Lucky Strike I idly entered some online competiti…
Lucky Strike
I idly entered some online competitions a couple of weeks ago through Loquax, an excellent competition portal that gives details of all the competitions being offered by UK websites. Having worked on commercial websites myself for the last few years, I know that the odds of winning in online competitions tends to be a lot better because not as many people enter as they do for offline competitions. It’s ridiculously easy to enter most of the compos too, especially if you use something like Gator which stores all your address details so you can fill in web forms with a single mouseclick.
Anyway, when I got back from Dublin, I discovered I’d won a copy of the new Leonard Cohen live CD, Field Commander Cohen, and a copy of the Harry Rasky tour memoir, The Song Of Leonard Cohen, courtesy of Audiostreet. Deeply gratifying, seeing as I was going to buy the CD anyway. I shall now enter hundreds more competitions and probably never win anything again ever, but still, a pleasant surprise.
And a useful one too, as the Cohen album isn’t as good as I expected, despite the favourable reviews. It’s probably because I prefer the later Len, whose voice has been marinated in cigarettes and whiskey long enough to give him that Barry White meets Tom Waits baritone croon. Field Commander Cohen features Len’s voice in its higher-pitched, more plantive sounding phase, and there’s a quite a few of his more obscure tracks on there which haven’t immediately grabbed me. I’d say Live Cohen from the ‘92 The Future tour is still the definitive live album, not least because the version of Dance Me To The End Of Love is one of the most beautiful songs ever recorded.
Rasky’s tour memoir looks fun - the sort of thing you can read in afternoon. I’m a sucker for pop trash biography anyway, so I’m look forward to finding some candid anecdotes about the Lenster in this book.
Meanwhile, I went on a bit of a CD splurge this afternoon after discovering some ridiculously low-priced gems. While I’m a big fan of Amazon, they certainly aren’t the cheapest a lot of the time, although they do have the best ordering and delivery system. At CD Wow I found Nick Cave’s new opus And No More Shall We Part for �8.99 including postage - and at 101cd.com I picked up Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and Talking Book, Mile Davis’ On The Corner and Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret for a mere �5.99 each. The 101cd site is a horrible looking mess, but they can be forgiven for prices like that. I still find Amazon really useful though for its reviews (both inhouse and from readers) - most other sites lack that sort of essential editorial, and it helps me make up my mind whether I want to buy something or not. From somewhere else that’s cheaper.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Leonard Cohen Live At Last
- Birds On The Wire I’ve just discovered two inte…
- Hallelujah Terrific news - Leonard Cohen is goi…
- Add this to the list
- Gateways to Hell
