chaos

This is what happens when three people in the same house are writing research papers a week and a half before finals....

Making music with friends

Maria managed to take this amazing picture with a disposable camera.

The action of Grace.

This is a quote from one of my favorite Flannery O'Connor short stories:

"Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood it was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker and he suddenly burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him. He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it. He had never thought himself a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise."

Flannery O'Connor - "The Artificial Nigger"

This vivid description of grace at work demonstrates for me one of the biggest reasons O'Connor is worth reading. I feel that many people start out by reading stories like "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and are immediately turned off by the macabre nature of O'Connor. The thing is, I think one reason she is such a powerful writer is her ability to demonstrate the need for grace in fallen man. This isn't always as obvious as in the above quote, but when one approaches O'Connor's work with this in mind it explains a lot.

I don't belong here.

A reworked version of Radiohead’s song “Creep” serves as the background to the just-out trailer for David Fincher’s latest, “The Social Network.” This brought up a lot of things for me that I wanted to address involving success and how it can be a good and also a regressive sort of thing.

“Creep” is a single off of Radiohead’s first album, Pablo Honey, and it was their first song to gain mainstream recognition especially in America. It received fairly extensive radio play, and is a song in Rock Band 2. All of this to say that it is probably a safe assumption that many people think of this song first when they think of Radiohead.

A somewhat backwards version of this occurred when Blur’s “song no. 2” became rather popular in America. The song comes off their fifth album, on which they dropped their former place of being one of the two major Britpop bands and transitioned to a more lo-fi alternative sound. You may not know the song by name, but if you heard a bit of it I would bet you know it. Its success was ironic, because the song is essentially Blur’s parody of American grunge bands.

Anyway, “Creep” in many ways personifies Radiohead’s first album: bold grungy British guitar-rock. Their second album, “The Bends” serves in many ways as an extension and refinement of their first. The case can be made that all of their albums since then are masterpieces of one sort or another. Radiohead accomplishes this, however, by rising above their original easy-to-pigeonhole genre. I think of myself as somewhat of an “album purist,” and although I don’t claim to be an authority, many would argue and I would agree that Radiohead produced in OK Computer and Kid A the best albums of their respective decades.

By OK Computer the band had started making disparaging comments about “Creep”. “Karma Police” refers to a radio playing popular, disposable music as “buzzing like a fridge.” Thom Yorke in an interview after the album was released said that “Creep” was just that, the background forgettable droning of alternative rock radio.

The interesting point is that without this initial successful single, who knows what would have happened to the band. It is impossible to tell what creative direction the band would have taken if they had muddled about in relative obscurity for years. I, for one, am happy with what came out of their success.

Richard III

I recently read the Shakespeare play Richard III because I was going to watch the 1995 film adaptation of the same name starring Ian McKellan, and I like to read works of literature before I see their counterparts on film. The play is incredible in presenting Richard III as one of the most Machiavellian characters I have ever seen. He will stop at nothing, even marrying the wife of a man he has had killed, to achieve his desire for the kingship. Of course he fails to anticipate the moral outrage of those who are in the know after he is finished with his string of murders and is thus finally undone.

I went in to watching the movie knowing it was highly critically praised, but even so it exceeded my expectations. The film is set in 1930 Britain. Usually attempts to modernize the setting of Shakespeare plays seem to fail miserably, but in this case it works perfectly. The closer Richard gets to becoming the ruler of England, the more the military uniforms begin to recall those of Nazi Germany during WWII. The dialogue is mostly taken directly from the original, and yet the pacing kept brisk enough to make for a solid story arc. Especially effective are what in the play would be Richard's asides to the audience, which in the film arewhen he looks directly at the camera and speaks his real purposes.

Berries

Things that make me happy:

Hot bread with butter and fresh strawberry jam.

I usually go strawberry picking with my grandma once a summer, and then we go and make oodles of strawberry jam. I didn't go this time, but I reaped the benefits anyway :-)

If there is one thing in the world that tastes like heaven, it has got to be fresh strawberries.

Various things.

So, among other items, I passed Spanish and did ok on my grades. Also, I am almost certainly bringing a car back to school, which will be quite useful.

