C'mon, live a little!

(based on the novel Push by Sapphire)

O happy day!

I ran out of fresh podcasts yesterday, and I just wasn't feeling the usual musical suspects.  A lot of folk might turn to the radio--online, airwave, or otherwise--under such circumstances, but I've somehow accumulated a couple months worth of 24-hour days of music in my iTunes library, with another couple months worth of podcasts.  Not an especially large library--looks like it'd still fit on a 160GB iPod--but plenty big.  And a quick scan reveals all the broad empty spaces I'd known were there, along the "play count" column.  I feel like such an indiscriminate tune hog!  Take and take and take, but when do I listen?!  Bah!  Only all the time, if just to a rather small segment of the collection.  It only means that hitting shuffle, or just playing roulette down the menu, is always likely to yield something new, or at least out of the ordinary.

On the other hand, even when I crave the new, I'm still a fan of the familiar.  So, I paid a visit, way down in the alphabetical basement of my podcast list, to Your Favorite Little Podcast.  I hadn't played that in a while, I thought.  Turns out, it might have been, like, a year or so.  Oh, in fact, I can tell: the "last played column" indicates the most recent play (outside the half dozen I just listened to yesterday), was the last day of March, in '09--shortly after Episode 15 was released, which seems to be the last one made.  I'm pretty sure I've played some of them on the iPod since then, for brunches at Sea Ranch over Labor Day...




This is a series of half-hour playlists put together by Derrick Bostrom, previously known to me only as the drummer for the Meat Puppets.  Nowadays, he indulges in his obsessions--which are not strictly limited to photography and any manner of audio-visual garage sale and second-hand shop finds--in posts on his Bostworld blog, which have included Your Favorite Little Podcast.

I was first tipped to this show by a post on my usual source for anything new on the web, BoingBoing.  I was already late in the game, but I went back and picked up all the previous episodes.  And now, a year and a half past the last one, I realize how busy my ears must have been, that it's taken me 'til now to track down what's gone on with it since.

Within the first half hour, hearing Episode 1 again, yesterday, I remembered why I'd loved it so: it's as though a shrewd guide has taken the trouble of sifting through all the wacky, tattered album covers in the racks at Community Thrift, sparing me the musty smell that always triggers my allergies, and pulling out only the jauntiest gems for my listening pleasure.  I'm just not a crate digger, but I'm so grateful for those who are!  As Exxon's Spirit of Achievement sang Up Came Oil, I figgered out for myself that a man with a catalogue so deep and weird, couldn't possibly have run dry after fifteen half-hour shows.

If I'd bothered to read the comments on that BoingBoing post, I'd have already learned that not only had Mr. Bostrom been inspired to podcast by the programming at LuxuriaMusic, but that he'd already taken a weekly hour slot on the station.  Instead, I sussed that out by searching Bostworld for clues, eventually finding a link to Luxuria's Saturday schedule, in a post about Hazy Osterwald's Jet Set, and BOOM, there it is: C'mon, Live a Little!  Dude's been doing this every week for years now.  I subscribed thru iTunes.  Seems they only keep the past ten episodes live, but I gots 'em now.  I look down the playlist of every show, and I think I've only recognized two artist's names in all of it.  Plenty of cover tunes with recognizable titles.  I don't know what I'll find, but thus far, it's turning out pretty good.

And the Luxuria site, currently advertising the 10th annual Tiki Oasis Extravaganza atop their home page, sounds like the kind of thing I could just leave on at work all day every day.  Once, that is, I've played through the rest of my C'mon, Live a Little!, and the Hazy Osterwald's Jet Set and The Adam Ross Reeds, I've just pulled down from Bostworld.

This feels like the first squarely and undeniably 40 year old behavior I've engaged in since turning 40 last month.  If I'm not careful, I might start becoming responsible.  In the meantime, it sounds like cocktail hour!