Skip to main content

Day One: Rox in the Box

One of the things I realized as I was doing a yearly review of my personal life this morning (sometimes I do that; it's a Jesuit Thing) is that I don't listen to enough music.

I used to listen to music basically all the time; I had songs in my life since the time I was old enough to have an object that made noise into headphones (at the time, a battery-powered portable tape deck). I would order my thoughts and my days by the music flowing into my brain, and if my life didn't have a narrative, at least it had a good soundtrack. But as I've gotten older, I've gotten less into radio and music and more into podcasts, and most of those podcasts are people talking into my brain and me trying to learn something new or interesting. Which is fine as far as it goes, but it does mean that effectively music has disappeared from my life.

I got a little of it back over the last couple of years as a succession of Rock Band games came out, which was a brilliant series and hey if anyone knows where I can get replacement instruments, let me know in the comments? My friends and I would get together semi-regularly to do "tours" and it was a bunch of fun, but life happens and plastic kit breaks and we haven't done that so much lately. And I'm finding myself missing music something fierce.

So, Daily Jukebox. I'm going to make an effort in 2015 to listen to at least one song a day, and post about it. Most of the entries are not going to be nearly this long, but we'll see if I can keep this going. Who knows?

Rox in the Box is the fourth track off the Decemberists' Album The King is Dead, which may be the best overall album they've done so far. It's a folky flavoured Coal Protest style song (which puts it basically in the category labeled "Songs Jerome Will Love Forever", and is ostensibly about the 1917 Butte Mining disaster, but mostly it's about a fantastic fiddle theme and a lyric that perfectly exercises the voice of Colin Meloy, the lead singer.

Obligatory Youtube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnxWcirrb-8&list=PL7mowONKIgBjFu4VfC3NIle8e9PlW66On&index=4

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Money and Happiness as a fungible resource

Money really does buy happiness. Anyone who tells you differently has a vested interest in keeping you poor, unhappy, or both. I know this because I grew up on the ragged edge of poor, and then backed my way into a career in IT, which is where the modern world keeps all the money that isn't in Finance. So I am one of the extreme minority of Generation X that actually had an adulthood that was markedly more financially stable than my parents. And let me tell you: money really does buy happiness. To be clear: at 45 years old, I'm now in a relationship and a period of my life where our household is effectively double-income, no kids. I live in the city, but I own a house, and can only afford to do that because of our combined income. We also have two cars -- one new, one used (though neither of them is getting driven very much these days) -- and we have a small discretionary budget every month for things like videogames, books, and the like. What my brother used to call DAM -- Dic

Occasional Media Consumption: Swordheart, by T. Kingfisher.

I'm not sure how to say what I want to say without saying it wrong. I don't think I have been this excited for a new author's work since I was in the rapid process of discovering and then chewing through the back catalog of C.J. Cherryh, who at that point had just published Foreigner and grabbed me by my whiskers and screamed (metaphorically) "Look! Here is an author whose style of prose and choice of character speaks directly and entirely to you!" Or that moment in my high school years when I stumbled upon Melissa Scott's Trouble and Her Friends and I suddenly knew, with a certainty that has still not yet left me, that I wanted to be a part of the future (and the culture) of technology. And yet that's not fair, because T. Kingfisher, nee Ursula Vernon, is her own writer, her own voice, her own authorial person, and doesn't deserve to be compared to others.   To say that Kingfisher's prose style and choice of genre (which is to say, a

Occasional Media Consumption: Justice League (2017)

So let's get this out of the way first: this movie is bad. I mean, it's bad . And not in the way that most superhero movies are bad, though it is bad in that way too: inconsistent characterizations, lack of understanding of motivations, weirdly-shot fight scenes, dodgy use of CG, etc. I mean, it is bad in all of these ways too, especially the whole thing where they digitally removed a mustache from Henry Cavill, who's honestly doing his best with a bad script and a character he's fundamentally unsuited to play. Gail Godot, in an iconic roll for her, suddenly shoved out of the way to make room for (also fundamentally-miscast) Ben Affleck's the Batman and Cavill's Superman, And Ray Fisher and Ezra Miller trying to introduce characters that honestly deserve their own movies. Jason Momoa's Aquaman got his own movie, but as far as I can tell he's just stepped into this one from a whole different universe and is basically pretending to live in the grim-n-gritt