about music, and the woods, and about God

I am so very excited for this.

Today Pitchfork reviewed the re-release of The Rural Alberta Advantage's debut album, Hometowns.  The RAA released Hometowns on their own last year, and I included it as an honorable mention in my post on the best albums of 2008.  After the first few listens I considered putting it in my top ten.  Part of that was because it's sound contrasted pretty strikingly with the main trends of the year.  I cooled a little on the album as I spent more time listening to it, and Pitchfork seems to like it even more than me now.

They're gonna be in Phoenix this weekend for just $8.  I'd like to go to the show, but Chase is out of town.  And since I went up a week ago and am going up again in a week, I don't really feel like making the drive for them.


The Pitchfork review got me to listen to the album for the first time in a couple months.  I still really like it.  And I think I mostly got it right [except that calling the album a "masterpiece" is a bit much (and calling Banwatt's tenor lousy is hyperbolic too), I'd change "crystal" to "sweet," and I could have written the mini-review a bit better]:

"...an indie punk masterpiece curbed by folk sensibilities. The lyrics evoke more David Wilcox than Joe Strummer, but RAA’s lead singer, Paul Banwatt, manages to strike a Jeff-Mangum-esque middle ground. He pushes his lousy, bleating tenor past its limits, but Amy Cole’s crystal voice softens Banwatt’s harsh edges. Hometowns does occasionally suffer from Banwatt’s nasally whine, and at times it feels like bad late-90’s California punk. Still it is an unusual and rewarding album for 2008."


I might also add, and not at all by way of derisive comparison, that it makes me want to listen to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea badly... just those first thirty seconds of King pt. I, at least.  And perhaps that's the biggest compliment I could possibly give the album.

Such tardiness being acceptable since they probably didn't sign on the fourth.

I made a mix for Ian so that, whilst in Oxford, he would not be tempted to pull a T.S. Eliot.

The music itself isn't themed or especially American--just the origin of the bands.  And the mix also isn't particularly good, though the songs are.  I'm mostly just pleased by the symmetry of the whole she-bang.


Don't Fergit Yer Country:
America, in Five Regions: A Mix

 I: The Midwest
1. "Anonanimal" by Andrew Bird, of Chicago
2. "I'll Fight" by Wilco, of Chicago
3. "Romulus" by Sufjan Stevens, of Michigan

 II: The Northeast
4. "So Far Around the Bend" by The National, of New York
5. "Two Weeks" by Grizzly Bear, of New York
6. "Young Adult Fiction" by The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, of New York
7. "Sleepyhead" by Passion Pit, of Massachusetts
8. "Wait for the Summer" by Yeasayer, of New Jersey
9. "Did I Tell You" by Yo La Tengo, of New Jersey
10. "Red Moon" by The Walkmen, of Philadelphia and New York

Interlude: Thanks for Trial by Jury, etc.
11. "Pyramid Song" by Radiohead, of Oxfordshire
12. "The Walls are Coming Down" by Fanfarlo, of London (and Sweden)

III: The Southeast
13. "Northern Lights" by Bowerbirds, of North Carolina
14. "Gospel Plow" by The Hackensaw Boys, of Virginia
15. "Peacebone" by Animal Collective, of Maryland
16. "Wordless Chorus" by My Morning Jacket, of Kentucky

IV: The Republic of
17. "Hail, Mary" by Shearwater, of Texas
18. "Balloon Maker" by Midlake, of Texas

V: The West
19. "My Wife, Lost in the Wild" by Beirut, of New Mexico
20. "Sanddollars" by Why?, of California
21. "Country Caravan" by Blitzen Trapper, of California
22. "Fisher of Men" by M. Ward, of Oregon

Closing the Circle
23. "Darkest Hour" by Megafaun, of Wisconsin


PS: I'm finally getting The Moon & Antartica thanks to the emusic Sony expansion... so it's not all sour grapes.

