Force 10 From Aqualung

Updating an iPod can really take a while. Added Townes Van Zandt's Live From the Old Quarter Houston, Texas, a live album that serves as a good Best Of for a guy you might call the Chet Baker of Country. Put on a couple Costello cds, The Amps - Pacer, which was a Kim Deal side project between Breeders discs and is about as good as anything she's done though rawer, less intelligible, angrier and at times sexier, as on the mail-order lesbian song, "She's A Girl", though the vigor and growl of "Tipp City" (Peacock/caught lookin in a mirror/Stop drinkin my beer!) still puts the hair on my neck up like nothing else except Public Enemy. Also added Camper Van Beethoven's two best discs, Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart and Key Lime Pie; ABC's The Lexicon of Love, which has that amazing early 80s Trevor Horn sheen but still sounds really great, with clever lyrics and good arrangements throughout. I also arranged some playlists of Depeche Mode mixes and b-sides and then after listening to a few checked iTunes and found there was a Remixes 81-04 disc out back at the end of October, so I grabbed the ones I didn't have. I lost interest in the bad several years ago but of course good remixes can add a lot of flavor and energy to songs that the band themselves might have lost. I was happy to find some long-lost Adrian Sherwood dub mixes of "Master and Servant" and "Are People People?" (different enough to merit the title change) on the disc as well. These are not dance mixes but true deconstructions of the songs. Not sure what Sherwood's up to now but he was one of those names I would look for in the 80s on mixes, as they always had an edge to them and were never merely extended versions of the single. Francois Kevorkian also was good.

Watched a couple episodes of Arrested Development during dinner and also wrote a rough proposal for a vampire graphic novel that would be pretty fun to do. Dark in tone, with no glamour at all to being a vampire, but it should be enjoyable to read. Not sure when I'll really dig in and do it but I felt like doing this tonight. It would require some research into modern art and a couple other things, though my instincts are to avoid watching or reading any vampire stuff, not that I've sheltered myself from Buffy or Lugosi or Hammer or Niles or George Hamilton :) Most likely next thing to work on is still Superunknown #2, or maybe Irregular Joe #3. Delays or not, I'd like to get IJ completely written and the first arc of Superunknown written before doing TOO much other stuff, though with about half of an 80-100 page graphic novel sitting dormant for months, I may want to jump back into that. We'll see. Good to have choices.