"For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts..." (2Tim3:16)

Ever since I first paid attention to it, I've been gently ragging on "Baby, It's Cold Outside" as "the date-rape Christmas carol." I got into yet another argument about this with kukla_tko42 at a party Friday night, so I figured I'd write up my case for it. Mind you, I still rather like the song. It's one of the best jazz duets ever composed and arranged. And it's really more of a parody of seduction and date rape than a celebration of it. To take it too seriously is to fall into the kind of trap where you'd label "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" as a pro-drunk-driving Christmas carol. That being said, let's take a look at the lyrics. But first, I have to label the parts. The alto (?) part is labeled, in Frank Loesser's original arrangement, "The Mouse," and the baritone part, "The Wolf." The Mouse leads off, and is interrupted near the end of each of her lines by The Wolf. So following the usual convention for displaying this song, I'll put The Wolf's part in parentheses. And I've taken the liberty of numbering the lines.

1. I really can't stay. (Baby, it's cold outside.)
   
2. I've got to go 'way. (But baby, it's cold outside.)
   
3. This evening has been ... (Been hoping that you'd drop in.)
   
4. So very nice. (I'll hold your hands, they're just like ice.)
   
   
5. My mother will start to worry. (Beautiful, what's your hurry?)
   
6. And father will be pacing the floor. (Listen to that fireplace roar.)
   
7. So really I'd better scurry. (Beautiful, please don't hurry.)
   
8. Well, maybe just a half a drink more. (Put some records on while I pour.)
   
   
9. The neighbors might think ... (Baby, it's bad out there.)
   
10. Say, what's in this drink? (No cabs to be had out there)
    
11. I wish I knew how ... (Your eyes are like starlight now.)
    
12. To break the spell. (I'll take your hat, your hair looks swell.)
    
    
13. I ought to say no, no, no sir. (Mind if I move in closer?)
    
14. At least I'm gonna say that I tried. (What's the sense of hurtin' my pride?)
    
15. I really can't stay ... (Baby, don't hold out.)
    
16. Ah, but it's cold outside.
    
    
17. I simply must go. (But baby it's cold outside.)
    
18. The answer is no! (I say that it's cold outside.)
    
19. The welcome has been ... (How lucky that you dropped in.)
    
20. So nice and warm. (Look out the window at that storm!)
    
    
21. My sister will be suspicious. (Gosh, your lips look delicious ...)
    
22. My brother will be there at the door. (Like waves upon a tropical shore.)
    
23. My maiden aunt's mind is vicious. (Gosh, your lips sure are delicious.)
    
24. Well, maybe just a cigarette more. (Never such a blizzard before.)
    
    
25. I've got to go home. (Baby, you'll freeze out there.)
    
26. Say, lend me your comb. (It's up to your knees out there.)
    
27. You've really been grand ... (I thrill when you touch my hand.)
    
28. But don't you see? (How can you do this thing to me?)
    
    
29. There's bound to be talk tomorrow. (Think of my lifelong sorrow ...)
    
30. At least there will be plenty implied. (If you caught pneumonia and died.)
    
31. I really can't stay ... (Get over that hold-out.)
    
32. Duet: Oh but it's cold ... out ... side!

Now, one of the oldest complaints that I've heard about this song is, "Why in the heck is this considered a Christmas song?" After all, it made its film debut, if not its recording debut, in a movie that had absolutely nothing to do with Christmas. It won the Oscar for best song in a comedy or musical for 1949's Neptune's Daughter, an Esther Williams film starring a very young Ricardo Montalban. But it pretty much has to be a Christmas song, because it's the only plausible explanation for what The Mouse is doing in The Wolf's bachelor apartment. He's in the city, living alone: he pretty much has to be a married man who's staying in his bachelor apartment for the night because either the late hour made him miss his train or the blizzard has stopped it. And for an unmarried woman, one still living at home (lines 5-6,21-23) to be inside a bachelor apartment at any time at all is scandal enough to cost any guy who has a bachelor apartment his job. Any time, that is to say, other than Christmas, where visiting people to convey holiday greetings and to drop off cards or presents for the family is a tradition that's older than Christmas itself.

The song's clearly meant as an amusingly rendered seduction. And seduction is controversial enough in and of itself. Up until only about a decade and a half ago, it was still a prosecutable crime in some states. And even shorn of the sexist legal principles aimed at protecting a father's financial interest in his daughter's virginity, there are still people who want seduction to be a prosecutable crime now. You don't hear as much about it the last few years (the war has been a substantial distraction), but you may recall that there are those who would extend the definition of rape to any act of sex where it wasn't both people's idea to start with. There are those who say that it is sufficiently difficult to draw the line between persuasion and coercion that there's no point in doing so, when it comes to sex. So that she says "no" specifically twice in the song (lines 13 & 18) and he keeps leaning on her to persuade her makes it, in no few people's eyes, rape whether she says yes later or not, and especially if she just fails or declines to say no one last time at the end of the song. Why not? Because, the theory goes, if he refuses to take "no" for an answer, how freely is her "yes" given? How certain can she be that a guy who hasn't taken "no" for an answer will draw the line at verbal persuasion? Note that her bargaining position is terrible, too. The song title, and repeated line, suggests that she's in substantial danger if she says no.

But if that doesn't clinch it, take a closer look at lines 8 to 12. To stall for time, or because she's flustered, or to get him off of the couch that is almost certainly the only piece of furniture in the room, she asks for a drink. And not long enough later to have taken more than a sip, she asks suspiciously what's in it. And her next two lines are about being unable to "break this spell," and the line after that says that she's trying to say "no" and can't. Even if the drink's just alcohol, remember that there are places where the law is that a partner who is inebriated cannot legally consent to sex, that sex with an inebriated partner is rape. But how sure are we, in the context of the song, that there wasn't anything in there but booze? If nothing else, it's obviously a whole lot stronger than she's used to being served. How does this color her concession (which, I note, still doesn't include the word "yes") in the last line?

Now, I know where Kukla gets her interpretation from. The first version she heard, and the one that she still considers definitive, is the very popular recording of it with Ray Charles and Betty Carter. And in the Betty Carter version, there's no doubt from the way that she vamps it that she made her mind to have sex with Ray Charles' character before she even came up to the apartment, that she's just trying to preserve her reputation by pretending to put up a fight. There's another classic recording, by Dean Martin and I forget whom, where the (somewhat obscure) female singer vamps her part so much that it's clear that her interpretation is even farther in the same direction than Betty Carter's. She's clearly trying hard to get laid, and sings her lines as nothing less frank than sexual teasing. And it's certainly true that by the standards of when the song was written in 1948, there would absolutely be those who would say that even at Christmas-time, if The Mouse wasn't willing to at least consider having sex with that man, what was she doing in The Wolf's apartment that late?

