After the near-record rainfall in January here, the past week has been mostly sunny and warm -- although with the cloud blanket gone, nighttime temperatures have dipped toward freezing. I've gone for two long walks in the sun today already. The first was up to Val's Cafe on Phinney Ridge for breakfast, then down along the edge of Green Lake (which was hopping with sun worshippers) and over to OfficeMax on 45th, where I hoped to buy some blank CD-Rs. However, a fire alarm drove us out of the building (for no fire that I could see), so I ended up buying a 5-pack at Bartell's. After burning a couple more disks here at home, I headed up to the post office to mail them, then walked up to Tangletown in the hope of drinking a pint of Malaise, but settling for the Saison instead. Then back to the house via Bottleworks, where I bought a bottle of the Spring Fever Grand Cru, which is utterly delicious and flowery again this year. It was so warm and sunny on the walk down the ridge that I took my baseball cap off and wondered if I'd get a sunburn.
Meanwhile, I burned my first compilation last night. I called it Random Songs, but if I told you why, I'd have to kill you. I mailed it to a friend, but not before making a copy for myself, which I'm listening to right now. Sounds pretty good, despite the fact that midway through putting it together last night I got sercon enough that some of my decisions about song order were rather ... random. But it's a bunch of songs that have given me a lot of pleasure in the past month to a year (and thirty years ago, too, in the case of two Keola Beamer tracks), and the recombination sparks new pleasure.
That wasn't the first disk I burned on this machine. The first was a copy of a disk I made on Denys' machine. It's called The Wizard of Oz Suite and consists of a selection I made of incidental music, variants, and outtakes from the two-disk deluxe edition of the original motion picture soundtrack. (I know, you're scared now.) The incidental music for The Wizard of Oz is beautiful -- full of strange echos, refractions, and elaborations of all the famous song themes. Shockingly, when I played the selection for carl, he really liked it, and the copy I made was for him. It's pretty rare for carl to ask for a copy of something I play for him! (He's probably secretly a Judy Garland fan, right? Well, too bad, she's not in it.)
Meanwhile, I burned my first compilation last night. I called it Random Songs, but if I told you why, I'd have to kill you. I mailed it to a friend, but not before making a copy for myself, which I'm listening to right now. Sounds pretty good, despite the fact that midway through putting it together last night I got sercon enough that some of my decisions about song order were rather ... random. But it's a bunch of songs that have given me a lot of pleasure in the past month to a year (and thirty years ago, too, in the case of two Keola Beamer tracks), and the recombination sparks new pleasure.
That wasn't the first disk I burned on this machine. The first was a copy of a disk I made on Denys' machine. It's called The Wizard of Oz Suite and consists of a selection I made of incidental music, variants, and outtakes from the two-disk deluxe edition of the original motion picture soundtrack. (I know, you're scared now.) The incidental music for The Wizard of Oz is beautiful -- full of strange echos, refractions, and elaborations of all the famous song themes. Shockingly, when I played the selection for carl, he really liked it, and the copy I made was for him. It's pretty rare for carl to ask for a copy of something I play for him! (He's probably secretly a Judy Garland fan, right? Well, too bad, she's not in it.)