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Archive for the ‘The Flaming Lips’ Category

Sam Lipsyte–“Deniers” (New Yorker, May 2, 2011)

Posted in Drinking, Drugs, Holocaust, Marriage Trouble, New Yorker, Racism, Religion, Sam Lipsyte, Short Story, The Flaming Lips on June 8, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: FLAMING LIPS-“Two Blobs Fucking” (2011).

As I understand it, the Flaming Lips will be releasing an EP a month for the next twelve months–all in an unusual manner.  The first track, “Two Blobs Fucking” comes as a 12-part free video download.  Like with their album Zaireeka (which had 4 discs that you were supposed to play simultaneously to get the full effect), this song  comes as 12 separate audio tracks.  According to the online instructions, you’re supposed to get 12 friends with iPhones to each download a section and to play them at exactly the same time.  I don’t have an iPhone (or 12 friends that I could get in the same place at the same time to listen to a song), so I did the next best thing: I used YouTube Downloader, converted the tracks to WAV and then mixed them with Audacity.

I have received many CDs over the years that have mixing technology where you can play certain tracks and not others, but it’s very rare that I play around with them.  This whole process was easy enough that I made 20 different mixes of the song.

The “full” version is a fascinating amalgam of noises with a very cool riff that opens the track.  About midway through, the whole song is taken over by noise–a distorted squealing noise–for a few seconds.  And then the song continues as it was with gentle washes of sound.

The twelve tracks include the main riff, the riff as done by “voices” (doh doh doh), there’s a few noise (guitar) tracks and some noise (animal sound) tracks.  There’s a drum and percussion track as well as the vocal track.

The lyrics are a brief story about Wayne finding a dumpster from a factory which makes and discards manikin body parts.

It’s a weird track.  It’s not their best by any means, and the lyrics are hard to hear for the most part (unless you isolate them, of course).  But having now listened to it so many different ways, I’ve rally grown fond of it.  The riff itself is as I said, simple, but very cool.

It’s a neat experiment and nice that it was free (unlike their second release–a USB drive that is buried inside a candy skull which costs $150).

[READ: May 23, 2011] “Deniers”

This is, as far as I can tell, the first short fiction piece that Lipsyte has had published (please correct if I’m wrong), aside from that really short piece in The Revolution Will be Accessorized.  I enjoyed The Ask quite a lot, and I was excited to read more from him.

This piece, as the title implies, plays around with types of denial.  But it is self-denial that they experience.  The main character is Mandy, an adult whose father, Jacob,  is still alive but who has recently been put into a nursing home.  The opening of the story is more about Jacob.  More specifically, it’s about how Jacob relates (or doesn’t) to Mandy.  Jacob is a holocaust survivor, but he has barely said one word about it (or, really, anything) to Mandy.

Through a series of flashbacks, we see Mandy’s childhood with this distant father.  We also see what happened between Jacob and his wife–a fascinating story of duplicity on almost everyone’s part (and which is wonderfully encapsulated by the picture that accompanies the story (a Shell station lit up at night with the light from the letter “S” unlit). (more…)

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David Foster Wallace–eulogies [audio] (2008)

Posted in Big Books, Boredom, David Foster Wallace, Death, Depression, Five Dials, Fun Boy Three, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen, Language, Madness, Marriage (Happy), NPR/PRI/PBS, Pearl Jam, Smarty Pants, Suicide, Tennis, The Flaming Lips, Zadie Smith on October 26, 2010| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: October 19, 2010] David Foster Wallace Eulogies

There are some really nice eulogies done for when DFW died.  The official (written) memorial service eulogies (from Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, George Saunders and others) are available here (from an outstanding online journal called Five Dials).  They’re all beautiful (I was amused that the second longest one comes from DFW’s editor!).

The audio eulogies are available at The David Foster Wallace Audio Project.  They include two very long full length ceremonies and several news (NPR mostly) reports.  And there’s a lengthy interview with David’s sister, Amy, which is by far the most moving one.

