Comic Book Tattoo (2008)

SOUNDTRACK: TORI AMOS-Abnormally Attracted to Sin (2009).
It’s been almost a decade since I was blown away by a Tori Amos album.  I feel like she has really been so engaged in the concept of her albums, that she has lost track of the tunes.  And while I don’t hate anything she’s done in the last [...]

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Periodical: The Walrus

I found out about The Walrus while watching an interview with Noah Richler on Book Television (back when I had Canadian satellite).  During the interview, they mentioned that the first issue of this cool new magazine, The Walrus, had just come out.  I was very intrigued; amazingly, the local Barnes & Noble had a copy! [...]

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Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp and Other Essays

SOUNDTRACK: TV ON THE RADIO-Dear Science, (2008).
The problem with TV on the Radio for me is that their first EP is so damned good that anything else they do pales in comparison.  Having said that, Dear Science, comes really close to topping that EP.  I liked Cookie Mountain (their previous disc) but I felt like [...]

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Periodical: The Week

I’m not sure how I first learned about The Week. I think I received a trial issue in the mail. But after just one or two issues we were hooked.  The Week is a comprehensive newsweekly, although it offers virtually no original reporting.  It collates news stories and offers opinions from a variety of sources: [...]

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Four Letter Word: Original Love Letters (2007)

SOUNDTRACK: SONIC YOUTH-SYR 7: J’accuse Ted Hughes/Agnès B Musique (2008).
The first side of the disc (for it was only released on vinyl) is a ballsy blast of music.  Ballsy because it was the opening track of their live set at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in 2000.  And who opens up their set at a [...]

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Periodical: Mental Floss

Mental Floss has been one of my favorite magazines for about four years now.  It only comes out every two months, but it is just chock full of all kinds of weird information.  Sarah and I fight over who will read it first.   And then later we say, Oh, I read somewhere about [...]

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David Foster Wallace–[Week 10] Infinite Jest (1996)

SOUNDTRACK: GARBAGE-Garbage (1995).
I was thinking about how IJ reminds me so specifically of a place and time (I instantly think of the apartment I was in when I started reading it).  And there are also some discs that I was crazy about at the time too.
I very distinctly remember when the first Garbage single “Vow” [...]

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Clash of the Gods (The History Channel, 2009)

[WATCHED: August-October 2009] Clash of the Gods

[UPDATE: October 26, 2009]
I have now finished the entire series.  I was pleasantly surprised by how much I learned from it.  (Not that I considered myself an expert, but you never know what you’ll get from TV series). The biggest surprise was how much this series filled in the [...]

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Kurt Vonegut–A Man Without a Country (2005)

SOUNDTRACK: SONIC YOUTH-EVOL (1986).
Ah, EVOL.  Here’s where Sonic Youth became Sonic Youth.  Who knows how much Steve Shelley had to do with it, but he shows up and the band becomes amazing.  The cover art is pretty darn scary and yet the music inside is amazingly beautiful.  While by no means a commercial album, the [...]

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William H. Gass–”Kinds of Killing: The Flourishing Evil of the Third Reich” [a review of The Third Reich at War] (Harper’s, August 2009)

SOUNDTRACK: Songs That Got Us Through WW2 (1993).

My dad was in World War II. He was a Navy man, and he worked on airplanes.  He was stationed in the South Pacific.  When I was growing up, he listened to a lot of big band music (while most of my friends’ parents were listening to folk [...]

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