I'm completely mesmerized. I can't stop watching it.
October 12, 2006
October 08, 2006
October 02, 2006
"Just hear this and then I'll go..."
So James Blunt, top of yet another list (via George)? So depressing, and not in a good way.
Inspired by the blandness of the popular choices, I decided to glance through my iTunes library for good funeral songs, and I found a few. The following would be on my top-ten list of songs for a funeral, and probably in this order, playing throughout:
- Spoon, "Anything You Want"
- The Beach Boys, "I Know There's an Answer"
- Dusty Springfield, "I Can't Make it Alone"
- ABBA, "Fernando"
- The The, "Love is Stronger than Death"
- Prince, "Another Lonely Christmas"
- Ghostface Killah, "Underwater"
- Jimmy Cliff, "Many Rivers to Cross"
- Patsy Cline, "Sweet Dreams (of You)"
- The Go-Betweens, "Love Goes On!"
These aren't necessarily all about death, and more importantly, they're not all really that completely sad [1]. It gets a little bit sad around the middle with The The, but then it lightens up (or something) with Ghostface Killah's "Underwater," a truly bizarre & stunning track from this year's Fishscale, which details a trip, well, under water, through pearls, mermaids, & Sponge Bob. And then it gets a little bit sad again, what with Jimmy Cliff's "Many Rivers to Cross" & the very sad "Sweet Dreams (of You)" [2].
But then, at the end, there's some light & love with the Go-Betweens' "Love Goes On!" from the exquisite 16 Lovers Lane.
Because: see that exclamation point in the title? That means it's not all about doom & gloom! It's happy in its sadness! It takes pleasure in being morose! But most importantly it captures joy, & sadness, & hope all at once, and I don't know if you can ask for much more than that.
[1] Into which category I'd probably put something like Jeff Buckley's "Last Goodbye," which is just too sad for words, and so sadly doesn't fit my overall theme.
[2] There's this scene in Coal Miner's Daughter, the Loretta Lynn biography, where Loretta has just heard on the radio that Patsy Cline died in a plane crash, and "Sweet Dreams" is playing in the background. At least, that's how I remember it, and it's completely heartbreaking.
September 26, 2006
"Hey girl... is he everything you wanted in a man?"
Just so you know, the best 3-song progression of 2006 is: [1]
4. My Love (listen)
5. LoveStoned/I Think She Knows interlude
6. What Goes Around... / ...Comes Around interlude
From, of course, Justin Timberlake's FutureSex/LoveSounds, which gets better every time I listen to it.
Speaking of which, the night of the JT concert in New York, Justin performed at the VMAs, and I kept forgetting to check out his performance. Tonight I watched it, and damn, it's really good.
[1] And "My Love" is the best pop song of 2006. Yes, it is, it's so good!
September 21, 2006
TV makes me happy.
Oh, the middle of September, when television begins again!
This week, the new cycle of Top Model premiered. I am happy.
Tyra says: stripping is not modeling... BUT: modeling is all about "gay boys and sex" (said in a very vampy voice, naturally). Send your own Tyra (voice) Mail!
And last week, the new season of Survivor! And this week, a new episode! It's the race one, you know, which is like, the most brilliant thing ever, and but so this week it got even better, when Billy (OMFGZ Billy!) pronounced his love-at-first-sight for Candice. And so the thing was that when they showed his weird little "I love you" after the challenge, I was like, um, creepy, but then actually seeing him saying that it was mutual started to make me sad.
And oh, Bill Clinton on the Daily Show, which we just watched tonight! I could hug that man.
September 15, 2006
September 04, 2006
"I sit on the ridge at dusk..."
My most recent batch of music store purchases has left me in a sort of post-rock haze, wondering what's become of my musical preferences [1].
Besides the Mountain Goats Get Lonely [2], my latest haul included: Talk Talk's Laughing Stock, which I mistakenly decided to shove on in the car on the way home from the record store, only to ask myself what the fuck I was thinking about five minutes later [3]; the Dirty Projectors' The Getty Address, which I masochistically listened to on my next car ride, and which actually fit a little bit better if only because it's sort of a road-trip/discovery type of album [4]; and Matthew Friedberger's Winter Women/Holy Ghost Language School double album, which is the poppiest of all three of these, but still pretty fucking inscrutable.
Anyway, all of this is to say that if you hear me humming a Franz Ferdinand track, this is probably (the only reason) why.
