Final Moments

2:33

2:34

2:35, and it's all over.

Here are most of my student assistants from this year. Zan and Pavan are missing. I'd never agreed to having an assistant before Nathan and Erin (not pictured) convinced me last spring. Thanks to all of you for teaching me that there are more important things to do during my prep period than actual prepping:

watching The Office on Hulu
Pitchfork.tv
coloring
practicing the cursive "z"
Slushee wagers
brainstorming ideas for AP Comp papers
waltz lessons along to Gillian Welch's Revival
getting ideas for funny things to say and do to students from Teri
trying not to tell you I knew Teri won the writing contest
getting Joe and Nathan into Collins LLC
deciding which days to go to the P4K Festival
Wii
trying to get Teri to go to IU
trying to make you all want to be English majors
and so much more.

To the Graduates

Well, HHS graduates, the flowers are out and congratulating you. Even the tiny Chamomile and Chives in my herb garden are doing their best. So when you pass something blooming that seems to be celebrating your passage from being someone who plays Nintendo at home into someone who plays Nintendo in a dorm room, be sure to say to it "thanks, it feels good."

If you take any lessons away from your time in my classroom, let it be these:

1. Blue .07 Pilot gel pens are the best.
2. Dogs are better than cats, but cats are better than nothing.
3. A comma-splice happens when two main clauses are joined by a comma.

Summer Survivor

I have decided that I am going to live this summer like it's one long, personal episode of Survivor where I am the host as well as both tribes and I give myself little challenges and compete for a million dollars against myself. Because I am both tribes, I will conclude each challenge by bad talking myself and saying what a back-stabber I am and stuff.
Tonight's challenge was to read the new Dean Wareham memoir while playing all three Galaxie 500 albums in a row. And I did it. I won the challenge. I now get immunity from something.

I don't know how long it takes to play those albums, but I read only 84 pages in that time. I am so slow. The book is a fun read, I suppose. He's got some funny stories. I like hearing about Kramer (not the Seinfeld Kramer) the most. I wonder if he has a book.

Galaxie 500 is just so awesome, though. That first record still kills me. This is one band I feel like I found all by myself and never shared with anyone else b/c nobody else knew about them. My friend Catherine in Bloomington did, but I think that was it. I remember once I told her I liked some e.p. that Damon and Naomi made after G500 broke up and she said she didn't and it embarrassed me because I thought she was cool and had cool taste. She was so right though, now that I think about it.

It's past my bedtime, but I need to go see if there is Youtube video of my school's senior prank yet.

Clawhammer Season

When the trees fill out is when I usually start to feel like playing banjo again. I would probably be a lot better if I played year around. But anyway this is the first time I've looked around YouTube for things to play and I came across this great video. The song is nice, but my favorite part is the dogs wandering around. Wait for the part when the third lab wanders in and stares at the guy for a few minutes before sitting down to scratch an itch.



What kind of world would it be if everyone had to own three Labradors? I think we would all be a lot more mellow. I remember when we lived in Evansville, everyone grew tomatoes. You could walk up to any stranger and say "How are your tomatoes doing?" and you would be friends, even if they voted for different people than you did, and most of them did.

How much better would the bond be if you could go up to anyone on the sidewalk and say "How are your Labradors?" I think it would be pretty nice.

Today's Reading

Annie Clark

Great article in the Sunday paper about the recent wave of "one man (and woman) bands" and the ways that technology has allowed them to develop some kind of movement in reaction to what the author calls the "conservatism" and "sparseness" of recent indie music. It features interviews with the guy from Final Fantasy, the guy from Panda Bear and the guy from St. Vincent, Annie Clark. These people seem like they're having a lot of fun, all obsessed with their cables and software and whatnot.

Maybe a lot of the appeal of the article is seeing bands like Ariel Pink and Animal Collective mentioned in a newspaper. It's also cool because I just had a student hand in a research paper/ profile about this exact same phenomenon, but on a local level.

It is a dangerous thing to read stuff like this on a sunny Sunday morning while you are inebriate with Sunday breakfast and the first good pot of coffee you have made in a month. You think of new hobbies. You want to buy a MacBook Pro, whatever that is, and plug a guitar into it and then start surfing the web for samples you can loop and then put it all together into your own private soundtrack for summer. I would put funny stickers on the laptop and sit on my bed as I fiddle knobs, all with a furrowed brow signaling to my wife "I am busy defining a new genre of pop at the intersection of dance-hall reggae, George Jones, bicycles, and YouTube."

