A recent obsession with violins and cellos has led me to the music of The Physics Of Meaning.
After adding the band as a friend on MySpace, I got a message from Daniel Hart telling me that he spent some of his childhood in Emporia, Kansas, which was the nearest college town to where I went to high school.
Emporia is home to a meat packing plant and the 18+ bars my friends and I would visit my senior year of high school. Daniel wrote a song about the town, "small towns and invisible people", which you can download from their website. I'm amazed that anyone could write such a beautiful song about a place that smells like meat.
You can also listen to three other songs from the self-titled album on their website and MySpace page. I highly recommend "Manhattan is an island" which combines a multi-layered drum machine beat with a string arrangement that is unlike anything I've heard recently.
The amount of reading I've been doing lately has greatly increased in relation to the decrease in my working hours. I'm sure it also has something to do with the fact that I've been reading mass market paperbacks. Such easy reading of cookie-cutter tales by mediocre writers. (Alas, I aspire to be a mediocre writer with straight to paperback novels but nevermind that.)
After finishing Crichton's State of Fear, I craved more science in my fiction. A new television show I've enjoyed this year, Bones, is based on the novels written by an actual forensic anthropologist, Kathy Reichs, so I picked up Grave Secrets at a used bookstore. In the television show, the title character, Bones, works with a team of quirky smarties and an FBI agent to solve crimes based on what little remains of the corpse--usually just bones. The books are less restricted in that the central characters travel all over the world identifying human remains; however, the characters remain two-dimensional on the page. Even the stereotypical nerds on the tv show are presented with more depth than their counterparts in the books. Although I cringe at Reichs' writing every other page, the forensic mysteries are interesting, and I will probably work my way through the books quickly especially with the frequent rain keeping me inside for most of the day.
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