Death in Her Hands - Otessa Moshfegh
I read Moshfegh’s Eileen a few years back. After I started this one I had to go back and read my summary of it to recall that it was an odd little book.
This one was odd, too.
It is the story of a Vesta Gul, a widowed, 80-something woman who lives in an old Girl Scout cabin with her dog. One morning on their daily walk through the woods she stumbles across a note that claims that the body of a dead woman named Magda is nearby.
I missed an absolutely huge anniversary over the holiday weekend and have been grievously late in finally getting to it.
Last weekend was the 50th anniversary of the first American Top 40 broadcast.
If you follow here closely you know that there has likely been no bigger pop culture influence on my life than AT40.
I remember my parents and their friends listening to the show in the late 1970s.
[open.spotify.com/playlist/...](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/390x9jvTMq1fxdXLtvPNCj?si=0qjDxbMyRrK7v3uJT098Ng) “Light in the Heart of Our Town” - Joensuu 1685
This Finnish band created some buzz about 10 years ago then splintered into side projects. They are back after that long fallow period and arrive with this absolutely gorgeous song
“same mistakes” - We Were Promised Jetpacks
Along with label mates The Twilight Sad, WWPJ practice a wonderfully miserable brand of Scottish indie rock. Their songs are dark and brooding and match the weather of their homeland.
I never served up a summary of the holiday weekend.
Our family from Denver were in town and stayed with us: S’s sister, her husband, and their two kids. It was weird picking them up and dropping them off at the airport, which seemed mostly deserted, at least from the curb-view. Not that IND is often a super-busy airport, but a holiday weekend usually means you have to double- or triple-park when doing curbside drop-off/pickup.
Mystify: Michael Hutchence
What a beautiful man Michael Hutchence was. Not just physically, he had a beautiful soul, too. He wasn’t a voice of a generation - well, maybe he was in Australia - but if you came up in the late ‘80s and listened to pop music, he sang a lot of songs that were in high rotation. INXS was never my favorite group, but they were often one of my 5-10 favorites, and I owned a surprising number of their albums.
Chart Week: June 23, 1984
Song: “Obscene Phone Caller” - Rockwell
Chart Position: #39, 8th week on the chart. Peaked at #35 the week of June 30.
I have always prided myself for knowing minor hits by artists who have been labeled as One Hit Wonders by the general public. Others find this trait annoying, but it’s kind of too late to change now. Not that I’m in-your-face about it. But I also do not hesitate to point out how Scandal or whoever actually had X other songs that cracked the top 40 in addition to their one, big, unforgettable hit.
As promised, a playlist for the holiday weekend.
This is the same PL I shared last year on July 4. I listened to it again this week and still thought it was pretty good.
I hope you enjoy it, and have a happy and safe Independence Day weekend.
I’m about to check out for the holiday weekend. I’ll post a special playlist for the weekend on Friday.
Before I step back for a few days, I thought I’d provide some more music recommendations. So here are a few good albums from the first six months of 2020. If you have free time over the next few days, open up your music streaming app and try something new!
Ratboys - Printer’s Devil
The Cold Dish - Craig Johnson
This is the time of year when I abandon my To Read list and seek out Best Summer Reads type lists online. One such list suggested this book, which was a nice spin on the detective procedural.
Walt Longmire is a sheriff in a small town in Wyoming. He is in his 50s, widowed, and spends too many nights pounding too many beers. He went to USC to play football, lost his deferment and got drafted into the Marines, who provided him with an all-expenses trip to Vietnam in the height of the war there.
Life continues to be fairly boring. Well, at least in our house. There is obviously plenty going on in the world, and I’m feeling the urge to revive my Covid posts.
This weekend was especially boring, thanks to plenty of much-needed rain most of the day Saturday and then on Sunday morning. S has been busy trying to knock out Downton Abbey before it leaves Amazon Prime this week. I finished up a show I’ll write about next week.
Another longer set of music this week.
“Find Your Way Back Home” - Neil Finn featuring Stevie Nicks and & Christine McVie The whole Neil Finn replacing Lyndsey Buckingham in Fleetwood Mac thing is so odd that I kind of refuse to believe that it actually happened. But Finn leveraged that to get his two most famous new bandmates to join him on his latest solo track. His music has mellowed out a lot in the last decade, but this is one of the few songs over that stretch that I’ve enjoyed.
The dishwasher is a constant source of battle in our house. As I considered it this week, while once again rearranging dishes my kids put in the wrong spots, I realized I am never more of a Dad than when I’m correcting how they put dishes into the dishwasher.
“These can’t go on the bottom rack, they stick through and hit the spray arm!”
“The good knives have to be hand-washed; the heat of the dishwasher will ruin their handles!
First off, obviously some changes to the site’s look. Big changes, for now. I know it’s a little jarring and I’m not sure if I’ll stick with it, but as I was doing some other administrative work, I figured why not throw up a theme that looks like nothing else I’ve used in my 17-year blogging career? I’m happy to read feedback, good or bad, if you want to share in the comments.
It looks like it has been nearly a month since I shared new music in a Friday post. That has left quite a backlog. So let’s get caught up with a mega-playlist to take us into Father’s Day weekend.
“Carousels” - Doves. The first new Doves song in over a decade, and it does not disappoint. Sounds mature yet maintains the energy that was present through their excellent run of albums.
The Border - Don Winslow For an author, finishing a trilogy has to be difficult. Especially when you didn’t set out to write a three-book series to begin with.
