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fleeting festivity

Last day of 2009.

Goodbye year.

Still 50% zeroes though. Another year until positive numbers regain the majority; a-hundred-and-one more and I predict the zeroes will be nearly extinct altogether.

I took down the Christmas stuff today. House-hung accoutrements, tree and all the trimmings, and various knickknacks. Did it all by myself; motions mirrored and reversed from my lonesome assembly only weeks ago. Sharaun was alternately busy and sleeping, and so couldn’t lend a hand. Boxed it all up and moved it back to its resting place high on a garage shelf. It’s good to put the Christmas high, you only need to reach it once a year so it’s not a pain.

It had to go, though. If you don’t get the Christmas stuff out early enough, give it enough life during December, the festivity is just too fleeting. Like going camping for one night it’s all setup and teardown. I’d have preferred this not to have been a solitary thing, but the tree had been goading me and I broke under the strain. Just sitting over in the corner glowing cheerily and multi-colored, growing more out-of-season with each passing minute, taunting me that it’d still be standing come 2010. Not this year tree. Not this year.

Someone needs to sweep up or vacuum the fake plastic pine needles now, though. They litter the floor, both the new hardwood and the carpet in the adjacent toy room.

The floor. Sharaun’s dislike for it seems to grow stronger by the week. I finally said to her today, “I don’t think you know how bad it makes me feel to hear you constantly ‘tsking‘ over each and every minute surface mar on this floor. I need to let you know that it pains me to think we spent this much on something you might hate.” Earnest appeals fell on deaf ears, however, getting something crushing in return like, “It makes me feel bad too; I wish we would’ve spent the money on something else or got laminate instead of this ‘soft’ hardwood.” Ouch.

I try not to make it a fight but it’s hard. Instead I settle for saying, simply, that I really like the floor. I comment often on how much better I think it makes the place look. Maybe I can at least keep the scales level if I say enough positive things. Balance it out. Some yin for some yang.

I don’t know why, but I take her disliking the floor so much almost as an affront to my ability to “provide.” I know it’s not like I felled the trees, planed out boards, scraped and stained the planks and set them down in rows myself… yet her derision makes me feel a poor decision-maker. Maybe it’s the ostensibly misdirected investment. Maybe it’s that she asked for wood floors for so long. Maybe it’s the fact that, personally, I really do like the floor. I guess it’s complicated, or stupid. Probably stupid. I hold hope that she doesn’t just plain hate the floor. It helps me feel less of a failure.

Yeah; stupid.

Goodnight.

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best of 2009

Internet.  It’s nearly the last day of this here year.  I let these trailing days sneak up on me…

Still haven’t managed to take down the Christmas tree, although I did get the lights off the house before the rain came this week.  Not all the gifts are properly stowed away either.  Still work to do.

Speaking of work to do…

I almost had an honest miss of 2009 with this entry.  It’s just that I usually do the year-end music list thing earlier in December, but I didn’t this year.  In fact, I forgot all about it until I today.  I was sitting at work, listening to one of the albums shown below and thinking about how much it’s grown on me in the past month or so… to the point where I’d probably rank it among the 2009 efforts I enjoyed most, and that’s when it hit me: I’d not done my list.  Spent some time today to rectify that, and here is the fruit thereof.

First up, the almosts:
(click for more info)

Honorable Mention

And now, the real-deal.  I tried to go back and write some fresh content on the portion of these records I’ve already given accolades in my halfway post, but a careful comparison would reveal at least a little blatant plagiarism betwixt the twain (hard to come up with original thoughts on the same content twice, y’know).  Even still, enjoy.

Most Serene Republic10. The Most Serene Republic – … and the Ever Expanding Universe

While not as immediately unstoppable as some of the MSR’s previous efforts (which have all, unfailingly, ranked here on previous blog toplists) – the Canuck collective’s latest release is nothing to turn away from. Still layered and dense and thickly sung by many voices, it still seems a tad bit dialed back from the all-out cacophony of their earlier stuff, and might benefit from being a little less unapproachable this time around because of it. For me, it may be that this band continues to do no wrong… but I liked this album from the first time I heard the first few seconds of the first song. Good stuff here folks; good, exciting stuff.

