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.
:)

so ok, after my morning nap (see previous post), i was fired up to go to work and sort some stacks of paper.
i got up, took a shower, ate some food, checked my email, got ready to go, and left the house.
i felt kind of smart because i have been annoyed recently by carrying my full set of keys around wherever i go, so i put my house key on a little detachable chain, and i remembered to add my bike key to it because i was going to pick my bike up from in front of cafe pizzaria, where i left it on thursday afternoon.
so i fiddled with my keys, put on my headphones, and had a lovely walk into campus.
i climbed the stairs to my office, took a deep breath, got ready to hunker down for some serious sortation… and realized that i didn’t have the key to my office door.
this was immensely amusing to me, given that i joke with myself all the time about how something always keeps me from going to the office on saturday, no matter my intentions, and so it seemed fitting that i would decide to do something new with my keys on the day that i actually managed to make it to the door.

i decided to sit in the hallway and listen to the rest of the song that was playing because it made me happy, and this made me think about how awesome the personal music revolution really is. i have come to realize that my entire outlook on the world is bumped up like seventeen notches on the sunny scale when i’m walking around with my headphones on. the people that i pass seem beautiful, the storefronts seem charming, and the wind never seems quite as cold. i think it’s because good music sets the baseline state of my brain at “the human capacity for beauty is awe-inspiring”, and it’s just hard to get upset by stuff when i’m in that zone. the first time i realized this i had the thought that maybe the reason that the ipod and other mp3 players have gripped our culture so tightly is because they combat a lot of the forces that otherwise make us want to throw up walls between one another as we walk down the street. streets are crowded, people are busy, we’re running late, bums are asking for money, there are ads on the sides of buildings and buses, papers get shoved in our faces… even in bloomington it’s enough to make you feel a little overwhelmed, not to mention the way it feels in actual city cities. we need to step back a bit, so we carry around these little musical bubble worlds, personalized for our mood and tastes, and even though i know that people complain about headphones on the street as an isolating force, what strikes me is actually a deeper sense of feeling close together, and i’m not just talking about some kind of strange affinity with everyone because they all have the same frickin white cords dangling out of their pockets.

i’m talking about that moment when you’re listening to a song you haven’t heard in a while, or maybe one you’ve been immersed in all day, and one of the lyrics suddenly jumps out at you as the greatest thing you’ve ever heard. you are dumbstruck and swept away for a second, but then you snap back into the moment because the verse peaks just as some stranger in liz taylor glasses walking a shih-tzu smiles at you as she passes by, or a young family gets out of a minivan looking a little flustered and tired and you feel like you know them even though you’ve never seen them before, or a couple walks out of a restaurant and adjusts their leftovers so that they can hold hands as they walk away, and your heart does a little flipflop…
in these moments your own personal soundtrack, chosen from within your own little bubble, feels like the perfect match for the whole scene, and even though you know it’s irrational and silly, you get this sense that everyone fits together, and there’s nothing you can do but smile, rock your head from side to side, and mouth the words silently, hoping you don’t look too much like a crazy person but not really caring all that much because it just feels like the right thing to do, and surely everyone can see that.

or is that just me?
:)

anyway, i love it.
and i was feeling that way as i walked away from my office, grabbed my bike, and headed back home.
i decided that it would make me cranky to go back to the office, so i chose another task that i had been unsure when i would find time for – laundry!
and thus my day has evolved according to its own volition, ignoring my best laid plans.

shrug

perhaps it is because i enjoy such spontaneous reformulations of my answer to the question: “what am i doing today?” that i can never really get myself to take my schedules all that seriously.
i like to make plans, but i like it more when they change and i end up doing something better.
what can i say, i like being reminded that anything is possible.
:)

now i am at david’s house, where i am able to sit and launder and do work and benefit from his generosity in absentia, since he is in new york city for the weekend.
i’m a bit taken aback by the rapidly darkening sky, but i think i’ve managed to get quite a bit done, and the night is just beginning, so…

i am off to the store to equip myself for the upcoming week of home food preparation.
after that, i may play some pool, though i suppose i can never really say these things for sure…
;)

these lyrics just made me have a warm fuzzy for the english language:
“get used to the lonesome
you need to atone some
don’t leave me no phone numbers there”

