Today at work I listened to:

Yes, Tales From Topographic Oceans: Man, I forgot how dumb this album is.

Soundgarden, Badmotorfinger: I don�t think I ever really forgot how good this album is.

Trans Am, Liberation: Better than their last one. Still not as good as their first few. (Don�t you just love how easy it is, with just a couple terse sentence fragments, to smugly dismiss someone else's hard work?)

Erlend Oye, DJ Kicks: In theory, a Norwegian folkster singing over his own DJ mix of mostly French and German dance music doesn�t work. But in practce, oh man, does it ever.

Groove Armada, Love Box: �Remember� kills me every time.

(I hate using HTML line breaks. They look so 1996.)

The other day someone asked me why going back to Grinnell is so stressful for me. It�s hard to explain, though I think anyone from Grinnell, or a similar town, probably knows the feeling. Maybe it�s because hometowns, no matter how far away, seem to have a certain gravitational pull; this is, for various reasons, not always a good thing. Excessive use of dependent clauses is also, for reasons more immediately obvious, not always desirable.

"For the last eight years he had been paying his great little sister several hundred dollars per month under the stringent condition that she would never never enter great little Grainball City. She told me, with wails of wonder, that for some God-damn reason every new boy friend of hers would first of all take her Grainball-ward, it was a fatal attraction; and before she knew what was what, she would find herself sucked into the lunar orbit of the town, and would be following the flood-lit drive that encircled it�'Going round and round,' as she phrased it, 'like a God-damn mulberry moth.'"

�Vladmir Nabokov, Lolita

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