mi god you should have seen us

I fell off the world for a couple of days, and finished up a bunch of incomplete things. The most overdue was the H. G. Wells introduction for a Penguin Modern Classics collection of his SF short stories, and that, along with a couple of other things, is now on the done side of the ledger, and I am so much happier. I'm going to fall back onto the world tonight, but in the meantime...

It's been a long time since I raved about a CD here, but ROGUE'S GALLERY is perfectly wonderful -- a sort of side Johnny Depp-Gore Verbinski spin-off project generated during the filming of Pirates of the Caribbean. A Hall Willner double CD of sea shanties... you can read about it at http://billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002691275
and it's brilliant. Much better than I had even hoped on reading the good review. (Don't buy it if you're easily offended, as the Loudon Wainright III version of Good Ship Venus is filthier than any I've ever encountered before. And it's not that there are any clean versions of that song.) I like the way it trashes genres. It's a folk album and a rock album and a punk album. The songs are, for the most part, amazing. And everyone sounds like they're having fun. Even Lou Reed.