Last week I belatedly shared my 2018 reading recap. This week I’m belatedly recapping my 2018 writing.
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ByGD
Why I’m Looking Forward to the (R)evolution of Steve Jobs at Seattle Opera
In all honesty, I wasn’t super-impressed last year when the current Seattle Opera season was announced. I didn’t want to see Turn of the Screw, and I was on the fence about the upcoming (R)evolution of Steve Jobs. I was kind of curious about it but suspected I wouldn’t like it. Now I’m actually excited to it see it. Here’s why.
ByGD
Music I Liked – EF, Chapel of Disease, Otoboke, Steve Gunn, MONO, Anemone
This week I’m bookending an eclectic bunch of music with some dreamy pop from EF and Anemone. But if that’s not your bag, I’ve also got Chapel of Disease, Otoboke Beaver, Steve Gunn and MONO.
EF
Bandcamp Daily did a post on Scandinavian bands carrying the emo torch. I don’t know why I even bothered to read it, except that lately I’ve noticed people slinging the word “emo” around in contexts that don’t match up with my memory of the early 20th century. So I read it, and listened to a few tracks, and EF totally hooked me. Ceremonies sounds like a cross between Sigur Ros and Phosphorescent and you can’t go wrong with that. Too bad they haven’t posted new music since 2013.
Chapel of Disease
The name Chapel of Disease sounds like death metal. The name Mark Knopfler (at least to me) means The Princess Bride theme song. A title like “…And As We Have Seen The Storm, We Have Embraced The Eye” sounds like post-rock. I didn’t expect these things to unite in one project, but here they are, and they are … death metal. And I like it.
Otoboke Beaver
As regular readers know, I don’t often listen to punk. But when I do it’s Japanese teenagers who name their band after a love hotel and make feminist videos in which they take down gendered life-goal expectations and stereotypical Japanese behavior by destroying wedding dresses with food. I’m looking forward to the new album from Otoboke Beaver in April.
Steve Gunn
I’m always a sucker for guitar-centric music, regardless of genre. The Unseen Inbetween from Steve Gunn sounds like 60s folk at first blush. It reminded of Father John Misty at his debut best. And after listening for a little while, it made me want to go be creative.
MONO
Just about every music blog I follow assured me that I cared about the new MONO album, No Where, Now Here. Every music app on my phone sent me an alert when the album was released. I’d never listened to the Japanese post-rock band before, but with so much prompting I had to check them out. Every now and then the bloggy buzz and the app algorithms are right.
Anemone
New release Beat My Distance sounds like the opening montage in the 1980s the way the movies want you to remember them, instead of the awful decade that we actually lived through.
Two pop albums, some death metal, two very different bands from Japan and folk music to inspire your own muse. That was my week. How about you? Did you hear anything you liked?
ByGD
King of Masks
I don’t go to the Seattle International Film Festival every year, and even when I do, I usually only see a couple of movies. So it’s notable that out of the thousands of movies I’ve seen in my life, so many of the ones that made a lasting impression were SIFF movies.
One of those movies was called King of Masks. That’s mostly because of the powerful adoption story at its heart. But its partly because it was my first exposure to Sichuan Change Art.
The second time that I took my daughter to eat at the restaurant at the China Community Art and Culture hotel, they were having a children’s festival performance. One of the performers was a Change Artist. My daughter didn’t know why I was so excited, because she hasn’t seen the movie. (We can’t afford the therapy that would trigger.)
But the Sichuan Change Art was the highlight of the evening.
ByGD
What I Read in 2018
Usually people share these Goodreads annual summaries around the new year, so I guess I’m kind of late. But hey, every day is a new day, and technically the start of a new year (as defined as a stretch of 365 days). So here is my 2018 year in books.