Another reason to appreciate NPR right here: The Fireman, a musical duo comprised of Paul McCartney and Youth, will release its third album, Electric Arguments on the 25th. NPR has the entire album on its website, for free.
Sorry excuse for a Beatles fan that I am, I had never even heard of The Fireman until this. No matter; I gave the thing a listen, straight through, and… I loved it.
I didn’t plan on doing this, but I Tweeted a micro review of the album, song by song, as I listened. If you weren’t paying attention to that—and I’m not sure why you would have been—here’s the track listing, with slightly more detailed thoughts, each followed (as possible) by the related tweet.
1. Nothing Too Much Just Out of Sight - Rather ordinary. It’s got good drive, but it just didn’t do much for me, personally. Seems a tad straining.
2. Two Magpies - Paul hasn’t lost the magic of Blackbird, Jenny Wren, and so many others.
3. Sing the Changes - Great upbeat feel. Compelling enough to finish making up for the first track. (tweet for first three tracks)
4. Traveling Light - Also not bad. Lovely understated piece.
5. Highway - Good song, I suppose, but it suffers from the same ordinariness as Nothing Too Much… (tweet for tracks 4 & 5)
6. Light from Your Lighthouse - Amusing, to say the least. Feels quite local & familial, almost like it could be a song from a VBS somewhere in the south. (tweet)
7. Sun is Shining - Less interesting, musically, to my ear, but still quite good. About as uplifting as you’d expect. (tweet)
8. Dance ‘Til We’re High - Nor particularly inventive, but still pleasing enough. (tweet)
9. Lifelong Passion - So-so. I got busy at work at this point in the album, to the extent that I didn’t notice this song go by. Upon second hearing, I wasn’t much more strongly impressed. (tweet)
10. Is This Love? - This track has a somewhat predictable quasi-African feel. Nice enough, but perhaps trying a bit hard? Also gave me the repeated impression I was about to watch Finding Forrester. Not sure what that means. (tweet, tweet)
11. Lovers in a Dream - Despite the techno-leanings of this track, it follows Is This Love? surprisingly well. (tweet) [At this point in the album, I have the strong feeling that the song-order is absolutely right. Each song follows the last perfectly, which helps very much the songs that are only average (tweet)]
12. Universal Here, Everlasting Now - If Lovers in a Dream was the dream, this track is the scene that immediately follows: lovers waking up in an unfamiliar place (with soft diffuse light, slightly out-of-focus; the camera pans up and out to show our heroes a source of calm amid chaos) and hardly being confused. Very nice.
13. Don’t Stop Running - A wonderful close to the album; excellent closure. Exhortative & compelling, I almost get the feeling it looks ahead to the next album, or at least its possibility.
Quite a good show. Certainly not what you expect from Paul McCartney, though I suspect we have Youth to thank for that (not that I have a problem with the “regular” Paul, but you do understand).
Overall: Two Thumbs Up (tweet).
Tags: album review, Electric Arguments, Finding Forrester, NPR, Paul McCartney, The Fireman, Youth
It has been a while. I’ve been keeping myself rather busy working on The Quiltie Quack, my wife’s new business. The dust is starting to settle from the initial construction phase of things, so I plan on having more time for LW and LaToVP.
I do hope you have been keeping up with Uncle Jeff’s exploits in Comfort, TX; he always has plenty of interest to say about the goings-on in their part of the world, and it’s always worth the read.
Anyway, my friend Jesse recently made some interesting observations regarding his foray into the blogosphere (I’ll admit: I feel a little silly typing that word). The long and short, for me (and LW) anyway, is that I’m feeling inspired to return to normal, regular blogging. In light of said inspiration and renewed vigor, you will notice I have changed the look of things around here. In addition, I plan to expand the range of this blog, while being more intentional in focusing the scope of LaToVP.
Should be fun. Come back tomorrow to see how it starts, then let’s see if I can get a few days under my belt, shall we?
