>> I bought the most amazing t-shirt I've ever owned today at the Paul Frank store in Nolita (Kenmare & Mulberry, for the record). It bears the above-referenced slogan, accompanied by a fine illustration of an otter. Oh, shut up. My family didn't like it either, but I think it's pretty damn amazing. None of you have art in your souls.

Anyway. It's been a strange couple of days.



I had Thanksgiving dinner with my parents and sister (she's an alumnus) at the Harvard Club. Portraits of dead white men and mounted animal heads abounded on the walls, including an elephant head donated by Teddy Roosevelt. Cra-aa-zy. The food actually wasn't that good, the service was just passable, and the atmosphere was oppressive and staid. They sure did have high ceilings, though.

Also on the sartorial tip, I had to wear a jacket and tie to the club (as I now refer to it, y'know, in the familiar), and I owned only the latter but not the former. So Tuesday night Ashley (Happy re-belated birthday!) and I hit up the Structure-cum-"Express Men" (they're renaming all the stores) on Prince & Broadway and were ably helped out by our chum Ben Lane. If you're a guy, and you need clothes, you should go to Express and ask for the Denim Master. Oh yes. He can help you. Oh yes. He can help you. Oh yes. He can help you. Ahem. So anyway, I now own a snazz-tastic suit in which I look muy caliente. Or something along those lines. I don't speak Spanish.

Tuesday night I stayed over at Josh's. And that was nice.

Thanksgiving night la familia and I (let's hit all the romance languages in one post, shall we? Oh shit, wait, I don't know any Romanian) took in Die Another Day. Prol was absolutely right: The first two-thirds are possibly amongst the best in the franchise -- surprising, sharp, engrossing, and smart, with a cerebral, dark take on the character. And then they go to the ice palace and it all just falls apart. Demerits for the poor use of CGI (the first time a Bond film has ever used computer effects), which not only failed visually but from a storytelling sense -- the film was written in such a way that CGI was required, and that harmed its logic. It's an enjoyable Bond -- a far sight better than The World Is Not Enough -- but a sad waste of a strong start.

Today, we aimlessly roamed around Chinatown / Nolita / Noho / Soho before going to dinner with friends of my parents and their two (adult) children. It was one of those strange experiences where I realized that I only surround myself with people of one personality type, and when someone from another one enters my life, I find them strange and become very intimidated. I don't have many social graces to start with, either. All in all I have to say that it was not a great dinner -- the Irish place we ate at in Midtown (which shall remain nameless, since I believe in gustatory praise but not in character assassination -- let's just say that if you're on 47th between Fifth Ave and Madison, don't go to the Irish restaurant) was only so-so, and our "friends" were of the "let's complain about everything" school, which makes the dining experience ever so antagonistic. I did get a pleasant surprise when the conversation turned to the music industry, and I was actually the one at a table who was knowledgeable and could speak with a small amount of practical authority. Then they started talking about Michael Jackson and I knew it was time to leave.

My parents ponied up for me to take a taxi home, and I spent the whole ride thinking semi-poetry about the Empire State Building and the spaces of New York. It's an amazing town, and sometimes I don't know why I'm leaving it, if only for a while, or why I'm living in it the way I do.

Let us not forget, by the way, that I was suffering from various stages of nasal congestion and laryngitis throughout the above-mentioned events. My voice is very nearly back, but who can say where tomorrow will find me.

So that's a mish-mash of my Thanksgiving week thus far. I hope yours was excellent. Tomorrow the family is making a trek up to Connecticut to visit the grandfather that I just might hate. Seeing him always enrages and confounds me, and it's an experience I'd like to just avoid; and while doing that is possible, it is also problematic. So I'm biting my tongue and doing the deed. Maybe I'll be able to explain the way I feel upon my return.

>> This entry is basically here so that the blog doesn't turn blank tomorrow, for lack of posts in a seven-day range. I oughtta change the settings.

I guess there is, theoretically, a lot to say, but I'm not going to say it, for two reasons:

• My voice is shot as the result of a bizarrely mischievous (yet otherwise tolerable) cold. So I can't really say anything. Har har. (This is funny and ironic because I am, in fact, typing on this blog, not speaking aloud.)
• Any life-events I list here would be nothing but a list. I have no real trenchant analysis to connect to them, and as such, sharing them is largely pointless. Jeremy's film shoot went well; school and work proceed apace; my parents are in town for Thanksgiving. Had a lovely dinner with them tonight after freezing my ass off looking at the balloons @ 77th Street (apparently I'm engaged to go to the actual parade tomorrow as well, which I'm not optimistic about). See? Just bits and pieces. Nothing intriguing to be said about them, really, or at least nothing that I'm capable of mustering at the moment.

I think I smell something on the wind.

For the record, this post was written to the sweet sweet strains of The Chemical Brothers w/ Richard Ashcroft's "The Test," a song (and album -- Come With Us) recently rediscovered as part of my obsessive 2002 music-inventory, the only thing engaging my leisure time at the moment. Download it if you'd like (get the 7:46 album version, not the pissy radio edit) -- I'd post it on the MP3s section, but my ethernet's down tonight and I ain't bangin' up a 9-MB file through a dial-up modem. Sorry.

