And if our lives should be spared, we'll need no other reason to sail on

Wow, the Dougie MacLean* concert was really good. He does a very fun live show, and he seems genuinely funny and nice. Of course, he didn't have the seven-person band who plays with him on his albums, so it was just him and his guitar (well, except for the hand-free harmonica thing during "Feels So Near"), but it gave his songs a different vibe that I quite liked. (He played some from the album he just finished a couple of weeks ago, that hasn't come out yet.) He even had the audience belting out the chorus of pretty much every song! So I picked up one of his CDs and got him to sign it (and I also am gonna keep out an eye for his other CDs).

* For the record, I've been saying it all wrong - it's pronounced "Doogie MacLaine."

Anyway, in celebration I've put up for download the album versions of some of the songs he played at the concert! (Sorry, I had to use YouSendIt because I suck and have no web hosting.)

Talking With My Father - A pretty, kinda melancholy song he played really early on.

Feels So Near - One of the two songs by him I really loved before I went to the concert and was hoping he'd play. He did, so yay! If you only download one of his songs, this is probably the one you should get.

Not Lie Down - He played this in the second half. This was a song I like in the album version, but I thought the guitar-and-voice version was more powerful.

The Boatbuilders - OK, he told us the story behind this - apparently there was this rather unpleasant Scottish Presbyterian minister, Norman McLeod, who commanded his congregation to move from the Assynt Hills in Scotland to St. Anne's Bay in Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, then after about twenty years they abandoned it because he wanted to go to New Zealand, so they built boats and sailed there (it took six months for the first ship to get there, then five more followed) and they founded the town of Waipu there. The chorus is really pretty. (This is one song I actually like the album version better.)

Caledonia - The other song I was hoping he'd play. He wrote it a long time ago - like 15 years ago - and it's become, as he put it (in a very Scottish accent), "a monster." See, it's become kind of an unofficial Scottish anthem, and while clearly it's nice having one of his songs become so popular I imagine it can't be very enjoyable having to play "Caledonia" at every concert. Still, it's a beautiful song, and I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't like it.

In this place where life's heart thunders, in this place where time holds still

I should not be allowed to go to the library. No, really. Today I checked out a massive indie comic (like 600 pages) called Box Office Poison by Alex Robinson. It was really good, but I totally spent like the last four hours reading it. (Also, though it didn't have a particularly unhappy ending it didn't have a particularly happy ending; it was very realistic, as in "eh, that's life," all about friends inevitably drifting out of touch and all that, but now I'm kinda gloomy and existential.)

Anyway, while I was at the 'brary I also picked up Jill Thompson's Death: At Death's Door, which is basically manga Sandman (it retells the Season of Mists volume from Death's POV). Thompson is best known for the Li'l Endless that showed up in one of the Sandman chapters (I think it was Abel's story in Brief Lives). Overall I liked it - especially Dream as an uptight bishonen; Delirium, Desire and Despair as a magical girl ghost capturing team (with Del dressed as a Japanese schoolgirl!); and Edgar Allan Poe with a crush on Despair. At times it gets kinda overly wacky, but the Endless are flexible enough as characters that it mostly worked.

Also, I officially hate Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Now, not that there aren't many reasons to hate him, but I'm specifically irked by his recent musical The Woman in White. It is, of course, based on the Victorian "sensation" novel (which was, in fact, the first of the sensation novels) by Wilkie Collins, which is quite possibly my favorite Victorian novel EVAR. Anyway, it's only showing in London and New York, but I saw the soundtrack at the library and picked it up. It includes the libretto, which gives a good idea of the characterization and events of the musical.

And it makes me want to strangle Webber (and not just because the music sucks, 'cause it kinda does). Seriously, did the guy even READ the novel? Marian Halcombe is, in my opinion, the best heroine in Victorian fiction, and he RUINED HER.

( A quick plot summary )

However, the heroine is oddly enough not the love interest, Laura, but her sister Marian. Now of course I knew that Webber would pretty her up a bit - the libretto called her "vivacious but not conventionally attractive," which is a far cry from the namby-pamby Walter's wonderful description of her from the book:

( Cut for length )

Now, I wasn't expecting Webber to put a mustache on his Marian, so I was completely ready to accept the physical makeover. But he's given her a lobotomy as well - he completely changed her personality.

Book Marian is my favorite Victorian heroine because, well, she IS a heroine - she takes action, she's very much a go-getter, and if traditional feminine roles get in her way she mostly just ignores them. Now, I'm not trying to say she's an anachronistic Victorian proto-Buffy, but she's the only one in the novel with any guts and is constantly having to prop poor Walter up, and (for example) she will cheerfully shimmy out onto the roof in the middle of the night to spy on Glyde and Fosco when she's suspicious of them, and does so quite capably. And I didn't read far enough to see if Webber kept that scene in, but I doubt it, because he turns her into a mealymouthed whiny petty pining wimp - basically, into another Laura Fairlie. Which completely destroys everything that made the character so likable - for Christ's sake, Collins had numerous single guys writing letters to him asking to know the identity of the original for Marian, and if so if she'd marry them! (And this is in spite of being described as having a mustache!) And it ends, as in the book, with Walter and Laura getting together, but instead of Marian quite happily choosing to stay with her beloved sister and her close friend, it ends with her being all mopey and "oh noes my man is taken," and all through the early part of the play Marian's all "omg i'm pining why doesn't he notice me instead of my sister" which PISSES ME OFF AUGH.

...er, anyway, I think my rant has gotten quite long enough for today, and I have to make supper, so I'll leave it at that. >_<

Edit: ZOMG BLEACH SOUL SOCIETY DATING SIM WTF