stevesunusual…music and more

The time has come again.

I’ve been watching lots of Women’s World Cup soccer action, and figure it is about time. Watching these women play with gusto and expertise hearkens me back to my days playing the same sport, and subsequent efforts in tennis, softball, basketball, and epic pick-up football struggles with friends–but those days for me are no more, even were I to pick sports back up. I have taken a different path, a more bookish one, and I figure I ought to make the most of it rather than look wistfully at other options. So, days of sucking orange slices with comrades in arms may be gone, but we press on.

Lefties unite! Rose Lavelle left foots it.

A lot of my previous writing was as assigned, always an easy task when given limits, or “because a fire was in my head.” Thanks to these and some other endeavors (see About for a few) I’ve scraped together something of a corpus. As years and un-begun projects stack up, though, it is a good time to start in greater earnest, perhaps with a bit of refinement-through-age helping me, although this is hardly the brevity I was hoping for when I began typing this morning.

This blog is about music, and more. Art exhibits I visit, philosophic and political ideas that rear their heads, favorite works of literature, historical oddities, movies, aesthetic miscellanies, etc. And this all started and starts with The Sugarcubes. A decade or more ago, a workplace intern told me she was a fan of Björk (Guðmundsdóttir), renowned Icelandic solo singer, and presented me with a collection of her best work. When I mentioned Björk’s early group of some distinction, The Sugarcubes, she hadn’t heard of them. Of course, this saddened me.

Now, quite possibly a generation removed from those who have any acquaintance with Björk, let alone The Sugarcubes, I figure one thing I can share for any who are to read is my experience with music, something I have delved into with natural, unthinking avidity for my whole life.

But the idea for this blog starts with The Sugarcubes, specifically their second album, Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week! This album is and was unsung, considered a disappointment at the time among the critics and my friends, my alternative set of friends as opposed to the rap one; another in the catalogue (yes, we can still spell it this way) of supposedly cursed debut follow-ups.

©1989, Elektra Records

I didn’t know the release date, which turns out to be September 1989. What a wonderful date! My birthday month and the start of my college career! I was off in a place away from my altie music friends, but saw them plenty during Christmas break and summers, and we even exchanged written and posted letters often discussing these very things, music releases that is! So, with those days in mind, I will see what I can make of this blog today, tomorrow, next week.