Is somewhat lame. Not the concept - again, it's just more stretching the my media, whenever i want it concept, which I'm a big fan of. But a whole term for it.. really, it's a bit over the top. Now if this was just a little widget you attached to your ipod and you were getting your subscriptions wirelessly while out and about, that would be worthy of a whole new term.

But just downloading mp3s from a website and then transferring them to your ipod, and giving it a funky name... well, that's just being precious now, isn't it?

Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to listening to Left, Right and Center today at the gym, courtesy of KCRW's "podcasts". I'm assuming it'll have the commercials included... which just means that the next version of the iPod needs a TIVO style quick 30 second skip hack.

(EDITED - no commercials! extended crap jazz music, true, but no commercials! surely that can't last...)

I'm most excited that it's Friday because it means I can go to the grocery store later tonight and it won't be crowded.

Yesterday was Ghost in the Machine... definately my favorite. Good enough, in fact, that I think I need to revisit my top 10 albums of all time. It's really dark and deep... the recording quality has the great dark airyness about it that is really intense. Opens up with Spirits in the Material World, fantastic... Every Little Thing She Does is Magic is a gorgeous pop song, still a bit melancholy... Invisible Sun, fantastic. A bit of a drop off in quality for the next few tracks, but none so hideous I'd get rid of them. Hungry for You and Demolition Man are pretty throwaway but fit the vibe of the album... Too Much Information musically kind of blows but I like the lyrics... Rehumanize Yourself, much the same, but a bit weaker. One World (Not Three) is a little too strident and certainly points the way to future Sting excesses... but all is forgiven as we head into the final three, Omegaman, Secret Journey and Darkness. I could listen to just those three on repeat forever, as the world crashes around me. Awesome.

Today was Synchronicity, which is probably one of the biggest albums ever. Somehow I made it through while putting a new exercise plan into play courtesy of my trainer... in between the tears of pain and agony, I gave it a listen. It's certainly good... but the hits were so huge it's hard not to feel you've heard them a few too many times. Sting has the songwriting thing down at this point, top of his game. It's a shame about Mother... a nod back to the wretched filler tracks of the past, this never should have been on the album. Miss Gradenko is one of my favorite album tracks they've done though... and then you're stomping right into the hits, heavily weighted at the end of the album. Every Breath You Take to King of Pain to Wrapped Around Your Finger. Classic songs, each and every one of them, and really... they're pretty fucking dark and deep for a hit song. You won't hear Britney or Avril singing lines like those anytime soon. After being beat over the head by those three, you get Tea in the Sahara, which is breathtakingly beautful, and you end on a bit of a flat note with Murder by Numbers. Oh well.

What have I learned? That the Police were a really, really dark group. Existential lonliness and anxiety pervade most of their songs. No wonder I liked them so much.

Think I'm a bit over-stung at the moment though... going to take the weekend off before delving into the solo stuff.

think i'm going to take the weekend off

Yesterday's listening was Zenyetta Mondatta... the last of the silly names albums. Thus begins the serious alienation and darkness, and when I start to like the "filler" over the singles. Opens up with Don't Stand So Close to Me, which is a great song, and then just starts getting really depressing. In a good way. Driven to Tears, When The World is Running Down... even the more upbeat musically songs like Canary in a Coalmine have pretty dark lyrical content. Check out these lyrics:

The President looks in the mirror and speaks
His shirts are clean but his country reeks
Unpaid bills
In Afghanistan hills

Written in 2005? No, from "Bombs Away", 1980. Some things never change.

Anyway... a few grips when listening straight through. De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da was a big hit, and it's a fun song... but it sounds like it's beamed in from another planet compared to the rest of the album, and it's sequencing just throws off the whole vibe. Behind My Camel is a really crap instrumental and never should have seen the light of day - the only reason I can see for it being there is a transition from "De Do.." back into the general bleakness of the rest of the album, but that's not quite what happens - we go into "Man in a Suitcase", which is another throwaway song that probably shouldn't have been in there. Finally, we get Shadows in the Rain, which is good but Sting did a much better version of solo a few years on... and the Other Way of Stopping, which is a pretty kick ass instrumental. I would have dropped that right after De Do and ended with Shadows, but that's just me.

Yesterday was album 2, Regatta de Blanc.. white reggae. oh dear. not the biggest fan of reggae music but the album really is incredible. opens up with message in a bottle, probably one of my favorite songs of all time. main thing i noticed listening to the whole album is stewart copeland's drumming... he's simply amazing. boom boom de whap boom boom whap. all over the place. stunning, really... hard not to focus on it. Bring on the night, another great song... i used to love it so much i named a bbs i ran when i was twelve after it. Now, twenty years on, i'm being paid to build very similar community sites for bands. If we had gotten the sting site, that would have been a full circle. strange.

Walking on the moon... bed's too big without you. great songs, really moving away from any lingering punk impact and embracing straight forward pop/rock songwriting. No Time This Time is killer, Does Everyone Stare could be a bauhaus b-side. Still a lot of throwaway filler tracks, but listening to it now, you can hear almost every major indie band of the late 80s and 90s in them.

