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The Kirby Derby has really got me going on the car. I spent most of the evening yesterday working on the art car diary. Not much difference to the viewer, but it's set up in Movable Type now like this diary. Which will make things a lot easier for me, for one thing, only one blogging software package to keep up with now. And I can turn comments back on (there was a bug in Greymatter comments that had allowed someone to hack my web hosting account, so I had to turn them off). Plus I can do that "trackback" thing, although I'm not entirely sure what it is.

Well anyway, I still have a few things to fix up in the art car diary: some style sheets here and there, the comments popup window needs to be formatted, but most importantly the photolog needs to be totally revamped. It's some PHP I wrote myself, and it needs to be rewritten to work with Movable Type. Also I want to set up a photo archive with categories. Because I have way too many photos to throw them all on one page, and it's only going to get worse when I add another 50 photos or so at Artscape.

The tattoo is just about healed. The "onion skin" scabs (sorry to be gross but that's what they are) are finally coming off. Thank god! I haven't been able to wear a regular bra since last Tuesday because I've been trying so hard to to protect the tattoo while it healed.

Had a nice show this morning. I was worried that I'd be too tired because I was up late last night working on the art car site. But I managed to get into a decent groove I think. Ended up playing a bunch of old music: XTC, Tears for Fears, the Smiths, the Buzzcocks. I was actually rather proud of myself for realizing that the Smiths would sound good after the song that was currently playing, and with only about 2 minutes to work with, finding the album (vinyl LPs are harder to browse than CDs), getting back into the control room, and cuing up the song (also harder to do with vinyl than with CDs) in time. I even knocked the needle out of place after I had cued up the song and had to do it again! Finished with about 10 seconds to spare. Once last summer I saw Phil, the DJ who used to be on the air before me, make a trainee do that (cue up vinyl with hardly any time) and I thought he was being sadistic. But it's not that bad once you get used to the station's turntables.

New RPM promos have starting coming into the station. I write a lot of letters to labels, and to be honest not many of them respond. (For one thing, a lot of the labels I'm interested in are in Europe, and they frankly could care less about some college station in the US.) But sometimes I hit the jackpot. Like this past week: I wrote to a new distributor asking for New York Lounge, the newest in the "City Lounge" series from Wagram. Each one is a 2 CD set of nu-jazz, downtempo and funk from a different city. So far I've heard Paris Lounge, Berlin Lounge, and London Lounge, and they've all been fabulous.

So anyway, I heard that New York Lounge was coming out soon & would be the best of the series. So I wrote to the label, and they put me in touch with their distributor, and the distributor sent a humongous box of stuff from a bunch of different labels. He even sent swag! I got a T-shirt for "Tracy Young Remixes Living Theater," and a keychain of a cute little Japanese kitty cat smoking a cigarette, that says Tamala 2010 on the wrapper. MSI is my new favorite distributor.

The only bummer is that they only sent a sampler of New York Lounge, not the full 2 CDs. It is every bit as fabulous as I heard; so I'm going to have to buy it anyway. It hasn't been released in the US yet, only as an import, but I found it for $20 on Amazon marketplace. They also sent only a sampler of Champs Elysees Cafe 2. I loved the first Champs Elysees Cafe, but the sampler of the new one isn't really ringing my bell so I don't think I'm going to buy that one.

Speaking of which, here's last week's CMJ chart. The Four Tet album was #2 on the overall playlist, so yay for RPM! Also I'm pleased to note that 5 of these albums were reviewed by me. Now if I can only get better about reviewing every week!

# ARTIST Recording
1 FOUR TET Rounds
2 CINEMATIC ORCHESTRA Man With A Movie Camera
3 RALPH MYERZ AND THE JACK HERREN BAND A Special Album
4 TRAVELER '03: A SIX DEGREES COLLECTION VARIOUS ARTISTS
5 KARSH KALE Liberation
6 AUTECHRE (CURATED) All Tomorrow's Parties 3.0
7 PEST Necessary Measures
8 RED ROOM Le Paradis
9 TORCH: A SIX DEGREES COLLECTION OF MODERN TORCH SONGS VARIOUS ARTISTS
10 IDOL TRYOUTS: GHOSTLY INTERNATIONAL VOL. 1 VARIOUS ARTISTS