>> All hail Prol, who has done nothing but bring musical brilliance into my life today: First, a beautiful cover of U2's "If You Wear That Velvet Dress" crossbred with Portishead (though neither of us can remember the name of the Portishead song it samples), and then, a package containing David Bowie - Live on the Jonathan Ross Show 2002, PLUS Gavin Friday's Ich Liebe Dich. I nearly pissed myself, I did. I'm more than happy to share the Bowiewealth -- sign up for a CD-R in the comments (the tracklisting's down there too, to save space...)

I'm afraid I won't be so much as looking at this blog for the next few days -- it's my roommate/best friend Jeremy's big film shoot this weekend, so I'll be spending pretty much every waking hour from 5:00 PM tomorrow until sometime late Sunday night in Queens. Argh. Wish the boy luck; he's organized and ready but these things are scary...

>> Happy 35th birthday to Stuart @ Hydragenic! To crib a little tune from Cat: This is your birthday song, it isn't very long. Oi! He's marking the occasion with a spectacular run of thirty-five fragmented posts, so git on over there and appreciate them. They deserve appreciation. As does he.

>> EDITOR'S NOTE: This was a post about going to see Man In Gray at the Luna Lounge. But when I deleted some comment spam out of it a while back, Safari overcached the text field and ended up publishing the text of the deleted comment over the original entry. Motherfucker. I hate fucking comments spam. The best part is, it was politics-spam, with an anti-abortion message that was no doubt attracted by this post's ever-so-vivid title. Anyway, that fucking sucks, but Man In Gray are cool and you should go see them. The end.

>> Things that suck:

• Having no money.
• Not getting to see your boyfriend for approximately 20 days out of the month.
• Plotting up a killer new design for your personal website (inspired by the genius of others), and then realizing that, due to college classes, paperwork, social obligations, an internship, etc., there's absolutely no point in the coming week at which you can work on it. (Obviously these points are universal and apply to all of humanity. Cough.)
• Drama, drama, drama.
• Freezing-ass fuckin' weather.
• Eating pizza for 50% of the week's meals and counting. Even if a lot of it is the best damn pizza in the world oh my god.

Things that rule:

• Having your boyfriend buy you comic books.
• Having the longest class in your schedule cancelled for a week, even if you do like it.
• Double-disc reissued versions of Elvis Costello's Armed Forces, Imperial Bedroom, and Mighty Like A Rose. Info here!

Things that suck again:

• Being too poor to buy double-disc reissued versions of Elvis Costello's Armed Forces, Imperial Bedroom, and Mighty Like A Rose.

Poop. Anyway, bonus points to the first person who names, in the comments, the song this post's title is taken from. Without using Google. Y'know, not that I can catch you at it, but... no, wait! I can catch you at it! You bastards! Grrrr! (Just believe me on this one. It makes me feel better.)

>> Man, I want to redesign this place so bad. I don't even remotely have the time, but that doesn't stop me from wanting to.

Completely inconsequential life-details:

I saw Far From Heaven tonight with Josh (freshly returned from far away). 'Twas pretty OK. I wish I had more to say about it, but really, it was just kinda enjoyable while it was on the screen and fairly forgettable afterwards. Plenty of mighty fine acting, a (purposefully, I should think) silly script, and rather a lot of autumn leaves. I suspect they had to spray-paint a lot of them. After the movie I bought a DVD for Josh, which was a mistake since I'm largely penniless, but it made us both very happy indeed, so it was worth it. I love that boy.

Bart let me borrow Beck's Sea Change this afternoon. It had played in the background of my life several times since its release -- at work, through the wall of Bart's room, etc. -- and each time I was unimpressed. But now that I've finally had it running through my headphones, I'm very very fond of it indeed. Unfortunately, buying it is going to be a pain in the ass, since I am (as mentioned before) quite poor indeed, and far too anal to buy the boring-ass default cover. I want the one with the blue back & spine and the squiggles neatly surrounding his face, but it's out of print. I'm such a loser. This should not be a component of my decision-making process. IN ANY EVENT, many thanks to Bart for the gift of good music. One less 2002 album to hunt down before the end of the year (Yes, I'm still just as obsessed by this project as I was).

Jeremy and I watched Batman today. What a film. What a crazy, ridiculous, kinda stupid but strangely loveable film. And then of course Batman Returns just had to be on TV tonight, didn't it.

And finally, a great big fat apology to Fiona (at her new blog! WOO-HOO!) and all the other NYBloggers I missed the chance to party with last night. (A sampling: Laura, Jenny, Jeremiah, Megan, Jen who at least I saw on Friday night...) I'm scum, I know... I actually was feeling really gross and sick and fell asleep way too early. I'm such a fun guy. You probably wouldn't have liked me anyway.

>> 

I don't much want to write about anything else, so this will, hopefully, accomplish something. 100 facts about me and my life (one of those memes-that-doesn't-die):

1. Jerry Springer lives in my hometown (Sarasota, FL).

2. Whenever I enter a classroom, I always move as far into it as I can, and sit as far from the door as possible. Usually this corresponds with sitting by the window, but I can't figure out if I do it for that reason or for some weird need to feel ensconced in any given space.

3. I don't like the idea of supporting Starbucks monetarily, but right now I could really go for their hot chocolate. And one of those English-toffee bars.

