Goin' to the chapel and we're gonna get married...

Damn! I don’t blog for five days and all this shit happens! (I mean, Christ, Britney’s nuptials were almost 3 days ago! She could have annulled this marriage before I got around to commenting on it!) With such a surfeit of material ripe for blogging about, there is only one good way to deal with it….A LIST.

THINGS THAT MUST BE BLOGGED ABOUT:

1) Obviously the Spears-Federline white trash wedding. I can’t get enough of the wedding pictures. Britney in fugly white pajamas with “pimp” (or something like it) scrawled across the ass (nothing says classy wedding like having lewd writing on your butt!) dancing with her guido-haired husband, who is wearing some weird Michael Jackson hat! Just to recap: they got married in Studio City! (to the LA-ers out there: isn’t that like getting married in Newark?) They served crab cakes and chicken fingers (like they were getting married at TGIFridays.). Britney changed into the pajamas outfit after the ceremony and took everyone dancing at some club (that had a cash bar, I might add. How much money does she spend on fucking fake tanning? Couldn’t she have spared some of that dough for an open bar at her freakin’ wedding!?). Oh yeah…and she’s a brunette now! I can’t believe that this girl is, not only younger than I am, but also younger than my baby sister and she is on her second marriage and is a step-mom to two kids! Britney, I hope you listened to your mama and made that boy sign a prenup cuz I do not have a good feeling about this!
2) They announced the finalists for the Shortlist Prize. Now this is really nothing to get your panties in a bunch over since they always have excellent finalists and pick a shitty winner (case in point, last year’s winner was Damien Rice!), but since the indie rock community doesn’t really get shout outs from the Grammys or the VMAs, I guess the excellent taste of the nominating committee (which included Robert Smith, Jack Black and Josh Homme) is worth a little bit of excitement. The finalists are:
Air: Talkie Walkie (Astralwerks)
Dizzee Rascal: Boy in Da Corner (Matador/XL)
Franz Ferdinand: Franz Ferdinand (Domino/Epic)
Ghostface: The Pretty Toney Album (Def Jam)
The Killers: Hot Fuss (Island)
Loretta Lynn: Van Lear Rose (Interscope)
Nellie McKay: Get Away from Me (Columbia)
The Streets: A Grand Don't Come for Free (Vice)
TV on the Radio: Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes (Touch & Go)
Wilco: A Ghost Is Born (Nonesuch)
And, while I’m obviously rooting for Franz or my boyfriends in the Killers, I’d be really excited to see TV on the Radio win. They haven’t had the hype job of some of the other bands mentioned and (aside from Dizzie Rascal—who is a rapper) they are the only people of color nominated and some of the only people of color in indie rock today PERIOD! If white rappers are all the rage (The Streets, Eminem), then I think it’s time for a black rocker resurgence. Seriously. All we’ve got now, really, is Lenny Kravitz and folks, that’s practically worse than having none at all.
3) Speaking of the Killers….I know that they get radio play and are very popular but I was absolutely fucking floored when I caught them on the VH1 countdown at #15. I expected to see them on MTV2 or even, eventually, TRL but I couldn’t believe it when I saw the “Somebody Told Me” video playing right after like the Dashboard Confessional Spiderman II song and right before some freakin’ Maroon 5 garbage. I was really excited for them. I’ve given up my territorial, teenage punk hatred of bands that I like going “mainstream.” Fuck that. I’m tired of nothing but bad music being on TV and on the radio. If the masses want to embrace the good shit, then the rest of us should welcome them with open arms and not cry sell-out when our favorite little band plays a huge amphitheater concert or has a video in heavy rotation on MTV.
