Do you remember we were sitting there by the water

(song starts 30 seconds or so into this YouTube)

By the time I had even heard about this leaking it was #1 on iTunes, such is the power of our Taylor. It's encouraging to hear her writing specifically about being a young adult ("yeah we've got bills to pay" and a line about cohabitation!) with the same skill that she wrote about being a high school kid. The "you made a rebel of a careless man's careful daughter" is super-entertaining verging on annoying, almost in an Elvis Costello way, but I've grown to love it. Yet again Taylor takes a cliche and makes it beautiful.

So basically after a week or so with "Mine" (and, truth be told, a walk home from Greenpoint to Bushwick the other night listening to it on repeat) I couldn't be more excited for this album.

Krazy about Crazy Heart

My expectations going into Crazy Heart were fairly low. Maybe it was the couple of friends who didn't like it, maybe I'm just so neck deep in Oscar buzz for shitty things that I'm starting to lower expectations right off the bat, I dunno. My friend Charles says I love any band that sings about drinking, and this movie has a bunch of drinking in it and treats itself like a big old country song, too.

And I'll definitely recommend Crazy Heart. I think it's a film that owns its clichés (conveniently also many of the clichés of country music). For example, when Maggie Gyllenhaal's character said that Jeff Bridges' character is just like "every other man," putting every ounce of twang available to her into that man, it for a minute seemed to me almost embarrassing. But soon after it became my key into the movie, an example well worn cliché, performed as one, that expressed a very true emotion. These kinds of traditional moments are infused into a contemporary world/story that contains alcohol rehab and songwriting royalties, and it's all filled out with well acted and written characters.

I'm not gonna say Bridges deserves an Oscar (anyways, I feel like his Oscar campaign is even more along the lines of "he's pretty good in this, but really, it's his turn" than most Oscar campaigns), but he's pretty much as good as a washed up country singer as you would expect him to be. His scenes with Robert Duvall are especially loose and wonderful. Gylenhaal is good too, as is Colin Farrell, whose character is a reflection of the movie's relative optimism - a modern country star who does his best to respect tradition while working within the Nashville system. It's not revolutionary, I know, but it seems to me both genuine and interesting, and I'll take that any day of the week.

Now I'm a going back on that same train that brought me here before

75. Gram Parsons - "Streets of Baltimore" (from the album GP, Reprise Records, 1973)

Proof that my brain doesn't quite work right sometimes:

As I was on the train to Baltimore to see my beloved Bears get crushed by the Ravens, I was reading Umberto Eco's the Infinity of Lists, a wonderful gift from my secret Santa that has in it, among an amazing wealth of both artistic and literary treasures, a passage from Edgar Allen Poe. So I tweeted, for Sunday was pretty much just a long chain of tweets, "Reading Poe on the way to Baltimore. Is that just asking for it?"

Things I was thinking about as I wrote that:
- Edgar Allen Poe died after being found, wandering and delirious, in the streets of Baltimore
- Whether or not I should throw in a reference to Gram Parsons' version of "Streets of Baltimore"

Things I wasn't at all thinking about as I wrote that:
- The Baltimore Ravens are named after Edgar Allen Poe's poem, "The Raven".

I often don't take the long way because it's more scenic or more righteous, I'm just stumbling around (note that I don't mean this at all literally, I'm actually very good with directions).