a us court of appeals is allowing Courtney Love to take her record company to court. it's about time. all entertainers and workers in california except recording artists have the right to terminate a personal service contract after seven years. the way record contracts are structured shows just how little the industry cares about music. and the "funny" thing is that i had to dig kinda hard to find an online reference to this story. think cnn.com behing owned by time/warner has anything to do with that? na...

i honestly don't care if a news organization is liberal or conservative. i mean, i know that the boston globe has a liberal stant. gees, i have a liberal stant!

so it's pretty funny when fox news proclaims that they're completely unbiased, but then print stuff like the following:

Americans are more determined, purposeful, patriotic and profound, grateful for the nation's liberties and character. The narcissism of the 1990s, so aptly represented and reinforced by the Clintons, has yielded to a far finer union.

unbiased my ass.

...especially since they've banned satan.

so these people can't see the parallels between themselves and the taliban? i guess not.

finally finished the biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay. phew! not really the fun read i was hoping for. maybe the author gave me the wrong idea but i ended up thinking that Millay was a self-centered, precocious, drug-addled loser. and maybe she was. she still wrote some amazing poetry tho...

short flower print dress
black, doc-martens
and oh, those thighs

saw a pretty interesting news special last night on the west wing of the white house. i honestly can't understand anybody would want to do that work. too much pressure. way too much. anyway, the funny part for me was when ari fleischer (refering to the enron thing) seemed annoyed at the tendency of the press to see a political scandal in every event. what? you know, i kinda agree with him. it's just funny hearing a republican cry about this after eight years of clinton scandal-mongering.

let the war begin.

currently going through all sorts of 'old' Genesis, from Trespass up through Abacab. trying to figure out why some stuff is really cool while other stuff leaves me cold. i've got the feeling that this is all groundwork for a longer article on the "Why Do I Like Like That?" thing.

like odors can have strong connections to events in the past, music can do the same for me. this must be a common thing given how popular oldies radio (no matter how you define 'oldie') stations always seem to be. i'm always a little blown away by how strong the connection is. i pulled out Southside Johnny's "The Jukes" yesterday. when "I Remember Last Night" came on i was stunned by a huge wave of memories of saturday nights at somerset hall at the university of maine. the human mind is an amazing thing.

ok, plenty of people seemed to have loved the music of Abba done review-style in the theatre. but Springsteen?

i'm feeling a little woozy.

a little chunk of nostalgia hit me in the head last night. way back to 1983. me and my friend Gene sitting in the living room of his folks' house in bangor, maine...listening to REM's "Murmur" and Elvis Costello's "Imperial Bedroom"....

i'm an avid reader of Stereophile. not so much because i love the writing, or because i'm an audio gadget jockey (i'm not). the real fun lies in two areas. the first is in reviews of ultra high-end gear. especially interconnects and speaker cable....wire. it's good clean fun wading your way through long-winded descriptions of high-fallutin' interconnects priced in excess of $5000. i suppose if i was stupid enough to spend that kind of money on wire i'd have to convince myself that they did something.

more fun (not generally clean...probably good tho..) can be had reading parts of the Industry Update section. here we have reports of the recording industry's campaign to rid the world of those devilish cd pirates. how? mostly by trying to take advantage of the error correction in your cd player. basically, they through in a bunch of random noise blasts that will make it tough for computer cdroms's to deal with. adding clicks to ripped cd data (mp3's). well, gee...what's really ends up happening is that people buy these cds and bring 'em home only to find out that they won't play on their home computer. it's all so pathetic.

oh ya, here's some standard industry propaganda on this technology.

president of the united states? publicist for a tobacco company? no, it's meteorologist in the northeastern united states. granted, we've only had a couple of storms to deal with this season...so maybe they're gettin' rusty. but yesterday was fabulous. at one point we were supposed to get 12-18 inches. that was downgraded (upgraded? depends on who you ask) to 4-8 inches. we ended up getting maybe on inch of icy slush.

stuff like this brings a smile to my face. too bad it doesn't happen more often.

