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The two books remind me a lot of another favorite author of mine, Don Delillo. Their writing styles are different, but the stories they're telling of humanity and its struggle with and for modernity are similar.
In Spook Country Gibson weaves together the stories of a rather large cast in brilliant manner. Their inevitable encounters in no way seems contrived, or forced. Furthermore each of them are complete persons, not mere filler in order to advance plot points.
This book is part techno-thriller, part spy adventure, with bits of martial artistry, art, media and rock and roll thrown in for good measure.
Spook Country is exciting from beginning to end, and proves there really is no more an exciting time than the present.
Chris Rose is a columnist for the Times-Picayune. His book 1 Dead in Attic is a collection of his post-Katrina columns.
The city he describes in this book is a battered, broken city, but we all knew that. What Rose wants his readers to know is that the city is getting better, but it still hurts. The destruction wasn't just in the Lower Ninth Ward as it appears in the media, but everywhere. Some parts of the city fared better than others, but nothing went unharmed. That includes its people.
Chief among those scarred by Katrina is Rose himself. While this book is a chronicle of a ruined city crawling back to life it is also the story of one man's descent into depression.
The book begins bleakly--The title is taken from graffiti scrawled on the wall of a house Rose drove past nearly everyday for a year--and never really lets up. There are bright moments, and Rose definitely wants his reader to experience these moments, but he also wishes that what happened (is happening) not be forgotten.
I do know what it means to miss New Orleans. I never lived there, but I grew up in South Louisiana, and visited the city fairly often. I do miss it, even more so after reading this powerful book.
- Brighter Than Creation's Dark -- Drive-By Truckers
- The Midnight Organ Fight -- Frightened Rabbit
- The Odd Couple -- Gnarls Barkley
- For Emma, Forever Ago -- Bon Iver
- Parc Avenue -- Plants and Animals
- Real Emotional Trash -- Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks
- Santogold -- Santogold
- Feed The Animals -- Girl Talk
- Evil Urges -- My Morning Jacket
- Narrow Stairs -- Death Cab for Cutie
Something that strikes me about this list is the number of albums purchased from eMusic. Seven of the albums on the list are from the site. I don't know if this means the music selection on the site is getting better, or if my taste is being skewed by the site. I do know I would not have discovered Frightened Rabbit or Plants and Animals without the site.
The last two albums on the list are positioned so because of their relative newness. I can say without a doubt that by year's end the My Morning Jacket album will rank much higher. Narrow Stairs may climb, but I can't be sure yet. We'll just have to see.
Speaking of year's end, I also see Brighter Than Creation's Dark sticking at the top for the entire year.
The idea of a grass-based farm has intrigued me ever since reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. A large portion of the book covers Pollan's experience at Joe Salatin's Polyface Farm in Virginia. I knew moving to Minnesota would place me in the center of farm country, and a quick Google search led me to Hidden Stream Farm, another grass-based farm. This weekend at the Rochester Farmer's Market I purchased a whole chicken as well as a pound of bacon from Hidden Stream. The resulting meals were delicious.
What Salatin is doing is beyond organic. Instead he follows Nature's template, which according to the farm's website means "Mimicking natural patterns on a commercial domestic scale [to insure] moral and ethical boundaries to human cleverness." What this basically means is a natural cycle is used for feeding the cows, chickens, pigs and rabbits at Polyface. The cows eat grass from the pasture, the chickens are sent in after to eat the remaining grass as well as larvae and flies from the cow patties. This sanitizes the pasture far more efficiently than a pesticide while at the same time the chicken droppings fertilize the next growth of grass. The entire farm operates on this principle, nothing is wasted. Every animal benefits another.
Hidden Stream Farm follows many of the same practices, calling themselves "proud producers of happy, healthy chicken, beef, and pork." They too are a family-owned farm practicing sustainable, grass-based farming. Their meats are drug and hormone free.
This Saturday we went to the Rochester Downtown Farmer's Market, not knowing what to expect. Our experiences with the market in Lexington, led us to believe that attendance by farmers would be low this early in the season. Many of the more popular fruits and vegetables aren't naturally available this time of year. As expected a lot of farms were selling flowers and seedlings, but we were happily surprised by the number of stalls. There were lots of turnips, cabbages and greens. And meats.
