I've been playing a lot of PS2 RPG's lately: no sooner had I finished "Kingdom Hearts" than I started on "Final Fantasy X." This little regression is just as well since the whole "growing up" thing hasn't really worked out for me anyway. I'm finding the games more engrossing than movies right now, although I did finally get around to seeing one of the Netflix discs gathering dust in my living room: "Camila." The cheap color film and mediocre cinematography made it look like an 80s made-for-TV movie, but the story was an interesting true drama about an Argentinian priest who had an affair with a high-society woman. Give it a B-.

On Sunday I discovered Ralph's Records on 82nd Street in Lubbock. Spent too much on used CDs again--all of them, strangely, in the "B" section, to wit: Beastie Boys Ill Communication, their jazziest work, full of hep riffs on flute, double bass, and organ; Blondie, The Platinum Collection; The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour; and Kate Bush, The Dreaming. Speaking of which, it's time for the second installment of...

Robert Christgau's Word of the Day

refulgence n : the quality of being bright and sending out rays of light

Kate Bush: The Dreaming [EMI America, 1982]

The most impressive Fripp/Gabriel-style art-rock album of the postpunk refulgence makes lines like "I love life" and "Some say knowledge is something that you never have" say something. Part of the reason is that Bush is flaky enough to seek the higher plane in "a hired plane," although as you might expect the resulting analysis often crumbles under scrutiny. It also helps that the emotional range of her singing sometimes approaches its physical range, although when it doesn't you'd best duck. But the revelation is the dense, demanding music, which gets the folk exoticism of current art-rock fashion out of mandolins and uillean pipes and didgeridoos rather than clumsy polyrhythms, and goes for pop outreach with hooks rather than clumsy polyrhythms. B+

(www.robertchristgau.com)

Four months here and I still haven't found anyone I can spend my free time with. It may behoove me to visit one of the Baptist megachurches in Lubbock, as much as I would dislike it.