Tusk > New York Cares Day

Tomorrow is New York Cares Day, and I have spent hours this week fretting about it (and minutes actually preparing for it.) Tomorrow I’ll be leading some 60 volunteers (out of a total of 8000 all around the city) in rejuvenating a K-8 school in Brooklyn, painting murals, organizing storage closets, and planting bulbs. Did you know I actually had to do a google image search to remember how the lines on various athletic balls look? I’m an idiot. I may have been terrible in gym class, but I was real awesome at the rest of school. Anyway, this morning I went to the school to make sketches, and a gym-full of sixth and seventh graders were made to thank me in a chirpy chorus. And despite having grown up to be a cool adult person, I felt a lot like a sixth-grade dork just then, intimidated by the crowd. Thank goodness I didn’t have to play kickball with them.

Autumn Songs: The way you can tell that, somewhere beneath my raw enthusiasm for pop music, I am a snob (the good kind) is that my favorite Fleetwood Mac album is Tusk. No question. The mad brilliance of Lindsey Buckingham won me over, the frenetic production choices, the sound of the group falling apart gloriously, excessively, addled, heart wrenching is audible throughout. The story is good too: Rumours blew the minds of everyone, sold more copies than anything, and propelled the band into a level of fame unheard of, and drugs and sex and romantic pairings and untanglings were all the more dramatic with so much money flying around, and being on tour. Having already sold all the records, by the time they were making Tusk, they had carte blanche to do whatever, and followed up the gigantic pop hit with this crazy sprawling double-LP (that’s four whole sides!) that didn’t generate any easy hits, or sell anything like the number of copies Rumours did. You should listen to the whole thing, all in one sitting. In the meantime, a Christine McVie song, maybe the catchiest on the album, and this awesome paranoid Buckingham thing that made me first realize that I totally love that guy and this album. (Ignore the video part of the videos, as always. Spiderman? Weird.) More Tusk coming soon.