World music is my favorite music genre & when I’m working I like to listen to New Sounds at WNYC or Pandora. Back in days of yore, New Sounds was syndicated at a local station, so each evening I would tape the show & listen to it the next day at work, on a Walkman-type cassette player. Now it’s just a matter of going to the website, picking a show from the archives & listening to the streaming audio. However, I probably wouldn’t have known about the show if I hadn’t listened to it on my local radio station.

Anyway Amazon is offering 25 Free World Music samplers, plus a list of 100 Greatest World Music Albums of all time, some familiar, others not so much, but lots to explore there.

Free World Music samplers

100 Greatest World Music albums

Watchmen

Last night I watched Watchmen on DVD, an experience which left me feeling oddly exalted even though the film’s vision is bleak and filled with “cartoon violence.” I think it must have been the Dr Manhattan perspective…

Looking to prolong the experience I checked out Amazon’s Watchmen store & thought the “Complete Motion Comic” sounds interesting, or maybe Watchmen and Philosophy: A Rorschach Test (The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series). to further ponder the issues raised in the movie….

Here’s a quick Season 2 recap:

See also: “Mad Men” at Amazon

From TheFutonCritic.com’s list of premieres in January, I’ve pulled out the ones I’m looking forward to in the coming month. Lots of great shows returning this month and at least one new one.

Wed Jan 7 @ 10 pm FX – Damages

Sun Jan 11 @ 8 pm Fox – 24

Fri Jan 16 @ 10 pm Sci Fi- Battlestar Galactica

Sun Jan 18 @ 9 pm HBO – Big Love; ABC – Desperate Housewives
Sun Jan 18 @ 10 pm HBO – Flight of the Conchords

Wed Jan 21 @ 9 pm Fox – Lie To Me; ABC – Lost

Thurs Jan 22 @ 10 pm USA – Burn Notice

In preparation for the new season of Battlestar Galactica Amazon offers a free “catch-up video” to watch online that covers all the previous episodes in 14 minutes. Also a good refresher even if you’ve seen all the episodes before. The video is also available at SciFi.com but I found it originally at Amazon. New episodes start January 16!

True Blood on HBO

Lately I’ve been watching and reading a lot of vampire-related material, especially True Blood on HBO, which inspired me to read the books the series is based on: The Southern Vampire series by Charlaine Harris. I recently finished the fourth book in the series, Dead to the World , my favorite so far.

Dead Until Dark

Though in movie adaptations the book is usually better than the movie, in this case the TV series seems much richer and deeper than the books. With 12 episodes in the first season that essentially just covered events in the first book, the TV series added some characters and fleshed out the action quite a bit.

Twilight

A few months ago the first two books of the best-selling Twilight Series appeared at a local garage sale, so I ended up reading all four of those books as well. They share certain elements with the Southern Vampire books — vampires, werewolves, and mind-reading— but the mood is completely different. The Twilight books are teen romance with a page-turning thriller element, where the Southern Vampire series books are light, humorous mysteries.

Before True Blood started I’d already had my mind on vampires, making my way through the many Dark Shadows DVDs (available through Netflix).

Dark Shadows

This soap opera from the 1960s is regarded as a cult classic, so thanks to Netflix I can fill in that gap in my pop cultural experience. It’s a very slow moving series, fun in a campy way, that shows how much TV production values have improved overthe last 40 years, also supporting the argument that TV has become more cognitively challenging (see Everything Bad is Good for You).

The Dead Travel Fast

A nonfiction vampire book to check out: The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula.

Last night I watched Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress on Netflix, a movie celebrating reading and the human need for stories.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

A few foreign (mostly French) novels transform the lives of people in a remote area of China during the Cultural Revolution. Two young men sent there for re-education manage to obtain the forbidden literature, which they read to the “Little Chinese Seamstress” (LCS) and retell to the villagers at various points in the film. Although they pride themselves on the way they are educating the LCS, she surprises them by taking the lessons to heart and walking right out of the men’s lives and out of the movie, her ultimate fate left unresolved, though the narrator and his friend both later try to find her. It is as though she wasn’t expected to have any agency of her own and then all of a sudden she does; probably that is how it seems from a male point of view! The narrator even goes back to the village to find her and asks for the “little seamstress” as though expecting to find her still there frozen in time, as she must be in his memory.

Also watched over the past few months: Flickering Lights (Blinkende Lygter), Porco Rosso, When the Last Sword Is Drawn, Chop Shop.

At the Futon Critic – a look at ‘Virtuality’, a sci-fi show being developed for midseason next year on Fox; sounds like it could be good.

July 10 @ 10 pm – Burn Notice (USA)

July 14 @ 10 pm – Saving Grace (TNT)

July 27 @ 10 pm – Mad Men (AMC)

July 29 @ 9 pm – Eureka (Sci Fi)