A couple weeks back, my brother sent me his list of favorite songs. It took me a while to create my list, but here is what surfaced in the wee hours of the morning. There is no set order of preference and I suspect that this grouping will change by the end of the month, but for now it exists as so.
Morrissey - Everyday is Like Sunday
The Killers - All These Things That I've Done
The Shins - New Slang
The Beatles - Mean Mr Mustard / Polythene Pam / She Came in Through the Bathroom Window
U2 - Gloria
Oasis - Champagne Supernova
Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run
Cowboy Junkies - Black Eyed Man
Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Lucky Man
Jack's Mannequin - Miss Delaney
Smashing Pumpkins - Drown
Led Zeppelin - Over the Hills and Far Away
I spent about an hour online reading about the evolution of the Abbey Road album by The Beatles and I am still impressed by what those four Englishmen did together even when they could not stand one another.
Rather than going to bed immediately after work yesterday morning, I spent some time on the couch watching some anime. On my DVR list of recorded programs, I had three episodes of Bleach and two episodes of Eureka 7 as viewing options. I decided to start with Bleach and move on to Eureka afterwards if I did not get too tired.
Now having seen some more of Bleach, I have to admit that it is starting to grow on me. Then again I probably should not have jumped to a conclusion about a series that has over a hundred episodes after seeing merely two of them. Yes, there are long fight sequences in Bleach, but there does seem to more story and characterization than what I saw in the other two episodes.
Lately I have been contemplating canceling my Netflix subscription. I like the service and the new unlimited streaming option is nice, but at the same time, I have to realize that I can watch a large quantity of anime online for free. Anime makes up a third of my viewing queue. The other two thirds are foreign films and documentaries. So with that in mind, I start to ask myself are foreign films and documentaries enough to keep the subscription? Maybe I am coming at it from the wrong angle.
February has gotten off to a great start on the exercise front and I want that trend to continue for the remainder of the month.
The Killers are still in heavy rotation for me and I think to myself why I always seem to be a few years behind the wave of what is good when it comes to music. I guess that that is another sign of me getting old. Plus I no longer feel the need to buy as music as I did when I was in my twenties. What I also find interesting is that when I look at the music portion of my Amazon wish list, half of what is there is classical music. With a mere two years of piano lessons twenty years ago, I can not say that I fully understand music, but I find the lure of classical music to be more than soothing.
]]>Lately all that I seem to do is complain about time or my lack of it. Weekends rush by and I never seem to get done what I want to get done. Then I try to find time to relax when I am not stressing out over trying to get things done. The phrase vicious cycle might apply.
Since Tuesday I managed to do the following:
During an hour of quiet time, I made some more progress on the novel The Amber Spyglass. After for what for me seemed like too long of an absence, Iorek king of the bears has surfaced again in the story. He was missed by me and I am eager to see him take a larger role as he joins Will in the search for Lyra. Some more interaction with the icy Miss Coulter would also be nice and with four hundred pages left in the book, I have no doubt that that will happen at some time.
I watched eight episodes of the anime series Coyote Ragtime Show only to discover that Netflix does not have the third disc that has episodes nine through twelve on it. Sigh. Maybe I should have done more preliminary reading before I rented the series and was left hanging. It was not the best series that I have ever seen, but not being able to see the end did anger me slightly. I can see why there were some comparisons to Cowboy Bebop, but at the same time, I liked the characters in Cowboy Bebop more than any of the cast of Coyote Ragtime.
Well over a month since Christmas ended, I finally took the tree down this Wednesday. The tree itself was very dry, but didn’t create that big of a mess as I lowered it over the deck to the ground below. Then in the midst of a winter whiteout, I walked the tree across the street into the woods in the hope that no one saw me do said act. As far as I know where I left the tree is property where no one lives so an abandoned tree should not cause any problems. Plus I am hoping that it stays buried until spring and then as everything around it starts to turn green it will slowly decay and rot back into the ground. My primary reason for disposing of the tree in such a way is that from what I understand there is no tree pickup service where I live and I was not about to stuff a tree with loose needles into the trunk of my car to be carried elsewhere.
The five part series How Art Made the World filled my head with a variety of theories that almost overwhelmed me. It was the most information that has been sent my way in a long time. Where else would I encounter Gilgamesh, Trajan’s Column and Aboriginal paintings in the same conversation? Yes, there was a theme tying those three elements together, but it was connection that I never would have made on my own. All three of those things are forms of storytelling to an illiterate audience and in a way a true precursor to modern film making.
I agree with other reviews that said that the three episodes on disc one were more compelling than the two on the second disc, but overall I really liked the series and was amazed at all of ways that art shapes society. Episode one started with paintings found inside the caves at Altamira and ended with hilltop sanctuary in Turkey called Göbekli Tepe. The cave paintings were known to me, but the site in Turkey was a Middle Eastern version of Stonehenge so to speak, but without any astronomical connection as far as I understand. I could be wrong on that last point though.
Having almost reached the end of the mutant crossover event The Messiah Complex, I am ready to abandon every title involved. I like Mike Carey and adore the art of Chris Bachalo, but the two of them can not keep me reading X-Men. Plus from what I have seen online, Bachalo is leaving soon. Besides if I need some Carey writing in my life, I can always dive into his Vertigo book Crossing Midnight. Then over in X-Factor, Peter David has made me care about his cast of characters, but they are getting lost in the bigger picture that Marvel is shoving down the throats of their audience. I find it to be very off-putting, which is not their intention I suspect.
I sampled the first two albums by The Killers and am amazed that such good music came from an American band. Yes, I like The Shins, but their sound is so mild compared to the force and impact of The Killers. The songs Smile Like You Mean It and Read My Mind are both in heavy rotation for me.
]]>