Music by Decade.

I was messing around with tagging in Itunes yesterday, and decided to figure out how much music I have from each decade. (Of course, Classical music is going to fall all over the place since it is usually dated when it was recorded.)

Total time: 31.5 days.

50's: 2.7 hours.

6o's 1.6 days.

70's 1.6 days.

80's 2.7 days.

90's 5.7 days.

oo's 16.8 days.

10's 3.2 days.

Apparently I need more 50's music.

Music I Hated, Disliked, and was Disappointed by in 2010

People tend to make lists of “the best” or “their favorite” albums for the past year. I don’t really want to put in the effort, so I think I’ll just talk about a few albums that I disliked/was disappointed by last year.

Plus I feel like being negative.

1. Sigh No More - Mumford & Sons

Quite a few people seem to really like this band. A number of my friends on fb mention them with regularity and they are described as “folk revivalists,” so I decided to give them an actual chance.

I want to preface this by saying that I love folk music. I am a big fan of the Avett Brothers and Nickel Creek and I have played fiddle music from different folk traditions many times over the years.

Apparently all one needs to be a “good” folk band these days is to play up-tempo rhythms on acoustic guitar and throw a banjo on top every once in a while. Seriously though, almost nothing that I appreciate in folk/bluegrass/traditional music is present on this album. The songs are very similar sounding and none of them display any type of impressive musical skill. Every once in a while some horns come in or a number of background vocals appear but other than that it’s pretty much the same thing for 12 chugging tracks of derivative, occasionally whiney, and sometimes downright annoying folk/rock. “Little Lion Man” is the only somewhat memorable track, partly because it is somewhat catchy and partly because it is the only song to use profanity.

2. Congratulations - MGMT

MGMT’s first album contained three songs that are insanely catchy and probably got a little overplayed at Hillsdale. The rest of the album was . . . interesting. I wasn’t a huge fan of the whole thing, but it was more a matter of personal taste. In other words, it just wasn’t for me but I could understand others liking it.

Congratulations doesn’t contain anything even vaguely similar to the highly popular “Kids.” I don’t even know if you could classify any of the songs as pop. I am in favor as treating entire albums as art, but this effort just comes of as weird and arty for weird and arty’s sake.

3. The Age of Adz - Sufjan Stevens

Sufjan Stevens has come out with some truly great music over the years. It has been a while since he came out with anything, so I was pretty excited when I saw he had a new album.

Unfortunately the album was somewhat disappointing. Sufjan’s great use of melody and strings are still very present, but the album marks a dramatic stylistic change from his earlier work. It seems to me that he is trying to create some sort of indie/industrial hybrid and I really don’t buy it. There are things that sound like steam whistles, various bleeps and bloops and machine noises and beats that for me just clash with the beautiful harmonies and string sections. It starts out sounding kind of cool but becomes old pretty fast. Combining musical cues from disparate genres often works, just not here.

Honorable mention: I won’t go into detail on these, but Transit Transit by Autolux and The Winter of Mixed Drinks by Frightened Rabbit were both incredibly weak second albums following great debuts.

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 . . .