disturbing video by david lynch ...song from Mobys last album, sounds pretty great to me... anyone pick up that disc?

Stuart, I confess I left the party w/out the disc but very much wanted to listen to it. I'm probably the least familiar with, and possibly most averse to (though Derek's post may contest this), country music as a genre so I'm really interested in listening to your hand-picked songs to see if it sways me. I suspect it will, at least with some of them so whenever one of you can loan me a copy I can rip that would be great.

I believe the high school boys to whom Derek and Brian were reading poetry were fulfilling a court-ordered community service order.

Jazz > Country each and every time. Nothing to do with pretentious coffee shops or the white man's attitude to music they don't understand.

Over the last few days I've listened to Bill Evans' "You Must Believe in Spring", Pharoah Sanders' "The Impulse Story" and the Marcin Wasilewski Trio's "January". All great stuff and much more in touch with the modern world we live in than the best that country music has to offer.

England plays Germany in the round of 16 on Sunday morning if anyone cares.

Oh that's right 4 billion people care except Woody and Arlo. My neglect has been far from intentional and I certainly haven't been hanging out at urinal sized coffee shops. For 99.9% of my life music trumps all. For the next few weeks bollocks to that. If it brings tears to your eyes then suck it up.

actually I saw Brian and Derek reading poetry in a park to a group of rapt high school boys as I was driving home so yes I think you have them summed up quit well...

The intent was to give a huge range from honky tonk to teardrop but I may have erred a little on the teardrop as you say...

Joanne mackell is interesting as a storyline... she was revered as equal to Bonnioe rait in the early sventies and they both got there first big record deals synultaneously.... Joanne drank her way through the huge advance in a matter of weeks and diddnt get around to recording her record...the label dropped her and now she is a regular at queen west bars , often free cover... terrific live show for a truly hidden talent...

Useless desires is patty griffin, her last 3 albums all consistently great...

Lawrence County is a relatively new nand the felice brothers who also have consisemntly put ourt great records...

They just released Guy Clark's - Old .No 1 his first record w LA freeway on it... if you like Towns van zant and Jerry jeff (and that Texas scene which basically set the template for alt country in the mid 70's)...as you do, this is a 5 star record, also a bit of a cult classic so to speak...
s

Forget the rest of these guys, Stuart. They're too busy listening to obscure jazz songs in pretentious little cafes to get immersed in some good old country blues. I was only too happy to give this a good listen. I was able to build a playlist on grooveshark with all of your songs except for the Joanne Mackell cut. Also, I used the Jerry Jeff Walker version of LA Freeway because they didn't have the Guy Clark version - but you really can't go wrong with Jerry Jeff Walker.

Lots of this music is already in my collection, but there were some nice ones that I didn't know, such as the Boy from Lawrence County, Wheels and Useless Desires. All very good. I have an album by the "Notting Hillbillies" (which is a side project of Mark Knopfler's) that includes "I Feel Like Going Home" with a slightly bluesier arrangement. That album is certainly worth picking up if you like this sort of thing.

Some of the tunes were a little too weepy for me - always a danger with country - but overall I really enjoyed the playlist. Thanks!

Well I can tell from the deafening silence that the country cd I mixed went over about as well as skunky Jack Daniels on a dusty cotton field but as Derek (and earlier Mike) had requested a tracklist ,here it is:

1 Relief is just a swallow away- george jones
2 Move it on over; hank williams
3 the bottle let me down - Merle haggard
4 Just one more - George jones
5 Last nights Waltz - joanne Mackell
6 The Virgin- Gene Clark
7 Carmelita-Fred Eaglesmith
8 Useless Desires - patty griffin
9 More Than I can do- Steve Earle
10 The L & N dont stop here anymore- michelle Schocked
11 leavin On your Mind- patsy Cline
12 Boy from lawrence County- The felice Brothers
13 Wheels - Flying Burrito Brothers
14 Sunday Morning Comin Down - Johnny
15 Stand By your man- tammy wynette
16 L.A. Freeway- Guy Clark
17 Hurt - johnny cash
18 Ventura- Lucinda Williams
19 Feel Like Goin Home - Charlie Rich

below is a link to a video from you tube...damned if I can download it to here though...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdcvTgJqK2U

Some good sounding releases coming up in the next couple of months, for those among us into white-boy indy guitar rock.

Agree w/ many of the song and albums listed but why mention the Billy Ray and Tom Cochrane tracks without noting them as exceptions which prove the rule? Are we to infer that the author believes these particular pieces (no, not of music) serve as examples of 1992's sonic bounty? If so, then I scream, "Bullshit" and declare the thesis to have failed. Realize this is a harsh baby out with the bathwater approach but....in fact, you may have to serve some sort of penalty for not reading through the fine print. Really unfortunate, because the other examples were really dead on.

Good article (well, list of albums and songs from 1992) on Allmusic, very appropos of our recent CD night.

I think of the flawed early 70's Michelangelo Antonioni film (which I love, for the record) Zabriskie Point as a film that was greatly improved by its soundtrack - including Pink Floyd, Jerry Garcia, and numerous others. Interesting film, considered a bit of an embarrassment when released for the golden boy of Italian cinema (Blow Up is another touchstone sixties film of his with a great soundtrack), but I've always thought it worked very well, and I can't help but think its reputation will revive over coming generations.

