Best Music of 2009

Posted on December 2, 2009 by lisafindley

Dearest fellow travelers, what say we get a head start on all those end-of-year lists. Music critics, the genuine article, are currently hunched over their laptops in tiny coffee shops all over Brooklyn, carefully crafting their annual odes to the best tunes coming out of the British and American scenes. I am not one of those critics, but I am hunched over my laptop in my Chicago bedroom, throwing together an inaugural celebration of some of my favorite music from this year.

Let me tell you how cool I am: I’m so cool I don’t care what’s cool. I live in an oppressively hipster neighborhood, and I’ve attended the Pitchfork Music Festival for the last three years running, but that doesn’t mean I love Beyonce ironically. In fact, it bothers me when kids too cool for school profess to love something ironically. I love that woman’s music wholeheartedly, and I bet you do too.

I grew up completely saturated in music — my grandfather composed hymns, my parents hold up the church choir, my sister writes songs that play to standing ovations. We probably had one of the first CD players in the country (don’t worry, purists, Dad’s still got his turntable) and I spent much of the summer of eighth grade categorizing the over 1,000 CDs in my father’s collection. I can read music, play piano, and sing harmony (as well as a soprano can force herself to sing harmony). (I can even make choral singer jokes!) I love music for how it moves me and how it makes me move. I don’t love everything that comes along (ask anyone who’s ever tried to play me a Foreigner song); one of the best parts about being a music lover is figuring out what combinations of beats, tunes, and often words get you excited and what combinations don’t. I don’t trust people who say they like everything, or who lay claim to eclectic tastes. Almost every time, that’s code for not listening to enough music to figure out what they care about. Being a discerning listener is the first step to being culturally conversant, and BONUS, it’s fun!

Sessily (she of the fantastic guest post) recommended this book and book review to me: Matthew Cheney’s review of Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, and if you are looking for my Christmas present, here it is. From what I can tell, Wilson’s book is all about how we make our cultural tastes and how we can move away from negatively exclusionary to positively discerning, from a hierarchy of art to an appreciation of arts, and that’s increasingly becoming my aim in my own life and my conversations with others.

Which is all to say: I titled this Best Music of 2009, but really, it’s my Favorite Music of the Year. What follows is not comprehensive by any means, but it is enthusiastic. Nothing is in any particular order, and I didn’t try to have a certain number of albums or songs for any category, as that seems limiting and arbitrary. Enjoy, and definitely leave your own favorite music/links in the comments!

FAVORITE ALBUMS

These are the albums I’ve been listening to over and over again, with no sign of getting bored.

Passion Pit – Manners
dance, dance, DANCE!

Sparklehorse and Danger Mouse — Dark Night of the Soul
It’s about time these two got together, and the guest list is quite impressive.

Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest
Probably the best candidate for this year’s “it really works well as an ALBUM, not just a collection of songs, y’know albums used to mean something” piece from the critics of the land.

Black Moth Super Rainbow — Eating Us
Triiiiiiiiippy. And less expensive than actual drug trips. (So I hear. Not that I’d know, Mom.)

Bat for Lashes — Two Suns
I never really listened to much Tori Amos, but this sounds like what Tori Amos sounds like in my head, only less awesomely political and more awesomely sweeping.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy – Beware
I have yet to hear anything by this man that I dislike, and this album is no exception. It’s a relaxed, generally happy album, with lots of twangy guitar.

Antony and the Johnsons — The Crying Light
Gorgeous.

Yo La Tengo — Popular Songs
They have yet to go wrong, and you gotta love the audacity of that title.

Speck Mountain — Some Sweet Relief
A local band my friend played in for awhile, Speck Mountain sounds like Mazzy Star for the new century.

Phoenix — Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
All those hipster assholes are hailing this as the album of the year and probably the decade, and while I quibble with those who call it straight-up rock (it’s a bit polished and electronic for that), I can’t argue with the appeal of those guitars and hummable melodies.

FAVORITE TRACKS

Hmm, so many fuzzy, feedback-y, atmospheric albums, and then a whole bunch of danceable tunes right here.

Yeasayer – “Ambling Alp”
Give us a new album already!

Kid Sister—“Right Hand Hi”
I never heard it the first time ‘round, and the album only just came out, so it’s an ’09 tune to me.

The National — “So Far Around the Bend”
New album next year, which is pretty exciting. Also, I am dating the band as a whole, which is pretty exciting.