But it's worth pointing out that the Ray Charles' recording of it is in 1961 and Dean Martin's in 1959. The earliest recording of it was in 1949, by Dinah Shore. And the one that I consider definitive, the one I certainly hear the most often, is one from around 1950 by Bing Crosby and, no I'm not kidding, Doris Day. And while Doris Day clearly had sex at least once in her life (she was married 4 times and had one child), it was certainly the public's impression that only someone truly sick could imagine it. If you're too young to remember Doris Day at all, imagine if Britney Spears had kept her original reputation as sexy but wholesome. All the way to at least the age of 50. That Doris Day. And when Bing Crosby takes off her hat in line 12, right after she's had that drink, there's a seriously frightened gasp on the recording; her character was not expecting to be touched. How consenting is it that she stayed now, do you think?

I know, it's just a silly song. And a very catchy tune. And some truly great jazz. And, as sexy D/s fantasy, very sexy indeed. But if The Wolf found himself in a shoot-out with The Mouse's father on the day after Christmas 1949, or found himself brought up on forcible rape charges by The Mouse on the day after Christmas 2006, in either case his defense would look awfully ragged. Enjoy the song ... but take a word to the wise.

(Brad is at Archon this weekend, and probably won't have enough access to a computer to write a journal entry in real-time. That's why he stuffed this entry into the queue Wednesday night after packing for the weekend, before his Thursday afternoon ride picked him up.)

A Perfect Halloween Present: Not that anybody gives Halloween presents. But this thing dropped into my lap with absolutely perfect timing. I had been agonizing over what to get kukla_tko42 for her birthday when a blog I was reading reviewed this. She was literally the first person I thought of when I heard of it, because of her "Goth Since Before You Were Born" userpic, and I found out about it just barely in the nick of time to rescue me from as lame a gift as an Amazon gift certificate or something. What is it? It's A Life Less Lived: The Goth Box from Rhino Records. Yes, it having been 20 years since the first peak of the goth subculture, back before it even became a fad, it's been long enough ago for Rhino Records to be doing one of their big fancy retrospective collections. Actually, I bought two of them: one for her, and one for me. I'm not exactly goth myself, although nobody seems to think I'm a tourist on the rare occasions I show up at goth night. Or at least, not so as I can tell. But I just plain had to have one of these. Even if I'd hated all the recordings on it, the packaging all by itself is just an artistic joy to behold. Three CDs and one DVD printed in black on red with a mixture of horror-movie, pagan, and celtic symbolism. A both insightful and drop-dead funny book packaged with it in faux-reptile-skin red oversize paperback. All of that wrapped in a great box that lacks only a title of being a better hoax Necronomicon than any of the gazillions of faux Necronomicons out there. And then, the icing on the cake, they wrapped the whole thing in a leatherette corset that's probably at least as sturdy as any of the corsets sold at Hot Topic. If nothing else, I wanted it for the same reason I bought Madonna's crappy book Sex years ago, as a cultural artifact.

But the true surprise came for me when I ripped all the songs and shoved them onto my MP3 player for a long afternoon and discovered that they pulled off something that even some goth nightclub DJs can't do. They actually came up with four hours of classic goth music and none of it sucks. They even managed to find two songs by The Cure that don't suck, that aren't whiny proto-emo suicide notes from a guy who (to my disgust) still hasn't gotten around to slitting his wrists like he's been flirting with us over for 25 years, and I wouldn't have bet that the Cure had two songs I could stand. The rest do exactly what Rhino does best: each song is a jewel by itself but is also historically significant because you can see in each of them the seeds of one of the future spin-off genres that descended from goth rock. I'm not as crazy about their selection of videos, only one or two of which didn't annoy me in some way and which will doubtless delight purists over the fact that they're not on-screen labeled but I kept being aggravated by that, too. But even without the DVD, I feel like this is the best investment in music I've made in a very, very long time. It'd also make a perfect gift for someone who self-identifies as goth but hasn't gotten around to tracking down the best of the music from before Hot Topic.

An Accidental Revelation of the Real Truth: Good thing I was able to find an archived copy of this story, because I put it off so long it dropped off of most of the news sites: Russ Bynum, "Immigration raid cripples Georgia town," Associated Press, September 18th, 2006. The story is somewhat interesting even for the reporter's main point: the Immigration and Customs Enforcement service just rounded up and carried off an estimated one fourth of the residents of a Georgia factory town that all-but belongs to meatpacker Crider, Inc, and another quarter or half of the population fled into the night to escape the round-up. The reporter is drawn to the apparent human tragedy of a thriving town turning into a ghost town in a single night, but that's not the part that interested me. The part that interested me is this: "The poultry plant has limped along with half its normal workforce. Crider increased its starting wages by $1 an hour to help recruit new workers. Stacie Bell, 23, started work canning chicken at Crider a week ago. She said the pay, $7.75 an hour, led her to leave her $5.60-an-hour job as a Wal-Mart cashier in nearby Statesboro." Doesn't that provide at least anecdotal proof of something that most of us have been saying all along, that illegal immigrants depress wages? Or are pro-illegal activists going to claim that it's a coincidence that as soon as they had to hire legal workers, wages went up a buck or more, and that suddenly when they did there were Americans available to work those jobs after all?

Why Does Everything Happen the Same Night? There's an interesting looking independently produced documentary called Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers by Robert Greenwald, the same director that made Outfoxed and a few other semi-famous documentaries. As with his earlier work, he wasn't able to get theaters to book his film, so he's dependent on various volunteer groups to organize screenings for him, and the local Peace Economy Project has scheduled a 100-seat screening for October 14th. Unfortunately, I'm already booked for the 14th. Maybe I'll get another chance to see it. Frankly, if she were smart, Claire McCaskill's campaign would be promoting this, too, at least hosting their own public showings. Early in her campaign, one of her signature issues was a call for the Senate to re-constitute then-Senator Harry Truman's World War II investigative commission on war profiteering. Part of me thinks that rather than just going on the defensive against the Talent campaign's ill-thought-out attack ads (is it really smart politics for them to remind the public that she's the same Claire McCaskill who was, during her tenure, the most popular state auditor we've ever had, and that she went after the nursing home industry even though it was her own family's ox getting gored?), she could do a lot worse than to order a bulk-purchase of these DVDs and mail them out to swing voters all over Missouri in a mailer renewing that promise of another Truman Commission.

