Lowlands are gearing up to play a show soon. We've been putting this thing together for over a year now. Stay tuned for details. I'm still not sold on the name, but am glad that the ten or eleven songs we've been working on are pretty much ready.
I didn't mention before that we saw Juno over the holidays. It was pretty good, but not great. The director relied a little too heavily on his indie rock soundtrack and hip pop-culture touchstones. And there wasn't enough of the hilarious Michael Cera. But Ellen Page, who's from Halifax, was really great. Very believable as an intelligent but self-absorbed and not entirely likeable teenager. We saw her dancing at the New Year's Eve show, by the way. She is tiny.
Because it was due back at the library, I quickly finished a book of Krishnamurti writings I'd been reading last week. I find him incredibly inspirational, but I guess not very uplifting. He was appointed head of some religious organization in India as a young child, supposedly the reincarnation of some great teacher or other, and went through all sorts of crazy spiritual training and saw weird visions and generally became highly enlightened, but then later renounced his position, as he came to realize that all organized religion is a waste of time, based as it is on tradition, which is the past, and therefore incapable of seeing the present in all its newness, which is what spirituality should be all about. Most of his
teachings are about what NOT to think or do, i.e. follow any method or technique for self-awareness; believe in time; believe in yourself as an independent being; have any beliefs at all, really. Of course he has no advice for how to achieve this non-achievement, other than a Nikean "just do it," but still I think he has a lot of important things to tell the world about living in modern human society as a socially and emotionally adult being. His "teachings" mesh pretty well with both Eckhart Tolle and Alan Watts.Now I've got the latest issue of McSweeney's (as mentioned in Juno) out of the library. It's a very happy surprise to me to find that they carry it, as I've missed every issue since the comics one, however long ago that was (a couple of years, I think), and they're pretty expensive. But they're also always full of great contemporary fiction, so I'm going to have a fun time catching up. Plus, we rented an issue of Wholphin, the filmic arm of the ever-growing McSweeney's literary hodgepodge, and it's been just as enjoyable as their other stuff.
- Andrew
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