Spending Money

To celebrate yet another day of not having a job to go to, I went out and splurged on music. I've been wanting some new music for some time, to the extent of bugging friends to make me mix discs. If I haven't bugged you yet, consider yourself bugged. I bought the following CDs:

Nigeria '70: The Definitive Story of 1970s Funky Lagos. I have no idea what might be on this disc. I envision it to be something like Pirate's Choice, the Orchestre Baobab CD I bought after hearing about it on NPR. The All Music Guide calls it a "stunning compilation" and "a rich, historical document that you might actually want to listen to." Sounds good.

Gang of Four's A Brief History of the Twentieth Century. Four years ago, I bought a CD by a band called The Elastic Purejoy in a bargain bin in Florida. The Elastic Purejoy is Dave Allen, who was in Shriekback, Low Pop Suicide, and Gang of Four. Because I am a completist, I bought a Shriekback CD, which is good 1980s alterna-pop. I didn't like Low Pop Suicide. And now I have my Gang of Four CD. After listening to two songs in the car on the way home, I state that it sounds like it came out of the same era as Mission of Burma and Wire, which it did. Which is good.

Lyle Lovett's Anthology, Vol. 1: Cowboy Man. Back in college and grad school, I was in a writing group called Litera. There was this guy Ron Riekki, who lives in Chicago but I never see him; he really liked Lyle Lovett, and he wrote a poem once that referred to a Lyle Lovett song. This is all to say that I still never listened to Lyle Lovett, and this is my first attempt.

Illinois Jacquet's Jumpin' at Apollo. This is another NPR find. Illinois Jacquet apparently changed the tenor sax forever when he "honked," which is playing the same note in succession, at least according to the NPR broadcast I heard. This CD features Jacquet playing with an A-list of jazz performers, none of whom I know except Charles Mingus.

So now it's 1:43, and I have three hours to kill until a bunch of us go see Hero. Do you want to come? We're meeting for dinner at the Billy Goat, and then we're seeing the movie at 7:00 at the AMC River East 21. Don't say I didn't invite you.

I'm here in my new apartment, feeling like a lazy bastard as Rebecca's cleaning people straighten up the apartment behind me. I didn't want to be here when they were here, because I feel a little too bourgeois having cleaning people picking up after me—notice how I called them Rebecca's cleaning people? I feel like the spirits of Upton Sinclair and Eugene V. Debs and Emma Goldman are looking down on me with scorn in their ghostly eyes.