In truth, it might make more sense to post this after I listen to all of it but wtf …. 90% of this is easily available in HK, it was just a lot cheaper to get it “over there.”

* Where the Action Is: Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968. Four CD set, the fourth in Rhino’s Nuggets series (an expansion of Lenny Kaye’s original 2 LP compilation, I think it was on Elektra?). I’d downloaded this but thought it was worth it to actually own it – in part because I love this music, in part because I have every other volume in the Nuggets series and especially because it features an absolutely fabulous book with detailed credits and info for each of the 101 songs on the set. Standells, Byrds, Love, Buffalo Springfield, Captain Beefheart, Lowell George, Iron Butterfly, Bobby Fuller, Rising Sons, Sonny & Cher, Doors, Seeds, Music Machine, Spirit – that’s just some of the bands on just the first disc of this kick-ass set.

* Foo Fighters – Greatest Hits – the “deluxe” version that includes a DVD of their music videos.

* R.E.M. – Live at the Olympia – again deluxe version with 2 CDs and 1 DVD, early thoughts are that they’ve really been a shadow of their former selves in the studio for the past decade but still can cut it live.

* Jimi Hendrix – Electric Ladyland – I’d wanted to get this “collectors edition” that includes a DVD with a documentary on the making of this, one of my all time favorite records, finally bit the bullet when I came across a used copy at Amoeba.

* Glen Campbell – Reunited With Jimmy Webb – for my money Webb is up there with the all time great songwriters and he got even better once he made the conscious decision to stop chasing hits. Campbell, one of the top session guitarists in the 60s, when he feels like it and when he has the right material, is a terrific singer. 14 bonus tracks clinched the deal for me.

* Barry Goldberg – Barry Goldberg – the original mix of the only non-Bob Dylan album produced by Bob Dylan, recorded in Muscle Shoals. Goldberg was my piano teacher while he was working on this record and two songs co-written with Gerry Goffin became big hits for others (Imagination for Gladys Knight, Spotlight for Rod Stewart). Maybe one of the worst album covers of all time. Barry introduced me to Goffin and Mike Bloomfield but I never got to meet Dylan – just as well, what the hell could I have said to his Bobness anyway. Further trivia: during this period Goldberg had an instrumental hit on r&b radio but had to change his name because the program directors said they wanted to play the record but couldn’t because his name sounded too white for their stations. So for one record he became “Snake Eyes.”

* Rolling Stones – Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out 40th Anniversary Edition – a relatively typical ABKCO disgrace – the first two CDs could have fit on a single disc. Haven’t watched the DVD yet. Whatever, the original album was great, and I say that not just because I went to one of these shows but because it was great.

* Flo & Eddie – New York Times – two CD set of tracks selected from their 15 year run of Christmas shows at the Bottom Line in NYC. Flo & Eddie of course being the leaders of the Turtles, members of the Mothers of Invention and two of the busiest session back-up singers of all time (everyone from Springsteen to Bolan), they could do amazing pure pop and biting rock satire.

* Big Star – Keep an Eye on the Sky – long overdue box set for this seminal group. They may not have recorded much, they may not have sold much, but their influence over everything that came after them remains huge to this day.

* U2 – Unforgettable Fire – the original album, a 2nd disc of bonus tracks, a DVD documentary and a really nice hard cover book.

DVDs purchased – again mostly available in HK but cheaper to buy there

* The Story of Roxy Music – More Than This – had been debating on this, again a cheap copy at Amoeba helped make up my mind

* Wings of Desire – one of my all time favorite films gets the Criterion Blu-Ray treatment, no way I could resist because the DVD I have of this looks like shit

* Third Man – I wasn’t going to spring for this Criterion Blu-Ray, I’m happy enough with the standard def disc, till I found out this was going out of print. If you’ve seen it, you know it’s a fucking amazing film. If you haven’t seen it, what’s wrong with you?

* Howard’s End – Merchant/Ivory get the Criterion Blu-Ray treatment. (Noticing a trend here? In the past I’ve bought as many Criterion releases as possible and rarely been disappointed; their Blu-Rays are even better.)

* Monsoon Wedding “and Seven Short Films” – yes, another Criterion Blu-Ray

* Rock & Roll Hall of Fame – the complete 9 disc set sold only via the net by Time/Life

* Food, Inc – bought this because I thought it was important for my mom to see it. I wanted to leave the disc with her after we watched it, told her she should loan it to all her friends, she said none of her friends have DVD players so it stays with me.

