Mary Ann Meets The Gravediggers And Other Short Stories

This is a Regina Spektor compilation album (it was created for release in the UK). I LOVE Regina Spektor, so of course I like this. It has some really fantastic songs on it. I hadn't heard Songs before I heard this so I thought some of them were new, but it looks as though I was mistaken. Anyway, "Consequence of Sounds" is fantastic. I also really liked "Prisoners". "Us" is one of my favorites by her, and I also love "Oedipus". And of course "Chemo Limo" is great. I guess what I'm trying to say is this is a GREAT little compilation!!!

Grade: A

News on the concert front: this Saturday's Regina Spektor concert was postponed. Again. For the third time. Regina, I hope you get better soon! I am going to have to find a new concert going partner if it gets rescheduled too late, because Jeff will be leaving for Japan on January 5th. How sad!

Tin Man (miniseries)

This came on SciFi the past three nights. It was a 'new cinematic retelling' of the Wizard of Oz story. While only nodding briefly to the original here and there, I thought it was imaginative and cool. It was silly and slightly cheesy, as any good SciFi original production should be. I like Zooey Deschanel, also. I would recommend watching it, but don't expect just a new version of the old one.

Grade: B

Portal (flash)

http://www.addictinggames.com/portalflashversion.html

Holy god, that's addictive. Fun puzzly madness!

Grade: B

Heroes, 'Chapter Two'

The finale of "Chapter Two" of Heroes was last night at 9 on NBC. (I should warn you, there's some spoilers).
I will admit, when I first heard about Heroes I was pretty uninterested. But then Jeff watched it online and highly recommended it. So, this summer, thanks to the sadly no-longer-extant TV Links, I obsessively devoured the first season. I LOVED IT, and was seriously looking forward to the new season. However, it has been kind of a disappointment. At first, I was still really excited about it, despite the slow start. The plot really dragged along, and the end-of-the-world scheme wasn't introduced until halfway in. This resulted in a pretty unexciting season. A lot of the plot points seemed really improbable (for the show, I mean, it's kind of improbable altogether in general but I mean people doing really stupid things). So that bothered me a little, and the finale was kind of anticlimactic and a lot of issues failed to be resolved. Of course, this could have been due to the writers' strike, and may be resolved in the 3rd chapter, which I will probably watch even if it sucks. The second season had been publicized as focusing on entirely new characters - and I think this would have been better than drying to milk more out of the old ones. The new characters that were introduced were barely included in the plot. Also, I am not excited at all about the super-recurring villain thing (i.e., they should have left Sylar dead, that whole subplot was boring and not well integrated). Besides, why would Peter leave the Irish chick in a nonexisting future! They don't even mention her at the end!!! Agh. Anyway. So, yeah, disappointing.

Grade: B-

The Book of Jhereg

This is actually a collection of three books by Stephen Brust, all of which are in the Vlad Taltos series. These are the first three. Jeff had been trying to get me to read this for quite a while, and I had been somewhat hesitant, because a lot of fantasy is pretty bad, I've gotta say. However, he persisted to the point of bringing the books from home so I could look at them, and I was swayed by his insistence that these were different fantasy novels. So, I dove into Jhereg, the first book. I was pretty much immediately hooked. The real draw is that the world is really well imagined, and it's not written in the typical fantasy style. Brust is not trying to say 'look at this awesome world I've created, at the expense of plot and character development.' In fact, these are very character-driven, contemporary stories that are simply located in a very fascinating world, which is only revealed little by little as things become important to the story. These three novels (Jhereg, Yendi, and Teckla) are about the assassin Vlad Taltos. They each have quite a different tone to them. I was initially interested in only reading one at a time and reading other things between, but I was so into it that I read the whole collection in sequence - granted, each book is only 17 chapters. I really want to get into the next few books but am giving it a rest at a moment, and checking out Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

Grade: A

new direction

As the new description indicates, I'm taking this blog to new heights in a perhaps futile effort to save it. Basically I now intend to review anything on here. I decided not to change the title because anything that's speaking out, or eradicating boredom, is in the spirit of conquering silence. I realize that no one really reads this, but I don't really care.

OH WOW

It has been quite a long time since I posted. I'm kind of giving up on the music blog thing - it's just not something I really have time for. Perhaps I'll occasionally write on here, maybe keep it as a more public blog... as opposed to my LiveJournal.

I guess out of habit... here's my fave artists/songs/albums/whatever right now.

-Jonathan Coulton - a comedy artist whose music is actually really good! He's very clever, has a wide range of topics, I really recommend him.

-The Magnetic Fields - Really great musicians. I've mostly heard 69 Love Songs, only a few other things, but it's pretty great. Not every song is something I love, but that's just it - they're so ridiculously diverse stylistically!

-Tori Amos - Umm, hello, she's amazing.

-Feist - Do I need to tell you how great Feist is? I absolutely LOVE her music... can't get enough of it.

-John Frusciante - randomly his solo stuff is quite awesome! Yes, I like RHCP too, but I've gotten a little tired of them being played as every other song on XM, and that's the only radio I use, so Frusciante's solo material is a refreshing change. In fact it really sounds nothing like RHCP for the most part... so check it out for something fresh.

-the new Honorary Title! - I've only heard a few songs and clips from the rest, but oh-em-gee it's good so far.

I will be grabbing some Bright Eyes off the lovely Michael Vogel in the near future, so maybe I'll get around to saying how that goes.

Also, I saw Guster and Brett Dennen in concert last weekend - and let me tell you, despite not knowing much of Guster at the time, they were really good live performers!!! I was very impressed. Brett Dennen was also pretty good, also an unknown for me, although I found I have one of their songs. The singer's voice seems a little too much the same all the time to make it great. I think one of my favorite things about Guster was their use of bongos. YES, BONGOS!!!
Also, I'd like to point out that the new Lake Matoaka amphitheater is a FANTASTIC venue. The acoustics are pretty much amazing, it's a beautiful outdoors location, and it's just got a cool feel to it.

Anyway, Jeff and I are catching Regina Spektor at the NorVa pretty soon, should be a good time.

So that was, in fact, a music blog.
Maybe other stuff later?