I spotted the Hidden Stream stall immediately and knew I wanted to at least purchase one of their chickens. At $2.99 a pound, a farm-raised chicken far outcosts a industrial chicken. The weekly ad from a local grocery is advertising whole chickens at ¢.69 a pound. I'll just say you get what you pay for, and that price is being subsidized by our national health and environment, and leave at that. Food costs are another post entirely.
In addition to the chicken we bought a pound of bacon. The next morning we cooked a simple breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon. We cooked the bacon by placing it on a cooling rack over a baking sheet in the oven. If you haven't cooked bacon this way I recommend it. This bacon was the best bacon I've ever eaten, and it tasted like no other bacon has. The flavor was rich, slightly buttery, and very much "porky." I've bought high-end organic bacon before, and even that doesn't compare. This was bacon as bacon should be.
The next evening I prepared a classic roasted chicken. I made a rub of fresh rosemary and thyme, salt and garlic. The herbs were also purchased at the farmer's market. I rubbed the skin with butter and salt, and the flesh beneath the skin with the herb rub. The chicken wasn't as much a departure from store-bought chicken as the bacon was, but there was a difference. The meat was definitely leaner due to the grass diet, versus corn, and it tasted cleaner in a way that I can't really explain.
Grass-fed meats aren't affordable for everyone, especially as our dollar buys less and less. However if you get the opportunity to buy or eat grass-fed meat do so without hesitation. Your palate and your conscience will be pleased.
I've finished two books since my last update. Ann Patchett's Run and The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.
The rest of the book takes place in the hours that evening and the following morning weaving together the two families in secret and wonderful ways.
This is a story of family most of all. Their secrets, their desires, their closeness are all captured here, skillfully so.
The book reads like a fairytale and in fact resolves like one, a little to neatly, but Patchett is a wonderful writer, and as such I didn't mind her fairytale at all. Rather I was transfixed by it.
It is a masterwork of nonfiction first and foremost. Pollan's prose is highly readable, not at all dry or boring. He brings the people he meets and the places he goes to life as well as the top fiction writers.
The subject matter is as powerful if not more so. Pollan's attempt with this book is to follow four types of meals from beginning to end: Industrial, Industrial-Organic, Organic and Hunted/Gathered. What we are presented with is an unabashed look at food in America and the secret lives and cost we don't see by simply looking at our plates.
This is required reading for anyone who eats food in America.
Jon Taplin pointed his readers to Bill Gross's June 2008 Investment Outlook. This quote calls out the American people and our presidential contenders for fooling ourselves.
What this country needs is either a good 5¢ cigar or the reincarnation of an Illinois “rail-splitter” willing to tell the American people “what up” – “what really up.” We have for so long now been willing to be entertained rather than informed, that we more or less accept majority opinion, perpetually shaped by ratings obsessed media, at face value. After 12 months of an endless primary campaign barrage, for instance, most of us believe that a candidate’s preacher – Democrat orRepublican – should be a significant factor in how we vote. We care more about who’s going to be eliminated from this week’s American Idol than the deteriorating quality of our healthcare system. Alternative energy discussion takes a bleacher’s seat to the latest foibles of Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears and then we wonder why gas is four bucks a gallon. We care as much as we always have – we just care about the wrong things: entertainment, as opposed to informed choices; trivia vs. hardcore ideological debate.
It’s Sunday afternoon at the Coliseum folks, and all good fun, but the hordes are crossing the Alps and headed for modern day Rome – better educated, harder working, and willing to sacrifice today for a better tomorrow. Can it be any wonder that an estimated 1% of America’s wealth migrates into foreign hands every year? We, as a people, are overweight, poorly educated, overindulged, and imbued with such a sense of self importance on a geopolitical scale, that our allies are dropping like flies. “Yes we can?” Well, if so, then the “we” is the critical element, not the leader that will be chosen in November. Let’s get off the couch and shape up – physically, intellectually, and institutionally – and begin to make some informed choices about our future. Lincoln didn’t say it, but might have agreed, that the worst part about being fooled is fooling yourself, and as a nation, we’ve been doing a pretty good job of that for a long time now.
