POP LIES

On Sunday I had planned to go and play at an open mic about 25 miles away. My friend and former bandmate Graham was hosting and I hadn't heard him play in a long time or played out in a long time myself. However, I spent most of Saturday doing work outside, raking leaves and pushing around a self-propelled lawnmower (long story but obviously I didn't know the mower was self-propelled). Along with that activity and the time change, I was completely out of sorts on Sunday and ended up not going.

I did, however, spend a good portion of my Saturday night making a CD mix. It had been over a year since I had done one and I always give a copy to Graham. I thought it would be a nice way to say thanks for letting me ride along with him to the open mic. I had the mix all set but I wasn't satisfied and changed it singificantly. Now it doesn't fit the theme as well as the previous version did but it has a lot more songs I really wanted to include. So, here is the tracklist for "Pop Lies"...

1. The Modern Leper/Frightened Rabbit
2. Fake Empire/The National
3. Die Die Die/The Avett Brothers
4. The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory/Guided By Voices
5. Use Somebody/Kings of Leon
6. Come Crash/A.C. Newman
7. Hot Bed/The Whigs
8. You're Not As Pretty/Reigning Sound
9. I Will Possess Your Heart/Death Cab For Cutie
10. How To Fight Loneliness/Wilco
11. Pop Lie/Okkervil River
12. The Cheapest Key/Kathleen Edwards
13. Perfect Games/The Broken West
14. I'm Not A Kid Anymore/Sloan
15. Joke About Jamaica/The Hold Steady
16. Rudderless/The Lemonheads
17. Out Of Reaches/Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks
18. Now/Mates Of State
19. There's A Place (In the Back of My Mind)/Julie Ocean
20. Little Tornado/Aimee Mann
21. Destroyer/King Khan and The Shrines
22. Videotape/Radiohead

PROJECTS

I have plenty of things to occupy my time but I'm always thinking about what I can do next. Over the past few days, I've decided to embark on a couple new projects.

The final volume of Y: The Last Man will be published on June 18, which is 8 weeks from today. The series has been one of the best comics of this decade and I have been reading it in trade format from the start. I am eagerly awaiting the last book and I thought it would be good to go back and reread the series up to this point. I did it for Harry Potter and this is just as meaningful. The only problem with this project is I have only 8 weeks to read 9 trades. Ah well, I'm going to give it a shot.

There was a post of Chris Roberson's blog (I really need to update my links, by the way) the other day about Kage Baker's series of novels and story collections in her Company series. I've read a number of the stories in the pages of Asimov's over the years and always meant to get around to the books. Well, Roberson's enthusiasm for the series has inspired me to finally get to the series. This project probably won't start right away but I hope to have many of the books read by the end of the year (if not all).

On the lighter (and easier) side, I think it's well past time for me to do a new mix CD to give out to friends. I believe the last one I did was way back in June (!). That's a long, long time for me to go without doing one. The good news is I have a ton of songs I could put on it. I hope to accomplish this by the end of next week, if not sooner.