Bear McCreary got nominated for an Emmy! For main title theme music (for Human Target, which I have yet to watch), not for the actual scoring itself, but still! He is nominated!

I've spent the last half-hour or so reading this, and it's been awhile since something reduced me to the kind of weak-kneed tears you have to just put your head down and weather: MetaFilter commenters in DC and New York club together to save a pair of visiting Russian students from falling into the hands of sex-traffickers. I can't imagine what it would have felt like to have followed this thread in real-time yesterday. (I was relating this story to Sarah and choked up again just talking about it.)

Also, this may not seem like it belongs in the same post, but it DOES, because this post is about JOY. Glee Cast - "Bad Romance"

Instead of burning a mix CD and mailing it out, I'm being lazy and just uploading it. Tracks uploaded separately and as a zip. I don't know if individual files come with the album artwork, although I know you can just download it or whatever, but I made an album cover anyway because I'm bored. :D

1. Florence and the Machine - "Hurricane Drunk"

2. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - "Heads Will Roll"

3. Klaxons - "Atlantis to Interzone"

4. Kasabian - "Empire"

5. P!nk - "Bad Influence"

6. Captain Ahab - "Was Love"

7. Joanna Newsom - "Autumn"

8. Laura Veirs - "Wide-Eyed, Legless"

9. Laura Gibson - "Come By Storm"

10. Joker's Daughter - "Nothing is Ever What it Seems"

Complete Album

Sherlock Holmes soundtrack. I've pretty much been listening to this and the Caprica soundtrack in a constant loop for the past two weeks.

It's snowed again here; school canceled, which means no work for me today. Watched some Fringe, will type up screenplay pages here in a little bit, but since we were stuck inside all day yesterday because of the snow, I'm getting a little stir-crazy. It doesn't help that everyone in this house is sick, so it feels like I'm in some typhoid ward from 1903 or something.

Caprica pilot soundtrack. I really don't understand why Bear McCreary is still scoring for TV. Don't get me wrong, I love being able to hear his stuff on a regular basis, and the quantity is not at all affecting the quality. I just can't believe that he hasn't been snatched up for feature scoring yet.

Catherine's post on Lady Gaga's new music video - which I totally love, BTW - made me think about some of my favorite music videos over the years. I love videos. They're not as tied to narrative as the other major film forms, they can really experiment with a lot of fun things and actually be quite innovative, and finding ways to interpret a song is always a creative challenge that, when it pays off, is quite awesome. These are in no particular order.

Smashing Pumpkins - "Tonight, Tonight"

Gorgeous. If you're not familiar with this video and its iconography, this is based on the very influential George Méliès film "A Trip to the Moon" from 1902, generally considered the first science fiction film. The Smashing Pumpkins manage to perfectly capture the look of the original film while still making it work in video form - it's absolutely right for the song, as well.

Kenna - "Hell Bent"

The video was originally an Academy Award-nominated stop-motion animated short film, which was recut and used by Kenna a few years later. I would never have guessed, because it works with the song so seamlessly.

Sigur Ros - "Glósóli"

When you're an Icelandic band, all you have to do is point the camera outside for an amazing, scenic, epic video.

Radiohead = "Street Spirit (Fade Out)"

My favorite music video of all time. The black and white cinematography is unreal, the moving in and out of slo-mo within a shot, the jumping women and breaking glass - all of it, perfection.

It's been over a year since the last time I posted my top 25 songs on iTunes, so here's the update.

1. Wonderlust King - Gogol Bordello
2. Supermassive Black Hole - Muse
3. Get Over It - OK Go
4. We Used to Be Friends - The Dandy Warhols
5. Dark Eyes - DeVotchKa
6. Here It Goes Again - OK Go
7. Starlight - Muse
8. Start Wearing Purple - Gogol Bordello
9. The Shape of Things to Come - Bear McCreary
10. Ballade No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 8 - Frederic Chopin
11. Dawn - Dario Marianelli (Pride and Prejudice)
12. The Inn - Philip Glass (Dracula)
13. Sweet Ones - Sarah Slean
14. Not a Crime - Gogol Bordello
15. Enterprising Young Men - Michael Giacchino (Star Trek)
16. Apocalypse Please - Muse
17. The Legionnaire's Lament - The Decemberists
18. Stand & Deliver - No Doubt
19. The Orange Tree - Philip Glass (The Illusionist)
20. Mr. Blue Sky - Electric Light Orchestra
21. Bordello Kind of Guy - Gogol Bordello
22. Grande Polonaise Brillante in E-flat Major - Frederic Chopin
23. Roslin and Adama - Bear McCreary
24. Charlotte Mittnacht - DeVotchKa
25. A Promise to Return - Bear McCreary

Numbers one through five are unchanged from last year, which is less about how much I've listened to them this year, and more about how much I listened to them a year ago. The fact that a song from this year's Star Trek soundtrack has already made it to number 15 is kind of terrifying, and shows that I probably listened to that, like, twenty times a day that first week. I rarely listen to a song on repeat over and over again (the last one I can remember doing that with was "Dark Eyes," which is number five), so.

