Miss Piggy Lunchbox

I barely had enough time or energy to make these, much less write about them.  Still, they’re done and in the hands of their recipients, so I’m going to at least get a blog post out of them.

As always, these are mixes that represent an intersection of what I think the recipients would like and what I reviewed here on MPL in 2009.  Whether the music was released in 2009 is irrelevant, and in fact very little of it was.  Eligible contributing CDs run from The Nields’ If You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now to A Man About A Horse’s Does Not Exist.

These mixes suck. Hard.  Cuz of that lack-of-time-and-energy thing. And because my busy year gave me fewer songs from which to choose.

Volume K
1. Stand Up Comedy - U2
2. Postcards - The Cutters
3. Government Center - Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers
4. Twa Recruiting Sergeants - The Old Triangle
5. Girlfiend In A Coma - The Smiths
6. Sex Euro and Evils Pop - Messer Chups
7. Wouldn’t Mama Be Proud? - Elliott Smith
8. Catch A Collapsing Star - The Mendoza Line
9. I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) - The Proclaimers
10. Does This Mean You’re Moving On? - The Airborne Toxic Event
11. Seven Years Gone - Quasi
12. Just To Know You’ve Been Dreaming - Will Johnson
13. Such Great Heights - Iron And Wine
14. The Wrestler - Bruce Springsteen
15. Heavier Than 3 Lbs. - A Man About A Horse
16. Carry On - Spacehog
17. Let Me In - R.E.M.
18. St. Teresa - Joan Osborne
19. (Love Is) The Tender Trap - Frank Sinatra
20. How Deep Is Your Love - The Bad Plus

Volume S
1. 9 To 5 - Dolly Parton
2. Li Li - The Cutters
3. Sometime Around Midnight - The Airborne Toxic Event
4. Barracuda - The Bad Plus
5. Our Haunt - Palomar
6. Wolfman’s Brother - Phish
7. Crazy Baby - Joan Osborne
8. Will The Night - Low
9. Aase’s Death - Grieg
10. Belated Promise Ring - Iron And Wine
11. Then I Met You - The Proclaimers
12. How Soon Is Now? - The Smiths
13. L.A. - Elliott Smith
14. Strangers Out Of The Blue - St. Thomas
15. Try For The Sun - The Old Triangle
16. Preface - Vincent & Mr. Green
17. Mainstreaming - Kaada
18. Flor de Leis - Slow Dazzle
19. Hopeless Bird - A Man About A Horse

2009 MPL awards to follow.

Ten Summoner’s Tales is an exemplar of a type of CD that makes me re-evaluate what a CD review means on MPL.  The tradeoff these CDs pose is whether to write from more of an evaluative perspective or a personal one.  Due to the style of the non-CD review content of this blog, I’ve always come down on the personal side, but coming across a well-executed CD that does not grab me always causes a re-assessment.

When I was taking my reviewing class four(!) years ago, my instructor pointed out that you should review something to give others an idea of whether or not they’d like it.  His gig was primarily movies, so his example was, "If you don’t like horror movies, when you review a horror movie you should evaluate it on whether or not somebody who likes horror movies would like it."  I don’t disagree with that approach at all, and use it as one of many guideposts in my reviews, but for a couple of reasons, it’s not really what I do here.

For one, I think it’s a bit of an old media mindset.  I don’t mean that as a pejorative; I just think that in an era when there were fewer sources of information and opinion, this quasi-objectivity made sense.  Now, though, you can get all kinds of opinions on musical artists and their output, and I feel the only reason to be read is to be interesting.

The main reason I tend to give more weight to my reaction, though, is that this blog is about me.  It’s essentially a public journal.  It may seem like I’m writing about a CD or a politician or a baseball game, but I’m really writing about my reaction to that thing.  Offhand I can only think of one regular reader I’ve ever had who didn’t know me personally.  I’m fine with that because, again, what I want to do with MPL is create a record of my life, and a record of how I’ve felt about collections of music serves as a pretty damned good proxy of my life.

So while I could spend time writing about Sting’s intelligently-written music, the proficiency of his supporting musicians, his clever lyrics, or the expertly-engineered sound, none of that captures the fact that these songs just do not grab me.  Where I should hear passion I hear chilliness and distance.  I respect the music, but I can’t love it.