Bell X1 — “The Great Defector”
I heard it on the radio and thought it was a Talking Heads tune.

BBU — “Chi Don’t Dance”
Don’t stop, can’t stop, won’t stop the beat.

Jay-Z featuring Kid Cudi – “Already Home”
I much prefer this to the New York song (and no, it’s not because of New York!); it’s that gently driving beat and the muted horns, I think

Cascada – “Evacuate the Dancefloor”
Let the music take me underground, indeed.

FAVORITE HALF-ALBUMS

I love about half the songs on this album pretty fiercely (examples included), but can’t get into the album as a whole. That might change on repeated listens.

St. Vincent — Actor (“Actor Out of Work,” “Save Me From What I Want”)
The Dirty Projectors — Bitte Orca (“Stillness is the Move,” “No Intention”)
Neko Case — Middle Cyclone (“Prison Girls,” her cover of “Don’t Forget Me”)
Girlyman — Everything’s Easy (title track, “Storms Were Mine,” “Tell Me There’s a Reason”)
Andrew Bird — Noble Beast (“Fitz and Dizzyspells,” “Natural Disaster”)

POSSIBLE FUTURE FAVORITES

I haven’t listened to these enough to make an informed decision, but I’m really liking them so far.

The Clientele — Bonfires on the Heath
Girls — Album (“Hellhole Ratrace” is so great!)
The Twilight Sad — Forget the Night Ahead

MUSIC I SHOULD HAVE LOVED LAST YEAR BUT JUST DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT
Santogold – Santogold and especially the mix album she does with Diplo – Top Ranking

If you’re an imeem user, you can listen to my playlist here: http://www.imeem.com/people/81Xsn-2/playlist/4QPTbGOm/best-music-of-2009-music-playlist/

It’s free and simple to sign up, and I have yet to receive any spam from them, if that helps in your decision. I wanted to embed a playlist, but it turns out imeem isn’t supported on WordPress, and I don’t have everything on Lala yet to get a playlist there. Sorry to delay the post just to not deliver on my promise, but these technologies can be tricky. I’m pretty proud of the imeem playlist, so please enjoy!

New Post Soon!

Posted on December 1, 2009 by lisafindley

I know my three devoted followers were disappointed to find no new post this week. I have a post written up on the best music of the year, but I want you to be able to hear those lovely songs, and I can’t get the imeem embedded player to work. So until I get that up and running, please enjoy this video from Sesame Street. You will never, ever forget that “q” is always followed by “u.”

Thanks for your patience, fellow travelers.

Urge for Going

Posted on November 24, 2009 by lisafindley

“I get the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown
Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in”

— “Urge for Going” by Joni Mitchell

Autumn in northern Michigan

Is anyone else feeling the pull of wanderlust this week? I never consciously think of fall as a season for travel; I associate summer with travel because of summer vacations past. But every time I hear Joni Mitchell’s “Urge for Going” I am overcome with a need to shuffle out of town with the rustling leaves. Joni captures so perfectly the melancholy of autumn. She strains to break free of it by up and leaving, physically moving away from lost loves, lost seasons, lost moments, but she also revels in it the way a small child jumps into a pile of leaves, knowing the damp rot is a necessary accompaniment to the sweet smell and ticklish embrace of the swept-up pieces of red and brown.

Autumn is my favorite season, and this year more than any other I’ve heard a lot of people saying the same thing. I think part of that has to do with this particular year for weather, since we had such an abbreviated summer that any sunny and mildly warm day in the fall is greeted with great enthusiasm. But there’s also the excitement of change, the sense that whatever pattern we lulled ourselves into in the heavy heat of summer can now be broken free of. Fall is when school starts up again, which of course was set to coincide with the harvest schedule on farms, so the growing season ends as the learning season starts. I like that we still follow this schedule, even though so many of us are completely removed from the seasonal rhythms of farms, because it recognizes the cyclical nature of the year–one thing ends, another begins, and both are cause for celebration. Even as we’re breaking free of some comfortable summer pattern, it’s not that that pattern was wrong or undesirable. It’s just that its time has come and gone, and now it’s time for another pattern or set of activities.

Ask anyone in my family and they’ll tell you what a hard time I have with change, especially with traditions. One year, my British grandparents were in town for Christmas, and the flurry of activity surrounding their visit somehow didn’t include decorating the tree. No one else was bothered, but the idea of having a Christmas without this part being the same as it was every other year made me want to cry. Finally, it was Christmas Eve, and I was about ready to bury myself in the snow rather than look at that unadorned tree any longer, so between the two church services, we pulled up the heavy wooden box from the basement and hung ornaments until that tree shone. I still get teased for that one.

