Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

I’d almost fin­ished writ­ing this post when the bloody spell-checker plu­gin ate it all.

I’m feel­ing a bit bet­ter now, although I still have an irrit­able chest cold and a gen­eral feel­ing of uggh that I just can’t seem to shake, which has been reflec­ted in the state of my hair. I’ve been har­vest­ing a mat­ted Sparrow’s nest now for almost a fort­night and no mat­ter how much I attack it, armed with brush and spray-in de-tangler, my hair still resembles that which belonged to Alison Moyet, circa 1984–87.

In other news, the count-down to Christ­mas has offi­cially begun in our house, with us all squab­bling over the sol­it­ary tape dis­penser. Admit­tedly, K began her “Christ­mas Shop­ping” in about August (no, I’m not exag­ger­at­ing) and is still going strong, with par­cels arriv­ing via Ran­dom Mail even yes­ter­day. By my cal­cu­la­tions, if I begin unwrap­ping my gifts on Christ­mas morn­ing, I should be just about free enough to post the res­ults here, come New Year.

I’ve been nag­ging at K for weeks for a list of what she’d like (she keeps banging on about PSP games, but I can’t seem to keep those titles in my head). She took so long in pro­du­cing the list that for a time, I was con­vinced I’d have to give her coal for Christmas.

I was given the list last night (writ­ten lov­ingly by hand on ador­able Dear Santa… sta­tion­ery), which details hours upon hours of hor­rendous Amer­ican comedy-sitcom box-sets. I begrudge buy­ing them, purely and simply because I know I’ll have to endure each and every one in chro­no­lo­gical order on a nightly basis, des­pite the fact that they’re all repeated to nigh-on insan­ity by the likes of Chan­nel 4, so she’s seen them all count­less times anyway.

When it comes to Sluts and the City, I’d rather fold my ears over on them­selves and staple the car­til­age to the lobes with a pneu­matic nail gun than be sub­jec­ted to that inane, plinky-plonky, hotel foyer intro and that bloody Parker women, with her bas­tard, asin­ine, nasal com­ment­ary that afflicts the begin­ning, middle and end of Every. Poxy. Scene. It’s like herpes: uncom­fort­able for every­one involved; just when you think you’re shot of it, it returns worse than before and to say its sur­plus to require­ments is an under­state­ment of the grossest kind.

Still, they’re her presents, not mine, so we’ll just have to see what Sant-ee brings…

Talk­ing of presents, I’ve been treat­ing myself recently, by act­ively attempt­ing my goal of own­ing Prince’s entire back-catalogue. I cur­rently own 24 of the 41(-ish) albums released to date, two of which arrived this week:

1996’s “Chaos and Dis­order” was ‘s final album with his record com­pany of the time (as per his con­trac­tual oblig­a­tion) and is still pretty read­ily avail­able, whilst 2000’s “Rave In2 The Joy Fant­astic” (not to be con­fused with the sim­il­arly titled 1999 album “Rave Un2 The Joy Fant­astic”) is like gold-dust.

“Rave In2 The Joy Fant­astic” is a remixed/re-released ver­sion of “Rave Un2 The Joy Fant­astic” (hence the close titles) that was ori­gin­ally released for pur­chase solely through the NPGMC.

The NPGMC was ‘s offi­cial online offer­ing of the time, where fans would have to pay (what I con­sider to be) fairly large sums in order to be a mem­ber and then pay addi­tional sums for exclus­ive mer­chand­ise and music, such as “Rave In2…”. After a time, it then became avail­able via an online offi­cial mer­chand­ise vendor, closely affil­i­ated with the NPGMC (but you no longer had to be a mem­ber to buy the CD).

Although, I con­sider myself almost a life-long fan of Prince, I was very late on dis­cov­er­ing and join­ing com­munit­ies online and as such, “Rave In2…” fell under my radar for a sev­eral years. I knew it exis­ted, but I still assumed that I’d have to pay upwards of 100 USD, before I’d even be allowed the choice of buy­ing it.

When the now defunct NPGMC went to it’s online grave earlier this year, there was an air of mad panic for mer­chand­ise in case the mer­chand­ise got pulled (in accord­ance with all other offi­cial Prince online resources).

I had insuf­fi­cient funds at the time (July 2006), but book­marked the vendor’s link for future ref­er­ence. I expec­ted the link to die within a week, but it didn’t. After a month or two, I still had reser­va­tions about order­ing, what if it was still live by mis­take? What if I sub­mit my order/card details and they were no longer trading/service was poor due to the NPGMC saga?

A fort­night ago, after fail­ing to nab a copy of “Rave In2…” on EBay for the ump­teenth time and see­ing the CD go for any­where between £40–90, I thought “Sod it!” and ordered my copy for about 15 USD from the offi­cial store (along with a lim­ited edi­tion single release of Days of Wild Live). It arrived monday (4 weeks ahead of sched­ule), I was so impressed that I thought I’d treat myself to more bits and bobs and attemp­ted to visit the store yes­ter­day. As expec­ted, it’s gone. Totally sunk without a trace, all links simply redir­ect to the dead NPGMC site. I’m gut­ted and smug all at once.

On one hand, I can no longer buy any­thing else that I saw on that store 2 weeks ago, on the other hand, I was lucky enough to be just in time!

As a side-note, although those Wikipedia-related album links bang on about both Rave albums being poorly received/weak etc, IMHO, the Rave–era rocked (and not just because of the Pretty­man’s fab­ulous and floofy hair). Rave In2…‘s track Beau­ti­ful Strange and Rave Un2…‘s ver­sion of the song Man O’ War, not to men­tion, the pair’s shared tracks (although dif­fer­ing ver­sions) The Greatest Romance Ever Sold and Pretty­man make up ten-fold for the dodgy “skip­pers” such as The Sun, the Moon and Stars.

And of course there’s the small mat­ter of the utterly lick­able DVD…