Top 25 Most Played Songs on iTunes:

1. Wonderlust King - Gogol Bordello
2. Supermassive Black Hole - Muse
3. Dark Eyes - DeVotchKa
4. Candyman - Christina Aguilera
5. Get Over It - OK Go
6. I'm Shipping Up to Boston - Dropkick Murphys
7. Rehab - Amy Winehouse
8. Here It Goes Again - OK Go
9. We Used To Be Friends - The Dandy Warhols
10. Suddenly I See - KT Tunstall
11. Starlight - Muse
12. Start Wearing Purple - Gogol Bordello
13. Apocalypse Please - Muse
14. Sweet Ones - Sara Slean
15. The Shape of Things to Come - Bear McCreary
16. Chelsea Dagger - The Fratellis
17. Stockholm Syndrome - Muse
18. Smile - Michael Lord
19. O Valencia! - The Decemberists
20. Charlotte Mittnacht (The Fabulous Destiny Of...) - DeVotchKa
21. Sally's Song - Fiona Apple
22. The Denial Twist - The White Stripes
*23. Something Deep Inside - Billie Piper
24. Ain't No Other Man - Christina Aguilera
25. The Legionnaire's Lament - The Decemberists
25a. Crazy - Gnarls Barkley
25b. Make Your Own Kind of Music - Mama Cass Elliot
25c. What I Got - Sublime
25d. Grande Polonaise Brillante in E-Flat Major, molto allegro, Op.22 - Warsaw Philharmonic

*23-25d are all tied for the same number of plays, so I included them all rather than cut off arbitrarily due to alphabetization. Because this for some reason mattered to me.

Clearly, much like Alyssa, there is a definite tracking of songs I listen to on my shuffle while I'm at the gym. Otherwise, I can't really explain the presence of Candyman.

It's actually been a fairly busy week, and I've been meaning to update for the last few days but I've been...busy? It's exciting.

First of all, the concert was ASOME. We had the best seats, it was a ton of fun, although I don't go to concerts very often so it's always so surreal. Am I really just twenty feet away from Eugene Hutz? Really? Seriously?

And the next couple of days were ho-hum, and then Sunday morning my mom decides she wants to go to IHOP for breakfast. And we're all slow moving out the door, and by the time we get there, it's packed. Because, Sunday. Churchgoers. Breakfast. So we decide to drive to the next IHOP, which is the same. And then we drive to the next. The same. And at this point we've been in the car for, oh, at least forty-five minutes. My dad brings up Old Country Buffet, which does the Sunday brunch thing. We head that way. (Amusing pitstop at another buffet place where we go, fine! Good enough! And we pile out, and go in, and the hostess informs us they stop serving breakfast in five minutes. Grr...)

So we make it to OCB. As always, I think of Cat. We eat, it's uneventful, but by God, we ate breakfast. We leave in our usual staggered fashion, only to see my dad already in the parking lot holding...something. And we get closer, and it's a tiny, shivering dachshund. And my dad's cooing at it, and apparently it was just cowering in the parking lot. And it's REALLY thin, and dirty, no collar, and apparently had been on its own for at least a couple days. I think my parents didn't want to take her to a shelter where she'd be stuck into a cage immediately, so we took her home.

The first day, she just wouldn't do anything but sit right next to you. Actually, she prefered it if you held her like a baby with her little head up on your shoulder, like you were going to burp her. Since then, she's really perked up a lot, and runs around, and barks at Spencer, although she's still quite the lap dog. We don't know what we're going to do with her; I think she'd be better off in a home without a larger dog as she's clearly not used to one. My mom's at the vet with her right now, just getting a check-up. But it's been weird.

On top of that, I'm doing NaNoWriMo, which is interesting. I'm most likely not going to finish 50k works in the month of November, but that's not really the point for me. I just wanted to start writing again (aside from the BSG spec and a spit-and-polish draft on the serial killer script, I haven't written much since leaving school), and I've never written prose before, so it's an interesting experience. I have just over 5k words right now, and it's coming along pretty well for a rough first draft without any real outline. We'll see.

Happy Halloween!

I was going to upload some music, but I can't be arsed to hook up the router right now and I'm on the fam's computer, so. I'm pretty sure I don't actually have anything new, Halloween-wise, that I didn't have last year when I put up music, so it's probably a moo point anyway.

Seven hours until the Gogol Bordello concert! I have to drive up to Lawrence in our creaky old van, said drive undoubtedly testing the structural integrity of said van, pick up Laura, find parking (maybe; might walk, depends on temperature and crazy Lawrence atmosphere), then get in line, as Liberty Hall is kind of a free-for-all in terms of where one ends up. Laura really wants to be up front, I'd rather chill in the balcony and enjoy the show, so...we'll see. I'm taking stuff up to stay the night at her dorm if I'm not feeling like I want to drive home afterwards; it's only a 30-40 minute drive home, but I probably will not want to take one of two of the two-lane windy country highways home late at night, especially on Halloween, and I don't know if I feel like shelling out the toll to take I-70. Decisions, decisions. If I stay the night, the free parking next to her dorm ends at 7am, so I'd have to get up early to move the car. I don't know. Will decide when the time comes.

I kind of wish I had a costume for tonight - nothing too fancy or crazy, maybe like Catherine's emo girl costume - but didn't put anything together. I imagine that it's going to be pretty wild and crazy there, not even taking into account the types of people who listen to Gogol Bordello, what they'll be wearing on H'ween, and the theatrics of the band itself. I worry that I'll be out of place just wearing street clothes. Even a cheap wig would help, but I'm kind of lazy and I don't really feel like getting out today and buying anything. I also feel very whiny today, heh.

Updated foozes!