523 e-mail messages. 45 minutes.

Thank you, David Allen. Thank you, Merlin Mann.

(Last night I reclaimed about 14 square feet of my floor from clutter, discovered I had a desk underneath all my piles of stuff, organized the said stuff in over a dozen different (labeled) folders, filled up two grocery shopping bags worth of papers to be recycled, and one garbage bag full of trash. I couldn’t believe it.)

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Speaking of more great music this year so far: Izzy is currently obsessed with the Nick Jr. TV show The Backyardigans. It’s easy to see why; the show is utterly charming, even for a jaded viewer like me. Five animal friends (a moose, a penguin, a hippo, a kangaroo, and one undefined creature named Uniqua) have adventures in their backyards which morph, Calvin-and-Hobbes-style, into jungles, Egyptian pyramids, medieval castles and so on. The CGI animation is somewhat soulless, but it’s pretty and it works.

The real draw is the music (and the excellent voice acting), which is just superb for a kiddie TV show. They’re incredibly catchy and witty children’s ditties that are the functional equivalent of Broadway showtunes—each song within the show is totally choreographed, with dancing. The songs are thematically coherent for each episode, though they’re not necessarily tailored to the plot; Irish music, for instance, accompanies the Backyardigans on their quest for the perfect cup of tea to Borneo and China (to ask the grumpy emperor for a cup). Across the series, however, the music runs the range from reggae to rockabilly to country to Dixieland to James Brown funk.

Anyhow, I finally got to see the scrolling credits by pausing the DVD (they get reduced to a tiny window when being broadcast), and discovered to my surprise that the list of musicians reads like a Tzadik session roster: Evan Lurie, Doug Weiselman, Greg Cohen, Smokey Hormel, Tony Scherr, Ben Perowsky, Steven Bernstein, Kenny Wollesen… Totally cool. (It’s practically Sex Mob doing the soundtrack!)

Best of all, Izzy gets up out of her chair to dance every time the songs come on! (She already kind of knows the choreography to “Please and Thank You.”)

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It’s only April, and I think I already have one of my favorite albums of the year. Up Dharma Down‘s Fragmented is an urban soul chronicle from the streets of Manila, both tense and laid back, full of nervous energy one moment and suffused with post-club comedown the next.

I still remember the first time I saw the video for the fantastic first single, “Maybe.” I was idly flipping channels one December night in Los Banos last year when the video came on, and I was transfixed by its evocation of claustrophobia, as the camera followed a near-hysterical woman pacing inside a hotel room, then down a narrow stairwell, tear-smeared mascara on her face.

But it was, of course, the music which kept me glued to the TV: an insistent, propulsive reverbed guitar riff; a skittering, distorted “Amen” break; a bass line turned up way high in the mix; and that voice which stretched “Maybe” into 27 different syllables. (I had to grab paper and pen to scribble down the name of the band; alas, their album wasn’t coming out until a few months later, as the kind women at Odyssey and Tower Records had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.)

The rest of the album doesn’t quite approach the succinct drama of “Maybe,” but it’s quite strong nevertheless, and I suspect more songs will float their way to the top as the year proceeds… I can’t wait to see them live.

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Purchased at the Russian-owned convenience store next to my place in San Francisco:

Discuss.

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I figure this is just about the earliest reference I could possibly find, way earlier than either Marlon Brando or Steve Martin — here’s William Stewart, a Republican Senator from Nevada, in a speech in June 1900 attacking the anti-imperialists as the Filipino American War raged on (quoted in Kristin Hoganson’s Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars):

We would suggest to the enthusiastic objectors who compare the guerrilla warrior of Luzon to the immortal Washington, that their language would be more accurate if they would compare [General Emilio] Aguinaldo to Tecumseh, Sitting Bull, Old Cochise, or some other celebrated Indian warrior whose exploits in the recent past surpass in gallantry the wily little Filipino.

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