The RedMolly Picayune-Democrat

A year in books (and a brief digression on music)

What did you read in 2009 that you'd recommend--or discommend--to others?

I read almost no fiction last year: a state of affairs I hope to change in the New Year. But judging from my current list of books on hold at MultCoLib, I'm not making particularly good progress on that front.

Yesterday, I picked up my first holds-batch of 2010: The Professional Chef (the core textbook used at the CIA), Gourmet Today: More than 1000 All-New Recipes for the Contemporary Kitchen (which, after the briefest of perusals, I'm thinking I will have to pony up for so I can own it forever), The Best Vegetarian Recipes: From Greens to Grains, from Soups to Salads: 200 Bold Flavored Recipes* (by the incomparable Martha Rose Shulman, whose recipe for Spinach-Potato Soup has become a Schardt-family-wide classic, and who also writes a very fine column on vegetarian cooking at the New York Times)...

...and Dethalbum II by, um, Dethklok. Because I want to encourage Fisher in his budding passion for METAL**, and also because our house was just not complete without a little more Metalocalypse. (Neither is yours. Seriously. Go watch it.)

After a long dry spell of not really acquiring any new music unless I needed it for Quizissippi (which is a whole nother story and will be told a whole nother time), I spent the last couple days in a frenzy of downloading... The Flaming Lips' astonishingly awesome "Embryonic," Rodrigo & Gabriela's [shut up] "11:11" [shut up... it was free and I kind of like it] and...um... Oasis. Yeah.

So what are you reading? What are you listening to?

*What's up with the double colons in the title? Can you do that? I meet this trend with stern disfavor.

**which takes its funniest form in his use of the word "metal" to mean "a thing I personally like," as in "Spaghetti soup is METAL!" and "Catching snowflakes on your tongue is METAL!"

Ukulele madness

For Jac, who has owned a ukulele for some time, and for Augie, who received one for Christmas:

Is it just me, or is "ukulele" one of those words that looks misspelled no matter what you do to it?

Celine Dion is amazing

You know it's true, haters. (Terry.)

Happy, sad, self-doubt and the transformative power of music

So I'm sitting here making a playlist.

The 75-minute limit that the CD format imposes forces one to make choices: thematic, lyrical, genre-iffic choices ("Genriffic" looked too much like some lame youth get-out-the-vote slogan. "Make Your Voice Heard! You're GenRiffic!" And I've had about enough of that already.).

In which direction ought one to go? Cheery, yet thoughtful? Trend-conscious, yet universal? Melancholy, yet... well, just this side of suicidal-ideation-inspiring? How the heck am I supposed to combine brassy Bollywood and heartrending post-folk on the same CD? And should I give in to the urge to plant a healthy dollop of Wu-Tang Clan right in the middle?

(Like that healthy dollop. Right in the middle it went.)

I'm guessing it must be universal, but it's no less creepy for its universality: the power of music to affect your mood with just a handful of notes. Even divorced of any particular place/time memory, a song can soothe your heart or clench your fists, send you into a downward spiral or inspire you to kick up your heels and do a little dance. (Or, better yet, the Saucy Walk a la my sister, which I have been trying to teach to my kids the last few weeks. I can't wait until they're teenagers and I can embarrass the hell out of them by doing the Saucy Walk when I go pick them up at the mall. Heh heh heh.)

So I'm wondering a couple of things:

1. Is there a particular song that threatens to tear you up a bit every time you hear it, even if you've heard it a thousand times before? For me, it's Nirvana's "Something in the Way," also, a little inexplicably, Radiohead's "True Love Waits." Am I alone in this weirdness?

2. Which sort of music do you like better: happy(ish) or sad(dish)?

3. If you could abandon whatever it is that you're good at--making art, running a business, crafting artisanal goatmilk cheeses, imparting classical knowledge to your children--and be terrifically good at something else, would you? 'Cos I would. In one half of one second, I would. So that I could make music.

Anyway, it looks like it's going to be a double (but, sadly, not Double Live) CD, possibly. Heading out toward what, ten of you?, sometime in the next few weeks or as soon as I can scrape up postage. And make some more art. Hooray, art!

