Cranes Flying Over Venice

Gorgeous.

The Head and the Heart

Performance on Austin City Limits:
(Concert runs from about 1:30-27:00)

Google Doodle

Today's Google Doodle really caught my eye. It's commemorating the 374th anniversary of Nicolas Steno's birthday. He was a Danish scientist and is widely considered the father of geology. The doodle illustrates two ideas that Steno is known for: rock strata and embedded fossils. 

Wow, That is Scathing: New Hampshire Edition

Excerpt from Henry Allen's 1988 essay on New Hampshire:

New Hampshire is a fraud.

Which is to say that behind that idyll of white-steepled, sleigh-belled, town-meeting, republican-with-a-small-R America lurks a much realer and hidden New Hampshire — the souvenir hustlers, backwoods cranks, motorcycle racing fans, out-of-state writers, dour French Canadians and tax-dodging Massachusetts suburbanites who have conspired as New Hampshire has conspired for two centuries to create an illusion of noble, upright, granite-charactered sentinels of liberty out of little more than a self-conscious collection of bad (if beautiful) land, summer people, second-growth woods full of junked cars and decaying aristocracy, lakes howling with speedboats, state liquor stores that are open on Sundays and the most vicious state newspaper in America — the Manchester Union Leader, which recently greeted the birthday of Martin Luther King by describing him as a Communist dupe.

They sell the rest of the country maple syrup, lottery tickets and Yankee sagacity the way Indians on reservations sell moccasins, bingo and environmental wisdom. They never shut up about how closemouthed they are. They beat you rich and they beat you poor. They do this by taking a Calvinist pride in the riches from the high-tech boom in the southern part of the state, and then asssuming the smugness of Thoreau in defending the poverty of the swamp Yankees and shack people living back in the woods with yards full of mean dogs and broken snowmobiles. They exhibit the ethics of Switzerland and the shrugging shabbiness of New Jersey.

Or as Emerson wrote: “The God who made New Hampshire taunted the lofty land with little men.”

The question is not who they think they are, to be holding us hostage every four years with their presidential primary. Instead, who do we think they are, to let them get away with it, this white, tight and right smidgen of a place, this myth-mongering bastion of no-tax/no-spend conservatives with no minorities to speak of and a total of .43 percent of the American people? As Thomas Jefferson said, after New Hampshire town meetings had attacked his Embargo Act, “The organization of this little selfish minority enabled it to overrule the union.”

Happy New Hampshire Primary!

Peter, Paul & Mary - Blowin' in the Wind

A beautiful live performance from 1966. God, Mary was so incredibly pretty.

Lists of 2011

I have compiled a list of my favorites from 2011. As usual, this is not a complete list -- there are plenty of things I wanted to listen to/read/watch in 2011 that I didn't get a chance to. Also, I tried to keep the lists limited to Top 25 or less.

Favorite Music: 
I'm proud of myself for actually having the strength (yeah, that's the right word) to narrow it down to a Top 10 list. With the concession being that I created an honorable mentions section. The Top 10 I selected just stood out to me as complete albums, in which I enjoyed nearly every track (or every track). With some albums in the honorable mentions section, the separation between them and the Top 10 is very slight. And then some honorable mentions are a distance from the Top 10's greatness, but they were still albums I liked. These albums had some really good songs, but then also some not-so-great ones.

(The embedded songs are not necessarily my favorite track on the album, just the song I felt like putting on today)

1. The Decemberists - The King is Dead



2. Adele - 21



3. Beirut - The Rip Tide



4. Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues



5. Bon Iver - Bon Iver



6. Wye Oak - Civilian



7. Florence + The Machine - Ceremonials



8. Lisa Hannigan - Passenger



9. Jay-Z & Kanye West - Watch the Throne



10. Milo Greene - The Hello Sessions* / Other Lives - Tamer Animals

*The reason this is a tie is that I felt Milo Greene definitely needed to be in my Top 10, but they technically don't have an album yet. The closest they have to an album at this point is a 4-song sampler. But I'm so in love with this band. And everything they do, I love. If they had a full album out, they would be higher up on the list. But as they don't, I felt they deserved to be in the Top 10 but probably should be at the bottom. And in case anyone thought it was a cop-out that they're on the list despite not having a full album, I decided to include the next album on my list -- so that at the very least I have 10 full albums in the Top 10 list. Thus, Other Lives.





Honorable Mentions:
11. The Civil Wars - Barton Hollow (I went back and forth between this album and Other Lives for the #10 spot. I had the hardest time deciding. So I feel like it deserves an embedded song)



12. Thao & Mirah - Thao & Mirah
13. The Head and the Heart - The Head and the Heart
14. The Black Keys - El Camino
15. Tennis - Cape Dory
16. Wilco - The Whole Love
17. Gillian Welch - The Harrow & The Harvest
18. Feist - Metals
19. Radiohead - The King of Limbs
20. Eisley - The Valley
21. Bright Eyes - The People's Key
22. Ryan Adams - Ashes & Fire
23. Death Cab For Cutie - Codes and Keys
24. Dawes - Nothing is Wrong
25. David Bazan - Strange Negotiations

---

Favorite Movies: 
1. Midnight in Paris
2. Bridesmaids
3. Beginners
4. The Artist
5. Win Win
6. Even the Rain
7. Incendies
8. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
9. Tree of Life
10. Moneyball
11. 50/50
12. The Descendants
13. Abel
14. Le Havre
15. Submarine
16. Jane Eyre
17. My Week With Marilyn
18. The Future
19. Martha Marcy May Marlene
20. Another Earth

Documentaries:
1. Our School
2. Life in a Day
3. Catching Hell
4. Hot Coffee
5. The Learning

---

Favorite TV:
If I did a Top 25, I'd pretty much just be listing every show I watch -- so I'm making a list of shows that I felt were exceptional or "special" this year (e.g., 30 Rock was great this year. It's great every year. But it was pretty much the same old 30 Rock this year. Nothing really stood out as different or exceptional).