9. The Flaming Lips – Embryonic

Of all the records on this 2009 list, I got the least amount of time with this one. Released in October, and only really seriously appreciated by me beginning in December, it’s a squeaker. But, even with the limited exposure I knew it had to bow here. I think the last Lips album I really dug was 1999’s The Soft Bulletin. Oh sure, Yoshimi was listenable but wasn’t anything I flipped over. Then again, the band has always been hit or miss for me – maybe because they seem to approach each record as a new experiment in what they can sound like. Sometimes I like the results, sometimes not. Well, ten years have passed since Bulletin and, on this album, they have an entirely different sound. It’s a consistent new sound though: fuzzed-out bass punched-out by distorted rhythm and wandering bells, picked accents, and the familiar Flaming Lips “trippy” vocals and various random-sound accoutrement. Might be the closest we’ll get to a modern-day reincarnation of Pink Floyd, if that makes you want to hear it.

Grizzly Bear8. Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest

At the halfway mark I called this album “opium party music.”  I stand by that classification. Made for lounging around on satin pillows letting lethargy drive an academic listening. It’s no secret that “Two Weeks” buoys the record from a broad-appeal perspective, or that the rest of the tracks dazzle more through subtlety than fireworks – but there’s a wall-to-wall beauty of perfectionist production here that demands intent listening throughout; even after things seem to “slow down” off the high that is “Two Weeks.” And yes, I’ll admit that I just plain don’t like “Dory” at all… but that’s no reason to shun this sparkly, sometimes slow, quiet beast. With each perfectly placed strum or beat or whisper, it proves it deserves the spot.

Wild Beasts7. Wild Beasts – Two Dancers

Oh Wild Beasts, how far you’ve fallen.  Mid-year, you were #2… and here you are finishing at #7.  What happened?  Now look… this album is still super-fantastic.  It’s still seductive, slippery, effeminate, growling, dirty, teasing, young, and dripping with aural sex. It still has the same plucky harmonics, sparse woodblock percussion, and should-be-offputting-but’s-instead-entrancing female/male range of the lead singer.  It’s even still got one of the best lyrics of the year in, “This is a booty call; my boot, my boot, my boot, my boot up your asshole.”  So what changed?

Back then, I’d just then discovered the record and I was simply enamored.  As the year wore on I realized that it was merely #7 good, and that other bigger and badder records more rightly deserved the #2 spot.  But hey, a spot in the top ten ain’t nothing to cry about.

6. Islands – Vapours

I don’t know why, but I didn’t like this album immediately. On first listen, I was disappointed that it wasn’t such an instant pleasure they way all previous Islands/Unicorns records had been to my ears. Maybe this is because I read a review online that called it “safe” compared to their last effort (which also charted on last year’s personal “best of”); perhaps I let that influence me too much. But then Ben commented offhandedly that he was really digging it, and I gave it another go. Lo and behold, on repeat listens, my fondness for the sometimes slower, more plodding and deliberate Islands sound grew and grew. So yeah, maybe less wild or spontaneous in some ways, but let’s think of the new-found structure and brevity as “development,” OK? If you try this record, I’m convinced that you, too, will end up digging the plucky keyboards, marching synth percussion, and, as always, the instantly recognizable vocal styling.

Decemberists5. The Decemberists – The Hazards of Love

What can I say about this record that won’t make you automatically write it off as just some pretentious concept album? Oh, that’s right: nothing. That’s because this, moreso than any loosely cohesive so-called “concept” record of the last few years, is indeed a supremely pretentious album-length story-arc. A shamelessly complex tale starring a multi-character cast built on the foundation of Meloy’s trademark wordy, arcane songwriting. Through a hefty dose of “thou” and “wilt” and “irascible,” you’re treated to a classic tragedy involving a maiden, a shape-shifting animal-man, a wicked forest queen, and… uh… yeah…

And, as much as that whole mess above might turn you off (and believe me, Sharaun could barely bring herself to listen to this thing after I’d ranted and raved about the story and concept), the music on here is just piss-pants brilliant. Thematically tight, brilliantly instrumented, and entertaining throughout, you’ll want to hear the album if only to dismiss it as trying-too-hard smarmy art-rock.

4. Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros – Up From Below

I’m trying to recall where I heard about this record, but can’t. I do remember that I downloaded it simply because I liked the name of the band… sounded intriguing. Turns out the music sounds like the kind of stuff a bunch of proto-hippies might make if they decided to up and leave LA, move into a bus in the desert, and make music as a collaborative sort of commune-thing. Sounds like that because that’s exactly what it is. And while there’s no one named Edward Sharpe in the band, you might recognize the lead singer’s voice from his previous work in Ima Robot. Bottom line though, this is great 60s-ish roots-rock with doses of psychedelia. Worked great in Mexico in sunny warm weather, and would be a fantastic driving album. It’ll remind you of other things at times: Arcade Fire for the modernists, maybe Jefferson Airplane or even early Bowie for the classicists. See, something for everyone.

Phoenix3. Phoenix- Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Back at mid-year I had bone to pick with the “breaker-upper” that is “Love Like a Sunset.”  Since then, though, I’ve actually learned to appreciate the turned-down track as a sort of “naptime” in between the unrelenting saccharine of this record. Phoenix has ranked for me in previous years, and back then I wrote about them that, “Every summer deserves a summery album. Like a sweet, dripping ice-cream cone, It’s Never Been Like That plops perfect little circles of melted goodness all over your favorite Hawaiian shirt.” And, aside from that being a pretty decent descriptive sentence, the underlying statement works for Wolfgang… too.

I want to bring this album back in time with me when they invent the machine; use it as the soundtrack to the saccharine over-emotion of a tweenage bout of puppy-love. The smiley songs could bounce along like a mirror image of my infatuation-fueled heartbeat as we held hand for the first time. Does that make you want to hear it? It should.

Mew2. Mew – No More Stories/Are Told Today/I’m Sorry/They Washed Away//No More Stories/The World Is Grey/I’m Tired/Let’s Wash Away

Mid-year to year-end and Mew jumps four spots to take the silver medal.  Quite a move.  It’s a well warranted uptick for this record, however.  As the year went by, I realized more and more what a frontrunner it was.  I’d find myself going back, back, back… over and over again to delight in the wash of keyboards and guitars and that oh-so-indie falsetto.  But what are you, reader, going to hear if you go snag this album?  I’ve heard the style of music called “space pop,” but I have no idea what that means.  To me this is something like “modern prog.”  The stuttering tempo of the peppier tracks recalls classic Yes, ELP, and King Crimson, while the dreamier slower stuff sometimes reminds me of the downtempo full-chorus stuff turned out by Canadian mutli-player collectives like Broken Social Scene or Most Serene Republic.  But maybe that’s just me.

Oh, and, after writing my own reviews of these albums, I always go to some “respected” music site to read and compare  my thoughts with their formal review.  I was quite happy this time around to see Pitchfork name-check King Crimson in their someone-got-paid-to-write-it review.  I promise I didn’t cheat.

Animal Collective1. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion

What more can I say about this album?

People have written about it to death this year.  So have I.  If you’re not an Animal Collective person, you’ll likely never share my appreciation for it.  Sometimes I even wonder to myself, “Heck… am I really an ‘Animal Collective person,’ or am I just caught up in the internet lovefest for this band?”  But, be it true love or crowd-influenced love, it’s most certainly love.  More than any other effort from 2009 I find myself coming back to this one again and again and again.

I understand you might think it’s not “music.”  It’s too experimental; too repetitive.; too dense.  Yeah it’s all that, it really is.  It’s out of my comfort zone too.  So really, I don’t know what happened with me and this album.  Perhaps it is some sort of mass hypnosis, but it was fully seeded and completely germinated in my brain if so.

I’m not even going to talk about the music.  It’s been done enough.  Hands-down, though, this is it.  #1 for 2009 beyond a shadow of a doubt.  I drank the Kool Aid; you should think about it.

And that’s it folks.  If you haven’t heard any of these records and want to, go buy them.  I recommend using Amazon’s MP3 store over iTunes, as you get DRM-free downloads you can take with you and load onto any device in the years to come.  Or, head on over to your favorite pirate downloading spot if you feel like risking prison rape.

Hope you’re setup proper for 2010.  We’re as ready as we can be.  Ten years married and a second youngling on the way and we’re pointed heavenward as much as possible from this cluttered Earth.

Goodnight.

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torture

Happy Tuesday friends.  Hope your Christmas was good.  Ours was great.

