I have always suspected that for some star-making roles, the magic is all in the part itself and any competent actor lucky enough to land the role could ride it to acclaim. But if that’s true in some cases, it absolutely isn’t true of Venus in Fur. Nina Arianda is unforgettable as Vanda, the dominant presence in the play (in every sense), but that’s in large part because it’s such a high-wire role. It’s all too easy to imagine how unconvincing the character could be in other hands. Capturing Vanda’s subtle wit and quicksilver tonal shifts cannot possibly be easy, and few actresses have the burning charisma and imposing physicality required to convey the woman’s utter mastery of the action on stage. Playwright David Ives needed nothing short of a goddess to make Venus in Fur work; it is to everyone’s good fortune that the play’s producers landed upon Arianda.

Arianda plays Vanda, a seemingly dizzy, unprepared actress who blows in late to an audition. Thomas (Hugh Dancy), the playwright and director, is in a foul mood—we’ve just heard him spouting venomous scorn for the actresses he’s already seen—but Vanda is relentless, and Thomas finally agrees to let her try out and, since everyone else has already gone home for the day, to read opposite her.

His play is an adaptation of Venus in Furs, the novella by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch—from whose name, Thomas condescendingly explains to the actress, the word masochism is derived. Our Vanda is auditioning to play the role of Sacher-Masoch’s Vanda (what a coincidence!), a forthright young woman whom the protagonist, Severin, convinces to embody his sexual fantasies by abusing and humiliating him over a period of months.

The actress Vanda proves remarkably adept at portraying the character Vanda, stepping into and out of the role with unnerving abruptness. She also flatters Thomas, praising his portrayal of Severin and pausing frequently to ask him to explain his dramatic choices and the characters’ motivation—first with girlish guilelessness but, increasingly, with teasing pointedness. Gradually the playwright realizes that this Vanda knows the material far better than she first led him to believe.

Ives’s play is styled as something of a cat-and-mouse act between Vanda and Thomas, with first one and then the other holding the power during her extended audition, but it doesn’t quite work that way. Vanda is clearly toying with Thomas, seeing him far more clearly than he sees her, so even when Thomas believes he has put Vanda in her place (as he imagines it), she’s obviously biding her time before she lures him into another shameful admission.

If Ives wanted his characters evenly matched, he failed in that, but I don’t think keeping the pair in the same weight class is a dramatic requirement. Vanda’s truly impressive dominatrix boots notwithstanding, Venus in Fur is as much about Severin/Thomas’s genteel misogyny as his masochism, and that misogyny is what makes him underestimate Vanda, her intellect and insights, and her own desires. Dancy plays that self-deceptive arrogance well, and even if Thomas is utterly outmatched, he doesn’t go down without a fight.

Yet even with only two actors onstage, Dancy is always in a supporting role; Arianda is the incontrovertible lead. Tall and long-legged, with a broad smile and cascades of blond curls, she can flip from ditzy to Amazonian without blinking, but as the play goes on—and Vanda starts teasing Thomas as to who, exactly, she is—she begins blurring the distinction between personas, constantly catching Thomas off balance. It’s a breathtakingly complex role, and Arianda handles every nuance flawlessly. Her performance is enthralling.

Moreover, it’s hilarious. Arianda’s shrewd comic timing keeps the play from bogging down in all its meta melodrama. Her Vanda is unspeakably funny, equally deft with velvety quips and whip-like gibes, and the switches between personas are timed as much for comedic effect as dramatic impact. I had my doubts about whether a morose proto-masochist romantic novella was really sex comedy material, but somehow Ives accomplishes that alchemy, and with Arianda in his corner, the play works even better than it should.

Ives muddies the thematic waters toward the end of the play, sacrificing some coherence for a flashy climax, but given the subject matter, it’s hard to begrudge him that—especially when he’s so playful with regard to Vanda’s true identity. And with the majestic Arianda in the role, you can easily imagine that Vanda truly is a sensuously vindictive Aphrodite, descending from Olympus to lacerate any man so bold as to tarnish a perfectly succulent kink with contempt. Realistic? Maybe not, but it makes for a perversely fun night at the theater.