I have always felt this sense of detachment from Sting’s music, and it’s always amazed me how passionate his fans are about his music.  No matter how much I listen, I cannot understand how he affects so many people so deeply.  I imagine that a KEN who loved Sting would be one that would write a review like this for, say, Faith No More’s Angel Dust, praising its execution and brilliance, but left alienated by the overwhelming assault on his ears.

I like plenty of music that might be described as passionless.  In particular, big chunks of the avant-garde music and death metal I praise do not grab me in the same way this doesn’t.  The difference is that those CDs tend to be more cerebral, exciting the puzzle-solving neurons of my brain, which in turn engage me in a sort of passionate way.  Sting’s music is smart, yes, but it’s not quite at that level of stimulation.

So, in the spirit of my reaction to this album, let’s polish this off professionally but dispassionately.  High points are the clever lyrics in "Seven Days," the emotional depth of "Fields Of Gold," and the nearly emotional "It’s Probably Me."  Low points are the ridiculous spoken portion of "St. Augustine In Hell," the ponderous incessance of "Heavy Cloud No Rain," and Sting’s insertion of his opinions of politics, war, and technology into a love song ("If I Ever Lose My Faith In You").

If I were evaluating this album on its terms, for what it intends to be, I would have no problem giving it my highest rating.  For MPL, though, I’ll just shake its hand, thank it for the occasional stimulation, and be on my way.

Rating:
  
Mixers: "Fields Of Gold"
Keepers: “Love Is Stronger Than Justice (The Munificent Seven),” “Seven Days,” “It’s Probably Me," "Shape Of My Heart”
Filed Between: The Steve Miller Band (Greatest Hits 1974-78) and Stinkfish (…Does It Again)

Seems like Louis C. K. has run into MPL’s favorite commenter.  Here he asks himself a lot of the same questions I was faced with when I was insulted in the same way. H/T J-mez.

Given that all the other lists of this sort come out on December 1, I’m two months late with this.  But we’ve been over the reasons for that.

This is the second annual MPL’s top ten CD list.  2009, however, was relatively light on the CD reviews, due mostly to busy spring and fall quarters, reviewing massive collections like Beethoven’s symphonies and Melvins v. Minneapolis, and spending a lot of my time reviewing Wagner’s Ring.  As a result, I only reviewed six CDs that came out in 2009.

So here they are, MPL’s top ten six albums of 2009:

4.5 lunchboxes:
1) The Bad Plus: For All I Care

4 lunchboxes:
2) Iron And Wine: Around The Well

3.5 lunchboxes (in no particular order):
3) U2: No Line On The Horizon
4) Melvins: Pick Your Battles, Live in Berkeley 1989/Boston 2008

2 lunchboxes: (in no particular order):
5) Bruce Springsteen: Working On A Dream
6) Covered, A Revolution In Sound: Warner Bros. Records

Last year I reviewed 10 2008 albums that received four or more lunchboxes.  In 2009 I only reviewed two that achieved that score.  And 2009 didn’t have a single five lunchbox album, at least not that got reviewed here and, really, did it even happen if it didn’t get reviewed here?  Sucks to be 2009.  But of course that’s been covered elsewhere.  At least Melvins made the top ten list two years running.

Your regularly scheduled blog will resume (shortly?).

This is probably really boring for you, but fyi there are really two things holding me back right now.

One is that the new expensive computer I bought is not behaving (a big FU to Sony).  Sometimes it hangs and the task manager won’t even launch, and sometimes when it does even killing processes from the process tree doesn’t work.  The second thing it likes to do to tick me off is to just turn itself off with no warning.  Fwip, it’s gone.  Anyway, I’m just hesitant to put anything else, like iTunes and all the other CD reviewing infrastructure, on this because I’m considering wiping it clean anyway.

The second thing keeping me from jumping back into the blogging full speed ahead is that My Baby has asked me to pick a CD (just one) that Our Baby can listen to in the womb so that it will be soothed by that CD after birth.  An initial pass through my collection resulted in about 80 CDs that made the “possible” cut, so all of my listening time is going toward paring that stack down.  I should have one picked out by June (that’s a joke…the kid’s due in March).

