Had a minor heart-attack today (not literally) as my iPod froze up and nothing I could do -- clicking the wheel in various combinations, plugging it into my iBook or the wall charger, tapping it on the desk, slapping it with the flat of my hand -- would bring it back to life.

I have all the music stored on it backed up on an external hard drive, but it would be a huge pain in the ass, not to mention an unexpected expense, to replace the iPod with a new model (even though the new models are shiny shiny, and have more storage capacity, and a color screen, and play videos; mine is the 40GB version to the right). Plus, I don't need another paperweight; I'd rather listen to the music inside.

Thankfully, after searching through Apple.com, I found a support page on how to reset the damn thing when it freezes up. I performed the magical sequence of button-pushing and switch-toggling while dancing on one foot and wearing nothing but a strategically-placed sock (not literally; there was no sock), and wonder of wonders, the iPod springeth back to life.

Whew.

The video for Saul Williams' "List of Demands," the 2004 song that got Reznor interested in him in the first place [source]. This makes me want to turn up the volume and dance around like a crazy person.

And below is the video of Williams performing the song live with Nine Inch Nails in 2005.

An email from Trent Reznor last week, via The Spiral email list:

As many of you know, I've been working closely with Saul Williams on his new record. We've spent many hours together in hotel rooms, busses, backstages and studios around the world working on something we knew was great. This is the most involved I've been with any project outside NIN since Antichrist Superstar, and I've been impatiently waiting for the chance for you to hear it. Well... guess what?

The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! has arrived! After my own recent dealings with record labels we decided to release it directly to you. Head over to www.niggytardust.com for all the details. Register now and you can download the record November 1st. Working on this project was a real pleasure. Saul was interested in breaking boundaries / crossing genres / defying expectations and we learned a great deal from one another in the process. When asked about the sound of the record, I've had to resort to "... I really don't know HOW to describe it." That's a good thing more than ever these days.

A word on the way we've chosen to release this. There are obvious similarities in how Radiohead just released their new record and the way we've chosen to. After thinking about this way too much, I feel we've improved upon their idea in a few profound ways that benefit you, the consumer. You obviously will be the judge of this in the end. One thing that IS very different in our situation is that Saul's not the household name (yet!) that Radiohead is, and that means we need your support on this more than ever. If you like what you hear, spread the word.

I hope you enjoy the music,

TR

Being the huge Trent fan that I am, I was at the very least intrigued. After going to the site, I was interested enough to plunk down $5.00 for the album.

A word about the publication. As he says above, the album is being released directly to the public, with no record label acting as middleman. However, the link to Trent and Nine Inch Nails certainly adds cachet to the project, and will hopefully bring in more listeners than if it had been produced by someone less well-known. As with Radiohead's In Ranbows, Saul Williams' The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! is now available as 15 DRM-free MP3 files. However, the difference here is that instead of setting your own price (and then, in addition, having to pay a fee to the transaction company, even if you enter £0.00), you can either download the entire album for free in 192Kbps format (which isn't shabby, but not quite CD quality), or kick $5.00 directly to the artist and download the album in one of three formats (192Kbps MP3, 320Kbps MP3, or FLAC lossless audio). The set price does take some of the choice away from the buyer, but, as Trent says, Williams is not yet a household name, so setting a minimum price is a bit of insurance that they'll be able to make some money from sales; plus, if you don't want to pay, you can always download the whole thing for free.

Another change is that they're using PayPal for the transactions, which is incredibly smart. I dread making a purchase online these days where I have to actually submit my credit card number; PayPal is secure, can handle a whole slew of currencies, and is phenomenally easy to use.

So I preordered the album in 320 kbps MP3 format last Friday, and got the email yesterday with the download link. Even zipped up, it took about an hour to download the whole album, including a 33-page liner-notes booklet in PDF (though I will say that my connection has been slower than usual lately, so it may not take that long for other folks). I listened to it on the train to class last night, and also on the way home. (I'm listening to it again right now as I write this.)

