In America

I feel like a foreigner here in the USA. I mean I've lived but an hour and a half away my whole life, but I notice it. Miles per hour, "zee," the accent. This is a great country and it has given me the electric bass, Lou Reed, Vans, Noam Chomsky, and some other stuff, but it is not my country. I am an outsider here.

Mild Yet Pleasant Surprise

Previously I had written off Hawksley Workman for A) a stupid and obviously fake stage name (that can't be his real name can it?) and B) the fact that the first single of his that I heard, Jealous of your Cigarette was about the most transparently sophomoric song until My Humps*. But yesterday I was listening to Lesley's iPod and heard a song of his that was actually quite good. I'm not sure quite how to describe it, but I was mildly surprised that this was the same guy. I suppose I should know better, that I should I know that singles are often a poor representation of an artist's work.

*Look Black Eyed Peas, you aren't getting off that easy. Remember the days before Fergie, remember when you had some shreds of credibility? I saw you at the Warped tour in 1999, you were something else then. I have a Black Eyed Peas sticker on my Gibson's case, but I think I'll have to remove it. No one else has disgraced themselves enough to warrant a sticker removal.

Flying Under the Radar Through Winter

That's what I feel like it's been this last little while. School has nicely taken up pretty much all the free time I might otherwise devote to posting on this little site of mine. In light of that, here is a week or so of updates compressed into one:

I'm sure that many of you have seen something about pandora.com. But if you haven't, then I'll go ahead say that you should. Deb pointed it out to me first, yes, Deb you rock.

I bought a book of Pablo Neruda's poetry. He's one of those poets whose name gets dropped by lots of interesting people. That being the case, I thought I'd check him out, and so now I'm tackling Residence on Earth.

The crazy-making thing with school these days is that I'm having to cite things in a different format than pretty much anything that I used in my undergraduate days. This is, as far as I can see, just some territorial thing, there's no good reason not to have everyone use the same format other than that. Anyway, things just look wrong to my eyes when I cite using APA instead of MLA or the other one that I've used.

Now that I've satisfied everyone's curiosity, I think I'll collect the garbage and recycling for garbage day tomorrow.

Mid-90s Alt-rock For Bedrooms

Yesterday I was spinning Automatic for the People and today I'm listening to Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. It's an interesting change to listen to things that I haven't heard in years instead of seeking something that's new and unheard by my ears.

One of the things that stand out to me is how much Fumbling verges on being a dub album. The bass and the drums are way more prominent than one might expect for an album of introspection by a female singer-songwriter. The song Possession in particular has a big loping bass line. I suppose maybe only Kate Bush was as experimental in this genre prior to this album.