GeeCee's Not-Entirely-Original Miscellany

June Tabor & Oysterband cover "Love Will Tear Us Apart".

NPR is streaming the new Kate Bush album "Director's Cut" in its entirety up until the US release date. Go take a listen over here.

The HOLY CRAP THAT WAS AWESOME post of last night was because I'd just gotten home from seeing Leonard Cohen at Merriweather, along with nminusone, chadu, and mrsexandpancakes. The man is 74 years old, and put on a 3.5 hour show with one roughly-15 minute break and seemed to love every minute of it; I am half his age and exhausted thinking about it, and he was skipping (literally) on and off stage between songs. The one less-than-perfect thing about the evening (other than the fact that he didn't do "Sisters of Mercy") was the fact that it started raining about 5 minutes before he hit the stage and kept raining pretty close to constantly until right around the time the show ended at 11; this was bad because we had lawn seats and no chairs, just tarps. I sent a text to twitter at the first break, which was essentially "I'm soaked to the bone and cold, and I don't care because this is fan-freakin'-tastic". Luckily I had chadu, prince among men, to kindly lend me his hoodie and save my dumb ass from freezing to death after I left mine at home and was stuck in a short-sleeved sweater. Admittedly, after an hour or so the large upcharge for tiny folding chairs in the pavilion started looking like it would've been worthwhile; on the other hand, there's only so wet you can really get and after that it can't get any worse. Until the cold wind picks up, but we shall not speak of that.

I already knew it was hard to hear over the sound of how awesome Leonard Cohen is, so the real discovery of the evening for me was Javier Mas. (Huey, I think the instrument we were wondering about is a laúd.)

If you have the chance to catch any of the remaining tour, do it. Trust me, it's totally worth it.

( The setlist )

Okay, so the other less-than-perfect part of the evening was the not getting home until 12:45 part. We got out of the parking lot much faster than expected, and then made the unfortunate choice of taking 95 instead of Colesville; someone had flipped a car on 95 a few miles north of the Beltway and 3 of 4 lanes were closed. It's surprising how much traffic there is through there after midnight on a Monday night.

I always thought that Portishead needed MOAR COWBELL. (Okay, no, I didn't. Until now!)

[Edit: Gah, the embed didn't work. Let's try this again.]

For anyone trying to get in touch with me, I am currently dealing with a couple of high-priority projects at work and generally am pretty tired and not overly social when I'm home. The annual winter depression sapping all of my focus isn't helping much either. If you're waiting to hear from me and you haven't, I assure you that it is not in any way personal. I know a lot of folks on my f-list are having a difficult time of things right now; I am trying to comment as I can, but know that you're in my thoughts even if I don't manage to say anything to you very promptly. Things will calm down here eventually. I hope.

A couple of collected entertainment links for you in the meantime:

• Download the new album by The Charlatans (UK) for free
  
• My Old Kentucky Blog resurrects the MOKB Covers Project: Hallelujah post with a few new additions, including Regina Spektor, Beirut, and Keren Ann
  
• dawnd: A squirrel with over 2000 dress-up outfits, complete with hats and accessories. ;)
  
• "Breakfast of the Gods" is a fantastic webcomic featuring breakfast cereal mascots; follow the adventures of Cap'n Crunch and friends as they battle the evil Count Chocula.
  Book One: The Last Good Morning
  Book Two: O Cap'n, My Cap'n (just wrapped up recently, book three is on the way)
  
  From an interview with the creator:
  

  Part of what makes "BOTG" so funny is that it's played so straight -- rather than being silly or overtly spoofy, you actually play this tonally as a sort of "Crisis on Infinite Earths"/"Lord of the Rings" epic. I mean, my God -- you open with the brutal murder of the Honey Bunch Bee. How did you arrive at this tone?
  
  A. Well, I have to admit I am deliberately aping the tone of the big event comics -- specifically "Watchmen." I mean, it's still valid now because DC and Marvel are still cranking out megaseries, but -- for me and my whole generation -- it's still all about 1985. "Watchmen", "Dark Knight Returns," "Crisis on Infinite Earths." There's a grand, serious WEIGHT to these projects, which are still, at the end of the day, focused on guys in tights beating the crap out of each other. Simple characters created in simpler times, for children, suddenly allowed to carry grander themes -- deal with adult issues -- all with a straight face.
  
  So I'm doing the same thing here. Of course, I still try to inject enough winking satire to let the readers know I know perfectly well how ridiculous this story is.

  
  

Right. Break's over, back on my head.

Over in gears_and_steam, one of the members posted a steampunk/neo-victorian music compilation; I've been listening to it for a couple of days and now have a few more artists on my "hunt down their stuff and buy it" list.

I've got a raging headache and want to try getting to bed in the next ten minutes, so I'm just going to make quick note of the last set of books (since mid-November) that I finished in 2007 so that I don't forget about it as I inevitably will.

52. Areas of My Expertise, John Hodgman


53. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Don Tapscott
    


54. A Civil Contract, Georgette Heyer


55. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier, Alan Moore
    


56. The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden, Catherynne Valente (I think this is my favorite book of last year.)
    