4. The first CD I ever bought was the soundtrack to Jim Carrey's The Mask. I would say I still stand by "Cuban Pete" but I haven't heard it for five years, and probably don't.

5. I lost my virginity less than a year ago. First kiss, too.

6. I have shaken the hand of a man who has shaken the hand of Bono. That's as close as I've come, not counting being in the front of the pit at the first Elevation concert.

7. My favorite part of New York City is the West Village.

8. I'm absurdly mood-sensitive to the weather.

9. Boxers.

10. I have only just recently fallen deeply in love with Krispy Kreme donuts.

11. One of my favorite songs is Lamb's "Gorecki," but I've never heard anything by Gorecki.

12. I absolutely cannot manage my money.

13. I avoid the seams in the sidewalk so subconsciously that I no longer notice.

14. The most I've ever spent on CDs at one time was $75. I will not be satisfied until I make a $300 purchase, I think.

15. I applied to Harvard.

16. There's a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli on my desk right now, as well as a bunch of CD-Rs, some napkins, a short story, a videotape, an empty water bottle, my Discman, and a printer the size of a small bathtub.

17. The vast majority of my clothes currently need to be laundered. This is the norm.

18. The vast majority of my clothes are blue, grey, or black.

19. If I can't see the Empire State Building from where I live, I don't feel like I'm in New York.

20. I always write my academic papers on the morning they're due, and often turn them in late, but have never gotten anything less than a B+ on them, except on one occasion where I knew it just plain sucked. I got a B- on that one.

21. I'm not dressed yet.

22. Last night was the first time I'd gotten ten hours of sleep in about two weeks. I've recently figured out that that's my comfort-level for sleep.

23. If I could manage it career-wise, I'd happily move back to my hometown.

24. I've ignored a lot of friends lately, and flat-out lost a few, I think.

25. I absolutely loathe winter.

26. My roommate is my best friend in the world. I've known him for nearly eleven years.

27. I'm starting to believe that blogging has ruined me as a writer, for a variety of reasons.

28. My sheets are green, and my comforter is blue on one side and green on the other.

29. I was a Moby fan for several years before working for his management. I'm not sure if it's brought me to a new understanding of his music, or just spoiled it for me.

30. I still don't know what I'm going to do with my life, but I still keep thinking I'll be a rock 'n' roll star.

31. It's a Joy Division kind of day.

32. My Coca-Cola intake has always been out of control.

33. My pizza intake has gone out of control since moving to New York -- I sometimes eat it ten times a week.

34. The best pizza in New York City is at Pomodoro. I only recently figured this out.

35. I'm not bad at Goldeneye.

36. I have at least one very profound blogger-crush.

37. Socially speaking, I don't really like gay guys, I don't really like straight guys (well, as people), and girls tend to bore and/or irritate me. I just wasn't made for this world.

38. I still haven't seen three of my absolute favorite musicians -- Gavin Friday, R.E.M., and Depeche Mode -- perform live.

39. I think I'm going to put on some pants and a heavy jacket and trudge my way through the murk to the Starbucks on Canal and resume this list later. God help me.

40. That was some good fucking hot chocolate. I should've gotten a bigger one but I was too cheap.

41. I often look at prescheduled events, even fun ones, as annoying obligations.

42. I love rain in Florida and hate rain in New York.

43. My favorite Prince song is "When You Were Mine."

44. I seem to only have two modes of writing: a very deadpan, minimalist, this-is-it style (ripped, against my will, from Bret Easton Ellis) and a sweeping, self-aware, over-playful carnivalesque style (ripped from Salman Rushdie). This angers me.

45. My boyfriend just left me an incredibly sweet message on my cell phone.

46. I have never seen CABARET (the show), but I own the soundtrack.

47. I cannot believe this list is not even halfway done.

48. I don't take pills when I can help it -- I have no prescriptions, and don't even take cold medication most of the time. Part of that's my gag reflex, and part of it is just a general distrust of powerful chemicals.

49. I only started to appreciate the beach when I left Florida.

50. I'm already tired of starting all these items with "I" or "My."

51. As a child (until I was maybe twelve), I used to chicken-dance -- i.e., whenever I thought about something really exciting, I used to jump up and down and flail around. Now, whenever I'm alone, I put on music and do the saddest little rocking-out routine you ever did (not) see.

52. I don't know if my favorite movie is Rushmore, Fight Club, or Moulin Rouge.

53. The movie of Fight Club is much, much better than the book. Chuck Palahniuk is just not that good, people.

54. I used to be obsessed with The X-Files. I stopped watching at the end of the eighth season, when Mulder left for good. It could've been such a dignified ending right there, and I've never regretted not looking back.

55. The $100+ X-Files boxed DVD sets haunt my dreams. I must have them.

56. Speaking of dreams, I rarely have nightmares except when I'm very very overtly stressed out. I have started having more and more kinky sex dreams. I haven't had a lucid dream lately, and that's sad.

57. If given a choice between sex and buying CDs, I really, really don't know which one I'd pick.

58. My family's lived in the same house for my entire life.

59. There's a waterfall on our pool. The '80s were good to my parents.

60. I've never broken a bone.

61. I like being naked.

62. I wish I had the strength of will to be a vegetarian, but I just don't like vegetables. At all. I really do avoid eating them in every possible way.