The Sunday WaPo had an article in it on a subject that's near and dear to my heart: Stephen Hunter, "The Lost Action Hero: Strong, Stoic, Feared: Alas, Hollywood Doesn't Make 'Em Like It Used To," (Washington Post, Sunday, September 3rd, 2006. Registration required, annoyingly.) becka_kitty forwarded it to me because we'd been chatting about the subject after she mentioned casually to me, a couple of weeks ago, that the temple she's involved with is trying to persuade enough guys to be interested in getting together to discuss men's issues. I think that there are men's issues. But unlike the women's issues circa 1948-1960 that were famously described as "the problem that has no name," problems that couldn't begin to be solved until women each realized that no, it wasn't just them, I don't think our problems can be solved by sitting around in a circle and talking about them, so I couldn't be arsed. In fact, if anything, the way in which men's problems would probably be discussed in a pagan-ish temple's "men's group" is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

I think that Stephen Hunter's analysis of the roots of the problem and his prescription are wrong, but he's fingered one of the same symptoms I point to: there isn't a single leading man in Hollywood under about the age of 50 ... and that's being generous. Not leading boy, not leading guy, a leading man. Think of the "man's man" actors of the past: John Wayne, yes, but even more so Humphrey Bogart; John Dean, Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis, and the like; even borderline cases like Tom Cruise and Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Of whom, I say, Bogart is first among equals, the real man's real man.) Or consider the truly great exemplar of what it means to be a grown man, an adult, Johnny Cash. Contrary to what the WaPo's Stephen Hunter says, it's not their brutality that sets them apart from boys or guys, nor their willingness to be total sociopaths. Nor is it any kind of macho invulnerability; all of those actors get the stuffing kicked out of them at least once in virtually every movie they make, and finish most of their movies half crippled up from their injuries. Nor, as the Johnny Cash example perfectly exemplifies, but also most of Bogart's roles, is it necessary for a man's man to have no feelings, nor is it necessary for him to care about no one, nor is it necessary for him to feel no fear.

My personal nomination for what's missing from nearly all men today, the true lack that makes it unimaginable that Hollywood could reasonably cast another Rick Blaine or Han Solo and make it look convincing, is a willingness to take as many lumps as it takes to get a job done and not whine about it. From "The Man Comes Around" to "Ring of Fire," from "King of the Road" to "I've Been Everywhere," from "Folsom Prison Blues" to "Hurt," Johnny Cash sang about a lot of pain. But unlike almost every other guy in country music, and every emo rocker of whom we have such a plethora, and virtually every so-called man who's recorded a song that mentioned their own pain since the Man in Black died, he sang about his pain as if it were no big deal. As if he never expected a man's life to not hurt. As if any pain he was in, or any pain that he'd been through, was just a topic of casual or technical conversation -- like the weather or car shopping or the price of beans. Even rappers, most of whom supposedly grow up in neighborhoods where they ought to have grown up knowing better, complain about their lives in petulant and angry tones that make it clear that any hint of pain in their life feels terribly unfair to them, like they were entitled to a pain-free life. How childish.

Or consider Humphrey Bogart's portrayal of Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. In the penultimate scene, as he's making sure his gun is loaded for the big confrontation with the ultimate villain of the piece, Bacall's Vivian Rutledge points out, in a "gotcha" tone of voice, that his hands are shaking. He explains that of course he's afraid -- and in a lot of pain, it hasn't been that long since he took a beating that should have sent him to the hospital -- and still in shock from having had to shoot his way out of an attempted assassination at point blank range less than an hour ago. And worse, he's legitimately nervous about screwing this up, because the villain has out-smarted him at every step up until now. But he says these things neither petulantly, nor fearfully, and nor unhappily -- he says them as if they were obvious, and important, but emotionally neutral facts.

Vin Diesel could almost play that part. But I sense that he wouldn't, or his agent wouldn't let him; he seems to only be cast as smugly indestructible butt-kickers. Samuel L. Jackson can do it, and does, and so does Bruce Campbell as his female co-star raved about him in the making-of feature on the Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. DVDs. But what sets those three actors apart isn't just their actual meaningful masculinity, but that being masculine actors in today's Hollywood makes them hopelessly perma-cast as genre actors ... unemployable above the B-movie level. Because raising boys to some day become MEN has gone out of style.

Auto Assault patched their servers today, fixing a rather frustrating bug that had been "gate-keeping" my main character. Now the fun is back big time, even bigger than before, and while I may have something for tomorrow, tonight I'm too distracted by my fun to think out anything especially weighty. That makes this a good time to go digging through the bookmarks directory of things I set aside regularly because I might want to comment on them, but end up having less to say than I thought. Which is to say: you get Quicktakes.

Privilege. By now probably half of you have already seen this. I have several friends who will go right up a wall over this, because they're right in the cross-hairs for a wonderful article by Barry Deutsch, aka "Ampersand" at Alas, a Blog. For those of you who insist that there is no such thing, I give you: "The Male Privilege Checklist."

It Takes More than Controversy to sell me a movie, it takes even more than attempts by people I hate to get me to not see it. I'm all into Forbidden Lore, yes, but on the other hand I'm not interested in wasting my time on a movie that I think will be boring, trite, or poorly made just because it also ticks people off. Which is why I've only seen seven of what Entertainment Weekly called "The 25 Most Controversial Movies Ever." Although to be fair, I'm planning on seeing one more of them when I get around to it.

The Other Alice and Wendy Story. I saw in the news that Alan Moore is in the process of getting his 3-volume Alice Liddel/Wendy Darling cheesy slashfic reprinted; the sample pages I saw reaffirmed my belief that the man hasn't written anything worth reading in over a decade. I'm rather more interested in the premise behind somebody else's take on those characters, and more: Cheshire Crossing. It assumes that neither Alice Liddel, nor Wendy Darling, nor Dorothy Gale were believed when they said that they'd traveled to other worlds. (Yes, I know that Dorothy Gale is an anachronism. So are half of the characters in LXG. For an interesting enough premise, I'll cope.) But unlike in most of the sequels (including, yes, unlike in the rest of the Oz books), Cheshire Crossing makes the much more plausible assumption that their parents sought professional help to cure their daughters of this delusion. All three have been through extensive psychotherapy; Dorothy, being from America, has even had a great deal of primitive high-voltage electroshock therapy. And now their parents have been persuaded to enroll all 3 of them in the same boarding school, whose headmaster (we find out) does believe them, and wants to find out more about them and their other worlds. He also has exactly the right headmistress to deal with 3 girls with magical powers: Mary Poppins. Only the first issue is out, and I admit the artwork is a trifle primitive. But the premise has my attention.

Well, There Went Two Hours of My Life. Who knew that there was a website with fourteen hundred 1980s music videos on it?

Hey, Wait a Minute. I don't know what to make of this funny, but deeply wrong The Onion satire: "Report: U.S. May Have Been Abused During Formative Years."

There's a reason why Pink's second album, Missundaztood, is the only major-label album I've bought in the last five years or more. I just got reminded (not that I needed a reminder) why. shrijani posted a link the other day to the first video from her album that's coming out in April, "Stupid Girls," and the video is officially up at MTV.com. The official link to it is on their flash-heavy, requires Active-X, Microsoft DRM crippled website (gah); if you're lucky, the (pirate?) 36Mb mpeg that Shrijani linked to may still be up.

There's a classic put-down of feminism that suggests that feminism is ugly smart women complaining that men don't prefer smart ugly women to stupid pretty ones. There are enough exceptions to make it an unfair criticism, but it is true that you don't see a lot of supermodels complaining about "looksism" -- not even in Berkeley. (Nor should feminists feel singled out by this criticism, because it's hardly unique to them. After all, most political movements' central tenet is "people like us should be ruling the world," and many people's political thinking never advances far beyond that.)

