knowing glances

so the Westification will probably be dying a slow death over the next few (6) weeks... I'll be overseas, and probably will have few if any posts for you.

In the meantime I suggest these quite pleasant alternatives:

Musings
Doug - On Being Brown
Melody - The Melodious Accord
Tracy - tracycakes
Paul - The (s)wheat spot!

and of course Stereogum, for all vital music news and the occasional really good MP3.

Take care. Take luck. Take what you will.

a brief thought...

The accomplishment of tasks is only valuable as a means to accomplishing relationship, not as an end in itself.

when cats become squirrels...

...or try to chase them:





Earlier today, at Spider House: a great place to spend a morning.

the gifts of girls

Girls give each other gifts that no guy would ever dream up. Stuff from places with "barn" or "yankee" in the title, places having nothing at all to do with proper farm management or the states north of the Mason-Dixon line. Case in point: my sister's birthday is on Friday, and last night some of her friends from school took her out to dinner. Someone gave her "Bookmarker Pens":



Bookmarker Pens (7 slim pens in 4 tasteful shades) are apparently good for these reasons: (1) Slips easily, trimly over a page and your pocket. (2) Ideal place marker and pen for diaries, checkbooks, questionnaires and the phone book. (3) Light weight. Mail to a friend, a good reminder that you're owed a letter.

I've never thought of mailing a friend a pen to remind them that they owe me a letter. That seems a little passive agressive. Also isn't the ideal pen for a phone book any kind of pen? Who weighs the pros and cons here, now really.

I do like the inspirational quotes though, I'm a sucker for inspiration:

"Hope is a waking dream." - Aristotle

"All the sounds of the earth are like music." - Oscar Hammerstein II

"Everything you can imagine is real." - Pablo Picasso

"Wish not so much to live long as to live well." - Benjamin Franklin

"A good laugh is sunshine in a house." - Unknown

"Nature does nothing uselessly." - Aristotle

"All art is but imitation of nature." - Luciuas Annaeus Seneca

I'll take credit for that unknown quote since no one else has, even though it's a bit cheesy. I've probably said that before, and besides, I need to start stockpiling quotations if I ever plan on reaching Benjamin Franklin status.

Doug has something much more interesting over at his blog, Lyrics of the Week, encouraging people to "Feel free to add anything that's been haunting you." You should do that.

spam zombies

Well, it turns out I wasn't being targeted with neo-Nazi propoganda spam simply b/c of my last name:

"'Spam' e-mail, used for years to sell snake-oil medicine, penny stocks and suspiciously low mortgages, is now being used to sell neo-Nazi ideology as well.

A new computer worm sent right-wing German messages to millions of computers over the weekend in what anti-virus experts said was a sign that spam has become a tool for propagandists as well as scam artists"...

Keep Reading [CNN.com]

Germania!

Well I knew the day was coming. It seems my past has finally caught up with me. You may not realize it, but my family name - Westervelt - is Germanic in origin. In Germany they would say Vesterwelt, as they tend to see "W" and pronounce "V" (and vice versa).



I am a fully devoted user of Gmail, have been for the past year or so. One of the things that I've enjoyed about my Gmail is that there is a "Spam" folder for all of the junk mail that people tend to aquire. This isn't all that novel, as most email services have a spam folder of some kind. What I like about Gmail's rendition, though, is that when it is empty it says something to the effect of: "Hooray! No spam here!" I love that. It's downright celebratory.

Sadly, the days of celebration are over. My German heritage has caught up with me. Yesterday afternoon I began recieving all kinds of German junk mail. I have no idea what I'm being junk mailed about, with the messages being entirely in German.


[Click to enlarge.]

The lone exceptions are a few emails that I've recieved with the subject "The Whore Lived Like a German." Which begs two questions: 1. Which whore? 2. What does it mean to live like a German? (Besides of course to speak German, which these particular emails seems to be avoiding entirely.) Anyway, I have no desire to do any research into this "whore", but thanks for the heads up.

I wish that Germany would stop trying to get me to buy things that I can't even read about. I mean, I'm no marketing guru or anything, but I just don't think these ploys are very clever.

reviewing Cold Roses

In case you were wondering what I thought of the new Ryan Adams album Cold Roses after all my hyping, I put together a little review:



There are, for the most part, three different responses to the name Ryan Adams. For some, descriptives like arrogant or jerk quickly come to mind. For others, confusion arises as to why Bryan Adams’ name was so carelessly misspelled, quickly followed by a sense of longing for a bygone summer (’69 to be specific). Then there are those who cringe at both of these sentiments, while anxiously asking, “Ryan Adams? Where?”