The first of the lengthy pieces is the ceremony from Amherst.  It consists of colleagues, friends and students all telling stories about DFW.  And their collective memories join together to create a great portrait of the man; things that you’d never know about him (except you kind of would) from reading his work.  The thing that really struck me from this memorial was just how many friends he had.  This seems like an insult but it isn’t meant to be; rather, the impression I had was that he was quite a solitary man, holing up with his dogs and his pens.  But the stories and love from his friends during his college years especially are really quite nice to hear, and showcase a side of him that he left out of his work (except, of course, really he didn’t). (more…)

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Jonathan Franzen–“Lost in the Mail” (New Yorker, October 24, 1994)

Posted in Drinking, Drugs, Jonathan Franzen, New Yorker, Paul Debraski, Pavement, Post Office, The Flaming Lips, Weezer on October 7, 2010| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: PAVEMENT-Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (1993).

Now this album, Pavement’s second (after the Watery, Domestic EP, which I’ve never heard) is my idea of perfect Pavement.  Some might complain that this album is too commercial (although it hardly is) but to me is shows a consolidation of the talents into actual songs.

It opens with “Silence Kit” which sounds like a twisted take on a Buddy Holly song–disconcerting and familiar at the same time.  The second track “Elevate Me Later” ups the ante a bit with a noisy raucous chorus.

“Stop Breathin'” is a dark song, a sort of minor ballad that sounds even more disconsolate with the slightly out of tune guitar work.   But the lengthy instrumental at the end is (although simple) quite pretty.

And then there is the sublime nonsense of “Cut Your Hair.”  This was the first Pavement song I’d ever heard all those years ago.  And from the silly “oo oos” at the beginning to the crazy screaming guitar solo and crunchy “NO BIG HAIR” line I fell in love immediately. It was a wonderful left field hit (not unlike “She Don’t Use Jelly”) that brought a great band some attention.

It’s followed by “Newark Wilder,” a slow track that fits wonderfully after “Hair.”  One might even call it a ballad.  But it is definitely not standard fare, when the bass (or baritone guitar) plays a riff instead of a bridge.

The album picks up the rocking vibe again with, “Unfair” which I noticed is like a rough precursor to Weezer’s “Beverly Hills.”  It’s a fairly conventional song but it’s made unconventional by Malkmus’ delivery and guitar style (and would probably be a hit if it was released today).

I recently mentioned “Gold Soundz”.  (And it’s amazing how much the live version sounds just like the studio–as if everything was intentional).  It’s followed by the goofy Dave Brubeck parody/tribute “5-4=Unity.”  And of course, “Range Life” is just an awesome slacker anthem.  It’s got everything.

The last three songs offer a lot of diversity.  “Heaven is a Truck” is a piano based, drunken-sounding ballad.  “Hit the Plane Down” is a rambling wonderful shambles that devolves into a complete chaos, and “Fillmore Jive” is a 6 minute “epic.”  It opens slowly, and then builds into a fairly conventional sounding (drunken, sloppy, end of the concert) rock song.

I feel that Pavement peaked with this disc.  It’s really fantastic.

[READ: September 23, 2010] “Lost in the Mail”

As I am wont to do, I have gotten a little obsessed with an author. Recently it was Wells Tower (there’s still a few Harper’s pieces by him I haven’t read yet). And right now its Jonathan Franzen (even though I haven’t read any of his novels yet).  After reading the previous New Yorker piece, I wanted to see what else he had written for them.  Seeing his entire list at the New Yorker site is daunting and it makes it seem like he was constantly writing quite long pieces for them.  And yet, parsing it out, it comes out to about one article a year.  And yet some of these article, whoo boy, are 12 or 13 pages…quite lengthy for the New Yorker.

And so, I’m going to read these pieces over the next few weeks–I thought about reading each year’s piece during a different week, but that seems too regimented.  And since the majority of these pieces are non fiction (there are about 5 short stories in the mix) I’m going to be reading them with an eye towards these questions: Can a good writer make a story that I don’t care interesting?  Would I enjoy this same piece if it were written by someone else?  As a reporter (at large) does Franzen bring some kind of personality to the way the piece is constructed that someone else may not have?

This questions are unanswerable of course, because no one else wrote the piece in a different way.  But, when scanning the titles, some of the subjects interest me but others do not.  And those will be the real test.