The best thing about science fiction (or any fantastic genre) is how escaping the confines of a strictly realistic setting allows the storyteller to address real issues from a fresh angle. Aliens, for example, aren’t necessarily all that compelling in and of themselves (I faithfully watched seven years of The X-Files, where the little green men or gray men or black oil slicks or whatever were nearly always the least interesting things on screen, so I know this for a fact), but aliens as a vehicle for addressing how people deal with the unknown, or how majority groups deal with minorities, or how we conceptualize humanity—that’s compelling. Idle fancies can be fun, but the best speculative fiction ultimately returns to earth.

Initially, Fringe was a textbook example of idle, empty science fiction: a facile yet muddled X-Files rip-off in which a top-secret division of the FBI investigates strange paranormal events while powerful shadowy figures manipulate them and their results—diverting enough but hardly promising and extremely derivative. But then, improbably, the writers settled on a brilliant explanation for the paranormal “fringe events”: the slow collision of two parallel worlds. With that essential conflict at its core, Fringe has developed a gorgeously baroque mythology and, even better, used it as the foundation for thoughtful, poignant explorations of identity and personal history and guilt and love. In short, when it was just about creepy things going bump in the night, Fringe was dull; now that it’s given those sci-fi elements real resonance, it’s perhaps the most underrated drama on TV.

The storytelling has become so elaborate and novelistic that the premise feels miles away from the most recent episodes, but nonetheless here it is: FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) is assigned to investigate unexplained phenomena with the assistance of a mentally unbalanced scientist, Walter Bishop (John Noble), and his estranged son, Peter (Joshua Jackson), who acts as a sort of sane-to-crazy translator. Over the course of their work, the three of them discover that they have more in common than they knew, and that their dark personal histories tie them to the paranormalities they’re investigating in ways that are only gradually revealed.

That really doesn’t begin to cover it, though—especially now that the show routinely visits Earth-2, the parallel Earth, where “Faulivia” and “Walternate” (punny nicknames that never cease to amuse me) are playing similar roles yet Peter, strangely, does not have a double. The separate universes have demanded increasingly nuanced performances from the actors, who have risen to the challenge beautifully. Torv, for example, plays our original Olivia, the Olivia from Earth-2, and a second version of the original Olivia after her universe has been slightly but significantly altered. (Plus, in a couple of episodes, the original Olivia is possessed by Leonard Nimoy’s recurring character. I don’t want to get into why, so suffice it to say that Torv’s Nimoy impression is downright uncanny.) Each Olivia is recognizably Olivia—you can see qualities intrinsic to the character—yet the three women are fundamentally different, not remotely interchangeable.

And that, it turns out, is one of the central ideas of Fringe: identity is grounded in a person’s life experiences, not merely her genetic code. Meetings between doppelgängers prompt them reconsider their own choices, and relationships cannot be easily re-created simply because one character was close with another’s doppelgänger. The show has gotten tremendous mileage out of throwing a character from one universe into another—sometimes covertly, sometimes openly, sometimes against that character’s will—and observing how the outsider interacts with familiar strangers, so to speak. On a few occasions, Earth-2 characters have impersonated Earth-1 characters (and vice versa)—sometimes quite successfully—but the inevitable disconnects, the ways in which the impostors fall short of clean duplication, have yielded surprisingly poignant plot arcs.

Of course those plot arcs are mind-bendingly complex, too—packed with conspiracies and forking timelines and barely skirted paradoxes. As if to help out, in a cute touch, the opening title sequence is color-coded by episode to indicate which universe it’s set in: blue for Earth-1, red for Earth-2, amber for alternate universe. That’s not really necessary—the setting is quickly made obvious by any number of context clues—but it reflects the great attention to detail that show runner Jeff Pinkner and his team bring to Fringe. (J. J. Abrams and his Star Trek screenwriters created the show, but as it only got really good when it drifted afield from its more generic initial premise, I’m hesitant to give them too much credit.) Visits to Earth-2, for example, are always trippy fun, packed with counterfactual historical flourishes and startling differences in style and technology.