Where is he playing, when is his new album coming out, what is the latest rendition of his website all about exactly? These are the devoted fans of Ryan Adams. The ones who aren’t quite sure what else everyone is so busy listening to. The ones who wonder where all the critical acclaim and albums sales are. Who can’t figure out how people can be so harsh, or even worse indifferent, towards a musician they love so much.

Cold Roses will both meet and challenge the expectations of these fans. For everyone else, this latest release from Ryan Adams (with backing band the Cardinals) will serve as a proper introduction, given the chance....

Keep Reading

i turn my camera on

I just got a hold of a new digital camera. Is this what infatuation feels like? Two pictures from earlier today:


Cup of Jo


Ashes of American Roses


My Muse (basking in white space):

caffeinated thoughts

We are incredibly vague. We’ve lost our sense of self. (These statements being fairly ambiguous in and of themselves.)

I was thinking about music today (which I’m apt to do). Almost all of the music of our day is about romantic relationship of some kind, that four –letter word, the one that starts with “L”. Being lonely, wanting to be in love, being excited about how great love is (or at least how great a lover is), emoting post breakup.

Now there’s obviously more to life than romantic relationship (or as some have boiled it down to – the physical outer workings thereof). It’s just that few of the musicians of our day talk about these things. Of course some of these songs about dating or not dating people are really really good, and even insightful into the rest of what life is really about. Ryan Adams comes to mind. And of course there is music being made about other things that matter. U2 comes to mind. I’m making on-the-whole-generalizations for the sake of brevity.

When did love (or sex) become the only thing that sells, the only thing worth talking about, or dancing to? Actually maybe that’s why. Dancing. No one wants to dance to social justice, and dancing (and other types of self-satisfaction) seem to be job number one In this year’s world. If we don’t know who we are, why we’re here, who we’re supposed to become, and where we’re supposed to go pleasure is all that’s left, really. Making music about love, mostly the romantic kind, makes sense. People write music (and do other things) based on what they value, and people value feeling loved.

I heard another person say the other day that “learning to love back is the hardest part of being alive.” This is challenging to think about. So much of what I’m about is being loved. The truth is I already am loved- perfectly- by God. Son of the Father, sheep of the shepherd, bride of the bridegroom. It’s the loving back that’s the hardest part of being alive.

There is a new trend in music. Storytelling. Bands like Eisley, Midlake, and The Decemberists weave fantastical tales, the stuff of nostalgia or dreams. Through this lens of vagueness and loss of identity, this too seems like a natural progression. People don’t resonate (at least not forever) with vague generalities, this is why cheap pop doesn’t last. Telling tales is a way to say very specific things while not needing to have any story of merit in and of ones own self.

I love music. I listen to it a lot. There’s way more to enjoy than complain about. A lot of the music I listen to really does an amazing job of putting my unexplainable emotions into explainable words, and I need that. It’s just that I cannot help mourning what we so often boil life (and the art that reflects it) down to. There is more. I know this in my soul. I just wish we would talk about it, singing on occasion.

[UPDATE: upon reading this again, I wanted to clarify a bit. I think that bands like Eisley, Midlake, and The Decemberists do a great job at creating artistic distance. I think that to some degree they are sharing their own actual stories, just doing so through fictional means. I prefer this sort of thing to bland relationship speak anyday.]

Aweslan

Following the trend of great books being made into quite good movies, the C.S. Lewis classic The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is coming out in December. Check out what those in the industry would call a teaser trailer, here.

Light Sensitive

Below are a few pictures (2) that I recently exposed. They are about light.





[click to enlarge.]

Awe_____

I've been thinking about the word awe lately. Taking it apart, putting it back together. I don't really get it. Namely...

Awesome would seem to describe something having some amount of awe, whereas awful seems to speak of being full of awe. I tend to think of awe as a good thing (or at least an emotion worth experiencing), and yet my native tongue would say that awesome is a good thing, while awful is to be avoided (at almost all costs). I'm sure there's some explanation for this, I just don't know what it is. Maybe if I knew Latin.

In case you were wondering, here are a few things that AWE is an acronym for: Accepted Weight Estimate, Atomic Weapons Establishment, American Wilderness Experience.

Drooling in the City Limits

The lineup for this fall's Austin City Limits Festival has just been announced. I'm essentially speechless.



