Just a bunch of different things…
Fantastic, really beautiful—feels like an album more than a B-sides collection. Anyone even remotely interested in Sonic Youth should hear this.
The Office Characters Singing Karoake
I love how the characters on this show (the best show on TV, if you must know) end up singing pretty often—either karoake at a party, or one character with a song stuck in his head, or whatever. This season they’ve been doing it an awfully lot, and last week’s Christmas episode was full of karoake performances, which made me really happy.
Top Chef Characters Quitting
Maybe characters isn’t the right word, but how come two people on this current season of Top Chef have quit right before the decision was made to kick someone off, even though the judges were about to kick off someone else? Weird way to show competitive spirit, but a nice twist for viewers.
Writing Music Best-of the Year Lists
I always enjoy figuring these out, and doing multiple lists when possible. I haven’t figured out any sort of definitive list for me, but I did contribute one list to PopMatters’ collective list-making endeavor, and wrote a top 10 indie-pop albums list for the same site.
Reading Music Best-of the Year Lists
The blog Large Hearted Boy has a ridiculously comprehensive list of them going now.
For Your Consideration
Watched this the other day…not a great movie, but not horrible either. More like strangely half-finished or something, like they forget to give the characters very complete motivations or backstories.
Tower Records bankruptcy sale
OK, this hasn’t been all that great either, both because it is the death of another place to buy music and (on a more selfish note) because people bought so much during the small-discount times that there’s not enough left to get that many great deals. Still, the cheapskate side of me loves nothing more than combing through the last remaints of a big sale, finding great deals for $5 or less…and I’ve found quite a few.
One of the most recent of those deals…
...and another.
...during which he essentially dismissed every single Sam and Dave recording as worthless, acknowledging that most of his career has been based around singing songs he never liked. A fascinating interview.
