music

Lighten up

If there’s one thing I like about Wednesdays, it’s how much lighter my bag is at the end of the day than at the beginning. Most Tuesdays, including this past one, I work from home, which means taking my laptop home with me every Monday night and returning with it to the office the next day. It’s not ridiculously heavy, even with the battery, but my bag does feel wonderfully lighter at the end of the day.

Also lighter — check out the dismount on that segue! even the Russian judges are impressed! — is my musical mix for July. Only four songs total:

  1. “Guggenheim” by the Ting Tings
  2. “Calabria 2008” by Enur
  3. “When I Write the Book” by Nick Lowe
  4. “Abide With Me” by Emeli Sandé

I think that “Abide With Me,” from this year’s Olympics opening ceremony, is just too beautiful not to share:

NBC, of course, didn’t agree. They cut it out from their (overall pretty lousy) coverage of the opening ceremonies in favor of an interview with Michael Phelps. As I wrote on Twitter: Anyone who could listen to Emeli Sandé’s stunning “Abide With Me” and think, “let’s replace that with Ryan Seacrest” has no soul.

Saturday

I read some Kaleidotrope submissions today, watched a little bit of Would I Lie to You? on YouTube, and then this evening, I suppose inspired by yesterdy’s Song of the Day, I watched The Harder They Come. It’s not bad, although the soundtrack is probably what it’s best remembered for. (The soundtrack, including the title song, is pretty terrific, and I’m not even usually a huge fan of reggae.)

Anyway, that, more or less, was Saturday.

Right now, the neighbors are having a very loud party across the street. So there’s that.

Wednesday various

  • How Doctors Die [via]
  • A Drug That Wakes the Near Dead
  • Every Beatles song played at once. Can you make it to the end? It isn’t easy, and I’m not sure it rewards you for your efforts — audibly, that is; some of the comments are quite funny — but it’s an interesting experiment nonetheless. [via]
  • “Won’t it make you lose your wits, / Writing groats and saying grits?” Can you pronounce all these words correctly? [via]
  • And finally, Warren Ellis on what sounds like the worst computer repair problem ever:

    One day, a few years ago, my backups all got corrupted, and my backup device died. I didn’t have online backups at the time. I’ll fix that on Sunday, I thought, as I was under deadline pressure. Saturday evening, my main machine died in flames. Sent it off for data recovery. The guy running the data recovery shop took it in and then went off to Europe for an operation. And died on the operating table. Came back to the shop to get my machine, because no-one was answering the phone, to find it boarded up, the (mostly off-the-books, apparently) employees scattered to the four winds, and the shop stripped down to the plaster. Not a computer left in there — not even mine. I lost everything, all notes and scripts for work in progress as well as the entire archive.

Books, movies, and music: a look back

If you include books I read for work, some of which I truthfully read in manuscript form last year, and if you include a healthy number of graphic novels, I read just shy of 100 books this past year.

Which ones stand out now more than the others? Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination. Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon. Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Jeff Smith’s Bone series. Jedediah’s The Manual of Detection. Tina Fey’s Bossypants. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Paul Harding’s Tinkers. And, of course, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, for all the wrong reasons. But I’ve stopped being angry about that, honest.

I’m more than a little disappointed that I didn’t read much of anything these past couple of weeks, which all too often seems to be the pattern when I’m on vacation, but I’m going to try to up that number next year.

Then again, it’s not all about quantity; inspired, in part, by this Studio 360 segment, I’ve decided to re-read a certain number of books in 2012. I’m thinking maybe five or six, which seemed like a more reasonable number than my original plan of twelve, one for every month. I’ve always been vaguely jealous of people who, every year or so, curl up with an old favorite book once again, and I already have some titles in mind for doing just that in 2012.

I saw 59 movies in 2011. I’ll probably see at least one or two more before the year, and my vacation, is up. The best of them? Touch of Evil. True Grit. The Social Network. Green for Danger. The Fighter. The Third Man. All About Eve. Though, really, only a few movies I saw this year were truly awful. (I’m looking at you, Clash of the Titans.)

Musically, it was a really good year, and like always I had a tough time putting together my “best of the year” mix. But put it together I finally did — a couple of weeks ago, actually, so I could mail some copies out for the holidays — and here it is:

  1. “Canaan” by Black Dub
  2. “Truth” by Alex Ebert
  3. “Rox in the Box” by the Decemberists
  4. “Shell Games” by Bright Eyes
  5. “Dreams” by Brandi Carlile
  6. “Paris (Ooh La La)” by Grace Potter & the Nocturnals
  7. “Police on My Back” by the Clash
  8. “Optimist” by Zoe Keating
  9. “the devil is in the beats” by the Chemical Brothers
  10. “Helplessness Blues” by Fleet Foxes
  11. “The Tiger Inside Will Eat the Child” by Fatty Gets a Stylist
  12. “Party in the CIA” by Weird Al Yankovic
  13. “Civilian” by Wye Oak
  14. “Gimme Sympathy” by Metric
  15. “Paper Forest (in the Afterglow of Rapture)” by Emmy the Great
  16. “Job’s Coffin” by Tori Amos
  17. “Charming Disease” by Gabriel Kahane
  18. “So Far From the Clyde” by Mark Knopfler
  19. “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye (feat. Kimbra)
  20. “Mad Mission” by Patty Griffin
  21. “Tragic Turn of Events/Move Pen Move” by Dan Mangan & Shane Koyczan
  22. “The Gulf of Araby” by Natalie Merchant
  23. “Redemption Song” by Johnny Cash & Joe Strummer
  24. “Gangsta” by Tune-Yards

I’m not entirely pleased with some of it, particularly in the second half. (It’s more or less chronological, and I’ve had less time to live with some of those later songs.) I also can’t believe I left off Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep”, which really was one of my favorites from the beginning of the year, despite how inescapable the song has become in the months since. I try not to fault an artist her success, and I’m always weirdly amused on those rare occasions when my tastes match up with top 40 radio.

Holiday various