Apparently #musicmonday is a trending topic on the Twitters - bunch of bloody Johnny Come Latelys. Some of us have been here every Monday morning (for various definitions of 'every', 'monday' and 'morning'), mining the rich vein of at-least-a-decade-old music for nuggets and gems to present you with. Although I'll concede that it may be closer to a family cat, possibly elderly and constantly smelling faintly of urine, 'presenting' you with a the mutilated carcass of a songbird than to a lover presenting you with a platter of the finest silks, gems and perfumes purchasable.
Either way - I forge on, secure in the knowledge that I'll be here long after those young whipper snappers have got tired and moved on to new things.
Anyway - my American friends will be blissfully unaware that for British soap operas are completely unlike their Yankee brethren. For a start there are no impossibly glamorous people or complicated plots involving hitherto unknown twin siblings, murders and lengthy comas. Or vampires. No British soaps, such as "East Enders" are mostly populated by grim, ugly people living grim, ugly lives in grim, ugly surroundings. See this comparison for example:
Anyway, when we want to import a little glamour we instead turned to two Australian soaps - "Neighbours" (24 years old this year) and "Home and Away" (22 years old this year). I mean, when I say glamour it's still no "Stairwells of Time" they're are still set in mundane locations - a Melbourne suburb and small, coastal town near Sydney respectively - after all, and the people them selves are pretty ordinary.
But they boast a startlingly accomplished and wide spread alumni amongst the cast. Probably the most famous, is of course, Ms Kylie Minogue, now so famous that her surname has withered and dropped off with disuse, like an unused appendix. Kylie played tomboyish greasemonkey Charlene Ramsey in Neighbours
Which is, to say, you probably didn't realise it but there are Australians everywhere. Do you really know your friends and neighbours? Do they ever casually "chuck" a "shrimp" on the "barbie"? Do you ever see them with faint traces on zinc on their noses? These and more may be an indication that you have an Australian infestation. You have been warned.
Anyway - so on to the main point of this increasingly rambling and incoherent post. 90s music. And Australians. Who were in soap operas.
Oh, look it's adorable elfin faced pixie Natalie Imbrugliagaliagala looking all quirky and alternative
Christ, bet you'd never thought you'd find a musical blog which mentioned Natalie Imbruglalalaiglia and Wolfsheim in the same post.
Anyway, somewhat little known fact - Ms Imbruglaglaglala didn't write (and by 'write' I mean, 'was given the song by one of the 5 pop composer supremos who secretely write about 90% of stuff that's in the charts these days') "Torn" it was originally a 1991 track by a Swedish band called Ednaswap
which was then covered by Danish singer Lis Sørensen as "Burnt" in 1993 (in Danish - listen to it, it will mildly freak you out!)
Of course the best version ever done was Johann Lippowitz's mime version
OOPSLA 2009 happened a few weeks ago. OOPSLA stands for Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications and I've always been quite interested in the conference. The proceedings of the conference aren't put online, but I've managed to find two interesting papers:
A Market-Based Approach to Software Evolution (PDF) tries to imagine an open market which is targetted around fixing bugs and improving software. It's quite interesting as it's quite similar to a proposal from Nicholas on spending other people's money. The authors point out many potential flaws.
The Commenting Practice of Open Source (PDF) analyses projects on Ohloh and tries to spot commenting trends. "We find that comment density is independent of team and project size", but they find that it varies from language to language. "Java has the highest mean of comment lines per source lines at.. one comment line for three source code lines" and "Perl has the lowest mean with.. one comment line for nine source code lines". They list as future work to find out why this might be the case.
Placebo are one of those bands that I always feel oddly guilty about enjoying which is odd because "Nancy Boy" is damn fine blistering 3 minute pop song which lovely crunchy guitars and a thumping bass line. I mean the video's a little bit "Art school student gets his 'alternative' friends together and then gets a bit enthusiastic with the Inferno effects plugins" but I never seem to get tired of listening to the song itself
As a bonus track - not strictly 90s but I really like the Placebo cover of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" which Q magazine memorably described as "sound[ing] more like a 'pact with the Devil' than the original 'deal with God'"
even if the video is like a better dressed emo version of Feeder's "Just A Day" (which for some reason I can't help watching every time it comes on)
Hmm - no nerdy music factoids so far. Errm. Ok - the reason why drummer Steve Hewitt is blurred out in the Nancy Boy video is because he was still contractually obliged to a band on another label at the time.
"Economists should listen more to techies on what techs will be feasible at what costs, but techies should also listen more to economists on the social implications of tech costs. Alas, just as economists prefer to rely on their intuitive folk tech forecasts, techies prefer to rely instead on their intuitive folk economics."
This Halloween I'll be drinking McNuggetinis
Two words: Ham Daquiri
Sometimes I'll say "I'd love to see that film" and I mean the whole experience - the watching, listening, thinking about plot etc. Sometimes I just mean "see". "300", "Sin City", "The House of Flying Daggers" are examples that spring to mind.
This is a film made to be seen - it looks amazing from this trailer. I care little for the plot (but are those spaceships - that'd be neat :-) I'd love to see it on a big screen - but my 40 incg LCD on Blu-ray is a very good replacement for the cinema experience, and doesn't have annoying people crunching popcorn in my ear.
The trailer itself is great - no voiceover, so very little plot spoilerage. Beautiful scenes, stylised fighting, an epic scale. Brilliant.
It turns out that Sedona in Phoenix is so unspeakably cinematic - with its soaring orange mesas and artistically arranged cacti silhouetted against the blazing sunset - that your brain can't actually deal with it and you just start thinking that it looks like a really bad special effects cliché and discounting it as being fake.
