There is a danger in completing your Christmas shopping before Thanksgiving: the kids change their minds. L. made a brand-new Christmas list yesterday. Luckily one thing on it is up in the attic, so she won’t be totally disappointed. I know many of you saw this last week, but it was absolutely worth making sure no one missed it. Enjoy Deadspin’s Drew Magary ripping apart his seven-year-old daughter’s Christmas list. Long-time friend of the blog Stacey B.
9 - “I Don’t Know How” - Best Coast As I wrote when I first shared the video for this song last month, singer Bethany Cosentino drives some critics nuts with her repetitive lyrics. But I love her. And I love how this song begins as a droning, (indie rock) torch song and then gains (false?) confidence through the middle third. And that final third? Oh man, that’s pure greatness. “You see me everywhere, you walk around without a care,” is a wonderful, devastating lyric, and when contrasted with the jubilant, almost defiant music, it’s a brilliant combination.
Here we go. The top 10, one per day for the next two weeks. Enjoy. 10 - “Amsterdam” - Gregory Alan Isakov. Most gorgeous song of the year. That final verse, “Oh churches and trains…” Mercy! You can have your Mumford and Sons. I’ll take Isakov for beautiful, warm, country-tinged neo-folk.
My Favorite Songs Lists are always works in progess. Each January I start a new list in iTunes called XX Favs, where XX = that year. As I listen to music over the next 11 months or so, I toss my favorites into it. A few times during the year I’ll scan the list, delete songs that no longer delight and put some thought into how they would line up if the year ended that day.
The era of cheap and easy streaming music makes it easy for anyone to assemble a pretty nifty playlist for the holidays. However, you need to go beyond just your favorite songs. You need to dive into Christmas albums and build sets that can be spun for hours as the soundtrack for your parties, dinners, and Christmas morning celebrations. The core of these selections should be built around the holiday music of Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Dean Martin.
Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination - Josiah Thompson Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK - Gerald Posner Well, I got a little obsessed around the anniversary of JFK’s assassination. Aside from numerous TV documentaries watched and online stuff read, I came across an Errol Morris film that features Josiah Thompson. After watching it, I rushed to the library and picked up Thompson’s book and I was off.
There’s no real way to tease this, other than to suggest you go look at it. New Wave Artists Aging Gracefully Well, not all of them are aging gracefully. Be on the lookout for: Boy George (!), Tears For Fears (???), and Simon LeBon (WTF). I think it’s safe to say that Pete Burns has had the most profound change in appearance. And, if you pay attention to the musical heroes of our youth, it will be no surprise that David Bowie and Susanna Hoffs have aged the best.
Note: I’ll kick off my look back at the music of 2013 later this week. Here’s an appetizer about music in, but not of, 2013. I forget what the motivation was, but for some reason last night I decided to check and see when season two of The Americans was supposed to start. Unofficially, I found early February. Which is kind of a bummer. Mid-January would be much nicer. I guess I can go stream all of season one after the holidays to refresh my memory before the new ones air.
A full month of books, but also one in which I got obsessed by a specific topic late. So I’ll chop this into two entries: one for the non-obsession books then a second, tomorrow, for the books that haunted my dreams for a couple weeks. The Things They Carried - Tim O’Brien The Quiet American - Graham Green I began the month in a bit of a Vietnam jag. I read an article about Pham Xuan An, “the perfect spy” of the Vietnam War, which got me interested in reading more about the war years.
Mondays are for catching up. After a long holiday weekend there’s even more to share, so here we go. The girls had a long, five-day weekend. We could have used warmer weather as we really needed to shove them outside more. I’m not sure where they get all their energy. Or why they refuse to listen to us. Wednesday M. got a replacement for her fish, Sparkle, which died two weeks ago.
It’s assassination season, amped up 10,000% by this being the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death. I’ve watched bits and pieces of several shows about the assassination over the past week, and plan on settling down with the History Channel later and watching some more. This is nothing new. It’s long gone now, but in high school I taped a rebroadcast of the original NBC coverage on Nov. 22, 1963 and watched it over-and-over again, fascinated by history unfolding on live TV.
Time, and technology, march forward. The first widely popular desktop application that played MP3 files, Winamp, is being shut down in December. AOL Shuts Down Winamp For Good I first downloaded Winamp in December 1997. Pearl Jam had a new single, “Given To Fly,” that was getting airplay in advance of its official release. I kept reading on Pearl Jam discussion lists how you could listen to “radio rips” of the song if you had the right software1.
Forgive me as I link to one thing and then take it in a completely different direction. Esquire has a terrific profile of George Clooney in the December issue. I’ve always been a big fan; he seems like the kind of guy you would almost be happy stole your girlfriend from you. “So what happened with you and Jane?” “Oh, she’s dating Clooney now. But I’m totally cool with it. He’s really much better for her.
The belated weekend wrap up. Man, was it a crazy weekend. First off, we were lucky that the awful storms that blew through Indiana split before they made it to our house. We had some heavy winds, but nothing like the 80 MPH gusts they had downtown, or the tornadoes that were just to the north of us. The sirens did go off, and we hustled the girls to the basement for a bit.
It’s a double sick day. C. came home early yesterday with a fever and L., who was already on medication for a bad cough, was burning up this morning. Good times. We’re deep into a Netflix binge that will likely last all day. I got called to come pick C. up about 2:20 yesterday. When I got to school, M. was sitting in the office with a big, proud grin on her face.
I love it when the Onion says things that are both funny and true. Example: their take on a new (fictitious) ESPN show. “We’re looking for three, maybe four absolutely reprehensible, know-it-all fucks to sit around a table and share their idiotic opinions about the day’s biggest sports stories,” said ESPN’s vice president of original programming Jamie Horowitz, adding that ideally, the obnoxious, pig-headed pieces of shit will be a mix of annoying national sports columnists, repulsive former athletes, and one prick from Boston.
Wow, that was worth staying up late, and feeling kind of miserable this morning, for. All the pre-game chatter amongst KU fans, at least the ones I interacted with, was, “Well, I just hope we make a game of it and the kids get some experience that will pay off later.” Funny what a sloppy season opener can do to expectations. Some of that pessimism was because unlike KU, Duke returned several players from last year, and added a transfer with D1 experience.
Ominous skies here in Indy today. We’ve had a couple of small snow events already, nothing that accumulated, but tonight we may get as much as an inch. And then the temperatures are expected to to tumble for most of the week. I guess Mother Nature still has some bitchiness left after the (seemingly) endless winter of 2012-13. We have a clear view of those skies, too, now that most of our leaves have fallen.
Finally, the games begin. It’s been a long run since that sad Friday night in Dallas last March when Elijah missed, Trey hit, and Michigan knocked off the #1 seeded Jayhawks out of the NCAA tournament in overtime. Given how last season ended, this has been a surprisingly un-angsty off-season. Well, there was angst plenty of angst until May, but then for some reason a lot of that went away.
It’s been a nice, relaxing week. With the exception of C.’s Daisy Scouts meeting yesterday, we’ve not had a single event outside of school. Which has been nice after two-plus months of soccer practice and games. M. and C. wrapped up their seasons on Sunday. M.’s team had a great game against an opponent that had not lost all season. It was a tense affair, as the coaches for the other team were being very aggressive, throwing all their defenders forward the entire game, in an effort to clinch the undefeated season.