The Cultured Girl

If you’re looking for some light reading for the approaching Labor Day weekend, you guys should enter the contest we’re having over at Fabsugar, where four winners will get a free copy of Laura Dave’s much buzzed-about novel, London Is the Best City in America. Just send an email to bookcontest@sugarpublishing.com and tell us about what you think the most fabulous city in America is. We will be accepting entries until 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time TODAY, August 25th. We will pick four lucky winners over the weekend, and winners should have their new books just in time for Labor Day Weekend.

Old favorites: The Ronettes, Sleater-Kinney
Upgrade: The Pipettes, We Are the Pipettes

Just watching the Pipettes’s music video for “Pull Shapes”—without sound, no less—convinced my roommate to buy this album. I’m glad he did, because the quirky, carousing songs live up to the hilarious Russ Meyer visual collage. Like the music video, the summertime songs on We Are the Pipettes conjure up a hodgepodge of eras: Swingy strings call to mind teen dances fraught with flip-hairdos, while the edgy British-accented vocal harmonies lean more toward 1990s riot-grrl rock. This may not be an album you hand down as a family heirloom, but it will be the perfect thing to take you through the end of summer.

Today is the 26th of July, which seems as good a day as any to mention the 26th of July Movement, which was the band of Cuban revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro who overthrew Batista and installed the current Communist regime. (July 26 is actually the date of a thwarted assault on a Cuban army facility in 1953; Castro didn’t actually assume power until 1959.)

For a unique perspective on the Cuban revolution, I highly recommend the memoir Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas. The fast-paced and artfully written book tells Arenas’s incredible life story, starting with his dirt-poor peasant childhood and a youth spent in Castro’s army, then moving onto his eventual persecution and imprisonment as a counterrevolutionary writer and homosexual. Throughout the story—which is weighted heavily toward tales of sexual exploits and gruesome violence—you also get a crash-course in Cuban history and an inside look at what the country was like before, during, and after the revolution. When you’re done with the book, or if you’re too lazy to start it, I also recommend the movie of the same name, starring Javier Bardem and featuring a delightful cameo from Johnny Depp.

Upgrade: Thom Yorke, Eraser
Old favorites: Radiohead, the Postal Service, David Bowie

Given the spastic freakouts of Radiohead’s last two albums, Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief, you might expect Thom Yorke’s first solo outing to be equally high-strung. But when left to his own devices, Yorke has relaxed, letting his pointed vocals and matter-of-fact lyrics take center stage over simple, layered arrangements. Eraser has Yorke still veering away from rock and roll, but now he’s going in the direction of mellow electronica—think Boards of Canada or the Notwist—rather than following the epic experimental path blazed by Radiohead as of late. While Eraser doesn’t break brilliant new ground, it is a captivating and cohesive album with several standout tracks, including the trancelike melodies of “And It Rained All Night,” the Eno-inspired pop of “Harrowdown Hill,” and the straightforward “this is fucked up” poetry of “Black Swan.”

Syd Barrett, the emotionally troubled but musically gifted co-founder of Pink Floyd, has died at the age of 60 of undisclosed causes. Barrett left the band very early on, in 1968, and he’s been living in relative anonymity ever since. But in his brief tenure as guitarist, he wrote some of Pink Floyd’s best songs, including most of the seminal 1967 album The Piper At the Gates of Dawn, while exerting great influence on the early psychedelic movement in Britain. He was also the inspiration for one of Pink Floyd’s greatest (and most accessible) albums, Wish You Were Here.

If you’ve never heard Piper, or if you haven’t revisited it in a while, I strongly recommend giving it a listen. Barrett’s songs on that record are truly singular in the way they blend trippy guitar work and cheeky, whimsical lyrics. Think catchy space-rock meets nursery rhymes. Just last week, in fact, his song “Bike” surfaced on my iPod, and I found myself smirking at brilliant lines like “I’ve got a mouse / and he hasn’t got a house / I don’t know why / I call him Gerald.” (Seriously, you have to hear this song.) With mice named Gerald and songs titled “Intersteller Overdrive” without the slightest sense of irony, Piper is a valuable relic. For even more Syd, pick up his quirky solo album The Madcap Laughs, which covers everything from psychedelia to off-kilter pop and even stunning ballads like “Late Night.”

Upgrade: Calexico, Garden Ruin
Old favorites: Elliott Smith, Graham Parsons

Arizona-based Calexico has pioneered a sound that might be dubbed “Southwestern folk.” Now, its newest album, Garden Ruin, suggests that the band’s whispery marracas and mariachi brass have collided with 1960s British rock on some dusty red highway. Hushed ballads such as “Yours and Mine” harken back to the languid instrumentals of early albums like Spoke. Then, sharply and efficiently, Garden Ruin veers into the unfamiliar terrain of rollicking summer anthems with “Letter From a Bowie Knife.” Perhaps the most telling track is the sultry and enchanting “Roka,” which uses a Spanish female vocal to accessorize an otherwise pensive indie-rock number.

Ok, so this may not be the most “cultured” thing in the world, but I’m not suggesting you use it to send thank you notes or anything: CareerBuilder.com’s Monk-e-mail lets you send messages of your choice in the form of an animated monkey. You can even select from different monkey characters, outfits, and accents. Trust me, send one to a friend, and it will really brighten her day, because everything is much funnier when uttered by a costumed monkey.

Most of the commuters I know swear by audiobooks, but buying them online can definitely add up. That’s why Librivox.org sounds like a really cool idea. (I discovered the site while browsing Budget Travel magazine, which I highly recommend, though the spinoff, Girlfriend Getaways, should be avoided.) Because Librivox only offers books and poetry in the public domain, all of the files are absolutely free, so you can listen to classics like Pride and Prejudice and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court without paying a dime, or turning a page.

It’s becoming more and more acceptable—almost expected—for cultured girls to slack off a little between between college and “adulthood,” whether that means taking six months off to travel or bouncing around aimlessly between jobs. After all, don’t all successful, creative people have a little bit of slacker in them? That’s the premise behind Tom Lutz’s entertaining book, Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America. The funny and fascinating chronicle traces the concept of laziness from Adam and Eve to the ancient Greeks to the Beatnik movement and Generation X. It’s full of fun tidbits, like the fact that Benjamin “Time is Money” Franklin took “air baths,” which involved lying nude on his bed for at least one hour a day. The book itself is a sort of lazy person’s education: In a mere 360 pages, you can brief yourself on such important historical subjects as the Calvinist movement and Marxism. Sure, we all have to work for a living, but if you believe Lutz, everyone needs some slacker time too.

Justice finally prevailed in the ongoing saga of Enron, when the company’s former execs Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling today were found guilty of fraud and conspiracy. Apparently not buying the argument that the defendants were clueless victims, the jury convicted Lay on 10 counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, and other charges, while Skilling was found guilty on 28 different charges.

If you’re still confused about the in’s and out’s of the Enron tale, I highly recommend the 2005 documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Far from a dull corporate chronicle, this highly detailed and chilling film has the effect of a horror movie that you can’t help but replay in your head. It’s full of juicy and tragic details and jaw-dropping examples of greed and gall that will help you understand why this is one of the most important news stories of the past decade.