Anyway, I really should recommend eBits PC Laptop here (I used the Capitol Hill location but the same guy runs the U District location).  They cleaned out the fan in my old laptop real nice, and it lasted for a few weeks before dying again, at which point they replaced the fan with a new one, charging me only for the part.  And they were fast about it, too, at least the second time around.  We got off to a bit of a rough start on the customer service responsiveness front, but once they realized I was a high-touch customer they became responsive.  I would definitely go there again.

Oh, and if there’s a third thing keeping me from blogging it’s the complete lack of never-snow.  It’s been very warm here.  Last weekend it was considerably warmer here than it was in Miami.  You can read about it in full-on breathless style here.

Anyway, I’ve still got lots of CDs to review, so I will be back.  Thanks for hanging in there.

First, sorry for my prolonged absence. It started because I attended Seattle Opera’s production of Wagner’s Ring cycle, which is four operas, three of them very long. All told it was 18.5 hours if you count just the time from the start to the end, including intermission, but not including commute, parking, etc. time. I thought I would blog that week by writing up reviews of the operas, but it was hard enough just to get my work done in time.

And then last week I got sick, which put me further behind and left no time for blogging. Plus I can’t stand listening to music when I’m sick…it just leaves me with negative connotations of whatever music I listened to at the time. I still have very negative feelings about Nirvana’s very good Incesticide, which was a gift for me when I got my wisdom teeth taken out. I know music is supposed to have healing qualities and ameliorate pain and discomfort, but for me it’s the other way around: the pain and discomfort and up coloring my impression of the music. I guess that’s me in a nutshell, huh? Always able to find the cloud in that silver lining.

So anyway, this last weekend My Baby headed out of town for the weekend to the family cabin because she knew I’d need the weekend to catch up. And I did. And I had an entire holiday weekend lined up with nothing but Getting Things Done on the docket. So imagine how thrilled I was to fire up the machine and find out that the server on which all of my work is at school is down for the weekend. It’s hard to describe how overwhelmingly depressed I was. So, an illness during the week and no server availability over the weekend. Somebody up there really wants me to fail.

I won’t be able to post much this week, either, but more on that next week. Sorry.

MPL: Hey, KEN

KEN: Hey

MPL: So what gives? A while ago you take some time off completely to concentrate on your studies…that was explained…but after you came back there were hardly any album reviews…and suddenly the album reviews are flowing out of you again. Why is that?

KEN: I stopped watching baseball.

MPL: What?

KEN: I came back to writing this blog during baseball season. Having baseball on while I work doesn’t leave much time for listening to new music. Now that I’m not watching baseball I have more time to listen to music.

MPL: So you just stopped watching baseball recently?

KEN: Yep.

MPL: Why?

KEN: I don’t know. I just wanted not to watch it.

MPL: Are you going to start watching it again?

KEN: I don’t know.

MPL: …

KEN: I don’t know. The fact that the Twins are underperforming their talent level had something to do with it. Other factors were missing music; the Seattle Mariners’ announcers are the second-worst team in the game (Chicago White Sox), making every game seem like drudgery; a general long-term lessening of interest in sports as I age; a feeling that baseball was a to-do and not a relaxing way to pass time; a long-term desire to push aside things in my life that I don’t see as core to who I want to be, like video games and baseball, and to increase the amount of time I spend on things like my studies, my work, music, playing piano, and family and friends, all things I’ve neglected in the past because advertising has made me feel like I can’t possibly miss the next baseball or video game…just realizing that that’s a fake community foisted on me at the expense of a real community. And finally, a general trying to make space in my life…

MPL: Make space for what?

KEN: Life, I guess

MPL: You’re making space in your life for life?

KEN: Yeah, living…you know.

MPL: Okay, well, the album reviews that came out earlier in the summer were pretty bad, but you seem to be getting your stride back. Why is that?

KEN: I stopped watching baseball and stopped cluttering my life so much. See above.

MPL: Interesting. How is the not watching baseball going for you?

KEN: So far, so good.

MPL: Miss it?

KEN: A little.

MPL: Is this a permanent thing?

KEN: I don’t know. I mean, I’m sure I’ll watch baseball again. It’s not like I’m punishing myself or anything. I just took it off my to-do list.  In fact, just last night I saw that the Mariners were tied in the bottom of the ninth, so I turned that on and loved Ichiro’s game-winning hit.  And I’m still following the construction of the Twins’ ballpark and checking scores from time-to-time.

MPL: But do you think at some point you’ll come back to full-scale baseball intake again?

