Blast from the past

I have this long history of eagerly awaiting the arrival of the mail. When I was growing up, I actually wrote letters to a lot of people so I had a reason to obsessively check the mailbox during every commercial break of "The Young & The Restless." As an adult, I find myself still kind of excited by mail delivery, even though it's usually just bills and other things I don't particularly give a shit about.

I'm kind of in a "where's the mail, dammit?" mode because I ordered a Sticky & Sweet Tour shirt from the Live Nation store during a one day $9.99 sale. As I said on Facebook, I absolutely won't spend $30-50 on a crappy tour shirt that cost 50 cents to make, but I will spend 10 bucks. (I was looking for a link to it in the store, but it's apparently sold out. This is the one I bought.) Anyway, that didn't arrive today, but this did:

It is nothing less than a Blond Ambition Tour era postcard! I don't know if it's actually from that time period or not, but who cares because I love that photo! It is one of my all time favorite photos of Madonna. As it turns out my friend Matt found it at a record show he went to this weekend and knew that I would love it. And at only a buck, the price was right. I think it's frickin' awesome.

Semi-relatedly, Madonna's new video is available for free on iTunes right now. I think you almost get your money's worth with it at that price. I'm sorry, but if she isn't going to put any effort into making videos any longer, she just needs to STOP DOING THEM. I know that not everything can be a "Vogue" or "Express Yourself", but seriously! When was the last time she had anything approach the greatness of even some of her late 90s videos? This one is even lamer than the "Give It 2 Me" video was! (even though I kind of liked GI2M at first)

And then, to add insult to injury, there is a "deeeeluxe" (Heidi will get the reference) edition of Celebration on iTunes which is the single most horrific example of money grubbing I have witnessed in quite some time. OK, at 30 bucks, it's probably a deal. You get the two disc set, 30 videos and two bonus tracks, one being a remix of "Celebration" and the other a never-before-heard American Life b-side. I will NOT be purchasing it, mostly on principle but also because this is one rare example of me actually wanting the physical CD vs. the digital copy. I simply cannot justify spending the money twice this time around (like I did with Confessions and Hard Candy). Plus, there is a DVD coming out with FORTY SEVEN videos on it + I already own all those videos on the video collections already out. Paying all that extra dough for what boils down to one song? Forget it. The record company is begging for that to be pirated like crazy.

OK, I'm done bitching. For now. I'll be back tomorrow or the next day with a word or two or fifty about a couple of new releases to really be excited about.