First impressions: it's very evident that Trent Reznor produced it; his industrial style is all over the album, but hey, that's why I bought it, right? His instrumentation is very similar to what he's used previously in Nine Inch Nails, and I note in the credits that he actually provides the music (whole or in part) for 12 of the 15 songs. So it's not just that he produced the album, he also had a very direct hand in the music as well. That said, all the lyrics (sung, rapped, or word-spoken), with the exception of the cover of "Sunday Bloody Sunday," belong to Saul Williams.

The percentage of hip hop in my overall musical tastes (Cyprus Hill, Eminem, M.I.A., Busta Rhymes, Beastie Boys, Rage Against the Machine, Chamillionaire, Lauren Hill, Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, Tricky) is fairly low, so I can't really talk about NiggyTardust in an overall hip hop context, but I'm digging the album so far. Only one of the songs, "Tr(n)igger," has samples from previous music (Public Enemy's "Welcome to the Terrordome"); everything else is original. It's industrial, it's hip hop, it's spoken word, it's raw and it's angry. There are times, mostly when Williams sings instead of raps, that his voice sounds eerily like Reznor's (making me wonder if this was purposely done, or whether it's a wonderful coincidence), so much that when Reznor actually adds background vocals for "WTF!" it's impossible to tell them apart; this track is also the most NIN-like on the album, which may be why it's my favorite song so far.

I very much recommend NiggyTardust if you're a fan of hip-hop and/or Nine Inch Nails, or if you want to support an artist in what will soon become a sizable community of musicians who want to break free of the control of music studios. If nothing else, you can download the album first for free, and if you like it, donate some money straight to Williams himself.

Just downloaded the new Radiohead album In Rainbows and am listening to it right now. Digging it so far, although it's different from any other previous album. And I really dig that it was delivered as a ZIP file that contained (10) 160kbps DRM-free MP3s. Much love to the dudez. I chose to give them £5.00 for the album (~US$10.00 or S$15.00), which is pretty much what I would have paid if I'd bought the album off iTunes, but in this case, all of that money is going to the band. W00t.

***

After a faculty meeting this morning at SMU, I wandered into the uni's library to poke my head around, since I really hadn't before, and discovered a small lending section of fairly recent books, many of which I was interested in. As a faculty member, I can borrow books from the school library, so I snagged Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, then went up to the information desk to get my membership all squared away, during which I found out that I can check out an unlimited number of books for a month at a time and renew them online for free (as opposed to the National Library, where I have a limit of 4 books for 3 weeks at a time, and have to pay 50¢ to renew them for only 14 additional days). There was no fee to set up a membership (NatLib fee: $10.50), and I can reserve as many books as I want for free (NatLib fee: $1.55 per book).

Granted, the selection at the National Library is quite a bit larger than SMU's (and they have lots of satellite locations that might contain the book if I can't find it at the main branch), but man, they sure are fee-happy. I haven't checked the rest of the SMU library yet (apparently there are more books to lend out on another floor, and I can even borrow reference books!), but even if they don't have as many books as the NatLib, it's a nice alternative.

Afterward, I took the MRT up to Orchard Road and walked to Kinokuniya to spend the gift certificate bux I received for my birthday. I wandered around for about an hour, sifting through the aisles and trying to find something worth spending money on that I couldn't otherwise borrow. After much deliberation, during which I wrote some titles in the Moleskine to find later at the library, I picked up the UK trade paperback of William Gibson's Spook Country, and volume one ("On the Ground") of DMZ by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli (enthusiastically recommended by Cory).

Reading-wise, I'm currently about a third of the way through Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown, and really taken with it so far. Interesting the way it's structured, in that the reader is presented with a violent killing at the beginning, and then afterward we are shown in great detail all the events in the main characters' lives that lead to the fatal encounter in front of a New York apartment building. Languorous pace as well, especially compared to The Satanic Verses and Fury (the two other Rushdie books I've read), with intense concentration on the words themselves, and I often get (happily) lost in his language and style. We'll see if I still feel the same 350 pages from now.

[Disclaimer: I am a BookSense Affiliate, so clicking on any of the book links above will net me a bitsy referral fee. Plus, you'll be supporting your local indie bookshop, so everyone wins.]

