Friday, August 1, 2008

Thermals News = Excessive Slavering

Lots of Thermals news recently, which always makes me a happy camper. After being transformed into stuffed dolls earlier this month, and releasing two demos from their upcoming album they've finally replaced erstwhile drummer Lorin Coleman - with Jar Jar Binks, god help us all.
The band has a more or less final track listing for their upcoming album Now We Can See, even if, after turning down a two album deal with Sub Pop, they don't exactly know who's going to release it quite yet. Hutch Harris in a recent interview with Pitchfork:
...Kathy [Foster] and I just felt that we needed to go it alone again, for ourselves, for our "art," if even for just a short while. We've considered releasing the record ourselves, or licensing it ourselves to different territories. We are currently talking to many great labels, one of them being Sub Pop. It's still my favorite label.

Since every Thermals album seems to be even better than the one that preceded it, it's no surprise if labels are tipping over themselves to license Now We Can See, which should be out before the end of the year. And if you needed another reason to be super psyched about a new Thermals album, it's being produced by The Paper Chase's John Congleton, which promises to make for a darker album than Thermals fans are used to.
And if you can't wait for new Thermals to hear more from Kathy Foster, don't despair - September 23 sees the first album in five years from All Girl Summer Fun Band. Hooray!

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Snap Judgment: When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Just finished David Sedaris' latest inevitable contribution to the NYT Bestseller list. What can I say - it'd David Sedaris, and if you like David Sedaris, you're going to have fun with it. The author's ruminations on spiders, mortality and battles of will waged in airplane seats are by turns wryly amusing and deeply disturbing, but the book makes good in it's finale, The Smoking Section.
Sedaris's trip to Tokyo to curb his decades long smoking habit is confessional without being cloying, and his eye as an American abroad is as sharp as ever. His travel writing is the best since Me Talk Pretty One Day, and one can't help but compare the two pieces. Language school once again proves a comedic goldmine for Sedaris' neuroses plagued mind, but he channels his difficulties into pieces that rank as some of the best observational humor out there.

Monday, July 28, 2008

You Never Call Anymore!

Barabk Obama arrived home from his whirlwind tour of the Middle East and Europe over the weekend to equal parts criticism and laudits.

On the plus side, he improved his foreign affairs cred - meeting with Petraeus and Maliki in Iraq and Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan. He was also seen with lots of world leaders, looking very presidential - which is apparently both a blessing and a curse. There seems to be a lot of talk about how he seemed to presidential - seen as arrogant or as one put it - too equal.

This "arrogant" stuff is getting pretty thinly veiled as a way of attacking Obama for - well, essentially for being a black man demanding to be taken as seriously as his white competitor. And it's only gotten worse as he's had the gall to steal the media spotlight from the McCain camp. There's a danger, certainly, in reading racial undertones into every criticism of Obama. But the description of Obama as arrogant has crossed the line between criticism and coded speech.

Meanwhile, McCain continues to harp on the media for covering Obama, sounding more and more like an unpleasant relative complaining that no one ever calls anymore. After spending his week kvetching about the media covering Obama's noteworthy trip, McCain apparently didn't feel the need to do anything particularly media friendly. While Obama discussed economics over lunch with a cavalcade of economist including Warren Buffet, McCain... held two fundraisers in Claifornia. That ought to get those cameras rolling.