Guys, we hope you are enjoying your holiday vacation as much as we are. Frankly, we have eaten a lot of Christmas cookies and done very little else. We can’t give you cookies, but here are two treats to bring you a little Christmas cheer.
“Holiday Road” by Lindsey Buckingham
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“The Christmas Tree”
These songs are nasty. We find the gangsta life endless entertaining and silly. You probably shouldn’t listen to them around the easily offended. We’ve added this break to protect the eyes of the innocent.
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Besides being super sexy, Owen Pallett is a classically trained musician who formed the band Final Fantasy. We’ve been listening to his album, He Poos Clouds, and “The Lamb Sells Condos” caught our ear. The title made no sense to us until we did a little research. Besides the beauty of the song, we were kind of struck by the thematic parallels to Joni Mitchell’s “Harry’s House, Centerpiece.” Both describe the domestic consequences of the rampant pursuit of business. Without trying to be too heavy handed, businessmen in the pursuit of money sacrifice their own lives and the lives of their families, ultimately leaving everyone feeling unhappy and hollow. We wonder if Owen was/is aware of the similarities. Or maybe it’s a Canadian thing.
“This Lamb Sells Condos” by Final Fantasy from He Poos Clouds
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“Harry’s House, Centerpiece” by Joni Mitchell from The Hissing of Summer Lawns
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The New York Times featured a great article, “The Dance of Evolution, or How Art Got Its Start” by Natalie Angier (what a great name), yesterday about the evolutionary origins of art and the contention that to be human is to be an artist.
Here’s a snippet:
Art, [Ellen Dissanayake] and others have proposed, did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade — a proposal not surprisingly shared by our hora teacher, Steven Brown of Simon Fraser University. Through singing, dancing, painting, telling fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists, and otherwise engaging in what Ms. Dissanayake calls “artifying,” people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of art, the relative weakness of the individual can be traded up for the strength of the hive, cohered into a social unit ready to take on the world.
We ran across The Dodos‘ “Fools” while wandering around the Internet. The song is great. Great Weather for Airstrikes has a comprehenisve artist profile about The Dodos and “Fools.” The only thing GWFA fails to mention is the drummer, Logan Kroeber, is completely sexy with his 70s porn star mustache.
Also, how freaking great is the Philippe-Halsmanesque photo we found for this post? We like to think that we are as much of a photo blog as a music blog so we’d like to call attention to Elizabeth Weinberg and her mesmerizing photography. You should check out her work in her portfolio. She has a blog on her site where she details the story behind some of her photos.
