Brown October brings the pheasant

MUSICAL DISCOVERIES

Francis & The Lights: I consider myself very lucky to have been able to see this band open for Mark Ronson two nights in a row.  In fact, I think I enjoyed Francis & The Lights even more than I enjoyed Ronson, especially on the second night when I knew what a treat I was in for. This band has gone right to the top of my list for 2010.  I've listened to their album It'll Be Better everyday since I've had it in my possession. As an unashamed lover of 80s music, I just can't resist all the aural references to The Style Council, Genesis, Steve Winwood, Prince, Elvis Costello, and Peter Gabriel.  While the recorded music is beautiful, uplifting, and soothing, the live performance is full of energy and life.  It takes guts to dance like you just don't care, but Francis pulls it off like no other, his fierce and fearless moves matching his stellar croon.

MINI MIX

"YSLM (You Stopped Loving Me)" -- BURNS & Fred Falke
"Somebody To Love Me" -- Mark Ronson & The Business Intl
"Night Watchman" -- Francis & The Lights
"Music Talking (Fred Falke Remix)" -- The Montanas & Dj Roland Clark
"Another Chance (Wez's Beach House Mix)" -- Wez Clarke & Maxine Hardcastle
"In A Limousine" -- Francis & The Lights
"Ride the Storm" -- Carl Kennedy & MYNC project feat. Roachford
"Trust Me" -- The Streets

FILMS

The Social Network
Catfish
Let Me In
Nowhere Boy
RED
Back to the Future
It's Kind of a Funny Story
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

NETFLIX QUEUE

Brick
This Is England
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
The City of Your Final Destination
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (though I like to think of it as Stark Trek: The Voyage of the Mimi)
Around the Bend
Uncertainty
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
Purple Violets
She's The One
Moonstruck
Ondine

COOKING

Crab salad sandwiches
Pasta with sausage and mushroom tomato sauce
Mushroom barley soup
Carrot ginger soup

BOOKS

The Cement Garden, Ian McEwan

A nice, graphic, disturbing little McEwan sketch of a book.  It was decent enough for a quick read, but this one is already fading from my memory, nowhere near as haunting and effective as On Chesil Beach.  However, like Christopher Buckley's Losing Mum and Pup, it forced me to contemplate how children (grown or not) cope once their parents are gone. It is a hard thing to face, and McEwan renders it as beautifully and starkly as he always does.

Shadow Divers, Robert Kurson

Read this book. Now. I have told so many people about this book because it is thrilling, interesting, exciting, well-written, and true.  I was on the edge of my seat the whole time I was reading it, due to Kurson's skillful blend of action, adventure, danger, history, and mystery. The passion and dedication of the real-life divers who discover a mystery U-Boat off of the New Jersey coast is infectious, and the dangers that they face are startling. I felt deeply for them and wanted very much for them to succeed at the task they had set themselves despite all the setbacks they faced during their journey.

The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch

This is one of those books that I had to force myself to read, despite the fact that the prose is well and insightfully constructed. I just couldn't connect with it no matter how hard I tried.  One of my biggest struggles was that the narrator was absurd and completely detached from reality.  His version of events was clearly not connected to what was actually happening, and over the course of 500 pages, this became quite bothersome. As a stubborn person myself, I totally understand where the narrator is coming from with his steadfast convictions, even if they aren't rooted in reality.  But on the whole, the tragedy of his delusion was just too hard for me to bear.

A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro

I liked this book quite a bit, despite that fact that when I got to the end, no clear truth was evident and a week later I am still not sure what the author intended for me to think happened in the story. The blending of past and present is done extremely well, heightened by an air of mystery from events never fully explained. I also enjoyed the very restrained, Japanese tone of the writing and dialog which heightened the atmospherics of post-War Nagasaki.
Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje

I greatly enjoyed the first half of this book, set in northern California.  The languid golden haze of Tahoe is beautifully conveyed through Ondaatje's prose and I wanted to slip into the complicated lives of his solid characters. Coop and Claire are especially fascinating in all their fragile wounded glory.  However, the second half of the book, set in southern France with a different cast of characters only loosely tied to the first, simply left me longing for the lights of Lake Tahoe.  As I was reading the second half of the book, I wanted to leave the French behind and get back to Coop and Claire, and I was very disappointed when I realized that wasn't going to happen. This second part was serviceable fiction, but didn't captivate me nearly as much as that which preceded it.