I was reading this interview with a member of Thievery Corporation. I'm not taking issue with anything said in the interview, just with the detail that audience members didn't like the politics in Massive Attack's part of the show. (They're on tour together.)
This really irks me, because their latest album, Heligoland, is political. And not in a bad way. "Atlas Air," for example, is about torture. "The Flat of the Blade" is about the recent stabbings in South London. Audience members apparently couldn't see what politics had to do with the music, but if you're listening to the music, you know the answer.
And, seriously, check the album out. It's amazing.
Daniel once commented that he didn't like Evanescence's second album, The Open Door. After I got over the shock of imagining Daniel listening to Evanescence, I found myself comparing the two albums.
I love The Open Door. Second albums tend to be the same thing from bands, but this was distinct and different and extraordinary baroque in its darkness and fury and pain. I love how unafraid it is to be so demonstrative. A lot of people would mock that, but Evanescence embraces it.
Probably my favorite song on the album is "Like You," which is about losing a loved one. Apparently Amy Lee wrote it about losing her sister. I love my sister, and I know, without a doubt in my mind, that I would throw myself in front of a bus for her. Or anything else large and deadly, for that matter. If I lost my sister, I don't think I could begin to deal with my despair. And somehow that makes this song all the better for me.
"Cloud Nine" at one point samples a section of Mozart's infamous Requiem. For a long time I could hear it in the song, and it would nag at me, because I was certain I was hearing something I knew. A couple of years ago I was listening to Requiem and I realized what it was about this song. And I love that about so much music: finding little things in it long after I've listened to it over and over again. I probably do this because I have no music knowledge whatsoever and am slow. But it tickles me all the same.
And it's the little touches that make this album for me. Introductions like in "Snow White Queen" and "Lacymosa" have wonderfully little additions that add up to lovely sounds. I wish more rock was produced like this.
None of this is to say their first album, Fallen, is bad. Far from it. But Fallen is a much more subdued set of songs; it's not as angry, it's a more stripped down sound.
I really like postcards. I'm not totally sure why, but there's something nice about a well-designed one, like it's a little poster.
I'm really into some vintage-inspired ones that I found online, like this one which I think it suppose to be for Switzerland. I like the bright colors and the simple shapes. I usually don't like writing on my postcard's front image, but I really like the writing on postcards that are clearly inspired by old school advertisements. They remind me of those stickers people used to put on their luggage to indicate where they had been before.
Also in vintage postcard world is this French postcard. Again, it reminds me of those old advertisements, but this one also reminds me Alphonse Mucha's style of art.
And this great one of Michigan reminds me a little of the cover art for Greeting from Michigan by Sufjan Stevens. I suspected that the cover of that album was not just meant to look like a vintage advertisement but was probably inspired by a specific one, and this looks kind of close.
(As a sidenote, I'm so sad to hear that Stevens won't be doing more state albums. I was personally pulling for one of Oregon myself. I suspect that someone down the line will start making state albums themselves, and I'm hoping it'll either be Kimya Dawson or Double Saginaw Familiarity. Because, really, someone needs to.)
Other vintage postcards that I like include ones of Milan, Australia, Cuba, this one castle I can't place, Mexico, a fleur de lis, St. Tropaz, Bulgaria, Flanders and Brazil. Possibly this one from Egypt is vintage too, though maybe it's just me.
I guess I am a geography nerd, because I even liked some of the flag ones out there, like this one from Senegal. I'm always trying to quiz myself when I see flags, trying to get good at remembering every country's flag. I'm embarrassed to say I didn't remember Senegal when I saw this one. I really should, considering how much I love African history and really want to go to Senegal someday. It's not quite as bad as not knowing the flag to Cambodia, but I'm still not pleased with myself.
The only one I found that I really don't like is this one for New Zealand. I suspect that woman is suppose to be a "Native." I get the feeling they were like "Hey, we need something exotic and sexy, let's put a woman in a bear blanket and nothing else." Er. Racism is never hot, sorry.