Oh yeah... so that "Double Live" can enter your family's vocabulary, too:

Sansamini

The boys just left, roughly 6 minutes ago, for a Campfire gathering in the wilds of Camp Namanu this weekend.

It's drizzly, but not cold, so I expect they'll have a fine time. Mud is less than daunting to a determined child.

So maybe I'll tackle some actual writing on The New Story. So far I have 3 densely written pages of notes, including a beginning, a middle and an end. Huh...

Also: iTunes Genius is genius. How awesome is it to be able to select a song and have iTunes give you an automatically generated playlist of coordinating songs? Some, of course, are better than others... but the one it obligingly spat out for Radiohead's "True Love Waits" runs the gamut from Animal Collective's "Fireworks" to Smashing Pumpkins' "In the Arms of Sleep" with a welcome detour into M. Ward's hauntingly sad version of "Let's Dance." A swell feature for those times, increasingly frequent and close together, that I have neither the time nor the energy to fine-tune my musical accompaniment for whatever mood has struck. Maybe now I'll spend less time playlisting the perfect playlist and more, y'know, writing or something. Heh.

Multiquest panmemetical personal disclosure polysyllabarium

Via Jennifer Lynn. I like this one 'cause you can replace questions as you see fit:

A) People who have been tagged must write their answers on their blogs & replace any question that they dislike with a new question. (note, you’ll need to pull the list of questions from her post if you want to see which one I switched out. but I'll save you the trouble... I didn't change any.)

B) Tag 8 people to do this quiz.

1.How many songs are on your iPod?

3355

2. What music would you want played at your funeral?

The Flaming Lips' "Do You Realize?!" and also Tom Waits' "Dirt in the Ground" and oh, probably some Radiohead. "True Love Waits?" Or maybe "Exit Music for a Film?" Yeah, probably "Exit Music." And hell, "Gin & Juice," why not? (I would very much appreciate it if people would commemorate my demise by smokin' indo and sippin' on gin & juice, beeyotch.)

3.What magazines do you have subscriptions to?

Martha Stewart Living (thanks, Mom!), Scientific American, Science News, the New Yorker (again, thanks, Mom!).

4. What is your favorite scent?

Ylang-ylang, also cinnamon, also garlic frying in olive oil, also salt air.

5. If you had a million dollars that you could only spend on yourself, what would you do with it?

I could probably think of something. Oh, real estate doesn't count

6. What is your theme song?

I wish it were "Today" by the Smashing Pumpkins, but I think it's more of a mashup of "Am I Evil?" (the Metallica version) and "Yakety Sax."

7. Do you trust easily?

No.

8. Do you generally think before you act, or act before you think?

I try to do the former but have an unfortunate tendency toward the latter.

9.Is there anything that has made you unhappy these days?

Yes, but let's not start getting into that.

10. Do you have a good body-image?

No.

11. Is being tagged fun?

Yep.

12. How do you spend your social networking (Facebook, etc.) time?

Obsessively monitoring the statuses of people I barely know, also playing Scramble.

13. What have you been seriously addicted to lately?

Red wine and wasting time.

14. What kind of person do you think the person who tagged you is?

Smart, tough and funny.

15. What’s the last song that got stuck in your head?

"Punkrocker" by Teddybears. Happens a lot.

16.What’s your favorite item of clothing?

Coat. Also boots. Also heels.

17. Do you think Rice Krispies are yummy?

No.

18. What would you do if you see saw $100 lying on the ground?

Lunch. With wine.

19. What items could you not go without during the day?

E-mail, eyeliner and Sephora blotting papers.

20. What should you be doing right now?

Finishing tracking sheets for the February/March issue, lifting weights, sending in paperwork for the kids' pediatrician, pitching this article I've been thinking about for like three months now, brushing my teeth, cleaning my office, washing dishes... yeah, something else, probably.

And now, a video which I discovered while searching YouTube for "Yakety Sax":

And another one:

Good lord, I'm going to be here all day.

Tags: Ute, Lynn, Summer, Kelly, Lori, Rachel, Sam, Stephanie, um, does anyone else read this blog?

