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.

i ain't got nothing to be scared of

i remember when the last yo la tengo album came out. rabi and i had just broken up for the first time, and i bought it for her. i had a promo copy which i'd been listening to a lot, and it was doing me some good. i wanted to burn her a copy but she said she'd end up buying it anyway so i just bought it for her instead, at spaceboy records (which has since moved down the street, and which is closing shop for good tomorrow), the night it came out, when i was on south street, with liza, to see the reunited joe jackson band at the TLA. i never purchased a full-art copy for myself, because i preferred the artwork that i made out of a magazine ad for the album plus the throwaway outer cover of rabi's copy (with a construction paper beach ball under the cd on the tray card.) anyway, summer sun's comforting glowy warmth notwithstanding, rabi and i were both so miserable that we were back together within a week.

critical consensus to the contrary, i think it's just as lovely as anything (or possibly everything) else they've done. which is a lot of albums, many of which i've picked up used here or there over the years (my first encounter with them was and then nothing... which i ordered from BMG my freshman year.) i'm pretty sure that makes this the first YLT album i've ever bought new, full-price: i am not afraid of you and i will beat your ass.

i didn't buy it right away. well-documented fandom notwithstanding, the first time i saw it on the counter at a.k.a. i balked at the cover image. (audibly.) yeah, it's really ugly. and the title is, well, very silly, at best. at worst, they're at least sending a clear message.

which is not about the music. obviously they care about the music. now i'm listening to it.....well, it's good. it's not like i had any worries that it wouldn't be good. not really any illusions that it would be incredible. (though i'd be happy to be proven wrong.) yo la don't really do incredible, they just do always, consistently, very, very, unimpeachably good. i can't say much more about this album: it will take time to sink in, and i plan to listen to it a lot in the background as i make my way through war and peace. if that doesn't work maybe i'll try the tortoise box set. (i need a good excuse to pick that up - maybe it can be the reward if i finish w+p in a month.)



YO. what is going to be my favorite album this year? i don't know. there's nothing obvious, nothing that's grabbed me like think tank or the sunset tree, or funeral. or satanic panic even. (or oh inverted world or figure 8, but obv.) it's not that i haven't really gotten into any albums. as previously mentioned, many of those have been discoveries of records from a year or two ago. (ashlee, rachel, robyn.) but no one album has stuck with me all that strongly - i have no idea what my most listened-to albums from this year would be, for instance.

condensed listening report - recent favorites and strong contenders: Girl Talk, Paris Hilton, Matmos. the Junior Boys album i picked up today as well (was going to buy it new but spotted a used copy - a promo, but with most of the art), and it is excellent, much better than their concert last week...but i'll need to spend some time with it of course. I've been listening to the Pet Shop Boys album a good deal, actually. and the Daedelus, which didn't do much initially, is growing on me. from earlier in the year, the Veronicas and the Strokes still command soft places in my heart, and i'm going to need to revisit the Neko Case and Howe Gelb and Cat Power records. James Hunter is still a cool dood. i watched the two Camera Obscura videos on YouTube today, and the songs sounded better than ever. i still want to hear the Rihanna, Justin, Beyonce, Christina, and Lily albums, though i don't expect to especially love any of them as albums. the Lupe Fiasco toons i've dled sound quite nice. to beef up the selection pool, i've ordered, largely unheard, albums by the Ark and Scanners, both of which come highly recommended from friends. so we'll keep seeing. as for Get Lonely... it's nice too.

and Yo La Tengo? whoa, they're kicking it in now! time for bed, eh?