63. I'd much prefer to have a pleather jacket instead of a leather one, but I couldn't find a good one when I went jacket-shopping.

64. I slouch. As a teenager I had sad little boy-tits, and my self-consciousness about them continues to this day. They still haven't been totally eradicated to my satisfaction.

65. I always sit with my legs splayed open. My friends say I look like I'm always expecting a lap-dance.

66. The block on 10th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues is my favorite in New York.

67. I wouldn't mind going to the movies today.

68. I get hit on through this blog at least once a week.

69. My sister is twelve years older than me, and my brother is ten years older than me. I was an uncle before I graduated high school.

70. If I was wealthy enough, I'd have a place in New York, a house in my hometown, and a mansion in the Bahamas.

71. I think it's average. But I've been told otherwise.

72. The choices I make in the next six months will change my life forever. This makes me so scared I want to poop myself, and I've been avoiding thinking about it.

73. I'm so fucking sick of people leaving their computers running all day and putting up away messages.

74. I think more of my friends read my suitemate's blog than mine.

75. I don't really care much about Nirvana.

76. In fact, I think Soulwax's bootleg "Smells Like Booty" is better than anything Nirvana actually did.

77. I've only recently started to really, really like the idea of having a family someday.

78. I save ticket stubs from concerts, movies, museums, etc. etc. In fact I save everything and am a total pack-rat.

79. I miss loving comic books the way I used to.

80. My Mac is a pretty amazing computer, but I can't lie, I do miss certain things about Windows. Mainly the availability of free programs.

81. My brother learned to fly at the same flight school that trained one of the 9/11 hijackers.

82. I'm starting to come around to Greatest Hits collections. Buying them always used to make me feel like a quitter.

83. The first time I left the country, I was too young to remember it (It was Canada, and I was 2 years old). I've travelled a pretty fair bit since then.

84. I need a gym buddy or there's no way I'll go. At the moment, I don't have one, and I don't go.

85. I don't try hard enough. At anything.

86. I really want a bulldog.

87. I have a problem with remembering character names. Which is pretty fucking bad for an English major.

88. I absolutely love eating in restaurants, and am not picky about when, where, and why, nor do I ever get grumpy when something goes wrong.

89. I don't like talking on the phone.

90. I love sunglasses but lose every pair I get, always within a year or less.

91. I really love performing, but hate awkward things with small audiences that I know well.

92. I overtip. Generally on purpose, but frequently by accident as well. I hate math.

93. My immediate family still doesn't know about this blog. I haven't told them, at any rate.

94. If you Google for Chris Conroy, the first result you find that pertains to me is an embarassing crappy comics e-zine I used to run. I shouldn't tell you this, but at least I'm not linking to it.

95. My hands are always cold. I'm pretty worried about what that means health-wise. In fact, I'm quite sure that I'm much less healthy than I think I am.

96. I've always had clear skin on the whole, but I often get just one irritatingly obvious zit at a time.

97. I used to love to draw, but I abandoned it when I realized I wasn't at a professional level. I haven't really done it for a while, and I regret it.

98. My brother and sister both studied music in high school; I studied art, and again, I think I regret it, because I truly, desperately wish I could play music now.

99. My childhood teddy bear was named Zach, and he was a panda. I still have him at home.

100. Many of these statements about me won't be true in ten years.

>> God fucking damn it. U2 and their cronies have put together an amazing Radio Free Virgin station, and the fucking player doesn't support the Macintosh. "Grrrrr" doesn't even start to describe it.

>> Mmmm. The usual super-pile of Wednesday night homework. But why bother with it? I have an iPod to play with!

There are two principles governing my iPod usage (freshly updated!) at the moment. The first, and least extensive, is that I'm trying out a couple of Tom's techniques -- I made a "Top 40" smart-playlist which archives the most-played songs in the past week, and dumped it into the Pod. I also included only one of my own playlists, the mix mentioned a couple of entries ago (once again, it has a purpose... mwahaha).

The rest of the music payload is devoted to 2002. I've begun the massive, nonsensical project of ranking every complete album I've heard that was released in the past year (as well as a cobbled-together two-disc anthology of my favorite songs). There's something comforting and necessary about this project, though of course it's unreasonably time-consuming and intellectually spurious. Much like this blog. And you can rest assured that the results of this survey will be published here, oh yes.

It's an ongoing project, obviously -- there's still a few albums I need very badly to hear, but am too poor to buy, i.e. Beck, Peter Gabriel, Sigur Ros, and many others -- but I do have a thirty-something strong pile to sort through now. Mmm, mm. Let the time- and brainpower-wastage begin.

>> One sure-fire way to gauge my mental state: Watch the "Recently Acquired" section in the Music sidebar. If it updates more often than the blog, I'm in full-on avoid-all-difficulties, self-medicate through retail-therapy mode. The funny thing is, I'm actually in a pocket of comparatively low stress right now. As placed against the last couple of weeks, anyway.