Recently watched 'The Darjeeling Limited', an (often too) cute if somewhat underwhelming film by Wes Anderson (Rushmore). One of its more laudable aspects--and this always seems to be the case with his films--was its choice and use of music, from 60s Stones classics like 'Play with Fire' to Debussy, in background and foreground, as part of scenes or as still frame captures. Of course, this made me want to try to recall other fair-to-mediocre films with either kickass soundtracks or just incredible uses of music throughout. Tarantino is an obvious contemporary touchstone, even when his choices are jarringly anachronistic (i.e. David Bowie's song from Cat People in 'Inglourious Basterds'), though I'd say his films more succeed than fail for the most part so perhaps he doesn't count.

Gents, with apologies for a problematic technology evening last Friday, attached is the list of songs that were played. I suspect I'm missing some, especially from Derek, so feel free to add on. Definitely some good music here, but lots of it was untapped due to no (effin') iPod cord, and rather amazingly, wireless router and turntable problems! Turntable played perfectly all weekend, incidentally. Ah well. We'll get it right next time. I've listed albums (rather than songs) where I know them, feel free to improve upon that as well.

Brian (1) Squirrel - Niagara (2) Tinker - Soft Shell Friend (3) Big Dipper - Heavens (4) Cracker - Kerosene Hat (5) Haden - Trees Lounge (song) (6) Camper Van Beethoven - Key Lime Pie (7)Siouxsie and the Banshees - Peep Show (8) Superchunk - from Foolish (1993), and Heres Where the Strings Come in (1995) (9) Rain Parade - Explosions in the Glass Palace

Derek (1) Sebadoh - Bakesale (2) Orange Juice - The Glasgow School (compilation) (3) Pooh Sticks - The Great White Wonder (4) Guided by Voices - Mah Earwig!

Kyle - where no albums, please add (1) Prefab Sprout (2) Robert Palmer - Clues (3) Aztec Camera (4) The The - Soul Mining (5) Northside (6) The Real People - Window Pane (7) Electronic - self-titled (8) Grandaddy - Under the Wester Freeway

Marc - (1) Catherine Wheel - Happy Days (2) Lou Reed - New York (3) Tom Waits - Rain Dogs (4) Leonard Cohen - The Future (5) Buffalo Tom - Sleepy Eyed

Stuart (1) Spirit of the West - Labour Day (2) Neil Young - Harvet Moon

My head's still spinning from reading your description of the fix, Mike, but I 'm glad you got it sorted out...eventually...as is always the case with these types of issues. Luckily you didn't have to reformat the entire drive. As for the pied piper across the street, I sympathize. The only thing worse than bad flautists are serial whistlers, who I have come close to pushing off subway platforms on many occassions.

But onto something more fun, in honour of the world cup, starting friday:

That's exactly what happened - I wasted most of the day struggling with this. I checked the anti-virus log (nothing), and I ran spyware and adware checkers (which removed a few things, to no avail). And I did a bunch of searching for solutions, which eventually turned up something useful. I found an article that was very technical that claims that MS Windows systems occasionally fall into a trap whereby the ATA and SATA drives have their DMA disabled, which forces them to revert to the less efficient PIO. Nuff said. I only recognized this as significant because one of the symptoms matched the behaviour that I was seeing. The site offered a little script that would reset the ATA devices, thereby re-enabling DMA. With some trepidation I tried it, and it seems to have worked! As I type, I am listening to music that is not skipping or stuttering (R.E.M. at the moment). The little kid across the road is quiet so far today, but I'm ready for him...

Arrgh! Hate it when the computer behaves that way, not just because it's irritating that it won't work but because finding the solution can easily suck hours out of a day, with little progress.

-do you have antivirus software running? if you temporarily disable it, does the problem persist?
-if you turn off the router or internet, does it still happen?

My first thought was that you have some sort of adware or malware running constantly in the background, which is tying up the cpu, thus causing skipping or jolting of other programs, but you indicate that the cpu usage is okay? Are the rest of the programs you're running slow as well (ie. lag time between text typed and when it appears)?

This morning the little kid across the road spent well over an hour tunelessly blowing on a penny whistle or a recorder or some such instrument of torture. My first thought was to put some music on and drown the little bastard out, but my computer picked this moment to fail me. Playing music on the computer has always worked before, but suddenly today it isn't working. At first I thought it was noisy - some kind of static. Upon closer listening, thought, I think that it is stuttering very rapidly on brief sections of the music and then moving on. The effect is most unpleasant. Have any of you encountered such a problem before? More importantly, have any of you come up with a solution to a similar problem before?

Technical details:

- Running XP

- The machine has plenty of memory, CPU power etc. - it's always worked before

- I'm not running out of disk space

- The problem shows up with Windows media player, itunes and one other media player I tried. I suppose this means that the problem is at a lower level (codec? driver?)

- It gets worse when the computer is busy (searching, opening a document, etc), but it is there to some extent even when the computer is doing nothing else.

- I've checked all of the physical connections, and they appear fine

Thanks for any help you can offer - the kid's not playing his pipe at the moment, but he could start again at any time, so this is an urgent request...

yes, was also upset to hear of his rather sad and untimely death. was a big fan of sparklehorse, particularly those releases from about a decade ago. for the unitiated, the best of the bunch, imo, is 'good morning, spider'.

here's a track from the followup disc (titled, with cruel irony in retrospect, 'it's a wonderful life'):