But that will probably not happen. Whatever I do this summer, it will probably involve mowing. Maybe I will spend the summer mowing and looking for a new, indie-approved, MacBook-enabled method of gardening worthy of Readymade or Make.

I Want to Believe

Goodness. I just scored four tickets to see MBV in Chicago this September. Could this be the biggest show in the history of the world? Yes, I think it could.

Back when I spent a semester in London, losing 20 lbs because I spent all my money riding the Tube around and seeing bands and none on food except for the occasional fish and chips which always sounded better than it tasted, my only real regret was not getting to see this band. They played like four straight nights before Loveless was released. It was my last few days in town and they all sold out before I could get tickets.

Since then, Loveless re-wired my brain in some way. It's my most immediate connection to the sublime. It's times like this that I wish I didn't traffic in hyperbole so frequently because it has dulled my ability to express how much I love the really significant stuff.

What's kind of cool is that technology has maybe progressed enough that they will be able to get the live experience closer to what they did in the studio so that Shields doesn't feel the need to just crank up the volume and kill us all with decibels as a plan B.

Never thought this day would come, so I'm kind of excited.

Cramer Imitation

Untitled (Scary Back Yard) #5

The best I could do in my own yard. Worth a try, anyway. I think I will spend today on the other, brighter side of the house, planting the stuff I got from the Botanical Conservatory's plant sale last Thursday.

Gustav Cramer

Untitled (Woodland) #56, Gustav Cramer

With the rain and with all these things climbing out of the dirt in my garden--I think they're called "plants"--I can definitely feel my state of mind switching over into the spring mode. I'm always surprised at how one day you see mud and leftover winter out your window and then the next day you see withering Daffodils and Peonies about to go off.

But I love having more garden than I can possibly handle. It's the way it should be. I've seen this guy Gustav Cramer's pictures a couple of times now on places on the internet and it's pretty great for the way it expresses that threat that nature carries to do fine without us. In his woodland series all the woodlands look they're places happy to be finally left alone. That's how I see it, anyway. Something about them reminds me a little too much of my own backyard.

Is this dog deaf?

The Smokey, with pile of sticks.

So I tell my wife by email this morning that she has been right all along: The Smokey is deaf. I confirmed it last night by using the "treat test" on her, yelling "wanna treat?" pretty loudly but while standing out of her sight. She had no clue.

I was only a little sad about it at first except when I would work myself up by saying "now she can never hear her masters' voices again." I told my 5 year old about my fears and she says "It's okay, Dad. You can just use sign language to talk to her."

So after school today, I come home and try the "treat test," and Smokey gets up and looks at me all excited--the expected treat response. She passed the test! So now I don't know what to think. I guess I'll just go on thinking what I usually do: she is old and will die sooner than I think so love her while I can. You have to have a little death at hand to love something the way it deserves. She's barking to get in now. I will demonstrate my love for her by not making her wait.

God, that dog is annoying. In and out all day long.

IN OTHER NEWS, Monkesquirrel endorses Voting over Not Voting. What a fun day to be a Hoosier. We've got all the attention for once, and it matters. All I will say here is that I changed my vote at the last second, while standing at the machine. Not an experience I am accustomed to.

The Outdoors is Open

Finally, the first outdoor meal of the year. We should eat all our meals outside year around, like the Indians did. They had it figured out. Everything tastes better there. I could even eat grass outdoors. Like cows. Cows have it figured out too, I guess.

This here is a picture of the new fish taco recipe I made for C's birthday. I always make different fish taco recipes because I don't have any written down and always end up at different web sites looking one up. This one had me frying cod, and that is never a bad idea. Might be my new favorite.

I fry so rarely that I never know what to do with the left over oil. I let it sit out and then throw it away trying not to think about what I spent for the bottle. Could I fry donuts the next morning after making fish tacos at night? Probably not. C suggested the reverse might be possible, though.

This is a picture of the tree that I tried to fill with lights to make the night more festive. It looks cool in person. I think the summer rule will be that if you drive by and see the lights on in the tree, then you can stop by and we will grill something for you. Asparagus, probably, so I hope that's okay.

The family

And before I forget, I need to write it down that if I ever write a children's book, my pen name will be "P.J. Bottoms."

American Teen trailer!