The Findley Family Christmas Tree, circa 2005

Which is to say that accepting change as a natural and beautiful part of life has not been easy for me. I like making lists, I like things in order, I like knowing where I stand at all times. But autumn is a great reminder that this simply isn’t sustainable. Trees that just days before were full of green life are now thinned with yellow, and soon enough they’ll be waving their bare branches at the sky. If I spend all my time mourning those green leaves, I’ll miss the joy of the yellow ones, and even the stark beauty of the spindly brown branches. Metaphors aside, it’s true in my life as well; I was heartbroken to not marry T, but I became a more interesting person who I’m happy to spend time with because of it. I thought my first job was necessary for my career and didn’t want to leave for the opportunities I thought I’d miss if I did, but when I left I moved to the city and found a good group of friends and a sane job that were more important than succeeding in a dying industry.

I’m not saying everything happens for a reason. I can’t believe that and look at the daily tragedies so many people have to endure. And Zeus strike me down if I sound like a self-help book. But I do think that many changes that I used to fear–probably even the ones I still fear–can yield surprising results. They’re not always even better results, but just as my shadow grows longer with the lengthening of the nights, they are different; change of some sort is as inevitable as summer turning into fall. This is why autumn is my favorite season. I’m reminded every year that the world is in a state of constant flux, and there’s beauty to be found in all those changes.

Of course, those changes do awaken my wanderlust, previously lying sleepy in the long, sunny days of summer. As I walk around Humboldt Park on a crisp afternoon or mix up a cup of cocoa in the evening, part of me is appreciating the sights and sounds of Chicago this time of year, and part of me is wondering what it feels like in Morocco right now. Here’s a change my teenage self would never have believed possible: I can be perfectly content where I am and still long impossibly to be a thousand miles away. For now, like Joni, I “get the urge for going, but I never seem to go,” but you and I both know that soon enough, that too will change.

Guest Post — Tourist/Non-Tourist

Posted on November 16, 2009 by lisafindley

Dearest fellow travelers, it gives me great pleasure to introduce a guest post from Sessily Watt, a good friend and fellow K alum. A few weeks ago, she and I were discussing the comments on the Great Expectations post, and about what it means to live in a different country rather than simply visit it for a short time. Sessily is a writer living in Chicago, and her post reflects on her time spent living in Ecuador in 2005. Enjoy!

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We were standing on a sidewalk between several medical buildings, in the middle of a tour of a small hospital in Ecuador, when the woman approached us. (Or maybe she was our guide through the buildings, and it was at this point that she asked us about who we were. Time has passed. The memories have shifted.) After a flurry of conversation she was under the impression that some or all of us were medical students, and offered for us to come and observe a birth that was happening at that very moment. She led us back through the buildings to the doorway to the delivery room, where it became clear that observing a birth meant all ten of us (nine students and one of our program directors) crowding into the delivery room and its doorway. Four of us had already felt uncomfortable as we approached the room, and our discomfort increased. We waited a moment, but it was soon clear the rest were planning to stay and watch, so we left them there, walked out of the building, through the waiting area where the pregnant woman’s family was waiting, out the front door to a set of benches in front of the building. We sat down.

Out on the benches, we were split again by the cause of our discomfort. Two, male, were personally uncomfortable with watching a woman give birth. Two, female, were uncomfortable that we had been welcomed into that room without permission being asked or granted from the woman who was lying on that table with her legs spread. Our fellow students were back in that room, with their cameras out. We waited.

The nine of us had been together in Ecuador for five months at this point. One of our program directors, who was with us that day, had led us on three previous trips as a group. We had already passed through that stretch of time where we got on each other’s nerves, and now we were a more or less cohesive group. The people who chose to stay in that delivery room and watch the birth were (and are) perfectly nice, lovely people. I enjoyed traveling with them. But I judged them for staying in that room.

Traveling, especially as a tourist to another country, can lead to a sense of entitlement to see anything and everything. In my opinion, the people who stayed in that room were acting out that entitlement. They weren’t medical students. Their presence served no purpose for the woman lying on the table. They were simply there to see what it was like. (In the case of at least two people, who have since gone on to medical school, I can see how this experience was edifying. And, who knows, maybe in some way it will prompt them into actions that improve the delivery of medicine, etc etc, but those benefits move us further and further away from that woman on the table who was not helped by them and who did not give her consent for them to be there.)

