Access Brain, Press "Play"

KEXP and the iTunes music store have conspired to introduce me to more good music this year than I can ever remember being exposed to previously, bless them. They have also compelled me to buy more music than I used to, damn their eyes. Yesterday morning, for example, I happened to hear a song that caught my fancy on my short drive to work. (Of course, that in itself never used to happen, since before I found KEXP I would likely spend my entire twenty-minute drive hearing only commercials, relieved only by perhaps Yet Another Repetition of whatever Dave Matthews song was newest.)

When I got home that evening the song had lingered sufficiently in my memory that I remembered to go to the KEXP website and look at their playlist for that hour to get more information about the song. Artist and song name in hand, I toodled over to the ITMS and bought it. 99 cents later, I have a new song. Granted, I'm sure the artist only got about a penny of that (if they even saw that much), but that's a penny more than they'd have got out of me last year. And I now have the eerie, sexy catchiness of TV on the Radio's Staring at the Sun to listen to.

Speaking of new means of delivering media to my eyes and ears: Firefly. Firefly, Firefly, Firefly. Please allow me to just gaze off into space and dream about this fictional universe. See, I never heard of this show while it was actually, briefly, on the air in 2003, since it only ran for about ten episodes. But a few months ago there was an outburst of excitement at Making Light about an upcoming movie called Serenity. Upon investigation I found out the movie had emerged from the ashes of the short-lived TV series Firefly, and put the whole series on our Netflix queue. Thanks to the magic of Netflix, the DVDs arrived two days later. We waited until Friday night to pop in the first episode, curious as to what all the fuss was about.

We ended up watching the entire season that weekend. Instantly hooked.

Spaceships, lost causes, terrifying invasive technology, bitter ex-soldiers, clever dialogue, wonderful character development--I love this show. I watched the trailer for the movie Serenity after watching the show, and how much do I LOVE Malcolm Reynolds when he says darkly over the intercom, "This is the captain; we have a little problem with our engine sequence, so we may experience some slight...turbulence, and, uh, explode."

Um, so anyway, the SciFi channel is airing Firefly on Friday nights for the rest of the summer, to lead up to the movie's release on September 30th. We had some friends over last Friday to watch the first half of the first episode, since SciFi couldn't manage to arrange their schedule well enough to fit the WHOLE first episode into one showing. It was fun! We had people over, and we didn't melt or accidentally insult them or anything! See, we can be social.

Here ends the lesson.