Some very cool news from Trent Reznor:

Hello everyone. I’ve waited a LONG time to be able to make the following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate. Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008. Exciting times, indeed. (via Ed)

I've blogged previously about Trent's awesomeness, and this is indeed exciting news. He's often commented about studio pressures impinging on his artistic vision (oddly similar to Poppy Z. Brite's relationship with Three Rivers Press), and of the actions taken specifically counter to his promotion of Year Zero (as part of the ARG associated with the album, he purposefully leaked mp3s of songs from the album before its release, both online and on thumb drives planted in the toilets of NIN concert venues, with the express purpose of P2P sharing, and his label stupidly sent cease-and-desist notices to the sharers).

Ed notes:

With Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead now operating without record contracts, perhaps the music industry might want to reconsider precisely how it conducts business. The artists and the listeners are not the enemies. The industry’s continued litigation towards online music listeners, the industry’s sustained avarice towards artists locked into unfair contracts, and the industry’s failure to embrace inevitability collectively suggest that we may very well be witnessing a remarkable revolution that may well knock the remaining wind out of record companies.

Other less well-known bands have already gone this route and begun selling directly to their fans -- Royal Crown Revue and Collective Soul are two that immediately come to mind, not to mention the legions of bands who give their music away on their websites and on MySpace -- but the fact that two huge players like Radiohead and NIN are no longer willing to play the record companies' game is a huge defection. I don't completely agree with Ed's assessment, but I sincerely hope that the company executives get their heads out of their asses and stop treating their customers as criminals. They're losing millions of dollars on their petty little RIAA crusades, and it's produced nothing but ill will toward them. It's time for a sea change, and we may be seeing its emergence.

Thing 1: Lots of new fiction out now from my peeps and other writers who may not be my peeps but I like their writing nonetheless not to mention venues that are cool and quirky and need your support, such as Farrago's Wainscot, Lone Star Stories, Helix, and Strange Horizons.

Thing 2: In case you're not one of the hundreds of thousands of readers who dig Boing Boing or John Scalzi, some very cool news: Radiohead, one of the best-selling and critically-acclaimed bands on the planet, is releasing their next album, In Rainbows, directly to the public via the site I just linked to twelve words ago. In two versions: an $80 discbox that comes with all kind of goodies, and a download version where you can set your own price. That's right. Thom Yorke and his mates certainly aren't hurting for money, so if you only want to pay 2 pence, that's fine, although I'm guessing that they're banking on the fact that many of their fans will pay much more since this is a system that suits both them and the band. And even if everyone only coughs up £5, that money is going straight to the band instead of to a middleman, which I'm sure is making music studios everywhere quake in their boots a little.

Thing 3: The Facebook meetup at the Singapore Art Cafe went really well, and was a lot of fun. I managed not to trip over my tongue too much whilst reading "Screwhead" (photographic evidence, and yes, I know it looks like I'm about to deliver a sermon, but that's a Moleskine I'm reading out of, with a Threadless sticker on the front), and the audience laughed at the funny bits, and even some bits that were not quite intended to be so. It was a little strange, being the only prose reader (and white guy) among the group of talented acoustic musicians, but I felt very welcome. Lots of great food (it was also a potluck; Janet made Tom Yam rice, and it turned out really well) and the cafe itself is really cool; it's actually part of the public library at the Esplanade, but could be separated (as it was last night) by a retractable glass wall, so that people in the library proper could gawk at us while we performed and we could stare at them checking out books and stuff.

(via barthanderson)

Trent Reznor remains my hero:

Year Zero is selling for $34.99 Australian dollars ($29.10 US). No wonder people steal music. Avril Lavigne’s record in the same store was $21.99 ($18.21 US). By the way, when I asked a label rep about this, his response was: “It’s because we know you have a real core audience that will pay whatever it costs when you put something out - you know, true fans. It’s the pop stuff we have to discount to get people to buy.” So, I guess as a reward for being a “true fan” you get ripped off.

[...]