Oh, who am I kidding. I'm mis-managing my money, I've got a mile of Study Abroad paperwork to sort out, I'm already letting the schoolwork slide after catching up, and my relationship is about to hit a rough patch. November already sucks as much as October did.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to pump myself full of caffeine, do a hundred-odd pages of reading, and sort through all the CDs I have that I haven't listened to, because I'm an acquisition junkie.

>> A mix:

1. Joan Jett & The Blackhearts - "I Love Rock 'N' Roll"
2. Buzzcocks - "Ever Fallen In Love?"
3. Twilight Singers - "Love"
4. Pet Shop Boys - "Closer To Heaven"
5. Prince - "When You Were Mine"
6. The White Stripes - "The Same Boy You've Always Known"
7. Ramones - "Do You Wanna Dance?"
8. Pulp - "F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E."
9. P J Harvey - "This Is Love"
10. Elvis Presley - "Anyway You Want Me (That's How I'll Be)"
11. Elvis Costello & The Attractions - "I Want You"
12. Doves - "The Cedar Room"
13. R.E.M. - "Be Mine"
14. Passengers - "Your Blue Room"
15. Underworld - "Dirty Epic"
16. Robbie Williams - "Let Me Entertain You"

It has a purpose. You just don't know it yet.

I got a haircut today. Final-fucking-ly. I'd been shagging up since mid-August and it was getting to be untenable. Now I am svelte and overpoweringly sexy. But you don't deserve pictures, no. Get down and lick.

(This bravado is concealing how utterly shit this blog is. Apologies.)

I want to start a magazine, I want to be with the one I love, I want to drop everything and run. Oh well!

There's one issue at the heart of this fucked-up blog depression that I really ought to put out in the open, but I just don't have the energy to frame it in words. Which is tragic, because framing things in words is what this blog and the aforementioned "issue" is all about. But again, oh well!

>> The Guns 'N' Roses Pinball Machine. As you were.

(via Cory Branan)

>> Really, really excellent and entertaining article at Pitchfork -- Travis Morrison from The Dismemberment Plan lists 10 Records He Likes That No One Else He Knows Does. I was so entertained, in fact, that I suddenly want to buy a Dismemberment Plan record. This is a meme waiting to happen... I'll try to weigh in when I get back from class.

>> Even the most cursory re-reading of the entry below finds it to be extraordinarily poorly written, abounding in clumsy sentence structure that could be easily corrected. Doing so will probably be an ongoing process, so if you're one of those who reads it in the next day or so and has to extract a coherent reading experience from its current jumble of parentheses and double-dashes, then I apologize profusely. Sigh. As I just got done telling Josh: the day I write a piece that fully explains how I feel about U2 that remains entirely readable, nay, even compelling, is the day I drop dead, as there will be no ambition left to strive for. Make of that what you will. It's a more profound statement than you'd think.

On other technical matters, you'll notice the recent jacking-up of the font size. I've only just now figured out that the little teeny font was aesthetically brilliant until you actually had to try to read my half-sane gibberings, so I've decided to have a very small mercy on you and preserve your eyesight.

I'm way too tired to write properly these days, which is a shame, since writing properly would do a great deal to re-energize and re-invigorate me on every level of my life. It's time to face up to the fact that I'm a fucking hack at best, methinks...

>> Saturday afternoon I got my grubby, completist paws on a copy of U2's The Best Of 1990-2000 (Amazon / U2 Discography Entry), three days before its actual release (which, for the record, is tomorrow, November 5th), at a store on 14th Street. Of course this filled me with the delightfully superficial joy that only collectors of meaningless crap can understand. But on a deeper level, I've come to realize that I already kind of loathe this CD.

Warning: this blog entry has been written entirely in the mode of an obsessive pedant, which I promise you is only one facet of my relationship to music. Many people question why I care so deeply about a Best Of compilation, which is obviously just a money-grubbing ploy to start with. The short answer is that I care very deeply how my favorite band is seen by the public, and I want them to present themselves in the best manner possible; I also care deeply for the music, and don't want to see it slighted. So. If you've got the stomach for it, read on.



The 1990s output of U2 is my favorite music made by any artist in any time. Period. So you'll forgive me if the idea of anthologizing it is something I take fairly seriously. Of course, it's a uniquely troubled time in the band's history; they went from the single most acclaimed work of their career (Achtung Baby) to the single most denigrated (Pop) in six years. The band are, theoretically, proud of that latter album -- and God knows that the fans, myself included, love it to death. It's just that the band believe that album to be unfinished. They scheduled a tour before the album was properly done, found themselves running overtime in the studio, and ended up releasing the record -- what they had of it -- with only a month of tour-rehearsal time left. As a result, the fantastically expensive Popmart tour got off to a very shaky, and very visible, start in Las Vegas (Adam Clayton later called it the worst gig they'd ever played), generating miles of bad American press and damning the show to half- or quarter-full stadiums across the country. Which is a shame, since anyone who saw its later dates, myself included, can attest that the band quickly found their footing and delivered a fucking fantastic show.

However, the history of Pop is an essay all its own. The point about discussing its troubled past is to underline the band's own dissatisfaction with how it turned out (taking over the world every time out is key to the band's strategy these days). So, now that it's come time to wrap a bow around the 1990s and look forward to the next decade of U2, the question of just how the band felt about Pop had to be addressed. Sadly, they've taken precisely the wrong stance.

