thank you notes 3/31

i'm thankful for next thing, the new album by frankie cosmos, which comes out tomorrow and is streaming free now on bandcamp. i'm thankful for her first album, zentropy, which was one of those great friendly artworks, like slacker or, that makes making artwork of your own feel so eminently possible. i'm thankful for this new album, which i think is an ideal second album, in that it gives me the same things i loved about the first album (the sweetness (both in timbre and in lyrics) of her voice, the shaggy (and shaggs-y) garage sunshine of the melodies, the play with the dynamics and wonky push-pull rhythms) but refines them (i'm thankful for the vocal overdubs and harmonies and the more prominent rhythm section, the rich sixteenth note basslines). 

i'm thankful for how short her songs are (i'm thankful for short pop songs, which beg to be played over and over again, the way that you can never eat just one fun-size candy bar) and how packed they are, for their small size, with beauty and surprise. i'm thankful for her casual diction and quotidian subject matter and for the way she constantly uses the names of her friends in her songs, which enlivens her rhyme schemes and makes her songs feel even more personal and reminds me of ray johnson and larry rivers and the new york school poets (cf kenneth koch's lines from "the circus": "I never mentioned my friends in my poems at the time I wrote The Circus / Although they meant almost more than anything to me / Of this now for some time I’ve felt an attenuation / So I’m mentioning them maybe this will bring them back to me / Not them perhaps but what I felt about them / John Ashbery Jane Freilicher Larry Rivers Frank O’Hara / Their names alone bring tears to my eyes."). i'm thankful that there is no one else in the office right now and i am listening to the album at my desk while i type this and feeling happy.

i'm thankful that though i was tempted by the package of two half-pound reese's cups that i saw while riding down the escalator at the pharmacy, i did not buy them. i'm thankful for the large bag of black forest gummy bears and worms we bought, even though they weren't as good as we hoped they would be. i'm thankful that mediocre gummies are still gummable and gumworth thankful to have learned from this experience: 1) that the bright pop of acidity in haribo gummy products is far superior to black forest, even if the black forest gummies have a nice texture and 2) that gummy bears are always better than gummy worms (i'm thankful to ponder whether it's something about their size? gummy worms always feel like too much in my mouth, even though the number of gummy bears i shove in is probably close to the same amount of gummy?)(i'm thankful to think that maybe it's actually the texture that's superior--the fun of feeling the little arms and legs and head and ears on your tongue versus the samey ridges of the worms).

i'm thankful that it was raining too hard this morning for me to bike to work, so i had to walk, even though that meant i had to leave earlier than i usually do and so couldn't lie in the warmth of our bed for as long looking at things on my phone. i'm thankful for variations in route and rhythm--i'm thankful that lately to enliven my bike commute, i've been doing slight variations on my usual routes, discovering and rediscovering streets and intersections. i'm thankful on my walk this morning to have made eye contact with a fireman polishing his fire truck at the fire station. i'm thankful to have witnessed a law student be excited to snag a prized street parking spot downtown and thankful that a block later, when we were crossing the street by the law school, he recognized a friend in the car that was waiting for us to cross and smiled and pointed back, bragging, at the spot he had gotten.

i'm thankful to have smelled the sweet smell of some colorful flowers in a bed by the sidewalk by the office. i'm thankful that because i was walking instead of biking, i could listen to music on my commute. i'm thankful to remember there is a whole world of walking music that i never listen to anymore because i bike commute. i'm thankful to have listened to "bohemian rhapsody," which is a fun song to listen to while walking through a dark rain. i'm thankful, as the rock opera played in my headphones, for the ballet of avoiding stepping in puddles, the en pointe maneuvers and skips, hops, and leaps. i'm thankful i only stepped in one puddle and it wasn't a big one.