We will put out one last album for Universal and after that we will sell albums directly to fans from our website at (say) $4 an album.

Nine Inch Nails just played their first ever concert in China, and this is what he had to say to his Chinese fans:

As for the special situation in China, it does not seem to be easy to obtain Western music via legal channels, so I have the following suggestion for our fans: If you can find and buy our legal CDs, I express my thanks for your support. If you cannot find it, I think that downloading from the Internet is a more acceptable option than buying pirated CDs. Our music is easy to find on the Internet, and you might not need to spend much effort to find most of our songs. If you like our songs after you’ve heard them, please feel free to share it with your friends. As I have put all my effort and heart into my music, I sincerely hope that more and more people can share the enjoyment with us.

Still visionary, still relevant. The dude just gets it.

1. "The Great Plastic Bag Plague" by Tara Lohan at AlterNet. We are drowning in a sea of plastic bags, and some of the statistics here are just mindboggling: "The Algalita Marine Research Foundation learned that 'broken, degraded plastic pieces outweigh surface zooplankton in the central North Pacific by a factor of 6-1. That means six pounds of plastic for every single pound of zooplankton.' Which means, when birds and sea animals or looking for food -- more often, they are finding plastic."

2. the_flea_king introduces us to Dr. Julius T. Roundbottom at the exquisite new site Clockpunk.com (syndicated at dr_roundbottom). Jeremy has outdone himself once again with the presentation and content here, whish is just amazing, and pushes all of my geeksquee buttons.

3. "It's capitalism or a habitable planet - you can't have both" by Robert Newman at Guardian Unlimited (via willshetterly). This opinion piece is over a year old, but still an interesting and timely read. You'll have to decide for yourself if he's right.

4. MonkeyBrain Books is having a September two-for-one sale. "Buy any book direct from us through www.monkeybrainbooks.com at the regular price, and receive another book of equal or lesser value free of charge." And they take PayPal. The new Hal Duncan novella, Escape From Hell! is looking mighty tempting...

5. Keepon, the squashy yellow dancing robot, dances to Spoon's "Don't You Evah." Awesome. Cute dancing robots and music by Spoon; what more do you need?

"Knights Of Cydonia" by UK band Muse. (via JeffV)

I just watched Stranger Than Fiction for the first time since seeing it in the theatre, and it struck me once again what a damn good movie it is. Love love love it. As they say: made of awesome.

And I'd forgotten that Spoon frontman Britt Daniel had a big hand in the music for the film, using several instrumentalised Spoon songs as background, as well as one written especially for the film. An ingenius combination, pairing this film and this music.

I've been listening to a lot of Spoon lately (Kill the Moonlight is on heavy rotation right now). I'm warming up to Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, still available in free streaming format until its official release on Tuesday (I don't know if they'll take it down at that point or leave it up).

No real point to this entry except to g33k out over music and a movie that I really dig. Which is what blogs are all about, right?

Spoon, one of my favorite new discoveries last year, with their mind-blowingly excellent album Gimme Fiction, has a new album coming out, called Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. The band is streaming the entire album, song by song (via JeffV); they're now up to five. What I've heard so far is interesting, not quite as immediately grabby as Gimme Fiction, but not bad either. This is a nice change from the other new albums that have come out lately from Marilyn Manson, Linkin Park, and The Killers, which were all disappointments (not that the styles of these albums are the same, but that I bought them lately).

I've only seen one episode of Doctor Who (back when I was a wee lad, on PBS, one of the Tom Baker episodes, since I definitely remember the scarf), and I've felt a bit deprived because of that, especially when folks talk about the new episodes out right now.

But I did always dig that theme song. This afternoon, for background music I was listening to Dean Gray's excellent mashup album American Edit (an album I hadn't listened to in a while, and one which made me shell out my hard-earned cyberbucks to buy Green Day's original album American Idiot (which is on heavy rotation on the ol' iPod; are you listening, Warner Brothers?)), and up came track 2, "Doctor Who on Holiday," which combines "Holiday" with The Timelords' "Doctorin' the Tardis."

