One Big Library.

Music 2011

dchud — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 04:09:37 +0000

Hi.

2011 was the first year in many (since 2002?) that I didn't go to at least 8-10 concerts. I'm not sure what happened. It was a busy work year with a job change; some of my favorite bands play larger halls now, and we don't enjoy those shows as much anymore; we moved just far enough away from the Rock and Roll Hotel that shows I would've gone to because they were so close I now think twice about. I also miss a lot of shows that occur on Friday nights; a few years ago I made an exception to my observance to see a show (two of our favorite bands, actually) and I enjoyed the show a lot less than I'd have expected because of it. Possibly, seeing Wild Flag's terrific set at the Black Cat on March 11, arriving home late still wound up from the show, and watching twitter explode with Japanese friends' earthquake tweets as it all happened lowered my excitement for live music.

Probably the most interesting aspect of listening to music in 2011 was, just like Ed notes for himself, streaming really worked for me for the first time with rdio. I'm an unabashed fan; I love having the equivalent of what napster provided at its peak but in an affordable, convenient, and much more reliable service. I've almost entirely stopped purchasing cds; the only time I will now is to pick up a rarity or perhaps a favorite recording direct from an artist at their shows. My favorite rdio strategy is to find classic jazz recordings not yet in my collection by searching "Rudy Van Gelder". Every single one I've found is a true classic, and I didn't own or even know several of them before rdio showed up. It's also meant I've spent a lot more time with older music from every era and less new music. When a motif or harmony in a new song by someone you are just getting your head around reminds you of something from 30 years ago that you can look up with just a few tap tap taps it's easy to forget to go back to the new stuff.

Anyway. There were several new recordings in 2011 that I spent plenty of time with: my favorites, not in order:

C'mon by Low
Wild Flag
David Comes to Life by Fucked Up
The Deep Field by Joan as Police Woman
w h o k i l l by tUnE-yArDs

Other candidates that I just don't know well yet are the new St. Vincent, and Wye Oak, which I like so far, and... um... hold on, I have to look up this obscure 70s track M. and I can't remember the chorus for... no wait that's not it... oh you get the picture.

Linked Data Feedback Mechanisms

dchud — Mon, 16 May 2011 02:37:28 +0000

Last week I attended code4lib north at McMaster University in Hamilton. It had the great vibe of the best code4lib events: low key, great mix of old and new friends, and an intense exchange of ideas tempered by ready access to serious beverages. @adr and @ruebot did a great job putting it all together, in a great space in the libraries there.

I gave a talk called "WWIC? Library Linked Data as a Customer Service Medium". You can find the slides at slideshare and the video of the talk archived in McMaster's repository or just watch the video here:

In the talk I try to merge lessons from Paul Ford's WWIC paradigm for what the web is about with the basic tenets of publishing Linked Data by Tim Berners-Lee. My premise is that Linked Data is great, but without adding the appropriately-tuned community feedback mechanisms that make great communities on the web work, it falls short of the potential the web has to offer.

To demonstrate this argument I took downloads the last three years of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) in the MARC format, serialized them into JSON on disk, storing the resulting files (one file per subject heading) in a directory under version control with mercurial, with each of the 2009, 2010, and 2011 revisions of MeSH loaded in turn, with changes recorded in mercurial and tagged for each year. Then I created brought up a Django project using django-hgwebproxy, which publishes cloneable mercurial repositories through Django's friendly admin view infrastructure.

To me, this demonstrated the potential for simple ways to:

put a vocabulary online as linked data
back the vocabulary with version control to provide access to its history
use a modern web framework's url router to enable cool URIs to the vocabulary's concepts
expose the version history to the web in a human-friendly UI
expose the version history to anyone who wants to clone or fork the vocabulary using version control tools
mix in feedback mechanisms like commenting, voting, etc.

...and in enabling all that, it offers the potential to take Linked Data from a read-only mechanism great for following your nose to cool stuff toward a read-write model integrating technical and human mechanisms for exchanging opinions and expertise about the data itself.

