The I-Tunes Follies

Today is a day for I-Tunes Follies. The deal is that Plot wanted to transfer the songs in his I-Tunes on his desk top to the I-Tunes on his laptop, but there's stuff on the laptop he doesn't want to lose either. And of course, the problem with I-Tunes is that you don't download the stuff you love, you download the stuff you get, most of which you haven't even heard when you download it. So you end up with a disc full of crud you couldn't care less about, plus a few nuggets.

And if you're writing a musical, you also end up with hundreds and hundreds of snippets of tunes and dialog pieces and wave forms and mixes you can't remember and you don't know which are which and you feel like just erasing everything and starting over anyway.

And, to boot, Davey Blue, who used to own this laptop, has some very cool stuff on there already, but also, you know -- the Collected Devotional Tapes of Guru Satchinanda-Doo-da-Day. He's also got some maudlin things Plot wishes he hadn't ever run into.

Final piece of confusion: you don't just transfer tunes out of I-Tunes en masse, you have to do it ONE SONG AT A TIME and it's endless. So, here's what Plottie has decided to do.

He's erased as much of the garbage as he can find on the laptop, and is importing his favorite stuff from the original CDs, those he has anyway. (NOW he knows why you save CDs, instead of giving them back to the person who gave them to you in the first place once you've downloaded them.)

(And, yeah, yeah, the songwriter didn't get paid, trust us we know all about that one, and never have complained about it all that much because we do it too. So.)

So here's Tupac's "Brenda's Got a Baby"-- man, this artist got a terrible bum rap from white people around the country. He's really a genius, and like so many, a dead one.

And here's Hugh Masakela's "Bring Back Nelson Mandela," possibly Plotnik's favorite song of all time. It doesn't matter how many times he listens to it, this song fills him with hope, with happiness, with the desire to go dance again in a Capetown club.

And here's Chris Smither's "No Love Today," a song about a vegetable seller in New Orleans, but really about a long ago time. One more thank you to Hanky Girl for turning Plotnik on to Chris Smither in the first place.

Ooooh - Asimbonanga. How many times did the Plotnik family Minus BZ (and Brooklyn Belly) listen to this Johnny Clegg song in the car while driving through Swaziland and Zululand?

Coltrane, Wynton Marsalis ooh Lila Downs and soundtrack from Frida and The Wild Tchoupitoulas...this isn't such a bad job after all.