nature's path

i'm still not over leonard cohen yet. today i got death of a ladies' man(1977), often considered his greatest misstep, but i love it. again, his sense of humour is always underestimated. jazzer drop your axe it's jazz police. there are only four albums left. then i'll need a new obsession, i guess. i'm focusing a lot on the lyrics of the future, his 1992 album. democracy is coming to the u.s.a. perhaps i like political songs after all. of course, EVERYTHING is politics! i've seen the future baby; it is murder. i may dive next into dead can dance; i also got spleen and ideal(1985) today.

i purged my itunes library tonight, killing all sorts of things that i usually skip past. i want to build the perfect collection. if i don't like it, i'm not going to waste space on it. on a different note, i still can't find a copy of richard hawley's coles corner anywhere. it's beautiful. here are two songs from it:
- coles corner
- i sleep alone

i have two more full days off, and will use them reading and, maybe hiking. so i hope. i spent my time in surrey playing with lego and watching 'campaign politics' on CPAC. all i read was earth abides, a 1949 sci-fi novel that really affected me. it follows a freak survivor of a species-wide plague for 60 years after the disaster, expanding from a character study to encompass the small unit of survivors he builds into a family unit, all the while full of angst about how to keep an intellectual life alive in a new time where the practical is all that can matter. these books were all marketed as action-thrillers at the time, but a lot of them are incredibly touching and thoughtful. earth abides made me quite sad!

three new books from the salvation army thrift store at 108th and 148th:
-fantasyland: inside the reign of bill vanderzalm, from 1991, i think
-reign of error: the inside story of john turner's troubled leadership, from 1988
-joe clark, a biography from 1978!

surrey is much easier to navigate than people think. i know exactly where 132nd and 87th is, even without knowing the suffixes. surrey goes from 0 ave(south) to 116 ave(north), and from 120 st(west) to just about 200th st(east). easy.