There are a few things that I'm really enjoying right now. One of them is the iTunes exclusive, The Arcade Fire & David Bowie - Live At Fashion Rocks EP.

This is the recordings made at the show when David Bowie (right) joined the Arcade Fire (left) for their concert in New York earlier this year (lI posted a link to a video of the performance of "Wake Up" earlier this fall).

Now iTunes has released three of the live tracks in an online EP. The tracks include two Bowie songs, and one Arcade Fire: "Life on Mars?", "Wake Up," and "Five Years." "Life on Mars?" is one of my favourite Bowie songs and the live version with the orchestrations of the Arcade Fire, accompanying Bowie's maturing (a nice way of saying aging) voice makes it unique from other takes on the song. Definitely worth the $2.97 CAN.

Another thing that is keeping me from getting much done on my "50 pages" project is, Turner Classic Movies channel. Some genius had the idea that putting one of the greatest television channel ideas of all time on basic cable, just before exams and papers are due, would be a brilliant idea. It is, but it's also really distracting. Basically, non-stop good movies. No commercials. Yesterday, was a Joan Fontaine festival. They played Hitchcock's Rebecca and Suspicion (which I'd already seen) and Fritz Lang's Beyond A Reasonable Doubt (1956, which I hadn't seen and was actually very entertaining with a neat twist ending). Today it's documentaries on Merican C. Cooper (the creator of King Kong), King Kong (1933, which I also bought today on the brand new Collector's Edition DVD) and some of his other non-Kong films (including the other giant ape film, Mighty Joe Young - the 40s version). It all makes for good background viewing while I make notes on Middle Scots Poetry.