Author Archives: Duff

À la Super Eggplant, currently, I am…

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Making: About halfway done w/ Curious George #2 (basted / now just quilting & binding to go).
Reading: This hilarious new book by Michael Chabon “Gentlemen of the Road”. It’s an Arabian Nights-like, fairytale-esque story, and as such the incredible overuse of adjectives, similes and metaphors TOTALLY FITS the mood. But they’re so abundant that it sometimes becomes giggle-inducing. “With his skin that was lustrous as the tarnish on a copper kettle, and his eyes womanly as a camel’s, and his shining pate with its roof of wool whose silver hue implied a seniority attained only by the most hardened men, and above all with the air of stillness that trumpeted his murderous nature to all but the greenest travelers on this minor spur of the Silk Road…” Come on now, people, are you not totally cracking up now? It’s a very enjoyable read.
Watching: K-Ville was the only show with a fresh episode this week (and it was way too over the top) but I also watched the Bones rerun since it’s one of my favorites (the Christmas where they all get locked in the lab). Maybe a movie Thursday night? We’ll see.
Listening: Very obsessively to two albums: Bat for Lashes “Fur and Gold” and Sea Wolf “Leaves in the River”. Completely in love with both of them.

Best of November

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I kept not finishing writing things up so I had to keep putting off writing this post. Ah, the life of a slacker…
The best movie I saw in November was No Country for Old Men, with Gone Baby Gone a close second. Both violent, icky, and GOOOOD.
The best book I read in November was the collection of short stories Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work, by Jason Brown. Very subtle. Very good. Families, relationships, losers, loners, struggles.
The best gig I went to in November was a tie between Athlete, a band I have been longing to see and was so blown away by their show, and Griffin House, who I had no idea how good he was going to be.
My favorite tunes in November…. hmmmm… well, my favorite album purchased in November would have to be Great Northern “Trading Twilight for Daylight”. I don’t know if I had read about them somewhere (a blog? Paste? who knows?) but for some reason I was checking them out on iTunes and I’m really diggin it… Otherwise I spent a lot of time listening to stuff from earlier in the year (Band of Horses, Travis, Rogue Wave), thinking about year-end lists, and buying lots of random singles (old Jay-Z, new Anthony Hamilton (American Gangster), stuff from the I’m Not There soundtrack)…
Random personal highlights: Hangin’ out with the nephews, who get both more lovable and more irksome every time; Michelle visits! for almost a week! yay!; Pam & Steph come down for the night!.
Lowlights? Fresh TV is drying up but for a few shows; FNL is wandering far from its strengths; meant to see a bunch of movies I never got to; and seem to have gotten almost nothing done all month. Man, what a whiner! Suck it up, eh?

(Fictional?) Memoir: “The Life of Hunger” by Amelie Nothomb

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An somewhat philosophical memoir of hunger, being hungry, (at some points, actually anorexic), but also of being sated, in all of their various meanings: not just physically, but also emotionally, intellectually, etc. Also a book about “home”, going there, leaving, about living places that aren’t that. A book about feeling lost and alone even within the midst of your own family, let alone a strange city, school, country etc.
Very good. A very slim, quick read. But weighty in thought.
I thought I knew the meaning of the word ‘big’. You have to have driven across the United States before you can have any idea of what that means: whole days of straight road without seeing a single human being.
My parents were forty, the age at which you pull up your sleeves and put your responsibility to the test of work. [Really? Uh oh! Danger ahead!]
Is it not enough to have some very good chocolate in your mouth, not only to believe in God, but also to feel that one is in his presence? God isn’t chocolate, he’s the encounter between chocolate and a palate capable of appreciating it.

Albums I Did NOT Buy in 20062007 [doh!].

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But am now planning on at least checking out due to their proliferance on other people’s year-end lists (or specific comments on the lists of people whose other choices I am down with, even where they differ from me). (Largehearted Boy has a huge list of links to people’s lists. Fun, fun!)

  • Bat for Lashes “Fur & Gold”
  • Burial “Untrue”
  • Justice “[cross]”
  • The Field “From Here We Go Sublime” (‘quiet is the new loud’ / minimal techno)
  • Animal Collective “Strawberry Jam”
  • Jens Lekman “Night Falls Over Kortedala”
  • Smashing Pumpkins “Zeigeist”
  • Bowerbirds “Hymns for a Dark Horse”
  • White Rabbits “Fort Nightly”
  • Clorox Girls “J’aime Les Filles”
  • Caribou “Andorra”
  • Mavis Staples “We’ll Never Turn Back”
  • Jarvis Cocker “Jarvis”
  • Miranda Lambert “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”
  • Avett Brothers “Emotionalism”
  • The Perishers “Victorius”
  • The Octopus Project “Hello, Avalanche”
  • Akron/Family “Rise Above”
  • Moonbabies “Moonbabies at the Ballroom”
  • Franklel (Michael Orendy) “Lullaby for the Passerby”
  • Lucy Wainwright Roche “8 Songs”
  • Wintersleep “Welcome to the Night”
  • The Cobbs “The Deathcapades”
  • Vampire Weekend
  • Au Revoir Simone

Already bought based on others’ lists:
Brother Ali “The Undisputed Truth” (like it!)
Albums/Bands for which I cannot even comprehend the hype (and I’ve even seen these acts live):
Battles
St. Vincent
Deerhunter
Surprising Comments:
One review referred to Ben Harper’s “Lifeline” as “tepid.” (But another had it #1.) You know I don’t think there’s anything tepid about that boy.
Hilarious reviews:
This dude’s take on Rufus Wainwright’s “Judy Does Carniegie Hall” is hilarious.
The comment that “Young Folks” made whistling cool again. “And we mean cool as in annoying.”
Great way to start a year-end list:
We’re already at the end of another godforsaken year…

Selected Sampler Singles – Paste #36

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New (to me) Songs/Artists I’m Diggin:
“A Sunday Smile” Beirut (1)
“Goes Around” Rockfour
“The Ritz” Office
“Eyes Like a Levee” Johnny Irion (2)
“Snakebit” Mary Gauthier
“Rise” (acoustic) Will Dailey
“You’re a Wolf” Sea Wolf (3)
“Civil Twilight” the Weatherthans
New (4) Songs by Old Friends:
“Scar That Never Heals” Jeremy Fisher (5)
“One Crowded Hour” Augie March (6)
“Time Is a Lion” Joe Henry
from Paste #36.
1-Old news, right? People kept mentioning Beirut to me but I never got
around to checking him out.
2-Wow! Love it!
3-Rambles along, I like how it picks up toward the end.
4-Or new when the magazine came out…months ago! 🙂
5-Got this ages ago from Fuel/Friends. Love it.
6-Australians, picked up an older album of theirs on Mariko’s and my trip.

Self-fulfilling prophecies.

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“I used to write really shitty, gloomy songs about how everything sucked,” he says, “but I realized that everything sucked because I wrote those songs. My music controlled me much more than I controlled my music.”

–Jens Lekman, as interviewed by Austin L. Ray, in Paste #37.

No present without the past.

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I’d like to say that I’ve lived from this moment on without regret, but what makes a life worth living are the small calamities and the train wrecks we live through; a scar becomes a story of endurance.
–Tod Goldberg, from the story “Myths of Our Time” in the collection “Simplify”