Spring and otherwise, in five points

1) Some perspective on the change of season, verbatim from my Gchat with Justin today:

3:47 PM
me: i’m just about to go for a run
Justin: that sounds fun, i think i might try to go cross country skiing after work me: ha! skiing! thats hilarious!
its 65 degrees here!

I know friends and family in Michigan will think this is cruel (sorry Dad), but seriously, the contrast between the climate here and the climate of my former home-state has been crazy this week! For example, running home about one hour after the aforementioned conversation, I turned the corner onto my street and pulled these - the first blooms of the season - from a flowering tree:

SPRING!

2) Also after returning home this afternoon, these things were found within a 15-foot radius of my apartment:

A box of heads.

A bag of arms:

I haven’t yet formulated an opinion on this.

3) I STILL hate Sasha Frere-Jones, who had another winner of an article in the New Yorker this week. Again centered on the overwhelming hang-up he has about white people appropriating elements of black music, his commentary this time was focused on recent Grammy-winner Amy Winehouse, who he dubs in the article as “the Marge Simpson of junkie retro soul.”

Wait, what? Do you mean a “junkie” who sings “retro soul”? Because Sasha, seriously, don’t pretend like there is more than one artist who comprises that musical genre you JUST MADE UP.

I could go on and on listing the article’s many well-padded, yet nearly-meaningless assertions (”This style provides a way of singing derivations of black music without resembling modern R. & B. In fact, avoiding the sound of current R. & B. may be its guiding principle. White singers generally seem to use it more than black singers, though it is open to anyone who wants to use its limited vocabulary.”) and unanswered questions (like the opening line “Is there anything surprising about Amy Winehouse’s being awarded five Grammys this month?”), but I’ll spare you any further reiterations of its uselessness.

Basically, I’m irked because Frere-Jones fails to make much of a stand on any aspect of Winehouse’s music or reputation, convincing me again that any and all claims he makes to his current employment as a CRITIC - much like his assessment of Winehouse’s “worrying series of relapses and collapses” - are “simply a trick of the light.”

4) I’m really digging the new Beach House album, Devotion. It’s pretty. My friend John works for Baltimore Public Radio (Beach House’s stomping ground) and you can hear his review of it here.

5) And finally, on the theme of music reviews, don’t miss Food For Animals latest Belly - an album I was loving for a while but had almost entirely forgotten about. Though a friend gave me the album almost exactly a year ago today (at which point I proceeded to rave about it for two months) I somehow abandoned it in sync with my move from Michigan. Fortunately (I hate it when I have to thank them), Pitchfork reminded me to revisit a sound that I didn’t even realize I’d been missing. Though FFA’s gritty, noisy hip-hop might seem out of alignment with the rest of my moody taste in music, this album is SICK.

More soon . . .