Things That Make Me Happy

Kylie Minogue, X : Yeah, what of it? Kylie has grown into a pretty good album artist; she seems to approach albums as a collection of singles, which can occasionally backfire, but which also means hooky and well-written tracks. Which, you know, is nothing a fan can complain about: Light Years is one of my all time favorite albums -- even the slow song I don't like serves a purpose -- and Fever was also really strong as well. (Body Language, which was released after Fever, is not among my favorites: it isn't particularly dance-oriented, and seems chilly. I associate it with German's trying to replicate early 2000's R&B. Perhaps I should revisit it.) All of which is a long-winded way of explaining that when I see she has released an album, I buy it. On CD. So when I saw it on sale at Barnes & Noble one evening, well, you can guess the rest.

And it was totally worth it. One of my favorite songs on the disc is the very first song, "2 Hearts": it has a jazzy sloppiness (a very deliberate sloppiness, I admit) that I find extraordinarily appealing. That same sort of deliberate looseness is evident throughout the album. Beats aren't totally precise, and synthesizers always have the sort of clumsy chunkiness I associate with new wave. This coupled with the funkiness that underscores most of the songs makes the album very appealing to me.

Kylie Minogue: "2 Hearts".mp3

And the video for another winning song, "Wow":

The Poe Museum, Richmond, VA : Well, it is right across the street from me, but an exhibition of Poe in comics opened up at the end of April, so with the extra day off this weekend, I went to see it. It was cool -- I sort of wish they had been able to find more original art to include in the exhibition, since it's hard to really get a good idea of the art when it's in the printed comic book, and under a plastic case. And the lighting in the exhibition area made it difficult to see some of the exhibits, but it was a fun exhibit, nonetheless, with work by Rick Geary, Richard Corben, and Gahan Wilson.

Original art by Rick Geary: "The Tell-Tale Heart", from Graphic Classics:
Edgar Allan Poe (which I coincidentally bought at the gift shop).

On top of this, though, the Poe Museum itself is very pretty. Especially the so-called Enchanted Garden, a courtyard in the middle of the complex. To wit:

Yeah, so I took the opportunity to play around with my new cameraphone. And, sure, that third picture even hurts my corneas. You got a problem with that?

In the gift shop, I asked about volunteering. So I may be doing that. We'll see.

How I Met Your Mother : As Heroes has become increasingly disappointed, and as I've lost interest in Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives as they both seem increasingly desperate to attract viewers, even as the quality of the shows have waned, I've found that the network television series that I watch regularly have decreased a great deal. Basically, it's Lost (which has enjoyed something of a resurgence this year, as it seems the writers may, in fact, know where they are heading towards) and perrenial favorite 30 Rock. And that's a shame: there's something that episodic television can do that you don't get from many other forms of entertainment. But, owing in part to the reviews of the show on the A.V. Club TV blog, I decided to give this a try. Sure, it seems sort of Friends-esque, but fans of the show point to the superior writing and interesting chronological tricks to demonstrate what makes the show different -- after all, virtually all of the show is a flashback told from 2030. That's interesting, right?

Well, yeah it is, but what completely got me was how funny it is. I started watching it, and it was amiable enough. But by the end of the first disk of the first season DVD set, there's an episode that features a cockamouse -- half cockroach, half mouse -- that invades the apartment of the main characters. There is some discussion whether it is, in fact, one or the other -- maybe it's a cockroach wearing the skin of a mouse? -- but it is never resolved. They finally get the nerve to throw it outside, at which point it starts flying, and as the characters watch, it tries to fly back into the apartment. The unique narrative structure, at least as far as TV is concerned, means that everything we learn in the episodes depends on what the narrator tells us; if the narrator decides to exagerate a story for narrative effect, this is what we see. It allows the writers to indulge in minor bits of surreality without straining credibility. It's a show that is definitely concerned with story: with how they are told, and how we see our lives as a story, and how we try to impose narrative on our lives. And, as funny as the show is, it also has moments of heartbreaking sensitivity, which, on the whole, never descend into melodrama. It's just a really good show. Plus, it had the good taste to feature Roxy Music's "Mother of Pearl" in a romantic montage, which immediately makes it a cut above just about anything else.

Plus: ROBIN SPARKLES!!