I think.

Have a look and let me know what you think.

The earthquake, twitter, and libraries

dchud — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 05:28:57 +0000

Our Man In Abiko is publishing a book about people's experiences with the disastrous earthquake in Japan last week. Here's mine:

My Twitter app exploded with news of the earthquake when I was about to go to sleep late last Thursday night. I studied Japanese in college, and was just in Tokyo a few months ago for a professional engagement. I’m a librarian, and a software developer, and an avid Twitter user. Having connected with Japanese professional colleagues on that recent trip, I’d also connected with many of them on Twitter. Within minutes, it seemed like everybody I know using Twitter in Japan was tweeting — "not again", "it's still going", "this is a bad one" -- so I knew how serious it was. Feeling helpless, I offered a simple「気をつけて」and watched the NHK web feed all night in horror like many other people.

I can’t comprehend the horrible loss of life, culture, livelihoods, and infrastructure any more than anyone else. As a librarian, though, I can turn aside from the tsunami videos and look at photos of spilled library shelves collected by Japanese librarians at http://togetter.com/li/110820 and it hits home, hard. Like they explain on the “savelibrary” wiki (http://www45.atwiki.jp/savelibrary/, see also hashtag #jishinlib), saving lives comes first, but when reconstruction begins, libraries will be as crucial as ever, and libraries suffered great damage like everything else.

At my job I work on a project at the Library of Congress to collect the archive of all public tweets donated by Twitter to the Library. Later this year we hope to make access to this archive available to researchers. Maybe it will be a valuable resource to someone studying terrible events like the earthquake and tsunami. Long before that, though, librarians throughout Japan will be back to work serving their communities just like before, having gone through the same hardships as everyone else, and responding in the way they know best, by helping people to connect with information and with other people. It’s a lot to ask when so many people have lost so much and face pressing needs for survival, but if you have the ability, please consider stopping by your local library to see if there’s anything you can do to help.

Music 2010

dchud — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 03:24:19 +0000

It's a little late for this but it's one of those if-I-don't I'll-regret-it posts. 2010 was a terrific year for music for me. Many of my favorite artists released excellent new records, and I was able to see most them live. Retribution Gospel Choir, The National, Spoon, The Books, Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene. I also made it to a number of other great shows: Doc Watson, Caetano Veloso, Plants and Animals, Neil Young and Bert Jansch, Land of Talk, Joan as Police Woman, a second show by The National in Royal Oak. Chris Lightcap put out a new record with Craig Taborn (first saw him 20 (!) years ago in Ann Arbor) that I'm enjoying as much as the previous two and even the Wall Street Journal saw fit to plug it. Some additional records I really enjoyed in 2010 were the latest Sharon Jones, Tallest Man on Earth, and Jamie Lidell.

But I think I can summarize the year with a little something you can enjoy along with me. Spoon's Transference was maybe my favorite record of the year, and everything I love about it and about my favorite song on the record "Is Love Forever?" and about Spoon the band as a whole is articulated concisely by Max Goldblatt:

Spoon "Is Love Forever?" from Max Goldblatt on Vimeo.

Now do you understand? Good, I knew you would.

That was a real highlight, as well as having a quick chat with Joan and later with the bassist from RGC after their shows, both of whom were gracious and friendly after tearing up their respective stages with all the energy and passion you could hope to expect from a live performance of music you really love.

Then I thought the highlight of the year was going to be seeing Caetano Veloso play my favorite song on my birthday (actually it was the next show after this):

Right. Hard to top that.

But then I saw מארש דונדורמה. That's Marsh Dondurma for the non-Hebrew-enabled among you. "Marsh Dondurma" is an Israeli marching band, in the spirit of the Hungry March Band, but infused with all the diverse musical strands you might expect from a band based in Jerusalem. You can read about them on mcclatchydc.com, Jerusalem Post, and Israelity. But you have you see and hear Marsh Dondurma for yourself to understand why every Shabbos we now prepare dinner chopping and slicing and dancing and singing along with them and their three excellent albums. You can buy the first two Marsh Dondurma albums on CDBaby, and you can listen to the new one on their site (hopefully it will be available in the states sometime soon, each is better than the ones before, and the first one is great to begin with).

