It’s the meme that’s sweeping the internet this second!
No one is “tagged” or obligated to post their own. I just thought it was amusing. |
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music
January in song
If you’ve been wondering — and I’m sure you have been — what my monthly mix of tunes for January wound end up being, wonder no longer:
- “Elephants” by Rachael Yamagata
- “Never Going Back” by the Lovin’ Spoonful
- “Angry Any More” by Ani DiFranco
- “Tombstone Blues” by Richie Havens
- “The Valleys” by Electrelane
- “Sweet Child o’ Mine” by Taken by Trees
- “Souljacker, Pt. 1” by Eels
- “Wild Is the Wind” by Nina Simone
- “Mattis and Maia” by Maia Hirasawa
- “Jack of Diamonds” by the .347’s & Waylon Jennings
- “Good Night, Irene” by Dr. John
- “Dounia” by Rokia Traore
- “String Bean” by Every Good Boy
- “People Got a Lotta Nerve” by Neko Case
- “Sleepy Tigers” by Her Space Holiday
- “Emanicpated Minor” by Ani DiFranco
- “Ulysses” by Franz Ferdinand
- “America” by the Indelicates
- “On My Side” by Cory Chisel and the Wandering Sons
- “The Hope that House Built” by Future of the Left
- “Dog Days Are Over” by Florence and the Machine
This is what the start of 2009 sounded like for me. As always, one-on-one CD trades are welcome if you’d like to tell me what the month sounded like for you.
Goodnight, Irene
“Sometimes the best laid plans have been known to go astray”
– John Mellencamp, “Sometimes a Great Notion”
So last week’s Battlestar Galactica, which I’ve finally watched, was pretty much exactly what I expected. (Spoiler warnings in effect.)
Not the specific twists and plot developments — which still seem mostly like unearned shocks and melodrama — but the overall feel and my reaction to it. Like just about all BSG episodes in recent memory, this was an intense (and sometimes very bleak) hour of television that afforded the actors some interesting scenes and suggested some not uninteresting things to come. (Or to have come again, if the cyclical nature of History is really what the show’s all about.) But narratively, it’s kind of a mess, betraying a lot of the same problems that have weighed down the show since at least season 3 — and which have likely been present from the very beginning.
I think my opinion of the show falls somewhere between Gerry Canavan and Abigail Nussbaum’s (links above). By no means have I lost all faith in Battlestar, and at this point I’ll continue to watch to the very end, but I didn’t see anything in “Sometimes a Great Notion” to suggest the last of the series will be less problematic or frustrating than what’s come before.
“And my heart, it lies at the bottom of the ocean”
– John Mellencamp, “Sometimes a Great Notion”
“The only truly natural things are dreams, which nature cannot touch with decay.”
I just finished watching I’m Not There, which is like a weird, fevered dream about Bob Dylan. It helps to know something of his life and his music to appreciate the film…yet it’s not a biopic. It’s not the place to go looking for information. And yet, it’s maybe the closest we can ever get to a biopic about Bob Dylan. A distinctly weird experience.
Sincerely faking it
In a recent interview on the Sound of Young America, Ben Folds said:
I’m not so sure that I want it to be clear whether I’m being biographical or not. And that, in theory, would arrest people’s attentions a little bit to wonder whether it’s autobiographical — because people are interested in that, and they’re interested in reality shows….
Americans are. The English are aware that, as I always use as an example, that David Bowie didn’t go to Mars. But over here, Bruce Springsteen, if he says he’s done something, he better have that credibility.