For Fringe really is fun, immersive and imaginative, with finely drawn characters and an impressively wide range of tone. Skin-crawlingly ooky, delectably sad, agonizingly suspenseful, deeply unsettling, deliciously uncanny, quirkily funny, grandly romantic, poetically provocative—it can hit every one of those notes, not all at once (and some more than others) but with enough finesse and variety that settling into watching an episode always feels a bit like an adventure because you never really know where it’s going to take you. And it’s to Fringe‘s credit that it’s now that—not the FBI-investigating-the-paranormal premise—that feels most reminiscent of The X-Files. At its height, X-Files could be a masterful thriller, comedy, romance, or gross-out horror flick, yet always remain true to itself, true to its distinct worldview and its beloved protagonists. Fringe achieves that same delicate balance of versatility and constancy, with its own idiosyncratic air and winning characters. It might not get the greatest ratings—and the dense, trippingly complex back story makes it unlikely to attract a larger audience now—but it’s managed to stick around long enough to find its own voice and demonstrate once again just how powerful science fiction can be.

• At the AV Club, Genevieve Koski ponders why only covers and novelty musical acts (as opposed to musicians writing their own material) receive widespread attention on YouTube. I think there’s a clear answer to that (which she gets to eventually), but she does a great job of analyzing the issue with lots of fun examples.
• Pushing back against recent Luddite remarks from author Jonathan Franzen (of course), among others, Tim Parks makes a beautiful argument in favor of ebooks at The New York Review of Books. I’m not sure I agree with every point, but it’s given me a lot to think about.
• One of the geekier blogs I follow is Law and the Multiverse, written by two lawyers who analyze (in incredible, deadpan detail) the legal ramifications of various story lines in comic books and other genre fiction. It’s kind of hilarious. Usually I’m not familiar with the stories in question, but Buffy I know, so their take on the potential criminal liability of the vampires on Buffy and Angel delighted me. (Bottom line: Angel is so screwed.)
• Amy Poehler and Will Arnett are awesomely hilarious both separately and together, which is itself awesome, as L. V. Anderson shows at Slate. (Never break up, Will and Amy!)
• Westminster Dog Show slideshow! Yay!

• To this day, I can’t think about the children’s photo book Koko’s Kitten without tearing up (rest in peace, All Ball), so news of Koko the gorilla always delights me. Anyway, scientists have been giving Koko wind instruments (recorders, harmonicas, whistles, and the like) and are surprised that she’s learned to produce sounds with them—the kind of controlled breathing they had assumed was linked to speech capabilities. That’s all well and good, but the lack of posted video or audio clips is a travesty.
• Victoria Johnson’s survey of maps in classic children’s books at The Awl is nostalgia at its best. (Plus, the map she links to—two fans’ extrapolated map of Panem from the Hunger Games series—is absolutely incredible, particularly in the explanations. Wow.)
• Justin Davidson’s even-handed assessment of Peter Gelb’s uneven reign at the Met meshes well with my own experience. (For example, I adored Anthony Minghella’s beautiful, beautiful Butterfly but found the new Tosca production ridiculous.) The new Ring Cycle looks interesting—but probably not interesting enough for me to spend twenty hours with it.
• Jessica Walter plays hilariously dreadful, profane mothers so well (in Arrested Development and Archer—two of my favorite shows) that it’s almost startling to be reminded that she is, of course, an actor. Her sweet-old-lady interview in The AV Club—in which she demonstrates utter naïveté about the Internet and admits that some of the salacious jokes she delivers initially go over her head—makes me love her all the more.

Emily Dickinson described books in general as frigates, “to take us Lands away,” but in my experience, only the special ones actually accomplish that. Those are my favorites, transporting you to another place, sometimes foreign or alien or fantastic, sometimes a near mirror of home, but definitely elsewhere. The details conjure smells and sights and sounds with enough resonance to give your imagination material to fill in the rest, and the characters seem to continue living outside the pages. The depth and breadth of the setting invites you to linger longer than the plot does, and past and future extend beyond the story’s boundaries.

The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern’s debut novel, is one of those rare frigates, so immersive that reading it is like jumping into a cool, clear pond and discovering you can breathe underwater. An elegant grown-up fairy tale, suffused with magical and ahistorical period color, it spins its love story with delicacy and ever-increasing warmth, but the real accomplishment is the setting, the circus for which the novel is named. So evocative, so beautifully and ardently rendered, the spellbinding circus is a wonder to visit.

