Other 2014 favorites

I have already written about my favorite movies, books, and some beauty loves of 2014. Since I'm on a roll, I thought I'd wrap it up with some of my other favorites/recommendations. I know I'm forgetting some greats, but unfortunately I did not do a good job of recording my loves as the year progressed - this is all coming from the top of my head. Feel free to share your loves with me as well.

TV/Internet:

• Orphan Black - Folks, I am obsessed with this show. I am in awe of Tatiana Maslany's chameleon-like skills in portraying about half a dozen different characters on the regular - fully formed, unique women, who happen to be clones. Love the little bits of humor mixed in with the big mystery (that has to do with science!), and really appreciate Paul's abs. (I am very shallow.)
• Parks and Recreation - I love this little show, love the cast, am sad it is ending. It never fails to put me in a better mood. Three words: Treat Yo Self. 
• The Good Wife. I have been a fan of this show for years, but they really shook it up and knocked it out of the park in 2014. (And not just because they added Matthew Goode to the cast, which was a great move as far as I'm concerned.)
• Jane the Virgin: I did not expect to like this show. The title, the premise (about a virgin woman getting accidentally artificially inseminated), and the fact that it was on the CW did not add up to a winning formula for me. But then I watched it, and it turns out it's funny, smart, and sweet, as well as a clever send-up of telenovelas. I'm a fan.
• Mamrie Hart/You Deserve A Drink: This woman cracks me up on the regular. Love her quirky/weird improv-y Mametown videos, and her punny/funny You Deserve A Drink series, which besides a good laugh, provides some interesting cocktail recipes. Plus she wrote a movie, Camp Takota, and actually got it made, co-starring herself along with two of her best friends (who are also very funny ladies on YouTube.) I have much respect for a woman who will use just about any excuse to bust out a costume and a funny pop culture pun

Music:

• Betty Who - I've played her Slow Dancing EP countless times this year. Feeds my love of catchy pop music that is a pleasure to listen to, no guilt involved.
• Taylor Swift 1989 - I admit it, she got me. 
• Sia 1000 Forms of Fear - loved this album. Chandalier was the hit, but Elastic Heart was the one I kept listening to on repeat. 
• Sam Smith In The Lonely Hour - Had never heard of him until I saw his performance of Stay With Me on SNL, but after it I immediately pre-ordered this album. Happy with my decision.
• Tori Kelly's Dear No One is one my favorite songs of the past year - I perhaps related too well to this one. 

Food/drink/other

• Copperworks Distillery As I've said before, I'm a fan of booze tourism. Although I did get to visit some vineyards with much prettier views this year, my visit to this distillery in Seattle provided me with the most pleasant surprise: a gin I like! Their barrel aged gin was so good I had to buy a bottle despite the price tag, and I have been savoring it slowly since. 
• While talking about food/drink in Seattle, I have to say the crab and shrimp tator tots I had at the Steelhead Diner are one of the best things I've eaten this year. 
• Taco Bamba it took me awhile to finally try this excellent taqueria in my neighborhood, but now I'm a superfan. The "El Beso" taco is my crack.
• Tortilla soup in Phoenix. I've had it at several different places, including various hotels, and it has always been spicy deliciousness. 



View from WNYC Transmitter Park.

• Paulie Gee's really liked this pizza place in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and my culinary trip to NYC this summer in general. Enjoyed international cuisine in 3 boroughs in 2 days. I highly recommend it. :)
• Another great meal with a view I had this year was at Restaurant Montealegre in Valparaiso, Chile. The food and the view were both absolutely fantastic, and I just remember it being a super fun time with my parents. Highly recommend.

Tape love

Last year, in my frenzy to watch movies before all the major awards started being handed out, I hadn't been doing much book reading. With only so many free hours in each day, I usually fixate on one form of entertainment at a time. So, having reached my movie watching goal a little early, and thanks to some generous electronic-book-friendly Christmas presents, I started tackling some new books in December. And I've been averaging about a book a week so far this year.

It just so happens that the two of my favorite recent reads, Eleanor & Park and Love Is A Mix Tape, both of which I very much enjoyed and have recommended to folks who have expressed a similar book taste, had me reminiscing for the lost art of the mix tape. Then I started reading Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs that Defined the 1980s and, well....I saw a theme.

Eleanor & Park is a lovely story about first love, forged out of a shared taste in music, and solidified over mix tapes. Love Is A Mix Tape is the memoir of a relationship, with chapters framed using various mixed tapes that the couple made each other. Mad World, is, as the full title suggests, an oral history of music, mostly from the 1980s, framed around a handful of songs. Maybe not coincidentally, there are artists that make an appearance in all three books. And it has me all nostalgic about my old tapes.

Making a mixed tape was an act of love - because it took so much time to make one. You couldn't just click 12 songs from a list and burn them on a CD, you had plan ahead, making sure the running times for the songs on each side of the tape was right, so you wouldn't end up with too much dead time at the end, or that one side cut off a song before it ended. You had to sit next to your recorder to start and stop each recording. You had to spend TIME - so even if you told the person "no big deal, I thought you might like these songs" - it WAS a big deal. You would never make a mix tape for someone you didn't care about. Even if it was just a copy of a mix tape you made for yourself - you still had to take the time to make that copy.

