Soundcheck's Critic's Week: The Decade in Rock

Now that I drive into work, I find myself listening to a lot of NPR, a station which used to be reserved for special road trips upstate. When I was able to leave work a little early last week, I managed to catch Soundcheck, while they were having a week where they reviewed the best music of the decade. I caught Critic's Week: The Decade in Rock, which was really interesting, and made me think much harder about a decade when I felt like music really wasn't at it's peak. I guess there was so much Britney Spears and Good Charlotte that it sort of blocked out The Arcade Fire and The Strokes and Regina Spektor and Muse and all the other great artists from the 2000s in my mind.

Ryan Schreiber, the featured critic, also noted the way that music became more and more individualized in the 2000s, citing the fact that you could look on anyone's iPod and find music that almost no one but them would know. I didn't finish the program, but I hope he expounded on the fact that having an iPod at all helps to create a sort of cult of music as personality. The collectivity of music (starting out at the basics, as most of music being created by a band, and moving toward collective music experiences like massive concerts which are then aired on television to an even more massive group of people) is starting to disintegrate just a little in the face of such individualizing technology.

Anyway, the small review is this: it was a very interesting program, and you should go listen to it. I'm planning to listen to the whole thing, and then hopefully check out the rest of the week's episodes.

Outlet Shopping

Since starting a new, higher-paying job a few months ago, I have (hesitantly, perhaps even unwillingly) started shopping again. The most immediate and pressing thing that I noticed is that prices are higher now than they were when I more or less stopped shopping five years ago. The next thing that I noticed is that it is pretty addictive. I'm vowing to slow down after the holidays and a trip to Iceland in late January. This may well coincide with the end of my higher-paying job, so it's probably good that I plan ahead.

Regardless, I've recently been shopping primarily at outlets and online, and have yet to make one stop at a proper indoor mall. Outlets, for the most part, are different than they were when I was younger, and from what I think they were intended to be. I remember going to Woodbury Commons (our closest outlet mall, and the primary one for New York City dwellers) and finding lots of clothes missing buttons or with the wrong tags or slight damage. It was a place for cast-off items at pretty low prices. You could sew on a new button or try to remove a stain or what have you, and you were making sure that well-made clothes didn't go to waste.

It seems to be a little different now, and while we did find some stores that had last year's styles (The North Face, Kate Spade, Williams-Sonoma) or slightly damaged goods (Fossil, Crate & Barrel [and LL Bean, apparently]), many simply had cheaper versions of the clothes currently in stores (Gap, J. Crew were both big on that, although I did see some of last year's clothes at Gap). Although I'm always a fan of affordable things, the point of most high-end retail stores is to have well-made clothes that will last a long time, and a cheaper version of those clothes isn't any better than the clothes that start out cheaper. Additionally, outlets are usually outdoor malls, which can get cold, or, if you were at Woodbury Commons on Sunday, icy. Very, very icy and actually a little dangerous. Although most of the stores were very calm, there were long lines outside Coach and Ugg.

One benefit to shopping at an outlet mall is that they are really meant to be for smart shoppers, so there are plenty of coupons online, as well as a large book of them that can be found at the information booth (with a coupon online). Also, being outside allowed for more movement space, and also meant that they weren't blasting Christmas carols, so it never felt overwhelming, the way being inside a normal mall or on Fifth Avenue or in SoHo can. Overall, I would say that the experience was more enjoyable than it would have been at an indoor mall, and I'd like to check out an LL Bean and an Under Armour outlet sometime in the future, after the holidays but before going to Iceland.

Allan Tannenbaum's Portraits of John & Yoko

I'm not sure if I really like Allan Tannenbaum as a photographer. Photos of celebrities and 1970s-era New York tend to feel a little cliched to me, and his website looks more like an ad for a bad nightclub than a photographer's portfolio. He has a LinkedIn account, which I find cool, but I don't know if that can make up for poor web layout.

Having said, that, however, he took some really lovely images of John Lennon and Yoko Ono a few weeks before Lennon was murdered, and compiled a book of them about two years ago. I haven't seen the book, John and Yoko: A New York Love Story, but I did see some images from it, and they were quite lovely, so I figured I'd share them with you. My two favorites are below, and you can see the rest in Vanity Fair.

I'm not sure why, but I really love images of John and Yoko, and these are no exception. Although I think it's impossible to tell the truth about anyone or any relationship from a picture, almost all photographs of the couple are beautiful or interesting in some way. I like the two I've included here because the first is lovely and composed, and the second feels spontaneous and, to me, very happy.

Amazon.com Wishlists

I really love Amazon's wishlist feature, particularly now that it has the "universal wishlist button" that lets you put items from other stores (including local shops and etsy, yay for taking down big business while using big business!) onto your list. Essentially, the wishlist is a registry that you can start without having a reason to have a registry (I know registries are becoming more popular for housewarmings, but most people still only use them for weddings and babyshowers, and damn it, everyone deserves a present now and again, big life event or not).

I'm a big fan of gifts, both giving and receiving them, and having a list of things a person wants comes in handy around the holidays and at birthdays. Particularly if you live far away from someone, the fact that you can ship directly to their house can be helpful. I've also found that I'm a particularly difficult person to buy for, and so having a wishlist is an easy way to let people know exactly what I want without looking like a jerk.

It's particularly easy to set up and use, and I'd definitely recommend starting one of your own. I've been searching for a lot of my friends, and so far, have only found two who have them, and one who actually uses it, so do yourself and your loved ones a favor and start one today!

Carhartt.com

Simply put, this website is poorly designed and difficult to use. There are five options for women's pants, each with at least three sub-options, and one cannot navigate between the pages easily. Obviously it's difficult to remember whether you've just looked at Traditional Fit Boot-Cut Canvas Jean or Modern Fit Straight-Leg Canvas Workpant or Curvy Canvas Jean because the names are similar in their banal un-description and also because the photographs all look exactly the same. Duck canvas workpants, whether Traditional or Modern or Curvy or Boot-Cut, all look exactly the same in a low-resolution photograph. The written description doesn't help much, either; the pants are generally either 8.5 or 12 or 12.5 weight canvas with or without hammer/ruler/scythe accoutrements. They need to have some Lands' End bathing suit full-body 3D CGI SFX TMI ASAP KTM viewer.