pop culture, reviewed

…here is a catch-up entry in boring list form.

I finished Harry Potter and I loved it.  I cried.  That is not a spoiler because I cry about really happy and really sad things in equal measure.  If you’ve read it and want to discuss, please email me because I still want to talk about it.  Jake was in Birmingham winning a trial (yay) when the book came out and I made him buy an extra copy of it so that he could read it on the way home and thus discuss it with me sooner. 

I went to see The Swell Season sing the music from Once at the 9:30 Club and it was magnificent.  Upon further reflection, it might be my favorite show of the year so far.  I wished fervently that Glen and Marketa would come back to our house and just sit around and play music all night long.  They played all the music from the film, covered Van Morrison, the Pixies, and Dylan, and played a Frames song that is now one of my new favorites (“Pavement Tune”).  I don’t need another band to follow around, but I am going to have to go see the Frames in New York next month because I need another Glen Hansard fix.  In the meantime, the entire concert is available for at npr.org. (I’ve listened to it all the way through at least three times, and I was there.)

My book club read Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert and so far I am the only person in the world to hate it.  I wouldn’t have hated it if it had just been a regular vacation memoir — she is funny and a good writer — but I did not for one second, not one page, not one paragraph, believe that she experienced any sort of internal change or spiritual transformation.  Please.   I just plain did not buy it.  (Or maybe I bought some of it, but only in the way I “bought” He’s Just Not That Into You — like, really, you relaxed when your publisher paid for you to go to Italy for four months to eat?  Not shocking.) 

Did I ever tell y’all what I thought about Easy Tiger?  I like it a lot.  It’s probably right in the middle of Ryan’s catalog for me — very enjoyable, but maybe without some of the emotional heft that a lot of his albums have.  I do enjoy “Halloweenhead” although that might be as close as I get to a Ryan guilty pleasure, and I think that “The Sun Also Sets” and “I Taught Myself How to Grow Old” are already squarely on my Ryan favorites list.  (If “I Taught Myself…” doesn’t break your heart a little, you don’t have one.)

Today The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter comes out.  Buy it and fall in love and then come back and tell me about it.