malvasia bianca

I am still looking for music recommendations. Several of the bloggers that I read occasionally recommend either individual artists or podcasts; since I seem to agree with said bloggers’ tastes in other matters, I usually give them a try. Alas, all such experiments have proved unsatisfactory. Fortunately, the artists that they recommend have sample songs […]

Translators, beware. Banana phone! Just in time for the primaries. No, we don’t need webcasting rights. Fun with flash. Um. Well.

I can’t wait to see how this turns out. Don’t get me wrong – the proposed law won’t leave us in an ideal situation, but I am glad to see a real stand for openness, and sensible penalties for making unauthorized personal copies. On a related note, I laughed at this quote from an interview […]

I was listening to Herbert Grönemeyer’s first two albums in the car today; as they always do, they reminded me of the game Trinity. It is by far the strongest association I have of any piece of music with any other work. (Other than soundtracks, of course.) Which is pretty weird – the two have, […]

I did not know about these.

I would seem to be quite the lucky fellow: I won another iPod at work. They asked us all to bang on the Sun Grid for a little while before its launch, to try to find some bugs; I did my banging, and my name was drawn out of a hat. About which I feel […]

I am juvenile enough to be amused by the phrase “his ancient vocal technique, known as ‘yoik’.” (From Gierran, by Wimme. The vocals are pretty interesting; I could have done without the decidedly non-ancient accompaniment, but Scott warned me when he lent it to me that he probably likes electronica more than I do.)

A followup to an old post of mine: I was just reading the liner notes to the Davitt Moroney recording of The Art of the Fugue, and it seems that there is good historical evidence that the unfinished fugue was, indeed, intended to be part of the work. Which makes me happy: it would feel […]

I don’t know if anybody cares, but here’s a longish John Lennon interview that I hadn’t seen before.

I’ve been celebrating my newfound freedom to listen to whatever the the hell I want by going through the oeuvre of Charming Hostess. At least most of their oeuvre; browsing through their website, it would seem that I am missing Thick and Grim. So maybe I’ll have a followup post next week. Anyways: I first […]

When I first moved out here (summer of 1998), I didn’t listen to music much. When I was at home, my media time was largely spent playing video games; sometimes I listened to CD’s in the car, but once Liesl learned to drive, I took the bus to work. (During which I read books. Which […]

I was just listening to Magical Mystery Tour; what a good album that is. I only got it a year or so ago, when I was rounding out my Beatles collection; somehow it had never entered my consciousness as one of the great Beatles albums. But it really is quite fine; I’d heard most of […]

I recently bought a 3-CD set of Beethoven’s late string quartets. (Performed by the Takacs quartet; quite good.) On my way into a meeting yesterday, I put in the third CD; before doing so, being somewhat geeky, I looked at the timings on the first few tracks; happily, the first four tracks, comprising the first […]

A while ago, I went looking for Cole Porter DVD’s; unfortunately, there wasn’t much available. (For all I know, not that many of his musicals ever made it on film.) I ended up with a five-movie box set, which sounded good until I started actually watching them. High Society is actually pretty good; I should […]

When I was looking for podcasts, I ended up going to iTunes and browsing the top rated ones. I found some that I like, but the best is the They Might be Giants podcast. Only one episode so far, but it’s really good; I should go and get more of their albums. Other podcasts I […]

Anybody have any good podcast recommendations? I’ve been listening to them for a few months now; the only ones that have stuck are agile toolkit, which can be very interesting but which doesn’t get updated very often, and the Mercury News video game podcast, which I enjoy but might well not listen to if I […]

I was just listening to a collection of Stan Freberg singles. Satirical musical comedy from the 1950’s; pretty good stuff, though it is, of course, somewhat dated. Reading through the booklet that came with the CD, though, it’s amazing how much pop culture we’ve lost from only a half-century ago. A few of us have […]

Ever since we went to see a musical version of A Little Princess, I’ve been on a Frances Hodgson Burnett reading kick. I never read any of her books when I was a kid, but now that I’m giving them a try, I really like the ones I’ve read four so far (A Little Princess, […]

Whenever you rip a CD with iTunes, it looks up information about the contents of the CD in Gracenote’s CDDB: as hard as it is to believe in this world of digital information, a CD contains no information about its contents other than the number and length of its tracks and, of course, the music […]

About a year ago, I started toying with the idea of getting an MP3 player: I’d recently taken up jogging (and I’m still doing it, a year later), and jogging is really boring. But after toying with the idea for a while, I gave it up, because none of the available players seemed to have […]