And this naturally led me to YouTube to find the original title sequence for the television show. Among the many intros was the above video, produced sometime in the 1980s, and which features musician and composer Peter Howell at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop creating the theme song with syths and other electronic equipment before the advent of midi systems or multi-track software. A really interesting behind-the-scenes look into how the theme song of the most popular British SF show evar was (re)made.

Talked to my parents via Skype today, since it was the first time this week that I felt I've been able to express aloud what I've been feeling. I was probably terse in our conversation as well, because it's still hard for me (despite how much I've been blogging). Mom and Dad, as always, were great reassuring voices; they've been checking on me all week long, and I'm glad for it.

I listened to Ajahn Brahm's podcast lecture on "Coping With Loss" (MP3), which seemed to help.

I've also been listening to Nine Inch Nails and The Church, because somehow that has seemed to help as well. Also, the soundtrack to the film Run Lola Run, which Jamie introduced me to, and, as Alex reminds me, was "definitely his go-to movie."

And of course, Janet has been an incredible support. As has her family.

As have all of you beautiful people.

And, appropos of nothing, a review of mine went up this past week, turned in last weekend to Vagablogging.net, for Mark Ehrman's book Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America.

Rolling Stone reports that Nine Inch Nails has initiated an unusual way to promote their new science-fictional concept album Year Zero:

It is no longer 2007. According to Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero mania sweeping the internation, we’re almost three months into -15 BA (Born Again). In the semi-terrifying world of Trent Reznor’s new future-based concept album, the year 2022 is Year Zero, the year we were “Born Again.” Every 12 months prior to Year Zero is denoted by negatives, thus 2007 is -15 BA. If this confuses you, give up now.

In what has to be the most innovative promotion scheme since the leaked sex tape, NIN have treated their fans to a sort of Where’s Waldo game that includes tour merchandising, a dizzying network of websites and, umm, bathrooms in European concert halls. We’d be lying if we said we weren’t checking echoingthesound, the main fan checkpoint, every hour to see what the latest update is.

In case you’ve been living under a rock (without internet), let us catch you up:

It all started with a NIN tour T-shirt. An overeager fan realized that the bolded letters on the back formed a phrase: iamtryingtobelieve, which if you add a .com to the end of it, takes us to the first piece of the puzzle. Here, we learn about the drug Parepin, which has been added to the water supplies of Orlando as protection against similar acts of bio-terrorism against Los Angeles and Anaheim in 2009 (or -13 BA…try to keep up). This site speculates whether Parepin is a medium for the government to control the minds of its citizens.

[...]

Throughout NIN’s European tour, members of whatever all-star marketing squad is behind all this have been leaving USB drives in random concert venues. The drives are filled with new NIN songs (”My Violent Heart” and “Me, I’m Not”), cryptic mp3s and pictures visible only via spectrographs. These files if deciphered correctly also provide us playing the game with the next clue/website.

Want to know if your bathroom is going to be raided? Those ingenious posters at echoingthesound have discovered that every time a pixel blob appears next to one of the songs listed here, you should hit the toilets early for a chance of grabbing one of these drives.

This reminds me a lot of the Alternate Reality Games that Sean Stewart was involved with to promote the film A.I. and the video game Halo 2. I wonder if he has a hand in this as well.

Cory Doctorow has contributed a new piece to Salon, called Steve Jobs' iTunes dance, in which he discusses the horribly crippling DRM that Apple applies to its products:

If you rip your own CDs and load them onto your iPod, you'll notice something curious. The iPod is a roach motel: Songs check in, but they don't check out. Once you put music on your iPod, you can't get it off again with Apple's software. No recovering your music collection off your iPod if your hard drive crashes. What's more, Apple prevents copying indiscriminately. You can't copy any music off your iPod. Apple even applies the no-copying measure to audio released under a Creative Commons license (for example, my own podcasts), which prohibits adding DRM. The Creative Commons situation is inexcusable; because Creative Commons licenses are machine-readable, iTunes could automatically find the C.C.-licensed works and make them available for copying back to your computer.