So, if I made a mixed tape for you back in the day, know it was because I thought highly of you, and your taste in music. And to those who made tapes for me, in case I didn't say it at the time - thanks! Thank you to that friend in high school who made a tape of The Bangles Different Light for me - I still love that album. (And my favorite songs are not the biggest hits.) Thank you to the different friend who gave me a tape of the hits in Canada in 1986, which included Rumors by Timex Social Club, Lessons in Love by Level 42, and of course songs from Corey Hart and Glass Tiger. Thank you to the friend who made me the mix tape that introduced me to INXS, and my great love of the late 1980s, Michael Hutchence. Thank you to the guy who gave me that mixed tape of rock en español songs- I didn't get the hint at the time- but it was very nice of you. And though not a mixed tape, thank you to my stepmother for giving me that Escape Club tape as a present the first day we met. It's a tape I still own - not so much for the music, but as a keepsake memory.

So many of my friendships have been forged around a shared love of music. I have had way too many long phone conversations or online chats with friends that consist mostly of playing or sharing links to music we love. And I really love how just reading a mention about a song I love can so easily lead to me reminiscing about a time long ago and far away.

Now excuse me while I go dust off some of those albums I haven't shown love to in awhile. (And if you too are a product of the 80s, check out the excellent mixtape put together by the authors of Mad World... I'll be over here embarrassed that the only "rap" I know all the words to is from Wham!)

My soundtrack

I love music and I love movies. Nothing blends these two loves as well as a good movie soundtrack. The first album I remember buying was the GREASE movie soundtrack, and I have had a love affair with movie soundtracks ever since. FLASHDANCE, FOOTLOOSE, TOP GUN, PRETTY IN PINK, TWO OF A KIND, PURPLE RAIN, WHO'S THAT GIRL, LOVE ACTUALLY, JUNO, BOOMERANG, GARDEN STATE....I have purchased a lot movie soundtracks over the years.

So the other day while listening to music during my commute into work, my mind started to wander, as it often does. I started to think - if I could score the soundtrack to the bio film of my life, what songs would be on it? And I kept thinking about it - tough choices would have to be made. Because it would have to be songs that I not only love, but that would match a particular period of my life, or would work for particular scenes. Many of my all-time favorite songs would not make the cut. My weakness for pop music would probably make this an impossibly expensive album to put together in terms of licensing. But I put some thought into it, and I pared it down to this: the soundtrack to my life, so far.

Love songs

I take public transportation, and my commute into work can take anywhere between 45 minutes to almost 2 hours depending on what kinds of issues the Metro system is having that day. During that time, subject to my mood, I will either do some reading, listen to podcasts, and/or put the iPod on shuffle and see what comes up.

Today I went for random shuffle. Peter Gabriel's In Your Eyes came up, immediately followed by The Cure's A Lettter to Elise. I love both those songs. Like, a lot. I have cried listening to them, although not for the same reasons. They are two very different kinds of love songs. The first is all epic, and deals with finding that perfect someone with whom you feel complete, with choice lyrics like "I look to the time with you to keep me awake and alive" and is for many of us linked to Lloyd Dobler and that boombox. Whereas the latter is about a relationship that is probably ending, with lyrics like "I let the dream go and the promises broke and the make-believe ran out."

So because my mind often wanders when I'm just sitting on a train listening to music, I started thinking about love songs, and how they're split in the two camps, sweeping/hopeful/romantic, and mournful/heartbroken. And it seemed that many of my favorites fall into the second category. (Not sure what that says about me, but I don't feel like doing any self analysis right now.) Then I started trying to make a mental list of what all my favorite love songs are. Although my musical taste tends to be pretty cheesy overall, and I do enjoy a poppy love song, most of my favorites in this category don't really fall into that guilty pleasure category. I also concluded that a lot of my favorite love songs make really great background music for movie montages. (Again, let's not analyze that.)

Here are some of the songs I thought of right off the bat, besides the two already mentioned. They all stir up all kinds of feelings every time I hear them. There have been a lot of worn-out tapes and bad sing-alongs tied to each one of these.

• Donny Hathaway A Song For You If you don't get feels when you listen to this song, we just don't have much in common.
• Madonna Crazy for You - This songs transports me back to middle school, and that ridiculous crush. Who apparently never did feel the weight of my stare, or, if he did, didn't give a shit. 
• Elvis Costello She One of those sweeping love songs I like to imagine is being sung about me.
• Etta James At Last - A classic for a reason. I don't want no remake, give me the original every time.
• U2 Bad I have a real weakness for dudes that sing their hearts off onstage.
• Indigo Girls Love Will Come To You and Ghost both sung loudly and off key many a time.
• ABBA The Winner Takes It All - No list of my favorite songs doesn't include ABBA. If you've seen THE TRIP or MAMMA MIA, you know this one is a classic.
• Mecano Me Cuesta Tanto Olvidarte Pretty perfect song - trust me, even if you don't understand Spanish. (Also, please click on that link if only to check out the questionable and very 80s fashion and makeup choices.)