A study abroad program like the one in Ecuador is designed to encourage students to take part in society as if they aren’t tourists: we lived with host families, attended an Ecuadorian university, and ended the program with an internship/volunteer position in an Ecuadorian organization. One would hope these experiences would lessen that feeling of entitlement to see everything. To a certain extent, we lived in Ecuador for six and a half months, rather than traveling there. Especially during my last month in the country, volunteering at an organization where I worked with Ecuadorians, Germans, and French, I felt like I had found a niche for myself. I woke up in the morning, rode the bus for eight stops, picked up a copy of El Comercio from the newsstand, and walked three blocks to the corner building where the organization had a series of rooms on the second floor. Sometimes I went to lunch with my coworkers, sometimes I walked to a sandwich place that was nearby. My coworkers and I tutored kids in the afternoon. Some afternoons I was bored, others I was outraged, or sad, or content. In the evening, I visited with my host family for a little while before I went to bed. Some nights I went out. By living in Ecuador I learned that I enjoy large cities, can’t imagine living without public transportation (though I grew up in a small town without it), and when I’ve moved to a new place I feel anxious about leaving home until I get out and walk around, take a bus or two, and maybe get lost. Without living in Ecuador, I may never have considered moving to Chicago.

La Casa Amigos, where I volunteered during my last month in Ecuador

But no matter how well designed, a study abroad program couldn’t make us Ecuadorian, and the trappings and support of the program at times increased the feeling of being a tourist. When we went on the program-designed trips, we traveled in our own bus, a little bubble of pirated American movies and Seinfeld episodes. There were always nine of us to compare to all of them, emphasizing our differences. Like any other tourist, we were there to see the country, to experience those cultural differences we heard about in our pre-trip lectures. Perhaps even to “broaden our horizons.” Yes, there are real benefits to exposing ourselves to differences–not to mention that it can be a lot of fun–but that focus on cultural differences, in combination with other factors, leads to forgetting that those people aren’t there to open themselves up for us to examine.

the bus we traveled around in for our program trips

Every traveler has a different line they draw in how far they will go to experience it all. The other students in my program didn’t feel uncomfortable with their experience in the delivery room. The doctors were fine with their presence. The woman supposedly thanked them after it was all done (cynically, I ask, “Did she even know why they were there?”). As a very private person, I imagine that my line comes much earlier than others. By not staying in that room, I may have missed out on an amazing experience. I’m willing to imagine there are other instances where, if I had been willing to press a little harder, to dig in a little more, I might have had other theoretically amazing experiences. But.

I traveled by myself once while I was in Ecuador, right at the end of my time there. Throughout that trip, I often felt different from the people I was with, and like I didn’t belong. But it was during that trip I felt the least like a tourist. I wasn’t there to see the sites. I wasn’t there to see what life was like in this coastal city. I was there to visit a specific person, because I thought I would regret it if I didn’t visit her. It was in those moments when I was living my life and just happened to be in a country different from the one I grew up in–traveling by myself, volunteering–that I felt like I had the clearest glimpses of Ecuador.

Lights on the Water

Posted on November 11, 2009 by lisafindley

Tonight I took the #11 bus north to Lincoln Park, to meet a friend for dinner. As we rumbled over the Franklin Street Bridge, I looked out the window and instantly I was in a strange new place. The river curved around behind me, the brand-new condos stretched out to my left, and to my right, Merchandise Mart loomed. It was 6:30 and already quite dark, and all the buildings glowed.

I take the same route home every night, and it all looks the same, so taking a new route or visiting a new place can be pretty shocking, in a good way. It makes the city new again. And especially when it’s dark and the nights are winding tighter and tighter around a cold winter, a new route reminds me of the sheer size of the city, the massive number of lives being lived. I feel closer to the people behind each one of those bright lights, closer in our anonymity.

Riding over the river always gets me — nothing clarifies and sets apart like a body of water, and of course it’s that same body of water that forms a connection between the two sides of the bridge, the body of water that is the reason for a city’s existence. The Chicago River is a dark mass that barely ripples through downtown, a river that flows the wrong way, a black surface reflecting thousands of bright lights and individual lives. And then just as I’m feeling welcomed to a new place of abstract shapes and the dark spaces between them, we’re on the other side of the bridge and caught in traffic. That moment of beauty and connection is gone as the buildings rise up around the bus and the glow of those lights is drowned out by the bus’s fluorescence. But the river remains, and there are always other routes, always other ways home.