If only emusic had some stuff by The Knife I'd be going on a kick.  I have to settle for YouTube's table scraps.  And I had to job over to dailymotion to find a copy of the Heartbeats music video.  Trot over to i guess i'm floating and download "Parade" (the actual subject of the post, a remix of "Sleepyhead," is really worth your time too--as they say, almost as catchy as the original... and given that 90% of remixes destroy something good...).  It's definitely worth your time.  I don't know if they ever made a video for it (Also check out "We Share Our Mother's Health" in all it's weird music-video glory at YouTube.)

Every day I drive to the mountains to go home.  The hills at the foot of the Santa Catalina Mountains are only a couple of miles from my house, the mountains (namely, Mt. Lemmon itself) only a couple miles beyond the hills.  It's about a mile from Tanque Verde Road to my front door, and probably 3/4's of that is driving straight north.  Sometimes I have an odd image flash through my head about a tunnel under the foothills and the mountain itself in a direct line with Essel Road.  I know which house in the foothills and the particular ridge on the mountains I would drive under.  I prefer the idea of Essel turning into a mountain pass road rather than a tunnel, but that image doesn't strike my semi-conscious-self as much.

Today the cloud cover is such that the mountains are shrouded in shadow, with scattered appaloosa-in-negative bright spots, and I am listening to "Flourescent Half Dome" in the neighborhood.

[When you drive up in the mountains you can still see everywhere the devestation of two different fires, one of which destroyed a great deal of Summerhaven.  Ski Valley is the southernmost "ski destination in the Continental United States," our friends at Wikipedia tell me (there's skiing in Hawaii?).  Technically the size base-to-tip is less than a thousand feet, but most Tucsonans, in my experience, consider most of the range to be part of "Mt. Lemmon"... in an hour you can drive from Tucson, at 2,389 feet, to the top of Mt. Lemmon, at 9,157 feet... meaning that if the Santa Catalinas were near Colorado Springs, Mt. Lemmon would be a fourteener.]

These are desert mountains, so they are a mixture of brown and rock and washed-out green.  As I said, you can see the pines on the ridges behind, but these are not the dark green mountains of Colorado.  You can't quite tell where the saguaro's end or where the pine trees really pick up, but you can see the fully wooded ridges in the background.  In a month the monsoons will be deepening the green.  Someone from the East, as it were, might not notice at all, but for someone who drives into the mountains every day to go home, the transformation is magnificent.

Chase tipped me off to the Bowerbirds show in Tucson in August, after which I checked them out, liked them, and posted a great music video off their first album.

I just found out on the Club Congress site that their opener is Megafaun, a band I had first found via this Said the Gramophone post.  They have their debut album coming out a couple weeks before the show.  They have already put out an EP, a sweet freak-folk affair strongly reminiscent of Animal Collective's Sung Tongs mixed intermittently with Look Out! by the Hackensaw Boys.

Seeing Megafaun on the bill got me really excited for the show, so I decided to look a bit more at Megafaun.  I hadn't realized till now that they are generally best known as the band composed mostly of former members of Bon Iver's former band, DeYarmand Edison.  Which is a shame, because they're quite different from Bon Iver, and also very good, and very interesting.

To supplement the Said the Gramophone mp3, you can pick up other Megafaun mp3's legally here and here and here.

---

Also, "Sleepyhead" by Passion Pit.  I'm really enjoying their debut album Manners.  Sleepyhead was first on their Chunk of Change EP last year, and that's where the video comes from.



You can watch them perform it at the Interface.  It translated surprisingly well to performance; I suspected that Angelakos' voice would be a disaster live, but he sounds very good here.  Unfortunately they're spending most of 2009 on the other side of the Atlantic.  While you're over at the Interface, check out the recent Sigur Rós performances.

The Concert and then the Album (and then Krug the Genius)

The Concert: Part 1

Chase and I showed up a little after 10 PM, right before the second opener, the Witchies, got started.  Their first two songs were pretty good, and they had one or two more I liked after that, but there were a whole lot that felt pretty much like filler.

