2009: Year in Albums

Favorite albums of 2009:

1. Yeasayer: All Hour Cymbals*
2. John Vanderslice: Romanian Names
3. Iron and Wine: Around the Well
4. Neko Case: Middle Cyclone
5. Lou Barlow: Goodnight Unknown
6. Various: Dark Was the Night
7. Bifrost Arts: Salvation is Created (A Christmas Record)
8. The Mountain Goats: The Life of the World to Come
9. Fanfarlo: Reservoir

*Yeasayer gets an asterisk, because All Hour Cymbals came out in 2007. However, the first I ever heard of them was their track on Dark Was the Night, and they're my favorite "new-to-me" band of this year.

A few late 2008 live/B-side collections that I listened to a lot this year were Belle & Sebastian's The BBC Sessions, Patty Griffin's Live from the Artist's Den, and Bob Dylan's wonderful Tell Tale Signs. In addition, there are a few older records that I finally discovered this year: Jeff Buckley's Grace (1994), Elliott Smith's posthumous From a Basement on the Hill (2004), and the Mountain Goats' Tallahassee (2002).

Not sure how this will work, but I made a sampler from these favorite albums using Rhapsody, which you can probably access here. Enjoy!

2009: Year in Concerts

I hope to remember 2009 as a good year of live music. During the course of this year, I got to see some really outstanding shows:

• February: Ben Folds at the Durham Performing Arts Center
• September: Mountain Goats at the Durham Armory; short set, small audience
• October: Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band: standing in the third row for the FINAL show at Giants Stadium
• December: Dave Rawlings Machine at the Cat's Cradle in Carrboro

While I'm jealous of my friend Liz, who got to see Patty Griffin and Neko Case in the same week up in Boston, I think I did alright for myself this year.

Newbigin paper: Finished!

Just finished a term paper for my course on Lesslie Newbigin. I present it here, courtesy of wordle.net.

Allow myself to introduce myself.

The parallel universe of Facebook has a funny grammar.