Over the Hills and Far Away

The Holidays

2009-07-05T20:38:00.000-07:00

Over the last year, my family has completely reinvented the way that we celebrate holidays. No more stress, no more worries. We just take the time to be together, and I actually have enjoyed these days more than I have in a long time. This 4th of July, my mom and I went to the lake with a bunch of her friends. It wasn't anything spectacular. 15 people or so, laying around in the water, just enjoying the day. We had some great food, and we just rested. We were content.

About 30 minutes before we left, one of the guys I was sitting around with asked me a pretty deep question. He said: "If God is omnipotent, then is your future already written?"

Now my answer to this question is important, but it's not as important as the fact that it was asked. With all of the changes that my family has been through in the last few years, this is the most important one. We actually talk about important things. Eternal things. Life altering things. And it's good. Even more impressive is that my mom's friends are interested in these same things. They are constantly searching out and trying to understand the big things.

This is what has driven me up the wall over the last year. I've struggled to put my finger on it for a long time, and I think this is it. I tried to force some people think eternally, to think big, to think differently, and to ask questions. But some people just don't or won't talk to me about those things. I realize that it is time for me to accept this, and it is time that I reinvest my self in the people who ARE willing to go to those places with me. To ask the difficult questions of both themselves and me.

I've always known who those people are, but for some reason I neglected them. I came up with good reasons to legitimize my separation. It was all wrong though, and I'm glad that I realized that. This is why I'm so excited about the fall. I'm ready for getting back to the people and the ideas that are important to me. For once, I'm looking forward to change.

What I'm Listening To

2009-06-22T19:36:00.000-07:00

I love music. Whether I'm just trying to fill the sound vacuum, reading, or just laying in my bed listening: I've almost always got something playing. I figured it would be cool to look back in a couple of months and see what I was listening to during the summer, so here it goes.

10 Songs I'm listening to right now

1. Superstitious (Stevie Wonder) - as Scott Gentry said: "How come blind, black men, seem to be able to create such incredible music, and how great would they be if they could actually see their instruments?" Need I say more?

2. She Talks to Angels [Acoustic] (Black Crows) - I love the lyrics to this song, and the incredible piano in the back ground of this version is just icing on the cake. "She keeps a lock of hair in her pocket, she wears a cross around her neck. The hair is from a little boy, and the cross from someone she has not met... not yet"

3. Rock N' Roll Ain't Noise Pollution (AC/DC) - I heard this on the way to Headland a couple of weeks ago, and it made me feel like I was on a road trip to some music festival in the 70's. Man I missed out. I grew up listening to classic rock, and there's just something about it that makes me feel unchained.

4. Dreams Be Dreams (Jack Johnson) - Nothing like a little Jack on a hot summer day. His lyrics are so clever. I love that in this song he stays away from typical song structure. His words fit together like 3D puzzle. It may take a few listens to get exactly what he's saying, but if you listen a few times, you can finally hear all the layers.

5. KT LIVE (Katie Thompson) - Okay, so this is a complete cd, but I couldn't pick one song. She's got an incredible voice, and it's a good thing because this album is just her, the piano, and the audience. It's not only the music that makes this a good listen, she's clever, and you seem to get a real sense of what it would be like to listen to her live. Just turn it on and snuggle up in the corner booth of your favorite imaginary jazz bar.

6. 1901 (Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix) - What a crazy name right? Let me say that I'm beginning to appreciate the art of a good pop album. Phoenix definitely fits my developings tastes. A clever, catchy, uptempo beat. High production value. Simple lyrics about the never-ending struggles that are part of human relationships. If you've seen High Fidelity, then you know what I'm talking about.

7. Great Gig in the Sky (Pink Floyd) - It's taken me a long time to appreciate this song. When I first listened through Dark Side of the Moon, I'm pretty sure I skipped over the incredible vocal solo that Jack Black so readily appreciates in School of Rock. My music tastes have developed about as much as my taste buds over the last few years, and Pink Floyd is steadily climbing my chart of favorite bands.

8. The Dream of Evan Chan, Anywhere Anyone, Last Songs (Dntel) - Okay, so I'm cheating again. This is a trio of songs that I had to combine. I love Postal Service. Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello managed to create an album in Give Up that not only was the best selling album for Sub Pop records since Nirvana's first album Bleach, and they managed to create a cd that stayed in my cd player for two weeks back in 11th grade (I'm not sure which is a greater achievement... :>)). In any case, Dntel is Tamborello's other project. Each of his songs hints at what Tamborello and Gibbard would later create with Postal Service, especially Evan Chan, which features Gibbard on vocals.

9. Tangerine (Led Zeppelin) - I'm not sure if it's possible to pick a favorite Zeppelin song, but if forced, this would give Stairway and Kashmir a run for their money. I love the intro. Also, I love the fact that every time this song comes on, I am reminded of Almost Famous and the tour bus riding off into the sunset at the end of the movie. Absolute glory.

10. Your Bruise (Death Cab for Cutie) - Thank you Bethany Cochran for renewing my interest in this band. I bought Transatlanticism a couple of years ago, but I honestly didn't think too much about it. This song is from Something About Airplanes, which is one of their earliest albums. Their sound in this song is so much more lo-fi and underdeveloped than their later work, but I think it's the song's raw characteristics that attract me to it.

An American In Paris

2009-06-21T10:24:00.001-07:00

So I've been thinking about how to start a blog. What do I say? What is the first thing that you write when you are beginning something like this? Granted, this is not a problem of epic proportions, but it is a problem large enough (and small enough) to be tackled on a Sunday morning. I've searched for the solution for a couple of days. Mostly because I didn't want to write some meaningless introduction. IN FACT, I'd rather have written nothing than to have written something that I didn't believe was worth reading. Having said that, I spent this morning cleaning. I just happened to be in one of those moods, but once I finished, I sat down around lunch time and flipped on the television. And there it was, something to write about.

Until this morning, I've never been sure why, but classic movies have always been interesting to me. As I was going through the channels, I ended up stopping on TCM. There wasn't anything special about the movie at first. Two people were sitting on the banks of a misty river in Paris. It was there first evening together, and the man was saying that he already knew that he wanted to see her again. She tried to leave, but he pulled her close and told her that they couldn't part this way. Haha. In hindsight it seems sort of silly. He began to sing (in the way that they did in movies from the 1950's), and they danced together.

It's funny that this movie has helped me realize why I love the classics so much, it's because they are an escape. Today's movies, unless they are fantasies, don't seem to take me away from where I am. In fact, my favorite modern movies are the ones that remind that I can change my world, and they make me think of where I'm going and where I've been. But I'm finding that my favorite classic movies are the ones that sweep me away for two or three hours. I get so caught up in the passions of the people and the events of the time that I forget that I am just a spectator. I feel what they feel. This is the remarkable thing about art. Great art, makes me feel.

So my first post is about art. It is about feelings, and passions. It's about emotion and depth. It's about the good ol' days, and being swept away to new places. It's about how the silly things can help you discover or understand important truths. And it is about how great it is appreciate the beauty in both the modern and the classic, the old and the new, because they achieve different, but equally great things.