I once told my brother that there were three great American novelists still living today, authors that stand far beyond the rest of the pack. Authors from a different era, authors that transcend brilliance, authors that consistently push the boundaries with each release and raise the bar for every other author out there. We know the greats from the past – Hemingway, Faulker, Fitzgerald, Twain, Steinbeck – and these are authors that fifty years from now would be studied in universities right alongside them. These authors, I told my brother, were Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and John Updike.

Well, we’ve lost one of these greats today.

John Updike has succumbed to lung cancer at the age of 76.

Updike was probably best known for his masterful series of four novels and one novella that spanned the life of the struggling Rabbit Angstrom, one of my favorite characters in all of literature. Two of these novels were awarded the Pulitzer Prize (Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest). He’s published over two dozen other novels, (among them, The Witches of Eastwick, The Centaur, S., and Couples) and hundreds of short stories, poems, and essays over his long and prosperous career. He will be missed greatly, but he left plenty to be read, and even just released The Widows of Eastwick this past year and he has a new collection of short stories still on the way.

If there is ever a time to pick up some Updike, it’d be now. Why not start off with one of his short stories, just for a taste?

“When I was a boy, the bestselling books were often the books that were on your piano teacher’s shelf. I mean, Steinbeck, Hemingway, some Faulkner. Faulkner actually had, considering how hard he is to read and how drastic the experiments are, quite a middle-class readership. But certainly someone like Steinbeck was a bestseller as well as a Nobel Prize-winning author of high intent. You don’t feel that now. I don’t feel that we have the merger of serious and pop— it’s gone, dissolving. Tastes have coarsened. People read less, they’re less comfortable with the written word.”
-John Updike, 2000 Interview

Just a few months ago:

That body is still new to her, she’s still trying it out, thinking it through, a bit like a kid walking the streets with a loaded gun and deciding whether he’s packing it to protect himself or to begin a life of crime.

-from The Dying Animal by Philip Roth

News spread recently that Spike Lee acquired the film rights to the memoir of afro-american physicist, Dr Ronald L Mallett. Aspiring to reunite with his deceased father, Mallett made it his life long ambition to unlock the secrets of time travel. His memoirs, aptly titled Time Traveller, are his unusually lucid accounts of his personal sacrifices and scientific discoveries upon which he built his theoretical premise on how to build a time machine. Published in 2006, and leading up to a rather detailed explanation how a light-circulating time machine could feasibly operate, Mallett became an overnight celebrity with his peer-reviewed findings, getting the ball rolling for what may be this century’s greatest scientific discovery.

Anytime you put the words ‘Spike Lee’ and ‘Time Travel’ in the same byline you have my undivided attention. Much like Mallett, science fiction played a significant role in my developmental years, ever since Back to the Future the concept of time travel and its bounty of philosophical paradoxes left an indelible impression on my psyche. In his memoirs, Mallett takes great care to document the history of time travel both in science fiction and in physics. From H. G. Wells The Time Machine, to episodes of Star Trek, to even arcane examples like Frequency starring Dennis Quaid, this slim hundred-odd-page tome is short on style, but rich in content, disproportionately less of his personal life (considering how much dramatic use could have been made of it) and keeping more of the focus on the shoulders of giants that led to his discovery. The content hits that perfect stride of being scientific enough to be informative and clear enough to be grasped by the laymen. Read More

Who? Great Lake Swimmers

When? Their 2007 album Ongiara

Why? It is a very simple song, but one that will be stuck in your head for hours each time you listen to it. Catchy, light, and relaxing with its use of the banjo and with some uncomplicated but beautiful lyrics. And these guys are Canadian, like much of our Row Three crew.

Favorite Lyric: “I traced my finger along your trails. Your body was the map, I was lost in it.”

If there are any other fellow sports fanatics out there, jump on in the discussion.

versus

Born and raised a hardcore Steelers fan here. Rarely do I miss watching a game. I’ve been to at least one game each year since I was 16. I follow Steelers football more closely than any other team or sport. I admit, a few weeks into the season, I wasn’t convinced that Pittsburgh could make it this far, the way their line had been playing – but the defense picked up the slack and with it helped carry the team. In the meantime, the offensive line turned things around, and Pittsburgh was playing the best football in the league. I’ll spare the excessive gushing over Hines Ward, Polamalu, Fast Willie, Santonio, and gang, but I do want to throw something out there that I have been saying all season, even with his interceptions and stupid decisions he sometimes makes: Ben Roethlisberger is a top 5 quarterback in the league.

