Yesteryear’s Best Records

So the ‘08 twelvemonth has come to an end. I’m not anxious to put together this list because only a select few records are worthy of Apollo and his gang of poetic players. Let us look forward to the coming year when Noble Beast and Merriweather Post Pavilion are due out. But for what it’s worth, here are
my favorites:

(Because I lack the savvy to format this correctly, I can only create a collage. 1 and 2 are first row, as 3 and 4 are second row. It’s bearable so don’t lament to me.)

In retrospect, if there’s one album (or in this case EP) I want to give a lengthier listen it’s Air France’s Long Way Down. It is so delightful and pleasant–reminds me of Amiina.

I Can’t Write Here

At home, that is. The country is wonderful when you’re surrounded by interesting people; or sometimes, if it is solitude that you desire, it can be wonderful then too. I feel inclined, by and by, to write something about my hometown. The onus I’m inevitably faced with is whether or not to bomb it. No one wants to smite the place where they were raised; but these woods are nothing more than a funereal existence to me. I will always be dispirited by my domicile and it pains me. For this reason I cannot bomb the wide yards that I know too well.

Lazybones

It’s hard to get too into the holiday season when you have the flu.

I have ample spare time to write, but I’m just not up to it. Hopefully I’ll have my Top 10 Albums posted by the end of the year.

In the meantime, for the two or three readers I have out there, check out TED. It’s a brilliant website.

Political Apprise

Excellent news for my family. Vice-President-elect Joe Biden has been assigned an initiative titled “White House Task Force on Working Families” — a stratagem against America’s deepened recession. According to CNN Obama’s key goals for the task include expanding education and training; improving work and family balance; a focus on labor standards, including workplace safety; and protecting working-family incomes and retirement security.

Homeward Bound

Looking yon, out the doors of 30th Street Station, the sky is whitewashed with misty rain, and the pedestrians hasten in the wet weather, quenched like fish in a hoary sea. Cosi Cafe is something like the bush-league of coffee shops, but I can’t complain–I am, in fact, at a train station. Like Shakespeare prettified: “An ill-favored thing sir, but mine own.” So I’ll take my latte for what it’s worth.

I was reading an essay by Mark Twain, recently published posthumously by the New Yorker. Essentially it was about the good parts about being dead. The benefits include freedom of speech and posthumously promulgated work (the oeuvre that doesn’t harm the family because they’ve been deceased since the late 1800’s). Those are the sweet roses of death. No impairment can be done to you unless you’re an organ donor; and the great problems of life you think you’ve solved can be revealed, by and by. I’m sure Twain’s pessimistic approach to life has been studied by some highbrow at the university. In fact, I’ve been doing a little study of my own. I’m currently reading Woody Allen and Philosophy: You Mean My Whole Fallacy is Wrong? with essays scribed by philosophy students. I must admit reading about the surly philosophies of writers and artists is not in the least emasculating. I’m very beguiled.

Anyway my train has arrived. There’s a girl a few tables down from me reading NPR’s Top 10 Albums list. She’d be more attractive with a Parliament in hand. I fancy those lovely things, that you find in Murakami novels, where characters are lighting up cigarettes in the back of movie theaters, not wounding the lungs and morale of the killjoys in red trousers up front. Only in my mind’s eye, yeah Horatio? Christ. I couldn’t be more of a green monster for the jazz age, or psychedelic 60’s, or simply the 90’s. So many ill-favored things. And on that note, I am homeward bound.

P.S. I’m working on my own Top 10 list for the ‘08 twelvemonth. It should be published within a nights.

Fleet Foxxes – “English House”

I’ve been searching YouTube for their performance on Late Night but that was of to no avail. This video, courtesy of Hulu (I apologize for the inconviences, e.g., commercials, harsh compression), is of the Fleet Foxxes performing “English House”, one of the many folk-jamborees off their self-titled, critically aclaimed album. ENJOY!

Anthropology Wars

Just read an article from Times Higher Education about the schisms dominating the anthropology field. The study of humanity appears to be ruptured; it contains two divisions of thought: those who accept biological disparaties impact societies and those who refute it. Social anthropology versus evolutionay anthropology. I personally feel the two divisions must congregate or come to some consensus, or the field I’m studyiny will make no further progression academically.

Philosophy From The Father of American Literature

I just read something interesting and thought I’d share it with you. It’s an Orwellian credo surely, and one of antiquity.

“We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us. All that is original in us, and therefore fairly credible or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from, a procession of ancestors that sketches back a million years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed.”

-Mark Twain from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Yawny At The Apocalypse

The leaves have fluttered away in icy gusts. The wind now pierces the face of Philadelphia. It’s snowy and chilly, at times despondant; but when a man needs his coffee, he must embark out into hypothermic pressures.

I got slapped in the forehead by a gust of wind today. It nearly toppled me backwards. I am partial to this season, truly, but the city is so much more bone-chilling in late autumn than I’m used to. I miss those banks of deep snow after a storm or my own snowbound country home. Those were great pleasures that I long to see despite the hedonism of the city.

In 7/11 there was a quirky looking chum wearing tight Indian green cargo pants, a gray sweatshirt, and a red Alpine hat. I’ve always thought I was the mismatched one. But he possessed this oddly appeal. Perhaps it was the Alpine hat. I asked him where I could find deals on ski caps, for he had the look of a true penny-wise hipster. Not the silk-stocking kind rolling in their parents’ money. Definitely not an Urban Outfitters spendthrift. There are booths set up at City Hall during the holiday season that he fondly esteems. I think I could carry that torch. I was in fact down there just yesterday and bought myself a home-knitted beanie. He knew what he was talking about. It’s beautiful downtown. And the German crafts were affordable enough. I might have to do some Christmas shopping down there.

(I only named this Yawny at the Apocalypse because I’m listening to the song, and the icey gusts of wind and carrion in the street remind me of what the Apocalypse could be like)

A Lesson On Slavery?

Comcast.net News reports a white social studies teacher in White Plains, N.Y. attempted to vitalize a lesson on slavery by binding the hands and feet of two black girls. You can read the article here.

I think she garbled the issue to a drastic tine of pathetic creativity. This is cussed and unjustifiable. I’m glad the NAACP is getting involved. One of the girls, Gabrielle Shund, burst into tears at home. For Christ’s sake she had to crawl under a desk, bound by ropes, to simulate the experience. I wish the school board would more severely punish the teacher. Alas, I expect nothing to happen to her.