This news absolutely made my stomach drop. Before selling all my CDs, I ripped them to my iBook, and then transferred them to the iPod; once the number of files started getting huge (over 5,000), I began deleting many of them from the laptop, figuring that if I needed to, I could just copy them back from the iPod (though I did keep some on the iBook, about 400 or so). After reading this, I tried it yesterday, and Cory is absolutely right about his roach motel metaphor: I could move music to the iPod, but I couldn't get it back off. If my iPod gets damaged, or if I ever want to upgrade to a new model, I'm screwed, my songs are stuck there.

And so there needs to be something we can do to pressure Jobs to put his words -- offering to embrace a DRM-free music-sales environment "in a heartbeat," if only the big four music companies would let him -- into action, that it's not just lip service and passing the blame to the music industry (although they have a lot to account for as well). If I had transferred the music as MP3 files (or even as AAC files) via normal file transfer instead of through iTunes, I'd still be able to access them and copy them back if I needed to, and I could kick myself for not knowing about this sooner.

Lots of things to talk about (or at least point to), lots of tabs open, so here we go.

Thing #1: Chinese New Year

Gong Xi Fa Chai, everyone! Janet and I attended the CNY festivities this afternoon at the state fairgrounds, organized once again by TACAS, the Triangle Area Chinese American Society of North Carolina. We ate some veggie dishes, watched adorable kids approximate traditional dances, sampled teas, and I learned how to make an origami box (though I'm pretty sure that now I've forgotten).

Here's hoping the Year of the Fire Pig is a groovy one.

***

Thing #2: Volver

We checked out a matinee of this film earlier in the week, and wow. Not enough good things can be said. Pedro Almodóvar has crafted an extraordinary work of art here, ably assisted by an incredible cast; Penélope Cruz is voluptuous and strong and vulnerable and absolutely commands the viewer's attention whenever she's in a scene. I've been hoping to do a proper review, but other things have been diverting my attention lately; I'll just settle for urging anyone reading this to run out and plunk down your $8 to see this phenomenal movie.

The Volver website also has a number of interesting short essays by Almodóvar himself, including this one, on Genre and Tone:

I suppose that Volver is a dramatic comedy. It has funny sequences and dramatic sequences. Its tone imitates "real life" but it isn't a portrayal of local customs. Rather it has a surreal naturalism, if that were possible. I've always mixed genres and I still do. For me, it's something natural.

The idea of including a ghost in the plot is a basically comic element, particularly if you treat it in a realistic way. All of Sole's attempts to hide the ghost from her sister, or the way she introduces her to her clients, give rise to very comic scenes. Although what happens in Raimunda's house (the death of the husband) is terrible, the way in which she fights so that no one should find out and the way she tries to get rid of him also create comic situations.

Although mixing genres is something natural for me, that doesn't mean it's free of risk (the grotesque and the "grand guignol" are always a threat). When you move between genres and cross opposing tones in a matter of seconds, the best thing is to adopt a naturalistic interpretation that manages to make the most ludicrous situation plausible. The only weapon that you have, apart from a realistic setting, are the actors, or rather, the actresses, in this case. I had the good fortune that they are all in a constant state of grace.

***

Thing #3: The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson

Like many TV watchers in the States, my first exposure to Craig Ferguson was as Nigel Wick, the effeminate authoritarian boss on The Drew Carey Show, a character that always felt like a caricature, a cartoon. Who knew that the guy was actually genuinely funny?

Janet and I have become night owls since both my jobs ended in December (and I consequently didn't have to wake up early in the morning for work), and even though The Late Late Show is on opposite Conan O'Brien, we've started watching Ferguson more than Conan. In a battle of opening monologues, there's simply no contest; bucking the traditional format of hopping from topic to topic and ending each joke on one-liner, Ferguson instead spends fifteen minutes every night, the camera never moving or cutting away, improvising on just a few topics, moving from one to next in smooth segues that often involve self-deprecating remarks and double entendres. It's like a stand-up mini-set every single night, and more often than not, the guy's got me howling with laughter.

And hey, he's also written a novel: Between the Bridge and the River.