Now I’m going to jump into some blog.

There are two well-defined moments in each day where Sharaun and I have come to expect maximum bad behavior from Keaton.  One in the morning when it’s time to brush her hair, and one at night when it’s time for bed.  While her reactions aren’t 100% predictable, I’d estimate she explodes into an irrational fit at these events about 80% of the time.  And folks, 80% of the time is just too often.

I think it’s probably worst when it’s time to brush her hair.  Likely because, when that time comes around, it’s usually right before we’re about to walk out the door to be somewhere we’re expected to be.  To Keaton, having her hair brushed is akin to torture.  At first she balks: running, hiding, dodging.  Once you finally corral her and begin brushing she enters the protest phase: squirming, ducking, shifting on her feet, anything to get out of the way.  When you’ve had enough of this and you demand she remain still so you can continue, she enters the ridiculous phase: screaming, crying, whining, and generally fighting you as you try to gently rake out the tangles.  I mean, her hair isn’t even that bad… it stays fairly de-tangled and we had it trimmed recently to help with the dry ratty ends.  It’s just something she’s opposed to.  I’ll be glad, though, when this “phase” (it’s a phase, right?) is done and gone with and she can brush her own her without intervention or argument.

Bedtime is sometimes as bad, but usually more tolerable as we aren’t pressed for time.  Here, the first phase of protest is the classic kids tactic of bargaining for more awake time.  Once she’s warned bedtime is nigh, and is asked to start the readying process (clean-up, teeth brushed, potty, jammies), she starts negotiating.  “Daaaaddd… can I just have three more minutes, pleeeaase?”  We set audible timers on the iPhone as a way to reinforce the time warnings and keep her from delaying, and those seem to help… but once the time is upon us and it’s go-time, she escalates.  Knowing she’s got to do her routine, she instead shifts strategy and moves to delaying tactics.  This can be the “thousand-year brush” style of teeth-brushing,the “slow-motion potty,” or the “inch-a-minute” style of walking from one place to another.  Quite crafty, that child.  After being called out on delays, we move to a similar endgame as the hairbrushing fiascoes: all-out panic and fighting.

In general, bedtime usually doesn’t get to that last phase… but hairbrushing… oh man hairbrushing.

Goodnight.

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merry christmas


Merry Christmas out there peoples.

Our gift-opening rush (which was really more like Keaton’s gift-opening rush) just wrapped up. I cleaned up the mess while Sharaun got started on the roast. Looking forward to a nice dinner with the family.

Hope your day is/will/did go/going well and that Santa was kind. Again, merry Christmas!

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contrary science is fun

The blog failed me last night.  The Christmas tunes entry should’ve auto-posted Tuesday at midnight, like most of my entries do.  Welp, it didn’t – and I only noticed late in the evening my time Tuesday.  Regardless, it’s published now and should fall just below this post for your reading pleasure.

Construction began last night.  Keaton held the walls steady as Sharaun fixed them with a sturdy bead of royal icing.  Before long, the roof was on the gables and iced down.  To ensure compliance with California’s stringent earthquake-rating building codes, we let the hull of the house sit overnight, roof propped on cups to  avoid slippage.  Tonight she was ready for gale force winds… and the finery began.  Gumdrops, peppermints, licorice sticks, jelly beans and fruity Cheerios were stuck here and there (under Keaton’s direction) to make for festive, icing-drenched gingerbread house.  Are we really supposed to be able to eat this thing, too?

I saw a study online the other day that really tickled me.  It stated that, due to the amount of food they consume and associated resources needed to produce it, dogs have double the carbon footprint of an SUV.  This means that, if you’re in favor of the environmentalist concept of “trading” or “offsetting” environmental impact, it’s half as bad for Mother Earth if you drive an SUV than if you own a dog.

I love when real science proves to be antagonistic or contrary to popular psuedo-science (or Oprah-fueled public misconception).  Organic food leads to obesity; sunblock contributes to cancer; anti-bacterial sanitizers actually weaken your natural ability to fight off germs, and thus make you more likely to get sick; etc.

