It's the last day of the last month before the last month of the year. What were some of the highlights of it for you?
I'll share mine if I get, oh, let's say ten people responding. I need some traffic on my comments page. ;)
Listening Party for New U2 Album To Benefit African Well Fund
St. Louis can participate in the dismantling of an atomic bomb Sunday, November 21st. @U2 (“at U2”), a website run by and for U2 fans, is holding listening parties in Boston, Seattle and St. Louis for U2’s latest release, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, before the album hits stores. This is no clandestine operation, no public airing of leaked MP3s—it’s the real thing, courtesy the good folks at Interscope Records.
The bomb will be dismantled in the Crown Room at Schlafly Bottleworks, 7260 Southwest at Manchester in Maplewood. Doors open at 7 pm, and space is limited so anyone interested is advised to come early.
Admission is $10 at the door, cash only, net profits benefiting the African Well Fund. (The AWF is a charity started by U2 fans to raise money to build wells in Africa.)
There will also be a giveaway of U2 prizes, such as the vinyl “Vertigo” single and the new concert coffeetable book, U2 Show.
For more information visit @U2.
(Confidential to Pollux and Actor: have a good tech week.)
...since it was at your wedding. CD review from Playback STL:
Luna: Rendezvous (Jetset Records)
Once at a friend’s wedding, I was spun round the dance floor to the rapturous strains of Luna’s take on “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” Any band that can make that song its own is doing something right.
On Rendezvous, Dean Wareham and friends show off everything they do right. They create an atmosphere of space-age intimacy by matching shimmering guitar noises with murmured vocals. The lyrics are sometimes a step above nonsense, sometimes not—with the occasional clever wordplay, like a reference not to Chairman Mao but to “Chairman Mouse.” But the lyrics aren’t the point. The Lou Reed–y delivery lets the words slide by, just a minor element of the experience; they are backup vocals. The guitars are singing lead with chimes, swoops, dives, chugs, and tremolo—often all in the same song.
“Malibu Love Nest” is the poppiest and most memorable track, but don’t listen too carefully or you will be disappointed with the silliness of the lyrics. The loveliest noises are to be found in “Star-Spangled Man.” This song may well expand your sense of the cosmos.
Word on the street is that this is the final Luna album. More’s the pity, but the band have had a good run for anyone in the “critically acclaimed” column of the ledger—a dozen years, eight, albums, several EPs. You might want to keep an eye on their touring schedule on their official site, www.fuzzywuzzy.com. Catch them while you can.
"The critical problem with which we are confronted is whether this art--the art of myth-making--is a species of literary art. The objection to so classifying it is that the Myth does not essentially exist in words at all. We all agree that the story of Balder is a great myth, a thinkg of inexhaustible value. But of whose version--whose words--are we thinking when we say this?
"For my own part, the answer is that I am not thinking of any one's words. No poet, as far as I know or can remember, has told this story supremely well. I am not thinking of any particular version of it. If the story is anywhere embodied in words, that is almost an accident. What really delights and nourishes me is a particular pattern of events, which would equally delight and nourish if it had reached me by some medium which involved no words at all--a mime or silent film. And I find this to be true of all such stories...
"Most myths were made in prehistoric times, and, I suppose, not consciously made by individuals at all. But every now and then there occurs in the modern world a genius--a Kafka or a Novalis--who can make such a story. MacDonald is the greatest genius of this kind whom I know. But I do not know how to classify such genius. To call it literary genius seems unsatisfactory since it can co-exist with great inferiority in the art of words--nay, since its connection with words at all turns out to be merely external and, in a sense, accidental. Nor can it be fitted into any of the other arts. It begins to look as if there were an art, or a gift, which criticism has largely ignored. It may even be one of the greatest arts, for it produces works which give us (at the first meeting) as much delight and (on prolonged acquaintance) as much wisdom and strength as the words of the greatest poets. It is in some ways more akin to music that to poetry, or at least to most poetry. It goes beyond the expression of things we have already felt. It arouses in us sensations we have never had before, never anticipated having, as though we had broken out of our normal mode of consciousness and 'possessed joys not promised to our birth.' It gets under our skin, hits us at a level deeper than our thoughts or even our passions, troubles oldest certainties till all questions are reopened, and in general shocks us more fully awake than we are for most of our lives."
--C.S. Lewis, from the introduction to a book by George MacDonald
Two days ago the fog hung low around the Statue of Liberty; I was watching her as our boat pulled away from the island. She was an indistinct form, a woman who might have been living, breathing--the veil tricked the eye into sensing more than copper.
And then I remembered.
I had a dream when I was in grade school--in fact it must have been before I reached fifth grade. In this dream I was on a small boat, with fog everywhere, and the Statue of Liberty was looming out of the fog. Nothing happened in the dream, there was no plotline, no words, I can barely even remember its images--was the statue broken, lying in pieces in the harbor? Who was there with me in the boat--but it had a feel. Foreboding. An eerie feeling...not a panic but a chill.
Was the statue broken? Two days ago I was in the boat, the small boat, and the fog wrapped so tight around the lady she was cut from sight above the waist. Why was the mood of the dream so eerie? Perhaps was it precognition, and then, what is cause and effect? It was eerie to look at this statue and remember that this was how I dreamt it would be some day. And in the dream did I have foreknowledge of how eerie it would feel to remember the dream...?