— पांच हजार एक सौ पंद्रह —
I suppose I just need to adapt to changing times.
My new subscription to Apple Music is already, quickly changing my emotional relationship to my music library. It remains frustrating that virtually all of my playlists, which I maintained with minimal issues for a fucking decade and a half in iTunes, are permanently fucked up. The only ways to fix them, really, are either to scour through my entire library and repurchase every track that was once on CD and had been burned to my computer (whether I used to own them—and I got rid of nearly all my CDs a couple of years ago—or they were burned from library copies), or to reconstruct every single one of them using the tracks available via the Apple Music subscription. The more logical, and far less time consuming, choice is the latter.
It is weird, though, to have this sudden sort of equality between all the albums I once owned outright, and virtually any album I never actually purchased: I actually have yet to find any music I want that is
not available via Apple Music.
I signed up for a free trial of Paramount+ yesterday, so I could see the live concert movie of Madonna's
Madame X Tour, her first tour since 1993 that I did not go so far out of my way to see it that I was willing to travel out of state for it—in fact it was he first tour I didn't see at all. She really went out of her way to make it difficult for me to see it, anyway: she radically changed her approach to touring for this, limiting the U.S. leg to all of seven cities, doing a "mini residence" in each one, at which she did an average of 7 shows each. (These did vary by city; there were 16 shows in New York and only 3 shows each in San Francisco and Las Vegas.) Now, it is indeed true that I had traveled to Las Vegas to see her live three times before (2004, 2006 and 2008), and any other year I probably would have done the same for this one. The real problem was that this tour was in the fall of 2019, a year in which I already took three significant trips, to Toronto/ Niagara Falls / Syracuse; to Denver; and even to Las Vegas! The trip to Vegas that year, I believe, had already been planned with Danielle before I even knew the dates Madonna would be performing there, and so that year the Vegas trip was at the end of September, whereas Madonna performed in mid-November. There was just no way to make it work, and I certainly didn't have the funds, or even the bandwidth, to take a
second trip to Vegas in the same year in addition to those other trips, as well as the huge trip Shobhit and I also took to Australia not long after, in late February and early March 2020. Thus, that took out seeing Madonna in any other city during that tour ether—San Francisco was the closest she got to Seattle that time (after being in Seattle for
The MDNA Tour in 2012 and then Vancouver, B.C. for the
Rebel Heart Tour in 2015).
In any event, a concert film version of
Madame X was the closest I was going to get to seeing that tour. For some time I have thought she only got to do a small portion of that tour due to pandemic closures, but it turns out the pandemic only canceled the last six dates of it, all in Paris; she actually had the rest, and the majority, of it done before COVID hit.
I started watching the concert film on Paramount+ last night, and got through only the first number before I needed to spend the rest of the evening doing other things; I'll watch the rest of it later. It's all right so far—a bit over-edited. I am starting to wonder how my relationship to her tours in the future might change as well; I probably won't prioritize attending them as I used to. Certainly not after she started
promoting covid misinformation. Combine that with her longstanding delusions about her continued relevance, and I'm just leaning toward being over her.
I mean, I'll still always listen to her music. In the past I would say I would always
buy her music, but guess what? Getting back to my original point: it occurred to me to wonder if she has released, or plans to release, a live
album of this tour, and she already has!
In October. How did I go this long not knowing this? But the thing is, this is her first album release I feel no compulsion whatsoever to hand money over for. It's already right there on Apple Music. I haven't even listened to it yet. I don't have a clue when I will. Although I want to have seen the full concert film first, at least.
And that's where music streamer subscriptions get weird for me. I suppose I'll eventually get used to it. But I can already feel this happening: when I have not paid money for an album, I just don't value it in the same way. It doesn't seem possible. I mean, granted, after my six-month trial period ends then Apple Music will be charging me ten bucks a month, so in a sense I will be paying for it. But that won't be for specific albums, it'll be for, functionally speaking,
all music.