Chicago River by night

Apologies, dearest fellow travelers, for a late and abbreviated post — I hope to flesh it out later.

Look for a guest post from S. next week, about living in Ecuador for a semester abroad.

Great Expectations

Posted on November 3, 2009 by lisafindley

And now, dearest fellow travelers, for the flip side of the coin. Last week I talked about how great it is when you go somewhere new and it’s better than expected. I didn’t mean that I go to new places not expecting to like them, but that I sometimes have to overcome some preconceptions to really appreciate them. Also, when you’re visiting a city for the first time, it’s hardly unusual to feel some trepidation at what you might find there, and the nervousness mixes up with the excitement until you have a little knot of energy in your stomach, making you kind of nauseated and kind of buzzed at the same time.

At least, this is what I experience when I’m visiting a new place, and I feel this regardless of whether I’m visiting for a few days or staying for several months. When I physically approach a place that I’ve previously only known through pictures, guidebooks, and secondhand stories, my whole body vibrates with the sensation of moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar and also from the unfamiliar to the familiar — from my home to a new place, but also from not being personally connected to this place to being bodily in and of it. I love that feeling of being on the edge of knowing the unknowable, of reaching out to touch the as-yet-nonexistent with your fingertips, crossing over from plans of the future to realities of the present. This is one of the biggest thrills of travel, and I have yet to tire of it.

Some people, however, freak out at the whole idea. My junior year of college, I lived in Rome for 5 months and studied classical history, archeology, and Renaissance art. I approached those months with a jumble of feelings, but the overriding emotion was excitement. I couldn’t believe I was living in this place, which was simultaneously a living monument to history and a bustling modern city. My roommates, on the other hand, couldn’t believe they were living in this dirty, noisy, badly run city, and they commented on it almost daily.

The Pantheon in Rome, Italy

K College has several very good study abroad programs, but Rome is not one of them. They don’t run it; it’s farmed out to the American University in Rome, which is kept busy bringing in students from a lot of different schools. The 16 of us from K got lost in the shuffle — we lived with each other in small apartments, we didn’t speak any Italian, and we had no class trips or on-site director (unlike programs in most other countries). So we weren’t a cohesive unit by any means, but still, we were all there because we were in the Classics department back home, so that was a kind of place to start.

But it was apparent in the first week alone that I had a very different idea about living in Rome than my roommates did. The five of us weren’t friends before living together, and I don’t think any of us went home very close, so on top of the stress of starting a new school and living in a new country thousands of miles from home, we all added the stress of living in close quarters with virtual strangers. At first, it was like freshman year all over again; we’d go places in groups with the other K kids, who were rooming together in various combinations, and we’d stay up late talking and drinking cheap wine (the difference from freshman year — cheap here meant literally one or two euros). Conversation ranged from the people we’d left behind to the professors and students we were just coming to know, from assignments on ancient sculptures to how to ask for chicken at the supermarket. But somehow conversation always morphed into complaints. I was astonished to learn that my roommates and fellow students of the arts thought Rome was a pit.

They complained about how dirty it was, with graffiti all along the walls of the city and dog poop up and down its sidewalks. They whined about how noisy it was, with nonstop traffic (we lived just up the street from a hospital and became very familiar with the yowl of the Italian ambulance) and inefficient buses. And the buses! Don’t get them started on the buses. They were never on time, they didn’t seem to follow any reliable route, and you practically had to flag them down like a taxi just to get a ride. The people were unfriendly, the clothes were expensive, the streets were labyrinthine, the monuments were rundown, the food wasn’t as good as the Italian places back home… It went on and on and on.

I discovered potato and rosemary pizza when in Rome, and I'm a better person for it (doesn't seem to actually be pictured here, but these Roman style pizzas are also as good as they look)

Why on earth did they go to Rome in the first place? I’m still not entirely sure on that one. When I asked them, they said they wanted to go on study abroad like the rest of our school did, and they thought Rome would be cooler than it turned out to be. Each of them admitted to not really enjoying cities. Did they think Rome was a small, quaint town? It’s been a massive city teeming with life for literally thousands of years.