This is what it looks like when Marsh Dondurma puts on a show in Jerusalem.

This mob flashed a few weeks before our trip to Israel, a few steps from where we stayed during that trip. I didn't see them out in the open like that, though, when I saw them it was in the basement music store a few blocks from there, horns and percussion spilling out onto the street along with folks of all ages and sizes packed in the store up the stairs and into the steps outside, dancing because you couldn't help but move. But aside from arranged appearances like that one and others they've done in many locations including in North America a few times, apparently it's not surprising to find them playing impromptu shows like this:

Good music makes me sing along, it makes me remember a time or a place or a person or an event, it evokes emotions, it moves me and makes me move. Great music makes me want to play music.

I want to abandon my career and start a marching band. I can play a little bit of drums, and I used to play clarinet a little in eighth grade, but you've got to start somewhere, right? Who's with me?

Seriously. LET'S START A MARCHING BAND.

This is what I'm talking about:

And this:

If I knew how I'd put on a marching band festival on the national mall every year and invite them and Hungry March and Rebirth and Batala and it'd be a hell of a party.

In case you're wondering the name is a take on "maras dondurmasi" (sp?), which I think refers to this unique Turkish approach to ice cream sales:

So if the new marching band fails I'll just move to Turkey and offer myself up as an apprentice to one of these guys.

Happy 2011!

linky linky

dchud — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 04:18:06 +0000

Next week I'll be speaking at an event about metadata infrastructure on the topic of "Linking Library Data in the Web." It's always best to lead with a demo so I'm hacking on Ed's linkypedia django application as a way to understand and explain what we're doing well and and we're not doing well in libraries to connect our data together. My sense is that we're doing an amazing job of connecting our stuff together except for that "last mile" of the web, the humble link.

Because most of what I learned about linked data on the web I learned through years of watching over Ed's shoulder (virtually and, more recently, actually), linkypedia seemed like a great place to explore this proposition. It took longer than I expected to get my head around what linkypedia actually does - it's a bit of a mind hack. linkypedia tells you which pages in wikipedia link to sites you care about. You tell it about the site you care about (eg "my library's web site") and it crawls through wikipedia looking for links to your site. It's a valuable addition to what your users and web usage logs and crawlers and bots might otherwise tell you about your site because it reflects, in a subjective yet tangible way, how others consider some aspect of your site to be instrumental in telling some distinct story from the one you're telling yourself.

If you haven't tried linkypedia yet, go check out Ed's. Click around a bit and you'll get the idea quickly.

Because the way it tells you about how others value your site is by showing you how they're linking to it, it gives us another bit of useful information: who else is doing something online that helps wikipedia tell a story I care about? I set up a fork in github and added a screen that shows this directly:

This tells you that the Pablo Picasso wikipedia page links back out to the Modern, the Met, the National Gallery, and Yale's Gallery. It also tells you that there's an LCCN for the authority record for Picasso. This is all evident and nicely organized on the wikipedia page itself, for the most part, but seeing it extracted here gives me as a librarian a clear picture of some other things we could be doing in libraries.

I hope to actually draw those pictures and post those soon. In the meantime linkypedia does a lot more than what I've described, and if you're the kind of person who would be reading this blog and still reading this post you'll probably want to take a closer look. A good starting point is what Ed's written on his weblog about it.

Advice to a library school student

dchud — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 04:53:52 +0000

Several times a year a non-librarian friend tells me "I have a friend who's interested in doing more of the tech side of libraries, he/she is [thinking about | starting | in | finishing] library school and I thought you might get in touch with each other, can I send them your contact info?" I always say "please go ahead" and I almost never actually hear back.