The hit single "Don't Let Me Get Me" from Missundaztood made a powerful impression on me because here was (in my opinion) quite possibly the best looking woman in the music industry at the time, certainly in the top five, someone whose first album was produced (and she was groomed by her managers) to market her as The Next Teen Pop Sex Symbol, who threw it all away -- apparently in no small part because music industry artificial cyborg girl-pop stars aren't allowed to express anger. She was the rare beautiful woman who condemns looksism -- and yet, in that song and video, there's the sucker punch that it's in no small part because she feels like she can't compete. Britney Spears, with whom she unfavorably compares herself in that song, is an almost entirely artificial creature that Pink sang, bitterly, that she could never be because she's not that "pretty," when the same industry with the same skillset was begging to make her just as artificially pretty as Britney Spears. (In my opinion, she already looked a heck of a lot better than Britney will ever look. I have no idea what anybody sees in her. I'd rather screw a mannequin.)

Well, "Stupid Girls" can be seen as just a send-up of pop sex symbols, from Shakira to Paris Hilton to the anonymous interchangeable sluttily-dressed dancers on BET. Read at the next level up, it's a complaint that having to compete with these women for men's attention drags women down enough, dumbs them down enough, to render them powerless and ineffective. For example, there's the lyric, "What happened to the dream of a girl President? She's dancing in the video next to Fiddy Cent." Which, of course, is especially poignant considering that the video came out the week after the third country in the western hemisphere elected a woman as President, and we haven't, putting us far behind such enlightened bastions of feminism as the Philippines and Pakistan, although she couldn't have predicted that when she was making it.

But pay attention to her character in the video. She's not exactly claiming the moral high ground here, and not just because of the (hysterically funny) "in case of emergency pull here" tab on her bra. After lambasting other girls for bulimia and plastic surgery, we see her in the gym ... wearing pink panties under her workout clothes that say "Say No to Food," and then going straight from there to plastic surgery where she's (by the surgeon's prep marks) planning on getting enough work done to fill half a season of Nip/Tuck. What's more, I remember (pleasantly and vividly) what she looked like with most of her clothes off a few years ago in the video to "Just Like a Pill," and it scares me to compare that woman to this one: the signs of exercise abuse, of working out so fanatically that she's eliminated almost 100% of the fat on her body, leaving her barely even female, combined with that clue on her panties, suggest to me that she's admitting that the pressure to compete with big-titted blonde bimbos has pushed her into anorexia. That's not just criticizing the rules of the game from the position of a loser. That's a winner who hates the game, hates what playing the game has done to her, and wishes she could have stayed her old self.

For what it's worth, I don't agree with 100% of her analysis here, for all that we're heartbroken over many of the same things. Having starved herself and worked herself into a hideous caricature of an anorexic pre-teen girl with a woman's face, she finds that men aren't looking at her? Maybe it's because she looked a whole heck of a lot sexier before she did that to herself. Nor does the fact that men's eyes are easily distracted by big, bouncing cleavage mean that we prefer it, at least not all of us ... it's just another spectacle. And in my experience (backed by at least one study I've seen the results of), it's women who make each other psycho on the subject of weight, not men making women psycho about it. (The average woman goes on her first diet, according to the last study I saw, at the age of 11. Almost 90% of those first diets were prompted by a cruel remark from an older female relative. And according to the same study, the average woman puts on 8 pounds per diet she's ever been on.) And I may not buy the album, because I'm not as crazy about the musical accompaniment to this track as I was about the rawer, edgier stuff on Missundaztood. But what I still adore Pink for is that she at least occasionally sings about stuff that matters, and does so with an emotional and intellectual honesty that you almost never see in pop music.

Okay, despite the fact that anybody who hadn't seen Serenity in theaters yet obviously wasn't going to when I wrote about it, I took crap from two different people about "spoilers." So I'm going to talk a little bit about what is and isn't a spoiler. Now, I admit something right up front: none of these ideas are original to me. I think I'm putting my own spin on them, phrasing them in my own distinctive and colorful way. But the real reason I'm saying this is so that y'all know where I stand ... and, I admit, because I'm hoping to persuade some of you to back off to a slightly more reasonable stance.

Spoiler-Phobes Are Being Damned Selfish. Do you even understand what the point of a cultural event is? The point of knowing that a movie is an "event" movie or a blockbuster movie is the same point as knowing that an album is on the Billboard charts, which is the same point as knowing that a book is on the New York Times list of current best sellers, which is the same point as being taught that a piece of classic literature is part of the canon. Half of the joy of seeing a blockbuster movie, of buying a gold record, of reading a classic or a best-seller, is that you have a better than average chance of finding something good. But that's only half of it. The other half, perhaps more than half, certainly the most important half, is that it gives you an emotional experience, and a set of ideas, that you share with other people, that you have in common with other people, to bring you closer together with them.

By insisting that those of us who read the best seller first, who saw the blockbuster movie on opening weekend, who heard the Billboard album before it made it big, who read the classic in school that you haven't gotten around to you, may not discuss it in public without first making sure that everybody present has already finished with it, what the hard-core spoiler-phobics are doing is making it much harder for the rest of us to experience the pleasure of finding other people who shared that experience and sharing our joy over it. And what's more, they're doing so for only the shallowest of reasons, because ...

If It's Any Good, It Can't Be Spoiled. When (as Kipling put it) 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre, he was singing to audiences who knew how the story was going to turn out. The Trojan War was the defining event in ancient Greek civilization, the birth of their common culture. Everybody in his audience had ancestors who fought in that war, and everybody in that audience had been hearing the events of the Trojan War since before they were old enough to talk. And on the off chance that anybody didn't know how the Illiad was going to turn out, Homer himself "spoils" it in the first verse, where he says that he's singing the story of the wrath of Achilles and how that wrath brought many great heroes prematurely to the grave. Going into it, they all knew that Achilles, and Patroclus, and Hector, and all the rest were going to die. Going into it, they knew that Menelaus, Helen, and Odysseus were going to live. And yet, somehow, they listened anyway. Enough of them listened that we're still listening today, almost 3000 years later. Why? Because a great story has more going for it than finding out what's going to happen. If it wouldn't be any good the second time through, it probably wasn't really any good the first time through and you just didn't notice.

