My hat's off

...to the people who maintain a blog day after day with plenty of intelligent things to say. It's been kind of frustrating that I haven't been keeping this thing up, but dang, the winter has been kind of a downer, and life has been pretty busy.

Still, there's the show to worry about. New playlist by clicking on the link in the previous post (now I'm really being lazy).

NP: M.I.A.--"Arular"
Yes, still, and if this darn near isn't my album of the year, I'm gonna be pretty stunned when something comes along to topple it. The discussion on this online is just about deafening, in good and bad ways (best jumping on point is Carl Wilson's blog, he being the rather savvy music critic for the Globe and Mail out of Toronto). I don't consider myself that familiar with the scores of sub-genres they talk about, all I know is I want to keep hearing this and bounce up and down like a fool (The political and sexual subtexts don't hurt, but it's still all about the music). It was supposed to be out today, but apparently Beggars has postponed it "indefinitely" for some legal complications, which means it will wind up being revised somehow. So far, I count four versions of this thing floating around out there: 2 slightly different Piracy Funds Terrorisms, the official promo (and I'm not even counting the 7-song demo) and the "clean" version, which I have a copy of too but haven't even listened to, cuz what fun is that, I ask you?

Next week, the Review is all about some shows coming to town, but I'm not going to say anything til I get my ticket, because, naive thing that I am, I think it might sell out and I don't want that to happen til I get there (selfish, too). I'll let you know. Course I thought that the show that I attended last week at the Dryden about outsider music would be packed too. It wasn't, and it was awesome, turning me on to a number of things I wouldn't have encountered before, about more which later.

NR: Carol Emshwiller--"Mister Boots"
Actually, I haven't started this yet, but probably in the next day or two. It doesn't come out til July but I hear already it's one of the year's best fantasies.

More to come, like a list of favorite blogs, books finished so far this year, and maybe even a Kylie discourse or two.