This song has been putting a smile on my face with every listen.
Sure, Frightened Rabbit aren't the first band to explore loneliness, horniness, or emptiness in song, just like they aren't the first set of siblings to decide to jam together, but their jangly melodies claw their way inside your brain just the same, making them latest in a long line of Glasgow bands to effortlessly combine celebratory sonics and miserablist lyrics into something singular.
-Rebecca Raber, April 14, 2008 -- Pitchfork.com
The city referred to in the title is Ambergris, and rather than tell the story of Ambergris in a traditional novel format, Vandermeer has instead pieced together short stories, biographies, history papers, and letters to weave an image of this terrifying city and its inhabitants.
Vandermeer wrote each piece, but many different voices tell the story of Ambergris. Usually I'm turned off by the collection of stories as novel format, but Saints and Madmen, would not work as well if presented as a traditional long novel. Instead what you have is a sort of found guidebook to a city you've never heard of, that you read anyway.
The pieces here reference one another, sometimes contradict one another, but always add a layer to the city's realness. The slow reveal pays off big time. The city is still alive in my mind days after finishing the book.
Vandermeer is a rising star, and this intriguing book left me eager to see what he does next.
Perhaps you've heard of Muxtape, the latest darling of the musically inclined web crowd. It's a neat interface for sharing your music, mixtape style.
The last mixtape I made was for a girl in a Mississippi city three hours away from my home in Baton Rouge close to 13 years ago. She and I made a lot of mixtapes that summer. Swapping them on weekends when one of us would drive in to see the other. They were actual tapes too, made on a dual cassette boombox. Pressing play on one tape, record on the other. Some of the songs were recorded straight from my local rock station100.7 The Tiger, or, better yet, the Zephyr out of New Orleans if the wind was right and the sky was clear.
I really want to make a Muxtape, but I have so much music now that almost nothing stands out. I've probably bought over twenty albums in 2008 so far. I like most of them. Some of them I've spun only once before moving on to the next one. Maybe I'll give those another listen, maybe I won't. I can think of at least two that were added to my iTunes library this year that I haven't even listened to.
Before digital music vendors like iTunes (if you must), eMusic and now AmazonMP3, I bought two-thirds less music than I do now. This meant I was spending a lot of time with each individual record. Getting into the nuances, finding the hidden gyms. I played most of those early albums so many times, that it's impossible for me, even now, not to think of the next song as the previous one fades out (Soul Coughing's "Soft Serve" will always make me think of "White Girl"). Now when I buy two or three albums in a single click, I may spend a day with one album, the next with another.
I applaud the fact that this allows for more experimentation with my music. I've bought several albums from eMusic that I would have passed over easily in a traditional record store. Most of those times I've been rewarded with the discovery of a great new artist. However I lament that I care about less music as a result. In order for a song to earn a place on a mixtape, it has to carry some significance. My relationship with most of the music in my collection is insignificant.
To combat this syndrome, I've been using a method similar to Daytrotter.com's Progressive Reviews, which involves spending an entire week with a single album. It's the way I used to listen to music before I bought an iPod. One album on endless repeat. Of course back then my commute was a lot longer: 40 minutes one way versus about 15, so it takes a few trips to even get through an album. Last week it was Destroyer's Rubies. This week it's Parc Avenue by Plants and Animals. Nothing drastic has happened, but I do appreciate the songs more on the third or fourth listen. Maybe one of them will make it onto a Muxtape before the RIAA takes the site down.
Like a distant Canadian cousin of Blitzen Trapper, this three-piece spins shaggy songs into expansive, genre-bending symphonies. And though last year's too-brief With/Avec EP hinted at Plants and Animals' expansiveness, it didn't fully prepare listeners for Parc Avenue, a sprawling collection of rootsy melodies, majestic arrangements, and classic rock riffs that owes as much to jam-band psychedelia and it does to delicately orchestrated chamber-folk. -- Pitchfork, March 13, 2008.
