Spango Dips

Hey zero readers,

I am in possession of an all-or-nothing personality, meaning that in my personal affairs there appear to be no options between the extremes of commitment to perfection and total rejection. That is, If I’m going to do it at all, I’m going to sweat every detail. Nothing irks me more than being forced into a position (usually as the result of time constraints) where I have to do something half-heartedly; it always seems like a weak-tea compromise. As a result, I have done a few small things in my life of which I’m immensely proud, and have let a hundred times as many potential things die in preproduction because I felt I couldn’t do them as well as they deserved to be done.

This may shed some light on my long absence from posting. I think I’m capable of recognizing now that this measly blog doesn’t have to reflect every facet of my personality, that it doesn’t have to be brilliant, and that it shouldn’t be a chore to maintain. So I hope to develop a more relaxed attitude toward the practice of blogging, and in so doing become once again a semi-regular presence on the bustling pages of pers.picacio.us.

Where to begin, I don’t know. Writing movie reviews was, for me, probably the most enjoyable and least stressful way to contribute to the blogosphere, so I think I’ll restart that engine. With the end of 2007 somehow horribly fast approaching, I’ll be starting to think about best-of lists, so the timing’s certainly right. I know I was also once talking about album reviews, and I gave it a try in private, but I think I lack the focus to evaluate albums in the form of a monologue. Somehow they always seem too broad and too rich to distill into a single paragraph. No album is one thing (except maybe Weezer’s Make Believe). Songs, however, are a different story; more often than not, they are one thing. And if the task of the critic is to name that thing, then I can whip up a paragraph about a song lickety-split. I was thinking I could try letter grades for song reviews, but that’s so condescending. And the Pitchfork scale of 0.0-10.0 seems simply too big. Maybe I can just stick with stars; although it’s customary for music reviews to go to 5 stars rather than the 4 that’s more common for movies. Cripes, maybe I should just abandon the whole th—NO! I will figure this out. My ratings scale for songs doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be “personal.” It can just work.

I’ll get back to you.

Dearest me. It’s been a while. Also, it’s a little late to start rolling out my End of Year Lists for 2006, but, honestly, there was such an abundance of great stuff last year, at least of the musical variety, that I was totally unable to keep pace with it. I’ve spent all of January thus far scrambling furiously to catch up.

Before the unveiling of the titular item, let me offer you a tiny preview of some of the features coming soon to this blog.

1. A new layout, courtesy of Greg Borenstein. Featuring both improved navigation and a little thing called an aesthetic. Looking forward to this one.
2. As part of the new layout, a little mp3 player in the upper-right corner of the front page, where any and all readers are invited to click to hear the three songs that are rocking my bones the hardest at a given moment.
3. Capsule reviews. As some of you may be aware if you’ve known me well for a while or if you’ve ever Van Eck phreaked my monitor, I’ve written a one-paragraph review for every movie I’ve seen since about 1996, and I keep them all in a bloated, rigidly alphabetized Word file, with formatting stolen outright from the Leonard Maltin Movie Guide. [Reader murmurs: "good God, whyy??"] Well, honestly, as a teenager it made me feel smart and important. And unsurprisingly, most of the “smart and important” reviews that I wrote as a teenager now turn my blood to custard. But I’ve stuck with the project, revising the old ones as I go, because I’ve discovered that I don’t really know how I feel about a movie until I endeavor to write about it. It’s been completely personal, and I don’t believe I’ve ever shared the writings with anyone. Well that’s about to change. I’m going to start posting these reviews—not just for films, but also for albums, classical works, and books—as I take them in. So you all have that to look forward to.
4. Actual content beyond the utterly trivial, somewhat regularly, probably, I hope. I had a wildly eventful Christmas vacation that I’d love to share with you all, so that might be a good place to start. Coming soon.

And with that, I give you The Top Twenty Songs of 2006. Discussion is encouraged.