For The Best Of 1990-2000, U2 made the eyebrow-raising decision to completely rework four tracks -- "Discotheque," "Gone," and "Staring At The Sun" from Pop, and "Numb" from Zooropa. At first, I welcomed this decision with open arms -- I wasn't terribly upset by the notion of revisionist history at the time. I was tremendously curious to see what the band would cook up.

Their first mistake was in going with a new producer. If the band considered the songs "unfinished," why wouldn't they try to finish them in the way they'd originally been intended -- i.e., with Flood and Howie B behind the producer's desk? Instead, the "honors" go to Mike Hedges, who I'm told worked on All That You Can't Leave Behind and who has therefore been accused by much of the fan community of trying to bring these more experimental tracks in line with the smooth, polished studiocraft of that album. There's some merit in those charges, but these tracks haven't really been de-fanged per se. They've just been subtly, insidiously ruined.

Of the four mixes, "Discotheque" and "Gone" take the tack of matching the new mixes as closely as possible to the live arrangements of the songs. This is, theoretically, a noble goal. When played live, "Discotheque" is stripped of its incredibly dense production and turned into a straightforward guitar-bass-drums T.Rex kind of song, and it's truly brilliant (though of course The Edge is required to cycle through a sizeable stack of effects pedals to make it work properly, the emphasis is on the simple, abrasive, hard-rock guitar sound, not the signature ethereal chiming-delay work he's known for). And "Gone" often spirals out of control into a careening, almost psychedelic mess of loops and feedback haze that can flat-out crush an arena (the finest performance I've ever heard/seen is, conveniently, immortalized on the Elevation Live In Boston DVD, if you've never seen it). Obviously the live arrangements of both songs work smashingly, and U2 now have a reputation as a great live band, so any producer will try to put two and two together.

Unfortunately, Hedges just quietly fails in his task. The new version of "Discotheque" does boast an appealling new intro (the original song's intro was reworked dozens of times; Howie B sometimes recounts an amusing cell-phone conversation with Bono in which he was told "we were thinking swirl" and made to come up with an entirely new intro in one night), and it does incorporate the brilliant guitar textures of the live arrangement. However, it doesn't replicate the sheer gargantuan scale of the song in live performance, and it also drains out the layered, thunderous production work of the original, leaving it in an uncomfortable and utterly mediocre middle ground. After an appeallingly retooled bridge, the song just whimpers to a close with an underproduced outro that omits what could be declared the original song's raison d'etre -- the uber-camp refrain of "BOOM CHA! BOOM CHA! DISCOTHEQUE!" It removes both the fun and the menace of the original.

"Gone" escapes with minimal damage -- an alternate vocal take which duplicates the live version's pacing and phrasing (though nobody can quite tell if this is an unused, 1997 take, or a re-recorded Bono vocal -- if it's the latter, it's his finest vocal in recent memory, though it might be digitally reconfigured within an inch of its life to sound that way), and a few other dribs and drabs of rework throughout the mix -- but it doesn't improve on the original in any way, and also misses an opportunity to incorporate the absolutely mind-exploding finale of the live arrangement (again, see the Elevation Live DVD to get the idea).

"Staring At The Sun" turns out much like "Gone" -- a few cosmetic changes which don't add up to a superior take, just an alternate one -- which is a shame since the band have always felt the song could've been a monstrous hit if they'd only gotten it right. They still haven't. It's worth noting that there's not really a live take to duplicate with this song, since it's only ever been played in a two-acoustic-guitar arrangement at the band's shows; apparently they could never arrive at a satisfactory full-blast approach.

And then there's "Numb," which Matthew at Fluxblog wrote about a little while ago, and I'll just have you read his piece since he pretty much nails it: a song which never ever needed to be touched in the first place gets ham-fistedly brutalized. I do like the new guitar track, but I very easily could've lived without it.

So: the remixes suck. It's a shame. But that wasn't the compilation's only sin, oh no. Not only is the question of Pop unsatisfactorily addressed; but also, the question of All That You Can't Leave Behind.

Even a non-U2 fan can tell you that ATYCLB is miles away in form and content from the rest of the band's '90s output; therefore, including its tracks creates an aesthetic rift that's hard to reconcile. Of course, commercial concerns are important, and I'm willing to accept the presence of that album's songs if it'll help to alleviate the public's perception of this compilation as a string of U2's weird, avoidable tunes. But they've waffled on it. Instead of making the album a coherent portrait of the band's experimentalism, or a slightly more commercialized all-encompassing anthology, they've only included two of ATYCLB's singles -- "Beautiful Day" and "Stuck In A Moment..." -- the two released in 2000. "Walk On" and "Elevation" were 2001 releases, and are presumably being saved for The Best Of 2001-2010.