Have been reading a lot of McCarthy and Faulkner lately. Found a particularly interesting word in McCarthy's first novel, "mizzling," which means about what you would expect it to:

miz·zle ¹ (mzl)

intr.v. miz·zled, miz·zling, miz·zles

To rain in fine, mistlike droplets; drizzle.

n.

A mistlike rain; a drizzle.

---

[Middle English misellen; probably akin to Dutch dialectal mieselen; see meigh- in Indo-European roots.]

---

mizzly adv.

Also the Middle English/Dutch roots make me happy.

I am currently at my grandparents house in a suburb of Cleveland. Our whole family is going to Cedar Point tomorrow, and I thoroughly plan on going on roller coasters till I puke

Modern World

This is a Wolf Parade song that Spoon covered when I saw them in Chicago.

I'm not in love with the modern world
I'm not in love with the modern world
I was a torch driving the savages back to the trees

Modern world has more ways
And I don't mention it since it's changed
While the people go out and the people come home again
It's gotta last to build up your eyes
And a lifetime of red skies
And from my bed saying your haunted hissing in my bed
Modern world don't ask why
Cause modern world build things high
Now they house canyons filled with life

Modern world i'm not pleased to meet you
You just bring me down
Modern world i'm not pleased to meet you
You just bring me down
Modern world i'm not pleased to meet you
You just bring me down
Modern world i'm not pleased to meet you
You just bring me down

Lattes at 11:30

A pair of lattes I made tonight. My coffee has become quite old due to a lack of funds to buy more, but the espresso is passable in milk drinks. Caffeine is a wonderful thing.

Vending Machines

It is amazing the things in life that can make you happy. For instance, accidentally buying hot tamales instead of pop tarts at 2 in the morning, and then having the machine give you two instead of one.

In addition:

1. Ice cold Dr. Pepper

2. Popcorn with loads of butter

3. New shoes

Also, someone should explain why we don't have beef jerky vending machines in this country . . . .

Swellness

"Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship. I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something for nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on."

From "The Sun Also Rises" by Hemingway

Videotape

When I’m at the pearly gates

This’ll be on my videotape

My videotape

My videotape

When Mephistopheles is just beneath

And he’s reaching up to grab me

This is one for the good days

And I have it all here in

Red blue green

Red blue green

You are my centre when I spin away

Out of control on videotape

On videotape

On videotape

On videotape

On videotape

This is my way of saying goodbye

Because I can’t do it face to face

So I’m talking to you before . . . .

No matter what happens now

You shouldn’t be afraid

Because I know

Today has been the most perfect day

I have ever seen.

Reality

Following a list of Charlie Marlow's responsibilities while working up the river:

"When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality - the reality, I tell you - fades. The inner truth is hidden - luckily, luckily. But I felt it all the same; I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks, just as it watches you fellows performing on your respective tight-ropes for - what is it? half-a-crown a tumble--"

From Heart of Darkness.

The Sun Also Rises

"It was very hot and bright, and the houses looked sharply white. We turned onto the Gran Via.

'Oh, Jake,' Brett said, we could have had such a damned good time together.'

Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car suddenly pressing Brett against me.

'Yes,' I said. 'Isn't it pretty to think so?'"

This is the ending of The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway. The characters have essentially done nothing and gone nowhere by the end of the novel, and the book essentially a describes people without meaningful lives dealing with the circumstances before them (primarily by drinking a lot and going to bullfights). So, in the end, all they have is the thought that they "could have had such a damned good time together." Brett makes this statement, but Jake knows that it is just a statement and nothing more than wishful thinking.

Of course, Hemingway eventually could not deal with the circumstances before him and ended up scratching the back of his head with a shotgun. English majors have such a bright future :-)

Joseph Conrad and human nature.

"We had so far saved him, and it had become a personal matter between us and the sea. We meant to stick to him. Had we (by an incredible hypothesis) undergone similar toil and trouble for an empty cask, that cask would have become as precious to us as Jimmy was. More precious, in fact, because we would have had no reason to hate the cask. And we hated James Wait."

From "The Nigger of the Narcissus"

The judge.