This is the final entry in Winslow’s excellent Power of the Dog series, in which he unfurls the epic story of the rise and fall of a Mexican drug empire and the forces that were aligned against it.
I think authors have two choices when writing a series: you can either tie each book closely together, make it necessary to read the previous entries to understand the latest one; or you can fill later editions with plenty of hooks back to the history laid down by earlier books, while still making them readable on their own.
Before I get to some more notes on what’s been going down around here, a quick warning that I’m going to be doing some of my patented “jacking around with the blog” over the next few days. I’m hoping I can do it in a way that doesn’t prevent you from finding the site when you look for it. If not, my apologies and it should return soon.
Pool Troubles After a year of pretty pain-free pool ownership, we finally ran into a hiccup.
It’s been a few days. A couple of you checked in - which I appreciate - and all is well. The girls and I spent a few days out in the wilderness. OK, that might be overstating it a bit, but here’s a breakdown.
We went with our old neighbors to Turkey Run state park, about two hours east of Indy, Wednesday afternoon through Friday morning for camping, hiking, and tubing.
Just a couple weeks in and we’ve already entered the lazy days of summer. Swim most days. Have some family or small group of friends over on the weekends. Hope it doesn’t rain yet complain when it’s too hot.
That happens quick when there’s no place else to go. S popped into the nearest mall one day last week to return a few things and said maybe half the stores were open.
I think I’m done with Facebook for awhile. I’m not a huge user to begin with. But over the past week I’ve been disappointed at both Mark Zuckerberg’s continued stance that FB has no role to play in reining in posts that are meant to deliberately mislead people and spread lies and with a few friends who have posted/shared things I’ve found troubling following the George Floyd murder. I’ll check in to see who has a birthday and send them a message, but I don’t see myself scrolling through my feed or posting much again for some time.
Another week in the books that was a little worse than the week before. I don’t know what the end point is, when things will start getting better, but I fear where the next worst week will take us.
For this week’s playlist, some songs that both sum up what’s happening and how I feel about it. Not the most uplifting playlist, I admit, but there are some damn good songs in here.
My goal for May was to knock a bunch of movies off my To Watch list. At first glance it will look like I did exactly that. But I must admit I watched eight of these movies in that last nine days of the month. That was solid work!
The Last Dance
Well, shit, I never got around to writing about this. I guess it’s because I’ve talked about it so much to so many people I never felt the need to share more here.
It is hard to know what to write today. We are in day four of an absolutely glorious run of weather. We got to see a few friends this weekend. The SpaceX launch was very cool. There’s a new wave of openings here in Indianapolis today which is making life feel a little more normal.
But all that is offset by what is going on in our country right now.
It’s been a slow music week for me, so I’ll stick to some older tunes for today’s offerings.
“Great Expectations” - The Gaslight Anthem One of the great Side One, Track Ones of the digital era. The kids today don’t even know what a Side One, Track One is.
“Test Transmission” - Kasabian Kasabian had their moment right when I was transitioning to actually buying digital tracks instead of finding them on some “sharing” service.
Say Nothing - Patrick Radden Keefe My brother-in-books Sir David and I often share recommendations with each other. I don’t know that he’s ever pushed a book as hard as he did this one. I think he got a little nervous he had oversold it, but this turned out to be a great recommendation.
Keefe provides a thorough but quick history of the Provisional Irish Republican Army and its key members during the Troubles, the period in Northern Ireland from the mid–1960s through the 1990s when the country was torn by violence between primarily Catholic Republicans looking to unify with the Republic of Ireland and mostly Protestant Loyalists who wanted to remain a part of the United Kingdom.
Chart Week: May 10, 1986 Song: “Be Good To Yourself” - Journey Chart Positions: #20, 5th week on the chart. Peaked at #9 the week of May 31.
Remember when it used to be a surprise when new music arrived? At least for kids. Before the internet, before I had cable TV, and before I could read music magazines regularly, new albums by my favorite artists often appeared seemingly out of the blue.
Holiday number two of the Coronavirus era has come and gone. Memorial Day weekend was especially strange here in Indianapolis since there was no 500 mile race to dominate local events. The race has been pushed back to August, for now. But the month of May is the biggest month of the year in Indy, and the last three weeks have felt extra empty without all the race prep and coverage.
Happy Memorial Day weekend! Some songs to fuel your holiday.
"Peaceful Ambassador" - The Dead Tongues
Hiss Golden Messenger has been a connecting point for me to that sub-genre of music that balances indie rock, folk, and alt country. Ryan Gustafson has played with HGM over the years, but The Dead Tongues is his personal project. He works in that same space, but this track has a dirty, early 1970s feel to it.
I’m struggling to find the motivation to write this week. I have a couple things started but can’t seem to get them wrapped up.
Instead of working on either of those, I thought I would share this insane video instead. I hate heights so this make my stomach churn but I still find it amazing.
youtu.be/RG9TMn1FJ…
Via TMN
(Apologies to Rex Chapman for stealing his “Dogs, bruh,” for the title.)
I’m not sure if it is time to transition the title of these assorted notes posts back to how I labelled them before March. Not everything in these is about what is going on with Covid anymore. At the same time, our lives are going to continue to be pretty boring for some time and much of what I share here will be affected, at least indirectly, by the state of the world.
youtu.be/KRa8ZH_iO… Prince and the Revolution, live, 3/30/85 This is my weekend assignment, so I’ll make it yours, too. For this weekend only this concert is streaming for free. Superfans insist it is one of the greatest Prince performances ever, and it came at the absolute height of his popularity. Find a way to spend two hours with it.