This is fucking recockulous, if you'll forgive my fratboy slang. Why have they chosen to alienate every potential buyer? Fans want the band to release an album that accurately portrays them; the general public wants an album of appealing songs. Neither camp gets everything they want, which is, of course, how life is -- but the bizarre thing is, they both easily could have! The single remix of "Elevation" and the radio edit of "Walk On" would have both fit onto this compilation right now, without deleting anything from the current tracklisting -- the CD only runs 71-something minutes at the present moment, and 80 minutes are possible. Presumably the band want to keep catalogue sales for ATYCLB high by leaving it tantalizingly unanthologized; but (a.) they could've had the same effect by leaving the singles off The Best Of... entirely, and (b.) they've instead alienated customers by leaving them cheated by a technicality. The public affection for those songs won't be as strong 10 years from now, when the next Best Of is released, as it is at this moment. (And of course, the question of sales figures reveals another curious decision -- they're putting the album on sale the same week as new releases from Jay-Z, who has trounced them in opening week sales before, and Justin Timberlake, practically guaranteeing themselves a #3-or-lower chart position.)

I'm STILL not done bitching! Even the b-sides CD they've attached to the one-week-only limited edition is a disappointment, skipping over some truly great songs ("Holy Joe," "Slow Dancing," "Two Shots Of Happy, One Shot Of Sad") and some entertainingly louche ones ("Big Girls Are Best," "Where Did It All Go Wrong?") in favor of a handful of often mediocre remixes.

As far as I can see it, the only good things to come out of the whole affair are the booklet, which has some rather excellent Anton Corbijn photographs of the band, the vast majority of them being new or rarely-seen; and "Electrical Storm," which I've become more and more convinced is one of their better singles. We can talk about it later if you want. IM me sometime. (Of course, its glory is somewhat counterbalanced by "The Hands That Built America," a musically compelling song which boasts some truly abhorrent Bono-matic lyrics, including the clumsiest 9/11 reference yet heard in pop music.) And my obsession with analyzing the project has renewed my passion to listen ever-closer to the band's 90s albums -- I hadn't put Zooropa on in almost a year and was pleased to discover that it is very nearly note-perfect, one of the most amazing records I own.

Do I know what I would've done, had I been the one in charge of The Best Of 1991-2000? You bet I do. I'll share my ideal tracklist at the end of this entry (by "ideal" I mean not my favorite songs, but the tracklisting which strikes me as making the most artistic and commercial sense), but not before concluding by saying that I really do respect U2's judgement (it was them, not the record company, who chose the album's tracks), and I'm pleased that they can, at least, still surprise me with the way they relate to their music. The moment I know them utterly is the moment they cease to be interesting to me, so in a melancholy way I'm glad they disappointed me. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and I should've seen their choices coming. "The First Time" is one of those simple, elegant, traditional little near-classics that I think the band would like, very desperately, to believe is the kind of song they ordinarily write, when the truth is much closer to what Matt Fluxblog said about their experimental nature. But all in all, I'm glad to be startled; it's healthier.

I feel a little bad about pissing on this release so hard, since it may convince a couple of people to give the album a miss at the shops this week (here's looking at you, Paul), and it is, at the end of the day, a collection of fairly amazing music -- "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me"? "Until The End Of The World"? "One"? Top-notch! But my personal relationship to this album is something that's been weighing on me pretty heavily, and I'm glad I got the chance to vent. Even if this rant is rambling and unstructured, and probably largely impossible to read. If you actually got to the end of this entry fair and square, leave me a comment and I'll find some way to reward you. ;-D

Oh yes -- and you can download one of my favorite '90s U2 songs, "Your Blue Room," in the MP3s section. Though it's not U2 strictly speaking... oh whatever. It's a great song, go get it.

Chris Conroy's Ideal Tracklisting, The Best Of 1990-2000:

1. "One"
2. "Discotheque (Single Mix)" (This is not the Best Of Mix)
3. "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me"
4. "Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of"
5. "Mysterious Ways"
6. "Elevation (Remix)"
7. "Numb"
8. "Until The End Of The World"
9. "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)"
10. "Your Blue Room"
11. "Gone"
12. "Please (Single Mix)"
13. "The Ground Beneath Her Feet"
14. "Walk On"
15. "Beautiful Day"
16. "Electrical Storm (William Orbit Mix)"
17. "The Fly"

And a very good night to you all. This is the longest entry in the history of this weblog, by God.

>> My week's turning to shit and it's not even noon on Monday yet. Damn it.

>> Two unrelated bits:

-- Giant squid may now outweigh humans in terms of global biomass. In point of fact, this article didn't convince me of that statement at all, but it is still about giant squid, which are fucking amazing. (Link via Lukelog)

-- I saw Taylor Hawkins from the Foo Fighters outside the Tribeca Grand, as I got off the subway this morning. He was walking from the lobby onto their tour bus. It was fairly uninspiring. I wonder if he liked my U2 beanie...

>> Throughout my childhood, my family held a membership at a resort island in Charlotte Harbour, about an hour and a half south of our home by boat (which was the only way the island could be reached). There was nothing to the place except a dock, two restaurants (one just a fisherman's-style bar and grill, the other a more traditional, stodgy inn and restaurant), a swimming pool, and a collection of about a hundred tin-roofed single-unit condos, strung along a pink sandstone foot-path that wound amongst palm and banyan trees.

