Author Archives: Dr. Brainy

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Music player device thingy

Currently on my portable music player device thing:

  • The Cinematic Orchestra: Arrival of the Birds [song]
  • The Cinematic Orchestra: Entr’acte [song]
  • The Cinematic Orchestra: To Build a Home [song]
  • Bailter Space: Bailterspace [album]
  • Sufjan Stevens: Come on Feel the Illinoise! [album]
  • Pixies: Monkey Gone to Heaven [song]
  • Judee Sill: Heart Food [album]
  • Judee Sill: Jesus was a Cross Maker [song]
  • Bill Fay: Life is People [album]
  • Lemon Jelly: Lost Horizons [album – four songs]
  • Aimee Mann: Lost in Space [album]
  • Paul Buchanan: Mid Air [album]
  • Minor Majority: Alison [song]
  • Over The Rhine: Changes Come [song]
  • The Mountain Goats: The Life of the World to Come [album]
  • The Mountain Goats: The Sunset Tree [album]
  • The Mountain Goats: Transcendental Youth [album]
  • Rickie Lee Jones: Where I Like it Best [song]
  • The Whitlams: Truth, Beauty and a Picture of You [album – two songs]
  • Brooke Fraser: What to do with Daylight [album – four songs]
  • Bruce Cockburn: You Pay Your Money and You Take Your Chance [album – three songs]
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White Cedar

White Cedar is one of the best ones. Compassionate and generous, and beautiful. Who ever writes songs about this stuff?

A Mountain Goats interview in Pitchfork includes this:

Pitchfork: “White Cedar” sounds like one of the darkest songs on the album– the lyrics seem to address a sort of finality.

John Darnielle: The song’s about accepting the permanence of one’s condition. The narrator is a guy who’s in and out of hospitals a lot. I’ve worked with people who’ve experienced that, and I always assume there has to come a point where it’s really hard, but then you try to find some way to be OK with it. There’s a lot of sadness in that song.

What I’ve been learning over the course of my life is that diagnoses exist to help get people services they need– but there’s no such thing as mental illness. We’re all mentally ill and we’re all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don’t wind up needing extra help. So I think that “mental illness,” as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something. I believe in mental health care, but when we call people “crazy,” we exclude them from our circle. That’s bogus– you’re in the same boat as they are! Maybe some people are better at pretending they don’t harbor all kinds of issues, but, really, everyone has them. Everybody experiences reality in a way that’s only true for them.

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Entr’acte

Love The Cinematic Orchestra. The wonderful Entr’acte fits my walk to work pretty much to the minute. It is nuanced and varied and I adore the piano and strings at 9:33.

As much as I feel uplifted and energised by fast guitar music, these days I tend to listen a bit more to contemplative music that gives me plenty of room to move emotionally and creatively. But a mix of styles is best – so much music, and sadly, so little time to listen to it all.

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2666

I finished reading 2666 by Roberto Bolaño recently and still find myself thinking about it a lot. It told the stories of so many people’s lives so well and I found it very involving. Besides the main characters there were a large number of side stories, all of them engaging.

This quote from the book captures something incredibly well, if you have aspirations of writing well: “Ivanov’s fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one’s efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers.”