Ah it’s that time of year again. Macworld announcements, and now this. Thanks jeantue for this wonderful distraction.

for those of you unattuned, this is just a casual list of friends that send around a list of their favorite cultural distractions for the previous year. I think it’s a fine tradition. For fun’s sake, I’m blogging mine this year. If you’d like to play, use a pingback to this post and any others you find, and tag it “cultura”.

From the creators, you are requested to write about…

…bands, djs, songs, films, theatre, moments, meals, photos, paintings, videos, tv shows, travels, egret sightings – whatever moved you! Whatever you liked best is what we wanna hear about.

The rules: There are none. Whatever format you want, whatever you wanna pick and whatever you wanna say is cool. A few people get elaborate. Many are brief. Some aren’t wearing briefs at all.

Here’s my picks for favorites for 2006:

Kaki King ~ …Until We Felt Red

This album knocked my socks off. Virtuosic, unique guitar style coupled with haunting songwriting. My faves:

I Never Said I Love You ~ Deeply sexy beautiful smoky dark early morning unrequited love music.

Yellowcake ~ Have your yellowcake and eat it too…

Gay Sons Of Lesbian Mothers ~ It’s not really as complicated as it sounds.

Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus

This album conjures up black turtlenecks, ber√�ts, triangular cocktails, and reefer madness.

All the Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother ~ I could be 7 different kinds of fungus.

Yo La Tengo ~ I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass

Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind ~ Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhgmlb.

Duruflé: Requiem

I first discovered this piece playing a benefit concert last September with the Pacific Collegium. I can say nothing else about this sublime, underperformed masterpiece for soprano, orchestra, choir, boychoir, and pipe organ, except that you need to go and hear the entire recording.

Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Reiner & Chicago Symphony Orchestra – Brahms: Violin Concerto & Double Concerto

This is my favorite recording of these two Brahms works. Piatigorsky does the masterful cello work on the Double Concerto. This is in my mind the definitive recording of both works, although I’ve had arguments on this subject with others…

One of my biggest pet peeves about iTunes has finally been corrected. The Gapless Playback feature is described thusly:

Live albums, classical works, or any work that sounds best when it���s continuous, now seamlessly transitions from one song to another

I had been importing certain CDs as single files just to get around the gap problem. And downloads from the iTunes music store with segues and track delineations in the middle of works will be heard as they were intended – seamlessly.

My only question is: What took you so long?

Now finally, something to report of deep significance. Huge.

I think I’ve found the first instance of a podcast dedicated exclusively to double bassists: The BassCast, all the way from Tenerife!

I must say, one of the finest podcasts I’ve subscribed to. Well, I only heard the most recent episode, but I’m giving it excellent marks. I hope he can continue this level of quality in the future productions. Love it! So great to listen to double bass content in the podcast format! I look forward to hearing many more episodes…

I stumbled across this when doing a search for symphony orchestra podcasts. Which I might add are suprisingly light. Yakima is doing one. The New York Philharmonic is doing RealAudio broadcasts which is super great and all, but a subscribable podcast that would automatically find it’s way to my iPod would be preferred. That would rock, right? Get live radio-style broadcasts of your favorite orchestra via podcasting. I’m sure it’s time will come. I loved the format of the NY Phil broadcasts – just iPod the bugger please.

But anyway, how cool – we have a bassist podcast!! This kind of thing makes me smile.

I found the iTunes Signature Maker at the blog of Ryan Shaw this evening. Extremely cool little idea to take your iTunes playlist and make a short little audio avitar of your musical tastes. Here is mine.

The creation of the file requires you to trust a Java applet to scan your iTunes collection and make hashes out of some of your favorite music. The applet is signed by Thawte, which checks out, but the usual cautions should still apply here. You can set some parameters such as the number of tracks to pick from and how long each segment should be. Here’s what it came up with for me, which I found particularly interesting:

I like how it finishes with a reference pitch that I use to tune to every time I practice. It makes a nice blend that tapers off into the solo E a nice touch. It was my first run of the applet, but I’m going to go with it.

Recently I had been looking for a recording of the Fantasia for Gutar and Piano by Mario Casteluovo-Tedesco. I was able to find numerous references to the work, but every site I tried listed these CDs as being out of print, or at least out of stock. Not a popular item, I’ll admit. It was not listed on the iTunes Music Store either. But it was listed as available for download at a site that I had never heard before: eClassical.com.

I was impressed. They have an extensive collection of rarities that go far beyond what I’ve been finding at the iTMS. The download came to me as an MP3 compressed at the higher quality 160kbps rate, and I had my two movements of the work downloaded instantly for about a dollar and a half.

The Fantasia is a gorgeous work that seems to be not terribly popular — probably due to the somewhat odd paring of guitar and piano — but it’s one of these gems that shouldn’t be overlooked. Obviously the pianist is going to have to love playing pianissimo; that is the predominant dynamic in the work and definitley anything above a mezzo-forte is going to render the guitarist nothing more than a harmonic suppliment. But for a masterful guitar and piano duo, it has got to be the star chamber work for the very limited repertoire that this combination has available.

The new Google Music Search feature is cool and all, but as of this writing it only turned up four recordings for Ludwig van Beethoven, and Gustav Mahler returned nil. Ditto for San Francisco Symphony.

The direct links to iTMS are cool too, but something seems wrong with my Firefox because those links seem to only launch iTunes from Safari right now.

It’s nice to see the direct link to iTMS though. It’s certainly a result that up until now has been mostly absent from their results, and now if they can figure out how to get the entire iTMS catalog properly indexed and how to cross-reference composer, work, conductor, soloist, and ensemble for classical entries, it will be useful to me.

What I like about iTunes 5:

• Better, larger status display window
• Much faster performance in the UI, especially when browsing the iTunes Music Store.

And bottom line, those are the most important features to me. However…

What I could care less about in iTunes 5:

• “Skip when shuffling” preference. Yawn.

And what sucks:

• “User interface guidelines? What user interface guidelines? We don’t need no stinkin’ guidelines!”
• The iTunes Visualizer is totally busted now. The other visuallizer plugins work just fine, but the Apple one is hosed. Shows an Apple logo and the song title for too long, then fades to black and that’s it. Minimalist for sure.

This came up in an interesting discussion today: What are your top three or four priorities? Everyone had the most interesting responses, and it was really insightful to hear what people had going on in their lives. Such a wide variety of answers, each very dependent on one’s life experiences and current affairs, and sometimes even where someone wanted to go. Here’s mine:

1. Family
2. Music
3. Career
4. Friends

Putting family at the top is a no-brainer for anyone with a wife and kids. Really, they are everything in the world to me. The interesting revelation for me was where I placed the career entry, below music. Ask me the same question a couple of years ago before I got my bass restored and iTunes rekindled my interest in listening, and music would not have even been on the radar. Ask me thirteen years ago, before I met Yingwen, and music would have been the No.1 spot. I think music has drifted back up to it’s proper place now.

Career means a wide topic actually. A major chunk of that is all that I do – web development, computer technology, programming, design, information, etc. Another aspect of it is simply the primal need to provide for item No.1 on my list. But the part I like the most about No.3 is that I absolutely love what I do for my career – I wouldn’t have it any other way.

And lastly, I added friends to the list. I am by some nature a social person, and I value my friendships with other people. They are in many ways like family, but thankfully I don’t have to worry about them every day. A big part of my life is conversation, activities, and sharing with others – the list would feel incomplete without some notion of those people that are outside my immediate family but still are very close to us.

What’s on your list?