dog because I realized recently it's long been one of my underappreciated favorites. I'm sitting sideways on the train, watching the sun setting out the opposite windows, just enjoying the glimpses of the sun through the trees as they run past. If summer could last forever I would freeze it right here.

mix cd tangent

1. start making that summer mix
2. put The Message and Summertime onto it
3. burn a rough copy and give to friend
4. get in discussion of good old hip hop and rap tracks.
5. go home and raid CD shelf and iTunes Music Store and notice that playlist has roughly 1 song for every year from 1980 to 1990
6. organize tracks by year, remember others to add, watch playlist grow

it currently looks like this:

Rapper's Delight - The Sugarhill Gang - 1979
The Breaks - Kurtis Blow - 1980
That's the Joint - Funky Four Plus One - 1981
The Message - Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel & The Furious Five - 1982
Sucker M.C.'s (Krush-Groove 1) - Run-DMC - 1983
Roxanne, Roxanne - UTFO - 1984
Rock the Bells - LL Cool J - 1985
Slow and Low - Beastie Boys - 1986
Rebel Without a Pause - Public Enemy - 1987
Dedication to all the B-Boys - Schoolly D - 1987
Microphone Fiend - Eric B. & Rakim - 1988
Hey Ladies - Beastie Boys - 1989
100 Miles and Runnin' - N.W.A. - 1990
Summertime - DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince - 1991
O.P.P. - Naughty By Nature - 1991
Nuthin' but a "G" Thang - Dre & Snoop Dogg - 1992
Who Am I? (Whats My Name) - Snoop Dogg - 1993

That's at least 4 minutes too long for a CDR right now, though, so I need to yank something. I don't know what to pull, though, none of these songs sound 10 or 20 years old. A lot of them I haven't heard in years, and quite a few I heard last night for the first time, like Rapper's Delight.

I love the really early evening light- 5 PMish- late in the summer- the last week of august, days that still make me nervous about getting trapped in school. I sat on the curb running around the edge of grass my dog was playing on yesterday evening. It looked too bright green, too endless, as if there was a neverending field of doggie romping to be had, infinite dandilions to pull up, always another twig for him to shake around. When I finally drove us home, I played Pulp's We Love Life, an album rapidly working its way into my heart. I turned up the volume as loud as I could handle- it sounds better crashing between my ears and so immediate that despite trying, I still haven't caught many of the lyrics. In the thirteen minutes it takes me to drive back I have time for just a little slice of the album, picking up where it left off on last night's drive, so I'm still working my way a few songs at a time through listening to it.

1996 was my first city summer. I lived in Cambridge, MA, and most memories of that summer involve the particularly sharp bouncing-off-pavement heat that only treeless city streets ever seem to have. Biking home from Star Market, I would squint my eyes against the glare coming off car windshields, staircase railings, and even just the muggy air itself, desperately trying to hold on to each afternoon as September slipped closer in; and waking up early in the morning from the T shaking my loft, I would pull the pillow over my head until I couldn't breathe through the heat. Watching the sidewalks come alive at 10 PM was an alien experience to a suburban kid; summer evenings had meant lightening bugs and swimming, not street musicians and midnight ginger flavored ice cream cones.
That heat has hung around my new home for the last few days, draining me of much desire to listen to anything. I had to put The Private Press into my discman and walk out of the apartment to listen to it; I bought it a few days ago, but it's taken a while to play it. While it sat on my bookshelf, I tried to forget what a disappointment Endtroducing... had been for me. Now the shimmering start of Six Days reflects the heat here; the skittering drumming over the deeper and slower beat under it are the first bits that I start out loving; it's an amazing little piece of a song, wrapped around a sample with the right feeling of August sleepiness. Fixed Income reminds me of Dissolved Girl- maybe it's just the beginnings of both of these songs. I want to play Dissolved Girl right after this one, but the only unpacked copy that I have of it is on my laptop, which still won't play any music without a static overlay. All I'm going on here is my memory of that song, which is probably not to be trusted. Listening to Fixed Income, I'm back to listening to Massive Attack on repeat in the darkroom at school, making print after print, each one maybe 3 seconds more exposure or one filter down. There was a way that Mezzanine was the best possible music for the repitition, which probably colored the version of that album in my head. This afternoon I'm enjoying the non-vocal tracks the most so far, which is I think the opposite of the ones that I like on Rjd2's Deadringer. Both of these albums are hard to write about for me. I was concentrating on what made each song good or not good, and felt that I had no criteria for judging any of them. Guitar band music is easier for me- I know what I consider to be transcendently good playing, and it's a structure that I can understand. When I venture far away from it, I can still tell if I like a track, but I'm at a loss to figure out why, which rules are involved in the sucess of a few of them and the failure of others. Whoops, wrong Massive Attack album title. It just popped into my head over lunch today that I had the wrong one, so I've corrected it now.