Puppy Bean

I had actually decided I might use Hector today, though as it turned out there wouldn't have been much other choice, photographically. What really decided it was Beck's poetic description of the bedbound beast this morning...

In other news, I've finally reached the end of my Top Twelve Albums for (now) last year, please insert your own drum roll...

#1. ‘Benji’ by Sun Kil Moon

Mark Kozelek seems to be in a very good place right now, creativity-wise, after a few years where it felt as if he might be content to just carry on messing about with his classical guitar and supplementing his income with a string of live albums long enough to test even the committed fan. Now, after releasing no less than three albums in 2013, he’s managed another couple this year, one of which (that’ll be this one, in case you hadn’t guessed, not that I don’t enjoy a Christmas Carol as much as the next man) is easily his best album since ‘Ghosts of the Great Highway’, the first Sun Kil Moon album, back in 2007.  Lyrically, Kozelek has expanded on the ideas he was exploring on the album he made with Desertshore last year, which came across like diary entries remembered in stream-of-consciousness. Here we get proper short stories in the American tradition of Cheever or Denis Johnson, poetic and rooted in personal experience but detailed, affecting and mostly dealing in reflections of mortality. The settings, whilst less ornate, are stark, steely and resonant but warm and fluid enough to grow ever more comfortable with repeated listenings. Long may he strum!

A Short Story