If the only reason to finish a book, or to sit through a movie, is "to find out what happens," then what you've told me is that it's a terrible stinking book or movie. This is half the reason why I can't be bothered to plough through the thousands of pages of Harry Potter: that all of you who are hard-core Harry Potter fans act like it would be the end of the freaking world if someone told you, before you found out for yourself, what the plot of each book was. Friends, if knowing the plot is all it takes to "completely ruin" the book for you, there isn't enough book there to hold my attention. And it's for just this reason that I now actively seak out spoilers. Knowing what's in a story is the most reliable way I know to find out, in advance, if the storyteller has anything interesting to say about his story. Heck, I wish somebody had "spoiled" The Sixth Sense for me. From the trailers, and the publicity for it, I thought it was going to be just another generic ghost movie. If you had told me in advance that the twist that sets this apart from a billion other generic Hollywood ghost movies is that the lead character doesn't know that he's dead himself, I would have found out in time that the director was telling an interesting story.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy story has now been told four different times, just that I know of: the original radio plays, the book adapted from the radio plays, the TV series adapted from the book, and the most recent movie adapted from all of the above. Are you going to tell me, any of you, that you skipped seeing the recent movie only because you already knew how the story was going to turn out, so what was the point? No, you went or didn't go purely based on whether or not you thought that this movie would do a good job of telling a story that you already knew. If you go to see Good Night, and Good Luck this week (which I hope to do), you're going to go into there knowing that Edward R. Murrow becomes an even more respected public figure and Joseph McCarthy becomes a national disgrace, because that's history that almost all of us know ... but that won't make it a pointless, joyless, unentertaining movie; to find out what happens to the crew at CBS News and what happens to Senator McCarthy is not why anybody would go see that movie. By the time Erin Brockovitz came out, everybody knew that the real Erin Brockovitz and her law firm had won the PG&E hexavalent chlorine lawsuit. By the time Silkwood came out, everybody knew that Karen Silkwood managed to make an important national news story out of Kerr McGee's negligently exposing workers to plutonium before she was assassinated. That didn't stop both of those from being darned good, and economically successful, movies.

There Is a Reasonable Middle Ground. Casablanca is still one of the greatest movies of all time, even if you know who Ilsa is going to stay with at the end and whether or not Victor Lazlo is going to escape from the Nazis. However, I will admit that you get even more out of it if you don't know. There's a plot twist about 1/3 of the way into MirrorMask that really kicked the movie into high gear, and you'll notice that when I reviewed it during the first (and only) week it was in theaters, all I told you was that there was an interesting plot twist. Once you get to that plot twist, any reasonably bright person can predict how every scene in the movie, from there on, is going to turn out. If all you want to know is how MirrorMask is going to end, if you're a reasonably bright person you can walk out of the movie at the 30 minute mark and be confident that you're not missing anything. Except, well, that you are: you're missing some amazingly beautiful art, and some excellent dialog, and some really good acting.

So I stake out what I consider to be a reasonable middle ground. During the first roughly two weeks after a major cultural event book or movie comes out, if there's a plot twist that can't be seen from a kajillion miles off by any halfway bright observer, that really improves the story if you don't see it coming, I'll keep my mouth shut about it. But when there's been plenty of time for the people who absolutely have to see a movie or read a book "cold" to have done so if they really care, I refuse to let myself be cheated out of the joy of discussing it in public.

A couple of weeks ago, kukla_tko42 calls me ... a too rare treat, for all that I know how busy she is so I shouldn't complain. It turns out that her acting troupe was booked as the lead off entertainment for a local goth scene quarterly event, the Armageddon Ball. thesigother usually plays her leading man roles, but that night he was going to be busy with his kids. So even though I'm not in the troupe, she offered me the part. Basically, the deal was that the actors would get paid in food and in free admission, and she would get the added incentive of being able to advertise (and sell program book ads) for her upcoming fund-raiser, a performance of Midsummer Night's Dream. (Buy tickets here.)

For me, it meant a chance to get out of the house, to listen to some cool music, hang around stylishly costumed people, see some friends I only see a couple of times a year, get a free meal out of it, and best of all, spend time around four of my favorite sexy femfen: kukla_tko42, allura629, professor, and bakadragon. And it meant I got to be on stage, and you should all know by now that anything involving theater is sacred to Dionysus and therefore to me. So for me it was a slam-dunk obvious easy win-win scenario all around. As I often remind people, perhaps too often, I can refuse Kukla nothing, but this time the real favor was from her to me.

The performance was a roughly six minute mime show, acting out Loreena McKennitt's song "The Bonny Swans" to the accompaniment of the song. To synopsize, it's a story blending a couple of the standard fairy tale themes and at least one of the Child Ballads, sung to an original rocked-up semi-Celtic arrangement. If it weren't for the fact that I can't stand McKennitt's voice, it'd be the sort of thing I like; as it is, I'd rather read it than hear it. But anyway, the plot summary: The oldest of three princesses drowns her youngest sister in the river out of jealousy for the youngest's boyfriend. The corpse washes up against a miller's dam; the miller's daughter, at first thinking it a swan, retrieves the corpse. When they see that it's a noblewoman's corpse, they (for no given reason, it's a fairy tale thing) make an enchanted self-playing harp out of her corpse and present it to her father the king. Once back home, the corpse harp begins to sing ... and names her murderess.

Kukla doesn't have infinite faith in my acting capabilities, and it's a fair cop. As an actor, I make a halfway competent spear carrier. But as she had choreographed it, the role of the king wasn't terribly demanding; she didn't even bother to invite me to the single rehearsal they held, squeezed in between the rehearsals for Midsummer Night's Dream. My role was primarily to lead Kukla (the queen) in for her grand entrance, then re-enter for the finale and broadly portray my grief, then shock, then anger. It may have come easier to me than to some; having once taken a brief seminar in comedia dell'arte, I had at least a little practice playing up my emotions enough to be visible on a dark-ish stage, without the benefit of voice or subtle facial expressions, to an audience fairly far away. The Professor played the villainess, Baka the victim, and Allura the middle daughter and (with a quick costume and wig change) the miller's daughter. Two guys I don't particularly know played the boyfriend and the miller.

How'd it go? Well, like everybody amateur or semi-pro who's ever been up on stage, I could nitpick it to death, especially my own performance. Two people picked up their cues late, one of them (the miller) late enough to confuse the audience briefly. And I broke one of the cardinal rules of theater, by adding a bit of improvised choreography and throwing it at Kukla without warning, gambling that she'd catch it quick enough; she did, but if she hadn't, it would have looked really crappy.

But for all the nitpicking that any of us who were up there on stage could do, the performance had a lot of things going for it. One of the reasons Kukla agreed to this was that, having run faerie court at Ren Faire many times, she could pull fabulous costumes for this out of her closet in a heart beat. And all the girls, of course, looked beautiful, which never hurts with an audience. I'm told I did a great job of pulling off the regal look and bearing, wearing a crimson with gold trim long open robe over my usual club gear (cargo pants, black leather vest, white poet shirt) with a page-boy wig and a Halloween costume store crown. The postures for that costume come easily to me after all those years in the SCA. (It wasn't the easiest thing I've ever done giving back that wig after the performance. It looked remarkably like my original hair.) About half of the audience seemed to know, or at least to be able to follow, the song, and were very enthusiastic to see it acted out. But even those who obviously couldn't follow it (and I don't blame them, that's what I hate about McKennitt's voice is that it always gets completely lost in the music) ate it up with two spoons. We were a huge hit, and got long and thunderous applause.