So those are a few of the love songs that get me so emotional...wait, did I leave Whitney off the list? Oops, my bad. If I thought about it more than a few minutes during my commute this would be a REALLY long list. So I'm going to stop thinking about it.

What are some of your favorite love songs?

Oh, memories

This morning a friend posted a link to one of Rick Springfield's many bizarre videos, which reminded me of what may be his video magnum opus, the video for the song Human Touch. And that is saying a lot, the man was like a machine of weird cheesy music videos with inexplicably grandiose plots. Human Touch is a lovely time capsule of what the video's director must have thought "the future" would look like back in 1983. Folks, in just 4 years (the video is set in 2016)  after some sort of apocalypse, people who were frozen in the 80s wearing some uncomfortable looking clothes, will be forced to use some really outdated technology, and will be in such dire need of human touch, they will spontaneously burst into bad choreography with their fellow survivors. Wonderfully kooky. I've watched the video about 3 times today, and giggled each time.

I was a teen in the 80s, and have the pictures of me with feathered hair and blue eyeshadow to prove it. As such, I have wonderful memories of all the incredibly bad music videos of the era, time capsules of the bad fashion choices and horrible acting that happened when musicians were forced to make music videos in order to reach the MTV audience. Most of the videos that I enjoyed at the time do not hold up well - and I'm pretty sure people watching them for the first time would be too busy laughing to enjoy the music. I have wonderful memories of incredibly odd videos from Duran Duran, Billy Idol, Hall and Oates, Pat Benatar, and of course my fav, Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart. I have no idea what the names of the boys in One Direction or The Wanted are, or how their music will hold up, but I know they don't have the moves of the first boy band I remember dancing to, Ronnie, Bobby, Ricky and Mike (plus Ralph), aka New Edition.

Anyway, I always love a trip down 80s music memory lane, especially if it features an awesomely overblown music video. If you have a fav, let me know, and let's keep this little nostalgia trip going. If it features a dream sequence, even better!

Singing gibberish

My recent obsession with PSY's GANGNAM STYLE and a conversation with friends about music in French made me think of all of the songs I've danced/bopped my head/sung along to without knowing what in the world the singers were saying. Given the popularity of English-language music worldwide, I'm sure I'm not alone - there are kids in South America singing along to Justin Bieber not really understanding the words coming out of his mouth - but I think it's super rare for that to happen here in the U.S., partly because we're generally not as exposed to world music.

I didn't grow up in the U.S., and I had quite a few friends who didn't speak English. As a kid, I found it hysterical to listen them sing along to their favorite Duran Duran song, because they thought it sounded just like what Simon Le Bon was saying, and to me it sounded like complete gibberish. Unfairly, they couldn't in turn laugh at me when I sang in Spanish - well, except to laugh at how horrible a singer I was.  The great equalizer was when a song in a language than none of us spoke became popular - then we all sang along with our own nonsensical lyrics.

A thousand wasted hours a day

I was just listening to the JV Club podcast with Jen Kirkman, and in it they talk about the music that influenced them as teens, and shared how much they loved The Cure's Disintegration album, which of course made me want to pull out my Cure playlist. Something about those long moody guitar intros take me straight back to high school.

The first The Cure song I remember hearing was In Between Days, still one of my favorites. I was in middle school. I immediately went out and bought Standing on a Beach, which was a greatest hits compilation that included that song. The real superfans, the ones who dressed like Robert Smith, looked down their noses at my Johnny-come-lately fandom - they owned Pornography on vinyl and I just had a cassette. But whatever, their last name was not the same as the name of the band so they were probably just jealous. And I'm pretty sure they didn't have to buy their album twice because they wore it out.

My first non-compilation The Cure album was Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, and it remains my favorite to this day. Sure it has some catchy poppy numbers like Why Can't I Be You and Just Like Heaven, but it was the moody If Only Tonight We Could Sleep and A Thousand Hours that really spoke to my angst-ridden teenage soul. And continues to speak to my inner 14-year-old.

   A thousand wasted hours a day, just to fill my heart for a second. 
   A thousand hours just thrown away, just to feel my heart for a second.

I mean, these lyrics were written specifically for angsty teenagers, right? Plus I love that the album cover was a giant pair of bright red lips....wait, is that where my red lipstick obsession first started?! (OMG, did I just have an epiphany while writing this?)

I know Disintegration is the favorite album of quite a few people, and I love quite a few songs from that album, but it's not the one I pull out to play from beginning to end on rainy days. That honor belongs to Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, the album that reminds me of the girl I used to be.

   Yeah I know who you remind me of
   A girl I think I used to know
   I'd see her when the days got colder
   On those days when it felt like snow
   You know I even think that she stared like you
   She used to just stand there and stare
   And roll her eyes right up to heaven
   And make like I just wasn't there
   And she used to fall down a lot
  That girl was always falling again and again
  And I used to sometimes try to catch her,
  but never even caught her name