1. Joanna Newsom: Sawdust & Diamonds
2. Joanna Newsom: Cosmia
3. TV on the Radio: Wolf Like Me
4. Mastodon: Colony of Birchmen
5. Be Your Own Pet: Adventure
6. Gnarls Barkley: Crazy
7. Thom Yorke: Harrowdown Hill
8. Mew: The Zookeeper’s Boy
9. Strength: I Tilt My Head Back
10. Hot Chip: And I Was a Boy from School
11. The Knife: Still Light
12. Clipse: Trill
13. The Decemberists: The Crane Wife 1 & 2
14. Grizzly Bear: Knife
15. The Thermals: A Pillar of Salt
16. The Hold Steady: First Night
17. Liars: The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack
18. TV on the Radio: Tonight
19. Justin Timberlake: My Love
20. Sonic Youth: Incinerate

I will sidestep the tiresome cliché of opening the first post in a long time with an apologia enumerating my reasons for not having posted in a long time. Suffice it to say: I did, and do, intend to funnel my blogo-energies into layout customization and such pretty soon, and also I’m really lazy.

There is much too much stuff to talk about. I’d be remiss if I used this space here and now either to gloss over the world’s various catastrophes and reduce my nuanced and no doubt laceratingly brilliant insights on each topic to crude punchlines, OR to go into soporific detail on any one of them. So instead, I’ll give you a quick bullet-pointed list of what’s going on in my personal life.

• I’m at a point where teaching drum lessons full time is profitable enough that I no longer need to supplement my income with the emasculating nightmare-generator that is a minimum-wage job. Yahoo.
• Things being as they gloriously are, I’m quitting Movie Madness in two weeks.
• I will be celebrating this emancipation with a trip to LA, to commence virtually the moment I clock out of my last shift. I’ll be there from August 31 to September 12.
• I’m writing a lot of songs. At Dusk is on a brief vacation, what with Cary in MontefreakingNegro and all, and I’m meanwhile getting a good stack of acoustic tunes together on my own, and also rekindling the 2delicious fires with my friend and engineer extraordinaire Chris Anderson. 2delicious, for those of you not in the know, is a hip-hop/dance fusion project on which Chris and I broke ground about a year ago, and then had to abandon entirely in order to focus our energies on You Can Know Danger, and Chris’s other major time-abyss of 2005/06/04, the Strength album (which, for my money, is the best album of 2006 so far, and by dint of greatness has retroactively nullified all of the grief that I gave those guys about their perfectionism during the Hundred Years Recording Process that it seemed to require). I like making music, on a computer, that is purpose-engineered to move butts, at the very least because it’s such a far cry from how I normally operate in terms of priorities.
• A little off-topic, but: Chris and I refer to 2delicious as 2del, just for private shorthand, and… well, check out what www.2del.com currently is. I guess we won’t be able to register that domain after all.
• I’ve seen many movies recently. I’m back up to an average that approaches the voluminous input I was enjoying back in the Video West days. I think I might follow Jem’s lead and do a capsule review post soon, but I’m comfortable revealing now that the best of them was, uh… either The Wicker Man (which was totally captivating though I only really watched it in the first place because I’m going to need to substantiate all the animadversion I’ll be directing at the remake even though I probably won’t see it), or The Wages of Fear.
• I am still reading a very, very long book.

I am tired and I’m going to bed. Stay tuned, now, officially, for more posts soon.

Technorati Tags: music, movies, self-employment, atdusk, 2delicious

How does it feel?

I guess I decided that being a regular contributor to two different group blogs (saeo.blogspot.com, atduskmusic.com,) wasn’t enough. So I struck out on my own, with more than a little help from pers.picacio.us founder/administrator/life guru Jem. I’ll protect his anonymity by not revealing his surname. But I will say that it almost rhymes with Faxbotron, which I think he should consider formally adopting anyway.

Well, I’m off to quite a propitious start, what with that Faxbotron business and all.

Technorati Tags: beginning, blog