1. Breaking Bad (!!!)
2. Community
3. Boardwalk Empire
4. Homeland
5. Portlandia
6. Louie
7. Curb Your Enthusiasm
8. Game of Thrones
9. Parks & Recreation
10. Big Love (A great final season to end the series)
11. An Idiot Abroad
12. The Women's Soccer World Cup (not exactly a show, but it provided some excellent TV watching this summer. So much drama!)

Other good TV this year: 30 Rock, Modern Family, Dexter, Nurse Jackie, The Big C, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The United States of Tara, The Walking Dead, The Hour, The Ricky Gervais Show, Hell on Wheels, Top Chef: All-Stars

Notes: The Office is doing better than I thought it would without Steve Carrell -- but it's still kind of struggling. I enjoyed the Glee episode dedicated to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours album. I felt they ended United States of Tara well. The Killing was frustrating. I'm still pissed there was no Mad Men in 2011.

---

Favorite Books: 
This list consists of books I read in 2011 and not necessarily books released in 2011. I was planning on doing Top 20 fiction and Top 5 non-fiction (as I tended to read more fiction this year), but Travels With Charley was begging to be on the list. So it'll be a 19-6 split.

1. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
2. The Art of Fielding- Chad Harbach
3. A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan
4. The Help - Kathryn Stockett
5. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
6. The Tiger's Wife - Tea Obreht
7. Let the Great World Spin - Colum McCann
8. So Much For That - Lionel Shriver
9. The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje
10. Freedom - Jonathan Franzen
11. Room - Emma Donoghue
12. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz
13. The Marriage Proposal - Jeffrey Eugenides
14. Great House - Nicole Krauss
15. Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout
16. State of Wonder - Ann Patchett
17. A Gate at the Stairs - Lorrie Moore
18. In the Woods - Tana French
19. The Fates Will Find Their Way - Hannah Pittard

Non-Ficton:
1. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot
2. The Warmth of Other Suns - Isabel Wilkerson
3. The Devil in the White City - Erik Larson
4. Bossypants - Tina Fey
5. Unfamiliar Fishes - Sarah Vowell
6. Travels with Charley - John Steinbeck

Have You No Shame, New Yorker? Pt. 2

Remember the last installment of this, where I gave examples from New Yorker profiles where the writers had fairly unflattering things to say about the individuals featured in the piece? Well, here's some more!

*Rankin is thirty-eight, six feet tall, and broad in the beam. He has a high forehead and wears large eyeglasses, which together give the appearance that he is always about to ask politely if you've got a minute.

*In Baylor's lab-coated corridors, he wears designer jeans and square-toed ankle boots, and walks with a bounce in his step that's suspiciously close to a strut, like Pinocchio heading off to Pleasure Island.

*On the outskirts of Oxford lives a brilliant and distressingly thin physicist named David Deutsch... In the half-light of the winter sun, Deutsch's house looked a little shabby. The yard was full of what appeared to be English ivy, and near the entrance was something twiggy and bushlike that was either dormant or dead...His thinness contributed to an oscillation of his apparent age between nineteen and a hundred and nineteen. (He's fifty-seven.) His eyes, behind thick glasses, appeared outsized, like those of an appealing anime character. His vestibule was cluttered with old phone books, cardboard boxes, and piles of papers.

*A hefty fellow of fifty-four -- with a face as round and frank as a full moon, set off by scholarly spectacles...

But this cute cover makes up for it, right?

*Zadran, who is in his late sixties, is an extraordinary-looking man, with a face like something devised by a Claymation animator. At the meeting, he wore a black turban topped with a flamboyant cloth fan and trailing a yard-long train. He has a horizontal stripe of eyebrows dyed jet black, a great proboscis, a handlebar mustache, and bassetlike jowls. His ears are massive, resembling dried apricots loosely attached to the sides of his head.

*For those whose picture of [Clarence] Thomas remains frozen at the time of his confirmation hearings, in 1991, the Justice is today a startling sight. His jet-black hair has gone almost completely white. He has gained a great deal of weight. (An injury long ago ended his days on the "highest court in the land," the basketball court on the top floor of the Supreme Court building.) His gait is weary, and he looks older than his sixty-three years.

*Nilekani has a round face, as if reflected in the back of a spoon, and the wry, detached manner of someone so taken by visions of the future that the present seems too mundane to merit his full attention. Although he is often persuasive, he is not always eloquent; sentences often fall away to phrases like "the branding thingy." He is known as a great salesman, but he sells softly, blithely, by making it seem almost an imposition to have to explain the benefits of his product.

*Mountainously built, with a broad face surrounded by a mossy underbeard and rootlike dreadlocks, Lanier has an imposing presence that nonetheless comes off as oddly fluttery. He tends to talk in breathless bursts, and he often defuses his inflammatory remarks by allowing his voice to rise into a register that is more often reserved for talking to pets or small children. This can give listeners the impression that he is lecturing to a three-year-old while walking up a steep hill.