Sunset Rubdown hit the stage a little after 11:15 PM and opened with "Black Swan" from Dragonslayer.  On the whole they put on a very good show.  They all know what they're doing, and seeing the three guys not named Spencer Krug musical-chairs with their instruments (at first I wrote "play musical instruments" but then I realized that in no way got my point across) was pretty awesome.  You'll see in the video below the drummer at one point playing keyboard with one hand while drumming with the other.  Not too shabby.

Last summer, when I blogged about the Wolf Parade show @ the Rialto, I noted the slightly uneasy interaction between crowd and band, particularly when Spencer Krug literally shoved a drunk tool off the stage.  Rereading that blog now, I notice how Krug basically asked not to have to do the fake encore bullshit, the audience made him, and then they took especially, awkwardly, long to come back on stage.

Similar happenings this go-around.  Krug did seem to be enjoying himself about half-way through the show, and his crowd-banter picked up... until the following interaction, which Chase also described at the Sad Bear Blog.

Krug: "Do you all ever just find yourselves driving through the desert and listening to The Doors? Because that's what we did today... Well, we *had* to drive through the desert to get here..."
Douche: "Did you *have* to listen to the Doors?"

Chase and I exchange disgusted/horrified looks.  Krug looks mortified and a little pissed.  Also, a few seconds after that exchange, a drunk guy shouted "YOU SUCK!" either to the band or possibly the douche... then a few seconds later "...I'm kidding..."  Pretty much from there on out Krug looked unhappy with the crowd.  When they finished their set, instead of doing an actual fake leave and waiting for the encore, Krug said, "Give us a sec."  Now, I can understand how that unorthodox departure would confuse some concert-goers, but nevertheless, standing their dead silent without cheering or even clapping is, erm, pathetic.  Chase and I and one other random guy were shouting and cheering and clapping and everyone else was Dead.  Silent.  About a minute before the encore, when literally everyone but the three of us were either quiet or chatting with their friends, Krug made "cut-it"-type-motion to the sound guy... but then twenty seconds later two of them came on stage followed about five-to-ten-seconds later by the other (reluctant-looking) three.  Krug said, "Well that was f*****g awkward, and I just wanted to extend the moment."  Followed by final song (can't recall)...  Not a good way to close a show.

The Plush, by the way, is a fantastic venue.  Definitely one the better small venues I've been to.  The video Chase took turned out to be surprisingly good audio-wise.  The vocals, as you might tell, were a little more muffled close up than about three feet back and to the left, where the mix was a bit better.

"The Taming of the Hands That Came Back to Life" by Sunset Rubdown @ the Plush, June 22, 2009.



The Album: Part Two

From my very first listen, Dragonslayer leaped over Shut Up I Am Dreaming to become my favorite Sunset Rubdown album so far (I like Random Spirit Lover quite a bit too, by the way).  It shares the ethereal and otherworldly feel of Shut Up.  Dragonslayer, though, is less plodding than that album, while it doesn't have the frenetic pace of Random Spirit.  The only downside is that the closer isn't quite good enough to merit 628 seconds of the album's time, but it's still quite good, and I haven't gotten bored of it yet.  And the seven songs that precede are just fantastic.  Okay, I don't actually want to write any more about the album right now.  Suffice to say, it's one of my very favorites of the year so far.  I'd put it right up there with Veckatimest, Bitte Orca, and Merriweather Post Pavilion.


Krug the Genius

I don't intend to undersell the importance of the really excellent people he works with, particularly Dan Boeckner (Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs), Dan Bejar (Destroyer, the New Pornographers), and Carey Mercer (Frog Eyes, Swan Lake)... but seriously, has anybody else put out such a high volume of really good music in the last five years?  He's been a driving force behind nine full-length albums, all good (well, at least of the ones I've heard) and many that are really, really good in half-a-decade.  And while Apologies to Queen Mary still remains my favorite Krug project ever, Dragonslayer is a clear second for me, and I'm continuing to like it more and more.

 There’s nothing “New Radical” in American Pastoral.  Over the course of four-hundred-twenty-three pages Philip Roth unravels the American Dream, but there’s no smug pleasure in it, no loathing—no idiotic glorification of the 1960’s, no demonization of the West.  It is all tragedy, a slow collapse topped off by the jolt, the old liberal’s education in reality: Kennedy is dead.  Cities are burning.  The American Dream is suddenly the enemy?  The Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s wake in an American nightmare and wonder, “what the hell happened what is this goddamn place?”

