The First Round of Rewrites

So yesterday I'm driving to Emeryville to pickup some cupcakes (delicious by the way), and I just grab a couple discs I haven't listened to in a long time; Coheed and Cambria's In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3 and Jet's to Brazil's Perfecting Loneliness. Both discs I got back in college, and both I haven't listened to in at least three years. First off, Keeping Secrets, is garbage. Disjointed riffs, zero fluidity, completely inorganic transitions, recording quality that is just piss poor for a national release, and screams that just flat junk. The only redeemable quality is the ocassional catchy lyric. Looking back I don't know why I bought any of their albums. I saw them on accident 2 or 3 times in college (once at mshop for a few bucks, they opened once at gabes, and the warped tour), and I think I may have gotten caught up in the hype. Lame.

Now revisiting Perfecting Loneliness is a completely different story. Have you ever bought a book, album, jacket, etc and fall in love but somehow misplace or get caught up in something else and forget about it? Such is the story with Perfecting Loneliness (yes, I am the king of the run on sentence). What a solid disc. Quite the inverse of Keeping Secrets. So much so that it may work its way into my top five albums of all time... Come on! When you're 25 its time to take stock of the important things in your life! Top 5 favorite albums is one of those important things.

Old List: 1) The Colour & Shape - Foo Fighters 2)Clarity - Jimmy Eat World 3)Blue - Third Eye Blind 4) Pinkerton - Weezer 5) II - Presidents of The United States of America
New List: 1) The Colour & Shape - Foo Fighters 2)Clarity - Jimmy Eat World 3) Perfecting Loneliness - Jets To Brazil 4) Vs. - Pearl Jam 5) Freaked Out & Small - Presidents of the United States of America

Yeah, I can't really offer any logic to my list other than music is subjective and visceral. Maybe you can listen to those albums and hear one successive thought. I'll have to give that some thought...

Parting shots! After visiting Taste Spotting (warning: this site is serious food porn [not actual nudity just tasty shots of tasty bites]), and realizing we've been doing this for two years, Marieta is working on a food blog. I'll link you kids up after she gets it rockin. The NBA playoffs have begun, and holy crap they are good. Let me tell you that since Marieta is busy setting up her food blog, I am getting a heaping helping of ball viewage. A few thoughts: Phoenix-Spurs will go down as one of the best interconference playoff rivalries of all time (i.e. bulls-pistons, bulls-knicks, Celtics-Sixers), the Pistons have got to come down off their high horse if they want to survive the first round (Not I want them too [I never noticed what a team player Reggie Evans is]), and I don't care who the Celtics blow out I could watch every minute, of every game they play. Okay, its Monday and its time to earn my paycheck. PEACE!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This book should not exist

Image
It's late on a mid-October 2015 night and I am struggling with whether I should buy a $1,200 last-minute ticket to California to be with my family for my mother's emergency brain surgery. A week prior everyone was together in my house for an adventurous weekend climbing a wind turbine and celebrating my grandmother's 90th birthday, now we are on the eve of my mom going under the gamma knife for emergency brain surgery. Turns out she has a size-able tumor growing on the surface of her brain.   It's a bit of miracle that the tumor was discovered in the first place as my mom's routine cancer screenings didn't usually include brain scans; however, she had been complaining of blurry vision and balance issues, plus she had become quite irritable having been pushed to take FMLA from work to deal with what she thought was post-cancer "brain fog." Thankfully her doctor had the good sense to add it all up and include her brain in her next cancer scan. Sure enou...
Read more

Finding "Clarity" in 1999

Image
I distinctly remember Tuesday, February 23, 1999. I was still living in Iowa and immediately after school let out I road with a friend to Best Buy so he could pick up Eminem's freshly released second album. Always down for a hang, I road along as there was one album I had read about and wanted to see if it was in stores. That album was Jimmy Eat World's Clarity . On the ride home I didn't bother asking to put in my purchase as my friend was not a rock fan. So for the next hour or so of cruising we blasted Slim Shady at painful volumes. For those uninitiated, this was the "Hi! My name is (ticka ticka) Slim Shady" album. I was indifferent to rap so it got a little long and tiresome by roughly the third time through the album. When I finally listened to Clarity it underwhelmed. Nothing on the album is lyrically hook centered on kinetically riff focused like later Jimmy Eat World releases. For a 16 year-old ska and pop punk super fan, Clarity go...
Read more

My Favorite Creative

Image
As I type this two drastically different things are happening; I'm in California for a film festival and my mother, Linda Boberg, is lying in a Des Moines hospice bed. In fact she started hospice care the day I flew out here. As you can imagine, I'm experiencing quite the emotional tug of war. When you have a kid you commonly examine where they get certain traits. I've always been able to parse that I get my emotional, empathetic tendencies from my mother and my pragmatic, compartmentalizing skills from my Dad (another raging tug of war at the moment). This list could go on forever, but one thing I've never fully understood is where my creative drive came from. Now with the writing on the wall, it's obvious my mom flipped the creativity switch. It wasn't until my Mom self-published a novel at 65 years old that I understood how creative she is. In the last three years she's self published half a dozen books and written many more. Her first bout of cancer in 2...
Read more