I’ve now had a Kindle 2 for two weeks – actually 2 Kindle 2′s, first the review loaner I got from Amazon and then the one that I purchased for myself.

Pluses:

I love being able to carry so many books with me in such a slim and light weight device. That’s always been one of my biggest issues when traveling – balancing wanting to bring a few books against trying to minimize weight in my backpack.

Reading books, navigating on the device and populating the device are features that are mostly intuitive and can be quickly learned by everyone.

I find that for sequential reading – by which I mean simply reading a book from page 1 to the end – the device is intuitive and easy to use. The fact that I can hold and manipulate it with one hand, or even put it down on a table without fear of losing my place, is great. That I can sit down on a bus or train and instantly be at where I left off – or stand on a bus or train and have no problem holding this and turning pages with one hand, that’s also incredibly useful.

The almost instant delivery – via wireless or download to my PC – versus having to spend time shopping (usually unsuccessfully in HK) or waiting two weeks for delivery from the US remains a major plus. And I absolutely love being able to get the first chapter of every book for free. Not to mention the fact that in most cases, the eBook version is much cheaper than the physical book.

As I’ve said before, I believe that having the screen be gray instead of white means noticeably less eye strain when reading for long periods. The ability to select from six different font sizes for every book is also amazingly useful in this regard.

The Kindle app for my iPhone works really well. And they’ve just released beta Kindle software for the PC along with a promise that Mac software will be released soon.

Last but not least – when buying an eBook reader, one of the most critical factors is how you’re going to fill it up. And at the moment, Amazon offers a far wider selection than either Sony or Barnes & Nobles. And aside from the wider choice of titles, they’re running constant specials – some special free books and some bundled offers (for example, one of Chuck Klosterman’s older books included free when buying his latest one). The second screen on the Nook may be nice, it may be useful, but it’s meaningless if the book you want isn’t available for that device.

Minuses:

I’m disappointed that the Kindle 2 does not contain native support for PDF files – something that the Kindle DX reportedly does have. I do not want to send PDFs to Amazon for conversion out of privacy concerns – many of the PDFs I want to view are confidential corporate documents and I don’t want to inadvertently be the source of a leak. And I’ve found that converting PDFs on my own, via the freeware MobiPocket creator, is a less than perfect process – sometimes small sections of the files don’t convert properly.

Navigation for non-sequential reading is clunky. For example, technical manuals or travel books or cook books. It’s better for books purchased from Amazon – use the menu to go to the table of contents and then highlight a chapter, push a button and you’re taken there. Converted PDF files feature no such indexing. And for at least one of the books I purchased, the index at the back of the book was not indexed – there was no way to go through that index, highlight an entry and go directly there. The QWERTY keyboard is also really only fit for single-finger entry. I also found myself wishing that there were more options such as “go forward ten pages” (it is possible to do a “skip to the next/previous chapter” which is good but I’d like more.

While images contained in the books come out okay, I was frustrated because they usually seemed to load at a nice contrasty resolution and then, once loaded, “soften” up quite a bit. I looked for a way to manually increase contrast but didn’t find it. And while you can select an image and click on “zoom” to have the image increase to full screen, I would like an option to be able to further zoom an image – this lack was especially noticed in books that contained tables of data treated as images; it was difficult to read some of the figures in the tables and I couldn’t zoom in any further.

If you are going to buy a Kindle, I recommend that you purchase a protective cover and a small light for it.

I bought Amazon’s own $30 cover for the Kindle. There are all sorts of third party covers available but the Amazon one seems good enough.

I purchased the Mighty Bright clip-on LED light with flexible neck, $20 if memory serves. It has 2 LEDs and you can have either one or both lit; it runs on 3 AAA batteries that are not included in the package. The light is more than sufficient to illuminate an entire page in dark surroundings. However, glare from the light was sometimes an issue and I’ve had to really twist it around to minimize that.

The built-in dictionary feature may be useful for some, especially those for whom English is a second (or third!) language. The ability to create bookmarks and jot down notes tied to specific places in the text may also be useful for some people. And I found the text-to-speech feature worked far better than I expected it to (and I liked that one could choose either a male or female voice).

Note that Amazon seems to have now stopped selling the US-only CDMA edition of the Kindle 2. The only version you can buy is the international GSM version. This change took place after I purchased mine (a refurbished version of the CDMA model at a $40 savings).

