um, hi there…
i have no excuse for not keeping everyone updated on my exploits over the past month, apart, i suppose, from the exploits themselves, which have kept me rather busy.

but that’s pretty lame.

i am writing today from palm beach gardens, FL, where i have spent the holidays with my mother and grandmother, and actually, i don’t have any updates for you beyond that skeletal announcement, sooo… maybe i should skip this part and go with more of a distraction-oriented technique…

is that a new sweater you’re wearing? because the color really suits you. you look ten years younger. i hardly recognize you. in fact, have we met? i think you need to send me your bank account information and the last four digits of your SSN, just so i can be sure you’re really who you say you are… and by the way i’m going to tahiti next week, can i send you a postcard?

:)

(don’t really send anything, grandma…

…but i’ll still send a postcard)

ok so anyway, a year ago i wrote a post describing a potential new end-of-year tradition - the compilation of a playlist; a soundtrack of sorts for the year gone by; a record, as i put it at the time, of “the songs that happened to stand out for me in a given year, be they new discoveries or old favorites that are somehow heard anew.”

i like this idea for lots of reasons, not the least of which that i have always found the compilation of mixes to be hella fun, and it turns out that picking out songs that trigger memories of the key events of the year gone by is a very enjoyable activity with quite a bit of reflective potential, so… good new year’s game! i did it again!

this year, however, i finally abandoned all pretense of ever intending to actually burn the finished product onto CD, and as a result there was no very strong incentive to limit my choices to a number that would fit easily within the memory requirements of antiquity. whether that led to a bloat of laziness or a blossoming of potential i shall leave for you to decide, but, whatever the verdict, if you decide to play along i shall increase your mp3 collection by 44 units, so i hope that there are at least one or two selections that help you kick off the year with a smile.

fwiw, 6 of the songs are actually the movements of one cello suite, so that kind of skews the tally, and in a few cases there are several songs in a row because they have been inseparably fused together in my memory as components of some pastiche of imagery and sound that i heard in my head at one point or another during the year, but have not yet fully discovered how to translate into this shared domain we know as the physical world. that is quite possibly a project for the year ahead, so… stay tuned for volume 3! :)

as it is, i offer you my year in music, 2007, zipped up for less frustrating downloading (but still passively time-intensive… go read someone else’s blog! drink tea!), ordered with one ear to a rough chronology and the other to pacing and flow. whether any of it shines through the cracks of my tinkering or not, i hear a story when i listen to these songs, and i am privileged to have the chance to share that story now with you.

enough words.

January-July.zip
August-December.zip

happy new year.

so for a long time i was annoyed with itunes because there was so much more i wanted to do with playlist management… and there still is.

but recently i find myself doing something very interesting that i must grant is only possible with the ginormous always-there library that is itunes trademark, and that is this:

i think of a song or album i want and type in a keyword to trim the list down - like “river” or “hotel” - and then i listen to the song i was after, but when it’s done i listen to all the other songs that came up, too. it’s kind of like getting a themed shuffle playlist, but the theme can be like “songs with the letter ‘g’ in them.”

once i realized i was doing this, i started having fun with it, and sometimes i just type in a random word, or i take the word i was going for and erase a few letters to see what happens. like just now i typed in “great” because that’s my new favorite way to get all of david’s gift of the greatest jazz recordings of all time while also getting other good songs for kicks, but then i scaled back even further to “gre”, and as a result my playlist now has songs, albums, and artists with “green” in their name and, for some reason i don’t understand, all of OK Computer.

people wonder how we will slice and dice our music when we are perpetually confronted with a full lifetime library. so there’s my random data point for the anthropological record. :)

i took very few pictures at bonnaroo.

sorry.

my camera was running low on batteries, they didn’t want them inside centeroo (where the musics was) anyway, and i was focused on other matters, so…

here’s the view from our tent when i woke up friday morning:

those are just a handful of the homes of the 80,000+ people who descend upon the otherwise deserted tennessee farm for three days of chaos and music.

