BO11: Other Things I Forgot About Liking

(Well, this is nothing if not timely.)

Some albums I may have forgotten to shout out are below. As always, I'm sure there are more, but the following got me all twisted:

TV On The Radio - Nine Types Of Light; PJ Harvey - Let England Shake; Wilco - The Whole Love; St. Vincent - Strange Mercy; Kate Bush - 50 Words For Snow; Iron & Wine - Kiss Each Other Clean; Zombi - Escape Velocity; Arctic Monkeys - Suck It And See; Jamie Woon - Mirrorwriting

Some movies I saw in '11 that I really enjoyed (and I know I left some out, but whatevs):

Drive; Melancholia; Hugo; Take Shelter; Meek's Cutoff; Warrior; Jane Eyre; The Skin I Live In; Bridesmaids; Super 8; Martha Marcy May Marlene; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; Project Nim; The Artist; Attack The Block; Cave Of Forgotten Dreams; Contagion

A few wonderful '11 books:

Ready Player One (Ernest Cline); Love Goes To Buildings On Fire (Will Hermes); Robopocalypse (Daniel Wilson); The Last Holiday (Gil Scott-Heron)

And a final shout-out to Netflix, for allowing me to discover The IT Crowd, Archer, and so much more. Almost makes living in Petoskey somewhat less sad and distasteful.

Comments

"The Silver Gun" by Robert Palmer (1983)

I mean...Urdu? Seriously, Urdu . On an already eclectic and worldly album -- Pride , from 1983 -- "The Silver Gun" closes a chapter in Robert Palmer's career by singing a song about a horse in a language spoken daily by over 100 million people. The liquid bass line and propulsive electronics set out a bedrock for Palmer to ping phrasings rather out of place in Western music, askew astride even the peripatetic minimalism of the rest of the record. Somehow, in the middle of Michigan's Appalachia, I had this on vinyl a few years before the CD era officially commenced. It was an album of effort -- even the cover, a pointillism-and-bronze work, had Palmer's head barely above the water -- but the stitches didn't show to my pre-adolescent eyes and ears. In a career marked by zigs and zags, Pride and "The Silver Gun" were most certainly Other, and for a kid that felt like he didn't belong much of anywhere, it was nice to have those discrete feeling...

"I'll Drive You Home"

Upon reflection, I’ve had a fortunate life in the area of work. As a freshly minted teenager, I would visit Evergreen Park Grocery and dream of someday working there like my father did, and at the age of 14, I got $2/hour to live out that dream, such as it was. From there, I yearned to try other occupations, from record stores to teaching, and I’d be chuffed to tell Young Erick that both of those things happened in due course. ( Oh, and Young Erick, one of them got you to meet David Bowie, and one of them got you to own houses and cars, so I’ll let you ponder on which one was better. ) I even got to DJ a bit here and there, and while it never hit the heights of a professional radio gig, it was certainly better than the summer I played preset cassettes on my boom box for a nerd camp dance while my unrequited crush stayed in her room. What I never crossed off my professional life list was acting, either regular or voice, but while I still yearn for that big breakthrough -- seriously, ask...

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