Incredibly Stupid Bliss

I started this blog over a year ago to chart and define my love of things in the world (art, books, music, TV, whatever else), and my approach to loving these things:  incredibly, stupidly, blissfully.  But this has been a year or so of a lot of bad shit:  my mom died, then a friend from long ago committed suicide the next month, and just yesterday I found out one of my best friends has cancer.  What do you do with all of this? Write a blog about a TV show I guess.  One of the standouts on TV this year has been a show called The Last of Us .  Big hit based on a video game about the end of the world caused by an evil fungus. One episode stands out, although all of them offer a wildly precise fusion of arthouse and house of horrors.  This episode focused on a gay survivalist who stumbles across the love of his life after ambushing him in his post-apocalyptic front-yard pit/trap.  From that connect through twenty years of being together, the two men ...

  Fruit Bats is a one-man band overseen by Eric D. Johnson.  I've loved everything he/they have done since 2003 or so (including his side-band Bonnie Light Horseman), when I first discovered Echolocation , the debut album.   All the way through those 20+ years, Fruit Bats has been a touchstone for me, but Pet Parade , an album that came out a couple years back, is what I go to just about anytime I need music now.   It's lush country-drag pop, delicate but also full of denim-flavored 70s Fleetwood Mac greatness.  His voice is Supertramp merged with Glen Campbell, and the music has a synthesized ominousness and sense of fun, a hominess too. It's singer-song-writery but also contemplative beyond that, moving into this weird poetic direct-connect to my soul.  Every dang song on this thing is blissful and halfway awkwardly stupid in the way it needs to be, feelings bleeding out of every chorus and every note, with melodies laced with losses and happine...