“What interesting and unusual music are you listening to these days?” my Uncle asked me during Sunday dinner of bar-b-que and beans.
Good question.
I may be falling into that mid-30s rut where your musical tastes are locked into the bands you loved in college and shortly thereafter (or just straight through college, depending on how long it took you) Following in that thread, The Arcade Fire just released a new album entitled, appropriately for our current situation The Suburbs.
I don’t own it yet, I’m having a quick internal debate about whether I should buy the MP3s on Amazon for $3.99 or if I should order the Vinyl + Digital Download direct from Merge Records.
Anyway, say what you will about Pitchfork, they just nailed me into a corner with this observation in their review of The Suburbs:
This is another 2010 example of a Boss-indebted band (see also: the National and Titus Andronicus) making epic outpourings of modern disillusionment and disappointment for people who can commiserate and return to fretting about their jobs and bank accounts once the house lights go up. But just because the concerns of The Suburbs are at times mundane, that makes them no less real. And that Arcade Fire can make such powerful art out of recognizing these moments makes our own existences feel worthy of documentation. By dropping Neon Bible’s accusatory standpoint, The Suburbs delivers a life-affirming message similar to Funeral’s: We’re all in this together.
I love the National! And who is this Titus Andronicus?
Guilty as charged.
Update: I’ve purchased the MP3s. Instant gratification. Merge’s store appears to be down at the moment and I didn’t want to wait to find out how much the vinyl is.
Another reason for the lack of recent blogging is my mild depression regarding all things government. Health care: underwhelmed. Financial regulations: meh. More tea party crazies in government: Positively scary.
I could blame Republicans for the fact that not one G.O.P. senator indicated a willingness to vote for a bill that would put the slightest price on carbon. I could blame the Democratic senators who were also waffling. I could blame President Obama for his disappearing act on energy and spending more time reading the polls than changing the polls. I could blame the Chamber of Commerce and the fossil-fuel lobby for spending bags of money to subvert this bill. But the truth is, the public, confused and stressed by the last two years, never got mobilized to press for this legislation. We will regret it.
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Friedman’s op-ed actually opened up a new line of reasoning I hadn’t considered before. What exactly would the motivation be for climatologists to fake global-warming? If someone could answer that for me, I’d love to know.
Internet, I love you, but you’re bringing me down.
(with all apologies to LCD Soundsystem)
I can’t get up the motivation to blog about much these days. Summer is here, the socks are off, Emilia keeps growing and growing, and there just isn’t much time for blogging.
I should be a better journal-er, I know it’s in there somewhere… but the priorities go something like this…
1. Spend QT with Family
2. Relax by medium-sized body of water suitable for swimming
3. Cook tasty meals with the ample vegetables received from our CSA: Featherstone Farm.
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…
…
…
99. Wax Car
100. Blog more
101. Beat Mario Galaxy
That may be a little overstated, I did play Mario Galaxy for 20 minutes a few days ago instead of blogging.
Regardless,
I’m starting to get on the wagon when it comes to the idea that multitasking is bad for your brain. I didn’t hop on this train after I turned 30, either. Most of the research that I have seen lately says that people are cognitively better off to focus on one specific task at a time. The PBS documentary Digital Nation wades right into to this debate. Turn off your IM, your email, your TV. Quit every application that you don’t need running and FOCUS.
It’s funny, but one way I think the iPad is a glimpse into the future of computing is by the way it forces you into a single-tasking environment. It’s almost too bad that one of the major new features of iOS4 is the ability to “multi-task”. I guess it will be good for allowing Pandora to run in the background, but personally, I feel like we don’t need any help doing more things at once. If anything, we need help (serious, lie-down-on-the-couch type help) doing less.
In the first Champions League final televised by a U.S. over-the-air network, Inter followed its semifinal victory over Barcelona with another solid performance.
It was a great game, can’t wait for the world cup to begin. I let Emilia watch some of the game with me, and she was yelling “Kick!” “Goal!” “Big kick!” and cheering whenever they showed the crowd waving their flags and cheering.
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