had a phone conversation with an old friend of mine last night. we were talking about what is is that attracts a person to a piece of music. that is, what makes it sound good to you. for instance, right now i'm listening to "You Will Be Shot" on John Zorn's Naked City. there are all sorts of cools things on it: surfy guitar, squeeeeling saxophone as well as Zorn's patented cut-and-paste of musical styles....but while i'm listening i don't really think about any of this. actually, i don't get too far beyond "hey, that's kinda neat!".

hmmm, this topic needs further investigation...

there were folks protesting bush's visit to the university of new hampshire yesterday. why are people like this portrayed as freaks by the major media? i often hear about how the liberal (now a pejorative term akin to "communist") media are in control of our news. and yet any dissent about our position in afghanistan is met with a sneer of contempt. look, i'm not saying that what we've done there is all wrong. in fact, i'm not really sure what the right thing to do is. it's pretty obvious that something had to be done. but it we're going to blindly ignore things like the death of innocent people then we're just setting ourselves up for another fall.

we finally get a little snow in the northeast. everything's nice and crystalline white, the temperature dropped so we avoid the usual post-storm slush (that's gonna happen later this week i bet), life is beautiful. of course, i'm so optimistic about this because i haven't performed my yearly slip-on-ice-fall-on-ass ballet. don't worry, it'll happen.

is this my first step toward conservatism? a complaint about the mass media? (i hope not)...anyway, i happen upon some qvc-type channel where a computer is being hawked. the sales guy is remarking on how windows xp is the most fantastic, rock-solid os they've ever had to deal with. much better than any other 'non-microsoft' os....sigh...
first of all, what exactly are the other non-microsoft operating systems that they're talking about? i know you can get flavors of linux pre-loaded but that's not exactly a common thing....and then i notice the channel: something called "shopnbc". hmmm, i may be cynical but it's not a huge leap to make a shopnbc->msnbc connection.

pulled out a vinyl copy of Judas Priest's "Point Of Entry" today. it's been a looong time since i've heard "Heading Out To The Highway". what a blast. it's also been a long time since i've heard a new rock song with a guitar solo in it. so much so that when i hear one it almost seems revolutionary. what ever happened to guitar solos anyway? obviously they're out of style. i'll admit that too many bands in the 70's and 80's went way overboard in this area. on the other hand, some of the newer stuff could be a little more interesting if the monotonous crunchy guitar->screaming->more crunchy guitar pattern was broken up.

i've been reading Savage Beauty, a biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay. let me tell ya, she was one fun-lovin' gal when she was young. i've always held this stereotype that people from the early 20th century (ok, from any any time earlier than mine) had little or no interest in sex. turns out i was wrong. wish i had known about this while i was actively hating poety in high school.

just discovered this little tidbit. i'm no longer as depressed as i was fifteen minutes ago.

so i'm reading the paper this morning and yet another local independent grocery store is being bought out (by 7-eleven) and converted to a convenience store/gas station. this is so damn depressing. i try my best to give my business to 'local' stores...there just seems to be less and less of them. maybe we should just give up now and award all retail to 7-eleven/wall mart/target/home depot, all banking to fleet/boston and all software development to microsoft (since we all know they make the best software).
ok...maybe not.

(not in any particular order)
Ani DiFranco - Revelling/Reckoning
the prolific ms. difranco really dropped the bomb this year. it took quite a while to digest the contents of this double cd but it was time well spent. Reckoning was my favorite of the two discs with its generally pensive mood and pacing: each song is followed by a short instrumental. definitely not your generic chick-with-guitar recording. i've got to admit that part of what attracts me to her lyrics is that they would tend to piss off the modern conservative. ..from "Your Next Bold Move": 'coming of age during the plague/of reagan and bush/watching capitalism gun down democracy'.  ...ouch.

Bill Laswell - Carlos Santana: Devine Light
another in a series of remixes and reconstructions, laswell places his stamp on music from Illuminations and Love,Surrender,Devotion. the addition of beats, percussion and other sonic weirdness manage to add a whole new layer of psychedelia. makes me wish i'd saved my blacklight posters.

Neu! - The Reissues
a friend of mine turned me on to the music of Neu!. apparently, they were the godfathers of the so-called Krautrock era (along with Can, Tangerine Dream and others). well, i missed Krautrock the first time through but i'm elated to have come across this music. loads of spacey guitar-based jams with the occasional, uh, 'vocal'. a very unique sound.

