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It’s been almost five years since I realized that I was in love with the Brooklyn-based, Baltimore-bred band Animal Collective. I had fired up Sung Tongs, expecting something vaguely similar to Iron and Wine’s The Creek Drank the Cradle, Devendra Banhart’s Rejoicing in the Hands, or Joanna Newsom’s “Bridges and Balloons,” all of which, like the Collective, had been branded as “freak-folk” by that year’s musical ethnographers. The other signposts indicated were the Smile-era Beach Boys.

Instead, there was this weird sound — “Leaf House” — that didn’t quite work in headphones or at parties or in your car, but rattled around in your brain. The harmonies on “Who Could Win A Rabbit” paid off the Beach Boys campfire rumors, but I still didn’t quite know what to do with it. Finally, “Kids on Holiday” won me over. Its lo-fi strum, its fleeting, wavering, erotic yelps, and solemnly intoned lyrics about a Felliniesque trip to the airport, replete with surreal details (“the smell of pajamas”) and quotable asides (“Where the hell have I got to?”). It was Pet Sounds, but polymorphously perverse.

This is a very roundabout way to say that AC’s new album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, is out — and it’s very different from those weird not-quite-folky sounds on Sung Tongs. But it’s even more awesome. I’m pencilling Animal Collective in as the best indie-alternative band of the decade.

The Edge Annual Question — “WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING? / What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?” — is here. The usual suspects give their often-too-usual answers, and I (as usual) am taking about a week to read and process it all.

However, I’m already charmed by “Never-Ending Childhood,” the entry from UC-Berkeley psychologist Allison Gopnik:

Humans already have a longer period of protected immaturity

This really is Lovecraftian:

In an alarming yet little-noticed series of recent studies, scientists have concluded that Canada’s precious forests, stressed from damage caused by global warming, insect infestations and persistent fires, have crossed an ominous line and are now pumping out more climate-changing carbon dioxide than they are sequestering.

This fact might be the best illustration I’ve seen of the unexpected consequences of climate change. “Inexorably rising temperatures are slowly drying out forest lands, leaving trees more susceptible to fires, which release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.” What a catastrophic chain of events. How frightening to imagine that global warming is powerful and sinister enough to co-opt the very forces that ordinarily keep it in check.

I just became a Boxee alpha tester, and while it isn’t flawless, it’s the best setup I’ve seen yet for watching TV shows and movies on the computer, particularly a computer hooked up to a television screen. Haven’t used its social recommendation engine yet (if you’re using it too, let me know), but the Hulu and Netflix integration set it apart from XBMC, Plex, Front Row, et al.

I watch a lot of computer-based TV, particularly since I don’t have cable. My setup — first-gen MacBook Pro with busted screen, Western Digital 500GB external, Wireless-G router, Samsung 26″ HDTV, Apple remote, and a Logitech keyboard (DiNovo wireless for Mac). I’ve got a DVI-HDMI cable and a simple stereo output running between the notebook and the HDTV. Best experiences – 30 Rock on Netflix and Hulu, The Daily Show at ComedyCentral.com, all five seasons of The Wire backed up on my external drive, and Yo Gabba Gabba through iTunes.

I’ve been mulling over a bunch of different ideas about this computer-media server-television hybrid, but first I guess I’ll just ask the ‘matrix — how do you guys watch TV with/without your computer? What do you like or not like about it? What are you still trying to figure out?

Rob Spence wears a prosthetic eye. It’s the 21st Century. Ergo, Rob’s new eye is going to include a video camera.

Unnerving Story of the Day™ is sponsored by Ratchet Up and the letter Um.

Watching The Big Sleep in a hotel in Midtown Manhattan, and it is glorious. Lauren Bacall is as cool as blue flame, but it’s hard to beat watching Bogart with Dorothy Malone. Even bookstore clerks are wise! In a way this is a key to film noir — what passes as toughness is really a monumentous and universally held contempt for the slightest stupidity.

“I’ve got a Balinese dancing girl tattooed across my chest, and I’d better take her home.” It’s enough to make you want to write pastiches of pastiche, like the Coen Brothers squared.

I’m off to San Francisco tomorrow, to win the hearts of academicians large and small. Committee breakfasts, a job interview (!), and a paper on paternity, modernism, and tragedy. (Apollonian patriarchy, legal fictions, Hegel’s love child, and Ockham’s razor abound! It will be awesome.)

I will catch you all after New Year’s if not before. Keep your Kindles warm.

P.S.: Special props to Robin for hosting me in SF. When he returns, the city will be especially strong in the Snark.

Gavin at Wordwright wants the word back:

“Graphic novel” is not any more descriptive, and worse in that it implies fictional content to the detriment of memoir, travelogue, reportage, etc., which is where you find some of the most interesting work being currently done

In mine, I would be played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman. There’s a fair-to-middling physical resemblance, to be sure, but mostly, I just feel like he would do a really, really great job.

I’d also like it if he would say this about me:

The world is hard, and … being a human on this earth is a complicated, messy thing.

Matt can keep his Kindle — I’ll take one of these:

I seriously want to know more about the early history of astronomy. Less the sociology than the psychology of it – what was it that led humans to devote themselves to such long-term, precise observations? A belief in the power of distant gods? Boredom? The urge to find certainty somewhere, anywhere in the cosmos?

Via HNN/Ralph Luker.