Of course, there's nothing quite like an intriguing picture to make a good postcard, like this one, which is from some place I've never heard of. When it's a good picture, I kind of hate it when someone sticks words over it. I feel like that's part of the point of the back; you can just turn it around if you want to know where the picture is taken from. Most of the humorous postcards out there strike me as tacky and/or lame, but some of them genuinely make me smile. See this postcard from Earth. It's times like these I wish I had a friend who actually thought he was the Doctor, because then I could send him this, writing a message that sounded like I was a companion. I suspect that would be the sort of thing a lot of my friends would think was funny. (Maybe I could do that to Matt? He made himself one of those gigantic scarves like the fourth Doctor has.)
The biggest problem with looking at these is that they make me wish I was out traveling and actually seeing some of these things. Then I would have the excuse to buy some postcards and send them home to my friends.
Paper update: Today, I managed to write eight pages on Teresa of Avila and another eight on Matilda of Tuscany. I also finished my research and outline on the later paper. I'm feeling rather productive. The Teresa of Avila paper might need a thesis reworking, since I feel like I'm breaking one of the research paper cardinal sins by trying to make a thesis without any real evidence. Tisk, tisk. When will I learn? One of the strange things about working on research papers is that you end up having a lot of random thoughts, as I discussed last night. Today was no different. First, I discovered that Matilda apparently signed with the title "ducatrix" when she was married to Welf V. It's a unique title, since it's inbetween duke and duchess. I've been thinking about what mistress name I am going to have. Even though I don't want to work professionally like the lovely Mistress Matisse, who I admire greatly, I do want to have kinky relationships. As far as I can tell, a mistress name is not a requirement, but it would be nice to have one. Ducatrix Matilda? Or maybe Ducatrix Madeline? Usually, it's more like "Mistress Kinky Name Here", but since I stumbled across this little history nugget, it seems like a sign. Although I have been playing around with Anathema as a mistress name. It's just strange enough and has the right sort of dramatic history. Also, I have once again managed to find the sort of material that might make a good historical romance. I'm working on the relationship between Matilda of Tuscany and Gregory VIII, and they were very close, even to the point where some angry bishops and Emperor Henry IV declared it being inappropriately so. I actually don't want to write a May/December romance about them, not because there's anything wrong with that, but because my sense is they were more of the father/daughter variety. I want to write one of those "historical" novels that Philippa Gregory manages to make so much money off of. Philippa Gregory writes about real people, and she gets all of the facts she has to get right, but then she basically makes up her own crazy stuff about people. Her books are trashy, but in a way that is hard to notice when you're reading them. (Though the American movie version of The Other Boleyn Girl makes it super obvious.) My trashy not-really-based-on-history historical novel is this: Gregory was the literal father of Matilda. He knocks up Beatrice when she was hostage of Godfrey V of Lorraine and Gregory was in Germany at the court of Henry III. (See? Based on actual truth, but twisted in a way that is highly unlikely.) Adorable child Matilda hanging out with younger, not-yet-Pope Gregory. Gregory, cunning man that he is, has Matilda's two older siblings, Beatrice and Frederick, murdered, laying the ground for Matilda to inherit her father's holdings. Fantastic. Like I said last night: probably not helping me write papers. But fun to think about none the less. One of the things I find that makes paper writing easier (other than say treats and not being under the gun and not having irritating professors and having something interesting to say) is music. Mostly, I've been listening to the delightful Gimme Fiction by Spoon. (It is up, if you look, on YouTube.) I have a lot of thoughts on the album, mostly positive, but I feel like I don't want to carry on too much about it here. Mostly, let me just say that it's nice to be singing lines like "Great dominions, they don't come cheap" midway through a sentence explaining the rhetoric of femininity in Teresa of Avila's writing.
The other song I'm in love with? "Break It Up" by Patti Smith. Smith is one of those people I put on lists about ideas/movies/music I am promising myself to check out. Friday afternoon, I was on my office's computer, and one of the other workers usually messes with it so that it plays random stuff off of Last.fm. Mostly, it's hipster stuff, which I have mixed feelings towards. The first thing that came up this time was this song, and I fell in love. Now I'm going to have to listen to the whole album.