Of note (in my book): Coldplay, Oasis, Wilco, Deathcab for Cutie, Arcade Fire, Spoon, Eisley, The Doves, The Decemberists, Rachael Yamagata...

Check out the full lineup here

[Has the Westification turned to a music only blog? No. Well, of late.]

Politically Correct versus Very Funny

I was trying to come up with a theme for the Cru end of the year party last week. In a moment of unadulterated inspiration I came up with this:

Filthy Rich versus Filthy Poor

Some dressed in their finest evening wear, others clothed in potato sacks and dirt (preferably rubbed in the hair). The rich sipping on ginger ale and Evian, snacking on hors d'oeuvres. The poor eating vienna sausages, cooked over a trash can fire.

I realize how very politically (or maybe morally) incorrect this all seems. The problem is that the picture this puts in my head is extremely funny. Besides, neither extravagant wealth or absolute poverty are a good thing in my view, so I wouldn't exactly be championing a given side.

Plus think of all of the sociological experiments to perform (and learn from). Would a "rich" friend associate at all with a "poor" friend at the party? Would the poor hate the rich for being rich? Would the rich hate the poor for being there? Would hors d'ouevres be exchanged for vienna sausages and vice versa?

I thought about trying to make things a little less wrong by coining the theme The Bourgeois versus The Proletariat, but it feels like that sort of thing has been done.

I'll have a good time I'm sure, Living in the 90's, but I'll always kind of wonder what might have been.

counting down Cold Roses

The newest release from Ryan Adams, Cold Roses comes out TOMORROW. (Which is in a little over an hour in these parts.)



We're having a listening party at my house a little after midnight, b/c the kind folks at Cheapo Discs are open until midnight. I recognize that the Westification's countdown might be a little over the top, might be hyping things more than is fair. I hope you've grown some appreciation for the sometimes maligned Ryan Adams. That's what we're about on the Westification, helping you love what we love... b/c well, things worth loving are naturally worth talking about. (By we, I mean me, that's the royal we.)

So here's a review of the new album care of the All Music Guide. I recognize that the AMG isn't the most neutral review service, they put a postive slant on everything, but it's the only review I could find and it seems pretty balanced on the whole:

Last time we received a dispatch from Ryan Adams, the self-styled savior of rock & roll, it was in 2003, when he delivered his straight-up rock & roll record (aptly titled Rock N Roll) and his two-part mope-rock EP (later combined as one LP) Love Is Hell. Admirable records both, but not quite the sequel to Heartbreaker that fans craved. They also weren't quite as successful as all the hype surrounding their release suggested that they would be, so Adams briefly retreated from the spotlight to regroup, heading back in 2005 with a planned triptych of new albums, the first of which is the double-album Cold Roses, recorded with his new backing band the Cardinals and released at the beginning of May. Three albums in one year is overkill even for an artist predisposed to releasing his every whim, and while it's too early at this writing to judge whether he needed to release all three of the records, it's safe to say that Cold Roses is the record many fans have been waiting to hear -- a full-fledged, unapologetic return to the country-rock that made his reputation when he led Whiskeytown. Not that the album is a retreat, or a crass attempt to give the people what they want, but it's an assured, comfortable collection of 18 songs that play to Adams' strengths because they capture him not trying quite so hard. He settles into a warm, burnished, countryish groove not far removed from vintage Harvest-era Neil Young at the beginning and keeps it going over the course of a double-disc set that isn't all that long. With the first disc clocking in at 39:39 and the second at 36:29, this could easily have been released as a single-disc set, but splitting it into two and packaging it as a mock-gatefold LP is classic Ryan Adams, highlighting both his flair for rock classicism and his tendency to come across slightly affected. As always, he's so obsessive about fitting into classic rock's long lineage that he can be slightly embarrassing -- particularly on the intro to "Beautiful Sorta," which apes David Johansen's intro to the New York Dolls' "Looking for a Kiss" in a way that guarantees a cringe -- which is also a problem when he drifts toward lazy, profanity-riddled lyrics ("this sh*t just f*cks you up" on "Cherry Lane") that undercut a generally strong set of writing. But what makes Cold Roses a success, his first genuine one since Heartbreaker, is that it is a genuine band album, with the Cardinals not only getting co-writing credits but helping Adams relax and let the music flow naturally. It's not the sound of somebody striving to save rock & roll, or even to be important, but that's precisely why this is the easiest Ryan Adams to enjoy. The coming months with their coming LPs will reveal whether this is indeed a shift in his point of view, or just a brief break from his trademark blustering braggadocio.