The traveling circus, Les Cirque des Rêves, is the stage for a mysterious, years-long competition of sorts between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who were bound to the duel as children. Celia’s father, a brash stage magician called Prospero, and Marco’s guardian, the shadowy Mr. A. H—, have feuded for decades, centuries, perhaps longer, but Celia and Marco do not share their enmity or their combative nature. To their guardians’ mutual frustration, the circus becomes not a gladiatorial arena but an exhibition of ingenious enchantments. But as it grows more elaborate, drawing an ever larger and more passionate audience, the circus also becomes more unwieldy and fragile, and Celia and Marco must uncover the destiny laid out for them so they can try to escape it.

That summary of the premise makes the novel sound more plot-driven than it actually is. The Night Circus is much more interested in setting a mood and creating a world than in hammering out some kind of fantasy-thriller. For starters, though magic is ever-present, it’s not showy, abracadabra, wand-wielding flash. Morgenstern takes an enigmatic approach, often describing effects rather than causes, implying rather than spelling out. Magic is mysterious, even to those who control it, and in one of the book’s most beautiful touches, it becomes a medium of art.

That’s what makes the magic-infused circus so lovely: it’s a collaborative work of art created by Celia and Marco and a host of other players, some of whom know something of the venue’s true nature but most of whom don’t. Rather than provide one big descriptive dump of the place, Morgenstern continually provides new little details about the place—the confections served, the costumes of the living statues, the bottled stories tucked away in a corner. It’s a tremendously rewarding approach, both reinforcing the idea that Le Cirque des Rêves always has more to discover, more to explore, and constantly adding greater scope and richer color to the vision in the reader’s head.

Sliding back and forth in time, making particularly good use of foreshadowing, The Night Circus generates suspense by toying with the idea of destiny. Destiny is, of course, a fairy tale mainstay, but although Morgenstern draws on myth (particularly the tale of Merlin), she doesn’t retell it indiscriminately. In this way, The Night Circus is both old-fashioned and contemporary in its sensibility. Celia and Marco make a beguilingly affecting pair of star-crossed lovers, struggling to move the stars, and several of the other characters make the most of their turns in the episodic novel’s spotlight.

But more than any of the characters, more than the meticulously crafted story, I loved the setting—that beautiful, starlit circus with its black-and-white tents and enchanted clockwork and gracefully dazzling performers. Slipping into that world invariably filled me with keenly mixed emotions: happy delight in being there and childlike sadness in knowing that it wasn’t real.

I learned after the fact that New York City Ballet’s all-Wheeldon program was a special honor for the relatively young choreographer, something usually done only with the works of George Balanchine or Jerome Robbins, but when I bought my ticket, it never occurred to me that the programming was anything out of the ordinary. Wheeldon’s work has been a constant in City Ballet repertory for the half a dozen (!) years I’ve been attending, and I’m sure I’ve seen more of his pieces than Robbins’s.

The program this weekend demonstrated why that’s the case, why the company created the role of resident choreographer for Wheeldon in 2001 and why it continues to champion his work even after his departure in 2008. Even in his weaker pieces, Wheeldon’s aesthetic fits New York City Ballet. Often playful but always elegant, acutely conscious of music, making gorgeous use of the corps, his work truly does feel descended from (though not derivative of) Balanchine’s. He can justify a full program easily.

“Les Carillons,” a premiere set to music by Bizet, opened the program, but it was probably the most traditional and least interesting work. (It didn’t help that Bizet’s suite opens and closes with an arrangement of “March of the Kings,” which I found incredibly distracting as that carol has always been a terrible earworm for me.) Still, it was jaunty and fun, with several flirty pas de deux (some light, some rather dark in a fittingly Carmen sort of way) and a rousing, energetic ensemble number at the end.

I preferred “DGV: Danse à Grande Vitesse” (created for the Royal Ballet several years ago), a kinetic, pulsing work that clearly drew inspiration from the music’s inspiration: a high-speed train line. Composer Michael Nyman’s minimalist swellings and recedings lend themselves well to the motion of the dancers, and Wheeldon made conspicuous use of foreground and background, always driving forward, pushing entrances, adding intricate detail work in the corps.