57. Lord John and the Hand of Devils, Diana Gabaldon
    


58. Daughter of the Blood, Anne Bishop
    


59. Heir to the Shadows, Anne Bishop


60. Queen of the Darkness, Anne Bishop


61. Dreams Made Flesh, Anne Bishop


62. The Invisible Ring, Anne Bishop


63. Tokyo Look Book, Philomena Keet
    


64. I'm Ready for My Movie Contract, Darby Conley (Okay, it's a collection of comic strips; let's count this as .5.)
    

I feel like I need a weekend to recover from my weekend. (Okay, it's really more that I seriously do not want to go back to work tomorrow.) Friday evening nminusone and I met up with the fabulous jessicamelusine and friends to see "Elizabeth: The Golden Age". "Textile porn", Salon called it, and I don't disagree. Historically accurate? Probably not so much, but very, very pretty. It was very nice to finally meet MzMelusine in person, which I hadn't quite managed to do yet for various and sundry reasons. Got home late, took Nyquil, passed out.

Yesterday Chris and I trekked down to the Green Valley Book Fair. Sorry, but it was kind of a last-minute trip and so I didn't extend an invitation to other folks. There's another iteration coming up in late November I think, maybe we can plan a group road trip. It worked out to being something like four hours of driving for an hour and a half at the warehouse, but this wasn't a problem. I really don't need any more books to add to the "to be read" stack, but I still ended up with ( a decent haul. ) You see why this is a dangerous place for a book addict.

Part of the reason we didn't stay longer was that we had tickets to see Issa, formerly known as Jane Siberry. She was quirky (to say the least) and charming, as always. Since I'd last kept up with her, she's changed her name, given away or sold almost all of her worldly possessions, and moved all of the music to which she controls the rights online with a self-determined pricing model. I have to say, I had a brief moment of envy because I am not brave enough to travel the world living out of a knapsack right now.

Today I skipped the Marshall Crenshaw show in favor of hanging out with chadu, during which it was discovered that I cry like a baby during "Nature" specials involving animals. Newborn baby polar bear and mama? Tears. (Contemplating polar bears and the fact that they may not exist in the wild for much longer makes me sad.) Watching chimps from animal research labs being too scared at first to leave their transport carriers and step onto the grass at their new sanctuary home? Tears. Seeing the chimp who is primarily responsible for the fact that we have a hepatitis vaccine today and who died a few days after the footage was shot? Lots and lots of tears. Being sure that something bad's about to happen to an hours-old foal who can't stand up for some reason? Gotta leave the room, seriously. Watching Shirley and Jenny at the elephant sanctuary in Tennessee? Tears. Listening to Shirley's keeper of 22 years at her previous zoo home say goodbye and talk about how happy he was that she'd never have to wear a chain again? Ohgod, when he started crying, it was all over for me. Don't tell anyone, okay? It can be our little secret.

I'm really loving the new Radiohead album "In Rainbows"; I'm on my second listen since downloading it about an hour and a half ago. Also, I love their "pay what you want for the download, anything from £0 to £100" approach; I paid £7 and some change, which works out to about $14 ($1.40 per song, and roughly what I'd expect to pay for a new CD), since this is the sort of thing I like to reward. When you have major labels claiming that simply ripping a copy of a CD you own so that you can listen to it on your iPod is stealing, I'm perfectly happy to fork over cash directly to artists instead of to the label. Some folks in the comments at Stereogum were saying they didn't pay anything for it because it's only encoded at 160 kbps, but that's perfectly acceptable for me given that I'm not particularly picky about the bit rate so long as it's at least 128.

No, wait. Make that three times.

I got myself an online storage account at MP3tunes so that I could have another backup of my 80GB or so of mp3s and as a bonus have it all accessible to me anywhere rather than having to keep it stored on a bunch of different machines. (Yes, I could set up a media file server at home and stream stuff using Apache or something similar and may yet do that, but this is quick, easy, and provides another backup.) They have a nice little tool that you can use to sync your music files to or from your storage locker, which I started running last night around midnight on my laptop at home. It's now 6:15 pm. As of five minutes ago, I have 846 songs in my locker, and a total of 6457 songs on my laptop alone. There's math involved here, but the executive summary is "oh god, this is going to take a very long time to finish". Once the laptop is done, I need to sync my work desktop (which was quoting me something like 65 hours to complete) and then I really need to upload stuff from my home desktop, which hasn't been backed up in many, many months. I figure I ought to be done uploading sometime around the end of the month at this rate, unless I'm very lucky and it doesn't treat every new upload from a different system as an initial sync; if it checks to see if files are already in my locker before uploading, it might not be quite so bad.

Apparently I'm in the mood to listen to stuff I loved in college. Tonight's playlist so far:

"Softly", The Soup Dragons
"Miss Freelove '69", Hoodoo Gurus
"Girlfriend", Matthew Sweet
"Tattva", Kula Shaker
"Black Metallic", Catherine Wheel (still a favorite)
"The Only One I Know", The Charlatans
"I Wanna Be Adored", The Stone Roses


I hate culling CDs, because I have a bad case of "I might really want to listen to that later" syndrome. It needs to be done though, and if I haven't listed to this Die Form disc in three years, I'm probably not going to listen to it anytime soon. I'm flipping a coin on whether to take stuff up to CDepot in College Park or mail it off to Second Spin; Second Spin offers better prices for stuff if they want it, but CDepot has the benefit of being local (and offering more than McKay in Manassas).