As for the opponent, it’s hard not to like the Arizona Cardinals. Larry Fitzgerald is a class act who had one of the greatest playoff performances in wide receiver history. Edgerrin James is proving that he is still more than a relevant running back. Kurt Warner is trying to solidify his legacy, when it doesn’t seem so long ago that he was being booed off his home field, benched, traded, and his career seemed all but over, his legacy seemingly tainted by a bad taste his left in the mouth of St. Louis fans (this being not so long after being MVP and leading them to the Superbowl). When traded to the desert, he was just supposed to fill-in while pretty boy USC alum Matt Leinart was prepping to take over, the great red-and-white hope for the Cardinals. Now, throw in the fact that Arizona is coached by former Steelers offensive coordinator Ken Whisenhunt (a real stand-up guy) and you realize that in any other situation, any, I would be rooting for these guys.

The fact of the matter though is that I bleed black and gold and will feel no pity for Arizona come game time. It was a hell of a feat for them to get to the Super Bowl in the first place and that says quite a bit itself. Still, after those two ridiculously exciting championship games yesterday, I’m really looking forward to seeing this all unfold. We’ve got perhaps the most respected organization in the NFL with the most loyal fans versus an intriguing Cinderella story that played beyond everyone’s expectations.

Make it six, Pittsburgh.

It’s a topic that can’t be ignored by the music lovers out there especially us in the younger generation growing up in the digital age: illegal downloading and file sharing. It’s so much easier and cheaper; but it is right? Everyone can ponder that question on their own, but I found a fabulous article/rant written by a guy named Rob at his blog, Demonbaby and decided to reprint it here so that we can have our own conversation on the topic (there are already a TON of comments over there and I don’t have time to dig into them all).

A little over two years ago I was invited to join an online file sharing community known at the time as OiNK. It was an incredible community of people all sharing only top quality music .torrents and lots of them. If ever an album was needed, you could be sure to find it on OiNK (likely weeks before its actual release). They had everything… EVERYTHING. Their community was by invitation only and their rules for uploading and sharing were extremely strict. Hence, you knew everything you were getting was top quality and safe. Then last year the “headquarters” was raided and OiNK was no more. My record “collection”, but more importantly an outlet for gaining musical knowledge and discovery, suffered tremendously.

In its stead was this terrific article that I read all the way through and learned a lot about the world of illegal downloading and the stupid stupid world of the record execs and studios – complete with a nice little history lesson. It is a ridiculously long article, but fascinating, entertaining and fairly well written by a guy who seems to actually know what the hell he’s talking about. It completely changed how I look at file sharing and my guilt (or lack thereof) for participating in it.

Some of the info in here isn’t really new and some of it might be a bit outdated by now, but check it out anyway. It’s a fabulous read (if you have time).

see the full article under the cut…
Read More

Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.

-from A Clean, Well-Lighted Place by Ernest Hemingway

Title: Horizon
Artist: Hiroshi Sugimoto
Release Date: March 3
Track listing:
1. “No Line on the Horizon”
2. “Magnificent”
3. “Moment of Surrender”
4. “Unknown Caller”
5. “I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight”
6. “Get On Your Boots”
7. “Stand Up Comedy”
8. “Fez — Being Born”
9. “White As Snow”
10. “Breathe”
11. “Cedars of Lebanon”

Discuss.

I have been debating ever since I saw Revolutionary Road whether Thomas Newman’s score was in fact a ripoff of one of my favorite Eluvium tracks. In might just be that they are both sparse piano pieces, and they do clearly deviate but I still think they are eerily similar. I have placed them side by side, let me know if I am crazy.

Eluvium – I Will Not Forget that I Have Forgotten

Thomas Newman – Revolutionary Road Score

and just for fun (this is how the song actually starts):

Eluvium – As I Drift Off



Perpetually I am drawn to the question of religion. It infiltrates everything I read, even the most blatantly atheistic of such books are fraught with some aspect of religion waiting in the margins. My initial interest in William James’ Varieties of Religious Experiences was not that it had to do with religion, nor that it was written by William James (a philosopher of some importance in his own right as part of the American Pragmatist movement) but ultimately because James was one of the rarefied thinkers Ludwig Wittgenstein was known to have acknowledged positively. Wittgenstein being the apex of my particular interests in the realm of philosophy it was only a matter of time until I encountered firsthand this great American thinker. James excels in his clarity of writing, a quality that is absent more often than not in the treatises of philosophy, Wittgenstein being one of the most notorious culprits in this regard. The book I was intending to read first was James’ WILL TO BELIEVE, I am infatuated with the power of belief and its curious ability to authenticate while circumventing reason altogether. My running thesis is that man is a species of habit and intuition shrouding itself in rhetorical airs.