My favorite work, though, was “Polyphonia,” set to a series of piano pieces by Györgi Ligeti. It reminded me a bit of the black-and-white Balanchine ballets I’ve grown to love, with a similarly stark aesthetic and a quiet genius for bringing forth the lines and touchstones in music that might not be immediately accessible. (I don’t mean that as criticism. For the record, I think Ligeti’s piano music is beautiful, but its romanticism is fraught with angles and dissonances that can sometimes seem forbidding.) Several of the episodes within the ballet use dramatic lighting to striking effect. In the first, for example, the ensemble almost seems to be dancing with the enormous overlapping shadows behind them, as though Wheeldon had choreographed not for eight but for sixteen.

And then “Polyphonia” pares down to just two dancers, Wendy Whelan and Jared Angle, in an achingly slow, smooth pas de deux, curling and unfolding with perfect control—the kind of thing that puts Whelan’s alien grace on stunning display. (She originated the role when it premiered in 2001.) Intellectually I know it must take incredible strength to move so deliberately and sinuously through the positions Wheeldon created for her, but Whelan wields her body with such cool control, without the slightest bobble or jerk, that she looks inhuman in the very best sense. Everyone always makes a big deal about how Whelan is the last City Ballet dancer personally selected by Balanchine (though she was too young to ever work with him), so it’s lovely how well Wheeldon—perhaps not Balanchine’s direct heir, but certainly a choreographer who has become tightly linked to his company—choreographs so well for her. One can imagine that Wheeldon sees in Whelan the same austere, sinewy beauty and strength that Balanchine must have seen because he sets that beauty so exquisitely well. That alone makes an all-Wheeldon program cause for celebration.

• I want to link to Jeremy Denk’s article about recording Charles Ives’s “Concord” Sonata—a fascinating exploration of a truly original American composer, a remarkable piano work, and the trials of the recording process—but The New Yorker placed the thing behind its pay wall, so I’m settling for the magazine’s audio interview with Denk, which is also interesting, especially since it includes musical clips.
• The weekly lists at The AV Club are always fun, and this week’s is particularly great, with the various writers each offering up a bit of stand-up comedy that strikes them as particularly profound or insightful.
• A more frivolous—but fun!—list can be found at The Awl, where people confess the movies they can’t help stopping to watch whenever they turn up on TV. The funny thing is that the movies aren’t necessarily good, by anyone’s estimation, which is my experience, too. I’m unable to resist The Devil’s Advocate (so insanely over-the-top!) or the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice (so hilariously un-Austen!), and I don’t actually have much respect for either of them.
• Anna and Elena Balbusso’s illustrations for a new Folio Society edition of Margaret Atwood’s modern classic The Handmaid’s Tale are a perfect blend of beautiful and unsettling.
• The band OK Go made its name with dazzlingly creative, buzzy music videos, so it’s sweet that the guys have now made one for Sesame Street, teaching kids about primary and secondary colors with all their usual charm.

No one slums with so much style as director Steven Soderbergh. The Ocean’s movies, for example, are far more aesthetically polished than any star-studded trifle really needs to be, but that, of course, is part of what makes them so charming. In fact, I secretly prefer frivolous Soderbergh to serious Soderbergh. His sleek manner can come across as cold when he’s dealing with some substance, but it’s just cool everywhere else.

Haywire, his latest, isn’t comedic like Ocean’s or sexy like Out of Sight (my personal favorite)—and it’s not on their level—but it’s fun all the same and just as impeccably put together as the man’s films always are. Plus, the conceit is great: Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs set out to make a vehicle for mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano by catering to her strengths (looking tough, kicking the snot out of people) and underplaying her weaknesses (emoting, delivering extensive dialogue, maybe acting in general). Transcendent it’s not, but as tight, hard-boiled B-movies go, it’s terrific.

Carano plays Mallory Kane, a former marine turned private black ops agent. Betrayed during a mission—by her colleagues? her boss?—she has to extricate herself from one dangerous predicament after another, find out who’s responsible for the treachery, and, of course, seek her revenge.

That’s it. After all, it’s just an excuse for expertly rendered fight scenes and an old-fashioned, strong-and-silent-type hero, and Carano is well suited for the endeavor. Dobbs wisely gives her a taciturn, no-nonsense character, emotions tightly in check, and she effectively embodies that with flat delivery and a stony gaze. And, of course, she knows her way around Mallory’s potent use of her body as a weapon. In a funny way, Haywire is like an old Fred Astaire movie, with fight scenes instead of dance numbers. It would have been criminal to obscure Astaire’s grace with choppy cuts or close-ups, and Soderbergh clearly has a similar philosophy when it comes to Carano’s own physical prowess. Haywire shows every movement, even cutting all music and extraneous noise from the soundtrack in those key scenes, the better to highlight its star’s greatest strength.