Great night tonight... skeely came back from his tucson trip, and we hadn't really hung out for awhile since he was doing a bunch of production gigs for a good week or two prior to that. Headed down to Finn's to knock back a few... and they were closed! They shot a beer commercial there all day, and production was tearing down and whatnot. Shit. Now what? No worries... it's good to have a local. Our friendly neighboorhood bar owner let us in to hang out and enjoy the festivities, as we poured our own beer and lit up the smokes. A good time was had by all.... ahh... if only every night could be so pleasant. of course, i should have been at home working on my 42 minute opus, but there you go. no fun makes brian a very dull boy.

I'm doing at least an hour a day at the gym or riding a bike or whatever these days, and I've really been running out of things to listen to. Or at least finding it difficult to pick something... so today I'm embarking on a new project. There are a number of bands that I pretty much own the entire recorded output for, and obviously I like them quite a bit. So I'm going to attempt to listen to their entire recorded output, in chronological order, while exercising. Why? Why not. See how the bands that I love have evolved, watch the progression in songwriting, etc.

I thought I'd start with the Police, simply because "Ghost in the Machine" was the first tape I ever purchased for myself, Sting's "Nothing Like the Sun" the first CD, Sting on the "Dream of the Blue Turtles" tour, my first concert. The first band I ever really got into.

So today I loaded up the iPod with "Message in a Box", the complete Police boxset, as well as all the Sting albums. I'm leaving live concerts and bootlegs out of the mix at the moment; that would just be overwhelming, particularly when I get to the Cure. I'm including Sting because he's obviously continued to develop as a songwriter (more on that below), but not Andy Summers or Stewart Copeland's solo work because, well, I want to follow the main songwriting thread.

No guarentees I'll make it all the way through Sting's solo work, because, frankly, the last few albums have been wretched.

Anyway, today I hit the elliptical and make it through most of the first Message in a Box disc. All the pre-first album singles and the first album, "Outlandos D'Amour". Impressions? they were pretty fucking punk rawk on the first few singles; interesting to hear Sting screaming "fuck" and "cunt". Outlandos is a pretty decent album as well; they'd definately embrassed musicality and pop sensibilities in time for the album. Next To You, So Lonely and Can't Stand Losing You are all great songs... and I love Hole in My Life. But there's definately some serious filler... a habit they were to keep for all their albums. Be My Girl - Sally has a great melody, but the fucking stupid-ass spoken word part is just wretched beyond belief.

Still, overall, the album has stood up pretty well... it sounds very dated, but in a Clash/Sex Pistols/late 70s guitar rock way, which is ok. Nothing classic here (well, maybe Roxanne was until Sting pimped it out) but you can tell there's something pretty serious happening here.

Tomorrow I'll be starting off with second album Regatta de Blanc, which I'm looking forward to it. I used to really love that album and haven't listened to it in years.

Ooh... just noticed the last entry was entry #666. Sweet.

Anyway... I've got all this music I'm supposed to be writing for the big buffalo festivals in june and i haven't done squat... been blocked and not really interested, plus there's just a ton of day job stuff to be doing. Got a call from Robby yesterday who just dropped an additional nugget on me - a long ambient piece that will play in the main hall at the Albright Knox. Great. More stuff to do.

But it did seem to be just what I needed to get started. A long ambient piece means no need for structure so it was easy to just start playing around, and next thing I knew it was around 1am. Ended up with about 14 minutes of almost finished stuff and some sketches that should fill out the rest of the piece, and I really like it. I'm going to shoot for exactly 42 minutes and call it "life, the universe and everything." or "thanks for all the fish". not sure which yet. going to get back to it this afternoon...

I'm on my second week of attempting to hack/install/smack some piece of crap software into submission. It's not going well. It'll be great if it does actually work. But my hair is going grey and my stomach is in constant pain.

On a lighter note, I made the mistake of showing Wendy how to control the wireless music library, mainly because i was sick of getting emails telling me she didn't like the song i was playing. So now the entire neighborhood is being treated to a selection of White Stripes songs. Very, very loudly.

isn't it great when you purchase a product and find out it's a fucking hacked up mess?

and you don't have any more time to do anything else?

so you have to spent the entire night hacking away at shit and attempting to get it to work the way it said it would?

yay. i'm sure i'll still be up come sunrise.

wen's off doing her thing again and i've had next to no human contact for two days. skeely and ej have been working and almost everyone else i know is out of town. even karl buggered off to maui for the week. this feels like payback for the past few years of having a hell of a lot of fun. sit and work, all day long.

going to take off for the rest of the night and watch a movie or two. i didn't even have human contact for the movies... they came via netflix.

tomorrow, i might even do some music instead of just working and going to the gym. how nice that might be.

wah, wah.

reading, listening, watching. seems i get around to it once every few months.

It's all shiny and white and they're beautiful concepts. But should I really need to fucking reboot and reconfigure my goddamn airport express at least once a day to play music wirelessly?

Going to see Eddie Izzard tonight. Colored me excited! It would appear to be witty englishman week here in fungusland...