It seems that their expectations for Rome weren’t founded in fact or forethought, but rather in a vague idea of European cosmopolitanism and romantic stories of blissful honeymoons. This is the key — plan ahead! Now, before you accuse me of being a list maker and not a risk taker, let me say that yes, I tend towards that way, and it does irk me (but that’s a topic for another post). What I mean is that even if you don’t like to laminate an itinerary before heading out on your travels, you should at least do some preliminary research so you have a basic understanding of the place you’re going and the people who live there. I love hearing stories from fellow travelers, but I am always aware that we’re different people with different tastes, and their idea of fun people or good food is possibly not at all the same as mine. I’ll note down the restaurant and sightseeing recommendations and keep them in mind as possibilities, but not must-sees. Guidebooks, too, are written by people with individual tastes, budgets, and travel companions, but at least I can get an idea of the lay of the land and its history. From these, too, I get possibilities. Guidebooks, friends, blog posts, travel sites, library books, maps — I gather it all up and sort through it for my own interests, then head out to the unknown with at least these knowns in reserve.

I do think that you can have a different approach here for simply visiting a place for a few days. When P and I went to Memphis, we knew we were going to Graceland but we didn’t know anything about Beale Street, and we ended up at an all-ages bar watching a riotous rockabilly act. It was even more fun for being something I didn’t know ahead of time, and then we moved on. But if you’re going to be living in a place for more than a couple weeks, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t prepare yourself as best you can for the customs and people of the place you’ll be living.

This is not to say that I adjusted perfectly well and knew all about every Italian custom before moving there — not at all. In fact, the negativity of my roommates really affected me and I found myself in a weekslong funk, simultaneously resenting every nuance in culture between Italy and the States as well as my roommates for pointing out those nuances every damn day. But I did get out of that funk, and managed to make the best of a bad living situation, and it was actually thanks to those very same roommates.

The Italians take siesta, as do all Mediterranean countries, and in Rome, any time between 1 and 4, shops, offices, and restaurants close for a couple hours as all the workers take a nap from the midday sun. It’s a surreal experience, as an American, to walk down an empty street at 2 in the afternoon, passing shuttered shop after shuttered shop. And then at 4 or 5 they’re all back open for business for another couple hours. My roommates complained about this custom; when were they going to go to the grocery store? What if they got hungry? When were they going to buy school supplies? Why did the whole city have to shut down?

I fell into siesta quite easily; what is there to dislike about citywide naptime? The day I realized I could reclaim my own expectations of living in Rome and reject these false ones my roommates had, it was about 1:30pm and I heard the complaints drifting in from the living room as I climbed into bed. I pulled the covers over my head and thought, “Damn, if there is any time for this phrase, it is now: WHEN IN ROME. Good night!”

an approximation of my cot bed in Rome

P.S. Get excited! Comments on last week’s post about the difference between visiting a place and living there inspired this post, and also a forthcoming guest post from my friend S. Witness the power of your I’m-procrastinating-at-work-so-I’ll-comment-on-Lisa’s-blog energies!

Happy Halloween

Posted on November 2, 2009 by lisafindley

I hope you all had a very happy Halloween. I talked a big talk about my costume, and let me tell you, I pulled it off. No, let me show you:

Jareth, Goblin King of the Labyrinth

Jareth tempts Sarah

the gang's all here for Halloween night

I hope your Halloween was safe and festive!

Better Than Expected

Posted on October 26, 2009 by lisafindley

Dearest fellow travelers, how often have you been obligated to do something that sounded dreadful, only to find yourself having a wonderful time? Or maybe it wasn’t even going to be dreadful, merely kind of dull, like a coworker’s wedding or your second cousin’s bar mitzvah, but the DJ played MIA and ABBA and other artists whose awesomeness requires that their names be in all caps, and the buffet had those tasty bacon-wrapped dates and slabs of Gouda (none of that cubed stuff), and you spent the night dancing with a highly attractive friend of the family who was very willing to share their hotel room with you at the end of the evening? In these situations, you might look back on the experience and conclude, “Well, that was better than expected.”

My mom is very fond of the phrase “better than expected,” and it’s become somewhat of a thing in our family to admit our pessimistic outlook was proved wrong and we were pleasantly surprised. Why, just a few weeks ago, when I was visiting EL, H and I went to a church party with our parents and had so much fun talking to people we hadn’t seen in months that we stayed an hour and a half later than we’d planned to. Better than expected.