and here’s me, after walking around all day friday, and acquiring a new piece of headwear to protect me from the sun. because no one wants to put on as much sunscreen as would be required to actually prevent blistering. so i decided to enlist material support. by sunday? i was wearing long sleeves. place was like a desert. heat and dust and tons of people higher than kites and in desperate need of hydration. fun times.

here’s my short list of highlights from the weekend:

• meeting our underage friendly neighbors from connecticut, one of whom used “phatty” at least ten times a sentence, as a general descriptor of the awesomeness of the universe entire.
• being able to loan an extra tent to the people a few cars down from us who were missing their poles. good karma from hour one.
• seeing richard thompson and feeling time stop and texting jeff when vincent black lightning was playing.
• john paul jones came out and played mandolin with gillian welch and david rawlings. it was an awesome moment. but honestly? she was super cool all on her own.
• renee taught me to play some card game with gold involved, and i could do it!
• regina spektor and damien rice both kept me wrapped around their adorable, beautiful, charming, subtle, sweet, nuanced fingers, even though some would say i should have gone to hear ziggy marley and ben harper. i don’t regret it.
• sting on a big screen with 50,000 screaming onlookers is indeed impressive.
• the flaming lips are a joy to behold. and dance to. with no restraint. and bonnaroo is brilliant because there are so few places on this earth where one can walk from the flaming lips to gov’t mule to sasha and john digweed all within the space of a night and then strike back to your tent with the sun coming up and the world feeling like a glorious marvel.
• at one point some jokester walked by us muttering under his breath “plutonium!! weapons-grade!! depleted uranium!!” as a commentary on the black market. it was amusering.
• bobby weir was there, and a bunch of hippies who came only for him. it was awesome. he played come together. and we did.
• many of the not hippies were there for widespread panic, about whom i knew very little. they put on a damn fine show. consider me schooled by the younguns. ;)
• i made two new friends of rather different stripes, but i hope to remain in touch with them both.
• as we were packing the car, we learned that our neighbors had never heard of hair. the musical i mean. we played it. they laughed. it was the campiest scene Ever. and awesome.
• on the way out, we groundscored a baby pool for jarien, a couple buckets, a sleeping mat, a decent pair of boots, a bunch of stuff i did not even process but renee found room for somehow, and, i kid you not, a four-foot tall red stuffed animal with a cardboard sign around it’s neck that proclaims: “Feed the Dragon!”

so quite the weekend, eh?
:)

on with the show!

right after i published that last post, the crystal ball that is shuffle offered up one of my favorite ani difranco songs, a song that speaks of both mothers and moving beyond anger, and the fact that it has already been a musical day here at the K-log and this one is offered up (up, up, up…) by one of the most well-known icons of feminism in the musical world, well…

it seems a fitting way to put the day to bed.

Ani DiFranco - Angry Any More

now really, i’ll shut up for a bit.

since many of you probably didn’t get to the bottom of my rambly year in music post, today i am going to relink to one of the songs, because i clicked on it in my itunes this morning because of the name, and then i remembered how happy it makes me, and now i want everyone to run around the house making trumpet noises with their mouths and half-whispering “he gets a little jumpy when the PHONE rings!”

because if that doesn’t make your day, then i’ve got nothin else to offer.

Hey Momma - Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground

Go a little crazy and love both your momma and yourself.

this is the kind of high-quality sap that youtube was made to deliver to a wider audience.

it’s a cover of coldplay’s “fix you” by the Young@Heart chorus, a group in Northampton, MA that is composed entirely of senior citizens and apparently tours around and gets NEA grants and stuff.

talk about schmaltzy, but i am always interested in things that are good schmaltz, because knowing what pulls our heartstrings can teach us a lot.

let’s just say this song was very well chosen.

for the curious, this link was brought to me via this blog, which, fwiw, is the blog that most makes me wish that feedreaders imported stylesheets. it’s purty.

so a few years ago i made a cover song compilation that has since become somewhat notorious amongst my friends. its notoriety is not because of its contents, but because i totally dropped the ball on delivering it, even though i had hyped the whole thing up quite a bit, so for most people it was a rather vicious tease.