***

Thing #4: "The End of the Novel?" by William Deresiewicz

Deresiewicz examines Milan Kundera's newest book-length essay The Curtain:

Although Kundera rightly rejects the notion that he's a political writer, he did his best work after his immigration to France in 1975. As with so many twentieth-century writers, the tensions of exile seem to have tuned his imagination to its highest pitch. Unlike most others, he lived past the century's symbolic end in 1989, and the removal of the condition of exile -- not the fact of not being at home but the fact of not being able to be -- seems to have slackened it.

An interesting notion and one I hadn't thought of before, but it makes some sense. When I was putting my Kundera books up at SCBA, the ones I was least willing to part with were The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, all of which seem more preoccupied with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia than his later work. These are the books that remain more vivid in my mind, and I'm curious as to whether it's because this was his most vibrant and exciting work, or whether the length of each (which far exceeds his later novella-length books) caused me to remain with the characters for a longer textual amount of time.

Regardless, even though Deresiewicz thinks The Curtain can't compare to Kundera's earlier book The Art of the Novel, I'll still be seeking it out at the library once we get to Singapore.

***

Thing #5: Year Zero

Nine Inch Nails is releasing a new album on 17 April, and Trent Reznor has posted two tracks on their MySpace page*: "Survivalism" and "My Violent Heart." And if those tracks are any indication, Year Zero is going to be a disappointing album. Frankly, The Fragile was the high point of Reznor's career; nothing he's done since (with the possible exception of the live album And All That Could Have Been and just a few tracks on With Teeth) has measured up in terms of quality and scope. It's been merely okay. This may have something to do with the complete turnover of his band members, or it may just be that his best days are now behind him.

I hope that this isn't the case, and being a completist NIN fan, I'll still pick up Year Zero when it drops, with an optimism toward the other songs on the album. But Trent, d00d, you're starting to lose me, man.

* Am I the only one who thinks that it's weird that Nine Inch Nails has a MySpace page? Because industrial metal + social networking tool for teenagers = Jason's brain exploding. Of course, Janet made the point that if you're any type of musician these days, you need to have a MySpace page in order to compete at all.

***

Thing #6: Nineteen Eighty-Four, the film

Some brave soul has posted the entire movie on Google Video Canada (via Ed), so go see it before it gets taken down. (The book is in the public domain now in Canada, but I'm guessing the film is not.) The Orwell novel is still one of my all-time favorites, and this film is the ultimate in adaptations. The acting, the direction, the cinematography, it all breaks my heart every time I see it. Big Brother is Watching You.

It's also one of the few DVDs I'm taking to Singapore.

***

Thing #7: Two skiffy writers coming to North Cackalacky

Cory Doctorow will be in North Carolina on 22 February, giving a talk on copyright at the University of North Carolina at 2:00 p.m. and a talk on privacy at Duke University at 5:00 p.m.

Jonathan Lethem will be reading at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh on March 26 at 7:00 p.m. to promote his new novel You Don't Love Me Yet.

***

Whew. Well, that's all for now. Happy rest-of-the-weekend, y'all.

Via cmpriest, the green-screen take of Donny Osmond doing his best Funky White Boy (or, Funky White Middle-Aged Man) behind Weird Al Yankovic for the entire length of his single "White & Nerdy." Awesome awesome stuff, and uploaded to YouTube by Weird Al himself, which just prove true the lyrics of the song. :)

YouTube also has the official video, as well as a behind-the-scenes featurette.

Back in September, I asked you nice folks out there in the intertubes about borrowing Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 because I didn't want to have to buy the CD (the only format it was available in, since it wasn't offerred on iTunes, and out of print at that) just to have to turn right around and sell it again at a loss. ravynmaniac was nice enough to hook me up, and I continue to owe her thanks; it's a great album, and I listen to it quite a bit.

I now have another request.

Palast Orchester, and their incredible frontman Max Raabe, are a German orchestra that has, among other things, reinterpreted many modern rock and pop songs in what Boing Boing calls "Roaring 20's style." The five songs I've managed to find online ("Oops, I Did It Again," "Around the World," "We Will Rock You," "Blue (Da Ba Dee)" and "Tainted Love") are in constant rotation on the ol' iPod, and I discovered they come from two albums: Super Hits and Super Hits Number 2, both of which are imports and unavailable on iTunes.

