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11-26-03 // 11.16 am saturday, wait! NP: all of the Cure stuff on the iPod Wednesday morning in this half deserted office feels like a glorious Friday. It almost feels like a day before Thanksgiving when I was in college, which was always a day of nearly giddy anticipation of a few precious days to catch up on sleep, see old friends and eat a proper meal for the first time in months. Today is filled to the brim with that old feeling. I've been reading Pitchfork's revised 'top 100 albums of the '90s' list. It's interesting how much I agree and disagree with there, though it's always good to remember that lists like that are inherently bullshit. At their best they are good but totally relative, and this is an admission despite my love of making and reading such lists. In any case, I think I liked Q's old "top 100 albums EVER" feature from about 5 years ago. I'm not sure if that can be chalked up to myself being more attuned to the English aesthetic, or if it was down to the fact that their list was actually created by reader polling. Of course, this was back in the day when Q was fairly intelligently run and written, and Q readers tended to be smart cookies with a fairly diverse musical taste. The magazine doesn't quite do it for me these days, sadly. It used to be something I looked forward to every single month. It was nearly $8 per issue, a small fortune to an impoverished student, but I made it one of my trio of indulgences, along with decent beer on the weekends and a trip to CD Warehouse once a month. But yeah, Q was my care package from another culture, my montly dose of Anglophilia, and most of all, it was something American music magazines weren't. Sadly, these days Q's new taskmasters seem to be bent on turning it into some British version of Rolling Stone, all celebrity crazy and pop-culture fetishizing. Actual music and musicians take a backseat to celebrity worship. I find that wholly sad. It's also ironic that last year Rolling Stone fired their old, somewhat bearable editor and hired an Englishman who proceeded to basically...ape Q, but in the degraded, Rolling Stone-ized manner it had become! But whatever, man, whatever. Erin has the entire weekend off! Two full days that I am also off...feels like this hasn't happened for absolutely ages. So yeah, I anticipate lots of sleeping in and lazing about, some shopping, watching the Rams live for once this season, and of course putting up the Christmas decorations (including tree!) that Erin's been anticipating for weeks. I'm quite looking forward to spending the time with her and not having a schedule to adhere to. Brilliant. Meeting up with Ryan S after work for some cards and probably a bite to eat. Schlitt is supposed to be up from Carbondale and said he was going to join us, though neither Ryan nor myself have heard back from him for sure, so who knows. Either way, cool. I originally planned to put in a full day here, but I might take off early. Today the world is my oyster (or at least some variety of bivalve), and I do not plan on squandering it like I sometimes tend to do.
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