[1] Which is not to say that I don't like this stuff, or that underneath it doesn't have pop sensibilities, &c., but really only to say that this is not particularly catchy music.
As a demonstration of which, take this example: all of the above left me so yearning for a catchy melody that, on a recent flight, I even enjoyed the Killers track at the end of The Matador.
[2] Which isn't necessarily catchy, but it's also not that hard to parse, musically--it just happens to be really fucking depressing.
[3] ... for putting it on in the car, not for buying it in the first place. I'd seen it mentioned a couple of times on ILM as a sort of equivalent in the career-trajectory sense to Scott Walker's Tilt, which interested me immensely. And then I also saw Michael mention it, so I added it to my list.
But it's not really car music.
[4] This album perplexes me. If you catch a five- or ten-second snippet of it, it sort of sounds unlistenable (as well as unclassifiable), but listened to in whole it's seriously one of the most comforting, warm, relaxing albums I've heard in a long time. In that way it reminds me of the KLF's Chill Out (about which I could, and will, write a full post someday), also a travel album, & also an impossibly relaxing album.
August 27, 2006
QotD: I'm reading (or about to read)...
What books are on your nightstand?
Having just finished Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age this evening [1], I've got the following books queued up next:
All books about food! I guess I'm a bit obsessed.
[1] I'm working my way backwards through Stephenson's stuff, though of course I did read the Baroque Trilogy in the proper order, as doing otherwise would've been fairly silly.
TDA started out a little bit slowly for me--which always tends to be the case more w/ fiction than non-, just because I don't really care that much about anyone in the story, and it has no grounding in reality. But and also I'm not really a fan of science fiction that much--or really, fiction in general--and so it took me about a week to get through the first 75 pages of TDA, because it suffered from some of the typical things that annoy me about science fiction, particularly the overuse of jargon-y language.
But once I told myself to just sit down and fucking read it this weekend, it turned out that I really loved it, as I figured I might. What struck me most about it is how apt its subtitle ("Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer") is--said primer is one of the key items in the book, obviously, but it's also a remarkably apt description of this book, in the way that it's basically a young Victorian woman's saga wrapped up in science fiction garments. Which probably explains why I enjoyed it more than most science fiction.
August 21, 2006
QotD: In Heavy Rotation
What albums are in heavy rotation for you right now?
My current favorites, both old & new:
All perfect summer fare: CSS, wonderful & wicked fun (listen to "Music is My Hot, Hot Sex"); Richard Hawley, mellow & fantastic for a relaxing weekend; A Tribe Called Quest, timeless, smooth, & just incredible.
August 20, 2006
2 Read
There's probably something longer to write about this, being as how much I absolutely adored Infinite Jest [1] & pretty much everything else that David Foster Wallace has written, but I just love DFW writing about tennis, and his "Roger Federer as Religious Experience" fit the bill for a good Sunday morning read. (via Kottke)
And as for books: I've been intermittently reading Marc Romano's Crossworld over the past couple of weeks [2], and it's good, though not great. But I sat down & finished it this weekend, and really, really enjoyed the following passage.
The scene is that the publisher of Games magazine, where Will Shortz was working, set up a meeting between Will and Bill Clinton, while Clinton was running for president. For the meeting, Will prepared a fifteen-by-fifteen crossword puzzle. Clinton warned that he was busy with the campaign & wouldn't have much time for the meeting, but:
Once Clinton saw that Will was in earnest, he agreed to doing the puzzle. He told an aide that only the most urgent calls were to be passed through, clicked the timer on his wristwatch, and set about solving Shenk's grid. Will fell silent, but Clinton said, "Go ahead; don't stop asking me questions," and he answered them as he filled in the puzzle. About three minutes into the proceedings, the phone rang; Clinton clicked the timer off and answered the call, which was long and involved. (Will later found out it was from the Reverend Jesse Jackson.) When he was done, he clicked on the timer again and finished the puzzle--in six minutes fifty-four seconds. When the meeting was over, Will and Shenk looked at Clinton's answers. They were 100 percent correct.
Yet another reason to love Bill Clinton: he's brilliant at crosswords!
[1] a summer reading project, if there ever was one, and it was, most definitely, for me, back in college.
[2] hoping for something as brilliant as Stefan Fatsis's Word Freak, but never really finding it, in Crossworld.