The new Joanna Newsom album Ys is like her last one: maddeningly compelling. I don’t want to like music which sounds like it was written by J.R.R. Tolkien and sung by the genetic offspring of Bjork and Yeardley Smith, but I do. The line in “Monkey & Bear” that goes “But Ursula we got to eat something” is just…bone-chilling somehow. I don’t know…it’s like there’s someone telling a story over in the corner that I’m not really paying attention to, but part of me knows that the story’s fascinating.

.:.

This is the first night in a long time that I haven’t to do some kind of work. No school work to do tonight, no film festival stuff to plan, no pressing errands…I had time to go for a run, read through all my feeds, blog a hundred things and now I think I’ll watch an episode of Deadwood, or read some more of the Philip Roth book I started this morning (The Plot Against America). Aaaaaaah.

I guess all that hard work from a few weeks ago paid off, though. I got 88% on the term paper, which I’m pretty happy with. I’m one of those guys who’s happy with pass + 1%, so (in the immortal words of my brother Andrew) everything more than that’s just gravy.

[tags]joanna newsom, bjork, yeardley smith, philip roth, leisure time[/tags]