I'm so excited for this movie. Filmed in Warsaw! Mrs. K just pointed me to the trailer, which I'd been waiting to see for awhile, and it looks so good.

new sport: Brother Sport

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE , BROTHER SPORT
by GrrrndZero

My favorite of the new A.C. songs, but I like "Safer" a lot too. The title intro is a little dull, but when the actual song starts and especially when when the 3:40 mark hits, it becomes one of the most sublime moments since Loveless. I think, anyway.

Instead of Juno

Now that it is out on DVD, people are hearing about Juno again, so it's a good time to mention Rocket Science, which is better. It probably rates about the same on the plausibility scale as Juno, but the difference is that the liberties it takes are intentional and, more importantly, earned by its performances and script, whereas Juno loses its credibility points with the viewer (or this viewer) by accident. For me at least, it sounds like every word Diablo Cody put in Juno's mouth came from some revisionist or wishful-thinking diary she kept full of the things she wished she had said and done during high school. Just too clever.

One of my students had this great comment in his journal the other day about how all the girls at our school think that the character Juno is so cool but if she went to our school, they would all hate on her.

The two films' soundtracks are also similar, but again, in my opinion, Rocket Science wins here--the music feels more integrated and, I guess, "warranted" would be a good word to describe it, where in Juno the songs may be catchy but they're used like cans of energy drink, as a substitute for energy where there isn't any (just like Wes Anderson!).

Anyway, you should see it and then tell me if you agree or disagree. Or no, only tell me if you agree. The trailer:

Rugby Saturday

We got there too late to see my school's match, but whenever rugby is going on, it seems like there are always plenty of teams willing to drive to town to make a day of it. I got there just in time for this squad from Detroit to take on the local club. It was about the cruddiest weather imaginable: wind & sleet. A Detroit guy says to me "Thanks for saving the good weather for us" and I say "please, they invented this weather in Deroit." And then he punched me in the face. Actually, they were all super nice fellers. And they all look like contestants in a Bluto look-alike contest (Bluto, you know, the bully in the Popeye cartoons). I could have thought of a better comparison, maybe.Rugby really is one of the more confusing games to watch if you don't know the rules. I can't figure out any of it. From what I can tell, they only stop play when the teams aren't causing enough injuries. Other than that, they just run around and dislocate things that should always be very firmly located.

Record breaker

Without even trying, I think I am on the verge of breaking the world's record for the number of times listening to the (smog) song "Strayed" in one two hour period in front of a computer. I have not yet found the actual record online anywhere, but I have got to be close. Better listen a few more times to be safe.

Broad Shouldered Weekend

Chicago is not the same place when you have kids with you, but it's still Chicago. A friend loaned us her pied-a-terre at 777 Michigan Ave for the weekend, and it was not to shabby, as they say. This is the view out of one window, looking north. The kids spent a lot of time looking at it. B would start a game of I Spy with you but kept choosing cars. They would drive away, so you could never win. J reverted to some cloying language she must have gleaned from Disney, saying things like "I surely wish I could live here forever." She's five and fluent in princess.

It was mainly museums, then. No Damen Ave. book stores this time. Shedd Aquarium was my favorite except for the dolphin show, which is primarily a lecture. They should advertise it that way. But I could watch the Beluga whales for weeks. Unfortunately, the main attraction for me, the octopus, was balled up in a corner of his small box of a tank. But still, a live, large-ish, non-fried octopus. I could see one of its eyes, an intelligent eye, and I think we shared a moment.

Walking around some of the neighborhoods just northwest of the water tower was some of the more laid-back adult stuff we got to do. We spent about twenty harrowing minutes in a fabulous Anthropologie store. I was convinced we were going to buy some broken $200 bauble but we made it out okay.

In the particular beautiful brownstone part of Chicago where we were walking, you don't see a lot of families. It's just too expensive, I guess. You'd see a few local families out and about with strollers and it may have been me but the parents had these looks on their faces like "look at us! We're raising our family in downtown Chicago and we're doing great!" Maybe I was jealous, but I don't think so. Out of the other side of the apartment, you could see the Museum of Contemporary Art. On Friday night, they were having a late-night party thing with DJ's and hipsters, presumably, but I couldn't quite tell from the apartment. I watched people walk through the galleries for awhile and thought "I surely would love to sneak out and hang with the DJ's." But no, not this night.

