Witness: The trailer to the 2012 movie verion of the musical Les Miserables: I must say, this looks right, and sounds pretty good, thankfully. The cast is theoretically very good, and the fact that director Tom Hooper, I’ve read, insisted that the whole thing be done with live vocals rather than lip synching to studio […]

The 30th edition of this particular exercise does have a theme, though I’m not entirely sure what it is. There’s a lot of “rock” going on here, spanning several decades, but centered on the early 90s, for no other reason besides the fact that that’s when I did the greatest volume of compact disc buying. […]

So, last night I tagged along with the cub scouts on an outing to go see the local AA minor league baseball team, the Richmond Flying Squirrels, totally pound the Bowie Baysox into a pulp. It was a reasonably nice, if overcast evening out. If you’re familiar at all with minor league baseball, you know […]

A few more discs from the big green box, with the requisite inclusion of long-forgotten discs from the early 90s. I never quite know what I’m going to get when I start writing things down about the listening experience – sometimes, It feels like I’m just phoning it in, sometimes I hit on some interesting […]

Not a hell of a lot going on ’round these parts. Was a mostly rainy, quiet weekend, with the wife and one third of the kids out of town. I spent a good portion of the last 72 hours hauling the other two-thirds to various activities, usually involving their proper education in the arts. This […]

You know what, It’s been months since I’ve gotten lazy enough to throw up a collection of random musings and links to things I thought were interesting and/or amusing! Let’s do it! ♦ – The bike commute this week was pretty damned scary. My nerves are a bit frazzled after nearly getting hit four or […]

Four more discs from the most transitional of periods in my life – my late 20s. One foot in childhood, another in adulthood. Sounds I associate with different times, different places, sometimes in surprising combinations. In any case, it’s a draw from the box that’s a little varied, but wouldn’t necessarily be out of place […]

I look forward to reading the rest of Steve Hyden’s six-part(!) series about his experience being a life-long R.E.M. fan over at the av club for a lot of reasons, but mostly because of the first installment’s uncanny ruminations about the experience of being “a fan” in the way that only a certain type of […]

3/22 – Updated with an example of how this might have gone. See below. I saw John Carter this evening. In glorious IMAX 3D. I spent eighteen dollars for a ticket, for that is the going rate in the Washington D.C. market. It was totally worth every penny. I had a blast with this flick […]

I truly was intending to keep making these record reviews a regular thing, though I can’t seem to manage it lately – it’s not that I’m not listening to music, it’s that I’ve not been bothering to write down my thoughts on a lot of the CDs I’m listening to. As I said, I’d keep […]