If you’re on the jessibird.net home page, you’ll need to click the title of this post to see the whole thing.

Favorite albums

Please note that I do not claim that these are the best albums of 2009, simply the ones I like a lot and play over and over.

Next page: runners-up

I’ve been trying to tell anyone who will listen about the Free Music Archive, where the music is legitimately free and good. Don’t take my word for it. Try listening to this sampling of some favorites of mine. If you like a particular track, click the little i for more info, or the arrow to download:

If I had to pick my favorite of these favorites, it would be a tough call but it’d have to be Selva de Mar. Their album Olas Invisibles is a winner. Go ahead! Click on the album cover to download it now! And happy new year to you!

Ingredients for this recipe: iTunes, iCal and AppleScript. No scripting knowledge required, I promise.

Make your wake-up playlist

Make a playlist in iTunes that you’d like to wake up to. I like to wake up to some mellow classical or jazz radio. If you like that idea, just click each link below to download the station’s stream; double-click the downloaded file to open it in iTunes; then copy each station you like to your playlist.

• All-Classical WGBH 89.7-HD2
• KCSM Jazz 91 * The Bay Area’s Jazz Station *
• KJAZ SPIRIT- JAZZ RADIO
• KKJZ 88.1 FM
• WCPE
• WNYC
• 1.FM – Otto’s Baroque Musick

Get the wake-up AppleScript

Go to Doug’s Mac-as-iTunes-alarm-clock tutorial, but do not follow the steps in order.

Go straight to the complete script right under Step 3: Volume Up and Down. Click the little [upm] link; this will open the script in the AppleScript Editor.

Customize the script by changing the “tick” and “thismany” numbers, to adjust how quickly the volume ramps up in iTunes. And don’t forget to change “Recently Played” to the name of your own playlist!

Click the Run button to test out your script. Clever, aren’t you? :D

Now save your script, as a script, to any location on your computer you like, with any name you like.

Schedule your wake-up script in iCal

Create an iCal event at a suitable time of day. In your event, set an alarm, choose “Run Script,” and then choose your wake-up script. Set your event to repeat daily, or as desired.

Alright sleepyheads, now you just need to get to bed earlier, and waking up should be a little more pleasant! And if you’re feeling grateful, please consider making a donation to Doug.

I may look middle-aged, but do you know, I feel about ten years old (in the best way) when I’m riding in the dark with colored flashing lights. Kind of like a trip in a time machine.

Just today, the Night Riders club membership has doubled. My friends A and L wrapped their BikeGlow lights today, and A’s partner M will wrap his soon, I’m sure.

Speaking of another kind of time machine, L has a project going: fixing up an old 78 phonograph that runs on tubes. I am looking forward to traveling in the musical time machine to hear whatever 78s he’s got.

McK also has a musical time machine going on over at his blog. He’s been posting pics of old punk shows, his buddies in X, and Lee Scratch Perry. Well worth a look!

And now, a free treat for your ears. Have you ever heard and appreciated Fela Kuti’s afrobeat? Then you’re gonna like Pax Nicholas, who was in Fela’s band. Courtesy of Voodoofunk Frank and Daptone Records, you can stream the entire album. You can also read why Fela Kuti said, “Don’t you ever, EVER play it again!” Sorry, Fela, I AM going to play it again. Click the pic below to get yourself funked up, 70s afrobeat style.

Radiohead is giving away a new song for absolutely free! Watch them perform it:

Download it: These Are My Twisted Words

(Hat tip to cyclelicious)

I guess I’m a little punchy cause I stayed out late; for me, 9:30 pm is late. I had fun hanging with my friend L and singing Mexican folk songs. Well, he sang, I croaked through my rusty pipes. We would both like to learn the song Cucurucu La Paloma, which is a beauty.

My favorite lines:

Las piedras jamás, paloma,
¿qué van a saber de amores?

(What will these stones ever know of love?)

Thanks L for a fun evening!

I am so lucky to have a friend who’s a folk musician, and another friend M who’s a punk rocker. They help keep my ears from getting too used to one kind of music.

It’s M’s birthday. Many happy returns of the day, M! My wish for you: may this be the year you get to reconnect with making your own music!

I was at the farmers’ market with my good office pal M and I heard something I don’t often hear there: really good music. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad anyone who wants can get their yayas out in the drum circle, but I usually don’t consider the results musical, exactly. Call me picky, but I kind of like a discernible rhythm, and a series of monotonous, randomly-timed bom bom boms doesn’t count.

Anyhow. Back to the really good music, with actual rhythm and melody and everything. We followed the sound of the fiddle and found locals Paul and Emily Rangell and their two visiting friends. They play old-timey folk dance tunes from all over the world. Paul plays mandolin, fiddle, and guitarron, Emily guitar. One of their friends was playing the concertina, the other, fiddle.