Recipe for a Playlist

The Ruby Suns

Once again, I have the Animal Collective message board, "Collected Animals," to thank for finding me new music to dig. This time, it's The Ruby Suns, more kind of Beach Boys sounding stuff, which I seem to be into lately.

I was thinking about this today and I realized that I usually find myself patrolling a few places for new music:

(1) blogs like Gorilla vs. Bear and Stereogum and others
(2) The New Yorker's blurbs about bands playing in town that week
(3) The New York Times "Playlist" column in the Sunday paper.

Those last two sound stodgy, but they are actually pretty smart sources. By far, though, the AC board has the highest success rate for me.

Usually, it goes like this: mine a thread for suggestions and then plug them into The Hype Machine to stream songs it finds across the universe. After streaming them for awhile, it's a pretty simple decision whether I want to pay to download the album or not.

Anyway, I do this and think that I'm caught up with what's happening in the music world and then I read a few SXSW reports of all the bands who played in Austin and I realize that I'm not even close. I'm more than a little jealous of my friend Jim, who just took a job as photo editor of Wired magazine and got to go to SXSW as a result. Maybe some day I will be able to trade my two Masters tickets to someone for some all-access badges to that festival. That'd be a dream.

I've also been spending a lot of time this break reading Abu Muqawama, a pretty amazing Iraq war blog, which does so much more to explain the nuances behind what you read in the traditional media. It has helped convince me, for example, that recent reductions in violence have less to do with our increased numbers of troops, and all to do with giving al-Sadr the chance to participate in the political process and therefore an incentive to call his militia off.

Heavy.

Now I have to drive in to school to feed my fish, though they're probably all dead by now. My last shark, "The Kid," has to be a goner, just like at the end of Blood Meridian.

Break

The first Saturday of spring break. Many of my students probably haven't even gone to sleep yet, having stayed up playing Gears of War all night. They're already bored, I bet--they're already wishing they could be back in my class. See, kids, video-games are not the answer: they are a diversion from Truth, a living death. Hey, I just saw a woodpecker fly into a knothole in a tree outside my window. I thought that only happened in cartoons. Nature!

That's a picture of my new favorite local band, Tugboat Jack. They played a fun show at the Warbird Brewery last night full of Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Sr., and some revved-up traditional bluegrass standards. Makes me want to pick up the banjo today and put new strings on it.

First Signs

This is the early crew heading out to cross a half mile of late winter mud to get to the Yoder sugar bush yesterday, something that is starting to be a fun, first signs of spring ritual. The people there are as sweet as the maple syrup they are boiling in the evaporator room. A lame simile, but it's true. Every year, I leave thinking "I've just got to start drilling holes in my trees to make my own syrup," and I don't even care that most of our trees are Chinese Elms. Even if the stuff tasted awful, it would still be something I made, which is basically our sole purpose on this planet: to make stuff.

Cath is carrying what may be the first Vera Bradley bag that I am willing to say, publicly, is cool. It almost has an Anthropologie feel to it. Sure, there have been patterns in the past that I have liked, but none that I was comfortable enough to admit it to outside of a close, trusted, inner-circle of friends (okay, one other I can admit to openly is the classic Blue Toile). This pattern, called "Puccini," is still a prototype, and is therefore still being tested in wind tunnels and by rooms full of violent chimpanzees, but the early results have been promising.
Last year, I swear that they made the pancakes for you, but this year you were supposed to bring your own batter for the grills. My bad. Fortunately, Wes and Sarah Jane brought enough for all. B. got to man the tractor, a highlight for him, apart from the donuts the Yoders had for the kids.

Here, I predict, is the 2008 Christmas card photo that Wes and Sarah will use. It's that good. I love the way the firewood radiates in these, like, rays like it's one of them old-timey religious icons. That's what it makes me think of, anyway.

I knew him before he was big

A big drug dealer, that is. According to the Journal-Gazette, this guy here just got caught, allegedly, in possession of over three tons of marijuana, the largest pot bust in local memory. I didn't recognize him at first because it has probably been almost twenty years since I saw him last, but he is the younger brother of a pretty good high school friend of mine. We weren't great friends, but we hung out a lot. I got mad at him once when he lost my Dead Milkmen t-shirt, and he got mad at me when one time when I made out with his high school sweet-heart, but J.R. was always cool.

Anyway, I'm sorry that J.R. and his family are experiencing this. The McChesneys are an extremely nice, bright, and upstanding bunch of people. Such a shame.

