Joanna Newsom

Joanna Newsom is a 23-year-old musician from San Francisco who plays a full-size concert harp and sings at the same time. The songs are intricate and dense, and very long. There are only five of them on this album.

Her voice is a bit hard to take. You won’t be humming along. Most reviews mention caterwauling and helium, although many of the reviewers like her anyway and this CD has done very well for her.

Newsom has been photographed wearing an animal on her head. What, she’s a warrior princess? Maybe she needs to learn to say no to the marketing department.

So far, I don’t know if I like her or not. I admire her originality. I’ve got her on my iPod in heavy rotation. I think she’ll either grow on me or drive me crazy.

Newsom reminds me of a band from the 60s called The Incredible String Band. They were two guys who performed a kind of pagan backwoods British folk-music-sounding stuff, using weird instruments that they didn’t seem to know how to play. They couldn’t sing either, but I came to love them. Here’s the cover of an album of theirs called The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter.

Christianity

I’m not a Christian. It just seems too complicated to me. If somebody didn’t tell you about it, you’d never guess any of that stuff.

I think if a religion were true it would seem inevitable. Maybe even obvious. Most likely there’d be a thunder god.

But I came across this quote from C.S.Lewis (author of the Narnia books, among others), whose thoughts on this are the opposite of mine:

“That is one of the reasons that I believe in Christianity. It is not a religion you could have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe that we have always expected, I should expect that we were making it up. But in fact it is not the sort of thing that anyone could have made up. It just has that queer twist about it that real things have.” -C.S. Lewis

I’m inclined to say “Hmmph.” By that logic you might as well believe in anything, such as Scientology or the tooth fairy. Or gravity! ;)

Hmmph.

Hockey playoffs

It’s a 1-1 tie in the 2nd intermission of game 4 with the Penguins. This one is making me nervous because tonight the Senators don’t look as good.

I hate how they don’t seem to be able to come through with enough grit when it really counts. That’s what everybody says, but maybe it’s true.

During the intermission I zipped over to check out Sanjaya on American Idol. He’s really terrible. Back to hockey!

Oh I hope they win this. I can hardly stand to watch it. The Senators are such a hard team to be a fan of.

Volchenkov scores! 2-1 Ottawa with 10 minutes left to play.

[Final score: 2-1 Senators]