At least two people have "tagged" me with the "name your six favorite songs" meme. And I like to think that I'm willing to answer any question. But I've been putting this one off for days, because I don't even understand what the question means. I'm also pretty sure that it doesn't actually mean anything in terms of how I relate to music. Imagine a hierarchy of genre to artist to album to song. In general, I relate to music at the genre level only. I almost never think to myself, "I'm in the mood to hear (name of song)." Only once in a very, very rare while do I even think in terms of, "I'm in the mood to listen to some music by (name of artist)." By and large, the way I prefer to relate to music is to decide what genre I'm in the mood for. Then I go looking for a radio station (if one is at all available), online or over the air, dedicated to that genre and put it on, and listen to whatever comes along. I seldom pay enough attention to even notice where one song ends and the next begins.

So I guess the only way I can answer this in any meaningful way is to pick six genres of music that I listen to the most often, pick one artist that I've actually noticed in that genre, and then flip through the music directory on my computer or a couple of web pages to see if I can even pick out an individual song by that artist as a particularly good or noteworthy or typical example. So for the love of god and all that's holy, do not think of this as "six specific songs that Brad likes more than all others." Even more so, I abjure and cast forth any suggestion that I could stand to hear these six songs over and over again! The only meaningful answer I can give, if any, is that these are the six best examples I can come up with of what kind of stuff I listen to - genre, then artist(s), song, and album.

1. Tiki & other Exotica, for example: Eric & Ryan Kilkenny, "Bongo Avenger," Two Zombies Later: Weird and Unusual Music from the Exotica Mailing List
   
2. Dance, especially Deep House, for example: Club 69, "Riding into Battle with Her High Heels On," Adults Only
   
3. Lounge Music & Cocktail Jazz, for example: Quincy Jones Orchestra, "Soul Bossa Nova," Austin Powers: Original Soundtrack
   
4. Comedy, parody, and novelty songs, for example: H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, "Oh Cthulhu," A Very Scary Solstice
   
5. Electronica, Ambient, Space Music, for example: Robert Rich & Steve Roach, "The Grotto of Lost Time," Strata
   
6. Darkwave, for example Xorcist, "Governet," Soul Reflection

And at that, I feel like I'm leaving a ton of stuff out.

P.S. I'm not going to tag anyone else, because I'm running out of people I know who haven't been tagged. At six people per, this pyramid scheme is about exhausted.

My sleep schedule has been a little bit goofed up by the need, this week, to get to the bank during hours that I normally sleep, made worse by a bout of insomnia yesterday. So I went to a wedding yesterday with an open bar, on about two and a half hours of sleep. When I got home, I fell over like a log, slept for only about 5 hours, and woke up right about the time I usually start journal entries. So I'm tired, and still slightly tipsy, and you know what that means? It means time to dip into my "Temp" bookmarks folder. It means that what you get are a couple of Quicktakes.

Kevin C. Johnson, "Ru Paul is Still 'Red Hot'." (St. Louis Post-Dispatch music critic, 4/8/05): I liked his music the first time around, and he seemed like a guy who occasionally had something interesting to say. But either Kevin Johnson scoured a very long interview for some real gems, or Ru Paul has gotten even smarter, even cooler, even better spoken, even more insightful, and a heck of a lot more forceful with age. Let me quote my favorite parts of the interview, for those of you who aren't clicking through: "We're living in the '50s, and it's scary. It's insidious because it doesn't seem so bad because we've got cell phones and iPods and TiVos. But young people need more examples of diversity and thinking outside the box. Everything is so corporate and safe, and not safe in a good way but safe in a subversive way. ...  Music echoes what's happening politically and culturally. To get into dance music, you have to move your body from below the belt. Being what it is, dance music is often relegated to the back rooms because it's thought of as 'sissy music.' And right now is not a good time to be a sissy."

I'm a dance music fan myself, and I think that he's not wrong about the "sissy music" thing. I'm straight as string, but when I set out to create a borderline pornographic dance-music Live365.com radio station a couple of years ago, their artificial intelligence lumped it right in with ... that's right, the gay pride stations, which I wrote about at the time. It wasn't just the AI, either. My target market at the time spurned me, because to them the overtly explicit heterosexual music I was playing was "too gay."

Bruce Bower, "Read All About It: Kids take different neural paths to reach print mastery." (Science News, 4/30/05): Most of you will want to read this, because I think the stories of the kids documented in this article will resonate, will sound familiar, to most of you. Unsurprisingly, they're linking an early obsession with reading to autism spectrum disorders. They carefully call it an "unusual condition" and not a "disorder" or "disease" or "syndrome." But now I finally see why so many people who clearly have Asperger's Syndrome are uncomfortable with the diagnosis; this article brought home to me a point that they were trying to make to me. How long will it be before "hyperlexia" is not just a documented variation in human personality and becomes "pathologized?" How long before reading early and reading a lot becomes thought of as a disease to be treated and an incurable form of madness to be conditioned out of at an early age before the habit ingrains?

(Tomorrow, if I'm not too tired: the Hellenic Reconstructionist religious and spiritual significance of "Girls Gone Wild," or, "The Person of a Bead Whore is Sacred to the God.")

Before I say anything meaningful about music piracy, I want to nail down definitions of a couple of controversial words. These are words that everybody hears, and that many people use. These are words that that most people understand, but in some vague sort of way, and they're only barely aware that they don't all mean the same things by them. So if I'm going to talk about this, and I feel like doing so, then before I do so, I'm going to clarify exactly what I mean by certain words and phrases. And of course, by doing so, I'm going to make it clear just what I think about the current ongoing situation. And since we're talking about an economic and political issue here, I'm talking about job titles, not social roles or what have you. When I have occasion to refer to people who make music or whatever but don't get paid for it, I will refer to them as amateur musicians or amateur whatever.

• A musician is someone who gets paid to play or otherwise perform music. A professional musician is someone who earns their primary income from, and spends the majority of their working hours, playing or performing music.
  
• A recording artist is someone who makes recordings. A professional recording artist is someone who derives their primary income from, and who spends the majority of their working hours, either making or selling recordings.

I would use a separate term for someone who is famous as a musician or former musician, but who neither plays much music any more nor sells many recordings any more, who is now primarily famous for being famous, as they say. Let's call them "rock stars" or "pop stars," in quotes. You know, like the famous difference between an actor and a movie star.

For example, my friends who perform as Beltana got paid, in cash or considerations, for oh, I don't know how many concerts this year. Not enough to live on, yet, but they did get paid for it. They sold a few home-made CDs, too. But for the majority of the buyers of those CDs, the CD is primarily a piece of concert memorabilia, like a band t-shirt, and it was bought at a concert, so I count that as money they got paid for performing. Venus Beltana and her band-mates are semi-professional musicians. On the other hand, Madonna Ritchie will probably spend about 50 days this year performing music, let's say maybe 38 concert dates and 12 days in the studio just at a guess. The other 315 days of the year, her primary income stream is from sales of her records and her primary job is selling those records. Madonna is a recording artist. Using those same standards, Jimmy Buffett is a musician (admittedly, one with a very successful adjunct merchandising business) and Brittney Federline is a recording artist (who also makes some of her money for performing gymnastic routines to recordings of her own music).