I purchased this version using a US credit card and US billing address. This gives me a $2 savings on all eBooks I purchase and access to the full Kindle book store (the international version of the book store has about 15 or 20% less books available) but means I can only download the books to my PC and then transfer via USB from the PC to the Kindle. I can live with this although using the wireless feature in the US was really convenient! (And yes, on Tuesday I went to Barnes & Nobles in NYC, sat on the floor in front of a section I was interested in, and then pulled out the Kindle to see which of the books in front of me were available for Kindle. Maybe I downloaded one or two of them while sitting there.)

Overall, I’m extremely happy with my Kindle 2. It’s not perfect, but for me it’s extremely useful and works as promised. It goes with me everywhere – from long trips to short commutes, from the dining room table to the bedroom to, um, the bathroom. In recent years, I haven’t been reading as much as I used to and I think that having this is going to result in reading a lot more – and no one can say that’s not a good thing.

So while I think there’s a lot of room for future enhancements to both the hardware and software, I have no regrets about sticking a stake in the ground and buying one now.

Is a Kindle right for you? That’s something only you can decide. But I do think that everyone who reads should at least take a closer look at this.

(Note that the Kindle DX, essentially the same machine with a much larger screen at almost double the price, will start being available internationally starting early next year.)

This trip was ten days but seemed like forever. So it feels extra nice to get home.

The flight back was relatively painless, or as painless as a 16 hour flight can be for a heavy smoker with a short attention span. I didn’t get tagged with any excess baggage charges and the food on board was slightly better than the food ten days ago on my HK/LA flight.

On the flight, aside from my Kindle, my MacBook is my prime source of entertainment now. Electric outlet by the seat and the power adapter for the MacBook is neither bulky nor heavy. I’d loaded it up with movies and TV shows and also about 60 gigs of music – why pull out my iPhone and run the battery down?

The one movie I watched turned out to be almost shockingly bad, especially considering the talent attached to it. Lucky You was directed by Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys, 8 Mile). The script was cowritten by Hanson and Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Insider, Ali, Munich, Benjamin Button). Starring Eric Bana and Drew Barrymore, the cast also included Robert Duvall, Robert Downey Jr., Debra Messing, Horatio Sanz, Madeleine Peyroux, Jean Smart and a bunch of professional poker players as themselves. Bana is not much of a screen presence and Barrymore’s talents are overwhelmed by her quirkiness (and in this case a poorly written character). The story has nowhere to go and takes its sweet time getting there.

I also watched 3 episodes from the current season of Mad Men, meaning I’m almost caught up to the season finale, which aired on Sunday. And the current episode of Californication – I’ve thought this season is something of a train wreck and yet I’m enjoying it, mostly due to a bravura performance from Kathleen Turner (and a hilarious cameo from Peter Fonda this week). I also tried to watch the Will Ferrell film Land of the Lost but gave up on it about a third of the way in. It was funny in bits and pieces but I just couldn’t bring myself to care enough about it to stick with it to the end.

In terms of books, I mostly read Clarence Clemons’ book, which is a very mixed bag. It’s not told in a straightforward manner, his co-writer is someone who primarily writes for TV (leaving the book filled with vapid cliches) and they admit up front that only some of the stuff in the book is true, the rest is tall tales. (Hustling pool with Fidel Castro and Hunter Thompson? Fishing with Norman Mailer?) But it does give some insight into who Clemons is and the surprise (to me anyway) is that he’s a far more complex and interesting person than I would have thought. You won’t find much here on how he developed his unique sound and there’s very little of the behind the scenes/in the studio kind of gossip. No outrageous road tales (he says he’s being careful because everyone in the band has kids and grandkids). But it’s a quick, breezy read and I recommend it to all Springsteen fans.

Overall, the trip was a mixed bag. As always, I didn’t get to see anywhere near the number of people I planned to see. Once I get there, I’m hit with the reality of my mother’s situation – 88 years old and lonely and with me only visiting once a year, I try not to run off on her too much even though being around her for more than 5 minutes at a time drives me up a freaking wall. This also meant that the lion’s share of the food I ate was from diners and deliveries, so not quite the gourmet paradise I was hoping for. Then again, in terms of shopping, I got everything I planned to get and a little bit more.

So now I’m home. Of course I’ve got a bit of jetlag (I slept tonight from 10:30 PM to 2:30 PM). Meanwhile my gf’s vacation was in the same time zone so she’s peacefully sound asleep right now.

Next couple of days will be spent getting ready for a BBQ party I’m hosting for my former staff on Saturday night. Then next week, will start making some changes (hopefully improvements!) to the blog. And of course looking forward to getting out and about and seeing friends after the long break.