Ever So Slightly Behind Some Curve

So...I write a really cool piece on The Mountain Goats for Killing the Buddha, I tweet it, and hardly anyone pays me any mind. Then I tweet an only mildly funny word of despair concerning Smashmouth's cover of "Under Pressure" and myriad peoples take note. I remain unsure as to how to best broadcast these things. The Mountain goats deliciousness can be found here. I believe it speaks to all manner of interestingness. And I love how the album cover of The Life of the World to Come evokes (to my mind) the artwork on the final albums of Rich Mullins.
And perhaps now is as good a time as any to share a Paul Muldoon poem I copied out of a magazine. The last stanza helps me to just say No when I'm tempted to google myself. Enjoy.

A Second Hummingbird

Yet another money-man
With a finger in the till
At Flavor & Fragrance, my own
Not standing still

no less a stance
than his, the only grounds
for his existence
now being to make such rounds

and roundelays as mine, to touch
what I’ve come to see
as the raw nerve

in each of us, each
doomed to think himself ever so
slightly behind some curve.

--Paul Muldoon

That Popular Feeling

You arrived as I was leaving
You were filled with that popular feeling
I could tell by the walk
I have heard about the walk
"Injured Bird"

Like the Invisible Man directing traffic
I'd be ineffective no matter how enthusiastic
"It Is What It Is"

I post the lyrics in the hope it will drive folks to access the songs and consider the life. He left us yesterday in Athens, Georgia under a rising tide of over $70,000 in medical bills. He's one for the ages. I'm reminded that we'd all do well to celebrate, champion, and lift up the voices of the geniuses we're given to discern while they're still with us.
Kristin Hersh remembers him here.
Some especially good conversations with the man are here and here.

History of Lights & Shadows

It's yours beginning with a click to the right. It's awfully good. It makes sense. Music feels a little like tapwater these days but it still does its business. Here's what you would have printed somewhere within the package if you were one of those people who procured or bought what they call "hard copy":
A History of Lights and Shadows
All songs written and performed by Sarah Masen 2007 except track 5, music by bulb words by sarah dark2007
All songs recorded by todd greene and tony doling at I’m going to kill you studios. Additional guitars and programming also by the mad duo. look these lovers up @ www.bulbmusic.com
one exception: track 6 was recorded by jon foreman at everybody to the limit studios in san diego, CA. the impossibly hopeful vocal arrangements were also jon’s masterful doing. I give him the Buddha bow.
It’s been years since I’ve done this. I have many people to thank. AHoLaS would not have happened without the kind and encouraging time of Todd and Rusti Greene and Anthony Doling. I would also like to thank David for all the time he gave me to get away on Monday nights and plenty of afternoons to stare into oblivion a little. This little project is dedicated to you. Thank you for loving me so well.
Much of the content of this ep came from reading George Eliot’s, Middlemarch.
track 1 TRY
But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
track 2 LET’S KILL HIM
Some people did what their neighbors did so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.
track 3 PLOUGHMAN
With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
track 4 SPEAK
Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot?
track 5 SO LONG SO LONG
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?
track 6 THE RIVER
I would not creep along the coast but steer out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.

Everything In Its Right Place THIS CHRISTMAS

I trust everyone understands that, from where I'm sitting, the way to go THIS Christmas when it comes to that relative/friend/associate with whom you want to take things to the next level conversationwise is toward this little fellow right here. There are of course some companion volumes with which one could complete the set. And if you're an absolute completist when it comes to the author's work and feel a little off kilter until you have everything, you'll want to spy his contribution in a fine volume called Radiohead and Philosophy: Fitter Happier More Deductive. It serves as an introduction to all manner of deliciousness philosophical and cultural and all that. My bit primarily treats Thom Yorke's Eraser project ("Start Making Sense: Witnessing to the Possibility of Witness"). One quasi-disclaimer. If you're someone who finds it difficult to give your attention to an argument, an image, or another person's voice once an expletive's been dropped, I will encourage you away from this volume, for now, and urge you to consider applying your offendedness more broadly (toward needless death, destruction, and hatefulness for instance...not that the deployment of blue language is never hateful). I have a number of items and scenes I'll mean to blog about in the next few days. We'll see how it goes. In the meantime, I give you this poem I can't seem to get enough of:
Religion Comes

Religion comes from our pity for humans

They are too weak to live without divine protection.

Too weak to listen to the screeching noise of the turning of infernal wheels.

Who among us would accept a universe in which there was not one voice

Of compassion, pity, understanding?

To be human is to be completely alien amid the galaxies.

Which is sufficient reason for erecting, together with others, the temples of an unimaginable mercy.

--Czeslaw Milosz