Paul and co. are fine musicians, and I don’t just mean that they play their instruments well. I mean that they are connoisseurs of dance tunes and select truly delightful melodies to polish and perform. Waltzes, polkas, rags, and whatevers from all over the globe. They seldom seem to know any names for the tunes, instead referring to “that Greek one in E” or some such.

Here’s the exception to their dance tune repertoire: a fight-to-the-death tune! They got it from the old Gary Cooper movie Cloak and Dagger. Gary and the Nazi battle it out and all the while, someone’s singing and playing this sweet Italian ditty in the background. Check it out. Embedding was disabled for this video, darn it, but it’s worth clicking through.

Gary Cooper, Marc Lawrence, and a sentimental Italian folk song

Hear Paul and Emily any Sunday between 10 am and noon in the Buttery patio. You may well see me there!

Ratty and I were having some mellow back yard time when suddenly a small tortoise-shell cat came up and yowled aggressively at him. Before I knew what was going on, he had broken his leash and both cats had scrambled into the yard behind our yard. I don’t even know if they went over, under or through the fence!

Ratty has three legs and has a severe phobia of traffic, plus he can’t move very fast. For these reasons, he’s primarily an inside cat. I don’t think he has a spatial sense of the neighborhood. So as you can imagine, I was freaking out.

(Just in case you don’t want to read the following saga, he’s safe back home now. Read on for the stressful details.)

I could hear them both yowling. I called for a minute, then dashed into my kitchen and grabbed my stepstool and the cat treats. I tried to see over the fence, but it was too tall. So I dashed into the garage, tossed some boxes bigger than me out of the way, and got my landlady’s ladder. Now I could see over the back fence and I could see Ratty, but not the other cat.

Ratty wouldn’t pay me much attention. He’d gotten rid of his harness somewhere and was checking out his new environment. But now I knew where he was, so I got down and peered under the fence and held out some treats. The tortoise-shell seemed to be gone by now, but Ratty seemed too interested in exploring. He ignored the treats and me.

I noticed how small and pretty the yard was, with lush grass and lovingly tended trees, flowers and tomatoes. I didn’t see any people at home. The house and yard were in the no-man’s land between Linden Street and Branciforte Avenue, and I had no idea how to possibly access them. At this point I was worried that Ratty didn’t even care to come home and would stray off and out into the street and get hurt or worse. I thought I’d better try getting at him from the other side of this yard.

I dashed back into the garage and bungied the cat carrier to my bike rack, then wheeled around the block to Branciforte. Lots of people were strolling around, engaged in our popular form of local commerce, the yard sale. There were about four or so sales in a row. I couldn’t figure out which house was in a direct line from mine, so that I could ask the owner if I could access the no-man’s land. So I just kept asking everyone if they knew who had triangular tomato planters in their back yard. No one knew. I told them to keep an eye out for a three-legged black cat with no collar.

I pedaled back to Linden, counted houses, went to Branciforte, counted houses again. Not a one-to-one correspondence, but I figured it might help. But no. I pedaled back home again, looked over and under my back fence again. I couldn’t see Ratty at all! I called and called. The tears were starting.

I ran inside and consulted Google Maps which guessed the house on Branciforte that corresponded to mine was number 1126.

Back to Branciforte again. No 1126, but there was an 1127. No one was home. I sneaked around the back, opened a gate, and could get to the back of 1127’s yard, but there was still no way I could see to get to that house and yard in the middle of no-man’s land. Too many fences!

In the picture below, the little yellow house marks the yard for my studio. The blue pointer is approximately where Ratty was.

Rushing back home with tears dripping by now, I went and climbed the ladder by the back fence, thinking I needed to climb over the fence and do the best search I could. I couldn’t see him. Just when I’d given up calling and got down the ladder, guess whose tail I saw poking under the fence! Oh Ratty! You have put your mama through some trauma!

I gave him all the treats I had, then reached through, grabbed his one rear leg, and unceremoniously dragged him back under the fence.

He is back in the studio now and probably wishes he were still exploring. I don’t think he ever got worried or felt lost for a second. I am still coming down off the adrenaline, though! I wanted to scold him, then I wanted to hold him. He just says calm down and leave me alone, Mom!

I promise to post a nice photo of the troublemaker shortly.

I was already familiar with most of these artists, such as Toumani Diabaté, Orchestra Baobab, Buena Vista Social Club, Cheikh Lô, and Ali Farka Touré. But I can’t believe I didn’t know anything about Tony Allen! He was Fela Kuti’s drummer from ‘68 to ‘79 and helped found the Afrobeat movement. This list kicks off with the title track of his new album, Secret Agent.

Hope you enjoyed that as much as I did! Soon, I hope to bring you more posts about WordPress, iTunes, and whatever else takes my fancy.