Tinariwen Made My Day

by playing live at Other Music

When I Was a Kid

I thought Pete Rose was the Hulk, and vice versa:

Ride - Taste live Brixton 1992

I was there. Look for my shadow ...

Your List is On My Kiss: 2007 In My Nutshell

Now with downloads! Act fast, bandits & varmints ...

Why not just a list? A list of things. No specific number but the one the list leaves. No "top" anything, just the best things, whatever art. A list that functions as only a list.

Maybe the confines of a single year will be applied, but then only to define the time in which these particular things pleased me. These things need not have been made or released in said year. What's the point of calling anything the best [whatever] of 2007 when it could have been made in 2006 or maybe earlier?

Why must I leave out a record released in November of 2006 if I spent almost all of 2007 listening to it? That's 2007's fault for being shitty.

2007 made good with:

Les Savy Fav - "Patty Lee"
Boris & Michio Kurihara - Rainbow
Electrelane - No Shouts No Calls
PJ Harvey - "White Chalk" (title track only)
LCD Soundsystem - "Get Innocuous" (blatant Scott Walker impression, but it works)
(LCD Soundsystem - Get Innocuous; soulwax remix)
Liars-Liars and I don't even like them. Liars - Freak Out [it's not incomplete]
Jandek on Corwood DVD (2003, but I saw it in 2007)
Paul Duncan - "Red Eagle"
Yeasayer - All Hour Cymbals (Yeasayer - Sunrise)
The fourth season of the Wire
Soft Circle - Full Bloom (Soft Circle - Untitled)
Nick Jaina & the 7 Stations - "Maybe Cocaine"
Shearwater - Palo Santo Expanded (Shearwater - White Waves)
Deerhunter - Cryptograms
Flight of the Conchords
Allesandro Stefana - Poste e Telegraphi (Allesandro Stefana - Western Soda)
The reissue of Seefeel's 1993 album Quique
Oakley Hall - I'll follow You (Oakley Hall - No Dreams)
Radiohead - "All I Need" and "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi"
The announcement of Big Dipper's reunion shows coming in 2008
Big Dipper - All Going Out Together
Big Dipper - When Men Were Trains
Jay Reatard live in NYC, all 20 minutes of him. And then being introduced when he walked into a bar much later that night. And his album Blood Visions, although it was 2006, because y'all slept on it. (Jay Reatard - Don't Let Him Come Back; Go-betweens cover!)
Ditto for the Drones' Gala Mill (The Drones - Jezebel)
77Boadrum

In 2007 I was excited for but ultimately disappointed by:
Richard Hawley's Lady's bridge
MIA - Kala
Pharoahe Monche - Desire
Someone covering an Indio song
Dinosaur Jr. - Beyond
Beirut - The Flying Club Cup (maybe I wasn't even excited)
Crowded House's new album
Jens Lekman - Night Falls on Kortedala
Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam
Kate Bush -Aerial
That new Okkervil River album, what was it called? Yeah.
Any good new hip hop (although Kanye came close)
Human Giant. The mix-tape battle was great, but otherwise, human giant failure.

2007 Would have been improved without:
Eddie Vedder covering an Indio song
ATP failing to commission Ride to play their Nowhere album in entirety. There's always 2008.
Voxtrot
The Ponys
The Shins leaving "Split Needles (Alt Take)" off their album. The whole album needed an alt take.
Missing 77Boadrum
People with good taste loooooving the National
Jay-Z as both executive and resurrected MC (well, at least for def jam, 2007 would have been better without him)
Sunset Rubdown
Grizzly Bear's Friend EP. I love the two albums, but this was like hearing paint peel. More boring than C-Span while on meth.
Blitzen Trapper. See above.
A new Smashing Pumpkins album
Lee Hazlewood dying
And most everything else

The Library on Top of Mount Ararat

I don't read as much as I'd like to, anymore, but parenthood and three jobs will do that to you, although I have three jobs I like, doing exactly what I like to do, so this might be a shallow complaint.

And then I also don't read as much as I'd like to because I'm becoming more and more confident that my hunches are correct about which books will be a waste of time before I suffer 100 pages. Plus: the dirty secret of fiction (and often poetry) has become more apparent: it takes heaps of time and significant reading before it permanently sinks in that, like popular music, much of what gets critical celebration has simply been done before. Is it me, or do I rarely read a book review that states "yeah, well-done, but done before, and therefore dismiss-able?" In music criticism, such sentiments are legion, fair or unfair. Maybe conventional wisdom considers authorship to be more deserving of respect than the comparatively simple act of recording a song. Ok, it is harder. But that shouldn't be an excuse for recycling.

And ok, I didn't finish Pynchon's Against the Day because I've decided it is un-finishable (although better than Ambien, believe me, so I may be "using" it more often). But I did get far enough through to prove that many high profile reviewers didn't read it at all. This happens more often than we want to know. A recent writing assignment lead me to a certain book's orig review, in Time, in the 1950s, and it was obvious the reviewer had faked it. A discussion for another day.

I have completed Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital. Finally: completely transporting fiction by an American writer, rooted in realism but painted with the fantastic in such a way as to evoke little before it (with maybe the exception of the Bible, but the story of Noah's ark wasn't done in detail by that mess of a book). During a torrential rainstorm, a San Francisco children's hospital leaves its foundation and begins floating, and soon its inhabitants realize they might be the last living humans following a celestial apocalypse. Seven miles of water cover the world and its dead. There is no land. The hospital, designed by an architect directed by voices he thought deemed him mad, reshapes itself to a floating habitat, with an angel narrating from its walls like a wacko HAL 9000. But not all is eden. Young patients begin dying. Our narrator becomes pregnant, but suspects her pregnancy is not all about her that is now different.

Certainly in need of some excising -- I speed-read some sections flashing back to the central character's pastoral childhood --The Children's Hospital spools out of Adrian's head like the fictional battle one would expect from an author who's already a pediatrician and has just entered divinity school. The resolution, without gratuitous phantasmagoria, is at once beautiful and sad, and unexpected, and horrifying.

There is strangeness in religion. I am not religious unless my daughter naps for three hours, but it's good for something, and that something is often the strangest art and fiction and poetry crafted.

Over and out.