gooder

This one little leaf is about as autumnal as it gets around here. This was shot through an open-screened window while wearing shorts in late November.

The Lovely Bones
Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Atlas Sound, Bedroom Databank Vol. 1  
Atlas Sound, Bedroom Databank Vol. 2
Butthole Surfers, Pioughd + Widowmaker! (only because I don't have that Beme Seed tape anymore)

Pretty good at making records, that Kanye West is. This new album sounds like an artisan version of all the boilerplate pop music to which I listened at the pool this summer. Atlas Sound is riveting stuff; I really dont; know whty I never latched onto it before. It is temporarily riveting, passing like a breeze or a fever, but that's my favorite kind of rivet lately.


Atlas Sound's cover of Kurt Vile's "Freak Train" via BDv2.

While I'm taking the air out of accolades, Zadie Smith sure can write a book. The four pages I've read so far of White Teeth are in full repeat in my brain. The Lovely Bones started out sweet and then got magical and I thought: this is how you make a movie! and then the magical part went on and on and turned into a Gap ad or a musical number or a Blind Melon video or something and I thought: oh yeah, this is how they make movies. I hate movies. So much expense to bleed the story so dry for so many people. Jackson's pointless take on King Kong was more delicately handled. How is it that Lord of the Rings the more understated line of his oeuvre?

Oh shit, I almost forgot. This new Barry Hannah story emerged and it is unquestionably fantastic. It trickles out day by day and I love it even more for that. Thanks Five Chapters! From part two:

 Goodie was from California with a different voice or he couldn’t bear her, but even she was affected and went into a drawling mush-mouthed countryese when she needed more charm. In the service he’d known pleasant, smart, efficient Southerners. But their voices were an agony, a ball of grub worms in the throat.

Today, by the way, is the 12th anniversary of the marriage to my wonderful California-voiced wife Jerri and myself, gooder than any Goodie ever told in song or story. I'm a lucky guy.