A recent Newsweek article, which is otherwise a bit suspect on its research (as usual), touches on Yoko Ono’s annual commemoration of her husband which this year culminated in the last two pieces of his catalogue being reissued. Only the figures are a lot lower than you’d think. The new Working Class Hero: The Definitive Lennon compilation slipped off the charts after having sold only 180,000 copies, and the number of copies sold for last year’s reissue of Rock ’n’ Roll was placed at 32,000, which is sad considering its quality.

Japan will get an advanced release of Elvis Costello’s upcoming live disc My Flame Burns Blue which will include, as a bonus CD, Il Sogno, which seems quite the bargain.

Elvis Costello offered a preview of 10 of the songs from The Secret Arias, his opera based on the story of Hans Christian Andersen’s unrequited love for a Swedish singer, at a performance in Copenhagen.

Talk about first impressions… there weren’t a lot of children in my neighborhood when I was young, just a couple of contemporaries and I probably didn’t really know them until I’d started school… so I really wasn’t prepared when I had to mingle with a couple dozen strangers, and I was surprised that none of them really thought like me. I have been suspicious of crowds ever since—probably suspicious of everyone ever since. It takes a while for me to let my shield down.

Like I’ve said before, Christmas is time for watching fresh TV in Britain, either one-off special episodes or, in the past, Bond films. Spike TV has accidentally stumbled on the latter by running marathons of 007 films over Thanksgiving weekend. The way they do it involves perverse amounts of self-promotion and commercial breaks in excess of 5 minutes for every 9 minutes of each film. More palatable is the news of restorations for upcoming DVD editions involving ultra high-resolution scanning of the original negatives (the New York Times reported that the company behind this work, Lowry Digital, employs 600 Macintosh G5s with a combined memory of 2,400 gigabytes for this project).