I came home from Dublin a couple of hours ago, and I’m just chilling out and finding my bearings again. I probably won’t have a chance to write about my trip until the weekend, but in the meantime I wanted to share something I mostly prepared earlier.

Like a lot of people, I’ve grown up watching Madonna; watching her videos and dancing along to her albums. Her Immaculate Collection LP was one of the first albums I ever bought for myself, and I loved to hear the crackle of the vinyl under the needle in the seconds before I played La Isla Bonita and twirled around my bedtime in the imaginary arms of my own Latino lover.

Over the years I’ve admired her inventiveness, not only in her music, but in the multitude of personas that she has created for herself. Twenty years later and I’m still listening to Madonna’s music, which is a feat in itself. She may not be the best singer or dancer that you’ve ever seen, but undoubtedly she is one of the best entertainers of the last twenty years.

So here’s a collection of some of my favourite Madonna songs/videos. Sorry about the large quantity, but I found it really hard to choose!

Playlist

1. Express Yourself
2. Don’t Tell Me (love the bit when she approaches the camera with the muscly cowboys behind her)
3. Human Nature
4. Beautiful Stranger (I sang this for an exam at music college - it was such a fun song)
5. Into The Groove
6. Secret
7. Nothing Really Matters
8. Deeper and Deeper
9. Die Another Day
10. Like A Virgin
11. Get Together
12. Material Girl
13. Sorry
14. La Isla Bonita
15. Hung Up
16. Vogue
17. Like a Prayer
18. Jump
19. Cherish (think I had a brief obsession with this song…)
20. Who’s that Girl?
21. Frozen
22. Love Profusion
23. Hollywood
24. The Power of Goodbye
25. Erotica
26. Crazy for You
27. Open Your Heart
28. Bad Girl
29. Rain
30. True Blue (I remember singing this in the playground at school)
31. Papa Don’t Preach
32. I Want You
33. Live To Tell
34. Take A Bow (I love that she used the same brooding guy as her love interest in these last three videos, which make these songs seem linked into an ongoing love story.)
35. You’ll See
36. One More Chance

I’ve nearly finished a double Mills and Boon book by Penny Jordan which I just started this evening after coming home from the cinema (I saw Wanted). I took a break to clear the junk off my bed and this song popped into my head. When I typed the title into youtube I found a live performance of the song on a moving bus, which is unbelievably cool.

I also love the fact that she’s strumming a tiny spanish/classical guitar, it’s just so perfect.

Vid: I Feel it All by Feist

In his book On Writing, Stephen King talks about finding your ideal reader, your fantasy audience condensed into a single person. This person could be real or imagined, but real is usually preferable.

For my blogging I don’t have a single person in mind when I’m writing, I’m writing to amuse myself and hoping that other people will enjoy reading my thoughts. And judging from the comments I receive, not many people who end up here are much like me, but we’re still having fun together.

However, if I were writing a novel, I’d have to be more focused about my audience. The person who’d walk out of WH Smith with a Silhouette Intrigue probably wouldn’t go for a Martina Cole crime novel, and so on. If I were writing a niche blog I’d also have to think about this issue seriously, but here the rules don’t apply. Welcome to my world.

Ginuwine: Number 1 Fan

Check out the following video, sit through the entire piece of music then tell me how it made you feel. For me it was intense and yet charged with humour. Once the novelty of it fades the experience heightens for everyone involved. I would have loved to have been sitting in the Barbican while this was performed.

4′33″

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. ~ John Cage

Ring Ring Ring by De La Soul

Spiderwebs by No Doubt

Telefunkin’ by N-Tyce

Brass in Pocket by The Pretenders

‘Cause I gonna make you see
There’s nobody else here
No one like me
I’m special so special
I gotta have some of your attention give it to me

This song was playing in my head today, don’t know why.

This song by Roisin Murphy is guaranteed to cheer me up, and this video by a film student is very cute. The choreography reminds me of the Everybody (Backstreet’s Back) video:

Confession time: When this video was released I bought the making of edition so that I could have the full-length version and learn the routine. I was quite a big BSB fan back in the day, I even went to one of their concerts. My favourite one was Howie, who makes a lovely vampire…

Much better than the Teletubbies’ version. This is the best mashup ever.

(via electro^plankton)

I just happened upon a Music Intelligence Quiz via Chris’s blog, and decided to have a crack at it though I’ve never claimed to be a musical genius.

Your final score was 108/180

Birthday Party DJ (73-108 points)
You are a rabid consumer of music. You get a rush every time you hear something new but remain faithful to those artists you love. Your music collection represents who you are and what you care about and your home may even bear the tell-tale signs of your affections – posters, old band t-shirts and the odd music biography. But you aren’t a completist, you know what you like and make sure you have it. Simple as that. To expand your repertoire, perhaps there are some genres that you’d benefit from giving a little more attention to – perhaps now is the time to hear something new or get hold of that missing album from your collection.

And while we’re on the subject of intelligence, I heard about this dating site for intelligent people and had a go at the entry exam. Unfortunately when I saw the format of the exam I knew I wasn’t going to pass. I’m awful at those “complete the pattern” questions with triangles and squares and circles, and being given a minute to solve each one didn’t help. Luckily, there’s more than one kind of intelligence, and more than one way to meet your soulmate.

The other day I came across a post on Liane’s blog about a list of 1001 books which apparently must be read before we all die. I’ve only read 21 of those books so far, and only recognised the other ones which had been made into movies. The shame of it.

Thinking about it though, quite an industry has been created in the world of books and lifestyle television to extoll the importance of reading a certain 1001 books, of visiting 1001 particular places, of viewing 1001 paintings, etc. Obviously it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect someone to watch 1001 movies, but if someone were interested in doing so it would have to become their life’s work. No marriage could survive the pressure of visiting 1001 gardens or 1001 natural wonders; no normal career could accommodate such a task.

So are these books an impossible challenge or a burden? As we age will we look upon that hardback book on our coffee table and like the clich� says, regret all the things that we haven’t done? Will we really care that we haven’t swum with dolphins or read Ulysses?

Maybe I’m thinking too deeply about this issue, perhaps they are simply an easy way to experience those experiences vicariously. Instead of reading 1001 books, we can read or just dip into this single tome and feel more informed and enlightened. Instead of visiting Monét’s garden in Giverny, we can look at a double-paged spread of the Bridge over a Pool of Water Lilies, and express the notion that one day we’ll go there and see it for ourselves. Instead of going to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa, we can admire her from oceans away (though I can confirm that it’s definitely not the same as seeing that little portrait in person).

In addition to what we can do in person, we are able to enjoy a sort of virtual experiencing. We can imagine ourselves in any situation, in any place which has been recorded in ink or online. There may be a time when we may not need to leave our homes to explore the world via virtual reality. Imagine it; I could visit the Grand Canyon, while Becca from Chicago checks out the Tower of London. Sounds cool, but I prefer to give my passport an airing from time to time. Real experience may be limited, but it’s never limiting. It’s the usual message of quality over quantity.

I decided to search the Itunes shop for songs entitled Before you die, and came across the following song by a guy called Mr Moods. I listened to his album and ended up buying the whole thing, it’s a chilled-out mélange of trip-hop and hip-hop.

Mr Moods: Before You Die