On the Campaign

Best Albums of 2007

A picture of Permanent Records on Chicago Ave, not far from my house.  This is where I kill time flipping around.  Permanent is a sort of cat-reef of records, where you can occasionally see great things like Warhammer 48K or Bird Names.

Music I've Been Enjoying This Year:

Pylon is from Athens, GA, and REM cites them as a big influence even though they don't sound like REM.  This is the coolest record I've heard all year.

I really like the Deerhunter album Cryptograms; it strikes me as really different and great.  Bradford Cox also makes an amazing amount of music and posts it all to his blog for people to download for free.  You can hear some songs where he works with "healing music," writing songs for specific people and situations that might be helped by music, even in the sense of sonic vibrations having a beneficial physiological effects on sick people, which is very cool, almost as cool as doing an interview with Pylon. Which he also did. 

...

Elliott Smith / / / XO

Patti Smith / / / Horses

the Cocteau Twins / / / Heaven or Las Vegas

King Khan & BBQ Show / / / What's For Dinner?

Wolves in the Throne Room / / / Diadem of 12 Stars

Okkervil River / / / The Stage Names

Dinosaur Jr. / / / Beyond

So the whole Numero Group thing is great. I love the idea that there are record detectives out there. Having a few beers, listening and reading through the liner notes to a new episode is a great way to kill an hour.

 I like Feist and Panda Bear, like lots of people.  Their albums, Remainder and Person Pitch respectively,  are both really relaxing and smooth.  Not like Warhammer 48K.

               

The single best thing I've heard might be the Dirty Projector's album Rise Against, a recasting of Black Flag's Damaged from 1981. Dave Longstreth, the main force of the band, has classical training combined with a really eccentric ear and, from what I've heard, a drive to accomplish difficult musical tasks even if it takes several years. This album is one of them; I think it turns on its head the underground fashion of punk simplicity in 81' to reflect the renewed emphasis on frenetically complex melody.  

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Books I've Bought, Books I've Read Over the Winter Break

Books Bought:

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift

Haunted Tales, Edward Gorey

Paradise, Toni Morrison

The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino

The Penal Colony, Franz Kafka

Garage Band, Gipi

Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi

Books Read:

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J.K. Rowling

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy

Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem

Haunted Tales, Edward Gorey (ed.)

The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino

Garage Band, Gipi

Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi

Well,  I started off with a lot of steam, reading the Harry Potter and the McCarthy books in a few days.  They were great, all three.  I knew somewhat what to expect with the McCarthy, but it still didn't prepare me for the grisly spectre of the dead, which is exposed to the reader as though through the dark, rusting mouth of a pistol.  I went home to Kentucky over the break to spend some time with the family, where I witnessed a new kind of excessive decorations that make inflatable Santa Homers look lame. 

I was unsure what to do with some xmas gift money at the "local" Barnes & Nobles, so, at a good friend's suggestion, I decided to venture into the graphic novel.  It is an of intimidating field to me, like classical music or constructivism, but I had the good fortune of getting a suggestion by a very helpful store employee who was also a graphic novelist.  Realizing I wasn't as interested in the choppy and colorful Sea of Manga, he recommended a book by Gipi, and a book by Marjane Satrapi, neither of which I had heard of before.  The Gipi book was beautiful, and managed to evoke bursting color in the setting of a run-down surburb somewhere in Eastern Europe.  His organization of the book into four parts was very clever, as though each chapter were a song on an EP. 

Persepolis was nearly the opposite, all black and white simplicity, not like the fantastically misty magic atmosphere of the movie, but I ended up really liking it that way.  The simplicity emphasizes the playful that imbues the narrator, and ultimately plays a huge role in the resistance the narrator mounts against the socio-ideological regime of Iran she is forced to confront, where playfulness and humor and art are viewed as decadent and Westernized. Satrapi chronicles a life that is hard to imagine for me, and yet I felt throughout the novel as though I could understand her, as if through these cartoons I was inducted into the hushed-up world of Iran's sexual intrigue, gossip, and friendship that only make the Iranian religious regime seem all the more ridiculous, and reminded me how subversive art and the freedom  to express sexuality can be.