Tags: A Year in Comfort, blogging, The Quiltie Quack
There are a few new games on the links page; Vector TD is my current obsession, can you tell? WARNING: Seriously, if you are at all interested in tower defense games, DO NOT play Vector TD unless you’ve got large chunks of time to kill. I did not heed a similar warning when I first discovered Vector TD, and my workday suffered heavy casualties.
I might try to adjust my aim and shoot for a weekly posting here. I haven’t been good at posting lately, and I don’t know how much better I’ll get very soon, so weekly seems a fair goal.
Lastly: vote tomorrow, but not if you’re uninformed.
Tags: tower defense games, Vector TD, voting
Took a few spare minutes to add to the ReadOuts a timeless classic: “The Raven”.
Also, Mike tagged me, and I tagged Uncle Jeff. He responds eloquently, as usual. Go read his lists, and then read all of his other posts, too. Good stuff, as those of you who know Jeff will expect.
Tags: ReadOuts, The Raven
In case you’ve forgotten, I’ve got two haiku up at 3LIGHTS starting today. Go check it out, and while you’re there, read the rest of the haiku as well!
Oh, and I smashed my toe pretty good Saturday. Basically, a hammer snuck up on me. Fortunately, a friend of mine, whom we just happened to be seeing later that day, is a chiropractor, so she took a look at it that night and said about what I expected: not much I can do but ice it and try to go easy on it. Not broken, which surprised me based on how it had felt that day, but a bad sprain which will probably take something like 6 weeks to fully heal.
Let the good times roll.
Tags: haiku, injury, poetry
Here’s something: 3LIGHTS Gallery accepted two of my haiku for publication in the “Way Back Home” exhibition, which goes live on October 1st. I’ll post about it again on or about the 1st, I’m sure, but I just had to start spreading the news early!
As a rule, I’m pretty lazy when it comes to submitting my work—that is, I just don’t do it often. Perhaps this will change that; perhaps not. Regardless, go visit the website now, bookmark it, and visit it again on the 1st!
Tags: 3LIGHTS Gallery, haiku, poetry
So I’ve noticed something: my posts here, in addition to being randomly infrequent, tend to be very brief. Perhaps my affinity for Twitter is seeping into other areas of my internet life. Perhaps I’m just not taking the time to think of interesting things to post about. Whatever it is, I’d like to adjust that dimension of post-length a bit.
In light of the same, then, here’s my first attempt at reviving an art form that used to come quite easily to me:
Longwindedness
First, some updates. we (and by “we” I mean family members who are not me) moved Grandma Thompson this weekend. She is now significantly closer to our apartment, a geographical fact she will no doubt exploit to see three of her grandchildren more than she previously was able. The new place looked rather smaller to Lisa’s eyes, but it looked to me like a good size for a single woman in her eighties.
Yesterday was the first small group get-together of the fall (the group catering to young marrieds with small children and centering around food and all-inclusive art projects). The turnout was, well, basically zero. It was us and Sarah & Jonas. To be fair, two other families had other committments but look to attend from here on out, so hopefully the numbers will improve. And still, there was much fun to be had, as we did marble painting with the kids (computer issues aside, I’m assuming Lisa will post some pictures of the project, both action and after, before too long), so it wasn’t a total loss.
That about sums it up for the time being. (Though in other news, I’m thinking I’ll shut down the LW network on Ning pretty soon—in hindsight, it seems silly to have set up a separate network for this little project of mine, seeing as it hasn’t really taken much hold as of yet. One thing at a time, shall we?)
One final though: should I make this a daily deal, or what? I just don’t know. An “as it comes to me” approach makes the most sense in my head—or it would, if posting “as it came to me” weren’t so likely to be rather infrequent, indeed. Stay tuned.
(Technically speaking, I don’t this this post counts as longwinded, but relative to the other posts on this site, it’s basically Tolstoy. And that’s my point.)
Tags: longwindedness, marble painting, Ning, small groups
