boolar

y’ever get so bummed that you can’t be bothered to water the plants or feed the fish or pick up yer dirty clothes or wash the dishes or whatever? you know, one of those blah days where everything just seems so difficult turns into one of those blah weeks and the plants are wilting and you’ve misplaced the floor for all the dirty socks?

yeah, well, for me today, it isn’t just all of those things above, it’s also feed the sourdough starter and get the kefir grains into fresh milk and what about the kombucha and “what are you going to do with all of this rye and garbanzo beans that are sprouting on the counter and when are you going to do it?” and check the incubating tempeh or yogurt and water the plant starts that are filling every window right now and golly gee a happy hour cocktail over the crossword with maryam sure sounds lovely right now but all of that hard work certainly doesn’t.

my solution? prints. i love this lp.

bradley and i might claim that Harry Nilsson’s I’ll Never Leave You is our song, but the album we fell in love to is Howard Hello, a gorgeous album half made long ago by one half of Prints, Kenseth Thibideau.

This here Prints is different than that early Howard Hello. You like hand claps? You like grooves easily locked into? You like happy shimmery jangle pop well produced? You like Prints. There’s got to be some reason why Kenseth and Rob Crow work together so much, and I’m guessing it be the brilliant pop sensibility the two men share.

And this guy Zac, the other half of Prints? I don’t know much ’bout him ‘cept that one of his other projects is called Who’s Your Favorite Son God and that is brilliant.

Love you, I’m gonna go finish the dishes now. The tempeh’s alright.

I got one of the best birthday presents ever last week. A new friend somehow intuited my love for an album that I have on cd but have been wanting on vinyl ever so desperately (we don’t have a cd player at work, see) and brought me his very own personal copy!

It was about four years ago that Bradley picked up a copy of Bill Nelson’s The Love That Whirls (Diary of a Thinking Heart) on cd, which he found within walking distance of our Inner Sunset apartment at Amoeba Records on Haight Street.

If ever I came home from work or school and couldn’t find Bradley, I knew that he was one of two places: at the corner store, where Bradley’s “friend” would sell him a four-pack of Guinness in the can for seven seventy-five, in which case he would be home within minutes, perhaps with a piece of candy that his friend sent home for me, or he was at Amoeba, where he had no problem losing all memory of the outside world for hours at a time, combing the used cd and records methodically until he had gathered a huge stack of hopefuls which he would then look up in the reference books (which Amoeba thoughtfully kept on hand) for the year, producer, additional musicians, and any other information that would help him decide which he would buy and which he’d pass on.

It was, for me, a torturous process to watch, no matter how effectively it improved our collection. My own method was to check the used “new arrivals” section and then bounce from one place to another, guided by whatever popped into my mind (if ever at a loss, I’d go through the B, M, and S sections only, all are large and full of bands I love). I could never spend more than half an hour under those fluorescent lights and the irritating musical selections of the staff before my head would start to spin and I would just haftagetoutta there.

So now I am realizing that the day he unwittingly introduced me to Bill Nelson, we had already moved to Portland (which for the first several years was some kind of purgatory after the heavenly bliss of the Inner Sunset, a paradise we would try to revisit often… might I note here that I still haven’t found Indian food in all of Portland, let alone within three blocks of home, that can compare with Tasty Curry, where for less than $15 Bradley and I could eat ourselves sick on samosas and biryanis and dahls worth crying over).

So scratch the beginning of the story, here we were back in SF to visit. Bradley had heard all about Mr. Nelson because of his ambient works, and though he’d never heard anything about this particular album, wanted to take a chance on this cd with an elegantly simple black and white design.

He insisted that we put it on as soon as we got into the car (I was not as excited as he, you see, as he’d been putting me through a lot of experimental drone noise at the time, and so I resisted at first). It didn’t take half a minute before his exuberant expectation had given way to huge disappointment, but, boy howdy let me tell you that Bill Nelson rocked my synth-pop socks off from the very first shimmering track.

You like Kraftwerk? Eno’s pop records? Gary Numan or XTC? Give The Love That Whirls a chance.

Eventually, Bradley got what he was looking for from Mr. Nelson on records like Chance Encounters in the Garden of Lights, but I’ve yet to find a record of his that I like better.

And thanks to Daniel, I’ll be playing it in Tiga a lot this summer.