Any self-respecting personal blog has to have these, right?
Music: Amazon.com invited me to submit my list, which went up on their site recently. In brief and alphabetical order: Beastie Boys, Björk, Claude Debussy/Maurice Ravel, Damien Rice, Death Cab For Cutie, Imogen Heap, Jan Garbarek & Hilliard Ensemble, Marillion, Radiohead. I was tempted to throw Kanye West in there, mostly because I crack up at “Golddigger” every time.
Written word: John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (finally!); Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (in progress); Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter; and a book on René Magritte, text by Jacques Meuris. The last one is going entirely over my head; I know next to nothing about Surrealism, Symbolism and other such. Really I bought the book for p. 101, the painting L’empire des lumières, which I saw in Houston’s Menil Collection several weeks ago and has been haunting me ever since.
Picture: Go see An Inconvenient Truth. Draw your own conclusions afterwards, but do see it. It’s not so much a documentary (much less a “thriller” as some have called it) as it is a lecture-mentary, a classroom talk transferred to the big screen so as to become a national conversation starter. I hope it succeeds in that.
By the way, welcome to v3.0 of the site. Bear with us while we work out the kinks—it’s still Eric Miller and me server-side, six years later. Any and all niftiness is his doing. Most screwups are probably mine. Some things never change…