American Pastoral is no political treatise disguised as a novel.  The best books—ones that deserve the effort of attention—do not float out in some artificial world.  They are palpably real.  Very little (some) in American Pastoral seems artificial or contrived.  It is partially autobiographical, and Roth constructs an account that feels authentic.  I would readily believe that 80-some-% of it has a loose connection to actual people and actual events.  At the same time there’s no “based on a true story” garbage and nothing like Roth’s attempt in The Plot Against America (or Don Delillo’s in Libra) to create a “counterfactual history” or “plausible counter-history.”  American Pastoral neither manufactures, as does science fiction, an imaginary world with imaginary rules to make an imaginary point, nor does it disingenuously muddle untruth and truth.  This partly accounts for how much better American Pastoral is than those two novels.

The first ninety pages are a day.  The middle hundred or so span about forty years.  The last two-hundred pages are a day. This ability to explore an entire life by covering a mere two or three days amazes me.  Richard Ford’s Independence Day covers three or four days in 400+ pages (and also wrestles brilliantly with very similar themes).  The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker unpacks a few minutes in 130 pages.  Some twenty pages might account for but thirty seconds of “real time,” but a magnificent and not-at-all-boring unpacking goes on at the same time.  These asides are anything but aside-from-the-point, and the worst response would be an impatient “get-on-with-it!”

[Speaking of which, I am exhausted from American Pastoral and, rather than launching right into The Crossing (Vol. II of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy)  as I had planned, I shall, by way of interruption or pause, reread The Mezzanine, as funny a novel as I know of.]

Nowadays the American Dream might as well be called the Republican Ideal.  Big shiny houses, big shiny cars, big shiny business, (rather small) shiny families.  But in a larger, older, wider sense the American Dream is a fundamentally liberal concern.  Only in the last four decades has new liberalism turned savagely against it.

If American Pastoral were the sort of self-satisfied, new-radical indictment of all things Western, I would have found it repulsive.  The unsympathetic superiority of those who breed chaos, who love to disillusion and embitter others since they themselves are so—I have no patience for that, for those who would replace materialism with anger, for those who prefer “honest” depravity to “hypocritical” mixed morality.  For those I merely say our options in this life are either mixed morality—the best we can hope for in this world—or Blood Meridian.

Let me say again.  There’s nothing smug here.  You never want the American pastoral to fail.  As it undermines, American Pastoral also underscores the beauty in America the Idea—not as a lie to spit on, but as a mixed, sometimes noble unreality, an often good-hearted failure to come to terms with human existence. vindicated.

PS: Dr. Gamble wrote a challenging reconsideration of Reagan the Conservative in this issue of The American Conservative.  Definitely worth the read.
PPS: Sunset Rubdown post forthcoming.

Grizzly Bear played a gorgeous set, heavy on Veckatimest material but they also played "Deep Blue Sea" and a number of songs from Yellow House including "Little Brother," and they closed with the second part of "On a Neck, On a Spit."

Wilco started a little slow.  Jeff Tweedy seemed a little uninterested, not very into it at first.  It was still shaping up to be a good, professional show until they played "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" and "Pot Kettle Black" back-to-back, maybe eight or nine songs in.  From then on out, it just rocked.  The show was, I think, weighted towards new material and stuff from Sky Blue Sky, which makes sense.

The highlights, for me, were "A Shot in the Arm," which really got the crowd going... and the entire seven-song encore... and Nels Cline, who is absolutely a badass...  They played for well over two-hours straight, with fun but pretty sparse crowd interaction--though Tweedy was more talkative as the night went on.  Their roadies were good, so transitions were quick and smooth, meaning they just packed in a ton of music.  The amount of music they covered was incredible, ranging all the way from A.M. to Wilco (the Album).  The encore was just a blast, though they made us work for a good while before giving it to us.  Somewhere in the middle of show, it seemed like the band started having a lot of fun.  They hadn't been to Tucson in 14 years, and there were a lot of longtime fans there who were going nuts.  Great great atmosphere.

