There Is No Movie Of The Day

NOT BECAUSE I am not in the mood for a movie per se. I watched the latter two thirds of Hot Fuzz, then the first part of Deep Impact, before concluding that I simply was not in the mindframe to sit through the meat-hammer that is Deep Impact, and then caught The Good German in time for lunch. But I will probably switch to something stupid like Law & Order before too long. Stupid only because I have seen them all twice. But I am still a sucker for that show. Good New York porn.

Today's lunch is potstickers & lemon grass chicken wraps with ginger sauce, hoisin sauce, and Chinese mustard, which is something I have determined I will never do again. Chinese food should come from a restaurant. Period. At home, I don't have a wok, if I did I couldn't get it hot enough to operate properly, and if I could I wouldn't be using it enough to properly season it. So what I have here, frankly, is fine enough. But it isn't . . . right. Alright. That's that: you either know what I mean or you don't. De gustibus non disbutandum, largely because at a certain point it's impossible to describe why you like or dislike what's on the plate.

But the real reason that there is not movie of the week-- aside from my inherent fickleness-- is that it is almost my birthday.

This year, the Wifey decided that rather than hand her a list of CD's and stuff, I could go ahead and go on a spree at Amazon, handing me the arbitrary limit of 100 bucks. Which is great: I ordered the stuff, and it came in most of a week before my actual birthday, which means I get to listen to the stuff this week and go do something else on the actual day. Whatever my faults, I am amazing easy to please.
So yesterdays's selection, for my listening pleasure, was The Alan Parson's Project's Eye in the Sky. This is one of those albums I owned way back when; I bought it on the strength of the hit single title track and defended it to all who told me it was a rotten piece of ofal that would damage my soul. This is the musical equivalent of a novel written by a literary critic. Alan Parsons is a noted engineer and producer, most noted for working with Pink Floyd at the heighth of their prowess. His chief collaborator, Eric Woolfson, is a singer-songwriter-producer-etceteragrad. And the album sounds alot like what you would expect from guys who know how it's done. Most of the numbers are extremely well done, others seem over-written, or over-producted to the point of sounding like aural mush. But it's a good thing to hear in its entirety. It is very much a concept album, not inasmuch as the songs all confront a singular theme or tell some kind of narrative story, but rather inas each track represents a particular kind of aural layer in the overall cake. And if that's not a murky and ineffective metaphor, I don't know what is. It's very easy (and was done often back in the day) to think of this as Pink Floyd Lite, largely because it is.

But the real treat here was the bonus tracks. Now, these days I don't go in for bonus tracks much. I have a copy of Santana's Abraxas that I have to jump up and turn off because they included a bunch of crappy live tracks at the end. And all studio versions are supperior to live versions, unless, and I mean this, you are Cheap Trick, in which case the exact inverse is true.

In this case, the bonus material is alternately illuminating and ridiculous, almost precisely. The real treats are the first two bonus tracks: a demo version of the opening theme, "Sirius" (if you're a sports fan you know it: it's that piece that goes "Bow-dow-burkr-dirkr-bow-dow-burkr-dirkr"); and a version of the ballad "Old and Wise," voiced by Woolfson, which perfectly illustrates the fact that if a ballad is written broadly enough, it doesn't matter who sings it. But the real treats were the last two bonus tracks, an instrumental re-working of several of the albums themes and an orchestra rendition, respectively, which go on for freakin' ever.

The next offerings will be Billy Joel's albums 52nd Street and The Stranger, and then after that Leonard Bernstein & The New York Philharmonic's performances of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and Night on Bald Mountain. Oh, wait; what was that I said about live versions?

PS: Oh, year: and Brad Paisley's Play, which I have already read the liner notes for.

PPS: But now, I am watching The History of the Joke with Lewis Black. So pretty much everything else will have to wait.