OK, for music post #2, I wanted to celebrate Ryan Adams’ new album, Prisoner. Rather than setting the stage myself, I thought I would share this excellent view of the State of Ryan Adams that Steven Hyden published earlier this week. It’s a good primer on where Adams has been over the past few years. And it has a little extra weight since Adams confirmed on Twitter than Hyden’s theory about Ryan Adams is correct.
It’s the first really big new music Friday of 2017! Which means bonus musical content for you! Strand of Oaks and Son Volt have new albums out today. Middle Kids released their long-awaited debut EP. And the crown jewel of the day is Ryan Adams’ Prisoner, which is already making me happy/sad. Oh, and there’s a bonus cherry on top: Prince’s music hit all the streaming services again last weekend, which is also worthy of celebration.
The Nix - Nathan Hill. My brother-in-reading Dave V. received two copies of this book over the holidays. He was generous enough to pass one of them my way. Quite the gesture, which I appreciate immensely! This is a great book. It’s also one of those books that makes me mad, as it is Hill’s first full-length novel. How can people write something this brilliant on their first effort? I’ve tried a couple half-assed attempts to write lengthy stories over the past 10 years and the results have been thoroughly embarrassing.
You all laugh at me for my stupid sports superstitions. But today I’m laughing at all of you. Because today I have proof that these “stupid” superstitions work! Let’s jump back almost two years to West Virginia’s visit to Lawrence in the final week of the 2015 season. For the full recap you can read here, but basically, Perry Ellis got hurt before halftime, West Virginia was kicking KU’s ass and led by 18 in the second half, I got pissed and started watching other things.
Once upon a time, not that long ago, I was known as the trivia guy. Where other people mastered law or medicine or sales, my mind was best suited to accumulating a nearly endless parade of useless if somewhat interesting facts about old pop culture, sports, and history. Some might say I had a gift. My reputation reached its zenith when I ran a daily trivia email list for something like three years.
open.spotify.com/user/224a… “The Punisher” - Lucius. I don’t know anything about this group, but this song is awesome. “Thick as Thieves” - The Menzingers. This band has always leaned a little too emo for my tastes. But they shifted ever-so-slightly on their latest album and I’m finding a handful of the tracks very nice to listen to. Good to hear some guitars in the indie rock world! “The Distance” - Emma Ruth Rundle.
Catching up on three recent reads. On Bullshit - Harry G. Frankfurt. “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” Thus begins what is, really, an extended essay in book form on the meaning of bullshit. I read a blurb about this somewhere over the holidays and thought it sounded like a hilarious and quick read. In fact, Frankfurt was a professor of philosophy at Yale and Princeton, among other places.
I really should be flogged for not sharing this earlier. It took me several nights back in December to get through it. And it was worth every second. Prince’s Closest Friends Share Their Best Prince Stories The saddest thing about Prince dying is that we lost the chance that he would ever really open up about his life and career. He was slated to put out an autobiography, but I’ve not heard how deep into that project he was.
Sometimes sports are the worst. Sometimes they’re the best. There’s been a lot of both lately. Super Bowl Had I been fully neutral, that would have been an awesome Super Bowl. The league heavies get blasted early and look thoroughly overmatched by their young, brash, high-powered opponents. Then an epic comeback, featuring an all-time play, and the first overtime game in Super Bowl history that ends with the Patriots staking claim to greatest franchise in league history and Tom Brady officially passing Joe Montana as the greatest quarterback ever.
Sports are funny. As much as the location where you grew up or live, style of play, or favorite athlete, narrative is a huge part of how we choose the teams we root for. If you’re an uncommitted fan, or just a fan with no strong ties to a particular team to begin with, the story that surrounds a team can often be as big of an attraction as anything.
Australia was in the news a little this week. I had some Aussie (and one New Zealand) tunes gathered. Seemed like a good time to put them together with a classic from Down Under to form a very pleasing playlist. open.spotify.com/user/224a… “Never Start” - Middle Kids. I discovered their “Edge of Town” way back in the spring of last year. It was good enough to land in my year end favorites list.
Some matchup last night, arguably the biggest of the year. When you get the best spellers from eight schools in the same room, you know there’s going to be some terrific performances. Uh huh, last night was the local Spell Bowl! After serving as an alternate last year, M was selected to represent the St. P’s sixth graders this year. The weird thing is, she refused to talk about it with us beforehand.
When we first became parents, we set some limits on ourselves that we thought would benefit our kids. These rules were based on observations of other parents, both adopting elements of parenting we admired and rejecting those we thought were inappropriate. One rule was that we would never take our kids out of school for an extended period to take a family vacation. We violated that rule four years ago when we went to Disney.
Sunday sucked. Not because of the weather. For the second-straight day it was in the 60s here, although it was a more dreary day than Saturday. No complaints there. Not because anyone in the family was sick. We are all reasonably healthy. Not because of L’s basketball game. Although we lost by 2, it was a good game and the girls played really well. Sunday sucked because of a text I got late in the morning from a friend back in KC with the news about Yordano Ventura.
Everything is different today. Things that had been in place for years are suddenly changed, awkward, and troublesome. Yep, you guessed it: M got braces put on yesterday. Or at least her top brackets. She was alternately excited and anxious. I think it’s weird that kids these days often look forward to getting braces. I guess it has to do with how you can personalize them with different colors, and how they are much less bulky than they were when our generation was growing up.
Well, here we are in the middle of January, and once again the Kansas Jayhawks are putting together an excellent season of college basketball play. Some things just never seem to change. Except something is different this year. No, not Bill Self’s four-guard offense he’s had to install due to a lack of quality big men. No, not that (Bitch I’m) Frank Mason III is averaging over 20 points a game, putting him on track to be only the second player of the Self era to do so.
An early winter sports update, starting with L’s second year of basketball. She is playing in the pre-CYO league run at her future high school by the girls coach there. I’m coaching her team again this year. This time around I have eight girls - four second graders, four first graders - all from St. P’s. In fact, of the four teams in the league, three are from St. P’s.
A nice, long weekend was exactly what we needed just four days after the girls went back to school. That was an intense four days! I kid. I’m fully supportive of the MLK Day holiday. It just feels oddly timed after our late holiday break. And our girls are going to miss a few days of school next week[1] so January is going to be a very quick month. Academically at least.
open.spotify.com/user/224a… “Emotions and Math” - Margaret Glaspy. I really enjoyed Glaspy’s album this song serves as the title track for. But I lost it in the haze of the end of last year. I was reminded of this track, and then the album, when my brother in music Erick$ included this song in a playlist of his favorite songs of last year. I love the swagger that Glaspy sings with.
First two books of the new year. The Association of Small Bombs - Karan Mahajan This is a complicated, if very good, novel. Beginning with a fictional terrorist bomb that explodes in a Delhi market in 1996, it follows the explosion’s effects on those it touched. That includes the men responsible for the attack, the parents of young brothers who died in the blast, their friend who survived and his family, and how the ripples of the attack eventually changed modern Indian society.