I am looking for digital copies of all the songs on this old mix that Ethan sent me.

Except 'Come Sail Away'.

And 'Party and Bullshit', which was the first thing I tried to get my hands on as soon as I got my current computer (finally capable of finding and playing music).

When I write, every truism that inadvertently slips onto the page thanks to my effort to try to move things along, to have said enough that I am actually in a position to say something rather than mouth the words that will lead the reader on - every one stops me dead in my tracks.

(And somehow that made it - better? acceptable?)

'I didn't think it was Nelly, because it sounded so bad.'

'Oh - it's Christina!'

I wanted to post something about what I've been listening to for the past week or two, but there's so much of it that's so good that when faced with it all on the screen I have no idea what to say beyond giving an enormous list of titles. But here are, let's say, five of them:

Jadakiss f. Sheek, Styles P, & Eminem - Welcome to D-Block
Junior Boys - Last Exit
Houston f. Chingy, I-20, and Nate Dogg - I Like That
Muddy Waters - Long Distance
Jay-Z - S. Carter Collection

You have great hair, is what she said to me, and repeated for me after I paused my iPod and asked her what she said (I had just walked onto the elevator; I didn't know her at all). Really? Yes, she said - hasn't anyone ever told you that before? Well, a couple of times, I said, but I guess I didn't really believe them. I'm starting to. Thinking about it on the way home, though, I worried that perhaps I am not up to the responsibility of having great hair.

I felt so, so excited at the 'Housequake' bit at the beginning of Circus Music. And like Mia says, it does seem to have a sneaky deft lightness (while at the same time being sort of neck-snappy, like they say on the track). Though when they let the beat ride out for a long time just playing the carnival-slash-big-top-whatever melodic bit, the tension goes out of it in a way that feels dissapointing.

I'm still unsure whether Jim O'Rourke's bass parts are the source of the very slight reservations I have about Sonic Nurse - and by 'reservations' I don't mean principled ones, at base, but whatever lies behind the fact that I haven't given myself over to the record as much as I might have yet. It feels like I'm guarding myself. Typical primal reactionary cool-anxiety, perhaps - regardless of whether or not it's enjoyable, rewarding, the idea of liking, or more, formally approving of, a Sonic Youth album that sounds so ordinary - it gives me pause. And when I say that it's not that my reservations are principled, it's because I think what distracts me occasionally about O'Rourke's playing is not only that he plays bass like a fucking guitar player (not always a liability), he plays 'musicianly' bass - and thinking of it that way is surely sliding close, on my part, to a lame sort of identification of Sonic Youth's earlier beauty with their anti-musicality, their deliberate rejection of lots of conventional norms. Stupid. And that's not what I think, anyway. If anything I think they're probably all the more musiciany for it. But.

This is the most intriguing record review I've read in months. There's something very noble about it, somehow. Maybe because it actually seems thoughtful to me, where I might expect a thematically-attuned review of a record in a special interest forum to be at best parochial, at worst laughable.

(The review also answers a question I was too apathetic to find the answer for of my own initiative, about the origin of the phrase 'dude ranch nurse'. Well, not definitively. But to my satisfaction, being apathetic and all.)