The whole movie is like that: taut and trim, with Soderbergh’s trademark slippery timeline and a typically deep cast: here including Ewan McGregor as Mallory’s craven boss, Channing Tatum as her none-too-bright colleague, Bill Paxton as her devoted father, Michael Douglas as a cunning government bureaucrat, Antonio Banderas as a shady contact, and—best of all—Michael Fassbender as a British agent with the skills to match Mallory. To some extent, the experienced actors help Carano sketch her character. Paxton fills in a close father-daughter relationship, grounded in deep mutual respect, and subtly suggests that while Mr. Kane doesn’t worry overmuch about his girl’s survival skills, her mental health and happiness may be of some concern. McGregor delivers a hilariously weaselly performance, making Mallory look all the more like a straight shooter by contrast. And Fassbender—well, he shows us not to underestimate Mallory, no matter what she might look like in a slinky black dress and heels.

The best sequence comes about a third of the way through the movie—a premature climax, all things considered—but even after that memorable brawl, Soderbergh keeps the energy up, staging a desperate foot pursuit, an off-kilter car chase, and a creepy calling-from-inside-the-house scenario with perfectly modulated tension. If he weren’t so busy being a serious, acclaimed director who’s always threatening to retire, Soderbergh would have a real future in this kind of pulp.

• I’m really looking forward to seeing Ralph Fiennes’s new film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. I can’t imagine that the play will be as brilliant as T.S. Eliot claimed, but Slate‘s article on his assessment of it and Hamlet is fascinating.
• The Public Theater just announced that they’re doing Sondheim’s Into the Woods this summer! I’m so excited. My brother’s going to come visit, and we’re going to camp out in Central Park before dawn to get tickets, and then I’m going to sing “I Know Things Now” and “A Very Nice Prince” and “Moments in the Woods” and “Last Midnight” for weeks! I can’t wait! Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point!
• Star Wars Uncut, a full-length re-creation of the movie assembled from hundreds of amateur filmmakers’ fifteen-second contributions, is wildly inventive and endearing—and surprisingly timely, as Matt Zoller Seitz explains, using the project as a way to examine the problems with current copyright law.
• A few studies and plenty of anecdotal data suggest that animal shelters can improve the likelihood that a dog or cat will be adopted by posting a flattering photo of it rather than a dim, depressing snapshot, so some professional photographers have begun volunteering their services. I’ve seen a few stories about their efforts—here’s a new one—but the pictures are always incredibly touching, especially when an animal is clearly not pet show material but so cute and lively and affectionate-looking nonetheless. (Via Jezebel.)

The complicating issue is that we have a very diverse music collection, so I have to create a System to address all of it. I eventually decided that different genres should have different parameters for what fields should be filled out and how they should be filled out, and then I had to determine what the genres should be, which took lots of list-making and -remaking, and then I had to hammer our exactly what the parameters should be, and so on, and so forth. I was happily explaining all this to Sean (who nodded along, because he knows enough not to challenge the crazy), and he sensibly pointed out that if the System is so complex, I should create a style guide for it, like I do at work.

So that put an exciting new spin on the whole project. Style guides, for the uninitiated, lay out rules for how different stylistic questions should be answered (serial comma, yea or nay?—that sort of thing). A style guide was exactly what I needed to organize my project—and, of course, to kick it into utterly insane, OCD overdrive in which I spend hours agonizing over where conductors should be listed and how to handle featured artists on R&B albums and what constitutes a compilation. My heavily revised style guide is now eight pages long and far from complete.

But the dorkiest thing is that I’m actually enjoying the project a lot, despite the fact that I’ve started to have cataloging dreams. It’s oddly satisfying to make my way through one of our massive binders of CDs—scanning all but the most embarrassingly ’90s among them—and know that all that music is now at my fingertips in a way that it hasn’t been for years. I’m discovering music I’d forgotten, and I’m ridiculously excited about the prospect of reloading my iPod with all my old-but-new, tidily organized files. It might me take weeks, it might even take me months, but as crazy and overkill as it is, this is a project worth finishing.