Friday Tinny Random Ten

Here I am, still in Maine - took longer to deal with the car inspection than I figured, they had to order parts - about to drive off in an hour or so, but I might as well get the Random Ten for the day done. Won't be able to do any cat stuff until much later - probably tomorrow.

Unfortunately, I left my nice headphones back in Brooklyn, so I have to listen on some old ones I found lying around in Mom's house, which are incredibly tinny and make everything sound like I'm listening to everything with my ear up against an old AM mono transistor radio.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing - I know that the finest recording studios used to keep (maybe still do) a crappy mono car or radio speaker patched into the board to pump mixes through, the idea being that a song should be able to sound great on the best and worst audio delivery systems. In practice, I've found this to be more true than not.

So here's ten from 25,559 in the iPod, tinny and reduced:

1. "See You in the Boneyard" - The Flesh Eaters - A Minute To Pray A Second To Die
2. "The Riddler" - Frank Gorshin - 7" single
3. "Space Monkey" - Patti Smith Group - Easter
4. "Chills & Fever - The Serfmen - Garage Punk Unknowns vol. 8
5. "Willie Moore" - Richard Burnett & Leon Rutherford - Anthology of American Folk Music, volume 1: Ballads
6. "RIP" - Alien Sex Fiend - Return of the Batcave volume 1
7. "Guess Things Happen This Way" - Johnny Cash - Best of Sun Records Volume One
8. "Bull Dog" - The Shangri-Las - Myrmidons of Melodrama
9. "Before You Accuse Me" - Bo Diddley - The Chess Box
10. "Let's Twist Again" - Chubby Checker - Beat of the Pops 01

Yup, all sounded good in the crappy headphones. Of course it makes sense for all the pre-1970s singles up there - 7 out of the 10.

Got some good writing done on Spell while up here. More work needed on Everything Must Go - Berit sent me some notes of things that had gone on at the last work session for EMG that would have helped me get some work done, but I got them too late one evening to get to work on it, and by that point I was on a roll with Spell and didn't want to break it.

The more I research some of the political history that has to go into Spell the more I am daunted by trying to deal with it all - trying to sum up sides of massive, decades- (or centuries-) old arguments in a few minutes of conversation that's meant to serve the play in other ways anyway. I'll find it - I was just starting to - but research leads to more research more often than it leads to solutional writing.

I'll crack it. Just . . . daunting . . . right now.