andrew_jorgensen

Aretha Franklin. Elvis Costello. Solomon Burke. Taj Mahal. The Blind Boys of Alabama. Cissy Houston. The music of Sam Cooke. I just got my ticket.

That's an incredible line-up; but I dread NPR-ready phunque. Actually, considering that my favorite "cutting-edge" artist is always the most prominent Jimi/Sly/Prince-throwback (Outkast elbowed out Beck a few years back), I should dread realizing that I am the primary market for NPR-ready phunque.

I gotta put on Live At The Harlem Square Club. Loud.

I currently have 4 books and one CD in my Amazon shopping cart, and I was looking at Amazon's blurb for "The Page You Made," when it struck me that the top two items were The Road To Disunion, based on rahael's recommendation, and Donald E. Westlake's new Dortmunder caper, The Road To Ruin. I thought that was an interesting synchronicity, though not powerful enough to make me go crazy or anything. Instead, I will have to overstate the relevance of Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages, which, in juxtaposition with the others, suggests that while we may be headed to some bad ends, we're going to take our own sweet time getting there.

The CD is Prince's new Musicology; my unfortunate tendency, if left alone with a word, to pronounce it in an atrocious mock-French accent has led me to wonder about the etymology of ponce. My Oxford Shorter gives the derivation as "perhaps POUNCE," which I find inconclusive. Citations date back to the late 19th Century, when, rumor has it, at least one Prince of Wales was associating with prostitutes. Other princes may have been, for all I know, slightly effeminate. It's a tempting induction, suggesting that ponce might derive from "prince," but folk etymologies are often tempting, and always wrong.

Comfort food is making me uncomfortable. I rationalized the economy of my P. F. Chang's trip with the idea that I could stretch out my order of Kung Pao Chicken and Spicy Eggplant over several meals, and then proceeded to eat the entire thing.

It is my understanding that there exist, along with comfort food, comfort magazines, so I bought a couple. I got the new WIRED, for reasons that may later become apparent, and, inspired by the example of hermionesviolin, the current Rolling Stone. This is the Rolling Stone which contains its list of the 500 "Greatest Albums Ever Made." Hmmm. It seems like just six years ago that they were prying my money from my fingers for their list of the 200 "Greatest Albums Ever Made." I'm not buying another issue until they come out with the 10,000 greatest. Take that, exponential progression!

Perhaps because I've had the earlier list as a subconscious influence since 1997, I own a higher percentage (54 out of 200, compared to 87 of 500) of what was then the "definitive library of the best albums ever made). My suspicion is that the earlier list was actually superior (and thus, my tastes are actually superior). It was chosen by a smaller panel with more of an eye towards history, and thus contains selections by Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker. On the other hand, the later list has a lot more jazz on it (a surprising amount of which I own -- not that I listen to it -- not that the panelists listen to it either). The earlier list also has the advantage of being arranged chronologically instead of in some supposed order of quality, which prevents us from being consumed with inanities such as "Hotel California is only number thirty-seven? Damn it, that's a top thirty-five album in my book!" It also provides the benefit of disguising the Beatles fetishization by slotting the copious amounts of their records into their proper slot -- the 1960s -- rather than into nearly half of the top ten.

Anyway, what follows is the list of the albums from the new list which I own. Most of these I have on CD, some I bought back when I was primarily a casette consumer and have not updated since I got my first CD player in 1990 (make of that what you will), and a couple I only have because I ripped my girlfriend's CDs onto my MP3 player. I have not included tapes I made of CDs my high school friends had, mostly as a discriminatory measure designed to keep Pink Floyd off the list. I was a bit confused with how to count some of the anthologies: for example, I do not actually own Sly & the Family Stone's Greatest Hits, but I own Anthology, which contains all of Greatest Hits plus tracks off of there's a riot goin' on and Fresh. However, I have not checked whether or not the anthologies of Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Howlin' Wolf and others correspond to what I have in any way.

( 87/500 )

I suppose one could compare the above to the full list, then cross-reference with my preferences stated both in my user info and my response to shadowkat67's meme and come up with a reasonable approximation of an Amazon Wish List. And with the holidays just around the corner. Of course, on any list of the 500 things I need most, 413 albums have to come pretty low.

I have promised myself that I will write a real, substantial, LJ entry before Friday. It will pull no punches and speak truth to power. It will change your life, give you renewed purpose, and blow the lid off the military-hiphopdustrial complex.

In the meantime, please excuse the following blather.

Item the first: should I ever be in the mood to scare my cats, I now know exactly what to do. I just need to get them on edge by carting them off to the vets for some yearly boosters, then bring them home, let them get snug and warm and comfortable, almost to the point where they trust me again, then slip on my headphones and dance (if one can call a semi-epileptic crossbreed between the Watusi and a torn anterior cruciate ligament "dancing") around the kitchen to O{+>'s "Billy Jack Bitch."

Item the second: it crosses my mind that I'd like to see whether or not my spawn, my scion, the sole heir to all my worldly widely webly possessions, atpotch will be able to get down to London around the weekend of the 22nd. I assume that my meeting londonkds and yabyumpan is, as we say in O{+> speak, a 4gone conclusion. But I would be willing to expend an especial effort to meet the one I sired; though, obviously, it would be all the more convenient if I could get him to be the one who goes through all the hassle of UK travel.

Item the third: it's amazing how a not-that-flattering picture can, with the judicious application of just a little Photoshopping, be turned into an absolute nightmare of blotchiness and bignosiness. Errr, I mean, GIP.