I’m writing this from the lobby of The State Room, a venue in downtown Salt Lake City, waiting to hear one of my favorite bands ever, Shearwater. Never heard them, you say? Never heard *of* them?? Oh my lord, you are missing out. Go FORTHWITH to Shearwater’s website and take a moment to discover some if the most haunting, evocative music you’ll ever encounter.
Here’s hoping their live show lives up to my expectations…
Also: SQUEEEEEEEEEEE!
UPDATED:
The concert was so much more than I hoped for. I discovered a new band—Wye Oak (new to me, I mean; not *new* new)—and several amazing musicians. I saw lots of awesome local people. I screamed so long and loud that I may never be able to speak again. I was blown away by Shearwater. Completely blown away.
Also I got pretty drunk, for the second night in a row. Oops.
Another meme! I know you are so excited. The rules:
Once you’ve been tagged…
1) turn on your mp3 player
2) go to Shuffle songs mode
3)Write down the first 25 songs that come up…song title and artist– NO editing/cheating, please.
4) Choose 25 people to be tagged. It is generally considered to be in good taste to tag the person who tagged you.
And here is the list of tracks my iPhone spit out. (Try clicking the links and listening! Some of these are really good songs.)
This was kind of a bizarre exercise, because it uncovered some music on my iPhone that I’ve never listened to, ever. (And no, I’m not talking about the Pink songs.)
Uh, once again, I probably won’t be tagging anyone explicitly here, but feel free to consider yourself tagged anyway. Post a link to your list in the comments!
Update:
I made this into a playlist on Grooveshark (all except tracks 2, 8, 14 and 18), which you can listen to below.
In my feverish quest to put off the final projects in my classes until there is LITERALLY NO TIME TO COMPLETE THEM, I’ve finally caved in and created a Blip.fm account where I post whatever song is currently stuck in my head so that it can infect your brain as well. You should try it out! It is addictive and will keep you from accomplishing anything worthwhile for hours at a time! If that doesn’t recommend it to you then you are far too demanding and also impossible to please.
I was watching Neil Gaiman perform “Creepy Doll” on YouTube with Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm and I realized that I only had six Jonathan Coulton songs in my iTunes. I know! Crazy, right? So I went immediately to jonathancoulton.com and downloaded everything available. I’ve been listening to Jonathan Coulton for the past two days and wow, his music never gets old. Check. Him. Out.
According to the ANTI- Label Blog, for every blog that reposts the link to Neko Case’s new single, “People Have a Lot of Nerve,” ANTI- and Neko will donate five dollars to Best Friends Animal Society.
You can either listen to the single on the ANTI- Label Blog or download it directly from ANTI-.
I’m sitting in the Sam Weller’s Coffee Garden, reading my new book, listening to music on my newly Genius-enhanced iPhone, drinking a skinny iced vanilla latte and eating a decidedly un-skinny slice of pumpkin pie with whipped cream. And let me tell you: I’m already in love with Cryptonomicon. Neal Stephenson is MARVELOUS.
Later: now I’m on my way to the gym to work off the un-skinny. Laterz!
Sometimes when I’m listening to my favorite music—like “Sinnerman” by Nina Simone, or “Urge for Going” by Joni Mitchell, or anything by Neko Case—I get so overwhelmed with how amazing the artist is, how much I luuuurve the song OMG OMG, how profoundly the lyrics SPEAK TO ME, that I get a bit frustrated. Once I’ve shared a song with my friends and casual acquaintances, once I’ve given it a 5-out-of-5 rating in iTunes, sung it to myself every morning in the shower and happily listened to it hundreds if not thousands of times, what else is there to do???
There’s a special feeling of desperation that overcomes me in such moments: I gasp with ecstatic joy when I hear the piano sample start up on Lily Allen’s “Knock Em Out,” and I feel I must declare my undying devotion to it, but what act could be meaningful enough to convey such a dizzying height of unselfish love? My first impulse in these cases is usually to write a blog post, like I would for a book or movie that had changed my life (SEE: Atonement; Brokeback Mountain; Sunshine; etc.), but I can’t imagine a better way to make sure my blog really was alone and unobserved than to swamp it with incoherent gushings about how I want to have Sufjan Stevens‘s babies.
So just imagine that I said something profound here about the coded ur-gender manifestations in Jonathan Coulton’s “Skullcrusher Mountain,” and we’ll leave it at that. And you can check out what I’m listening in the sidebar, or listen to my Last.fm radio station, and maybe sometimes I’ll mention an album I’ve particularly enjoyed, and we’ll pretend that I’m not hopeless at disguising the fact that I am a crazy person.
It’s been some time since I read anything that I have found as viscerally terrifying, and yet also verisimilar, as Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. This is the story of Marcus, AKA w1n5ton, a cocky seventeen-year-old student cum hacker whose life changes forever when terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge—and he and his friends are arrested by the Department of Homeland Security as terror suspects. Doctorow does a good job of making the reader feel humiliated, powerless and angry as Marcus begins to fight back, first in small ways and then in large, while always keeping within the bounds of a possible scenario. And that’s what’s terrifying: the kind of picture Doctorow paints is stomach-turning, and yet it seems utterly plausible, given what we know our government has already done and continues to do.
Another frightening book in a similiar but more scholarly vein is Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians, an online, six-chapter introduction to the Right-Wing Authoritarian personality and its current influence on American politics that explains a lot about why the idiots running this country were elected, why the religious right has managed to steal so much power and what can—nay, must!—be done about it before Cory Doctorow’s fantasy comes to life right here on American soil. [Thanks to Dave Barber of The Great Whatsit for posting about Altemeyer and his book.]
I’m also reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which is turning out to be at least as good (or even better—is this possible?) than the movie, and earlier I was listening to the movie soundtrack, which is stunning, gorgeous, unbelievable, sheer genius. Especially the incorporation of typewriter sounds into the music. [TRUST ME.]
Disappointing. The pacing was off, the world-building seemed almost hesitant, and the occasional use of omniscient third person felt intrusive and unnecessary. China Miéville is better than this. […]
The first thing I did when I picked up this book was look up Kovalevskaya in the index. As in Sofia Kovalevksaya, mathematical genius and pioneering female mathematician and academician of the 19th century. And there she was, a full page on one of my heroes. Weierstrass's unsung research partner.... […]
Laughably, ridiculously useless. Way too short, way too sparse, almost no workable examples, way too many typos. This was obviously thrown together at the last minute by a desperate author/publishing team. […]