Today, I heard back from somebody. Then I responded with the following (a few parts elided for obvious reasons). Maybe it'll help somebody else:

Hi _____, it's nice to hear from you. (Thanks, _____!) I say that because more often than not when a friend of a friend going into library stuff is referred to me, I never hear from them. So already you're making a great impression. :)

Your background in cataloging is going to be very helpful, even if you never do it again. Some of the most capable library software developers I know spent some time early on as catalogers, and it really helps orient their minds to what our business is about under the hood. I'm married to a cataloger, and I've learned a ton from her over the years.

The best advice anybody ever gave me when I was finishing library school and looking for a job was "look at all your options and choose the most challenging one. If it scares you, like you think maybe you won't be up to the challenge, you're on the right track and should go for it." If you don't feel challenged now, you're right to be looking elsewhere (especially if you're young or don't otherwise have lots of obligations to other people and can freely look around).

Here's another thing I learned by chance while I was in library school. The most important stuff I learned that set me up in my career was stuff I learned on the job during library school, not in school or coursework. My classes were just fine, I did learn a lot, but I got a job where they said "go learn how to administer unix boxes, there's some oreilly books on the topic that are good. ask for help if you need it" and a few months later, out of pure fear, I'd learned how to do that. I learned Perl, I learned all kinds of stuff about how unix works, and the approach they threw me into was one where you build confidence in teaching yourself stuff. I've been doing that ever since. Heck, for the last two hours tonight I've been reading a tutorial for R because it sounds cool and maybe I can use it sometime. Seriously, if you have this kind of curiosity and learn well on your own, this is a good direction.

On the other hand in that job I worked with a bunch of really smart CS-major undergrads who were friendly and taught me lots of stuff. They thought I was awesome because I could find all kinds of answers to arcane technical questions online (this was before Google!) so they learned from me too. If you can find some people who know what you want to learn about, find a way to hang out with them. You'll learn a ton by osmosis and they'll probably learn something from you too.

After years of being a solo coder/sysadmin type in various jobs in libraries, I missed being in a group like that, so when I looked for my current job I was really lucky to find the group I'm in now. I learn all kinds of stuff from my colleagues every day, nearly all of whom are better programmers than I am. I value that almost as much as the salary they pay me. :)

I took some master's level CS classes at ____, and while I know their MLS program is good, the sad truth is that that degree isn't going to set you apart when you're looking for a new job that interests and challenges you more. I just got back from a conference (Access) that had half as many attendees as usual because nobody has a decent travel budget anymore. People are losing library jobs, retirees aren't being replaced, libraries are being shut down. In the middle of all this, there are many good jobs open for library software hackers. Vendors, universities, gov't, public libraries, every library that's still open needs more technically minded people. I helped start a list called code4lib years ago - look at the last few weeks' worth of archived postings and notice all the good-sounding jobs in there:

http://www.mail-archive.com/code4lib@listserv.nd.edu/maillist.html

A few more things about that - join that list, and look around code4lib.org for more information about the code4lib community, the journal, the conference, the irc channel. I'd encourage you to engage with one or more of these even if it seems intimidating. We're not intimidating once you get to know us. :) You can lurk if that's all you're comfortable with or just jump in and ask or answer questions. Also, if those job descriptions sound like stuff you'll never be able to do, that's honestly where I was when I started library school. I got my first job because I already knew perl and unix - seriously, they told me that, that my resume stood out because I could hit the ground running. Also, I got that job because I contacted the people in the library and asked them questions about the posting and the library, so when they saw my resume they remembered my name and thought the initiative and interest I showed were positive signs. Don't go overboard with it, but people (like me, obviously!) in libraries really like to be asked about their libraries and what they do, so don't hesitate.

If you're not on twitter, hop on and follow me, @dchud (if you can stand lots of random comments about music and food and sports, i do occasionally tweet about work).