4) You know how a couple entries ago, I entreated you all to go rediscover some old album that you overplayed and give in to what you used to love about it? Now I ask you to do one better….Go find an album that you bought but never really got into and give another listen with new ears. That is what I did this week and now I’m OBSESSED with the Postal Service album, “Give Up.” I know, I know… This album came out LAST FEBRUARY and everyone was all abuzz then about how great it was and how warm the electronica was and how great Ben Gibbard sounded. I thought it was pretty good and then totally forgot about it. But since I’ve been going through my Rilo Kiley phase, I decided to give another listen to the Postal Service (cuz Jenny “Hannah Nefler” Lewis sings on it). Omigod, it blew my fucking mind! It fizzes with new wave synths and cool, lux electronica beats but Ben Gibbard’s lyrics and his whispered croon layer an emotional top to the music. My two favorite songs are “Such Great Heights” (which is rumoured to be about his relationship with Jenny!) and “Nothing Better” which is a version of Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” for the new millennium set over Casio keyboard tones that I seriously thought might’ve been sampled from the Super Mario Brothers game soundtrack. I can’t stop listening to it!
5) Do you know that I got almost 60 hits in one day yesterday? The weirdest part was that almost all of the searches that brought people to Retown were on Maria Menounous. I can’t decide which is weirder: that THAT search brings you here (did I ever even write about her?) or that that many people are interested in Maria Menounous?
6) I must admit that, although the new TV season has started, I haven’t really been watching any of the shows. Which is weird cuz I’m kinda a couch potato. I am trying to get into the Wire (to have something to replace Six Feet Under with), which is fairly easy since the writing is some of the smartest I’ve ever seen on television (even if I’m not entirely sure what the fuck is going on, plot-wise!). The only other shows I’ve even caught are Real World Philadelphia (because it is set in my home town) and the Surreal Life. I think the Real World casting people pick worse people every year. It’s like they are specifically trying to dare me not to watch. This season is populated with the most hateful cast ever—though I can’t decide who deserves a lifetime of explosive diareahea more: MJ, the southern asshole who looks like Justin Timberlake if he we beaten with an ugly stick and was slightly retarded, or Sarah, the “I fuck like a guy” girl who totally can’t handle fucking like a guy! (She’s already cried when she kissed MJ and then he gave his number to a girl at a bar!!) The Surreal Life though is amazing. Seriously. If you aren’t interested in watching Brigiette Neilson and Flava Flav get it on, then there is something wrong with you! Plus you have the added bonus of crazy Charo (Brig is a “crazy bitch”) and getting to watch Jordan Knight cope with his serious social anxiety disorder. I can’t believe this is an actual TV show! It’s like watching a car accident. But, like, a car accident of clown cars stuffed with B-list sub-lebrities.
7) I had my first run-in with a non-outdoor rat. It was very upsetting. I’d say more about it but I honestly can’t think about it without gagging. I’m totally trying to suppress the memory of seeing it’s fleshy, pink little tail scurry across the floor in what was Jen and Marisa’s apartment (now, sadly, it is just Marisa’s!). I had to sleep on the couch because I couldn’t stomach going into Marisa’s room because that is where the rat ran. I know you must think I’m totally neurotic but there is NOTHING grosser or scarier to me than rodents. Seriously. I think it even freaked out their dog because not five minutes after the rat sighting, she squatted and peed on the floor.