KEN: I don’t know. I guess I’d put the chances at 50/50. The odds of me watching the playoffs sit at about 99/1.

MPL: Many of your friends and acquaintances only know how to talk to you about baseball. Are you worried about losing them as friends?

KEN: A little, but I hope they can take the opportunity to learn something else about me. Maybe we could talk about music, go to a concert together, make mix CDs for each other, or just sit around and make music the event together. I always wanted to start a listening club, like a book club, only we’d pick a CD or make a mix CD for each other and get together, listen, and talk about what we liked and didn’t like.

MPL: That sounds awesome!

KEN: Yeah.

MPL: You should do it.

KEN: I don’t know. It sounds kind of lame to bring up.

MPL: I’d do it.

KEN: You would.

MPL: So fess up, you just chose this format for this post because it’s super easy to write about a big change in your life, without having to come up with a lot of prose, an intro, a middle, etc., right?

KEN: Hey, whatever works.

MPL: Right? Anyway, thanks for this exclusive interview.

KEN: You’re welcome, but it really wasn’t that exclusive. If anybody else wants to interview me I’d probably grant it.

It’s on a post a couple of months old, so I wanted to point it out in case you missed it: a golden comment came in on Saturday on my two-lunchbox review of Bon Jovi’s New Jersey.  It begins:

Wow you are a complete musical idiot.

The insight doesn’t end there.  The whole thing is here.

We’re not even quite four weeks into the quarter and I’m already overwhelmed. My Baby and I also have two weekends out of town planned in the remaining seven weeks, further straining my time during the week. And so I’m strongly leaning towards putting MPL on extended hiatus for the first time since I started writing regularly in 2005, unless you count the roughly four weeks I took off for our honeymoon in 2006.

I’ve been busy before, and have always kept MPL going. Part of that is because it is a nice ritual that keeps me sane. It also keeps my friends updated on what’s going on with me, which makes catching up with them much more efficient. Additionally, I’m always listening to new music, so writing about it is just a part of that. But it takes a few hours each week to give each CD the attention it deserves (and oftentimes much more than it deserves) and write about it. It also makes me less productive to listen to new music that I don’t like. So I think I might just put the new music thing on the back burner, too, and pick that up again after the quarter.

Anyway, things might slow down significantly here for a while. I have some stuff planned for the next few weeks, and you can be sure that if there is any relevant update in the Minnesota Senate “race,” I’ll post about it a few weeks after it happens, but if you don’t want to check back in every day while I’m going slow, know that I plan to ramp back up again in mid-June, after my final project is due.

Astute readers might have noted that last Sunday, with its traditional Opening Night game, came and went without me posting my predictions of the final standings, something I’ve done since 2006.

I’ve kind of burned out on baseball. I still like it, and I had the game on that night, I’ve already sworn loudly at a Twins game this season, and I’ll watch more than my share this season. But out of necessity I dove into school, work, and finding a job this offseason and didn’t have time to follow it. Not surprisingly, the offseason went by much less painfully than it usually does. In addition, my RSS reader blew up on me some time back and I never added back my baseball feeds…I never really got an inkling to, either.

Ironically, the same thing that drew me in strongly to baseball in the early part of this decade, the analytical writing in the baseball blogosphere, is exactly what tended to suck the excitement out of the game for me. First, there’s just too much content out there. Even if you just narrow it down to my two fave Mariners and two fave Twins bloggers…man, I have other stuff to do. Secondly, it’s all so negative (and I realize I am totally the pot calling the kettle black here), getting way too worked up over this move or that decision…gnashing teeth over such little consequence. Third, it’s too analytical. Whatever, I respect the work they’re doing, but we blew past the 80/20 rule six years ago, and we’re just niggling at the edges now. If you have to do linear regression in order to come up with a number that measures a player’s worth, then by definition that measure is too unintuitive to me for it to add to my enjoyment of the game. I’ll be here with my broad strokes, thank you very much, enjoying the game in my way.

There’s more to this, like the fact that baseball season, in the past, upset me more than the offseason because, despite being able to watch some baseball, I was almost constantly distressed that there was baseball on and my schedule wasn’t allowing me to watch it. I could go on and on, but I don’t really care to analyze it too deeply and I doubt you want to hear about it that much. I’m just saying, me and baseball, we’re still f**king, but we’re seeing other people.