[more personal stuff elided]

[end sent message]

I hope this doesn't read as egotistical. The other thing I didn't say which I probably should have is that I busted it during library school and for that job and in the first 10 years or so of my career to be sure I was really learning this other "non-traditional" stuff that made my skills unique and practical and effective as an employee and as a job candidate. It's tiring but all those long hours can pay off if you can stay focused. Ain't nothing prideful about going out of your way on your own time to make yourself better at what you do.

Slides from "Hacker 101/102" code4lib pre-conference

dchud — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 05:59:53 +0000

Monday I gave a whole-day pre-conference at code4lib 2010 in Asheville called "Hacker 101/102" and "Hacker 201/202". The morning ("Hacker 101/102") seemed to go well - the thirty or so people who attended seemed to move smoothly through the material, asked a lot of great questions, and offered a lot of positive feedback. Here are the slides (also attached as a pdf) from that part, which give a full tour of basic programming concepts using Processing:

Hacker 101 - Intro w/Processing

View more presentations from Dan Chudnov.

The afternoon session ("Hacker 201/202") started off poorly, as I'd not figured out the "what platform can we use to move a little further with this stuff" problem and we all stumbled around trying to get some stuff going on our desktops. Fortunately Mark Matienzo was there to give a tour of pymarc and Mike Giarlo was there to fix my crappy example code and many other people helped each other out when I was fumbling. The latter part of the afternoon was saved by dropping the "let's get this working" bit and instead opening discussion up to why unit testing is a good idea, with a tour of how pymarc unit testing works, and a walkthrough of the Kohana web framework by Eric Palmitesta and a similar discussion of what Django offers from me.

Surprisingly the room didn't empty in the afternoon, and I'm just sorry that I hadn't thought things through better. Running into problems getting language libraries installed and running on diverse platforms is, in a way, the kind of stuff that all of us deal with all the time, even very experienced folks. So it was kind of natural that that would happen. Unfortunately running into that kind of frustration is the kind of stuff that keeps newer developers from progressing past the basics, and before I attempt a session like that again I'd prefer to have a radically different strategy that builds up confidence in a more controlled way. I just don't know what that is yet. I hope that at least it was reassuring to the 50 or so attendees in the afternoon session that this kind of crap does really happen to all of us and the first thing you have to be willing to do is stop beating your head against the wall and ask somebody else for help. Many participants did exactly that and made progress getting things going, so I hope that small set of victories will help in some way.

In any case I'd like to think the morning was a full success and I'd like to give a Hacker 101/102 pre-conference session again for sure. We still have the list we set up for the pre-conf and I hope participants will share their thoughts on how it all went here or on the list. I also hope that everyone will consider asking for help when getting stuck on whatever folks get stuck on back at our regular jobs, either on the preconf list or on the code4lib list or whatever forum might be appropriate.

Hey NBC: get out of the way and show us the Olympics

dchud — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:10:52 +0000

NBC's staff appears to have done everything they can to turn me into somebody who no longer cares about the Olympics. Two years ago at the summer games they had this great deal wherein for the cost of swallowing my pride and installing Silverlight I could watch nonstop live Handball and Skeet Shooting and I LOVED IT. Seriously. Go Iceland! I couldn't get enough Handball. And Field Hockey. And Steeplechase. Every "mid-major" event type was streaming live, as it happened, and my simple ol' Verizon DSL connection was all I needed to view it. Wonderful. I never enjoyed the Olympics more than 2008.

What happened?

It's two years later. I've updated Silverlight and presumably it hasn't gotten worse. But I cannot watch the Olympics. When I tune into the local NBC affiliate I get one of three things: Bob Costas, Al Michaels, or Mary Carillo hosting some bizarro talk show about "Moments" and the Cold War; tape-delayed over-produced jingoistic hagiography of Lindsey or Shaun or Evan (all of whom seem wonderful when they're competing but I am only allowed brief glimpses of that smothered in extreme closeups of them crying or swearing afterward); music videos by indie rock bands I like in heavy rotation starring car companies and household products. I am tired of talk shows, hagiography, and bad music videos.