You know, I would try and come up with three more things to rant about so the list could be at an even 10, but I’ll let you marinate on these 7. After all, I think I’ve left you with a nice little image—dog piss and rats. And that is what Retown is all about, really. Well, that and hating California!

California Uber Alles

My sister moved to California. The OC, to be exact. I’m trying to not be too broken up about this and be happy for her because this is what she’s wanted for a really long time. But I miss her already and can't believe that she's so goddamned far away.

Now I have a well-documented hatred for the state of California (especially Southern Cali). It’s too warm, people get too much sun, no one can dress for shit (people, yoga clothes are only appropriate if you are DOING YOGA, not if you are out for drinks on a Friday night!), and you spend way too much time on the goddamn expressway in your stupid car. I mean, there is a reason that California is going to fall into the ocean eventually. Why-o-why is everyone that I love moving there? Southern California is like a disaster movie--mudslides!earthquakes!fires!-- with overly blond, plastic surgury freaks in freakin' Juicy Couture velour track suits!

But--I must admit-- as I sit here shivering in my office (because, even though it is like 60 degrees and about to rain outside we have the A/C on full blast) looking at a forcast on weather.com that calls for rain all week long I must say that it looks nice that for the next week in Newport Beach it is going to be 80 degrees and sunny.

Your cheatin' heart

There’s not much going on here—aside from the fact that this is Jen’s last week in New York (which is a topic I refuse to discuss or, frankly, accept).

I have, however, been marinating a lot recently on cheating. For some reason it seems to be the topic of conversation this week. I have friends who are trying to date people that are in long-distance committed relationships, friends who are screwing married people, and friends in serious relationships who are screwing someone else. I feel like I’ve given more advice on cheating in the last couple weeks that I ever have in my whole life. Which is especially weird since I’ve never cheated on anyone. Nor have I, to my knowledge, been cheated on. (Unless of course you are counting my gay boyfriend—but in that case we both openly hooked up with other men so no one’s feelings were hurt.) This has less to do, I’m sure, with the quality of my character and more to do with the fact that I don’t really do “dating.” I mean you can’t really cheat or be cheated on if you are just casually screwing someone. Or…say, if you don’t know the other person’s last name.

The drama queen in me can imagine how hurtful cheating is. I think I might even feel worse if I was the cheater than if I was the cheated on. (But I honestly think I’d rather just break up with someone—and I HATE doing that—than cheat on them. I don’t think I could do it.) And, I think, as someone who sees too many movies (and too many Lifetime TV movies, at that!) I can totally imagine myself as the wronged wife or even—in my imagination—as the straying woman but I have spent very little time imagining myself as the third party. I mean how culpable are you if you are the “other woman?” I mean, you know that it is wrong to fuck someone else if you are dating someone, but how wrong is it to—as a single person—fuck someone you know is in a relationship with someone else? Pretty wrong, I know, because we should all “do onto others as we would have done onto us” and because of karmic retribution and blah blah blah… But I actually found myself giving advice to one of my girlfriends this week—advice that I actually believe, I might add—that, if she really likes someone and he has admitted to really liking her and he has a girlfriend that she shouldn’t feel guilty about going out with him because (as a single gal) she’s free to go out with anyone she wants and it is his responsibility to keep it in his pants unless he wants to break up with his girlfriend. I also parroted magazine sexpert advice to another friend who cheated on her significant other with a one-night stand. “Jamie Buffalino says don’t tell your partner if you committed a one-time indiscretion,” I told her. He says that admitting your wrongdoing only serves to make you feel better and less guilty and usually ends up ruining your relationship. But—lest you think I’m some total amoral libertine—I also totally condemned my friend who is fucking the married person. I don’t know. I don’t think I am qualified to give anyone any advice about cheating. All I know is how I’d want to be treated and if I was married to you, you’d better be committed to only sleeping with me. And if I was dating you and you had a one-time fling with someone (and that fling taught you that you didn’t want to ever cheat on me again and you felt terrible etc.) I wouldn’t want to know about it. And if you were my boyfriend and you lived all the way across the country from me and you met another woman you were attracted to and wanted to make a go of things with her—yeah, I’d be pissed off but I’m not sure I really believe in long-distance relationships and I think that you’d owe it to yourself and to us to see if things worked out better for you with the girl who shared your zip code. But again, I don’t really date, so what do I know?

What I do know is that I’ve found the perfect soundtrack for all this cheating talk swirling around me all week. Mothertruckin’ Rilo Kiley. You must forgive me for being so hyberbole prone. I know I get obsessed with one band and blog about them ad nauseum until I find another band that I’m obsessed with. (This became perfectly evident to me when I was checking blogpatrol to see how people found this blog and like 32 people found it by doing google searches related to the Killers or the phrase, “you had a boyfriend who looked like a girlfriend!”) But that band is currently Rilo Kiley and—just like Bright Eyes has, what I think, is the most perfect song ever written about a one-night stand—they have the best song about cheating that I’ve heard in a long time. And the best part is that they surround the story, narrarating from all the different sides of the love triangle. At first you find yourself on the side of the narrator who lives in California and is pining away for this man who lives across the country and is married to her friend. He and his new wife are expecting a baby and run an antiques shop together and seem happy and the narrator is wistfully happy for them—though she is still getting letters from this man proclaiming his love for her. (He says that he’ll leave her and come out to California.) But, by the end of the song, you can’t help but feel bad for this new wife who is shakily trying to make her marriage work even though she knows that her man is being unfaithful with her friend across the country. And you realize that none of them will be happy. I get chills at the last part of the song when Jenny “Hannah Nefler” Lewis sings:

“Late at night
I get the phone
You're at the shop sobbing all alone
Your confession it's coming out
You only married him
You felt your time was running out
But now you love him
And your baby
At last you are complete
But he's distant and you found him
On the phone pleading saying "Baby I love youAnd I'll leave her and I'm coming out to California"
Let's not forget ourselves good friend
I am flawed if I'm not free
And your husband will never leave you
He will never leave you for me”

It gets me everytime. In other breaking show news…. Bright Eyes has announced a New York show (he is only playing this fall in “swing states” as part of moveon.org’s Vote for Change show with Bruce Springsteen and others). He is playing next Thursday at Northsix (one of my favorite venue’s in New York—mostly cuz it’s down the street from my apartment!) as a benefit for the RNC protestors’ legal defense fund. They just announced this show, but it’ll be sold out by the weekend. Don’t say you weren’t warned. Tickets are $15 and the proceeds are going to a good cause.

It's a nice day for a white wedding...

I attended the second or third wedding (depending on whether or not you count my appearance at my aunt’s wedding in 1980) of my life this weekend and I learned some valuable lessons. Wedding bands, no matter how proficient at playing Motown standards, should not play rap songs. There is nothing more hilarious than a bunch of rich, white folks shaking their collective asses (badly, I might add) to a bunch of 40-year-old never wases saying things like “Don’t want to meet your mama, just want to make you come-a.” Though I’m totally over Hey Ya and would be happy to never hear it again, it is especially sad to hear it sung at a wedding where any spontiaity and sexuality has been drained from it like the color from my face when I realized that the wedding band also plays inappropriate songs like Rock the Casbah. If I was ever to have a big, fancy wedding (which I would never do) I would totally have a DJ. No wait, fuck that….I’d be the DJ.

Also- and this is less something that I learned and more a lesson that I hope you, as the general public, will learn and take to heart- when a girl drags herself to a wedding without a date it is not polite to ask why. Needless to say, my sister and I were the only girls present at Sunday’s affair without an escort- which would have been fine if everyone hadn’t felt the need to come up to the poor Raber sisters and find out why were such lepers. I told Leah that I wished I had the balls to answer, “Because my girlfriend couldn’t make it,” but I have a sneaking suspicion that my parents friends already think that, because I haven’t introduced them to some nice Jewish boy from Long Island, I’m a lesbian, so why perpetuate the rumor. So I devised two failsafe answers to the questions, “Where is YOUR date?” that basically shut people up but stop short of saying, “You ridiculous ass, what kind of question is that?” Answer #1: “Dates really get in the way of my drinking agenda.” (This works best if said in between gulps from one of the TWO glasses of booze you are holding) Answer #2: “He’s right here. His name is Captain Morgan.” So basically all of my parents friends think that their daughters, while dateless and sad, are fantastic alcoholics.

This wedding also re-instilled a burning desire in me to start a cable access channel devoted solely to showing videos (wedding, bar mitzvah, etc.) of dressed up white people dancing. Come on! That is hilarious. I’d totally watch that channel. Moms, dripping in diamonds, bumping and grinding with their daughters drunk boyfriends. Dads doing the white man’s overbite. Everyone overcompensating for their lack of rhythm by singing along loudly to wildly inappropriate songs. (“Get on the scene, like a sex machine!”) This channel would totally be a hit. Stoners, college kids and black people across the city would pee their pants watching.

