muzak and shit

yawn. i'm recording Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip so i can watch it sans commercials in a little bit thus do more productive things now. meanwhile, i'm cleaning up, listening to David Bowie, and finally downloading music en masse for the first time in, what, two or three years?

i've decided that it's idiotic for me to remain fairly ignorant about the classics. when it comes to actually listening to music, i've got pretty intelligent, discerning tastes... when i'm interested enough to bother. i've tapped into some pretty cool indie bands without even looking for 'em, but when it comes to the classics, honestly, i know next to nothing about the music even though i know enough about performers and the critical feedback (and some of the obvious hits) to know who i'm gonna dig. i blame the ignorance on my parents. while everyone else's parents were listening to the Doors and other greats from '70s, mine were listening to fucking Patsy Cline, Liona Boyd, and Kenny Rogers. yeah, i know when to fold 'em.

Bowie, for instance, is a recent addition to my library. i know i like the Beach Boys but have nothing of their work, so i'm downloading a huge library of it, as well as a bunch of George Michael stuff (oh, humour me). other present downloads -- Miles Davis, an obscure canadian named Mary Margaret O'hara (who i was introduced to through a show i captioned -- the album Miss America is a 1988 effort that went way underappreciated, from the info i can find, but is years ahead of Alannis Morrissette and PJ Harvey and Liz Phair and other chicks like that -- i thought the track i captioned was current, it was so contemporary sounding. to find out it was 18 years old blew me away) and some more obscure Beatles and Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash and Elvis Costello and stuff like that. couldn't come up with a good selection of the Replacements, who i used to have a double-cd of but then lost it (sorry, whipped boy). finally getting some Tribe Called Quest (who i blatantly ripped off for my handle "scribe called steff", needless to say).

but i'm about to start seriously beefing up my music collection. i think my lack of intouchedness with current music, too, is leaving me feeling dated. and i'm not dated. i'm pretty damned hip, really, so this is irritating to me. i've got to start reading the reviews at Pitchforkmedia.com again and getting in tune with today's scene. fo damn sho.

and i'm wanting to get back to seeing gigs. i liked seeing the Stones last week, but i much prefer seeing up-and-coming bands or stalwarts of the club scene, in small venues, not in cavernous shitholes like the BC Place, where 90% of the people are in nosebleed seating. not exactly vibe-inducing, y'know? having been to, what, 200, 300 concerts, i know a good show when i see one, but i appreciate the smaller ones these days, or at the most ones that are in smaller stadiums like the Coliseum.

but then i still need to figure out how to format my fucking iPOD. i love the brilliance of those idiots at Apple: an iPOD formatted for Mac cannot be used on a Windows computer. a Windows-formatted iPOD can be used on a Mac. what the fuck is that about? maybe they've changed that in the two-plus years since i bought mine, but jesus fucking christ. nothing pisses me off more than stupidity like that. how hard is it to make it a multi-platform on Mac if it goes both ways originating on Windows? i am NOT one of the legions of people who owns Mac and thinks it's flawless and always brilliant. i have both, a desktop PC for home use and a mobile iBOOK for whatever else. there are pluses to each. the negative to Mac is that when it DOES start acting up, when things go south, there's little you can do to circumvent it. usually you have to reinstall the whole goddamn OS. at least Windows has more utilities available for fixing downfalls.

(my favourite? registry mechanic. best tool ever. any time things go awry, r.m. fixes me good as new. hurrah for programming brilliance.)

anyhow.

this downloading music thing is gonna be a problem. space will be an issue. ah well. that's what burnable dvds are for. i'll just copy it all off and keep the best on here until such time as i have a secure job and can spend on stupid things like disk space.

for now, i'll use the excuse of not having that money as a reason to download and stuff my hard drive full of the classics.