A bit of everything today.

1.) I'm not a fan of Elvis Costello, but he's one of those artists who is so random/diverse in some of the songs he makes (and I guess you could probably owe a lot of this [like Green Shirt] to Nick Lowe early on in Costello's career) that I've got a few (3) in my collection that totally fit what I think is great. I can just discard the rest of his stuff. (I don't care for stuff like Alison...)

2.) This song was used in the intro sequence to Jake Kasdan's massive failure and Bill Pullman's massive success, Zero Effect. This is a fun movie but it requires patience, because it's not very good and it's very slow moving, but Bill Pullman is so great in it and his hair is awesome. So awesome. Also, he drinks Tab and eats tuna right from the can with a fork. So awesome.

3.) When I heard this song for the first time in that movie, I'd swear I'd had exhausted Costello's discography of significant tracks but this one wowed me. This exposed an effect I have to play with more: seems to me that as your tastes change, you should revisit old albums, and this iTunes/MP3 age makes this so much more difficult.

I get locked into listening to the same tracks off an album all the time because it's so easy to. I add them to a playlist and there they are. In the old days I'd have to put in the album, and I'd end up listening to full albums. These days I listen to an album a couple times through, pick the songs I like off of it, and then forget about the rest. Just the other day I discovered an Andrew Bird song that I didn't like two years ago but think is ridiculously awesome now. It was like finding a twenty dollar bill in my pocket that I didn't know I had.

Be careful, hardcore listeners of the digital age, because we're killing the art of the album, I think.

4.) I think growing up on the internet really killed my "awkward sexual confusion" days early on. With a brief Yahoo search I could find detailed descriptions, diagrams, and videos all about how it went down. My parents never gave me a talking to, and when it finally came time for me to put my wanger in a hoo-hah there was no mystery, wonder, or confusion to it. It was just a dance I'd been watching videos of & reading about on the internet for a couple years.