• Bright and Vivid - Kathryn Calder


• The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Sampler) - Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross


• Another Green World - Brian Eno


• Before and After Science - Brian Eno


• Here Come the Warm Jets - Brian Eno


• Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) - Brian Eno

Those last four have been on my want list for years (used to own them in LP format in my college years). They are the four classic albums in the 'pop' series by Brian Eno, who has done a lot of cool music in many genres, including inventing a couple on his own. He has also produced albums for such 'formerly famous' groups as Roxy Music and Talking Heads.

The major emusic players all wanted $9.50 for each, and that seemed a little steep for albums from the 70's. But today I got email from Google that they were running a new music store, and when I checked, these were all available for $5 apiece. So I bought them all. Seems that capitalism works in my favor sometimes.

Assuming that Music for Airports is still $5 when I get my next paycheck, I'll grab that one too. That's not from his 'pop' series, but from his 'ambient music' series. I consider him one of the primary inventors of that genre.

While downloading these, I spent the evening browsing Spotify, and discovered that they had the collaboration between Brian Eno and David Byrne (Talking Heads) entitled "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", which is an album of compositions mixed over samples from Southern Evangelical radio shows. It was one of my favorite albums of the period. Unfortunately, it is still 'expensive'. Guess I'll just have to wait for more 'capitalist' competition to bring the price down!

Renee needs more control over the display of her work, since two or three pieces were murky or off-color. Indeed, we were planning to buy one of her self-portraits, but she convinced us otherwise, because the primary colors were the result of the printer running out of a couple color cartridges during printing. Ugh!

We'll try to recover an original for that one, in which case, I'll post the revised image.

It's pretty cool, and I've been snapping photos of some of the experiments and inlining comments on Flickr. I'll probably regret that, as Flickr will die an ignominious death one day, and all my careful comments will go down the memory hole with it. In any case, browse if you care.

Hunky Dory
Sheer Heart Attack

Hunky Dory is of course due to my tracking down the song Kooks after it was played in the movie Hanna. I still think this album is one of those pivotal works that should appear on every top-X albums of the history of pop/rock.

Sheer Heart Attack is just my nod to Freddie's birthday, which was nicely acknowledged by a Google Doodle recently.

“iTunes customers have shown they overwhelmingly prefer buying TV shows,” Apple said in a statement Friday.

That is, quite simply, a categorical crock. The truth is, I've been buying Dr. Who seasons for the last two seasons. But I've also been renting episodes of Leverage. Do I want to own it? No way. Thanks alot, Apple, and whatever network owns Leverage. You used to get a buck an episode from me. Now you get nothing.

The Mercury Men, a lovingly retro web-based sci-fi serial. Diggin' it.

Steve Albini on Odd Future

I've begun snapping him when I can, first with the joke camera in my iPod Touch, then with my P&S, which I've started taking to work for just this purpose. He wasn't there this weekend, but I plan to try to grab him with my D70 and my 70-200mm lens some weekend, and I'll add any results to this photo set.

Like all music services, for sale or streaming, it is incomplete, failing some of my 'acid test' list of hard-to-find musicians and albums, but it nevertheless has an impressive playlist with many 'soundtrack-of-my-life' songs. It won't replace eMusic, or anyway, it won't replace the eMusic I liked before they tried to become iTunes-only-more-expensive-and-less-convenient, but it will let me play in the more popular streams. Still need a good indie/jazz/world/outsider vendor to force me outside of my comfort zone, but this will be fun for more conventional needs.

And for the record, I am a bad person. I did not get anybody souvenirs. This is partly because we packed a single carry-on each (even going so far as to hand wash a pair of pants in the hotel tub during the trip). The only 'souvenir' I got myself was a museum shirt so that I had something to wear one day, and I wore it home on the plane.

Sorry friends, I am a bad friend. If I ever go on another trans-continental trip, I'll try to mail things back home...

On a lighter note, I discovered that my stabbing sinus flight malady can be greatly reduced by applying saline nasal sprays every half hour during the trip, and taking a vicodin about an hour before the final descent. This is a single data point, so it may have been just luck, but the landing in Paris was nasty, and the landing in Sea-Tac was merely unpleasant, so I'll be trying that drill again if ever forced aboard another jet.