I am so good at art.

What a beautiful snow day that was yesterday, and I would have loved it even more had I known that we do not have to make it up at the end of the year. I sat around, had some mediocre coffee that I had roasted in my basement the night before and then made a really hard test for my Comp class and then made it a lot easier. And then, like most people, wasted time on the internet. I watched the mail-man pass right by the house because I didn't shovel our front walk. And the prospect of a day with no mail bummed me out, so I drew pictures for awhile.
I don't really draw, but last weekend my friend Clare showed me these "blind contour drawings" she'd done, and it made me want to try. I'd never heard of it before, but what you do is not look at the paper as you're drawing, and you don't lift the pencil, either. You can peek to see where the pencil is, but you can't move it while you're looking. I first attempted those two heroes of modernism William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. I like Carlos the best, though he looks a little like Tintin with glasses instead of Snowy the dog. Wallace Stevens is a little bit of a disappointment, but not nearly as bad as James Wright.

It's funny. I wanted the Wright one to be the best, so it's like the left side of my brain, or whichever side is the one that can't draw, tried to control things too much. Pretty scary, but that's part of what's so cool about blind contour drawing: when they turn out ugly, you can say "hey, I wasn't even looking when I drew it, so shut your face." I haven't had to say that to anyone yet, but I will if I have to.

In other disastrous news, I made the mistake of listening to Terry Gross today, who somehow managed, in the first three minutes of her interview with David Simon, producer of the incredible show The Wire, to let out at least three major spoilers about season five. We just finished watching season four last night and were planning on waiting until the DVD's came out to watch 5, but now Terri has taken much of the fun out of it. After the first two major plot things slipped out of her mouth, I started running to the radio to turn it off, but not before she told me that XXXX XX XXXXXX XX XXX XXXX [redacted]. I couldn't believe it. Thanks, Terry. I always liked Diane Rehm better, and this just confirms it.

Bring that snow.

New Snow, Northern Michigan, 2.08.08

End of February, starting to hear lots of folks say things like "I am so bored with winter" and "I am so bored with winter." But this has been a nice one, I think, for the way it, like, keeps renewing itself, you know? The winter melts on you, leaves standing water in your yard, looks ugly, and then snows all over again and some part of you says "yay, snow!" That reaction doesn't happen when you just have snow every day; it's the mud/snow cycle of this winter that keeps bringing that feeling back for me.

I haven't been posting much lately, but life has proceeded regardless. For example, I have been busy with my winter sport of mice-killin, though I appear to have scared off, or smushed, all my opponents. There is not nearly as much sport in mousing as there is in mole-hunting, which requires a high degree of judgment, sensitivty to the rodent-mind, and cold-blooded wilfulness. Mouse hunting just requires peanut butter. Still, it passes the time.

So here is a snow day, then. Snow day #5, the first one to officially make my summer shorter by one day. That is one long bike ride I will not get to take now. Still, it is hard to argue against a snow day. They're gifts, where you don't have to do nothing you don't want to do apart from the occasional time-out for your kids. So far, I've spent most of the morning looking up the TAB and Youtube covers for REM ("Driver 8" and "Talk About the Passion"), Big Star ("I'm in Love with a Girl"--but I tell my girl it's "The June-y Song"), and that "Falling Slowly" song from Once (which is a little cheesey, but it's of the moment).

And now the kids are asleep and I'll either go skiing or read a little more of the new Junot Diaz so that I can hopefully, retroactively, remove some of my demerits with my club. Probably not. This is a club that does not forget.

And if you like The Smiths, I found this pretty awesome Youtube of a guy showing how he recreates the effects for "How Soon is Now." I've watched it about four times now, I think.

New new low

So our power goes off for twenty minutes today and at first my desktop is working a little funny and then I "fix" it (re-boot once or twice) but then for some reason my network card won't work. Laptop runs fine over the wireless, but the desktop connection's "broke," as they say. How weird that a power surge would just mess up one part of my setup but not, like, other parts. I guess tomorrow is the day I buy a surge protector and an external hard drive and hope that it fixes itself over night.

