This month sucked like a Twilight vampire but without the sparkling. The sparkling would have at least added something.
But it was sunny today, so there was that.
Goodbye November, you stinky old month.
And hello, December! This year you promise to be filled with pleasant weather and nice things, yes? Please say yes!
R.E.M. has released their final album, a compilation that for the first time covers their five albums with I.R.S. as well as the 10 they recorded for Warner. Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011 also includes the obligatory new tracks (three, in this case) to lure completionists into buying the double disc set — a tactic that worked better before the ascendancy of digital music. Now an R.E.M. fan can just buy the bonus tracks separately. Record executives somewhere are shaking their fists over that.
Here’s the total list of tracks via Wikipedia. As one would expect of a retrospective, it covers the band’s entire career and includes all of the singles/hits along the way. It’s also clear — since the band chose the tracks themselves — that they have a few personal favorites (Automatic for the People gets four tracks).
They picked 40 songs so I’m going to do the same and pick my favorite 40 songs and see how our lists compare. Like R.E.M., I’ll pick at least one track from every non-compilation album, including the Chronic Town EP released in 1981 (30 years ago, egad).
My original list had too many songs (five from Lifes Rich Pageant alone) so I culled a few to get down to 40. I found it especially difficult to pick only a handful of favorites from Murmur, Reckoning and Lifes Rich Pageant — each of these albums are remarkably lean, each song equally worthy of inclusion. A big surprise was finding four songs from Collapse Into Now. Although it sounds drastically different than something like Murmur recorded 28 years earlier, it’s perhaps R.E.M.’s most thoughtful and mature work, but free of the pretension and torpor that afflicted lesser efforts like Around the Sun. It is, in other words, one of their best albums.
Comparing R.E.M.’s list to mine, we overlap on 18 songs, roughly half and we both matched on at least one song from every album. And looking over the official listing I see they included “Bad Day” from the In Time compilation album. Cheaters. It’s a worthy song, though, so I could probably find some song to punt in order to squeeze it in.
Notably absent from my list are some prominent hits like “Stand”, “Shiny Happy People” and “Everybody Hurts”. I’m not one of those who hates R.E.M.’s silly songs nor grinds my teeth at their ballads but I felt in each case there were other songs on each album that resonated more for me (even if they were ultimately overplayed, like “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”, the song that was my R.E.M. gateway drug).
And now a bonus list, my picks for R.E.M.’s best five albums (they released 15):
It’s fashionable to think of Automatic as overrated and over-serious but I still appreciate that the band produced a richly dark meditation on mortality that expanded their musical palette with confidence (and was more successful than the various experiments of Out of Time). The simple beauty of “Nightswimming” and “Find the River” lift the album significantly.
The worst album? That would have to be Around the Sun. It’s perhaps the most personal album, nearly all of the songs centering around relationships, but the pacing and energy of the songs never picks up. It’s the musical equivalent of a car stuck in second gear. Even the allegedly peppy songs like “Wanderlust” never generate much heat. The musicianship and vocals are fine throughout but they are in service to songs that are ultimately dull (“Leaving New York” is a solid opener, though). While Up and Reveal also had their share of so-so songs, neither album falls into the slumber of Around the Sun.
This should really be a Facebook non-content post but I only post on FB every six months or so as the mood strikes.
I have a cold and I don’t get colds very often but they still do indeed suck. The stuffy head, the lack of energy, the desire to nap at non-napping times, the urge to do a lot of nothing.
As I said to someone, I feel like a kitten — weak and fuzzy, but cute. More scruffy than cute at the moment. Maybe more of a tomcat kitten than an adorable one, perhaps.
Anyway, here’s to tea and warm blankets.
Back in October I espied a strange sight at my old jogging grounds at China Creek Park. It was this sitting on the northeast baseball diamond:
At long last (and with summer long gone) the city had decided to bring in fresh bark to spread over the badly-deteriorated trail at China Creek. Hooray!
We then move forward to November 19th. With summer even more long gone than before, I noticed that the number of bark piles had shrunk:
Apparently more bark had been delivered and various people had in turn spread it around the trail at the park. This created a visual effect not unlike that of a burrowing Bugs Bunny. It also made the trail entirely unusable:
Not to be deterred, the jogger below simply chose to run inside the trail, with the added bonus of making each lap a tiny bit shorter. Also note her colorful attire. Not many people can successfully pull off combining green, blue, black, pink and turquoise. Actually, I’m pretty sure no one can.
I will be strolling by China Creek in the next few days and will be curious to see what the state of the bark is. For the sake of the joggers, the walkers and even the misinformed dog owners, I hope it’s all nicely spread out. Well, moreso than it is now.
Today I decided to buy some groceries out near Lougheed Town Centre late in the afternoon. This was a bad idea because I knew I would be caught in the rush hour traffic coming back. Sure enough, at the Lougheed SkyTrain station the first train pulled in and it was packed not unlike a sardine can. What amazed me, though, is how the car in front of me began disgorging passengers and after a good 10 or 15 seconds was still disgorging passengers. Ten or fifteen seconds may not sound very long but for a SkyTrain car this is a very long time indeed. And yet for as many people that improbably kept streaming out of the car, a good number remained in. The car had barely started to load passengers from th platform when the ‘clear out, this sucker is moving’ chime sounded and the doors tried to close.
My speculation is a wormhole developed in that particular car and it was letting out passengers from other cars all across the three SkyTrain lines in the Lower Mainland. That’s the only reasonable explanation, really.
I have no idea what to write about today.
Therefore, good night!