A quote from McCarthy's Blood Meridian. The judge in the novel is such a fantastic, almost epic character. He appears supremely reasonable while often perpetrating stunning acts of violence.

"The judge had been holding the femur upright in order to better illustrate its analogies to the prevalent bones of the country about and he let it fall in the sand and closed his book.

There is no mystery to it, he said.

The recruits blinked dully.

Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.

He rose and moved away into the darkness beyond the fire. Aye, said the expriest, his pipe cold in his teeth. And no mystery. As if he were no mystery himself, the bloody old hoodwinker."

Transference

Spoon's new album Transference comes out next week, but you can now listen to the whole thing from NPR here. I just played it for the first time and am very happy with it. It is not perhaps their best album, but Kill the Moonlight probably has that locked down anyway. I was rather relieved, because I was talking to Seth about the album the other day and we were afraid that it could be sub-par, just because they haven't really ever made a bad album. The album is generally more laid back than Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, probably more similar in overall tone to Gimme Fiction. Britt Daniel does use his voice to do some things he hasn't done before, this may be Spoon's best as far as vocals go. I can't really talk about it that much, it tends to take me quite a while with an album before I can analyze it at all.

Spoon also just released American tour dates. They are going to be in both Minneapolis and Chicago . . . over spring break. Drat. I really wanted to see someone live this semester, and NO ONE is touring in America out of the bands I want to see live. At least Radiohead is in the studio, so music for 2010 should not disappoint.

This Morning

Latte art on espresso which had no crema because my parents do not yet have a grinder. At least it made my mom happy.

I have been thinking about what I want to talk about on here, and also the incredibly narcissistic nature of a personal blog in general. In any case, I will probably try and focus on music, literature, and coffee. Of course, there are no guarantees, since all of those things tend to be related to others . . .

Overly Large first post.

So, everyone is doing lists for the end of the single digits, or the zeros, or the 2000s, or whatever you want to call them. I was originally going to do 10 albums from the last 10 years. Of course, after scrolling through iTunes I had 30 albums in a list, so I figured why not do a criminally long post on my favorite albums of the last 10 years?

These are not the "best" albums of the decade. They are in my favorites for one reason or another, whether they are in my opinion among the best is a different matter. I also don't begin to claim to know enough to actually make this list hold any validity, so for all intents and purposes this is my relatively narrow view on good music.

Also, if you read this whole thing you are likely insane but I thank you for indulging my Christmas break need to spew words online.

2000

Kid A (Radiohead)

2001

Is This It? (The Strokes)

Turn on the Bright Lights (Interpol)

2002

( ) (Sigur Ros)

By The Way (The Red Hot Chili Peppers)

Kill the Moonlight (Spoon)

In Full Swing (Mark O’Conner’s Hot Swing Trio)

2003

Hail to the Thief (Radiohead)

2004

How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (U2)

Music for Two (Edgar Meyer and Bela Fleck)

Keyed Up (Vasen)

Rubber Factory (The Black Keys)

Turbo (Hoven Droven)

Funeral (The Arcade Fire)

2005

Nothing is Sound (Switchfoot)

2006

The Eraser

Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not (Arctic Monkeys)

The Crane Wife (The Decemberists)

2007

Armchair Apocrypha (Andrew Bird)

Emotionalism (The Avett Brothers)

Prog (The Bad Plus)

Super Taranta! (Gogol Bordello)

We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank (Modest Mouse)

Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (Spoon)

Icky Thump (The White Stripes)

In Rainbows (Radiohead)

Neon Bible (The Arcade Fire)

2009

Dragonslayer (Sunset Rubdown)

Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (Phoenix)

Horehound (The Dead Weather)

Kid A: In my opinion, the best album (rock or otherwise) ever made. I can listen to Kid A beginning to end endless times and it only gets better. I am a proponent of the unified album as a work of art, and this is the preeminent example of that.

Is This It? and Turn On The Bright Lights: both great debut albums from bands whose second albums where also good, but then slid pretty heavily on their third.

( ): post-rock comprised of songs without titles and a made-up phonetic language based on icelandic. It is spare and starkly beautiful, the songs build on themselves gradually before collapsing back onto themselves.

By the Way: The best chili peppers album, funky and driving and messy and delightful.

