And here are two more.

At the link above are two more roughly CD-length mixes of new music from 2006 (and, as ever, year-2005 releases that staggered into 2006 due to poor distribution or my own obliviousness). This appendix was going to be short– just a few songs that would have been included if CDs were a few minutes longer, or that broke my own finicky rules about how many times the same musician can show up. Instead, when I looked at my bin of worthwhile near misses, I had six hours of music to work with.

Unlike the other mixes I’ve posted, these are tiered– while this is still all awesome music, I rate everything on mix A higher than everything on mix B, and nearly all of the eight earlier mixes higher than both. I’m definitely interested to know whether you agree or disagree.

Just to convey a sense of scale, there are 50 or 60 more songs that I tagged as ‘good’ where these came from, but I have to stop somewhere. That’s close to 300 records I heard last year from which I found at least one song seriously enjoyable. I mention this not because I think it makes me wonderful or awful, but because of two arguments I hate having:

a) “Music just isn’t as good as it used to be. I hardly bought any new music last year at all. You can say I’m just getting old, but I’ve looked, and the good music isn’t THERE.”

b) “People who take the so-called critical perspective on pop music are so negative. They sit around picking apart things other people enjoy instead of being able to just sit and enjoy things themselves.”

Admittedly, each of these has a seed of important truth in it… In the first case: popular culture is demanding and often implies to its followers that it has a monopoly on the fulfillment of whatever desires or ideals led them to popular culture in the first place. People who insist it’s all been downhill since records X, Y and Z may just be trying to establish that they liked those records for the right reasons and that they are still a worthy bearer of those reasons. As though that’s what hating Death Cab For Cutie will buy you! I blame society.

In the second case: one of my little personal axioms is that people who like a record (or book, movie, video game) always understand something about it that people who dislike it probably, initially, don’t. But again, I don’t think that critics’ desire to be conscientious members of the latter category when they find themselves in it is what’s really on the table when I get stuck in this debate, defending something mean somebody said in a review I liked. People entrust part of their identity to art they like, in return for pleasure. They get angry when they feel like Pitchfork’s writers are standing nearby to bump their hands at the crucial moment in the transaction.

Anyway, you can see how the scope of my own listening makes me want to dismiss people out of hand for swinging one of these claims near my head, even though I know it’s not friendly of me.

Found this guy to be a SERIOUS nuisance when I first heard him. Now he sounds less confident and better off, no longer comfortable being that guy who raps really fast in a funny voice. I mean, he’s still a guy rapping really fast in a funny voice, but he’s not That Guy. You know? The new Busdriver comes off like Juice Aleem and MC Paul Barman taking turns imitating each other. (Which, it turns out, they totally should try doing.)

The beat DJ Nobody built out of a sample from Yes’ “Close To The Edge” is also a beautiful thing.

Rowan took me to a vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco run by disciples of Sri Chinmoy, a reasonably jovial guru who could be seen lifting sheep on a back-wall TV screen throughout our meal. Rowan then offered me some neatloaf from her plate, and it only took one bite to realize that her advance praise of neatloaf was not exaggeration. She also mentioned that a friend of ours had tried to reverse-engineer it, but couldn’t figure out all of the ingredients.

On returning, I mentioned all this to Rosa, who thought to search the web for recipes. She found this, which was fully weird enough to make me suspect it was Sri Chinmoy’s real recipe, presumably stolen by the forces of darkness to keep money out of Chinmoy’s pocket.

We made it last night, and while it wasn’t perfect– I remember the restaurant’s version being slightly less moist, with more of a crust on the outside– it was delicious, and eerily like what we had eaten in Dan Francisco. My only complaint was the sauce’s sweetness; less-sugary ketchup and maybe a longer baking time are the only changes I plan to make next time. And oh, there will be a next time.

Here’s the recipe as posted at Recipe Link; strike-throughs and italics represent our changes. We realized afterward that the amounts will come out a little nicer if you multiply everything by 1.5, though if your store doesn’t sell ricotta and tofu in convenient quantities (why *14* ounces?) there’s less point in doing so.

LOAF:
4 eggs
2/3 envelope Lipton Onion Soup Mix (the whole packet measures 1/4 cup, so use slightly less or use the whole packet if you like the onion soup mix taste) - for vegetarian version substitute dry soup mix without beef bouillion [Wait, is normal Lipton Onion Soup Mix not vegetarian? Is Sri Chinmoy's neatloaf not vegetarian? We used something called Lipton Recipe Secrets that was beefless but came in larger packets. 2/3 of 1/4 cup is 1/6 cup, for what it's worth.]
1/3 LB low-fat ricotta cheese
1/3 LB firm tofu (mashed into small pieces)
1/4 cup vegetable oil of choice olive oil
1/3 cup chopped onions
1/2 cup cooked brown rice brown rice, cooked
1/2 tsp. oregano
1/2 tsp. basil
1/4 tsp. rosemary (fresh is good)
4 cups (dry measured) Special K (note: this approximately equals 4 oz or 113 grams of the cereal by weight)
1 1/2 tbsp. chopped garlic

SAUCE:
1/2 cup ketchup
1/8 cup Dijon mustard
1/4 cup molasses
1/8 cup to 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar (to taste)
Pinch cayenne ground pepper (to taste)

Preheat oven to 300 degrees F.

Saute onions and garlic until onions are translucent. [We did this in extra oil, leaving the 1/4 cup to be an ingredient on its own. The loaf ended up moist enough that I suspect we were wrong, not that it was a problem.]

Beat eggs in a bowl, and then add all other ingredients (from LOAF block) except the Special K, which you should crumble in a separate bowl. Mix well and then add fold in the Special K last. Put in pan that is sprayed with cooking oil coated lightly with butter.

Bake for 1 hour. While it bakes, mix all the sauce ingredients together. Pour sauce over loaf after 1 hour, and bake for 10 more minutes. Serves 4.

I played Lumines last summer on J’s PSP while I was recovering from an awful sunburn and it was great. This is apparently identical, except that a few skins were removed (one I loved, one I hated, and one I can’t remember) and several more added, maybe from Lumines II. One of those new skins, Tiny Piano, consistently ends my game– I think usually I’ve staggered on to the next skin, but it was Tiny Piano that did me in.

And there’s the one big problem with Lumines: its genius is in taking a falling-block puzzle game and making it FEEL qualitatively different for each level you complete. New background music, new colors, new block design, new sound effects. I certainly care about these ’skins’, these cosmetic changes to the game, more than I’ve ever cared about choosing a skin for any program on my computer, and I see Firefox a lot more often than I see my Playstation. But these skins are so different from one another that I want them to be rewards for doing different things, like the variation in levels with Katamari Damacy or the merit badges in Fizzball (whose design was so good that I kept playing even after it was clear that it wouldn’t get any harder and was thus essentially boring). Instead, you get new skins for doing the same thing over and over, better and better.

If you haven’t even seen this, though, you have to.