In his book, THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, James lays the groundwork for a science of religion, trying to classify the religious experiences as accurately as possible using the tools of philosophy and psychology combined. At first I was expecting this to be a harsh critique of the mysticism of religion, but in fact it affirms many of the opinions I hold on the primacy of belief. James notes that it has oft been an attempt by psychologists to interpret religious sentiment by way of its origins, as neurotic phenomena categorically discernible, but James insists that the critique needs to focus on the way its works on the whole of the person, (‘by their fruits ye shall known them, not by their roots’). In defense he writes: Read More

A couple years back a good friend introduced me to “Band of Horses” and their debut album, Everything All the Time quickly became my favorite record of the year (2006). Then in 2007 they released Cease to Begin which also quickly rose near the top of my 2007 top ten.

Now word comes that 2009 will be a big year for “Band of Horses.” The year kicks off with two shows on sunny California’s west coast. Tickets go on pre-sale to fans only over at Ticketbastard on Thursday (1/15). You’ll need the password, which is “GHOST.” General public tickets go on sale on Friday.

More exciting is the news that the band is getting into the studio to lay down a new album. New Year’s Eve fans in Atlanta already got to hear some of the new tracks and I can’t wait to get my ears on the new tunes.

If you’ve not graced your ears with the delicious sounds of “Band of Horses,” I’ve prepared a couple of .mp3 below for you to feast on before purchasing the record. Enjoy!

“Is There a Ghost in My House” (from the album, Cease to Begin)
Beethoven

“Ode to LRC” (from the album, Cease to Begin)
Beethoven

“Funeral” (from the album, Everything All the Time)
Beethoven

Ever since they skyrocketed to fame in the 90s, the British rock band Oasis has been surrounded by as much controversy as praise.

While they have sold over 50 million albums as a band, along the way the two Gallagher brothers who front the band have been lambasted with allegations of being arrogant, childish, wild, and insanely overrated as musicians. The last point I will disagree with wholeheartedly as I feel Oasis is already a legendary rock band and can do nothing to tarnish that. They have fallen in popularity since the mid-90s, but their past two albums have had quite the resurgence and are still one of the most popular and recognized bands in the world today.

So, I figure this is an appropriate band to start our artist and band Rank ‘Em threads, in which we simply showcase a band or artist by ranking our favorite songs (sometimes nearly impossible, but still fun to do) and discuss everything that comes to mind about the band in the comment sections.

15. Underneath the Sky
14. Some Might Say
13. Lyla
12. Stop Crying Your Heart Out
11. Slide Away
10. Half the World Away
9. I Hope, I Think, I Know
8. Talk Tonight
7. D’You Know What I Mean?
6. Champagne Supernova
5. Go Let it Out
4. Don’t Look Back in Anger
3. Live Forever
2. Acquiesce
1. Wonderwall

What Oasis songs do it for you? What do you think of the band and their eventual legacy? What was their highest and lowest points? What are you thoughts on the Gallagher boys?

Oasis Albums
Definitely Maybe (1994)
(What’s the Story) Morning Glory? (1995)
Be Here Now (1997)
The Masterplan (1998)
Standing on the Shoulder of Giants (2000)
Heathen Chemistry (2002)
Don’t Believe the Truth (2005)
Dig Out Your Soul (2008)

The people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect – simply a confession of failure.

-from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Tf you weren’t watching the increasingly irrelevent Golden Globes this evening, the other television event was the two hour season premiere of “24″. Going in I was quite skeptical, but I have to say I’ll watch hour three tomorrow night and am looking forward to it. I was really hooked last season early, but for whatever reason faded as the day went on. I’ll give it another try this year, and it seems Jack Bauer’s world is in a bit of disarray. CTU has been dismantled, Bauer has been testifying before a contentious Senate, even many in the intelligence community see Jack Bauer as a dangerous threat. I won’t give anything away in this day of TIVO and DVR, but the stories seem interesting enough and Kiefer seems great (as always). We’ll be following this season closely and will post more as we get deeper in to the season.

Neko Case will be releasing a new album titled “Middle Cyclone” on March 3. I found this short “behind the scenes” promo and it’s too good not to share.   “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood” from 2006 was a remarkable album and after watching this (although it’s still early and I’ve only heard snippets), it really sounds like this one will be a contender for the cream of the crop of ’09.  Enjoy.