When I went to New York City this past May, it was a classic case. I was, of course, immensely excited to visit my sister E, but that was separate from how I felt about visiting the city itself. See, I’ve had a bias against the East Coast for over ten years now, based on all the literature and movies that assume everyone is aware the Midwest is for uncultured oafs, and the only place to be, if you’re going to be anybody, is New York (followed by Boston or DC if you have to settle). Unfortunately, many of the people I’ve met from New York support this theory, and I can’t stand their smug superiority.

I’ll be damned if people are going to tell me my city is second rate to any other, especially a city as overblown and overdone as New York. People in New York are proud to be assholes to tourists, whereas people in Chicago might get annoyed at having to point out the Sears Tower over and over, but we’re still going to say excuse me when we bump into you on the street. Everyone in theater knows that there are two towns for theater in the US — New York and Chicago. New York has a giant park and a dirty ocean, but Chicago has miles of park running alongside a lake you can actually swim in. Bands might move to New York when they need to cut a record deal, but they’re just as likely to record that album in Chicago. And if you’re a hip hop act, Chicago is the place to be. If you want to eat at one of the hot restaurants in New York, you have to make reservations before the place even exists. In Chicago, I’m pretty sure I could get a reservation at Alinea or the Publican a week or two out, and in the meantime, there’s Kuma’s Corner. Chicago has the perfect combination of Midwestern manners and big city excitement, and I honestly don’t want to live anywhere else for at least a few years.

Oops. I got off on a tangent there. But that’s exactly what I mean — I get so defensive about Chicago when I’m talking to East Coasters, and New Yorkers in particular. Of course I still wanted to go to New York. It’s not that I think there’s nothing special about the place, or that it’s inferior to Chicago, or that I wouldn’t enjoy myself. Not at all! New York has many unique sights and a fascinating history. That’s what I had to keep reminding myself as I prepared to go there. I had a mental block about the people I’d meet and the city’s relation to my city, but if I could just get past that, there was a world class city waiting for me.

Indeed, I had a wonderful time. Granted, E introduced me to her friends, so everyone I met was friendly, but I was kind of expecting to get straight up shoved into the street for walking too slowly on the sidewalk, and that did not happen. I was also fairly confident that I’d get “tourist” hurled at me as an angry epithet when I stopped to take my 400th photo (in five days. not kidding.), but instead, I was twice stopped for directions from other tourists who took me for a native. And the sights did not disappoint. I am a firm believer in seeing lots of tourist sites when visiting a new place, since you never know when you’ll be back, and there’s usually a reason something got famous enough to be a tourist destination in the first place. Accordingly, I packed it in: Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Staten Island Ferry, Central Park, Greenwich Village, Little Italy, Chinatown, a show on Broadway, Times Square (for ten bewildering and terrifying minutes), the Modern Museum of Art, and even Coney Island when my return flight was delayed by several hours.

Central Park

Chrysler Building from the top of the Empire State Building

as touristy as possible, and mighty happy

What’s that? Okay. Yes. I’ll admit it, and gladly. New York was better than expected.

Redrawing the Maps

Posted on October 20, 2009 by lisafindley

Two weekends ago, I went up to Michigan to visit some friends and admire the autumn colors. I went to the Barking Tuna Fest in Kalamazoo on Friday and walked around Lake Lansing North on Saturday. I grew up in East Lansing and went to college in Kalamazoo; I go back to visit my family five or six times a year, but I haven’t been to Kalamazoo in a couple years. I have some complicated feelings about my four years at Kalamazoo College, and no strong affection for the city. So when the train pulled into the station that Friday, I was a little unsure how I’d like it. Would I see the city as it was, or as I remembered it?

Lake Lansing North

I have maps of all kinds tacked up to my walls at home — subway maps, walking maps, maps of the world. I think of my relationship to any given place in terms of a map. I see the layout of the place, major landmarks, and a “you are here” star for myself. I like to be oriented in time and space, and maps are the perfect way to do that; they anchor you in a place, but only as that place was conceived by the mapmaker at the time it was made. A map is an artifact and only a guide — just because it’s been printed with in ink and paper doesn’t mean it has marked the landmarks you need. Your reading of the map is what fixes you in time and space. When I run one finger down a street and another finger along the cross street, I pinpoint myself at that place at a time of my choosing — either in memory, or in a daydream about the future, or in the here and now.