Tonight I went bowling for the first time in a million years. Jeff, Jason and I went to Dell Lanes in Surrey (whose slogan sounds like a parody — “The future starts here”). Dell Lanes is part of the Dell Shopping Centre and features Dollar Giant, Al’s Vacuum Superstore and a check-cashing outlet among its retail jewels. Like most bowling alleys, Dell Lanes is below ground where the sound of pins being constantly knocked down will not upset the neighbors.
This was to be five-pin or sissy bowling, as I call it. I knew that such advance mockery would later come back to haunt me.
For some reason the interior of the bowling alley is done up like a disco. I mean, there are actual disco balls, colored lights, black light, everything you’d expect to see from Saturday Night Fever. And music, though not necessarily music. There was instead a digital jukebox, which looks somewhat like an old-style jukebox except it has an LCD screen, no records and probably costs a dollar a pop (I didn’t check). The maker of the jukebox was advertising on the screen to like them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter. Yes, I’m going to do that straight away. It also showed popular choices and it seemed the local folks favored “Jessie’s Girl” and a whole lotta country. We got to listen to Willie Nelson and Clint Black (the latter identified by Jeff). Yee and haw.
I bowled about as expected. Some gutter balls, hooking to the left so often I ended up overcompensating and hooking to the right. I think 5-pin may actually be tougher than 10. The balls are lighter and there are fewer pins but the pins are spread apart further and it seems easier to knock over just one without convincing any of the others to follow along.
Jeff, who said beforehand that he might get one strike per game, opened with a strike. This proved not to be beginner’s luck as he went on to amass an impressive score of 187 in the first game. I managed 110 and Jason was right behind with 108. I should point out that Jason is eight years old. Yes, I was almost beaten by someone who was born the same year Iraq was invaded.
First game scores:
Jeff – 187
Me – 110
Jason – 108
Jeff and Jason cooled off for round 2 while I improved a statistically insignificant amount:
Jeff – 153
Me – 116
Jason – 33
Once the official games were over, Jason improved remarkably, getting several strikes. He nearly threw the ball about a half dozen times while the pins were being reset, though. To his credit, his reflexes were fast enough to stop (except once, but the speed of the ball was just right, so the pins reset just as it arrived).
Jeff, meanwhile, seemed to favor a ‘launch the ball into the air and let it crash onto the alley’ approach. It actually seemed to work, too. None of us managed to go down the alley with ball in hand, so I consider the evening an overall success.
The pizza was entirely decent, too.
I’d like to think I’d do better at ten-pin (more stuff to knock over) but I know I’d probably goof up on that as much as with the 5-pin. No matter, bowling is silly and fun and that’s all that matters.
We had our first snow of the season today, a dusting in most areas, a few cm or more in others. No calamities to report. Still, damn snow.
The Province is a newspaper that essentially makes fun of itself or perhaps a better way to describe it is to think of the editors as trolling the people of BC.
I espied this headline while walking past a pair of newspaper boxes. The box on the left was The Vancouver Sun and featured the headline Goodwill gone at Occupy: VPD chief. The Province carried the same story on its front page but with the headline that can be seen below.
Let me explain. Occupy Vancouver is a tent city at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the people gathered there railing against various societal ills, primarily how the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and something about 9/11 being a conspiracy for good measure. The city has been agitating for them to move and after a fatal drug overdose on the grounds started the legal paperwork to get the occupiers out. This has led to what some might term a tense situation. The Province headline has cleverly played on this by using the word ‘tents’ in the headline instead of ‘tense’ because it sounds just the same (that’s a homonym; relax, Province readers, it has nothing to do with homosexuality). See? Tents standoff. Ho ho.
It starts here, indeed.
I actually think this pun is an improvement over their usual front page stories, most of which are about assault victims, the headlines of which are written in the first person and usually along the lines of I thought I was going to die and he laughed like Hitler.
So, good work, The Province. You are slightly less deplorable on this day!
The HMV store at the corner of Burrard and Robson is sporting some new signs lately, as seen in this photo I took the other day. Compare the small sign on the left to the rather large one on the right.
I guess they need someone to help unload those Everybody Loves Raymond DVD sets at 50% off. And if you get fed up with the job, no problem, you won’t have it for very long, anyway!
Maybe it’s just me but in the live video of R.E.M’s “Oh my Heart” (a fine song from a fine album, by the way) Peter Buck looks a bit like a woman. It’s the hair, I think. It reminds me of the old Monty Python gang when they would dress as (rather frightening-looking) women for some of their sketches.
To his credit, Mr. Buck is not frightening looking at all. Except for the hair. It is mildly frightening — much like my own.
Also, Micheal Stipe appears to be the only member of the band still looking lean. Maybe that explains why he started taking nude photos of himself. Brr.
The other day I was looking at this-here blog of mine and thinking about sprucing it up a bit. I have several other images I could use for the header, though I must admit I’m still smitten with the clean, crisp look of Buntzen Lake I have up there now. I could adopt a new theme but I blanch at the thought of all the manual tweaking I’d have to do in order to get it look just the way I wanted.
I also gave thought to tweaking the existing theme, perhaps going with a different body font. Right now I use Verdana, which is entirely readable if a bit bland. I experimented with Arial, Georgia and Garamond but none of them quite looked right. I began searching the vast reaches of the Internet and found a site called I Love Typography. I instantly went gaga over the body font used there and used my Interweb sleuthing skills to determine which font it was, as the site did not appear to share this particular detail. My efforts were without success so I sent an e-mail to the author of the (quite lovely) site and to my delight, he replied the same day with a single word response: Scala.
I now had knowledge but was faced with two new problems as a result:
Ergo, Verdana stays. For now.