Digital Analogue

Digital Cable

The cable guy finally came back yesterday to actually install the cable for my living room, and the digital cable box. (Getting through the brick façade required two calls back to the main office and a hammer drill; once that arrived on the scene, the job was easy and it went through like a hot knife through butter. Cool piece of machinery.) Anyway, so now I have cable.

I've been watching a lot of country music videos. The way I always used to leave the radio on, now I've been leaving the TV on music video stations and glancing up occasionally. Already I've seen a bunch of repeats (sigh).

Country music videos, by and large, haven't given in to the lure of more skin that is seen these days on pop and hip-hop videos. Unfortunately, a lot of them end up being sort of boring. Some are great, though.

...Holy cow, the one on right now is disturbingly bitter: Chris Isaak / Don't Go Walking Down There looks like the singer is praying the rosary over his (dead? dying?) wife and bitterly complaining about all the happy people out there and how he can't join them (they being represented by a bunch of 70s-style go-go dancers, incongruously enough). Disturbing.

Anyway, I was going to say: I like the one for "What was I thinking"---very well constructed video, and the singer's facial expressions are awesome. "I love this bar" never really did it for me as a song, but the video is really well-shot and compelling. Shania's "Forever and for always" is incredibly cute, and I'm still baffled as to how exactly her... garment... is constructed, not to mention how it actually stays up. It looks really cool, though.

On the other side of the coin, I've seen a bunch of videos that are essentially recordings of live performances or, even worse, of recording sessions. Gee, let's take the worst of both worlds and put them together!

Interesting how the song distribution differs, though, from what's on the radio. I assume that has to do with the relative release time of videos, not to mention the fact that an enh song can make a great video and vice versa.

Huh, they just showed one of a band I've never heard of before, that has the look of an alternative band but the sound of... a pop-ified country band, I guess. One of the guys is playing a miniature guitar, and the girl's on electric fiddle. Great sound, though (nifty video, too): Nickel Creek, they're called. Have to check them out.

'Well, god forbid we require people to actually have a decent vocabulary in order to play well, let alone make the game challenging, so it has been twisted into, "Who can memorize more stupid two-letter combinations that, though not actually words, we slipped into the 'standard' dictionary for this one game."' --Kevin Colby