This piece, about the Chicago Post Office is something that I didn’t care about specifically.  However, I have a certain love of the Postal System, and so I found this story heartbreaking and something of an illusion-shatterer. (more…)

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James Joyce–[Week 7] Ulysses (1922) [Eumaeus, Ithaca]

Posted in Big Books, Demons, Digression, Dreams, Fears, Infinite Zombies, Irish Writer, James Joyce, The Flaming Lips, Tindersticks on August 23, 2010| 7 Comments »

SOUNDTRACK: A HOUSE-I am the Greatest (1991).

A House were a Dublin band that released a number of great songs and a few good albums from the mid 1980’s until the late 1990s.  I loved A House (but never knew whether to file them under A or H).  They were a smart, often sarcastic, occasionally poppy college rock band who played dissonant songs more often than not and wrote lyrics which could be off-putting more often than not, but which, in the right mind frame, were simply, as the album says, the greatest.

It opens with a nice jangly guitar which is quickly interrupted by a strange feedback sound and Dave Couse’s somewhat unsettling voice.  And he gives a litany of things about which he does not care, but mostly because nobody else does.  It’s followed by the sweet tender ballad “Too Young.”  The next track was the single, of all things.  “Endless Art” a simple riff which name checks dozens of dead artists that bridges with Beethoven’s Fifth.  It gets tedious after about 200 listens, but since I haven’t heard it in a while, I found myself really grooving to it again.

In keeping with the “let ’em guess” attitude of the disc, the next song is a plaintive moan of longing called “When I First Saw You.”  I’m fairly certain he’s singing out of tune for the whole track.

“Take It Easy on Me” opens with a great wah-wah’d guitar sound that should have been a left-field hit like The Flaming Lips had.  But it’s their simple acoustic songs that pack the most punch like “I am Afraid.”  It’s followed by what sounds like a Tindersticks song, until Couse’s voice kicks in, and we get a great questioning song about religion called “Blind Faith”.

He seems back to his old tricks on “I Lied” (“When I said that I loved you, I lied.”) Then the full band kicks in (with great harmonies) “When I said, when I vowed, I don’t love you anymore, I lied.  I adore you!”

The rest of the songs play with this formula: off kilter yet poppy, harmonies on top of dissonant leads.  The pace never slackens, and the albums stays strong through the brilliant final track, “I am the Greatest” (a spoken word folk track that is all smackdown which devolves into a bunch of blokes shouting “I am!”).

Check out the fantastic stop motion video for “Endless Art” on YouTube, and let me know if you can find a version that’s better than this one.

[READ: Week of August 23, 2010] Ulysses: Episodes 16-17

Nearing the end of the book, still recuperating from the insanity of the Circe episode, we get two episodes that are considerably mellower.  I enjoyed the beginning of Episode 16, but felt a little at sea when it was hijacked by the sailor.  Episode 17 on the other hand is definitely my favorite.  Even though I love the surrealism of Circe, there’s something about the catechism of Episode 17, with its question and answer format–its own sort of surrealism–that I find fascinating, funny and surprisingly informative.  It fills in a ton of details that were left out of the beginning (or that were hidden) and yet still retains a bizarre stream of consciousness. It also offers incredible insight into the man who is Leopold Bloom. (more…)

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David Foster Wallace–“A New Examiner” (Harper’s, September, 2010)

Posted in Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, Canadian Music, David Foster Wallace, Harper's, The Believer, The Flaming Lips, The Polyphonic Spree, Work on August 12, 2010| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: THE POLYPHONIC SPREE-The Beginning Stages of… (2001).

The Polyphonic Spree caused a lot of stir when they released this album.  There were like twenty of them, they all wore robes, and they sang choral chamber pop that was incredibly infectious.  Some people hated them outright.  And yet at least one of their songs was deemed worthy of being in a commercial (maybe that’s why people hated them).

It’s been almost ten years since the record came out and I have to say it still holds up really well.  In fact, given the trend of music over the decade, it almost seems like a precursor to bands like The Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene (the swelling orchestral bits, that is) and there’s the inevitable comparisons with The Flaming Lips.  Even Nick Hornby got into the act, naming one of his collections of essays for The Believer, The Polysyllabic Spree.

