2008 Year-end wrap-up

I’m pretty tardy with this, my second personal year-end report. But, better late January than never, right? So, here’s what I was up to:

1. In January, I finished up my first semester of law school by taking my fall exams. Celebrated being done with a weeklong trip to Chicago to visit Jessica and a whirlwind day back in Ann Arbor, before plunging immediately thereafter into the second half of my 1L year.
2. Around March, I locked up a volunteer position with these wonderful folks for the upcoming summer. Immediately started thinking about living in London all summer; immediately started worrying about paying for it.
3. By the end of May, I’d finished two weeks of exams, one week of law review competition, twenty hours of travel, and found myself in London. I proceeded to catch a cold or something immediately, and to my continuing shame I don’t think my nose stopped running for the full ten weeks. It says something, then, that despite my infirmities my time in London was amazing. I was especially happy that I got my family and Jessica each to visit for a week.
4. In late July, I found out that the week I’d spent on the law review competition paid off — I got on! This meant cutting short my time at home by a week, but I’m enjoying the experience of working on the Review so far. Back in Cambridge, I started the three week orientation in August, and began the fall semester immediately after that.
5. As soon as school started up, so did the on-campus interview season. Unfortunately, it was about this time that Wall Street institutions started dropping like flies. Of course, this hurt recruiting and raised the pressure for 2Ls in my position. By October, though, I’d done a number of interviews with firms in New York and Silicon Valley, and shortly settled on Davis, Polk, & Wardwell for next summer. Certainly excited about that — I’ll be splitting the summer between their offices in New York and Menlo Park.

All in all, 2008 put me on two continents and in thirteen cities for at least a night. (I tracked my major trips in Dopplr.)

1. Owosso, MI
2. Cambridge, MA
3. Chicago, IL
4. Ann Arbor, MI
5. Boston, MA
6. London, UK
7. Amsterdam, NL
8. East Lulworth, UK
9. Alpena, MI
10. Somerville, MA
11. New York, NY
12. Palo Alto, CA
13. San Francisco, CA

In keeping with my single-year tradition, I’ll also run down the best music I discovered in 2008.

• Algernon Cadwallader – Some Kind of Cadwallader (2008): This is probably a niche pick — if you weren’t into Chicago’s shambolic Cap’n Jazz in high school, you probably won’t dig Philly’s shambolic Algernon Cadwallader today. This band is unmistakably going after the Kinsellas’ sound, but it’s a pretty good sound to chase as far as I’m concerned. They’ve got a proper album out now, at any rate, and their demo is floating around the net.
• The Band – The Last Waltz (1976): What can I say; I’m late to the scene. I’d heard bits of this before, but never the whole thing. My introduction to the whole Last Waltz experience came this summer, about five in the morning, in surround sound. Good stuff.
• Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago (2007) and Blood Bank (2008): Yep. Just like everybody else this year.
• Boris – Pink (2006): I only knew of Boris as part of the Japanese noise scene before this year, and I was happy to remain at that level of distant familiarity. How wrong I was! As near as I can tell, there might as well be two Borises, and the one I was unfamiliar with is amazing. They’ve got the riffs of Black Sabbath, the drones of Blue Cheer, and the fuzz of probably seven or eight stompboxes in a row. I don’t like a lot of heavy stuff, but I really like Boris.
• Dr. Dog – Easy Beat (2005) and Fate (2008): Really like this band’s sound. For a while this fall, I’d been listening to Let it Be and wondering where that woody, rooftop concert sound had gone. One day, I happened to stumble on Dr. Dog, and these two albums really scratched that itch. Listening now, I don’t know if I’d compare it to the late Beatles, but the instrumentation and harmonies are right on. Even better, unlike some of their contemporaries in the guitar-fronted indie pop market, it doesn’t sound like they’re writing the same song again and again.
• Earth – The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull (2008): I know I said above that I’m not into much heavy music, and here I am citing Earth in addition to Boris. Actually, though, their last few albums (following a seven year hiatus) are a world apart from the traditional, massive Earth drone. The guitars are clean and the beat (as plodding as ever) washes over you rather than knocks you to the ground. This is great study music.
• Fennesz – Black Sea (2008): More ragged ambiance — I’m picking up on a trend in my listening this last year that I didn’t notice at the time. I’ve loved Fennesz’ prior work, in large part because it’s the kind of thing I used to aspire to, back when I was recording music. Black Sea is the winter to his earlier, and just as good, Endless Summer, and it’s destined for some black and white documentary footage near you.
• Fleet Foxes – Self-titled (2008): Back in the realm of the vocals, it’s no secret that this band got a lot of love in 2008. But let me add mine: this is songwriting as it should be done. And those harmonies! I haven’t been as excited for a “folk” act’s sophomore release since Iron & Wine.
• Jeff Tweedy – Living room shows: So here’s the deal: Jeff Tweedy (of Wilco) auctions off a solo acoustic show every year for charity. The winner invites friends over, and Mr. Tweedy plays everybody’s requests in the winner’s living room. He’s taper-friendly, so the last few years’ shows are available online. This might be another niche pick — if you don’t like Wilco, you won’t like Jeff Tweedy playing their songs — but I really loved both the idea and the execution. Wilco actually played a five night engagement in Chicago in February, in which they played every song from their major releases, but for my “money,” I actually prefer these stripped down, banter-heavy renditions.
• Keith Fullerton Whitman – Playthroughs (2002): This is the kind of ambient music I’m always looking around for. Not unlike Fennesz’s work, Playthroughs is mostly processed sound, with all the looping, loping feel that implies. Unlike his followers, though, Whitman created a really listenable piece of music from his source material. If you’re interested in experimental music from around the point where Powerbooks first started showing up on stages, start here.
• PAS/CAL – I Was Raised on Matthew, Mark, Luke & Laura (2008): As I said, I can’t believe these guys aren’t better known. After landing a perfect pop song in a ubiquitous Saturn commercial a few years back, PAS/CAL vanished. Finally, last summer, they released their first real LP, and I for one am glad I stuck around. Their sound hasn’t changed much from their beginnings, they’re as dandy as ever, and if you know my girlfriend ask her about the time Casimir Pascal made a pass at her — but they’re still writing brilliant pop hooks, and that’s all that matters.
• Sir Richard Bishop – Polytheistic Fragments (2007): In the vein of Robbie Basho and John Fahey, this is an album of fingerpicked guitar mastery with a heaping side of mysticism. It’s a good combination — at its best, Sir Richard Bishop’s guitar takes on a swooning quality, and the music fades into the background, until the next “how did he do that?” moment only a track away. A great break from my standard study, electronic music.
• Yesterday’s New Quintet – Angles Without Edges (2001): As I understand it, this is essentially Madlib (you’d better know him as half of Madvillian), alone in the studio with a bunch of invented personas that he’s assembled into a fictitious soul band. Got that? But none of that matters — you need only know that this is Madlib recording an album’s worth of warbling, Rhodes-inflected  grooves that nevertheless sound indescribably modern. If you accused me of prejudice, you’d be right — I do tend to presume that everything Madlib touches is gold. But his YNQ releases went a long way in forming that opinion.

And, although the number is a bit lower this year than it would have been for the last few, here are the books I can remember reading in 2008.

1. The Insanity Defense – Woody Allen
2. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
4. Harry Potter: Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix: J.K. Rowling
5. The Aleph and Other Stories – Jorge Luis Borges