New Music

I realized I need to catch up on what I've acquired recently. No hotlinks, just Google if you care...

• 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!

Art in the Burbs

Not this most recent weekend, but the previous Friday, we went to Art in the Burbs, which was a fundraiser for local schools. Area artists displayed their work at Alberta Rider Elementary school, and students had displays there alongside them. Our daughter Renee had five art pieces on the walls, and they are featured in this photoset, with the other art we saw there.

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.

Make: Electronics

Okay, Lisa has already found the stash of images at Flickr, but I've been meaning to mention this for awhile. I've been working my way (glacially) through Make: Electronics by Charles Platt. On any given weekend, I may or may not have the time to run one of the experiments from the book, but when I do, I haul everything from the den into the dining room and wire up another experiment from the book.

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.

RIP, Dennis Ritchie

This.

New Everything (Renee)

I recently uploaded a bunch of photos Jean snapped of Renee to record her new (glasses|hairstyle|dress). I appended them to the existing Renee's New Glasses photoset, in case you're curious.

New Back Catalog Acquisitions

Amazon's September $5 sale includes two albums from my high school years, so I grabbed 'em:

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.

Categorical Statements

In Apple discontinues 99-cent TV rental program they explain the removal of rentals with the following quote:

“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.