Unlike a lot of music that I’ve been enjoying lately, this album doesn’t have a lot of diversity within it.  That’s not to say that it’s bad, because what it does it does very well.  Symphonic pop.  Euphoric, majestic, swelling happiness.

You have to be very cynical not to be moved by some of these songs.  (Or really into death metal, anyway).

Of course, nobody needs the 36 minutes of synthesized swirls that constitute the last “song.”

[READ: August 12, 2010] “A New Examiner”

For those following the releases of excerpts from The Pale King, this is apparently the same fiction that was published in Issue #6 of The Lifted Brow (which I haven’t seen, so I don’t know if this is the same excerpt in toto). (more…)

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90,000

Posted in Alex Stone, Craig Ferguson, David Foster Wallace, David Goldberg, Dropkick Murphys, Edmonton Folk Festival, Evan Goldberg, Flight of the Conchords, Futurama, Gordon Korman, Gordon Lightfoot, Jeff Kinney, Jens Lekman, Kurt Vonnegut, Late Late Show, McSweeney's, Paul F. Tompkins, Pearl Jam, Pierdomenico Baccalario, Pseudonymous Bosch, Seth Rogen, Sonic Youth, Swedish Music, The Airborne Toxic Event, The Decemberists, The Flaming Lips on July 27, 2010| Leave a Comment »

On July 25, I reached 90,000 hits.
It took me seven months to get from 60,000 (Dec 25, 2009) to 90,000.
It took me nine months to get my first 30,000 hits.

There are some obvious contributing factors to this improvement (not the least of which is links from referrers that make absolutely no sense whatsoever (and which are pretty clearly spam, but hey, numbers are numbers, right?)  But the most obvious is the huge outcry at the failure of Scholastic to continue publishing the Ulysses Moore series.

If you Google “Ulysses Moore” I am the first post (after the official Scholastic site, Amazon, and fantasticfiction).  I have received so many comments from people who are frustrated that the can’t finish the series. It is amazing that so many voices are ignored.  As you can see, this series has garnered me 4020 views.

At 60,000 views I posted some theories as to why I thought these posts were so successful.  Since very little has changed (mostly just a little shuffle of the top ten), I won’t bother repeating that.  But, there is one post (see the bottom, hee hee) which has absolutely skyrocketed in just a few short months.

1. 4020 views posted April 25, 2009 [was #1 at 60,000: 1663 views]
Pierdomenico Baccalario–Ulysses Moore series Books 1-4
SOUNDTRACK: PEARL JAM-Vitalogy (more…)

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Berkeley Breathed–Bloom County: The Complete Library Vol. 1 (2009)

Posted in Berkeley Breathed, Big Books, Bloom County, Danger Mouse, David Lynch, Doonesbury, Funny (ha ha), Garry Trudeau, Grandaddy, Graphic Novel, Gruff Rhys, Iggy Pop, Political Humor, Politicians, Religion, Smarty Pants, Sparklehorse, Super Furry Animals, The Cardigans, The Flaming Lips, The Shins, The Strokes, Vic Chesnutt, War on June 3, 2010| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: DANGER MOUSE AND SPARKLEHORSE present: Dark Night of the Soul (2010).

Seems like most things that Danger Mouse touches involve lawsuits.  I’m not entirely sure why this disc had such a hard time seeing the light of day.  But it is due for a proper release in July.  Although by now, surely everyone has obtained a copy of the music, so why would anyone give EMI any money for the disc (since they hid it away in the first place).

The name that is not listed above is David Lynch, who is an important contributor to the project.  He creates all the visuals (and the visuals in the book that was the original release format).  He also contributed vocals to two tracks on the CD.  (His vocals are weird and spacey, just like him…and if you remember his voice from Twin Peaks, just imagine Gordon singing (but with lots of effects).