As I walked down a rainy Kalamazoo Ave last week, I was thinking about the night before, when I’d met up with some friends at a bar in Chicago, but the act of walking down that street brought to mind other thoughts, memories of trekking out to Bell’s or Kraftbrau for a rare night out during college or driving back into town after a weekend at my then-boyfriend’s place. Being in the physical space that I used to call home didn’t throw me back into that older time, more like they just layered on top of one another. I was 26 and visiting a friend for the weekend, but I was also 19 and venturing downtown for the first time, and I was 21 and going to see my English professor and her husband in their rock band, and I was 22 and amazed that it was time to leave town. The memories and attendant emotions layered on top of one another like onion-skin paper maps laid carefully one over the other, the old feelings of newness and vulnerability running in shaky pencil under the steady brushstrokes of confidence and age.

So I saw the city both as it was and as I remembered it, and I suppose this is true of any place that was once familiar and is now a travel destination. No wonder people get anxious about going home for the holidays; that’s years of maps layered one on top of the other, a lifetime of landmarks lost, wrong turns taken, street names changed over to honor new heroes. Orienting yourself in the vast time and space of a place you knew so well is a dizzying task. For those with unpleasant or seriously complicated memories of home, it’s not even a welcome one. Sometimes it’s easier to spin a globe and stick a finger on it at random. “Here. Let’s go here. I’ve never been here before. I don’t even have a map for this place.”

Still, I’ll continue to go home for the holidays and I’ll probably visit Kalamazoo again in the next couple months. It’s partly the place and partly the place as I know it through people. The love of my family and friends draws me daily, but I see them all too rarely. When I do visit home, however, all sorts of maps get pulled out and re-drawn. There are hundreds of spots all over town that signify whispered secrets, blowout fights, midnight moonlight dances; a joint snuck behind the pine trees here, a naked encounter with the cops here.

One swing set at the park near my parents’ home reminds me of: the day we moved to Michigan from Illinois and my sisters and I had to play at the park but I really had to go to the bathroom and I was sure I’d pee in front of all these kids who were about to be my classmates; the weekend my three surviving grandparents and six aunts and uncles flew in for my sisters’ birthday and the whole family went on a glorious walk of silliness in which my grandpa did pull-ups and my mom walked on the balance beam with me; prom night junior year, when my friend K and I were the only ones without dates, so we dressed up and ran around town golfballing people’s houses and having a whole lot of fun; the night I pushed my curfew past its breaking point by staying up til 6am in the back of T’s station wagon in the parking lot of our elementary school playground; and the night, not long after T had broken up with me and I had graduated from college with no plans, that I sat on a swing right here on this swing set and sobbed at 2 in the morning, feeling more lonely and lost than I ever had before. One swing set.

Of course, on this last trip home, I saw that they’ve torn down that particular swing set to put up a plastic one. I was disappointed, and it’s harder to draw up memories without the physical reminders, but really, none of the maps are gone. They’re just redrawn.

Halloween, Night of the Magic Dance

Posted on October 13, 2009 by lisafindley

Dearest fellow travelers, my apologies for not posting sooner. My intention is to post on Tuesday mornings, but I was out of town this weekend and blah blah excuses blah. So! To keep you coming back to this site, I will now reveal a small but persistent addiction: my love for all things Bowie.

This isn’t to say that I know all his albums by heart or the details of his personal life, and I’ve never had his image plastered to my bedroom wall. But it does mean that my cousin R. and I will discuss how long it takes to do something in terms of the length of the original Ziggy Stardust and the Rise and Fall of the Spiders from Mars album, eg, “It took me a Ziggy and a half to wash the car today.” And it also means that I bought a red wig and a length of shimmery green fabric last year and spent Halloween as Ziggy Stardust himself. This year, I didn’t set out to step into a Bowie role again, and who am I going to be, the Thin White Duke?

But then, inspiration! For Halloween this year, I could become a terrifying magical being, the ruler of an entire kingdom, and the thrilling sex dream of teenage girls. In short, I could become The Goblin King from Labyrinth.

the James Dean look for a fantasy Jim Henson world

Friends R and R are filling the roles of Sarah and Hoggle, and I am currently on the hunt for a small doll in red striped pajamas so I can toss him to alarming heights and sing about the babe with the power.

I don’t know about my chances for a cure of this Bowie love, but as long as I’m shaping my eyebrows into demon points, stuffing my pants with value packs of tube socks, and singing about stealing children, I’m not sure I want to.