What I've Been Up To

I've been staying in the past couple days...yesterday I read, napped and worked out. Today-again- there is no sun. The wind and rain began last night and it is mid-afternoon now. There is a gloomy-gray and wet, windy look to the cityscape out my living room window. You can hear the wind howling around the apartment tower we live in. Instead of going out exploring, I am enjoying the library materials I checked out last Friday. Just finished watching a music documentary, Ben Harper's "Pleasure and Pain". It took me awhile to become a Ben Harper fan. I'd heard about him from friends, but it's not unusual for me to catch onto a really good musician/music group late in the game. Growing up, we were somewhat restricted in music taste; Christian rock like Michael W. Smith, Amy Grant or this, or harmless pop rock like the Beach Boys, Debbie Gibson (now, embarrassingly, Deborah Gibson) and Tears for Fears. Though I can hardly blame things on childhood upbringing anymore...Just the other day I was listening to the Radiohead Album, "The Bends", thinking how great they are and how I wasn't completely clueless about cool modern bands- then realized it was made in 1995- twelve years ago, when I was about 20. (How time flies, mate!) Anyway, the documentary with Ben Harper is great. Beyond the numerous cliche clips of him getting in and out of tour buses and getting hyper over his afro or buying a cool pair of shoes, it illustrates his close ties with family and the musical heritage he grew up with. It has an interesting segment of him discussing the types of guitar he plays and why. It shows his great versatility, musicianship, and refusal to answer silly media questions like "Are you easy to work with?" I only own two of his albums, "Diamonds on the Inside" (2003)and the 2006 "Both Sides of the Gun" (which is really two albums in itself) but I listen to both constantly and have probably played his song "Amen Omen" daily for the past year... And I'm still not sick of it. (My old college roomie, Mary, is probably having flashbacks if she's reading this...when the Counting Crows recorded "Mr. Jones" I played it over and over in our dorm room until she had to stage an intervention which included excessive teasing). So if you're a Ben Harper fan, go get it, but make sure you have about three hours to truly appreciate all of it, including live performances and bootleg tracks. I've also been watching Mythbusters and listening to Jack Johnson's "In Between Dreams" and Lizz Wright's "Dreaming Wide Awake". I'm reading The Rough Guide to Sydney in preparation for a weekend trip to Sydney a few weeks from now. Also, a dark, strange book called The Electric Michelangelo by Sarah Hall. The author is only a year older than I am and this is her second book--the writing style is sophisticated and unusual, in a way I don't know how to describe.