The rest of the disc is jam packed with interesting singers: Wayne Coyne (from The Flaming Lips), Gruff Rhys (from Super Furry Animals), Jason Lytle (from Grandaddy) on my two favorite tracks, Julian Casablancas (from The Strokes), Black Francis, Iggy Pop, James Mercer (from The Shins), Nina Persson (from The Cardigans), Suzanne Vega, and Vic Chesnutt.

I’m not sure if Danger Mouse and Mark Linkous wrote the music already knowing who the singers were going to be, but musically the tracks work very well.  And yet, despite the different sounds by the different singers, the overall tone and mood of the disc is very consistent: processed and scratchy, melodies hidden deep under noises and effects.   Even the more “upbeat” songs (James Mercer, Nina Persson) are dark meanderings.

It took me a few listens before I really saw how good this album was.  On the surface, it’s a samey sounding disc.  But once you dig beneath, there’s some really great melodies, and it’s fascinating how well the songs stay unified yet reflect the individual singers.

EMI is going to have to pull out all the stops to make it a worthy purchase for those of us who have already found the disc.  Since The Lynch book was way overpriced for my purchase, (and they surely won’t include it with this CD), they need to include at least a few dozen Lynch photos (and more).  And with a list price of  $19 (NINETEEN!) and an Amazon price of $15, the disc should clean your house and improve your wireless connection too.

[READ: June 1, 2010] Bloom County Vol. 1

Boy, did I ever love Bloom County.  Back in high school I had more drawings of Opus and crew in my locker than anything else.  (I used to reproduce the cartoons by hand, I was never one of those “cut out of the paper” people.)  And so, there are tons of punch lines that I still remember twenty-five years later.

And yet, despite my fondness for the cartoon (and the fact that I owned (and read many times)) all of the collected books, I was amazed at how much of the early strips I had no memory of, at all.  True, some of the really early ones are here for the first time in collected form (according to an interview there are hundreds of comics in collected form for the first time in these volumes).   But those early 1980 comics…wha? (more…)

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Damion Searls– ; or The Whale (2009)

Posted in 19th Century, Big Books, Damion Searls, Death, Fishing, Funny (strange), Gods, Henry Rollins, Herman Melville, Infinite Zombies, Jimmy Fallon, Meta, Morality, Peaches, Pink Floyd, Racism, Religion, Stardeath and White Dwarfs, The Flaming Lips, Whales on May 13, 2010| 12 Comments »

SOUNDTRACK: THE FLAMING LIPS & STARDEATH AND WHITE DWARFS featuring HENRY ROLLINS and PEACHES doing The Dark Side of the Moon (2010).

You’ve got to have balls to cover the most popular album of all time.  Everyone knows Dark Side of the Moon, according to Billboard charts everyone probably owns a copy of Dark Side of the Moon.  So, you’re taking on a pretty big task here.  But the Flaming Lips aren’t called The Fearless Freaks for nothing.

What delights me about this album is that it is utterly unfaithful to the original.  There’s nothing worse than a cover song that just apes the original version.  With that in mind, the Lips have put their bizarro stamp on the classic album, oftentimes rendering the songs almost unrecognizable–but more on that in a moment.

The two guest stars on the disc are Henry Rollins and Peaches.  Rollins recites all the spoken word bits from the original.  He actually makes a lot of those weird ramblings clear for me for the firs time.  The originals were spoken by a (presumably) high Englishman.  Rollins’ delivery is much more abrasive (but then so is the music).  It works pretty well, especially since Rollins’ laugh is maniacal, although if he sounded a bit more drunken I think it would work even better.  Peaches sings a few of the female vocal bits.  I’ve never been much of a fan of hers but, man, she does an awesome job in covering “The Great Gig in the Sky,” the track from the disc that features a wondrous diva singing and screaming her heart out.  Peaches really lets loose and showcases the power of her voice.

The Lips play on 7 songs and StarDeath play on 6.  They work together on 2 tracks.

StarDeath is fronted by Wayne Coyne’s nephew, Dennis.  I’d only heard one track from them before, and I liked it.  Dennis’ voice is a higher register, like Wayne, but he’s also a bit more subtle. Musically they are less noisy as well, and it’s a good counterpoint to the static of the Lips’ tracks.