Makes me miss back before computers when all you had was, um, nothing. I guess I don't really miss that all that much. Growing up in a small town, I would have loved to have a link to the outside world. As it was, I didn't even learn about the Talking Heads until I moved to Ft. Wayne at the age of 13. Thirteen before I heard the Talking Heads!! Not sure how I managed in little old Marshall, Michigan. Such an isolated town. It was so small the neighborhood bully was also your best friend because there just weren't enough kids to go around. We liked Ozzy and Molly Hatchet because that's all the one record store sold. The entire theater stood on the seats at the end of Star Wars because we had never seen anything like it. We played baseball because we didn't know about cricket. Didn't know about cricket!! We probably still would have played baseball even if we knew about cricket, though.

One of my dreams is to start a cricket club at school. That would be hilarious.

I'm gonna go make some tea.

New low

For the first time in my life, I just voluntarily turned off an IU game before it was over. This has to be the lowest point in my history of loving IU basketball. And that goes back kind of far since one of my earliest memories is the party my parents threw when we won it all in 1976. But this year, geez, it is worse than a Mike Davis team because our offense is just as painful to watch but our defense is worse and we have more talent. Seriously, this has to be the most athletic and talented team since, heck, Cheaney's days, but Sampson doesn't appear to have the first clue about what they should do to score in the half court. It's humiliating. Well, as an IU fan it is humiliating. There are worse things in life than having your team suck. I'm just sayin'. I'm going sleepies now.

The real weather report.

Enough of this 6-10" snow prediction stuff. I am going to call it early tonight and predict that our actual total will fall in the 2-3" range, and result not in a cancellation, but in a 2-hr delay. That's my call. Looking at the radar trend, there is no other possibility. Why can't the forecasters be as smart as I am? It's tiring doing both my job and theirs, too.

Untrue or False

I think Burial's "Untrue" played in my livingroom on repeat from 9 to 5 yesterday, and then we drove around for an hour or two listening to it in the car as we shopped for a new tv. Sometimes I'd forget it was on, sometimes I'd stop what I was doing and just listen, but after a full day, I still can't decide how much I like it. Somehow, it's riding this perfect line between sublime and boring. Does it take some kind of genius to do that, or what? Still figuring that one out.

My first day as a DIY electronica musician.

Finally, via boing-boing, I discover a free way for me to realize my dream of becoming whatever you call a person who makes electronic music. This great link to aM Laboratory lets you tinker with all the knobs on the above virtual, vintage, Roland drum machine. I can't really figure out how to control it much yet. No idea what "decay" means or "shuffle," or what clicking those buttons on the bottom do, but still, I'm making music. Or beats, at least. Best time waster I've found in awhile.

2008 is happening.

Lake Caravan

That was a healthy break, there. This muddy looking image is from a few days before new year's at the in-law's lake place. The lake had been free of snow for a few days before and like glass and you could see the bottom like a window, like summer was still happening down there. You have to wonder if fish have any idea at all, where the boats go, where the worms go. I know a guy who walked out on the ice and found a fishing lure he'd lost last summer. Now he just needs to remember when he comes back in July.

What else.

I'm the first person I know who doesn't love Juno. And I don't have a cell phone. That makes me extremely rare, I think. There is something going on now where young whippersnappers want to use soundtracks as substitutes for film-making. Wes Anderson does it, and this movie does too, all over the place. Oh, and Garden State. It was well done in The Graduate, but that movie makes it look easy.

Still, the baby-birthin' scene made me tear up at the end of Juno. Once you're a dad, I guess, every time you see those you say "let's have us another one of those babies!" And then you snap out of it somewhat, or you don't, but you know that you have to stop having the babies at some point in life, let other people have some of them. It's hard.

Here is a new year's resolution: learn to juggle 4 things. You have been juggling 3 things for what, many years now? It is understandable to not know how to juggle, but to know how to juggle 3 and not learn 4 after 15 years or so just looks lazy.

Good news today is that Silver Jews have a new album coming out in late '08 and I had no idea. So excited. I love this excerpt from the Pitchfork interview with David Berman where I heard about the new album. They ask him what he does when he's not working, and he says this:

DB: I read a lot. I read, like, ten hours a day.

Pitchfork: Sounds perfect.

DB: I figure that's what I'm supposed to do when I'm not working. I think that I'm supposed to keep learning, in order to be useful in the event of an emergency, I don't know. I still have to learn how to make knots and all of that stuff. And why France collapsed so easily in 1940. There's a million things I have not caught up to.

I know the feeling.

Anyway, hello, 2008.

My favorite records, 2007

That was a quick year. I hope 2008 takes its time. Here's the music that I dug the most this year.


1. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, The Doldrums

Okay, not really released in 2007, but this list, as I have said, is for music that I first heard this year. Of all the things I turned onto this year, this is the one that, even after a bobillion listens, still completely baffles me with delight every time I hear it. I have no idea what I'm listening to half the time it's playing, but when I try to describe him to myself, I say that he sounds like the kind of music Bob Pollard would make in the creepy basement if he were the serial killer guy in Silence of the Lambs.

And the coolest thing is that all the retro influences he corrupts and spits and beat boxes into his microphone made out of walkman headphones are completely sincere--he's not winking at us; he's just rocking out and not caring how ridiculous his falsetto is.

2. Animal Collective--Strawberry Jam

I dunno--everything they do is awesome and either you agree or you don't. I'm not judging you if you don't. I mean, I'm sure there are lots of people who don't like Animal Collective and manage to live completely normal, fulfilling lives. I guess it's possible in theory, at least.

3. M.I.A.--Kala

This is not at all like anything I usually listen to and therefore I didn't for a couple of months after I borrowed it from the school radio station. And then I watched her in-studio performance on Morning Becomes Eclectic, which probably wasn't all that amazing, but somehow it clicked for me and now it's my number one sitting in traffic album. For the past month, chances are good that if I am not driving in silence, listening to the fan on my car heater and that sound the air makes, I am listening to this.

4. Justice--Cross

Deep in my heart, or maybe not that deep, what I really want to be is a deejay like the guys in Justice. You watch their videos on Youtube and they're just totally stone-faced but the beat is in them, you can tell. DJ's are so business-like these days. I don't think they're allowed to smile at all, even. What a paradox: being a DJ is at the height of the cool hierarchy, just below architect, but you cannot smile or show the world how much fun you are having being so cool. I believe architects can smile, but it is hard to tell behind their glasses.

I just remembered a time in high school when I went to a job interview to be a DJ for a local outfit here in town and the guy started it by putting me by a deck or whatever and he said "okay, now let's hear you give your rowdiest 'get this party going' hello to the audience." I said "I don't think so" and walked out. Yes, it was all about the music to me then. Still is.

But seriously. This album is one of the few electronic--or whatever--records that just killed me over and over this year. There must be more out there that isn't boring; I should look for it.

5. Panda Bear--Person Pitch

Hey, this one is kinda electronic, too. I might have listened to the first track on this album more than any other song this year, other than, of course, "Only Shallow" from Loveless, which I usually hum to myself about 12 times a day. Not sure if that counts. But on this record, even the tracks that don't get mentioned in the press much are beautiful, and they are long but they all meander and change into a couple different beautiful tunes with great "beats" before they're done.

And that's all I'm going to list this year. I listened to a lot, but these are the things that I liked so much they just all stand above the rest. If I were to go to 10, these might be there, though: 6. Radiohead--In Rainbows--I still think they are indie poseurs like U2 and sound like U2, but this new one is pretty; 7. Grizzly Bear--Friend ep--after the P4k Festival especially, I think I have to like everything they do from now on; 8. Califone--Roots & Crowns; 9. Band of Horses--Cease the Begin--not nearly as lame as people are saying. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it is not lame; 10. Jose Gonzalez--In Our Nature--maybe this is because I just started listening to him, but this record is on my mind a lot lately. For some reason, I am embarrassed about this because I think he is supposed to considered cheesey.

So, that's it for 2007. If anyone knows of good freeware that will let me start mixing my own samples and beats here at home, let me know.

Real Snow

Finally, some serious snow. They'd been getting our hopes up all week, and even this one wasn't quite what they thought it could be, but it was enough to slow the town down for a day. People couldn't drive up the hill in front of our house. The mall parking lot was only half full. Neighbor Herb snow-blew our walk, demonstrating again why I have neither snow blower nor cell phone: when you really need one, there is bound to be someone near by who will loan you theirs.

Check this cookie

My AP Lit class has been in the middle of independent novel presentations this past week, and a crack team presented Cormac McCarthy's The Road. They made these cookies to go along with their presentation--how awesome is that? They took the time to mix a food coloring to make "ash" colored icing. Pretty great. Couldn't bring myself to eat one.

Another group is reading Blood Meridian, and just talking to them about their project has me reading the darn thing again. It's just unstoppable, that book. Maybe Suttree isn't my favorite.