The Daily Sabbatical

Great video from Pioulard’s excellent new(ish) album, Temper. A really excellent followup to his 2006 precis.

Lanie and I bought and lit our tree today.  If only we’d had this 7″ by Low to decorate by.  One of my favorite bands puts the oh-shit back in Christmas.

The new album by the Finnish group Paavoharju is my clear choice for an album to drive snow covered roads to.  Listening to this is like listening to a radio tuned between three stations, where one is playing the most beautiful melodies you have ever heard, another is playing organ music recorded in a gothic cathedral, and yet another is playing nordic-techno.  The music is of a crystal fragility, and it is layered beneath dissonant statics and hisses.  It is also utterly entrancing.  I haven’t heard their first album, but I will.  A lovely find.
Italialaisella Laivalla.mp3

I hope there is such a thing as a Marnie Stern wall-poster, and I hope that many of them are hanging on the bedroom doors of rock-aspiring young women everywhere.  This chick is completely kick ass.  Her new album “This Is It And I Am It And You Are It And So Is That And He Is It And She Is It And It Is It And That Is That” is one of the strongest records of the year.  Stern’s Deerhoof-ish guitar leads the way in this uncompromising album, but her voice–more rhythm than melody–and the spasmodic drums push this album to the top.  Comparisons are not easy to come by–Deerhoof is one, and there are Pixies-ish moments, but Stern is really doing her own thing.  And I fucking love it.
steely.mp3

In this fun little paper, Jason Brown, a professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Dalhousie University, uses Fourier Transforms to figure out what notes are being played in that first chord of A Hard Day’s Night.  Turns out, common transcriptions must be wrong–and a piano is involved.
Even math is more fun in Canada!

Just got this video forwarded from my friend and economic badger Saltuk Ozerturk.  Peter Schiff, against laughter and ridicule, correctly analyzes our economic plight and for the right reasons–two years ago. It’s a lesson, I think, in sticking with the fundamentals and not being cowed by mockery when you know what you are saying.  Makes Fox News once again look awful.

Marnie Stern, who’s just a little bit awesome, riffs on Rocky.

I, for one, am not at all surprised that Shadow Country by Peter Mathiessen has won the National Book Award.  It is one of the grandest pieces of fiction published in this country in the last decade.  Like another book on that short list, Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Country is a true American novel.  It centers around the life, death and legacy of Edgar Watson who is the sort of morally compromised pioneer that has no doubt always been at the edge of new frontiers.  The novel is at once a detailed portrait of the post-reconstruction South, turning the corner into the twentieth century, and a deep character study of a man of questionable character.  It constitutes, in my mind, a clear addition to the American canon and should be on every serious reader’s list.
Shadow Country is really a reworking of three previously published novels by Mathiessen, which themselves were a re-working of one gargantuan novel he began years before.  The books are now pared down into this three-part novel which offers a multi-perspectival take, Rashomon-style, on the life of Edgar Watson, portraying him variously as a misunderstood hero and as a bloodthirsty rogue.  Book One tells of the circumstances of Watson’s murder–which is implicit in the book’s first few pages–from the perspective of his neighbors living on the southwestern edge of the Florida Everglades.  The second book is from the perspective of his son Lucius, who tries to write an “objective” history of his father’s life, all the while dealing with the complications of his legacy.  The third and final book is from the perspective of Watson himself, from earliest childhood until the time of his death. Though the book cranks in at over 900 pages, there are no lulls, no time at which I was tempted to set the book aside for a while.  The three books make an unassailable whole of an astonishingly consistant quality.  I left the book feeling like I knew the land and the people on it, the times and their moral deficiencies, and the flawed nation that was, which grew into the flawed nation that is, the United States.
This book is up there with the greats.  It deserves every award they can heap upon it. 

Boy, I hate to put two animal misery videos back to back on the blog, but I couldn’t pass this up. This is a video of Sarah Palin, who apparently went to a turkey farm to “pardon” a turkey before thanksgiving. She then gave an interview while turkeys were being slaughtered behind her. It’s rather surreal.

Today was animal rights day in my intro class. It was probably the preachiest I’ve been all year. (Next class, though, is Famine, Affluence and Morality. That’ll take the cake.) I refrained from forcing them to sit through Meet your Meat, so I’ve decided to post it here.
If you eat factory farm meat, which if you eat meat you probably do, I’d suggest giving this a look.