On Friday night, at around 10.30 in the evening, I checked High Violet on iTunes and discovered that the song names which had been greyed (non-purchasable) last time I looked were not solid and I downloaded on the spot, 4 days ahead of the official May 11 release. No idea how that worked, but maybsomeone just took pity on me. Of course, I will probably buy the CD (to actually have the damn thing for real), and could have downloaded as part of my eMusic subscription, but immediacy counts and now I have it. Obviously, I have ranted somewhat about it in recent weeks (see reviews and previews here and here) but for now I just want to live with it around me (in my car, my office and on a trip to the UK mid-week) for a while and then give my final review after it has settled down for good.
So, I won't dwell any more on it here, but have some other updates to talk about.
(Other) music
As a birthday present, I bought my wife some Natalie Merchant CDs and both came with quite beautiful packaging, as seen below for 'Leave your sleep'. I previously mused about the difference between the physical CD and the download here, in terms of how record companies need to offer something far more complete and differentiated in the package than the music itself to tempt me back to the record shop, and the Natalie Merchant CD is a gorgeous example of how to do it right, with care in the design and a collectors-item-quality total package. Haven't listened to the music yet, but that is not quite the point here!
Other downloads this week were by AA Bondy (I loved 'Mightiest of guns' on this month's Uncut CD but haven't listened to the album much yet), The Hold Steady (whose hold on me grows steadier each album, 'Sequestered in Memphis' now being on my all-time classic songs list), and Clogs (well, the National connection is pretty strong, although there is quite a contrast between sound of name and sound of songs so far, thankfully). I have also been listening a bit in the car to a Ryan Adams playlist I made a while back, for some reason. I will include the aforementioned AA Bondy song in a lovely version here:Another recent download is by John Grant, who was with the Czars, and this is him solo with Midlake as backing. The Czars released a number of albums which occasionally veered towards the MOR but always contained a few gems of literate orchestral pop, such as the gorgous 'Paint the moon', in an acoustic setting below:
Movies
Went to see 'Date night': I actually really enjoyed it, in a very throw-away way, and I do love Steve Carrell (big fan of the US office). I know the reviews were not great, but it was light and it made me laugh, and what else do you need!
Other main movie-related story of course is the introduction of movies to rent or download through iTunes. I noticed this earlier in the week, and then got an e-mail from Apple about it and saw an article in the Irish Times about it here. While I have certainly been thinking since I have started increasingly downloading games and books (e.g., through Steam and Kindle), the last bastion of hard copy (as I have never illegally downloaded a movie - honest!) is the DVD, but here it goes under threat.
First thoughts on the matter are as follows - the range is not great, the price is (in my view) too high, and what about the DVD extras (I know there are some [PC-bound] extras for some movies but can commentaries work this way?)? I do not see the small screen size too much of an obstacle, if you think more of using the iPod or iPhone as a player you can carry movies around on and hook to your TV set using the right leads, but another issue is that the memory will get pretty full with big movies (roll on the 64-GB iPhone I plan to queue all night to buy if necessary if it comes out during the summer).
All in all, not sure how much of a success this will be (remember UMD movies for the PSP and how big a hit they were?), but finally decided today to keep an open mind and download one movie ('Zombieland'), which took 3 hours through my PC. Will report later on my experiences when I watch it.
Gadgets
Had a fairly technologically frustrating week. iTunes asked me to load a new version (can't remember which) and then seemed to lose the plot of my collections completely. All music and playlists recovered fine, but lost all my podcasts (was able to recover from other PC and import, and would have been pissed off to lose ones like Ricky Gervais' which I had paid for), apps (but back-transferred from iPod, thankfully) and picked up every tiny video scrap from my PC into the movie library. Took quite a while to fix!
Then I realised just how dependent I was for games on Steam when the dam thing stopped working with an error message about something fatal and did not seem to recognise my username and password when I tried to log-in to the site. Got there eventually and had to delete most of my files in my Seam folder and reinstall, following instructions on the site, but the new version (presumably the changeover caused my problem) seems to have picked up my old games. More techo-aggo though, grrrrr!
Books
Still working through the lives of Crick and Cheney alternately. Interestingly, the biographer of the latter, who seemed very favourably disposed towards his subject at the start of the book, seems to be gradually distancing himself as his role in the Bush II administration develops.
TV
Started to watch 'The pacific' at last, and looks good although I rapidly lost track of who was who in the mud. Also thought it very very strange to include in the first episode what can only be seen as a reference played for laughs to the opening Omaha beach sequence from 'Saving private Ryan', where the approach by landing craft, the faces of the soldiers, the fear and vomiting, were all the same, but their actual arrival on a quiet beach with only US soldiers around seemed almost a punch-line compared to the earlier scene of carnage that ensued. Is it just me or is this in very strange taste?
Otherwise, the most amazing thing I saw on TV the last few weeks (or in many weeks) was this act on (abashedly as I say it) Britain's got talent. I surprised myself a few weeks ago by including paintings in this blog, but I genuinely never saw me including clips of mad gymnastics, but this is quite simply incredible and jaw-dropping stuff (see it here).
On that surreal note, enough for today!
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