We love Radiohead

...kind of a lot. Enough that we've started cultivating our own stable of Minotaurs.

Don't worry, sweetie! The next one won't hurt nearly as much!

See? By the time you get to the third, it's refreshingly old hat, and you can even get color done without a flinch.

Inspired by this logo, and also this one.

Both done by Jerry Ware at Atlas Tattoo, who is pretty much an amazing artist. Which is good, 'cause we're already contemplating our next bits of permanent personal artwork. (Jim's: a corkscrew. Mine: something with a cat.)

The boys are back in town

And not a moment too soon. I was getting awful twitchy without them.

Tonight we returned to our regular routine. Jeopardy!, Simpsons, dinner. Except usually I make dinner while they're watching Simpsons but tonight it was the one where the family goes to the Frying Dutchman restaurant and tells tales of nautical adventure while they're waiting for their food to materialize. So I had to hang out and watch that one, 'cause it's freakin' hilarious.

Anyway, two things of note. Well, three.

1. We had all-Oregon pasta for dinner tonight. Cherry tomatoes and zucchini from our garden; hazelnuts from some local grove. All sauteed in butter, tomatoes slightly squashed so they'd lose their structural integrity and thicken the sauce thereby; hazelnuts roughly chopped and stirred in at the last moment; the whole mass served over capellini with plenty of grated Parmesan. (As Fisher helpfully pointed out, neither the pasta nor the Parmesan was technically from Oregon, thereby spoiling the all-local conceit somewhat. Thaaaaanks, Fisher.)

2. Fisher soliloquized during dinner tonight about his favorite bands. "I like Mastodon, and Black Sabbath, and Dethklok, and the White Stripes, and Metallica..." Me: "So you mostly like hard rock and heavy metal." Fisher: "Yeah, except for Of Montreal. Oh, and Abba. Money, money, money/ Always sunny/ In the rich man's world."

3. Speaking of music: we saw Radiohead night before last at the White River Amphitheatre located on Muckleshoot tribal land in beautiful Auburn, Washington. If you're thinking of seeing a show there for any reason: don't. A Citysearch reviewer summed it up perfectly: "I'm not sure if this is the Native Americans' way of getting back at the general public for past wrongs, but if it is, it's ingenious." There was no tailgating allowed in the parking lots, and this policy was enforced by uniformed cops patrolling the aisles; the "beer garden" offered the opportunity to pay $8 for a can of Budweiser and drink it while standing around in a doubly-fenced-off cattleyard-style environment; the post-concert crowd management consisted of packing hundreds of people into a narrow concrete alley and not letting us move--of course, no explanation was offered for why we were being forced to stand there and when we would be allowed to go; the hordes of local cops who were unavailable for crowd management proceeded to direct us into a random detour that resulted in us inching along in bumper-to-bumper traffic for 45 minutes before rejoining the same traffic-clogged two-lane road we'd been on originally. Fortunately, Radiohead themselves were freakin' awesome and put on a super-swell show; that said, I'd tear out my own toenails with pliers before I'd go to another show at White River. And I made a set list, which I'll post tomorrow along with photos. Maybe.

A question for the universe

So I've found that the best music for me to listen to when I'm writing is dramatic, symphonic, instrumental-type stuff. Kinda soundtracky, but not usually so heavily orchestrated, 'cause the Wall of Strings effect gives me hives. Stuff like Explosions in the Sky, Thee Silver Mt Zion, Godspeed you black emperor, Danny Elfman, Mogwai, Tortoise.

And I'm also on kind of a classic country kick. Merle Haggard, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Marty Robbins. And of course Miss Dolly Parton and Miss Loretta Lynn. (Don't come home a-drinkin' with lovin' on your mind, unless I was out a-drinkin' with you, in which case I've probably already got lovin' on my mind too.)

So what else is out there that I should be listening to? Ideas are welcome, but I must warn you that if you suggest Carrie Underwood, I will be forced to hunt you down and cut off your ears. 'Cause you obviously weren't using them anyway.

Doppelganger

Remember how ages and ages ago I pointed out how much Rhys looked like Beck?

He still does. More so, even:

For your reference:

D'you think I should ask for child support?