Musical Three-Minute Eggs

Lately I've been listening to, as much as I can, all the songs in my iTunes library that I haven't played all year. (Oh, good lord, another year is almost down the tubes...) In order to get as many as I can out of the way, I put them all in a playlist and then put it in order of time (length of the track). That meant a lot of very quick tracks, such as those little interludes (musical, spoken word, whatever) that artists like Janet Jackson put in between songs, or old WAV files such as lines from cartoons, went first, in very rapid order.

The other day I got to the 3:00 mark -- all the songs that, according to the mp3 info, are exactly three minutes long. (We interrupt this story for a DISCLAIMER! With mp3s sometimes being obtained from various sources, there can be a bit of blank space before or after a song, so you may not hear exactly three minutes of music. We now return you to our previously scheduled programming.) This reminded me of something my former boyfriend used to do. He told me that, in order to make soft-boiled eggs, they had to boil for three minutes. So he would play the song "When Will I See You Again" by the Three Degrees, because it was exactly three minutes long. That gave me the idea for this post: the list of 3:00 songs in my iTunes library. And while I don't have that Three Degrees song, I do have a cover, as you can see...

When Will I See You Again - Erasure
You've Really Got A Hold On Me - The Miracles
Children Of The Revolution - Bono, Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer
Hello - Kelly Clarkson
Sing - Kristin Chenoweth
The Way You Look Tonight - Olivia Newton-John
Dance To The Music - Sly & The Family Stone
Every Little Bit Hurts - Brenda Holloway
She Tracks My Tears (mashup) Smokey Robinson & The Miracles/The La's
Darts Of Pleasure - Franz Ferdinand
Christmas in Hollis - Run-D.M.C.
Paid To Smile - The Lemonheads
Burning Man - Third Eye Blind
The Fool On The Hill - The Beatles
Shoplifters Of The World Unite - The Smiths
Do You Know The Way To San Jose - Dionne Warwick
Shiver - Maroon 5
Your Wonderful, Sweet, Sweet Love - The Supremes
The Right Thing To Do - Carly Simon
Vacation - The Go-Go's
The Ballad Of John & Yoko - The Beatles
Now That You Got It - Gwen Stefani
Promises, Promises - Dionne Warwick
The Christmas Waltz - Kristin Chenoweth
Favorite T - The Lemonheads
Candyman - Jason Nevins feat. Greg Nice
The Christmas Song - Ella Fitzgerald
It Takes Two - Marvin Gaye & Kim Weston
Kill The Pain - INXS
Liar Liar - Debbie Harry
For One Night Only - Bodyrockers
Everything Is Everything - Phoenix
Rushing - Moby
Gimme Some Lovin' - The Spencer Davis Group
Give A Little More - Maroon 5
Never Can Say Goodbye - Gloria Gaynor
Airplanes - B.o.B (feat. Hayley Williams of Paramore)
Santa Stole My Lady - Fitz & The Tantrums
Somewhere Along The Way - Nat King Cole
Give Love On Christmas Day - The Jackson 5
Little Of Your Time (Of Montreal Remix) - Maroon 5
Sleigh Ride - Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra
Somebody To Love - Jefferson Airplane
Baby Come Home - Scissor Sisters

My 2010 In Music

Well, I've done all the accounting -- or, to be accurate, iTunes kept track of the totals -- and will reveal shortly my Top 25 Most Played Songs of 2010 (since I've reset the count to zero for the new year). First, I'd like to tell you about my top 10 albums of 2010. The problem with that is...I don't have one. I only bought 16 new albums all year, and if you take out greatest hits collections and albums released before 2010, that number drops to 11 -- and two of those were Christmas albums, so they don't really count.

(By the way, it seems weird to refer to "albums" when vinyl albums as we know it hardly exist anymore. There are music purists who prefer vinyl, thus allowing a certain number of releases in vinyl, but the vast majority of new releases -- and certainly everything I've gotten in at least the last 15-20 years -- are strictly CDs or digital downloads. But it's easier to refer to them as albums.)

Perhaps more will come into my hands in the future, but for now, here are the nine non-Christmas 2010 albums I bought:

Vampire Weekend – Contra
Glee cast - Glee: The Music, The Power of Madonna
Kele – The Boxer
Scissor Sisters – Night Work
soundtrack – Despicable Me
Kylie Minogue – Aphrodite
Linkin Park – A Thousand Suns
Bruno Mars – Doo-Wops & Hooligans
Mark Ronson and the Business Intl. - Record Collection

I will say that, except perhaps for the Linkin Park album,

My Week In Comics 9-15-10

An interesting (well, probably only to me) quirk: I bought four books -- from four different publishers.