Apparently Jeff Tweedy lived in Tucson for a year in junior high.  All he remembers, he said, was that a guy named "Boots" gave him "punk rock records" and "ruined his life."  Hah.

Let me again say that Nels Cline is a badass, in case you missed it above.

One of the best shows I have ever seen.  Just phenomenal.

Letterman called the dancers "tricker treaters" when they accompanied AC to perform Summertime Clothes on the Late Show.

Animal Collective like themselves a disconcerting video.  Nothing tops the Peacebone video though.

Merriweather Post Pavilion hasn't gotten any older for me.  It's phenomenal.  By the by, I found out on June 1 that Animal Collective was playing Tucson on May 31.  Damn.

Okay, okay, it's nerdville.  I like it anyway.

A: NOTHING.  That is, when your friend Hannah WINS TICKETS ON THE RADIO AND GIVES YOU ONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

FREE.

GRIZZLY BEAR
opening for
WILCO

Free.  For me.
 

eMusic is dead.  Or what it used to be is dead.

eMusic is adding Sony's back catalogue (i/e everything that's older than two years), jacking up prices (i/e my emusic quarterly account was 100 songs for $25.  Now it's $29 for 60 songs...).

They try to dress it up by showing how many fantastic new bands you get.  Among those mentioned: Alicia Keys, Dixie Chicks, Foo Fighters, Aerosmith, Journey, Destiny's Child, Beyonce, Celine Dion, Justin Timberlake, Kelly Clarkson, Mariah Carey, Hall & Oates, John Mayer, R Kelly, Kenny Chesney, Brad Paisley.

Did I mention that eMusic is dead?

On the positive side you also get: The Clash, Spiritualized, The Clash, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, and Modest Mouse.

I'll probably stick around an extra month and grab some of that stuff, then I'm out.

---

Lighter note, "In Our Talons" by Bowerbirds, a band Chase just told me about.  Good song, fantastic video.




---

PS: Why does almost everyone sound awful on SNL?

One of my favorite Take Away Shows.

Let me just first say that I found this to be astonishingly and amusingly (sometimes infuriatingly) true in some interactions I've had.

From N.T. Wright:

". . . we may not as a culture be fond of old-fashioned supernaturalism, but we certainly like spirituality in whatever form we can get it.  I suspect that if anyone other than Jesus (Krishna, say, or Buddha) were suddenly put forward as being for a second coming, millions in our postsecular society would embrace such a thing uncritically, leaving Enlightenment rationalism huffing and puffing in the rear.  We are a puzzled and confused generation, embracing any and every kind of nonrationalism that may offer us a spiritual shot in the arm while lapsing back into rationalism (in particular, the old modernist critiques) whenever we want to keep traditional or orthodox Christianity at bay.  And yet it is Christian orthodoxy, properly understood, that can help us find the way through this morass and muddle and out the other side."

Let me just say that in my limited experience, that crazy double standard--eastern mysticism gets a free pass from critical thinking, while Christianity gets scrutinized for all it's worth--is rampant.

I’ve had this inkling for a while now that thinking historically rather than scientifically might do away with a number of the barriers to religious belief that have been erected over the last four-hundred years (during the so-called Modern Age).  The “explosion” of bizarro belief in the last half-century reflects, I think, the collapse of scientism as a basis for understanding the world.  My science professor last summer had some cheap knock-off Native American mysticism going on (“I think I’m overweight because I’ve been visualizing the wrong spirit animal.  I’m now visualizing the snake.”  Raised eyebrows and mouths slightly agape all around.).  Plenty of Americans from all walks of life and all religious backgrounds are dipping (and I do mean “dipping”… there’s nothing terribly serious about it) into Eastern mysticism to keep themselves together.  There’s something distinctively post-scientific about all this.  Of course, that kind of willingness to believe in whatever is no more friendly to Christianity than the sort of strident illusions of empiricism that have dominated the last Modern Age.