Puffy Ami Yumi - Spike
pure japanese pop. these girls (women? gees, it's kinda hard to tell) make some of the most infectious stuff i've ever heard.

Various Artists - Timeless (the music of Hank Williams)
with what passes for 'country' music on the radio these days, it's nice to see that some modern artists have some reverence for the past. standouts include Johnny Cash doing "I Dreamed About Mama Last Night", Emmylou Harris with "Alone And Forsaken" and Keith Richards with "You Win Again". but far and away the most amazing track is done by Beck with his take on "Your Cheatin' Heart".

Bjork - Vespertine
as far as i'm concerned this woman is from another planet. certainly her voice sounds like no other human's. and i never tire of hearing that voice wrapped around and through the blurpy synths, orchestration, beats, choir and other bjork-isms.

Pat Metheny Trio - Trio->Live
ok, this is really a late-2000 entry. but i spent so much time with it during 2001 that i just couldn't leave it out. finally a live recording with Metheny in a trio context. with Larry Grenadier on bass and Bill Stewart on drums, Pat goes through his own older material (Bright Size Life, James), newer stuff (Into The Dream), standards (Giant Steps, All The Things You Are) and skronk! ( Counting Texas and especially Faith Healer).

Thomas Newman - American Beauty (Score)
this also came out the previous year but i didn't get around to seeing the movie until last year. i actually had to restart the movie after about 20 minutes because the music was so mesmerizing that i literally stopped paying attention to the dialog and images!

Bill Frisell - Bill Frisell with Dave Holland and Elvin Jones
now there's an all-star rhythm section for ya! while this is no powerhouse recording it's fun to listen to all of the interplay. this release surprised me in a couple of ways. for one, i was expecting something a little more 'out there' given the lineup. for another, the material continues to grow on me despite its lack of out-there-ness.

Mary Lou Lord - Live City Sounds
i just can't believe she doesn't have a recording contract. (well, given the pathetic state of the recording industry, maybe i shouldn't be too surprised). this a collection of covers recorded live in the subways of Boston (at Park St. and Harvard Square). anybody smart enough (ok, i really mean "with good enough taste"...but that sounds kinda snotty) to cover Dylan (Lonesome When You Go), The Pogues (Sayonarra) and Richard Thompson (Vincent 52, Beeswing) is ok with me. oh ya, and her version of Springsteen's "Thunder Road" bill bring tears to your eyes.

Radiohead - I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings
not!

man, who turned up the "suck" dial? after lazing around the house for over a week, today i had to get up at what seemed like the middle of the night. turns out it was 7 am. hmmm....how many years left to retirement?

phew! what a year. i hope everybody's hanging in there. let's hope that this year is nicer and far less surreal.

i bought a couple of new records yesterday. ya, new. i've gotta say that it was kind of thrilling to remove the shrinkwrap and put that baby on the turntable. oh ya, what did i get? Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" on 180g vinyl and "lift your skinny fists like antennas to heaven" by Godspeed You Black Emporor. (also had Metallica's "And Justice For All" in my hands but couldn't pull the trigger).

wha? so i'm trying to wade through a series of articles on formalism in music when i run across this paragraph:

All musical elements have mysterious bonds and affinities among themselves, determined by natural laws. These imperceptibly regulating rhythm, melody, and harmony, require obedience from human music, and they stamp as caprice and ugliness every noncompliant relationship. They reside, though not in a manner open to scientific investigation, instinctively in every cultivated ear, which accordingly perceives the organic, rational coherence of a group of tones, or its absurdity and unnaturalness, by mere contemplation, with no concept as its criterion or tertium comparationis.

what? natural laws? a cultivated ear? if something is natural doesn't that imply that instinct takes over? more important, why the hell am i wasting time reading crap like this?! (actually, i know why....there are a few concepts that seem to elude me...currently the list includeds asthetics as it applies to music, postmodernism, and (oddly enough) capacitance and induction. so every so often i dig around and find what looks like an Aesthetics for Dummies kind of article...i read it and it confirms that i am in fact a dummy. so i put it down and try to just live with my ignorance.)