I think it would be hilarious to see a bigger comparative chart of activities that are thought of as environmentally-conscious vs. those that have garnered a bad name.  For instance, the impacts of the massive fleets of recycling trucks burning fuel nationwide on a weekly basis graphed against the regained-resources we get from the materials they collect.  Or, cloth diapers and the water and energy they consume vs. disposables.  Maybe showing, unit-for-unit energy, that a landfill is actually the most efficient way of dealing with waste.

By the way, I don’t know if any of those things are true, but contrary science is fun.

Have a good Christmas Eve eve, folks.  Until later.

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something about christmas songs

There’s something about Christmas songs. Well, the traditional ones.

By “traditional,” I guess I mean the ones you’d expect to hear in church. Songs like “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” “What Child is This,” “Angels We Have Heard On High,” and, most of all, “Silent Night” knock something loose inside me. If they’re sung right, these songs can illicit the most striking, unbidden, emotional response from me. Especially “Silent Night.” A well-done version of that song and I’ll have trouble holding back tears. I don’t know why this is, or how the association got made in my subconscious, but it’s for-sure there. This Sunday at church they did a run of mostly these holiday tracks and my chest swelled as I sang along. There’s just something about Christmas songs.

Ahem… do I get to keep my man-card? OK, moving on then.

We’re supposed to get our car back Wednesday, but if things aren’t looking good I’m going to rent a vehicle to get us through Christmastime while my folks are here. Something of comparable size to the out-of-commission Acadia, on the off chance we want to do something as a family while my folks are in town (in my head I see us doing a whole lot of nothing, but you never know). The bill came to $6,000 or so of damage… although it was all superficial and the body shop says there’s nothing wrong with the underlying chassis of the vehicle. All the same, I’d rather it never had been in an accident, let alone just a few months after we’d gotten it. But, such is life. We can roll with it.

As predicted, work has slowed considerably this week. As the holidays approach there are less and less cars in the parking lot each morning. By Thursday the place will be a ghost town. All this makes for and environment that’s 1) very quiet, uninterrupted, and work-conducive as well as 2) hard to stick around long in, even being super productive. The desolation and thoughts of everyone else being at home enjoying family or a good book just makes a man want to cut-out early and call a few hours work “good enough.” Maybe, since things come so easy in the silent solitude, I can justify a few hours work as equal to a busy interrupt-drive day’s full eight hours? Yeah… that’s the ticket.

Goodnight.

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amble at an easy pace

Been a while since I wrote.  Should be a slow week; writing should pick up.  All over the place today.

Tonight (Sunday) I got a wild hair and wanted to cook dinner for the family.  At work they make this roasted red pepper tomato bisque that I could eat ten bowls of, and since it was a nice chill gray day I figured it’d be fun to give it a try.  After some internettin’, I had cobbled together a recipe that sounded good and we picked up the raw materials on the way back from church.  Turned out to be dead-simple and pretty tasty, and the family approved so I felt accomplished.

Saturday morning my mom called and said that she and dad were considering a last-minute trip down for Christmas. A few hours of deliberation later and we got a copy of their itinerary in the inbox. Sharaun and I are both excited we’ll have family around for the holidays after all. We can cook a real-sized dinner now without feeling wasteful or overly-gluttonous (until we sit down to eat, at least), and we’ll be able to share gift-opening with Keaton. We were just lamenting the other day about not being able to spend the holiday with any extended family, and now we got that on lock. Thanks guys.

Cleaned out the computer desk area this weekend, found the DMV notice that Sharaun’s registration needed to be renewed… back in August.  With the fees, it’s nearly 200% what it would’ve been four months ago were it done on time.  My fault; I’m the one who’s responsible for doing “those kind of things” around here and it must’ve just slipped through the cracks.  Bad thing is, I’ve been giving Sharaun a hard time for the past month, contending she’d lost the renewed stickers they must have sent when I (surely) paid on-time.  I’ve been reminding her to call the DMV to get new stickers on an almost daily basis for weeks now.  Dang.

As a blogging-mecahnics sideline, I’ve become quite good at blogging on the iPhone WordPress application. In landscape mode I can tap out the paragraphs at an alarming pace, with relatively few typos or rewrites necessary. Best of all, the prospect of tackling a full-sized entry via the phone is no longer too duanting. In fact, everything you’ve read up to now, including this very sentence is iPhone-birthed. Not bad as a handheld tool.

Don’t really have anything more.  Goodnight.