So I again would like to appeal to the diversity of my readers, and ask if anyone has these two albums, and wouldn't mind if I borrowed them for a short while. Again, I'll pay for postage both ways, and I will return the albums in the condition in which I received them.

Thanks in advance.

The Management

Hallowe'en was kind of a non-issue last night. After picking up marrael at the airport, we grabbed some Vietnamese food for dinner, though Janet didn't eat much, having partaken of a giant muffin a few hours before. At home, I was surprised she made it until 9:15 before conking out. I couldn't stop hugging and kissing and touching her to make sure she was really here, really back. When I woke up this morning and she wasn't in bed, I had the fleeting thought that it had all been a dream, that she was still in Singapore, but a few moments later, she walked in, having been up since 6 a.m. meditating, and all was well.

It is an understatement to say that I am an extremely happy monkey right now.

Oh, anyway, the whole Hallowe'en thing. Last year, we didn't get a single trick-or-treater, and I had to eat all of the candy that I'd bought (and yes, this was an ordeal, and ordeal, I tells ya). So I wasn't expecting any little ghosts and goblins this year and didn't even bother buying candy. By the time we got back from dinner, it was around 7 p.m., and dark (I'm still getting used to that; my body thinks it's still an hour later than it is), and so I'm guessing that any candy-beggars that might have been in the neighborhood were safely ensconced at that point at home, stuffing faces with sugary treats.

This morning, in the office, there is a whole bowl full of leftover candy, various flavors of Tootsie Rolls and lots of other gooey edibles I've never seen before. Actually fairly easy to resist.

***

Okay, some links for you so that I can close some tabs:

Neil Gaiman provides a spooky op-ed for The New York Times: "Ghosts in the Machines." He also has helpfully provided a fill-in-the-blank will for writers, so as to take care of one's literary estate.

Viggo Mortensen -- poet, musician, photographer, painter, Aragorn -- runs an independent press that publishes his passions, Perceval Press.

Good luck to everyone participating in NaNoWriMo. I've come to the definitive conclusion that the stories I want to write cannot be done quickly; I have to consider, and ponder, and ruminate, and reflect, and examine, and this process makes me a slower writer than I used to be. But hopefully, my fiction is better as well. However, there are many writers who thrive on being able to write quickly, and this month is dedicated to y'all.

Kelly Link reads one of my favorite of her stories, "The Hortlak," as part of KQED's weekly arts and culture reading series The Writers' Block. (Via Gavin)

The Valve is running a roundtable discussion of Michael Bérubé's new book, What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? I may have to seek this out at the library.

John Scalzi offers The Occam's Razor Theory of Literary Rejection.

Jeff VanderMeer, one of the hardest-working people I know, presents Dispatches From Smaragdine, a new column now up at SF Site.

Issue number 2 of Clarkesworld Magazine is now online. This month's stories are "The Moby Clitoris of His Beloved" by Ian Watson and Roberto Quaglia and "Lydia's Body" by Vylar Kaftan.

Steve Silberman has an article in the latest Wired about the difficulties Darren Aronofsky faced in making his latest film The Fountain: "The Outsider." (Via Boing Boing) Incidentally, this is one of the films I've been most anticipating this year. Both Pi and Requiem for a Dream were incredibly disturbing in the visual techniques employed and non-traditional narratives used, but both films were indisputably original in their content and execution.

Beck's new album, The Information, dropped yesterday, and I'll be downloading that sucker just as soon as I get home. On his website, you can listen to "Nausea," one of the songs he performed on SNL this past weekend. And wow, did anyone else see that? Those marionettes, like tiny bestringed homunculi, duplicating the band's movements as they made them, man, that just killed me.

Also, the new Scissor Sisters album, Ta-Dah, is amazing. They've built off of their eponymous first album while not repeating themselves, better and tighter and groovier. Certainly worth picking up.