I have always had an obsessive compulsive streak (leading directly to my work on Monk and House, M.D., of course). As a child, my mother would ask me to organize things because it gave me so much enjoyment, and I would happily sort her jewelry, cleaning products under the bathroom sink, whatever. For those of you who remember our kitchen adventures this summer, you may recall that my inability to go slowly or stop when something isn’t completely finished led to a broken car windshield and two of my toes that were equally broken. For me, the urge to categorize and organize, to place everything in its proper place is directly related to a similar urge to finish, to get it all done. It’s a psychic itch, and its latest manifestation has been my obsessive drive to correctly categorize my iTunes music library, with at least minimally correct information for each track (correct title, artist and album) and the largest, highest quality cover art I can find. Along the way I’ve learned that the Replacements’ song “Dope Smokin’ Moron” is not in fact, as I had always believed, from the album Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash, but instead from the Stink EP. I will sleep easier at night now.

I’m not quite as bad with learning music as I am with categorizing it, but I don’t like learning just one movement of a piece. Sometimes I have to since the other movements may be simply too difficult (and often too fast), but I was happy to discover the second movement of the “Suite castellana” by Torroba was quite playable and has in fact become one of my favorite pieces to play. I had already recorded the first movement of the suite, “Fandanguillo,” on Fermata. Well, if you learn the first and second movements of a three-movement suite, shouldn’t you really learn the last one, too? And by that, I mean: aren’t you compelled to do so? Well, I was, so I’ve added the two new movements to the Fermata web site. You can download the two new “bonus” tracks as a zip file at the welcome page, like this:

Or you can go to the Suite castellana page and click on the new tracks to listen. By the way, someone didn’t know how to download an .mp3 file from the QuickTime controller bar. When you click on a track, you’ll see the controller on a black page, which looks like this:

Once the piece has entirely loaded, you click on that downward pointing arrow at the right end of the controller, and select “Save As Source….” Like this:

Huh?! As the kids say on the internet, WTF? OMGWTFLOLBBQ?! When did Apple upgrade the ability to save completely free and public, non-DRM-protected files exclusively to users of QuickTime Pro? Seriously, that’s pretty… well, I guess “assholish” would be the word. The ethically proper response, of course, is to upgrade your QuickTime to QuickTime Pro using a pirated serial number taken from the web. I’m not advising you to do that, of course, or saying that I have done anything similar in the past—I’m just reminding you of what Nietzsche says about the origin of morality. All “morality” is actually just what the person advocating the morality finds personally advantageous. You will draw your own conclusions.

Anyway, new music!