Kill the Moonlight: Very possibly Spoon's best album. Meticulously crafted songs, stabbing piano chords, extremely groovy, and of course Britt Daniel's great voice.

In Full Swing: Lovely swing/jazz album with great collaborators (Jane Monheit, Wynton Marsalis) from one of my favorite violinists.

Hail to the Thief: The most underrated Radiohead album. It drags a bit in the middle, however it communicates a certain paranoia/fear/creepiness that I think is unsurpassed and chillingly enjoyable.

Atomic Bomb: I know, I know, you aren't supposed to like newer U2. This just happens to be the first rock album I ever owned/had on my ipod/listened to all the way through more than once. I still think it is pretty good, better than No Line on the Horizon in any case.

Music for Two: The best living Bass Player and the best Banjo player in the world playing songs they wrote together live. Influenced by bluegrass/classical, technically stunning playing.

Keyed Up: Vasen is a Swedish viola/nyckelharpa/12 string guitar trio that used to be my favorite band. I have seen them live several times. They play traditional and original compositions with amazing energy and passion.

Rubber Factory: This list probably under represents how much I like blues music. Rubber Factory is red-hot blues-rock, searingly good. There is just something about blues guitar I cannot get enough of.

Turbo: Swedish roots-rock. Loads of fun (for me anyway . . . )

Funeral: It seems to me that few bands can play of of raw emotion and not come of sounding overdone or stupid, and Arcade Fire is one of the few. The entire album bleeds passion while being original in its sound. (They also use live strings, which makes me happy).

Nothing is Sound: There is just something about this album in its mood and lyrics that resonates with me. I don't think Switchfoot are very original, but they use the influences they draw from to create a very entertaining an polished sound.

The Eraser: Thom Yorke's solo album which in many ways sounds like Radiohead if all they had was a laptop and more than the usual amount of paranoia. One of the only albums that could be put under the genre electronic that I listen to.

Whatever People Say I Am: The Arctic Monkey's first, and I think best album so far. Guitar-driven British rock and not much more, but still great.

The Crane Wife: Solid Decembrists album. Some think the band's lyrics are pretentious, but I think that misses what they are trying to do. They often tell stories in their songs, which lends itself to literary language. The fact that it can be over-done is exactly part of the effect they are going for.

Armchair Apocrypha: Andrew Byrd sings, plays the violin and guitar, and whistles. Often at the same time. He also writes beautiful music, and this is one of his best albums.

Emotionalism: My favorite album from the Avett Brothers, also likely my favorite straightforward bluegrass album.

Prog: Also not enough Jazz on this list. The Bad Plus are an amazing progressive jazz/jazz-rock bass/piano/drums trio. They do sprawling rock covers and original pieces, generally deconstruction songs to the point that they cannot be recognized while still somehow remaining together.

Super Taranta!: Two words. Gypsy-Punk. If you don't like it, you need to have more fun.

We Were Dead: Isaac Brock's voice seems to be a kind of love/hate issue for most people. He tends to talk, growl, yelp, and scream a lot along with some singing, and I get that many don't like it. However, I really enjoy Modest Mouse's music as a whole, especially the excellent use of strings on this album.

Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga: A real grower of an album, also probably Spoon's most enjoyable LP.

Icky Thump: My favorite Stripes album. Loud and bluesy (also there is a bagpipe).

In Rainbows: Really just a flat-out beautiful album. Every song is so well-constructed and it manages to be Radiohead's most accessible album while not really sounding like any other band.

Neon Bible: Offers a stinging critique of much of what is wrong with organized religion with a passion that shows how much Arcade Fire cares about it. It was recorded in churches and makes stunning use of pipe organs.

Dragonslayer: Slightly odd indie-rock that has grown on me a lot. The songs are complex and you tend to get more out of them with every listen.

Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix: Very catchy alternative rock from France.

Horehound: Jack White with Alison Mosshart of the Kills and the bass player from Raconteurs and the guitarist from Queens of the Stone Age. Jack White plays drums on the album. He originally played the drums before he took up the guitar, and is actually very good. The whole album has a great blues/gothic feel and Mosshart uses her impressive voice well.