Fractionals

A few things of mine have gone up in the past few days on PopMatters: a really good interview with Liz Hysen of Picastro (whose new-ish album Become Secret I continue to insist you really should hear), and a piece on "Shelter From the Storm" for our coverage of Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks.

When you're walking through the dark and the unexpected mid-April hail, on your way to the bar nursing some serious Doubts About Your Life (looking, in other words, at the sky more than anything else), and you get to the train tracks and - for once - there's a train crossing them, and you stand there for a few minutes and are struck for the first time in years at how big the train is at it grumbles past, how tall, how looming, and the world is just put on hold for a moment - is there a more perfect song to have come up on your iPod than "Tom the Model"?

The train got out of the way just as "Teenage Wristband" kicked in (which is not the same thing as saying that the track started). Perfect.

- This is about the best "1901" cover you're going to find, and it's by one of my favourite Youtube acts. The Voluptuous are two kids who usually do two-piano covers of indie rock tunes. But it's actually great, and this cover, while completely different from their normal thing, is also great (and not just because I listened to Souvlaki today).

- Meanwhile, Zack Handlen has done a painful, excellent job explaining why both of us have trouble watching things like the UK Office. Awkwardness ahoy!

- I think Morgan Murphy is really fucking funny. Continue with your lives.

- It's lookng likely that I will never buy Kerrang!, Mojo, or Q ever again.

- Would Alex Chilton have lived if he was Canadian? Possibly.

- Here's a good review of the new Flannery O'Connor biography. But while I respect and take seriously O'Connor's beliefs and the beliefs of her characters, I have to say that as someone raised without religion (someone whose life, for better or for worse, has never been and never will be "Christ-haunted"), I don't find Wise Blood very funny. To me, it feels apocalyptic instead. It's also one of my favourite novels and has been since I read it in high school.

Spent all weekend driving to, watching a soccer game in, and driving back from the Boston area (we lost, badly), so I'm very behind. But I should quickly mention that I have short review of the really good new My Majestic Star album and the intense, accomplished Former Ghosts record up at PopMatters, and that PM has undergone a bit of a renovation. These things always take a bit of getting used to, but I like it; it seems to have a bit more functionality than the old one.

So Godspeed You! Black Emperor (I prefer the original punctuation) are going to be touring again. I still have the (quite nice) poster from the last time I saw them live, and I would love to do it again. That announcement, however, only mentions ATP, "a handful of british and european shows, and then 9 american towns." Really? One of the most significant Canadian bands of the last 20 years is reforming, and they're not playing Canada? I mean, yes, most "American tours" by American bands have a few dates up here, but from these guys I expect if they say American dates they mean American dates.

My housemate Julia loves Xiu Xiu. Fucking adores them. How do I know that? Because she took today and half of tomorrow off of work so that she could take the Greyhound down to Buffalo to see them live. She did this despite a nasty bout of stomach flu that hit her about 2 am this morning, getting on the bus via sheer force of will and unwillingness to miss the show.

She got to Buffalo to discover the show is cancelled. I'm not calling shenanigans or anything - from what she could figure out, someone in the band is very sick. But c'mon, universe - you could at least have given her a bus to take back home once she gets to Toronto at 1 tomorrow morning.

I've never really watched late night TV, and if not for my PVR I still wouldn't. But (as my housemate could tell you) I've gotten pretty addicted to The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Plenty of other people online have written about why the show is brilliant (personally, the feeling that anything can happen every night is enough to have me watch them all by itself - and I've missed a lot of the really big shows, like the ones about his parents and the Desmond Tutu one), but this interview sums up really nicely why I like Ferguson.