SOUNDTRACK: The Best Albums of the Year
Andrew Womack, fellow Infinite Summer player and founder of The Morning News has begun retroactively listing The Best Albums of the Year for each year since 1978. This is a project that I have often thought about doing myself, yet never had the time to sift through all the music I have.
I was delighted to see how much I not only knew, but also agreed with his decisions. Although if I’m honest, my list would have more metal and less new wave in it. But the overall tenor is pretty on par with my feelings.
But, imagine my surprise to see that on the 2004 list I barely knew any of the discs at all! I wonder what happened to make us diverge so much in that one year.
Anyhow, it’s a noble, well, not noble so much as worthwhile pursuit. One that we can all enjoy.
[READ: Week of July 27] Infinite Jest (to page 434)
In the August 2009 issue of Wired, they have a little scroll across the bottom of one of the pages that lists “Word Counts”. King James Bible: 784,806; Where the Wild Things Are: 338; Infinite Jest: 483,994. So, at almost halfway done we’ve read over 240,000 words!
Also, I haven’t sufficiently acknowledged some of my fellow Infinite Summer bloggers. So I want to send a shout out to Infinite Tasks. I especially enjoyed this post which takes a decidedly more philosophical approach than I did about a section that I found really enjoyable. And Chris Forster, who gives a lovely discussion about Eschaton. And I would be remiss if I did not mention Infinite Zombies, just because he may have written a letter here but his posts always get sucked up into spam, so I’ll never know. (And because the posts are really thoughtful and worth reading too).
But enough back patting, onto the book.
It was a fun place to pick up reading. At the small paragraph where I left off, we learn that the Statue of Liberty’s book now advertises that year’s Subsidizer.
On a couple of occasions there is the suggestion that the year 2000 is the first year of Subsidization, as they talk about things being different in the new millennium. Although Matthew Baldwin’s argument here is very convincing which would make Subsidization begin in 2002.
And then we return to A.A.
[WATCHED: June 2009] The Power of Nightmares
Back oh, fifteen years ago, I subscribed to 
SOUNDTRACK: THE REPLACEMENTS-Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash (1981).
Since I’ve been talking about The Replacements so much, it made me want to go back and listen to their stuff. The Replacements are the quintessential band that “grew up” or “matured” and for better or worse sounds utterly different from their first album to their last (a span of only nine years!). In fact, I don’t imagine that there are too many people who would enjoy all seven of their discs. One suspects that if the band themselves were given a copy of their All Shook Down disc in 1981, they would have smashed it.
Colin Meloy is the lead singer and songwriter for the Decemberists. This is a recording of Meloy’s solo acoustic tour from 2006. The recording is from several venues on the tour, although it is mixed as if it were one concert.
I don’t recall why I started getting 
Sigur Rós are nothing if not ethereal. Their music is constantly floating up in outer space somewhere. So imagine the surprise when the first song of this disc opens with some thudding drums. And, there are acoustic instruments aplenty this time around. Their previous disc Hvarf/Heim had them playing a number of acoustic pieces in various unexpected settings. And clearly the experience must have been a good one.
SOUNDTRACK: YES-90125 (1983).
We had a snow day Monday, and since we were all home, I thought it would be fun to bust out some old records. As soon as the opening chords of “Owner of a Lonely Heart” crashed out, Sarah gave me a “What made you think of playing this?” look and then said “What made you think of playing this?”
I Just Read About That... 