I go online. nbcolympics.com won't show me anything live if I don't have a cable subscription, which I don't. CBC and CTV and BBC and EuroSport and a half-dozen other overseas networks honor their contracts and won't show me anything when they recognize my IP must be coming from the US. I can't find good illicit streams, not that I know many places to look, and presumably if there are any they're being shut down as fast as they appear. I've considered ordering a Canadian VPS just to web proxy video streams but that just seems pathetic.

So here's what I'm reduced to: about 30-60 minutes of biting my tongue watching terrible coverage of whatever sport is deemed appropriate for prime time at night until I explode in anger and frustration and leave the room. Following incredibly helpful people from other countries who share my passion for sports but I've never met before like @ompairuka to get decent updates of sports I care about. Watching the occasional replay of, say, Sidney Freakin' Crosby winning an early match for Stevie Y's home team in a shootout (OMG DID YOU SEE THAT oh you did? good for you because NOBODY WOULD SHOW IT TO ME DAMMIT) when nbcolympics.com deigns to offer it after it happens. Ranting on twitter, and, finally, here.

I'm heading off to a busy conference on Sunday and I probably won't have time to catch much more of this, though maybe if the hotel rooms and bar have CNBC or USA or whatever it is I don't have that show live hockey I'll probably forget about the whole meeting and my talks and spend all my time retreating from this horrific lawyer-mandated hallucination-riddled Olympics withdrawal to feast on Nicklas and Jaromir and Sergei and Marty.

I'll repeat, with emphasis: Hey NBC, shut the hell up, get off the stage and out of the way, and let me see the Olympics already! Ask me for money and I'll pay it. Just let me see some live Hockey and Curling and Biathlon and Skeleton. Please?

Love, a fan.

unaloggin' again.

dchud — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:16:53 +0000

unalog is online again.

Registration isn't available yet, so if you're looking for an old school social introvert bookmarks app, drop me a line over email or DM @dchud with a username/pass/email and I'll get you an account.

Music 2009

dchud — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 04:30:34 +0000

This was a very good year for new music. Here are some of my favorites:

Allen Toussaint, The Bright Mississippi. We saw him at the Silver Spring jazz festival. If you were ever looking for a record to use to introduce a non-jazz fan to jazz, this could be it: it's immediately accessible, it's dripping with talent and experience and emotion and That Feel, it references and looks back to tradition while keeping a forward-moving vibe, and above all else Allen Toussaint's playing has this incredible measured-groove touch that I can't get enough of. Do yourself a favor and go get this.

Beirut, March of the Zapotec. Didn't see him. In the past I haven't liked his music much, but I love this part of his 2009 record and have listened to it constantly. This happens once in a while -- I don't like Bright Eyes but I loved "I'm Wide Awake". There's something about the arrangements and vibe and how his voice fits into it all that makes me think I've been missing something.

"La Llorona" New Official Beirut Video from Owen Cook on Vimeo.

Califone, All My Friends are Funeral Singers. I love everything this band does. We saw them at the Rock and Roll Hotel, and it was a terrific show. I just can't believe there weren't more than 100 or so people there. If you get a chance to see them, don't miss it.

califone - funeral singers from Califone on Vimeo.

Do Make Say Think, Other Truths. Saw them at Rock and Roll Hotel, another great show. I couldn't find any videos from this record but here's one of a favorite song from an earlier record, 'You, You're a History in Rust.'

No. 4 Do Make Say Think - "A With Living" from Retread Sessions on Vimeo.

One of the best things about the DMST show was that the opening acts were basically the same musicians in different configurations. One of these configurations was a set of performances of music/recordings from Charles Spearin's Happiness Project. Do yourself a favor and open that link up in another tab, stop reading this, and go check that out. You'll be glad you did.

