• Getting increasingly comfortable with Ubuntu. Waiting for Jaunty to come out next month and hopefully fix my wifi problems with the new Linux kernel.
• Playing Zelda.
• Lamenting/celebrating the new Decemberists album.
• Playing with GNOME Do, Ubiquity, and about:tab.
• Taking photos.
• Watching Tim and Eric.
• Collecting all known online accounts and compiling them into KeePass.
• Wishing Virb were more popular.
• Entering Resounder into a WordPress design contest.
• Flipping out over the latest Destroyer news.

The corner store has had NES, Super Nintendo, and N64 systems and games in the window for several months now, if not longer. I couldn’t believe they hadn’t been sold, until I went in today to look at them and met the guy selling them. He refurbishes them and sells them for sixty bucks apiece. Games are five bucks each, or $20 for five. He’ll refurbish your own NES or other system, including a new pin connector, for twenty bucks. I love this guy. I have a retro Nintendo gaming shop in my neighborhood.

Almost two years to the day.

Read Stereogum.

@ Destroyer Wiki.

On streethawk.livejournal.com.

This Night is going for a hundred, and I could have had it from Merge like a year ago for $25 or something.

I wonder what my copy of City of Daughters is worth.

Oh yeah, I already wrote about this kind of, when Streethawk was $108, and Thief was $75.

Okay so the first one could be “Quiet, Ruby, someone’s coming…oh it’s just your precious American underground,” though a subway is kind of a goofy way of depicting that. The second one is probably the “cheap dancers.” Third is “Blessed doctor, cut me open.” Then there’s “Proud Mary said as she lit the fuse,” though I’m not sure what a fire hydrant has to do with anything. And finally of course “Priest says, ‘…I can’t bear her raven tresses caught up in a breeze like that.’”

Via Streethawk LiveJournal Community.

Winning bid: $108.50
Destroyer’s Streethawk:A Seduction, very rare and long out of print. This vinyl and sleeve is brand new and is in MINT++ condition, it has NEVER been played.

I refused to listen to it in any other format, because the record had become so personal to me, I needed that tactility of flipping over the record and the intimacy of only listening to it alone in my apartment.

Finally I moved to Cambridge last December, marking the end of that strange, lonely period of my life, and decided I could move on, that the quality of the album demanded that I have it available on my iPod if I needed it on the subway. I was listening to it digitally for the first time, and I was startled when I heard “The Space Race” immediately after “No Cease Fires!” I had been trained through countless listens to know that “The Space Race” begins side B of the album, with that abrupt opening. I thought for sure my iPod was just fucking up again, but when I came home I realized “The Space Race” was actually tagged as track 3.

I wondered how this could have happened, so I looked up tracklists online. As it turns out, both MusicBrainz’ entry and even Merge Records’ own Destroyer catalog list “The Space Race” as track 3. Which means there are two possibilities: either the Merge site was used as a reference for poorly-tagged mp3s, or the CD release actually sports a different track order. My money’s on the former, so re-tag your files and hear it the way it was supposed to be heard.

1. Comments on the World as Will
2. No Cease Fires! (Crimes Against the State of Our Love, Baby)
3. Dark Purposes
4. Emax I
5. I Want This Cyclops
6. Loves of a Gnostic
7. Emax II
8. State of the Union
9. School, and the Girls Who Go There
10. The Space Race
11. Melanie and Jennifer and Melanie
12. War on Jazz II or How I Learned to Love the War on Jazz
13. Emax III
14. You Were So Cruel
15. Signs
16. Rereading the Marble Faun
17. Son of the Earth

And here’s a hi-res picture of the cover art, a slightly out-of-focus one, but, as far as I can tell, the only decent one available online.

Found at I Love Music.