But I have been trying to figure out what connection there might be between a post-scientific historical thinking and Christianity.  Four chapters into N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope and I’m thrilled.  Wright is making those connections explicit for me.  For starters, Wright takes the gospel writers and subjects seriously as historical (meaning, real, like you and I) persons.  Not as the ancient buffoons many moderns, with their Progress and consequent snobbery, supposed them to be . . . nor as the otherworldly or not-quite-human beings we Christians often make them out to be (so we can treat the Bible like some otherworldly document not written by human persons).

Wright (+ my thoughts)
“Science studies the repeatable; history studies the unrepeatable. . . .  Historians don’t of course see this as a problem and are usually not shy about declaring that these events certainly took place, even though we can’t repeat them in a laboratory.”
(This was not but could easily have been N.T. Wright summarizing Lukacs.)

“That is fine; I respect that position [of skepticism towards the Christian account]; but I simply note that it is indeed then a matter of choice, not a matter of saying that something called scientific historiography forces us to take that route.”
(We choose our beliefs.  They are not forced upon us, though as thinking persons we have an obligation to believe responsibly.)

“. . . the old liberal strategy of pretending . . . that to believe in the resurrection of Jesus is impossible for those who accept what one writer has called ‘current paradigms of reality.’  If this means capitulating before the worldview of Hume and other Enlightenment thinkers, I reply that precisely now, in the early twenty-first century, there are all kinds of reasons for questioning current paradigms. . . .  The ancient world of Homer, Plato, Cicero, and the rest had no room for resurrection either.”
(I love this for two reasons: 1. Wright’s recognition of where we stand in history. 2. His assertion that the ancients were no dumber or more gullible than we are.)

“My sense, from talking to some scientific colleagues, is that, though it’s hard to describe, something like [an epistemology of love] is already at work when the scientist devotes himself or herself to the subject matter so completely that the birth of new hypotheses comes about not so much through an abstract brain (a computer made of meat?) crunching data but through a soft and mysterious symbiosis of knower and known, of lover and beloved.  The skeptic will at once suggest that this is a way of collapsing the truth of Easter once more into mere subjectivism.  Not so. . . .  Love is the deepest mode of knowing because it is love that, while completely engaging with reality other than itself, affirms and celebrates that other-than-self reality.  This is the point at which much modernist epistemology breaks down.  The sterile antithesis of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective,’ where we say things are either objectively true (and can be perceived as such by a dispassionate observer) or subjectively true (and so of no use as an account of the real, public world), is overcome by the epistemology of love, which is called into being as the necessary mode of knowing for those who will in the new public world, the world launched at Easter, the world in which Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn’t.”

I want to talk a bit more about this strange language.  Let me simply say that this is essentially an argument for participant truth, that we discover truth not as objectivists but as participants, that objectivism pushes us away from understanding (and therefore truth).  Science often encourages the illusion of objectivity, of an absolute separation of knower with the thing known, but Wright’s example indicates that such a division cannot exist, and that scientists can and should embrace a participant understanding of truth beyond the outdated antithesis of objective/subjective.  Still, science is more likely to foster continued illusions about objectivity.  But history cannot.  Objective history does not exist, and attempts at it make for invariably and inherently bad history.

Reading N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope.  Points out what resurrection actually means--not "life after death" as almost everyone in every culture has always believed.  Life after death is really just a different way to think about the state of death.  Resurrection is not so much a rethinking of death, but an overcoming of death... a physical, corporeal bodily life after life after death.  And that is distinct, held essentially by only a portion of Jews in the ancient world.  The incursion of many of our ideas of the afterlife came from pagan culture, and only started making inroads into Christianity towards the end of the second century A.D.

Also reading Last Rites by youknowwho.  Depressing.  Do you realize how few people read books at all anymore?  And within that tiny minority, who reads stuff outside of celebrity memoirs or self-help or cutesy pop books?  Not that those things are necessarily bad any more than junk food is bad...  Bad alone, though.

