Album of the Week: Mist King Urth

 

Robert Pollard has been known to cite the "four Ps" - pop, punk, psych, prog - as the primary building blocks for his prodigious musical omniverse. Lifeguards, his coalition with former Guided By Voices bandmate Doug Gillard, explicitly emphasizes Pollard's prog predilections. I use "prog" here more to denote structural ambition than to reference the synth-based, conceptual long form works associated with the term.

The Week Ahead

If I can break away from my ever-important horticultural research, here's how I hope the upcoming week will shake out:

Monday: Album of the Week
Tuesday: 2010 Film Wrap-Up
Wednesday: Thoughts on Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin
Thursday: Pensées
Friday: A new approach to Freeday Friday

This is, of course, barring any unforeseen bouts of monsterism in my patients.

So far as this evening's self-congratulatory festivities are concerned, I think the stuffy Brit thing will win for picture and actor, that ridiculous ballet thing will take actress, the how-we-livin'-now movie will nab director, and etc. I can't bring myself to finish this thought.

By the way, this is still going on. Please check it out. Great write-ups this year:

Freeday Friday Continues Lazily

Kind of phoning this one in today. Short story written 8+ years ago. Have at it. The cabin is meant to establish setting. It's the result of a two minute Google Image Search.

Music Monday Launch (Sort Of)

This is all I got:

An almost completely ignored masterwork from 1993, featuring members of Yo La Tengo and Combustible Edison. Perhaps part of their obscurity is due to their completely unGoogleable name (the band, by the way, is Christmas; the album is Vortex).

Inauguration of the Freeday Friday Dome!

As threatened, here is the first installment of the horribly named Freeday Friday. The title itself is a homage to my former gym teacher, a colorful character who once summered on an air mattress in the middle of a lake. I hope to take up some future FreeFri space on that particular story. For now, this weekly feature will highlight old attempts at creative writing, fragments from my 15+ years of journals, doodles, etc.

Here are two pieces, both written while I was living in Los Angeles. I present these without editing and with only one comment: I was into "scare quotes" -- and hyphenated asides -- back then, wasn't I?

2010 Report Card and Muriels Fanfare

Tomorrow, the honorable Steve Carlson and Paul Clark begin unveiling, day by day, the Muriel Awards. I'm honored to be a voter again this year, my second. In preparation, I figured I'd go ahead and list, in descending order, the 2010 films I saw that were eligible for the awards this year. I'm leaving out the top twenty in order to discuss them further and maintain the proper amount of suspense with regards to my ballot.

Now I know nobody reads this so I'm effectively nattering on to myself, in the style of a three am subway passenger. However, I hope in the coming days to actually start writing here more often. Movies, of course, will be on the docket. I'd also like to start picking my way through my impressive CD collection and write on some of my choice albums. Most importantly, this Friday I'll inaugurate Freeday Friday, a carnival of words and wonders to delight the mind and tickle the fancies. So there's that to look forward to.

Without further ado, my 2010 Movie Report Card (asterisks indicate films I have full intention to explore in future posts):