Added a new section to the site… MP3. It’s not so much new as a reorganization of some stuff that was elsewhere on the site. The Lake Holiday mp3s are here now, as well as what will become a running history of the MP3 of The Week. I’ve also posted some of my own little compositions, separate from the Lake Holiday Experience. Mostly random noodlings that bear some resemblance to songs – I could call them kernals of songs that will become more fully-realized in the future, but I know better than that.

I think I had Doritos for dinner.

np – Heavenly / Heavenly Vs. Satan

Right now through February 2003 at the Toronto Reference Library is the Celebrating Sixty Years of Curious George: The Art of H.A. and Margret Rey exhibit. It’s a nice little exhibit showcasing a lot of the original artwork from the Curious George children’s books. I had no idea this was going on, I just happened across a poster advertising the exhibit at Vortex and stopped at the library on my way home.

The Curious George books were my very favorites from since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, so it was a real treat to be able to see the original drawings and artwork from the books, including this classic where George gets into the ether…

I got some more of my Christmas shopping done, found a used-but-pretty-much-mint copy of the original Bogart/Hepburn/Holden Sabrina on DVD for my dad. I’m also going to get him a copy of Casablanca. It’s a Bogart party! And for myself I found a copy of Sleater-Kinney’s All Hands On the Bad One.

Rented Brotherhood Of The Wolf last night – it had been recommended to me on the grounds of it being a crazy melange of kung-fu, fantasy, horror and mystery… and yeah, it was all those things but not in a particularly effective mix. The special effects seemed to have been done by a monkey with ADD, and not one of those clever monkeys that actually knows how to effectively use slow-motion and sped-up video editing techniques to enhance and action sequence, but the other kind. The plot was both cliched and incomprehensible, if that’s possible. Some of the action sequences were impressive, editing notwithstanding, but overall the payoff wasn’t sufficient, especially for a film as long as this one. Disappointing.

np – Sleater-Kinney / All Hands On the Bad One

Five Seventeen has been asked if Lake Holiday wants to put a song on a compilation for The Unlike Label. I’m game, but am not sure if we’ve got anything worthwhile in the can right now, everything we’ve recorded may already be earmarked for something else. After all, we have to make sure there’s enough super-limited edition (read: ultra-low distribution) collectors items out there for the faithful after we become superstars. Also, Brad’s peeps down in Chicago are finally getting down to recording the drum tracks for the always-forthcoming album, hopefully we’ll have those to work with by the new year. Either way, it looks like there’s going to be more recording on the sched.

And in a related note, a deadline of next Thursday has been imposed for completing recording of those songs that we’ve been writing for God-knows-how-many-months now. Which means I better get liquored up and write some lyrics.

“Because you just said: ‘No

I’ve got somewhere else to go

And the plans I’ve made

Don’t include you, I’m afraid’

And that’s all that you would say”

— David Gedge, “Montreal”

np – The Wedding Present / Singles 1995-1997

The new trailer for X-Men 2 is online at Yahoo! Movies. It’s essentially the same footage from the San Diego ComicCon that has been kicking around online for months, but there’s some footage of Nightcrawler in there now.

The Two Towers on Tuesday, X-Men 2 in five months… Hollywood knows how to keep my inner geek satiated.

NME is reporting that Mogwai’s new long-player, provisionally called Bag Of Agony, will be out early next summer. They’ve also got new t-shirts available in their store… I don’t know how well this Chairman Mao design would go over with the parentals, though…

Had a different sort of band practice tonight, packed up the acoustic and hauled it over to casa del Seventeen. Ostensibly to learn some songs but it ended up a picking songs session. Since Seventeen has all the demos, final mixes and live tracks on his computer, we went through essentially our entire ‘catalog’ and picked out what we wanted to keep in the set, what we wanted to excise from memory. Came up with a good list of old and new stuff and burned some new CDs of demos. Also on the CD are the final (sort-of) mixes of “Awake Too Long” and our cover of The Magnetic Fields’ “Born On A Train”. They’re final mixes, but not – I will explain when I get the mp3s put up this weekend.

I also got a copy of Joe Pernice’s book of poetry Two Blind Pigeons from Seventeen, who had multiple copies sent to him for review in his Tape-Gun zine, which I don’t think he’s actually published in months if not years. What a great scam – set up a zine and people will send you all kinds of free shit. You won’t want most of it, but still.

Seventeen’s cat Jean took a shine to my lap tonight which would have been fine if she hadn’t just been found to have fleas. She had to settle for sleeping on the guitar case.

Lost out on that ebay auction for the first Longwave album so I had to buy it from Lunasea, which is fine since it’s about the same price as the ebay one and is new.

np – Low / Trust