woke up used

how 'bout, first person to comment here and wants it gets the copy of the sunset tree that i just bought a shamefully low price at a.k.a. (seriously, for shame, guys!) that means it'll be dave, of course, unless he has it. but whatever. i probably owe him anyway.

so i'm sitting on the porch, the sky palette getting flatter and darker, drinking wine from a jar and playing with my new macbook, definitely feeling like i'm flauntin'. which part of the fun. theoretically i could have done this with my (vintage?) 2000 powerbook (which, incidentally, bears more resemblance to this here 13" blackbook than to anything else they've made since), except for the fact that, having gone through something like three batteries in six years, i still can't use it unplugged.

this isn't on reminced (where i would sort of rather have put that first graf), so i guess i better talk about music instead of just listening to it. and hold off on tolstoy, almodovar, and apted (whose work i've done nothing but consume, along with some maximalist felafel fantasies, for the last two days.) enough with the sentence construction too. on to the titular referent.

without hardly meaning to (all i wanted was to buy a(nother?) copy of ulysses, honest. this started in a bookstore!), i just acquired twelve cds. for the cumulative price of something like $23, so can you blame me? that's less than two new cds, even pretty cheap, with tax. i sometimes think about megaposting minireviews of all the music i acquired in, say, june, as an attempt to justify my behavior (that is, to prove that i actually listen to all this stuff enough to form opinions.) for no particular reason, this time i'm just going to ennumerate the latest haul immediately after the fact, so i'll thereby have an excuse to have nothing substantial to say about them.

book trader is blowing out their three racksworth of bottomscraping used discs for 93¢ apiece, so naturally i had to go through and come out with four: lindsay lohan's a little more personal (raw) (score! glad i waited rather than paying more), okgo's newest (tho i quite enjoyed their debut, i'd mostly managed to avoid this one; i'll fess up to having seen the treadmill youtube thingy, once, but not until ester blogged it), the roches x-mas album (a sentimental favorite - nice pickup since i was about to buy it next door for two bucks more and with the silly cartoon cover which was not the version i grew up with), and, randomest and maybe coolest, though listening will tell, an album by bang on a can clarinetist evan ziporyn, who i pretty much just know for his recording of reich's new york counterpoint (allmusic rave notwithstanding, i'm very curious how i'll respond to this.)

big jar just had the joyce edition i already have (my dad's copy), so i retreated to aka. apart from the mountain goats album (this was at least my fourth time purchasing it, as far as i can remember, and definitely the cheapest), i found another mountain goats album (all hail west texas!! which means i now have all of the 'normal' mgs albums - well, i only have a burned copy of nothing for juice, but still. i don't believe new asian cinema really exists anyway), a copy of the massively-hyped-on-stylus-but-otherwise-unknown (in the us) debut by sway, a random but cool-looking 1968 sam & dave album (i thank you), and b&s's books single aka the "your cover's blown" single (probably the day's worst deal, which is not really saying much at all) - all in the $2.99 section.

and just to round it off, snagged no strings attached, a dirty-ish but fine-looking rid of me, and a perfectly mint (cute little picture cards intact) pizzicato 5 cd (happy end of the world) in the seldom explored 99¢ boxes on the floor.

as for the regular used section, it's now suddenly and rather inexplicably flooded with deluxe editions and fancy-pants digipak versions of pretty much every album by the who, the beatles, the grateful dead, john coltrane, etc., all priced way too high to move, by a good margin, which means i'll be wading through them for a good while now, unless they come to their senses and reprice them.

so that's about that, then. a.k.a. is going to be selling r5 tickets starting like now. and they're hosting rob't xgau next weekend or something. so, like, i'll inevitably be there a lot, but i am starting to get just slightly annoyed about it - this is probably the wrong kind of response, but i really get a little resentful of the staff for just knowing how much (time/money) i spend in there. even though i'm sure they really don't care. but the least they could do is, you know, hire me, or something.

soon (tomorrow?) i will render even these feats of spendthriftery (a word i always wanted to mean the opposite of what it does, which knowledge is crucial to my using it here) by acquiring some number of used albums, at the marvelous, for the cumulative total of nothing! except for spend a couple of hours there, last week and more soon hopefully, hanging out and filing 45s, pricing used cds, moving furniture, cleaning out cultural detritus, etc.

til then, that's my report.

p.s. i know: i could have just gotten all hail west texas and this is my demo, and maybe the lohan or something, for $7 total, and it would have been a nice, modest and elegant, eminently reasonable little fortuitious purchase. but that just doesn't seem to be how things work out. at least, not today.