the trouble was that i got sucked into grand plans of liner notes and cover art that made the whole project take much longer than necessary, and then when it was finished the poor thing had to contend with me looking up addresses, finding packaging, and going to the post office, which are all activities that i tend to find difficult in a degree that is far out of proportion with reality.

my resistance was hopefully understandable, therefore, when in the midst of this cover project i conceived of aNother cd project - not of cover songs, but of the songs that happened to stand out for me in a given year, be they new discoveries or old favorites that are somehow heard anew.

it seemed like a fun alternative to a christmas letter, since it would be a similar sort of “year that was”, but it would then also have the bonus of performing a function other than the justification of the existence of the refrigerator magnet.

not that magnet support is not a noble function; it’s just already a pretty full market.

it was a masterstroke of procrastination, really, even though it was trying to sneak by in generosity’s clothing. my brain wanted to prolong the fun of picking and ordering songs indefinitely, so it decided to conceive of a lifelong ambition rather than admit that the first cd was done and prepare it for mailing.

i really am rather insane.

i scolded myself and put the idea aside with the intention of returning to it later, but since the cover story fizzled out and thinking about it makes me tired and guilty, the “year of songs” idea has suffered by association.

this year, however, i started considering it again while i was traveling, and probably because overseas postage made my desire to avoid a massive mailing seem reasonable rather than embarrassing, i kept thinking about it, and decided that i would just make it a blog post, and then maybe there will be enough momentum that i will be motivated to make a cd version next year.

or maybe cds won’t exist next year…

heh heh

as it happens, given the combined impact of lucy’s amazing card sending habits and the fact that i got a christmas card from jeff and shaowen and i didn’t even give them my address, i am considering making the hanging up of my postal hangup into a new year’s resolution, so perhaps those cover cds will be on their way yet.

while me and the resolution board sort that one out, though, the “just put it out there” action committee is proud to offer you kynthia’s year in music, 2006.

despite their longing to be free, a concession to the unresolved nature of the intellectual property debate will lead me to return the songs to the captivity of private ownership after ONE WEEK ONLY - that is through January 9, 2007, after which only the links endorsed by the artists themselves will remain, and you’ll have to ask itunes or napster or some music getting elves if you missed the train.

that means i’m taking the songs down next tuesday, a’ight?

if you made it on time, and you’re using firefox like a good monkey, you might want to check out the flashgot extension if you don’t have it already. it downloads all the links on the page, so you don’t have to.

once it’s installed, i recommend going to tools->flashgot->more options->downloads and putting mp3 in the box, because then it will only get the mp3 files, which saves you the hassle of deleting a bunch of crap that you really don’t want.

if that sounds too complicated, just do whatever makes you happy. :)

happy listening, and happy new year!

Kynthia’s Year in Music, 2006

In January I decided that I wasn’t allowed to ride my bike with my new mp3 player and super-duper headphones. I knew that I was smitten when I then found myself walking to class even when the roads were clear and dry.

1. This Heart is a Stone - Acid House Kings
2. Say - Cat Power
3. Blow - Lincoln

In February, at F&L, David sang scat with his eyes shut tight and his hands in the air, Erik built a dance party out of mad skillz and honeybells, and the Beatles revealed new secrets to me early in the morning. Each of them reminded me in turn of why and how much I love them.

4. Minnie the Moocher - West End Orchestra and Singers (Blues Brothers Soundtrack)
5. Let’s Get Retarded - Black Eyed Peas
6. Carry that Weight/The End - The Beatles

In the spring and early summer I stared the reality of graduation in the face and buckled down to conjure a capstone from the scattered trail of post-it notes, sketches and grandiose visions that had been accumulating in my wake all year. In the midst of the whirlwind, Moby mysteriously became the soundtrack for Dunn Woods at dusk, Josh Ritter centered me as I floundered in the effort to express something so big that I could barely glimpse how it held together, Fiona Apple was a gift from Erik as we made our pact to present something every day even when we sounded like lunatics, and, before it was anywhere and everywhere, Crazy secured its place in my memory as a video in I107 as we procrastinated, a joyous shout from Lucy as we shared 1/2 price wine, and a drunken singalong anthem on moonlit backroads and train tracks leading home from the Vid as spring bled into summer and we struggled valiantly against the weight of what was to come.

