New albums by two of my favorite bands of recent years:
I got an email from a friend telling me her Dad died, and it reminded me that Madeleine L’Engle died recently and I’ve been meaning to recommend a specific book of hers.
While I dearly dearly love the Wrinkle in Time books, and there are a few of her adult fiction books I enjoyed also (A Small Rain, A Severed Wasp), my all-time favorite L’Engle book is from her “Crosswick Journals” ‘set, Vol 4. Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage.
A large part of the book is about her husband dying of cancer, and her struggling with her faith to “make sense of” or deal with that without falling back on either the nonsensical “why god why” or the equally (to believers in the concept of Free Will) nonsensical “God must have had a reason.” (In a world operating under Free Will, God is not a puppet master.)
It was a really lovely book and helped me when I was dealing with a death that hit me particularly hard, given the specific circumstances.
I reread the Wrinkle in Time books a few years ago during Harry Potter mania, to reconfirm that I did still love them even though I didn’t love (what I tried of) Harry Potter. They are more like both C.S. Lewis (faith-based fantasy) and Phillip Pullman (lovelovelove), and Meg and Charles are very beloved characters (by me and, of course, many others).
RIP Madeleine L’Engle.
RIP Papa Auta. I am sad I’ll never meet you when I finally make it to New Zealand. Your daughter has been such an important part of my life.
I really hadn’t listened to Pearl Jam much in recent history, but then I started reading I Am Fuel, You Are Friends, and Heather is an unabashed PJ fan…and then they played Lollapalooza…
This album is the soundtrack to the movie. And I swear when I listen to it..this is going to sound crazy!… I can FEEL Alaska. I can feel wide open horizons… I can feel solitude, and silent (echoing?) forests… Expansive. Lonely. Calm. I don’t know what it is — Vedder’s voice, the background music, the lyrics — but it is creating very vivid pictures in my mind…
It’s a mystery to me…
You think you have to want more than you need
Until you have it all, you won’t be free.
Making: Same as last week, although I do have something on the blocking board I may get to sometime this week. Maybe…Quilting friendship star blocks. Knitting socks.
Reading: “Love Walked In” by Marisa de los Santos. I’m just about done though. I would be done if I hadn’t had to stand on the train this morning, and then things got all herky jerky and I fell into someone’s lap (no joke!) and was too embarrassed to pull out a book after that because what if it happened again and my book went flying and hit someone in the head or something….
Watching: Premieres! Yay! So far this week watched Heroes, Bones, Reaper (LOVED!), Chuck, 1/2 of Journeyman (hopefully I’ll finish that tonight), and the second episode of K-Ville. Still have House premiere and current episode of Damages on the DVR menu. More premieres to come tonight. Yay!
Listening: Nothing I haven’t mentioned here already…. my 1, 2, 3 albums so far this year The National, Okkervil River, Earlimart, new stuff from Kanye and Josh Ritter and James Blunt, and lots of French rap…. and Hard Fi “Once Upon a Time in the World” which I bought on a total whim the other night and really like! Rock/punk/FUN!
She thought about that word “capture,” how it put a writer on par with a fur trapper or big-game hunter, and how it implied that stories were whole and roaming around loose in the world, and a writer’s job was to catch them. Except of course that a writer didn’t kill what she caught, didn’t stuff it and hang it on a wall; the point was to keep the stories alive. She felt skeptical about this way of thinking of writing, she decided, but was glad to have considered it.
–Maria de los Santos, “Love Walked In”
really loved them both.
You gotta love writers, they’re the opposite of actors. Actors are openhearted and sweet and writers are bitter and twisted, and very very funny.
-Hart Hanson, creator/executive producer on Bones (from the DVD extras)
A 2006 poll showed that atheists are the group most feared by the public as a threat to the American way of life (“below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians,” according to the study’s press release.
—Paste Magazine, issue #34, in the article on Greg Graffin of Bad Religion.
The people who voted that way in that poll? They’re the ones that scare me!!!!!!!!!!!
This movie is HILARIOUS. Side-splittingly funny family farce. Along the lines of The Royal Tennenbaums, but less dark (despite it being funeral-focused). Ray Romano and Hank Azaria are funny, as expected, and Debra Winger is really funny, playing against type. Loved it.
Lots of completely inappropriate, non-PC humor, which is really the best kind, right? Everyone knows that the only gay relationships that work are between people of the same height. Or Azaria having told his daughter (Zoey Deschanel, so sweet) that her mom died when she was young “from being a social worker who cared too much.” (Turns out she was actually a porno actress.) Too funny.
Totally awesome show. The lead singer has a voice so deep, it feels like it reaches down to the very bottom of your soul. Their new album is probably my top listen of the year and this show just made me like them that much more. Ranks right up there with Gomez as the top two gigs of the year thus far.
Consummate musicians, tunes sounded great, stage banter was minimal but fine, lead’s antics were perplexing and sometimes humorous. Lovely lovely sounds. Beautiful show.