-The Shins: Gone for Good, from Chutes too Narrow

i got an email today from wtts saying that they’re having a special john lennon day tomorrow, seeing as it’s the 25th anniversary of his death, and they asked for stories and thoughts from listeners that they may or may not use on the air or in some kind of online kumbaya exhibit. i don’t really care about that one way or another, but i Had been thinking some stuff over the past couple of days as the event made its way around the news, so i used the prompt as an excuse to write a bit. i went ahead and emailed it to them, and now i’m putting what i wrote here.

—-

i was only 1 year old when john lennon died, but i’ve grown up with the story of my mother’s memory of the moment that she heard the news. she was sitting in the bedroom, feeding me, and my dad came in to tell her. she was stunned, and overwhelmed, and sat crying and holding me tightly for a long time, thinking about the loss for the world and for me, who would now forever think of one of the most pivotal voices of her generation only in the past tense. somewhere along the line i got an image of her tears making their way into her milk, of my small self somehow grasping the sadness that my mother was feeling and drinking it in without really knowing what to make of it. looking back, i wonder how that story has affected my own relationship with john and the beatles as i have grown. i don’t really think that it penetrated my consciousness at the time – the memory is entirely constructed out of hearsay and i’m not even sure when i first began to formulate it. but it’s lodged in my brain now regardless of its authenticity, and the other day in the supermarket when i saw a magazine cover talking about the 25th anniversary of his death, it gave me pause. i think of the john that my mother mourned when i was a baby – a living, breathing, dynamic human being; and i think of the john that i have come to know – a voice and an image, a cultural icon, a continual reminder of a young, hopeful, courageous vision of the future that resonated with a lot of people, people who now continue to live and work to make their own visions as real as they can. i can see how it is sad that we will never get the chance to see who my mother’s john lennon would become, and i honor that memory and that grief, but i also feel grateful for the john lennon that i do know, and even for the ways that the shadow of his death has made meaningful impressions on the backdrop of my own life, only just beginning as his was cut short.
i am now right about the age that my mother was when the sorrow of john’s death moved her to tears.
i think i’ll take some time tomorrow, go sit outside on a bench somewhere, and watch some wheels go round and round.

i was reading this blog post this morning, which talks about the potential strengths that subscription-based music services have over ‘piecemeal’ song collection for a lot of people, and in the comments people talk about how two big downsides of subscription services are that the artist doesn’t get money directly and you don’t get to keep the music (so if the site goes down for some reason and you’ve invested hundreds of dollars over the years, you’re left SOL with only the sounds of silence (in non-musical form, of course)).
so first off, i wonder why the artist can’t get money directly – they can keep track of what people download, right? can’t they apportion the money relative to popularity? i thought they did that already anyway…
what i really wonder, however, is about something more like a rent-to-own service.
say you pay $30/month or whatever for your subscription service, but then in addition to your unlimited downloading rights you get a certain number of vouchers for “permanent” downloads. i don’t know how many you would really get. 5? 10? whatever, this is just hypothetical right now.
so you get these vouchers every month and they roll over like bonus points in a book club or something, and you can use them at any time to get your favorite songs in some more permanent (and potentially higher-quality) form.
so you get the benefits of the versatility and openness of the subscription service but you also get the chance to build up a library of the songs you actually listen to in case you have to go underground for a while. because this is the other point everyone makes – sure, it’s Nice to be able to access everything, but when it comes down to what you really Need, it’s not so much for most people. so a fraction of what you download every month would probably be sufficient over time. it would take a while to build up, but that would be something the companies would like because it would reward loyalty.
and it would take care of the whole paying the artists directly bit, too.

shrug

how bout it?