7. Stop Whispering - Radiohead
8. Underwear Goes Inside the Pants - Lazyboy TV
9. Freshman Thesis - Thee More Shallows
10. Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad - Moby
11. Thin Blue Flame - Josh Ritter
12. Waltz - Fiona Apple
13. Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part One) - Pink Floyd
14. Crazy - Gnarls Barkley

Summer hit full force, but it took a while for the idea that I had finished a Masters’ Degree to sink in. In the meantime, I went to St. Louis to eat ribs and climb on old airplanes, and drove to Tennessee to go desitively bonnaroo. Then I set off on my solo trek down the eastern seaboard that would lead eventually to Scotland and 6 months across the sea.

15. Fake Plastic Trees - Radiohead
16. Bastard - Ben Folds
17. Masterfade - Andrew Bird
18. Another Mystery - Dar Williams
19. And it Rained All Night - Thom Yorke

In Edinburgh there was a lot of music, but it was such a whirlwind that the only thing that really sticks in my mind is some guys with didgeridoos and bagpipes, and I don’t have a recording of them. The Hollytree, on the other hand, was a dive into the pop charts as we sought ways to fill the hours and connect to the world from which we were otherwise isolated by miles that might as well have been oceans. Tania took this more seriously than the rest of us by singing something ALL of the time, even if words or spoons were thrown in her direction. Some things will never leave our heads as a result. :)

20. Mr. Jones - Counting Crows (”caught up in kentallen… show me some of that ceilidh dancing…”)
21. Hips Don’t Lie - Shakira
22. America - Razorlight
23. Falling Stars - Sunset Strippers

I’m rounding the year off in London, with a lot of alone time. It has given me the chance to catch up on 3hive recommendations from the past few months, and, as always, a few of them are like old friends I am overjoyed to finally meet. In true “one is silver and the other’s gold” fashion, however, Michael Stipe made his way onto the playlist by chance and stayed there, so he gets a nod as well.

24. You are the Everything - R.E.M.
25. You Never Got Me Right - Frida Hyvonen
26. George -First Coat
27. Hey Momma - Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground
28. Words - Evan Duby

In many ways, Andrew Bird is the artist of my year (buy this whole album!), so he deserves another even if it disturbs my roughly chronological ordering, which I am honestly surprised that I followed, but it’s fun and actually flows quite well.

Luckily, this song strikes me as a very fitting theme for the year as a whole, so I can think of no better way to wrap things up.

29. Tables and Chairs - Andrew Bird

Enjoy!

i be downloading music
and listening to it
and writing a longer blog post
and keeping that convivio paper open on another desktop so that i remember to work on it next
and probably something else that i forgot about, given the number of windows that are open…

can one be doing something that one has forgotten one is doing?

i think the answer is yes.

anyway, i figure i’ll push my sweet, sweet gig of RAM a bit further, in the name of replying to a post harsh wrote a whiles back, because it led me to think of him when i heard this a few days later.

so everybody get up and dance, whatever the weather.

i mean it!

california dreamin’_the royal gigolos.mp3

some words on itunes
downloading singles makes it less likely that we’ll wade through the rest of albums, and discover the gems therein

smart playlists not smart enough

library too big

stupid with external files

i’m ripping a few cds that i’ve had in a pile for a while, which is a good background activity for the mindnumbing data crunching that i need to do for my infovis project.

as i get to a väsen cd that i bought at lotus last year, i feel a surge of gratitude for cddb, (or more accurately in this case, for freedb).
this gratitude is not a new sensation, but it is made all the richer by the awareness that, were it not for the generosity of some programmers who came before me, i would have to type things like Polska på övervåningen, which, while amusing for the diacritical showboating that it allows me to do while writing about it here, would nevertheless grow tiresome after a while, i fear…

i feel that all my posts lately have been sheer fluff, despite the fact that there is much on my mind…
hopefully i’ll do something about that soon.

but not now.
:)