Yes, it is a reflection of how bored I am, after four days on the couch, that I’m watching actual television shows.
Day 4 out after ankle surgery, and I’m watching Leverage on DVR, mainly because this guy (who wrote this) is one of the executive producers. I’ve been reading Kung Fu Monkey for years – ever since Crazification Factor, and it’s been fun trying to figure out from the blog who John Rogers is and what he does because he does so many different things. I mean, Transformers, Blue Beetle, looks like he worked on the Cosby Show, and for the longest time I thought he was Yet Another Hilarious Liberal Blogger, one who didn’t post very often.
It’s been interesting watching Leverage, because I don’t watch much TV. After all John’s posts on TV series sausage-making, I was curious how the show would turn out. I was hugely disappointed by the first episode, which lays some pipe on how the group gets together, none of which I bought. Not the characters, not the relationships, not the story, nada. It was all so quick, so shallow, so idiot-driven, that I couldn’t take it seriously. “Television shows,” I said to myself, and didn’t watch further. It took until I was laid up with the ankle to watch some of the episodes recorded since, and now I’m kinda hooked, and now I get it. TV shows RELY on the fact that you’re coming back next week. There’s no way they can do setting, characters, and plot in one short show, especially with all the commercials they have to show.
And, tentacles, do they show a lot of commercials. If there were no DVR, I’d never be able to watch the sucker. Even on fast fast-forward, the commercial breaks are almost more than I can stand. And – memo to TV industry DVR haters – I still know what every one of them is for. You watch the commercials REALLY intently when you’re FF’ing to make sure that you don’t skip over the next bit of show.
That is, music I’ve acquired in 2009.
Here we are, almost halfway through the month, and I’ve already bought/downloaded (eMusic) the following albums since 1/1:
1/13 – MGMT – Oracular Spectacular
1/13 – Kimya Dawson – Remember that I love you
1/11 – Joseph Arthur and the Lonely Astronauts – Temporary People
1/8 – Mr. Scruff – Ninja Tuna
1/8 – Kimya Dawson – Hidden Vagenda
1/8 – Juana Molina – Un Dia
1/4 – Laura Veirs – Two Beers Veirs
1/4 – Quasimoto – The Unseen
1/2 – The Presets – Blow Up
1/2 – Breakestra – Hit the Floor
So I’ve been going a little overboard. That’s 119 tracks in 15 days, suggesting I’ll need a couple new hard drives by the end of the year.
My favorites of these so far are:
Kimya Dawson – wordy, fearsomely smart, profane, progressive. It was worth leaving the useless iTunes “genre” column in the display to discover that Apple classifies her under “Country”. Toby Keith fans may pass right on by, though.
Yeah, I first heard her in the Juno soundtrack, too.
Juana Molina – Blurry loops of beautiful vocals, and I can’t understand a word. An eMusic recommendation.
Breakestra – Throwback funk, with Chali 2na rapping on one track. Why can’t we ever get more than one track of Chali 2na on any album? Another eMusic recommendation
Mr. Scruff and MGMT are promising, but I haven’t listened to them enough yet.