So the opener, “Breathe” (Lips) is distinct right away, because the main focus of this version is a loud throbbing bassline. “On the Run” (Stardeath) is completely indistinguishable from the original.  You would never suspect it was a cover.  It’s a bass-propelled, very cool song, but there’s almost no similarity.

“Money” (Lips) stays fairly faithful to the original, except that the vocals are totally auto-tuned.  It makes the song sound really alien, as if coming, yes, from the other side of the moon.

“Time” (Stardeath) on the other hand, is a very delicate, acoustic track, (sounding somewhat like Mercury Rev, actually).  It is something of a counter to the rocking version on the original.

“Us and Them” (Lips) is probably the closest sounding to the original.  It has simple washes of sound and Wayne’s delicate voice.  But, once again, the louder sections of this song are left out.  “Any Colour You Like” (Stardeath) is a much closer instrumental to the original than “On the Run” was.  And “Brain Damage” (Stardeath) is really quite spot on (and may be even creepier than the original).

The ender, “Eclipse” is like a distorted indie rock version of the original.  It works pretty well.

There’s surprisingly little in the way of sound effects (which are all over the original).  I’d have thought they’d populate the disc with all kinds of fun things, but no, they actually play it pretty straight.

My one real complaint about the disc (and actually about Embryonic as well).  The Lips have always pushed the envelope of music.  But lately, they seem to be redlining  a lot of their sounds, making them distort and crackle.  Now, I love distortion when it’s used well, but this “too loud” distortion actually hurts my ears, even if the volume is low.  I find the sound to be unpleasant, and not in a good way.  And I think it’s a shame because the Lips write such great music, that I hate to have it obscured by clouds of noise.

So, yeah, this will never replace the original for anyone.  But it’s a fun experiment and actually sounds a bit like a rough demo for the final release.  In fact, in many ways it sounds like it’s coming from outer space and may be conceptually more accurate for the title.

I saw The Lips and Star Death on Jimmy Fallon.  They played “Breathe” and all eight (or more) guys were on stage.  It was a big wonderful mess.  And they sounded really good together.

[READ: May 11, 2010] ; or The Whale

In 2007, a book was published called Moby Dick in Half the Time.  And, as the title implies, it took Herman Melville’s Moby Dick; or The Whale and truncated it.  The editors basically kept in all of the “plot” and excised most of the “wandering” parts of the story.

So, in 2009, Damion Searls decided to print all of the excised material as a book itself.  This exercise was published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 2009 | Vol. XXIX.  So, this “book” is Moby Dick without the “plot” or as the introduction puts it, “all Moby, no Dick.”

This book includes “every chapter, sentence, word, and punctuation mark that Anonymous removed to produce [Moby Dick in Half the Time]” (10).

And so what we get is a very surreal story indeed.  It comes across as a fascinating look into the mind of the (in this version) not named until Chapter 11 or so narrator (since we’ve obviously lost “Call me Ishmael”).  It also comes across in many sections as bizarre poetry.

; or the Whale’s opening line is:

“methodically.” (31). (more…)

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David Owen–“The Dime Store Floor” (New Yorker, January 25, 2010)

Posted in Black Sabbath, David Owen, Jools Holland, Later with Jools Holland, Nostalgia, The Divine Comedy, The Flaming Lips on January 19, 2010| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: LATER WITH JOOLS HOLLAND (Ovation TV) (2010–but obviously not really).

I’ve known about Jools Holland for years, and even knew about Later… from some other source (maybe it was on BBC America?).  But anyhow it is now being broadcast on Ovation TV (and what is that?  I’d never have heard of it except that TiVo found a Flaming Lips show for me).

The premise of Later is that there is one center stage, and encircling it are five or so bands.  The bands all face the center (where the camera is) so they get to watch the other bands, too.   Each band plays a song or two or three (depending on popularity I guess).  And it’s live and fun and generally a good time.

This episode, as I said, had the Flaming Lips on it.  I noted that the TiVo info said 2010, but the Lips played songs from At War with the Mystics, so it was more likely 2006.  Also on the bill were The Divine Comedy (and I was very excited when it said 2010, because I thought that DC had a new disc out, sigh).  The Strokes, Cat Power and a couple other folks rounded out the bill.

