My Month of Entertainment – August 2006

May 2006
June 2006
July 2006

As a response to the excesses of June and July, I vowed to cut back on spending in August, especially since I was already going on a long-planned trip to Chicago for a Pirates game and Lollapalooza. That was enough entertainment spending for the month. Of course, I didn’t escape August unscathed, but overall I was pleased with my efforts.

DVDs

Veronica Mars, Season Two – this one was a given. The Butterfly and I got completely hooked on VM halfway through season two. We knew it was a fantastic show even though we didn’t know half of what was going on. We’ve caught a lot of reruns, and we’ve seen most of season two by now, but it’s time to go back and watch from start to finish now that we actually have the context of season one. That, and there are enough plot complexities that a second watching of some episodes is still quite interesting. Can’t say that about too many shows on TV right now.

I cannot say how impressed I am with this show. Even the episodes in which the overall season storyline (in the case of season two, the bus crash) is barely addressed, the writing and pacing are fantastic.

One other DVD note of interest would be that we joined the Netflix revolution this month. Just about the most convenient thing ever, really. Our first two movies last week were Syriana (for us) and Memoirs of a Geisha (for the mother-in-law). Syriana was pretty much what I expected—it’s a bit hard to follow (though not nearly as confusing as I was prepared for), but it does a phenomenal job of tying together lots of different storylines into an overall impression. Geisha, as I mentioned during the Sunday Blogroll, disappointed me in that it was totally and strangely in English. Guess it wouldn’t have appealed to a larger audience if the audience had to, you know, actually read subtitles, but it bugged me the entire film.

Next up on Netflix: Failure to Launch (for the in-laws) and CSA: Confederate States of America (for us).

Books

The Long Tail, Chris Anderson – As I’m still working my way through the backlog of June and July’s purchases (just finished Mind Game, just started Fever Pitch), I didn’t feel the need to buy any books this month. By purchasing this one, I was just following orders from berlin niebuhr. This is an interesting look at the new economy of entertainment, how people are developing more specialized tastes thanks to the Internet. I’ll go into a lot more detail later, when I’ve read more than two chapters.

CDs

Modern Times, Bob Dylan
Idlewild, Outkast
Game Theory, The Roots

I honestly didn’t intend to buy a single cd this month, and I’ll tell you why. A fellow music nerd and friend of mine in Chicago and I have a long-standing habit of sharing music and introducing each other to new artists whenever we visit each other. Well, when I visited Chicago earlier this month, we engineered what was easily our largest music exchange ever. I’m now listening to quite a few artists/albums I either a) intended to get into but never have or b) had never heard of. Arcade Fire, John Mayer Trio, Dinosaur Jr., Cornershop, a couple old Radiohead albums, Pixies...lots of good stuff. With all of this music to digest, there really was no need to purchase any new albums this month.

However, there are certain artists whose new releases warrant an immediate purchase and repeated listen. Unfortunately for my intentions, three of those artists—Dylan, Outkast, Roots—put out albums within a week of each other. I’ve only managed to listen though these albums once each so far, and with these artists it takes a lot more than one listen to digest what’s going on, so expect a lot more about these later.

So there you have it. By far my least-expensive Month of Entertainment since I started writing these summaries...though thanks to the Chicago Music Exchange, I’ve had as much or more to work through than ever before. Hopefully I’ll keep up my relatively accelerated reading pace because I still have another 10-12 unread books on the shelf, and my queue for new book purchases is now into the double digits.