Now, here's one of the things that gets swept under the rug in most discussions of music piracy. The overwhelming majority of musicians do not receive any meaningful income from, or spend any meaningful percentage of their working hours on, sale of recorded music. The St. Louis Riverfront Times lists 390 music venues just in St. Louis, and that counts only places that have live music playing or live DJs mixing. Multiply that by about a hundred cities, and add in the scattering of music venues across the smaller towns of America, and I'd say that off-hand there probably about 50,000 music venues in this country. Figure that the average group of musicians in a group that plays in such a venue is four? And figure that the various venues booked on average three acts per venue this week? So, this week alone, my back of an envelope calculation says that 600,000 musicians were paid to perform music. Oh, but wait -- this doesn't include college marching bands on full scholarship, who are getting paid a full time living to perform but receive most of their pay in barter. It doesn't include symphony orchestras, who usually only pay their musicians for playing or performing. It doesn't include the various military bands who got paid all week to perform music. You can probably think of more examples. So the actual number is probably at least several thousands, maybe tens of thousands, more.

How many recording artists actually got paid to work in America this week, do you think? Maybe a couple of thousand? Probably a lot less. What's more, in terms of actual dollars of economic activity, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that the economic activity of those 650,000 or so musicians at least equaled, and maybe even exceeded, the gross economic activity of the record labels. But the money that goes through the recording industry, as opposed to what really deserves to be separately called the music industry, is much more concentrated; most of it flowed through two or three conglomerates. This puts those conglomerates in a great position when it comes to having their voice be heard in public and in front of legislative bodies. Recording artists, because of their visibility, have become the tail that wags the music industry dog.

There were obviously musicians before there were recording artists. There were musicians for thousands of years before even copyright was invented, let alone recording technology. Hell, there was rock and roll before there was much of a recording industry. Elvis played the same music back when he was a musician that he played (less often) when he became a recording artist. The Grateful Dead made money, good money, every year of their careers, until the mainstream "success" of Touch of Gray turned them into recording artists, and that was the first year that they ever lost money. It was also the beginning of the end of the band (and more importantly, the beginning of the death of Jerry Garcia, because as a working full-time musician he had much better control over his drug habit than he could sustain as a professional recording artist and part-time musician).

One of the reasons that I'm such a fan of European imported electronic music in digital format is that the overwhelming majority of it is produced by musicians. Techno artists, and even more so mixing DJs, make the overwhelming majority of their income and spend the overwhelming majority of their working hours, preparing for or performing live gigs. There, they use the audience of dancers the way a recording engineer uses his sound gauges, to tell what's working and what's not, to fine-tune the performance on a second-by-second basis. Unsurprisingly, they record these performances, and the ones that really were successful in moving the audiences they digitize and give away on the Internet, or sell on home-made CDs at cost. Do they do this in hopes of landing a recording contract? Maybe some of them. But the really good music is being made by people who see Internet distribution and hand-to-hand distribution of homemade CDs as a marketing technique aimed, not at getting them a recording contract, but getting them more opportunities to get paid for performing.

Even if the worst-case dire disaster predictions coming out of the record companies came true and those companies all disappeared overnight, with no replacements because the business model had finally broken down, the overwhelming majority of the musicians in the US would never feel any impact on their livelihood. All we'd be missing is a handful of artificially inflated celebrities, and whatever economic activity was previously associated with them would find other entertainment outlets to be spent on. There might not be a whole lot of nationally or internationally famous pop music, just like there already mostly isn't in jazz, dance music, or classical music. Has the absence of pop-stars destroyed, or in any way impaired, any of the musical genres that don't have big-name recording artists? No. So rock and roll wouldn't miss them either.

And by the way, I'm not the only one who thinks so.

Coffeehouses: Finally dragged myself out of bed in time to get to Rivalz at a reasonable time on Friday, and closed the place down and then some. jennlyle's already written about it at length, not a lot needs to be said about it other than wow, how great it was to spend an entire evening with so many people I love to hang out with all at once, people who like me never have the time and energy to get out of the house and just hang out. I'm guessing that the occasion was that the lovely and cherished minidoc was in town (yay!), but I hope it happens more. (It probably won't. Archon's in a month, and people are sweating bullets; nobody I know has significant free time between now and then. In fact, I need to get cracking myself if I'm going to do anything with IA!ADL in time for Archon.) Even if it doesn't, that was a pleasant flashback to what the great old coffeehouses of St. Louis, Haven and Caffiend, used to mean to me.

Gaming: Character generation session at the_geoffrey's yesterday could have gone better; we needed more copies of the game book. Could have been worse, though, because at least everybody who showed up had some idea what they wanted to do with their characters. Next session in two weeks should be the start of the first story line; we should be able to jump straight in then.

Partying: kukla_tko42's mom hosted a party last night for minidoc, and there just officially Ain't Nothing Wrong With That, to say the least! I was completely exhausted, so I stayed sober as a judge, caffiened to the limit of human endurance, and still vaguely out of it, but it was still a wonderful time, and I came home feeling vaguely cherished in a way that recent conventions and parties and gatherings haven't left me feeling. I was by no means the center of attention (which was good, because I couldn't have sustained the energy level to even be attentive if I had), but still a large number of people I love and value were even more loving and demonstrative than I remember lately, lots of good touch. Maybe I've scared people. Maybe I just look adorably cute when I'm half-passed-out from sleep deprivation. Maybe it's POM-dependent, as we used to say of intermittent computer bugs. (POM = "Phase of Moon.") Still, definitely a morale-builder.

Dance Pop: To my vast annoyance, my (previous) favorite Live365 dance pop radio station, Kozmic Kreme Radio, has gone "premium subscriber only," and that's only barely supported by Linux and not worth what it costs to me. The good news is that disgust with this lead me to find MakRadio.com's The Pulse, which is playing now on my computer. Nice, nice stuff so far, and without Live365's increasingly annoying self-promotion commercials.

Faux Retro Tiki Glamour! While I was at it, I went looking for a non-Live365 streaming tiki music station. I didn't find one. I did find what has to be the best Tiki web site out there, KonaKai.com, and through them found something that so many of you would adore: Winki Tiki's Gorgeous Girlie Photos. It's an absolutely delightful collection of brand new faux-retro glamour photography, with something for just about everybody I know. These thumbnails are just two of their tiki themed ones; I have the left-hand one as my current desktop image. But there's more there than tikis: old-fashioned pool party shots, rec-room glamour, 40s pinup styles, devil girls, late 60s pop art, all kinds of retro glamour photography imagery iconography updated with new girls and 21st century digital production values. It's sweet and very cool, check it out!

