web log (late 20th c. – early 21st c.)
This is the first post in my new categories “LOST” and “Obama.” I am already excited for the 20th and 21st of this month. The double header of the Inauguration and the season premiere of LOST may prove to be more than I can handle.
At any rate, I will be blogging the inauguration and every episode of LOST this season.
This particular journey has not been as treacherous nor as long as others in this post, but it did involve some self-discovery, heartbreak, hope, and despair.
It started on a couch (one of my favorite places in the world) as I was watching the Colbert Report on June 18th. Junot Diaz was promoting his Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Now, I try and be an independent thinker, but I am just as susceptible to the NYT bestseller, highbrow literature, “it” book marketing tools as everybody else. So, I thought to myself, I’ll have to pick that up next time I’m in a bookstore… Continue reading “The Brief Wondrous Vacation of Matt Eilar”
Alex Ross has a new post about the centennial of Olivier Messiaen. I had the privelage of seeing pianist Jeff Payne perform Messiaen’s masterpiece, Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus in a (I’m told) rare complete performance.
I found the experience completely disorienting. I found the lack of melody hard to deal with, and reminded me of what a terrible Philistine I am. I also had a huge moment of low self esteem when I was talking over the concert the day after with a friend of mine. He had heard and played many of Messiaen’s organ works, and heard much more harmonically in the piece than I did.
It has become another one of my Moby Dicks… there will be one day when I will hear more than a dense swirling of disjoined chords in that work.
Uncut and Mojo have their end of the year lists out. I have not fully looked at the lists (I tend to look at them as an index of albums that I need to listen to anyway), but a quick perusal tells me that neither of them have Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals on them, unlike, say, Blender. Another post will have to deal with my problems with Girl Talk, but I don’t understand how even his biggest fans can really think that his album is the best new music that the year has to offer. At best, it is fun dance music, or an index of popular hooks. But the best of the year? Really?
The review that I wrote yesterday reminded me about another book that I recently finished, The Mission Song, by John LeCarré. By chance, I finished the book a couple of days after watching the perplexingly mediocre new Bond installment, Quantum of Solace.
I was really intrigued by the new directions that these two franchises have taken with this new century. Le Carré was the prototypical Cold War spy novelist. James Bond was the over-the-top secret agent obsessed with his nemesis, S.P.E.C.T.R.E. And yet the Cold War is over. Teenagers today were barely alive during the fall of the Wall, and it will be many years yet before people will begin to read Cold War novels as historical fiction. Where then do writers go when they have built their entire careers on books that are factually and fashionably out of favor?
hammer & jack 