Update on Ground Zero

I wrote a massive email today to a friend in India, catching her up on about a year’s worth of news. I was tapping it out on an iPod touch while doing errands all around town (Russ & Daughters was all out of the super special matzoh), and at one point I walked past the World Trade Center site. I work nearby, but I haven’t actually seen it in a long time.

One World Trade Center has been going up for a while, but it’s massive now! Wow. It must be fifteen, twenty stories tall already, towering over what is now a field of white cranes. They look like a herd of bleached sauropod spines. Bridges that used to look down into the pit are now dwarfed by the red girders; “Yankees #1!” is scrawled across the thickest horizontal.

I share this because after writing for six hours, you want something to show for it, something that can be shared with more than one person. Curse you, intimate details, sprinkled indiscriminately throughout this masterpiece of heartfelt correspondence!

Also: have you seen that building recently? I know it’s been a long time coming, but still. We don’t have a gaping hole in the ground anymore. Quite a feeling.

Opposite of Adults

The excellent music blog Pretty Much Amazing serves up a lot of clever, fun songs (Santogold and M.I.A. and Major Lazer!), but trendy music rarely has much staying power.

Rapping over a sample of “Kids” by MGMT—that impossibly catchy song you heard at every hipster dance party last summer— sounds like a recipie for just this kind of disposable amusement. Instead, “Opposite of Adults” by Chiddy Bang, which I found on PMA last week, is something I’ll be happily listening to ten years from now. It reminds me of Big Jaz or A Tribe Called Quest, that laid back, big hearted sound that never seems to get old.

Hip hop is brilliant at capturing and evoking nostalgia; see “It’s That Simple,” “T.R.O.Y.,” “Empire State of Mind,” “Concrete Schoolyard,” “A Wrinkle In Time,” and “The Art of Storytellin’ Pt. I.” That crashing hi-hat feels as joyous and innocent as we incorrectly remember childhood being.

So add this to your back in the day playlist. Click to stream, right-click to download.