Hating on Fall Be Kind

One of the bands I forgot to mention in my new music post the other day was Animal Collective. At the recommendation of Jonathan Lethem, I picked up the Fall Be Kind EP and was blown away by it. Fun listening!

Reading up on the collective, though, was an exercise in bizarre hipstersm prose. Few, if any, people writing about the music spoke to the music in terms of listening to a group of songs. Instead, they wrote about how the music "fails to build upon" past successes (i.e., the earlier albums are always better) or talk about how annoying Animal Collective fans are (as if you should judge music by who listens to it).

As an example, Ben Graham's excellent review for the Quietus looks at the EP from the perspective of politics and punk and finds it lacking:

...Alternative America was able to settle back into its spaced-out hippy comfort zone, as hazy as the fog over the San Francisco Bay. Just ... sit and listen to this new EP by Animal Collective, who have developed their 'Brian-Wilson-with-a-sampler' sound over the last decade to become the cherished darlings and freak-flag bearers of the whole contemporary scene. ... It's always seemed to me that Animal Collective have more in common with these mellow, close-harmonising spiritual children of David Crosby than with the electronic avant-garde they're more usually linked with: frequently wonderful, and groundbreaking and innovative in many ways, Animal Collective nevertheless seem bound to a late 60s musical and cultural aesthetic which is often anachronistic and even unhelpful in a 21st Century context.
... At the close of 2009 this kind of head-in-the-sand navel-gazing is even less acceptable, no matter how physically impressive it would be if you could actually carry out that mixed metaphor as a literal action. The fact is, Animal Collective are highly educated young people from the richest nation on earth, wearing masks and pretending to be pandas while effectively pissing around in a sandpit. The patterns they make are often exquisite. But it's not enough.

While this is interesting, I find it lacking in several respects:

- What is "enough"? Producing more angry music? Inserting deliberately political lyrics into songs that may not be able to support them? The end here is vague and the criticism suffers as a result.
- Again, the defining of the music by its audience. Who cares what scene they're part of? All that you should really be judging is the music that enters your ears.

Anyways, at the end of the day, I love this little album and find myself continually listening to it. I'm not reading the lyrics for deeper meanings or exploring what their audience says about them. I'm just enjoying the good songs.

Seven Years

It was seven years ago today that I somehow convinced my lovely wife to give up her single life in favor of my old bones. I came out on top of that deal! For those of you that don't know her, she's a dynamic, powerful, beautiful, and endlessly joyful woman that keeps finding new ways to make me happy. She even gave me two sons! In short, she's an amazing woman, and I'm looking forward to her keeping me laughing and singing until I'm old and gray.

The Failure of the Rose Kennedy Greenway as Open Space

Robert Campbell offers suggestions on how to save the Rose Kennedy Greenway. Amen.

I used to walk down the Greenway every day when I left my office near North Station and walked to South Station. While infinitely better then walking down narrow city streets or the horror of the old elevated highway, the stark barren spaces are really quite intimidating. There's almost no activity there, and the winds can get quite ferocious when the weather is right. Now having said that, when it was hot out, the kids would crowd around the fountains, and there were usually a few Frisbee games going on near Quincy Market. But the southern portion of the Greenway was always vacant and sad, with the notable exception of the open space directly across from South Station that would occasionally host a farmers market.

Why Can't We Just Burn It?

Pablo explains why we can't just burn off the oil slick:

Unlike the gasoline that is distilled from it, crude oil has a relatively high flash point of 140°F. The flash point is the temperature at which a substance can vaporize to form a ignitable mixture in air. In order to sustain combustion the crude oil must be maintained at or above the flash point. Unfortunately the sea surface temperature near the oil spill is in the mid to low 70's and the air temperature is only slightly higher. This means that the additional heat to maintain the combustion needs to come from the combustion itself. Since the oil slick is spread out and quite thin, this surface layer does not contain enough chemical potential energy per square foot to sufficiently heat the oil adjacent to it.

This just looks uglier and uglier every day.

How to tell when a Tree is Dying

You see both a Downy Woodpecker and a Red-bellied Woodpecker working on it at the same time. I'm looking at them attack the Maple in my front yard as I type.

Sure wish why someone called the Red-bellied Woodpecker that when it's head, not stomach, is red. Who's the marketing genius that came up with that one?

I Knew It Made Me Uncomfortable... but Killing Me?

Business Weekly claims that my office chair is killing me. Yikes.

I know that I find the average chair to be really uncomfortable after a few hours. And trying to get a comfortable chair in the average office is next to impossible. At my current company, people kept stealing my comfortable chairs and replacing them with awful chairs that didn't adjust and had too much lumbar support (like most modern Honda car seats). I finally ended up with an acceptable chair, but it was a struggle.

And I can't imagine working standing up, much less walking while I worked. When I draw or paint I work on a tilted table which is nice but my back gets even more tired on my stool then it does an office chair.

Quote of the Day

I love eating apples. They taste so clean. - Kelly Vaast