Apparently two months of a sedentary lifestyle destroys flexibility.  Who knew?  Not only am I out of shape, but I'm also as inflexible as I can ever recall being.  I'm planning to start a new workout schedule, but with my current flexibility I can't do squats or deadlifts properly.  So, this week is dynamic stretching and some basic lifts.  Next week I'll add running.  Then the next week I'll ease into squats and deadlifts.  Hopefully by mid-June I'll be in my full workout regimen.  Lift and swim MWF, run TTh.  Hopefully fit some basketball and maybe pickup rugby in.

PS: Andy Rooney just suggested that we find a "new religion" that would eliminate war.  Good luck Andy.  Perhaps we should invent a new humanity after that to eliminate greed?

It’s All Over Let’s • Summer 2009

1. Who Could Win a Rabbit -- Animal Collective (Sung Tongs)
2. Tail & Mane -- Cryptacize (Mythomania)
3. Epistemology -- M. Ward (Hold Time)
4. Sabali -- Amadou et Mariam (Welcome to Mali)
5. No Dice -- Beirut (realpeople: holland EP)
6. Strictly Game -- Harlem Shakes (Technicolor Health)
7. C & F -- Antarctica Takes It! (TBA)
8. The Latest Toughs -- Okkervil River (Black Sheep Boy)
9. Interlude (Milo) -- Modest Mouse (Good News for People Who Love Bad News)
10. Bedside Regiments -- Ten and Six (Ten and Six EP)
11. Slim Slow Slider -- Van Morrison (Astral Weeks)
12. Under a Hollow Tree -- Royal City (Alone at the Microphone)
13. 1901 -- Phoenix (Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix)
14. Brother Sport -- Animal Collective (Merriweather Post Pavilion)
15. Motion Picture Soundtrack -- Radiohead (Kid A) Edited down to 3:22 from 7:01.

Speaking of which, I’m back on emusic and really liking the Harlem Shakes album so far—just got it day before yesterday.  It may turn out a bit too eagerly good-natured for it’s own good, but I’m enjoying it right now.

I’m trying to limit myself to three books at a time—otherwise I’ll get lost (speaking of which, how bout that season finale?  Eh?  Eh?).  Just finished The Sound and the Fury and about to start The Road.  I’m also racing through Hemingway short stories and meandering through Independence Day by Richard Ford.

On the docket: multiple books by Louise Erdrich, Cormac McCarthy, and Richard Ford; Signposts by Walker Percy (just finished The Moviegoer); two more Lukacs books (Last Rites and A Thread of Years, two books of supposedly beautiful prose); some German history by Gordon Craig and others; poetry by Czeslaw Milosz and Wallace Stevens; a book each by Marilynne Robinson and Kaye Gibbons . . .

We’ll see how all that goes.

If you want a copy of the summer mix, let me know.

Been listening to the two ladies across the aisle pillage another culture to stave off the ordinary.  Dip in, steal what’ll get you through the day.  What do the Tibetans think of living and dying?  Well, she’s got a book for that.

“I’ve been studying Buddhism and Hinduism lately,” the other one says.  Buddhism and Hinduism?  She goes on about how she wouldn’t dare to say which was right.  That would be arrogant.  What’s not arrogance, I suppose, is stealing an item or two that strikes you as profound from a thousand years of history.

These ladies talk about their beliefs like you’d talk about lunch—no one will evaluate you too harshly for wanting Chipotle rather than Pei Wei, and so it doesn’t really matter which one you choose.  Belief is too important to agree or disagree with, and so taste becomes more important and meaningful.  You can’t call someone a fool for looking to the Buddha to inject meaning into their middle-class American lives, but you can call them a rube for their nasty denim jacket.

I’m no longer awed by people who nomadically wander around the world.  There’s surely something to be said for adaptability to various cultures, and no doubt some things that can be learned from a brief stay in the exotic and unfamiliar.  For most of us, I think more can, should, be learned from a permanent stay in one place.  Reading one good novel carefully beats the Cliff’s Notes versions of a dozen classics.  If you don’t love your neighbor, I promise that you won’t love your African or Pakistani or Chinese neighbor.

Dude beside me farting up a storm.  Smells like a paper mill in here.