Writing: This is the real monkey on my back lately, though. The game thing just had the convenience of being a nice sized chunk of writing I could do with no additional research, and simple enough that I didn't need an outliner to work on it. For the life of me, I can not find an outline editor for Linux that doesn't blow chunks. But then, I never found one I could really stand for Windows, either. Man, I would sacrifice a year of my life for a version of the old Macintosh outliner Acta Lite 2.0, only rewritten for Linux. It was profoundly powerfully emotionally satisfying to me to be spending time at the keyboard, to the point where it pushed aside eating, sleeping, chores, all kinds of things. I had to explain to two different friends that even though I was home and was at the computer, I had chat clients turned off because people kept popping windows up in front of my writing, and it was getting between me and my "fix." I wasn't kidding when I complained about work interfering with my writing time. Man, what I wouldn't give to have the time to research my two or three book proposal outlines that I have on my hard disk and then spend a year (or even the rest of my working life) doing nothing but writing. There are stories they tell about Isaac Asimov, who would go through painful physical withdrawal symptoms if he couldn't get in at least two hours a day at the typewriter, and after this last week, I now know what they meant.

I figure that the reason there's a "current music" field in the LiveJournal entry form is that people want two things. What mood were you in when you wrote this? And what kind of a person are you, as judged by the music you listen to? Now, I'm not really any bigger on the accuracy of that second theory than I am on, say, natal horological astrology, but then, that didn't stop me from posting my astrological details on the Brad FAQ.

So here are my current favorite internet radio stations. These are all internet radio stations because, so far as I can tell, all broadcast radio in St. Louis sucks in some way or other. OK, Red @ 104.1 is OK, if awfully repetitive. But other than that, it's garbage from one end of the dial to the other. I get nearly all of my music listening off of Live365.com, because frankly, that's where the music that doesn't suck is. My opposition to Clear Channel, and to a lesser extent to Emmis and the other conglomerates, isn't that they're conglomerates. It's that they're doing far more to kill the music industry than all the downloaders on the planet.

So anyway, that digression aside, here are my current picks for stations that don't suck, in alphabetic order by name. If you want to listen to any of these, all you need is an MP3 player that can handle streaming MP3s (like WinAmp) or RealPlayer. You'll also need to create a free login ID at Live365.com. It was something they got blackmailed into by the RIAA, who insisted that they deliver an accurate count of how many different people listened to each track.

• Astreaux World: "New age, ambient, and space music." Imagine Echoes without most of the Celtic harp stuff, or Hearts of Space back in its heyday, or Musical Starstreams back when it was really good.
  
• Cinegroovin' by Exploitika: "Groovy & funky tunes from 60's & 70's movie soundtracks." What that ends up sounding like is a lot of funky jazz that I haven't heard to death. Occasionally I'll recognize one of the themes, especially the easy ones like the overture to "O! Calcutta!" and get a grin out of that, too. It's as soothing and pleasant to listen to as any soft jazz station, but with some delightful surprises mixed in.
  
• Classic Jazz Corner: "Classic, hard bop, and straight-ahead jazz (Miles, Coltrane, Mingus, ...)" -- that is to say, the kind of real jazz that I actually really, really like and don't know enough about to find on my own.
  
• EBM-Radio.com: "Industrial, electronica, goth." Or as I prefer to think of it, techno with a thought or two in its head.
  
• The Green Lounge: "Music for your lounge, elevator or stylish bachelor or bachelorette pad." A very nice mix of jazz, swing, and exotica; the format that they're calling "Lounge Music" now. It's the kind of thing that I originally hoped that Red @ 104.1 was going to be.
  
• Kozmic Kreme Radio: "Dance, house, trance." This is the kind of music that Z107.7 would be playing on Friday and Saturday nights ... if they weren't a Clear Channel station and therefore contractually required to play the same four songs over and over again. Absolutely the best dance music channel I've found yet, even better than my old station was.
  
• Vegas Vic's Tiki Lounge: "Exotica and Polynesian tiki lounge music." I've hyped this station often enough in my journal that by now you should know how I feel about this station and why. But if you're a new reader in the last week, suffice it to say that those 50s and early 60s tiki musicians invented ambient world music a generation before its time.

So, those of you who do judge people by the music they listen to, what does that list say about me?

I learned something about myself up at Lothlorien last week: I'm not a drummer any more. I'm done with the drum circle thing, I think. I'm going to miss it a little. But I've got three problems with it that just aren't going away, they're getting worse. And those three problems have crowded out all of the fun, and all of the spirituality, I ever got out of it. Twice last week, I went to drum circles at the Thunder Shrine, and both times I lasted 15 minutes before I couldn't stand it any more. So I'm probably going to give away at least some of my drums, probably to kukla_tko42, and give up looking for drum circles for the foreseeable future.

I'm Bored. ( Read more... )

Even More, I'm Sick of the Soul-Sucking Parasites. ( Read more... )

Wiccans Are Really Starting to Piss Me Off. ( Read more... )

I mentioned a while back that I've gotten hooked on Tiki music - in particular, Vegas Vic's Tiki Lounge on Live365.com. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what the appeal of it was - and all of you probably agreed with me that the appeal was unfathomable. But the more I listen, and the more I look into it, the more I get it. No, more than that, the more I wish I'd re-discovered this stuff ages ago. Oh, and by the way, I also found out that there's a downloadable 2-CD collection of the best of the stuff, complete with all the CD case inserts - click on the album cover graphic for instructions.

So what's the appeal?

( Read more... )

OK, any time a LiveJournal meme is so powerful that it ends up mentioned in passing in Wired News and SlashDot, I guess it's worth doing on my way out the door. I loaded my entire ~/music directory into XMMS, randomized the playlist, and these were the first 25 songs:

VNV Nation, "Dark Angel" - Masters Of Percussion (Sarvar Sabri, Hossam Ramzi, Udo Jam Buttie), "Drumming - Arabic -African - Latin - Tabla" - Ray Manzarek, "Downbound Train," The Golden Scarab - Lords of Acid, "Young Boys" - Carbon Based Lifeforms, "Into the Canyon" - Weird Al Yankovic, "Star Wars Cantina" - Cream, "Layla" - "Madonna WTF vs. Prohibited" - Liam Lynch, "United States of Whatever" - Lords of Acid, "Voodoo U," Voodoo U - My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, "Do You Fear (For Your Child)" - Sir Mix A-Lot, "Baby Got Back" - Aerosmith, "Love In An Elevator" - Tangerine Dream, "Unicorn Theme" - Ray Manzarek, "Choose up and Choose Off," The Golden Scarab - B-52's & Ramones, "Chop Suey" - Robert Rich & Steve Roach, "Fearless," Strata - Weird Al Yankovic, "Jerry Springer" - Weird Al Yankovic, "Taco Grande" - Aerosmith, "Big Ten Inch (Record)," Toys in the Attic - Spike Jones, "Harlem Nocturne" - Spike Jones, "Hawaiian War Chant" - Drum Army, "Motherland (Africa)" - Billy Joel, "She's Always A Woman" - Divinyls, "I Touch Myself"

For those of you who punked out on Venus Envy last night, a few notes. First of all, you must have been practically t