I know I'm really late to the bus with this one. Millions of people are already so used to this they probably read this and wonder if I just stepped out of a time machine from ten years ago. I really hung on for a long time to my personal music library, rationalizing that I didn't want to feel like all that money I spent on albums over the years—over the decades—had gone wasted. On the other hand, this is not that much different from when people had to replace their vinyl collections with CDs, or replace their CDs with online music purchases. In the end, compared to the total cost of those transitions, moving to a monthly streaming service is actually a lot cheaper.
I'm just not looking forward to the time commitment it will take to reconstruct all of my playlists, that's all. I also really hate that the Apple Music subscription won't let me create playlists using the tracks in my own library. That part I really don't understand, and it's preventing me from syncing my favorite Christmas music playlist to my phone, the one with digitized cassette recordings of songs on vinyl that retain surface noise and occasional skips for which I have a specialized nostalgia in the context of that one playlist. It may just be that from now on I can only listen to that playlist from my computer. So really, Apple remains insistent on being a pain in the ass.
— पांच हजार एक सौ पंद्रह —
— पांच हजार एक सौ पंद्रह —
So what were the other things to do last night, you ask? Don't deny it, you asked! You're dying to know, you can't fool me!
First, Shobhit and I made nachos for dinner, using leftover sauteed vegetables made for another dish a few days ago; fresh chopped onions and mushrooms; a shredded cheese blend; a prepared batch of just-add-water "taco seasoned" veggie ground; and salsa. It would have been nice to have beans to add but we had none, and I didn't want to go to the store for just that. Anyway I had leftovers from it for lunch as we made a pretty hefty amount of it last night.
I might have had time to watch more of the
Madame X concert film, but I also caught up on several weeks of my favorite YouTube show,
UNHhhh, starring drag queens Trixie Mattel Katya Zamolodchikova. I've tried to find other drag queens I enjoy as much, but this show is uniquely funny and clever with visual and photoshop editing, putting it truly in a league of its own. I was several weeks behind on these videos that average 10 to 12 minutes in length, and ate my nachos and drank my margarita (Shobhit's suggestion for the beverage of choice for this dinner, an inspired choice) while watching them.
After that, Ivan had the night off last night, but he slept fairly late into the mid-evening, so the movie we discussed watching could not be started until shortly after 8:00. I only learned of it from Karen Kilgariff on
My Favorite Murder, calling it "delightful," and it sounded thus to me:
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy,
on Prime Vidoe. It's the true story of the late-19th-Century illustrator credited with popularizing the cat as a house pet rather than just a mouser, thanks to his whimsical drawings and paintings of cats. With Ivan's love of cats, I figured it would interest him and it did; I figured Shobhit would find himself interested too.
Well, except that cats don't really play into the plot until roughly halfway through the movie, and this story of a man who lived with his widowed mother and countless sisters (he being the only man of the house, and a frustratingly flighty and flaky one at that) meant a lot of domestic scenes that are quite loud and chaotic. This is not your typical, serene British period piece. It's really the story of a man who didn't know to copyright his wildly popular paintings and thus left a family crushed in debt, on top of schizophrenia running in the family. It doesn't have a particularly happy ending.
Shobhit declared the movie "weird." He wasn't entirely wrong. He predicted I'd give it a B-minus. That was likely true too. I really thought I would actually review this movie, but two things made me change my mind about that: I kind of enjoyed it myself, but would not especially recommend it to anyone, so why bother? Plus, it's been out since October, which I decided was far too dated for me to bother reviewing a movie that was just . . . okay. If it had actually been "utterly delightful," I still would have reviewed it. But, it was kind of barely fine, at best.
Shobhit asked if it had gotten any nominations, and then said "I hope not." As it happens, it looks like it's only been nominated for four British Independent Film Awards, of which it won one (Best Makeup & Hair Design). I'm fairly certain it won't get nominations from any other awards body of note. Oh that reminds me! The SAG Award nominations came out yesterday and I still haven't looked at them! I'll just do that now.
— पांच हजार एक सौ पंद्रह —
[posted 12:28 pm]