Batman Beyond 4 (of 5): From DC Comics, obviously. I found this issue to be a letdown. If the last-page reveal of the person behind the "Hush" getup who is killing the former enemies of the original Batman is to be believed, it rubs me the wrong way. The way the tale here is told, it's not quite logical unless the story isn't being told in chronological order.

Rawhide Kid: The Sensational Seven 4 (of 4): And this one's from Marvel Comics, and was also a letdown. Everything played out quite predictably, including the identity of the old man who was being held with the Earp brothers. In the end, like most sequels, this didn't quite live up to the first series featuring the gay cowboy.

This image unites two of the four books this week!

Simpsons Comics 170: From Bongo Comics -- did I mention they finally have a website? -- comes a story that isn't a letdown! Lisa discovers that a tune she plays on her sax-o-mo-phone makes everyone instantly go from mean and greedy to kind and generous. Of course, she decides to use it to make the world a better place, but things don't quite go as she planned.

CBGB 2: Finally, we have this: a comic book about the legendary nightclub, from a company called Boom! Studios. Is it an ongoing book? A miniseries? No idea. The only reason I even looked at it is because one of the stories in this issue was written by Ana Matronic of the fabulous Scissor Sisters. It's ostensibly about a writer and her writer's block, but it's really a love letter to the New York City of the 70s, before the Disney-ification of Times Square, the days when CBGB was entering its prime as the home of the punk and New Wave scene. I highly recommend this one just for Ana's story.

Randomness: Celebs Make Out, Come Out, Comics

Here are some unrelated items that caught my eye today...

• This isn't going to get me to listen to a music station with commercials, but morning show DJ Elvis Duran, whose Z100 (New York City) show is syndicated and airs on Q102 here (where he used to work in the 1980s -- I vaguely remember him being on in the afternoon at one point) came out on his show today in a very matter-of-fact way.

• Speaking of coming out, if any more long-time closeted Republican officials want to come out now, and then whine about how hard it was to be gay and working in the GOP, read this. Then go have a really blunt chat with your remaining GOP friends -- I say "remaining" because I bet some of them drop you like a hot potato -- about how despicable you've all been for so many, many years and how it has to end now. If you can't do that, then go fuck yourself, because I (among others) surely won't.

• Did Adam Lambert really make out with Scissor Sisters' Jake Shears while Katy Perry looked on? Watch this and find out!

• Sometimes the scheduled release date of a comic book is delayed. When such a book is connected to other books/storylines, it can be a problem. So the news that a book I thought would be out a couple of weeks ago, issue 5 of the "Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne" miniseries, has now been pushed back to October, just makes me laugh. There are all of these special one-shot issues due in October that are tied into Bruce Wayne's return, not to mention the regular monthly Batman books and that horrendous "Time Masters: Vanishing Point" miniseries. Unless everything's getting pushed back, there will probably be plot points mentioned in these other books that spoil what happens in "B:TROBW." (Would that acronym would be pronounced "be-tro-bwoo" or "buh-tro-bweh" or...?)

• But there is good news in comic book land: after 17 years of publishing Simpsons Comics, Futurama Comics and a bunch of related titles, and even a couple that had nothing to do with either show, Bongo Comics...finally has a website!

Stewart Bradley, Scissor Sisters and Me

What a nice day on my Twitter feed. I got a reply to my tweet to the Eagles' Stewart Bradley (I've written about him before)...

Then, a few minutes ago, I checked the list of my followers and found a new addition. You may recall that the other day I got to see the Scissor Sisters do a half-hour free concert for radio. That night, I found them on Twitter -- I had been following Jake Shears already but not the group -- and, sadly, found out that they held a Twitter giveaway for tickets to their show here. If only I had followed them 24 hours earlier! D'oh! Despite that, I decided to follow them -- and they're now following me back! I have another celebrity follower!

Okay, there are probably PR people or something doing a lot of the tweets, but still, it's the band's Twitter and it's a Verified Account, so it counts!

Scissor Sisters: Free At Noon

Local public radio station WXPN has a free concert series. Fridays at noon, at their cool little World Cafe Live venue, an artist does a half-hour show which is broadcast on WXPN (and the shows are archived by NPR at their website). Today's show featured the fantastic Scissor Sisters, who were in town for a concert tonight, when I learned about this Free at Noon show, I signed up to be in attendance. All I had to do was not oversleep. If you know me, you know that this is a problem occasionally.

I didn't oversleep. YAY!

I was surprised when I got there because the room wasn't full. It never completely filled up, though there was a decent crowd. The band performed seven songs, starting with "Any Which Way" from their new album "Night Work." I used my phone's camcorder to record the next song, "Laura." Quality's not really good, though.



"Whole New Way," "Take Your Mama," "Fire with Fire," "Comfortably Numb" and "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'" finished off the show. From what I've read, the full concert is much wilder. Wish I could've seen that, but at least I got a little taste. You can listen to today's show here.