PuffyAmiYumiYummy

I’ve been wanting any PuffyAmiYumi CD for a while, but music and wine are indulgences I’ve cut from my domestic budget for the rest of the year. So imagine my delight when I discovered Thomas had PuffyAmiYumi’s An Illustrated History in the pile of give-aways for our Trivia Night last Friday. I felt a slight bit of guilt in lifting it, but he assured me it was okay. Tonight, on my way home from the Chocolate Bar (AFTER working at Mad Art AFTER working at my corporate job) I had a chance to listen to it in its entirety, due to a serious car wreck on highway 44 around midnight. (Car wrecks are the only occasion when I display the sign of the cross. I’m not even Catholic, but when I come across a wreck I feel so helpless and so badly, I don’t really know what else to do. So I do the cross thing. My other weird superstitious car habit it avoiding black cats. Once, a black cat crossed my path on 12th Street so I turned right onto Lami and took 13th down to Lynch to get to Mad Art. I figure if there’s an easy alternate route, why chance it?) So…to get back to PuffyAmiYumi. This is good stuff. Sort of a cross between ABBA, Book of Love, and ELO. I know that whole “a cross between” thing is the cheap, easy way out to music and movie criticism—but music, like movies and wine, are topics that I have always wished I knew more about. I enjoy them all so much, but they are topics so vast. I know my mind cannot take up scholarship at this level—not at my age. I have a hard enough time keeping up with the art, literature, and pop culture that I love. So I know just enough to get by. And PuffyAmiYumi is music to get by with—pure indulgent fun that reminds me of a million other things but yet sounds incredibly fresh and fantastic. I especially enjoy Puffy De Rumba (track 7). So I highly recommend this CD and also apologize that this review is like a page from Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine, rift with parentheticals, footnotes, and personal anecdotes. But since this is one of my favorite books, I suppose it isn’t such a bad thing either.