Grizzly Bear, Veckatimest. Call me a fanboy, I can take it. Hell, ask my family, one of my favorite impressions to do is Michael McDonald, and they released a remixed track with him (!). Check out this video of Grizzly Bear (sans our friend the Doobie Brother) playing in a cab.

Metric, Fantasies. I like every record they put out more than the one before. I saw them in Ottawa at the civic center on a stage, which, essentially, is a hockey rink. I don't understand why they aren't the biggest pop band in the world. Maybe it's better we keep them our big little secret. The kids of the friends I attended the show with mishear the line and chant "everybody just wanna play the wii, play the wii, play the wii", maybe somebody should tell Emily.

METRIC - Sick Muse - OFFICIAL VIDEO from Metric Music on Vimeo.

Neko Case, Middle Cyclone. I liked her earlier records okay but went a little nuts over this one. Still can't get enough of it.

St. Vincent, Actor. I first heard/saw her in a take-away show but was a bit disappointed by the production choices on the first record. I love her sound stripped down with just a guitar. This came out and grabbed me from the first "paint the black hole blacker" backing vocal and I've been hooked since, elaborate arrangements and all. It also made me hear the previous release with new ears, and I like it a lot more now too. Still, love that tight feel of just her and her guitar.

St. Vincent Tour Videos // 01 from Alan Del Rio Ortiz on Vimeo.

Those are my favorite full records of 2009.

I also really liked Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion, particularly "Summertime Clothes" and though it's cliche to say it, "My Girls". The video does the song justice.

Animal Collective "My Girls" from Chad von Nau on Vimeo.

I liked the new Akron/Family, "Set 'em Wild, Set 'em Free" a lot, too, particularly "River". We saw them at the Rock and Roll Hotel, another great show there.

KEXP Session 16.1 - AKRON/FAMILY from More Dust Than Digital on Vimeo.

We live just 5-6 blocks from Rock and Roll Hotel, this tiny little place so many of my favorite bands play. We also saw Apostle of Hustle there, which was a great show with only maybe 40 people in the crowd. They put out a new record this year but I somehow never did hear it. If I did, though, it might be more prominent on this list since I like the earlier ones so much.

I like the latest Dirty Projectors record a lot, too, but none of it as much as the track they did with David Byrne on the Dark Was the Night charity compilation, "Knotty Pine".

Some artists I like a lot came out with new records that never quite stuck for me. A.C. Newman, M. Ward, the Dodos come to mind. I'll give them all another shot, though. The new Fiery Furnaces convinced me that I will just never like them.

There were a few year-old records I listened to a lot more in 2009 that seem worth mentioning again: Joan as Police Woman's 'To Survive', Juana Molina's 'Un Dia', and Deerhunter's 'Microcastle' all stuck in my ear repeatedly.

The National (#1) and Spoon (#6) didn't release records this year, but they are both at the top of my last.fm charts for 2009. Good money's betting on their new records to be my favorites for 2010, easy.

I spend a ton of money on music all the time, and I also download a ton of music all the time for free. Usually I find a way to spend money a "legit way" on artists I spend the most time with, either by buying their records or seeing their shows or, preferably, going to their shows and buying their records from them at their shows. Sometimes I look back and see that I haven't spent a single dime on my very favorite stuff, and this year I want to correct that.

I have never "purchased" a Neko Case or St. Vincent record, nor paid to see either of them perform. I might see St. Vincent in a few weeks, but I might miss her. In any case I don't like not supporting artists as directly as I can.

So: the first five people living in the US or Canada who read this and write me privately (not in the comments! use my email address, i'll use my inbox to judge who's first) with their snail mail address will get a copy of the new St. Vincent or Neko Case records sent to them by me, purchased from the most obviously preferred sales venue available on the artists' own promotional websites. Say which record you prefer. Limit one per person, and I'll do three of one, two of the other, so if you're the fourth person to ask for one you'll be out of luck.

...still you're surprised, 'prised, 'prised, when I eat ya...