Brief

The semester is finished and it is Winter Solstice. What a glorious feeling.

For the Dorks.

Last year, I went over and over and over whar a top ten LPs album would look like and then even a top five EPs (#1 would be Agalloch's The White EP without a doubt) in my head.

Last year brought us more great music.

I bought several albums this year, from things as obscure and avante garde as Nels Cline's Coward and Arvo Pärt's In Principio to things as hipsterish as Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest (holy shit what a boring album and what an awful lead singer) and Yim Yames's (read Jim James's, lead singer of My Morning Jacket) tribute to—a lovingly crafted solo white EP of George Harrison, to things as poppy and popular as Bruce Springsteens Working on a Dream and Bob Dylan's Together Through Life & Christmas in the Heart and Dave Matthews Band's unbelievable comeback from a decade of shit, Big Whiskey & The Groo Grux King (fuck what you think; it's great).

But the best album for me is definitely going to remain Neko Case's Middle Cyclone and the best song of the year is the always too short "I'm an Animal" off that album.

I don't want to try to put my mouth all over it right now. I just wanted to state the facts.

Music as perfect as that album and that song do not come around all that often. Buy it, listen to it, keep listening to it, and imbibe it. Neko Case, Paul Rigby, and friends are gifts from God. Drink this music 'til drunk with divine ecstasy.

Something Refreshing From the Depressing World of Portishead

Portishead - Chase The Tear from Mintonfilm on Vimeo.

Exciting Things May Be Happening

BC

I love the music of the smashing pumpkins. That music has been with me deeply ever since I set foot in the strange liminal at times scary world of adolescence and muc of it continues to move me today.

I don't love Billy Corgan, though. Who knew the conflation of Billy Corgan's superfat ego with new-age vague ideas about God, Self, and Consciousness could be one of the most noxious smelling things on the internet?

Ugh.

I will agree with him on one thing, though. I, too, am thankful for Ronnie James Dio on this, Thanksgiving Day.

An Undead Friend of Mine

"Does life seem nasty, brutish, and short? Come on up to the house!"

In times of comfort, it sounds like Tom Waits's house, and the picture the imagination conjures is warm and grand.
When life does seem nasty, brutish, and short (was it Hobbes who said it first?), the house I actually do need to go to is Richard Bachman's, where we mix gasoline in with our whiskey, put snakes in our jambalaya, and the other way we feel about things, about life, about people, about women—you name it—the way people can't handle hearing about unless a paid comedian is talking about it onstage humorously comes out in our conversation over the kitchen table, which is made from the extruded teeth of our enemies.

It's Richard Bachman's house I went to last night, and, if I get enough work done in this day which is too short, I'll return to tonight. He's in the middle of telling me a good story. It's disgusting and unbelievable vivid and seems totally real, even though it's set sixteen years from now and they still use payphones. He calls it The Running Man.

We all run day to day to day. Always on the run. And you know what? It's never enough.

Things I Am a Fan of and Not a Fan of Lately.

Things I am a fan of lately:
Tiny Vipers. Two albums on subpop: Hands Across the Void, and Life on Earth
Old Frankenstein Movies
"The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone," from Ray Bradbury's short story collection The October Country
Nick Cave & Warren Ellis's two-disc handsome release of soundtrack work and instrumental material from the vaults, White Lunar
Brown Clothes, such as my new boots, my new brown simple belt, and hand-me-down cashmere turtleneck sweater.
Walking through fall leaves
Apples
My folks' new coffeepot: The Moccamaster
Plaid
Dennis Doherty's new poem, "Epic"
Tuthilltown Distillery's Baby Bourbon Whiskey
Stephen King's Danse Macabre
Stephen King's old manuscript from 1982, "The Cannibals," easily downloadable as a pdf file right here
The cover of the new Stephen King book, Under the Dome
Franklin Evans, or, The Inebriate
Sheppard Lee
Edgar Allan Poe (who loved the aforementioned novel when it first came out and he reviewed it)
The Sound and The Fury
Jane Campion's new film about John Keats, or more properly, his girlfriend, Bright Star
The show that never should have ended, Joss Whedon's Firefly
T. Rex, getting into his earlier albums with the full name, likeUnicorn
The original 1963 film adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, Robert Wise's The Haunting
A life with less argument and internet, and more contentment and reading
The typewriter I picked up at an old barn lately:



The black cat who has taken a shine to me and to her coat:

Zeugma.
My cat, Evie.
Noble Coffee Roasters' coffee. (I finally get it.)
And, as always, pumpkin spice lattes...


Things I am not a fan of lately:
The President getting a Nobel Peace Prize while the war in the Middle East continues. Horseshit.
Nick Cave's new novel (listening to his reading of it off my computer, with ambient and musical accompianement from himself and Warren Ellis)
Where the Wild Things Are, what Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers did with it.
Byronic Heroes.
Thom Yorke's The Eraser left-overs, being served cold three years later.
People who talk like they are on The Family Guy in graduate-level English courses
All the sensitive indie and not-so-indie musical chosen ones contributing to a soundtrack for the second Twilight movie.
Con men.
Sloppy road construction.
Interminable bridge projects in Rosendale.
Robin Furth, and all comic book adaptations and interpretations of Stephen King books.
Snow in October. Horseshit.
(I am blaming it on Bob Dylan for releasing an album of Christmas music in October.)
This fucking cough I cannot seem to get rid of.