Some Musical Inspiration from a Lamentably non-Musical Jalina

It's so strange that all of my songs and photographs can fit inside a slim few inches of metal (there in the middle, in the blue case). I love iPods, MySpace, blogs, Wikipedia, and navigational systems just as much as I love gardening, getting hopelessly and serendipitously lost on road trips, making earth-friendly cleaning products, and reading mythology with my kids. What can I say? I'm a 21st century mama.

Tonight I updated my iPod with lots of great songs: a jazzy old Nina Simone song "Feeling Good," "Dissolved Girl" by Massive Attack, and "To Build a Home" by The Cinematic Orchestra featuring Patrick Watson. I'm so in love with this song:



Also... "Beyond" by Bluba Lu, and "My Moon, My Man" by Feist. Lovely music...

I just checked out Bluba Lu on MySpace, and coincidentally their top friends are Cinematic Orchestra, Portishead, and Brian Eno. I totally love that scene. Here's a great video from Bluba Lu (though I prefer their music with Androniia Popova):



Here's a video of them creating the song "To Love You," featuring Androniia Popova's enchanting vocals. This is one of my favorite songs, right up there with practically every song by Portishead. It's beautiful:

TO LOVE YOU at STUDIO ONE


And of course I also downloaded lots of free Radio Lingua German podcasts. I listen to these on the Autobahn all of the time. Haben Sie ein Doppelzimmer? Kann ich mein Gepack hier lassen bitte? That was this week's lesson about staying in a hotel. I highly recommend these 3-minute "quickie" podcasts. They're easy fare for a drive to the store or 20 minutes on the tread mill, and they offer many different languages. You could learn to ask if you can leave your luggage at a hotel in many different countries. ; )