The main thing I learned from this wedding though, aside from the fact that most of the girls I went to high school with are major douchebags, is that, if I ever get married, I totally don’t want a wedding. I want to elope to Vegas or some pretty beach somewhere and then come home and throw a big party with all of our friends and family that people could come to in jeans. I don’t give a rat’s ass about a fancy dress or beautiful flowers or caterers. I just want something low-key and fun that is really about celebrating my marriage (and getting ravingly drunk, of course) and not about the nonsense (and EXPENSE) of some frilly, girly party. I don’t want nightmares about table settings. I don’t want groomsmen in ugly white tuxedos. I don’t want to pick out bridesmaids dresses or a ballroom or a cake that looks beautiful but tastes like something you’d get in your high school cafeteria. Fuck that. It’s so not important. Does that make me a traitor to my gender? Every woman (at least the ones on TV) always says, “I’ve been planning my wedding since I was a little girl.” REALLY? I’ve never once stopped to plan my wedding. I was too busy planning my actual life- like what I wanted to do for a career and where I wanted to live. I’ve got better things to do than spend 15 years salivating over some overpriced white dress. If that sounds like bitter, single-girl rhetoric, I’m sorry. But, it’s true.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever get married. (I can’t imagine feeling that way about someone- wanting to spend forever with just one person and wanting to be a real grown up with them.) But I am sure that I definitely don’t ever want a wedding.

Born in the USA

I feel kind of bad about how apathetic I’ve been during the whole RNC in NYC thing. As a kid who was totally enamoured of the 60s, I liked to imagine that I would’ve been part of the making of history: getting tear gassed at Berkeley or Columbia or beaten at the DNC in Chicago in ’68. But people have been making history all week long here in my hometown and I’ve stayed far, far away. I think I now know for certain that- had I been born 30 years earlier- I would’ve just smoked a lot of pot and dropped a lot of acid but I probably wouldn’t be bothered to take over any administration buildings. (It would’ve been cool to see bands though! Young Bob Dylan! Hendrix! Zepplin!)

While others of my generation were busy being arrested (and I know there were almost 2000 of them- I know this cuz I had to type up all of their names for next week’s issue at work!) I was sitting on my ass at home and, you know what, I wasn’t even WATCHING the convention. Nope, I watched A Chorus Line (say what you will, I think this movie is HILARIOUS! The best number is clearly Richie’s song about “doing it in a graveyard.” I just about peed my pants when he sang, “And then we did it again.”), lots of SoapNet reruns of All My Children (they are locked in a very Agatha-Christie-like game of murder that is going to lead to actual murder and I’m very caught up in the drama of it…is that sad?), and more MTV2 than I care to admit. I did make sure, however, to tune into the Daily Show so that I could check up on the ridonkulous things being said at the convention, but I couldn’t actually watch the convention itself. Not because I didn’t care. On the contrary, because I cared so much that it was upsetting. It was upsetting that Arnold “I admire Hitler” Schwartzenegger said that he was a Republican because of Nixon and reduced people with actual, legitimate concerns about the way Bush has handled the economy to “girlie-men,” which isn’t even one of his lines- it’s a line from an SNL skit about Arnold-like bodybuilders. It was upsetting that Zell Miller went crazy on the stand giving a keynote address that, in comparison to Obama’s at the DNC, looked like a rant at a Klan rally. It was upsetting that the Republicans felt the need to attack John Kerry (who’s the flip-flopper, Bush? I believe it was you who said one day that the war on terror couldn’t be won and then a day later changed your tune!) instead of talk about issues because they know that they have a weak leader with a poor track record to stand behind so it’s easier to throw vitriol at their opponent. It was upsetting that the Republicans trotted out families of 9/11 victims and tried to use New York City as a stage to prey on the nation’s sympathy. Fuck you. This is my home. 9/11 is not your tragedy to exploit. That is despicable.

Whatever. This isn’t a political website and I don’t claim to understand the ins and outs of the political process. But this week I was glad I was a Canadian.