It's kind of weird.
Anyway, that's got absolutely nothing to do with this weeks 90MM which I've plucked randomly from my scratch pad of potential candidates based purely on the fact that it's gone 2pm already and I hadn't noticed.
Inspiring, huh?
Anyway, so "All I Wanna Do" by Sheryl Crow.
Looking round to find the reasons the general consensus, including the commentary on Wikipedia, calls this inexplicable but, having watched both this 'original' and the more common one (which you can find here for comparison) I think I have an answer - the edited version is better and the guy who plays Billy comes across as an insufferable douche who I'd really like to give a good shoeing to.
Anyway, with that particular issue settled we can get onto even more obscurity like, for example, the fact that the song is actually a pretty much word for word recital of the poem "Fun" by Wyn Cooper (who is credited as a co-writer and made, apparently, a metric fuck-tonne of money from the royalties)
“All I want is to have a little fun
Before I die,” says the man next to me
Out of nowhere, apropos of nothing. He says
His name’s William but I’m sure he’s Bill
Or Billy, Mac or Buddy; he’s plain ugly to me,
And I wonder if he’s ever had fun in his life.
We are drinking beer at noon on Tuesday,
In a bar that faces a giant car wash.
The good people of the world are washing their cars
On their lunch hours, hosing and scrubbing
As best they can in skirts and suits.
They drive their shiny Datsuns and Buicks
Back to the phone company, the record store,
The genetic engineering lab, but not a single one
Appears to be having fun like Billy and me.
I like a good beer buzz early in the day,
And Billy likes to peel the labels
From his bottles of Bud and shred them on the bar.
Then he lights every match in an oversized pack,
Letting each one burn down to his thick fingers
Before blowing and cursing them out.
A happy couple enters the bar, dangerously close
To one another, like this is a motel,
But they clean up their act when we give them
A look. One quick beer and they’re out,
Down the road and in the next state
For all I care, smiling like idiots.
We cover sports and politics and once,
When Billy burns his thumb and lets out a yelp,
The bartender looks up from his want-ads.
Otherwise the bar is ours, and the day and the night
And the car wash too, the matches and Buds
And the clean and dirty cars, the sun and the moon
And every motel on this highway. It’s ours you hear?
And we’ve got plans, so relax and let us in—
All we want is to have a little fun.
... and lets face it, who doesn't like a good beer buzz early in the morning?
Have you seen "24 Hour Party People"? You should, it's pretty good. It's about the rise and fall of the legendary Hacienda club in Manchester and the entwined Factory Records which was home to acts like Joy Division, New Order, The Happy Mondays and Cabaret Voltaire amongst others.
Anyway, the reason why I'm proselytizing the film is that it's not a bad introduction to the Madchester/Baggy scene that sprung up in Manchester at the start of the nineties - a weird and heady blend of rave, indie rock, psychedelia and hip hop.
The movement, as well as bringing the phrase "You're twisting my melon, man" into common parlance, provided a second coming from a relatively obscure band called James. James had previously had two minor hits around '89 with "Sit Down" and the more stereotypically Baggy "Come Home" which had both done well in the indie charts but got more mainstream recognition when they released "Gold Mother" around the same time as musical press attention turned north.
Singles "How Was It For You" and re-released "Come Home" and "Sit Down" did well (the latter was only kept off the top spot by Chesney Hawkes) but the eponymous single from the album "Laid", released in 1993, was the one that 'broke' in the US.
Released as three different versions of the same video (of which I can only find two)
"This bed is on fire with passionate love, the neighbours complain about the noises above, but she only comes when she's on top"
meaning that, although it 'only' got to number 23 in the UK charts and peaked on the US Billboard charts at #61 its cult status on college radio stations drove it to #3 on the Billboard Modern Rock charts and was later used in the American Pie films.
The album itself is fairly interesting. Recorded as a series of session with Brian Eno it actually produced enough tracks for two albums - "Laid" being the "song album" and "Wah Wah" being the more experimental release.
You note, of course, that I use the term "interesting" in a way that means "if you're a huge music nerd like me"
A few weeks ago I was up in the hills about Geneva reminiscing with my sister about all the things we used to enjoy when we were smaller. When I was younger I used to really enjoy programming computer games, first on my 48K Spectrum and then later on in STOS BASIC and then 68000 assembly language on my Atari ST.
I haven't programmed a game in a very long time. However, I'm an avid gamer, playing games while travelling on my DS and at home on my Xbox 360. I almost enjoy reading Edge magazine more than I like playing games.
At YAPC::Europe in Lisbon, Domm pointed out that the Perl SDL project (which wraps the Simple DirectMedia Layer) was languishing and that we should all programs games in Perl.
A few months later I got around to playing with SDL and made a simple breakout clone which I styled after Batty on the Spectrum, but with gravity. It was fairly easy to program, but there was a lot to grasp. The Perl libraries are a mix between a Perl interface to SDL and a Perlish interface to SDL, with limited documentation, tests and examples.
Of course this is where I join the #sdl IRC channel on irc.perl.org and start discussing with the other hackers (kthakore, garu, nothingmuch). We decide on a major redesign to split the project into two sections: the main code will just wrap SDL and then there will be another layer which makes it easier to use. I've started writing a bunch of XS on the redesign branch of the repository while trying to keep Bouncy (my game) still working. There is a bunch of work still to do but we've made a good start. This is what Bouncy looks like at the moment:
