Tom: always the first to know! Like FOX 10:00 News!

Here's something that's mildly safistfying: picking up a piece of news a full week before indie news media giant Pitchfork Media. BOOYAH!

And I managed to do it without sophomoric references to marijuana too.

Sister Act

First, the article that could have been:

We've all been hearing a whole lot lately about the process of evacuating major cities, and how this process may need an overhaul. With this in mind, it seemed fairly obvious to me that since getting in and out of Philadelphia on even a normal day is a complete nightmare, it isn't even worth trying to overhaul it and make it more efficient because our highways will never be able to handle that much volume (since about 1.5 million people live in Philly, and an additional 4.7 million live in the surrounding area). Never. Forget about it. If we want traffic jams that aren't 100 miles long, we're doing to need to literally double the amount of traffic our highways can handle.

I considered backing this up purely with anecdotal evidence (tales of sitting on the Schuylkill Expressway and moving about half a mile in 45 minutes... at 11:30 p.m. on a Saturday night), but decided to make a more convincing argument and dig a little deeper. So off I went in search of facts to support my argument, when I realized that I'm not a city planner, and would have to learn an entire canon of knowledge to make a convincing argument (I started looking into local highway capacities vs. population densities, etc.), and that in the end, the facts might not support my claim anyway. So that post is gone the way of Freddie Mitchell's contract with the Kansas City Chiefs (ba-zing!), because somebody at Slate is bound to do it more thoroughly in the next couple days anyway.

Instead, here's an interesting tidbit I found while looking up demographic information about Philadelphia: "Philadelphia has ten sister cities, as designated by Sister Cities International, Inc.: Douala (Cameroon), Florence (Italy), Incheon (South Korea), Nizhni Novgorod (Russia), Tel Aviv (Israel), Tianjin (China), Torun (Poland), Aix-en-Provence (France), Kobe (Japan), and Mosul (Iraq)."

If you'd asked me what Philadelphia's sister cities were, I'd probably have answered, "Camden, NJ, and... Upper Darby?" I honestly had no idea that "sister cities" and "twin cities" were a big program undertaken by places all over the world. I'd always thought that the entire concept of "twin cities" was a half-baked explanation for why Minneapolis and St. Paul only have one international airport between them (this is where my one Minnesotan reader will tell me that's not actually true, assuming she actually reads this).

So now, if somebody asks me what connection I have with Florence, Italy, I'll have a real answer! Or at least I'll have a better answer than, "I read Hannibal, and parts of that take place in Florence." And the next time I read about a suicide bombing in Mosul, I'll pause a little longer, and reflect on my fallen brothers and sisters.

Sister cities are fun! Who wants to undertake a world tour with me, to visit all of our brothers and sisters, bringing good tidings from the City of Brotherly Love?

And we'll hook them up with some Eagles gear while we're at it, because they probably have geographic neighbors that are sisters with Boston or Atlanta... and Phillies caps for those situated near a sister of Houston or... ok, still Atlanta. I'm just saying, Florence or Aix-en-Provence, if you want to swap some soccer jerseys for some (American) football or baseball gear, I'll trade some sports karma with you.

Tom digs Kanye

I'm willing to admit that maybe I just don't really "get" rap music. It seems like a genre in which even the best albums are hopelessly bogged down in cliches (the irritating skits between songs, the extended stream-of-consciousness "bonus" track), and a genre in which I can't really tell the good apart from the bad.

I often rely on first impressions to judge hip hop artists, and as often as not they're wrong. OutKast seemed too self-consciously "eccentric" to be truly good (they're actually both), and Jay-Z seemed like the living embodiment of every decadent-rap-star cliche (bling, bitches, and a Benz!), but it turns out he's also a master of the infectious pop hook (just try not to be mesmerized by "Big Pimpin'"), and also possesses the massive amounts of talent and charisma that it must take to make Linkin Park momentarily seem like they're not the stupidest band on the planet.

So what does it mean when I actually like a rap album? If it's Kanye West, it means that I have something in common with pretty much everybody else these days.

But what I think it really means when I like a rap album like Late Registration (which, by the way, I like a lot more than last year's The College Dropout), is that it is, deep down, a good pop album. In Kanye's case, I think it's a combination of great pop hooks and socially conscious lyrics. Much has been made of the latter attribute, and I certainly wouldn't suggest that addressing problems in society makes something automatically good, but a song like "Diamonds from Sierra Leone" offers a take on a less-publicized issue that's smart and subtle, and acknowledges an inherent conflict between wanting the best for ourselves and wanting the best for those less fortunate than us. It's certainly a more nuanced and thoughtful position than "George W. Bush doesn't care about black people." Oh wait...

So the lyrics are good, but what really appeals to me is the actual music. The College Dropout is an album that bursts with energy, with lush and intricate backing tracks. Much has also been made of the addition of producer Jon Brion, whose credits include mostly weepy singer/songwriter types like Rufus Wainwright, Badly Drawn Boy, and Aimee Mann (he also appeared on the last album released during the lifetime of the weepiest of all singer/songwriter types, Elliott Smith, may he rest in peace). I have no idea what Kanye did and what Brion did, but I do know that Late Registration is a whole lot more appealing on an aesthetic level than The College Dropout.

All of which is to say that I'm not necessarily a fan of rap music, but it's hard to resist such well-made, lush, orchestral pop music like that on Late Registration, regardless of how the words are put on top of it. It gets my personal thumbs up, with extra points because there's not likely to be a better album that's more popular than this one this year (an honor stripped from the hands of Coldplay, who put out an album that wasn't really that great).

Side note: my friend Denise has suggested "T Says" as a new title of this blog (see my post from September 10), which sounded good at first, until I realized that it was a reference to Mr. T. I brought this up with her:

"Wait a minute, that's a Mr. T reference isn't it?"
"No... well, yeah, kind of."

I have to admit that this aspect makes it much less appealing to me. So "On the Corner With Tom" stays until a better name comes along. Sorry, Denise.

Gratuitous lists... by others, not by me.

I'm a sucker for lists. I love making lists of my own, and debating lists by others. So in a random internet search for albums of covers (to supplement the Espers post a couple days ago), I was mildly excited to find a website that featured dozens of lists for me to look over and think about.

I have no idea who compiled these lists (haven't got around to looking yet), but for the most part they're pretty predictable, although some of the picks are mind-boggling. For instance, they are apparently of the opinion that The Mars Volta's Frances the Mute is the third greatest album of this decade. Yes, over Radiohead's Kid A, over Brian Wilson's Smile, and over Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Hell, Frances the Mute is easily one of the worst albums I've ever heard. Not just in the 00's, I mean ever. And keep in mind I have a sister who's seven years younger than me who used to love Hanson and The Spice Girls.

Anyway, the one that surprised me the most that I've looked at so far was their list of greatest vocal performances. I was expecting the predictable, and got some of it ("Stairway to Heaven"? Check. "Bohemian Rhapsody"? Do you even need to ask?), but guess what was number 1. "Love Reign O'er Me" by The Who!

Ok, so The Who aren't exactly unknown, but that song isn't particularly one of the more famous ones. It was on one of their less popular albums (Quadrophenia, although "less popular" is a relative term with a monstrously popular band like The Who), and is easily less famous than probably a dozen Who songs that the average rock fan would have picked. Like "Bargain" ("the best I ever HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!") or "Won't Get Fooled Again," which may have the most famous rock scream ever. Or "Baba O'Riley," which is so recognizable by it's memorable vocal that most people still think it's called "Teenage Wasteland." Or they could have gone with the great Who harmonies and picked "Who Are You" or "I Can See for Miles," or sheer melodicism and rock power and gone with "Pinball Wizard" or "The Kids are Alright." But they dug deeper, and found the one song in the Who catalog that almost makes me put down Keith Moon's air drumsticks and pick up Roger Daltrey's air microphone.

There are other surprises on that list too. There are actually a lot of songs that I would have picked, not just songs that I would predict others would pick. Like "Grace" by Jeff Buckley (#8), or "Life on Mars" by David Bowie, which somehow beat out "Space Oddity" as the top Bowie song. And not only did "God Only Knows" by The Beach Boys make the list at #14, it was properly attributed to Carl Wilson! Hallelujah! And "Exit Music (For a Film)" by Radiohead was buried pretty far down on the list, but the fact that it made it at all is impressive to me.

So that's that. There are other pleasant surprises that I've found, like The United States of America ranked as the #1 underrated rock album of all time, and Todd Rundgren's Something/Anything as the #5 greatest forgotten album, both of which I have discussed in this blog (here and here, respectively).

Hey look, it's Christopher Walken!

For about as long as I've known who he is, Christopher Walken has been regarded as an almost mythical figure of comedic creepiness, the kind of person whose mere presence in a movie is funny. We don't come out of Wedding Crashers talking about anything he did in the film, we just laugh at the fact that he was actually in it.

What I'd like to know is: how long has this been going on?

It's easy to forget that Walken is an honest-to-God Oscar winner (for The Deer Hunter), and that he won it for a performance that, in my opinion, ranks right up with Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in Psycho and Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs as one of the most disturbing ever captured on tape (why were the first two examples I thought of both guys whose first name is Anthony and last name ends with "-kins"?).

These days, to the extent we consider him "good," it's not because he actually is, but because he's not. He is now camp personified, and like an acting equivalent of Ed Wood, we're never quite sure if he's in on the joke or not (actually, it would seem obvious that Ed Wood wasn't, in fact, in on the joke, but still... one can never really be sure). His legendary appearances on Saturday Night Live are memorable not for any sense of comedic timing he brings, but because he has none whatsoever. "By the time I'm done, you'll be wearing gold-plated diapers." An awkward pause follows, as Walken stares straight ahead at nothing, leaning forward and wobbling ever so slightly as he stands silently. I imagine the cue cards reading, "Ferrell, Fallon, Parnell: stare at Walken in disbelief for at least 5 seconds" after every one of his lines.

I'm not the one to say for certain when Walken made the transition from serious actor to Shatneresque comic prop (the kind of actor whose roles are usually discussed by beginning with, "Hey look, it's..."), although his appearance in Heaven's Gate, Michael Cimino's notoriously disastrous follow-up to The Deer Hunter, probably didn't help. All I know is that something happened between 1978 and his Fatboy Slim video. (Hey look, it's Chris Walken! And he's dancing! How droll!)

Any suggestions? Comments? Etc.?

In the meantime, an interesting tidbit of Walken trivia: he was George Lucas' second choice to play Han Solo.

Espers tease Tom

As you may or may not know, Espers are one of my favorite new bands right now, along with Espers leader Greg Weeks' solo recordings. His solo stuff is its own thing, but I consider it all part of the same canon, I guess. And they're from Philadelphia, to boot!

Anyway, I started seeing references on Espers' record label's page to a recording called The Weed Tree, and I've been wondering what it could be for a few months now. Tonight, I decided to hit up my old pal Google and discovered the best possible news: The Weed Tree is, in fact, a new Espers album! New Espers! Only a year after their first album! and only eight months after the latest Greg Weeks album! What a wonderfully prolific man/group!

Then I started reading further on a couple of the sites I found... it's not a new Espers album. It's an album of cover songs. Oh, why do you mock me so?! An album of covers? When has a full album of covers ever been a good idea?

Oh well. They're apparently releasing this as something to tide the fans over (in other words, to make sure we don't forget about them) while they work on something new for 2006. So at least I still have that to look forward to. And a show on November 19th at the Khyber with none other than Gary Higgins! (More on him later.)

Life's not all bad in the world of Espers.

To Jenny, the sweetest canine ever to live.

My dog is slowly dying.

It may not look like it to the casual observer, but she is, make no mistake about it. Every time I come back to my parents' place, she's a little slower, a little wider around the belly, and a little grayer under the chin. She no longer has much interest in playing catch or fetch with the squeaky toys that used to enthrall her. She responds to her favorite words in the whole wide world, "You want to go out?" out of habit, but once outside, she quickly wants to come back in. If you take her to her favorite place in the whole wide world, Nottingham County Park, where people are so sparse that she can run free, unleashed, chasing (and never catching, of course) squirrels, rabbits, and birds to her heart's content, she'll still do all of those things, but will barely move for the next two days.

The meaning of "dog years," and the notion that dogs age 7 times faster than humans do, become much more poignant as they age. In November, Jenny will be nine (or 63) years old, and she shows it.

But like our favorite grandparents, she's so much more than just a reminder of a once-ebullient personality. Everything that's made my family love her is still intact. When people raise their voices, she gingerly nudges her way in, as if it's somehow her fault, brandishing her irresistible "puppy dog eyes," and lifts one paw as if to say "everything's ok," and it's impossible to stay mad at anything. She'll follow people wherever they are, just to have company (in fact, right now she just came out from another room and sat by my side upon hearing my typing). And when I come back here after some time away, nobody makes me feel more welcome than she does (it's a scene I look forward to every time: the car comes down the driveway, and she makes her usual acknowledgement that somebody's home, then she realizes it's me and, for the next few minutes, is so excited that she looks five years younger).

Watching a pet age is something I've never really had to deal with. I've dealt with death before (when I was in first grade, my grandmom, my kitten, and a friend of mine died in rapid succession, and I think I'm still dealing with that in subtle ways), but I've never had to watch time take a slow and excruciating toll on a beloved animal before, which is why I'm writing this (the fact that I can see it take place in increments, rather than gradually and seamlessly, because I no longer live here every day, makes me more aware of it as well). I'm usually the first person to acknowledge that most of what we love about pets are just traits we project on to them, and I'm the person who gets frustrated by people who feel sadder about an animal death than a human death, but when Jenny passes on, there will be real and genuine grief. And just like when a friend or loved one passes on, it will be a time for remembrance and acknowledgement.

It may be sooner, it may be later, but eventually it's going to happen. I just hope that when it does, I can say that we've made the best of our time with each other, and not taken each other for granted.

I've said it countless times in the past decade, and meant it every time: you're a good girl, Jenny.