Here's some updates on new music I've picked up, movies, television, and other general cultural stuff. I think you guys can reply or comment so we can have a conversation here, otherwise I'll just give you guys the blogger login and you can post too. Or I should do that anyway. Hmmm, what would Neil Peart do?
On the music side I've picked up a bunch of new stuff, and please note that everything but the Radiohead was bought before the freaking Grammys. And let me also say for the "Both Kinds" of music types that, yeah, Arcade Fire is way better than Lady Antebellum. And while I'm on the subject, I was down in Galveston yesterday (rode the bike the long way down via Surfside and the toll bridge) for a Rodeo Kickoff and beer tastings at the San Luis Rey H20 bar and pool. First off, what a freakshow ride that was. The fog was unreal, I swear I was living a Stephen King story. Mid afternoon and you couldn't see the water from the road. The mist was condensing on my visor and windscreen like it was actually raining.
That lent a kind of an episodic feel to the ride. You'd ride through bits of visibility that might reveal some Ike-ravaged beach homes, or a group of tents on the beach, or a big huddle of kids and a couple of empty school buses parked just off the road. Really strange how compartmentalized the world can be when you can only see a hundred feet at a time or so.
So, at the H20 bar of course there's live country music which at 4 in the afternoon amounted to a couple of guys with a Tele and a Martin and a computer. At some point the Martin guy says something about how this next song is a "classic" George Strait number and once again, I found deaf to be an evolutionary imperative and I was grateful. [Note: As I recall, Kevin likes George Strait and he may in fact weigh in with how there really is "classic" George Strait but all I can say to that is, PFFFFFFTTTT!)
Anyway, the upshot of Galveston was, freaky fog weather, actually nice ride for the middle of February, decent beers (and honestly, Saint Arnold is a top of the line brewery; they just sent a cask out of state to Louisiana for the first time but nothing at the tasting was in the same league as Saint Arnold except the Blue Moon and a Sam Adams, so dig it at any opportunity, especially IMHO the Elissa IPA and the Amber Ale), mist off the pool at the hotel, and of course hotties pouring beer.
Oops, music, right. But first, about the ST1300. So I filled up close to home and rode down to the Bass Pro Shop at 288 and the Beltway to meet my friends. They're on a Honda Shadow (loud pipes too by the way and they swear they've had fewer close calls since they installed them, I want to slap them). He needs gas really soon so we stop and he fills up a little south of there, I don't. We ride into Galveston, do the beer tasting, and when we leave he says he's going to stop at the first place over the causeway. We do, he fills up, I yawn. I'm still at half a tank and he'd filled up twice. And speaking of bikes, so I'm in Ace Hardware today to get some, you know, hardware, and I notice they have Harley Davidson key blanks so you can get a key copied onto a Harley Davidson blank. They're $3.99 each. I look to the left and there are other logo blanks -- universities, Hello Kitty and so on, for $2.99. I have no idea what a blank blank would be but Harley charging a 33% premium over the other logo'ed blanks is just freaking obscene.
Anyway, so yeah, music. First off, I went out and paid for Pandora. I hadn't used Pandora a lot before but when I realized I could really do all the channels I wanted, it was pretty easy to go for a higher quality stream and unlimited skips. I added a bunch of bands, almost 100, and some classical composers and I've found some interesting stuff as a result. For example, Jaci had recommended a guy named Dave Barnes, so I added him to my Pandora stations. (Good stuff too by the way, Jaci, thanks). Pandora also suggested a chick named Sara Bareilles. She had come up for me in Pandora before too, from David Gray I think, so that connection alone validated the Dave Barnes thing.
Other fun stuff from Pandora was the results of the classical composers I put in. I tended to listen to that while I was working just because classical is much easier to tune out in general. Pandora disagreed I think and based on Shostakovich brought up some really distracting Prokofiev and Gorecki (who had died recently too) quartets. Then the Bach channel brought up a bunch of Bach I really didn't know much about but was just brilliant -- the English Suites and the the Two- and Three-Part Inventions with the Chromatic Fantasy. The Bach stuff brings up a lot of questions we can discuss later if anyone is interested.
So as a result of the Pandora playlist, I picked up CDs of the complete English Suites by Murray Perahia (here, and here) and a recording of the Two- and Three-Part Inventions by Angela Hewitt. Great stuff, really. Also I picked up from the Pandora playlist, the Prokofiev quartets on this CD.
And finally from the classical stuff, a reference from an NPR show, I want to say "Performance Today." led me to a CD of the Mendelsohn octect (two string quartets) and a relatively unknown Russian on this CD. Excellent stuff, nicely programmed with the Prokofiev bookending the Nadarejshili.
If you're still here, this is probably the more interesting stuff.
Eh, this is long enough as it is, I'll do the Arcade Fire, Mumford & Sons, Amos Lee, Adele, and others in the next post. Maybe the new Radiohead, King of Limbs but I've been listening to that for the last few hours and it might be a post of its own cause it's really, really good. Radiohead has fully succeeded in defining its own style in the same way Pink Floyd, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones did. you can't compare a Radiohead album to anything but another Radiohead album. Damned impressive.
And if anyone's interested, Jasper Fforde will be in Austin on Friday March 11th signing books for his new novel, One of Our Thursdays is Missing. Stupid coincidence of the year award too since SXSW starts that night so there isn't a hotel room available anywhere close. Still, I'm doing a road trip for the signing and coming back the same night. If anyone wants a signed copy let me know and I'll have him inscribe one for you.
SSA,
Danno del Mar
um, and then what happened?
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