As a child I always held mixed feelings about the place -- sure, it was pretty, and it was nice to go somewhere different for a weekend every once in a while, but my dominant impression was boredom. They had a swimming pool, but I liked ours better; they had no beach (not that I liked the beach much as a child anyway); their T.V. reception totally sucked and all of my toys were back at home. I would always beg my parents to let me bring a friend along, and they almost always accepted. The one thing they did have was a small, musty, salt-stained library, in a paint-peeling shack between the pool and the tennis courts; and while I was a precociously intelligent child when it came to reading, I never did find anything to interest me there except old Reader's Digests and National Geographics, and I would often have to do battle with the angry wasps who lived in the alcove above the library's door just to browse through those minor treasures. Still, it was the idea of the library that appealed to me, and I spent hours in that old room, with its decaying carpet and crisp-crackling book-pages, while my parents walked or sunbathed or other such child-boring "nonsense."

Now that I've grown, I still have somewhat mixed feelings about the place. I've been back several times, and in addition to the standard-issue realizations (it is, of course, smaller than I remember it; as a child, I used to think of the far end of the island, beyond the swimming pool, as some kind of vast, wild, untamed expanse; I believe I got this impression because my brother once saw a raccoon there), I've become aware of the amount of money it took to move about in such a sphere. That makes me a little bit uncomfortable, and it made me hesitant to write this account because it makes me seem like so much of a privilegiado; but my personal relationship to my parents' fairly respectable prosperity is not just a weblog entry in itself, it's a fucking weblog in itself. For now, it goes to the side.

I am writing this account because last night, I dreamt of the place. I can recall it right now in its every visual detail, but my dream was far more interpretive; the landscape was different, but the place was undoubtedly the same. I was there with my family, again, only at my current age. Tellingly, I don't recall ever seeing any members of my family in the dream, only the friends I'd brought with me (who, bizarrely, started out as Claire, Andy, and Erin, and ended up metamorphosing into Ashley, Mark, and Jackie by dream's end -- all of whom have very specific personal connotations of Florida that I suppose led to their inclusion). I was doing for them much of what I am doing for you now: explaining the place, its history and its effect on me. We were enjoying ourselves pretty immensely. As I woke from the dream, we'd just encountered a small whale in a salt-water inlet, and we were running across the island to the dock restaurant, which, I recalled, had bait-fish we could feed it. The image was a little bit troubling (there was a sense of innocent menace from the whale, I'd originally been afraid he would, in his enthusiasm to greet us, topple the small motor-launch we'd been puttering about the inlet in) and more than slightly unreal (he looked exactly like a baby humpback, but he had tiny conical teeth), but was in all its other respects simply so beautiful and fantastic, in the Garcia-Marquez sense, that I couldn't help but be touched by it.

As I woke from the dream, rolling about in a broad, comfortable bed that was clearly not my dorm's, spattered in intimate morning sunlight, I briefly hoped that I was back in Florida, perhaps even on the island itself. It was a conscious, and fleeting hope; the brick of the Upper West Side was visible through a gap in the blinds, and as I sit here typing this account, my bare feet are chilled by the sort of November you'd never get back home. I love it here but I can't lie: I'm disappointed. I want to go back.

(I could link to the island's website, or give it its proper name; but there's a sense of unreality to the place in my mind, especially in the wake of this dream, and doing something so pedantic as providing a URL punctures that illusion. Let me be disappointed enough by my memories of a larger island, lost to me by my own advancing height and damnable, damnable maturity.)

>> Anyone who IMed me tonight between 8 and 9:30 PM was greeted with the following away message:

I'm out taking a nice walk on the Upper West Side. Yes. I figure I'll walk as far as, say, oh, Tower Records on 66th Street. And I'll probably turn around there without going inside and spending $100 on CDs. Yeah, probably. That's what'll happen. And y'know, maybe MONKEYS WILL FLY OUT OF MY BUTT.

As it turned out, by God, I was almost right. I took a nice walk down to Tower Records on 66th Street, and though I did go inside (I spent about forty-five minutes there, in fact), I did it without buying a damned thing. And I was so psyched to walk out with an armful of stuff, too! I toyed with buying any number of albums & singles, but in the end I simply compiled a mental list (in addition to the several-hundred-strong catalogue of titles I want saved on the computer back at my dorm -- I really should upload that to the site, shouldn't I?) and decided to have my binge at the downtown branch tomorrow afternoon. Bizarrely enough, everything I wanted is like a buck cheaper down there anyway. So if you'd like to witness my frenzied self in full music-spending abandon-mode, be at Tower Records sometime 'round 2:30. It's sure to be a horrifying sight.

On my return to my sister's neighborhood, I was nearly murdered by a bustling swarm of bicycle-straddling restaurant delivery men. At the corner of 82nd and Amsterdam there were literally five or six of them simultaneously weaving through the automotive and pedestrian traffic; David Bowie was jittering in my ear about TVC-15 and I couldn't hear their cries of "Achtung!" or "Peligro!" or anything of the sort, and was very nearly plowed into twice within seven seconds. I thought everyone went out to eat on Friday night. Sunday nights are for delivery, you mixed-up New Yorkers! When will you ever learn?

>> I have to leave for work in ten minutes, so I can't really stop to post, but I just want to say how proud I am of a friend who did something incredibly difficult last night. I can't say who but perhaps you'll know someday.

Dogsitting this weekend AGAIN (Jebus! At least I'm getting paid this time), so my communication status will be rather unsettled. I really am sorry about how content-poor this weblog is...