This past weekend of three days was dominated by two things: reading of Dune and Independence Day events.
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Flight of the Conchords show
Saw Flight of the Conchords do a live show at Playhouse Square to(last)night. The show was opened by Arj Barker (Dave from the TV show) who did a stand-up routine. It was quite funny. FOTC did about half new material, half old, but the old stuff had new parts interspersed. Funny stuff. And not just the songs: The banter in between was plenty funny itself. It was a hard hearing at times when the crowd was loud, but I caught most of it. Glad I decided to go.
Of note, playing at the same time and one theatre over was Opera Circle’s showing of Il trovatore, which my friend / coworker was involved in. I had been torn between seeing the two. I checked less than 24 hours from show time for FOTC tickets but it said they were sold out, so when I left, I had been expecting to see the opera, but intended to ask about FOTC tickets. When I arrived, tickets were in fact available. The cheapest available was $55, so I was ready to pass on that and started asking about the opera when the lady said there was a free ticket that somebody had returned and that they couldn’t charge for that I could have. I couldn’t turn that and a rare chance to see FOTC live down. Also, I had arrived late for the opera because the rapid took longer than expected. I’ve seen many of Opera Circle’s operas since meeting my coworker. So, sorry Wanda, I’ll see the next one.
I took the rapid downtown because I don’t like dealing with traffic and parking there and for one person it’s hard to compete with the price. I was a little anxious walking around downtown because of an event that happened last year, but nothing happened this year. It did, however, take some waiting.
Yesterday, I went to see my coworker, Wanda Sobieska, play viola in Norwalk. It was a bit of a drive, but enjoyable.
Listening to some music, I thought it quite powerful, that it presented some important truth of the world. Then I thought that some others might not find it as such, but may find some other music powerful that I do not. “Everybody finds their own truths,” I thought, as I had many times before. Truths in everything: music, lyrics, statements, tweets, books, posts, articles, shows, scenes, thoughts, choices, situations: anything.
iTunes CDDB info for the Yars
In January, my former band The Yars released their first full album (they were all shorts or live while I was there). I’ve had a copy of it since then, but haven’t imported it. I had heard the songs tons of times as Dwight was working on them, so was certainly burned out on them. I also don’t entirely like the sound direction the songs have taken, and it’s a little weird listening to another drummer play them. And it wasn’t in the iTunes store, so they had no CDDB data. I wanted to wait for that. So I never got around to importing it.
Today I decided to. It’s been in the iTunes store and other venues for months now. But still, there was no CDDB in the Gracenote database that iTunes uses. I could go to the store and see all the track info, but there was no way to get it to the album. But I found this article describing how you can copy store songs to a playlist, then use one of Doug’s scripts to copy them to another set of songs. So I went to the iTunes store to copy them to a playlist. Unfortunately, the new fancy iTunes song playlist doesn’t allow this to happen. The songs are like HTML elements on a page. And I had planned to boycott getting new versions of iTunes because they had cut off support for third party access. But just recently I think the very features that were now causing me trouble, plus the full new version number, had enticed me. I found the “Column Browser”, which does have a Cocoa style list of the songs, but I searched every possible genre with no luck at finding the Yars.
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