It was quite a show, and felt like they packed in a lot more than an hour’s worth of music.  The Lips especially pulled of an amazing three song set (scattered throughout the program, by the way) with a ton of scaled back, but still fun live gadgets (oversized hands, confetti etc).  And, they did a rocking cover of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs.”

I asked TiVo to tape more Later.  If the diversity of artists here is any indication, I assume you;’e bound to get at least one band you like on every show.  Cool.

[READ: January 19, 2010] “The Dime Store Floor”

I don’t often review Personal Histories from The New Yorker, but every once in a while one grabs me.  And this is one of them.

I have to assume that everyone feels that smells are highly evocative, so I’m not unique in feeling that scent is super powerful.  And yet, I think I tend to overlook smells in my daily life, even though I’m always secretly hoping for one to whack me up the side of the head and say, hey remember this!

And this piece is all about revisiting scents: both intentionally and accidentally.

I really enjoyed the closing where he opens the Old Spice deodorant and flashes back to his father.  However, I had one major question/quibble with the author.  Well, two actually.

The first was this: “A few years ago, an online store I’d been using ran out of my regular brand of deodorant, and, because I was unable to think of anything else, I switched to Old Spice, the kind my father used.”  Okay, that, wait what?  You buy your deodorant online?  You couldn’t go to any store anywhere and just buy another roll-on?  What kind of unique deodorant could this possibly be and conversely how could Old Spice possibly compare?

The second, a little further down: “…went to a local drug store to buy replacement [toiletries].  There I saw that Old Spice deodorant comes in more strength, formulations and scents than I had thought and realized that the one I’d been using High Endurance Pure Sport couldn’t have been my father’s.”  Where exactly does David Owen live that he didn’t know Old Spice had a huge line of deodorants out?  Go to any store in America, heck open a magazine, you can’t miss it! I myself am monogamous to Tom’s of Maine, and even I know there’s like a half dozen Secret containers on the shelf!

Owen clearly has the internet, so it’s not like he’s unaware of the outside world, and the whole story is about interacting with others, so he’s not a recluse.  I’m just baffled by all this.  (And Sarah and I had a good laugh too). (more…)

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60,000

Posted in Against Me!, Alex Stone, Clash of the Gods, David Foster Wallace, David Goldberg, Dropkick Murphys, Evan Goldberg, Flight of the Conchords, Gordon Korman, Gordon Lightfoot, Harper's, Infinite Summer, Jeff Kinney, Jens Lekman, Loudon Wainwright III, Marisha Pessl, McSweeney's, Paul Debraski, Paul F. Tompkins, Pearl Jam, Pierdomenico Baccalario, Pseudonymous Bosch, Seth Rogen, Sonic Youth, The Airborne Toxic Event, The Flaming Lips on December 28, 2009| 1 Comment »

[cue music]:

I saw these stats come sailing in, on Christmas Day on Christmas Day.
I hit 60,000 views on Christmas Day in the mor-ning.

I hit 30,000 views back in March, and I was quite thrilled.  When I started the blog in May of 2007 I didn’t expect to get all that many views, it was more or less a blog to keep track of my books and maybe have other people comment too.  And so, it took nearly two years to get to 30,000.  Imagine how delightful it is to reach the next 30,000 views in the span of just nine months!

So thanks everyone for checking out what I had to say.  And thanks also for all the comments.  As with the first 30,000, I’ve included the stats that have brought me to this hallowed (but random) spot.  And I must add that Infinite Summer, which is underrepresented in my top ten posts, was absolutely essential for this huge spike in views (thanks DFW fans).  But, by far the biggest surprise was the surge that came from the first book(s) on the list below.  I posted about the Ulysses Moore series in April.  And it was by far the most frequently sought and (presumably) read post on the blog.  So, Scholastic Publishing, if you read this, please note the craving that my readers have for the rest of the series!  And please update your site!!

So, anyhow, thanks all.  Listed below are the Top Ten (and a few extra) viewed posts on my blog.  Happy New Year!

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